Under the Egg

by Laura Marx Fitzgerald

  “I know, I know, you keep telling me—”

  “One day I’ll pass on, and this house will be yours. This house and everything in it. It’s the only legacy I can offer you. But it will also be your burden to shoulder—to finish the work that I couldn’t.”

  At the time, I had assumed that burden was my mother. Jack’s expectations had always been clear: That I would take care of my mom the same way he dropped out of school to support his own mother through the Depression.

  But it was only now, on this morning out in the garden with Bodhi, that I remembered those words and wondered if the painting was the burden Jack intended. Or the legacy. Or both.

  I was jarred back to the moment by the familiar thwack of Madame Dumont’s screen door. As expected, two eyes and a beehive appeared over the wooden fence. Jack always regretted that he’d made that fence too short.

  “Oh, good, Theodora,” she launched in without a glance Bodhi’s way, “I need to speak with you. Alors, your mother’s debt is now to two hundred and twenty-nine dollars—”

  My mouth gaped open but no words came out. “What?” I finally sputtered. “Why? I told my mom to stop going to the tea shop. I told you to stop selling her tea!”

  “She never had the Smoked Oolong. It has a certain je ne sais quoi.” Yes, we get it, Madame Dumont. You’re French. “This is becoming very serious, you see? I would hate to—comment dit-on?—to retain counsel.”

  My head was spinning. “Counsel? What’s counsel?”

  “A lawyer,” she replied icily. “And when I speak to this lawyer, I will also ask about the city noise regulations. For your roosters.”

  “For the last time!” I exploded, embarrassed at the unhinged screeching in my ears but too angry to stop myself. “We don’t have any roosters! We have never had roosters! For fifty, sixty, maybe even two hundred years, we have not had roosters! For the love of Pete, roosters do. not. lay—”

  An object sailed over my head, a white object that glinted in the morning sun and traveled a perfect arc that led straight to Madame Dumont’s head.

  Now Madame Dumont was the one who sounded unhinged, shrieking as she tried unsuccessfully to shake eggshell and egg whites out of her helmet of hair, all the while dodging the new missiles Bodhi lobbed her way.

  She let fly a string of French not found in a school textbook, pausing long enough to pronounce us: “Wicked, wicked girls! I will take this to my lawyer. No, to the police! I will! You wait and see!” Madame Dumont’s screen door slammed closed again.

  “Who was that anyway?” Bodhi turned to me, lightly tossing the last egg back and forth between her hands. “Kind of a cranky old baguette, right?”

  Frozen in place, I stood stunned and staring at that last egg in Bodhi’s hand.

  “You okay?”

  I tried to take some deep breaths, then began to heave gasps of air, my body shaking as I sank slowly to my knees and fell back, right in the middle of the pecking flock.

  “Oh, man.” Bodhi plopped down next to me and threw her arm around my shoulders. “Oh jeez, I’m sorry, Theo. I’ll buy you more eggs. I’ll buy you a dozen. I’ll buy you a whole bunch of omelettes. I just couldn’t help myself.” She thought for a moment. “I have kind of a problem with impulse control. At least that’s what my mom’s shrink says.”

  But what Bodhi didn’t realize is that great guffaws welling up from my belly were sobs mixed with laughter, dislodging that pit of knots I’d lived with for the last month—for the last thirteen years, if I was honest. I was shocked at Bodhi’s sheer nerve; I was laughing at what Jack would think to see it; I was crying that he never would—and yes, I was mourning the loss of the eggs, too. And as I allowed myself to rest my head on Bodhi’s shoulder—imagine that, on a friend’s shoulder—I laughed and cried to think that I actually had someone to lean on.

  I wiped my sweaty, teary face on my sleeve. “I’ve always wanted to do it. But I could never spare the eggs.”

  Bodhi held up the egg in her palm. “There’s one left. You still have a chance.”

  I stood up and helped Bodhi up, too. “No. I know a better place for that egg. And you’ve earned the right to put it there.”

  • • •

  After a lunch of tomatoes, peppers, and one shared scrambled egg (we used the Egg of Honor we replaced with Bodhi’s more heroic one), we escaped the heat of the house at the Jefferson Market Library.

