by Tara Conklin
“Yes, it is great, isn’t it?” Now Lina allowed herself to be excited too and to let Jasper hear it. “And I don’t think anybody else knows about it. I mean, just the two of us.”
“Your secret is safe with me.” Jasper was mock-serious, again teasing her, but this time she laughed, then asked, “Listen, could you tell me your dad’s full name? And date of birth? It would be helpful, if I get that far down the road.”
“March 16, 1947. Christopher Caleb Battle.” He enunciated each word carefully as Lina wrote the name in her notebook. She thought she heard his voice shake just the tiniest bit. Then he added gently, “But you know, I’m still not interested in being your plaintiff.”
“I know, but if I’m searching for Josephine Bell’s descendants, I might as well search for your father. You’re my biggest lead right now, Jasper. Do you have any cousins?”
“One, actually. Though I don’t think you’d like him very much.”
Lina smiled against the phone. “Jasper, I’d really like to see your Bell pictures. I think we can help each other on this. But first I need to see what you’ve got. I’ll be back in New York tomorrow.”
The band had a show tomorrow night, Jasper told her, at a place on the Lower East Side. “You should come,” he offered. “I could show you one of the pictures afterward—I don’t live far from the club.”
“I’ll be there,” Lina said without hesitation, and she registered a prickle along her spine, a fizz of excitement that seemed almost foreign, a sensation she had nearly forgotten herself capable of. But she didn’t allow herself time to consider it fully. Jasper Battle was her potential plaintiff, that was all. They said their good-byes and Lina took out her BlackBerry to e-mail Dan with her news about Josephine Bell. The image of Jasper remained open on the screen of her laptop: his head down, his face hidden.
THURSDAY
At nine A.M., Lina drove back to the Bell Archives. Already the day was bathwater warm, the sky a washed-out blue studded with small puffball clouds. The air smelled of damp and flowers. Nora greeted her at the door, today wearing a loose yellow cotton dress, another row of bracelets, another braid. But her cheer had vanished.
“Those Stanmore people,” Nora began. “They are so full of themselves. I swear, they don’t even care about the art. They act like this is all about them. The Stanmore reputation. What a bunch of phonies. Josephine Bell lived here too! It’s not like Lynnhurst’ll just fall into the ground if she made those pictures. There’s still so much to be proud of.” Nora exhaled loudly and fanned her face with an outstretched hand.
“My sincerest apologies, Lina,” she continued. “I don’t normally get so upset, but it’s been a trying time, these last few weeks. And I was just over there at the Foundation, trying to get the Stanmore farm book for you, which is just sitting there. But they would only let me copy out some pages.” From her bag Nora pulled a messy stack of papers. “Old Mr. Stanmore did not keep very good records so I just had to guess at what to copy. I hope there’s something in here that’ll be of use.”
“Oh, I’m sure there will be.” Lina felt a downward tug of disappointment as the papers spilled from Nora’s hands into an untidy heap on her desk. She summoned a smile. “Thank you for taking the time. I’m sorry it’s caused so much trouble.”
“Oh, no trouble at all. To be honest, it’s good for me to go over there, speak my mind a bit. They all think I’m batty.” Nora lifted her eyebrows and widened her eyes. “Oooh!” she said, and gave a little flap of her outstretched hands. “Please.” And she lowered her hands, pursed her lips. “If they want batty, I will show them batty one of these days.”
NORA LEFT LINA IN THE archives reading room with the copied pages, sixty-eight in total, full of cramped handwriting and columns of figures.
Like Robert Bell, Justice Stanmore had kept a farm book to record information relating to crops, acreage, livestock, yields, as well as the purchase of new slaves, their births and deaths. Unlike the Bell book, Stanmore’s did not list the slaves by name—just gender, age, and a basic description (“mulatto,” “dark,” “R thumb missing”). The name of the seller was usually written, or the auction house, but many purchases were dated only with the year or left undated entirely.
Lina began to read. Her progress was slow. Pages were out of order, dates difficult to decipher, and Justice Stanmore’s writing was barely legible, cramped and slanted so severely that Lina thought he must have turned the paper on its long side to write.
