“This evening, then?”
“I wish I could, but I have to go see my uncle Solly. I want to talk to him about you. He’d make a better reference than Ash.”
“Janny! Now!”
“I guess I’ll see you at the party, then.”
“I’ll be working too, but look for me.” I blew him a kiss as I scurried after Ashley.
I let myself into Uncle Solly’s brownstone in the East Seventies, a four-story gem that, unlike most of its neighbors, had never been divided into apartments. He’d given me a key when I got the job with Ash, so I’d have someplace to disappear to within walking distance of the Met. I started down the high-ceilinged hall that ran the length of the parlor floor to Uncle Solly’s den at the back of the house.
“Is that you, Janny?” Uncle Solly called. “Come in, come in.”
“I’m looking at the naives. Oh, wow, is this new?”
“They were always your favorites.” Uncle Solly’s voice had cracked and faded with age, but his rich chuckle survived.
“When I was ten,” I said. “They’re still great, though.”
The track lighting made the most of his collection of American naive animal paintings: zoos, Noah’s arks, and peaceable kingdoms. Each canvas, crowded with bright colors and painstaking detail, was innocent of perspective yet perfectly balanced. Each scene attracted and satisfied the eye, charming without being cute.
“This one is new,” I said. “Did you really need another Bronx Zoo?”
“See if you can spot what makes it unique.” Uncle Solly chuckled. When I was little, he’d always made up games for me that involved some sort of visual training.
“The baby giraffe!” No doubt the Bronx Zoo really had a new baby giraffe. Uncle Solly had no use for anything inauthentic.
I wriggled out of my coat and slung it over the back of an armchair. Uncle Solly’s den was like a Victorian gentlemen’s club from the waist down: dark leather, chairs built for comfort, gleaming parquet peeking out around the edges of a muted but still gorgeous Persian carpet, an antique Kashan. The walls, however, were stark and white to show off his magnificent art collection.
Uncle Solly sat hunched forward, sunk in the depths of a bulky cabled sweater like an old, wrinkled turtle. I dropped a kiss on the top of his bald head.
“Sit, sit,” he said. He rubbed his hands together as if the friction between his palms might strike a spark. “I’m always cold these days.” He examined the backs of his hands, papery skin draped over blue veins that stood out like rivers on a map. “Never get old, Jannele.”
I sat down facing him and laid my hand over his.
“Don’t say you’re old.”
“The calendar doesn’t lie. I wish it did.” The remains of a Viennese accent still clung to his lips, turning “wish” into “veesh.” Uncle Solly had been a resistance fighter in his youth. He had come to America at twenty, right after the war. “So open your eyes and look. What do you see?”
This was an old game between us. I twisted in my chair and scanned the room.
“The Kandinsky.” It glowed on the wall behind him, another favorite from my childhood.
“You called it ‘The Big Bang’.”
“You told me that was its title!”
We both laughed. Uncle Solly had taught me how abstract painters like Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock express energy and motion. “Open your eyes and look” was an old catchphrase between us.
“So what else?”
“The Tchelitchew.” Another luminous painting, this one a small watercolor study for the famous “Hide and Seek,” which hung in the MOMA.
If my dad’s grandpa had been Solly’s father instead of his uncle — or if he had trusted Great-uncle Herman’s enthusiasm for the radical young painters he met in Paris before the war — I might not be a poor relation. But I never thought about that, except when Ash reminded me.
“So what else?”
“Something new?”
“There!” My eyes widened. The small painted panel hung where he could see it from his chair. “Is that a Botticelli?”
“So what’s wrong with the Old Masters? Meet la bella Simonetta.”
“My God, it really is.” Simonetta Vespucci, the toast of late fifteenth-century Florence and inspiration for its artists, dead at twenty-two.
“I outbid three museums for her. I put her where I can look at her all day.”
“This isn’t catalogued,” I said. “How on earth did they ever miss her?”
“How do you think?” His eyebrows, dappled tufts that had outlasted his hair, drew down in one of his rare frowns. “Looted and hidden away.”
Oh. He meant the Nazis, who had stolen a staggering amount of art from Jewish families. Pieces were still turning up, and international law was still grappling with the claims of the original owners’ descendants versus the collectors who had ended up with them.
“Is the provenance known?”
“They are all dead in the camps, with no survivors to start over after the war or children and grandchildren to come forward now. If I could, I would give it back, Jannele.” He shook his head to clear the moisture in his eyes.
“I know you would, Uncle Solly.”
“So. What’s bad and what’s good?” This was another game we’d always played. I could remember giggling at his accent as he explained, “Bad is wegetables. Bad is ven the teacher scolds because you make a mistake. Good is love and art and learning something new.”
“Bad is Cousin Ash, as usual,” I said.
“That girl.” He shook his head. “Good head, bad heart.” Ash was not on the Jewish side of the family — Aunt Gwen was my mother’s sister — but Uncle Solly was on the board of the Met, so their paths crossed from time to time.
“She’s okay,” I said. “Well, she’s not, but I can take it.” I didn’t want him worrying about me. “Good is Joel.”
“Ah, the boyfriend.” His head popped up out of his turtleneck, and his eyes were bright with interest.
“I think he’s a keeper, Uncle Solly.”
“He is the lucky one,” he said.
“The Vermeer is good too,” I said. “I haven’t seen it yet, but I can hardly wait. Are you going to the opening?”
“Too many people, too much standing, not so good champagne,” he said. He lifted a bushy brow and cocked his head. “You will be there? Working?”
“Holding Ash’s train as usual,” I said. “But I’ll get to see the painting. If I have to stay late, can I come back here?” The guest room on the top floor was always ready, though I didn’t like to impose on him too often.
“Yes, yes, whenever you wish.”
“I may not come.” I hoped that Joel would invite me home to his place in Brooklyn. We were too new as a couple to take anything for granted.
“Whatever is best for you, my Jannele. Be beautiful, and enjoy the party.”
The Met knows how to throw a party. The Great Hall was packed. Everybody from the mayor on down had been invited, and it looked as if no one had declined. The hall’s perpetual display of flowers was glorious tonight: out-of-season dogwood and mimosa, oversized sprays of lilies whose heavy scent mingled with the guests’ Chanel and Guerlain. Champagne flowed, canapes topped with dabs of caviar circulated, and vast trays of elegant finger food were demolished and replaced.
To view the Vermeer, guests had to mount the broad marble stairs and follow signs to the small gallery where they’d hung “Girl Feeding Birds.” It had gone up only that afternoon, the location a secret that had been widely leaked. Security and the higher-ups had been livid, but everybody else, like me, had managed to sneak away to see it before the crowds arrived. At the Met, even the trolls in the basement love art.