Drawing Home

by Jamie Brenner

She headed back to the hotel. It took her a minute before she noticed the police cars. Two were parked at an awkward angle right in front of the building. Traffic was being redirected. A small crowd had gathered on the sidewalk.

  She ducked her head down and tried to slip across the front porch to the hotel entrance.

  “Young lady, step aside. You can’t go in there,” an officer said.

  Ushered to the sidewalk, Penny wondered if she could sneak around back. And then—

  “Some old guy dropped dead at the bar,” a man announced. “Right over his martini.”

  “That’s how I want to go,” someone said.

  Penny stood very still. Sirens blared nearby, and she covered her ears, her anxiety officially triggered. In the midst of all this, the four o’clock jitney pulled up to the curb, and dozens of passengers disembarked, lugging bags and talking on their phones. Although Penny was desperate to get away, she was trapped by the swarm of summer people in a hurry to have fun.

  Chapter Two

  Few things in life gave Bea Winstead more pleasure than a crowded room.

  As one of New York’s most legendary art patrons, Bea was famous for her intimate gatherings of, oh, a hundred or so people, the kind of people whose deep pockets and eagerness to acquire the next big thing merited an invite. And then there were the guests of honor, the lucky artists who walked into Bea’s Park Avenue apartment wondering how they might pay the next month’s rent on their studios in Greenpoint and ending the evening with six figures in sales. It was this promise of art meeting commerce that had given Bea’s parties the heady air of unpredictability and importance for more than four decades.

  But apparently, her power was waning. She scanned the room and noted the no-shows. Had her parties lost their luster? Or was it simply that she could not compete with Memorial Day weekend, when everyone fled to the Hamptons? God, how she loathed the Hamptons.

  “Kyle, tell the caterers to keep the drink carts at least five feet from any panels.”

  Her assistant was a handsome young man with a thick head of hair, vibrant blue eyes, and the chiseled features of a movie star. When she first saw him doing odd jobs around her building, she assumed that was what he aspired to be, an actor, like her favorite waiter at Aureole, who’d ended up on a sitcom.

  “No, ma’am. I’m happy to be a handyman,” he’d said when she asked.

  Bea appreciated that kind of focus. Dedication to work was important, whatever that work might be. It was a sign of good character. And so, when she needed help with a particularly complicated art installation in her apartment, she’d asked him. That same week, her assistant quit. She thought, Why not hire someone practical, for a change? Enough with these dreamy art hangers-on with no discernible skills. She offered the young handyman a job with a salary he couldn’t turn down.

  Bea took a final look at the canvases Kyle had mounted on the wall for the evening’s event, paintings of gigantic flowers, amoebas, and birds. The artist, Bronx native Frank Cuban, was twenty-six years old. Bea was hosting this show of his work tonight as a favor for an old friend, Joyce Carrier-Jones, an artist she’d known back in the heyday of the Tenth Street galleries. Now Joyce was the dean of admissions at Franklin, the city’s top fine-arts high school. Cuban was a former student. In art, as in life, it was all about who you knew.

  The artist’s show included one panel in acrylic, graphite, wood, and nail polish. Another was an oil pastel on paper with Sharpie and spray paint. Amusing, yes. Groundbreaking, no. Bea missed the days when there were one or two big art movements in any given decade. She missed the sense of discovering a true star.

  But the key to longevity was not to look back. Looking back was fatal to the spirit.

  Joyce Carrier-Jones walked over and handed Bea a glass of wine. Joyce had a loud manner of dressing, bright caftans and large ceramic jewelry. Her dyed-black hair had a dramatic silver streak in front and she wore oversize square-framed glasses.

  “Cheers,” Joyce said. “To the rise of another new talent. You know, Bea, I really admire your career. I might want to move into managing artists like you used to do. Never too late, right?”

  Bea barely heard her. She held up her wineglass, incredulous. It was stemless! Did any standards exist these days?

  “This is unacceptable,” she said.

  “Do you see a crack?” Joyce said.

