When We Meet Again

by Kristin Harmel

  “Ah.”

  “But it sounds like Gaertner mentored a handful of artists in the sixties and seventies. We thought my grandfather was perhaps one of Gaertner’s students. Or maybe he knew one of Gaertner’s students.”

  “I see.”

  “Did Gaertner mentor you too?”

  Fromm smiled. “I suppose you could say we all mentored each other. There were several of us from Germany who moved to the States in the 1950s, and we formed a sort of community. Of course there’s no doubt that he—Gaertner—was the most talented among us. And yes, he was very generous in helping others hone their craft early on. But as the years went by, he withdrew more and more into himself.”

  “Is that why his output of paintings declined so sharply in his later years?”

  “I see you’ve done your research,” Fromm replied. “And yes, I suppose that’s why he created fewer and fewer things for public consumption. But he always painted. Once you discover that you can make magic with a brush, painting becomes like breathing. You can’t live without it. Ralph continued to paint well into his nineties.”

  “So you were close friends with him?”

  Fromm sighed. “We had a falling-out toward the end. I’ll always regret that. There was a distance between us in that final year, and I’m afraid it was my fault.”

  I wanted to ask Fromm more, just out of curiosity, but I wasn’t here about Ralph Gaertner. I was here about my grandfather. “Can you tell me more about Peter Dahler?”

  “Yes, of course.” He signaled to the waitress, who hurried over with our check. “But as you know, I am a painter. I believe images tell a story better than words. And that’s why I would like to show you the story of your grandfather rather than tell you. Will you come with me?”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, I was parking behind Arno Fromm’s vintage Cadillac in front of a squat, brick warehouse that looked like it dated back to the nineteenth century. It looked like the kind of place where bodies were dumped. There was something about Arno Fromm that seemed trustworthy, though, so although this visit made little sense, I had to believe that there was a purpose in bringing me here.

  Fromm got out of his car, slammed the door, and turned to me with raised eyebrows, obviously wondering why I hadn’t made a move to follow him yet. I got out of my rental car, locked it behind me, and followed Fromm toward the front of the warehouse building. When we reached the door, Fromm stopped and stared at it for a long time.

  “It’s been quite a while since I’ve been here,” he said, putting a hand on the door and sighing.

  “Are you okay?” I asked when he didn’t move.

  “Just awash in the memories.” He took a deep breath. “Emily, dear, would you mind entering the code?” He gestured to the keypad to the right of the entrance. “My hands are shaking.”

  I nodded and stepped forward.

  “The code is oh-seven-oh-five-two-six,” he said.

  It wasn’t until I punched in the numbers that I realized why they seemed familiar. “My grandmother’s birthdate,” I murmured. “July fifth, 1926.”

  “Yes.” Fromm smiled sadly as he pushed the door open and gestured for me to enter.

  The building was musty and stuffy inside, as if no proper air circulation had taken place in months. The atmosphere made it feel like we were walking into a place that had somehow been frozen in time. “Can you tell me where we are and why we’re here?” I asked as our footsteps echoed through the long corridor. We seemed to be heading for a room at the end of the hall.

  “You’ll see in a moment,” Fromm said without turning. “Then, it will all be clear.”

  He stopped in front of the last door in the hallway and entered another series of numbers on a keypad. I could hear something click into place, and then Fromm turned the knob and stepped into the room, flicking a switch on the right to turn the lights on.

  I followed him in, my eyes adjusting to the sudden burst of illumination, and when I realized where we were, I stopped dead in my tracks. All I could process were the hundreds of paintings in the enormous room—some hung on the walls, some on easels, some simply tacked to the sides of cardboard boxes. The ceiling itself was even painted to look like a beautiful sunrise sky, with more graduated shades of purple than I’d ever seen in my life. The windows were all covered with blackout shades, keeping the sunlight out and the paintings preserved.

  “What is this place?” I whispered, transfixed by the barrage of images. But I already knew the answer to my own question, and I think Fromm knew that as he turned to me with a sad smile.

  “Your grandfather’s private studio.”

