French Braid(62)

They both started giggling again.

“Oh, my,” Magda said finally, shaking her head. “Darling Robin.”

“When our grandson left for his study year abroad,” Mercy said, “his parents gave him one of those watches with two faces, one face set to foreign time and the other to home time. And Robin said—” here she knotted her eyebrows, putting on a perplexed look. “Said, ‘Really? I would have thought,’ he said, ‘that a person would just always somehow know what time it was at home.’?”

This made Magda laugh again, and Mercy looked pleased. “Right?” she asked Candle.

Candle, who had no memory of that conversation, smiled but didn’t answer. She hadn’t even remembered that a grandson had studied abroad. (Could it have been her brother, Eddie, even? He was the one who liked learning new languages.) Oh, she was just too much younger than the others; that was the problem. She was hopelessly young, and out of step and inexperienced. But she was doing her best to catch up.



* * *



—

Say the word “gallery” to Candle and she pictured the National Portrait Gallery over in DC, where she’d gone once on a school field trip. A double row of columns, massive wings at either side…So when they arrived at Magda’s gallery, a few blocks from the restaurant, she was disappointed to find a tiny storefront with a single mullioned window. Mercy, though, had the opposite reaction. “Why, Mags!” she said. “This is very classy!”

“Ah, yes,” Magda said. “I seem to be moving up in the world.” Then she told Candle, “My last show was in a framing shop.”

Candle liked her for admitting that.

They went inside, and a young woman seated behind a desk stood up immediately. “Ms. Schwartz,” she said. “How nice to see you.”

“Hello, Virginia,” Magda said. “Is Mr. Phillips in?”

“No, he’s at lunch, I’m sorry to say.”

“Well, never mind. I’m just bringing my friends by to see the exhibit. Mercy here is an artist from Baltimore. We went to school together. And this is her granddaughter, Kendall.”

“How do you do,” Virginia said, and she made a little bobbing motion that was almost a curtsy. She wore a fascinating outfit, a black knit top that had a ruffle at the bottom too long to be mere trim but too short to be a skirt, with nothing below but black tights and black ballet shoes. Candle took careful note, wondering if her mother would allow her to wear such an outfit. Meanwhile, Magda had clasped Mercy’s elbow and was leading her toward the first painting. “This is the one I was telling you about,” she said. Candle followed, two steps behind. “I still can’t decide if it’s finished or not. What do you think? Should I have held it back until I felt more certain?”

“No, you should not have held it back,” Mercy told her firmly. “You know what Mr. LaSalle always said: ‘The worst thing you can do to a painting is overwork it.’?”

“Oh, yes, he did say that,” Magda said. “You’re right.”

Candle, though, wasn’t so sure. The painting was a glossy white rectangle, some two feet by three feet, with a single black curve like a Nike swoosh in the lower-left-hand corner. Had Mr. LaSalle ever felt that a painting could be underworked?

The next painting had more going on—five green V shapes, floating here and there on a matte beige background. You could almost imagine the Vs were a flock of birds. Although maybe, Candle thought, it was wrong to try and turn such a painting into something recognizable. Probably you were supposed to appreciate the Vs for themselves. She narrowed her eyes and concentrated on appreciating.

It wasn’t as if she had never seen abstract paintings before. At her grandparents’ house there was an oversize art book with scribbled drips by Jackson Pollock and linoleum squares by Mondrian. But these were the first she’d actively struggled to understand, frowning intently at each as she followed the two women around the perimeter of the room. “Oh, Magda, so many red dots!” her grandmother said, and Candle thought, Many? because at the moment she was studying a large white square with only one red dot set slightly off-center. But Magda said, “Yes, sales have not been bad, I have to say,” and Candle realized what Mercy had been referring to. She stopped following them and took a little detour to the front of the gallery, where a sheet of paper was tacked to the wall just inside the front door. Red dot, red dot, red dot, next to the list of titles and prices, all of the prices in the thousands. Four thousand, five thousand. Seven thousand, in one case. She turned away and went to catch up with Mercy, who was continuing the circuit on her own now because Magda had gone over to speak again with Virginia. “What do you think?” Mercy asked Candle, and Candle said, “They’re really…interesting.”

Then she winced, because she was reminded of what her pop-pop always said when he was served some dish he wasn’t used to. “Very…inner-esting,” he would pronounce, and the family members around the table would exchange knowing smiles.

Mercy, though, just patted Candle’s arm reassuringly and said, “What I find interesting is, I like to look at paintings like these and imagine how it must feel to finish one. I mean, you’d lay down your brush, you’d take a step back, you’d say, ‘Yes, that’s what I had in mind, all right.’ And when I think about it that way, I can see that it really must be a great satisfaction. Not to overstate things, I mean; not to feel the need to spell everything out. To be capable of such…restraint. I’m not capable of it, but I have to say I admire it. Oh, isn’t it amazing, all the different ways that different artists’ minds can work?”