Free The Truth About Lorin Jones by Alison Lurie Page B

assume.”
    “Bill said nothing doing. Well, actually he got rather enraged. He suspected Paolo had had an offer he liked better, maybe from some museum, and his back was up, naturally. There was a lot of bad feeling between them for a while.”
    “Really.”
    “That wasn’t the worst, though. Because, you see, Lorin didn’t give up even then. Instead she did something quite mad: she phoned Grace Skelly, and in her whispery little voice she offered to buy the triptych back, dealer’s commission and all. And when Gracie asked why, Lorin told her. You can visualize the reaction.”
    “I suppose so.” Polly imagined Mrs. Skelly, a handsome, expensively dressed, loud-voiced woman who attended most of the private openings at the Museum, hearing that in Lorin Jones’s opinion she was unfit to own one of her paintings.
    “Well, after that Paolo literally didn’t dare hang Lorin’s work. I begged him to reconsider; I told him she was an utterly marvelous painter, and he should make allowances. That’s what I said, though my heart was absolutely in my mouth, because I’d only been working there a few months, you see.”
    “And did he listen to you?”
    “Alas, no. He simply wouldn’t have anything to do with Lorin anymore. He came right out and told her he couldn’t take the risk.”
    “Why didn’t she go to another gallery, then?”
    “Well, you know.” Jacky laughed and cleared his throat apologetically. “Word gets about. And Gracie and Bill — they’re lovely people, really, but they don’t like to be pushed around or called names by artists; they’re not used to it. They never hung the triptych, and they wouldn’t put it up for sale either. Kept it in the vault twenty years, till you borrowed it for your show. And probably Bill Skelly bad-mouthed Lorin a bit around town. Quite naturally. Nobody insults his wife and gets away with it.”
    “So that’s how it was.”
    “That’s about it. But you mustn’t put any of this in your book, promise. It’d be fatal. I don’t know why I told you, anyhow.”
    You told me because you are a notorious gossip, Polly thought.
    “Promise, now. On your honor as a biographer.” Jacky giggled.
    “All right,” she said.
    As Polly stood damp and swaying on the Madison Avenue bus, she didn’t yet regret this promise. Jacky’s tale wasn’t flattering to Lorin Jones; it even, as he suggested, cast doubt on her sanity. After all, throughout history works of art had been bought, and even commissioned, by collectors whose manners and morals left much to be desired: think of the Borgias, or J. Paul Getty. It was just one of the facts of life. Sooner or later these people died, and the work they had privately hoarded was placed on public view. To demand that only the wholly virtuous and refined be allowed to buy paintings would be like screening members of a theater audience for previous convictions.
    Besides, there was nothing so awful about the Skellys. They were important collectors, and trustees of her Museum. They were famous for being interested in new young artists, and willing to take financial risks in support of their enthusiasms; they lent their extensive holdings freely and donated generously. It was not their fault that they had loud voices and a high opinion of themselves.
    As for the Skellys’ failure to hang Birth, Copulation, and Death, there was no proof that this came from vindictiveness. Most major collectors owned far more art than they could display at any one time. Though they might buy a lot of new work, they preferred to show currently well-known artists. Probably the reason the Skellys didn’t hang Jones’s picture for twenty years was at first that she wasn’t famous, and then that she was dead and more or less forgotten.
    Anyhow, there was no guarantee that Jacky’s tale was true, Polly thought as she waited in the steady rain for the Eighty-sixth Street crosstown. Jacky wanted her to think well of Paolo Carducci and the Apollo Gallery,