  “My God,” I murmured as I finally stepped fully into the room and began to take in each painting, one by one. There were rows and rows of them, in clusters and alcoves, and as far as I could tell, they were all of the same woman. My grandmother. In almost all of them, she was wearing the same red, wispy cotton dress that she was wearing in the painting that had been mailed to me. And in most, she was standing in the middle of sugarcane fields, or on the edge of backdrops that reminded me of the Everglades. I was positive now that the paintings were of Belle Creek. “My grandfather was a painter too.”

  “Oh yes. And Margaret was the love of his life,” Fromm said quietly. “He couldn’t stop painting her, no matter how hard he tried. So he did it here, where he could keep every one of the paintings. It was his own private place, a place where she always surrounded him.”

  As I walked around the room, dazed by the sheer volume of images dedicated to a woman I loved and missed so much, I realized that small pockets of the studio were dedicated to different settings. One corner, for example, included paintings of my grandmother walking through the streets of what appeared to be a Bavarian town. It might even have been Munich. “I think this was during a time when he was imagining what life would have been like if he’d been able to simply take her home with him,” Fromm said from behind me. “You see, there are even some where your grandmother is holding a baby.”

  “He was thinking about what life could have been like if he’d known his son,” I murmured. “Do you mind if I take a few pictures with my phone?”

  “Snap away,” Fromm said.

  I knew I’d have to show my father these paintings, to let him know that he’d been loved, even if his father had wrongly believed him dead. Loving someone from afar was a powerful thing too. It was the way I’d felt about Nick for the last nineteen years, although I’d never had the courage to reach out across the divide. It was the way I’d always felt about Catherine, although there was no way to find her. But the lack of physical contact hadn’t made me love them any less, and I realized that perhaps it had been the same for my grandfather. He had never stopped loving the woman and child he thought he’d lost.

  I found more paintings of my grandmother as a young woman in Belle Creek, and another cluster where she was painted as an older woman. I knew my grandfather had imagined how she might have looked if she had aged, and he had been almost completely right in his depictions of her. There were crow’s-feet exactly where they’d been in real life, and the tilt of her head and the shape of her smile were so accurate that it was like he had painted her in person. But he’d gotten one thing wrong; her eyes were missing the constant sadness that they’d always carried in the time I’d known her. It took me a split second to realize why. Here, she was painted by a man who loved her, who would have filled her life with happiness. If they had truly found their way back to each other, the sadness that defined her would never have been there. She had grieved for him, I now believed, and if things had been different, she wouldn’t have had to carry that weight.

  I was so absorbed in the paintings, and in the way that they took me down my own memory lane, that I lost track of where Fromm was until he walked up beside me. “Emily? I’d like to show you something else. Can you follow me?”

  I nodded and let him pull me away from the series that included my father as a baby. I followed hi
m down a row that featured paintings of my grandmother as he imagined her in the 1950s, and then in the 1960s. I could discern the era from the fashions and the backgrounds, but also from the way she aged gradually and gracefully as the years went by.

  “So he was the one to paint the image Ingrid Gaertner mailed to me,” I said softly as we walked.

  “Oh, almost certainly.” We stopped in front of a cluster of paintings in the back right corner of the enormous warehouse room. “Here,” Fromm said. The entire space was filled with paintings that were different from the rest. None of them featured my grandmother in the foreground, and although a few of the paintings seemed to include a woman in a red dress far away in the crowd, the work didn’t match the others. But clearly, the artist had been obsessed by the scene. The paintings seemed to depict the 1963 March on Washington. Sunlight gleamed from the Reflecting Pool, and in some of the paintings, I could make out the figure of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a podium in the background. But what made the paintings so extraordinary was the sea of life spreading all across the image. The artist had taken care with each figure, though none of the faces were clear; they were all obscured by the light or turned away.

  “These weren’t done by my grandfather, were they?” I asked, turning to Fromm. There was something familiar about the images.

  “Emily,” Fromm said slowly, “do you know what these are?”