  “It’s not what I see, it’s what I don’t see—a stem! You cannot serve white wine in a stemless glass.” Her free hand fluttered impatiently up to the large pearls around her neck.

  “Oh, Bea, it’s fine. You have to get with the times. These are very popular right now.”

  “A stem is for function, not decoration. It is to keep the chilled wine from being heated by hands.”

  She charged back into her foyer in a huff, thinking for the thousandth time that the greatest indignity of aging was not watching your body degrade but watching the world around you fall apart.

  Bea had been raised in a place where etiquette was second only to religion—Newport, Rhode Island. She was born just a few years after the Great Hurricane of 1938, a night when roads had been washed away along with people’s lives. But her parents’ story about that infamous evening said everything about the town: When the deadly storm hit, their neighbor Grace Graham Wilson Vanderbilt was preparing for a formal dinner, and she continued her preparations even as a large portion of her porch was swept away by the winds. Roads became rivers, and the invited guests had to decide whether to risk their lives or risk offending Grace Graham Wilson Vanderbilt. Twenty-seven of the thirty invited dinner guests arrived.

  She would have her assistant deal with the wineglasses.

  “Kyle, I need to talk to you,” she said, snapping her fingers and waving him over.

  “I need to talk to you too,” he said. “There’s something you should see.”

  Kyle handed her his phone, a news alert on the home screen: Henry Wyatt, pioneer of the minimalist art movement, dead at 83.

  The room blurred around her. The party, the paintings, the wineglasses—all receded, replaced by images of another crowded room decades earlier. A young man with tapered fingers and paint under his nails. She closed her eyes, seeing a railroad apartment filled with canvas after canvas stacked against the walls. The memories rushed at her, vivid and breathtaking. She saw herself as if it were yesterday, sitting with Henry on a bench in Washington Square Park, broke and uncertain but with their entire lives ahead of them.

  Bea reached for Kyle’s arm to steady herself. “Get everyone out of this apartment. Pack my bag and pull the car around to the front.”

  “Now?”

  “Now!”

  “Where are you going?”

  “We are going to the Hamptons.”

  In addition to everything else she had to do, Emma suddenly had another major task: maintaining a sense of normalcy.

  While she had long heard rumors that The American Hotel was haunted, she had never known anyone to actually drop dead there. That it would happen on her watch was unfortunate. That it would happen to someone she knew and liked, even more so. But there was no time to think about Henry Wyatt when the bar was overflowing and the wait list for a table was in the double digits.

  The Henry Wyatt business was being handled by her boss. The owner of the hotel, Jack Blake, had spent a long time huddled in the back office with the police chief and he was now busy keeping out the press. Emma told herself to pretend it was just a typical Friday night and focus on keeping the guests satisfied.

  The head bartender, Chris Vincenzi, signaled for her.

  Emma had a special affection for the bartenders at the hotel. She knew it was partly because her own father had been one himself. He had died when she was very young, so the hotel bar felt like a link to him. But on a practical level, she appreciated the bartenders because they made her job easier.

  The bar was the heart and soul of the establishment. When cocktails were flowing and the conversation reached a fever p
itch, when the assembled crowd was that perfect mix of local and transient, moneyed and blue collar, young and old, all was right with the world. Even the most persnickety hotel guest couldn’t help but fall under the spell. When she’d applied for a job at the hotel, she’d dreamed of working behind the bar. But Jack Blake had never, in the history of his establishment, hired a female bartender. Sexist? Maybe. The guys at the bar called it tradition. She wondered if her father would have agreed with them.

  “Em, can you pull this bottle for me?” Chris said, scribbling the name of a particular bottle of the Châteauneuf-du-Pape on a bar napkin. “I don’t think any of the servers will be able to find it and I’m too slammed to go myself.”

