The violet sky frequently made an appearance in his paintings too, for to him, it represented the meeting of heaven and earth. The world had been an almost unbelievable shade of purple at the moment he first saw her, and since then he had come to believe that it had been God himself opening up the horizon to let all the light in, and that Margaret, his angel, had somehow slipped through. He wondered sometimes if he could still feel her presence because she was always close by, just above him in a violet heaven, looking down.
Then something had changed. Last month, the night before Thanksgiving, he’d had a wrenching dream. Margaret was floating above him, just out of reach, trying to tell him something. But he couldn’t hear her, and she smiled sadly and ascended toward the purpling sky. The clouds wrapped themselves around her like a perfect embrace, and then she was gone.
There was something strange left in the dream’s wake. Over the years, he had managed to mostly let go of the image of the son he’d never had, the baby who had been stillborn and cremated with Margaret. But after that night, he had begun dreaming something else. He’d begun dreaming of the face of his son, what the boy would have looked like if he’d grown into a man, and if that man had gone on to have children of his own. Now, when he awoke in the mornings, sometimes his paintbrush pulled those imaginary creatures from thin air. A man who’d be nearly forty now. A child—a granddaughter who looked like Margaret, Peter decided—who would be young and light, without a care in the world. He began to paint them, and because Maus rejoiced and complimented him for finally moving on, he didn’t tell Maus who the figures were. He knew it was unhealthy. He knew it was wrong. He knew it was a betrayal of Ingrid, who had no idea that he kept a warehouse full of the life he wished he had lived.
In fact, Ingrid had her own idea of what the Gaertner Angel of his paintings represented. Perhaps you were just waiting for me, she said. Perhaps now the woman in your paintings can have a face, for you have fallen in love.
And because he wanted very much to love her, because he wanted his world to be centered in reality rather than fantasy, he made a decision. After that dream of Margaret, he decided to try to let her go. He knew he could never stop painting her, but he had to force himself to move on. Maybe the dream was somehow her good-bye. So on this morning, waking up beside this beautiful woman, he intended to finally make the change that he probably should have made years ago. Maus would be proud.
“Merry Christmas, Ingrid,” he said, giving the woman in his bed a sweet kiss on the lips. He waited, as he always did, for the kind of firework sensation he’d had each time he’d kissed Margaret, but it eluded him. “I will bring you breakfast, my dear. Just wait here.”
She smiled at him, seduction in her eyes. “You won’t come back to bed?”
He blinked. He wanted to. Of course he wanted to. But he had made himself a promise. He had to do this. Perhaps it was the way to become whole again. “Please, I will be right back.”
He prepared a tray for her in the kitchen. Scrambled eggs. Strawberries. Freshly squeezed orange juice. Strong coffee. And a jewelry box. He carried it upstairs, arms shaking, and set it down beside her. He could tell that she’d gotten up and applied a bit of makeup before he’d returned, and there was something about it that twisted his insides. She should know he already found her beautiful. Why did she have to put on layers of artifice? But there was no time to think about it, for she had already spotted the little blue box, was already tearing the white ribbon off, cracking it open. “Oh, Ralph!” she exclaimed, looking up at him with wide eyes.
“Will you marry me?” he asked, swallowing the mysterious lump that had suddenly lodged itself in his throat.
“Oh yes! Yes, my darling, yes!” She pulled the Tiffany solitaire from its perch and slipped it onto her own finger before Peter had the chance to do it for her. “Oh, we will have such a wonderful life together!” she exclaimed, diving toward him on the bed to wrap her arms around his neck. The coffee spilled a little, sloshing onto the bedsheets, and they both laughed. But as she pulled back, already making plans about who she would call first and when they might marry and what kind of dress she would wear, Peter had to look away, because his eyes were wet and cold.
* * *
He wanted it to work. He wanted to love her. He wanted to put his thoughts of Margaret to rest at long last. It had truly been his intention.
And yet as the years swept by, he began to realize it was impossible.
He grew to care deeply for Ingrid, but it was a different kind of love than he’d had for Margaret. He felt an enormous sense of affection, and when Ingrid was happy, he was happy. When something good happened to her, he rejoiced with her. And on the nights when she was traveling for business, he missed her.
But was that love? Was that how it was supposed to feel? He tried to discuss it with Maus once, but his friend would have none of it. You have a perfect, beautiful woman who loves you deeply, Maus had said. Why can’t that be enough? Why can’t you see how lucky you are?
Why indeed? It was the question constantly ringing in Peter’s head too. Why couldn’t he close his eyes without seeing Margaret? Why couldn’t he pick up his paintbrush without wanting to bring her alive in watercolor once again? Why couldn’t he make love to Ingrid without having to hold Margaret’s name back from his tongue?
