Under the Egg (8 page)

“Um, sure. I guess.”

“Your grandfather was a valued employee of the Met for many, many years. I'm sure he would be
deeply
disappointed to think you were spreading stories—fictions really—that besmirch the reputation of this museum.
And
its security team.” He looked at me pointedly over the top of his spectacles.

I looked pointedly back. “Jack didn't care about reputations—his own
or
the museum's. The only thing he cared about was the art.”

“Why, yes, Theodora. You're right. He did care deeply about the museum's collection. And wouldn't he prioritize the safety of that art above all else?”

I thought back to the painting in his studio, painted over and hidden for decades. Hidden for its safekeeping, I suddenly saw. “Yes,” I nodded slowly. “Yes, he would.”

Lydon stood up and came around to the front of his desk, looming over us like an eclipse. “And that's why we mustn't go around repeating these stories—which have no basis in fact, I should add—which can only confuse people.” He settled himself on the desk's corner. “And we don't want to confuse people, do we?”

“What are you guys talking about?” Bodhi piped up. “The truth is, you're missing a painting. How is telling people the truth about it confusing them?”

Lydon's concerned-uncle façade faltered. “Look, girls, I don't want word getting out about any of this—period. This is a small but significant painting of great value. If word gets out, we could lose it to the underground art market forever, especially if people believe it's in unsecured hands.”

“Oh, it's not unsecured,” Bodhi blurted out, then looked at me and slapped her hand over her mouth.

The small room filled with a menacing silence.

“It's not possible. There's no way that painting could have left this building. Not past our security—” Lydon stopped himself.

I said nothing, as did (thank God) Bodhi.

Lydon began agitatedly tapping his fountain pen on his knee.

“It's no secret that Jack always had financial issues,” he mused aloud, “despite the work I secured for him over the years.” Blue ink began to spatter Lydon's crisp trousers with each tap of his pen. “But perhaps Jack had a ‘retirement plan' in place, hmmm? One that involved removing the painting and leaving it, for some reason, in the hands of a ten-year-old girl—”

“Thirteen,” I corrected.

Lydon leaped to his feet and grabbed my arm, oblivious to the inky fingerprints he left.

“Listen, you little brat. You think you can walk into a pawnshop with a de Kooning under your arm? They'll arrest you so fast—”

“De Kooning?” I gasped. “What are you talking about?”

“Yes, of course the de Kooning. The missing painting.” Lydon cleared his throat. “I mean, the painting rumored to be missing.”

Even I knew that Willem de Kooning was a twentieth-century Dutch abstract painter. Who most definitely did not go around painting the Virgin Mary.

Lydon was talking about a different painting.

But before I could do damage control—

“Who's de Kooning?” piped up Bodhi. “I thought we were talking about Raphael.”

Lydon stared at Bodhi and slowly released his grip on my arm.

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing.” I glared at Bodhi who finally clamped her lips shut.

Lydon sat back and regarded me. “My God, there's another painting, isn't there?” he put together slowly. He looked at my sweater bag, bulging with its tomes on the Italian Renaissance. “A Raphael,” he whispered.

Bodhi jumped up and pulled the arm recently vacated by Lydon's grip toward the door. “Nope. There's no missing painting, remember? That's what you said. So I guess this conversation never happened.”

We were almost to the stairs by the time Lydon made it to the door. I don't know what made him madder—our escape or his ink-stained suit—but the last thing we heard in the stairwell was the bouncing echo of a four-letter word.

W
e didn't stop running until we were halfway through Central Park, finally giving in at the roller skaters' circle. It took most of “Disco Inferno” before we'd caught our breath enough to talk.

“So,” Bodhi wheezed, “that guy was talking about some other painting. A de Korn— de Koon—”

“A de Kooning. Yeah,” I nodded wearily.

“So Jack stole that one, too?”

I paused to massage a stitch in my side. “I don't think he stole either of them,” I started slowly. “I mean, there is still a chance that Jack smuggled our painting out—what, forty years ago? But honestly, if they're this keyed up about a minor de Kooning gone missing in the last year or so, they'd have conducted a full-scale manhunt already for a missing Raphael.”

