A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,16
a secondary exhibit at the Fogg that reacquainted the public with its existence.
It was only later that day that she realized she had not asked to see the paintings or drawings for herself. This lack of curiosity, she knew, was a symptom of the depression she’d been suffering since Ronan died. She stopped being interested in things not directly affecting her immediate circumstances. She’d lost all natural curiosity: What’s behind that door? What did that person mean? How does wireless work? And here she was, a supposed expert, a presumed devotee, who sent the drawings directly to the lab, to science, when she probably could have told just by looking at them whether they were forged, misattributed, or the real McCoy.
Elm was a keen judge of drawings, etchings, lithographs, and all prints prior to the twentieth century. She wished she could trust Ian’s eye, but they had both agreed, after a couple of martinis at the Algonquin Hotel one night, that Ian’s talents lay in client relations—in selling or commissioning art, not in appreciating it. He admired it, adored it even, loved being around it, took an aesthete’s pleasure in viewing it. But he lacked that critical and ineluctable something that allowed a viewer to hear a painting speak—the “eye.” Elm had it, a way of seeing through a painting or drawing, of gathering in an instant its myriad qualities, good or bad, and forming an almost infallible judgment. No amount of study or exposure could teach you the eye if you weren’t born with it. And while it wasn’t necessary to have the eye to work in art (many collectors, gallerists, and even some artists lacked it and were successful), it was essential for a director. Ian would grow and deepen, certainly, gain a greater store of knowledge from which to draw comparisons, but he would always be hobbled by his dead eye.
Elm’s eye, on the other hand, had been honed since birth, growing up her whole life around Tinsley’s with its revolving museum-like galleries. She looked at the drawings, let her gaze soften, and became, just for the moment, the artist himself. Apart from her acquired knowledge about paper, materials, subject matter, and style, she could effect this transubstantiation. That and her position at Tinsley’s led to her acknowledged preeminence in the field.
Ian poked his head through her door, then came in and sat down without waiting for an invitation. “So, up near Columbia, right?” he said. It took Elm a minute to figure out he was talking about his visit to the Attic. “Picture one of those old buildings that has housed academics for the past couple hundred years. The lobby’s marble has grooves between door and mailboxes and stairs. The elevator—unspeakable. I took the stairs, of course. Fifth floor. I knock. There’s no answer. But I’d made an appointment with the caregiver. Finally, a shuffling noise, and the door creaks open, straight out of some Bela Lugosi film. This woman, one hundred years old, skin hanging off in folds, some nightmare of old age, answers the door and without speaking waves me in.”
Here Ian paused for effect. Elm loved his stories the way Moira loved being read to at night. She wanted to hear them over and over again, revel in the inconsistencies, in their slight variations.
“So I walk into this apartment, and I swear it is unchanged from 1940. I half-expected to see Marlene Dietrich waltz in from stage right. Not only that, it hasn’t been cleaned since then either. And piles and piles of stuff—newspapers, folders, advertisements, boxes, envelopes. Just like the those brothers … What’s their names?”
“The Collyer brothers,” Elm filled in. They were part of New York lore, the brothers who saved every newspaper for fifty years and then died inside their prison of newsprint.
“Right. Complete with the paths between piles from kitchen to bedroom to toilet.”
“Just like the marble grooves in the lobby.”
“Don’t throw my storytelling inadequacies back at me. What, Homer never repeated an epithet?”
“Sorry,” Elm said. She leaned forward and put her chin in her hands, pantomiming rapt attention. “Pray, continue.”
“She still hasn’t spoken to me, but we go into the bedroom, where a wan light is shining through the windows, illuminating the dust motes.”
“Poetic,” said Elm.
Ian ignored her. “And then she points to the drawings, which are in a Woolworth’s shopping bag, circa, say, 1920. And I’m wondering if the bag is the artifact she wants us to appraise. So I take the gloves out of my pocket