“What is he going to do with it?” I asked my mother during one of our long-distance phone calls. This was sometime in — I’m guessing — late 1990 or early 1991.
“I don’t know, Don. He says he’s going to put it in fine-art storage. He says he doesn’t know what else to do with it.”
“Does he still believe it’s a Frederic Church?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
In the summer of 1991, I moved out of the apartment I shared with K., and began a period of bouncing from place to place. For a while, I lived in a small rented room. At about this time, down in Miami, S. packed up and left my mother’s apartment. My mother told me later that he had begun drinking again; he wasn’t, according to her, in good shape. She bumped into him every now and then at AA meetings — he seemed to be in and out of the program — or spoke with him on the telephone. She said, in one conversation, that he had taken a job matching house-paint colors for a paint and hardware store. On another occasion, she told me that he was working as a sign painter. She did not have an address for him, but she believed that he was living somewhere out on Miami Beach. At one point, she told me that she thought he might be sleeping in his car. In the event, S. did not, she said, look as if he was getting much to eat. He was drunk a lot, drunk even when attending AA. He looked bad. She did not expect him to live long. She did not expect to see him around much, as time went on.
The matter of the painting was, as far as I was concerned, now dropped in earnest. One day, though, I got a phone call — yet another update — from my mother. It seemed, as I remember the story from her, that S. had gone to a bar on Miami Beach where he fell into conversation with a pair of foreign men, or maybe it was just one man. The men, or man, claimed to have connections to art dealers abroad, perhaps in Holland. After a while, S. got up his nerve and pulled out the photograph of the painting. I had the impression, listening to my mother, that S. did not explain his ideas about the identity of the painting; rather, he dug the picture out of his wallet, handed it over, and waited for a response. The response was one of amazement. Where had S. found this picture? Had he taken it himself? Where was the painting? Had S. seen the painting? Did he know its whereabouts? Did he realize the importance of this find?
According to my mother, the men informed S. that this was, without a doubt, a work by the American painter Frederic Church. It had, S. had told her, belonged to a collection in Europe, and had gone missing in the early years of the century, possibly between the wars, and had been presumed destroyed. This was what she reported to me.
“Jesus!” I said to my mother that day on the phone.
“How about that?” she exclaimed, as if the matter of the painting were now settled.
I said, “Are you serious? Do you believe any of this? What’s he going to do with the painting? Where is it? Is it still in storage? What kind of storage? One of those outdoor sheds? Is the shed waterproof, I hope? Wait a minute. Does the painting belong to him? Is it insured? Did whoever it was in the bar say anything about its value? What bar was it? How do we know that any of this is for real? A Church? I can’t believe it’s a Church. Shit. What else did S. say?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know the answers to any of your questions. All I know is what I’ve told you,” my mother said, and I said, speaking of S., “How in the world is he going to cope with this?”
“I’ve told you, I don’t know, Don.”
“Is he living out on the Beach?”
“I think so.”
“Is he drinking?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know you are. I am, too.”
“There’s nothing to be done?”
“Don, I’ve done everything I can do. He’s in God’s hands now. He’s in God’s hands.”
In August 1992, Hurricane Andrew struck the southern tip of Florida, with winds measured as category four. The storm tore its way through Miami, causing billions of dollars in damage. My mother’s condominium was ripped apart — one whole wall was effectively dismantled and removed by the winds that rushed in from the Atlantic Ocean. All across the neighborhoods in which I had lived as a teenager, streets, homes, and businesses were wrecked.
My mother told me that the storage facility in which S. had deposited his Frederic Church — I had, I realize now, come to think of the painting as belonging to S.; and, with this in mind, and on the strength of hearsay evidence transmitted through channels that I knew from long experience to be unreliable (S. and my mother), had come to regard the painting as a genuine Church — the storage facility, as I was saying, was, according to my mother, very badly damaged. There was, I recall my mother telling me, no hope that anything would or could be left of the painting. For years, I imagined that it had been annihilated. It had been swept out to sea, or blown up the coast, or drowned in the marshlands of the Everglades.
But was that true? Was the painting really gone?
In the summer of 2003, I made an attempt to find S. I assumed he’d passed away, though I did not know for certain. My search led me to a former employer of his in Miami, the owner of a sign-painting business, who believed that S. was alive. But he did not know where, or how, to locate him.
And then — suddenly — I received a message from S., leaving a number in Florida where he could be contacted. I’d called him, and he told me that he was getting his life together again, after thirteen years of drinking. In that time, he had moved up and down the East Coast and had rarely had a proper mailing address or a phone. He had heard only the day before about my mother’s death. We talked for a long time, remembering her, and then he set me straight on a few matters regarding the painting, which, as it turned out, had been water-damaged but not destroyed. He had given it away, he told me, to a former friend, a bartender, who, he believed, had in turn given it to his parents in Connecticut. “It had been haunting me for a quarter of a century. I figured that was enough,” S. said. I noticed that his speech was less halting than it used to be, his voice firmer.
