Tomas

(Chapter 1)
A novel by
Robert Bedick

© 1982-2009 Robert Bedick

All Rights Reserved
Tomas Chapter One

Chapter One

For the first thirty-one years of my life I had never heard of Alfred Tomas. It took a
letter from the man’s wife to make the formal introduction. The letter, a short handwritten
note on personalized stationery, was part fan letter, part job offer. As a fan letter it
praised an essay of mine entitled “Art and Politics” that had appeared a few weeks earlier
on the op-ed page of The New York Times. As a job offer it asked me whether I would be
interested in meeting with her to discuss a writing project concerning her late husband, “a
highly influential but criminally obscure artist,” as she had phrased it.
I wasn’t sure what to make of the letter; my image of Mrs. Tomas kept changing. At
first I imagined her as a wealthy widow who wished to offer me both her well-worn (but
still attractive) body and a million-dollar contract to ghost write her husband’s
autobiography. Then I thought she was probably some ninety year old crackpot who put
doilies on her furniture and had illusions of grandeur for her late paint-by-numbers
husband who once won a blue ribbon at a nursing home art show for his masterpiece
called “Fruit Basket.” Being a realist, I reluctantly settled on the crackpot image, but
decided to meet with her anyway – my admiring, loony, public of one. I had never
received fan mail before, and I was curious to see this woman who thought my article had
been “Superb!”.
The next week I took the train into New York and went to our designated meeting
spot – the Museum of Modern Art. After waiting for about ten minutes an attractive,
well-dressed, middle-aged woman approached me.
“Are you Paul Weber?” she asked.
“Yes,” I answered.
“I’m Evelyn Tomas,” she said.
We politely shook hands and then she motioned for me to follow her inside the
museum. Somewhat European in look, I thought as we made our way through the
museum’s revolving doors. I thought I even discerned a hint of a foreign accent in her
voice, though I later found out that she was Brooklyn born and raised.
“I wanted us to meet here to add some legitimacy to my letter,” Mrs. Tomas
explained as we entered the museum together. “It so happens that one piece of my
husband’s work is currently on exhibit here.”

Page 2
Tomas Chapter One

The one piece that Mrs. Tomas was referring to was located on the third floor. I
quickly followed Evelyn, as she indicated she’d like to be called, past the Picassos and
Chagalls and Rousseaus to a part of the museum I rarely bother with. It was a narrow
dark room filled with the sculpture of various artists. Evelyn led me to a small bronze
piece, a woman’s head, that was resting on a pedestal in the corner of the room. The hair
of the subject was a series of wet-looking, rough tangles of steel, while the skin of her
face was smooth. Her lips were slightly parted, her cheekbones pronounced. The head
was tilted down and to the left. The eyes were half-closed and looking down in the same
direction.
Nothing special, I thought, as I silently read the card attached to the pedestal: “Alfred
Tomas, Woman’s Head, 1929.”
“I see her as a deposed queen,” Mrs. Tomas reverentially whispered, “resisting the
stares of her former subjects who now gawk at her present captivity. She waits for her
revenge.”
I nodded twice with something I hoped she would take as solemn agreement. But
instead of acknowledging my nod, Mrs. Tomas continued to stare straight ahead, silently
admiring her husband’s work. Her devotion made me feel uncomfortable, as if I were
praying in a church that I didn’t belong to, a church where non-believers, if discovered,
are summarily executed with a quick flash of a curved sword. I began to sweat through
my sports jacket.
“It’s a tragedy,” Mrs. Tomas said, “that out of all of his work this is the only piece of
his on exhibit in New York. It barely scratches the surface of his talent.”
With that she quickly turned away from the sculpture and made her way back to the
elevators. After a few steps I was able to catch up with her.
In the outdoor sculpture garden over a cup of tea, Evelyn outlined for me the life of
Alfred Tomas. Born in the early 1900’s to wealthy Boston parents, he rejected the upper
crust society of his birth and spent his early twenties traveling to one exotic place after
the next: Lapland, Africa, India, Nepal, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, South
America.
“He was really one of the very first anthropologists,” Mrs. Tomas proudly explained.

Page 3
Tomas Chapter One

In the early 1930’s Tomas achieved a short burst of artistic recognition, a recognition
that quickly evaporated in the middle 1930’s with a series of experimental art works that
Mrs. Tomas called years ahead of their time. Along with art he became well-versed in
leftist politics, an area he became quite active in.
“He’s much more appreciated in Europe,” Evelyn explained. “In America he’s
shoved in a dark corner, purposely forgotten. In Europe he’s been given full scale
exhibitions in Paris, Leningrad, Madrid. He fought in the Spanish Civil War, you know.”
Mrs. Tomas blamed her husband’s low level of popularity in America on the public’s
fear of his politics. During World War II, along with designing recruitment posters for the
United States, he also designed propaganda posters for the Soviets, and for some time
after the war he continued to serve the communists, a fact that did not endear him to
Senator McCarthy. Tomas was forced to leave the United States in the 1950’s, never to
return.
“The blacklists have not yet died,” she regretfully told me.
Tomas’s interest in revolutionary causes continued unabated even after his forced
departure from the United States. He was, according to his wife, one of the first
foreigners to tour China after the communist takeover in 1949, the same with Cuba in
1959. If one could believe Mrs. Tomas, which was something I was having trouble doing,
Tomas had also been something of a guru to the student revolt in France in 1968.
Although the life being related to me was no doubt interesting, I found my mind
beginning to wander from the repetition of exclamation points that I kept hearing in
Evelyn’s voice. The pleasant weather must have had something to do with it. It was the
middle of May, a warm clear day that brought out the best in New York. There were
couples strolling about the sculpture garden – young women with long straight hair who
every-so-often would spontaneously kiss their unapproachably handsome boyfriends, or
1950 Greenwich Village retreads wearing berets tilted just so, silk ascots, and pencil thin
moustaches, having deep philosophical discussions about art – the one who name-
dropped the most always coming out on top. The older, regular crowd sat in their metal
chairs, sunning themselves or reading the papers, while rich high school girls dared to
take off their wooden clogs and dip their bare feet in the cool concrete stream that ran
through the garden. Japanese tourists posed with a Rodin. In front of a Calder a young

