Corpus Christmas

Rick had wanted to open the doors of the huge chestnut ice box, to lift the lids of painted tin canisters and peer into the built-in storage bins, but Pascal Grant had tugged at his sleeve.

“They’re all empty. Come and see my window before it gets dark, okay?”

As he trailed Pascal through the cavernous basement passages, Rick was reminded of explorations he used to take with his best friend through abandoned barns and farmhouses back home in Louisiana ’s bayou country. There was that same sense of sadness, of human artifacts abandoned to their own devices.

On the other side of the scullery were empty coal bins, made redundant by an oil furnace that was itself in need of replacement. Beyond the kitchen lay rooms no longer needed for their original purposes: cold closets with sharp hooks for hanging meat and poultry, bins for food supplies, a laundry room with deep stone sinks and tall drying racks. These were now lumbered with bulky storage crates, trunks, rolled-up carpets, and odds and ends too good to throw away, yet no longer needed for the day-to-day business of the museum. The hall wound past a room that held racks of pictures an earlier curator had weeded out of the main collection as too hopelessly banal; another room stored the folding chairs that were brought up whenever the main hall was used for lectures or recitals.

At the street end of the basement was a sturdy wooden service door that opened onto a shallow areaway beneath the grandeur of the high marble stoop with its elaborate railings. Echoing the rounded door top was one of those whimsicalities to which Victorians were so often given: a lacy wrought-iron spider web set into the upper third of the door, each interstice of the web fitted with clear beveled glass. At the center of the web was a tiny brass garden spider which Pascal kept polished till it shone like gold.

The window was uniquely decorative, yet city-smart as well. Callers could be identified without opening the door and the strong iron cobweb was fine enough that no burglar could smash a tiny pane of glass and reach through to unbolt the latch. Rick had no formal grounding in aesthetics but it occurred to him that Pascal’s sense of beauty might be more sophisticated than he’d realized.

The young janitor was looking up at him through long golden lashes. “It’s my first favorite window,” he said shyly.

“It’s beautiful,” Rick told him. “I definitely want a picture of this.” He tilted the strobe on his camera to bounce light off the ceiling and took a couple of experimental shots before switching lenses for a close-up of the spider.

As he worked, he began to consider the potentials the house offered.

“My grandfather wants me do a new brochure and perhaps some new souvenir postcards,” he said, “and Dr. Peake wants me to photograph all the paintings, but I bet I could do a whole series of slides on just architectural details, another on furniture, perhaps one on Victorian clothes or dishes.”

“All the paintings?” Pascal interrupted. “Dr. Peake said for you to take pictures of all of them?”

“Yeah, he said they’ve never done a photographic record of the whole collection. ‘ Rick finished with the window and recapped the lens.

“I’ve got some pictures in my room,” Pascal said proudly. “Dr. Peake said I could. Come see.”

He led Rick back down the passageway and through the kitchen. Beyond the service stairs was what had once been the downstairs butler’s pantry, co

Although the kitchenette was for Pascal Grant’s use, it was open to the stairs and kitchen and to the casual inspection of anyone passing through. Perhaps that was why it looked as impersonal as any laboratory, thought Rick.

As if he could read thoughts, Pascal paused before a closed door at the rear of the alcove and looked up at him with another of those seraphic smiles. “Mrs. Beardsley says everything has to be neat out here.”

He opened the door and clicked on a wall switch. “I can do what I want to in here.”

The room was astonishing. Everywhere Rick looked he saw patterns upon figures upon designs-paisleys and florals beside stripes and basketweave and geometries. It was like a private retreat designed by some mad Victorian decorator and it should have overwhelmed Rick’s visual senses; yet, the colors were so rich and dark that lamplight was soaked up until the whole room coalesced into a mellow warmth that made him think again of a small anthropomorphic animal’s cosy den. A human hobbit hole.

Originally the servants’ sitting room, the ceiling and windowless walls were papered in a faded turkey red and the floor was layered with odd-size throw rugs, all threadbare but of oriental design. A couple of shabby easy chairs stood on either side of an open hearth that sported a handsome overmantel of carved walnut. For sleeping, Pascal had pushed a double bed mattress and box springs up against a cluttered sideboard and covered it with embroidered shawls and thickly fringed pillows so that it looked more like a Persian divan than a bed.

The lower doors of the sideboard had been folded open to store his clock radio, tape player, and stacks of tapes within easy reach, while a nearby Moroccan brass coffee table held a miniature television.

Pascal unzipped his coverall and stepped out of it. Beneath, he wore jeans and a thin knitted jersey that molded every line of his slender torso. He hung the coverall inside a tall wooden wardrobe and pulled on a blue Fair Isle sweater, a castoff from one of Mrs. Beardsley’s sons that echoed his clear blue eyes. Smoothing his tousled golden hair, he looked up at Rick happily.

“See my pictures?”

It was impossible not to since every wall was covered so closely that the red wallpaper beneath was almost hidden.

A large sentimental farmyard scene hung above the fireplace. It pictured baby ducks and chicks, rosy-cheeked children, and other young animals and was doubtless meant to inspire wholesome thoughts among the servants.

But that was the only properly framed picture in the room and the only one that clearly belonged to the nineteenth century. Everything else was thumbtacked to the walls and was vigorously modern: Kandinsky, Klee, Rothko, Pollock, Picasso, Dali, Ernst-all the twentieth-century icons. None were smaller than twenty-four by thirty-six inches and, looking closer, Rick saw that they all seemed to have begun as high-quality art posters. Some were so beautifully reproduced on such heavy stock that, with the subdued lighting, he had to touch the surface of a Dali dreamscape to reassure himself that it wasn’t real.

“I cut off all that writing stuff,” said Pascal.

“Writing stuff?”

“Museum names and numbers and stuff like that,” the young handyman explained earnestly. “I don’t read so good, but I know real pictures don’t have that stuff on the bottom, so I cut it off.”

“Where did you find so many posters, though?” asked Rick, curious.

“Dr. Kimmelshue-he was here before Dr. Peake. He died. He had a bunch of them in his office and lots more down here.” He gestured in the direction of the storage rooms. “Dr. Peake told me to throw them all out and I told him I could take them if he didn’t want them so he said I could have anything there I wanted.”

Pascal paused and caught his short upper lip with his lower teeth. “Well, he didn’t mean anything I wanted. There’s some trunks with clothes and stuff. I didn’t take those. He just meant the pictures. And you can take pictures of them, too.”

There was such i