Madonna of the Apes

by Nicholas Kilmer

  The Canaletto was a good picture. The fact that it came with the house, that Clayton had not chosen it purposely, made it no less a picture. It was, though, a badge of Bostonian generations, like the Gilbert Stuart portrait of a young woman hanging on the wall opposite. Fred studied her, but with less patience. She was presumably an ancestor of the wife Clayton had lost. What was her maiden name? Clay had mentioned it with a passing caress, but too much had been happening.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Next to the Gilbert Stuart virgin or young wife, the top of whose bosom was as rosy as her cheeks, and painted with the same formula, hung a shocking shriek of obscenity that was what, in fact, had pulled Fred across the room: a woman’s head contorted in a scream. It was, it had to be, one of Gericault’s studies of mad women. The paint was as tortured as the strokes in the Stuart were smug. There was cruelty in the face, cruelty in the world, and a compassionate answering cruelty in the artist’s eye.

  Gericault had painted studies of the heads of guillotined prisoners. This was worse. Anyone looking could tell you, “This is Granny. She’s been like this eight years. She’d pull her clothes off if she could. We have to tie her to a chair and change her every day. She’ll only eat when we feed her by force. Threaten her? With what? She’s already on fire.”

  Fred knew her. He’d been there. He didn’t need to reach out to feel the searing heat that lurked back of the gray background. “Does the man have a sense of irony?” he asked. “Or does he hang them side by side because the background color of the Stuart portrait is almost the same gray?”

  Then—was it still an ironical procession?—next to the Gericault, but separated from it by a whatnot bracket on which a whatnot made of blue and white porcelain was sitting, there hung a Dutch cow. Fred could not put a name to the painter, and couldn’t read the signature. Clay Reed had the tact not to stick brass plates on his picture frames to tell himself what he was sitting on. In any case there were probably twenty Dutch painters, in the mid-1600s, who could have painted this cow this way, and this well. She was at ease on the crest of a green hill, chewing her cud and, all twelve hundred pounds of her, compressed into a rectangle barely a foot wide. The carved black wooden frame around her might as well be the “little black dress” intended to package her to the best advantage. Her charms included a coat of almost poisonous buttery creamy yellow, and a placid eye that regarded the viewer with outraged disbelief, as if Fred were saying, “Don’t get up.”

  “Don’t worry,” she’d say, in cow. “I’m doing what I’m doing, and I’ll keep on doing it long after you’re dead.”

  It was all about gravity, and light, and the transformation of frail green tendrils into butterfat, and the present if waning triumph of the Dutch maritime empire. She owned it all. She wasn’t moving.

  A phone rang at the end of the double room, next to the kitchen. Clay kept a desk there, on which was nothing but the telephone. Fred crossed to it but let it ring. As far as Clayton’s world was concerned, nobody knew that Fred had entered the picture. If Clayton was trying to reach him, they hadn’t planned for it. The guy had a whole life after all, independent of the matter at hand. The phone stopped ringing. No answering machine. What had he said? “It lets them know what we are doing.”

  Clayton had hung a mirror over the desk, grudgingly, no doubt, since it took wall space. Except that it reflected, once the unruly lines and crags of Fred’s face were out of the way, the small luminous gem from far away. From here it was only lines and color, backward: primary colors.

  Fred crossed the room again, dodging furniture, including the grand piano on which sat the portrait, framed in silver, of Clayton’s wife. Prudence? Lucy? Yes, “Stillton,” he’d said. Fred stopped and looked at the photograph with amused surprise. She looked, didn’t she—and you had to make allowances for the casual mists of loveliness thrown around their subjects by portrait photographers—but didn’t she bear some resemblance to Leonardo’s Madonna? No wonder the man was smitten with his painting.

  Strange, the night of their first meeting. Fred had assumed, out loud, that the conjunction he’d happened into, between Tilley and Reed, had been an assignation. Reed, accused of the indiscretion, had responded with a surprising lack of affect. The normal response of any man would have been vigorous and, if the suggestion did not apply, vigorously negative. But for Clay, beginning from that first encounter, sexual orientation seemed to be a non-issue. Though he spoke of it, he seemed, simply, to have no dog presently in that hunt. If it was an issue at all, it was only an issue because Fred had made it one, as Tilley had. And Clayton had simply dodged away.

