Corpus Christmas

II

Friday, December 11

Thanks to the Sussex Square Preservation Society which had successfully fought to retain them, six of the city’s last original gas streetlights survived in working order, and here in the early December twilight their soft flickers gleamed upon polished brass door handles and kick plates.

A through street for cars and taxis passed along the bottom of the square, but when vehicular traffic was banned from the northern three sides around the small park, the original cobblestone carriageway was repaved in smooth brick, a substitution Mrs. Beardsley regretted anew as she stood in the doorway of number 7 and watched the last visitors descend the broad marble steps.

Mrs. Beardsley lived diagonally across the park at number 35. As senior docent, however, she spent almost as much time at the Breul House as she did in her own. She had hoped for the seat on the board of trustees which had recently gone to Dr. Shambley, but until that prize dropped into her lap, she would continue to conduct tours of the house, arrange seasonal decorations, and intimidate the reduced staff.

Mrs. Beardsley’s officiousness might weary Benjamin Peake-especially when he was called upon to calm the ruffled waters she left in her wake-but the director revenged himself with the secret knowledge that the woman would never become a trustee as long as he had a say in the matter. Otherwise, he had no intention of discouraging her interest in the place. After all, she deferred to his position, she was capable of surprisingly shrewd promotional ideas, and she worked tirelessly without a salary, of itself no small consideration, given the Erich Breul House’s current financial difficulties.

Although a discreet sign inside the vestibule suggested donations of three dollars per person to view the house and its contents, at least a third of those who came either donated less or brazenly ignored the sign altogether. This wouldn’t have mattered if hundreds daily thronged the house. Sadly, the two who had just departed were the forty-first and forty-second of the day.

An average day these days.

Mrs. Beardsley sighed and lingered for a moment in the chill twilight. She considered herself a closet romantic and the square was at its wintertime loveliest tonight. The very sight of it restored her good spirits because she could, she thought, take credit for its beauty-not only for the gaslights but even for the tiny colored lights that twinkled upon a tall evergreen at the center of the square’s handkerchief-size park.

The tree represented compromise. Every year the question of decorative Christmas lights came before the Sussex Square Preservation Society and every year Mrs. Beardsley had managed to block their use. This year a younger, more vulgar contingent from numbers 9, 14 and 31 had rammed the motion through. Mrs. Beardsley had then rallied her forces and carried a vote which limited the lights to a single tree.

With predictable incompetence, the arrivistes had underestimated how many strings it would take to bedizen every twig, so the evergreen emerged more tasteful than Mrs. Beardsley had dared hope. In fact, it was even rather festive but Mrs. Beardsley had no intention of admitting that to a soul. Give them an inch and they’d string every bush next year.

One electrified tree was anachronism enough.

An icy gust of wind made the tall spruce dip and sway and Mrs. Beardsley shivered with a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the plummeting temperature.

“Somebody just walked over my grave,” she thought and hurried inside.

Footsteps sounded on the marble stoop behind her and she held the tall door open a crack.

“I’m sorry but we’re just closing and-oh! Mr. Munson. I didn’t realize it was you. Do come in.”

With a thin gray beard that hung down over his woolly muffler, Jacob Munson was small and spry enough to remind a more fanciful imagination than Mrs. Beardsley’s of an elf escaped from Santa’s workshop. Adding to the illusion was the perennial cloud of peppermint fumes in which he had moved ever since his doctors forbade cigarettes, and his eyes danced with merriment and goodwill beneath his wide-brimmed black fedora.

“Mrs. Beardsley, is it not?” A slight German accent underlay his friendly tone. “The others are here?”

“I believe so. ” She started to escort him toward the director’s office at the far end of the vaulted marble hall where the others were gathered when she suddenly found her outstretched arm draped with Mr. Munson’s muffler and overcoat. His hat and gloves followed in rapid order and he himself was speeding across the polished tiles before Mrs. Beardsley could make it clear that she was not some sort of resident butler or hatcheck girl.