  The owner of the hotel was serious about his wine. Jack had been collecting since the early 1970s, and the wine list was more than eighty-five pages long with somewhere around seventeen hundred selections. Although Emma had been employed at the hotel for almost a dozen years, the intricate maze of the wine cellar still occasionally stumped her. When she was downstairs, wandering through the rows of bottles, a thought popped into her head: Penny! It was the first time in hours she’d had a minute to think of her. Penny was going to take the news of Henry Wyatt’s death hard. Emma just hoped that she could be the one to tell her what happened, that Penny wouldn’t hear about it from someone else or see it online.

  The hardest part of her job was that, when she was at the hotel for twelve or fourteen hours straight, she didn’t get much contact with Penny. It was a safe town, and everyone knew everyone, but it was still less than ideal to have a fourteen-year-old running around unfettered after school. She was a good kid, but things happened. And when Emma was caught up in a busy wave at work, she felt completely cut off from her other job, her more important job, of being a mother. A single mother.

  The wine cellar’s numerical system sometimes sent her in circles and made her feel like she was misreading coordinates on a map, but tonight, thankfully, she navigated it correctly and spotted the bottle of Paul Jaboulet Aîné 2010 Domaine de Terre Ferme Red, Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Okay, so something had finally gone smoothly. Maybe the night was turning around.

  Upstairs, she delivered the wine to the table and hurried back to the front desk to answer the ringing phone.

  “The American Hotel, Emma speaking.”

  “Emma, Jim DiMartino here.”

  Jim DiMartino, a ten-year veteran of the Sag Harbor Police Department, had been one of the first responders when Henry Wyatt collapsed.

  “Hi, Jim. You looking for the chief? He left a while ago.”

  “Actually, that’s not why I’m calling. I’ve got Penny here at the station.”

  Over the din of the bar crowd, she could vaguely make out his words, something about a party and underage drinking and someone backing a car into a house on Fahys Road. Penny hadn’t been drinking, but she’d been caught up in the sweep.

  Emma looked helplessly around the room at the full tables, the packed lobby, the bar three-deep with customers.

  “I’ll be right there.” Mercifully, the police station was just two doors away. She would go get Penny, and then she would have to call Angus to take her home. Angus, who used to rent the house next door, had moved in with Emma and Penny five years ago, when he lost his wife. Part of the move had been for financial reasons; why pay rent on a whole house when he lived by himself? Angus and Celia had, years before that, sold the house they’d owned together. The increased property taxes were crushing everyone, even people who were living in modest homes in modest parts of town. Now there was no such thing. A lot of people Emma knew had been forced to make tough choices.

  But really, the move had been part of a promise he’d made to Celia before she died. Celia, who had babysat for Penny since she was a baby, did not want her husband to live alone after she was gone. “The man has been married for fifty-eight years,” she’d said to Emma. “He won’t fare well on his own. Good heavens, do you know how he would eat if left to his own devices?” Celia, anxious to make sure her husband would be loved and taken care of, made both Angus and Emma promise they would live in the same house.

  Emma hated to call him this late. Angus spent his days volunteering at the Sag Harbor Historical Society or the whaling museum and he was usually asleep before eight. And, really, Emma should be taking Penny home herself. But just as a captain couldn’t abandon his ship, she couldn’t leave the front desk on a busy Friday night. Emma had long ago accepted that at any given moment, she was dropping the ball either at work or at home.

  She turned into the alleyway between the municipal building and Page Restaurant. Page had its windows open, and music and laughter filled the night air.

  The small station couldn’t house all the teenagers picked up at the party, so they were lined up as if this were a fire drill at the high school. Every young face was glued to a cell-phone screen. She scanned the group for Penny. Her daughter, tall for her age at five foot six, usually stood out in a crowd of teenagers. Her wild hair also made her difficult to miss. And yet Emma didn’t see her.

  Emma made her way into the station. Sure enough, Jim had kept Penny close. She sat behind the counter at a chair next to DiMartino’s desk.

  “Thanks for the call,” Emma said, shaking the officer’s hand. She turned to her daughter. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, Mom. I’m fine.” In typical teenage fashion, she seemed irritated, even though Emma was the one who’d been put out. Moments like this would be so much more tolerable if she had a co-parent with whom she could share an eye-roll. But, just as she had countless times before this, she reminded herself that she was in this alone and that she and her daughter were both doing their best.

