I most clearly recall what she said about Johannes Vermeer, as we stood before his enchanting Girl with the Red Hat. That story has haunted me for almost half a century. Why it haunts me I won’t say just yet, but soon. When Vermeer’s story comes to mind on nights that sleep eludes me, I feel acutely the fragility of life, the ephemeral nature of everything we seek and create in this world.
The girl in Girl with the Red Hat stared at us from that small canvas, the sensuous details and the illusion of light creating a vision as liquid as reality, mesmerizingly dimensional, and Amalia said, “Vermeer may be the most masterful painter who ever lived. He was a perfectionist who worked hard but painted slowly. Maybe sixty pieces. Thirty-six have survived. Twenty-nine are masterpieces. His life was hard. He was poor, though he worked other jobs in addition to painting, desperate to feed his family. Fifteen children. Can you imagine me and fifteen Malcolms? I’d be insane. But wait, no, it’s not amusing. In those days, the sixteen hundreds, many died in childhood, and Vermeer grieved over four of his own. He, too, died young at forty-three, admired by other Dutch painters, but penniless and in his own mind a failure. His widow and eleven children, whom he’d loved as much as life, were left destitute. For two hundred years, his work was forgotten … two hundred years. But tastes change. To generations of the willfully blind, true beauty can remain unseen in plain sight, but beauty sooner or later asserts itself—always, always, always—and is at last recognized, because there’s so damn little of it. He died a broken man, but now till the end of civilization, his name will be spoken with respect by many and even with awe by some.”
Kids—and perhaps not just kids—are suckers for stories about underdogs who triumph in the end, even if they have to die first, and Vermeer became a hero of mine that day. By the time we were halfway through the exhibition, my paranoid expectation of being kidnapped was forgotten, and thereafter—for a while—I felt safe in the city.
61
Meanwhile, in Charleston, Illinois, Mrs. Setsuko Nozawa sat in her small office at the back of the dry-cleaning shop, balancing the business checkbook, while Toshiro Mifune slept at her feet. One of her employees appeared at the open door and interrupted to say that a professor from the university, Dr. Jubal MaceMaskil, had come to speak with her about an urgent matter.
At the front counter stood a tall, lean man with a bird’s nest of prematurely white hair. His gaunt and hard-lined face was softened only by bushy white eyebrows, and his gray eyes, flecked with green, seemed wild to Mrs. Nozawa, like the eyes of something that ought to be kept in a securely locked cage.
She disliked him on sight, partly because of how he was dressed. In her opinion, a college professor—and a doctor yet—should not be seen in public wearing badly wrinkled khakis, a T-shirt bearing the letters MYOB—whatever that meant—and a thin, baggy khaki jacket with several patch pockets bulging with, if you asked her, all manner of things that would probably interest the police. The jacket had been torn and crudely patched in places, but of course it had come from the store that way, because distressed clothing was chic these days. She knew he wasn’t unique. There were other rebels at the university, rebels everywhere these days, eager to forge a shining future by rejecting the past and all its evils. But she much valued tradition. The past was a trove of hard-won wisdom. Anyway, the human heart being what it was, those who erased the past would in fact purge only the wisdom and preserve the evils.
No sooner had Mrs. Nozawa introduced herself than Dr. MaceMaskil launched into a tribute to Lucas Drackman, a former student of his, to whom he’d been mentor, a student of exceptional brilliance and integrity, majoring in political science, a young man of the most tender sensitivity and keen intellect and boundless energy. Did she know that Lucas had come to the university less than a year after his parents had been murdered in their sleep by some savage intruder? Did she know that in spite of his crushing grief and bitter loss, Lucas applied himself to his studies as few others, carrying his terrible burdens, could have done? Did she know? Did she? His future could not be brighter, for he possessed both honor and charisma, humility and noble ambition.
At first puzzled by these torrents of words, which spewed from the professor like water gushing from a fire hose, Mrs. Nozawa in time realized that those extravagant plaudits were a defense. Dr. MaceMaskil apparently operated under the incorrect assumption that she had gone to the university and inquired about Drackman because she had some accusation to level against him.