Bill Schillaci

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Art History

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Mile after mile, driving down the eastern slopes of the Berkshires, I tried not to think too hard about what I was doing. Mainly I was distracting myself by replaying the lively parts of Uncle John Riley’s recitation of sin and redemption. The sin, his, had occurred decades ago in the confounding days following 9/11. In all the years since, the victim of the misdeed said nothing and did nothing to force or cajole John Riley to correct the injury he’d caused or, at least, admit to the wrong and voice remorse. From that side of the story there was silence. In that silence John Riley, at this pivotal juncture in his life, perceived that redemption, if it was to be, must start with him. 

That I agreed to be the instrument of John Riley’s atonement had less to do with my commitment to justice than with loyalty to John Riley himself. 

“It’s a simple task,” John Riley said as if he was asking me to take out the trash.

I neither agreed nor disagreed. What I was being asked to do was so outside the contours of my experience that I could not fathom the implications of my involvement. It could be simple, as John Riley assured me, or as dark and dangerous as a bear’s den. Either way, the request came from John Riley. Refusal was out of the question.

John Riley had summoned me to his lodging in North Adams, a spacious second floor apartment in a shabby Queen Anne Victorian he’d been renting for years from the batch downstairs, who, like John Riley, lived alone. It was an easy walk to MassMoca, or had been before John Riley lost interest in walking and then most of his ability to do so. He let me in and, spent by the effort, collapsed into the cushions of his favorite chair, a Regency wingback with sculpted English oak legs and brass casters that etched grooves all over the dark wood floor because long ago they ceased to turn. He’d just topped off his pewter goblet and Danish mead sloshed onto the front of his velvet robe. A full head of white, oleaginous hair divided by a ragged center part flicked the tops of his shoulders. His bare feet and ankles were overrun with plaque psoriasis. He stretched them out before me as if they were badges of honor. Maybe it was the image he’d crafted for himself or the one I conjured up, but what I saw was a feudal liege lord bruised and hobbled by time and self-indulgence into a shadow of a regal past, left with nothing to do but mull a vassal’s claim that his goat had been poached. I asked him how he was. 

“As well as can be expected at death’s doorstep.”

“John Riley, you are not at death’s doorstep.”

He looked at me severely, then asked if I wanted a draught.

Six months before, he’d shocked my mother with his announcement of terminal illness. After much gentle probing, my mother learned that John Riley’s affliction was self-diagnosed with no involvement by the medical profession. It was not, he said, ravaging any single organ; rather it was a “whole-body disease,” breeding in all parts, skin, bones, innards and, most grievously, the brain, where it originated. My mother made no attempt to persuade John Riley to see a doctor. She knew her brother. She told him what he wanted to hear, that she would be at his side as his mortal coil slumped and stumbled through its final act. 

His lodgings, as always, reeked to high heaven. The sources—remnants of deliveries from DoorDash, a moldy and slippery bathroom, tropical heat—were all shaken and stirred with Febreze aerosol that did less to mask the odors than enhance their piercing complexity. This time there was something new and feral. I asked if he’d adopted a cat.

“A cat?” John Riley glanced around. “Who am I to say?”

There could have been a cat or a python or a homeless person creeping unseen through the riotous clutter of the main room. Stacks of incrementally yellowing Le Monde’s fully occupied a three-person settee and other random locations. Small antique tables and other flat surfaces bore dusty objets d’art in metal and porcelain and depleted bottles of mead and stronger spirits. Garments were scattered about as if they’d been blasted from a canon. Shelves in tall, wide and perilously listing cabinets sagged under the weight of coffee table art books. The walls were hung to capacity with classic and contemporary reproductions: Pompeii frescos, van Eyck’s Crucifixion, Gustave Moreau, Beardsley, body horror by Francis Bacon. For John Riley, the raison d’être, the only recourse to the decline of civilization, was to shield himself within the masterpieces of the painted medium. His despondency with the human condition was ironically assuaged by the artistic peaks achieved by the same fallen species. His own work, paintings that never became on canvas what burned so brightly in his mind’s eye, was either trashed in despair or stuffed into cardboard boxes in other rooms. I didn’t know if he still painted; I never asked.  

“There,” he said, waving his goblet at a non-specific region of the clutter. More mead escaped.

Following vague directions, sighs of exasperation and redirections, I arrived at last at a small oil painting in a gilded frame on the floor leaning against a knock-off Tiffany table lamp. Back in my chair, John Riley watched in silence as I studied the portrait on my lap. After a time, I said, “Carpentier.” 