  If the stage set tells the story, what was Clayton’s story? It needed more than one mind to understand the stage set. Put a woman here, in this space, and ask her what was the story. A woman would read it better. How would Mandy understand it? Mandy coming out of the shower into Clayton’s parlor, her hair wet, in that yellow robe? She’d done pretty well, figuring out War and Peace.

  She’d look at the photograph of Lucy Stillton and say, “What do I know? The man comes from somewhere. He’s obviously not from here. Chicago? California? He’s done well. Princeton, he said. Then Yale. Or the other way around. Whatever. So his family had money, some, enough to send him to school.

  “Then he comes to Boston. Not law. Not government work. But his business—I know—his business is Money. He works for a firm and he does well, meets other people in Money. Goes to the opera with them, maybe gets into one of the clubs, even though he’s from somewhere else. Then—what makes sense? He’s a fish out of water here, in a way, but he fits right in. He’s a convert, is what. It’s all his more than if he was born to it. And it’s not his by inheritance, either, because he’s a proud man. Odd bird he might be, but he has what he has because he gets what he wants.”

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Mandy wandered the room, her bare feet leaving damp tracks on the carpets. “I know. He makes money, but not that much. Also his dad, who believes in supporting the kid just so much, stopped with the allowance one year after he got out of Princeton, or Yale, whichever came second. He didn’t flunk out. Not him. So it’s graduate school. Where there were other people so much like him he didn’t know he was out of the ordinary.

  “Anyway, he’s here in Boston, doing well. Then he comes into real money. Sudden money. Which can only be crime or tragedy and since it’s Clayton it isn’t crime. His parents—no—his brother. His elder brother. Because the guy’s a man in the world, and he knows he’s a man in the world, but he’s had the role in some way thrust upon him. He’s diffident with it. So the older brother, the heir apparent, older by six years, so Clay really looked up to him—he dies in a tragic way that’s also unseemly. He’s murdered, maybe in a gay bar, and everyone had assumed he’s straight including the girl he was engaged to. He’s, whatever he is, or was, amazingly successful and he left pots of money, and all of it to his little brother Clayton, big surprise. Now suddenly this guy’s a millionaire, with a brother he loves who’s dead in disgrace. His parents are living still? I can’t see them. They die maybe later, but they’re not important because Clay’s moved on.”

  She lifted the hem of the robe to dry her hair, bending in the diffuse light of the bay window. She was enjoying this, getting into it. “He’s already fallen in love, or he’s already met, the woman he’s going to marry, this Lucy Stillton, from an old Boston family. Though he doesn’t have much experience of love, he’s suspicious of this one because he’s been to Princeton and Yale and he’s read the books and he can see that, for the outsider, a way to move into the social system is to marry into it, and he wants to be part of it. But he also knows that it’s the woman who moves most successfully. A man moving into the tribe doesn’t take on its color the way a woman does. With a woman, unless you really look, you don’t know where she comes from.

  “But he’s rich now, because of the unseemly tragedy of his brother’s death. So nobody can suspect him of being after Old Boston m
oney, and besides in this case though the family is old, it turns out there’s no money. Nothing more than illusion.

  “Lucy Stillton is younger, she’s pretty and she worships the guy. She’s been out of Wellesley two years already, where she was good in French. She swims well. Was athletic. The family has a place on the North Shore. Manchester maybe, or a small town near there whose name I wouldn’t know because I haven’t been invited. She’s been used to go sailing with her brothers and their friends, and they go skinny-dipping in the ocean. She’s good with a boat and she’s strong. She meets Clay—at a wedding? A garden party? On the neighboring boat when they tie up in Gloucester to buy lobsters? Does she take Clayton Reed skinny-dipping? Somehow I can’t get there.

