Small Town

He was out the door at six-forty-five and caught a cab right away. This time the driver was a black man with a French name. Haitian, he supposed, or possibly West African. Wherever he’d come from, the guy’d been doing this long enough to know the city. He didn’t have to be told where Stelli’s was. The name was enough. He drove right to it.

thirteen

Gregory Schuyler was a dear man, and, as chairman of the board of the Museum of Contemporary Folk Art, an important frog in the small pond Pomerance Gallery swam in. Whenever Susan suggested lunch he was quick to select an impeccable restaurant, and wouldn’t hear of her picking up the check, or even splitting it. And there was no question of the museum reimbursing him. Not only did he volunteer no end of unpaid hours to the museum, but he also gave them an annual donation in the $50,000$100,000 range, depending upon the fortunes of the Schuyler family trust of which he was the principal beneficiary.

He’d taken her to Correggio and insisted they have the Chilean sea bass. Because it may be our last chance, you know. The Australians say it’s being fished out and want everyone to observe a moratorium. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t order it this afternoon. Ours have already been caught, haven’t they?

He was going on now about some really exciting quilts, and she smiled and nodded in the right places without paying a great deal of attention to the words. Had she ever seen what she would regard as an exciting quilt? She understood quilts, she could tell the outstanding from the merely expert, and she could appreciate the whole folk tradition of quilting. She responded to the better examples of a wide variety of quilts, from the pure Amish work (geometrically precise blocks of unpatterned fabric) through the various complex patterns of American folk tradition, to the sometimes astonishing painterly works of appliqué and embroidery produced by sophisticated contemporary artists.

The quilt that had come closest to stirring her was a crazy quilt, entirely handmade, by an unknown Pennsylvania quilter. Odd shapes of discordant fabrics overlapped one another in no pattern at all, held together by oversize stitching in a vivid orange that clashed with everything. Sometimes the woman’s needle seemed to have gone out of control, piling up whirls of orange as though trying to spin itself into the ground.

She didn’t like the quilt, didn’t see how anyone could like it, really, but it had that touch of inner turmoil that had changed her life the day she saw it in Lausanne. The woman had surely been mad, but madness in and of itself was no guarantee of artistry. Lunatics could produce perfectly predictable and pedestrian paintings, they could turn out smears as devoid of interest and excitement as the fingerpainting of a dull child. Not every spoiled grape had been touched by the noble rot that could produce a Trockenbeerenauslese; not every deranged artist blossomed into a Jeffcoate Walker, an Aleesha MacReady, an Emory Allgood.

Was it time to let Gregory Schuyler know about Emory Allgood?

She waited for a conversational opening, then eased into it. “Have you been traveling, Gregory? So many people seem to have lost their appetite for it.”

“Oh, I know,” he said. “Friends of ours were planning on a camel trek across Jordan earlier this year. In March, it must have been. Is that when you trek across Jordan?”

“A cold day in hell,” she said, “is when I trek across Jordan.”

“My sentiments exactly, my dear, but these friends of ours are intrepid travelers. Leif and Rachel Halvorsen, do you know them? They go everywhere, they sleep in places one wouldn’t want to drive past. After last September, they decided that this might not be the year to go trekking anywhere in the Middle East. Jordan is supposed to be better than most, but still.”

“Where did they go instead?”

“That’s the whole point, they stayed home. Rachel told Caroline there was no end of places they’d have been comfortable going, but they just wanted to be in New York right now. And I must say I can relate to that. We were going on a South Seas cruise this winter, we had it booked and mostly paid for, and we didn’t go. Now that was because it was one of the cruise lines that went out of business, but we could have rebooked on another line and gone somewhere. And instead we stayed home.”

“And this summer?”

“Well, next month is Mostly Mozart, and Beverly would have my head if I wasn’t here for it.” He was on the festival board. “But we’ll go somewhere in September, I think, or the beginning of October. I wonder what the anniversary will be like.”

“Of—?”

“Of the bombing. I’m sure there’ll be ceremonies, and something awful on television, but I wonder if...”

“If something will happen?”