The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

  But Yale was a grown man, and even if the world wasn’t always a good place, he reminded himself that he could trust his perceptions now. Things were so often exactly what they seemed to be. Take Bill Lindsey here, leaning across the table to Roman, talking about the art professor who “really opened me up, if you know what I mean.” Take the snow out the window, falling so deliberately. Take the waiter, checking his watch.

  2015

  Fiona covered as much ground as she could that afternoon, figuring that even if Claire was no longer here, someone who’d known her when she had been here could be helpful. She tried art supply stores, yoga studios, every vaguely approachable person on the sidewalk.

  Shrugs, sympathetic smiles, confusion. Two people took pictures of the photo with their phones, copied down her number.

  She ought to be back in the States, where Claire was most likely to be. But after they searched the apartment, she could lasso Kurt, with or without Arnaud’s help. Enormous as he was, she could sit on him till he talked.

  She ended up back on the Pont de l’Archevêché. Mostly empty, again. Sections of it were still covered in padlocks, as they’d been in the video, but some panels of chain link had been cleared and covered with plywood. A giant heart sticker was affixed to the sidewalk, an English message printed in white on the red: “Our bridges can no longer withstand your gestures of love.” In the heart’s right atrium, a crossed-out lock.

  On the other side of the bridge, a man leaned over to stare at the tour boat passing below.

  She rested her back against the railing, facing not the water, not Notre Dame, but the width of the bridge itself. It was a cold day, foggy and damp. How long could she stand here, waiting and watching, before someone worried she was a suicide?

  When no other pedestrians were on the bridge, she called Claire’s name down the river. Because it wouldn’t do any good, and wasn’t it nice, for a change, to do something she knew would do no good? She was tired and hungry again, and she needed to get back to the apartment and call Damian before it was too late in the States. She needed to call the store and make sure Susan was running everything smoothly.

  She shouted for Claire ten times. It felt like a lucky number.

  Beginning in fifth grade, Fiona was in the habit of taking the train nearly every Saturday to see Nico while her parents thought she was at Girl Scouts. The leaders never cared if you showed up, so she made sure to put in just enough appearances (the first meeting of the year, the last, the field trips) that she remained on the troop’s roster. But most Saturdays, she’d take the Metra to Evanston, and then the El all the way down to Belmont.

  She’d carry a backpack filled with things she’d filched from the cupboards and refrigerator up in Highland Park. Half a carton of cottage cheese, a stick of butter, leftover chili, a sleeve of Ritz. Spoons, once, when Nico didn’t have enough. Items from his room, so slowly her parents wouldn’t notice: socks, photographs, tapes. She wished she could bring his records, but they wouldn’t fit in her backpack—and besides, his roommates seemed to have plenty. It dawned on her only years later that they hadn’t needed any of the things she’d brought, not really. They could have stolen spoons from a restaurant. Between them, they could have afforded food.

  There were five of them, sometimes six or seven, living in one room above a bar on Broadway. Almost all of them teenagers. She found out only years later, as Nico was dying, that some of them had been hustling. Nico had a job bagging groceries, and between that money and Aunt Nora’s money, and the few dollars Fiona managed to sneak him (she’d steal change all week to pay for her train tickets, give him what was left), he managed to stay off the streets. At least this was what he’d maintained to the end. She didn’t imagine he’d tell her, though, because then she’d have felt it was her fault, that she hadn’t done enough, back when she was only a kid and was doing all she could.

  She would knock on the door and he’d fling it open and say “Feef the Thief!” and scoop her inside. It was Christmas every time, watching him open the backpack, remove the items one by one. His roommates would crowd behind him, cheer for things like the spoons. Once, she managed a bottle of wine. They couldn’t believe it. One of them—was it Jonathan Bird?—made up a song about her. She wished she could remember it.

