The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway Read online

  Why did it have to be someone like Morniel Mathaway that got that kind of nod from fate? There were so many painters who were decent human beings, and yet this bragging slug …

  And all the time, a big part of my mind was wandering around in circles. It just proved, I kept saying to myself, that you need the perspective of history to properly evaluate anything in art. You think of all the men who were big guns in their time and today are forgotten, that contemporary of Beethoven’s, for example, who, while he was alive, was considered much the greater man, and whose name is known today only to musicologists. But still—

  Mr. Glescu glanced at the forefinger of his right hand where a little black dot constantly expanded and contracted. “My time is getting short,” he said. “And while it is an ineffable, overwhelming delight for me to be standing in your studio, Mr. Mathaway, and looking at you at last in the flesh, I wonder if you would mind obliging me with a small favor?”

  “Sure,” Morniel nodded, getting up. “You name it. Nothing’s too good for you. What do you want?”

  Mr. Glescu swallowed as if he were about to bring himself to knock on the gates of Paradise. “I wonder—I’m sure you don’t mind—could you possibly let me look at the painting you’re working on at the moment? The idea of seeing a Mathaway in an unfinished state, with the paint still wet upon it—” He shut his eyes, as if he couldn’t believe that all this was really happening to him.

  Morniel gestured urbanely and strode to his easel. He pulled the tarp off. “I intend to call this—” and his voice had grown as oily as the subsoil of Texas—“Figured Figurines No. 29.”

  Slowly, tastingly, Mr. Glescu opened his eyes and leaned forward. “But—” he said, after a long silence. “Surely this isn’t your work, Mr. Mathaway?”

  Morniel turned around in surprise and considered the painting. “It’s my work, all right. Figured Figurines No. 29. Recognize it?”

  “No,” said Mr. Glescu. “I do not recognize it. And that is a fact for which I am extremely grateful. Could I see something else, please? Something a little later?”

  “That’s the latest,” Morniel told him a little uncertainly. “Everything else is earlier. Here, you might like this.” He pulled a painting out of the rack. “I call this Figured Figurines No. 22. I think it’s the best of my early period.”

  Mr. Glescu shuddered. “It looks like smears of paint on top of other smears of paint.”

  “Right! Only I call it smudge-on-smudge. But you probably know all that, being such an authority on me. And here’s Figured Figurines No.—”

  “Do you mind leaving these—these figurines, Mr. Mathaway?” Glescu begged. “I’d like to see something of yours with color. With color and with form!”

  Morniel scratched his head. “I haven’t done any real color work for a long time. Oh, wait!” he brightened and began to search in the back of the rack. He came out with an old canvas. “This is one of the few examples of my mauve-and-mottled period that I’ve kept.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” Mr. Glescu murmured, mostly to himself. “It’s positively—” He brought his shoulders up to his ears in the kind of shrug that anyone who’s ever seen an art critic in action can immediately recognize. You don’t need words after that shrug; if you’re a painter whose work he’s looking at, you don’t want words.

  About this time, Morniel began pulling paintings out frantically. He’d show them to Glescu, who would gurgle as if he were forcing down a retch, and pull out some more paintings.

  “I don’t understand it,” Mr. Glescu said, staring at the floor, which was strewn with canvases tacked to their wooden stretchers. “This was obviously before you discovered yourself and your true technique. But I’m looking for a sign, a hint, of the genius that is to come. And I find—” He shook his head dazedly.

  “How about this one?” Morniel asked, breathing hard.

  Mr. Glescu shoved at it with both hands. “Please take it away!” He looked at his forefinger again. I noticed the black dot was expanding and contracting much more slowly. “I’ll have to leave soon,” he said. “And I don’t understand at all. Let me show you something, gentlemen.”

  He walked into the purple box and came out with a book. He beckoned to us. Morniel and I moved around behind him and stared over his shoulder. The pages tinkled peculiarly as they were turned; one thing I knew for sure—they weren’t made out of paper. And the title-page…

  The Complete Paintings of Morniel Mathaway, 1928–1996.

  “Were you born in 1928?” I demanded.

  Morniel nodded. “May 23, 1928.” And he was silent. I knew what he was thinking about and did a little quick figuring. Sixty-eight years. It’s not given to many men to know exactly how much time they have. Sixty-eight years—that wasn’t so bad.

