Corpus Christmas

by Margaret Maron

  An average day these days.

  Mrs. Beardsley sighed and lingered for a moment in the chill twilight. She considered herself a closet romantic and the square was at its wintertime loveliest tonight. The very sight of it restored her good spirits because she could, she thought, take credit for its beauty—not only for the gaslights but even for the tiny colored lights that twinkled upon a tall evergreen at the center of the square’s handkerchief-size park.

  The tree represented compromise. Every year the question of decorative Christmas lights came before the Sussex Square Preservation Society and every year Mrs. Beardsley had managed to block their use. This year a younger, more vulgar contingent from numbers 9, 14, and 31 had rammed the motion through. Mrs. Beardsley had then rallied her forces and carried a vote that limited the lights to a single tree.

  With predictable incompetence, the arrivistes had under-estimated how many strings it would take to bedizen every twig, so the evergreen emerged more tasteful than Mrs. Beardsley had dared hope. In fact, it was even rather festive but Mrs. Beardsley had no intention of admitting that to a soul. Give them an inch and they’d string every bush next year.

  One electrified tree was anachronism enough.

  An icy gust of wind made the tall spruce dip and sway and Mrs. Beardsley shivered with a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the plummeting temperature.

  “Somebody just walked over my grave,” she thought and hurried inside.

  Footsteps sounded on the marble stoop behind her and she held the tall door open a crack.

  “I’m sorry but we’re just closing and—oh! Mr. Munson. I didn’t realize it was you. Do come in.”

  With a thin gray beard that hung down over his woolly muffler, Jacob Munson was small and spry enough to remind a more fanciful imagination than Mrs. Beardsley’s of an elf escaped from Santa’s workshop. Adding to the illusion was the perennial cloud of peppermint fumes in which he had moved ever since his doctors forbade cigarettes, and his eyes danced with merriment and goodwill beneath his wide-brimmed black fedora.

  “Mrs. Beardsley, is it not?” A slight German accent underlay his friendly tone. “The others are here?”

  “I believe so.” She started to escort him toward the director’s office at the far end of the vaulted marble hall where the others were gathered when she suddenly found her outstretched arm draped with Mr. Munson’s muffler and overcoat. His hat and gloves followed in rapid order and he himself was speeding across the polished tiles before Mrs. Beardsley could make it clear that she was not some sort of resident butler or hatcheck girl.

  Miffed, she carried the art dealer’s outer garments over to a bench near Miss Ruffton’s desk and dumped them there, grateful that the secretary had not been required to attend tonight’s informal meeting and had therefore missed this minor humiliation. Miss Ruffton was an enigmatic young black woman who never talked back or argued, yet Mrs. Beardsley suspected that she secretly enjoyed any affronts to the older woman’s dignity.

  As she put on her own coat and gloves to leave, Mrs. Beardsley subconsciously tried to fault Miss Ruffton but found nothing to seize upon. The secretary’s gleaming desktop was bare except for an appointment calendar, a pot of red poinsettias in gold foil, and one of those stodgy brochures that outlined the history of the Erich Breul House.

  And that reminded Mrs. Beardsley: Where was young Mr. Evans? Didn’t Mr. Munson expect him to join them? She pushed back the cuff of her cashmere glove and glanced at her watch. Everyone else was there except him.

  “Boys!” she murmured to herself. With her children hundreds of miles away and occupied by families of their own, she had unconsciously transferred her maternal interest to Pascal Grant, who would never completely grow up. And she’d be quite surprised if Rick Evans were a day past twenty. Now what sort of mischief, she wondered, could be keeping those two so long in the basement?

  Officiously, Mrs. Beardsley opened a door concealed beneath the marble stairwell, passed along a short hall that led back to what was left of the butler’s pantry, turned right, and descended the stairs to the basement.

  * * *

  An hour earlier, Rick Evans had followed Pascal Grant down those steps into the kitchen. It was enormous, but the stamped-tin ceiling was surprisingly low and the room’s dry snugness made Rick think of Wind in the Willows and of Mr. Badger’s home and Mole’s cosy tunnels. Blue rag rugs were scattered over brown floor tiles, a massive cookstove resplendent with nickel-plate ornamentation dominated the room, and one wall was lined with shallow open shelves that held the blue willowware Sophie Breul had provided for her servants’ daily use.

