But what about the other painting, the one from S.’s days as a young artist living in New York? For S., that painting had been, during his transient years, a source of creative contemplation, and a symbol of whatever remained in him of the will to escape his circumstances and work as an artist. More to the point — and especially during the period when he was, to use an expression that is popular in AA rooms everywhere, hitting bottom — it had, I believe, served as a symbol, maybe the spiritual symbol, of his desire to live. He had thought about, and pondered over, that painting almost every day of his life as an alcoholic. When he was spraying paint on rusted cars, when he was hammering carpentry nails, when he was sitting at a bar, in New York or Florida, he thought about the painting. S. thought about the man who had first suggested the importance of the work, and about the magazine article that he had heard about but never seen; and these thoughts led him to think about European and American painting traditions, and about the history of art in general, and, I suppose, about all the famous paintings that he had seen only in books. The memory of the important painting in its huge and heavy wooden frame — not to mention a preoccupation with the thought of one day verifying his evolving ideas about the painting’s provenance — had, I realized in my conversations with both S. and my mother, helped keep him alive.
“What do you think it is?” I finally asked him at some point in our phone conversation, that day in 1988.
“A what?” I said.
“ … a Leonardo da Vinci,” he said.
“Put Mom on the phone, okay?” I said.
“Hello? Don?”
“What’s going on?”
“He believes the painting may be a Leonardo da Vinci, dear.”
“I know. I heard him.”
“He’s going to spend a week in New York and he wants to research this and he wants to know if you’ll help.”
“Help?”
Which is what I did. After a fashion. When you are, as I was — and as I am — the anxious child of a volatile, childlike mother, you learn how to appear to accept, as realistic and viable, statements and opinions that are clearly ludicrous.
You may learn, too, as a defense against the absurd disappointments caused by fragile and unhappy parents, the crude art of sarcasm. “When is he coming on this vision quest?” I asked my mother, and she filled me in on the details. A month or so later, S. took up temporary lodging with — and here the story becomes somewhat foggy — one or another of those above-mentioned cousins, the man who, following the death of the owner of the downtown boardinghouse in which S. had first seen the painting, now had possession of the painting. S. promptly photographed it, then took a pair of scissors and cut swatches from the spare canvas tucked away along the inside perimeter of the stretcher. This seemed to me to be an act of mutilation, or, at the very least, one of proprietary aggression, and probably out of keeping with whatever protocol might exist for the care of old artworks. Were you supposed to chop up the canvas? On the other hand, what concern was it of mine? Why should I care what S. might do to some painting that was, in all likelihood, just a piece of junk sitting in an apartment?
Questions like this — any and all questions, for that matter, concerning S., my mother, and the painting — frequently became points of division between me and K. Long before any of this crazy art-historical family business ever got started, K. had learned that whenever my mother and I got involved in each other’s lives, even over matters of no apparent consequence, there was likely to be trouble on the way for her, trouble in the form of fighting between us. In those years, I was terribly unskilled at managing the consequences of my loyalty to my mother, a person who was constitutionally incapable of staying out of her children’s affairs, or of coping with what she regarded as hostile infractions—“Mom, do you think the painting is a Leonardo da Vinci?”—against her own liberal and openminded worldview. Thus I found myself repeatedly subjecting K. to antagonistic appraisals of my mother’s cultivation of fantasy. When K. went along with my negative assessments, I turned the tables on her and rushed to my mother’s defense.
S., in the meantime, had arrived in Manhattan. He was coming full circle. I remember that he visited me and K. in our apartment on Eighty-fifth Street. I also have a memory of going with him to see the painting. What I chiefly remember about the painting now is not how it looked, precisely, but how I felt, standing next to my mother’s boyfriend, a man on a mission to find a Leonardo da Vinci.
As I recall, the painting appeared dirty. It was leaning against a wall. Its carved and filigreed frame was, as S. had indicated, massive and even oppressive; it had the look of mahogany, stained to a shade of darker brown, that I have come to associate with the woodwork inside Victorian-era brownstones; the frame was about the size of a headboard for a bed. The painting — imprisoned, as it were, inside this boxy frame — looked somehow out of scale with itself. I should point out that at that time in my life I knew practically nothing about the history of painting, European, American, or otherwise, and that what little I know today would in no way qualify me to appraise a work of art. That said, the painting did not strike me as an Old Master. It did not, in fact, look like an obvious find, regardless of its period. In the bottom half of the picture was a rocky stream or small river that tumbled directly toward the viewer. Trees grew along the banks of the stream, and green hills sloped up and away from the center of the painting. The foreground was dominated, interestingly, by a number of tall and leafy marsh reeds; on the stalk of one sat a bird — in the dove family? — rendered large for the sake of perspective. The sky above this nature scene was radiant, glowing, painted in an almost white shade near the horizon, and growing, with increasing altitude, darker and grayer, as if the unseen sun had barely begun to rise.
But something about those round rocks and the water cascading over them did not look right to me. The colors, I thought, seemed odd; the trees were luridly dark, while the river was sparkling and bright. The light in the painting, the light from the invisible though rising (or possibly setting) sun, originated in the background. Wouldn’t that background light argue for a darker foreground river? And what about those leafy Southern Hemisphere plants? What about the single, fat songbird? Overall, the scene looked romantic in a faintly unpleasant way It looked, I thought, offi-puttingly Victorian — as did the frame. I couldn’t help thinking of turn-of-the-century stained glass. I did not find the work beautiful.
And yet I have to admit that it affected me. Whenever I think about it, I am struck by a desire to see it again.
All I have to look at, though, is the photograph S. took during his stay in New York, a badly aimed, poorly lit snapshot printed on Kodak paper. I also have a few scraps of the canvas that S. scissored off the painting’s stretcher. And I have copies of the replies written to S. by curators to whom he had sent letters of inquiry and, presumably, duplicates of the photograph. One letter to S., dated November 28, 1988, and sent to my mother’s address in Miami, is from the Frick Collection, and it suggests that S. contact the European Paintings Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The letter is a clear blow-off. Who could blame the people at the Frick? An undiscovered Leonardo? Another letter, from the New York Public Library, proposes that S. get in touch with the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, in reference to the Leonardo da Vinci collection there. A December 9, 1988, letter from Sotheby’s indicates a lack of interest in offering the work at auction.