The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues (2 page)

Garson surveyed the empty room and nodded his approval. “What time is it?”

Dickory looked at the cheaply made, poorly designed wristwatch her brother had given her as a high school graduation present. “It’s a quarter to six, more or less.”

Garson frowned. “I have an important dinner party to go to, so the observancy test will have to wait until tomorrow. Ever hear of the Panzpresser Collection?”

“Yes.” Dickory had never heard of the Panzpresser Collection, but she had something else on her mind. The room was too clean.

“Best private collection of Post-Impressionist paintings in this country. Not that I much care for that school. As far as I’m concerned, art stopped with Fragonard.”

Isaac had returned. Garson pointed to the three remaining cartons, then continued. “Anyhow, Julius Panzpresser is the collector, but his wife is the one with taste. She wants me to paint her portrait.”

Dickory studied the planked floor. Either Garson was joking, which seemed unlikely, or he was a pompous fool, a phony. She kept her head down while Isaac stacked the cartons and carried them out of the room. She could not bear to look at the disfigured creature, and she certainly did not want to be formally introduced.

“Let’s call it a day,” Garson said.

Dickory protested feebly. “I thought I would unpack while you dress for your dinner party. The costumes will get wrinkled if. . . .”

“But I
have
changed,” Garson replied. “The Panzpressers invited an artist, and they are going to get an artist.”

He was a phony, Dickory decided, as she followed him out the front door.

A taxi was waiting at the curb. “Where do you live?” Garson asked, doubling his long legs into the back seat.

“First Avenue and Fourteenth Street,” Dickory replied, hoping for a ride home. “With my brother and his wife.”

“Have a pleasant walk.” He slammed the door.

Shivering in the early evening chill, Dickory watched the cab drive off, then started on the mile-walk home. She had to walk. She had accidentally packed her purse and jacket in one of the costume cartons.

2

“Who’s Dick Ory?” Professor D’Arches pointed to one of the color compositions propped before the design class.

“The name is Dickory,” She had intentionally signed her name to look like two.

“Do you know what you’ve done here, Dickory?”

“Not really,” she admitted. Using four different Magic Markers, she had composed a square of joined triangles, but it had been difficult working in yellows by candlelight amidst the bickering and squabbling. Her brother and sister-in-law had argued most of the night about who was supposed to have paid the electric bill, and they had argued into the morning and through a breakfast of boiled coffee and untoasted bread over which one of them had spent the money saved to pay the bill. Now, in daylight, Dickory’s color arrangement looked quite different. The yellow triangles were almost indistinguishable from one another.

“A monochromatic design could have included tones and shades, you know,” the professor said. “What do you call this masterpiece, ‘Yellow on Yellow’?”

Dickory didn’t respond. No one responded. D’Arches shook his head in despair. “That was a clever pun, but obviously none of you self-styled artists has ever heard of Malevich’s ‘White on White,’ let alone Futurism or Suprematism.” He sighed. “All right, which genius wants to give his opinion of Dickory’s work?”

A freckled, gangling youth rose and raised his hand. “I think it is very subtle, sir.”

The class giggled at his polite high school manner.

“And which of these disasters is yours?” D’Arches asked.

“The purple one, sir.”

“Well, well, it seems we have a Fauve in our midst. Or is it Naïf?”

“Pardon, sir?”

The professor read the signature on the clumsy arrangement in purple, violet, and lavender. “Sit down, George the Third.”

The blushing young man resumed his seat and smiled at Dickory.

“If this class spent more time on design, and less time on their signatures, I wouldn’t be ruining my digestion on such garbage.” D’Arches pointed to a green composition thick with pigments squeezed from the tube. “Where’s the plagarist who signs himself ‘Vincent’?”

A bearded student defiantly explained that Vincent was his middle name.

“It is also the signature of Vincent Van Gogh,” the professor replied angrily. “Isn’t anyone here original enough to sign his own name? Where’s the joker who thinks he’s Whistler?”

“That signature is not a butterfly,” a chubby young man argued. “It’s a silverfish. Harold Silverfish is the name.”

“Get out of here, all of you, this minute. Out!”