  “Anyway she’s in love, he’s in love, he’s the only kid left in the family now and his scruples are overcome when he understands that the family home, where he was invited last Christmas Eve, is in hock, mortgaged as far as a mortgage will go, and the family—the parents are dead? The father is, only the widow’s alive and Lucy’s brothers, all older, because they are MEN, have taken on or been bequeathed the family finances. And wrecked them.”

  “Wait a minute,” Fred objected.

  “Don’t bother me. I’m rolling,” Mandy said. She sat on a sofa, the yellow of her robe singing against its blue upholstery, and crossed her legs. “The brothers—do the scene that Christmas Eve, with one brother raising his glass to proclaim drunkenly, This is the last time we’ll be together in the old wreck, so drink up. He’s tipsy but not too tipsy, since he’s used to it. Let’s not overdo this. It turns out the brothers have decided to sell the family place and divide whatever’s left after the mortgage is paid off. They think it’s worth more than it is. They always do.

  “So Clay steps in, buys the house as a wedding present to Lucy, and Lucy and he move in. (Never mind that what Lucy wanted was an apartment over the harbor.) Mama stays on upstairs until she fades out of the picture, which has to be soon because Lucy is gone pretty soon herself.

  “They’re in love. She’s young. He’s innocent. They are elated when the symptoms begin, because they believe, everyone does, she’s pregnant. Clayton’s amazed, out of his mind. This business of carrying on the race, and the family name, he had been leaving to the elder brother and now it’s he, Clayton, who is presiding at the bud that’s to become a new branch on the family tree.

  “But the symptoms are of something else, devastating and wasting. In four months the woman who had been strong enough to swim through waves in sea water sixty degrees, and towing a dinghy with a rope she holds in her teeth—in four months she can’t walk by herself, and in six months she’s dead.”

  Chapter Fifty

  “Clayton Reed never knew what hit him,” Mandy continued. As a wraith she had remarkable staying power. “How long they were married I don’t know. Two years? Could he have even known her? Did she suspect, when they married, that something was wrong with her? I don’t think so. She was more surprised than anyone.

  “Clay was devastated. If she hadn’t been so determined in the first place, they’d never have been married. And if she hadn’t been three times as adaptable as he was—women are—they’d have never stayed married. He woke one morning like a man who’d had a cathedral fall in on him. Lucy’d been buried in the family plot in Manchester or nearby, and here he was in this house, this present he’d bought her, with the mother upstairs, the brothers, the nephews and nieces, the furniture and the Canaletto.

  “The whole thing makes sense as a monument to Lucy Stillton. Lucy wouldn’t have bought the Hopper, or the Gericault Mad Woman, or that cow. Or…”

  “No,” Fred said, “you’re right. She wouldn’t buy it. But Clay would, in her honor.” The telephone rang again, and when Fred looked back from it, Mandy, the illusion of her, yellow terry cloth robe and all, was gone.

  Fred had wandered on to the small and intense canvas that had earlier caught his eye. About eight inches by ten, the painting was the only thing abstract in the room. A slab of rust red jostled against a slab of midnight blue. Jostled was the wrong word because the edges between the two colors were clean and hard. But the two colors were so antithetical one to another that they made friction, as two well-bred people might who had hated each other for years, but who found themselves seated next to each other at the funeral of a person both had loved.

  One of the Russian Constructivists? Malevitch?

  Or, “Why not finish the story,” Fred said. “The painting is by Lucy Stillton herself. She was one of those accidental geniuses who makes a stunning work of art, stands back, grins, says, Look at that! and never does it again. Never tries to. Never needs to. Never wants to. It’s done.”

  The telephone stopped ringing.

  Fred checked his watch. Four-thirty. Let Clayton not lose track of time in a library, the way Fred did! If Fred had any chance of confronting Professor Mitchell, there wasn’t likely going to be more than the one chance. He checked that the front door was secure before moving downstairs into the space that he’d so quickly, easily, and comfortably begun to think of as his office.

