The Chrysalis

by Heather Terrell

  On guard, Mara demanded, “Who are you?”

  “Again, my apologies. My name is Timothy Edwards. I’m the late Miss Joyce’s attorney.”

  “Oh…I guess it’s my turn to apologize.”

  “Not at all, Ms. Coyne. Not at all.” He glanced over at Sophia, uncomfortable with her presence.

  His unease registered with Sophia, who stood. “I guess I’ll take my leave. Mara, if you need anything, anything in the world, please call me.” Sophia’s eyes welled up again. “Again, I’m so sorry.”

  Timothy, as he insisted she call him, asked if they could sit together.

  “Of course.” Mara listened as Timothy shared with her his firm’s long-standing representation of Lillian. The relationship stemmed back to his father’s time and Lillian’s father’s time, and included the handling of Lillian’s father’s will as well as Lillian’s own.

  Mara grew confused. “Timothy, while I appreciate all this history, I really don’t see what it has to do with me.”

  “Ms. Coyne, it has everything to do with you. You’re a beneficiary of Miss Joyce’s estate. She has left to you a painting of particular importance to her, and she has made you the beneficiary of a substantial trust.”

  Mara, who had believed she now possessed a certain immunity from shock, was dumbfounded. She explained to the hapless Timothy her deep feelings for Lillian and her enormous gratitude, but weren’t there others who might prove more worthy recipients?

  Timothy placed his hand on hers. “Ms. Coyne, it’s not for me to understand, or to judge, my client’s wishes. It’s my job to carry out those desires. Miss Joyce came to me ten days ago and asked me to change her will in accordance with her directions. She explained her warm affection for you and the fact that she wanted to leave you the trust and the painting on the stipulation that you would carry out certain work you two had begun.” He cast his eyes down.

  “What kind of work?” Mara thought she knew but needed to hear him say it aloud.

  “I’d prefer to let her explain it to you. She left you a letter, which is back in my office.”

  “Can you at least give me a hint?”

  He coughed, a nervous tic. He obviously knew but was reluctant to say. “I believe it has to do with the restitution of the Strasser paintings. It’s all highly confidential, of course.”

  As they drove back into the city in Timothy’s car, he explained that Lillian had, in fact, no family to speak of. An only child of only-child parents, their legacy was hers exclusively, hers to pass on as she wished. Lillian had earmarked her birthright—not enormous but not inconsequential, Timothy assured Mara—for a number of charities. But, with the entry of Mara into Lillian’s life, that had changed in part.

  Entering his office, Timothy fended off Mara’s relentless questions. “Really, Ms. Coyne, I would prefer Miss Joyce to explain it for herself. Here is her letter.”

  Timothy left Mara to her privacy. She settled into one of his high-backed leather wing chairs and opened the envelope. Tears streamed down her face at the first sight of Lillian’s perfect penmanship. Brushing them away, she savored Lillian’s parting words.

  Dear Mara,

  It feels unbelievably maudlin and trite to be saying—as if we were in some stormy mystery novel—that if you are reading this letter, then my time has come. But it must be so, and rather than wallow in the inevitable, I prefer to discuss the terms of my bequest, which I expect that my steadfast Timothy has now shared with you.

  I am certain that my bequest will come as a shock to you. Oh, I know, you think that I tolerated you at best, but the truth is that I admire you. You alone rose to defend right when no one else would do so—including myself, very nearly. Thus, I have every confidence that you will embrace the conditions for the trust of which you are now the beneficiary: the restitution of the Strasser paintings, as I am loath but forced to dub them, to their rightful owners. I cannot allow my legacy to be besmirched by Edward’s maltreatment of me, even if no one but you and I ever discover it. The return of the Strasser paintings is a necessary tonic for the easing of my tormented conscience and, quite possibly, my wandering soul.

  The bequest of the Miereveld painting above my mantel, however, has no such provisos, no conditions whatsoever. Of all my possessions, it is my most cherished one. I acquired the painting some years ago in commemoration not only of the very first provenance I completed—the now-tainted Chrysalis provenance that launched my career—but also in honor of my distant ancestral relationship to its creator, Johannes Miereveld. Yes, I know, I should have told you of this genealogical tie, but, until very recently, with some private research I undertook as part of our Chrysalis crusade, the connection was only anecdotal, and I felt a bit foolish in flaunting it. In any event, the painting is for you and you alone, and I believe you will appreciate it as no other.