  Nico had his own place by the time she moved to the city after high school, but a lot of those guys were still around, still called her Feef the Thief, loved to tell these stories right in front of her. “This kid was Robin Hood!” they’d said. James, Rodney, Jonathan Bird. She might not have remembered Jonathan Bird, except that he was the very first to die. So early that he didn’t die of AIDS, because there was no such acronym; he died of GRID. The G stood for gay, and she’d blocked out the rest. Jonathan had been healthy one day, and the next he had a cough, and a week later he was in the hospital, and the next day he was gone.

  It hadn’t occurred to Fiona till just now, her hands gripping the cold bridge railing, that her mother might have known where she was going all those weekends, all those years. As she got older, when Girl Scouts wasn’t a legitimate excuse, she’d made up stories about skating parties, study sessions. Maybe her mother had left her purse unguarded for a reason. As she called Claire’s name one last time into the wind, as the city returned her voice on the wet air, Fiona remembered her mother calling and calling for Nico in the yard when they were kids. Had she ever stopped calling for him? Had she ever stopped leaving coins around, hoping they’d find their way to her boy?

  After Nico died, their mother spent twenty years drinking. Fiona knew she was crushed, but she couldn’t forgive her. They had done this to Nico, her mother and father. Her mother had stood there, crying, arms crossed, the night their father kicked Nico out, but she hadn’t done a thing to stop him. She hadn’t even given him any money. She’d gone and found his duffel bag in the basement, as if that were a favor.

  Over the years, Fiona visited them less and less. She withheld Claire.

  And maybe Claire would have been better if she’d had grandparents, a safety net, extended family.

  Our bridges can no longer withstand your gestures of love.

  Well, fuck.

  She peeled her fingers from the railing.

  She walked back to Richard’s, climbed the stairs toward the smell of browning garlic.

  1986

  In the morning, they ate their too-sweet cherry cobbler, and Bill nursed his hangover, and they watched the snow fall. “He won’t make it, will he,” Roman said. “The counsel.”

  Yale said, “I’m more concerned the rest of them won’t. They’ll say they have to delay because of the snow, we sit around three more days, it all falls through.”

  Even one extra day might mean more interference from Frank, an intervention from Cecily, a telegram from the president of the university.

  “Good God,” Bill said. “Who called in the doom brigade?”

  Roman stammered an apology. His hair, still wet, hung in clumps. One clump had left a spray of water across his glasses. He said, “I mean no one’s called yet, have they? That’s good. It’s a good sign.”

  * * *

  —

  The three of them were there at 9:50, waiting in the car until the bank unlocked its doors. At ten, they stood in the lobby trying to warm back up. Yale cursed himself for wearing Nico’s shoes, which had gotten wet in the snow and let the slush onto his socks. But they’d brought him luck last time, and he was superstitious. Why couldn’t he have claimed Nico’s scarf instead? It might even have smelled like Nico, like Brut and cigarettes. It was Nico’s favorite joke to try to convince people that Carly Simon’s song was about him, about his apricot scarf. “And I am so vain!” he always said. “So you know it’s true!” (“That scarf is not apricot,” Charlie always responded. “It’s orange and gray.” Nico would reply that British men were known to be color-blind.)

  Yale tried not to look a
t the clock above the counter. Despite the snow, despite Nora’s obstructive family: If this didn’t happen today, it would be his failure, his embarrassment. It was a magnification of how he felt when he was the one to pick the movie out of the listings: Although he couldn’t control the action on the screen, he was the one who’d set it in motion, and if anyone had a bad time, it was because of him. Instead of simply watching the movie, he’d watch it through Charlie’s eyes, glancing over for the reaction, listening for laughter. And right now he wanted Bill Lindsey thrilled. He wanted to give Roman the experience of a lifetime. He wanted these curious bank tellers to keep watching, with fascination, as art history was made.

  The snow continued falling in huge, lacy chunks.

  Roman said, “I’m worried the roads are getting worse.”