  While Fred had been occupied with a very living Suzette Shaughnessy, Clayton had lost no time scratching among the dead. He’d made remarkable progress fleshing out possible background for his painting; convincing circumstantial evidence that might tie the painting upstairs to the hands of the long-dead painter. Clayton had left his research lying around in the form of books with markers in them, and note cards on which he had written in pencil, in a hand that was most easily classified as “insufferable.” Somewhere between Greek and Cuneiform, it was made up mostly of vertical marks running parallel, most with a slight bend sinister. Fred found that the only way to read them was to get a running start and to let the eye roll along at exactly the right speed, neither too fast nor too slow. The words had to be read more quickly than speech, but more slowly than reading. Still, except for the odd word, Clay’s questions and observations were not impossible to get around.

  He’d concentrated on the period of Leonardo’s first stay in Milan, after he’d arrived there from Florence in 1481. He was thirty years old and, though he’d had some success in Florence, he’d had to dodge that scandal. Then he’d been passed over for a big commission, and decided to try his fortune in Milan, under Ludovico Sforza, known as Il Moro, The Moor.

  What he’d presented himself as, when he got to Sforza’s court, was a confusing jumble of possibilities. Jack of a lot of trades, not all of them useful. He was carrying with him a lute he’d made, or invented, or found—house present for the duke—of a lyre in the shape of a horse’s head. He, supposedly an accomplished musician himself, was traveling in the company of another musician, Atalante Migliorotti. This man, ten years younger, and said also to be Leonardo’s pupil, was a singer. What Leonardo was supposed to be teaching him never became clear although by the end of his life Migliorotti had become the Vatican’s inspector of architectural works. It would be easier to assume that they were lovers than that they were not.

  Leonardo had trained in Florence, in the studio of Verrocchio, who, like the other masters of his time, was equally able to paint, to sculpt, to design you a building, or to make a complicated wedding presentation in cast gold. Leonardo learned all these trades, and was assigned portions of some of Verrocchio’s paintings to execute, to correct or complete. But it was not as a painter that he offered himself to Il Moro, Duke Ludovico Sforza.

  “Take that, Peter Hartrack,” Fred said. What Leonardo da Vinci offered, in his letter to the duke, was arms. He described the weapons he wished to make with a lavish and optimistic assurance that promised to bless, with bloody chaos, all the military adventures his patron might ever contemplate.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  A copy of Leonardo’s self-introductory letter to the duke existed, in which his abilities as a painter were mentioned only, almost, as an afterthought. After the nine categories of services he offered, all of them military, he had added, in pe
acetime I…can…be the equal of any man in architecture…or conduct water from one place to another…I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, and clay; and in painting can do any kind of work as well as any man, whoever he be.*

  So, even in the unhappy event of peace, Leonardo suggested, there would be a use for him. But what he really wanted to make for the new patron was, 1, Strong but light bridges, by which to pursue or flee an enemy; 2, Scaling ladders to use during sieges, and means to drain the enemy’s defensive moats; 3, Systems that could be used to destroy enemy citadels in cases where bombardment was not effective; 4, Practical mortars, easily transported, to rain stones down on the enemy, filling him with terror, hurt, and confusion; 5, He could direct the digging of underground tunnels, even under the enemy’s system of moats; 6, He offered what we would call tanks, covered vehicles, safe and unassailable, to destroy the most powerful troops; 7, Bombards, mortars, and fire-throwers “of beautiful and practical design.” (“Beautiful and practical fire-throwing machines,” Fred noted. “What’s practical is also beautiful. The concept of beauty and practicality, for Leonardo, may be interchangeable. Talk to me, Mona Lisa.”) 8 and 9 offered the prospect of further engines of destruction, to be useful on land and sea, mostly in the hurling of missiles, but also, Leonardo claimed, he could make boats that would resist even the heaviest cannon fire, fumes and gunpowder.

  Aside from the instruments of war, Leonardo’s biggest selling point, in this work of self-advertisement, was the claim he made that he could design, and cast, a colossal bronze equestrian statue to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the lord your father and blessed memory of the illustrious house of Sforza.