The UnAmericans: Stories (28 page)

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You must think your dad’s gone crazy.”

“No,” Benny said. “I get it. At least I think I do.” And then Alexi saw something in his son’s face, an expression of pure, unbridled adoration, and he thought about how much he would have killed for a moment like this with his own father. It was all so unfair, he thought. Fatherhood was like one giant free pass. The crying, the rambling, the admissions of weakness: all of it seemed to be making his son admire him more, and when Katherine broke down and did the same thing—the exact same thing—it made Benny want to run from her. He hated himself right then. Benny was the only person he had left, and Alexi didn’t trust himself not to set this relationship on fire along with all the others. He thought about his friend’s pool house awaiting him in L.A., where he’d begin to grovel for work he didn’t even want, now that he could no longer return to the studio, now that all his contacts were still in jail, or hiding out in Mexico, or God knows where.

Alexi had convinced himself all that mattered was that he be near his family. But now even the smallest decisions felt enormous, insurmountable, potentially destructive—and for the first time, it occurred to him that this weekend could be causing Benny even more damage than the past year when he had no father around at all.

He put his keys in the ignition. Alexi suddenly wanted to drive very fast, as far away from himself as possible. “Let’s go,” he said.

“Where?”

“Back to San Francisco.” He’d punished his son so much already. Benny shouldn’t be forced to contend, on top of everything else, with the full reality of the disgraced man his father had become. It would devastate him. “I’ll drop you with your mother and Aunt Ellen.”

“But,” Benny whispered, “what did I do wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s just time to go.”

“But I don’t understand,” his son said, and when Alexi didn’t say anything, when he felt, quite possibly, that he had exhausted every word in the English language and there was nothing left
to
say, Benny mumbled, “Okay. I just need to use the bathroom.”

He watched his son disappear into the tasting room. Sammy Kaye floated out from the speakers, and a Cadillac pulled up to the lot and a man got out, followed by an attractive black-haired woman: people Alexi might have known in a life that was feeling so far away it was as if it had never been his to begin with. He could see horses meandering in the distance, and, walking freely through the gardens, a peacock. My God, he thought, where
was
he?

Alexi was itching to go, out of this vineyard, this town, this . . . he could go anywhere, he thought. Anywhere and nowhere. He looked around the property. Benny was taking an awfully long time. Alexi got out of the car and walked up the path where he saw, through the door, his son coming out of the bathroom from the back of the tasting room. Soon, Alexi thought, Benny would be grown, with a wife and a home and maybe a son of his own. And yet all of that seemed so far in the future, watching Benny walk toward him, still so in the process of becoming a boy, let alone a man. There his son was, wiping his hands on his pants, running a finger up his zipper to make sure it was closed. There he was, walking up to the tasting counter, so high it reached his shoulders. The attendant was busy talking to the black-haired couple, and when he turned to the register to ring them up, there his son was, ducking behind the counter. There Benny was, swiping a bottle of the Private Reserve right off the shelf. There he was, slipping it under his shirt, walking past the bar without even a sideways look—a better actor, Alexi thought, than he himself. His pulse kicked. He had no idea what to do. He stepped forward to stop him, to turn him around and make him give it back, to teach his son a lesson while he was still young enough to listen. But Benny was already walking through the doors and into the bright sunny day, pulling the bottle from his shirt and thrusting it at his father: terrified, astonished, ready for his love.

Friends quoted in the
obituaries talked about Eva Kaplan in her heyday, back in the sixties and seventies. They talked about the parties she and her husband used to throw in their Jerusalem home, inspired by the secret apartment exhibits Eva had attended in Moscow. A few Russian artists were often in attendance, and friends recalled them standing in front of their paintings, surrounded by philanthropists and U.N. officials and Knesset members, while Eva swept through the crowd in a silky pantsuit, a cocktail in hand, wearing what appeared to be all of her gold at once. The exhibits went on in the living room, but displayed throughout her home was the permanent collection amassed over a lifetime: the Picassos and Légers bought for a pittance back in the thirties, when she was still a young and ambitious art student in Paris; the Kotins and Gottliebs she’d begun collecting in the fifties during her years in New York; and, of course, the works that had made her as famous in her circle as the painters themselves: the hundreds of pieces she’d smuggled out of Russia, right up to the fall of the Curtain.

The art, her friends admitted, wasn’t always that great. Of course the whole point, one friend said, was that it was supposed to be edgy and political, but there was no getting around how unappetizing it was to stare at a canvas of Nikita Khrushchev in a compromising position each morning over breakfast. Other pieces had been virtually destroyed by the time Eva exhibited them. It was hard to know if the poor quality had to do with the fact that the artists often worked with anything they could scavenge off the streets, mud and trash and auto paint, or if it was the shoddy way Eva had packed them, so that by the time the smuggled art made it through customs at Ben Gurion and was unveiled on her wall, the canvases, which sometimes weren’t canvases at all but paper bags or burlap sacks, were so faded and torn it was hard to see what the artist’s original intent had been. Still, friends insisted it wasn’t simply the work one bought but the stories that went along with it. Eva had sneaked out several of Litnikov’s now-famous labor camp paintings and, more than anyone, had promoted Mikhail Borovsky’s work throughout the U.S. and Israel. Borovsky had been one of Russia’s best-known painters under communism and internationally prized even after his death a few years ago, possibly the only member of the Artists Union the unofficial artists had respected back then, the only one, they’d said, able to think craftily within the constraining box of Socialist Realism—the only one, as Eva had said, who didn’t think membership meant he had to paint “another bridge, or smiling worker, or ridiculous cow.”