Miffed, she carried the art dealer’s outer garments over to a bench near Miss Ruffton’s desk and dumped them there, grateful that the secretary had not been required to attend tonight’s informal meeting and had therefore missed this minor humiliation. Miss Ruffton was an enigmatic young black woman who never talked back or argued, yet Mrs. Beardsley suspected that she secretly enjoyed any affronts to the older woman’s dignity.

As she put on her own coat and gloves to leave, Mrs. Beardsley subconsciously tried to fault Miss Ruffton but found nothing to seize upon. The secretary’s gleaming desktop was bare except for an appointment calendar, a pot of red poinsettias in gold foil, and one of those stodgy brochures which outlined the history of the Erich Breul House.

And that reminded Mrs. Beardsley: Where was young Mr. Evans? Didn’t Mr. Munson expect him to join them? She pushed back the cuff of her cashmere glove and glanced at her watch. Everyone else was there except him.

“Boys!” she murmured to herself. With her children hundreds of miles away and occupied by families of their own, she had unconsciously transferred her maternal interest to Pascal Grant, who would never completely grow up. And she’d be quite surprised if Rick Evans were a day past twenty. Now what sort of mischief, she wondered, could be keeping those two so long in the basement?

Officiously, Mrs. Beardsley opened a door concealed beneath the marble stairwell, passed along a short hall that led back to what was left of the butler’s pantry, turned right, and descended the stairs to the basement.

An hour earlier, Rick Evans had followed Pascal Grant down those steps into the kitchen. It was enormous, but the stamped-tin ceiling was surprisingly low and the room’s dry snugness made Rick think of Wind in the Willows and of Mr. Badger’s home and Mole’s cosy tunnels. Blue rag rugs were scattered over brown floor tiles, a massive cookstove resplendent with nickel-plate ornamentation dominated the room, and one wall was lined with shallow open shelves that held the blue willowware Sophie Breul had provided for her servants’ daily use.

Rick had wanted to open the doors of the huge chestnut ice box, to lift the lids of painted tin canisters and peer into the built-in storage bins, but Pascal Grant had tugged at his sleeve.

“They’re all empty. Come and see my window before it gets dark, okay?”

As he trailed Pascal through the cavernous basement passages, Rick was reminded of explorations he used to take with his best friend through abandoned barns and farmhouses back home in Louisiana ’s bayou country. There was that same sense of sadness, of human artifacts abandoned to their own devices.

On the other side of the scullery were empty coal bins, made redundant by an oil furnace that was itself in need of replacement. Beyond the kitchen lay rooms no longer needed for their original purposes: cold closets with sharp hooks for hanging meat and poultry, bins for food supplies, a laundry room with deep stone sinks and tall drying racks. These were now lumbered with bulky storage crates, trunks, rolled-up carpets, and odds and ends too good to throw away, yet no longer needed for the day-to-day business of the museum. The hall wound past a room that held racks of pictures an earlier curator had weeded out of the main collection as too hopelessly banal; another room stored the folding chairs that were brought up whenever the main hall was used for lectures or recitals.

At the street end of the basement was a sturdy wooden service door that opened onto a shallow areaway beneath the grandeur of the high marble stoop with its elaborate railings. Echoing the rounded door top was one of those whimsicalities to which Victorians were so often given: a lacy wrought-iron spider web set into the upper third of the door, each interstice of the web fitted with clear beveled glass. At the center of the web was a tiny brass garden spider which Pascal kept polished till it shone like gold.

The window was uniquely decorative, yet city-smart as well. Callers could be identified without opening the door and the strong iron cobweb was fine enough that no burglar could smash a tiny pane of glass and reach through to unbolt the latch. Rick had no formal grounding in aesthetics but it occurred to him that Pascal’s sense of beauty might be more sophisticated than he’d realized.

The young janitor was looking up at him through long golden lashes. “It’s my first favorite window,” he said shyly.