“Bravo!” he exclaimed, raising his goblet. 

John Riley, knee-deep in squalor, contemptuous of most everything outside his chaotic redoubt, was still my guiding light in the world or art. He had taught high school English for thirty years because he could not thrive as a painter. One Christmas day at our home in Great Barrington, I told him I’d written a class report on Giorgione’s The Tempest. It was as if I’d declared myself his secret spawn, about as likely in the real world as Leda birthing Helen of Troy after her fling with the swan.

“Giorgione?” he said. “The Tempest? You?” 

“I love art, John Riley. I can’t paint, like you. But I can share it, the love.”

It was dopey, what I said, I chided myself later. But not to John Riley. He saw a new avenue to pass on something of himself that didn’t involve his own gnawing failure to achieve stardom. There followed weekend bus trips together to the galleries in Boston and New Haven, and, when my mother was persuaded by John Riley’s latest assertion of sobriety, in his mighty Crown Vic down to the collections in New York, Philly, Baltimore and Washington. I’d just started at UMass, where I promptly committed to art appreciation. John Riley and I were planning a financially unlikely tour of Europe when the onset of crushing osteoarthritis in his lumbar spine forced his retirement, the reduction of his world to his second-floor citadel and a complete relapse into alcoholism. Regularly, I arrived with warm scones and the latest issue of Artforum. I sat beside him and flipped the pages. Even inebriated, John Riley’s commentary was encyclopedic. There were no works outside his expertise. From the red hand-stencil in the Maltravieso cave in Spain to Banksy’s violent street art, John Riley knew what he was seeing, where it fit and what it meant in the timeless tide of artistic expression.

On my lap was a portrait of a ravishing young officer in Napolean’s French Imperial Navy. Smooth cheeks, windswept hair, deep brown eyes focused in the distance on the next sea battle against the despised English. The details of his uniform were lavish, fringed epaulettes, wide white lapels, gold buttons, galaxy-shaped medals as wide as tea-cup saucers, and an embroidered bordure dividing it all across his narrow, overburdened chest. It was the romantic essence that followed the example of David’s portrait of Napoleon in his study at Tuileries. It was also a social obligation. No young French officer with a franc to his or his family’s name could advance in stature in the European wars absent a stunning portrait. I’d studied the period, but there were so many notable works in the same style it was impossible to trace them all to known artists. But the one on my knees stood apart because it had been painted by a woman. 

“What gave it away?” John Riley asked.

“The medals. She does a luster, silvery but not too bright. Dark highlights, as it were. A fine replication.”

“It’s not a replication. 

I looked from John Riley to the portrait and back again. 

“His name is Jean Toussaint de Vaubois. He died in the Battle of Trafalgar at the age of twenty-two. Domenic told me the painting had been in his family since 1850 when it was obtained by one of his ancestors in a settlement of a land dispute.”

 “Domenic?” 

John Riley emptied his goblet. He waved the empty vessel. I shook several nearby bottles until I found one that wasn’t depleted and gave him a refill. 

“Thank you, Elisha. Before too long I will need to make use of the water closet. Can I rely on your assistance in getting there?”

“Of course, John Riley.”

“Domenic. We discovered each other on opposite sides of the ring of chairs in the basement of the YMCA in Worcester. It was my fiftieth meeting, maybe seventieth, whatever. His first. Our eyes locked. Recognition was instantaneous. Two aging, queer alcoholics relieved to find the other there. He wasn’t much to look at, but neither was I. Then he grinned, and the naughty gap between his front incisors sent an electric bolt through my thighs. Well, I thought, who knew?

“Afterward we went straight to his flat, roomy, like mine, but neater. He said he liked to straighten up while drinking. Domenic was less interested in getting sober than finding community, a place where he could not be kicked out because the only membership requirement was desperation. I said, ‘Dom, we are on the same page.’ That first night, after we’d bedded, he led me by the hand to a large wardrobe. He opened the double doors. Inside, hanging with military precision were vestments, creamy white, soft and long, a stunning sight. I said, ‘Are these chasubles?’ Again, that killer grin. Chasubles they were.”

“Domenic was a priest?”

“More than that. A rector, an important one, the ecclesiastical head of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the mother church of the diocese. Not when we met, not after the betrayal. He was cast out, but he could never leave the place that had nourished him and so many souls. The next stop was the window from which the cathedral could be fully viewed. The sight restores me, Domenic said. The church could expel him, but even then he could not live without it. Every day it restores me.

