“I finally got Hube's stuff all straightened out,” said Lydia Cruche. “You might as well come round and look at it this afternoon. By the way, you may call me Lydia, if you want to.”
“Thank you,” said Speck. “And you, of course, must call me — ”
“I wouldn't dream of it. Once a doctor always a doctor. Come early. The light goes at four.”
Speck took a pill to quiet the pounding of his heart.
In her summing-up of his moral nature, a compendium that had preceded her ringing “Fascist”s, Henriette had declared that Speck appraising an artist's work made her think of a real-estate loan officer examining Chartres Cathedral for leaks. It was true that his feeling for art stopped short of love; it had to. The great cocottes of history had shown similar prudence. Madame de Pompadour had eaten vanilla, believed to arouse the senses, but such recklessness was rare. Cool but efficient — that was the professional ticket. No vanilla for Speck; he knew better. For what if he were to allow passion for painting to set alight his common sense? How would he be able to live then, knowing that the ultimate fate of art was to die of anemia in safe-deposit vaults? Ablaze with love, he might try to organize raids and rescue parties, dragging pictures out of the dark, leaving sacks of onions instead. He might drop the art trade altogether, as Walter kept intending to do, and turn his talents to cornering the onion market. The same customers would ring at election time, saying, “Dr. Speck, what happens to my onion collection if the left gets in? Shouldn't we try to unload part of it in New York now, just to be on the safe side?” And Speck, unloading onions of his own in Tokyo, would answer, “Don't worry. They can't possibly nationalize all the onions. Besides, they aren't going to win.”
Lydia seemed uninterested in Speck's reaction to Cruche. He had expected her to hang about, watching his face, measuring his interest, the better to nail her prices; but she simply showed him a large, dim, dusty, north-facing room in which canvases were thickly stacked against the walls and said, “I wasn't able to get the light fixed. I've left a lamp. Don't knock it over. Tea will be ready when you are.” Presently he heard American country music rising from the kitchen (Lydia must have been tuned to the BBC) and he smelled a baking cake. Then, immersed in his ice-cold Cruche encounter, he noticed nothing more.
About three hours later he came downstairs, slowly, wiping dust from his hands with a handkerchief. His conception of the show had been slightly altered, and for the better, by the total Cruche. He began to rewrite the catalogue notes: “The time has come for birth…” No — ”for rebirth. In a world sated by overstatement the moment is ripe for a calm…” How to avoid “statement” and still say “statement”? The Grand Architect was keeping Speck in mind. “For avouchment,” said Speck, alone on the stairs. It was for avouchment that the time had come. It was also here for hard business. His face became set and distant, as if a large desk were about to be shoved between Lydia Cruche and himself.
He sat down and said, “This is going to be a strong show, a powerful show, even stronger than I'd hoped. Does everything I've looked at upstairs belong to you outright? Is there anything which for any reason you are not allowed to lend, show, or sell?”
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” said Lydia, cutting caramel cake.
“No. Well, I am talking about the show, of course.”
“No show,” she said. “I already told you that.”
“What do you mean, no show?” said Speck.
“What I told you at the beginning. I told you not to count on me. Don't drop boiled frosting on your trousers. I couldn't get it to set.”
“But you changed your mind,” said Speck. “After saying 'Don't count on me,' you changed your mind.” “Not for a second.”
“Why?” said Speck, as he had said to the departing Henriette.
“Why?”
“God doesn't want it.”
He waited for more. She folded her arms and stared at the blank television set. “How do you know that God doesn't want Hubert Cruche to have a retrospective?”
“Because He said so.”
His first thought was that the Grand Architect had granted Lydia Cruche something so far withheld from Sandor Speck: a plain statement of intention. “Don't you know your Commandments?” she asked. “You've never heard of the graven image?”
He searched her face for the fun, the teasing, even the malice that might give shape to this conversation, allow him to take hold of it. He said, “I can't believe you mean this.”
“You don't have to. I'm sure you have your own spiritual pathway. Whatever it is, I respect it. God reveals himself according to each person's mental capacity.”
One of Speck's widows could prove she descended from Joan of Arc. Another had spent a summer measuring the walls of Toledo in support of a theory that Jericho had been in Spain. It was Speck's policy never to fight the current of eccentricity but to float with it. He said cautiously, “We are all held in a mysterious hand.” Generations of Speck freethinkers howled from their graves; he affected not to hear them.
“I am a Japhethite, Dr. Speck. You remember who Noah was? And his sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth? What does that mean to you?” Speck looked as if he possessed Old Testament lore too fragile to stand exposure. “Three,” said Lydia. “The sacred number. The first, the true, the only source of Israel. That crowd Moses led into the desert were just Egyptian malcontents. The true Israelites were scattered all over the earth by then. The Bible hints at this for its whole length. Japheth's people settled in Scotland. Present-day Jews are impostors.”
“Are you connected to this Japheth?”
“I do not make that claim. My Scottish ancestors came from the border country. The Japhethites had been driven north long before by the Roman invasion. The British Israelite movement, which preceded ours, proved that the name 'Hebrides' was primitive Gaelic for 'Hebrew.' The British Israelites were distinguished pathfinders. It was good of you to have come all the way out here, Dr. Speck. I imagine you'll want to be getting back.”
After backing twice into Lydia's fence, Speck drove straight to Galignani's bookshop, on Rue de Rivoli, where he purchased an English Bible. He intended to have Walter ransack it for contra-Japhethite pronouncements. The orange dust jacket surprised him; it seemed to Speck that Bibles were usually black. On the back flap the churches and organizations that had sponsored this English translation were listed, among them the National Bible Society of Scotland. He wondered if this had anything to do with Japheth.
As far as Speck could gather from passages Walter marked during the next few days, art had never really flourished, even before Moses decided to put a stop to it. Apart from a bronze snake cast at God's suggestion (Speck underscored this for Lydia in red), there was nothing specifically cultural, though Ezekiel's visions had a certain surrealistic splendor. As Speck read the words “the terrible crystal,” its light flooded his mind, illuminating a simple question: Why not forget Hubert Cruche and find an easier solution for the cultural penury of the West? The crystal dimmed. Speck's impulsive words that October night, “Cruche is coming back,” could not be reeled in. Senator Bellefeuille was entangled in a promise that had Speck at one end and Lydia at the other. Speck had asked if he might examine his lodge brother's collection and had been invited to lunch. Cruche had to come back.