  I hadn’t been to the library since the day Jack died, and while I mourned the loss of my grandfather, the library came in a close second.

  The public library is the closest I’ll ever come to a shopping spree. Once, twice, sometimes three times a week, I’ll drop in, raid the stacks, wielding my library card like a socialite with a Bloomingdale’s charge account. I grab anything that looks interesting, flipping through a few pages before losing interest or devouring the whole thing in one sitting. And if I don’t like it, I can return it. It’s the only place where I can be wasteful with no consequences.

  As long as I return the books on time.

  The day Jack died was also the day Franny and Zooey went missing. A missing book meant not only late fines, but a replacement fee. That was a hit I couldn’t afford on $384—wait, $379. Every time I walked by the Jefferson Market branch, I could practically feel Ms. Costello, the ancient librarian, suspending the missing book over me with her liver-spotted hand.

  But now we needed the full catalog of the New York Public Library at our disposal. So I gathered up my entire collection of outstanding books—even the ones I hadn’t cracked yet—and hauled them back to the returns desk as a peace offering.

  I can’t remember the first day Jack brought me to the Jefferson Market Library; we were always just drawn there. “Now, this is my church,” Jack would say as we mounted the deliciously gloomy Gothic tower toward the stained-glass windows above. He always stopped to read “his creed” carved at the top of the stairway: “The precepts of the law are these: to live correctly, to do an injury to none, and to render to every one his own”—a holdover from the building’s original function as a jail and courthouse.

  Today Ms. Costello wasn’t at her usual perch, so we dumped my books in one of those anonymous returns boxes and went straight to the Information Desk. There we found a beefy . . . well, dude, for lack of a better word. With a shaved head, old-timey moustache, and a spiral of tattoos disappearing up his shirtsleeve, he whistled as he zipped around his desk, propelling his wheeled office chair with his shiny two-tone wingtips.

  Bodhi murmured, “Did the library hire a bouncer?” I shrugged. Sure, the library attracted its share of oddballs, but it wasn’t like a biker bar or anything.

  The desk chair stopped mid-slalom. “Whoa! How long have you been standing there?” His voice did not suggest that we were in a library. “What can I do you for?”

  “What happened to Ms. Costello?”

  “Well, they say she retired, but if you ask me, I think she ran off with Vincenzo the janitor, because he quit the same day.” He winked. “Just a hypothesis, though.”

  “Are you . . . a librarian?”

  “Sure am. I’m Eddie.” He reached out over the desk and shook our hands forcefully. “Freshly minted MLIS and at your service.”

  “Nice tattoo.” Bodhi pointed to the baroque symbol on his wrist.

  “Thanks!” Eddie’s volume dial seemed stuck at eleven. “That’s my band’s logo. We play thrash ska on Tuesday nights at the Snake Pit. It’s sick! You guys should come—wait, you aren’t twenty-one, are you?”

  We shook our heads.

  “Never mind. Anyway, what are you guys looking for today?”

  “We’re doing a project,” I said.

  “For school,” chimed in Bodhi.

  “Yeah, summer school.” I pulled out my notebook. “We need to get books on—let’s see here . . .” I glanced at Eddie. “You ready?�
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  Eddie smiled and positioned his hands at the computer terminal like a virtuoso. “Ready.”

  “Okay, we need books on the Italian Renaissance in general, probably the Northern Renaissance too—Flemish, German, Dutch . . .”

  “. . . German, Dutch, got it . . .” Eddie’s fingers flew over the keyboard.

  “Specifically books on Raphael, both biographies and monographs. Also books on art fakes and forgeries, stolen art . . .”

  Bodhi poked me. “Rubbing alcohol.”

  “Oh yeah, something on, I guess, paint chemistry? Or how paint works? Or dries?”

  “. . . Paint chemistry . . .” Eddie repeated and peered into the computer. “Okay. Are you ready for a Dewey decimal avalanche?” He hit print and unleashed a sheaf of paper our way.

