Corpus Christmas

V

Wednesday, December 16

The caterers arrived at the Erich Breul House shortly after six, and Mrs. Beardsley, delegated by Lady Francesca Leeds, was there to direct them through the door under the main stairs and into the butler’s pantry.

In the dining room, the formal table was relieved of its extra leaves and draped in dark red linen with green plaid runners. The caterers had brought their own silver-plated canapé trays and their own chafing dish for the hot hors d’oeuvres, but the dozen or so sterling candelabra that would soon light the long room with tall white tapers belonged to the house.

An arrangement of cedar, red-berried holly, and shiny magnolia leaves had been delivered earlier, and as Mrs. Beardsley centered it between the candles, Pascal Grant paused with table leaves in his arms. “Do you want me to do anything else, Mrs. Beardsley? Bring up some more chairs?”

She glanced about the room. Sophie Breul’s Sheraton dining table could be expanded to seat forty, but twenty chairs were its normal complement and Lady Francesca had said tonight’s party was to be quite small.

“Just three or four of the trustees, Dr. Peake and his secretary, the art people, Mr. Thorvaldsen, and of course you, Mrs. Beardsley. When Oscar Nauman asks about the history of the Breul House, we must have someone who can tell him.”

Mrs. Beardsley had known she was being buttered, but that didn’t diminish her pleasure. It was such smooth butter. Now she smiled at Pascal Grant. “I think we have enough chairs for anyone who might wish to sit. You go ahead to your movie, Pascal, and you needn’t worry about coming up later. We’ll put everything back as it was first thing tomorrow. Just don’t forget the alarm when you come back tonight.”

“I won’t, Mrs. Beardsley. Good night, Mrs. Beardsley.”

“Good night, dear,” she said absently, giving the room a final check.

Everything seemed quite under control. Gas logs blazed upon the open hearth next to the glittering Christmas tree and together, they lent the great marble hall an almost Dickensian warmth and cheer. Paneled pocket doors between the drawing room and gallery to the left of the hall had been pushed back to form one long open room and a hired pianist was familiarizing himself with the baby grand at the street end of the drawing room. The caterers had set up their bar in the pantry, appetizing odors were coming from the oven, and Miss Ruffton had returned from the cloakroom wearing a red skirt shot through with gold threads, a gold ribbon in her hair, and a party smile on her face. Even Dr. Peake had changed his tie before drifting in to lift the domed lid of the largest silver chafing dish and sample a hot savory.

“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,” he said, licking his fingers like a mischievous boy.

Earlier in the afternoon, Mrs. Beardsley had slipped across the square and changed into her own holiday dress, a black wool sheath topped by a red Chanel jacket, her grandmother’s three-strand pearl choker and earrings, and an emerald-and-ruby pin that seemed appropriate for the season. Now she decided it was time to complete her own costume, to exchange her sensible low pumps for the patent leather T-straps waiting for her in the cloakroom.

As she crossed the hall, the door swung open for Francesca Leeds, her windswept red hair swirling upon the collar of a dark mink coat, which she wore like a cloak over an evening suit of raw gold silk. “Show time! ” she caroled.

Uptown, along the broad avenues, Salvation Army Santas were jostled for sidewalk space by three-card monte dealers and free-lance Santas who hawked “genuine Rolex watches, jus’ twenny dollar-check it out ” between nips from their hip flasks.

Skaters twirled and circled before the blazing tree at Rockefeller Center; a string quartet sheltered in the street-level jog of a huge skyscraper to play German carols, while an artist chalked the sidewalk in front of St. Thomas ’s Church with an ambitious choir of angels. Further up Fifth Avenue, wide-eyed toddlers, blissfully indifferent to the monetary worth of diamonds and rubies, were lifted up by their parents to watch Muppets romp among the gems in Tiffany’s windows.

As customers streamed through the doorways of lavishly decorated stores, seasonal Muzak occasionally floated out to mingle with the Salvation Army bells. The vaguely religious music fell equally upon the warmly dressed and upon the shabby bundles of rags who tried to hunker deeper into the few dark corners. For many, the street people added just the right tinge of guilt to the general thank-God-I’m-making-it aura of self-satisfaction, a sort of memento mori that made modern yule tide hedonism all the more pleasurable.