“So we still don't know where he got it?”

“No.” I sighed heavily. “But Lydon had a good point. I can't walk into a pawnshop with this thing, or an antiques shop, or—”

“Cadwalader's? They didn't even think it was real.”

“That's because Gemma is an idiot. Nice shoes and all, but still an idiot.”

“No argument here.” Bodhi flopped herself under a tree.

“Okay, maybe it's stolen,” I said as I collapsed next to her, too hot to care about the dirt being ground into my petticoat. “But maybe it isn't. Maybe he got it honestly. All I know is, if I can't figure out where he got it and find some kind of proof of ownership, then they're going to assume it's stolen. And it's going to be taken away before I can figure out why Jack wanted me to have it in the first place.”

“And before you can sell it.”

“That, too.”

We eventually left the cool shade of the park and made our way slowly down Broadway (picking up a decent-looking castoff blender along the way). By the time we reached Spinney Lane, the sun was slipping beyond New Jersey.

Bodhi paused in front of our house, hitching a foot up on our stoop. “So do you think it's a portrait?”

The same question had been rattling around my brain all the way down Broadway. “I don't know. Raphael used La Fornarina as a model for the Virgin Mary plenty of times before. But every other time, he'd transformed her into this perfectly idealized Madonna. Why not this time?”

“Because this time—”

“This time he was painting the real Margherita Luti, his one true love. And if that's the case, then—”

“Who's the kid?”

“Exactly.”

Bodhi nodded distractedly and walked off toward her own house without even a good-bye. But as I got the key in the front door, I heard sneakers pounding on the sidewalk, and Bodhi appeared again under the light of the streetlamp. “Here's another question,” she panted. “That bird is flying out of the baby's hand, right? I saw a bunch of paintings at the Met today with Jesus and birds, but those birds were all flying down. All white and golden and shiny with light.”

“Wow,” I said, “you really were paying attention.”

“Hey, I told you, this is my new independent study project.” She grinned. “And I'm gonna get an A.”

• • •

Bodhi vowed to barricade herself in her media room and not to leave her computer until she uncovered proof that determined the painting's authenticity, or history, or both.

I retired to the kitchen, my books splayed all over the table, which is where I was when my mom wandered in around midnight and started opening cupboard doors at random.

“Mom? What are you doing out—I mean, up?” It was rare to see my mom outside her room beyond her morning walk to the tea shop.

“Oh, Theo, there you are. I was calling for you. I'm out of tea.” She started rummaging under the sink, among the buckets and cleaners. “The kettle?”

Sigh. “I got it.” I snagged the kettle from its usual place on the stove and filled it at the sink. “What's up? You stuck on something?”

My mom sank into one of the unmatched kitchen chairs and stared out the darkened window. “An equation. I can't sleep.”

“Me too.”

Her eyes, puffy under heavy lids, fluttered down to the books on the table. “Oh, really? Is it some kind of Diophantine equation? Because I could help—”

“Well, not an equation exactly. A problem.”

“Maybe I could take a look,” she murmured as she opened the big monograph.

“I dunno. It's not math.” I put Mrs. Tenpenny III's chipped china tea service on the table and threw in a (clean) old nylon stocking stuffed with loose chamomile leaves. “It's something for Jack.”

“Oh.” I heard my mom start humming as she flipped absently through the pages. She didn't like thinking about his death, and I could tell her brain had taken refuge in a theorem again.

I put a flowery teacup and saucer in front of her. “Careful with that book, please. It's not mine.”

“I
am
being careful,” she said. Like a child. Then she peeked in the pitcher. “Is there any milk?”

“No,” I responded testily. Not for a month.

“Oh, dear.” My mom drifted back to the monograph. “You'd better get some at the deli tomorrow.”

The teakettle whistled, and my mother made no move for it, engrossed in the monograph, her fingers lightly skimming the chubby cheeks of a Raphael baby.

“Oh, now, don't you move. Let me get that for you,” I said. Maybe a bit too loudly.

