The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [127]
“That’s right,” Moses said.
“Oh,” Badger said. “What about the general? Do you know if he’s worth anything?”
“I don’t know,” Moses said. He followed Badger back into the hall and saw him give the old man a cigar and push his wheel chair out onto the terrace. When Moses repeated the conversation to Melissa it did not change her sentimental feelings for Badger. “Of course he’s not in the toy business,” she said. “He’s never really been in any business at all. He just tries to get along and I feel so sorry for him.”
The fact that Justina was parting with her art treasures because she knew no one trustworthy made the next day both elegiac and exciting.
Mr. Dewitt, the curator, was due at one and it happened to be Moses who let him into the rotunda. He was a slight man who wore a brown felt hat that was so many sizes too small for him that he looked like Boob McNutt. Moses wondered if he hadn’t picked out the wrong hat at a cocktail party. His face was slender and deeply lined—he tipped his head a little as if his baggy eyes were nearsighted—and the length and triangularity of his nose were extraordinary. This thin and angular organ seemed elegant and lewd—a vice, a penance, a gift of the devil’s—and reinforced a general impression of elegance and lewdness. He must have been fifty—the bags under his eyes couldn’t have been formed in a shorter time—but he carried himself gracefully and spoke with a little impediment as if a hair had gotten onto his tongue. “Not pork, not pork!” he exclaimed, sniffing the stale air of the rotunda. “I’m simply pasted together.” When Moses assured him that they would have chicken he put on some horn-rimmed glasses and, looking around the rotunda, noticed the big panel at the left of the stairs. “What a charming forgery,” he cried. “Of course I think the Mexicans make the most charming forgeries, but this is delightful. It was made in Zurich. There was a factory there in the early nineteen hundreds that turned them out by the carload. The interesting thing is their lavish use of carmine. None of the originals are nearly as brilliant.” Then some smell in the rotunda turned his mind back to the thought of lunch. “You’re sure it isn’t pork?” he asked again. “My tummy is a wreck.” Moses reassured him and they went down the long hall to where Justina was waiting for them. She was triumphantly gracious and sounded all those rich notes of requited social ambition that made her voice seem to carry up into the hills and down to the shadow of the valleys.
Mr. Dewitt clasped his hands when he saw all the pictures in the hall but Moses wondered why his smile should be so fleeting. He carried his cocktail over to the big Titian.
“Astonishing, astonishing, perfectly astonishing,” Mr. Dewitt said.
“We found that Titian in a ruined palace in Venice,” Justina said. “A gentleman at the hotel—an Englishman, I recall—knew about it and showed us the way. It was like a detective story. The painting belonged to a very old countess and had been in her family for generations. I don’t clearly recall what we paid her but if you will get the catalogue, Niki?”
D’Alba got the catalogue and leafed through it. “Sixty-five thousand,” he said.
“We found the Gozzoli in another hovel. It was Mr. Scaddon’s favorite painting. We found it through the assistance of another stranger. I believe we met him on a train. The painting was so dirty and so covered with cobwebs when we first saw it and hung in such a dark room that Mr. Scaddon decided against it but we later realized that we could not be too particular and in the morning we changed our minds.”
The curator sat down and let D’Alba fill his glass and when he turned to Justina she was reminiscing about the dirty palace where she had found the Sano di Pietro.
“These are all copies and forgeries, Mrs. Scaddon.”
“That’s impossible.”
“They’re copies and forgeries.”
“The only reason you’re saying this is because you want me to give my pictures to your museum,” Justina said. “That’s it, isn’t it? You want to have my pictures for nothing.”
“They’re worthless.”
“We met a curator at the Baroness Grachi