Overhead in a Balloon Read online

  “I’d also like to see his pictures,” said Speck, thankful for the chance. “The pictures you said you had upstairs.”

  “You know how I met Hube? People often ask me that. I’m surprised you haven’t. I came to him for lessons.”

  “I didn’t know he taught,” said Speck. His most reliable professional trait was his patience.

  “He didn’t. I admired him so much that I thought I’d try anyway. I was eighteen. I rang the bell. His mother let me in. I never left – he wouldn’t let me go. His mother often said if she’d known the future she’d never have answered the door. I must have walked about four miles from a tram stop, carrying a big portfolio of my work to show him. There wasn’t even a paved street then – just a patch of nettles out front and some vacant lots.”

  Her work. He knew he had to get it over with: “Would you like to show me some of your things, too?”

  “I burned it all a long time ago.”

  Speck’s heart lurched. “But not his work?”

  “It wasn’t mine to burn. I’m not a criminal.” Mutely, he looked at the bare walls. “None of Hube’s stuff ever hung in here,” she said. “His mother couldn’t stand it. We had everything she liked – Napoleon at Waterloo, lighthouses, coronations. I couldn’t touch it when she was alive, but once she’d gone I didn’t wait two minutes.”

  Speck’s eighteenth-century premises were centrally heated. The system, which dated from the early nineteen-sixties, had been put in by Americans who had once owned most of the second floor. With the first dollar slide of the Nixon era they had wisely sold their holdings and gone home, without waiting for the calamity still to come. Their memorial was an expensive, casual gift nobody knew what to do with; it had raised everyone’s property taxes, and it cost a fortune to run. Tenants, such as Speck, who paid a fat share of the operation, had no say as to when heat was turned on, or to what degree of temperature. Only owners and landlords had a vote. They voted overwhelmingly for the lowest possible fuel bills. By November there was scarcely a trace of warmth in Speck’s elegant gallery, his cold was entrenched for the winter, and Walter was threatening to quit. Speck was showing a painter from Bruges, sponsored by a Belgian cultural-affairs committee. Cost-sharing was not a habit of his – it lowered the prestige of the gallery – but in a tight financial season he sometimes allowed himself a breather. The painter, who clearly expected Speck to put him under contract, talked of moving to Paris.

  “You’d hate it here,” said Speck.

  Belgian television filmed the opening. The Belgian royal family, bidden by Walter, on his own initiative, sent regrets signed by aides-de-camp on paper so thick it would scarcely fold. These were pinned to the wall, and drew more attention than the show itself. Only one serious critic turned up. The rooms were so cold that guests could not write their names in the visitors’ book – their hands were too numb. Walter, perhaps by mistake, had invited Blum-Weiler-Blochs instead of Blum-Bloch-Weilers. They came in a horde, leading an Afghan hound they tried to raffle off for charity.

  The painter now sat in the gallery, day after day, smoking black cigarettes that smelled of mutton stew. He gave off a deep professional gloom, which affected Walter. Walter began to speak of the futility of genius – a sure sign of melancholia. Speck gave the painter money so that he could smoke in cafés. The bells of St. Clotilde’s clanged and echoed, saying to Speck’s memory, “Fascist, Fascist, Fascist.” Walter reminded Speck that November was bad for art. The painter returned from a café looking cheerful. Speck wondered if he was enjoying Paris and if he would decide to stay; he stopped giving him money and the gallery became once more infested with mutton stew and despair. Speck began a letter to Henriette imploring her to come back. Walter interrupted it with the remark that Rembrandt, Mozart, and Dante had lived in vain. Speck tore the letter up and started another one saying that a Guillaumin pastel was missing and suggesting that Henriette had taken it to Africa. Just as he was tearing this up, too, the telephone rang.

  “I finally got Hube’s stuff all straightened out,” said Lydia Cruche. “You might as well come round and look at it this afternoon. By the way, you may call me ‘Lydia,’ if you want to.”

  “Thank you,” said Speck. “And you, of course, must call me –”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. Once a doctor always a doctor. Come early. The light goes at four.”

  Speck took a pill to quiet the pounding of his heart.