In the art gallery just off Fifth Avenue, Oscar Nauman refilled his empty cup from the fat china pot on Jacob Munson’s desk, leaned back in the comfortable leather chair, and smiled at his friend. “I must be getting old, Jacob, when I prefer your hot chocolate to your cold whiskey.”

“Ja, sure, ” the old man jeered, unwrapping another of his perpetual peppermints. They were imported from France especially for him and were made with particularly pungent oils that bit the tongue and almost compensated for his forbidden cigarettes. “Wait till you are my age. At least you don’t have doctors telling you what you can drink. I look at you, Oscar, and I see still the boy who first came through this door with those charcoal drawings of Lila under his arm.”

“The hair, ” said Oscar.

It was true. That thick mane of hair had turned completely white before he was thirty. His height helped, as did the probing intelligence in his intensely blue eyes, but it was the white hair that gave him such an aura of timelessness. Munson tried to look at him objectively, to catalog the fine wrinkles around his eyes, the lines beneath his firm chin, but it was hard to perceive the softening of age in that strong face. He did recognize that inward-turning melancholy however. Lila’s name still had that power.

If only the woman would die, he thought. Die or be cured. God knows she’d tried to kill herself often enough in the past twenty-five years. Jacob sipped his cocoa and refrained from looking at Oscar’s left ear. He knew that the scars Lila’s knife had left there were almost invisible. And the scars on Oscar’s psyche should have faded as well, but how could they while the woman remained alive in that prison for the criminally insane?

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I’m a stupid old man to mention her.”

“It isn’t just Lila.” Nauman cradled the cup with the fingertips of both hands and gazed at it bleakly. “That’s the worst of this retrospective business, Jacob. I’ll have to look again at so many things I thought I was finished with. I don’t think I want to do that.”

“For a real retrospective, perhaps not, ” Munson agreed, stroking his wispy beard. “But the Breul House-this we will treat like a preview, ja?” he said coaxingly. “The space is small. Friendly. This you will do for your old friend?”

“Preview?” Nauman growled.

“Ja, sure. How much longer can I keep working, Oscar? I tell you alone: I am eighty-two. Most men my age are dead but I cannot retire before we do your retrospective.” He tried to sound frail and pathetic, but his small body was still too wiry and agile and there was a jaunty glint in his black eyes. “You are killing me.”

“Ja, sure,” Oscar said sardonically.

The office door was ajar and Hester Kohn, vivid in red and purple, stuck her head in. The lush scent of her gardenia perfume floated in ahead of her.

“Car’s here,” she said, holding out Jacob’s coat and muffler.

Munson beamed. “Good, good! Now we meet your lady fireman.”

“Lady policeman,” Oscar grinned.

Sigrid had intended to leave work early enough to allow herself plenty of time for a long hot shower and a leisurely hour to dress, but in the late afternoon, she’d been called to an unexpected meeting that ran past six-thirty.

If she hoped to make Sussex Square before the party was over, Sigrid knew she could forget about that shower, much less changing into something more glamorous than the shapeless black wool suit and white turtleneck sweater she’d pulled from her closet this morning.

She rummaged in her shoulder bag and found a tube of lipstick and some mascara. She’d been running late the day before yesterday and had planned to duck into the locker room here at work, then completely forgot about makeup as soon as she saw the papers that had accumulated on her desk over the weekend.

Well, mascara and lipstick were better than nothing, she thought, and headed for the locker room where she washed her face and hands, pushed her hair into place and started on her eyes.

It looked so simple when other women did it. And really, what was so difficult? A steady hand, a bit of bravura and voila!

“Oh, damn!”

“Something wrong, Lieutenant?”

Sigrid whirled to see Detective Elaine Albee peering around the bank of lockers.

“No. ” She turned back to the mirror where she saw that the pretty blond officer was frankly staring at the smeared dark black rings around her eyes.