Finally, on page forty-two, Lina found a notation for a purchase from Robert Bell. The date listed was only “1852.” Stanmore paid $5,522 for the sixty-three acres of Bell Creek, all its furnishings, farm equipment, livestock, outbuildings and their contents, and six adult slaves, three women, three men.
No children.
Lina flipped the pages, looked to the margins, searching for any evidence of a child; she read the same lines again and again with increasing disappointment and a frantic speed. She was so sure that Josephine’s child had been born at Bell Creek, that it must have been sold to the Stanmores after Lu Anne died.
Justice Stanmore was sloppy and inexact but he would not have missed a child, not one he had paid money for. No.
Lina looked away from the papers and rubbed her eyes. The boy must have died. Or perhaps he’d been sold at birth, taken away immediately, far from Bell Creek, and Lina would never find him; she would never find Josephine. She checked her watch: 1:36 P.M. She had been hunched over Justice Stanmore’s pages in this gray, airless room for 4.1 billable hours without food or drink; she hadn’t touched the plastic cup of water that Nora had tiptoed in with hours ago.
Lina thought of Lottie’s portrait, the dark eyes, the unearthly, glowing flowers. The distant landscape behind the cabin so much like the sea, a great shifting expanse. Lottie’s bottomless eyes. Waiting. What had she been waiting for?
With a mounting sense of defeat, Lina returned to the Stanmore papers and scanned the remaining few pages. Her right foot, crossed over her left leg, had fallen asleep and she massaged it awake, the flesh tingling with the rush of blood. Those business cards still waited on her desk in New York. She hadn’t called a single person, but tomorrow, back in her office, she would have to. She would find another plaintiff. There was nothing Lina could do about the tragedy of Josephine Bell, another nameless, faceless woman lost to history.
The last page of the Stanmore papers was headed Negro Sales. The transactions here occurred well after Robert Bell’s sale to Justice Stanmore, and the notations seemed to cover only sales Stanmore had made, not slaves he had purchased. Lina scanned the columns of the last page, Justice Stanmore’s cramped handwriting with the oddly shaped y’s and j’s. She was rushing now to finish, her thoughts jumping ahead to the return trip to New York, Dan and Dresser, and the fast-approaching deadline. And then Lina’s eye caught.
One figure was boldly underlined: $2,250. A date, February 10, 1853. And a name beside it: Joseph, age 4. Lina shivered. $2,250 was an astronomical sum to pay for an able-bodied male slave, let alone a child. She would have thought the price was an error. But the underline: look at this, look at what I have done.
Lina stared at the figure, imagining Justice Stanmore’s pale fleshy hand writing the number so many years ago, the hand that accepted the wrinkled bank notes, the dully flashing coins. The boy from Robert Bell’s farm book; that child had been born on August 28, 1848. He would have been four years old. Joseph, age 4.
Lina looked to the column of names, the list of buyers. Who had delivered such a sum?
Sale to Mr. Caleb Harper, no fixed address, Stanmore had written.
LINA EMERGED FROM THE ARCHIVES reading room and made her way to the front of the building, blinking in the sunlight that filtered through the dusty air of the stacks. Nora sat behind the wood counter, her back to Lina, with a pile of index cards and bottle of Wite-Out.
“Nora—” Lina called, enthusiasm making her voice louder than she had intended.
; Nora started and swiftly turned in her chair. “Oh, goodness, you gave me a fright!” she said.
“I’m sorry. I just wanted to thank you for copying the Stanmore papers.” Lina grinned.
“Oh, you’re very welcome. So I take it they helped?”
“Yes. I think so. Do you know anything about the Harper family? A man named Caleb Harper?”
Nora’s lips parted slightly. “Harper?” she said. For a moment her eyes lost focus and she seemed to recede inward, as though she were considering a grave problem that no one could help her solve.
“It seems a man by the name of Caleb Harper purchased a young boy from Justice Stanmore, a boy named Joseph. He paid an astronomical sum. I’m just interested in why. Why would he do that?”
“Why indeed.”
Nora fell silent, her face tense.
“Nora?” Lina ventured. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes, yes. Everything’s fine.” Now her tone was brusque and resolved. “No, I’ve never heard of a Caleb Harper.” Nora half-turned in her chair, looking toward the wall where a framed reproduction of Lottie hung. She turned back to Lina with a bright, brittle smile. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“No, nothing, thank you.” Lina realized she had done something to upset Nora, but she could not guess what it was. “Then I’ll just head back to my hotel … my flight leaves in a few hours.” Lina paused, waiting for a word of explanation, but Nora offered only that same stiff smile. “Well, thank you for all your help, Nora. Good-bye.”