“These pictures,” she said, “they're just so—” She left the thought there and slowly turned the pages, in hopes the word she was searching for would appear on the next page.

I poured the steaming water into the teapot. “Yes, they're Raphaels. I've just rediscovered them, too. Jack always liked them, didn't he? They are very—”

“Symmetrical.”

Symmetrical? I looked over my mom's shoulder to see which painting she was talking about. All of them, it seemed, as she kept flipping pages.

“You're talking about the Madonna and Child paintings, right? I mean, there's a sense of balance and harmony between the figures, but it's not exactly mirror symmetry—”

“But there's such perfection,” she said as she traced a page with her finger. “The mother and the child, like two equal sides of an equation.”

In our case, that would be an imbalanced equation, I thought. “They're just mothers and babies, Mom.”

“No, the perfect mothers. The perfect love. Look, see?”

I leaned over, planting my hands on the table, to see the
Madonna della Seggiola,
one of Raphael's best-known Madonna-Child compositions. Mom had a point. The mother here—her little dumpling snuggled under her cheek—resembled a happier, more peaceful version of the Virgin Mary in the painting upstairs. For a moment, a sense of calm settled over the dank kitchen.

Then Mom flipped to the very beginning of the book, pushing it toward me. “And this one, too.”

La Fornarina graced the title page, in that topless girlie-mag pose.

I snickered. “Uh well, that's hardly the Virgin Mary, Mom. It's Raphael's mistress.”

Mom smiled a wistful smile. “No, she's a mother. See the way she's touching her breast? I did that when you were a baby, too. To remember which side I'd last fed you on. When you were hungry, I'd check to see which side felt full.”

Ew.

“I took care of you once,” she murmured, and she absently reached out to place her hand on mine.

Now you have to understand—my mother had “a need for solitude,” my grandfather called it. She was “not a hugger,” he sometimes said. “Touch aversion” was a term I came across in a psychology manual once. Whatever the name or the reason, I was surprised—no, shocked—to feel her hand closing over mine.

So maybe I can be forgiven for instinctively snatching my hand away.

But would Eddie forgive me for spilling an entire pot of tea on the For Reference Only monograph?

“Towels! We need towels, Mom!” I screeched. I ransacked the kitchen and grabbed whatever threadbare dish towels I could find, throwing them on the table to stave off the chamomile flood.

I looked up from my frantic dabbing and swiping to see my mom holding the empty teapot out to me. “Is there any more water?” She dangled the sagging stocking in the air. “I saved the tea.”

I took a deep breath. Then I retrieved the kettle and refilled her teapot, which she held gingerly by the handle and spout and took back upstairs to her nest.

It must be nice, I thought as I began to individually blot pages 10 through 107, to always be the chubby, helpless baby in the family. Or better yet, a flittering, nervous bird perched so precariously that everyone tiptoes around, trying not to scare it away.

And what if I did scare her away? What difference would it make, except to save me tea shop bills we couldn't pay anyway?

But I knew. It would mean that the Tenpennys weren't the Tenpennys anymore. It would just be the name on the door of a house I used to live in. Before I went to foster care.

And then I would be really, truly, entirely alone.

• • •

It took me another hour to blot and dry each page of the monograph individually, and I was finally heading upstairs for a cold bath when I heard banging at the door.

There was only one reason for banging on the door in the middle of the night. The jig is up, I thought as I fumbled for a reasonable explanation of why I'd let weeks go by without turning in a stolen painting to the cops. But when I wrenched open the front door, I found Bodhi dancing around in the stoop's shadows.

“Where's the painting? Where is it?” she said breathlessly.

I waved Bodhi inside. “Upstairs, of course. Why?” I stepped out on the stoop and looked around. No idling police cars.

“Well, go get it! And bring that big book on Raphael, too. We're going on a field trip!”

“Now? Can't it wait till tomorrow?”

“No way. We'll have better luck tonight.”

“With what?” As I stepped back inside, I saw by the meager hall light that Bodhi's right arm hung strangely at her side.

“With my broken arm.”