Even without success, it was lovely to see Lewyn at the warehouse, watching him go through the paintings, canvas by canvas and frame by frame. Each work was stored in low light, braced and padded, dehumidified and recorded, with physical files of supporting materials and Lewyn’s reference library. He spent a couple of days each week out here, sometimes opening the collection to scholars or curators and doing administrative work related to the loan requests that came in constantly. Over the years he’d found, in addition to his own general interest in the selections our father had made, a specific interest of his own in what he called “abstract depictions of tension around the expression of religious faith,” which sounded very much like the kind of thing you’d read about in the art journals he contributed to, if you could actually comprehend that stuff. It was a topic he said he’d first encountered in Utah, during the period even he now referred to, with no small degree of sarcasm, as “my wandering in the wilderness.” Abandoning our search after every conceivable part of the building had been checked, we went to pick up Italian sandwiches at F & M and returned, unwrapping them on the warehouse steps to take advantage of the late-afternoon sun. There was a steady stream of dogs, pulling their owners along toward the park and pier at the end of Coffey Street.
Neither of us had experienced Red Hook in its prior incarnations, so the proliferation of art galleries and whiskey bars along its side streets, the very hip young moms and cunningly attired children, and the more than locally famous lobster pound and key lime pie shop—not to mention the Fairway—had never struck us as out of step for the Brooklyn we had always lived in. With its cobblestones underfoot and the beautiful harbor at the bottom of the street, our father’s indefensible purchase in the early 1980s now appeared every bit as shrewd as certain of his earliest purchases of art had been. The houses on either side of the warehouse had all been sold in the years after his death, and in the warehouse itself Lewyn had upgraded the systems, bringing the technology of preservation and security into line for the twenty-first century, and carving out an office for himself in one corner of the cavernous first floor. Otherwise he had left the building pretty much alone.
“Did you ever come out here when you were a kid?” I asked, unwrapping my sandwich.
“No. He never took me. Though, to be fair, I don’t think I ever asked to come. I had no special feeling for art back then. Pretty ironic that I had all of this in my own family and I still had to find it through an art history survey in college, just like anyone else.”
“But you knew about it?” I said. “You knew he was buying paintings and keeping them here?”
“Oh, sure. But it was more in a negative context—this was the place he went to not be with us. It represented his absence, not anything good. I don’t know how the others felt, but it’s been pretty painful for me.”
“What do you mean?” I was trying to get my mouth around my sandwich.
“Well, just the lost opportunity, for the two of us. This was something we might have been able to do together. But it was a hidden thing, and I had no idea. Not just what was in the warehouse. What was in him. Do you understand?”
I wasn’t sure I did, but I nodded.
“Okay. So after Dad died I don’t think Mom came out here right away, she just kept up the security and the bills and that was it. Then, maybe a year or two later, she came with an appraiser so he could make an inventory. Then, after I was back from Utah, I came by myself. I had the inventory, but I don’t think I really believed it until I actually saw the paintings. The first time, I just sat on the floor and cried. I mean, for hours.”
I looked at him. “But why?”
He smiled, but sadly. “It was the passion. The love and the passion, all over the walls out here. This was what he’d given it to. Not to me, certainly. I don’t think to Sally and Harrison, either. I don’t think to Mom, which in a way was worst of all. I didn’t need the appraiser to tell me what he’d done. This,” he pointed back over his own shoulder, at the front door, “is a world-class collection, assembled without any oversight or guidance, and as far as I can tell, without any interest in artist reputation, or likelihood of appreciation. He completely ignored abstract expressionism, which was all anyone was trying to acquire in the 1970s. He bought the paintings he responded to, personally, and so many of the purchases were just astonishingly prescient. A Twombly blackboard painting! That was the first piece he bought, and it was a very intentional purchase. No internet back then, and he didn’t just stroll into some gallery off the street, either. He had to have actually seen it somewhere, or at least a picture of it, but I have no idea where. It was with a dealer in Turin. I don’t think it had ever left Europe. Having it shipped over, not to mention the purchase, itself—that would have involved many letters, bank transactions, trans-Atlantic phone calls. Probably took months, or even years. Today the paintings in that series are at MOMA, the Tate, the Whitney, the Menil. And a warehouse in Red Hook. It blows my mind, actually. He bought these California painters no one was paying attention to then, like Diebenkorn. There are two Ocean Park paintings in there! He went to an auction in London and came back with a Francis Bacon triptych. There’s a Hockney sprinkler painting and a slab painting by Hans Hoffman! And two Ruschas. Jesus.” He shook his head.
I was getting the gist of this, though most of the details escaped me. I didn’t say anything, and in a moment he continued.
“And you could say, well, okay, Bacon and Hockney. Twombly—you didn’t have to be a genius to see what was going to happen with them. And even a couple of years ago there were paintings in the collection that had been pretty but not worth very much back when he bought them and they were still pretty but not worth very much—just pictures he’d loved and wanted to own, by artists who never really broke through. But I’m telling you, the world’s caught up to a lot of those painters, too. Agnes Martin, for example. No idea where he even came across her in the late seventies, but there she is. Alma Thomas. Okay, she had a show at the Whitney in ’72, but nobody bought her work for another generation. And some of the Italian artists—Piero Manzoni and Lucio Fontana. Arte povera. Dirt cheap when he bought them. Not today. This is a treasure house. I can’t believe I get to work here.”
“Almost makes up for what you didn’t get from him,” I said carefully. “When he was alive.”
My brother sighed. “Yeah. Almost.” He took another bite of his sandwich.
I wrapped the rest of my sandwich back up in the butcher paper it had come in. I’d managed to get through less than half of it.
“Lewyn,” I said, “can I ask you something?”
He turned to me. “If you have to ask permission to ask me a question, it’s probably not about the weather.”
It wasn’t about the weather.
“Would you tell me what happened out in Utah? I mean, I don’t actually know. I’ve never asked.”
“No one in this family has ever asked,” said Lewyn. “Isn’t that interesting?”
“Well, I was so young when you came back.”
“Yes. You’re excused.”
“But I’m not so young anymore. So would you?”
Lewyn seemed to consider. He was halfway through his own sandwich, but he was slowing down.
“My freshman-year roommate at Cornell was Mormon,” Lewyn said. “He was from Utah. He was at the vet school.”
Like Paula, I nearly said. I hadn’t mentioned Paula to Lewyn. Or to our mother.
“So he told you all about it?”
“He told me a bit, yes. And the next summer I went to Palmyra, to watch him perform at Hill Cumorah.”
He said this as if I knew what it meant. I didn’t, so he had to explain.
“Then, after Dad died, I was very, I guess, lost in a lot of ways. We had to go through all that gruesome stuff together, and we were all barely speaking to one another. Also there was somebody I’d been in love with. She wasn’t speaking to me, either.” He looked glumly down at his sandwich.
“Rochelle Steiner?” I said.
Lewyn turned to me, plainly stunned.
“Sally told me. Sally also has a lot of regret about Rochelle Steiner.”
“Well, she should,” he said tightly. Then he clammed up again.
“Maybe it’s something the two of you should talk about.”
Lewyn shook his head. “I’m more likely to go out for a beer with Harrison.”
I opted not to say that a beer with Harrison was equally in the realm of the possible, and very much my personal intention where my brothers were concerned.
“So it was a bad time, that year.”
He nodded. “And there was this moment, I remember thinking, I’m just going to reach out for anything that makes me feel better.” He stopped. “I’ve always thought, good thing it wasn’t drugs. I’d be dead.”
“Well, religion is the opiate of the masses, I’ve heard.”
“Something to that.”