The Gallery (6 page)

I slid my foot, too, mimicking with the toe of my boot. “Wouldn't a bit of linseed oil treat this spot? At least, as a measure until the woodworker arrives?”

Ma thought for a moment. “Yes, I believe it would. Good thinking, Martha. There's some in the supply cupboard.” She checked her watch. “I have to run to meet with the grocer. When I return, I want the spot treated and the room vacated. Understood?”

I nodded and watched until the door closed behind her with a shudder of glass.

The linseed oil was instantly forgotten as drapes were whisked away from each of the cloaked paintings, sheets piled on the floor.

It was an odd collection of paintings, there was no
denying it: some larger than life, some small enough to tuck under your arm and walk out the door.

I also saw that, for a woman who ate only broth and mush, Mrs. Sewell seemed quite obsessed with fruit.

The painting next to Eve—or whoever she was—dulled in comparison, a ho-hum looking bowl of fruit, dusty, patchy apples in a pile, and here again was that strange-looking apple I'd seen in the lady's milky-white hands.
Nature morte
, a title on the frame read; the name on the frame was Courbet, and then the words:
in vinculis faciebat
.

The painting next to it was quite pleasing.
Still even,
the plaque said, by Willem Kalf. Large, imposing, and undeniably rich, it made me think of the dishes that came down after Mr. Sewell's more indulgent dinners: half-finished crystal glasses of wine, a mussed tablecloth, crumbs on the table and silver decanters overturned. But something about the way this one was painted made the whole scene seem delectable rather than messy. The silver glinted, the fruit shone, the linen tablecloth beckoned, and I impulsively reached out for it, feeling silly when I discovered it cold and flat against my finger.

The showpiece against all the finery was that fruit again, and now I had to admit Alphonse was right—
this was no apple. The fruit had split open as if exposing its guts, an explosion of glossy red. Against the soft white linen tablecloth, a single scarlet, glowing seed had fallen, and the maid in me wanted to sweep it into my dustpan.

The whole display felt obscene somehow, though I couldn't for the life of me figure out why. It was like it was something impossibly rich and lush, and yet at the same time . . . too much. Just looking at it gave me something of a stomachache.

And what was “still even” about it? I had no idea.

The final painting also baffled me.

Unlike the previous picture, there was nothing rich or delicious or enticing here. Instead the small canvas—I could pick it up easily, if I'd wanted to—mashed up a confusing maze of shapes and lines and smudges of brown, gray, and orange, like a subway train at rush hour. Black seedlike dots speckled the scene here and there. Above the action hovered the hazy words
cafe 3
, like a shop window shining through the fog.

Was this malarkey supposed to be a painting of a café? I looked closer.

But the title, next to the painter's name on the frame (Pablo Picasso), explained nothing:
The Pomegranate
.

Chapter

T
hat night I dreamed of the beautiful lady.

I hadn't dreamed at all since I started working at the house—too tired, probably, falling into what Ma would call “the sleep of the dead.”

But that night I dreamed.

I was in the house's lavish courtyard—it seemed I couldn't even escape the house in my sleep—where all the trees and shrubs had been draped in white sheets. From beneath one, two milky-white hands appeared. They held that strange fruit, and when I reached out for it, placed it safely in my own chapped hands. But as I raised the fruit to take a bite as I would an apple, it burst open, spewing the seeds, the juice staining my apron, dripping between my fingers like blood.

When I woke up, I swore I could taste that juice—both tart and sweet—on my tongue.

—

“Do you really speak French?”

I was supposed to be beating rugs behind the house that day, but it was raining, a steady November rain that drowned the autumn leaves, so I'd been given permission to dust the front parlors instead. I spent an hour on the front reception room alone, waiting to catch Alphonse at his station in the neighboring foyer. But Alphonse had been sent on some errand, and just when I thought I might dust the end tables down to wooden nubs, he returned to his post.

My question must have startled him, because he froze, his face drained of color.

I stepped out from the shadows and held up my dust rag, as if showing I wasn't armed.

He finally cleared his throat and answered, “Of course.”

“Courbet”—I pronounced it Cor-bett—“it's a French name, right?”

Alphonse's shoulders dropped and he let out a breath. “Ah, so you were looking at the paintings?”

“'Course. So is it French?”

“Yes. Yes, he was a French painter.” Alphonse seemed
to warm to his subject. “They call him a ‘Realist.' He wanted to paint what truly was, not what the people want to see.”

“So,” I fished in the pocket of my apron for the note I'd scribbled after closing up the gallery, “
‘nature morte'
—what does that mean?”

Alphonse looked down the hall, back toward the servant stairs. “I do not think your mother wants me talking to you.”