“It’s beautiful,” Rick told him. “I definitely want a picture of this.” He tilted the strobe on his camera to bounce light off the ceiling and took a couple of experimental shots before switching lenses for a close-up of the spider.

As he worked, he began to consider the potentials the house offered.

“My grandfather wants me do a new brochure and perhaps some new souvenir postcards,” he said, “and Dr. Peake wants me to photograph all the paintings, but I bet I could do a whole series of slides on just architectural details, another on furniture, perhaps one on Victorian clothes or dishes.”

“All the paintings?” Pascal interrupted. “Dr. Peake said for you to take pictures of all of them?”

“Yeah, he said they’ve never done a photographic record of the whole collection. ‘ Rick finished with the window and recapped the lens.

“I’ve got some pictures in my room,” Pascal said proudly. “Dr. Peake said I could. Come see.”

He led Rick back down the passageway and through the kitchen. Beyond the service stairs was what had once been the downstairs butler’s pantry, connected to the one above by a large dumbwaiter. This was where the Breul maids had put the finishing touches on meals before sending them aloft. Now the space was outfitted for the only live-in help left. On the counter beside the small sink was a new microwave oven, a coffee maker and a hot-air popcorn popper; below, a half-size refrigerator.

Although the kitchenette was for Pascal Grant’s use, it was open to the stairs and kitchen and to the casual inspection of anyone passing through. Perhaps that was why it looked as impersonal as any laboratory, thought Rick.

As if he could read thoughts, Pascal paused before a closed door at the rear of the alcove and looked up at him with another of those seraphic smiles. “Mrs. Beardsley says everything has to be neat out here.”

He opened the door and clicked on a wall switch. “I can do what I want to in here.”

The room was astonishing. Everywhere Rick looked he saw patterns upon figures upon designs-paisleys and florals beside stripes and basketweave and geometries. It was like a private retreat designed by some mad Victorian decorator and it should have overwhelmed Rick’s visual senses; yet, the colors were so rich and dark that lamplight was soaked up until the whole room coalesced into a mellow warmth that made him think again of a small anthropomorphic animal’s cosy den. A human hobbit hole.

Originally the servants’ sitting room, the ceiling and windowless walls were papered in a faded turkey red and the floor was layered with odd-size throw rugs, all threadbare but of oriental design. A couple of shabby easy chairs stood on either side of an open hearth that sported a handsome overmantel of carved walnut. For sleeping, Pascal had pushed a double bed mattress and box springs up against a cluttered sideboard and covered it with embroidered shawls and thickly fringed pillows so that it looked more like a Persian divan than a bed.

The lower doors of the sideboard had been folded open to store his clock radio, tape player, and stacks of tapes within easy reach, while a nearby Moroccan brass coffee table held a miniature television.

Pascal unzipped his coverall and stepped out of it. Beneath, he wore jeans and a thin knitted jersey that molded every line of his slender torso. He hung the coverall inside a tall wooden wardrobe and pulled on a blue Fair Isle sweater, a castoff from one of Mrs. Beardsley’s sons that echoed his clear blue eyes. Smoothing his tousled golden hair, he looked up at Rick happily.

“See my pictures?”

It was impossible not to since every wall was covered so closely that the red wallpaper beneath was almost hidden.

A large sentimental farmyard scene hung above the fireplace. It pictured baby ducks and chicks, rosy-cheeked children, and other young animals and was doubtless meant to inspire wholesome thoughts among the servants.

But that was the only properly framed picture in the room and the only one that clearly belonged to the nineteenth century. Everything else was thumbtacked to the walls and was vigorously modern: Kandinsky, Klee, Rothko, Pollock, Picasso, Dali, Ernst-all the twentieth-century icons. None were smaller than twenty-four by thirty-six inches and, looking closer, Rick saw that they all seemed to have begun as high-quality art posters. Some were so beautifully reproduced on such heavy stock that, with the subdued lighting, he had to touch the surface of a Dali dreamscape to reassure himself that it wasn’t real.

