“Like everything else,” she agreed. “And what about you? Why the interest? Are you thinking of investing in one of Declan’s mighty oaks?”
“There are a few that might work in my apartment,” he said. “One in particular, but don’t ask me to describe it.”
“A tree is a tree is a tree.”
“This is an old one, and it’s a winter setting, but that fits quite a few of them. The thing is they’re all different, but when you describe them the descriptions all come out the same.”
“I know. Listen, don’t tell Declan I said this, but what do you care who gets the commission? If you’ve found one you really love, and if you’re sure you’ll still want to look at it a month or a year from now…”
“Buy it?”
“You’ll never get it cheaper. And somebody else might buy it out from under you.”
Around one-fifteen, Maggie walked him to the door and stood on her tiptoes to give him a kiss. “No more flowers,” she cautioned him. “Once was perfect, but once is enough. Call me every now and then, say once a week, and we’ll get together like this for an hour or two.”
“A couple of hours,” he said. “Every week or so.”
“Is that too much?” She patted his cheek. “More often than that and we might wear it out.”
More often than that, he thought, as the cab carried him home, and we might wear me out.
Seven
At home, he paged through one of his stamp albums. Many of his fellow hobbyists were topical or thematic philatelists, collecting stamps not of a particular country or time period but united by what they portrayed. Stamps showing trains, say, or butterflies, or penguins. A doctor might choose stamps with a medical connection, while a musician could seek out stamps showing musical instruments, or those with portraits of the great composers. Or you could collect rabbit stamps for no more abiding reason than that you just plain liked to look at rabbits.
Art on stamps was an increasingly popular topic. Early on, when postage stamps were commonly of a single color, reproducing a great painting on a scrap of paper was easier said than done. A monochromatic miniature of the Mona Lisa might be recognizable for what it was, but it lacked a certain something.
Those early stamps, skillfully engraved and beautifully printed, were to Keller’s mind far more attractive than what they turned out these days, when virtually every stamp from every country was printed in full color, and any stamp-issuing entity could spew out gemlike reproductions of the world’s art treasures. Collectors made such endeavors profitable, and, unlike animation art from Disney or Warner Brothers, the works of Rembrandt and Rubens were unprotected by trademark or copyright. Anyone could copy them, and many did.
Keller’s 1952 cutoff date put most of the world’s art stamps out of his reach. But some countries had issued such stamps back in the old one-color days, more out of pride in their artistic heritage than in a grab for the collector’s dollar. The French were particularly eager to show off their culture, portraying writers and painters and composers at the slightest provocation, and Keller looked now at a set of French semipostals that gave you a real sense of the artists’ power.
And of course there was the Spanish set honoring Goya. One of the stamps showed his nude portrait of the Duchess of Alba. The painting had caused a stir when first displayed, and, years later, the stamp had proven every bit as stirring to a generation of young male philatelists. Keller remembered owning the stamp decades ago, and scrutinizing it through a pocket magnifier, wishing fervently that the stamp were larger and the glass stronger.
In the current issue of Linn’s, as in almost every issue, there was a spirited exchange in the letters column on the best way to attract youngsters to the hobby. Evidently boys and girls were less strongly drawn to philately in a world full of computers and Nintendo and MTV. If kids stopped collecting stamps, where would the next generation of adult collectors come from?
Keller, having considered the question, had decided that he didn’t care. All he wanted to do was add to his own collection, and he didn’t really give a damn how many other men and women were working on theirs. Without new collectors joining the fold, stamps might eventually decline in value, but he didn’t care about that, either. He wasn’t going to sell his collection, and what difference did it make what became of it upon his death? If he couldn’t take it with him, then somebody else could figure out what to do with it.
But others clearly did care about the hobby’s future. The U.S. Post Office evidently saw a very profitable sideline threatened, and had responded by issuing stamps designed specifically to appeal to the young collector. When Keller was a boy, stamps showed great American writers and inventors and statesmen, people he mostly hadn’t heard of, and in the course of collecting their images he had in fact learned a great deal about them, and about the history in which they’d played a part.
Nowadays, stamp collecting was a great way for young Americans to learn about Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.
Keller thought it over and decided they were doing it wrong. He’d collected avidly as a boy not because stamp collecting was designed for kids but because it was something undeniably grown-up that he could enjoy. If it had felt like kid stuff he wouldn’t have had any part of it.
Would a stamp with Bugs Bunny’s picture on it have prompted a young Keller to whip out his magnifying glass for a closer look?
Not a chance. If they wanted to get the kids interested, he thought, let them start putting naked ladies on them.
He called Dot first thing in the morning. “I hope it’s not too early,” he said.
“Five minutes ago you’d have been interrupting my breakfast,” she told him. “Now all you’re interrupting is the washing up, and that’s fine with me.”
“I was wondering,” he said. “About the client.”
“Refresh my memory, Keller. Didn’t we already have this conversation?”
“Suppose you were to call whoever called you,” he said. “Suppose you ask how the client feels about mushrooms.”
“You going into the catering business, Keller?”
“Innocent bystanders,” he said. “Drug dealers call them mushrooms because they just sort of pop up and get caught in the crossfire.”
“That’s charming. When did you take to hanging out with drug dealers?”
“I read an article in the paper.”
“That’s where you get your figures of speech, Keller? From newspaper articles?”
He drew a breath. “What I’m getting at,” he said, “is suppose something happened to a guy in Brooklyn, and his wife and kid got in the way.”
“Oh, I see where you’re going.”
“And the art gallery’s another possibility, but there too you might have people around.”
“So I should run it past my guy so he can get in a huddle with the client.”
“Right.”
“And I report back to you, and then what? Don’t tell me the job gets done and we can all move on.”
“Sure,” he said. “What else?”
Keller sat in front of the Hopper poster, taking it in. If you wanted to hang something on the wall, you couldn’t beat a poster. Ten or twenty bucks plus framing and you had a real piece of art in your living room.
On the other hand, how many posters could you hang before you ran out of wall space? No, if you were going to collect art in a small apartment, stamps were the way to go. One album, a few inches of shelf space, and you could put together a tiny Louvre all your own.
He could go either way. He could start a topical collection, art on stamps, or he could look for a few more posters that hit him the way Hopper’s did.
He put on a tie and jacket and got on a crosstown bus.
It was ridiculous, he thought, walking from the bus stop to the gallery. The painting he liked best, #19 on the laminated price list, was one of the larger ones, and the price they were asking was $12,000. It would be nice to be able to look at it whenever he felt like it, but he could walk over to Central Park anytime he wanted and look at thousands of trees. He could get as close as he wanted and it wouldn’t cost him a dime.