Restoration

For Bill Thomas

The buses have not yet begun to arrive: the garden club ladies in sandals and straw hats, the schoolchildren on field trips, the pale, weary northerners grousing about the heat. The least pleasant of the museum’s visitors are the amateur painters from the local art academies. They shuffle from room to room dismissing the silence with cruel laughter and snorts of disapproval. They know everything. They take the guided tours only for the opportunity to humiliate the docents. Huddled before the Asmore, they stroke their chins and pose the same questions: Why did the artist kill himself? Was the subject of this painting his lover? What on earth compelled him to make her mouth a smear?

“Smug sonsabitches,” says the man.

“Dad?”

“I’d like to give them a tour.” And now he shakes a fist at the morning air.

Today the man and his son hike up the long, shady drive and climb the stairs to the great bronze doors at the museum’s entrance. The man is a sport, and the sort one would not expect to find here on his day off. He wears a rayon shirt decorated with a diamond pattern, slacks with sharp creases from his wife’s iron, a porkpie hat with a feather in the red silk band. He is a photographer by trade, specializing in French Quarter views which he colors by hand and sells as “New Orleans Originals” to tourists.

They are a team, the man and the boy. And they are early again today, and apparently alone outside but for a maintenance worker, some twenty feet away, sweeping leaves and candy wrappers into a dustpan. The boy wonders aloud at the morning’s absence of visitors; the man hesitates to respond, not wishing to invite a stampede.

“What time you got, Jack?”

“Three more minutes.”

“Oh, baby. And we’ll have her all to ourselves.”

This is church, this building with the names of dead artists carved into the façade, and so the boy, too, has come dressed as if for worship. “Mr. Woodward, I adore you, sir,” says his little blue sport jacket. “Mr. Giroux, I think the world of you, as well,” say his polished penny loafers.

Against the side of the building hang long, flowing banners advertising the latest exhibition: someone’s collection of Early American paperweights. The show has entered its last week, and proved to be a miserable dud, a failure to museum personnel and patrons alike, with the exception of the man and his son, who, still alone now, cannot believe their miraculous good fortune.

“How much, Jack?”

“I have ten o’clock on the button, Dad.”

“You have ten o’clock?” And before the boy can reply, the man is thumping a hand against the door. “It’s ten o’clock. Ladies! Ten o’clock!”

The docents welcome them by name. It is no longer necessary for the man to show them his member’s card. He removes his hat and gives a polite bow. Even though he has fallen under the spell of the hipsters he remains
courtly and kind. He was humming Bobby Darin earlier. He has stopped that now.

“How are you, John?”

“I’m well, Mrs. Dupuy. Thank you for asking.”

“And Mrs. Charbonnet?”

“Mighty fine, too, ma’am. I’ll surely tell her you asked.”

The volunteers all smell of their morning baths. They are as powdery as cream puffs in a baker’s window. The boy is scared of them. “You want to be like your daddy when you grow up?” one of them says.

The boy looks up at his father to make sure it’s okay to answer. Given a nod, he says, “I guess I do.”

“You positive about that?” And the woman laughs to show she’s only kidding.

They climb sugary brown stairs and turn toward the room with the Asmore. They have no use for so much of what resides here: the Fabergé eggs, the marble statues, the ecclesiastical portraits of men with flowing robes and gilded halos. Give them pictures of oak trees and the bayou. Give them French Quarter courtyards and clumps of jasmine on garden gates. Give them Creole girls with small mouths who seem forever on the verge of saying something.

“Where are the guards?” The man stops and spins around. “Jack, hurry, son, go stand by the door.”

“By the door, Dad?”

“Tell me if you see anyone coming.”

The boy does as he’s told. At eight he is still too young to grasp the portrait’s sexual content, although the sitter’s breasts make him uneasy, flattening out his breath and provoking a tipsy sensation, like vertigo. He has wondered why the woman looks so sleepy, but somehow knows better than to ask his father for the reason.

“Anybody coming?”

“No.”

“Nobody?”

“Still empty, Dad.”

The portrait hangs at the center of the wall facing the doors and burns
against a battery of spotlights. The man lifts a hand and spreads it wide and gently places his fingertips on the suface. He repeats the exercise with his other hand. Together now his hands explore the figure of the woman.

“Jack?”

“Nope.”

It is when the man brings his nose to the surface and sniffs the paint that his hat falls off his head and lands on the floor, spinning a slow circle. The boy moves to pick it up but the man, raising his voice, tells him to stay at the door.

“I didn’t do this, did I, Jack?”

“Do what, Dad?”

“Come over here, son. It’s your turn.”

By now tears are running down the man’s face. Jack spots one of the old women coming up the stairs, putting two feet on each step, both hands on the banister. But this isn’t why he shakes his head, no. Jack knows beauty. He is content simply to look.