All over the world, obituaries puzzled over how Eva had managed to perform one of the largest and most dangerous art-smuggling operations of the twentieth century. The only person with a bigger collection was an American economist in Maryland, a friend of Eva’s, whose quest to bring as many unofficial Russian works to the western world had inspired her, she’d said in numerous interviews, to do the same for Soviet Jewish art. A curator in Stockholm, quoted in her
Ha’aretz
obituary, believed Eva may have surreptitiously rolled the thinnest sketches into rugs she’d purchased before going through airport inspection in Moscow, while the director of the National Gallery in London thought she may have hidden beneath the canvases of state-sanctioned art—those bridges, those workers, those cows—the unofficial works. But as Eva’s will traveled across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to her family in Boston, the biggest question for her daughter Wendy was what her mother had bequeathed to her. Wendy had spent the past two weeks in Israel, dealing with the funeral and the shiva and sitting through one too many luncheons honoring her mother at the Israel Museum, where Eva had been a board member for nearly fifty years. And while the trip had only confirmed for Wendy what she’d feared most of her life—that these art people knew her mother better than she did herself—Wendy’s father had already been dead two years, she was the only family Eva had left and she felt, in her heart, that the woman would have wanted to make her daughter’s life as financially easy as possible. The paintings in Eva’s house alone, Wendy told her own family as she tossed aside the rest of her mail and opened the executor’s letter, had to be worth almost twenty million. But there, typed out clearly and succinctly, Eva’s last wishes were stated: she was selling her private collection at discount to the Israel Museum and donating the proceeds, every last shekel, to charity.

Wendy sank into a chair and put her face in her hands. It was so like her mother, she whispered, to map things out to the minutiae. All the money, Eva had decided, would go toward creating the Eva Kaplan Family Foundation, which her daughter Wendy, son-in-law Larry and two grandchildren, Mira and Hannah, would administer. The foundation would fund art education programs at youth villages and immigrant absorption centers from Kiryat Shmoneh to Eilat, places Eva had been supporting for years. She’d use the rest of the money—of which there was millions—to build a new wing at the Israel Museum that would house the Eva Kaplan Mentorship Program, dedicated to granting fellowships to promising young curators from around the world, who would come to Jerusalem to work in the same space, and follow in the footsteps, of Eva herself.

And what could the Kaplans of Boston say?

“It’s really . . . amazing,” Wendy’s husband Larry said slowly, as though rummaging through his head for the appropriate word.

“And sort of tragic,” their son-in-law Peter offered. “That she’ll never see any of this.”

“But is it maybe,” their daughter Hannah said, “just a
little
bit tacky, putting her name on everything?”

“What it is,” Wendy said, finally looking up, “is so unbelievably
her
.” They were all at the dining table now, which no one had sat at in years—everyone always ate in the kitchen, even with company—but which had felt so fitting to spread the legal documents across, as if they were in a boardroom in some glittery high-rise and not a Victorian fixer-upper on Cedar Street.

“Always flying out to Europe, or lunching with some refugee scholar,” Wendy said. “Always—always—letting everyone know just how generous she was,” she said, walking into the kitchen to answer the phone. Standing in the doorway, twisting the cord around her elbow, Wendy resembled her late father, with her short, disheveled hair and sleepy green eyes, as if perpetually startled from a nap. Then she hung up, walked back into the dining room and said, “That was the Israel Museum. They’re planning another event next month in her honor.”

Her eyes filled up, that fast. “We’re all invited,” she whispered. “The entire foundation.”

Larry came behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders, keeping them there as the first cry, and then the second, escaped her throat. “It’s halfway across the world,” he said. “And you just got back. The museum would understand if you said you were busy.”

“Right,” Wendy said, swallowing. “I
am
busy,” and everyone nodded, though just a few weeks before she’d been talking about how unnerving it was to have both her children grown and married, and to only be working halftime now—that it felt strange and decadent, at fifty-six, to begin cultivating hobbies. But as soon as she said it, it turned out everyone was busy. Mira, of course, was out of the question—no one had heard from her in days. Larry couldn’t leave his grad students last-minute, and Hannah couldn’t pull the kids out of school so early in the year—it was only October. There would be other events, they reasoned, in which to honor Eva—
many
other events, they were certain—and since construction on the museum wing and the absorption centers wouldn’t be completed until summer at the earliest, it made sense, they decided, to wait until then. They could fly out for the ribbon-cutting ceremonies and turn it into a big family trip, maybe rent that apartment in Baka they’d liked so much for Larry’s sixtieth, and enroll Hannah and Peter’s girls, now that they were old enough, in kibbutz camp in the north. So they’d miss this one event, they said. What was the harm, and really, who at this point was keeping tabs?

Unless—and that was when Wendy turned to her son-in-law Boaz, who had been silent the entire night, sitting at the end of the dining table. Unless he wanted to go. He could treat it as a free vacation, Wendy said, make a quick appearance at the museum, then relax in Jerusalem for a couple weeks. Or get some free research out of it, spend time with that Ladino poet he loved whose name they were always forgetting. And when Boaz, surrounded by all of his in-laws except his wife Mira herself, who, only six weeks along, had up and left him for another man last Monday, calling him and saying she was sorry, but she needed some time away—when Boaz, who had been wondering if there was something seriously wrong with him for obsessing over the life and death of a woman he barely knew, poring over every obituary he could find, then driving here tonight, as if he too had a stake in the matter—when Boaz said he felt a little funny being the only one to attend given, you know, the circumstances, all four present members of the Eva Kaplan Foundation turned to him and said that he was family, always and forever, and that they all just had to be patient while Mira got this last tantrum out of her system before the baby came and she finally had to start acting like an adult.