The Gallery

by Laura Marx Fitzgerald

  —

  But if Mr. Sewell was now Alfonso Vanzetti, who was Alphonse?

  “I am already Alphonse Dupont,” he told me, handing off a swaddled Rembrandt as part of our makeshift bucket brigade. McCagg, Alphonse, Ma, and I manned various points along the stairs and by the dumbwaiter, as Rose’s entire collection of paintings was moved from her room, down the stairs, to the basement hallway, just outside the kitchen.

  Each painting was wrapped in whatever sheets, quilts, and fine silk blankets we could pilfer from the Sewell linen closets. I didn’t know why. I didn’t ask why.

  But I stayed close to Alphonse and to Ma, who each exuded calm in the midst of this bewildering afternoon.

  “I made this name after my brother’s death, to get a job without the prejudice.” Alphonse moved past me, tucking what looked to be the Picasso pomegranate under his arm. “It has worked for me so far. So I will continue with it. Mr. Sewell can have my old name.”

  I handed him another small frame. “Ma—did she know you were . . . Alfonso . . . when she hired you?”

  Ma’s voice came muffled from behind a large canvas she carried, wrapped in a feather duvet. “I didn’t know until you did. With all the photos of Mr. Vanzetti in the paper.” She put the bundle down and caught her breath while Alphonse took it over. “It’s why I sent Alphonse away. I knew Mr. Sewell would have him turned over to the authorities. And by then, I needed him for,” Ma glanced at the hallway operation, “this.”

  I looked back nervously at Alphonse. “So you are an—an—?”

  “An anarchist?” Alphonse looked annoyed, either with me or with the stacked frames that threatened to tumble like dominoes. “Are you a film star because you go to the picture show? Yes, I attended meetings. I attended rallies. I heard different opinions and plans and ideas. I gained knowledge. Knowledge does not change who you are.”

  “But”—I turned to Alphonse—“the bomb on the front steps . . .”

  Alphonse laughed. “That little scorreggia? Mr. Sewell make me to patch that together with rubber cement and firecrackers and leave it there. He knew it would attract the attention of the reporters and let him make his little speech.”

  I sighed with relief. “So you’re not really a bomber?”

  Alphonse looked at Ma, guiltily, I thought. “Not usually.”

  “Did you get everything?” Ma asked quietly.

  He nodded and tapped a brochure that I noticed poking out of his pocket. La Salute e in Voi! read the title.

  “Salute Eeee in—” I asked.

  “It means, ‘health is in you.’”

  “What is it, a recipe book?”

  “Of a kind.”

  Before I could pry any further, McCagg appeared with the largest wrapped canvas—from the shape of it, the Judith with the head of Holofernes. He dropped it with the grace of a dockworker. “That’s the last one. Where to, Miz O’Doyle?”

  Up and down the servants’ hallway, blanket-wrapped presents stood ready for their final destination.

  But where? Out the trade entrance? While obscured, the entrance was still visible from the street. Anyone walking down the side street would see this operation, and something told me this whole scheme was meant to be secret.

  We all turned to Ma for the answer. But she knew as little as we did.

  “Let me get Miss Rose. I’d hoped to let her rest more for the journey, but—” She looked up and down the hallway. Everything was ready. “Let me get Miss Rose.”

  —

  Wearing a patched dress of Ma’s, the headline-making, art-hoarding mad heiress was gone.

  Standing before of us was simply a shabbier, slightly frailer version of anyone you’d see walking down Willoughby Street. She was no one. She was anyone.

  She moved slowly down the hall, economizing her steps, saving her energy for something more important. She dragged her hand over the muffled squares and rectangles like a proud governess seeing her children off to school.

  She kept walking—past the servants’ entrance, past the kitchen, past the stairs that led to the main floor—all the way to the dark, dead end of the hall, where the doors to Chef’s pantry stood closed.

  Rose opened them.

  Slowly she began to remove the cans, jars, boxes of foodstuff from the shelves inside. Ma nudged me, and we moved forward to take them away, clearing away the pantry into neatly packed boxes we stacked in the kitchen.

