Stella went back to Oakland, where her life was. Of course she did. Salo, when he thought of her, which was often, had reason to be grateful she lived so far away. But when she came to the city he met her for dinner in some formal restaurant, the kind where people conducted business affairs, not personal ones. And they did have business to discuss, now that the Rizzoli paintings were safe in the collection of a single owner, an owner more than willing to make the works available to her for filming and study. She moved to secure funding from her previous partners: the Arts Council of California, the National Foundation for the Arts. Her project moved at the usual glacial pace, but it did move. Certainly, the film she envisioned was impacted by the public’s unyielding interest in Henry Darger, the painter of little girls at war who, to no one’s surprise, had become the shining star of the entire genre of Outsider Art, casting all other artists into corresponding shadow. Already there were books about Darger, and films about Darger, and innumerable magazine stories about Darger, and the works themselves were making their way around some of the country’s most important art museums. No one seemed interested in a different backward, antisocial guy who’d left his life’s work in a hopeless pile after his lonely death. It frustrated Salo but not Stella, who reminded him that documentary filmmaking was a long game, and any number of superb, even classic films had taken years of dogged stewardship and suffered many varieties of setbacks on their way to getting made. In the meantime, she had actually managed to find a couple of elderly San Franciscans who’d worked with the reclusive draftsman, and a neighbor who’d once stepped into his apartment on the day of his annual exhibition to the public. (And emerged moments later, mystified.)
Our father lived in torment. We understand this now. We also understand that he tried, for a time, to do what he thought was right—he wasn’t Hermann Oppenheimer and Stella wasn’t “Miss Martin from the office”—but also that this right thing was untenable. Twice a year, then more often. He always took her to dinner in staid and well-lit places, and he sat as far away from her as he could, because he was afraid of what might happen. This was the person he’d run into at that strange art fair, he reminded our mother when he came home after their dinners. This was the old friend from college, he said, leaving out the detail of what he had done to her all those years ago. It was exhausting to pretend not to feel what he felt every moment they were together and every moment they were not together. He couldn’t bear the thought of hurting her any more than he already had. He engaged in diversionary tactics: introductions to potential investors, meetings with curators, notably at the Museum of American Folk Art, who were already planning a major show for Darger (of course). He went back to the Outsider Art Fair with her each year. He even brought our mother out to dinner with Stella one January night when the kids were in eighth grade or ninth—Stella couldn’t remember the year and none of us ever asked our mother—the three of them at Aquavit under the waterfall, carefully eating arctic char and talking about this woman’s life in California and the movies she’d made and her current documentary subject, a strange and obscure artist from San Francisco who turned people into buildings.
“What a hard way to live,” Johanna told Salo in the cab, going home. “Good for her.”
It was the last kind thing she would ever say about Stella Western.
Salo, naturally, would have simply handed her the money for her film, but he knew she would never take it, not with their history, which was always between them even if they never spoke of it. The least our father could offer was access to the pictures themselves, to study them, to film them whenever she wanted, a few times to bring in experts to examine them. He had gone back to see Sandro Barth on the last day of that first Outsider Art Fair, intending only to buy one or two of the human buildings, but the Berkeley dealer was anxious to move on, perhaps to other corners of the Outsider market, perhaps to something a little more conventional. By the time their meeting ended later that evening (at one point it moved to the Gotham Bar and Grill), Salo Oppenheimer had purchased the contents of that corner booth two floors above the Henry Darger exhibit, and everything would be delivered a few days later to the warehouse in Red Hook: those strange buildings-as-people and the schematics for Rizzoli’s mythic city and the illustrated poems addressed to his dead mother and even the hand-drawn signs the artist had constructed to hang outside his apartment on that one day per year he allowed the public inside. All of it, comprising the entirety of the extant work of the very obscure (and likely to remain so) Achilles Rizzoli, would spend the next decade in an upstairs room of that former sugar refinery on Coffey Street, behind a closed door. And then it disappeared.
Chapter Seven
Warrior Girls
In which Sally Oppenheimer learns something new
Sally was the first of them to find out, and, for a long time, the only one who knew.
She was a newly minted teenager then, and not thinking about our father much, if at all, just as she wasn’t thinking about our mother or our parents’ marriage, all of which made her a very ordinary thirteen-year-old and, in that respect at least, entirely like her brothers.
Besides, she had other things on her mind.
Fifth grade had been the year of backyard Truth or Dare—a surprising number of Walden kids lived in brownstones, with backyards—and sixth grade had seen the first couples, breaking up and making up in the school corridors, sometimes with the help of intermediaries. By seventh grade there was open speculation about who had gone well beyond kissing, and one particular couple (granted, the boy was a ninth grader) was widely believed to have gone all the way. No boys seemed unduly interested in Sally, which was just as well since Sally was terrified one would be. Three years earlier, she had been so horribly captivated by one of her Pinecliffe counselors, a sweet girl from Shaker Heights who attended Northwestern, that she’d informed her parents she wouldn’t be returning to camp. After this, there had been a fallow period during which Sally just about persuaded herself that the counselor was an aberration, but then Lewyn mentioned that a girl from a popular TV show was actually in the Walden class behind them, and this had proved horribly true. It was obvious that Lewyn himself had a pathetic crush on this person, which only made things more stomach churning, and Sally did her best to defang her feelings by loudly and frequently making fun of her brother. It didn’t help. The girl was so pretty, with long hair parted along a razor-straight line and falling nearly to her waist, and long legs toned from years of ballet. (According to Sassy magazine, she had first been spotted at the School of American Ballet by another girl’s mom, who worked in casting.) Now, Sally saw this girl constantly: in every Walden corridor, in the middle school cafeteria, even in combined gym class, which was excruciating. She saw her in the mornings, on the sidewalk in front of Walden, with her mother. She even saw her one Saturday in Bloomingdale’s as Johanna force-marched her around the second floor, desperately trying to bond. (The girl, by contrast, was with a couple of friends, carrying armloads of stuff to the dressing rooms.) Of course, Sally never once spoke to her. She didn’t want to speak to her. But she didn’t want Lewyn to speak to her, either.
One afternoon, as she was leaving Walden’s signature Ethical Conflict Resolution class, a girl named Willa fell in with Sally and said the strangest thing. It was so strange that Sally actually had to ask her to repeat it, even though she didn’t know Willa all that well and didn’t much like the parts she did know.
“Sorry, what?”
“I said. I saw. Your dad.”
Okay, Sally nodded dumbly. She was fighting the urge to roll her eyes. She had as little interest in her father as Willa likely had in her own.
“With his girlfriend.”
This, undeniably, hit just as intended, and Sally was temporarily robbed of her breath, her speech, and her wits, roughly in that order. More than anything else, the sentence failed to compute, and then, in a great cumulative clanking of pieces sliding into place, it did.
“So?” Sally managed, desperately trying for nonchalance.
“Well, if it was my dad, I’d want to know.”
Ah, but it wouldn’t be Willa’s dad, would it? Willa’s dad was a surgeon who was always flying off to war zones to fix the damaged hearts of poor children. He was perfect. He probably had his affairs safely on the other side of the world. (It was remarkable, Sally observed, that she had gone from ignorance to snark so quickly.)