“Like a bomb?”
“Like a bomb.”
“My great-great-uncle threw a bomb. They shot him for it. Asshole.”
She was referring to her relative, he hoped.
“GOOD MORNING, NICK.”
“Mr. Morrison, good morning,” the guard said. “Good to see you. Ah … the young lady will have to check her parcel.”
He had hoped for exactly this: that the Big Brown Bag would prove a distraction, that his familiar backpack, rarely challenged, would not be challenged now, though it wasn’t the familiar one after all. It was new, considerably bigger, still fairly flat though.
“The young lady is well known to me; she’s carrying her art supplies,” Francis said. “Show him, Louanne.” And Louanne, feigning resentment, pulled out one by one a sketch pad, a sketch board, and pencils bound in their middle by a rubber band, fanning in both directions just as Vuillard’s daisies fanned upward from the mouth of the vase and their stalks downward into the expertly rendered water. Louanne then turned the bag upside down. A paper clip fell onto the floor.
“She’s going to copy a Rembrandt,” Francis confided. “Drawing a painting, it trains the hand.” The guard had to turn his attention to the visitor behind them. Louanne scraped up her tools.
They trotted upstairs to the Rembrandts. Louanne put some lines on paper. Then they trotted downstairs again, to the members’ lounge. From there they went to the trustees’ rooms and from there slipped down an out-of-the-way staircase to the basement and then farther, to the basement of the basement. There stood a dozen lockers, a few closed and padlocked, the rest ajar.
She helped him off with his backpack as if it were an overcoat and she a maid, a maid in a blue denim shirtwaist. He’d never before seen her in a dress. Francis unzipped the pack. Louanne withdrew the item without removing its bubble wrap. Francis slid it gently into a locker and closed the door.
Louanne took a padlock from her pocket, slipped it through matched metal loops, snapped it shut. She offered him the key on her palm. He shook his head. Her fingers closed over it.
Later, he figured, she’d swallow the key. She’d probably been practicing the maneuver. No matter: the painting would escape from captivity, in ten years or maybe fifteen — whenever a committee of janitors determined that the locker was abandoned. The padlock would be forced open, the locker’s secret brought to the director. A mild excitement would flutter the art world. Somebody would judge the painting authentic; somebody else would declare it an anonymous donation; the curious manner of its donation would be remarked. It would be hung on the wall of a numbered room. But first it would be displayed in an exhibition of recent acquisitions. He’d mail her an invitation and a round-trip plane ticket.
Following the girl up one stairway and the next, stopping for breath on each skimpy landing, he acknowledged to himself that Louanne might by then have vanished into a dark corner of Moscow, he into the blinding fluorescence of a nursing home. “Ars longa,” he muttered.
She turned her head. “Just a few more steps,” she assured him.
JAN TERM
February 5
Dear Ms. Jenkins,
Josephine Salter has informed me that Caldicott Academy will not grant an extension for her Jan Term paper until you receive a request from me. Consider this that request. Of course Josephine could not meet the deadline; there was an upheaval in her family due to her stepmother’s unexpected return on January 31 after a two-month absence. You probably know, too, as does most of the town, that her father greeted his wife’s homecoming by throwing crockery at the wall and pouring Scotch into the family’s aged computer. Josie and young Oliver, whom the family calls Tollie, were more welcoming.
Let me say, for whatever it’s worth, that Josie was an asset to Forget Me Not during January — the customers miss her respectful presence and I miss her height. Standing on only a telephone book she could reach bibelots from my highest shelf. She seems to have learned something about antiques, too. Nevertheless, I continue to think that Jan Term is Caldicott Academy’s devious method of giving teachers an extra month’s paid vacation and in the process driving parents frantic with worry. The fifteen-year-old girls who volunteer at shelters, veterinary establishments, ethnic restaurants, and Central American villages are at risk for TB, psittacosis, salmonella, seduction, kidnapping, and deep boredom. Josie, working at my store, at least avoided the first five.
How are you, Eleanor? I’ve got an Edwardian inkwell you might want to take a look at.
Rennie
February 15
Dear Ms. Jenkins,
Thank you for granting me an extension for my Jan Term paper. I didn’t need as much time as I first thought. Per your suggestion, I had kept daily notes on three-by-five cards, and as you predicted, it was not onerous to, after reading over the cards several times and arranging and rearranging them as if playing FreeCell* and thinking about them deeply, make an outline. (The preceding sentence demonstrates why you should not split an infinitive, so I left it in rather than correct it in case you need a reality example for the tenth-grade grammar unit.) My outline followed the helpful schema you provided: Why I Chose, What I Did, Some Things I Learned. After constructing the outline, writing the essay was pretty straightforward. I made the required three drafts on three successive days, starting on the morning my father gave me a typewriter (our computer had met with an accident). I found footnotes useful and deployed them according to The Chicago Manual of Style, numbering sequentially.
And so here is my paper, which I dedicate to my late mother. As you may know, though it was before your time, she too attended Caldicott Academy. She often shared with me her school-day memories, though she called them flashbacks. LOL.
Josie
* Similar to Solitaire
FORGET ME NOT JANUARY TERM PAPER JOSEPHINE DOROTHY SALTER
My original plan for a Jan Term project was to read to the blind. I’m told that I have a pleasing voice. Before she died of a tumor1 my mother lost her vision, and so I read to her every afternoon just as she had read to me when I was little, mostly Grimm’s Fairy Tales, our favorite book. But readers to the blind are sent all over the Boston area, hither and yon, and I needed a workplace close to my stepbrother Tollie’s day care center, since his own mother was not at home at the time and therefore I was in charge of him and also of our household, which numbered three. So I applied to Forget Me Not, a nearby antique shop, because you can learn a lot of history from the artifacts of the past. Ms. Renata McLintock, owner and proprietor, warned me that what I would learn mostly was cleaning and a steady hand in pouring liquids, and she hoped that my progressive, prolapsed2 school had taught me how to compute the 5 percent Massachusetts sales tax and that I would remember to do so.3
In this paper I will refer to Ms. McLintock as “Rennie,” since she asked me to call her that. She doesn’t know where her mother dug up Renata.4 Rennie was right about what I would mainly do. I vacuumed the floor and the furniture (I did that at home in January, too) and I scrubbed the little bathroom in back and then dumped the contents of the pail into the window boxes, for which I was responsible.5 I climbed a ladder and polished the brass chandelier which dates from 1775 or thereabouts. It has been wired and fitted with 60-watt bulbs.