A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

The Purple Is Everything DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS

You are likely to say, reading about Mary Gardner, that you knew her, or that you once knew someone like her. And well you may have, for while her kind is not legion it endures and sometimes against great popular odds.

You will see Mary Gardner — or someone like her — at the sym-phony, in the art galleries, at the theatre, always well-dressed if not quite fashionable, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of other women all of whom have an aura, not of sameness, but of mutuality. Each of them has made — well, if not a good life for herself, at least the best possible life it was in her power to make.

Mary Gardner was living at the time in a large East Coast city. In her late thirties, she was a tall lean woman, unmarried, quietly feminine, gentle, even a little hesitant in manner but definite in her tastes. Mary was a designer in a well-known wallpaper house. Her salary allowed her to buy good clothes, to live alone in a pleasant apartment within walking distance of her work, and to go regularly to the theater and the Philharmonic. As often as she went to the successful plays, she attended little theater and the experimental stage. She was not among those who believed that a play had to say something. She was interested in “the submerged values.” This taste prevailed also in her approach to the visual arts — a boon surely in the wallpaper business whose customers for the most part prefer their walls to be seen but not heard.

In those days Mary was in the habit of going during her lunch hour — or sometimes when she needed to get away from the drawing board — to the Institute of Modern Art which was less than a city block from her office. She had fallen in love with a small, early Monet titled Trees Near L’Havre, and when in love Mary was a person of searching devotion. Almost daily she discovered new voices in the woodland scene, trees and sky reflected in a shimmering pool — with more depths in the sky, she felt, than in the water.

The more she thought about this observation the more convinced she became that the gallery had hung the picture upside down. She evolved a theory about the signature: it was hastily done by the artist, she decided, long after he had finished the painting and perhaps at a time when the light of day was fading. She would have spoken to a museum authority about it — if she had known a museum authority.

Mary received permission from the Institute to sketch within its halls and often stood before the Monet for an hour, sketch-book in hand. By putting a few strokes on paper she felt herself conspicuously inconspicuous among the transient viewers and the guards.

She would not for anything have presumed to copy the painting and she was fiercely resentful of the occasional art student who did.

So deep was Mary in her contemplation of Claude Monet’s wooded scene that on the morning of the famous museum fire, when she first smelled the smoke, she thought it came from inside the picture itself. She was instantly furious, and by an old association she indicted a whole genre of people — the careless American tourist in a foreign land. She was not so far away from reality, however, that she did not realize almost at once there was actually a fire in the building.

Voices cried out alarms in the corridors and men suddenly were running. Guards dragged limp hoses along the floor and dropped them — where they lay like great withered snakes over which people leaped as in some tribal rite. Blue smoke layered the ceiling and then began to fall in angled swatches — like theatrical scrims gone awry.

In the far distance fire sirens wailed.

Mary Gardner watched, rooted and muted, as men and women, visitors like herself, hastened past bearing framed pictures in their arms; and in one case two men carried between them a huge Chagall night scene in which the little creatures seemed to be jumping on and off the canvas, having an uproarious time in transit. A woman took the Rouault from the wall beside the Monet and hurried with it after the bearers of the Chagall.

Still Mary hesitated. That duty should compel her to touch where conscience had so long forbidden it — this conflict increased her confusion. Another thrust of smoke into the room made the issue plainly the picture’s survival, if not indeed her own. In desperate haste she tried to lift the Monet from the wall, but it would not yield.

She strove, pulling with her full strength — such strength that when the wire broke, she was catapulted backward and fell over the viewer’s bench, crashing her head into the painting. Since the canvas was mounted on board, the only misfortune — aside from her bruised head which mattered not at all — was that the picture had jarred loose from its frame. By then Mary cared little for the frame. She caught up the painting, hugged it to her, and groped her way to the gallery door.

She reached the smoke-bogged corridor at the instant the water pressure brought the hoses violently to life. Jets of water spurted from every connection. Mary shielded the picture with her body until she could edge it within the raincoat she had worn against the morning drizzle.

She hurried along the corridor, the last apparently of the volunteer rescuers. The guards were sealing off the wing of the building, closing the fire prevention door. They showed little patience with her protests, shunting her down the stairs. By the time she reached the lobby the police had cordoned off civilians. Imperious as well as impervious, a policeman escorted her into the crowd, and in the crowd, having no use of her arms — they were still locked around the picture — she was shoved and jostled toward the door and there pitilessly jettisoned into the street. On the sidewalk she had no hope at all finding anyone in that surging, gaping mob on whom she could safely bestow her art treasure.