“I cut off all that writing stuff,” said Pascal.

“Writing stuff?”

“Museum names and numbers and stuff like that,” the young handyman explained earnestly. “I don’t read so good, but I know real pictures don’t have that stuff on the bottom, so I cut it off.”

“Where did you find so many posters, though?” asked Rick, curious.

“Dr. Kimmelshue-he was here before Dr. Peake. He died. He had a bunch of them in his office and lots more down here.” He gestured in the direction of the storage rooms. “Dr. Peake told me to throw them all out and I told him I could take them if he didn’t want them so he said I could have anything there I wanted.”

Pascal paused and caught his short upper lip with his lower teeth. “Well, he didn’t mean anything I wanted. There’s some trunks with clothes and stuff. I didn’t take those. He just meant the pictures. And you can take pictures of them, too.”

There was such innocent generosity in his voice that Rick hesitated, looking for tactful words. “They’re wonderful pictures, Pascal, but I think Dr. Peake’s mainly interested in the real old stuff. Like that one over the fireplace. It’s a terrific room, though, and you’ve fixed it up great.”

To change the subject, he walked around the bed, sat down on the edge, and began reading the titles on the other youth’s stack of cassette tapes. “Hey, what kind of music do you like, Pasc?”

Happiness suffused Grant’s beautiful features. “Pasc. That’s what my friend called me, my friend at the training center. That’s where I learned how to fix things. Are you going to be my friend?”

“Sure,” Rick said automatically.

“I’ll get us some soda, ” Pascal decided. He fetched two cans from the kitchenette, and upon returning, stretched across the bed to hand one to his new friend.

Rick continued to read the titles of the tapes as he sipped from the can. “Basie, Lionel Hampton, Cootie Williams, Gene Krupa-you’re really into classic jazz, aren’t you?”

Pascal Grant sat down on the other side of the bed and began pulling out his favorite tapes. “I like it,” he said simply. “It makes me feel good. Like the pictures do. Sometimes they-they get all mixed up together sometimes, the jazz and the pictures.”

“You have Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert?”

“ ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’!” Pascal exclaimed. “It’s on the player. That’s my very first favorite.”

Balancing his soda, he pulled himself over the billowing cushions and punched buttons until Krupa’s hypnotic drums filled the room.

“Hey, yeah!” breathed Rick. He pushed a couple of cushions into a stack and leaned back on them. Pascal did the same at the opposite end of the bed so that they sprawled heel to head, facing each other as they drank and listened to the pounding intensity of one of the greatest outpourings of spontaneous jazz ever recorded.

The music, the warmth, the rich reds and golds and purples of the room, the vibrant posters-Pasc was right, he thought, somehow they did look like jazz would look if you could paint jazz themes-everything about this moment combined to make him feel safe and unthreatened for the first time since coming to New York.

And there was Pasc himself, his angelic face in shadows, his tangled curls turned into a golden halo by the lamp behind him. A rush of love and pity welled up inside of Rick.

Then, as Jess Stacy’s piano explored the outer reaches of the melody, he felt Pascal touch his shoe, heard his low voice say, “I’m glad you’re going to be my friend, Rick, ” and was wrenched by something deeper and terrifyingly primal.

Startled, he sat upright and saw Mrs. Beardsley’s disapproving face at the door.

“I knocked,” she said in a stern voice, “but the music’s so loud-”

Pascal Grant eeled across the end of the bed to lower the volume, then turned to smile at the woman. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Beardsley. I was showing Rick my tapes. He’s going to be my friend.”

“That’s very nice, Pascal,” said Mrs. Beardsley, “but right now, I think Mr. Evans is expected upstairs.”

“Oh, gosh!” Rick groaned. Embarrassed and guilty, he left his soda on the sideboard and bolted past the stern-faced docent.