And the painting’s identity? S. had indeed met, in a Miami bar, a Belgian whose father in Antwerp had some connection with the art business. The father in Antwerp, upon seeing S.’s photograph of the painting, had inquired into its whereabouts. According to S., the Belgians offered cash for the painting. A meeting was set up. S. told me, though, that the father in Antwerp never properly identified the painting. Something about these Belgians spooked S. The meeting didn’t take place. S. was left with the feeling that the Belgians knew something they weren’t saying. He told me that he even went so far as to contact the State Department about them. How my mother had decided that the painting had been definitively verified as a Church, S. could not imagine.
And there was one more thing. I had always pictured S., upon first taking possession of the painting in New York, removing it from its stretcher and carrying it in a tube on the plane to Miami. In fact, the painting had been smuggled to Florida by a stewardess, an acquaintance of S.’s, who hauled it in its frame on board an airplane, where, unable to cram the thing into the coat closet, she locked it, against FAA regulations, in a rear lavatory. “She handed it to me in the airport, after we landed,” S. told me. When I asked him if he had gone back to his own art, he told me that he had. I wished him Godspeed, and we rang off.
In early 2003, before I’d ever dreamed of hearing from S. again, I went to Paris. It was the middle of winter, and unseasonably cold. As a result, I spent most of my time indoors. One place I went for warmth was the Louvre. Because of the weather, and because, I suppose, tourism had fallen off in anticipation of the war in the Middle East, the museum was unusually empty, and it was possible to march right up to the Mona Lisa. Until then, I had seen this painting only in photographs; now, standing before the real article, I was struck not only by its beauty but by its oddness. I was taken, in particular, with the way in which the landscape recedes, in balanced, serpentine patterns, behind the figure of the Mona Lisa. It is a distant, verdant l
andscape, viewed from what appears to be an elevation; looking at the painting, it is difficult to judge, with certainty, the exact spatial relationships between the background and foreground elements. The Mona Lisa herself, though framed by this background landscape that seems to lie far away and far below — I picture her, for no good reason, sitting high on a battlement — nonetheless exists less in relation to the immediate and visible countryside than to some larger world, the world of which the painted landscape is merely a small part. Thus the figure, looking toward the viewer and away from the background vista, occupies a position in the painting that is central in more ways than one, a position defined not only by the optical perspectives that control the painting as a whole but by a subtly disorienting perspective that feels, for want of a better word, spiritual. Standing in front of the Mona Lisa, I thought of S.’s landscapes — the one he’d painted, which was hanging in my living room; and the supposed Church, which at that time I thought was gone forever. In both paintings, I realized, the physical perspectives are destabilizing, to the extent that the viewer is asked to communicate — visually — with the artist in a way that is not, in essence, only visual. During the years when S. was traveling to and from New York, I’d asked myself what had prompted him to consider the landscape in the giant frame a Leonardo. Of course, in asking this question I was only a question or two away from other questions, questions having to do not with paintings or with painting techniques but with the ways in which painting techniques had become the vehicles for S.’s fantasies and delusions.
But what if I had asked, instead, a different kind of question? What had S. seen in a Leonardo da Vinci, even in a reproduction, that had led him to imagine the world (or, at least, the world represented in paintings) as a place where even formal perspectives become wholly subjective, private creations; a place where even a realist landscape — a simple and apparently straightforward depiction of the straightforwardly known world — can utterly disorient us and, in our momentary disorientation, cause us to see into worlds governed by laws other than those we rely on as somehow universal, worlds that are, in effect, governed by the traumas and hopes of others?
The question is not easily answered. S. loved my mother, and my mother loved S. She loved him for his spirit, as he tried to survive and to make, in his own paintings, and in his relationship with her, a world that looked like the world he longed for. She loved him in spite of, and because of, his preoccupation with da Vinci and with Church, his grand lost cause.
Recently, I showed the photograph of the painting to a friend, an art historian. This person seemed to think that the painting in the photograph was likely not a Church. But then she said, “You know, wait a minute. Church spent time in South America, right? He painted animals and birds into his landscapes. Could this be an oil study from his time in South America? A study for a larger work?”
That could be. I don’t know. I suppose I’ll have to wait for the phone to ring, and hear what comes over the line.
PART IV
One evening in 2003, while I was walking down a set of stairs at the New York Public Library, it occurred to me, as it had on occasions in the past, that there are people in the world who believe in an afterlife, and people who don’t; and that Heaven and Hell — or whatever vague and nebulous realms exist (or don’t) beyond our consciousness of them or our ability to comprehend their natures — may (or may not) be populated, as it were, with the souls of those who, during their time among the living, fell into the first category, the category of people who believe.