  In her summing-up of his moral nature, a compendium that had preceded her ringing “Fascist”s, Henriette had declared that Speck appraising an artist’s work made her think of a real-estate loan officer examining Chartres Cathedral for leaks. It was true that his feeling for art stopped short of love; it had to. The great cocottes of history had shown similar prudence. Madame de Pompadour had eaten vanilla, believed to arouse the senses, but such recklessness was rare. Cool but efficient – that was the professional ticket. No vanilla for Speck; he knew better. For what if he were to allow passion for painting to set alight his common sense? How would he be able to live then, knowing that the ultimate fate of art was to die of anemia in safe-deposit vaults? Ablaze with love, he might try to organize raids and rescue parties, dragging pictures out of the dark, leaving sacks of onions instead. He might drop the art trade altogether, as Walter kept intending to do, and turn his talents to cornering the onion market. The same customers would ring at election time, saying, “Dr. Speck, what happens to my onion collection if the Left gets in? Shouldn’t we try to unload part of it in New York now, just to be on the safe side?” And Speck, unloading onions of his own in Tokyo, would answer, “Don’t worry. They can’t possibly nationalize all the onions. Besides, they aren’t going to win.”

  Lydia seemed uninterested in Speck’s reaction to Cruche. He had expected her to hang about, watching his face, measuring his interest, the better to nail her prices; but she simply showed him a large, dim, dusty, north-facing room in which canvases were thickly stacked against the walls and said, “I wasn’t able to get the light fixed. I’ve left a lamp. Don’t knock it over. Tea will be ready when you are.” Presently he heard American country music rising from the kitchen (Lydia must have been tuned to the BBC) and he smelled a baking cake. Then, immersed in his ice-cold Cruche encounter, he noticed nothing more.

  About three hours later he came downstairs, slowly, wiping dust from his hands with a handkerchief. His conception of the show had been slightly altered, and for the better, by the total Cruche. He began to rewrite the catalogue notes: “The time has come for birth …” No – “for rebirth. In a world sated by overstatement the moment is ripe for a calm …” How to avoid “statement” and still say “statement”? The Grand Architect was keeping Speck in mind. “For avouchment,” said Speck, alone on the stairs. It was for avouchment that the time had come. It was also here for hard business. His face became set and distant, as if a large desk were about to be shoved between Lydia Cruche and himself.

  He sat down and said, “This is going to be a strong show, a powerful show, even stronger than I’d hoped. Does everything I’ve looked at upstairs belong to you outright? Is there anything which for any reason you are not allowed to lend, show, or sell?”

  “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” said Lydia, cutting caramel cake.

  “No. Well, I am talking about the show, of course.”

  “No show,” she said. “I already told you that.”

  “What do you mean, no show?” said Speck.

  “What I told you at the beginning. I told you not to count on me. Don’t drop boiled frosting on your trousers. I couldn’t get it to set.”

  “But you changed your mind,” said Speck. “After saying ‘Don’t count on me,’ you changed your mind.”

  “Not for a second.”

  “Why?” said Speck, as he had said to the departing Henriette. “Why?”

  “God doesn’t want it.”

  He waited for more. She folded her arms and stared at the blank television set. “How do
you know that God doesn’t want Hubert Cruche to have a retrospective?”

  “Because He said so.”

  His first thought was that the Grand Architect had granted Lydia Cruche something so far withheld from Sandor Speck: a plain statement of intention. “Don’t you know your Commandments?” she asked. “You’ve never heard of the graven image?”

  He searched her face for the fun, the teasing, even the malice that might give shape to this conversation, allow him to take hold of it. He said, “I can’t believe you mean this.”

  “You don’t have to. I’m sure you have your own spiritual pathway. Whatever it is, I respect it. God reveals himself according to each person’s mental capacity.”

  One of Speck’s widows could prove she descended from Joan of Arc. Another had spent a summer measuring the walls of Toledo in support of a theory that Jericho had been in Spain. It was Speck’s policy never to fight the current of eccentricity but to float with it. He said cautiously, “We are all held in a mysterious hand.” Generations of Speck freethinkers howled from their graves; he affected not to hear them.

