Men and Angels Read Online Free PDF Page B

another room. All her ordinary actions seemed unreal and incomplete, as if she were doing them for the camera.
    Three weeks he’d been gone and she still slept badly each night. For sixteen years she had held him every night, and now the bed was vacant, a lot abandoned with a half-finished house. Her relation to the children was different too; the rhythm she and Michael heard that told them when the other had become inadequate, impatient, unreasonable, tyrannical or lax was silent. She was alone with the children now; she was alone.
    She could hardly believe that they had done it. She tried to remember exactly how it had all started. It had been in a New York City restaurant. Benedict Hardy, whom she’d known since she was twenty and in London with a grant to study the Elgin Marbles, had taken them out to dinner as he did once a year, when he came to New York. He was an eminent British art historian, self-consciously aristocratic and fantastical, whose specialty was nineteenth-century French painting. Each year their night with him stood out from the rest of the year like a secret national holiday in a community of illegal immigrants. This year, when they’d finished their meal, Benedict leaned back and luxuriously lit a cigarette, without a hint of apology, as if it were another course. “I don’t suppose you’d like a job writing a catalogue for me,” he said to Anne, assuming the laconic expression he felt it his duty to adopt whenever he said anything of importance.
    He was arranging an exhibit at a gallery in New York of the works of Caroline Watson, a woman whose paintings had been neglected since her death in 1938. She was one of those painters, he explained, who had painted the wrong things at the wrong time. In the late twenties, when Cubism was the rage and Surrealism was following hard on it, she was doing dark Fauve studies of women and children. And landscapes, he said, which no one in fashionable circles considered anything but a genre to induce a blush. “Her misfortune was to be a merely first-rate painter in an age of geniuses,” he finished, leaning back, proud of his aphorism, which he could not just then have invented. He had known her in Paris and London in the twenties. Her daughter-in-law, the heir of the estate, was someone, he said, “to whom I am very much in the nature of being devoted.
    “Caroline left America for Paris in the 1880s, never really to return. At thirty-six, to everyone’s astonishment, particularly her father’s—he was very Philadelphia, a banker, right clubs and all that sort of thing—she produced an illegitimate child. A son. Stephen Watson. Poor soul, one of those born miserable. Caroline’s father said he’d cut her off if she brought the boy up anywhere but in Philadelphia. She tried to stick it, but she couldn’t and left the child behind. She said she had to live in France. Stephen drank himself to death at twenty-eight. Everyone said it was pneumonia, but one knew, really. He’d married Jane, and Jane and Caroline were inseparable. They lived together, greatly devoted, until Caroline died. You see, one of the reasons I thought of you, darling Anne, is that Jane, much as I adore her, can be difficult. Would not be everyone’s dish of tea. But you, of course, will be able to see her greatness and to get round the difficult bits. And then there’s your lovely thesis on Mary Cassatt and Eakins. So you’re a natural. It’s a marriage made in heaven.”
    He brought them to the gallery to look at some of Caroline’s paintings. It was exciting, in a charged, theatrical way, to enter the building at night, to be cleared by a guard, to watch Ben press a series of numbers on a keyboard at the gallery door, and, magically, to have the door open before them onto the pitch-dark room. Conscious of the potency of his gesture, Ben turned on the lights. He quickly showed them to a back room, not giving them a moment to look at the pictures currently on exhibit, and