People screamed and shouted that they could see the flames. Mary did not look back. She hastened homeward, walking proud and fierce, thinking that the city was after all a jungle. She hugged the picture to her, her raincoat its only shield but her life a ready forfeit for its safety.

It had been in her mind to telephone the Institute office at once.

But in her own apartment, the painting propped up against cushions on the sofa, she reasoned that until the fire was extinguished she had no hope of talking with anyone there. She called her own office and pleaded a sudden illness — something she had eaten at lunch though she had not had a bite since breakfast.

The walls of her apartment were hung with what she called her

“potpourri’: costume prints and color lithographs — all, she had been proud to say, limited editions or artists’ prints. She had sometimes thought of buying paintings, but plainly she could not afford her own tastes. On impulse now, she took down an Italian lithograph and removed the glass and mat from the wooden frame. The Monet fit quite well. And to her particular delight she could now hang it right side up. As though with a will of its own, the painting claimed the place on her wall most favored by the light of day.

There is no way of describing Mary’s pleasure in the company she kept that afternoon. She would not have taken her eyes from the picture at all except for the joy that was renewed at each returning. Reluctantly she turned on the radio at five o’clock so that she might learn more of the fire at the Institute. It had been extensive and destructive — an entire wing of the building was gutted.

She listened with the remote and somewhat smug solicitude that one bestows on other people’s tragedies to the enumeration of the paintings which had been destroyed. The mention of Trees Near L’Havre startled her. A full moment later she realized the explicit meaning of the announcer’s words. She turned off the radio and sat a long time in the flood of silence.

Then she said aloud tentatively, “You are a thief, Mary Gardner,” and after a bit repeated, “Oh, yes. You are a thief.” But she did not mind at all. Nothing so portentous had ever been said about her before, even by herself.

She ate her dinner from a tray before the painting, having with it a bottle of French wine. Many times that night she went from her bed to the living-room door until she seemed to have slept between so many wakenings. At last she did sleep.

But the first light of morning fell on Mary’s conscience as early as upon the painting. After one brief visit to the living room she made her plans with the care of a religious novice well aware of the devil’s constancy. She dressed more severely than was her fashion, needing herringbone for backbone — the ridiculous phrase kept running through her mind at breakfast. In final appraisal of herself in the hall mirror she thought she looked like the headmistress of an English girls’ school, which she supposed satisfactory to the task before her.

Just before she left the apartment, she spent one last moment alone with the Monet. Afterward, wherever, however the Institute chose to hang it, she might hope to feel that a little part of it was forever hers.

On the street she bought a newspaper and confirmed the listing of Trees Near L’Havre. Although that wing of the Institute had been destroyed, many of its paintings had been carried to safety by way of the second-floor corridor.

Part of the street in front of the Institute was still cordoned off when she reached it, congesting the flow of morning traffic. The police on duty were no less brusque than those whom Mary had encountered the day before. She was seized by the impulse to post-pone her mission — an almost irresistible temptation, especially when she was barred from entering the museum unless she could show a pass such as had been issued to all authorized personnel.

“Of course I’m not authorized,” she exclaimed. “If I were I shouldn’t be out here.”

The policeman directed her to the sergeant in charge. He was at the moment disputing with the fire insurance representative as to how much of the street could be used for the salvage operation.

“The business of this street is business,” the sergeant said, “and that’s my business.”

Mary waited until the insurance man stalked into the building.

He did not need a pass, she noticed. “Excuse me, officer, I have a painting—”

“Lady…” He drew the long breath of patience. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Yesterday during the fire a painting was supposedly destroyed — a lovely, small Monet called—”

“Was there now?” the sergeant interrupted. Lovely small Monets really touched him.

Mary was becoming flustered in spite of herself. “It’s listed in this morning’s paper as having been destroyed. But it wasn’t. I have it at home.”

The policeman looked at her for the first time with a certain compassion. “On your living-room wall, no doubt,” he said with deep knowingness.

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

He took her gently but firmly by the arm. “I tell you what you do.

You go along to police headquarters on Fifty-seventh Street. You know where that is, don’t you? Just tell them all about it like a good girl.” He propelled her into the crowd and there released her. Then he raised his voice: “Keep moving! You’ll see it all on the television.”

Mary had no intention of going to police headquarters where, she presumed, men concerned with armed robbery, mayhem, and worse were even less likely to understand the subtlety of her problem. She went to her office and throughout the morning tried periodically to reach the museum curator’s office by telephone. On each of her calls either the switchboard was tied up or his line was busy for longer than she could wait.

