“What did you mean about the artist going crazy?” I asked Lisa. “What does that mean, exactly? Schizophrenia? Psychosis? Things were different back then. Maybe she’d just been depressed and was never able to get treatment for it.” I thought I knew something about going crazy. Sometimes in the past year, I’d felt insanity creeping in. Paranoia in my case, but that had been based in reality. There’d been women in the prison out to get me.
Lisa kept her eyes on the road and shrugged almost imperceptibly. “I don’t know,” she said. “My father told me that about her one time and I didn’t think to ask him anything more. I’d never seen the mural, so I didn’t really care, but I think he was obsessed with it.” She looked in her rearview mirror and put on her blinker to change lanes. “Whatever was wrong with the artist, it was enough to prevent her from turning the mural over to the post office and getting paid, so it must have been pretty serious.”
“What’s the subject of the mural?” I asked, trying to focus on conversation to keep my mind off the road.
“I think just things related to the town,” Lisa said. “To Edenton. Most of the old murals were like that. We’ll see it soon enough, anyway.” She didn’t sound all that invested in the mural, and I guessed it was just a means to an end for her. Something she had to take care of to get the gallery up and running.
“So … you said there would be other artists’ work displayed in the gallery?” I asked.
Lisa nodded. “There’ll be a permanent collection of my father’s work, then a room for a few other well-known artists he had in his collection, many of them his good friends. That will change every few months. Then a rotating display of the work of the young artists he’s helped over the years and that work will be for sale.” Her voice had grown tight. “There’s just too much to be done before we can open the doors.”
“Is this your background, too?” I asked. “Art?” Lisa didn’t strike me as an artist. She looked more like the patron of an artist, if anything. Someone who could afford the awesomely tailored suit she was wearing and the diamond tennis bracelet that glittered at her wrist.
“I’m a Realtor,” she said. “I have no artistic talent … or interest … whatsoever, except with regard to the historical architecture of the houses I sell.”
“Oh,” I said. “Why did Jesse Williams—I mean, your father—put you in charge of the gallery, then?”
Lisa didn’t answer right away and I thought I might have stepped over a line with the question. But she finally spoke. “I’m his only child, so I’m it.” She let out a sigh. “I knew the gallery was in the works when he died, of course, but I had no idea he was going to dump it all in my lap.” She glanced at me. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I loved my father—I adored him—and I want to do this for him, but he gave me an impossible deadline and threw you into the mix…” She shook her head. “I still have my real estate business to run. I have clients to deal with. This is a busy time of year for me.”
“He must’ve thought you could pull it off,” I said.
Lisa sighed again. Then she reached for the radio, pressed a few buttons, and a podcast began to play. Something about mortgages, and I guessed we were done with our conversation, such as it was.
* * *
If anyone had asked me to guess what sort of house Jesse Jameson Williams had lived in, I would have pictured a Frank Lloyd Wright contemporary hugging a hillside. And I would have been wrong. Lisa pulled into the long driveway of a huge, two-story Victorian with double-tiered porches decorated with elaborate white railings. The whole front of the house looked like it was covered in white lace, and a garden, alive with color, stretched the entire width of the house.
“This was Jesse’s house?” I asked, surprised.
“The De Claire house,” Lisa said as we got out of her car. “A man named Byron De Claire was the first owner when it was built in 1880. My parents bought it in 1980.”
I followed Lisa to the front door and into the house, which showed its age only in the Victorian architecture. As Lisa turned off the elaborate-looking security system, I peered into the rooms I could see from where I stood. The foyer, living room, and parlor were painted in muted pastels: seafoam, and lavender, and blue-tinged gray. Artwork adorned every wall, and while Lisa talked on her phone inside the front door, I moved from painting to painting in the huge foyer, almost afraid to breathe near them. I recalled reading somewhere that one of Jesse Williams’s paintings went for ten million dollars at an auction, and here I was, surrounded by several of them at one time. Most of the work was his, but I spotted two of Romare Bearden’s collages and a huge painting by Judith Shipley of young girls sitting in a field of daisies. I quickly searched the Shipley for the iris the artist always hid in her paintings, a tribute to her mother by the same name, but with all those daisies, I soon gave up and turned my attention to one of the Bearden collages instead. It was full of African-American musicians, mainly guitarists, standing against a vivid red background. I felt a thrill of excitement that I was close enough to these original paintings to touch. Maybe I wasn’t much of an artist, but I would always love art itself.
“Come in the kitchen,” Lisa said, getting off her call.
I followed her into the spacious white-and-stainless-steel kitchen.
“Didn’t Jesse Williams—didn’t your father—live in New York most of his life?” I asked.
“Not most, but for many years.” Lisa opened the wide, double-door refrigerator and handed me a bottle of water, then unscrewed the cap of another for herself. “And he lived in France before that,” she said, leaning against the white-and-gray marble-topped counter. “He was in France during the war and just stayed. He met his first wife there. That lasted fifteen years or so, and after his divorce, he moved to New York and married my mother. She was much younger. It looked like they weren’t going to have children, but then I came along.” Lisa took a long drink from her water bottle. “She was thirty-nine and he was nearly fifty. He felt the family pull then and wanted to move back to Edenton. Back to his roots. I was seven. He had a name by then, and Edenton wanted to claim him.” She set her bottle down and began rifling through a manila file folder on the island. “Even so,” she continued, “they had to buy this place for cash. No one would have given a black man a loan for a house in this neighborhood back then. It’s hard enough now,” she added under her breath in a mutter. She pulled a sheaf of paper from the folder. “I want to read you this part of his will,” she said, holding up the paper.
I nodded, and Lisa began to read.
“‘My plans for the foyer of the gallery: In the closet of my studio’—his studio is back there, and it’s a mess.” Lisa pointed through the kitchen window, and I could see a good-size white cottage in the rear of the yard. “‘In the closet of my studio,’” Lisa continued, “‘you will find a large rolled canvas. This was painted in 1940 as part of a government-sponsored competition for post office murals by a young woman named Anna Dale. Anna completed the mural but became unwell before it could be installed in the post office, and it has been in my possession in one way or another since that time. The mural is to be the focal point of the foyer in the new gallery. Of course, it needs to be restored and that work is to be done by a young lady named Morgan Christopher, who has completed nearly three years as a fine arts major at UNC in Chapel Hill but is currently serving time in the women’s prison in Raleigh.’”