Harmony In Flesh and Black

by Nicholas Kilmer

  This man, Albert Finn, recently knighted in honor of his contribution to the march of British aesthetics, had thrown his lot in with the Americans, accepting control of the Department of Art History at Newark University, minutes from the largest art market in the world. He was presently working with a large government grant, a network of aides, students, and researchers, and a central bank of computers. His stated project, rather open-ended, was to compile the World Encyclopedia of Western Painting After 1400. His real goal was to add riches to honor. With Kenneth Clark out of the way, and nestled among the rubes in the New World, he did not anticipate or brook serious opposition.

  Any scrap of information about any painting in private hands that showed a corner anywhere in the world eventually got into Finn’s computers. Then, in a transaction quick as a frog’s breakfast, the painting (if it was the right painting) would disappear into another private collection without trace, or into a gallery with great fanfare—all the time gathering money and shaking it off like a dog coming out of a pond.

  And Finn would lean back and smile. He was short, rotund, and rubicund, protected by the armor of academic purity that appears to repudiate all interest in cash. He wore shabby suits and shoes that had given up all attempts at reflection many years before. He kept a poor man’s wife.

  “You know his cheery laugh,” Clayton had said. Indeed Fred did. And he knew how it raised Clayton’s back hairs. Clayton, through patient research, had once discovered the estate of an interesting Boston painter, an impressionist who had died in Geneva leaving one child, a daughter, who had married and moved to Antwerp. Clay found her and arranged to visit her.

  But Clay made a mistake, unusual for one so naturally secretive that he hardly informed himself what he was eating for breakfast. He brought his quarry up in conversation with a friend of his, the curator of graphic arts at the Boston Public Library. He mentioned only the painter’s name. The next day—no more than twenty-four hours later—Clayton received a call from Alexander Newboldt in London, one of the big dealers and a friend of his.

  “As a matter of professional courtesy,” Newboldt said, “I want to let you know that I have an agent in Antwerp who is on the point of making a telephone call for me to the daughter of an American painter who I understand may be of interest to you. It is an estate I wish to buy.”

  They went back and forth. How did Newboldt know of Clayton’s interest? Through “a scholar” who occasionally gave him advice.

  Clayton learned later, too late, that his librarian friend was a former student of Finn’s at Cambridge.

  Clay had never challenged Finn concerning his role in the hijack. There was no point in it. Their relations remained cordial, infrequent, and careful.

  The affair at the Gardner, scheduled for this evening, was a benefit cocktail party entitled “In the Pre-Raphaelite Mode,” to which Boston’s Best had been invited to come wearing formal dress or appropriate costume, dropping three hundred bucks a head for the privilege. Clayton wouldn’t miss it. He worked that kind of thing well, even enjoyed it. Fred had let his own invitation lapse.

  Clayton and Fred worked together but were like occupants of a rain forest who traveled in different layers. Clay kept to the canopy, while Fred did his best work closer to the ground. And Clay knew his leafy canopy. He was smart and had money. If outrageous, opinionated, and exasperating, he was hardly original or unique in those departments. Fred, for his part, understood the rustlings in the underbrush and brought size and physical skill to the operation, and a direct style that sometimes made people flinch. And he knew something about tactics.

  A person with a serious interest in collecting, like Clayton, must, as a practical consideration, keep track of what happens in the social circles where things are owned—which means, in Boston, where they are inherited. Clay had a natural knack for this activity, as well as having married into the network of Stillton aunts, uncles, and cousins, which resembled the road map of the North Shore in its illogical complexity and gave him access to what was otherwise marked, discreetly, Private Property.

  “You’ll have to keep your eye on Finn at the Gardner,” Clay said. “He’ll be doing his bit to make up for Berenson’s absence.”

  “I hadn’t planned to go tonight,” Fred said.

  “It should be a nice party,” Clay said. “And since Finn’s in town, it’s important to keep alert, see how the game is moving if we can.”