  AS THE CAB DROVE TO FIFTH AVENUE, MARA RAN HER FINGERS along the undulations of Lillian’s apartment key. She got out of the car, and the doormen greeted her with solemn warmth that conveyed their lingering grief. Lillian was a longtime and much-beloved resident, one of the building’s first. Mara consoled herself with the image of police cars pulling up to Michael’s own lavish apartment, with the thought of the punishment she would ensure was exacted.

  As she crossed over the apartment’s threshold, a wave of loss engulfed Mara, a keen sense that she would never know all the sides of Lillian. Yet in Lillian’s private space, Mara hoped to capture more of her lost friend than the tiny sliver she had revealed, to bring her close, even now. Stepping into the foyer, she was surrounded by unembellished, stark white walls and an austere, formal black-and-white marble parquet floor, arranged in the familiar diamond pattern seen in long-ago Dutch paintings. The only decoration was a gleaming round table in the center of the small entryway, with wilted flowers in a vase at its center. Mara recognized Lillian here immediately: the severe Lillian of their first meeting, ever formal, even thorny, on the outside.

  Moving into the next room, Mara felt a softening, a hint of a different, warmhearted Lillian, one she had only begun to know. The room was ivory, of varying textures and hues. Mara touched the damask couch, the marble bookshelves with their varied worn leather spines, including many first editions of Emily Dickinson’s works, the nubby silk drapes that framed the panoramic views of the budding park. Here, too, the ornamentation was sparse. The room’s sole adornment was a portrait over the granite mantelpiece, a seventeenth-century Miereveld portrait. In minute detail, it depicted a middle-aged woman, bedecked in the finery of the day and lustery pearls, challenging the viewer from her black-and-white parquet vantage point. The softly curling map on the table behind her signified her sphere of influence and authority, her unusual empowerment for a woman of her day. Looking closer, Mara made out Miereveld’s distinctive spiky signature. She shook her head in astonishment and wonder that this was Lillian’s unconditional legacy to her.

  Lifting away the final layer, Mara stepped into Lillian’s inner sanctum, her bedroom. Here was the youthful, almost girlish Lillian whom Mara had glimpsed with Julian but would never know firsthand. The walls were apple green; cosmetics jars festooned a vanity table; rosy-cheeked cherubs danced around a country French headboard; and black-and-white photos framed in silver dotted the room. It was clearly and distinctly a woman’s bedroom.

  Mara returned to the living room. She lingered over the chaise longue. With an antique portable writing tray perched on top and an empty teacup nearby, it seemed the space Lillian had inhabited the most, the space she had inhabited last. Wanting to slip into Lillian’s skin, even for a moment, Mara lowered herself into it, settling the tray over her, as Lillian must have done.

  Running her hands over the tray’s peeling edges, Mara felt the outline of a surprisingly deep drawer. She slid it open, finding a cache of documents. From the dates of the faxes and memos within, it appeared that Lillian had kept herself quite busy working away in the evenings on the private project she referenced in her letter; Ma
ra surmised that Lillian must have wanted to learn all she could about The Chrysalis once she discovered how her very first provenance—which had birthed her life’s work—had emanated from such deception.

  Two X-radiographs, special photographs revealing the different, earlier versions of paintings that lay beneath current canvas surfaces, spilled out. The first was of The Chrysalis. Looking closely with Lillian’s monocle, she saw Miereveld’s original handiwork: the standard Virgin’s crown of ivy underlying the bridal crown of myrtle, the addition of a swelling belly where a flat stomach was previously portrayed, the late insertion of the silver mirror capturing Miereveld and his subject, and the transformation of the goldfinch cupped in the Virgin’s hand to the chrysalis. And, in the upper right-hand corner, a dedication to the Jesuits appeared. Mara wondered what Miereveld’s alterations meant. The second X-radiograph depicted the last painting attributed to Miereveld, the Portrait of the Family Brecht. Squinting at the portrait of parents and their two sons, Mara made out a subject painted over roughly in the final portrait, a subject converted into background fabric by an unskilled hand. She recognized the face; it was the same woman depicted in The Chrysalis.