Sigrid was torn with frustration and embarrassment. “I’m supposed to be at a cocktail party in Sussex Square in exactly thirteen minutes and I look like a goddamned panda!”

“I was wondering if someone had given you a black eye,” the younger woman ventured. This was the first time she’d ever known the lieutenant to worry about her looks and Elaine wasn’t quite sure how to react. Lieutenant Harald could freeze a blast furnace with her tongue when annoyed.

“It’s probably because the light’s so bad in here,” she said diplomatically.

“This is ridiculous,” Sigrid said, grimly washing off the smeared mascara. “I’ll just call and say I can’t make it.”

“Let me help,” Albee offered. “I keep a few things in my locker for emergencies.”

“You have emergencies like this?” Sigrid asked curiously. “You always look so put together.”

“Come with me,” Elaine grinned and Sigrid soon found herself seated on a bench in front of the other woman’s locker.

Five minutes later, her eyes were expertly lined and shadowed, the planes of her cheeks subtly enhanced with blusher, her lips-

“My lip gloss is wrong for you,” Elaine frowned. “I’m blond, you’re brunette. You need something richer than anything I have here.”

Sigrid brought out her own lipstick. “Will this do?”

Elaine uncapped it, examined it critically and handed it back with approval. “Perfect for you. How did you stumble-” She caught herself. “I mean-”

“I know what you meant,” Sigrid said dryly as she leaned toward the mirror on the door of Albee’s locker and applied the lipstick. “It was the woman who cut my hair last month. She picked it out. I’ve just tried to follow her directions.”

She capped the lipstick and looked at the finished result as impersonally as if her face belonged to someone else.

“Uh, Lieutenant?”

“Yes?”

Elaine reached into her locker for a plastic bag with the name of a dress shop located in the next block. “I picked this up on my lunch hour today. It was on sale and looked like something that might come in handy during the holidays. You can borrow it, if you want.”

It was a scoop-necked shell of gold sequins that glittered and sparkled like Christmas lights when Elaine lifted it from the bag.

Sigrid made one weak protest, then shucked off her jacket and sweater, remembering just in time not to smear her lipstick. The sequinned top fit fine. Albee was curvier, but she was taller, so it balanced. With her jacket left unbuttoned, she looked almost glamorous.

Elaine was getting into the sport of it now and pulled out some gold-colored costume jewelry: bracelets and a pair of earrings.

Sigrid accepted the bracelets but regretfully confessed, “My ears aren’t pierced.”

“You have to have earrings.”

Another woman entered, greeted Albee by name, then gave Sigrid a formal nod and a curious glance.

“I’m late,” Sigrid said, looking at the clock on the end wall, but Albee was lost in thought. “Quarante!” she exclaimed suddenly. “In Records. She keeps a wad of costume jewelry in her desk.”

“I have to go,” Sigrid objected.

“Not without earrings,” Albee told her firmly and neither woman noticed that in this area it was now Albee who commanded. “I’ll meet you by the elevators on the first floor in two minutes.”

She sprinted for the door. Sigrid folded her turtleneck and left it in her own locker, put on her heavy coat, then took an elevator downstairs.

True to her word, it wasn’t much more than two minutes later that Elaine Albee raced down the stairs with a glittery dangling earring in each determined hand. Without a shred of self-consciousness, she stood on tiptoe to clip them on Sigrid’s ears, then fluffed her hair and stepped back to look at what she’d wrought.

“Your coat!” she cried. “I think I know someone-”

“No!” Sigrid protested, clutching her camel hair topcoat protectively.

“Well-” said Elaine. “But take it off the minute you get there, okay?”

“Okay.” Sigrid hesitated and awkwardly held out her hand. “Thanks, Albee.”

“Any time, Lieutenant.” Feeling almost maternal, the younger woman watched as her boss hurried out into the winter night, earrings swinging with each long stride.

“There you are,” said Jim Lowry when she returned to the squad room. “What’s funny, Lainey?”

“Nothing,” she grinned. “Except that now I know how the fairly godmother felt when she sent Cinderella off to the ball.”

