The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy Read Free Book Online Page A

standing on a hill, surrounded by some dervish-like Indians, I could see that the work had a certain sporting character that must have attracted Mr. Sheer. But I could not imagine that it would be readily marketable. I was mistaken.
    Mr. Sheer telephoned Caporello, the little white-faced Italian silver forger who spent his spare time in the outer room of our gallery.
    “What are you going to do?” I said. “It would take him quite a long time to forge a copy of this thing, and besides how do you know that he can work in bronze?”
    Mr. Sheer was displeased by this levity toward the bronze, which he was in the very act of admiring.
    “He told me once he thought he could sell it,” he replied shortly.
    When Caporello arrived, Mr. Sheer took him into the inner room, and after a time Caporello went away and then came back again, and the colored boy wrapped the bronze in brown paper and took it down in the elevator and put it in a taxi with Caporello, who drove off and was not seen again for three days.
    “He’s lit out for Italy, it’s a sure thing,” Mr. Sheer would say, pacing gloomily up and down the gallery. And each time he said this we would both laugh. For Mr. Sheer had a kind of calamitous humor, which when his mishaps seemed to take on an artistic shape or unity, he would turn wryly on himself. Death was always comic for him, and even while he was telling you that so-and-so’s end was “a terrible thing,” you could see the tension with which his face was held grave and almost hear the laughter bubbling underneath. He told me once of the death of his closest friend. “He was drunk,” he said, “and dived in a swimming pool [pause, and then the explosion of laughter], but there was no water in it.” Next, with a quick recovery of sobriety, “Oh, Miss Sargent, it was a terrible thing. He broke his neck.” Another time, several years later, I came to see him in his office and found him convulsed with merriment. “You know what happened?” he said. “My best customer just dropped dead.” One of his most hilarious anecdotes concerned the death of an old man, a wealthy soap manufacturer (“Miss Sargent, he was like an uncle to me”), who met his end in a Broadway hotel, signing checks for the entire floor show of the Rainbow Restaurant, twenty or thirty strapping blondes who crowded around the deathbed, guiding the fountain pen in his failing hand.
    Our doleful laughter finally penetrated to the corner where Elmer, the colored boy, had been sitting for days, brooding about his unpaid salary and a pair of field glasses that he wanted to buy for his R.O.T.C. work.
    “Mr. Sheer,” he murmured, “are you worried about this Caporello? I never did trust him myself, so when I put the bronze in the cab with him I took the driver’s number.” The atmosphere of the detective story had infected us all.
    Mr. Sheer was extremely proud of this quick-wittedness on Elmer’s part. “He’s a smart nigger,” he said. He even paid the boy his salary that Saturday, but was indignant when he learned that Elmer had used it to buy the field glasses, and so he did not pay him again for a long time. “That nigger played on my sympathies,” he said. “I thought I was contributing to the support of his poor old mother who does laundry.”
    The cab driver, whom we reached without difficulty, had been struck by the size of Custer’s Last Stand, and recalled at once that he had taken Caporello to Tympany’s. We telephoned Tympany’s and found that the little Italian had sold them the bronze, but was not to receive the check until the following day. Mr. Sheer could just as well have intervened himself, but he wanted, he said, “to have some fun with Caporello,” so he sent O’Bannon around to Tympany’s to nab Caporello as he came out with the money. The little man was trembling like a drug addict when he arrived, under escort, at the gallery door. He took his hundred dollars’ commission and scurried gratefully