Avoiding George III, who wanted to talk to her, Dickory hurried into the library. Professor D’Arches’ short temper had given her an extra half hour before she was due in Cobble Lane, time enough to find out about the Panzpresser Collection and Fragonard. And Garson.

Panzpresser, Julius. 1905—. Art collector and retired clothing manufacturer. Wife’s name: Cookie. Homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach. Art collection, worth $12 million, includes paintings by Degas, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Sonneborg.

The artists’ names were familiar to her, except the last. She had never heard of Sonneborg, but she had never heard of Fragonard, either.

Fragonard, Jean Honoré. 1732-1806. French painter.

Dickory flipped through the reproductions of Fragonard paintings. The colors were too sweet for her taste, the subject matter too shallow; but she had to admire his drawing skill.

Next, Garson. Dickory had searched through four biographical dictionaries of American artists before she found one short entry.

Garson. 1935- . American portrait painter. Born: Pigslop, Iowa. Father’s name: Gar. Occupation: macaroni designer. Mother’s maiden name: Aurora Borealis. Studied in Paris at L’Ecole de Louvre. Among the celebrities held in posterity under his facile brush are: Juanita Chiquita Dobson, banana heiress. . . .

Dickory slammed the book shut. Just in case there was some truth among those outrageous lies, she looked up two other names. There was no Pigslop in Iowa; there was no L’Ecole de Louvre. She had discovered only one thing about her possible employer: Garson wanted no one to know anything about Garson.

Steeling herself against the possibility of Isaac answering the door, Dickory rang the bell at Number 12 Cobble Lane. But neither Isaac nor Garson appeared. A fat man filled the doorway, a very fat man with bulging eyes and greasy skin that took on a purplish cast next to his white suit. His shirt, his tie, even his shoes were white. “White on White,” Dickory thought.

“Come on up,” Garson called from the landing.

Still blocking the entrance, the fat man scowled. “You the kid that’s supposed to answer the door? Next time you’re late, I’m kicking you out on your can.”

Ignoring his greeting, Dickory squeezed past and slowly, haughtily climbed the stairs. The fat man muttered some indistinct curses and slammed the door to the downstairs apartment. His apartment, now.

“I see you’ve met Manny Mallomar,” Garson said. leading her into his studio.

Her distaste for the repulsive new tenant was immediately washed away in a flood of light. Head raised to the enormous skylight that slanted two stories above her, Dickory turned in a circle between two large oak easels and blinked into the bright daylight. It was brighter than daylight, free of the glare and the shadows of the sun.

“Haven’t you ever seen a skylight before?” Garson asked.

“Not like this. There’s a tiny skylight in our bathroom that leaks when it rains, but the landlord won’t fix it. ‘Why fix it?’ he says. ‘What’s a little water, more or less, in a bathroom?’” Dickory stopped, remembering that she was supposed to be quiet.

Garson was neither disapproving nor sympathetic. “That makes sense,” he said, and beckoned her to the open staircase that hugged one of the studio walls.

Reminding herself to be observant, Dickory glanced about the spacious floor. There were no partitions dividing the front part of the house, now a library, from the glass-roofed studio, only a kitchen area against the opposite wall.

“Come,” Garson urged. “The cartons are up here.”

At the top of the stairs Dickory once again stood on a balcony. This one was much higher and looked into the skylight and down upon the easels. She thought she saw a man in colorful clothes sitting in a chair, but Garson quickly led her away from the railing and down a narrow hall.

“That’s my bedroom, the bathroom is over there, and this is the spare room. I’ll store the costumes in here for the while.”

The four unopened cartons were piled in the center of the small room. Garson pointed to the bare closets and empty chest of drawers. Dickory noticed a slight but unmistakable tremor in his right hand.

“I’m sure you’ve learned to be better organized after your walk home.” He had known about her missing purse and jacket all along. Avoiding his stare, Dickory opened the top box and removed a huntsman’s coat. Garson moved toward the door. “I’m going down to work. I’ve got to finish my lawyer’s portrait so I can begin painting Cookie Panzpresser. I’ll be back later to find out how observant you are.”

Trying to memorize the inventory as she unpacked, Dickory separated the men’s costumes from the women’s and arranged them in a vague historical sequence. In the middle of the third carton, between a lumberjack shirt and a red feather boa, she found her jacket and shoulder bag.