My mother trusted in her afterlife to come. I am not certain that I can make, on my own behalf, unambivalent claims as to the transmigration of souls. Life after death? I do admit that late one night after her father died, in 1995, I had a strong feeling that he had stopped to pay me a visit. For a few moments, I thought of him in his car, parked beside the curb outside my building in Brooklyn. The car, as I pictured it, was running — headlights and taillights on. It was October, and exhaust clouded behind the back bumper. Was my grandfather waiting for me to climb out of bed and come downstairs to say good-bye? Was he offering me a ride? I felt him near me. But I did not get up and go to the window. I did not see him (or his car), and I did not converse with his spirit. What does it mean to feel — or to imagine feeling — the silent presence of someone who has died?
From time to time, I speak to my mother. I am in the habit of occasionally filling her in on my news, explaining some problem or other that has me bothered, or maybe setting her straight, once and for all, on one of our long-standing, unresolved disputes. That is what I was doing, that evening several years ago, as I walked down the stairs at the Public Library: I was speaking (in a suitably quiet voice) to my dead mother. And it occurred to me, as I descended the massive Vermont marble stairwell at the northern end of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, that it was, after all, I who was speaking to my dead mother, and not she who was speaking to me. Back in the winter of 2001, several months after her death, I spent a sleepless night imagining, in a way that felt like believing, that my mother was inside the expensive mattress I had bought as solace for myself in my grief. In my panic that night, I imagined her reaching up with her arms to pull me down into my new bed, wanting me to join her in death. Since that time, however, I have never experienced anything that I could call a direct communication from her. She does not summon me, as they say, from the beyond, or make her presence in the ether palpable. I do not feel her beside me in a room, or turn suddenly and, glancing over my shoulder, catch a glimpse of — her, not there.
And so I wonder: If, when it comes to life after death, I am not (exactly) a believer, why am I talking? Who do I think I’m speaking to?
When I’m talking to my mother — at home, or out on the street, or in public buildings — there invariably comes a moment when I feel I can imagine her hovering in the near-distance, usually at a modest height above the ground, just as angels in classical paintings float in the vicinity of the upper corners of their frames. And in the instant in which I imagine her this way — less as an apparition than as a memory, in which she is sometimes a young and attractive version of herself, though more often she is older, and sick, and close to her death — I see not only her face, with her mouth curving mischievously upward at the sides, creating the dimples that accompanied her laughter or a smile; and her eyes, which typically, as they did in life, wear a look of slight bewilderment, as if everything in the world were too much for her to take in; and her weak Appalachian chin, the chin that I, too, inherited from our Scottish and English ancestors; and her hair, which, late in her life, looked as if it had been speedily cut with dull shears. I see these things, and then I see the rest of the picture. I see what she is wearing. I see, for one dreadful moment, my mother’s clothes.
In particular, I see a garment that she made during the early 1990s. She was living in Miami at the time, operating a small storefront boutique that was intended as a showcase for her own increasingly eccentric fashion designs, but which was dedicated mainly to routine tailoring and alteration jobs. She never got much business. The shop was in a run-down strip mall in an underpopulated district crisscrossed with freeway overpasses, not far from the Miami River. Because the shop was not — nor would it ever be — profitable, my mother relied on her father, who lived in North Carolina, to cover the rent.
I visited the shop in 1993. I was thirty-five. Ten years had passed since my mother’s last alcoholic collapse. My father was living with his new wife in southwest Miami. My sister had moved far away from South Florida to the Pacific Northwest and begun her own family. And I was living alone in Brooklyn. My mother, with help from the insurance company and her father, had relocated from a condominium that had been torn apart by Hurricane Andrew, the year before, to a one-bedroom apartment with partial views of the Miami River. And she had opened her shop. Its name was Peace Goods.
I remember that the storefront itself was tiny, and the
larger building housing it cheaply constructed. I can’t recall the businesses adjacent to my mother’s. Was there a liquor store? In front of her shop was the parking lot. I remember her being afraid of the people who walked past her door. Her space was, as I recall, brightly lit. The air-conditioning stayed on high. Carpeting was glued to the floor. In the rear of the shop were sewing machines. A tailor’s dummy — or were there two? — half-dressed in one of my mother’s raw-silk works in progress, stood beside a large worktable on which she spread and cut fabric. Scissors lay ready for her to pick up, along with spooled threads, sheets of pattern paper, pencils, measuring tape, and pincushions planted with needles. A particular pincushion comes to mind. It looked like a Holland tomato; it might have passed for a child’s soft toy. Bolts of cloth leaned in corners. The shop’s back door opened onto an alley where my mother went to smoke. She smoked inside, too, constantly, and I remember wondering what her customers thought when they carried home clothes that smelled as if they’d been worn to a nightclub. Wherever my mother was in her shop — standing at the worktable in her bare feet, measuring cloth; or rummaging around in the back, sorting through woollens and silks imported from Asia and Europe; or relaxing, legs crossed, in one of the chairs near the front door — her ashtray and her lighter and her coffee cup were close at hand. Also near the entrance were garment racks draped with clothes left by the few clients who had somehow happened on the place, or who knew my mother from AA or from her life before sobriety.
In this cramped and vaguely unsafe environment, my chains-moking, coughing mother began to realize a fashion aesthetic that was, I believe, arguably original and defiantly antisocial.
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