"M. Rickert - Cold Fires" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rickert Mary)

population 954, I kid you not. It was a nice little collection, actually. Most of the population of Castor
had come through to view the paintings at least once but it was my experience they seemed just as
interested in the carpeting, the light fixtures, and the quantity of fish in the river as they were in the work
of the old masters. Certainly the museum never saw the kind of popular attention the baseball field
hosted, or the bowling lanes just outside of town.

"What had happened was this. In the 1930s Emile Castor, who had made his fortune on sweet cough
drops, had decided to build a fishing lodge. He purchased a beautiful piece of forested property at the
edge of what was then a small community, and built his ├втВм╦Ьcabin,├втВмтДв a six-bedroom, three-bath house
with four stone hearth fireplaces and large windows that overlooked the river in the backyard. Even
though Castor had blossomed to a population of nearly a thousand by the time I arrived, deer still came
to drink from that river.

"When Emile Castor died in 1989, he stated in his will that the house be converted into a museum to
display his private collection. He bequeathed all his estate to the support of this project. Of course, his
relatives, a sister, a few old cousins, and several nieces and nephews, contested this for years, but Mr.
Castor was a thorough man and the legalities were tight as a rock. What his family couldn't understand,
other than, of course, what they believed was the sheer cruelty of his act, was where this love of art had
come from. Mr. Castor, who fished and hunted and was known as something of a ladies├втВмтДв man
(though he never married), smoked cigars (chased by lemon cough drops), and built his small fortune on
his ├втВм╦Ьmasculine attitude,├втВмтДв as his sister referred to it in an archived letter.

"The kitchen was subdivided. A wall was put up which cut an ugly line right down the middle of what had
once been a large picture window that overlooked the river. Whoever made this decision and executed it
so poorly was certainly no appreciator of architecture. It was ugly and distorted and an insult to the
integrity of the place. What remained of the original room became the employee kitchen: a refrigerator, a
stove, a large sink, marble countertops, and a tiled mosaic floor. A small stained glass window by
Chagall was set beside the remaining slice of larger window. It remained, in spite of the assault it suffered,
a beautiful room, and an elaborate employee kitchen for our small staff.

"The other half of the kitchen was now completely blocked off and inaccessible other than by walking
through the employee kitchen. That, combined with the large window which shed too much light to
expose any works of art to, had caused this room to develop into a sort of oversized storage room. It
was a real mess when I got there.

"The first thing I did was sort through all that junk, unearthing boxes of outdated pamphlets and old
stationery, a box of old toilet paper and several boxes of old Castor photographs which I carried to my
office to be catalogued and preserved. After a week or so of this I found the paintings, box after box of
canvasses painted by an amateur hand, quite bad, almost at the level of a school child, without a child's
whimsy, and all of the same woman. I asked Darlene, who acted as bookkeeper, ticket taker, and town
gossip what she thought of them.

"'That must be Mr. Castor's work,├втВмтДв she said.

"'I didn't know he painted.'

"'Well he did, you can see for yourself. Folks said he was nuts about painting out here. Are they all like
these?'

"'More or less.'