Still Life with Monkey

by Katharine Weber

  The bright, stabilized woodcut of St. George and the Dragon sent back to the collector by the Maybank Paper Conservation Laboratory a few months later, in its original triple-matted gold leaf cabinetmaker’s frame, was in fact another example of the work in a similar state that Carolyn Maybank had quietly obtained from a dealer in London. She had, working alone after hours, treated it very carefully to approximate the conditions of the destroyed woodcut, which she had documented with digital images before treatment, as was her prudent practice. This substitution of an imposter woodcut included the painstaking addition of minute, stabilized foxing marks along the top edge, though they were concealed under the inner mat, in addition to the creation of a tiny repaired tear in the lower left corner. Nobody in the Maybank Paper Conservation Laboratory knew about this subterfuge. The truth about the destruction of the Dürer print at the hands of an intern in her laboratory, where she famously performed all conservation treatments herself, was the last thing Carolyn Maybank would have ever wanted revealed to the world of paper conservation.

  Jill Feldman never returned to the laboratory after that day. Laura completed her internship in the chilly Maybank atmosphere (not only was there a Maybankian froideur, but also there was a strict rule that the ambient room temperatures were never to go above fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit), but decided to pursue painting and object conservation after that. Paper was just too fragile, too ephemeral. She wanted to work with more substantial objects and sturdier surfaces that she thought would surely be more forgiving of error. She had a series of good placements and apprenticeships for the next couple of years. She never crossed paths with Jill Feldman, who left conservation studies. (She ended up managing a storefront franchise of a paint-your-own-pottery business in Scranton, Laura learned many years later when she was idly Googling lost people the way one does.) The effaced Dürer woodcut was a secret. Carolyn Maybank had brought confidentiality agreements to the laboratory the next day, and everyone on the premises had been required to sign one.

  Though she wasn’t specifically intimidated by the confidentiality agreement, Laura never told anyone what she had seen that day, not even Duncan. She felt as if she had witnessed a violent crime. She felt guilty and complicit, even though whenever it came out that Laura had an internship with Carolyn Maybank, people were impressed. It opened doors for her professionally. She dined out on stories about twirling those damned cotton swabs, and she did a perfect impression of the Maybankian lockjawed pronouncement on the superiority of the “Wellesley Method of art history training.” Her Maybank credential surely helped her win the Yale job; the other two final candidates (Laura found out who they were after she was hired) had superior academic credentials. But when she read Carolyn Maybank’s obituary in a back issue of the Paper Conservator, while sitting one morning in a fertility doctor’s waiting room, Laura had felt an unexpected relief.

  Laura didn’t really keep in touch with anyone from her Maybank days, even though she had enjoyed the company of some of the other interns, especially Dan Smith, a soft-spoken illuminated manuscript specialist from Oregon who always pronounced die Buchmalerei with an exaggerated German accent. Once when they were alone in the freezing Maybank document storage area he had shown her his trick of photocopying needless duplicates of conservation reports in order to warm up his hands on the hot pages that emerged from the printer. After that they would often sneak down there together. On one particularly chilly and unsupervised afternoon, Laura lifted her shirt and inserted a nice thick and warm condition report under the waistband of her pants, where it was as comforting against her skin as a hot water bottle, though she rustled when she moved, and the warmth was fleeting. Were they a couple? They went out together a few times, but went to bed just once, an unsuccessful experience that proved to them both that it had been a mistake to go beyond friendship, and they never attempted to do so again. Dan found work in a university library in Germany, and they exchanged a few emails for a while before falling, inevitably, out of touch.

  Once, when a friendly visiting conservator who was invited to Yale from the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence to work on a surface problem with the Gallery’s Ghirlandaio told her over coffee about the nightmarish occasion (un incubo, she called it) when she had accidentally punctured a Rubens canvas that was being relined, when she was a young intern at the Uffizi, Laura remained silent about the effaced Dürer. “It happens all the time, at least once, to everyone,” the Italian conservator had said with a shrug and a laugh. “And then everyone tells me it is just like doctors when they have their medical training. Every conservator has murdered at least one patient.”