  “All righty! Take that, summer school!” Eddie got way more pleasure out of the online catalog than any librarian I’d ever seen. “You’ll need a shelving cart just to get that to the circulation desk!”

  “Oh.” I’d almost forgotten. “But there’s one problem . . . It’s a book. A library book. I can’t find it anywhere—”

  “Gimme your card,” interrupted Eddie.

  I placed my library card on the desk and watched him swipe and scroll. “It’s Franny and Zooey. I know I had it, but. I’ve looked and looked . . .”

  “Whoa, you’re one of our frequent fliers!” he observed, glancing through my record. “I should’ve guessed.”

  “Yes, see, I’m here all the time. I’ve never had so much as a late fee—we can’t really afford late fees—but even if we could, I’m very diligent about—”

  Eddie jabbed the keyboard commandingly a few times and hit return. “Done. The New York Public Library system has absolved you of your sins.” He made some semi-magical signs in the air.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.” Eddie winked again. “Just make sure these don’t go disappearing. Now, what’s next? Modern animatronics? History of the hot dog?”

  “No, I think we’ve got everything.” I started to gather up the stack with its columns of call numbers. “So, you are sort of a research . . . specialist, right?”

  “You got it. MLIS, Master’s of Library and Information Science—with an emphasis on information.”

  “Do you know anything about military records?”

  “Not much myself, but let me introduce you to my dear friend, Google.” Eddie was back at the keyboard again. “You want to find someone’s record?”

  “My grandfather’s.” I pulled the Veteran’s Affairs letter out of my bag and handed it to Eddie. With the discovery of the painting, I wasn’t willing to leave any questions floating around unanswered.

  Eddie tickled his keyboard some more, referring to the letter here and there. “Okay, here’s his draft record.”

  “What, just like that?”

  Eddie grinned. “Just like that. See for yourself.” Bodhi and I leaned over the desk. “There’s the serial number, there’s where he enlisted—here in New York, right after Pearl Harbor—see, December 11, 1941. He was eighteen years old; occupation: artist; and he lived in New York. Class: Private.”

  “So he served in the army?” This was news to me. “Where did he go? Did he fight?”

  “Doesn’t say. This is just the draft record, which tells us he enlisted but doesn’t say which division he got assigned to. For that, you have to submit an application to the National Archives.” Eddie jumped ahead a few screens. “You can do it all online. There’s just a twenty-dollar fee.”

  My heart sank. Twenty dollars meant a week’s worth of groceries, or keeping the lights (and fans) on for another week, or a dent in my mom’s mounting bill at the tea shop—not the beginning of a wild-goose chase.

  Another card hit the desk, but this one was shiny and silver. (“Platinum,” Bodhi would later call it.) “Let’s do it,” Bodhi said.

  Eddie looked skeptical. “Your parents okay with this?” He glanced at me. “Are you okay with this?”

  If there is one thing that Jack always told me, it’s that Tenpennys pay their way. Tenpennys owe nothing to anyone. Tenpennys do it themselves or do without.

  “Yes,” I said decisively. “Thank you,” I mouthed to Bodhi.

  Bodhi shrugged and slid the card across the table to Eddie. “So, how long to get the records?”

  Eddie checked the website again. “Anywhere from ten days to six months.”

  I groaned. “Six months?”

  “Don’t worry,” Bodhi patted my back consolingly. “It’ll take you that long just to read all these books.”

  Chapter Seven

  Bodhi’s mom wanted her to fly out to Morocco and meet some Sufi mystic-to-the-stars, so Bodhi headed off for two weeks with a laptop under her arm. “I’ll handle the Internet research,” she said the next morning as she headed for the airport, her head poking out of the taxi’s window. “I’ll have a lot of downtime once our camel caravan gets to the monastery. They have Wi-Fi and a pool.”

  That was fine with me. The minute Bodhi saw the stack of books on my reading list, she took care to inform me that she was “more of a kinesthetic learner.” And frankly, as much as I loved the library, the less time I had to spend around the creepy guys at the computer terminals, the better.

