The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World

  Then Mrs. Zender stood up. “I am retiring to my room,” she announced. She held her champagne glass at arm’s length and swept it around the room, almost making a full circle. When she stopped suddenly, the fabric of her silver lamé pants wrapped around her legs like a swirl of soft frozen yogurt. She lifted her glass and—full tilt—drank the last few drops of champagne. She laid the empty glass on top of the piano, which Mrs. Wilcox had covered with a quilt. The glass teetered ever so slightly. Ray rescued it and held it awkwardly, like a stage prop. He pinched the stem between the thumb and forefinger of one hand and nervously rubbed the bottom with the other.

  Mrs. Zender was now standing in the door with her arms extended outward at shoulder height. Her wingspan filled the archway from doorjamb to doorjamb. She waited until every eye was on her and Ray had stopped rubbing the bottom of the champagne flute. Slowly she swept one hand across her chest, followed it with the other, and columnlike, waited again. Then she lifted one hand—only one—and extended her arm. Like a Roman princess standing in the royal box, she announced, “Gentlemen, let the games begin.” She bowed her head and swept out of the hall in an eddy of silver lamé.

  Bert and Ray crumpled into the Chippendales. Without even looking at William, Ray handed the champagne glass to him. William carried it into the kitchen without being told to do so.

  Amedeo followed.

  “What happened just now?” Amedeo asked.

  William said, “Happens all the time. People hate having their things looked at and judged. It’s like an attack on their taste.”

  “Do you think that’s all?”

  “’Course not.”

  “What else?”

  “I think Mrs. Zender doesn’t like Bert and Ray.”

  “I can understand that. Definitely.”

  William laughed.

  When William and Amedeo returned to the music room—they hadn’t been gone long—the Meissen candlesticks had a red SOLD tag on them, and so did the antique brass fireplace tools. Ray was looking over Mrs. Wilcox’s shoulder as she was checking items off her master list before writing them down on the sheet that would become his and Bert’s bill of sale.

  Bert had picked up The Moon Lady again. He said to his partner, “Your call, Ray.”

  There was no music in the room, but Amedeo’s head was full of sound. He heard Mrs. Zender’s exquisite nonchalance about how collectible Modigliani had become. He heard her saying, “He is the darling of art collectors now. He did something that art collectors love: He died young.” But the question Amedeo could not stop asking himself was why Mrs. Zender was willing to sell The Moon Lady at all, let alone for five thousand dollars, and he knew—he knew in his heart that she didn’t want to sell it to Bert and Ray.

  Bert was still holding The Moon Lady.“Yes or no, Ray.”

  Amedeo spoke up. “It’s a no.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Mrs. Zender has withdrawn The Moon Lady.

  “ Why didn’t she tell us? She could have told us that instead of lecturing us about Paris being the capital of France. We know that Paris is the capital of France, don’t we, Bert?”

  Bert asked, “Why didn’t she tell us herself?”

  Amedeo had pitched his tent of lies, and now he had to live in it. “She told me.” He looked to William for help.

  William acknowledged him with a slight tilt to the angel on his shoulder and then said to Bert, “Mrs. Zender is used to having people.”

  Amedeo picked it up from there. “When you left for the tour, she said she decided to keep the drawing. She likes Modigliani”—he enjoyed not pronouncing the g—“too much . . . and you don’t like Modern.” Saying, “Excuse me,” Amedeo took the drawing from Bert. He started to peel the price sticker from the glass.

  Bert looked at Amedeo suspiciously. “Do you know about the Chinese screen?”

  William answered for him. “Yes, sir, he does. I told him.”

  Ray said, “I just got to wondering if you and your little friend are holding this back, the same way you did with that Chinese screen from the Birchfield estate.”

  William started to say, “We didn’t hold back—”

  But his mother interrupted. “I am right red-faced about all this. Please forgive me.” Bert and Ray concentrated on Amedeo’s removing the price label from the glass.