  But just then Debra walked in, wrapped to the eyeballs in a brown coat, a blue scarf. She said, “One of you has to help Stanley unload that wheelchair.” Yale felt something unclench in his lower back, a muscle he hadn’t even felt cramping.

  Bill went out to the van while Debra talked to a teller, and by the time Stanley and Bill came back through the doors with Nora and her chair, everything was in order. The whole group—Frank hadn’t arrived yet, thank God—followed the teller into the safety-deposit room.

  “Our counsel is on his way,” Yale said to Stanley. They could proceed without him if need be. But then . . . but then, but then.

  They started piling their coats on the long table in the middle of the room, but Bill needed it clear for inspecting the work. He handed out the white gloves they’d optimistically brought from the museum. Debra refused hers.

  Nora wheeled herself up to the table. She said, “This is just ideal, isn’t it? Now we have to tell you, I’ve absolutely bought Debra off.”

  Debra didn’t respond, just nervously twirled her key ring. Her fingers were red from the cold.

  Nora said, “There’s more in here than art, and we’ve decided it’s time to hand some of that over. Jewelry, you know.” Yale wondered why this would be a compelling payoff when Debra could just as easily wait for Nora to die. Maybe it was a matter of everything passing through Frank, the possibility of Frank giving necklaces to his wife instead.

  Yale was afraid to bring it up, but he said, “Where’s your father?”

  “We killed him,” Debra said. “I smothered him with a pillow.”

  Nora burst out cackling. “Well, that would solve things, wouldn’t it? Don’t scare them, dear, they’ll think you really did it. No, what Debra’s done for us is promise her father that nothing will get signed till this afternoon. A lie, but a white one.”

  “I promised him too,” Stanley said.

  Debra said, “He’s sleeping in.”

  But it was 10:15, and Yale imagined that when Frank woke up fully, when he looked around the empty house and thought about the fact that everyone was at the bank without him, he’d show up. Or worse: He had let them leave only to wait on the front porch for the lawyer he’d asked to speed down from Green Bay. Or he was polishing his shotgun.

  Debra’s hands shook as she tried to settle the key in the lock. She looked not just annoyed but terrified. Like someone who’d cut her losses and sold out her father, her rather vengeful father, for what was left of the pie. Yale was still struggling for a response when Roman touched Debra’s elbow. “You did the right thing,” he said.

  Debra said, “Okay, there’s two boxes, but I can never remember which is which.”

  The teller helped her slide out the first large container and carry it to the table. It held the shoebox—Yale carefully lifted the lid and took in the edges of envelopes and folded pages and white-rimmed photographs—plus some velvety jewelry boxes and a large envelope that, when Debra opened it, seemed to contain birth certificates and old deeds. Yale replaced the shoebox’s lid, resisting the temptation to paw through.

  They held their breath for the second container, and when Debra opened it and reached in herself, gloveless, Bill made a noise like a frightened bird. He said, “Please, let me, let me.” Nora, at eye level to the tabletop, couldn’t have seen into the box yet. She sat still, hands folded across her lap, taking long, patient blinks. Yale wondered how long it had been since she’d seen the pieces in person. Stanley stood beside her, attentive.

  The drawings and sketches were contained—dear God—in two crumbling manila envelopes. Below those, unprotected, lay the Foujita watercolor, Nora in the green dress. Yale was looking for paper quality, damage, rips. He was no expert, but things looked both appropriately old and in decent shape. The oil paintings, the alleged Hébuterne and Soutine and the two Ranko Novaks, were rolled and secured with rubber bands. Bill slid the bands off slowly, evenly, in a way that reminded Yale of a man carefully dealing with a Trojan. He called Roman to help, and together their gloved hands unfurled the canvas at an excruciatingly slow pace and held it, by the corners, to the table. It was the Hébuterne, the bedroom.

  Nora said, “Goodness, this is like being pried open, isn’t it? What an odd feeling.” She leaned forward to see the work. Yale could hear her wheeze, fast and thick.

