“And the beauty of a sycamore,” he said, “and of a receding city street, and of a work of art, of course you know that.” And the beauty of solitude, he silently added.
“And the beauty of a diamond? I could get you a diamond,” she said. “My aunt’s cousin Kolya, the rascals he knows …”
“Jewels don’t interest me.” How had he allowed this interrogation to begin? “Civility, that’s another of my transcendent values, and also—”
“Beauty,” she repeated. “I could get you that.”
“What do you mean, Louanne? You have already brought beauty into my life.” He withstood her glare. “The beauty of … your extraordinary young mind, and of our conversations.”
“Yah,” she spat.
THREE WEDNESDAYS LATER she came in carrying, by its strong handles, a big brown bag. Her expression was portentous, as if in imitation of an announcing angel. She lowered the bag with officious care and pulled out something surrounded by a narrow frame. She set it on the floor so that it leaned against the grass-cloth wall.
It was perhaps twelve by eighteen inches. It was Vuillard’s mother again, seen full face — an older face, shadowed: a face that might bend over a grandchild’s cradle, say, or the sickbed of an invalid. Broad brow, kindly eyes, and an upper lip that resembled a gentle awning. What she was bending over was a glass vase filled with flowers, mostly daisies, but also anemones and irises. The background was only a suggestion of wallpaper.
The painting was signed.
“I saw it weeks ago,” Louanne said, shrugging out of her navy peacoat. “In that house. It was in some sort of guest bedroom just to the side of the bathroom. I went to pee and I opened that door — it’s always closed — and I put on the light and I saw it.”
“Louanne,” in a whisper.
“I wasn’t surprised — the house is full of stuff like this. They’re loaded, those thugs. They buy stuff to wash money, you know that, Mr. Francis. In Russia they get more loaded, like you said.”
“… as you said.”
“As. So I took it. Yesterday. Because the guy’s wife has left him, and he’s going to Moscow tomorrow, and no one will know it’s missing for weeks, and then he’ll think she—”
“Louanne,” he said, still breathless.
“It wasn’t just hanging there for anyone to grab, don’t think that,” she said. “There was this security clasp I had to figure out. And getting the bag — that was no picnicking, either. I had to buy a scarf at Bloomie’s, and ask for the bag from the bitch saleswoman, and then return the scarf the next day and keep the bag.”
“Louanne.” It seemed to be all he could say. His chest hurt.
She stood before him, sturdy as a guard, not quite his height. “What?”
Personal property, it’s a right, he thought. Thieving, it’s a crime, he thought. There’s a social compact, he thought.
But she knew all that. She had memorized ethical principles the way she might have memorized the rules for rolling out pastry — stuff she would recite but never practice. And he would not rebuke her. Loyalty was what counted most; he’d told her that, or meant to.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she said, hands on hips.
“Thank you,” he managed.
HE HUNG THE PAINTING, the following Tuesday — it had taken him that long to decide where. He’d thought first of hanging it in the bedroom — no one else went in there except the cleaning woman. He thought of his small study: roses on the carpet, lilies on the wallpaper, books, a flame-stitch armchair, and cockatooed draperies almost concealing the single narrow window. He considered the kitchen and the bathroom and the communal hall between his apartment and hers; he considered the back stairway, whose steps wore rubber treads. He considered his clothes closet.
In the end he hung it in the living room, over the fireplace. The portrait of his great-grandfather (attorney general of the commonwealth, 1875–1880) was relegated to the bedroom, replacing the mirror, which itself went into the back of the clothes closet, appearing to double his thrifty wardrobe.
His great-grandfather, bearded, one hand resting on the laws of the commonwealth, had thrown his noble gaze across the room at the early map of Massachusetts. Portrait and map had provided an axis of honor. The Vuillard corrupted the room.
“Attractive,” said a former colleague who’d come over for some advice. “New?”
“Relocated,” Francis said, holding his breath. The conversation turned to the present governor, such a dimwit.
“Oooh, Mr. Morrison,” said the cleaning woman.
“Nice,” said the man who came to fix a leak in the bathtub, but he seemed to be referring to the apartment in general.
Louanne’s glasses glinted at the painting on her first few visits after the bestowal; then they didn’t. She was writing a paper on the Electoral College. Discussions of that valuable, antiquated procedure occupied their sessions. At the Zerubins’ they talked about dogs and baseball.
Nowhere could he find news of the theft. The painting had probably been stolen to begin with. He could not identify it in the catalogue raisonné; even under the heading “Privately Held” he could not find Mme Vuillard with Flowers or anything like it. Still, its most recent possessor must have noted its absence by now. Perhaps the Russian mafia was making confident plans to kill him.
Louanne was still teaching those dirty lawyers. “And the one in the grand house, if he should mention that he’s been robbed?” asked Francis.
“He hasn’t mentioned.”
“If he does?”
“In which language?”
“Oh … English.”
“I’ll say: ‘Speak Russian.’
” “In Russian, then.”
“I’ll look sympathetic.” To demonstrate, she slanted her head and pursed the corners of her mouth, an executioner checking the knot on a noose.
He loved the gift she had given him. As time passed he did not love it less. Nor did he get used to it: the woman’s head so close that her voice could almost be heard; the economy of line and the limited palette; the slight distortion of the angle of the head; the lack of a grand idea. The humble daisies. A humble artist: secondary even in his heyday.
“Our constitution is more specific than yours, because we do not rely on the judiciary,” she was saying one Wednesday. “Judges were considered an extension of the Little Father, and—”
“Yes,” Francis said, though he was not certain of the accuracy of her statement. “Louanne, my dear, we must relinquish the painting.”
Her glasses stared at him.
“I cherish it,” he went on. “But it is too much for me. I will die of it.”
“You will die of a heart attack. Isn’t that why you take that powdered stuff?”
“The Cystadane is to prevent my dying.”
“To delay it. Anyway, no one ever died from beauty.”
“Then I will be the first.”
Silence while she surveyed him. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that her spectacles probably reduced what was before them. “I’ve still got the big brown bag,” she admitted. “But I’ve been teaching those crooks at their office lately. I don’t know when I’ll be at the house again.”
“We cannot return it to them, Louanne. It demands a public place. A shared arena, a location where any person, moneyed or penniless, cultured or gross, passionate or indifferent, can benefit from its—”
“Mr. Francis?”
He halted. With effortful simplicity he said: “It belongs at the museum.”
“Oh. So donate it.”
“Well, no, not with its murky provenance.” He did not want her deported. “We must slip it in.”