John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

4

“Mr. Kleppmann, I believe?” Will had said, extending his hand. He was aloof, official, for he knew nothing yet of R. V. Kleppmann: another debtor, merely. It was Will’s place to be polite, his business to be cold, a functionary, invulnerable to any wedge of fellow-feeling.

“Good day, sir,” Kleppmann said. He was tall, well kept, with a face large and emotionless, a precise gray moustache, small and yet oddly protruding eyes adorned with neat, low-hanging gold-rimmed glasses of the sort seen in Czechoslovakia, say, or Russia. His manners those of a prince.

“Have a chair, Mr. Kleppmann.” Will Jr pointed with three fingers, palm up.

“Thank you.”

Will remained standing after Kleppmann sat down. He stood over his desk, his arms folded over his upper belly, his lips pursed judicially, and after a moment he began, formal, “As you know, I think, it is my unpleasant duty to ask you to answer a few questions this morning, for the purpose of ascertaining, so to speak, the whereabouts of any holdings which might be applied to the satisfaction of your present obligations to my client.”

Kleppmann nodded. He was a man of sixty or so. It was difficult to believe, from the looks of him, that he was not a man of the highest integrity.

Will cleared his throat. “We may as well proceed at once,” he said. “As you know, I presume, I’m obliged to examine you under oath.” He corrected himself, oddly flustered, “That is to say, you will be under oath, if I make myself clear.”

Kleppmann sighed. “Just as you say. Yes.”

“We may as well proceed at once.” It struck him that he’d used exactly that phrase a few seconds before. A bad beginning. He irritably switched on the tape.

Well, a grim ordeal. Seated, holding his hat in his hands like a supplicant, Kleppmann had managed to make Will Jr crawl. He was brilliant, that was all there was to it. He had a trace of an accent. In a soft voice, speaking in short, perfect sentences now and then punctuated by the involuntary sighs of a man ground under by adverse fortune, he told his tragic story. He’d been born into a wealthy family of Polish Jews, clothiers originally, but that was long before his time: his father was an art speculator, a man who bought up the work of promising young painters, sculptors, and ceramicists all over the world, particularly those in Paris, then waited, to put it politely, for their stock to rise. In point of fact he did not merely twiddle his thumbs, watching the market. His method was difficult to explain in a few words, Kleppmann said, but it went something like this. One must understand, first, that the world is amply stocked with art collectors who know nothing whatever about art, who buy for fashion’s sake or on speculation, but lack Kleppmann Sr’s eye. And one must understand, second, that a Miró which sells for an unheard-of price automatically raises the value of all other Mirós. The elder Kleppmann’s system was this: he sold paintings in groups, each group including one work — a blue Picasso, for instance — worth plenty. He gave away the Picasso for a song but jacked up the prices of the works by unknowns — and thus jacked up the value of other works by those painters, including, of course, the paintings in his own collection.

“It might seem,” Kleppmann said, “a dubious kind of business.” His sad eyes half-closed. “But there are virtues in it, or so it seems to me. It’s a help to the artist, certainly — it can sometimes mean the difference between life and death. And it’s not as if my father was—” He hunted for the word. “Indifferent. He had a superb eye. But I’m not speaking to the point, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.”

The old man was murdered by the Nazis, and Kleppmann, just beginning to make his mark as a classicist, was arrested, along with his mother and sister, and sent to concentration camp. He showed Will Jr the tattoo. He was there for three years. Both his mother and sister vanished and he had never been able to learn what had become of them. By a kind of fluke, a story too long to go into, he’d been released at the end of three years, his freedom bought for him by the United States Government, part of a project at that time to rescue incarcerated Jewish intellectuals. He’d come over penniless and, on top of that, physically and mentally sick. He waved two fingers, like a rabbi, dismissing it. “To make a long story short, I gradually improved. In 1952 I returned to Europe to hunt for my mother and sister and reclaim what I could of what we’d had before. It was futile. I married while I was there, however. A countess, beautiful, sensitive, well-off. We returned to this country and I tried to get back into teaching, but, unluckily, I was not up to it. I suffered a relapse of my former mental illness, and I spent from 1953 to 1961 in a private hospital on Long Island. When it was over we hadn’t much more than the clothes on our backs.” He sighed.

“I’m sorry,” Will Jr said.

“Life goes on.” Again he gave his despairing rabbinical wave. “We interested friends in a project. We borrowed money, and in September of 1963 we began, as you know, our hosiery factory here in Buffalo. An odd choice you may say. So it is. But my wife has connections in that line, and it seemed to us best. Luck was against us. We had labor troubles, legal difficulties, a terrible accident for which we were unjustly held liable — you have, I imagine, the record of all this. Things went from bad to worse, the pressure brought on a return of my old complaint, and, in short, we were forced to bankruptcy. I give you merely the outline. I could mention other troubles, but they will not be helpful, I’m afraid.”

“Have you stocks? securities of any kind?” He could not look at the man as he asked it.

“Nothing.”

“Household valuables, perhaps?”

Kleppmann smiled wanly. “You must visit us and see.”

Will Jr rubbed his upper lip with the inside of his finger. “Yes, I must, actually. It’s part of—”

“Yes of course.”

Kleppmann reached up to his face, brought his hand up under his glasses, and pressed the tips of his fingers to his eyes.

“Are you all right?” Will Jr asked.

“Yes, thank you,” Kleppmann said.

The questioning went on, useless. It was perfectly clear that the whole story was true. At last Will Jr switched off the tape. “I’m sorry to have caused—” he began.

“No harm, Mr. Hodge. I perfectly understand.” Kleppmann rose sadly from his chair and held out his hand.

Will shook it. “Thank you for coming.”

“My pleasure,” Kleppmann said. Then, with dignity, he withdrew.

The second examination was even more painful than the first. It was at Kleppmann’s place. A splendid house, but Kleppmann did not own it. He did not own the paintings either, he owned only the statuary, inexpensive plaster imitations of Renaissance masterpieces. That day Will spoke with Kleppmann’s wife.

She was tall, as tall as Will Jr himself, and thin, and elegant as glass. She had a clear voice, far-apart blazing eyes, a thick accent — Austrian, he thought. She walked slowly through the house with him, nodding with distant politeness when he praised the view of the garden from the second floor, admired the luxurious carpet (he felt like a peasant beside her, his bulging briefcase an old sack of beets). In the master bedroom he stood at the foot of the largest bed he had ever seen, with magnificent posts of hand-carved myrtle, and he said, “Good heavens! What a beautiful bed!”

She smiled, looking straight at him, and the openness of her smile was like a girl’s. “Yes,” she said. “Ours, I’m afraid.”

The frank, almost amused admission of what their business together was made Will Jr blush. And it was more than merely her admission. She was fifty-eight, but she looked perhaps forty, and when she smiled, standing in the sunlit room with the enormous bed, the handsome white shades and purple drapes, her bosom full and perfect, Will Jr’s heart sped up.