  Rick had wanted to open the doors of the huge chestnut ice box, to lift the lids of painted tin canisters and peer into the built-in storage bins, but Pascal Grant had tugged at his sleeve.

  “They’re all empty. Come and see my window before it gets dark, okay?”

  As he trailed Pascal through the cavernous basement passages, Rick was reminded of explorations he used to take with his best friend through abandoned barns and farmhouses back home in Louisiana’s bayou country. There was that same sense of sadness, of human artifacts abandoned to their own devices.

  On the other side of the scullery were empty coal bins, made redundant by an oil furnace that was itself in need of replacement. Beyond the kitchen lay rooms no longer needed for their original purposes: cold closets with sharp hooks for hanging meat and poultry, bins for food supplies, a laundry room, with deep stone sinks and tall drying racks. These were now lumbered with bulky storage crates, trunks, rolled-up carpets, and odds and ends too good to throw away, yet no longer needed for the day-to-day business of the museum. The hall wound past a room that held racks of pictures an earlier curator had weeded out of the main collection as too hopelessly banal; another room stored the folding chairs that were brought up whenever the main hall was used for lectures or recitals.

  At the street end of the basement was a sturdy wooden service door that opened onto a shallow areaway beneath the grandeur of the high marble stoop with its elaborate railings. Echoing the rounded door top was one of those whimsicalities to which Victorians were so often given: a lacy wrought-iron spider web set into the upper third of the door, each interstice of the web fitted with clear beveled glass. At the center of the web was a tiny brass garden spider which Pascal kept polished till it shone like gold.

  The window was uniquely decorative, yet city-smart as well. Callers could be identified without opening the door and the strong iron cobweb was fine enough that no burglar could smash a tiny pane of glass and reach through to unbolt the latch. Rick had no formal grounding in aesthetics but it occurred to him that Pascal’s sense of beauty might be more sophisticated than he’d realized.

  The young janitor was looking up at him through long golden lashes. “It’s my first favorite window,” he said shyly.

  “It’s beautiful,” Rick told him. “I definitely want a picture of this.” He tilted the strobe on his camera to bounce light off the ceiling and took a couple of experimental shots before switching lenses for a close-up of the spider.

  As he worked, he began to consider the potentials the house offered.

  “My grandfather wants me do a new brochure and perhaps some new souvenir postcards,” he said, “and Dr. Peake wants me to photograph all the paintings, but I bet I could do a whole series of slides on just architectural details, another on furniture, perhaps one on Victorian clothes or dishes.”

  “All the paintings?” Pascal interrupted. “Dr. Peake said for you to take pictures of all of them?”

  “Yeah, he said they’ve never done a photographic record of the whole collection.” Rick finished with the window and recapped the lens.

  “I’ve got some pictures in my room,” Pascal said proudly. “Dr. Peake said I could. Come see.”

  He led Rick back down the passageway and through the kitchen. Beyond the service stairs was what had once been the downstairs butler’s pantry, connected to the one above
by a large dumbwaiter. This was where the Breul maids had put the finishing touches on meals before sending them aloft. Now the space was outfitted for the only live-in help left. On the counter beside the small sink was a new microwave oven, a coffee maker and a hot-air popcorn popper; below, a half-size refrigerator.

  Although the kitchenette was for Pascal Grant’s use, it was open to the stairs and kitchen and to the casual inspection of anyone passing through. Perhaps that was why it looked as impersonal as any laboratory, thought Rick.

  As if he could read thoughts, Pascal paused before a closed door at the rear of the alcove and looked up at him with another of those seraphic smiles. “Mrs. Beardsley says everything has to be neat out here.”

  He opened the door and clicked on a wall switch. “I can do what I want to in here.”

  The room was astonishing. Everywhere Rick looked he saw patterns upon figures upon designs—paisleys and florals beside stripes and basketweave and geometrics. It was like a private retreat designed by some mad Victorian decorator and it should have overwhelmed Rick’s visual senses; yet, the colors were so rich and dark that lamplight was soaked up until the whole room coalesced into a mellow warmth that made him think again of a small anthropomorphic animal’s cosy den. A human hobbit hole.

