What was S. doing?
In addition to posting letters to museums, he was going to the Frick Art Reference Library, on Seventy-first Street, where he spent days paging through old art books in the hope of finding a plate that matched the snapshot he carried everywhere he went. He stressed to me the value of old art books, reasoning that the painting — which, he theorized, had been either stolen or lost from a private collection — might have been in currency in former times. When I wondered aloud why he didn’t throw the painting into a taxi and haul it straight to the Met, he made the excuse that, after all, it was not his painting to cart around town. Besides, he told me, he enjoyed looking through those old books in those fascinating archives, which were, I realized, a world away from suburban Miami and his life as an underemployed artist with a history of dead-end jobs.
In Miami, my mother waited for word. We spoke more and more frequently. “Have you heard any news from S. about the painting?” she’d ask me. Or I might ask her, “Have you heard any news from S. about the painting?” But I’m not sure that I ever told her, in so many words, what I thought of S. and his ideas about the painting.
“Mom, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Why doesn’t he take the painting to be evaluated by someone who knows about these things?”
“Don, this is his project. I think we ought to just let him do things his way. It’s important to him.”
“I know that. But his way isn’t very productive.”
“We don’t know that yet.”
“Well.”
“This means a lot to him, and he needs to sort it out in his own good time,” she told me, and I could hear, in her voice, the serene detachment so crucial to ongoing sobriety. But I also heard — and maybe this was what that detachment was meant to hide — something that sounded a lot like fear. She was, after all, S.’s partner. She was implicated in his scheme to identify what might become, if he could prove its authenticity, one of the most famous paintings in the world. My mother, in the years after she got sober, had shown an alarming gullibility in matters relating to mental and spiritual health. By 1988, I had become adept at listening to her describe workshops devoted to past-life channeling, to radical forms of astrology to speaking in dead languages. What was her angle on the painting? Did she truly think that her boyfriend had stumbled on a Leonardo da Vinci? Or was she simply concerned about the effects on S. of what might, were he ever to actually identify the painting, come as a shattering disappointment?
And what about me? Why was I going along with this nonsense, phoning museums and antiquarian booksellers and dealers, and asking them, on S.’s behalf, what a person might do, in the event that such a person might or might not know about a painting that might or might not be a missing priceless European treasure?
After a handful of humiliating phone calls, I gave up. I simply couldn’t do it. I wished S. well — he had by then returned to Miami — and I asked him to keep me informed of his progress. I put the snapshots he’d given me, along with the swatches of decaying brown fabric, in a drawer. And I tried to stop thinking about the problem of the painting.
One aspect of the problem, however, had me bothered. For many years, back in the days when she was drinking, my mother (in the manner of so many high-functioning alcoholics who get a lot done) had run a college department that specialized in costume history, fashion design, and textile chemistry. She knew how to date a fabric sample. Or, if she didn’t know how to do it herself, she knew how to contact people who did.
I asked her about this. “Mom, does that canvas seem to you to be about five hundred years old?”
“It’s so hard to tell, Don.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can’t you take a piece over to the University of Miami and see if anyone there can subject it to some tests?”
“Oh, I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I need to respect the fact that this is not my affair.”
“You don’t want to find out, do you? You don’t want to know!” I said to her at some point along the way.
Most likely, I was getting squared off to pick a fight with K., who, in fact, had been more than decent about this whole enterprise.
“How’s your mother?” K. would sometimes ask, when she saw me stagger off the phone like a person who’d drunk from a goblet that had smoke billowing over its rim.
“They’re out of their minds! They’re out of their minds! Leonardo da Vinci? Fuck me!”
“Donald, you knew it was insane.”
“I know.”
“So what’s the surprise?”
“It’s not — it’s not that it’s a surprise. It’s not a surprise.”
“Okay? So?”
K. had a point. Unfortunately, an understanding of reality is a liability in a situation in which reality is inadmissible — or, rather, in a situation in which people’s feelings and hunches, their hungers and appetites, serve as reality. Hidden inside the unfolding narrative of the painting — a narrative not only of feelings and hunches but also of grandiose hopes and dreams — was, I felt, the story of my alcoholic family. This story, now being told through the story of a moldy old painting that might, until shown otherwise, be a Leonardo da Vinci, was, I thought, a story in which pretty much everything that could ever happen in life — everything that could come true tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that — might, until shown otherwise, be the miraculous, transformative thing that, like a great work of art, brings us closer to salvation.
“Your mother,” K. would say to me whenever I got off the phone. Then she would sigh.
A few years before S. undertook his pilgrimage to the art libraries of New York, I boarded a plane and flew to Miami to visit my mother. It was a trip I had been looking forward to. In some ways, I suppose, I had been looking forward to this trip for much of my life. The time had come, my mother and I had agreed, for us to have a talk about our past. Specifically, she had invited me to sit at the table and tell her what it had been like, during the years in which she’d lived in and out of a blackout, to be her child.
It was, as I recall, the week of Thanksgiving. My grandparents were driving down from North Carolina. They, S., and I were gathering at my mother’s apartment to give thanks for her relatively new sobriety, which, however insecure, had nonetheless been hard won.
A night or two before this celebration was to take place, I sat in the dining room with S. and my mother. I suppose I must have been twenty-seven years old at the time. I remember — and I should have been more savvy about these kinds of signs and portents — that the two of them sat in chairs that had been pulled out from the table and pushed hard against the dining-room wall. I, on the other hand, sat in an improvised place lacking defined coordinates — the ambiguous middle of the room. In the scene as it was set, my mother and S. were positioned like heads of state, listening, in their official capacity, to the appeals of a supplicant. But they were also a couple of nervous alcoholics with their backs to the wall, waiting to be attacked. As usual, my mother was smoking up a storm. Her ashtray, her cigarettes, her lighter, and her coffee in its brightred mug sat close to her on the table. Somewhere in the apartment, her fluffy white cat with a skin disease was lurking.