  They were paintings of the March on Washington, and suddenly, I remembered what I’d read about how Gaertner got his start. “They’re Ralph Gaertner paintings, aren’t they? These are drafts of his famous March on Washington series.”

  Fromm nodded. “The series that established him once and for all as an artist to be watched.”

  “But what are they doing here in my grandfather’s warehouse?” I asked, leaning forward in awe. To think that such a famous painter’s works would be sitting in a darkened warehouse on the outskirts of the city was strange. “They must be worth a fortune.”

  Fromm didn’t speak for a moment. “This was the day that changed him.”

  “Ralph Gaertner?” I asked.

  Fromm nodded slowly. “He saw her in the crowd. He was sure he did. But he couldn’t find her after that, so he wondered if he had imagined it, or if he had seen an angel. He had gone to the March on Washington because he felt it was his duty to capture and advocate for social change. I think he still felt a lot of guilt about fighting for Germany at a time when Hitler was trying to eliminate all but the Aryan race. I think this was his atonement, this sort of work that advocated for civil rights.”

  I stared at Fromm, stuck on the first few words he’d said. “Gaertner saw someone in the crowd?” I asked. I glanced at one of the paintings and saw the telltale girl in the red dress, her face turned away, the one who appeared in silhouette in so many of his images. The pieces clicked suddenly into place. “He thought he saw my grandmother,” I whispered.

  Fromm looked me in the eye. “Yes.”

  “And he loved her too.”

  Fromm hesitated. “Yes.”

  I could see something strange in Fromm’s eyes, something that looked like guilt and sadness. Was it because Gaertner had betrayed my grandfather in some way by pursuing my grandmother? What had happened between these three men? I stared at the painting for another moment. “But she was there,” I said.

  Fromm’s eyes widened. “Margaret? She was at the March on Washington?”

  I nodded. “With my father.”

  Fromm’s eyes filled. “So he was right. My God, he always said he’d seen an older boy with her.” He leaned closer to one of the images and pointed to a gangly young man who stood partially behind the woman in the red dress, his face in the shadows. “Here,” Fromm said. “And here.” He pointed to another one of the series in which a man in his late teens was clearly visible. I had to admit, he bore a resemblance to my father.

  “But why?” I asked. “Why was Gaertner painting my grandmother all these years later, if Peter Dahler was the one she had loved?”

  “Because, dear Emily,” Fromm said, reaching gently for the painting in front of him, as if he could pull the scene back from the mists of time, “Peter Dahler and Ralph Gaertner are the same man.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  * * *

  CHRISTMAS 1984

  Ralph. Ralph, are you awake?”

  “What?” Peter stirred and struggled to grasp the present. It had been more than twenty years since he had left his old name behind to take on a new one, and still, there were days that he forgot he’d become someone else. The reinvention was never complete, because there was still a part of him living in a past that was long dead. The world had changed—everything had changed—but for Peter, one thing would always stay the same: he would never be as happy as he had been on that warm June evening when he’d last held Margaret in his arms. So the transformation to a new life as Ralph Gaertner was forever unfinished, and there were days he simply forgot to respond to the name.

  This morning, it was Ingrid Beck who was whispering his borrowed name, and despite the fact that Peter had been seeing her for a little over a year now, he was having a hard time bridging the gap between the old and the new. In his heart, he was Peter Dahler, forever committed to Margaret. But now, in this bed, he was Ralph Gaertner, the esteemed artist, who was waking up beside a woman his friends had wholeheartedly encouraged him to date.

  Dating. What a strange thought, at his age! He was sixty-three, for goodness’ sake! But Maus had insisted. Maus, who had been with him all these years. Maus was trying to take care of him, to give him someone to help him move on once and for all. And Ingrid—tall, cultured, beautiful, German-born Ingrid—was supposed to be his window to change. You only get one life, Maus had said sternly. And you are wasting yours, my friend. What good will your paintings do if your heart is forever closed?