“Huh?”

“Skip it. Didn’t you want to make the early movie?”

The cabbie had bent the speed limit, and Sigrid, who normally hated fast driving, gratefully added a little extra to her tip as he let her out in Sussex Square. It was only nineteen minutes past seven. Fashionably late, she told herself and hurried up the brick walk.

Remembering her promise to Elaine Albee, she slipped her coat off as soon as she entered the Erich Breul House. There she was greeted by a dignified gray-haired woman in a red jacket and beautiful pearls.

“Welcome to the Erich Breul House,” said the woman, directing her to the cloakroom. “I’m Eloise Beardsley, senior docent.”

“Sigrid Harald,” she responded and handed her coat over to an attendant. “I think Oscar Nauman’s expecting me?”

“Ah, yes.” Mrs. Beardsley led her past an ornate Christmas tree and gestured toward the arched doorway near a wide marble staircase. “There he is now.”

Suddenly all the silly panic over her clothes and makeup seemed worth it for the look in Nauman’s eyes as he crossed the hall to her.

“Very nice,” he said, handing her a bourbon-and-Coke. “I was afraid you might not come.”

“Not come?” she asked. “Why would you think that?”

Seated at the desk in his makeshift office up on the fourth floor, Roger Shambley happily fingered the pack of letters. He had read them so many times since last night that he’d virtually memorized whole passages. For the most part they chronicled the usual unexceptional adventures of an earnest young man released from schoolbooks and given permission to play for a year or two before settling into adult responsibilities.

After graduation in the spring of 1911, young Erich Breul Jr. had spent the summer at the family’s vacation “cottage” near Oswego on the eastern end of Lake Ontario. (Nowhere near as grand as the “cottages” at Newport, the Breuls roughed it each summer with a mere eighteen rooms and a live-in staff of only five.)

In August he sailed to England for a month in London, then entrained for Vienna by way of Antwerp, Cologne and Frankfurt. Christmas and most of January were passed with his mother’s people in Zurich. Spring found him in Rome. In each great art center, he dutifully visited the appropriate museums and churches, attended the expected concerts and operas, and afterwards, with filial rectitude, recorded his impressions of each for his “dear Mama and Papa” back home.

As spring turned to summer in those letters, Shambley could read between the lines and sense young Breul’s growing saturation with the old masters, lofty music, and approved lectures in fusty rooms. June made him restless for open air and manly exercise. Accordingly, he had sent his luggage ahead to Lyons and, in company with several similarly minded youths, had hiked along the Mediterranean coast from Genoa to Marseilles.

At Marseilles, he had somehow acquired a pet monkey, Chou-Chew. The details of that acquisition were glossed over; Shambley suspected a rowdy night in one of those waterfront taverns frequented by seamen from all over the world.

In any event, Breul had parted from his friends, who were going on to Barcelona, purchased a bicycle, and, with the monkey in an open wicker basket on the front, had pedaled northward up the Rhone valley. He meandered through small villages where he bought bread and cheese or a night’s lodging; and as he entered the fertile plains north of Avignon, he enjoyed both the blazing sun overhead and the cool shaded avenues of plane trees that lined the irrigation canals.

It was mid-August and the young vagabond was dawdling along a back road near the nondescript village of Sorgues-sur-l’Ouvèze when his innocent reveries were suddenly interrupted by an enormous white dog that bounded over the hedgerows, barking with such deceptive ferociousness that the startled young American promptly crashed his machine into the nearest tree.

Enter Picasso and Braque, thought Shambley, who had spent most of the night reading everything he could put his hands on concerning their summer of 1912.

The dog was Picasso’s, a Great Pyrenees, one of those shaggy white creatures as big as a Newfoundland or Great Dane. His whole life long, Picasso had adored animals, from exotic zoo specimens to the most common domestic cat. How could he resist a monkey?

Braque, himself a cyclist, was more concerned about the damage done to Breul’s new bicycle.

