The Burnt Orange Heresy

Sloan, the bartender (he wore a name tag on his white jacket), poured us Cutty Sarks over ice cubes. I trailed Gloria toward the terrace, where Mr. Cassidy was talking to a grayhaired man who was probably a senior officer in some branch of the armed forces. He wore an Oxford gray suit with deeply pleated trousers. The suit was new, indicating that he didn't wear it often. This meant that he wore a uniform most of the time. A suit lasts army and navy officers for eight or nine years. Pleats were long out of fashion and Oxford gray is the favorite suit color for high-ranking officers. They lead dark, gray lives.

"I appreciate that, Tom," Cassidy said, sticking out his hand, and the gray-haired man was dismissed.

I watched the old-timer head for the elevator. I could have confirmed, easily enough, whether the man was in the service by asking, "Isn't that General Smith?" In this case, however, I believed that I was right and didn't feel the need of confirmation.

Joseph Cassidy was short, barely missing squatness, with wide meaty shoulders and a barrel chest. His tattersall vest was a size too small and looked incongruous with his red velvet smoking jacket. He needed the vest for its pockets- pockets for his watch and chain, and the thin gold chain for his Phi Beta Kappa key. He had a tough Irish face, tiny blue eyes, with fully a sixteenth of an inch of white exposed beneath the irises, and square white teeth. His large upper front teeth overlapped, slightly, his full lower lip. His high forehead was flaking from sunburn. He wore a closecropped black moustache, and his black hair, which was graying at the sides, was combed straight back and slicked down with water. Cassidy was a formidable man in his early fifties. He carried himself with an air of authority, and his confident manner was reinforced by his rich, resonant bass voice. And his gold-rimmed glasses-the same kind that Robert McNamara wore when he was Secretary of Defense-were beautifully suitable for his face.

Gloria introduced us and started toward the indoor fountain to look at the carp. The pooi was crowded with these big fish, and I could see their backs, pied with gold and vermilion splotches, from where I stood, some fifteen feet away from the pool. A concrete griffin, on a pedestal in the center of the pool, dribbled water from its eagle beak into the carp-filled pool. It was a poorly designed griffin. The sculptor, who probably knew too much about anatomy, had been unable to come to terms with the idea of a cross between an eagle and a lion. Medieval sculptors, who knew nothing about anatomy, had no trouble at all in visualizing griffins and gargoyles. Cassidy took my arm, grasping my left elbow with a thumb and forefinger.

"Come on, Jim," he said, "I'll show you a couple of pictures. They call you 'Jim,' don't they?"

"No," I replied, hiding my irritation. "I prefer James. My father named me Jaime, but no one ever seemed to pronounce it right, so I changed it to James. Not legally," I added.

"It's the same name." He shrugged his meaty shoulders. "No need for a legal change, James."

I smiled. "I didn't ask for that advice, Mr. Cassidy, so please don't bill me for it."

"I don't intend to. I was just going to say that you don't look like a man named Jaime Figueras."

"Like the stereotype Puerto Rican, you mean?' The peculiar thing is that my blond hair and blue eyes come from my father, not my mother. My mother was Scotch-Irish, with black hair and hazel eyes."

"You don't have a Spanish accent, either. How long have you lived in the States?"

"Since I was twelve. My father died, and my mother moved back to New York. She never liked Puerto Rico, anyway. She was a milliner, a creative designer of hats for women. You can't sell original hats to Puerto Rican women. All they need is a mantilla-or a piece of pink Kleenex pinned to their hair-to attend mass."

"I've never met a milliner."

"There aren't many left. My mother's dead now, and very few women wear originals nowadays, even when they happen to buy a hat."

"Are hats worth collecting?" he asked suddenly, moistening his upper lip with the tip of his pink tongue. "Original hats, I mean?"

I knew then that Mr. Cassidy was a true collector, and, knowing that, I knew a lot more about him than he thought I knew. In general, collectors can be divided into three categories.

First, the rare patron-collectors who know what they want and order it from artists and artisans. This first category, in the historical past, helped to establish styles. Without the huge demand for portraits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, there would have been no great school of portrait painters.

Second, the middle-ground people, who buy what is fashionable, but collect fashionable art because they either like it without knowing why (it reflects their times is why) or have been taught to like it.