I waited until she’d ladled a bowl for herself and was sitting down before I took my first bite. My dad had taught me to do that. He also taught me to fork some cold potato salad into the gumbo and let the salad absorb some of the thick brown juice, and when I did that now I caught my mother looking at me with a wash of tears in her eyes. I thought if I just didn’t say anything maybe the feeling would leave her and it did after a while and then I began to eat.
We got through dinner and I cleared the table and told her I would do the dishes, to go wait for me in the living room. I didn’t use the dishwasher; I did it all by hand. It took me twenty minutes and when I was done I went to join her. She was sitting in her chair crying and I sat on the sofa next to her and held her hand and neither of us said anything, we just let her cry.
I turned on the TV and we watched a couple of shows and I didn’t once look at my watch, not wanting to have her think I wasn’t enjoying myself. “That was a good gumbo,” I said.
“It wasn’t too salty?”
“No, ma’am.”
Later I asked her if she needed me to take care of anything around the house. She said there was a lightbulb out on the back porch, if I didn’t mind changing it. I had to use a ladder. When I was finished, I sat next to her again. “I met this girl,” I said.
“Oh, Jack, you should’ve invited her over.”
“Maybe next time I will.”
There was more to tell her but I didn’t think I could do it. She walked to the kitchen and threw away the paper tissue she’d been using. She seemed better now. “I’ve liked all your girlfriends so far,” she said, sitting back down. “What’s this one’s name?”
“Rhys Goudeau.”
“Oh, that’s pretty.”
“Mom, do we have any black blood in the family?”
“Any black blood?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why do you ask, Jack? Are you wondering again why your hair is wavy?”
“No, I was just wondering.”
She looked at me and I could see that she knew what I was getting at, what I wanted to tell her had I been able to. She let out a sigh and settled deeper in her chair. “I just want you happy, Jack. It’s what your dad wanted, too. We were never complicated people.”
“Mom, I don’t understand the world sometimes,” I said.
“I never understood it, either, but then I never pretended to. Just do what you know is right, Jack. Good things will happen.”
“Are you feeling better, Mom?”
“Yes, I am. Thank you.”
I kissed the side of her face and she followed me to the door. When I was in my car driving off I slowed and looked back at the house and saw her through one of the windows in front. She had returned to her chair, and now the light of the TV was on her. I felt like pulling over and going back in and telling her that we were more complicated than she knew. But I got past the feeling and drove home to Moss Street, more sure now than ever that everything was going to be okay.
In the dark we covered the windows with sheets of brown contractor paper and used masking tape to keep them in place. Only after we finished did Rhys turn on a flashlight and light the Coleman lanterns. Her face, already damp with sweat, glistened in the cloud of yellow-green light. To make sure we weren’t giving away our presence in the building, she sent Joe Butler outside for a look from the street. He returned through a back door shaking his head. “Darker’n shit,” he said.
“Nothing? Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
They were whispering, although it probably wasn’t necessary. Earlier, when we’d arrived and parked on the side street, there wasn’t a soul in sight. Magazine Street, which generally is trafficked at all hours, was desolate under the humming streetlamps. No dogs barked as we unloaded the ladders and supplies from the van. The key had fit perfectly; the door had opened without a sound. It was so easy that both Rhys and Joe had laughed when I said they should consider a future as art thieves.
Now they were raising an extension ladder and positioning it against the wall with the mural. “We’ll start by taking the tacks out,” Rhys said. “Joe, use these.” She handed him a tack puller and a flat-head screwdriver. “Try to be careful not to dig into the canvas and damage the surface any more than it already is.”
“I wish there was more light up there,” Joe said. The light from the lanterns did not extend beyond the bottom edge of the painting.
“I’ll keep a flashlight on you. Jack, come stand here and hold the ladder in place. Make sure it doesn’t slip. We don’t want any accidents.”
“You got that right,” Joe said, then started to climb.
He worked quickly and when he finished prying out the tacks on the side and bottom edges we raised the ladder higher and he began removing the tacks along the top.
“Joe?”
“What?”
“Make sure you leave some in up there, okay?”
“Remind me why I need to do that, boss.”
“To keep the canvas in place in case the paste can’t support the weight.”
“Will do.”
She kept the flashlight on him but it did little to cut the darkness. He was moving slower now and with more care and deliberation. He seemed to be almost finished when one of the tacks dropped from the darkness into the lantern light and whizzed right past me. The tack hit hard and skittered across the tiles before stopping near where Rhys was standing. “This isn’t good,” she said, leaning over and picking it up. “Joe? Joe, darling, this is unacceptable.”
“One tack?”
“One tack might be all it takes.”
“All it takes for what?” I said.
“For us to go to jail. And for Gail Wheeler to go there. And for the school to close. And for Mr. Cherry to lose his job. Want me to continue?”
“No,” Joe said. “But you could relax a little. And point that light back up here.”
As soon as he started working again I could feel dust falling and then a strip of canvas peeled off the wall and came flying past me and crashed to the ground. It measured only about a foot wide but the heave of dust extinguished both lanterns and left a powdery residue all over my clothes. This time Rhys didn’t say anything, but as she was relighting the lanterns I noticed that her hands were shaking. “Hey, are you okay?”