“Don't worry,” I said, settling myself in a chair easily worth more than our house on Willoughby Street. “Ma's doing the inventory with Chef downstairs. They'll be ages.”

Besides, I'd tried asking Ma about pomegranates and
nature morte
, but she'd just looked at me strangely and asked if I'd finished sweeping out the fireplaces.

Alphonse looked unconvinced, but after a moment he plucked up the rag I'd left on the table and made himself look busy by polishing some candlesticks. “
Nature morte
.” He said it with more flourish than me. “To translate, dead nature.”

I thought back to the painting with this title—just a bowl of fruit. Dusty maybe, but edible, I thought. “That doesn't make any sense. Everything in the picture was alive. Well, at least, it wasn't dead.”

“It is just the French way of saying what you call in English,” he paused with his rag, searching for the words, “‘stop life'—a painting of objects. No people, no animals. Nothing moving. All still.”

“Oh.”

“Still!” He smiled broadly, as if he had solved a nagging problem. “‘Still life.' That is the name. Not stop. ‘Still.'”

Alphonse shot another look over his shoulder. Hearing no footsteps approaching, he continued his lecture, all the while staying with his busy work, moving beyond the candlesticks to the table. “Yes, because in Dutch, it is
still even
. Did you see the Dutch? These were the masters of the still life.”

“‘Still even.'” I remembered those words on the opulent table scene. “Does that mean dead nature, too?”

“It means ‘still the same.' Always the same. Frozen, maybe one might say. The Dutch had this belief of death and life together. Did you not see spots on the fruit, the beginning of . . . how do you say, rotten? Of mold? You will always see these things. It means that . . . ,” the rag paused on the table as he stared in the distance, putting together some idea in his brain. “It means that something is beautiful from a distance, but once you go close
you will see the flaws.” He began polishing again. “And that nothing, even the most beautiful, lasts forever.”

I hadn't noticed rot or mold or flaws. But those bloody red seeds returned to my mind, and I shivered.

“So that is what they mean by these paintings.” Alphonse stood up, now looking at me with curiosity. “And the Picasso, what did you think?”

I shrugged. “A bunch of nothing and a name that doesn't mean anything.”

“If it was truly a ‘bunch of nothing,' it
would
be nothing—a blank canvas. No, Señor Picasso chooses the colors, the shapes for a reason.” He stopped, something on the leg of the table catching his eye. He spat on the rag and knelt down to set to buffing it out. “Nothing on that wall is an accident.”

“You mean, on the painting?”

“I mean on the wall. And
The Pomegranate
is indeed a name that means something, especially on that wall.”

Alphonse's rag kept moving, so I kept talking.

“So what is a pomegranate anyway? And, oh!” I consulted the paper scrap again. “
In vinculis faciebat
. What's that?”

“It is Latin. It means ‘made in prison.' And as for
what is a pomegranate,” he spat on the rag again, then shook his head forlornly. “Pomegranate—a fruit. But a very,” he searched again for the word, “specific fruit. Specific for a reason. Not that you Americans—”

“I know, Cracker Jacks and catsup. Y'know, this is all awful fancy talk for a footman. French, Italian, Latin. How many languages do you speak anyway? And how'd you learn so much about pictures? Were you a priest or something in the Old Country? Because for someone so highfalutin', you'd think you'd have a job that didn't bring you so low.”

Alphonse stopped rubbing. He slowly stood up and tossed the rag, spit and all, on the table, then walked out of the room.

As usual, I'd pushed too far, driving away not only the serving staff's resident language expert but one heck of a parlormaid.

But just as I was reaching reluctantly for the spittled rag, he returned, his usually placid jaw clenched.

“There is not a thing that I know that I did not learn from a book,” he launched in. “Maybe you do not know what this is. They are this big, white things in the middle—”

“I know what a book is.”

“Do you? Perhaps they have forgotten what you
look like. There is an excellent library full of these books, just over there.” He indicated the direction of Mr. Sewell's office. “Homer, Herodotus, Virgil, Ovid.” He paused, then repeated. “Ovid. Words written many thousands of years ago, but they are still available to anyone—a millionaire, a lady, a footman, even a maid.”

I didn't recognize half the words in his little speech, but I did recognize a dare when thrown in my face. And that name—Ovid—sounded familiar, but I wasn't sure why.

I faked a guffaw. “Available to everyone? Really? Not when that library is in Mr. Sewell's office. Which is always kept locked, I believe?”

Alphonse stuffed his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth in the doorway. “There is one person in this house who stands guard at the door. One who meets the postman every day, takes the post, and places it on Mr. Sewell's desk. For this job, he is trusted with a key. And this person, he is very worthy of this trust, but sometimes, maybe he does not always remember to lock the door behind him.”