  Duncan’s nicely flattened and matted drawings of the Explicated Four-Square house were waiting for Laura on her work-table when she got to work, courtesy of a generous and shy colleague in paper conservation who had wanted to do something for her. She left them there for the time being; it was a drizzly day, and there was no rush, no reason to risk carrying something up the street to the framer in the rain.

  Her current projects were nearly complete, the writing of two condition reports. The first was a detailed preliminary assessment on a William Merritt Chase painting in the collection that had a serious condition problem. She had never seen this painting before, as it had been in storage, hanging on one of the sliding racks in the Gallery basement until Laura was assigned to review it as part of a routine sweep through the collection, when it was brought to the conservation lab. She had done the work, following a checklist, and was now simply revising her language to make the report concise and clear so the senior conservators would have a sense of the scale of conservation work it required.

  “Monkeying with Literature,” painted circa 1877–1878 when the painter lived in Venice, is an oil on canvas depicting Chase’s pet monkey Jocko rummaging through a pile of books, some of them cascading and splayed open on the floor. Examination reveals that large sections of the canvas are affected with a fine crack pattern, lifting and cupping paint, and paint loss due to insufficient adhesion between the top layers. The overall surface gloss of the varnish appears uneven and patchy. Fibers in the surface and examination under UV light indicate numerous prior conservation treatments where the old varnish was reduced inconsistently. There are traces of fiber from cotton swabs. [This would never have happened in the Maybank Laboratory, Laura thought, as she noted this observation with obscure satisfaction.] The probable course of treatment for the painting, given that the original paint layers may be potentially sensitive to most solvents, should be quite conservative. Securing of the flaking paint is the priority. All lifting paint should be consolidated locally, presumably with four percent sturgeon glue and a hot spatula. After consolidation of the paint layer eventual remaining matte areas should be locally treated with an appropriate varnish to improve the surface gloss.

  Laura’s remaining task of the day was the final report on the repair done by the senior object specialist on a Song Dynasty qingbai bowl that was on loan from Dud and Jinxy Cavendish, the demanding collectors who had verbally promised it to the Gallery as part of their hoped-for bequest. There had been a lunch with the college president and the Yale Art Gallery’s director, concluding with a walk-through of the potential Gallery space on the third floor that might house a future Cavendish Collection. All sorts of privately held, valuable works of art pass through conservation departments in museums around the world for this reason, though museums making this investment can be disappointed to learn that a competing institution, or a family member, has, in the end, scooped the pool.

  The loan and conservation of the Song Dynasty qingbai bowl, which had set a record price for a Song Dynasty piece at auction in Hong Kong when they bought it, was a test of the relationship, Laura knew. The self-important Cavendishes would scrutinize her condition report, looking for errors and omissions. She had been encouraged to write her report in the most positive (i.e., flattering) language possible, while also, if possible, making the case for Yale’s conservation virt
uosity. The Cavendishes were in the habit of using museums this way, collecting one restored object while delivering the next exquisite object in their collection with conservation issues. They made it clear that they fully expected the museum’s conservation resources to be at their disposal. Suggesting otherwise, or charging them for these services, would have been impolitic for an institution hoping to acquire the Cavendish collection.

  They had played this game for ten years at the Fogg before claiming back their long-term loans and reneging on their promises in order to follow the Asian Arts curator with whom they had a relationship when he departed Harvard for Yale. (Dud and Jinxy, whose money came from woolen mills in her family, had no idea that his promise to bring the extraordinary Cavendish Song dynasty porcelains and Ru ware—conservatively estimated to be worth triple-digit millions—to Yale had helped him win the appointment.) The Cavendishes, who raised a rare breed of sheep in Hallowell, Maine, were both in their early seventies, which meant that they could easily outlive their current fondness for Yale and move on to yet another courtship with an institution eager to acquire their vast, lovely, and exceedingly valuable collection.