  Turning to Amedeo, Mrs. Wilcox said, “Amedeo, dear, will you please to run The Moon Lady back up to Mrs. Zender with my apologies? Tell her I understand. Bert and Ray, I do hope you understand, too. I should have done more checking. I apologize again. But I’m hoping that little unpleasantness won’t stop you from enjoying all these other nice things William and I picked out for you to look at. Like, can you take a look at this here Whiting’s sterling silver? William, he polished every single piece, and I have researched all the hallmarks. It’s the Lily pattern. You know Mrs. Zender’s name was Aida Lily, and when she married, she received eighteen complete place settings. Everything. Including strawberry forks.”

  As he was leaving the room, Amedeo heard Bert say, “Nobody wants strawberry forks.”

  Mrs. Wilcox suggested, “You might could recommend that they do make nice cocktail forks.”

  Amedeo left the room holding on to The Moon Lady , but instead of carrying it upstairs to Mrs. Zender’s room, he left the house through the back door and took it to his room. When he returned to the Zender house, William was in the kitchen, wrapping the Meissen candlesticks in bubble wrap. William did not look up when he came in. Amedeo waited, then said, “I’m sorry about what happened.”

  “You embarrassed Ma.”

  “I know, and I am sorry.”

  “Mrs. Zender never did withdraw The Moon Lady, did she?”

  “No, I did.”

  William finished wrapping the first candelabra before he looked at Amedeo. “You took The Moon Lady home with you, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you call that stealing?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t expect to keep it, but I’m sure she didn’t want Bert and Ray to buy it.”

  “Because?”

  “I’m not sure. Mrs. Zender never said. I just know she doesn’t want Bert and Ray to have it.”

  William immersed himself in one of his extended silences as he started wrapping the arms of the second candelabra. Amedeo nervously started cutting strips of bubble wrap and handing them to him. With both hands busy, taping the stem of the candlestick, William brushed his earlobe to the angel on his shoulder before he asked, “Did you ever tell Mrs. Zender about how you always wanted to discover something that no one knew had been lost?”

  “Not directly. But she knows. Remember the day I told you? That was the day she kept coming into the kitchen, saying how hot it was and how she needed champagne to cool off. Like it was never hot and like she didn’t always need champagne.” Amedeo handed William another strip of bubble wrap.

  William allowed his silence to continue until he finished wrapping one of the arms of the second candelabra. He examined his work, added another piece of tape, and then spoke. “I think The Moon Lady was a plant.”

  Amedeo said, “I didn’t want to say so, but honestly, William, the thought crossed my mind, too.”

  William at last looked at him. “When?”

  “When I saw it sitting by itself on a shelf, calling attention to itself with a book that every schoolkid can recognize. And partly cleaned like nothing else was.”

  “There’s something else.”

  “What?”

  William started a long silence. He was cutting a pad of bubble wrap for the bottom of the candelabra, and Amedeo waited. “Ma and I were all geared up to start work on the library that weekend you went up to Sheboygan. Mrs. Zender didn’t decide she needed the weekend off—never said a word about it—until you told her that you were going to see an exhibit called Once Forbidden. She wanted you to be here when we started the library.” Despite himself, Amedeo broke out a huge grin, which William
did not return. “What I can’t figure is, if she didn’t want Bert and Ray to have it, why did she let it go that far?”

  “She’s spoiled. She wanted me to do it for her. Just like the day we went to Dig-It-All. She wanted the phones, but she didn’t want to pick them out, so I did it for her. And then when we went to check out, she embarrassed me in front of the lady at the cash register.”

  “Like you embarrassed Ma in front of Bert and Ray. Ma don’t deserve that.”

  “I know she doesn’t, and I am sorry.”

  William picked up one of the candlesticks, and Amedeo started to pick up the other. William said, “I don’t think you better go back in there. I don’t think Ma or Bert and Ray need to see you again. Not tonight, anyway.”

  Amedeo said, “Please tell your mother I’m sorry.”

  “I ain’t your people, Deo. You got to tell her that yourself.” He pushed through the swinging door of the kitchen and was gone.