“Domenic’s aunt gave him the Carpentier as a gift when she came over from France for his ordination. There was money in the family, and after his laicization he still had the means to live comfortably near his church.”

For many minutes, I stood in the only open space on the floor outside John Riley’s bathroom door. Our journey through the disorder was slow, obstacles met and circumvented or nudged aside. The trail was made more difficult by John Riley’s infirmity, my arm around his upper body, holding him erect. He wasn’t a big man, but neither am I, and with his limbs bloated by alcohol, I struggled to keep him upright and moving forward. His verbosity vanished; all I heard were feeble exhalations of breath. I’d never seen him so incapacitated; it was more than inebriation and the pain of arthritis. Could it be what he claimed, a whole-body affliction? As I waited, images of John Riley surviving day to day on his own unfolded painfully in my mind.

Back in our chairs, I asked what had happened to Domenic.

“A sad miscarriage of justice. He had just been ordained and was biding his time as a teaching assistant at St. John’s seminary before a parish assignment. It was the disco era and the Dionysian spirit infiltrated the corridors of the seminary. Domenic and one of his students got swept up. It was intimacy more than sex and it ended as quickly as it began. Many years later, Domenic had ascended the hierarchy, a shoe-in for a bishopric. The Globe’s Spotlight investigation was just getting off the ground. The young seminarian, now married, a tax accountant with teenage children, brought his story to the paper, which splashed it over the front page. Domenic denied nothing. The Church decided the scandal could be nipped in the bud by setting an example. There was no public announcement that he was stripped of his clerical duties, but the church cleverly leaked it to the press. Of course, nothing was nipped in the bud. What was most enraging was that the two young men were the same age. Didn’t matter, not to the Globe, not to the Church. Their liaison met the definition of abuse. That’s all that mattered. Bereft of his clerical role, Domenic still had his minor wealth, the bottle and the narcotic of random companionship.” 

John Riley asked for a moment, closed his eyes and appeared to drift off. I started a text to my mother to say that her brother’s dire predictions may not be delusional. But what could she do? I was the one with John Riley. I deleted the text without sending. John Riley roused himself and, of course, there was another round of mead. 

“I recognized it at once as Julia Carpentier. We continued with our charade, pretending to be surprised to find each other at AA. Finally we abandoned the pretense and the meetings. Over the months I got to know his humility, his vulnerability.  

“He’d mounted the Carpentier dead center on the wall of his bedroom. Nothing else, just this beautiful, doomed boy in a sea of stucco. Even in our bliss, I knew that Domenic was thinking not of me, but of Jean Toussaint. Perhaps imagining themselves together in the captain’s quarters of a warship-of-the line. I didn’t mind. I was there as well. 

“Domenic was a mouth breather, not snoring, just expelling great wheezes like a broken air conditioner. The moment he dipped into slumber, the racket began. I’d drift off and then get yanked awake. Often in the darkness I stared at the place where Jean Toussaint watched and waited. Our last night, I rose from the bed, snatched Jean Toussaint from the wall, grabbed my clothes and slipped out. I don’t think I took a breath until I exited the building and hurried half-dressed to my car. One day passed without a word from Domenic, and then a second, and now twenty-four years.”  

Autumn leaves, multi-colored, like flocks of migrating birds flew above Route 2. The Carpentier, protected by bubble wrap and enclosed in one of John Riley’s crusty blankets to prevent movement, sat on the rear seat. I had no strong opinion one way or the other about what John Riley had done. It did seem wrong, but maybe it wasn’t. But the closer I got to the city, the more my sense of innocence in this business waned. I was transporting stolen property with a six-figure value, even seven figures, given the gender of the artist and the rarity of the painting. Would it matter that I was returning it to its rightful owner? How did that work under the law?  I hadn’t a clue. After a hundred miles of trying not to think about this at all, I could think of nothing else.  

I found the apartment complex with the address John Riley had given me and Domenic’s name in the intercom directory. My lines were thoroughly rehearsed. Hello. Are you Domenic le Peletier? My name is so and so. My uncle is John Riley Fears. I have something of yours of importance. John Riley had given me a sealed envelope to accompany the Carpentier. What he’d written I didn’t know and truly did not want to. Domenic would ask questions probably. But I would say only that I am a messenger and know nothing else. 

There was no response to my buzzing, so I slipped through the building’s main entrance behind two loud teenage boys oblivious to my presence as they exited. I knocked softly at Domenic’s door and then forcefully and then angrily. I’d driven for hours to return his masterpiece and he dared not to be home.  