  “Not to change the subject to the nude you bought, but why don’t you tell me how much the painting cost?” Fred said. “So I can get a feel for what the stakes are.”

  Clayton would normally tell you nothing you didn’t have to know, especially when the subject concerned his money. If Fred was going to an auction to bid on a painting for him, Clay even hesitated to reveal how high he wanted him to go. Fred told Molly it was like having a partner at bridge who was so pleased with his cards that he wanted to keep even his partner in the dark and wouldn’t bid his best suit.

  “Art is a function of the spirit,” Clay said in his most infuriating manner.

  Fred looked at the painting. Its cheerful subject looked back from the far side of her langorous naked hip, an innocent mocking the horrors in the house she’d left barely in time.

  “All right,” Fred said, “if you want to keep me guessing. I’ll do what I can for the young lady. We’d best not show her, Clayton. Not even to Roberto. In fact, let’s hide the picture. If Albert Finn should drop in, or some such—not that it’s likely—I’d as soon not have to defend the young lady’s honor, even if she’s La Belle Conchita.”

  Out of the blue, without premeditation, blurting it out without thinking, Fred had hit the nail on the head. Clay jumped as if he’d been goosed—an infrequent occurrence in his social circle. Fred had guessed the model’s identity without intending to. He gave a big and lazy smile.

  “Naturally,” Clay said, miffed but pretending Fred’s accidental brilliance was the obvious. “Who else could she be? I discovered La Belle Conchita, and I have set her free.” He went all formal, his disappointment plain at losing, this fast, half of his secret.

  “Spare me the details. I shall rely on you, Fred, to do what you can to get that letter when you think it prudent, and to let me know when you succeed. By all means put her in the racks. I can’t enjoy the painting now. I am too tense. God help me, I must spend the afternoon with that ass Finn.”

  He went corkscrewing up the stairs to his quarters, leaving the painting of La Belle Conchita, as nature had intended her, for Fred to put away. She wouldn’t be allowed upstairs until she had been cleaned and a new frame chosen for her.

  6

  Fred hit the road. He turned the radio on and listened for news amid the chatter. Nothing. Smykal’s body, armed and triggered, lay as unremarked behind his locked apartment door on Turbridge Street as a Vermeer might, lurking beneath a Martin Johnson Heade.

  Traffic in Cambridge was picking up as it got closer to noon, and rain fell into the world in a hesitant way, slowing pedestrians. Fred drove slowly along Mass. Avenue and looked up Turbridge Street for the activity that would give away the presence of concerned authority. Nothing stirred. It looked as if a person could go up to Smykal’s door, ring, be admitted, and find the leering fellow hale and vertical. The past twenty-four hours had not happened.

  Fred parked several blocks away and sat in the car thinking, looking into the spring air at a Saturday he was not spending with Molly’s kids.

  He did not want this to be his business. Was it conceivable that someone had come back with a barrel and cleared the thing away, carpet and all?

  Since he could think of nothing to defuse the problem or even signal how large a problem it might be, Fred put it out of his mind. That left the Heade, and Albert Finn.

  Finn’s presence on the scene was a hazard about which, at the moment, nothing could be done. Fred put that out of his mind, therefore, as well, and enjoyed feeling smug about his lucky guess concerning the identity of the subject
of Clayton’s painting—La Belle Conchita.

  An intelligent subconscious had accomplished its mission. Let Clay think Fred had done it through good fieldwork.

  Aside from lucky guesses, there are two ways to find things out. One is through research; the other is by standing people in a corner and asking them questions. The fact that Fred had in the past shown talent for the latter method did not negate his capacity and preference for the former, and indeed he was as good working from the printed page as Clayton was; it was just that he had the ability, also, to do research under fire, while he was losing blood and friends of his were screaming not far off.

  It wasn’t anything he talked about with Clay, except once, tangentially, when he had first explained to him how Clay needed help he could provide. That was three years ago now? Four?