Benjamin Peak had, on his own initiative, called this special meeting to explore-informally, he assured them archly-various ways of stemming the Erich Breul House’s rapidly growing deficit, and he was prepared to be gracious about Rick Evans’ tardy entry for dear old Jacob’s sake.

Not that Jacob had turned into a doting grandfather. A respected dealer and now senior partner at Kohn and Munson Gallery, Jacob Munson admitted to seventy although it was generally believed that he was much nearer eighty. His fierce, explosive temper had been tamed somewhat since the death of his son several years earlier, but his devotion to art and to the business of art remained strong, and his friendship had occasionally smoothed Peake’s progress in the art world.

Beside him sat Hester Kohn, daughter of his late partner, a trim and smartly dressed brunette of thirty-four, with quizzical hazel eyes and a small mouth that smiled easily. She wore gray boots and slacks, a high-collared red silk shirt, and a wide flat necklace of gold enameled in colorful Chinese chrysanthemums. She was addicted to gardenias and her heady perfume fought Munson’s cloud of peppermint to a draw.

Munson had been apprehensive when young Hester Kohn inherited her father’s half interest in the gallery, but these past two years had gone smoothly. She handled the financial side of the business as efficiently as her faœther had and seemed equally content to leave final artistic judgments to him.

Jacob Munson considered himself less fortunate than Horace Kohn in his offspring. His only son, the son he’d groomed to come into the gallery, the son who painted like an angel, had been killed in a plane crash before the lad was twenty-five. His two older daughters, resentful because he’d never encouraged their participation until after the tragedy, resisted his tardy attempts to interest them in art. One was now a doctor in Seattle, the other taught economics at a small college in Louisiana. Although the doctor had remained willfully unmaternal, the professor had eventually managed one child, Richard.

Aware of his grandfather’s reservations, Rick Evans found himself a chair just inside the director’s door and now fiddled with his camera lens.

He focused on Munson’s narrow foot, twisting the lens until his shoelaces came into sharp detail. Rick would have liked to point his camera directly at Munson’s face but knew that would annoy. He wished that he pleased his grandfather better.

As Dr. Peake spoke of the Breul House’s financial problems, Rick unobtrusively moved his camera toward Francesca Leeds. Lady Francesca had turned thirty-seven that year, but there was nothing in her clean-lined profile to suggest it. Her golden complexion was as clear as a girl’s, her dark red hair glossy and natural, her slender body at the peak of its physical powers, with a lithe sensuousness that was the birthright of certain fortunate women.

Her companion was five years older and if one looked closely at his straw-colored hair one could see gray at his temples. He had an outdoorsman’s face, yet it took expensive tailoring to disguise the fact that his muscular body had perhaps spent too much time behind a desk instead of at the helm of his racing yacht.

Søren Thorvaldsen was a Danish entrepreneur who had parlayed a boyhood romance with the sea into great wealth by refurbishing aging transatlantic liners into luxurious West Indian cruise ships. After years of hard work, he was ready to start playing again and Lady Francesca’s proposal had amused him and appealed to both his financial and aesthetic appetites.

“Why don’t you explain your idea to Mr. Munson and Miss Kohn?” Peake said smoothly, turning the floor over to Francesca Leeds.

She smiled. “It’s really very simple. The Erich Breul House has a serious image problem. Is it a historical house or is it an art museum? Some of the pictures in this collection are first-rate. No one questions that. The others-”

A graceful half-humorous shrug of her shoulder indicated that she did not intend to speak uncharitably about the bulk of the founder’s collection unless pressed.

“The Breul Collection is highly regarded by scholars world wide,” said Jacob Munson, who chaired the board of trustees. “Even now, Dr. Roger Shambley is writing a new book using examples from the house.”

“But is it the general public who’ll be reading it?” There was a charming hint of Celtic lilt to the lady’s British accent. Her father supposedly owed his title to one of those tumbledown Irish castles.

“Jacob, it’s imperative that we find new sources of revenue,” reminded Benjamin Peake.