“Just for the record,” she said, “that wasn’t anybody’s fault.”
“Fault?” Joe said, from the top of the ladder. “Who cares about fault? Of course it wasn’t anybody’s fault.”
“I don’t blame you,” she said to Joe.
“Blame me? How about blame Levette? He put the damn thing up here.”
“Rhys, what is wrong with you all of a sudden?” I said.
She looked at me and smiled, and in the light from the lanterns, with her hair showing different colors, I thought of the Whitesell photograph of her grandmother Jacqueline LeBeau, and marveled again at the likeness between the two.
“That dust is mostly dried paste,” she said. “No big deal.” She was trying to sound like her old self, the confident one who knows everything and never hesitates to share it. “Did you breathe much of it in?”
“It isn’t toxic, is it?”
“It’s just glue—rabbit glue.”
“Thanks. That makes me feel so much better.”
My attempt at humor didn’t register. “Jack, do me a favor, honey,” she was still whispering. “If you wouldn’t mind, take the piece of canvas that fell and roll it up on one of those cardboard tubes. Make sure the yellow surface—the surface where the painting would be—is on the outside. You’ll crush the paint if it’s on the inside.”
Joe came down the ladder and the two of them cleaned the residue off the floor, giving it more attention that it seemed to need. There was nothing left that I could see but they kept cleaning, anyway. Joe was first to stop and he stood watching her awhile. Finally he cupped the back of her arm with his hand. “Good enough,” he said.
&nbs
p; “You think so?”
“We don’t want the sonofabitch too clean.”
Next they positioned a couple of eight-foot folding ladders under the mural and ran matching two-by-fours from the top step of one to the top step of the other, creating a platform. The boards were new and Rhys tested them for strength, bouncing up and down. “This ought to do us just fine,” she said. “Jack, you stay on the ground and watch the ladders and hold the flashlight. Joe and I will remove the panels. These things are pretty heavy and they’re clumsy to handle and they’re going to be a challenge, but we can do it. We’ll hand them down to you, okay?”
“I’m ready,” I said.
Working from the right to the left side, Rhys used a putty knife to scrape each section off the wall. As she progressed, Joe stayed close by her side with both hands on the canvas to make sure it didn’t fall. When she finished scraping under the canvas Joe would reach up with his tack puller and remove the last of the tacks, then together they’d lower the panel for me to hold until they could come down from the platform. We rolled each section onto a tube and then Joe and I moved it off to the side. In the lamplight I could see the sinew of his small arms and streaks of perspiration cutting the film of dust on his glasses. His strength surprised me. Like his voice, it might’ve belonged to a much larger man. Rhys was always first back up the ladder, and then the residue came raining down again. By the time we got the last panel down my hair was powdered gray and dust sat a quarter inch deep on my shoulders. “God, I’m sorry, Jack. I didn’t realize there would be this much.”
“You’re hell with a putty knife.”
“Just hang in there.”
I checked my watch against the lantern and it was a little after 3:00 A.M. “What time does the janitor show up for work?” Joe said.
“Six,” Rhys answered.
“I don’t think we have enough time,” he said.
“Don’t tell me that. We have enough time, we have plenty of time.”
She started cleaning the surface of the wall with an iron brush, more dust from the paste spitting out with each thrust. Joe went outside and brought the van over to the rear door and he and I unloaded the replacement mural and carried it into the building one section at a time. It was good to be outside in the night air, with stars fanned out across the sky and the moon full and shining up past the trees. A truck motored down Magazine Street, but there was no other sign of life, human or otherwise. Joe lighted a cigarette and took a few long drags. “Can I ask you a personal question?” I said.
“This the time you want to be doing that?” He removed a fleck of tobacco from the tip of his tongue.
“Are you a black guy or a white guy, Joe?”
“Am I a what?”
“Are you a black guy or a white guy?”
“The first one.” He looked at me. “Is that important, for some reason? So important it couldn’t wait?”
“The first one. You mean you’re black?”
“Why is that important at four o’clock in the goddamned morning and we’ve broken into a building and we’re stealing a painting?”
“It’s not important,” I said.
“You asked it.”
“I asked it but it’s not important.”
“It was important enough for you to stop what you were doing and make the words come out of your mouth.”
“I was standing here watching you with your cigarette and the question popped in my head.”
“That’s right, that’s what makes me wonder. Of all the things you could’ve asked me you asked me if I’m a white guy or a black guy. What kind of question is that?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It’s a dumbass question from a dumbass motherfucker, that’s the kind of question it is.” He dropped the cigarette to the ground and crushed it with the heel of his boot. “What about you, Jack? You a white guy or a black guy?”
“I’m a white guy.”
“Nice,” he said. “Now you ready to go do some work?”