  Mr. Glescu turned to the first of the paintings.

  Even now, when I remember my initial sight of it, my knees get weak and bend inward. It was an abstraction in full color, but such an abstraction as I’d never imagined before. As if all the work of all the abstractionists up to this point had been an apprenticeship on the kindergarten level.

  You had to like it—so long as you had eyes—whether or not your appreciation had been limited to representational painting until now; even if, in fact, you’d never particularly cared about painting of any school.

  I don’t want to sound maudlin, but I actually felt tears in my eyes. Anyone who was at all sensitive to beauty would have reacted the same way.

  Not Morniel, though. “Oh, that kind of stuff,” he said as if a great light had broken on him. “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted that kind of stuff?”

  Mr. Glescu clutched at Morniel’s dirty tee-shirt. “Do you mean you have paintings like this, too?”

  “Not paintings-painting. Just one. I did it last week as a sort of experiment, but I wasn’t satisfied with the way it turned out, so I gave it to the girl downstairs. Care to take a look at it?”

  “Oh, yes! Very, very much!”

  Morniel reached for the book and tossed it casually on the bed. “Okay,” he said. “Come on. It won’t take more than a minute or two.”

  As we trooped downstairs, I found myself boiling with perplexity. One thing I was sure of—as sure as of the fact that Geoffrey Chaucer had lived before Algernon Swinburne—nothing that Morniel had ever done or had the capacity of ever doing could come within a million esthetic miles of the reproduction in that book. And for all of his boasting, for all of his seemingly inexhaustible conceit, I was certain that he also knew it.

  He stopped before a door two floors below and rapped on it. There was no answer. He waited a few seconds and knocked again. Still no answer.

  “Damn,” he said. “She isn’t home. And I did want you to see that one.”

  “I want to see it,” Mr. Glescu told him earnestly. “I want to see anything that looks like your mature work. But time is growing so short—”

  Morniel snapped his fingers. “Tell you what. Anita has a couple of cats she asks me to feed whenever she’s away for a while, so she’s given me a key to her apartment. Suppose I whip upstairs and get it?”

  “Fine!” Mr. Glescu said happily, taking a quick look at his forefinger. “But please hurry.”

  “Will do.” And then, as Morniel turned to go up the stairs, he caught my eye. And he gave me the signal, the one we use whenever we go “shopping.” It meant: “Talk to the man. Keep him interested.”

  I got it. The book. I’d seen Morniel in action far too many times not to remember that casual gesture of tossing it on the bed as anything but a casual gesture. He’d just put it where he could find it when he wanted it—fast. He was going upstairs to hide it in some unlikely spot and when Mr. Glescu had to take off for his own time—well, the book would just not be available.

  Smooth? Very pretty damned smooth, I’d say. And Morniel Mathaway would paint the paintings of Morniel Mathaway. Only he wouldn’t paint them.

  He’d copy them.

  Meanwhile, the sign
al snapped my mouth open and automatically started me talking.

  “Do you paint yourself, Mr. Glescu?” I asked. I knew that would be a good gambit.

  “Oh, no! Of course, I wanted to be an artist when I was a boy—I imagine every critic starts out that way—and I even committed a few daubs of my own. But they were very bad, very bad indeed! I found it far easier to write about paintings than to do them. Once I began reading the life of Morniel Mathaway, I knew I’d found my field. Not only did I empathize closely with his paintings, but he seemed so much like a person I could have known and liked. That’s one of the things that puzzles me. He’s quite different from what I imagined.”

  I nodded. “I bet he is.”

  “Of course history has a way of adding stature and romance to any important figure. And I can see several things about his personality that the glamorizing process of the centuries could—but I shouldn’t go on in this fashion, Mr. Dantziger. You’re his friend.”

  “About as much of a friend as he’s got in the world,” I told him, “which isn’t saying much.”

  And all the time I was trying to figure it out. But the more I figured, the more confused I got. The paradoxes in the thing. How could Morniel Mathaway become famous five hundred years from now by painting pictures that he first saw in a book published five hundred years from now? Who painted the pictures? MornieI Mathaway? The book said so, and with the book in his possession, he would certainly do them. But he’d be copying them out of the book. So who painted the original pictures?

  Mr. Glescu looked worriedly at his forefinger. “I’m running out of time—practically none left!”

