The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World (17 page)

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. She'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.”

“I'm not surprised. It is not called calendar art for nothing.”

“Peter, do you remember the night of the gala opening of Once Forbidden?”

“Remember? Me, remember? Of course I remember. Was it or was it not a
magnifico
night to remember?”

“Do you remember the picture your mother showed us that night?”

“She showed us two. The one with your mother and—”

“The one with your dad as a young man. That's the one I need to see.”

“You have already seen it.”

“I need to see it again.”

“Mother has it. It's keeping her company, remember? She showed it to all of us the night she disappeared in a cloud of Winnebago exhaust.”

“Peter, please. I definitely need to see it.”

“But you've seen it hundreds of times. Every time you came over to our house. It was always on the mantel in the living room. Don't you remember?”

“I remember. I know I've seen it
frequently.
But, Peter, please, I need to see it again.”

“Why?”

“On the wall between your uncle Pieter and your father, there was a calendar.”

“A 1942 calendar. Uncle had circled the date, September 4. They apparently were celebrating something.”

“Peter, please, I need to see that calendar.”

“Have you become one of those idiot savants who can figure out what day of the week September 4, 1942, was?”

“I don't mean to be disrespectful, Godfather, but they don't call them idiot savants anymore.”

“What then?”

“They're autistic calendar savants. But I'm definitely not one of them. I want to see the picture on that calendar. I think it was by Modigliani.”

“Modigliani was a Jew, remember? You don't for one minute think that a human female tushie painted by a Jew would be on a calendar in Amsterdam in the year 1942, do you?” Then, as if to answer his own question, he said, “Oh, my God. Mother was telling me something, wasn't she?”

“I think so.”

“And the hero in the gray box—” Peter said, half to himself.

“Where is the box, Peter? Mrs. Zender's sale starts next weekend, and—”

“It's in a Winnebago. The only address I could possibly have for it is some double-digit interstate highway.”

“May I call your mother? Please? She said she has one of those car phones.”

“That phone costs a gazillion dollars a minute whether she's making a call or receiving one. That damn phone ought to be listed as a dependent. It costs more than my college tuition did.”

“Can I call her? Please? I'll be brief, Peter. I promise. Please give me her number.”

“I don't like having her talking on the phone while
she's driving. Mother's secret demon comes out when she's behind the wheel of any vehicle that has wheels and a motor. If she hears the urgency in your voice, she'll arrive with a police escort. And then won't you and your Mrs. Wilcox be embarrassed?”

Amedeo waited and said nothing. He knew what was coming.

It came.

Peter put on his Godfather voice again. “I'll make the call.”

“Thank you, Godfather.”

“You will need to look at some papers in that gray box.”

“I will, Godfather. Thank you. I will.”

“And you will need to kiss my ring.”

“I will, Godfather, I definitely will.”

“How often?”

“Many times.”

F
OR THE FIRST TIME IN
all the weeks they had been working together, Amedeo didn't wait until the bus was out of sight to meet up with William. He planted himself at the bottom of the bus steps, and as soon as William hit the sidewalk, Amedeo said, “I am mortified by the way I embarrassed your mother last night, and I want a chance to apologize.”

As he expected, William did not answer immediately. They were walking side by side, Amedeo anxiously keeping up with William's long-legged pace. They were halfway to Mrs. Zender's when William suddenly stopped. Lost to worry, Amedeo had gone on for several steps before he realized that William was no longer at his side.

To his surprise William said, “Ma has been right wary of
The Moon Lady
ever since the day we found it.”

Amedeo said hopefully, “Then she forgives me?”

“More than I do, and probably more than she should.”

“I'd like to see her and explain.”

“Ma suspects you know something about
The Moon Lady.
She's already guessed that you have something to tell.”

“She's right. I think I do have something. I called my godfather last night.”

And there on the street, out of sight and hearing range of Mrs. Zender's house, Amedeo told William about the old photograph from Amsterdam in the year 1942.

“So Mrs. Zender is being wily,” William said. And then he smiled.

Amedeo watched his smile widen into the kind that he and William often shared when Mrs. Zender held out her champagne flute, and one or the other of them would wordlessly fill it.

There was a lot besides smiles that Amedeo and William shared at Mrs. Zender's. There was also her house, which was always a carnival of sights and sounds. Whenever they opened the door, they never knew if they would meet the lady or the tiger, for Aida Lily Tull Zender could be fierce and demanding or smiling and funny. She was always full of herself, but she was also always full of fun. She dressed up every day as if she were giving a performance, and yet she did not seem vain. Despite her theatricality,
there was something genuine about her. She ordered everyone around as if she were royalty, yet she was not unkind. Despite her bossiness, there was something generous about her. She was full of commands, contradictions, and inconsistencies, but she was always interesting, and she touched both of them in ways they didn't have to admit or discuss. Being her friend was difficult but exceptional. Being her friend was a bond between them like a pledge to a fraternity.

William's smile had not faded before Amedeo said, “Mrs. Zender may be as wily as your mother is deep.”

William accepted the compliment with quiet dignity.

Mrs. Vanderwaal's Winnebago was waiting in Amedeo's driveway. As soon as they saw it, they broke into a run. Amedeo knocked.

Mrs. Vanderwaal opened the door and said, “Yes, dear.”

Amedeo introduced William, and Mrs. Vanderwaal said, “This is a lovely place you have here, Deo.”

“Thank you,” Amedeo replied. “Won't you please come in?”