CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Varnish
POSEY
The most dangerous day in the life of a painting is the one no one outside the trade ever thinks about: varnishing day.
You varnish to bring the color back up to what it was when wet — but only once the paint has cured all the way down, which takes months and cannot be hurried.
Varnish too early, over a layer still soft underneath, and the whole surface blooms milky, then grey, then ruined, and you lose the picture in the very act of trying to make it shine.
Anger, I learned this year, cures like oil paint — slow, all the way down, and once it sets it holds, and you can build on it. Anger you can varnish.
Hope is wet paint.
The invitation came on a Wednesday, in an envelope whose weight I knew before I read the front, because I’d addressed four hundred of its cousins every December for ten years.
Dot’s stationery. Dot’s engraver. Dot’s upright hand on the front — and inside, a card for Sunday lunch at the Hall, one o’clock, carrying a line I had never once seen on a Calhoun summons in a decade of receiving them: at the request of Mr. Whitman Calhoun.
He had called the Sunday. Not Dot. Him.
I set it on the work table beside a canvas I’d been not-varnishing for a week, and I stood there with my heart trying to do the exact thing I had spent the whole autumn refusing to let it do, and I made myself say it out loud in the empty studio: that’s wet paint.
Don’t touch it. You’ll bloom the whole picture trying to make it shine before it’s ready.
I took the card to Marguerite, because she is the one person this year who has never sold me a feeling I’d have to bring back later. She read it, and the only tell she permitted herself was setting down her pen, which from her is a standing ovation.
“You’re owed a public ending, Mrs. Calhoun.
One way or the other. Both are endings.” She slid the card back across the desk.
“He stands up at that table and corrects the record, or he stands up and can’t, and you watch which.
You’re not risking the picture by going — the picture’s finished, it’s hanging on Queen Street with your name on the wall.
You’re only going to learn which ending you’ve got. ”
It was Etta who tipped the scale, though, and she did it the way she does everything: sideways, over the counter, appraising.
She’d sent word to the studio that she had a ledger matter for me, which I took to mean paperwork on the ring. It was, in a way. I went to King Street and she didn’t bring out the working box. She brought out a witnessed slip and watched me read it.
The Calhoun ring had not gone back to any vault.
Whit had come to Forsythe’s himself — not sent a man, come — and had it formally returned to the family ledger in front of witnesses, signing away every claim on it as its keeper.
He had handed a four-generation ring back to the family, on the record, his signature renouncing the one piece of the Hall he’d been promised since birth.
“Forty years I’ve stood at this counter,” Etta said, “and I’ve taken in every kind of ring there is. I have never once had a man give one back to his own family.” She set the slip in my hand. “I don’t appraise people, dear — that’s not my counter. But the appraisal on that one is character.”
She went back to her work, and I stood out on King Street in the white noon light and felt the hope shift, very slightly, from wet toward tacky — not dry, not safe, but no longer a thing a careless touch would ruin.
The invitation had a smaller card tucked inside it, the way they always do, with a single line to fill in: number attending.
Ten years I’d filled in those lines for the Hall — galas, parties, Sundays — always in the plural, always us, always the number Dot’s chart had settled before the card ever reached me.
I filled this one in myself, at Bitsy’s kitchen table, in ink.
1 — and I’m bringing my own chair.
Then I put the hope under glass where I could watch it cure and keep my hands off it. Sunday at one. Either the varnish would hold or I would lose the picture — but I had painted it, every layer, with my own hands, and I was finished leaving my finished work in other people’s houses.