  Where was Rose going, I wondered, that her journey demanded cans of potted shrimp and caviar?

  The shelves finally cleared, Rose turned to McCagg and nodded.

  Out came a sledgehammer.

  With unmistakable glee, McCagg brought down the full force of his ham arms, splintering the shelves. Then he started in on—good Lord!—the pantry doors and the very walls themselves.

  “Ma!” I grabbed my mother’s arm, hoping she’d stop him, but she put her arm around my shoulders and passed her sense of calm to me.

  The entire wall—up until now nondescript and unnoticed—gave way to McCagg’s brute strength, and within minutes, an entirely new escape appeared in the rubble.

  Just behind that unremarkable pantry, a portal to another world had lain in wait: a double-high, double door, all oak and mahogany and stained glass, that rivaled the main entrance upstairs. It was the kind of grand entry you’d design for visiting millionaires, the kind who took private train cars from their Hudson Valley country houses directly to your door. The kind of private underground platform you could only have built if you were, say, the head of the Union-Eastern Railroad, like Rose’s father, Mr. Pritchard.

  That secret entrance had been long abandoned and built over, and as Rose opened the once-glorious doors, we were greeted not by well-heeled guests but by a windstorm of dust and soot, unleashed as a subway train rushed past on a parallel track.

  Now I understood why the kitchen rattled every five or six minutes (more during rush hour).

  As we all coughed and pushed our way out, we found the platform intact, as were the stairs at its far end. Industrial-looking iron stairs that led up to Seventy-Third Street.

  “Proserpina finally escapes Hades,” Alphonse smiled. And Ma pushed me gently toward the stairs. “Go ahead. Go and see.”

  —

  Though the night’s air was damp and heavy, it felt fresh in my soot-caked nostrils. I peeked my face out the unlocked street door, surprised to find only an empty, dark sidewalk. The nearby streetlamp must have burned out—or had it been clipped with a well-aimed rock?

  I turned back to see the hidden exit behind me, how it blended into the brick and stone, in an anonymous line of trade entrances and fire doors. How many times had I walked past that drab gray facade and unremarkable sign: CAUTION: DO NOT BLOCK?

  I turned back to look up and down the street, shivering from the night’s chill. And from the unsettling presence of a hearse, parked right by the exit.

  I looked closer.

  The driver’s window rolled down slowly.

  I saw, with a smile, that Ma had found the only driver in town who brought his own dancing skeletons, who uncomplainingly shared the passenger’s seat.

  Daddo.

  “I heard you need a getaway driver,” he said with a sadness that served as an apology. “Sorry I’m late.”

  —

  As the bucket brigade reformed, ferrying paintings from the hallway to the platform and up the stairs to the hearse, I saw now where Rose had been heading that night last fall when she fell out of the dumbwaiter (starting that headline-making fire when she accidentally brushed an olive-oil soaked rag into a pilot light). By making her way to the kitchen, she’d hoped to somehow break into the pantry and onto the platform, escaping by that unnoticed street door.

  She’d landed in that Daily Yodel reporter’s notepad instead.

  The notepad.
<
br />   I snuck back inside to Ma’s sitting room, where’d I’d caught the Yodel reporter the night of the party, calling in his report.

  And there behind the drapes in the corner, right where I’d kicked it, was his notepad.

  “Property of Silas Fowler,” it read.

  The operator gave me the number for the Daily Yodel newsroom, which, as I expected, was open even at this time of night. A young cub said he’d track down Silas for me when I said I had the scoop of a lifetime.

  “Who is this?” Silas shouted over the static. “Whaddaya want?”

  “Never mind who this is,” I answered with a calm that would have made Rose proud. “Just come to the Sewell mansion at—let’s say two a.m.—if you want the scoop of a lifetime. And tell your boss to stop the presses.”

  —

  It was almost one a.m. by the time we had the hearse packed up. It had been an ingenious choice, I thought at the time. Roomy enough in the back to fit the paintings stacked one on top of the other, but practically invisible to meddling outsiders. Who’s going to pull over a hearse for inspection?

