Over a year had passed since S.’s first trip north to look at the painting. Now, in early winter, he came back. For a period of months, he lived in Manhattan, in a Chelsea boardinghouse, a building, as I imagine it, similar to the one where years earlier this story had begun. It must, for S., have been something of a homecoming. Shortly before Christmas, my mother got on a plane and flew to New York for a weeklong visit. Together, she and S. camped out in his room. There was no phone; my communication with my mother was restricted to times when she could manage to fight the winter winds and get to a pay phone on the corner. Because her circulation was bad from smoking, this was a hardship for her. Also, she was beginning to have trouble walking. During the days, S. visited galleries and museum libraries. Of course, he came up with nothing.
I had thought, I remember, that this would be a good time for my mother and K. to meet. I suggested the idea to both of them. K. said she was ready to meet my mother, and my mother crowed at the thought of meeting K., whom she had spoken with on a few occasions, when I’d shoved the phone into K.’s hand and suggested that she say hello. But what was I thinking? Did I imagine that the four of us — my emphysemic mother, her passive-aggressive boyfriend, my increasingly fedup girlfriend, and I — would go out to a restaurant and order a meal together? Did I picture us sitting down like a family and talking about Leonardo da Vinci and Frederic Church? Nothing came of it. K. and my mother never met. And before I knew it my mother had packed her bags and gone home. A while later, S. was gone, too.
This time, though, he had something to show for his trouble. Of the cousins who at one time or another had, or had had, some connection to the painting, two were now dead, and a third — and this was not the man who had read the magazine article dedicated to the important painting — had gone ahead and given the painting to S. I learned from my mother that the cousin had said to S. something along the lines of “You’re the only person in the world crazy enough to give a damn about the thing. Take it.”
“What is he going to do with it?” I asked my mother during one of our long-distance phone calls. This was sometime in — I’m guessing — late 1990 or early 1991.
“I don’t know, Don. He says he’s going to put it in fine-art storage. He says he doesn’t know what else to do with it.”
“Does he still believe it’s a Frederic Church?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
In the summer of 1991, I moved out of the apartment I shared with K., and began a period of bouncing from place to place. For a while, I lived in a small rented room. At about this time, down in Miami, S. packed up and left my mother’s apartment. My mother told me later that he had begun drinking again; he wasn’t, according to her, in good shape. She bumped into him every now and then at AA meetings — he seemed to be in and out of the program — or spoke with him on the telephone. She said, in one conversation, that he had taken a job matching house-paint colors for a paint and hardware store. On another occasion, she told me that he was working as a sign painter. She did not have an address for him, but she believed that he was living somewhere out on Miami Beach. At one point, she told me that she thought he might be sleeping in his car. In the event, S. did not, she said, look as if he was getting much to eat. He was drunk a lot, drunk even when attending AA. He looked bad. She did not expect him to live long. She did not expect to see him around much, as time went on.
The matter of the painting was, as far as I was concerned, now dropped in earnest. One day, though, I got a phone call — yet another update — from my mother. It seemed, as I remember the story from her, that S. had gone to a bar on Miami Beach where he fell into conversation with a pair of foreign men, or maybe it was just one man. The men, or man, claimed to have connections to art dealers abroad, perhaps in Holland. After a while, S. got up his nerve and pulled out the photograph of the painting. I had the impression, listening to my mother, that S. did not explain his ideas about the identity of the painting; rather, he dug the picture out of his wallet, handed it over, and waited for a response. The response was one of amazement. Where had S. found this picture? Had he taken it himself? Where was the painting? Had S. seen the painting? Did he know its whereabouts? Did he realize the importance of this find?
According to my mother, the men informed S. that this was, without a doubt, a work by the American painter Frederic Church. It had, S. had told her, belonged to a collection in Europe, and had gone missing in the early years of the century, possibly between the wars, and had been presumed destroyed. This was what she reported to me.
“Jesus!” I said to my mother that day on the phone.
“How about that?” she exclaimed, as if the matter of the painting were now settled.
I said, “Are you serious? Do you believe any of this? What’s he going to do with the painting? Where is it? Is it still in storage? What kind of storage? One of those outdoor sheds? Is the shed waterproof, I hope? Wait a minute. Does the painting belong to him? Is it insured? Did whoever it was in the bar say anything about its value? What bar was it? How do we know that any of this is for real? A Church? I can’t believe it’s a Church. Shit. What else did S. say?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know the answers to any of your questions. All I know is what I’ve told you,” my mother said, and I said, speaking of S., “How in the world is he going to cope with this?”
“I’ve told you, I don’t know, Don.”
“Is he living out on the Beach?”
“I think so.”
“Is he drinking?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know you are. I am, too.”
“There’s nothing to be done?”
“Don, I’ve done everything I can do. He’s in God’s hands now. He’s in God’s hands.”
In August 1992, Hurricane Andrew struck the southern tip of Florida, with winds measured as category four. The storm tore its way through Miami, causing billions of dollars in damage. My mother’s condominium was ripped apart — one whole wall was effectively dismantled and removed by the winds that rushed in from the Atlantic Ocean. All across the neighborhoods in which I had lived as a teenager, streets, homes, and businesses were wrecked.
My mother told me that the storage facility in which S. had deposited his Frederic Church — I had, I realize now, come to think of the painting as belonging to S.; and, with this in mind, and on the strength of hearsay evidence transmitted through channels that I knew from long experience to be unreliable (S. and my mother), had come to regard the painting as a genuine Church — the storage facility, as I was saying, was, according to my mother, very badly damaged. There was, I recall my mother telling me, no hope that anything would or could be left of the painting. For years, I imagined that it had been annihilated. It had been swept out to sea, or blown up the coast, or drowned in the marshlands of the Everglades.
But was that true? Was the painting really gone?
In the summer of 2003, I made an attempt to find S. I assumed he’d passed away, though I did not know for certain. My search led me to a former employer of his in Miami, the owner of a sign-painting business, who believed that S. was alive. But he did not know where, or how, to locate him.
And then — suddenly — I received a message from S., leaving a number in Florida where he could be contacted. I’d called him, and he told me that he was getting his life together again, after thirteen years of drinking. In that time, he had moved up and down the East Coast and had rarely had a proper mailing address or a phone. He had heard only the day before about my mother’s death. We talked for a long time, remembering her, and then he set me straight on a few matters regarding the painting, which, as it turned out, had been water-damaged but not destroyed. He had given it away, he told me, to a former friend, a bartender, who, he believed, had in turn given it to his parents in Connecticut. “It had been haunting me for a quarter of a century. I figured that was enough,” S. said. I noticed that his speech was less halting than it used to be, his voice firmer.