Max grinned. He cupped hands around the fat unlit candle. His fingers were long and slender and tapering. Even the few unruly black hairs that sprang up close to his knuckles seemed elegant. His mouth was generous, his lips full, and Lizzie realized, with the shock of tasting sugar when you expected salt, that she thought he was beautiful. “I can’t believe he continued to talk to you,” she said, returning to the here and now, trying to brush aside her thoughts.
“Well, it wasn’t as if we became such good friends then and there. But he kept coming back into the gallery. I think he was glad somebody caught it before it became a significant embarrassment.” His craggy face carried a frank, gentle expression. He dipped the heel of the bread in the speckled oily puddle that was all that remained of the olives. “He grew to trust me enough to buy work from us. We sold him the Soutine.”
“The Bellhop?” The painting had come from New York; her parents had first seen it together. Lizzie knew this. “But he saw it in New York.”
“He did,” Max said, nodding. “It had been in a show at the Marlborough on loan from my parents’ gallery. He purchased it from them, years later.”
Lizzie remembered when her parents first saw the painting. She had been eight years old. Her parents separated six months later, and that evening was etched in her mind, one of the few memories she had of them married. Lizzie was supposed to be asleep when she heard her parents’ heated voices rising up the stairs. “Why would I want to own a third-rate sketch from Manet when I can spend the same money and buy something I truly love?” Lynn had said.
“Because it’s a fucking Manet! Because he’s one of the masters of the art world!” Joseph exploded. “And he’s dead, so he’s not making any more masterpieces, which means the value is guaranteed to rise.”
“Nothing is guaranteed. And it’s art. It should be something you love. Like that Soutine.”
“Why can’t it be love and an investment?” A pause. “I’m on your side, you know.”
Her mother didn’t answer for a long time. Finally she said with a flatness that left Lizzie cold, “Who said anything about sides?”
That was the last Lizzie heard of Soutine until she arrived at her father’s house. In those first few awful months in L.A., she would lie on the carpet stomach down and gaze at it. The Bellhop was also a stranger in California. It was only paint thrown on a canvas, but the portrait made her feel less alone.
For Rose Downes, there was no such comfort, Lizzie thought. She had lost everything—her home, her parents, her country. It had been weeks since Lizzie had written her. Maybe the address she had found was an old one. She resolved to look again.
Now Lizzie said to Max: “Do you know where your parents got the Soutine?”
“No. Their records were spotty. But I’m sure they had no idea it was stolen during the war. They would have been aghast, like your father was. In those days, people weren’t as assiduous about checking the provenance as they are today.”
For a moment, neither spoke. Then Max said: “You know your father was very good to my parents.” Lizzie nodded, though she hadn’t known.
“Especially my father,” Max continued. “I can’t imagine anyone having been better to my father. When he started getting sick—it was Alzheimer’s, but it took us a long time to realize that—the gallery became a mess, but he wouldn’t give it up. The more paranoid he got, the more his memory slipped, the more difficult he became. Joseph used to come by, chat with him, listen to the same stories over and over, convince friends of his to buy some pieces. He used to say that my father demented was more interesting than ninety-nine percent of the rest of the world. But really, he saved him. I know he saved me.”
Lizzie was nodding hard. This was the father she knew. She kept nodding, as if that alone might stop her tears.
“Oh, I’m sorry—” Max said, as if just now realizing her distress.
“No, no, it’s okay. I’m glad you’re talking, please keep talking. It’s good to hear these stories, you have no idea.”
“I think I do,” Max said, and he reached across the table and touched her hand. It was a light, evanescent touch. By the time she registered it, he’d lifted his fingers. But she felt jolted by it all the same.
Max cleared his throat. “You know I’m here for you, for you and your sister. If I can help in any way, about anything—please, tell me.”
“I know. Thank you.” She tried to bat away the tap of disappointment she felt when he said “for you and your sister.” What did she expect? He was her father’s friend.
Then she felt her phone buzz. She dug it out, and saw a 310 number she didn’t recognize. Her sister? Miller Perkins? “Hello?”
“Lizzie? Is this Lizzie Goldstein? It’s Rose Downes.”
“Rose!” Lizzie exclaimed. “I was just thinking of you.”
“You were?” Rose’s voice was wary.
“We were talking about the Soutine, Max and I,” Lizzie said, then stopped. What could she say? How could she explain? “You got my letter,” she settled on saying. “I’m glad you called.”
“Yes, you sent it, and I received it. That’s the way the postal system works. I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch earlier. Are you still in town?”
“Yes, for a few more days.”
“Can you meet for a walk tomorrow?”
“I would love that,” she said. She felt Max watching her, and sitting outside in the cool dying light of a March afternoon, Rose in her ear, Lizzie was startled to feel a charge of expectation. There was so much she wanted to know.
4
Leeds, 1940
Acting the part wasn’t hard. Rose had all the props: a cup of milky tea that Mary had brought sat untouched on the night table next to Mutti’s silk scarf with the birds, numerous woolen blankets under which she lay mummified. “I’m not feeling well,” she said from the depths of her bed, only her eyes and nose exposed to the damp air.
“You haven’t been feeling well these past three Saturdays,” Mrs. Cohen said. She attempted to strike a stern tone, but it came out beseeching. She stood in the doorway of Rose’s room, her sharp frame encased in a scratchy brown tweed suit with deep ruby buttons catching what little light there was. “The stitching is fine enough,” Rose’s mother would say. But it would be the jeweled buttons she would linger over, in a hungry manner Rose told herself she remembered well. The buttons are nothing, she wanted to tell Mutti.
Rose bit her bottom lip and didn’t answer Mrs. Cohen for several beats. She had been living in the Cohens’ house in Leeds for nearly a year now. She didn’t like to think about how much time had passed. Here she had turned twelve years old; she had seen the calendar, incredulously, catapult into a new decade altogether. But it had only taken her about a week with the Cohens to realize that silence was her most effective weapon. Finally she said in a thin watery voice, “It’s my stomach.” And in truth, it was. Her stomach was aflutter, leaping and pirouetting. Hello! her insides seemed to be saying. When are we getting out of here?