After we moved all four replacement panels inside he returned the van to the street and I took Rhys’s place on the platform prepping the wall to accommodate the new canvas. She sat on the floor between the lanterns with her legs splayed and sucked hard on a bottle of spring water. I could reach higher than Rhys did but not high enough, so Joe and I raised the extension ladder and he went up and finished the job. We set up the platform again on the folding ladders and Joe and I lifted the first of the replacement panels onto the boards while Rhys lathered glue on the wall. The new canvas wasn’t as heavy as the old one, but it was a bitch to hang. Rhys and I worked from the platform as Joe stood just behind us on the extension ladder. Except for the time I kissed her I’d never been so close to Rhys before and I could smell the shampoo in her hair and the smell of her sweat and I had to remind myself to keep working and not to think about it. By the time we’d hung each panel and hammered in tacks along the edges it was after five o’clock and I could see fatigue competing with panic for control of Rhys’s expression. Panic was winning. “We’ll make it,” I said.
“I don’t know. I think Joe was right.”
“Why all of a sudden are you listening to anything I have to say?” Joe said. “I don’t know shit. Now let’s finish.”
She went back up the ladder with a small can of paint and a small brush and began painting the heads of the tacks to match the yellow of the canvas. She had it all figured out. She’d been able to envision the heads needing that last touch of paint to make them look convincing. Joe removed the paper from the windows and I swept and cleaned the floor with a wet rag mop. “We can’t leave anything behind,” Rhys said. “Not a tack, not a piece of tape, not a mote of dust from the wallpaper paste.”
Joe went out for the van and brought it back around. We loaded the panels for the original mural and then the ladders, supplies and bags filled with trash. The room looked as clean as we’d found it. Rhys, however, refused to leave before inspecting it a final time. She placed both lanterns on the floor and dropped to her knees and crawled around looking for evidence that we’d been there. “It’s dusty here,” she said, peering up at me with a look of recrimination. “You missed a spot.”
“Did I miss a spot?”
“You missed it,” she repeated, then started to wipe down the floor with a paper towel. “Missed it and with all we stand to lose. Goddammit, Jack.”
“Let’s go, we need to go,” Joe said.
I was tired and sore and covered with dust and I could feel the twitching of the muscles in my arms as I stood in the middle of the room looking up at the wall where the replacement mural now hung. It looked exactly like the original. Rhys’s work was so thorough that she’d remembered to put bubbles and other surface defects in the canvas. It also had water stains dripping down under the air-conditioning vents.
“Amazing,” I said.
“To you, maybe,” she said. “The real test will come when Mr. Cherry has a look.”
“And Mrs. Wheeler.”
“Nah, she’s oblivious and half blind to boot. I wish the new tacks were identical to the old ones. The heads aren’t exactly the same size, did you notice?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“And I’m afraid the new paint’s too shiny. Do you see that, Jack? Does the paint on the heads look too shiny?”
“Let’s go, we have to go,” Joe said from the door.
We left as quietly as we’d come, and with daylight just starting to break. I sat in front squeezed between Rhys and Joe. It wasn’t yet six o’clock, but as we turned the corner onto Magazine Street I spotted Rondell Cherry stepping off a city bus stopped a block away. We drove by him and watched in silence as he lumbered down the sidewalk carrying a lunch pail and wearing headphones connected to a small music box at his hip. “You remember what he was listening to that day we first met him?” I said to Rhys.
When she didn’t answer I leaned forward to get a better look at her face. Her hands were tight on the wheel,
whitening her knuckles.
“I think it was some Teddy,” I said, in answer to my question.
“Who?” Joe said.
“Teddy. You don’t remember Teddy Pendergrass?”
For a moment I thought Rhys was crying. But then she turned and faced me and a big powdery smile came to her face. “We did it,” she said.
“Yes, we did,” I replied.
Farther down the street, she lowered her window and stuck her head out, letting the wind blow the dust out of her hair.
EIGHT
Dr. Gilbert Perret, wearing a black turtleneck sweater and wool trousers even in summer, stepped out on the third-floor gallery and summoned me with a finger curling backward. “Here to see Christine, are you?”
“Yes, thank you for the opportunity.”
He seemed to be trying to suppress a belch. It took a moment before I realized he’d meant to nod. “Always glad to show the old girl off,” he said.
Perret wasn’t much older than I was, and yet he might’ve been my superior by at least a generation. Perhaps it was the pair of reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose. More likely it was the rim of hair ornamenting a bald dome ridged with fat blue veins. He smelled like old books. “How was Europe?” I said.
“Cold and rainy but still Europe. Wonderful, in a word. Kind of you to ask.”
We entered the administrative offices. The elderly docent who’d scheduled my meeting with the museum curator welcomed me with a wave as we approached her desk. “Appreciate your help, ma’am.”
“Any time, Mr. Charbonnet.”
The painting hung to the right of Perret’s desk as you entered his office. To the left, and equally impressive, was a French Quarter Mardi Gras scene by Marion Souchon, a mid-twentieth-century Fauvist from New Orleans who also regularly turned up in books about southern art. “My first Souchon,” I said, pointing.
“Ah. But you’ve seen other Asmores?”
“Yes, I have: most recently Beloved Dorothy, from the Neal sale.”
“A real beauty, wasn’t she? And a winning example of the series. But I prefer this one, if only because of the museum’s familial connection to the sitter.”
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