“Oh!” I blurted, nearly sputtering into my coffee.
“And knowing Winnie… well I can see the apple didn’t fall too far from the family tree. It must be an awful lot of discipline!”
I blushed fiercely. Was this old lady suggesting my Aunt Winnie was some kind of Hollywood hobag? My mind reeled at the thought. She died suddenly when I was a teenager, back when I was still convinced that sexuality was my own personal secret invention. I had never seen her as an individual; she just seemed like my elderly authority figure, remote and unassailable. But she couldn’t have been much past fifty-five years old when she died in a drunk driving incident. She was still young and vibrant, I understood now through adult-colored glasses.
The images from the pictures above my fireplace flickered through my mind. I had never moved them, but I didn’t really see them anymore either. They had faded into the rhythm of the house years ago. There were dozens of snapshots from her days as a model, on movie sets with some very famous folk, and grinning at casual beachside barbecues and the like. Come to think of it, she was a beautiful, talented woman, and suddenly I wished I had her back so I could ask her about her life. Could it have been her that Brando cooked for? I mean, it seemed preposterous, but could it have been?
Right on, Aunt Winnie!
Edna seemed satisfied by my answer, at least for the moment, and I decided not to say anything else on the matter until I had really figured it out for myself.
Finally she set her coffee down and winked at me. The wind billowed her blousy blue- and green-swirled kaftan over her lap. “I could just sit out here all day,” she confided. “Actually, sometimes I do! But let’s get up to the gallery, shall we? I’m sure you have lots to do today.”
I smiled in answer and stood up, not too excitedly. She rose with an easy, agile grace and I wondered why she was wearing that frumpy kaftan. From the looks of her, I bet she had a pretty rocking figure under all that fabric.
As we passed back through the library, I took another look at the multi-colored riot of books on the shelves and asked, “Is this Jackson’s contribution to your collection?”
“Is this… Oh!” she laughed. “So you know about Jackson’s… soft spot, shall we say?”
“Yes I caught him the act at the airfield in San Francisco.”
She paused in front of the nearest shelf, chuckling.
“You know, there are about a thousand other places he could have brought all this, but somehow he wanted them here. I don’t know if I should be flattered or affronted!”
She rolled her eyes and continued to the sunlit stairway at the back of the library.
“Well maybe he thought since you’re both collectors…”
“Oh Jackson’s not a true collector,” she said briskly as she began to climb the spiral staircase. I hurried to keep up with her.
“Not a-- What do you mean?”
She shrugged and picked up the front of her kaftan to keep from catching it on the stairs, then let it down when we entered the large, round gallery. I bit my lip and tried not to gawk like a kid. It was a huge room, lit from diffused skylights above. Every inch of the 15 foot high walls was covered with some kind of art. Paintings upon paintings were mounted all the way up in a dizzying symphony of art.
“Oh my gosh,” I breathed, wandering closer to the wall, hushed as if I had suddenly found myself in a church. There were paintings from the last 400 years, all together. Baroque masterpieces hung alongside modern Spanish masters, next to German post-impressionists. It was profound and complexly varied, yet somehow it all sort of made sense when seen together.
“A true collector is ruthless for their collection, selective and uncompromising, whereas Jackson is more of an… evangelist. He’s more of a populist.”
“That’s funny,” I breathed, distracted and overwhelmed by the desire to see and touch everything. The grasping hand in a painting by some nameless icon painter seem to reach toward the spiral of exultant cherubs in the Bouguereau next to it.
“Now, Declan,” she continued, “there’s a man after my own heart. He can be absolutely unmerciful, if you know what I mean.”
“What?” I said, startled out of my trance. “Unmerciful?”
Her eyes sparkled as she nodded. “He’s an inspiration, truly. You see, a collector is an artist too. Just as you make critical decisions about what belongs and what has to be eliminated for the sake of a painting, we do the same thing for the whole collection. To make it sing, together.” She ended with her hand floating in the air, gesturing toward the whole room as though to illustrate what a successful collection looked like. And she was right; I could barely begin to fathom what it would take to acquire, arrange, and hang all these pieces. The fact that it had taken decades made the process even more impressive, like a slow motion painting on a grand.... impossibly grand scale. It left me breathless to even consider. How would you begin?