  Originally the servants’ sitting room, the ceiling and windowless walls were papered in a faded turkey red and the floor was layered with odd-size throw rugs, all threadbare but of oriental design. A couple of shabby easy chairs stood on either side of an open hearth that sported a handsome overmantel of carved walnut. For sleeping, Pascal had pushed a double bed mattress and box springs up against a cluttered sideboard and covered it with embroidered shawls and thickly fringed pillows so that it looked more like a Persian divan than a bed.

  The lower doors of the sideboard had been folded open to store his clock radio, tape player, and stacks of tapes within easy reach, while a nearby Moroccan brass coffee table held a miniature television.

  Pascal unzipped his coverall and stepped out of it. Beneath, he wore jeans and a thin knitted jersey that molded every line of his slender torso. He hung the coverall inside a tall wooden wardrobe and pulled on a blue Fair Isle sweater, a castoff from one of Mrs. Beardsley’s sons that echoed his clear blue eyes. Smoothing his tousled golden hair, he looked up at Rick happily.

  “See my pictures?”

  It was impossible not to since every wall was covered so closely that the red wallpaper beneath was almost hidden.

  A large sentimental farmyard scene hung above the fireplace. It pictured baby ducks and chicks, rosy-cheeked children, and other young animals and was doubtless meant to inspire wholesome thoughts among the servants.

  But that was the only properly framed picture in the room and the only one that clearly belonged to the nineteenth century. Everything else was thumbtacked to the walls and was vigorously modern: Kandinsky, Klee, Rothko, Pollock, Picasso, Dali, Ernst—all the twentieth-century icons. None were smaller than twenty-four by thirty-six inches and, looking closer, Rick saw that they all seemed to have begun as high-quality art posters. Some were so beautifully reproduced on such heavy stock that, with the subdued lighting, he had to touch the surface of a Dali dreamscape to reassure himself that it wasn’t real.

  “I cut off all that writing stuff,” said Pascal. “Writing stuff?” “Museum names and numbers and stuff like that,” the young handyman explained earnestly. “I don’t read so good, but I know real pictures don’t have that stuff on the bottom, so I cut it off.”

  “Where did you find so many posters, though?” asked Rick, curious.

  “Dr. Kimmelshue—he was here before Dr. Peake. He died. He had a bunch of them in his office and lots more down here.” He gestured in the direction of the storage rooms. “Dr. Peake told me to throw them all out and I told him I could take them if he didn’t want them so he said I could have anything there I wanted.”

  Pascal paused and caught his short upper lip with his lower teeth. “Well, he didn’t mean anything I wanted. There’s some trunks with clothes and stuff. I didn’t take those. He just meant the pictures. And you can take pictures of them, too.”

  There was such innocent generosity in his voice that Rick hesitated, looking for tactful words. “They’re wonderful pictures, Pascal, but I think Dr. Peake’s mainly interested in the real old stuff. Like that one over the fireplace. It’s a terrific room, though, and you’ve fixed it up great.”

  To change the subject, he walked around the bed, sat down on the edge, and began reading the titles on the other youth’s stack of cassette tapes. “Hey, what kind of music do you like, Pasc?”

  Happiness suffused Grant’s beautiful features. “Pasc. That’s what my friend called me, my friend at the training center. That’s where I learned how to fix things. Are you going to be my friend?”

  “Sure,” Rick said automatically. “I’ll get us some soda,” Pascal decided. He fetched two cans from the kitchenette, and upon returning, stretched across the bed to hand one to his new friend.

  Rick continued to read the titles of the tapes as he sipped from the can. “Basie, Lionel Hampton, Cootie Williams, Gene Krupa—you’re really into classic jazz, aren’t you?”

  Pascal Grant sat down on the other side of the bed and began pulling out his favorite tapes. “I like it,” he said simply. “It makes me feel good. Like the pictures do. Sometimes they—they get all mixed up together sometimes, the jazz and the pictures.”

  “You have Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert?” “‘Sing, Sing, Sing’!” Pascal exclaimed. “It’s on the player. That’s my very first favorite.”

