Maxfields

Heads & Tales / Harry Chapin











Elizabeth and Victoria stood shoulder to shoulder, purses clasped tightly in front of them and stared at the Maxfield Parish painting. It was the sister’s favorite and had been for the over thirty years they had been visiting the museum.

The spinsters liked coming once every few weeks. They would stop at favorites, visiting with them like old neighbors, which in a way they were. They would consider the new acquisitions, deciding if the particular piece was going to go into the notable category or the easily passed by category. They almost always agreed.


Some times, a particular piece would spark and interesting conversation and they stayed on in the café for lunch. Other times, it was not the museum itself that house the focus of interest and conversation, but the others who visited their particular neighbor.


Today, as the sisters sighed at the nostalgia of farm house twilight, it was clear to both of them that the real focus and the subject of a near future conversation was going to be the man equally entranced by a painting three down.


He was short, especially for a man, standing maybe 5’4”? This in and of itself would not have been notable. The sisters, each at 5’1” hardly noticed this or cared, it was first his jacket that caught their attention. It was an unusually loud hound’s tooth pattern. Thankfully his pants were black and his shirt white, because the jacket alone was enough. As he turned slightly one could also see a plan black tie.


Victoria had read once that wearing black and white made one appear smarter. Therefore that was the colors of choice when going on a job interview. It didn’t seem to work for this gentlemen. Although, maybe it did and he would have been more of a sight in a different outfit.


It was not merely the black and white check patterned jacket that made him noticeable, but that this pattern covered a sizable expanse. The man was not small in girth as he was in height. Likewise, his dark hair was tufting out of a black bowler hat.


At was a striking image. The out fit detracting from the man himself, causing Elizabeth to have to consciously shift her focus to his face to judge an age. Sadly this did not work. Not necessarily because the man looked particularly ageless, he did not. A second glance placed him in that ubiquitous range of 30-50-something. Her initial glance had been hijacked by a relatively large, rhinestone earring that formed the letters NY.


Well, yes, clearly he was the type to come from NY, but it seemed odd to have that sparkly jewelry on the pudgy man with hat and hound’s tooth. She was dying to find a way to get to his other side and see if the other ear had a match.