  “You didn’t tell me you were going to a party.”

  “It was a last-minute thing. And my phone died.”

  Emma didn’t have time for this.

  “Some night,” DiMartino said.

  “Never a dull moment,” Emma said, though that wasn’t exactly true. There were many dull moments. Mostly dull moments, punctuated by minor catastrophes. Was that motherhood—or was it life?

  She walked Penny back to Main Street and sat her on a bench in front of a sign for the old jail museum. She told her not to move an inch until Angus arrived.

  Only when Emma was back behind the desk at the hotel did she remember the news about Henry Wyatt.

  Chapter Three

  There were houses that had addresses and houses that had names. Henry Wyatt’s home of the past thirty years was the latter. It was nine at night when Bea reached Sag Harbor and Kyle steered the car onto a private street, Actors Colony Road. In the midst of this beautiful stretch of waterfront homes, the house called Windsong sat like the jewel in a crown.

  The driveway curved around the side of the house and led to a hidden garage. Of course Henry would not blight the approach to his home with anything as pedestrian as parked cars.

  Kyle came around and opened Bea’s door, and when the cool night air hit her cheeks, she almost lost her footing. It was real. This was happening. She was at Windsong, but Henry was not. Henry was gone.

  Kyle managed the luggage while Bea walked to the door clutching the single key in her hand. The darkness of night lifted when the security lights were activated by their movements. Kyle let out a low whistle as the house, in all of its modern, dramatic glory, suddenly came into view.

  It was a masterpiece designed by Henry himself decades ago. Henry was an artist to his core, and he had never been constrained by medium. He painted, he drew, he sculpted, and he created his home. Bea, a nonartist who had always surrounded herself with talented people, did not possess the drive to create, but she was in awe of it.

  The one thing all of Henry Wyatt’s work shared was minimalism, and Windsong was an absolute extension of that. A combination of wood, stone, and metal, the house had floor-to-ceiling glass walls and an open layout.

  Bea put the key in the lock. It had been a few years since she’d used it, but she hadn’t ta
ken the key off her key chain since the day Henry had given it to her.

  She moved through darkness and found the central light switch from memory.

  “This place is insane,” Kyle said. Even at night, the spectacular integration of the interior of the house and the outdoors was breathtaking. “You’re sure we should be here?”

  “I have a key, don’t I?” Bea snapped. She walked deeper into the house, each painting on the wall triggering a memory of the friend she’d just lost. She took a few minutes to run her hands over a few of the sculptures meticulously placed throughout, still in disbelief.

  A thirty-two-by-forty-inch oil painting with large swaths of green and black dominated the living room. As with all of his paintings, the piece had a central element to ground it. This particular canvas had hung in the Guggenheim for many years. Entitled Greene Street, 1972, it was named after the location of the gallery they had once owned together.

  “Follow me to the guest suites.”

  How long had it been since she was at the house? She had forgotten the tranquillity of the space, with its white oak floors and ceilings, the flat-panel doors with hidden fixtures. Everything was perfectly designed and seamless. Every inch was Henry.

  The news reports speculated that Henry had suffered a massive heart attack, but Bea needed to get the facts from official channels. She’d left a message for Henry’s attorney Victor Bonivent but had not heard back from him. Now she wondered if he had still retained Victor. How much did she really know about Henry’s life in recent years?

  The stairs to the upper level gave the illusion of floating along a white wall. Bea briefly considered going up to Henry’s room but decided against it. She wasn’t emotionally prepared for that; she would instead take a room in the guest suite.

  For a few years after Henry built the house, Bea had declined his invitations to visit. Windsong had been the mistress who stole him away from Manhattan, away from her. Their rift had not been caused by the house, but it had coincided with the construction of Windsong, and so the place had seemed, for a time, to be the embodiment of their lost friendship.