“Amazing,” Yale said, and he met Bill’s exuberant eyes. “That—details like that, I think, will help a great deal with authentication. Maybe we could record you, what you’re saying—”
“Well yes, someone should be taking it all down. Isn’t that what you’re for?” This was directed at Roman.
“I have a notebook in the car,” he said, helplessly. And when they all kept looking at him, he bounded from the room to fetch it.
“Well,” Nora said, “my point is you’re going to need these stories. And I don’t see how we’re going to do that if you take this all back to Chicago. And I’m going to want to sort things too. I can see now they’re out of order. Couldn’t you stay up here a week or so?”
But they couldn’t, not right now. They had meetings, they had a gallery to run—plus as soon as the papers were signed, they wanted to get the art away from Frank. They hit on the idea that Roman could take the shoebox to the public library that afternoon, along with a load of dimes, and Xerox everything. The originals could remain in Wisconsin for now. “Not in the house, though,” Yale put in. “So much more could happen to them there.”
“Yes, yes,” Nora said. He didn’t need to spell it out.
They’d leave it all at the bank, and next week Yale and Roman would come back up, help her sort through.
When Roman returned, out of breath, Yale felt a knocking on his knee. Knuckles. He understood that he wasn’t to jump or ask what Nora wanted. He looked down as subtly as he could at her closed fist. When she raised it slightly, he put his palm beneath it. She was passing him something. She let it drop into his hand, and he closed his fingers around a complicated object, metal and pointy. He could feel a chain. A necklace.
He didn’t understand, but he shoved it into his trouser pocket, shifted so the sharp part dropped next to his groin.
She said to them all, “Listen, I feel dandy today, but I don’t know how I’ll feel next week, and if nothing else I want you to take this down.” She pointed at Roman. “Everything I read about Modigliani says he drank himself to death. That’s bunk. He died of tuberculosis. The drinking was only to cover up the illness, because there was such a stigma. He’d be at a party and start coughing, and he’d pretend to be falling-down drunk and take off. Now, he really was a bit of a drunk, that’s why it worked. He was trying to save his dignity, isn’t that funny? I don’t think he imagined that decades later people would still be saying he drank himself to death. It makes me terribly angry. Did you write that down?”
Roman read from his notebook: “Modigliani died of tuberculosis, not alcohol.”
“Ha. Well, you missed a bit. Next time, a tape recorder. Now I need to tell you about Ranko, because you won’t find anything in a book.”
But the teller was back at the door. She said, “There’s a man here who’d like permission to join your party.”
Yale stood. His adrenal glands did strange and unwelcome things.
But the man stepping into the room was not Frank. It was someone Yale had never seen before—a tall, older black man brushing snow from his trench coat and looking horribly peeved.
“Herbert!” Bill said, and rose to shake his hand, a big, manly shake.
And while everyone was turned that way, Nora tapped Yale’s arm. “For Fiona,” she said. The necklace.
Yale nodded and rose to greet Herbert Snow. “This is our general counsel,” he said to everyone, to himself, to the universe.
* * *
—
Yale and Bill and Roman whooped and sang all the way back to Egg Harbor.
At the inn, Yale called Charlie.
“That’s good,” Charlie said. “I’m really happy for you.”
“You’re really happy for me? Come on, this is huge! That’s like what you say when you see your ex on the street, Oh, you have a new boyfriend, you lost weight, I’m really happy for you. This is a huge thing! Like, the art is literally in Bill’s room. I’m taking you out to dinner. Tomorrow, because we have to stay one more night. We have Xeroxing to do, and the roads are bad. Where do you want to go? For dinner?”
“I’ll think about it.” There was a pause, and then Charlie said, “I really am happy for you. I’m just tired.”
Yale almost said something then about the house, about how there was this house he’d been wanting Charlie to visit, and this was the sign, this was the right time—but that could wait. He’d bring it up tomorrow, when they’d had some wine.
He called Fiona next, and she shrieked gratifyingly. He told her he had something for her, told her to come by the gallery to see the art. She said, “Oh, Yale, this was supposed to happen, don’t you think?”
* * *
—
On the ride back the next morning—art packed and padded in the trunk, sheaves of Xeroxes on the backseat, papers signed and dated and witnessed—the three of them talked at full speed.
“I do feel bad for the family,” Yale said. “We’re not terrible people, are we?”
Bill said, “That man would take the pieces to the wrong restorers, the wrong appraisers, he’d get ripped off, and nothing would ever get authenticated, let alone into the catalogs. A lot of the world’s great art has been lost thanks to folks exactly like Frank.”
“And this will make the gallery,” Yale said. “I mean—I’m sorry, the gallery’s already in tremendous shape—”
Bill laughed to reassure him. “But we don’t yet have four Modiglianis.”
Roman spoke from the middle of the backseat: “This is a hell of a first week.”
* * *
—
It hit Yale halfway home: If Nora weren’t donating everything, she might well have willed a piece to Fiona. A single sketch could have paid Fiona’s way to college. And certainly Fiona knew it. And she’d never said a thing.
2015
When Fiona got back to Richard’s, Jake Austen was on the couch talking to Serge. She wanted to be angry at the invasion, she let herself be angry, but maybe she was a little relieved too. No one would ask her, yet, how her day had gone. Still: She hadn’t imagined this guy would embed himself. His eyes were red, his shirt undone one button too low.
She put her purse on the counter, slid her shoes off. Both men waved, and Jake pointed dramatically to his phone, which lay on the coffee table. He was recording. Fiona made herself tea as quietly as she could.
Serge was saying, “He finds the space between the action and the resting. He doesn’t want the photo of action, and he doesn’t want the photo of rest, okay? Yes? He looks for the moment between.” Fiona was unclear about whether Serge worked as a publicist for anyone else anymore, or if giving interviews about Richard had become his life.