Nora turned back to the index cards. “Good-bye,” she called over a shoulder.
LINA PACKED UP THE RENTAL car and refilled the tank. If she made good time to Richmond, she’d have an hour or so at the Virginia Historical Archives to research Caleb Harper before heading to the airport. On her way out of Lynnhurst, she idled for a moment at the sole stop sign on Main Street. The town lulled in repose, lush and sleepy on this summer afternoon, sunlight slanting low across the grass and through the arching branches of a row of magnolia trees, the flowers open, their cupped petals like small pink hands. Along the sidewalk ambled knots of tourists, mostly women, clutching their guidebooks and the map of Lu Anne Bell’s Historic Lynnhurst, a copy of which Lina had picked up earlier at the tourist information booth. The map rested on the car’s passenger seat, and it fluttered to the floor as Lina accelerated past the stop sign and out of town.
Lina left Lynnhurst, driving slowly through rolling farmland, then speeding up as she hit a wider, newer road. Past a McDonald’s, a strip shopping mall, a gas station, and Lina closed her windows to shut out the humid breeze and turned up the air conditioner. Caleb Harper, she thought. Who are you?
Just after Lina turned onto the freeway, her phone rang. She slowed and carefully pulled to the shoulder.
“Lina, have you left yet?” It was Nora, breathless.
“I’m on my way to Richmond right now. Is everything okay?” Lina winced as a car rushed past with shuddering speed.
“Lina, I have something to give you. Can you stop by the archives on your way? Just for a minute?”
Lina looked at her watch. She didn’t really have time to go back, but she heard an urgency in Nora’s request that seemed the very opposite of her cool dismissal earlier that day. “Did I leave something behind?” Lina asked, though she knew she hadn’t.
“No, nothing like that. I wasn’t sure what to do before, when you asked me about Caleb Harper. I just froze. I apologize, dear. I’ll explain when you get here.”
Indignation and curiosity rose up in Lina in equal measure. “Oh. Nora,” she said as curiosity prevailed, “I’ll be there soon.”
Lina hung up the phone and scanned the five lanes of traffic. Just up ahead she saw a police turnaround, highly illegal for civilian use but extremely helpful for someone looking to change directions fast. Lina waited for a break in the traffic, then accelerated hard and angled the car neatly across the five lanes and into the turnaround. She spun the wheel. The speed of the revolution left Lina with a flash of dizziness, a moment when the clear Virginia sky and the wide verdant fields bordering the road seemed to twist and meld together, a disjointed landscape of vivid blues and grays and greens, but as the car pointed southward, Lina’s head returned to level and she accelerated along the straight road back to Lynnhurst.
LINA PARKED THE CAR AND hurried down the hill toward the archives building. Nora was sitting on the front steps, partially hidden in afternoon shadow. “Lina, I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said. She stood and turned toward the door and Lina saw that her hair was unbraided, beautiful, flowing across her shoulders in silvery cascades of gray streaked a yellowish white, the effect almost ghostly. A colorful embroidered cloth bag was slung across Nora’s body on a thick black strap.
Together they entered the building and Nora turned and flipped the dead bolt, locking them inside. “Last thing I want is a surprise visitor,” she said.
They stopped in front of the wood counter, a few paces apart. Nora started toward the stacks but then changed course, her hair drifting wavelike behind her, and then stopped again, looking to Lina with wide eyes. Nora seemed lost. She took a deep breath. “Let’s just sit on down. We’re alone in here.” She turned in to the public reference area, and Lina sat across from her at a tidy round table. As Nora removed her bag and placed it on the table, Lina saw that her thin fingers were shaking.