Page 4
Tomas Chapter One

man from Queens with at least three cameras slung across his shoulders tried to pick up a
girl from New Jersey who was carrying a sketch pad. And at the tables where we were
sitting, amid the sophisticated consumption of white wine and spinach salad, there was a
self-satisfied hum of conversation that only those with such expensive looks and
expansive minds could ever hope to generate.
“What impressed me most about your article,” Evelyn said, jogging my interest with
a reference to something other than her husband’s unbelievably impressive life, “was the
premise that the artist must be at the vanguard of social and political change. That was a
view that was certainly held by Alfred. In fact, I would say that it was his guiding
philosophy. How did you phrase it in your article?” she asked, and then pulled from her
purse a clipping of the article along with her reading glasses. I could see that more than
one line of the article was underlined in red.
“Ah, here it is,” she said, and began to read. “’Those who practice art for art’s sake
and refuse to engage in the great moral battles of their time abdicate the single most
important duty that society demands of its artists.’ It’s a marvelous line,” she said,
smiling at me with admiration and approval.
I nodded, outwardly accepting her praise, but wincing inside at having the words I
had written repeated aloud. Three weeks after I had proudly strung them together, they
now sounded pretentious and bloated. Also, I was uncomfortable because I didn’t quite
share Mrs. Tomas’s keen interest in the philosophical premise of the article. To me the
article was an afternoon’s worth of work based on an idea that had been idly suggested to
me by my wife. The fact that it had been printed at all was pure luck. Although I had
been pursuing literary glory since eleventh grade creative writing class with Miss
Meredith, who thought I was a genius and once made a pass for me in the supply room, I
had met with little actual success. One story I wrote had been accepted by a small literary
magazine that folded before it was published. Another magazine had been willing to
publish a poem of mine, but only if I agreed to buy a one-year subscription for twelve
dollars, an amount I refused to pay – as a fifteen year old, I was broke at the time. Aside
from my college literary magazine, I had never had anything published except for the
Times article that Mrs. Tomas was so taken by. And even the Times had rejected the next
two articles I had sent them.

Page 5
Tomas Chapter One

“So,” Mrs. Tomas said, getting down to the business at hand, “are you interested in
undertaking this project?”
“I’m still not sure what you want,” I said. I guess I had daydreamed through some of
the more pertinent details.
“To put it bluntly,” Mrs. Tomas said, “my husband has not been treated kindly by
history. The art critics couldn’t neatly classify him or categorize him. He was eclectic,
constantly experimenting and changing styles. He rejected cubism when that was popular
and was doing abstract expressionism twenty years before it was acceptable. And in
America his art was essentially banned along with his politics.”
“What would you want me to write?” I asked, thinking it was an art historian that she
needed.
“Alfred, though an artist, also wrote a great deal – he kept journals since he was a
teenager. He came in contact with and wrote about other important artists, writers, and
even world leaders. I am looking for someone who will go through his journals and
letters, edit them into book form, and write an introduction, an introduction that would be
suitable for independent publication.”
I was interested – this was exactly the kind of break that I needed, though two
questions remained in my mind: Why me? and How much? I thought I was probably able
to do the job, but I realized there were many other writers who were more qualified than I
was. It’s true that my name wasn’t totally picked out of a hat, there had been that article
in the Times, but either I had a luck to be envied or Mrs. Tomas was not all that she
claimed to be. How many other young writers with inflatable egos had had this same
charming lunch only to realize later that they had been victims to a hoax, a seduction, a
warped vision of some harmless but slightly deranged woman? As to the second question
– How much? – Mrs. Tomas was willing to provide the answer unprompted.
“As far as money is concerned, I can’t promise too much. My husband left only one
thousand dollars in his will specifically for this project. Upon accepting the job you
would receive $250 as an advance. Upon satisfactory completion, $550. Upon
publication, the remainder of $200. In addition, if the book is published, you will receive
more money in accordance with the contract we negotiate with the publisher. Although I
can’t promise publication, I have received some positive leads. There is also a very strong

Page 6
Tomas Chapter One

possibility of some grant money coming our way. I’m sure that once we have a
manuscript to present we will be able to raise more funds.”
It’s me because I’m cheap, I thought, and told Mrs. Tomas that I’d like to examine
the diaries before I decided whether or not I would take the job.
“The material will be delivered to your apartment first thing Monday morning,” Mrs.
Tomas said.
It seemed strange that she would send her husband’s personal belongings to a
practical stranger, but before I could say anything she rose from her chair, her hand
extended. Our meeting was over.

[To read the entire novel go to:

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/tomas/8159037
]

Page 7