“Self-published,” said Harrison, with deep scorn.
“No, Harrison. Not self-published. A very good academic publisher.” I shook my head. “For some reason I don’t understand, you have made up your mind that he’s some kind of incompetent buffoon. Maybe he was, once. I wasn’t here. But he isn’t today and he hasn’t been for many years. He’s the only brother you’ll ever have, and you’re missing your chance to know him as he actually is. Right now.”
“Thank you, Phoebe. Very heartfelt.”
“And Sally, too. Sally is a wonderful person. And an entrepreneur.”
“Sally cleans houses. Lewyn went off to be a Mormon, like somebody joining a cult.”
“Well, so what? So he went walkabout for a year or two. He had to figure things out, and he did. So did Sally. Just because you already knew everything, that doesn’t mean … I don’t know. That you win.”
“The person who knows the most wins. Not necessarily the smartest. The one who knows the most.”
“Oh my God, Harrison. You are absolutely pathetic.”
The two of us sat in silence for a while.
“Here’s something else I’d like to know,” I said, opening up my backpack and removing the letter from the American Folk Art Museum. “What about this Achilles Rizzoli? Subject of a documentary by Stella Western. Apparently we’re hiding his entire life’s work somewhere. What do you know about it?”
He was scanning the letter. He did not look pleased.
“I see you’ve opened your mother’s mail. Is this a habit for you?”
“I opened it by accident,” I said. “I’m getting so much mail from colleges right now. Please answer my question.”
He said nothing.
“Did you know there was an earlier request about these paintings?”
“Drawings. Not paintings. I can’t say.”
“So you did know.”
“That’s a possibility.”
“And you won’t tell me.”
“I’m not at liberty to do so. Not at the present time.” He crossed his arms like a petulant toddler.
“Jesus, Harrison.”
“Hard no.”
“I thought negotiation was how grown-ups settle their differences in a civilized world.”
“There’s nothing to negotiate,” he said. “You don’t have anything I want.”
I came very close to smacking him, my seventeen-years-older brother.
Then something occurred to me.
“What did you want from Stella Western? In the negotiation. You said she wanted property—what did you want?”
Harrison seemed to consider this. It was not brief.
“We wanted her to promise never to contact us again. This letter is a breach of that promise.”
“This letter is from a museum, not from her.”
“Debatable.”
“And what did she get for the devastating punishment of never contacting us again?”
My brother set his jaw. “A house,” he said, finally. “She’d been living there for years. She was living there when Dad died, and she wanted to stay.”
Harrison turned to me.
“She had a kid. I mean, she and our father had a kid. And I suppose she wanted to stay in the home her kid knew. So I guess it was worth it to her. I can’t say we had a heart-to-heart about it. We could have kicked her out,” he said, a little defensively. “We didn’t. But that was the agreement. She got the deed; she agreed never to contact any of us again. Obviously,” he said, “I’ll need to involve our attorney.”
I gaped at him. For a long time I couldn’t manage to say anything, and when I finally did, all I could come up with was: “You’re kidding.”
“I wish I were kidding, but there you are. Yes, Phoebe, our father got this person pregnant, and now she apparently considers it her prerogative to fuck with us forever. Have you ever considered what it was like for our mother? After he died? And so suddenly, in such a horrible, public way? And then to be alone, with you to raise? Only not as alone as she’d have liked, because suddenly here was this woman with a very personal story to tell about her late husband, not to mention assorted claims about what she’d supposedly been promised, or already given. A valuable house. A room full of art works. Not so nice, is it? So yes, there was a negotiation. There was an agreement, which is clearly not being upheld. And now that you know all this, maybe you can find it in your big bleeding Walden heart to be just a little bit more sympathetic. Think of it as a way to help people and make the world a better place.”
I couldn’t stop staring at him. It was still coming across, like wave after wave on the beach behind the Vineyard house, relentless and without conclusion. My mouth felt dry and my hands clenched around nothing.
“I’m … You just…”
But then I had to stop again.
“Have you met … him, or her?” I finally said.
“Him,” said Harrison. “And no. Never met him. Don’t want to meet him. Why would I? And don’t ask me how old he is. Well, older than you. It’s obvious he was conceived while the three of us were still living at home, which is absolutely appalling. I refuse to think about him. I absolutely refuse to care about him. Why are you looking at me like that? I don’t even know his name.”
Chapter Thirty-One
The Love and the Passion
In which Lewyn Oppenheimer encounters his late father, and recounts his own wanderings in the wilderness
I didn’t talk to Lewyn about what Sally had told me, and I didn’t talk to him about what Harrison had told me. For a week I didn’t talk to anyone except my school friends and my teachers, but not, of course, about the only thing I was able to think about. Everything else was just horrible stasis and churning distress.
Well, except I did read Colleges That Change Lives. There was that.
The following Sunday Lewyn and I went to Red Hook together, and together we went through the warehouse, checking every corner, storage area, and crawl space of the building for something that might have been overlooked. There was nothing: not a single work of Outsider Art by a person named Achilles Rizzoli, let alone an entire trove comprising most of the artist’s life’s work.