“This is what furious looks like. How could she hide this from us? What was she thinking?”
Stella sighed. “She was thinking she had lost her husband. And I’m sure she was in great pain, because I was, also. And she wanted to be able to control what she could and protect her kids the way she thought they needed protecting, and I completely understand that, even if I disagreed with her idea of how to do it. I told her, at the time. I said, they’re going to need to know who Salo really was, and what made him that way. The accident, for example. I know why he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it, but after he was gone, I thought it was important. I told Ephraim, anyway. It might have been the most important thing I told him. Was it?” she asked her son.
“It was all important,” he shrugged. “Everything is important, since I can’t remember him on my own.”
“Wait,” said Lewyn. He seemed to have come fully awake now. “What accident?”
Stella said nothing. Ephraim said nothing.
“What accident?” Lewyn said again. And then I said it, too.
I could tell we were both afraid of the answer. But Ephraim was right: everything was important, and where our father was concerned, this turned out to be the most important thing of all.
We stayed for hours. We stayed long enough that we were hungry again, and Stella cooked dinner for all of us, and I went with Ephraim upstairs to his childhood bedroom. There was a desk at the window, which overlooked the roofs of three houses. Beyond them was the brick wall of the warehouse. “You kept an eye on things,” I noted.
“I did. I saw your brother occasionally, especially in the last few years, before I left for school. Never you or the others.”
“Lewyn took up the mantle,” I said. “I’ve only been out here a couple of times before today. Was it fun to grow up in Red Hook?”
“Except for the skateboarding, a blast. The cobblestones,” he clarified. “But I jest. My mom is extremely protective. She didn’t want me skateboarding anywhere. The Stuyvesant Spectator, that was my sport.”
I looked at him.
“Student paper. “The Pulse of the Stuyvesant Student Body.” No knee-pads necessary.”
“Stuyvesant! That’s some commute from Red Hook.”
“It was a bitch. A girl in my class made a database of commute times for our grade. I was in the ninety-first percentile with one hour twenty-eight minutes average, via two buses and a subway. But there were worse. Kids from Rockaway or parts of Queens. It’s a great school, though. I was very prepared for Yale.”
The desk was covered with files and notebooks, and a laptop. “Your project?” I asked.
He nodded.
I picked up one of the books: We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America.
“I’m … writing about white-to-nonwhite ethnic self-reassignment.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, there have always been Black people passing as white. If they were light-skinned enough, it could be a very attractive opportunity for all kinds of reasons, chiefly economic. But it also happens in the other direction. Much less common. But not unknown. And,” he added, “ongoing.”
“Like that woman, a couple years ago.”
“Rachel Dolezal. Yes.”
“So these are people voluntarily declining ethnic privilege?”
“Essentially. But of course it’s complicated. Anyway, this,” he tapped his desk, “is about someone … in the public eye. I’ve been working on it for nearly a year, with a research team at Yale Daily News. I need to be very, very thorough, not just for myself, though I certainly wouldn’t want to start my career in journalism by making a mistake of this magnitude. I know it’s going to be absolutely cataclysmic for the person I’m writing about. And their reputation. And…” he said carefully, “for everyone who’s trusted them, or worked with them. So I’m here, going back over all the sources, just interrogating every bit of information. I’m nearly ready to publish.”
“I can’t believe you’re my brother,” I told him suddenly. “I’m so happy.”
He smiled, but he was holding back. “I’m happy, too. It was hard not to say anything, last summer. I’m sorry. I promised my mom. She was very distressed about the whole thing. Not just because of the contract. She respects your mother. Salo respected your mother, and she honors that.”
I hugged him. After a moment, he hugged me, too.
When we went back downstairs, Lewyn and Stella were still at the dining table, the open bottle of wine between them. “You should hear this, too, Phoebe,” said Lewyn.
“What?”
“I’m telling Lewyn about the Rizzoli drawings,” Stella said. “Not just a film subject.”
“Oh no?” I said.
“They met because of the Rizzolis,” said Ephraim. “At the Outsider Art Fair.”
“Re-met,” his mother corrected. “I’d already begun working on Rizzoli, though there wasn’t much to film. I’d found a couple of people who’d known him, but there wasn’t a lot of expertise around. Even as a concept, Outsider Art was brand-new, and frankly, at that time, there was only room for one artist.”
“Henry Darger?” Lewyn asked.
Stella sighed.
“Who’s Henry Darger?” I said.
“The Pelé of Outsider Art,” Lewyn said. When I looked blank he added: “The soccer player everyone’s heard of even if they don’t know anything else about soccer.”
“Oh. Well, I’ve never heard of him. Either of them.”
“I loved that your father bought the Rizzolis from the dealer. Certainly there wasn’t any financial upside, absolutely no prospects at all for Rizzoli back then. When I saw the rest of the art he’d collected I really understood what an outlier Rizzoli was, for him. I know he did that for me, so I’d have access to the pictures. And because they were right here, right up the street, I was able to film every piece in detail, which has really been a godsend since I haven’t laid eyes on them since 2001.” She paused. “I asked her for them. Your mother. While we were working on our agreement. Actually, I begged her for them. Not just because of my film. They were a part of my story with your father. Finally, she said she didn’t have them and didn’t know where they were, and if I brought them up again she would terminate our negotiations and I could move out of the house. I didn’t believe her, of course. That she didn’t know. But I had to let it go. I’d already spent a year with a lawyer I couldn’t afford, and I was exhausted and in debt. I loved the Rizzolis, but I didn’t need to own them. I needed to own this house.” Ephraim put his hand over hers. Stella nodded. “I don’t know if your mother understood what those pictures represented to me, or if it was simply because I was asking for them. But I do know that it became something really painful for her, and I felt terrible about that. We were both grieving, and we were both angry. But when Salo was alive, those pictures were in the warehouse, and after I asked for them they apparently were not. Or so I was told.”
“They’re not there,” Lewyn interjected. “We looked, just this morning. And in all the years I’ve worked in that building, I’ve never seen a single piece that matches the pictures I saw online, let alone an entire collection. I would absolutely give them to you if I could. But I don’t know where they are.”
“Harrison does,” I said.
All of them looked at me.
“He does. He wouldn’t tell me. But he does. Mom does, too. I mean, if Harrison knows, Mom knows.”
“Well,” Stella said, after a moment, “after the film airs on PBS, a lot of people will want to see those pictures. Maybe they’ll be more willing to comply with the museum’s request than they were to mine.”
“I don’t think they’ll be willing,” I said. “I think it will take something more. I think we’ll need to come up with something else.”
And we began to work out what that something else might be.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Tabula Rasa
In which it is established, once and for all, that Oppenheimer is not a particularly common name