“Please do pursue it!” Mary cried.
Again he smiled, just a little. “That is not the Institute’s way of dealing with these things.”
“You do not like Monet,” Mary challenged desperately, for he had started toward the door.
“That’s rather beside the point, isn’t it?”
“You don’t know Monet. You can’t! Not possibly!”
“How could I dislike him if I didn’t know him? Let me tell you something about Monet.” He turned back to the picture and trailed a finger over one vivid area. “In Monet the purple is everything.”
“The purple?” Mary said.
“You’re beginning to see it yourself now, aren’t you?” His tone verged on the pedagogic.
Mary closed her eyes and said, “I only know how this painting came to be here.”
“I infinitely prefer not to be made your confidant in that matter,”
he said. “Now I have rather more important matters to take care of.”
And again he started toward the door.
Mary hastened to block his escape. “It doesn’t matter what you think of Monet, or of me, or of anything. You’ve got to take that painting back to the museum.”
“And be made a laughingstock when the hoax is discovered?” He set an arm as stiff as a brass rail between them and moved out of the apartment.
Mary followed him to the elevator, now quite beside herself. “I shall go to the newspapers!” she cried.
“I think you might regret it.”
“Now I know. I understand!” Mary saw the elevator door open.
“You were glad to think the Monet had been destroyed in the fire.”
“Savage!” he said.
Then the door closed between them.
In time Mary persuaded — and it wasn’t easy — certain experts, even an art critic, to come and examine “her” Monet. It was a more expensive undertaking than she could afford — all of them seemed to expect refreshments, including expensive liquors. Her friends fell in with “Mary’s hoax,” as they came to call her story, and she was much admired in an ever-widening and increasingly esoteric circle for her unwavering account of how she had come into possession of a “genuine Monet.” Despite the virtue of simplicity, a trait since childhood, she found herself using words in symbolic combin-ations — the language of the company she now kept — and people far wiser than she would say of her: “How perceptive!” or “What insight!”—and then pour themselves another drink.
One day her employer, the great man himself, who prior to her
“acquisition” had not known whether she lived in propriety or in sin, arrived at her apartment at cocktail time bringing with him a famous art historian.
The expert smiled happily over his second Scotch while Mary told again the story of the fire at the Institute and how she had simply walked home with the painting because she could not find anyone to whom to give it. While she talked, his knowing eyes wandered from her face to the painting, to his glass, to the painting, and back to her face again.
“Oh, I could believe it,” he said when she had finished. “It’s the sort of mad adventure that actually could happen.” He set his glass down carefully where she could see that it was empty. “I suppose you know that there has never been an officially complete catalogue of Monet’s work?”
“No,” she said, and refilled his glass.
“It’s so, unfortunately. And the sad truth is that quite a number of museums today are hanging paintings under his name that are really unauthenticated.”
“And mine?” Mary said, lifting a chin she tried vainly to keep from quivering.
Her guest smiled. “Must you know?”
For a time after that Mary tried to avoid looking at the Monet. It was not that she liked it less, but that now she somehow liked herself less in its company. What had happened, she realized, was that, like the experts, she now saw not the painting, but herself.
This was an extraordinary bit of self-discovery for one who had never had to deal severely with her own psyche. Till now, so far as Mary was concerned, the chief function of a mirror had been to determine the angle of a hat. But the discovery of the flaw does not in itself effect a cure; often it aggravates the condition. So with Mary.
She spent less and less time at home, and it was to be said for some of her new-found friends that they thought it only fair to recip-rocate for having enjoyed the hospitality of so enigmatically clever a hostess. How often had she as a girl been counseled by parent and teacher to get out more, to see more people. Well, Mary was at last getting out more. And in the homes of people who had felt free to comment on her home and its possessions, she too felt free to comment. The more odd her comment — the nastier, she would once have said of it — the more popular she became. Oh, yes. Mary was seeing more people, lots more people.
In fact, her insurance agent — who was in the habit of just dropping in to make his quarterly collection — had to get up early one Saturday morning to make sure he caught her at home.
It was a clear, sharp day, and the hour at which the Monet was most luminous. The man sat staring at it, fascinated. Mary was amused, remembering how hurt he always was that his clients failed to hang his company calendar in prominence. While she was gone from the room to get her checkbook, he got up and touched the surface of the painting.
“Ever think of taking out insurance on that picture?” he asked when she returned. “Do you mind if I ask how much it’s worth?”
“It cost me…a great deal,” Mary said, and was at once annoyed with both him and herself.
“I tell you what,” the agent said. “I have a friend who appraises these objects of art for some of the big galleries, you know? Do you mind if I bring him round and see what he thinks it’s worth?”
“No, I don’t mind,” Mary said in utter resignation.
And so the appraiser came and looked carefully at the painting.
He hedged about putting a value on it. He wasn’t the last word on these nineteenth-century Impressionists and he wanted to think it over. But that afternoon he returned just as Mary was about to go out, and with him came a bearded gentleman who spoke not once to Mary or to the appraiser, but chatted constantly with himself while he scrutinized the painting. Then with a “tsk, tsk, tsk,” he took the painting from the wall, examined the back, and rehung it — but reversing it, top to bottom.
Mary felt the old flutter interrupt her heartbeat, but it passed quickly.
Even walking out of her house the bearded gentleman did not speak to her; she might have been invisible. It was the appraiser who murmured his thanks but not a word of explanation. Since the expert had not drunk her whiskey Mary supposed the amenities were not required of him.
She was prepared to forget him as she had the others — it was easy now to forget them all; but when she came home to change between matinee and cocktails, another visitor was waiting. She noticed him in the lobby and realized, seeing the doorman say a word to him just as the elevator door closed off her view, that his business was with her. The next trip of the elevator brought him to her door.
“I’ve come about the painting, Miss Gardner,” he said, and offered his card. She had opened the door only as far as the latch chain permitted. He was representative of the Continental Assurance Company, Limited.
She slipped off the latch chain.
Courteous and formal behind his double-breasted suit, he waited for Mary to seat herself. He sat down neatly opposite her, facing the painting, for she sat beneath it, erect, and she hoped, formidable.
“Lovely,” he said, gazing at the Monet. Then he wrenched his eyes from it. “But I’m not an expert,” he added and gently cleared his throat. He was chagrined, she thought, to have allowed himself even so brief a luxury of the heart.