  Mara sifted through the rest of the papers, hoping to make sense of the X-radiographs. Amid a stack, she found a copy of a Guild of Saint Luke document listing the members of the studio Van Maes and Miereveld, including the name Pieter Steenwyck. Behind it were two official forms with the names of Johannes Miereveld and Amalia Brecht; the translations identified the documents as a baptismal registry and marital banns. Beneath these documents were a stack of birth records, including one dated 1662 for a child born of Amalia also named Johannes, and a roughly outlined family tree ending with Lillian and stemming back centuries to Amalia Brecht and Johannes Miereveld.

  But what did it all mean? Bells were ringing in Mara’s head, and the possible Chrysalis story, as unearthed by Lillian, began to take shape in Mara’s imagination.

  It seemed to Mara that Lillian had discovered the true tale behind The Chrysalis’s creation. She had revealed the love between an unlikely pair—a Catholic, tradesman painter, Johannes Miereveld, and his inaccessibly patrician subject, Amalia Brecht—and the hopes that they shared for their joint future. And she had uncovered the enduring fruit of that union: a child, Johannes, Lillian’s distant ancestor.

  Mara speculated that Lillian’s discovery of The Chrysalis’s dual iconography—the overt symbolism of Catholic redemption and the concealed imagery of the lovers—laid bare much more than the truth behind the painting’s formation. She guessed that Lillian had exposed the intertwined nature of the painting’s symbolism and its ownership history. Mara imagined that Amalia’s father, Burgomaster Brecht, somehow learned of The Chrysalis with its double message and banished the painting to the home of his fellow Calvinist townsman Jacob Van Dinter, robbing the painting’s initial patron, the Jesuits, of their commissioned masterwork for centuries. And possibly banishing Johannes Miereveld to obscurity along with it. She hypothesized that Miereveld—and The Chrysalis—had reemerged into the public consciousness due only to the Steenwyck auction, when the Miereveld paintings so painstakingly gathered and stored by Pieter Steenwyck after Johannes’s death, perhaps as an homage to his master, came to light. And she conjectured that The Chrysalis’s ultimate destiny was dictated by its religious iconography—to be purchased by Erich Baum as a source for private veneration; to be rejected by the Nazis because of its Catholic theology; to be embraced by the Jesuits as a lost treasure, once again found; and, finally, to be reclaimed by Hilda Baum as a memorial to her late father.

  Mara lay for a long time in the chair’s embrace, turning the players’ surmised stories over and over in her thoughts. She could barely wrap her mind around the impact Lillian’s discoveries had on the legal ownership of the painting but decided that it didn’t matter. Lillian, the descendant of the ill-fated lovers—and, in some ways, the painting’s rightful owner—would approve of the final fate of The Chrysalis. Rousing herself from her rumination, Mara reached down into her bag for Lillian’s letter. Her eyes raced to the last lines of the letter, which she read and reread:

  Mara, I leave you not with my words but with the words of Emily Dickinson, my most beloved poet. I can think of no better way to call you to rise to the legacy which I bequeath to you.

  We never know how high we are

  Till we are called to rise;

  And then, if we are true to plan,

  Our statures touch the skies.

  The heroism we recite

  Would be a daily thing,

  Did not ourselves the cubits warp

  For fear to be a king.

  Mara understood now what she would do. She would rise. She would let The Chrysalis glide with unfettered wings toward its own uncertain destiny, but she would not yet let the other Strasser paintings go. Each of the paintings told a story more layered and complex than its provenance alone could ever reveal—a story of the passions, hopes, and dreams of the artist, subject, patron, and owners. Mara would set out to uncover these paintings’ deeper lineages and tie the paintings to their past so they could achieve the full destinies that had been stolen from them. Like the Saint Peter of Michael’s etchings, who had been exhorted that “whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in Heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in Heaven,” she would tether their future to their past.

  thirty-six

  HAARLEM, 1662

  THE BURGOMASTER SEES THEIR LONG GAZES. HE NOTES THE absences and daydreams of his only daughter, his prized chattel. Yet he cannot believe her capable of treachery.