  “It’s time to go, Martha,” Ma was saying. “Say good-bye.”

  I started with Alphonse who was eager to get upstairs. He had “work to do,” Ma said, and by the presence of Creak and Eek under his arms, I understood it now. He’d leave the skeletons upstairs when he set off the bomb. That would make people believe both Mr. and Mrs. Sewell had perished in the blast.

  Alphonse shook my hand, one colleague bidding good-bye to another.

  “Where will you go?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” he shrugged, but with more a sense of adventure than apathy. “This is the land of opportunity, yes? I can travel light. My only valuables are skills, knowledge, experience. With these, you can go anywhere.”

  “That’s awfully optimistic of you, Alphonse.”

  He laughed and stroked that bare space where his mustache used to be. “Yes, well, I would say I have more—how did you say?—optimism these days. It is a new beginning.” He pulled my ear. “For you too, Martha. Do not forget it.”

  And dragging Creak and Eek behind him, he headed off to set the explosion, like the anarchist he never expected to be.

  “Say good-bye, Martha.”

  McCagg had already run off, his silence bought with the Sewell family silver, on his way to the pawnshops of Woodside and then the Belmont racetrack.

  I hugged Daddo, my arms squeezing the breath out of his ribs in both love and leftover resentment. I extracted promises to write, to visit, to stop drinking, to find a new agent. His breath was warm and smelled of peppermints—only peppermints—as he swore to walk the straight and narrow, and I knew, in his sober state, he’d make it at least as far as Brooklyn.

  That was all Rose needed today. The three of us—Daddo, Ma, and me—helped Rose to the passenger side. Ma settled her in and tucked a small suitcase under her feet. As Daddo took his place behind the wheel, Ma held tight to Rose. They whispered in each others’ ears, wiping their tears on each others’ hair. A warm spring wind carried the smell of green off the park, and I understood why Proserpina’s mother, Ceres, gave the earth back its life just to free her daughter.

  Ma pulled herself away.

  I still stood holding the door, looking down on Rose.

  She looked stronger now. Her hair seemed thicker, flax instead of straw, in its neat but unfashionable bun. Her cheeks were thin but flushed, her eyes no longer sunken but sparkling with excitement. I wasn’t worried she might collapse in drugged fatigue or bolt like a nervous pony. And yet, she looked anonymous. The closer she came to her former glory, the more her exterior lied, told a story ordinary and unremarkable. I think Rose preferred it that way.

  “You did it.”

  “No, it was you.” She grabbed for my hand. Her hand was warm now, like Ma’s.

  “I—I didn’t do anything. Anything I did only made things—” I glanced toward the back of the hearse. “I just mean—you and Ma made this happen. And Alphonse. And Daddo. I just—”

  “You believed me. That was enough. That was what started it all.” She placed her cheek on my hand. “You believed me.”

  I believed her.

  “Say good-bye, Martha,” prompted Ma one more time.

  I took back my hand, still wet with Rose’s tears, and gently closed her door. As soon as I stepped back onto the sidewalk, Daddo turned on the engine and slowly pulled the hearse away from the curb, taking Rose, her gallery, and him away.

  I never saw any of them again.

  —

  Thanks to the call I’d made to the Daily Yodel, the next day the story Rose had orchestrated ran on the front page, as follows:

  BOMB KILLS NEWSPAPER TYCOON AND HIS “WILD ROSE”!

  Priceless Art Collection Destroyed!

  Rose “battier than a church bell!” says maid.

  Chapter

  28

  May 2016

  In the passing years, I’ve made up many stories of my own.

  Some are about Daddo, of the acts he’s created under different names. He had this amazing talent of balancing anything on his face—chairs, bicycles, you name it—and now, wouldn’t that have made a great act? But as I’d flip around the channels on the radio and then the television, I knew there was no place for Daddo anymore.

  Some stories are about Willy and Timmy, about what they would have done with their lives, had they not given them up on beaches in Normandy and Okinawa. I like to imagine Willy pitching for the Yankees and Timmy for the Mets—or more likely, running a joint plumbing business and spending their nights at Dom Donovan’s.