  Balancing his soda, he pulled himself over the billowing cushions and punched buttons until Krupa’s hypnotic drums filled the room.

  “Hey, yeah!” breathed Rick. He pushed a couple of cushions into a stack and leaned back on them. Pascal did the same at the opposite end of the bed so that they sprawled heel to head, facing each other as they drank and listened to the pounding intensity of one of the greatest outpourings of spontaneous jazz ever recorded.

  The music, the warmth, the rich reds and golds and purples of the room, the vibrant posters—Pasc was right, he thought, somehow they did look like jazz would look if you could paint jazz themes—everything about this moment combined to make him feel safe and unthreatened for the first time since coming to New York.

  And there was Pasc himself, his angelic face in shadows, his tangled curls turned into a golden halo by the lamp behind him. A rush of love and pity welled up inside of Rick.

  Then, as Jess Stacy’s piano explored the outer reaches of the melody, he felt Pascal touch his shoe, heard his low voice say, “I’m glad you’re going to be my friend, Rick,” and was wrenched by something deeper and terrifyingly primal.

  Startled, he sat upright and saw Mrs. Beardsley’s disapproving face at the door.

  “I knocked,” she said in a stern voice, “but the music’s so loud—”

  Pascal Grant eeled across the end of the bed to lower the volume, then turned to smile at the woman. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Beardsley. I was showing Rick my tapes. He’s going to be my friend.”

  “That’s very nice, Pascal,” said Mrs. Beardsley, “but right now, I think Mr. Evans is expected upstairs.”

  “Oh, gosh!” Rick groaned. Embarrassed and guilty, he left his soda on the sideboard and bolted past the stern-faced docent.

  Benjamin Peak had, on his own initiative, called this special meeting to explore—informally, he assured them archly—various ways of stemming the Erich Breul House’s rapidly growing deficit, and he was prepared to be gracious about Rick Evans’ tardy entry for dear old Jacob’s sake.

  Not that Jacob had turned into a doting grandfather. A respected dealer and now senior partner at Kohn and Munson Gallery, Jacob Munson admitted to seventy although it was generally believed that he was much nearer eighty. His fierce, explosive temper had been tamed somewhat since the death of his son several years earlier, but his devotion to art and t
o the business of art remained strong, and his friendship had occasionally smoothed Peake’s progress in the art world.

  Beside him sat Hester Kohn, daughter of his late partner, a trim and smartly dressed brunette of thirty-four, with quizzical hazel eyes and a small mouth that smiled easily. She wore gray boots and slacks, a high-collared red silk shirt, and a wide flat necklace of gold enameled in colorful Chinese chrysanthemums. She was addicted to gardenias and her heady perfume fought Munson’s cloud of peppermint to a draw.

  Munson had been apprehensive when young Hester Kohn inherited her father’s half interest in the gallery, but these past two years had gone smoothly. She handled the financial side of the business as efficiently as her father had and seemed equally content to leave final artistic judgments to him.

  Jacob Munson considered himself less fortunate than Horace Kohn in his offspring. His only son, the son he’d groomed to come into the gallery, the son who painted like an angel, had been killed in a plane crash before the lad was twenty-five. His two older daughters, resentful because he’d never encouraged their participation until after the tragedy, resisted his tardy attempts to interest them in art. One was now a doctor in Seattle, the other taught economics at a small college in Louisiana. Although the doctor had remained willfully unmaternal, the professor had eventually managed one child, Richard.

  Aware of his grandfather’s reservations, Rick Evans found himself a chair just inside the director’s door and now fiddled with his camera lens.

  He focused on Munson’s narrow foot, twisting the lens until his shoelaces came into sharp detail. Rick would have liked to point his camera directly at Munson’s face but knew that would annoy. He wished that he pleased his grandfather better.

  As Dr. Peake spoke of the Breul House’s financial problem’s, Rick unobtrusively moved his camera toward Francesca Leeds. Lady Francesca had turned thirty-seven that year, but there was nothing in her clean-lined profile to suggest it. Her golden complexion was as clear as a girl’s, her dark red hair glossy and natural, her slender body at the peak of its physical powers, with a lithe sensuousness that was the birthright of certain fortunate women.