  Clay had needed a bodyguard, and that was how they had met. Fred had not mentioned at the time—because what Fred craved wasn’t what Clay cared about—that he also needed something: to touch things that were beautiful and not designed or intended to harm people. The paintings he handled for Clayton were objects in which Fred found a passion of intelligence, even where that passion (as he felt it to be in many paintings) was shaped by creative energy beginning in the artist’s hatred, frustration, or despair.

  If nothing was beautiful, nothing could be funny, either, and it was hard to be alive. Fred had needed a reason not to finish a brief life curled on a grate, a parasite and predator. He wanted beauty other than the functional perfection of a killing tool, and a quest whose object was not extinction or betrayal.

  As time went on, Fred’s instincts, his education and life experience, and his talents proved to complement Clay’s, and his role shifted accordingly, though it was never defined. When he could, he enjoyed losing himself in research. The fact that he worked with paper and images, and that the people involved tended to be long gone, added a spice of history to the work.

  The chase after La Belle Conchita had been fun. Fred, working hard, had followed her into a dark alley and left her there after fruitless attempts to find where she had gone next. He’d lost her trail in Baltimore, in 1895.

  La Belle Conchita, known to her less intimate acquaintances as Conchita Hill, had caught their eyes first as one of the few American women painters whose work was accepted for exhibition at the annual Salon in Paris.

  They had been amused and intrigued by her name. Clayton was further interested by the titles of her pictures, which suggested that she had been painting in Giverny at around the same time Monet was doing his haystacks.

  Conchita Hill had been born on a ship off the coast of Brazil in 1865, the daughter of an American sea captain whose wife lived on board, as was not uncommon in those days. Hill’s name appeared on the roster of the Art Students League in New York in the early 1880s. By the time she arrived in Paris, she was traveling with her mother, like three quarters of the Americans then studying art in that city.

  Conchita seemed, from the brief references available in the writings of her colleagues, not to have distinguished herself for demureness. Fred was convinced that this was the very girl he discovered dancing at the Moulin de la Galette, in randy dishabille, in an 1893 lithograph by Toulouse-Lautrec entitled La Belle Conchita.

  Whether or not this was she, they believed that the subject of their search had had extensive acquaintance among artists who were of interest to them. Practically every painter of consequence, American or European, had been in Paris at some point during the 1880s, and the papers of several referred to Miss Hill or to Conchita. Often the references suggested that she was having a very good time. There couldn’t have been many Conchitas.

  Clayton was determined to discover what had become of her paintings; nothing by her had ever surfaced on the market. To find her paintings, they first had to discover what had become of her. There was no record of a permanent alliance: no marriage; no later exhibition of paintings by a Conchita anything, née Hill; no siblings; no city, even, that either parent might have come from and she might have returned to. She sailed from Le Havre on a ship bound for Baltimore that docked in October of 1895, and there she disappeared.

  Fred had worked hard on her story and recalled it easily while looking out at Cambridge. He’d seen her now; that was flesh to attach to her story, and to another, Smykal’s.

  The city was moving slowly as the rain lifted. Buses geared up and droned. Dogs walked their masters and mistresses. Children dressed for soccer converged on the parks. At this moment Sam was playing baseball in Arlington, and Fred was missing the game.

  Who was the author of the picture Clay had bought? Fred’s lucky hit of the morning made him itch to establish the painter’s identity. And thinking about it would distract him from the loud noise he was waiting for on Turbridge Street.

  Fred found a meter open in front of a place on the other side of the square from Turbridge Street, and he went in and drank coffee, running through his mind the names of artists who could have been close enough to Conchita to record her in her skin.

  Such things were not the same in 1890 as they are now, not even in gay Paree. There was as much of a social gulf between artists and models as there was between artists and peasants or, for that matter, between peasants and professional models. The peasants would not take off their clothes except for two or three occasions in their lifetimes: birth, marriage, death. In Paris, models who undressed, either for students or for artists, were inclined to be not French but Italian immigrants. Some French city girls who had no expectations were also willing to work hard and preferred modeling to the more dangerous other option available.