  AMEDEO WAS EXHAUSTED. LIES, STEALING, and bert and Ray had worn him out. Worst of all, though, was having William mad at him.

  When he had snuck back into Mrs. Zender’s house, he had hoped to find William alone—which he did—and find him rather amused at the whole incident. It was clear to Amedeo that William did not favor Bert and Ray the way that Mrs. Wilcox did. He had a faint hope that William would even be pleased with him for having pulled the sale of The Moon Lady out from under them. It took only one look at William’s cold concentration on wrapping the candelabra for Amedeo to know that, polite and restrained as he had been in front of Bert and Ray, William was furious with him. And he had every right to be. Amedeo’s lie had put both William and his mother in a bad place. He had challenged William’s loyalty to him as a friend and a coworker, but worst of all, his lie had been a challenge to Mrs. Wilcox’s integrity. In front of Bert and Ray, William had stayed cool and courteous, almost courtly. But Amedeo had embarrassed Mrs. Wilcox—embarrassed her terribly—yet despite her concern for the feelings of Bert and Ray, she, too, had closed ranks around him.

  He owed Mrs. Wilcox a big apology. Definitely. It would take more than an apology, however big, to make it up to her.

  He thought again about William’s silence when he returned to Mrs. Zender’s. It was angry. Infrasonic. Beyond William’s worst. And he deserved it.

  Why? he asked himself. Why had he risked William’s friendship and Mrs. Wilcox’s? What was there about Bert and Ray that had made him lie and steal?

  He could deal with the stealing, because he still wasn’t sure if what he did was really stealing if he meant to return it. And there was the possibility that it had been a plant, after all. There was the possibility that he was meant to find it. Even William thought so.

  It was the lying that had hurt the most, and to be honest with himself, it wasn’t Bert and Ray who made him do it. It was Mrs. Zender. He had lied for her, for the sake of something he thought she might want him to do. He had become her people.

  But then he listened to himself, and he knew that if he lifted the quilt of lies inside his head, that if he told the truth out loud, he had to admit that he lied and stole not for Mrs. Zender and not because of Bert and Ray. He had done it for himself. For the part of himself that did not want to lose his chance to escape anonymity and discover something, the part of himself that wanted recognition.

  Maybe another truth, the truth about The Moon Lady, would help him make up for the lies. He had to start asking some hard questions: Why was Mrs. Zender willing to sell The Moon Lady in the first place? Why would she hold on to a little drawing on a menu by Alexander Calder—Sandy—and sell a signed Modigliani that Mr. Zender had given her as a wedding gift? And if she didn’t want it to sell, why had she priced it so low?

  He could start by asking Mrs. Zender some of the same questions he had just asked himself, but he knew he wouldn’t. Mrs. Zender didn’t operate that way. Her secrets were in the large hidden self that she kept offstage.

  If she had planted The Moon Lady for him to find—and he was more convinced than ever that she had—maybe what she really wanted was for him to find out the truth about it. The boys who discovered the cave of Lascaux had to call in the archeologists who had carbon dating to let the world know what they had discovered, and even the French soldier who found the Rosetta stone and immediately knew it was important, didn’t know why. It took twenty-three years and a college professor to decode the writings to find out that it was the key to understanding hieroglyphics. Maybe that was the kind of discovery he was supposed to make about The Moon Lady: decoding and deciphering.

  He would start now.

  He set the drawing on the desk opposite his bed and lay down with his hands under his head and looked at it. And looked and looked. Forty-five seconds would be just a tap on the time he would spend looking at it.

  It was already hauntingly familiar. Not because he had seen it at Mrs. Zender’s. It was familiar to him in another way. There was recency, but there was also frequency. Amedeo knew that he had seen it before and seen it often. Inside his head Amedeo kept reviewing how Mrs. Zender reminded him of how Modigliani did collectors a favor by dying young and thereby becoming a dead Jewish Modern artist.

