Corpus Christmas

In the meantime, Oscar Nauman was even less predictable and Thorvaldsen looked forward to meeting the artist whose pictures had given him so much pleasure, pictures that were as much a reward for his years of hard work as sex with a beautiful woman.

“A party?” Sigrid asked, dismayed. “I’m no good at parties, Nauman. You should know that by now.”

“I want you to meet Munson. You don’t have to dress up. Besides,” he reminded her, “you’re the one who thinks I ought to have this retrospective, so you might as well come along and see the place. Meet me there at seven and we’ll have di

Remembering that her housemate had mentioned something about a pickled boar’s head in honor of the season, Sigrid decided that a party was probably the lesser of tomorrow’s two evils.

“… so there we were-my machine smashed at the bottom of the tree, Chou-Chew hurling simian curses from the top, while I lay trampled beneath the paws of a monstrous dog who determined that my battered body should provide a footstool to raise himself closer to my hysterical pet.

Fortunately, help was immediately at hand. The brute’s master pulled him from me with apologies which owed as much to the Spanish language as to the French.”

Letter from Erich Breul Jr., dated 8.30.1912 (From the Erich Breul House Collection)

V

Wednesday, December 16

The caterers arrived at the Erich Breul House shortly after six, and Mrs. Beardsley, delegated by Lady Francesca Leeds, was there to direct them through the door under the main stairs and into the butler’s pantry.

In the dining room, the formal table was relieved of its extra leaves and draped in dark red linen with green plaid ru

An arrangement of cedar, red-berried holly, and shiny magnolia leaves had been delivered earlier, and as Mrs. Beardsley centered it between the candles, Pascal Grant paused with table leaves in his arms. “Do you want me to do anything else, Mrs. Beardsley? Bring up some more chairs?”

She glanced about the room. Sophie Breul’s Sheraton dining table could be expanded to seat forty, but twenty chairs were its normal complement and Lady Francesca had said tonight’s party was to be quite small.

“Just three or four of the trustees, Dr. Peake and his secretary, the art people, Mr. Thorvaldsen, and of course you, Mrs. Beardsley. When Oscar Nauman asks about the history of the Breul House, we must have someone who can tell him.”

Mrs. Beardsley had known she was being buttered, but that didn’t diminish her pleasure. It was such smooth butter. Now she smiled at Pascal Grant. “I think we have enough chairs for anyone who might wish to sit. You go ahead to your movie, Pascal, and you needn’t worry about coming up later. We’ll put everything back as it was first thing tomorrow. Just don’t forget the alarm when you come back tonight.”

“I won’t, Mrs. Beardsley. Good night, Mrs. Beardsley.”

“Good night, dear,” she said absently, giving the room a final check.

Everything seemed quite under control. Gas logs blazed upon the open hearth next to the glittering Christmas tree and together, they lent the great marble hall an almost Dickensian warmth and cheer. Paneled pocket doors between the drawing room and gallery to the left of the hall had been pushed back to form one long open room and a hired pianist was familiarizing himself with the baby grand at the street end of the drawing room. The caterers had set up their bar in the pantry, appetizing odors were coming from the oven, and Miss Ruffton had returned from the cloakroom wearing a red skirt shot through with gold threads, a gold ribbon in her hair, and a party smile on her face. Even Dr. Peake had changed his tie before drifting in to lift the domed lid of the largest silver chafing dish and sample a hot savory.

“It’s begi

Earlier in the afternoon, Mrs. Beardsley had slipped across the square and changed into her own holiday dress, a black wool sheath topped by a red Chanel jacket, her grandmother’s three-strand pearl choker and earrings, and an emerald-and-ruby pin that seemed appropriate for the season. Now she decided it was time to complete her own costume, to exchange her sensible low pumps for the patent leather T-straps waiting for her in the cloakroom.

As she crossed the hall, the door swung open for Francesca Leeds, her windswept red hair swirling upon the collar of a dark mink coat, which she wore like a cloak over an evening suit of raw gold silk. “Show time! ” she caroled.

Uptown, along the broad avenues, Salvation Army Santas were jostled for sidewalk space by three-card monte dealers and free-lance Santas who hawked “genuine Rolex watches, jus’ twe

Skaters twirled and circled before the blazing tree at Rockefeller Center; a string quartet sheltered in the street-level jog of a huge skyscraper to play German carols, while an artist chalked the sidewalk in front of St. Thomas ’s Church with an ambitious choir of angels. Further up Fifth Avenue, wide-eyed toddlers, blissfully indifferent to the monetary worth of diamonds and rubies, were lifted up by their parents to watch Muppets romp among the gems in Tiffany’s windows.

As customers streamed through the doorways of lavishly decorated stores, seasonal Muzak occasionally floated out to mingle with the Salvation Army bells. The vaguely religious music fell equally upon the warmly dressed and upon the shabby bundles of rags who tried to hunker deeper into the few dark corners. For many, the street people added just the right tinge of guilt to the general thank-God-I’m-making-it aura of self-satisfaction, a sort of memento mori that made modern yule tide hedonism all the more pleasurable.

In the art gallery just off Fifth Avenue, Oscar Nauman refilled his empty cup from the fat china pot on Jacob Munson’s desk, leaned back in the comfortable leather chair, and smiled at his friend. “I must be getting old, Jacob, when I prefer your hot chocolate to your cold whiskey.”

“Ja, sure, ” the old man jeered, unwrapping another of his perpetual peppermints. They were imported from France especially for him and were made with particularly pungent oils that bit the tongue and almost compensated for his forbidden cigarettes. “Wait till you are my age. At least you don’t have doctors telling you what you can drink. I look at you, Oscar, and I see still the boy who first came through this door with those charcoal drawings of Lila under his arm.”

“The hair, ” said Oscar.

It was true. That thick mane of hair had turned completely white before he was thirty. His height helped, as did the probing intelligence in his intensely blue eyes, but it was the white hair that gave him such an aura of timelessness. Munson tried to look at him objectively, to catalog the fine wrinkles around his eyes, the lines beneath his firm chin, but it was hard to perceive the softening of age in that strong face. He did recognize that inward-turning melancholy however. Lila’s name still had that power.

If only the woman would die, he thought. Die or be cured. God knows she’d tried to kill herself often enough in the past twenty-five years. Jacob sipped his cocoa and refrained from looking at Oscar’s left ear. He knew that the scars Lila’s knife had left there were almost invisible. And the scars on Oscar’s psyche should have faded as well, but how could they while the woman remained alive in that prison for the criminally insane?