  “I am a Japhethite, Dr. Speck. You remember who Noah was? And his sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth? What does that mean to you?” Speck looked as if he possessed Old Testament lore too fragile to stand exposure. “Three,” said Lydia. “The sacred number. The first, the true, the only source of Israel. That crowd Moses led into the desert were just Egyptian malcontents. The true Israelites were scattered all over the earth by then. The Bible hints at this for its whole length. Japheth’s people settled in Scotland. Present-day Jews are impostors.”

  “Are you connected to this Japheth?”

  “I do not make that claim. My Scottish ancestors came from the border country. The Japhethites had been driven north long before by the Roman invasion. The British Israelite movement, which preceded ours, proved that the name ‘Hebrides’ was primitive Gaelic for ‘Hebrew.’ The British Israelites were distinguished pathfinders. It was good of you to have come all the way out here, Dr. Speck. I imagine you’ll want to be getting back.”

  After backing twice into Lydia’s fence, Speck drove straight to Galignani’s bookshop, on Rue de Rivoli, where he purchased an English Bible. He intended to have Walter ransack it for contra-Japhethite pronouncements. The orange dust jacket surprised him; it seemed to Speck that Bibles were usually black. On the back flap the churches and organizations that had sponsored this English translation were listed, among them the National Bible Society of Scotland. He wondered if this had anything to do with Japheth.

  As far as Speck could gather from passages Walter marked during the next few days, art had never really flourished, even before Moses decided to put a stop to it. Apart from a bronze snake cast at God’s suggestion (Speck underscored this for Lydia in red), there was nothing specifically cultural, though Ezekiel’s visions had a certain surrealistic splendor. As Speck read the words “the terrible crystal,” its light flooded his mind, illuminating a simple question: Why not forget Hubert Cruche and find an easier solution for the cultural penury of the West? The crystal dimmed. Speck’s impulsive words that October night, “Cruche is coming back,” could not be reeled in. Senator Bellefeuille was entangled in a promise that had Speck at one end and Lydia at the other. Speck had asked if he might examine his lodge brother’s collection and had been invited to lunch. Cruche had to come back.

  Believing Speck’s deliverance at hand, Walter assailed him with texts and encouragement. He left Biblical messages on Speck’s desk so that he had to see them first thing after lunch. Apparently the British Israelite movement had truly existed, enjoying a large and respectable following. Its premise that it was the British who were really God’s elect had never been challenged, though membership had dwindled at mid-century; Walter could find no trace of Lydia’s group, however. He urged Speck to drive to the north of Scotland, but Speck had already decided to abandon the religious approach to Cruche.

  “No modern translation conveys the word of Japheth or of God,” Lydia had said when Speck showed her Walter’s finds. There had been something unusual about the orange dust jacket, after all. He did not consider this a defeat. Bible reading had raised his spirits. He understood now why Walter found it consoling, for much in it consisted of the assurance of downing one’s enemies, dashing them against stones, seeing their children reduced to beggary and their wives to despair. Still, he was not drawn to deep belief: he remained rational, skeptical, anxious, and subject to colds, and he had not succeeded in moving Lydia Cruche an inch.

  Lunch at Senator Bellefeuille’s was balm. Nothing was served that Speck could not swallow. From the dining room he looked across at the dark November trees of the Bois de Boulogne. The Senator lived on the west side of Paris – the clients’ side. A social allegory in the shape of a city separated Speck from Lydia Cruche. The Senator’s collection was fully insured, free from dust, attractively framed or stored in racks built to order.

  Speck began a new catalogue introduction as he ate lunch. “The Bellefeuille Cruches represent a unique aspect of Cruche’s vision,” he composed, heartily enjoying fresh crab soufflé. “Not nearly enough has been said about Cruche and the nude.”

  The Senator broke in, asking how much Cruche was likely to fetch after the retrospective. Speck gave figures to which his choice of socks and cufflinks lent authority.

  “Cruche-and-the-nude implies a definition of Woman,” Speck continued, silently, sipping coffee from a gold-rimmed cup. “Lilith, Eve, temptress, saint, child, mother, nurse – Cruche delineated the feminine factor once and for all.”