“Ja, ja. This is why we have lent you Richard.” He unwrapped another piece of hard candy and popped it into his mouth. The fragrance of peppermint wafted through the office anew.

“And we appreciate the loan,” said the director, smiling at young Evans, who looked back at him through the camera’s range finder. “But there’s no point in taking photographs for a new brochure or a larger collection of souvenir postcards if no one comes in to buy them.”

“We think people have forgotten what serendipitous treasures the Breul House owns,” Lady Francesca said coaxingly. “We must remind them-bring back not just the true art lovers but potential donors, too-the people who support what is chic to support.”

Francesca Leeds described herself as a free-lance publicist but she was actually a matchmaker between money and the arts. She maintained a small one-room office in her suite at the Hotel Maintenon and new business came through personal recommendations of satisfied clients. As one of the four most highly regarded party planners in the city, she had a flair for matching corporate donors with charitable fund-raising events.

An importer of Italian shoes, for example, could be persuaded to help support a fashion show to benefit a convent founded by a Sicilian nun. The importer’s shoes would be featured throughout the show while the Santa Caterina Sisters of Charity would net several thousands to further their good works.

The parent company of an expensive line of camera equipment might sponsor a movie premiere to help fund further research in retinitis pigmentosa.

For every worthy cause, Lady Francesca Leeds seemed to find a moneyed patron.

Her dark red hair glinted like polished mahogany as she tilted her head toward the heretofore silent Dane. “As a ship owner, Mr. Thorvaldsen recognizes a natural affinity for the Erich Breul House.”

Rich Evans’ camera followed her eyes, then swept the group as Hester Kohn gave a muffled snort.

Hester was puzzled by her inclusion in this informal planning session. She was not a trustee and she was much less interested in Benjamin Peake’s career than Jacob was.

She regarded her partner with fond uneasiness. He couldn’t possibly last more than another year or two and then what would happen to the gallery? She had grown up speaking the specialized jargon of the art world and she was quite comfortable managing the gallery’s finances. But Hester Kohn knew her limitations, knew that she was no judge of artistic merit. One could be cynical and say that given the current state of visual arts in this city artistic merit hardly mattered; yet ultimately, she knew, it did matter.

Although Jacob spoke halfheartedly of educating his slow-talking grandson, who had suddenly appeared full-blown from the Louisiana bayous this past September, Hester soon realized that the boy-he was only twenty-was even less intuitive about art than she herself. Her eyes lingered on him thoughtfully. Momentarily unshielded by his camera, he caught her gaze and turned away in self-conscious confusion. A tractable lad and willing enough to follow-she knew that better than anyone else in the room. Yet anything that couldn’t be captured through a camera lens seemed difficult for him to grasp.

Jacob must see this, she thought, but would the ties of blood outweigh his devotion to Kohn and Munson’s impeccable reputation? Or would he leave his share of the gallery to one of his protégés, someone like Benjamin Peake for instance?

She could keep Peake in line if she had to, she knew, shrewdly measuring his familiar, well-proportioned body with her hazel eyes. Despite his Ph. D. in modern art, she doubted that he was as sharp as Jacob wanted to believe, but allowances were made because Peake had been a close friend of Jacob’s son. They had met as fellow students at one of Meyer Schapiro’s seminars on modern art at Columbia, and after Paul Munson’s plane crashed, Jacob had transferred his paternal interest to Peake’s career. Indeed, Ben Peake owed his present position here at the Breul House to Jacob, who had persuaded the other trustees to hire him after that fiasco up at the Friedinger left him out on his ear. Jacob would not stand idly by and watch this place go down while under Ben Peake’s direction if there was something he could do to help.

But what?

In accent-free English, Søren Thorvaldsen leaned forward to explain the similarities between his acquisition of a fleet of cruise ships and the first Breul’s fleet of canal barges. They were kindred spirits, it would seem, and like called to like even after a century and a half.