  Amedeo took down his copy of the Once Forbidden catalog and looked for Amedeo Modigliani. All the artists were Modern. All were dead. Only one was Jewish. And it wasn’t Modigliani. It was:

  Marc Chagall: Degenerate because he was Jewish. The Jews—just by virtue of being Jews—by even a fraction of their heritage were the absolute worst contaminators of the Aryan race. What would happen to German culture if it allowed itself to be contaminated by Jews?

  He again checked every picture in the catalog. Modigliani was not there.

  He reread the introduction. The Nazis forbade artists to depict the male form as anything other than “heroic” and the female as anything other than “maternal” or “feminine.” Surely, the Nazis would consider The Moon Lady doubly degenerate. Her neck was long and swanny (at least the part he could see was). And the artist who painted it was a Jew.

  He reread Once Forbidden from cover to cover and recited the poem to himself. Braque, Chagall, and Picasso were all in the catalog, but Modigliani was not.

  But Modigliani was somehow connected to Once Forbidden. He reviewed the evening of the molto, molto magnifico gala. There was champagne and Peter’s welcoming remarks. There was the couple who spent all that time in front of the Braque and there was the boy with the pink bubble gum in front of the Blue Picasso.

  There was something else about the molto, molto evening. Something significant. He remembered more:

  Mrs. Vanderwaal’s surprise at the after-party party in Peter’s apartment. The Winnebago. The gray box she was taking with her. The two pictures she had shown them before putting them in the gray box.

  One was the old, yellowed, black-and-white picture that showed Peter’s father and his uncle, named Pieter, holding champagne glasses and toasting each other the way Mrs. Zender had toasted her audience in the music room. He had seen that picture before when they had visited Mrs. Vanderwaal in Epiphany.

  Frequency and recency.

  Amedeo jumped up from bed and checked his watch. It was after ten. But Sheboygan was on Central time. It would be an hour earlier there. He called his godfather.

  “Do you have a problem, my son?” Peter asked in his Marlon Brando/Godfather voice.

  Taking his cue from Peter, Amedeo answered, “Yes, Godfather, I have need.”

  “You may tell me, my son.”

  Amedeo told him the history of his work at Mrs. Zender’s.

  “What is her collection like?” Peter asked.

  “Mostly peasant scenes in large, elaborate gold frames. Mrs. Wilcox isn’t even sending them to an art dealer. They’re the sort that decorators want—along with the three feet of red books—which Mrs. Zender also has, by the way. Mrs. Zender is more interested in good music than in good art. She has a menu that Alexander Calder signed instead of signing the check. S
he’s keeping that. She’s keeping only one or two of the others for her new home.”

  Peter listened carefully and then said, “I don’t understand. What is the problem, my son?”

  “I think Mrs. Zender has a piece of Degenerate art. By Modigliani. Wasn’t his work confiscated by the Nazis?”

  “There was one Modigliani confiscated by the Goebbels Committee in 1937. An oil painting, Portrait of a Woman, or as they say, Damenbildnis. It was sold at auction. The Damenbildnis has a well-documented provenance; that is, it has proof of authenticity and past ownership. Everything sold at auction these days must have that. The Damenbildnis last changed hands in 1984. It is in a private collection, which, I’m sorry to tell you, is not Mrs. Zender’s.”

  “Mrs. Zender’s is a drawing, not a painting.”

  “Describe it to me, Deo.”

  “Pencil or crayon on paper, slightly larger than a sheet of tablet paper, buttocks facing out, face over her right shoulder, impish smile, no teeth showing, red wash of gouache or watercolor, brushstrokes clearly visible, no color on the body even though looking at it, you think pink.”

  “Well done, Deo. But I must ask, is her neck long and swanny?”

  “You can’t see too much of her neck,” Amedeo answered seriously. Then he laughed. “Dad taught me that poem, but I almost forgot to tell you the most important thing: Modigliani is written in script in the upper right.”

  “Well, my son,” he said, “I’m going to tell you the most important thing too. And because I am telling it, my important is more important than your important. Modigliani is very popular these days. People in art circles say that there were more works by Modigliani after he died than there were while he was living. His work is reproduced on everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs to—”

  “—calendars! That’s it. I’ve seen it on a calendar, Peter.”