  Yale had an additional advantage, according to the department memo, because a Cavendish granddaughter was in the sophomore class, a first for the Cavendish family. (Dudley Cavendish was a West Point man; the former Josephine Callaghan attended Sweet Briar. They had met at a poker game the night before a wedding in Newport News; he was the best man, and she was her roommate’s maid of honor.) They would travel down to New Haven to visit their granddaughter sooner or later, if not this semester then in January after the Christmas break, so there was an urgent need to take care of their bowl quickly. The museum director had promised them that whenever they came to New Haven, the work on their exquisite bowl would be complete. Completion of full documentation of the repair, Laura’s responsibility, was a priority, so that whenever they showed up, which could be next week and could be months from now, every i would be dotted and every t would be crossed. (Laura hated that expression, which the head of her department used often.) Laura wrote:

  This extraordinary Song dynasty qingbai bowl, a fine example of Ding ware that has been repaired superbly, has incised decoration that depicts the reflection of clouds in the water. The white, translucent body has a pleasing texture of very fine sugar, having been made using crushed and refined pottery stone instead of the more usual pottery stone and kaolin.

  Though standard practice required the wearing of protective cotton gloves at all times when handling objects such as this, Laura furtively removed a glove to caress the sugary texture with a fingertip, just for a moment. It felt smooth and nice. She wrote:

  This was a very successful hairline crack repair, barely visible to the naked eye. When the thousand-year-old bowl is back on display in the vitrine, nobody will be able to detect that a channel has been created across the crack using a very fine diamond rotary disk bit, in order for a hair of copper wire peg to be embedded. This exceptional repair was completed by a sequence of very intricately timed applications of warmed epoxy and delicate clamping. This remarkably imperceptible repair was finished with microscopic amounts of sanding and buffing to blend the surfaces inside and out. This is an outstanding example of the appropriate and necessary conservation work on an exquisite piece of Song dynasty qingbai that can only be executed under optimal circumstances in a museum conservation laboratory environment.

  Laura carefully placed the thousand-year-old qingbai bowl in its padded box, which she positioned in the secure vitrine reserved for objects in conservation. She made copies of the conservation report and left all the paperwork in the correct files. Then she headed home to her broken husband.

  TEN

  Gordon Wheeler admired the gorgons, beasts, and owls that came to his door

  GORDON WHEELER ADMIRED THE GORGONS, BEASTS, and owls that came to his door. Ferga was less appreciative, though with gentle reminding she resisted the temptation to bark at the costumed children as they straggled up and down the path. Some of them waded through the unraked leaves that covered the lawn in order to cut across in a direct approach from an adjacent neighbor’s front door. Ferga was especially jumpy when they did this because of the crackling-swishing noise they made in the leaves, which was to her ears identical to the sound squirrels made as they zig-zagged across the yard before running up a tree. A squirrel can make a huge racket getting from here to there. That was why Ferga liked autumn best, when a blanket of telltale leaves on the ground gave her an even chance.

  Every Halloween, Gordon spent more money than he should have on a mountain of Kit-Kats. He avoided brands of candy that he had difficulty pronouncing, which ruled out quite a few options he liked, among them Nestle’s Crunch, Baby Ruth, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and Tootsie Rolls. When Gordon was a child, making Halloween rounds with Duncan, he only whispered the cruelly challenging requisite phrase, while Duncan shouted it out loud enough for both of them.

  Now, when the costumed children on his front step chanted dutifully through the torn screen, he opened the door and held out the bucket of Kit Kats, letting them each take one or two, rather than dropping a single candy into each of their outstretched bags. He preferred to respect their judgment and independence, though his trust was inevitably betrayed by the occasional trick-or-treater who grabbed a handful. Thank you, thank you, thank you, the princesses and ghosts and Power Rangers and Nixons (still!) mumbled as they turned away and swished off into the leaves, to the house next door (where they only gave out the smallest Snickers, bite-size, and only one of those per child). Ferga kept sitting down and sighing and standing up again as the trick-or-treaters came and went through the afternoon and evening.