  He sped up the stairs, with me behind him. When we burst into the studio, I braced myself for the argument over the book. I wasn’t too happy about it, because I liked Mr. Glescu.

  The book wasn’t there; the bed was empty. And two other things weren’t there—the time machine and Morniel Mathaway.

  “He left in it!” Mr. Glescu gasped. “He stranded me here! He must have figured out that getting inside and closing the door made it return!”

  “Yeah, he’s a great figurer,” I said bitterly. This I hadn’t bargained for. This I wouldn’t have helped to bring about. “And he’ll probably figure out a very plausible story to tell the people in your time to explain how the whole thing happened. Why should he work his head off in the twentieth century when he can be an outstanding, hero-worshipped celebrity in the twenty-fifth?”

  “But what will happen if they ask him to paint merely one picture—”

  “He’ll probably tell them he’s already done his work and feels he can no longer add anything of importance to it. He’ll no doubt end up giving lectures on himself. Don’t worry, he’ll make out. It’s you I’m worried about. You’re stuck here. Are they likely to send a rescue party after you?”

  Mr. Glescu shook his head miserably. “Every scholar who wins the award has to sign a waiver of responsibility, in case he doesn’t return. The machine may be used only once in fifty years—and by that time, some other scholar will claim and be given the right to witness the storming of the Bastille, the birth of Gautama Buddha or something of the sort. No, I’m stuck here, as you phrased it. Is it very bad, living in this period?”

  I slapped him on the shoulder. I was feeling very guilty. “Not so bad. Of course, you’ll need a social security card, and I don’t know how you go about getting one at your age. And possibly—I don’t know for sure—the F.B.I. or immigration authorities may want to question you, since you’re an illegal alien, kind of.”

  He looked appalled. “Oh, dear! That’s quite bad enough!”

  And then I got the idea. “No, it needn’t be. Tell you what. Morniel has a social security card—he had a job a couple of years ago. And he keeps his birth certificate in that bureau drawer along with other personal papers. Why don’t you just assume his identity? He’ll never show you up as an imposter!”

  “Do you think I could? Won’t I be—won’t his friends—his relatives—”

  “Parents both dead, no relatives I ever heard about. And I told you I’m the closest thing to a friend he’s got.” I examined Mr. Glescu thoughtfully. “You could get away with it. Maybe grow a beard and dye it blond. Things like that. Naturally, the big problem would be earning a living. Being a specialist on Mathaway and the art movements that derived from him wouldn’t get you fed an awful lot right now.”

  He grabbed at me. “I could paint! I’ve always dreamed of being a painter! I don’t have much talent, but there are all sorts of artistic novelties I know about, all kinds of graphic innovations that don’t exist in your time. Surely that would be enough—even without talent—to make a living for me on some third- or fourth-rate level!”

  It was. It certainly was. But not on the third- or fourth-rate level. On the first. Mr. Glescu-Morniel Mathaway is the finest painter alive today. And the unhappiest.

  “What’s the matter with these people?” he asked me wildly after his last exhibition. “Praising me like that! I don’t have an ounce of real talent in me; all my work, all, is completely derivative. I’ve tried to do something, anything, that was completely my own, but I’m so steeped in Mathaway that I just can’t seem to make my own personality come through. And those idiotic critics go on raving about me—and the work isn’t even my own!”

  “Then whose is it?” I wanted to know.

  “Mathaway’s, of course,” he said bitterly. “We thought there couldn’t be a time paradox—I wish you could read all the scientific papers on the subject; they fill whole libraries—because it isn’t possible, the time specialists argue, for a painting, say, to be copied from a future reproduction and so have no original artist. But that’ s what I’m doing! I’m copying from that book by memory!”

  I wish I could tell him the truth—he’s such a nice guy, especially compared to the real fake of a Mathaway, and he suffers so much.

  But I can’t.

  You see, he’s deliberately trying not to copy those paintings. He’s working so hard at it that he refuses to think about that book or even discuss it. I finally got him to recently, for a few sentences, and you know what? He doesn’t actually remember, except pretty hazily!

  Of course he wouldn’t—he’s the real Morniel Mathaway and there is no paradox. But if I ever told him that he was actually painting the pictures instead of merely copying them from memory, he’d lose whatever little self-confidence he has. So I have to let him think he’s a phony when he’s nothing of the sort.

  “Forget it,” I go on telling him. “A buck’s a buck.”

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