The professor fled. No other word could adequately describe his sudden departure. Legs so long they seemed to have two knees each, arms flailing the air as if it must be more resistant than water, his rumpled and patched designer khaki ensemble rustling like a sack full of frantic rats, he careened to the left and then to the right as he sought escape. He made thin sounds of distress, as if he had wandered into the Little Dry-Cleaning Shop of Horrors and expected never to be allowed to leave. Meeting the glass door with his shoulder, he bulled through it, stumbled into sunshine, squinting as if it seared him, hurried west along the strip-mall sidewalk and out of sight, only to reappear a moment later, this time hell-bent toward the east.
Mrs. Nozawa came out from behind the counter and went to the door and stepped outside to watch the eminent educator make his way to his car. A gray Volvo. He seemed to have some difficulty figuring out how to start it. She imagined that he might be trying to insert the key into the cigarette lighter. Pulling out of his parking space, piloting the sedan toward an exit from the mall lot, Dr. Mace-Maskil blew his horn at every motorist and pedestrian he encountered, as though to warn them unequivocally that they were driving or walking recklessly. Even after the Volvo reached the street and disappeared, Mrs. Nozawa waited, listening for what seemed to be the inevitable shattering crash of a high-speed collision.
Being a shrewd businesswoman who could read people accurately, Setsuko Nozawa thought the strangest thing about the encounter was how the man had reacted to her story about Lucas Drackman having done a great kindness for her and her husband some years earlier. Although he had no reason to doubt a word she’d said, he hadn’t believed her for a moment. In spite of the extravagant praise he had heaped upon his former student, perhaps Dr. Mace-Maskil found it impossible to imagine that Lucas Drackman was capable of a kind act.
62
As Amalia and Malcolm and I moved on from Girl with the Red Hat, proceeding deeper into Kalomirakis Pinakotheke, I asked if she could not just tell me about the artist but if she could explain also what each painting meant, why its maker made it, what he wished to say.
Rapping my head with the rolled-up brochure each of us had been given when we paid at the entrance, Malcolm said, “That’s a pretty stupid thing for a prodigy to ask. Tell him why it’s stupid, Amalia.”
“If I recall correctly,” she said, “when I brought you here
for the first time, you asked me the same thing.”
“That’s not the way I remember it,” Malcolm said.
“How do you remember it, dear brother?”
“You were in a stormy mood that day.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Stormy?”
“And you were drinking.”
“Oh? What was I drinking?”
“Just everything. Brandy, beer, vodka, wine.”
“Did you have to carry me over your shoulder?”
“Not at all. I said you were brain-damaged at birth, and they gave us a courtesy wheelchair.”
“You’re terrible.”
“I don’t believe you were drunk,” I told Amalia.
“Thank you, Jonah.”
To me, Malcolm said, “You are painfully naïve, child. Anyway, as I wheeled her from painting to painting—she would point at each one and in an embarrassing drunken way, she’d demand to know what the picture meant. Sis, do you remember what I told you that day? Jonah needs to hear it.”
“Why don’t you tell him, Malcolm?”
“I’m not sure I remember it word for word.” To me, he added, “The dear girl will have committed it to memory. Even drunk, she hangs on my every utterance.”
“Utterance?” Amalia said.
“I heard a really cool British actor say it in a movie. Sounds sophisticated. From now on, I’m not going to say anything, I’m going to utter.”
“Utter all you want, you still won’t make sense.”
“Right there is a hint of her stormy mood,” he told me. “She must have a flask she’s been nipping from.”
“What I said to Malcolm that day, Jonah, is that there’s a lot to learn about art. You need to train your eye. But when it comes to what it means, no stuffy expert in the world has a right to tell you what you should think about a painting. Art is subjective. Whatever comfort or delight you get from a painting is your business. What it says, it says to you. Too many experts make art political, ’cause they believe great artists have always held the same convictions as they themselves do. But the last thing art should be is political. Yuck. Double yuck. Keep your mind free. Trust your eye and heart.”
Malcolm said, “That’s what I told her, word for word. Amazing she could memorize it, considering how pickled she was that day.”
In his ungainly manner, he went to the velvet restraining rope that looped through the gallery from stanchion to stanchion, and he stood before a painting titled Wheatfields by Jacob van Ruisdael. Amalia and I joined him.