“He’s probably at the church.”

Leaning head and shoulder from the door of the adjacent unit, a red-haired woman in a black hoodie cooly regarded me.

“Oh, hi. I have a delivery.” I raised the Carpentier, utterly indistinguishable inside the bubble wrap.

“Try the church. Or you can leave it with me.”

“I will try the church. Thank you.”

“Suit yourself,” she said. Her door closed emphatically.

The cathedral was a modest evocation of the early Renaissance, small for the mother church of the second-largest city in the state, but the stout granite body punctuated by tall Gothic windows and a square four-story tower with turrets imparted both a physicality and a longing for the divine that belied its size. 

Inside, a couplet of standing lamps barely illuminated the altar. Strings of chandeliers above the aisles were unlit. I saw no one. It was a dormant time in the week of a church, the middle of the Tuesday afternoon before Thanksgiving when everyone, clergy included, had somewhere else to be. 

I hold no religious beliefs but I am fond of devotional architecture, from the purest strokes of carpentry in Quaker meeting houses to the Rococo extravagance of seventeenth century palace churches. It was all of the same cloth, the quest for eternal life made manifest by human hands into objects of worship. I walked up the central aisle and was able to make out clusters of saints and representations of the Virgin Mary along the walls, all captured in their defining moments. Most prominent was a lofty tripartite stained-glass depiction of the story of St. Paul, from persecutor of Christians to missionary to the known world. 

I turned around and sat in a pew near the rear. Anxiety about the jeopardy of my mission was replaced by near exhaustion. The church offered to fold me into its cloak of quiet and I did not resist.  

“I believe you are looking for me.”

In my semi-slumber, I heard steps approaching. My hand fell protectively on the Carpentier on the bench beside me. Standing in the pew, a safe ten feet from where I sat, he watched me. I was struck by his appearance. Quite tall, portly, tightly groomed hair on a gaunt face that didn’t match the body below. A black formal overcoat, unbuttoned, also clashed charmingly with the checkered woodsman’s shirt underneath. 

“My neighbor told me she sent you here.” His voice carried the faintest continental intonation. 

“Domenic? Domenic le Peletier?”

He nodded carefully. Coming no closer, he sat. 

I remembered I had a speech, but could recall none of it. I slid the Carpentier along the bench to the midpoint between us. 

“This is yours. I was asked to return it.”

He seemed a man under strict self-control, but when he removed the bubble wrap and came face to face with Jean Toussaint, a powerful expression of breath, entering or exiting I didn’t know, passed through his body. He dipped his head and may have whispered something. I slid the envelope toward him.

“This is also from John Riley.”

He observed the envelope critically. For a moment, I thought he would not take it. Then he tucked it into an inside pocket. He rewrapped Jean Toussaint. Turning toward the altar, he said, “How is John Riley?” 

“Not thriving.”

“Are you a relative?”

“Nephew.”

“The art student?”

“Yes, well art appreciation. I teach now.”

“I remember. He was proud of you. Said he enjoyed your company more than anyone, except me. A lie, of course, but a sweet one.”

“I’m very sorry about what happened. I knew nothing about this. I never saw the painting until today. John Riley is not a bad man, but why he did it, why he stole, he told me nothing.” 

“No?” Domenic tapped the place on his coat, above John Riley’s letter. “Let’s see if we can find out.” 

Back in my car, my calls to John Riley went unanswered. In Greenfield I stopped for coffee and phoned my mother. She said John Riley was in the hospital. Something serious with his kidneys. She said he asked her not to tell me, not yet, not until my mission was completed. The mission is completed, I said. I arrived to find his condition had worsened and he was in the ICU. The third sibling, Uncle Arthur, was there as well. I asked if I could see John Riley alone. He was heavily sedated, his eyes half open, clinging to all he had seen, the totality of human experience in the hands of artists. 

In the cathedral, Domenic had asked me to wait as he read John Henry’s letter, using his phone’s flashlight in the dimness. He refolded the single page and returned it to his coat. We stood. He took my hand in both of his, thanked me for coming and walked into a shadowy corner of St. Paul’s. A side door opened, flooding the church with daylight, and closed. Jean Toussaint remained on the bench. 

I placed the painting on the pillow near John Riley. Listening to his labored breaths, gazing into Julia Carpentier’s work of art, I willed myself into the war-torn world of Jean Toussaint de Vaubois, barely a man, lost at sea. 

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