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And if the picture touched a chord, he would go off and rummage through books in his office and come back with illustrations that showed how Vermeer, though a Dutch realist of the seventeenth century, used the same approach; or how Picasso or Matisse had dealt with the same matter differently.
“Do you see?” he would ask. “Do you see?”
“Yes, sir,” Rick would reply, wanting to please. And he did see when his grandfather pointed it out, but when asked to critique a fresh picture, he always muddled it.
“Mein Gott!” Jacob had exploded one day. “The simplest thing in art and you do not see it!”
That day, he had grabbed Rick by the shoulders and fiercely swung him around to glare into his face. As their eyes locked, the anger had drained from the old mans face.
“Paul’s eyes you have,” he’d said sadly, “and in you they are blind.”
After that, his grandfather continued to sit in on some of the sessions and to instruct as before, but the intensity had gone out of his lectures and he had stopped asking Rick to describe what he saw.
He could stand that, Rick thought, as he snapped the last exposure on the roll of film. What he couldn’t stand was the look that had appeared on his grandfather’s face when he and Hester had returned from the police station yesterday.
“You were there last night?” Grandfather had asked in a dreadful voice. “In that Schwachsi
“In his room,” Rick had said, reddening under the scornful implication. “And he’s not an idiot, Grandfather, just a little slow. We’re friends.”
“Ja, sure,” his grandfather muttered wearily, and suddenly he looked his full eighty-two years, old and frail and utterly defeated by what fate had given him. He had touched the picture of his dead son, then sighed and laid it face down among the papers on his desk, swivelled in his chair, and turned his back on Rick. “Tell Hester to come in,” he’d said stonily.
He would stay until after Christmas, Rick thought, sliding a fresh roll of film into his camera. After that, he would go home and let his mother pull strings for a job with one of the state bureaus in Baton Rouge. He would walk back-country lanes again and take pictures of pelicans and swamps for wildlife calendars or tourist brochures.
And he would stop trying to deny to himself that he was what he was.
Next to a rent-controlled apartment, Zeki’s, just west of Third Avenue, was that most precious urban find: an as-yet-undiscovered, good, midtown restaurant. Even Gael Greene was unaware of its existence. Although celebrities often lunched there, knowing they would not be bothered by gawkers, New Yorkers came for the Turco-Croatian cuisine of delicately spiced lamb and indescribable breads, not to see and be seen.
It was nearly two and the outer room was still crowded as Oscar Nauman passed through. He spoke to a couple of friends, nodded when the barman said, “The usual?” and found Jacob Munson at his corner table in the back.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said, sliding into the chair opposite his dealer. “The garage down the block was full. You order yet?”
“Nein.”
Oscar looked across the snowy white tablecloth and frowned. “You feeling all right, Jacob?”
The old man shrugged. He looked shrunken today. His face was nearly as gray as his thin beard and his brown eyes had lost their elfin luster.
“Not coming down with something, are you?”
“It’s nothing. A little cough. What are you? Nurse Nightingale?” Jacob asked irritably.
“That’s better,” Oscar gri
But as his glass of ale arrived accompanied by a martini, the grin faded; and when the waiter had taken their orders, he said, “What’s with the drink? I thought your doctors said-”
“They did. Lean closer, my friend, and I’ll tell you a secret: Jacob Munson is not going to live forever. Tomorrow he could drop dead; so why not a martini today?”
He lifted the glass and sipped long.
“Then who’ll take care of my show?” Oscar asked lightly, determined to shake Jacob out of this puzzling mood.
“Elliott Buntrock will.” He caught the waiter’s eye across the room and signaled for another martini. “There’s a Buntrock under every rock,” he said bitterly.
“Jacob?”
“You’re a lucky man, Oscar Nauman. When you go, you will leave behind you good work that will honor your name.”
“What the hell’s going on?” Oscar demanded.
Munson sank back in his chair. “Roger Shambley was killed Wednesday night.” He twirled the stem of his empty martini glass back and forth between his wrinkled fingers.
The silence stretched between them. “So?” Oscar finally asked.
“So your lady policeman thinks my grandson Richard did it.”
“What?”
“She’s wrong, though. You will tell her this?”
“Jacob-”
“It was Benjamin or Hester or maybe both together,” he said heavily. “I don’t know.”
As the waiter brought their food and another martini, a paroxysm of coughing shook his small frame and Oscar told the waiter to take away the drink and bring his friend club soda with a twist of lemon.
When Jacob was breathing normally again, Oscar said, “Talk to me, Jacob. What’s happening at the gallery?”
“You know what Horace Kohn and I tried to build.” Jacob stared at the savory chicken stew before him. “We never said caveat emptor. Never! What we sold we backed with our reputation and for better than a half century, Kohn and Munson Gallery has been trusted. Never a stain on its name.”
“Yes.”
“You remember Paul?” he asked abruptly.
Oscar remembered Paul Munson as a handsome, sweet-natured kid. Bright enough, but not the flaming meteor he’d become to his father since his plane had crashed sixteen years ago. Odd to think Paul would be nearing forty if he’d lived. “Rick reminds me of Paul,” he said as he buttered a piece of crusty bread. “Same eyes.”
“They are nothing alike,” said Jacob, anger in every syllable. “Paul had an eye for art.”
“I meant in looks,” Oscar said mildly. “Same shade of brown. Besides, aren’t you being a little hard on the boy? He’s only been here three months.”
“Three months, three years, it wouldn’t matter. It’s his mother’s fault. Suza
Oscar occasionally had trouble remembering that there were two older daughters, Suza
“She made him a photographer. She made him a-” His voice dropped lower-“a Schwulen.”
“A what?” asked Oscar.
The old man’s face twisted with shame. “A faggot.”
Oscar ate silently. There were so many different sexual proclivities in the art world that he was surprised that Jacob could still be homophobic. Or did tolerance stop when it touched him personally?
“He was with the janitor that night. In his bedroom.”
“So what’s the big deal, Jacob? It’s not the end of the world.”
“Only the end of my line,” Munson said bleakly, drawing his fork through the sauce on his plate. “The end of the gallery.”
“Oh, come on, Jacob. If the boy doesn’t work out, Hester will keep things going. And it’s crazy to think she had anything to do with Shambley’s death. When Sigrid and I left Wednesday night, you and Hester were pla
“She got out at East Forty-ninth. Said she was meeting someone at the Waldorf. Yesterday when she came back from the police station, I made her tell me who. It was Benjamin.”
Oscar stopped cutting his lamb and started to wonder if Jacob were experiencing the begi