“As I understand it, your endowment has been much eroded by inflation and maintenance,” said Thorvaldsen, his keen eyes flicking from Benjamin Peake to Jacob Munson.

“Und?” asked the older man.

“Und I would like to help. If Dr. Peake and your board agree, I could underwrite the expense of mounting a major retrospective of an important artist.”

“The Breul House doesn’t do that sort of thing,” Jacob Munson snapped, yet curiosity piqued him. “Who?”

“Oscar Nauman.”

The old man smoothed his thin gray beard and shook his head. “He will not do it.”

“He might if you asked him,” said Lady Francesca.

“My dear lady, I haf asked him. Many times.”

“Miss Kohn?”

“Don’t look at me,” said Hester Kohn. “I’d love to mount a comprehensive retrospective of Nauman’s work, but Jacob’s right. He won’t even discuss it seriously.”

“But why?” asked Thorvaldsen.

Munson gave a palms-out gesture.

“I think he’s superstitious,” said Hester Kohn. “Some artists are. They think a retrospective’s the kiss of death, the beginning of the end, an official assumption that they have nothing more to say.”

“Nothing more to say?” exclaimed Thorvaldsen. “But this is a man who has found a dozen new voices in his lifetime.”

Hester Kohn uncrossed her trousered legs and sat more erectly in her chair. “Are you by any chance represented by Dansksambler in Copenhagen?”

Thorvaldsen hesitated, then nodded.

“ ‘Autumnal’ and ‘Topaz Two,’ ” she told her elderly partner.

“So, Mr. Thorvaldsen, you own two pictures by Nauman?” asked Jacob Munson.

“Actually, I own eleven of his works and I’m told there are things in his studio that have never been exhibited.” It was not quite a question and there was a touch of wistfulness in the big Dane’s voice.

“What do you think, Jacob?” asked Benjamin Peake and he, too, sounded wistful.

“Hester is right,” Munson told them with Teutonic finality. “Oscar will not agree to this.”

Lady Francesca stretched an appealing hand toward him and her soft brown eyes melted into his. “Dear Mr. Munson! Have you not been Oscar Nauman’s dealer for over thirty years? And if you were to explain to him the situation here at the Breul House and entreat him for old time’s sake-?”

Munson considered and Peake rushed into the lull. “If you approached him, too, Lady Francesca,” he said gallantly. “I’m sure you could make him agree. I’ve always heard that Oscar Nauman responds to beautiful women, right, Jacob?”

Her smile did not falter, thought Jacob Munson, and the old man gave her full marks for self-control. Nauman tried to keep his personal life private, but the artist was a public figure and rumors did get around. Jacob was under the impression that Oscar’s affair with Lady Francesca Leeds had ended more than a year ago. He seemed to recall that there was a fresh rumor making the rounds now. A lady fireman, was it?

Or dog catcher?

Something unusual anyhow. Leave it to Oscar.

Mr. Breul had arrived in Europe in the summer of 1879, but nearly three years were to elapse before he presented his compliments to the Swiss branch of his grandfather’s family in Zurich, where the Fürsts had been burghers since 1336.

In later years, Mr. Breul enjoyed speaking of that first encounter with his fair cousin, Sophie. Fresh snow had begun to fall as the young American crossed the park to the Fürst villa on the right bank of the lake. As he approached the gate, a small white dog darted through the railings, heedless of a girlish voice that called in vain. Though hardly dressed for the bitter weather, the impetuous girl had rushed from the house to rescue her wayward pet, undaunted by her thin shoes and indoor dress.

With the instant acumen which later marked his business dealings, Mr. Breul immediately grasped the situation and hastily captured the little dog by its collar before it could hurl itself beneath an oncoming carriage.

His quick action secured the young woman’s gratitude, but when he insisted that she take his coat as protection against the falling snow, he won her heart from that moment forward.

Erich Breul-The Man and His Dream, privately published 1924 by the Friends and Trustees of the Erich Breul House.