  No, I would spend the following week where I felt most at home: alone with my books and my paintings. After my morning chores, I’d walk the length of the island to the Met or the Frick, exploiting their pay-as-you-wish policies to trade a penny for a few hours with their Renaissance collections. In the late afternoons, I hunkered down in Jack’s studio, sweating over the reading, paging damp fingers through biographies and histories and the For Reference Only monograph Eddie let me smuggle out: three-hundred-some pages of every painting, sketch, and poem to ever leave Raphael’s hand.

  When I wasn’t reading, I was looking, just like Jack always told me. For a man who found something (or someone) to complain about wherever he went, you would be surprised how much Jack looked for beauty in the world. It was like an effort of forced optimism in the face of his own cantankery. He’d stop me in the middle of the street to check out the filigree work of a manhole cover or call me up to his studio to watch the golden-pink sunlight settle over Wall Street’s towers. “If you stop and look,” he once told me as we gazed at a fireworks display of cherry blossoms on East 11th Street, “you will be amazed at what you find.”

  So I spent those two weeks really looking. I looked at Michelangelos and Leonardos, of course, but also Peruginos, Bellinis, Titians, Georgiones, Simibaldos, Lottos, Pintoricchios, Solarios, Tifernates, Botticellis, Ghirlandaios, and all the Fras (Fra Bartolommeo, Fra Filippo Lippi, Fra Lippo Lippi, Fra Angelico).

  And the more I looked, the more the painting in Jack’s studio looked like a Raphael.

  But this was a problem in and of itself. For one thing, the more likely it was a Raphael, the more likely it was stolen.

  Still, if there was one thing I’d learned from the books on art fakes that Eddie found for me, it was that the best way to “find” an Old Master painting is to really, really want to find one.

  For example, there was this guy in 1940s Holland who specialized in forging Vermeers. Everyone wants to find a Vermeer—there are only about thirty-five known canvases in the world, and each one is worth a fortune. So experts fell all over each other to authenticate this one fake religious painting—even though it was a subject Vermeer never painted, in a size he never painted, and in a style that looked nothing like his other paintings! But everyone wanted to discover a Vermeer, so a Vermeer it became. For a while, at least.

  I had to focus on the hard facts, like when Raphael might have painted this particular Madonna and Child. So when the light faded in the studio each night, I headed down to the kitchen and strained my eyes to read one more book. It was one recommended by Eddie, who had called
it “a backstage pass to the Italian Renaissance”: The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by an artist named Giorgio Vasari.

  Imagine for a minute that you attend Great Painters of the Italian Renaissance High School. Like any high school, you have cliques, rivalries, and big personalities. Vasari is the school gossip. Vying for valedictorian you’ve got Leonardo da Vinci, the quirky supernerd, and Michelangelo, the angry but brilliant loner. Then you have the guy everyone wants to be seen with: the star quarterback who’s been elected both Class President and Most Popular.

  That’s Raphael.

  You could also add “Class Flirt” to his list of titles. According to Vasari, Raphael was a “very amorous person, delighting much in women.” He strung along an engagement to the niece of a powerful cardinal for seven years while he fooled around with his mistress, even refusing to finish the Pope’s frescoes unless she was brought to his villa for “inspiration.” Vasari records his early death at thirty-seven as due to “sexual excess”—a medical condition that I’m pretty sure has since been disproven.

  This true love of Raphael’s, a local girl named Margherita Luti—nicknamed “La Fornarina” or the “Baker’s Daughter”—pops up throughout his work. Raphael adored the plump brunette and used her again and again as a model. Many of those famous Madonnas are based on her.

  He painted her portrait, too: once as an elegant woman in sumptuous robes and a modest veil (La Velata) and once in a pose better suited for a girlie magazine, topless except for a transparent wisp held coyly to her chest.

  Now some scholars deny these two paintings are of the same woman. Some even say that La Fornarina was a myth. But Renaissance artists loved nothing more than to leave little clues and riddles in their paintings, and Raphael was no different. So put the portraits side by side and look for yourself. Why are the women in the exact same pose: half profile, their right hand held lightly to their left breast? Why do they have the same almond-shaped dark eyes, the same Roman nose, the same full lips and dimpled chin?