  I loved to picture Mr. Sewell, wasting away in an Italian seaside village where “right now” means “sometime next week” and the top headlines include the bocce results. It would be his very own Sisyphean hell to watch the days wash in and out with no more consequence than the tide. And surrounded by all those Cath-o-licks? I’ve smiled every single time I’ve thought of it.

  But most of my stories are about Rose. Whenever I picked up the paper, I’d scan it for daring women of a certain age. Was this Effie Edelstein, widow and Bronx real estate mogul, Rose reincarnated? Is this Rose, this Baroness Livia Stroganov, the mysterious Russian emigree who founded a cosmetics empire? Or a certain Josie Ann Jenkins, who flew stunt planes, led safaris, and married seven times?

  Other days I found myself resentful that I was reduced to these wonderings and wanderings. Why didn’t Rose “kill off” Mr. Sewell and save herself? Expose him and claim her rightful place—in her house, with her books, furniture, paintings?

  But they weren’t hers, those things. They were her father’s, or Mr. Sewell’s, or some other man’s. I think she relished starting over on her own terms, perhaps even in the life of a Jane Smith in Nowheresville, PA: trips to the grocery, haggling over the electric bill, a little TV at the end of the day.

  Maybe she wanted to rewrite her history, as the hero—no matter how mundane—of her own story.

  This thought stayed with me through the years. When I forced myself to pay attention in class, through nursing school, to stay awake on my feet through the late shift—only to take orders from doctors with half my experience and twenty percent of my brains.

  No. I would be the hero of my own life. I would write the story.

  It’s why I gave up nursing to study pharmacy. Like my friend Dr. Murphy, so many years ago.

  It’s why I opened my own drugstore, where people came to me with their problems instead of the other way around.

  It’s why I never married.

  For years, Ma and I hunkered down in that house on Willoughby Street, stacking locks and deadbolts on the doors, watching the pubs and shops around us become liquor stores with bulletproof windows. Ma died a month after Nixon resigned. It was breast cancer, but she fought it—right there at home—
until her dying breath.

  I carried on alone behind those locks until one spring day around the turn of the new century. I noticed a new place where Joe’s Shoe Repair had been, before Joe moved to his daughter’s on Long Island. It was a coffee shop—well, what we would have called a coffee shop, but what the youngsters called a café, with everyone sitting over a computer and cups of coffee that cost more than the early-bird special at the diner. Another one came, and then a shop that sold bicycles, and then another that sold the same vinyl records that I had put out on the curb when my hi-fi gave out.

  Not long after that, I sold Ma’s house for one million dollars to a young family wearing dungarees.

  So now I was a millionaire. Like Rose.

  I bought myself this place at Shaded Acres, right across from once-fancy Green-Wood Cemetery and the Pritchard crypt on the hill. Looking this evening, as the sun begins to set, I can see the roses just starting their last song of the season.

  Meet me here, they call, where Rose is laid to rest.

  Well, not Rose. Mrs. Eek, actually.

  If these flutters in my heart are telling me something, I’ll be reunited with Mrs. Eek soon. Rose prepared a place for me in that crypt, back in 1929. In those scheming weeks before she fled, she had Ma drop an update to her will in the mail. There was nothing notable about the change. It was so minor it didn’t even occur to the lawyer to alert Mr. Sewell. It read simply:

  In gratitude for their loyal service, I extend to Mary O’Doyle and her offspring the invitation to be buried alongside me in the Pritchard plot, should they wish it.

  Ma did not wish it. The world wasn’t ready to open that crypt, to see what Rose laid to rest, she said. Just look at it—heroes being assassinated, presidents lying, people throwing garbage on the streets. The world doesn’t deserve beauty; they’ll only destroy it, she said.

  But the way I see it is—hasn’t it been long enough?

  Hasn’t the world always been full of monsters and lies? Isn’t it our place to fight them, to tell the truth, to rewrite the story? To ensure the return of spring in a world of winter?