“Well,” she said, and drew from the bag a large white envelope. “I want to give this to you. This will, I think, help you in finding Josephine Bell’s family. It’s a document written by Caleb Harper. A sort of story, or letter, though I don’t believe it ever reached its intended recipient. I found it sealed among some papers that came to us from the estate of the Stones, who many years ago bought the farm where Jack Harper and his wife, Dorothea Rounds Harper, once lived. I filed them away in the archives as documents of a general sort of county interest. But this document here”—she patted the envelope—“caught my eye. You’ll see why. It’s a very sad tale, a very sad letter. But I did not connect it directly to Lu Anne Bell until this artistic … scandal came up. And when I realized its significance, well, I took the letter. I took it home.” Pride and some degree of fear wavered on Nora’s face.
“I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, but I couldn’t bear it. I didn’t want the Stanmore lawyers to get hold of it. Lord knows what they would do with it. The shenanigans that have gone on, I can’t tell you. I love Lu Anne, really I do, but I can’t be part of a lie. Josephine made those paintings, not Lu Anne. There’s nothing I or the Stanmores or anybody else can do about that, no matter how hard they try.”
Lina reached out and took the envelope.
“What shenanigans, Nora?”
“Oh Lina, it’s not my place to say. But there’s been a lot of … dishonesty around here. There are so many people upset about this, about losing Lu Anne. Or not losing her, but, oh, it’s hard to put into words. Losing the idea of her. Do you know what I mean? It’s just heartbreaking.”
“I do know what you mean,” Lina said, her voice low. A curtain of dark hair. A sense of contentment.
“And Lina, I’m sorry I didn’t give this to you sooner. I … wasn’t sure I could trust you. And taking something like this, out of the archives, keeping it away from the Stanmore lawyers. Well, I’ll lose my job.” Nora’s voice was thin, and then she said, with more force: “But it’s time, I think. Don’t you?”
Lina nodded.
Nora pushed up from her chair. “Well, I don’t want you to miss your flight. Thank you for stopping back here.”
“Thank you, Nora.” Lina stood and hugged her, their two bodies roughly the same height, each yielding and tough in opposite spots.
Nora stepped back first. “My goodness, I almost forgot to remind you,” she said. “You must be careful with this document! It’s very old, very fragile.” Her tone was all business. “Don’t forget—always handle these pages with cotton gloves. People don’t re
alize, the acid on their fingers. It’s such a struggle to keep all these documents from falling into the dust. A struggle.” Nora sighed and winked at Lina, and Lina winked back.
THE FLIGHT TO NEW YORK traveled through a dark sky; there was no view to occupy Lina, only a blurred reflection of the lighted compartment and a dark shadow of herself in the glass. It was with considerable effort that she did not tear open the envelope that Nora had given her, but Nora’s last admonishing words still rang in her ears—cotton gloves! Cotton gloves! Caleb Harper would have to wait.
Instead Lina unfolded the New York Times she had bought at the airport. Porter’s review of Oscar’s show was due to print today and there it was, spread across the front page of the Arts section, a photo of Oscar wearing paint-splattered jeans and a forced smile beside the Enough portrait of Grace. Lina stared at the grainy photo of her father, his carefully trimmed beard, close-cropped hair, a pair of sunglasses (sunglasses?) propped on his brow. His face presented no emotion, no hint as to why he had created these pictures, what he had been hoping to convey when he painted Grace, his dead wife, in the ways that he did. Lina almost folded the paper away again but she paused. Curiosity, of the kind associated with car crashes and natural disasters, seized her and she began to read:
ART REVIEW: OSCAR SPARROW’S EVERLASTING GRACE
By Porter Scales
Natalie Mason Gallery
West 26th Street, Chelsea
Through August 21
Oscar Sparrow’s new show, Pictures of Grace, offers up searingly intimate, oversize portraits of his wife, Grace Janney Sparrow, an artist who died nearly 20 years ago at the age of 28. Having known Grace myself, I approached his new work with some trepidation. Oscar Sparrow is well known for his artistic riddles; indeed, the intellectual subterfuge he brings to a canvas is part of his appeal, but it can also diminish the emotional experience of his art and, for some, the ultimate heft of his work. Does he merely dizzy us with his layers and clues? Is Sparrow selling us smoke and mirrors? After viewing a Sparrow, I am often left wondering whether the riddle’s answer is worth the exhausting task of the looking. I knew Grace Sparrow as a loyal friend and talented artist with an insightful and inspiring mind. I did not want to see her subjected to myth-spinning contortions. I did not want her torn apart and stitched back together, misshapen and deformed, on canvas.
