“I’m hardworking,” he said. She laughed some more. “I am. When I set my mind to something, I most certainly am.” He rolled down the window, fiddled with the radio dial. Someone was singing about a beautiful balloon. “God, I adore this place,” he said, fingers trailing in the warm air.
At the observatory, Harry bounded about, paying little attention to the magnificent views, all of Los Angeles fanned out below, talking about Rebel Without a Cause and soon enough, his hunger. “Absolutely famished,” is what he said. “Is Schwab’s anywhere near here?”
She exhaled. “Schwab’s is a tourist trap and Lana Turner wasn’t discovered there anyhow. I’ll take you somewhere better.” They drove back down the hill into Hollywood proper, to Carolina Pines Jr.’s. It was just a diner, nothing fancy about it—but she loved the futuristic swoop of the roof, the large glass windows that looked out onto the bustle of Sunset, the warm cinnamon rolls topped with the perfect amount of icing.
A young copper-haired waitress took their order. Rose asked for a cinnamon roll and a cup of coffee. Harry ordered coffee too, and a steak sandwich. And fries. “Wait,” he said as the waitress was turning away. “Can you add a side of chili too?”
She smiled at him, revealing a sweet gap between her top teeth. “’Course,” she said.
“Are you certain you’ll eat all that?” Rose said. “That’s quite a lot.”
“That it is. I’m a hungry boy.”
Rose shook her head while the waitress laughed, twirled her pencil between thumb and forefinger. “You look familiar,” she said. “You’ve been here before?”
“No,” Harry said, and he sat up straight, folded his hands like a schoolboy. “But I’m an actor.”
“Really? Maybe I’ve seen you in something.”
“I don’t think so. But you will.” He said it so seriously; in the moment, Rose nearly believed him.
When the food arrived, Harry tucked in. He ate and he ate, chased the last slivers of onion from his sandwich. After he finished nearly everything on his plate, he tore off some of Rose’s cinnamon roll and dunked it into his coffee. Rose watched, astounded. Her brother had always been a careful and appreciative eater, even before the wartime years; her nephew ate as if he might never fill himself up.
Harry drained his cup of coffee, leaned his long torso back. “You were right; that was good. And now?”
“I thought we’d go by the County Museum. It just opened last year.” She told him about the plaza out front, the Rembrandt portrait that she admired.
Within the hour, they were heading up the stairs from Wilshire to the museum, Harry taking them two at a time. “Oh, it is lovely,” he said. A trio of austere white buildings aproned the plaza, rising up and cutting against the cloudless sky. “When you and Uncle Thomas get sick of me, perhaps I’ll pitch a little tent here.”
Rose didn’t answer. She was staring ahead, shading her eyes. Could the sun be playing tricks on her?
“Auntie?”
Rose was walking toward the museum entrance, feeling light-headed, paying Harry no mind. There was a poster hanging by the entrance, an abstract swirl of a landscape in a blaze of colors—yellows and greens, roiling in movement: chaim soutine retrospective, march 3 to april 18, 1968.
There was such a pounding in Rose’s ears. A Soutine exhibit, here? Opening in less than a week? Harry was saying something—she couldn’t hear him, she couldn’t hear anything—she nodded mutely. He disappeared. And soon Rose was standing alone in front of the admissions desk.
“May I help you?” asked a fleshy woman with glittery cat-eye glasses.
“I’d like to know about the Soutine exhibit,” Rose said. Here she stopped. What did she want to know? “Are there portraits in the show?” she finally asked, feeling a profound sense of anticipation and unease.
“I believe so. There are lots of paintings, close to one hundred, I think.”
“Is there a list?”
“A list?” The woman behind the desk looked perplexed.
“Of the paintings in the show.”
“No. I’m sure someone has one, but we don’t have it. We’re just volunteers. Come back next week; it’s supposed to be terrific.”
Rose nodded, made her way to a nearby bench. She was sitting there when Harry emerged from the restroom. “You ready?” he asked. “Let’s go see that Rembrandt fellow everyone raves about.”
“Actually, I’m not feeling well; let’s go home.”
She didn’t tell Thomas. What was there to tell? She had known about other exhibits of Soutine’s work through the years—significant ones. A show at the Museum of Modern Art a few years before she moved to America, and a show in London at the Tate after she had left. The Barnes Foundation outside of Philadelphia boasted of many Soutines in its collection. She had written to the museums and galleries, requested and received (at no insignificant expense) catalogs of the exhibits, lists of paintings with their provenance included in their collections. The Bellhop had never been among them. What were the chances that it would magically resurface now, at a museum a mile away from her home?
Still Rose felt a low-grade nausea, a blanket of queasiness wrapped around her. The day the exhibit opened, she felt worse. She told Thomas she had a stomach bug and called in sick. She went back to sleep, and by the time she woke up again, even Harry was gone. She finished the dishes and made her bed and tidied up the study too, but all this seemed to be staving off the inevitable.
When she arrived at the museum, there were few people in the exhibit’s three rooms. Rose’s heart resounded so loudly, she felt as if it might crash out of her ribs; she half expected one of the elderly women milling about to hear its beats, look askance, shuffle away. Instead she heard one woman say: “Van Gogh’s work is much more precise, don’t you think?”
Rose looked and looked. Ninety pieces of Soutine’s work were gathered here (“the largest ever exhibition of his in this country,” the curator noted in an introduction mounted at the show’s entrance). She moved past so many—steely faces of waiters, forlorn brides, dizzying landscapes with windswept trees, silvery herrings about to be pierced by forks, skinny, headless, nothing chickens, swaying in front of brick walls.
Then her heart contracted. On a canvas in front of her was a boy in a red thickly swirled uniform. Rose’s cheeks flamed hot, her hands went cold. But no, this boy’s hands were at his side, not on his hips; his eyes were wider, his face paler and pancaked white. He didn’t look as constricted, as sullen, as she remembered The Bellhop being. Rose looked at the card. It was called Page Boy at Maxim’s, painted in 1925. It wasn’t hers.
She kept looking. Ghostly sting rays, their faces eerie and yet humanlike, portraits of a baker’s boy and a man in blue. Huge sides of raw beef, splayed open, entrails exposed with such furious brushstrokes that Rose had to avert her eyes, nearly mistook the paint for blood.