The Reluctant Nude - Meg Maguire [29]
In lieu of a tablecloth, various Cape Breton postcards and brochures and local newspaper clippings were arranged beneath a thick layer of Lucite.
The front-page cutting in question had the Pettiplaise Gazette’s masthead at the top. The yellowed article was dated over four years ago and its headline read “Controversial Artist Calls Pettiplaise Foyer Doux Foyer”.
The main photo was editorial, and Fallon guessed it must have been taken back when Max lived in New York City, perhaps for a magazine pictorial. In it he was seated in a straight-backed chair, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped together, dressed the same sort of way he did now, same hair, same tired eyes, but a slightly younger-looking face. A cigarette was pinched between two fingers, its plume unfurling. His bare arms were on show, just as powerful as they were today. Out of focus behind him loomed white statues and other trappings of a studio. His eyes looked as haunting and raw on aged newsprint as they did in real life, and he stared the camera down, seeming intelligent and dangerous.
World-renowned classical sculptor M.L. Emery gains Canadian citizenship, retains Pettiplaise address, the caption read.
The waitress approached with a sweating bottle of Keith’s and a glass, and Fallon stopped her before she could pop the cap. The craving hit her hard and fast.
“Sorry—could I change that to a glass of the house red?”
Beneath the main photo were two smaller ones. Each made Fallon’s breath go shallow. The left-hand one was grainy, depicting a boy, unmistakably Max. Skinny and wiry but already with those dark-rimmed eyes that belonged to a man ten years older. He was outside in a tumbledown graveyard, standing beside a statue of an angel as tall as he was. Emery at age twelve, posing beside the monument that made him famous overnight. Beside this was another shot, Max seated in profile, a few years older, smoking hands-free, at work with a chisel and hammer. Shirtless. Still lean and wiry, but more muscular, older. Emery, seventeen, in his first London studio. Fallon turned to the article.
Maxence Luc Émery (pictured above), better known to the art world as M.L. Emery, was born the only child of René-Luc Émery and Céleste Bedeaux Émery in the coastal village of Manent, in France’s Brittany region. By the time he moved to Pettiplaise a quarter-century later, Emery’s life and hometown would undergo radical changes. Some say miracles.
The circumstances surrounding Emery’s first known sculpture (photo lower left) are mired in rumour and hearsay. All that is known for sure is that he carved the piece in his mother’s likeness. It still stands in the Catholic cemetery in Manent today, despite several thefts and subsequent recoveries. The full-sized marble statue would have been an achievement for any stone craftsman, let alone a child. It was treated briefly as a hoax until Emery was documented creating a second, equally exquisite piece and declared a prodigy.
Once news of the child’s achievement reached Paris and beyond, thirteen-year-old Emery was moved to London to study his craft at the Slade School of Fine Art, among students many years his senior. He never fulfilled the requirements needed to attain a degree. Following a dismissal for “academic noncompliance”, Emery went on to establish a small studio…
Here the article jumped to an interior page, one not included on the tabletop. Fallon read the opening again, then again, nearly five times through before her supper arrived. She didn’t taste her wine or her soup as she ate. All she could take in was the image of Max from over twenty years ago, staring out from that photo. The thin, sour-faced child, the arms and eyes and scowl of his adult self already evident.
When the waitress appeared to collect the empty bowl and glass, she caught Fallon’s fixation.
“People are always staring at that one.” She tapped the plastic above the clipping with an acrylic nail, her hand heavy with costume jewelry. “Our celebrity neighbor.”
“Oh?” Fallon asked,