“I'm not satisfied,” said Speck. “I do mind.” He realized that something had been left out of his account. “I loved her.” Lydia Cruche looked straight at him, for once, as though puzzled. “As you loved Hubert Cruche,” he said.
There was no response except for the removal of crumbs from her lap. The goddess, displeased by his mortal impertinence, symbolically knocked his head off her knee.
“Hube liked my company,” she finally said. “That's true enough. After he died I saw him sitting next to the television, by the radiator, where his mother usually crouched all winter looking like a sheep with an earache. I was just resting here, thinking of nothing in particular, when I looked up and noticed him. He said, 'You carry the seed of your death.' I said, 'If that's the case, I might as well put my head in the oven and be done with it.' ‘Non,’ he said, ‘ce n'est pas la peine.’ Now, his mother was up in her room, making lists of all the things she had to feel sorry about. I went up and said, ‘Madame,’ because you can bet your boots she never got a ‘Maman’ out of me, ‘Hube was in the parlor just now.’ She answered, ‘It was his mother he wanted. Any message was for me.’ I said that if that was so, then all he needed to do was to materialize upstairs and save me the bother of climbing. She gave me some half-baked reason why he preferred not to, and then she did die. Aged a hundred and three. It was in France-Soir.”
The French she had spoken rang to Speck like silver bells. Everything about her had changed — voice, posture, expression. If he still could not see the Lydia Cruche of the Senator's vision, at least he could believe in her.
“Do you talk to your husband often?” he said, trying to make it sound like a usual experience.
“How could I talk to Hube? He's dead and buried. I hope you don't go in for ghosts, Dr. Speck. I would find that very silly. That was just some kind of accident — a visitation. I never saw him again or ever expect to. As for his mother, there wasn't a peep out of her after she died. And here I am, alone in the Cruche house.” It was hard to say if she sounded glad or sorry. “I gather you're on your own, too. God never meant men and women to live by themselves, convenient though it may seem to some of us. That's why he throws men and women together. Coincidence is God's plan.”
So soon, thought Speck. It was only their second meeting. It seemed discourteous to draw attention to the full generation that lay between them; experience had taught him that acknowledging any fragment of this dangerous subject did more harm than good. When widows showed their cards, he tried to look like a man with no time for games. He thought of the young André Malraux, dark and tormented, the windblown lock on the worried brow, the stub of a Gauloise sending up a vagabond spiral of smoke. Unfortunately, Speck had been born forty years too late for the model; he belonged to a much reedier generation of European manhood. He thought of the Pope. White-clad, serene, he gazed out on St. Peter's Square, over the subdued heads of one hundred thousand artists' widows, not one of whom would dare.
“So this was the Cruche family home,” he said, striking out, he hoped, in a safe direction.
“The furniture was his mother's,” said Lydia Cruche. “I got rid of most of it, but there was stuff you couldn't pay them to cart away. Sa petite Maman adorable,” she said softly. Again Speck heard the string of silver bells. “I thought she was going to hang around forever. They were a tough family — peasants from the west of France. She took good care of him. Cooked him sheep's heart, tripe and onions, big beefsteaks they used to eat half raw. He was good-looking, a big fellow, big for a Frenchman. At seventy you'd have taken him for forty. Never had a cold. Never had a headache. Never said he was tired. Drank a liter of Calvados every other day. One morning he just keeled over, and that was that. I'll show you a picture of him sometime.”
“I'd also like to see his pictures,” said Speck, thankful for the chance. “The pictures you said you had upstairs.”
“You know how I met Hube? People often ask me that. I'm surprised you haven't. I came to him for lessons.”
“I didn't know he taught,” said Speck. His most reliable professional trait was his patience.
“He didn't. I admired him so much that I thought I'd try anyway. I was eighteen. I rang the bell. His mother let me in. I never left — he wouldn't let me go. His mother often said if she'd known the future she'd never have answered the door. I must have walked about four miles from a tram stop, carrying a big portfolio of my work to show him. There wasn't even a paved street then — just a patch of nettles out front and some vacant lots.”
Her work. He knew he had to get it over with: “Would you like to show me some of your things, too?”
“I burned it all a long time ago.”
Speck's heart lurched. “But not his work?”
“It wasn't mine to burn. I'm not a criminal.” Mutely, he looked at the bare walls. “None of Hube's stuff ever hung in here,” she said. “His mother couldn't stand it. We had everything she liked — Napoleon at Waterloo, lighthouses, coronations. I couldn't touch it when she was alive, but once she'd gone I didn't wait two minutes.”
Speck's eighteenth-century premises were centrally heated. The system, which dated from the early 1960s, had been put in by Americans who had once owned most of the second floor. With the first dollar slide of the Nixon era they had wisely sold their holdings and gone home, without waiting for the calamity still to come. Their memorial was an expensive, casual gift nobody knew what to do with; it had raised everyone's property taxes, and it cost a fortune to run. Tenants, such as Speck, who paid a fat share of the operation, had no say as to when heat was turned on, or to what degree of temperature. Only owners and landlords had a vote. They voted overwhelmingly for the lowest possible fuel bills. By November there was scarcely a trace of warmth in Speck's elegant gallery, his cold was entrenched for the winter, and Walter was threatening to quit. Speck was showing a painter from Bruges, sponsored by a Belgian cultural-affairs committee. Cost-sharing was not a habit of his — it lowered the prestige of the gallery — but in a tight financial season he sometimes allowed himself a breather. The painter, who clearly expected Speck to put him under contract, talked of moving to Paris.
“You'd hate it here,” said Speck.
Belgian television filmed the opening. The Belgian Royal Family, bidden by Walter, on his own initiative, sent regrets signed by aides-de-camp on paper so thick it would scarcely fold. These were pinned to the wall, and drew more attention than the show itself. Only one serious critic turned up. The rooms were so cold that guests could not write their names in the visitors' book — their hands were too numb. Walter, perhaps by mistake, had invited Blum-Weiler-Blochs instead of Blum-Bloch-Weilers. They came in a horde, leading an Afghan hound they tried to raffle off for charity.
The painter now sat in the gallery, day after day, smoking black cigarettes that smelled of mutton stew. He gave off a deep professional gloom, which affected Walter. Walter began to speak of the futility of genius — a sure sign of melancholia. Speck gave the painter money so that he could smoke in cafés. The bells of St. Clotilde's clanged and echoed, saying to Speck's memory, “Fascist, Fascist, Fascist.” Walter reminded Speck that November was bad for art. The painter returned from a café looking cheerful. Speck wondered if he was enjoying Paris and if he would decide to stay; he stopped giving him money and the gallery became once more infested with mutton stew and despair. Speck began a letter to Henriette imploring her to come back. Walter interrupted it with the remark that Rembrandt, Mozart, and Dante had lived in vain. Speck tore the letter up and started another one saying that a Guillaumin pastel was missing and suggesting that Henriette had taken it to Africa. Just as he was tearing this up, too, the telephone rang.