Read Online Harmony In Flesh and Black by Nicholas Kilmer - Free Book Online Page A

realized while he was thinking that he had been lowering his head unconsciously to look into the mirror he remembered behind the reflected hip of Conchita Hill, trying to see the rest of the man whose legs showed in the glass.
    They had, those legs, the look of Robert Louis Stevenson’s, skinny, in their dark trousers, striding, in Sargent’s Calcot paintings. No, Calcot was 1887—the Stevenson portraits were 1885, at Broadway. But Molly was right: the painting was too tender for Sargent.
    *   *   *
    Fred took himself through Harvard Yard, the campus busy now with students, and to the Fogg Museum’s new addition on Prescott Street, where Harvard University keeps its fine-arts library. He had a bone between his teeth, time to kill, and an itch in the back of his mind to keep at bay. It was time to do some searching in the stacks.
    Harvard, encouraged by its development office, counts as alumni all those who have ever been enrolled, however briefly or disastrously. So Fred had an alumnus card for the library. The stacks are underground, at the foot of a perilous staircase. This being the end of the school year, Fred expected to find students gnashing their teeth over lost footnotes, but the place was almost deserted.
    The stacks are concentrated in a single room around whose sides hunch the desks, or carrels, that graduate students are assigned. Only three or four of these were occupied. A florid young woman in a blue print dress was leaning back in her chair, her feet up on her desk, a large volume on ancient Near Eastern pottery on her lap, and she herself as fast asleep as if she were enjoying a curse brought down upon her as a result of breaking into the wrong tomb.
    A few of her fellows searched the stacks. Way down at the far end, near the cage where sales catalogs and precious and/or dirty art books are kept locked, a young man in jeans, white shirt, and bow tie sat at his desk in a puddle of lamp light, looking down at a book and then up, as if he were a bird swallowing water, then down again, to scribble on a yellow pad. He had a suitably frantic air for this time of year. He seemed almost to tear at his long blond hair.
    American painting is in the middle of the stacks. Fred’s plan was, if he could, to deliver himself to the same random forces that had worked so well already that morning, another form of research, sometimes the most successful, being serendipity.
    He walked along the stacks, smelling the slow decay of leather, paper, glue, and cloth and looking for the trunk and head, and the fine hand, that would complete the male legs in the canvas mirror: the artist striding toward Conchita Hill, whose smile was greeting him. Paul Wayland Bartlett? Not too exciting. Frederick Arthur Bridgeman might have done it, but he would have stuck in something Moorish—perhaps a harem motif to give him an excuse for the nudity. Chase? There wasn’t much on him in the stacks. There was Frank Duveneck (who would have wished to keep such a liaison secret from poor, ailing Elizabeth Boott), but Fred had dismissed him the night before. Lucy Lee-Robbins, now. Suppose the artist was also a woman. Lee-Robbins had a murky story and a body of paintings that was well hidden. She had painted well-realized—even fondled—female nudes who looked as if they were about to have tea. Lucy became the mistress of her teacher Emile-Auguste Carolus-Duran, who was also Sargent’s teacher. The American manner of Clay’s painting, after all, had its origin in French fashion well established by Carolus-Duran, which Sargent, being trickier than anyone, could rub French noses in, going them one better.
    How about Charles Sprague Pearce? If the picture was by Pearce, it would be better off anonymous. Nobody wanted a Pearce. Sargent Fred had already written off. Molly was right about Sargent. He was a drapery man. Whistler?
    Well, what about Whistler? Fred’s heart did a little thump. The