As he turned on his heel, I heard a jingling of keys from somewhere in his pocket. And then, farther down the hallway, the unmistakeable
click
of a lock turning.

—

Ma and Chef were still doing the inventory. Mr. Sewell was at the newspaper offices, and Magdalena was silently working her way through the second floor. Alphonse was now nowhere to be seen.

In other words, there was no reason—outside of it being absolutely, entirely, and indubitably forbidden-—not to go in the library.

I tiptoed over to the doors. The knob turned with an easy
click
, and without even a look over my shoulder, I slipped in.

No longer filled with Mr. Sewell's outsized presence, the room felt cavernous.

Bookshelves covered three of the four walls, shadowed as the storm flung leaves and twigs in staccato against the park-facing windows. The wall switch flipped with a sharp
click
that made me jump, and the electric lights overhead shone a garish spotlight on the walls of rich leatherbound volumes—brown, red, green, like the wet leaves stuck to the windows.

While handsome, those neat rows of satiny spines made finding a particular book near impossible. There were no titles imprinted, no authors listed, no labels on the shelves indicating History or Philosophy
or Greek Mythology, and on closer inspection, there were many gaps and breaks in the shelves' soldier-like order.

A large ledger lay open on a stand in one corner which seemed to hold the key to the mysterious collection. It looked like each book had been added to the catalog as it was purchased. The catalog showed the bulk of books dropped in one go at the beginning and the rest added chronologically. But each was then shelved according to a numerical system with unhelpful tells like 876.544F.

This system meant that there was no alphabetical order to guide me to Ovid, whoever or whatever that was. It required going through the ledger, page by page, starting from the beginning.

Luckily I found several books identified as Ovid early on, part of that first haul from Mr. Pritchard's European travels of 1910 (so the ledger said).

But to the right of most entries, I saw my mother's long, looped handwriting: “Removed by Mrs. O'Doyle, for Mrs. Sewell.” March 3, 1927. April 4, 1926. October 2, 1925. The dates were scattered like seeds across a span of the last few years.

And then I remembered where I'd heard that name, Ovid, before Alphonse. It was the book the
doctor noted on Rose's bedside. The book, he suggested, was too provocative, too stimulating for such a fragile woman. Maybe any woman.

Was the doctor right? Was this Ovid helping to drive Mrs. Sewell crazy?

Maybe the words in these books were some kind of ancient spell, I mused as I hunted for the number (873.01), where the Ovids were meant to be found. Maybe they were designed, when read, to scramble your mind or spark an insane frenzy,

True to the register, in a section with a small brass plaque labeled 870-880, half the shelf was empty. I eyed the ransacked shelf with suspicion. Maybe an ancient spell wasn't entirely believable. But then what could be so dangerous here? And what was the subject that held Rose's fascination? Art? Botany? Fruit?

I warily plucked up one of the leftovers.

The soft, expensive leather gave nothing away, but after a few brittle pages Ovid's name was revealed, followed by
Fasti
, as if this explained anything. I flipped to the middle:

“. . . When from her saffron cheeks Tithonus' spouse shall have begun to shed the dew at the time of the fifth morn, the
constellation, whether it be the Bear-ward or the sluggard Bootes, will have sunk and will escape thy sight. But not so will the Grape-gatherer escape thee . . .”

The doctor might be right about the books. Writing like that would drive anyone crazy.

I tossed the volume back on the shelf and grabbed another:
A Commentarie and Arguement, Most Humbly Submitted, on a Translation of the Most Noble Verses, Metamorphoses
 . . . The title dribbled over at least a page and maybe into two. This book at least contained pictures, although not even in color: just black-and-white block prints.

As I flipped the book open, it fell to the center plate.

Here I saw a girl clinging in terror to a rock, shinking away as a scaled creature rose out of the waves that crashed at her feet, his talons threatening to rip open her flesh.

On closer inspection, I saw that she was actually chained to that rock, with no chance of escape.

I quickly turned the page.

The next illustration was no better. Here a creature hulked over a waif of a girl, cornered in the dead end of an elaborate maze. Some kind of
half-and-half monstrosity, with the body of a strong and strapping man, but the head and feet of a snarling bull: it was labeled
The Minotaur
. Teeth bared, horns glinting, he drew upon the quivering maiden.

But I never found out what happened next because with the sound of the library door swinging open, the book dropped from my hands.

“What!”

Just that one word, in Ma's mouth, said everything.

(This is the problem with books. When they're bad, they drive you away with their forthwiths and thithers, and you'll never finish them, no matter how much your teacher harangues you. But when they're good, they lure you in and won't let you go, and that can get you into just as much trouble.)