The Burnt Orange Heresy

Eddy worked the day shift at Hiram's Hideaway in South Palm Beach, but he was a popular bartender and was hired by many hostesses during the season for parties at night. I usually ran into him once or twice a week at various places. Everybody, I thought, needs something extra nowadays. A regular job, and something else. Gloria, for example, wouldn't have been able to pay the high seasonal rent on her gallery if she didn't occasionally rent it out in the evenings for poetry readings and encounter-group therapy sessions. She detested these groups, too. The people who needed to listen to poetry, or tortured themselves in encounter-group sessions were all chain smokers, she claimed, who didn't use the ashtrays she provided.

Eddy worked at a sheet-covered card table. There was scotch, bourbon, gin and vermouth for martinis, and a plastic container of ice cubes behind the table. I moved back to give someone else a chance, and picked up a mimeographed catalogue from the table in the foyer. Gloria was greeting newcomers at the door, bringing them to the table to sign her guest book, and then to the bar.

Her previews were not exclusive by any means. In addition to her regular guest list for previews, she gave invitations to Palm Beach hotel P.R. directors to hand out to guests who might be potential buyers. The square hotel guests, "honored" by being given printed preview invitations to a private show, and thrified by the idea that they were seeing "real" Palm Beach society at an art show preview, occasionally purchased a painting. And when they did, the publicity director of The hotel they came from received a sports jacket or a new pair of Daks from Gloria. As a consequence, the preview crowd at Gloria's Gallery was often a weird group. There were even a couple of teenaged girls from Palm Beach Junior College peering anxiously at the primitives and writing notes with balipoints in Blue Horse notebooks.

Herbert Westcott, I learned from the catalogue, was twenty-seven years old, a graduate of Western Reserve who had also studied at the Art Students League in New York. He had exhibited in Cleveland, the Art Students League, and Toronto, Canada. A Mr. Theodore L. Canavin of Philadelphia had collected some of his work. This exhibit, recent work done in Haiti during the past three months, was Westcott's first one-man show. I looked up from the catalogue and spotted the artist easily. He was short-about five, seven-well tanned, with a skimpy, light brown beard. He wore a six-button, .powder blue Palm Beach suit, white shoes, and a pale pink body shirt without a tie. He was eavesdropping on a middle-aged couple examining his largest painting-a Port-au-Prince market scene that was two-thirds lemon sky.

He drew well, as Gloria had said, but he had let his colors overlap by dripping to give the effect of fortuitous accident to his compositions. The drips-a messy heritage from Jackson Pollock-were injudicious. He had talent, of course, but talent is where a painter starts. His Haitian men and women were in tints and shades of chocolate instead of black, something I might not have noticed if it had not been for the Haitian paintings on the opposite wall, where the figures were black indeed.

The dozen Haitian paintings Gloria had rounded up were all surprisingly good. She even had an early Marcel, circa 1900, so modestly different from the contemporary primitives with their bold reds and yellows, it riveted one's attention. The scene was typically Haitian, some thirty peopie engaged in voodoo rites, with a bored, comical goat as a central focusing point, but the picture was painted in gray, black, and white-no primary colors at all. Marcel, as I recalled, was an early primitive who had painted his canvases with chicken feathers because he could not afford brushes. It was priced at only fifteen hundred dollars, and someone would get a bargain if he purchased the Marcel . . .

"James," Gloria clutched my elbow, "I want you to meet Herb Westcott. Herb, this is Mr. Figueras."

"How do you do?" I said. "Gloria, where did you get the Marcel?"

"Later," she said. "Talk to Herb." She turned away, with her long freckled right arm outstretched to a tottering old man with rouged cheeks.

Westcott fingered his skimpy beard. "I'm sorry I didn't recognize you before, Mr. Figueras-Gioria told me you were coming-but I thought you wore a beard. . . ."

"It's the picture in my column. I should replace the photo, I suppose, but it's a good one and I haven't got another one yet. I had my beard for about a year before I shaved it. You shouldn't tug at your beard, Mr. Westcott . . ."

He dropped his hand quickly and shuffled his feet.