Pictures at an Exhibition Read Online Free PDF Page B

without its hordes. He was childlike and gay after a few hours spent in the presence of his artists, and this was both infectious and infuriating to me.
    Tanned, sitting at our dinner table, he said, “Last time, I chose one set of paintings and when I had a leg over the threshold, the old Buddha said, ‘Wait, Daniel, those ones I have decided to keep!’ He's got a right to sell them on his own, of course. He suffers for them, says painting his delectable models and vases is more like slitting an abscess with a penknife or kicking down a door. Today Henri told me he begins to paint when he has the urge to strangle a man! I just nod. The paintings are so lovely. What a batty old Buddha! This time I chose all the ugly paintings and he switched his dotty mind and would only give me these marvelous still lifes and pink nudes. You could squeeze the lemons on the canvas, they're so bright. We're lucky we live across from Pablo and not Henri.”
    “Henri has fewer legal problems,” Mother said.
    “Only because he's too old to chase skirts. Now they all just work for him. And divorce suits Picasso.”
    “Does it?” Mother asked. Her right hand played sixteenth notes against the tablecloth.
    Father had helped Picasso negotiate the separation from his ballerina wife. (Before Rose, the thought that the world possessed a woman more beautiful than Olga Khokhlova had been inconceivable.) Picasso had worried that his beleaguered former bride would wrest half his paintings from him in the settlement. For three days, Father had sat over Monsieur Picasso's bankbooks, unwilling to trust anyone else to the task, and the two men drew up long lists of his assets. Somehow, Father had convinced Olga to part from Picasso without either money or art.
    “Now that he has the Russian off his mind, he has five new paintings ready for me. I'll see them this afternoon. I've been dreaming of these, painting my own Picassos in my mind.” Father snatched up my mother's hand and kissed the curled fingers. “Can you feel it, the current running through us? We've grasped the cord that ties Manet's generation of French painting to ours.”
    “Picasso is not French,” I said.
    “He's French now,” Father replied.
    “As French as Mother,” I said, and she laughed.
    MATISSE'S AND PICASSO'S NEWEST PAINTINGS MUST have pleased Father indeed, as the next morning he announced that he had set aside ten thousand francs—roughly the price of a new automobile—for me to invest in a painting. I took his blank check with a whoop and without a question ran for my coat and hat. It was eleven o'clock: auction hour. Mother went to her piano smiling. Father spoke to me tenderly, as if I were a young child. “This will be a grand occasion for you, Max. Take it all in at first. Don't act rashly.” I laughed and told him not to worry. I flew from the house, eager to spend the bounty I had earned but not deserved.
    Drouot's appeared as a mirage amid the soot-stained facades of the city's apartment buildings. Though I had passed by the old mansion many times before, leaving my father here to buy treasures for his gallery, I did not enter it until that Monday, March 20, 1939.
    I joined the crowd streaming inside and inhaled the smell of damp wool, face powder, and Macassar mustache oil. A woman with a nimbus of white hair led her spaniel amid a trio of Italians, holding their lit cigarettes above the crowd. The Italians debated which way to go and split in three different directions. The crowd slowed, swerved, and merged. It was thrilling to be there instead of in the lecture hall of the medical faculty, watching my surgery professor slice the skin of some jaundiced cadaver.
    The rooms at Drouot's were not numbered in any discernible order. From Room Three by the entrance, at a sale of mid-eighteenth-century medical equipment, as if to remind me of mydereliction of duty, an auctioneer bellowed, “A perfectly preserved scalpel!” Room Five, next door, was a sea of