“How’s it going?”

Dickory jumped. “Fine,” she replied, stooping to pick up the ruffled parasol that had fallen to the floor. “I’m nearly finished.”

Garson inspected the closets and drawers, then leaned against the wall. Ice cubes clinked against the glass in his hand. “Now let’s see how observant you are. I’ll give you three questions, and if you answer them correctly, the job is yours. No, don’t turn around, just keep doing what you’re doing.”

She was kneeling on the closet floor, lining up high-buttoned shoes, beaded slippers, and fur-trimmed boots.

“Do you know the difference between a primitive painter and a creative artist?” Garson asked.

Surprised, Dickory spun around. She had expected to be questioned about the costumes or the house or the Panzpresser Collection or Fragonard.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean that to be a question; I’m just explaining the rules of the game.” Dickory returned to the shoes. “The difference is this,” Garson explained, “the primitive painter meticulously draws in every brick on a building because he knows the bricks are there. But the creative artist can suggest bricks with a few strokes of his brush. The creative artist is concerned, not with facades, but with the inner structure, with the truth of what he sees.”

Dickory polished the toe of a cowboy boot with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. She had meticulously drawn every brick in her Magic Marker street scenes.

“Seeing the structure behind the facade, seeing the truth behind the disguise, that’s what I mean by being observant,” Garson said. “Remember that in answering my questions. Understand?”

“Yes.” That sounded simple enough.

“All right, then. In one word, only one word, describe Isaac Bickerstaffe.”

“Who?” Dickory stalled for time.

“Isaac, the man who lives under the front stoop.”

“Oh.” Dickory sat back on her heels and closed her eyes. She shuddered at the remembered features of the misshapen giant.

“Take your time,” Garson said between sips of his drink. “But remember—one word, the most important word.”

Isaac Bickerstaffe seemed too big to squeeze into one word. “Scarface” didn’t indicate his size, neither did “one-eyed.” On the other hand, “huge” or “giant” didn’t indicate his scars. Or his scariness. “Monster,” that was it.

“Monster,” Dickory said.

Garson shook his head. “You disappoint me. Poor, gentle Isaac a monster? That is not only inaccurate, it’s uncharitable. The word for Isaac is ‘deaf-mute.’ ”

Now Dickory remembered the flying fingers, the vacant stare. Shamed by her stupidity, she stood up as her hopes for the job crashed down around her. She decided to fight for another chance. “Deaf mute is two words,” she challenged.

“One word,” Garson replied. “Deaf-hyphen-mute.”

“But Isaac Bickerstaffe is more than just a deaf-hyphen-mute.” This was her last try.

Garson stared into his empty glass. “Yes, Isaac is also brain-damaged.” There was compassion in his voice, but when he looked up his face wore the same blank mask. “Ready for the next question?” He pointed a shaky finger at the shoes.

Again kneeling on the closet floor, Dickory paired a Greek sandal with an Indian moccasin.

“In one word, and only one word, describe the new tenant, Manny Mallomar.”

She had to do better this time, but “gross” fought with “greasy,” “foul-mouthed” with “white-suited.” Only one word described both the man and his character.

“Ugly,” she said.

“I, myself, would have said ‘fat,’ ” Garson replied. “Mallomar could never hide his obesity, no matter what his disguise. But I’ll accept ‘ugly’; only the brush of a portrait painter could disguise that.”

Why was he always talking about disguises?

“Now, take Manny Mallomar again, and step by step describe what cannot be disguised. Forget about ‘ugly’ this time.”

“Fat,” she began. That word had already been approved. “Bulging eyes.”

“He could hide his pop-eyes behind dark glasses,” Garson said.

“About five-feet eight-inches tall.”

“Mallomar wears stacked-heel shoes and is only five-five.”

“White stacked-heel shoes,” Dickory continued, “white shirt, white suit, white tie.”

“He could change his clothes.”

“Greasy skin, dark-complected.”

“The word is complexioned, not complected. And he could change his skin color with makeup.”

Defeated at every turn, Dickory blurted: “Manny Mallomar looks like the ghost of a greasy hamburger.”