He knew Ingrid could feel it too. She flinched, sometimes, when he looked at her, and he knew it was because the things reflected in his eyes were wrong. She could read emotions that shouldn’t be there. In bed, there was a growing gulf between them too. Sometimes, at the beginning, she tried to hold him, as if the cradle of her arms would let him be reborn. But with the passage of time, she moved further and further away, retreating into herself. He knew she loved him, and he knew that with each refusal, he wounded her a little more. There was an emptiness inside of him that she could never fill, and after a while, it was a gulf too wide to cross.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
* * *
I don’t understand.” I was staring at Arno Fromm, my throat suddenly dry. How could Ralph Gaertner, one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated artists, be Peter Dahler? My grandfather?
“Peter’s father was a cruel man,” Fromm said, “and after Peter learned that his mother had died and that his father had kept Margaret’s letters from him deliberately, he left Germany. He wanted nothing to do with his family again. But it wasn’t until 1963—after he thought he saw Margaret at the March on Washington—that Peter made the decision to leave the past behind forever, to become someone else entirely. He didn’t know how else to let his grief over losing Margaret go, and he feared that if he didn’t, he wouldn’t survive. Gaertner was in honor of his childhood best friend, Otto Gaertner, who had died in his arms on the battlefield in Africa. And Ralph was for Ralph Waldo Emerson, his favorite poet. The first conversation Peter ever had with your grandmother was about Emerson, and the two of them spent much time quoting Emerson to each other. He said the name would always connect him to Margaret in a way only she would understand.”
I could feel tears in my eyes. “Do you think that’s why my grandmother chose Emerson as a last name too?”
Fromm sucked in a breath. “Emerson is not your married name? I just assumed.”
“No, I’m not married. It’s the name my grandmother took when she left Belle Creek behind.”
“My goodness,” Fromm murmured. “They were connected after all, their whole lives through.”
“But what if it was the false names that kept them apart?” I asked after a moment. “What if they had been able to find each other otherwise?” They had both ultimately believed the lies they’d been told, but the most heartbreaking part of the story was that they had inadvertently created the final, insurmountable obstacle themselves.
“I had a nickname too,” Fromm said. “And I think Peter saw that it was a way to separate from the past. I was a scrawny little man, but the nickname allowed me to sort of reinvent myself as the funny guy. I think that ap
pealed to him, the way that a name allows you to become someone else.”
Something that Werner Vogt had said suddenly clicked. “Are you the one they called Mouse? Or, um, Maus?”
Fromm looked surprised, and then he laughed. “Why, yes. No one but Peter has called me that in many years. Peter found it very funny. I think the name made me disarming. No one is intimidated by a man named Maus.”
“Mr. Fromm, did you and my grandfather know each other in Germany, before Belle Creek?” I asked.
“No. In much the same way Belle Creek brought your grandparents together, it brought me and Peter together. He was my dearest friend, and my journey through life would have been far grayer without him. He brought color to my days, both literally and figuratively. He was a wonderful man, and I wish that you’d known him.”
“Did the two of you paint in Belle Creek?” I ventured. “Is that where you got your start?”
Fromm chuckled. “No, in fact. The two of us never even thought of it. We’d both been raised in homes where boys were allowed only to speak of guns and politics, not of something as insignificant as art. The irony is that in the end, the lives we were both able to lead were supported by the talent we both stumbled upon, almost by accident. Although admittedly, Peter possessed much more talent than I did, in the end. My skills were learned, but his came naturally, as if he’d been born to paint. Then again, I was the one who first handed him a paintbrush, I suppose.”
He explained how he and Peter had run into each other in Munich after the war, how he was working for a construction company, and how Peter was out of work and desperate to return to Margaret. It was Fromm who first began taking home brushes and paint samples, and soon, Peter followed suit.
“The rest, as they say, is history,” Fromm concluded. “For a time, I think the painting saved him. He realized first that he could paint Belle Creek, and then that he could paint Margaret. So for me, painting was a way to make a living, something to be proud of, but for Peter, it became an obsession, a way to remind himself of a world he swore he’d return to.”
“And then he finally made it to America,” I said softly. “And Louise lied to him.”
“She told him Margaret was dead,” Fromm said with a frown. “Eventually, Peter moved away. I don’t think he ever quite stopped believing, though.”
“But then he married someone else,” I pointed out.
Fromm frowned. “That was my fault, I’m afraid. I believed that Margaret was gone, you see, and yet Peter spent more than thirty years looking for her around every corner. He painted her constantly, and it made me worry. When Ingrid came along, well, it felt like she could save him from himself.” He bowed his head. “I sometimes think I was wrong to encourage him so strongly.”
“Didn’t she make him happy?”
“The only thing that made your grandfather truly happy was painting your grandmother. Look around you. This was his world, and I think eventually, Ingrid realized that too. She didn’t know about this place—neither did I, for a while—but we could both feel that he was never with us. Not entirely. His mind was always somewhere else.” He glanced around at the thousand images of my grandmother, all of which were staring at us. “His mind was with her.”
“Why did he marry Ingrid then?”
“He wanted to love her. But wanting and doing are not the same thing, are they? We all thought that she was what he needed: a beautiful, kind woman who truly loved him. Surely she would bring him back to life.” He paused. “I thought he would never take our advice. But I pushed and pushed, and finally, he saw what I was saying. He saw that he couldn’t hang on to Margaret forever without destroying himself. Ingrid was his attempt to move on.”
