I had been in Midtown before on outings with my mother, but never in the company of another boy with my sense of humor and never guided by a cute teenage girl who made people smile when they looked at her. When she hustled us across a street or when she hurried up a long run of stairs, her ponytail bounced and swung from side to side.
My mother had given me fifty cents, the cost of a student admission to the art museum, plus money for lunch. I felt rich and free and ready for fun … but a quiet paranoia plagued me.
At the bus stop from which we had departed, as we waited for our ride, I’d become obsessed with a black Chevrolet parked half a block away, in which two men sat. They were under a tree, in shadow, and I couldn’t see their faces, but I became half convinced that they were Lucas Drackman and my father.
I remembered what Miss Delvane had shared with Mr. Otani when he chatted her up on New Year’s Eve: that her boyfriend, recently divorced, talked constantly about one day getting his son back. If these men in the car were my father and Lucas Drackman, they might follow us. In Midtown, where I’d be far from home and vulnerable, they might try to snatch me.
When we disembarked from the bus, no black Chevrolet idled at the curb or passed by in the jostling traffic, which suggested that my fear was irrational. Nevertheless, it remained with me, a coiled tension at the back of my mind.
We had arrived at the corner of National Avenue and 52nd Street, the historical center of the city. Within two blocks in any direction stood the courthouse, the labyrinthine central library, the finest of concert halls, the cathedral, our oldest synagogue, and several ornate long-standing theaters. The architecture offered beauty at every hand, with buildings of granite and marble and limestone, even the towers, not a single hideous and inartistic glass monolith within two blocks of this core. Here was the most wonder-evoking part of the city, the beauty of order and the ordering power of beauty.
At our backs loomed the First National Bank on the ground floor of its thirty-story Art Deco financial center. Across the street, columned like a Greek temple, stood Kalomirakis Pinakotheke, where we would see a special exhibition, Europe in the Age of Monarchy.
“Kal-oh-what? Pin-ah-what?” I asked.
As we climbed the front stairs, Amalia said, “Mr. Kalomirakis was an early immigrant from Greece.”
“He made beaucoup bucks,” Malcolm said. “I mean, the guy made Scrooge McDuck look like a pauper.”
“He built this beautiful place,” Amalia said, “bought just scads of great art for its permanent collection, and established a trust to ensure its continuation. Pinakotheke is Greek for gallery—but people here tend to call it a museum. I call it bliss.”
I’d always had an ear for beauty, and maybe I’d had an eye for it as well, but until that day, I’d not recognized that the truth in great music could be found also in great art, that the heart could be lifted and the mind sharpened equally by both. By the power of her charm and the contagious nature of her enthusiasm, Amalia that day enormously expanded my world, threw open doors deep within me that otherwise might have remained closed for many years or perhaps even forever.
The paintings in the exhibition were on loan from museums as far away as the Netherlands and Paris, but also from as near as New York City. We saw work by Rembrandt and Vermeer and van Dyck, Georges de La Tour, Jean-Marc Nattier, Caravaggio, Procaccini, and others.
Often, Malcolm would say to his sister, “Tell him the story,” by which he didn’t mean the story of a particular painting but of the painter’s life or an arresting portion of his life. Some were amusing, some terribly sad, and each drew me into the work of the artist more than I, at that rough age, could have imagined.