  He does not want to receive the unwelcome visitor but knows he must. His duty toward his daughter’s soul mandates it; he must be certain of her innocence, and if he cannot, he must protect her from further sin. He signals for his footman to grant the caller admittance.

  “Did you bring the evidence?” He engages in no conversational niceties. There is no need.

  “I have. Have we reached an accord?”

  “We have.”

  The man hands him a sealed envelope.

  The burgomaster uses his bejeweled desk knife to pry open the waxen seal. Two jagged-edged documents spill out onto the floor. The burgomaster lowers himself to grasp the torn pages. He stares at them: a baptismal registry and marital banns. He looks up at his visitor. “And what of this heretical painting with my daughter portrayed as the Virgin Mary?”

  “You will not ruin him; you will protect the studio? And you will not tell him of our agreement?”

  The burgomaster cares nothing for Johannes; his rise and his fall are meaningless to him. He plans for his daughter’s salvation, as he sees it. So she will go to the highest Calvinist bidder, a wealthy landowner a full four days’ ride away.

  “That is what we have agreed, Pieter Steenwyck. And I am a man of my word. So, tell me of The Chrysalis.”

  Johannes runs down the muddy lane, but even so, he arrives late for their rendezvous. The rain has kept him. His arms spill over with bounty for their picnic; he grins at the thought of Amalia’s certain delight with the delicacies in the basket. They will have to enjoy an indoor banquet for two on this special day, their wedding day.

  The barn is empty. He waits, believing that the rain has kept her as well. In time, he rushes back to the studio; they have but minutes before the marital banns will be read and the priest will expect them at the altar. He hopes that she is awaiting him there, out of the deluge.

  Pieter sits on the stoop. He rises to hold Johannes back from entering. Johannes pushes him to the wet ground and races past him, past the kitchen with its broken pottery, past the spill of paint and shredded canvases.

  “Pieter Steenwyck, what have you done?” he roars. Instinct tells him whom to blame.

  He rushes into the studio, looking for Amalia. Her cape lies trampled on the floor, her wedding veil sits in a dark pool of rainwater, but she is gone. As is Burgomaster Brecht’s portrait, which Johannes had set
aside as a wedding gift to his new family. As is the Jesuits’ painting, The Chrysalis.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  During the early days of my tenure at a behemoth New York City law firm, the seed for The Chrysalis was planted. After a particularly grueling workweek, my close friend and then fellow associate Illana asked me a question, one posed to her in a law school seminar. Would I ever decline to represent a client on moral grounds, even though the client had a solid legal basis for the position it wanted to advocate?

  Over the weeks that followed, her query stayed with me. As I reviewed box after box of discovery documents, I kept asking myself whether such a client really existed for me. After all, like most lawyers, I had the occasional client with a position resting on strong legal principles, though its stance might be tinged around the edges with moral ambiguity.

  Then an article describing the emergence of a few cases in which families of Holocaust victims attempted to recover artwork stolen by the Nazis during World War II captured my attention. I began to do some reading and research in my not-so-copious spare time. Sympathy for the seemingly wronged plaintiffs did not translate into superior legal rights; the law did not seem to favor the surviving family members of Holocaust victims. In fact, the opposite was more likely to be true. I had my answer to Illana’s question: If I was asked to represent a client in its efforts to keep artwork from a Holocaust victim’s heirs, I hoped I would decline, even if precedent supported the client’s arguments.

  This process yielded the backdrop for The Chrysalis, even though its main character, Mara Coyne, does not refuse to represent Beazley’s. The legal landscape depicted in the book is largely accurate. Holocaust survivors and their families filing civil suits as private plaintiffs must deal with many of the same issues faced by Hilda Baum. I did streamline the issues, fictionalize the legal precedent, and heighten the difference between the relevant American and European law, both for dramatic tension and to make a murky quagmire of arcane procedural issues more interesting and accessible.