  It was a busy, child-filled neighborhood anyway, but their street was especially popular because the two women in the purple cottage with blue trim on the corner went all out every Halloween, planting tombstones on their lawn and lighting them dramatically, mounting a giant tarantula on their roof, and hanging ghosts and skeletons from the trees that shaded their house. They answered the door in elaborate costumes and greeted the children with disconcerting cackles of ghoulish laughter. Starting in the middle of the afternoon, they played a loop of dissonant, sinister music from speakers hidden in their shrubbery. Halloween was obviously very important to them. Year-round, every week he biked past Gretchen and Holly’s house on his way to the bookstore. On recycling days Gordon had noticed in their blue bin at the curb a great number of vodka bottles along with diet soda cans and bundles of pizza boxes and newspaper. He thought it was marvelous that they had each other.

  Halloween excited and exhausted Ferga. Her border collie heart’s desire each year would have been instruction from Gordon to go out and round up all the children wandering through the neighborhood and herd them together into a satisfying pack, all the worrisome unruly creatures consolidated in one manageable place in their backyard. Sometimes on winter evenings after dinner, while Gordon read a book in the worn stuffed rocker that had been in his childhood living room, when Ferga lay snoozing in front of the wood stove, her paws twitching, she was dreaming of this.

  Gordon couldn’t stop thinking about his brother, whom he loved more than anyone else on earth. If Duncan didn’t want to be alive, did anyone else have the right to insist that he keep living? He was devastated by what had happened to Duncan. Gordon was wary around Laura since that rainy night when she drank too much. Though he understood her desperation to find something that would give Duncan a different feeling about the future, he didn’t think she could do anything to change what Duncan felt. Whenever they were alone together, a circumstance Gordon tried to avoid, Laura would attempt to enlist him in finding strategies to help Duncan adjust to his new life and make the most of it. She talked about Duncan’s life before the accident and Duncan’s life after the accident, but Gordon felt as if the accident was one continuous event that was still happening, as if Duncan had rolled down some enormous steep hill and landed disastro
usly at the bottom, but he was still rolling, farther and farther away.

  At the bookstore, Gordon was pretty much the entire shipping and receiving department. He inventoried and shelved the books that arrived each day, and once a week he boxed up for return all the books that had been over-optimistically ordered for readings, which the store hosted twice a week. In the first month he worked at Roxy’s, Gordon had made some bad mistakes, and he was profoundly grateful to Roxy for the graceful way she had handled them.

  She had neither fired him nor shamed him when, the day after the shipment came in, Gordon accidentally returned all one hundred copies of a novel that had been ordered for a reading, leaving only the four copies stacked in the front window display available for sale at the very well-attended event (for which the author had traveled to Connecticut from Vermont). He had not yet developed a system, and the title on the returns box was quite similar to the title of the new novel, and the boxes had been shifted several times in the course of the morning. Though it had cost the bookstore, and the author had been pretty upset, Roxy never brought it up again after that night.

  Gordon had in those same early days offended a certain local celebrity cookbook author (he didn’t watch cooking shows on television and he didn’t recognize her face, her name, or her signature exclamation, “Golly whillikers!” which, when shrilly deployed at high decibel, was usually a foolproof means of getting the attention she needed). He had been insufficiently obsequious and contrite when she complained that the store had only three copies of Maggie Match’s Down the Hatch in stock, since she had dropped by to offer, magnanimously, to sign her newest cookbook for children. (No author hoping to see her recent book in a prominent spot on a front table ever wants to be reassured that the store can order that book, what’s the title, and how do you spell the author’s name again?) Gordon didn’t recognize regular customers, either, and this was a bit of a problem, which was why he was only put on the counter when the store got really busy. Roxy figured that Gordon might have very low facial recognition skills, and he didn’t disagree with her, but the truth was, Gordon didn’t often look people square in the face.