  The Senator saw his guest to the door, took his briefcase from the hands of a manservant, and bestowed it on Speck like a diploma. He told Speck he would send him a personal invitation list for the Cruche opening next May. The list would include the estranged wife of a respected royal pretender, the publisher of an influential morning paper, the president of a nationalized bank, and the highest-ranking administrative official of a thickly populated area. Before driving away, Speck took a deep breath of west-end air. It was cool and dry, like Speck’s new expression.

  That evening, around closing time, he called Lydia Cruche. He had to let her know that the show could go on without her. “I shall be showing the Bellefeuille Cruches,” he said.

  “The what?”

  Speck changed the subject. “There is enormous American interest,” he said, meaning that he had written half a dozen letters and received prudent answers or none at all. He was accustomed to the tense excitement “American interest” could arouse. He had known artists to enroll in crash courses at Berlitz, the better to understand prices quoted in English.

  Lydia was silent; then she said, slowly, “Don’t ever mention such a thing again. Hube was anti-American – especially during the war.” As for Lydia, she had set foot in the United States once, when a marshmallow roast had taken her a few yards inside North Dakota, some sixty years before.

  The time was between half past seven and eight. Walter had gone to early dinner and a lecture on lost Atlantis. The Belgian painter was back in Bruges, unsold and unsung. The cultural-affairs committee had turned Speck’s bill for expenses over to a law firm in Brussels. Two Paris galleries had folded in the past month and a third was packing up for America, where Speck gave it less than a year. Painters set adrift by these frightening changes drifted to other galleries, shipwrecked victims trying to crawl on board waterlogged rafts. On all sides Speck heard that the economic decline was irreversible. He knew one thing – art had sunk low on the scale of consumer necessities. To mop up a few back bills, he was showing part of his own collection – his last-ditch old-age security reserve. He clasped his hands behind his neck, staring at a Vlaminck India ink on his desk. It had been certified genuine by an expert now serving a jail sentence in Zurich. Speck was planning to flog it to one of the ambassadors down the street.

  He got up and began turning out lights, leaving just a spot in the window. To have been anti-American during the
Second World War in France had a strict political meaning. Any hope of letters from Louis Aragon and Elsa withered and died: Hubert Cruche had been far Right. Of course, there was Right and Right, thought Speck as he triple-locked the front door. Nowadays the Paris intelligentsia drew new lines across the past, separating coarse collaborators from fine-drawn intellectual Fascists. One could no longer lump together young hotheads whose passionate belief in Europe had led them straight to the Charlemagne Division of the Waffen-S.S. and the soft middle class that had stayed behind to make money on the black market. Speck could not quite remember why pure Fascism had been better for civilization than the other kind, but somewhere on the safe side of the barrier there was bound to be a slot for Cruche. From the street, he considered a page of Charles Despiau sketches – a woman’s hand, her breast, her thigh. He thought of the Senator’s description of that other, early Lydia and of the fragments of perfection Speck could now believe in, for he had seen the Bellefeuille nudes. The familiar evening sadness caught up with him and lodged in his heart. Posterity forgives, he repeated, turning away, crossing the road on his way to his dinner.

  Speck’s ritual pause brought him up to St. Amand and his demon just as M. Chassepoule leaned into his window to replace a two-volume work he had probably taken out to show a customer. The bookseller drew himself straight, stared confidently into the night, and caught sight of Speck. The two greeted each other through glass. M. Chassepoule seemed safe, at ease, tucked away in a warm setting of lights and friends and royal blue, and yet he made an odd little gesture of helplessness, as if to tell Speck, “Here I am, like you, overtaxed, hounded, running an honest business against dreadful odds.” Speck made a wry face of sympathy, as if to answer that he knew, he knew. His neighbour seemed to belong to an old and desperate breed, its back to the wall, its birthright gnawed away by foreigners, by the heathen, by the blithe continuity of art, by Speck himself. He dropped his gaze, genuinely troubled, examining the wares M. Chassepoule had collected, dusted, sorted, and priced for a new and ardent generation. The work he had just put back in the window was La France Juive, by Édouard Drumont. A handwritten notice described it as a classic study, out of print, hard to find, and in good condition.