  Students and friends did not then, as they do now, model for each other, unless clothed. For all that the human nude was exhibited as frankly and commonly as cows and chickens, only the rare American young lady would have had the presence and aplomb to serve as the original for the painting Clayton had purchased. But from the little they’d been able to learn about her, it seemed Conchita had been a jolly, open-minded girl, quite willing to test social frontiers.

  Seven or eight names roved in Fred’s mind as he finished the coffee and tossed the crumpled cup in the basket next to the door as he walked out. He realized while he was thinking that he had been lowering his head unconsciously to look into the mirror he remembered behind the reflected hip of Conchita Hill, trying to see the rest of the man whose legs showed in the glass.

  They had, those legs, the look of Robert Louis Stevenson’s, skinny, in their dark trousers, striding, in Sargent’s Calcot paintings. No, Calcot was 1887—the Stevenson portraits were 1885, at Broadway. But Molly was right: the painting was too tender for Sargent.

  * * *

  Fred took himself through Harvard Yard, the campus busy now with students, and to the Fogg Museum’s new addition on Prescott Street, where Harvard University keeps its fine-arts library. He had a bone between his teeth, time to kill, and an itch in the back of his mind to keep at bay. It was time to do some searching in the stacks.

  Harvard, encouraged by its development office, counts as alumni all those who have ever been enrolled, however briefly or disastrously. So Fred had an alumnus card for the library. The stacks are underground, at the foot of a perilous staircase. This being the end of the school year, Fred expected to find students gnashing their teeth over lost footnotes, but the place was almost deserted.

  The stacks are concentrated in a single room around whose sides hunch the desks, or carrels, that graduate students are assigned. Only three or four of these were occupied. A florid young woman in a blue print dress was leaning back in her chair, her feet up on her desk, a large volume on ancient Near Eastern pottery on her lap, and she herself as fast asleep as if she were enjoying a curse brought down upon her as a result of breaking into the wrong tomb.

  A few of her fellows searched the stacks. Way down at the far end, near the cage where sales catalogs and precious and/or dirty art books are kept locked, a young man in jeans, white shirt, and bow tie sat at his
desk in a puddle of lamp light, looking down at a book and then up, as if he were a bird swallowing water, then down again, to scribble on a yellow pad. He had a suitably frantic air for this time of year. He seemed almost to tear at his long blond hair.

  American painting is in the middle of the stacks. Fred’s plan was, if he could, to deliver himself to the same random forces that had worked so well already that morning, another form of research, sometimes the most successful, being serendipity.

  He walked along the stacks, smelling the slow decay of leather, paper, glue, and cloth and looking for the trunk and head, and the fine hand, that would complete the male legs in the canvas mirror: the artist striding toward Conchita Hill, whose smile was greeting him. Paul Wayland Bartlett? Not too exciting. Frederick Arthur Bridgeman might have done it, but he would have stuck in something Moorish—perhaps a harem motif to give him an excuse for the nudity. Chase? There wasn’t much on him in the stacks. There was Frank Duveneck (who would have wished to keep such a liaison secret from poor, ailing Elizabeth Boott), but Fred had dismissed him the night before. Lucy Lee-Robbins, now. Suppose the artist was also a woman. Lee-Robbins had a murky story and a body of paintings that was well hidden. She had painted well-realized—even fondled—female nudes who looked as if they were about to have tea. Lucy became the mistress of her teacher Emile-Auguste Carolus-Duran, who was also Sargent’s teacher. The American manner of Clay’s painting, after all, had its origin in French fashion well established by Carolus-Duran, which Sargent, being trickier than anyone, could rub French noses in, going them one better.

  How about Charles Sprague Pearce? If the picture was by Pearce, it would be better off anonymous. Nobody wanted a Pearce. Sargent Fred had already written off. Molly was right about Sargent. He was a drapery man. Whistler?

  Well, what about Whistler? Fred’s heart did a little thump. The fan was right. The colors. Whistler could have executed such an image and called it Harmony in Flesh and Black. Lord knew Whistler could draw a woman when he wanted to.