While Picasso quieted his dog and charmed the frightened monkey from the tree with his dark expressive eyes and coaxing voice, Braque hoisted the crumpled machine over his broad shoulder. Together, they led the youth to the nearest blacksmith’s, left the bicycle for repairs, and insisted that he go with them for a glass of wine.

As so often happens-even with strictly reared young Lutherans-one glass of wine led to two and before long, the first bottle was empty and Picasso ordered a second in which to toast “le grand Vilbure,” that great American whom he and Braque admired above all others and whose death that spring had so impoverished the world. The Spaniard spoke French with such a heavy accent that Erich Jr. had to ask him to repeat the name twice. Even then, Picasso had to spread his arms and make engine noises before Breul understood that they were toasting Wilbur Wright.

Eventually, the blacksmith’s apprentice tracked them down and informed M’sieu Breul that it would be three days before his bicycle could be repaired. His master had sent to Orange for the necessary part. One must be patient.

“But I’m due in Lyons day after tomorrow!” said M’sieu Breul. “I’m to meet friends there. It’s my birthday.”

“Tant pis,” shrugged the blacksmith’s apprentice.

“Never mind,” Braque and Picasso told him. “We will celebrate your natal day here.”

Although this would be the last summer that Picasso had to worry about money, the two artists had deliberately chosen Sorgues for two reasons: it was cheap and no one knew them there. But perhaps they missed Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Derain, Manolo, Juan Cris, Havilland and all the other friends with whom they socialized back in Paris. Or perhaps their kindness to the young American sprang from a combination of great personal and professional happiness just then. Not only did their work intoxicate them, so did their women.

Braque and his Marcelle still considered themselves newlyweds and Picasso had only that spring taken a new mistress, the lovely and delicate Eva, “ma jolie,” who was to die so young.

In any event, Picasso volunteered to nursemaid Chou-Chew and Braque arranged for Breul to stay with him and his wife at Villa Bel Air, a rather dreary and commonplace house that was more beautiful in name than in fact.

Shambley wished Erich Jr. had written less about Braques domestic arrangements and much more about Braque’s studio, the pictures he saw there, or the conversations that must have passed between the two artists when Picasso arrived the next morning with the monkey on his shoulder.

Instead, after a brief reference to Braque’s trompe-l’oeil technique and how he used combs and varnishes to duplicate the appearance of marble or grained wood on his canvases, Erich Jr. wrote that he did not think dear Papa would find the work of his new friends very meaningful. “I fear that you, with your deep love and knowledge of pure art, would scorn their papier collé and the strange analytical shapes of their designs, but their experiments interest me very much and when they explain what they are doing, their excitement infuses me as well.”

Having seen the results, Shambley could use his imagination to fill in the details Erich Jr. so lightly touched upon. They made him sit in a chair all afternoon, gave him Braque’s violin to play and, while the monkey clambered at will over sitter and artists alike, began to devise a birthday portrait, using their new techniques. In the evening Marcelle and Eva produced a special dinner and Breul gave them most of his pocket money for wine. By midnight, the portrait was declared finished (even though it had taken on certain simian details as more bottles were emptied) and both artists had signed it on the back before making a formal presentation to the birthday boy.

In return, Erich Jr. had risen to the occasion with a speech about Spanish-French-American friendship, in token of which he now gave his bicycle to Braque and his monkey to Picasso. Early the next day, with his portrait tied up in brown paper, a slightly queasy young American-“I think it must have been the sausages,” he wrote his parents-caught the morning train to Lyons, where his wander jahr returned to its prescribed paths.

Except that it hadn’t quite, thought Shambley, turning to the letters written after Breul settled in Paris for what was to be his final six months before sailing home. He was discreet about his sorties into bohemia, and his assurances of studious application to conventional art and culture were probably written in response to pointed questions from home.

But the catalogs and Montparnasse menus, not to mention the two Légers hanging four floors down in that zoo of a janitor’s room, gave ample evidence that the junior Breul had spent as much time among the avant-garde of Paris as in the venerable Louvre.

Shambley returned the last letter to its envelope and blocked them between his small hands like a deck of cards. At that moment, Dr. Roger Shambley was a deeply happy man. All his life he’d chased those capricious goddesses, Fame and Fortune.