Finally she hit on the idea of asking for the Institute’s Public Relations Department, and to someone there, obviously distracted — Mary could hear parts of three conversations going on at the same time — she explained how during the fire she had saved Monet’s Trees Near L’Havre.

“Near where, madam?” the voice asked.

“L’Havre.” Mary spelled it. “By Monet,” she added.

“Is that two words or one?” the voice asked.

“Please transfer me to the curator’s office,” Mary said and ran her fingers up and down the lapel of her herringbone suit.

Mary thought it a wise precaution to meet the Institute’s representative in the apartment lobby where she first asked to see his credentials. He identified himself as the man to whom she had given her name and address on the phone. Mary signaled for the elevator and thought about his identification: Robert Attlebury III. She had seen his name on the museum roster; Curator of…she could not remember.

He looked every inch the curator, standing erect and remote while the elevator bore them slowly upward. A curator perhaps, but she would not have called him a connoisseur. One with his face and disposition would always taste and spit out, she thought. She could imagine his scorn of things he found distasteful, and instinctively she knew herself to be distasteful to him.

Not that it really mattered what he felt about her. She was nobody.

But how must the young unknown artist feel standing with his work before such superciliousness? Or had he a different mien and manner for people of his own kind? In that case she would have given a great deal for the commonest of his courtesies.

“Everything seems so extraordinary — in retrospect,” Mary said to break the silence of their seemingly endless ascent.

“How fortunate for you,” he said, and Mary thought, perhaps it was.

When they reached the door of her apartment, she paused before turning the key. “Shouldn’t you have brought a guard — or someone?”

He looked down on her as from Olympus. “I am someone.”

Mary resolved to say nothing more. She opened the door and left it open. He preceded her and moved across the foyer into the living room and stood before the Monet. His rude directness oddly comforted her: he did, after all, care about painting. She ought not to judge men, she thought, from her limited experience of them.

He gazed at the Monet for a few moments, then he tilted his head ever so slightly from one side to the other. Mary’s heart began to beat erratically. For months she had wanted to discuss with someone who really knew about such things her theory of what was reflection and what was reality in Trees Near L’Havre. But now that her chance was at hand she could not find the words.

Still, she had to say something — something…casual. “The frame is mine,” she said, “but for the picture’s protection you may take it.

I can get it the next time I’m at the museum.”

Surprisingly, he laughed. “It may be the better part at that,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

He actually looked at her. “Your story is ingenious, madam, but then it was warranted by the occasion.”

“I simply do not understand what you are saying,” Mary said.

“I have seen better copies than this one,” he said. “It’s too bad your ingenuity isn’t matched by a better imitation.”

Mary was too stunned to speak. He was about to go. “But…it’s signed,” Mary blurted out, and feebly tried to direct his attention to the name in the upper corner.

“Which makes it forgery, doesn’t it?” he said almost solicitously.

His preciseness, his imperturbability in the light of the horrendous thing he was saying, etched detail into the nightmare.

“That’s not my problem!” Mary cried, giving voice to words she did not mean, saying what amounted to a betrayal of the painting she so loved.

“Oh, but it is. Indeed it is, and I may say a serious problem if I were to pursue it.”

“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.

“But is it authenticated?” She said it much as she would once have thought but not said, Fie on you!

“Sufficient to my company’s requirements,” he said. “But don’t misunderstand — we are not proposing to make any inquiries. We are always satisfied in such delicate negotiations just to have the painting back.”

Mary did not misunderstand, but she certainly did not understand either.

He took from his inside pocket a piece of paper which he placed on the coffee table and with the tapering fingers of an artist — or a banker — or a pickpocket — he gently maneuvered it to where Mary could see that he was proffering a certified check.

He did not look at her and therefore missed the spasm she felt contorting her mouth. “The day of the fire,” she thought, but the words never passed her lips.

She took up the check in her hand: $20,000.

“May I use your phone, Miss Gardner?”

Mary nodded and went into the kitchen where she again looked at the check. It was a great deal of money, she thought wryly, to be offered in compensation for a few months’ care of a friend.

She heard her visitor’s voice as he spoke into the telephone — an expert now, to judge by his tone. A few minutes later she heard the front door close. When she went back into the living room both her visitor and the Monet were gone…

Some time later Mary attended the opening of the new wing of the Institute. She recognized a number of people she had not known before and whom, she supposed, she was not likely to know much longer.

They had hung the Monet upside down again.

Mary thought of it after she got home, and as though two rights must surely right a possible wrong, she turned the check upside down while she burned it over the kitchen sink.