  Peter hadn’t been a saint in the intervening years. There had been times—years after Margaret’s death, of course—that a pretty woman had caught his eye at an art exhibit or at a party thrown by a gallery owner. He knew that when a woman wanted him because he was Ralph Gaertner, she would never see beyond the artist to the man he was inside, so it felt safe to spend a night here or there with one of them. He was always gentle and kind with them, but he made sure they had no illusions about a future together.

  Yet Ingrid was different. At fifty, she was thirteen years younger than he, and she too came from Germany, though her childhood there had differed vastly from his. She’d been merely a child when war had ravaged the country, and she’d come of age just as Germany began to rebuild. She loved the country of their birth in a different way than Peter did, and he had to admit, her passion for their homeland was rekindling a long-lost flame in his own heart. She was an art dealer who traveled to Munich and West Berlin frequently for work, and already, Peter had surprised himself by agreeing to go with her on her next trip.

  She made him feel less lonely, and she didn’t seem as impressed by his credentials as many other gallery women did. In fact, right from the start, she had asked him different sorts of questions than he was accustomed to. She didn’t want to know why he painted sugarcane fields and feminine silhouettes in the distance; she wanted to know things like whether he believed in God, how he had dealt with the death of his mother, and how he liked his steak cooked. In other words, she wanted to get to know the real him. But he could never show her everything. He would always be Ralph Gaertner with her, never Peter Dahler. Peter Dahler was dead.

  “Ralph?” Ingrid asked again, running her manicured nails along his spine, making him shiver. She pressed herself into him. “Darling?”

  “Good morning, Ingrid,” he murmured, turning to her, taking her in. She was beautiful; that much was undeniable. In his experience, this wasn’t what women in their fifties were supposed to look like. He remembered his grandmother, round at the edges and graying, and he thought of his own mother, who had only lived to forty-five. She had looked like an old woman even then, ra
vaged by starvation and the anguish of wartime. But Ingrid—blond, beautiful Ingrid—was different. She was a vision, and Peter had to admit, he liked the way it felt waking up beside her. But it was his body responding to her, not his heart. He liked the feel of her in his arms. He liked the way people looked at him when she was by his side.

  And he knew she loved him. It was in her eyes each time she looked at him. He wondered what Ingrid saw in his eyes. Shame? Sadness? Regret? He hoped there was love there too, but he was no longer sure what that meant.

  For him, love had become almost like an illness. You have to stop, Maus had told him again and again, gazing at him with worry. Keeping Margaret with you all the time like this, it’s not healthy. He knew that Maus was concerned about the fact that Peter had converted his attic into a shrine to his lost love. He painted Margaret again and again and again—he couldn’t stop—and then he filled his attic with the images, so that whenever he needed to see her, she was always there. Maus thought Peter was doing something destructive, but what he didn’t understand was that it was the only thing keeping Peter sane. When he was painting Margaret, he was able to go somewhere else in his mind, a world in which he could create the rules, in which he could color in the twists and turns and rewrite the story. The real world, Peter knew, dealt out tragedy, unblinking. But the world he created was something to hold on to, to keep him from drowning.

  But he could never tell anyone else that. So when Maus finally threatened an intervention, Peter bought an old warehouse building in Castleberry Hill and moved the paintings there, intending to slowly distance himself from them. Instead, the obsession grew, and he began to spend more and more time hidden and alone in the warehouse, imagining the life he could have lived with Margaret.

  Since he had begun painting he had always inserted her into his images. He never showed her face in his public work, because he felt that to reveal her to the world would be to give a piece of her away. But she was everywhere, in his every thought, and so he couldn’t help himself. A painting wasn’t complete unless she was somewhere in it. Over the years, art experts had speculated about the shadowy woman whose face was always turned away, and it had become Peter’s trademark as an artist. The Gaertner Angel, the critics called her. Some thought she represented goodness; others said she was the symbol of the solidarity of mankind, and that’s why her face was never shown; she was supposed to be an everywoman. Some even suggested that she represented the devil, for why else would she often be wearing a red dress? But nothing could be further from the truth. Peter was simply painting her as he’d first seen her—as a vision in faded red, floating against a perfect dawn.