Native intelligence and dogged hard work had made him a well-regarded expert in nineteenth-century American art. His first two books had gained him tenure; his third confirmed his reputation for good solid scholarship, which translated into speaking engagements, magazine articles, even an occasional spot on the Today Show when a feature story required an art historian’s authoritative comment. If that art historian came across the tube as acerbic and witty, all the better.

Yet everyone dreams of immortality. No matter how competently and wittily written, few books survive their time if they only rehash previously known data; but the discoverer of new material will always be read simply because he was first. That’s why every scholar dreams of new finds-that Greek statue only a shovelful of dirt away, that major missing piece of the puzzle. Discoveries automatically turn on the grant machines and roll out appointments and promotions.

With these letters and a description of how he found an unknown seminal work, Shambley knew he could write a monograph that would become a permanent appendage to the Picasso-Braque legend. Not only that, he would become a hero to everyone connected to the Breul House. Once it was made public that this dead-in-the-water museum contained the only documented example in the entire world of a Picasso-Braque collaboration, they’d have to put in a conveyor belt to keep the crowds moving.

Which took care of fame.

As for fortune…

Those two Léger canvasses presented interesting possibilities, none of which involved the Breul House. Today, he had gone to the Museum of Modern Art and bought two Léger posters as nearly like the two on Pascal Grant’s wall in size and composition as he could manage. He had already stashed them in one of the basement storage rooms. In the next day or so, as soon as he could substitute them for the real pictures, he would announce his discovery of the Picasso-Braque collage.

There would be such an instant uproar of excitement that even if the janitor noticed the difference between the posters and the authentic paintings, who would pay him any mind?

No one. He’d be home free with two Légers of his very own. Too bad he couldn’t openly offer them for sale at, say, Sotheby’s. Auctions always brought the highest prices. But Sotheby’s required a legal history of the artwork it put on the block: documents, canceled checks, and bills of sale; and the only provenance he could offer would be the 1912 catalog he’d found in Erich Jr.’s effects.

No, he’d have to find someone with a love of modern art, a streak of larceny, and the resources to indulge expensive tastes.

He looked at his watch. Time to put in an appearance downstairs. He started to put the letters back in his briefcase, then hesitated. Maybe it would be safer to leave the letters here for now. There were a million hiding places in this cluttered attic but, as most scholars knew, a misfiled letter is a lost letter.

Shambley opened a drawer marked “Miscellaneous Business Correspondence: 1916/1917” and craftily filed the packet under “August 1916.”

At that moment he felt positively gleeful, as if the ghost of Christmas Present had upended an enormous bag of toys at his feet. If the attic stairs had possessed a free-standing banister, he would have slid right down it, and it was all he could do to keep from chortling aloud. He stepped into the servants’ lavatory on the third floor, smoothed his unruly hair, and put his pugnacious face into a semblance of professorial dignity.

But as he walked downstairs to join the party, it occurred to Roger Shambley that perhaps he wouldn’t have to look very far for the buyer he needed.

The Breul dining room was the scene of many elaborate and festive dinners. Sophie Fürst Breul’s mother was famous in Zurich for her brilliant dinner parties and her daughter brought the Fürst touch with her to New York. Although extravagant, perhaps, by our 1950’s standards, Mrs. Breul’s dinners were considered small and select in their day and the guest list never exceeded forty, the number which could be comfortably seated at her table. Like Scrooge after his conversion, it could be said that the Breuls “knew how to keep Christmas well, if any [couple] alive possessed the knowledge”; and it was their custom to invite a few friends for “supper” on Christmas night. The following is from Mrs. Breul’s menu files and was dated “Christmas 1906.”

Crème d’asperge

Hûtres Sardines Dinde fumée

Rôti de boeuf

Haricots verts Pommes

Sacher Torte Noix glacée Topfenstrudel

Vermouth Bordeaux Champagne

from Welcome to the Breul House!-An Informal Tour, by Mrs. Hamilton Johnstone III, Senior Docent. (© 1956)