I shook my head as Fromm began to speak again. “I know now that it was wrong to encourage him to marry Ingrid. Peter broke Ingrid’s heart, you see. She loved him in a way that he could never love her. And that’s why, ultimately, when I discovered this warehouse, I told him he must never tell her. It would hurt too much. And so he spent many of his hours here, painting Margaret day in and day out without fear of hurting Ingrid any further. It was like an affair. Each day, with his paintbrush, he cheated on the woman he had married. But I was wrong, too, to encourage him to keep this place a secret. It became like a drug for him, an addiction, and after a while, Ingrid followed him and found out about it. She discovered that he was living in a world of make-believe instead of living in a world with her.
“He asked me to reason with her,” Fromm went on. “But I wouldn’t. I thought he was wrong. I told him that the only way to salvage his marriage was to get rid of this place—these paintings—once and for all. And that made him furious. He accused me of being jealous of the love he shared with Margaret, and although I denied it, he wasn’t entirely wrong. I had loved her too, you see.”
“You loved my grandmother?”
He smiled sadly. “She never loved me back, Emily. Really, she barely knew me. And she truly only had eyes for Peter. But yes, from the day I first saw her, she was in my heart too. Peter knew that and understood it. He forgave it, because after all, I couldn’t be blamed for the way I felt. I never acted on it. But when I told him he needed to get rid of these paintings and close the warehouse down, well, he wrongly assumed that it had to do with my long-buried feelings. We had a huge argument—the only one we really had in our many years as friends—and I assumed that he’d eventually come around. My pride kept me from apologizing to him, you see.”
“When was this?” I asked, though I already had the feeling it was toward the end.
“Three months before he died. I never spoke to him again.” Fromm sighed. “In any case, I’ve set up a trust that will pay the real estate taxes and insurance for this warehouse from now on. It’s my final gift to Peter—I will preserve this warehouse in his memory, because I can still feel his presence here. The mistake wasn’t in keeping his secret. The mistake was in thinking that I could force him to follow a path other than the one his heart was showing him. I realize now that some of us fall in love just once, and then nothing quite compares to that ever again.”
Neither of us said anything for a full minute. I gazed at the painting of my grandmother to my right, one in which she was standing in a small clearing, surrounded on all sides by sugarcane, looking at the viewer with eyes that were wide and full of love. It made me miss her terribly. In the painting beside it, a hand reached out for my grandmother—my grandfather’s hand, I imagined—and she was reaching back, her face radiant and hopeful. I thought suddenly of Nick, and my heart ached even more. Maybe I was destined to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps, haunted forever by something I could never have.
“None of it feels fair,” I said after a while. “How can two people love each other that much, wind up in the same city, and somehow never see each other? It’s so cruel and senseless. Why do any of us fall in love like that if we aren’t given the chance to find each other again?”
Fromm didn’t say anything for a moment. When I looked up, he was studying the portrait of my grandmother standing in the clearing. “I think they both ran from their pasts rather than running toward each other,” he said slowly. “Yes, they both believed the other was gone, and that was tragic. But if they hadn’t shut down—if they hadn’t reinvented themselves and run—maybe things would have been different. Maybe in the end you can’t run from who you are without destroying your life.”
I digested the words for a minute. “Do you keep in touch with Ingrid?”
Fromm nodded. “Here and there. I think she has never quite forgiven me for keeping Peter’s secret, even when I disagreed with it.” He turned to me. “But she loved him, and you are his granddaughter.”
“And yet she never told you about me. I don’t know when she realized the truth, but she had to know in order to send me that painting.”
He smiled sadly. “Ingrid is a lovely woman. But she’s also a woman who lives in denial. How else could she have stayed with Peter for so long? Still, I think
she’ll want to see you. If I’m right, can you stay in Atlanta for another day?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, then, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go call her now.” He nodded to me and slipped out a side door, leaving me alone with my thoughts. I felt stunned and winded, slapped in the face by a past that had been both so rich and so unfortunate. As I gazed at the paintings surrounding me, I felt a strange blend of sadness and hope. I pulled out my iPhone and snapped a few more pictures of the paintings, because I didn’t want to forget them. I wanted to be able to show my father too.
Fromm returned a moment later. “Ingrid would like to see you tomorrow morning at eight. If that’s agreeable, I can give you her address.”
I nodded, and he said he’d call to confirm the arrangements. On our way out of the warehouse, he added, “You are welcome back here anytime, Emily. This is your history. And please, bring your father as well. But I’m afraid that for now, I must go. I have things to attend to.”
“Of course. Thank you so much for showing me all of this.”
Fromm nodded solemnly. He pulled a notepad from his pocket, scribbled down Ingrid’s address, and handed it to me. Then, he grasped both of my shoulders and looked into my eyes. “My dear Emily, I knew your grandfather for more than seventy years. So I hope you’ll believe me when I tell you that he would have been glad to know you. He always dreamed of having a family.”
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