  Yale couldn’t read Bill’s reaction yet, didn’t want to say the wrong thing—what if Bill was busy noting that this was acrylic paint, not oil, that it couldn’t be legitimate?—but something needed to be said. “Nora,” he managed, “we’re so grateful to you.”

  Bill motioned for Yale to come take his place, to be the hands that held two corners down, while he himself stepped back to view it from a distance. And then he let out a sigh—a postsex sigh, a sigh of extraordinary contentment.

  Nora said, “Well, I like that sound.”

  “These are phenomenal,” Bill said.

  “Yes, and you believe me now, don’t you? Your skepticism did not escape my notice!” This was directed at Yale.

  Yale said, “We can’t thank you enough.”

  But now that the art was here, where was the general counsel? It was 10:35. If Herbert Snow didn’t arrive by noon, Yale decided, he’d go ahead with the paperwork anyway. But maybe he should do it sooner. Because what if Frank burst in?

  Bill rushed through the Novak paintings—the man in the argyle vest was smaller than Yale had imagined, the size of a notebook page, while the sad little girl was enormous—and lingered over the Soutine portrait. “That one,” Nora said, “I’ll have you know I stole it from him, which is why it’s not signed. He was going to burn it along with a heap of others. And it’s of me! I couldn’t let myself be burned! Such a strange man.”

  After the paintings, Bill no longer needed people to hold down corners; everything else was flat. He worked as carefully as a surgeon, removing the sketches from the manila envelopes. Yale stepped away, but kept the white gloves on. Like Mickey Mouse, or a butler. Bill asked Nora about dates for the ones that weren’t signed. “I’ll really have to think,” she said. “Ranko’s pieces are earliest. Those are the only ones from before the war. Nineteen thirteen, I’d say. But not the portrait with the vest, of course! No one wore argyle before the war!” She laughed as if this were obvious.

  Bill nodded, bemused.

  Yale went to where Debra leaned against a wall. He said, quietly, “We really appreciate your help. I do understand your side of things.”

  “I doubt that’s true.” She never moved her mouth much when she talked.

  “At least I know I’d be unhappy in your position.”

  Over at the table, everyone else was making noise about the writing on the back of one sketch, flipping it over and holding it an inch above the table. Debra whispered: “She had an amazing life. I’m bored out of my mind, and I’m giving up my freedom to take care of her, when she had these wild years in Paris hanging out with, like, Monet, you know? And she could’ve given me just a little bit of that. But she didn’t.”

  Yale had to give her credit—he’d thought it was all about th
e money, and maybe it wasn’t, after all. He said, “If it makes you feel better, there are absolutely no Monets in there.”

  “Listen, just tell me. How much do you think it’s all worth?” She closed her eyes, waiting for the blow.

  “Oh,” Yale said. “God, it—I don’t know, it doesn’t really work that way. The art market is so weird. It’s not like a diamond, where you could say there’s a certain weight and—”

  “But, like, how much do you think?”

  He couldn’t tell her. In part because it would make everything worse, right when they’d gotten her help. And partly because he didn’t want this poor woman dwelling on it for the rest of her life. He said, “They’re mostly just sketches, you know? A painting by Modigliani would be one thing, but—what’s valuable to us isn’t necessarily worth a ton of money.”

  “Okay.” Her face relaxed. Relief, but maybe a touch of disappointment too. Yale wanted to hug her, beg her forgiveness.

  “Debra,” Nora called to her, “look through the jewelry whenever you’d like.”

  Yale helped her spread it across the empty end of the table. He was almost as fascinated by these necklaces and earrings as he was by the art. They weren’t laden with gemstones, but everything was Deco and chic and bright, stuff out of an Erté print. Yale watched Debra pick things he could never imagine her wearing. A sunburst haircomb, chandelier earrings, a scarab-beetle brooch. There was a necklace with what looked like a real emerald, not that he’d know, and he moved it to her Keep pile. “This could be worth something,” he said.