The House Girl (15 page)

Missus drew open her eyes and gave a slow nod. “Yes, thank you for calling, Melly. May Josephine help you to your buggy?”

“Oh no, no,” Melly said, too fast. “No need, really. It’s scarce ten paces. I shall be fine on my own.” She leaned to kiss Missus Lu’s cheek and then descended the porch steps, down the side path toward the barn where her buggy waited. Otis had watered and fed and then rehitched the horse. It watched Melly approach with an air, it seemed to Josephine, of placid disappointment.

“That woman is nothing but clay-eating trash.” Missus’ voice rose razor sharp from her chair. Her eyes were open and watchful as Melly seated herself on the bench, took the reins, and waved a tightly gloved hand in farewell as the horse began its plodding toward the road.

“A spinster. She sniffs around here, seeing to me. Condolences. Do not allow any other visitors to enter this house. Do you understand, Josephine? I will see no one.” Missus did not look at Josephine. “Now, go fix up Mister’s dinner. He’ll be coming in soon.”

J
OSEPHINE LEFT
M
ISSUS ON THE
porch and stood for a moment in the entry, seeing if she might follow inside. But no, she heard the soft creak-creak of the rocker, regular as rain. Walking high on the soft pads of her feet, Josephine darted first to the kitchen for the bundle of food, then up the stairs to the studio. With one hand she grabbed the boots by the laces, with the other she plucked the roll of canvas from her pile. In her attic room, Josephine placed these treasures under the sleeping pallet. The material bulged with the bulk of them, but there was nothing else to be done.

Josephine started down the stairs and to the kitchen. With Louis’s name spoken into the day, Josephine felt the world shift toward brightness. He had run once, he would run again, Josephine had no doubt.
Philadelphia,
she again heard Louis’s voice form the word, each syllable sweeter than the last. She did not think of the mechanics of finding him, the likelihood of their success and reunion. It was merely the knowledge that he lived that made herself seem suddenly more alive, and stronger too, capable of running away because wasn’t she running toward something? Wasn’t there the picture now in her head, however fantastic, however unreal, of walking with Louis along a broad busy street, of a city where she might find a beloved face, and in that face find her home?

S
UNDAY

L
ina and Oscar waited outside the Calhoun Gallery for Marie to return from a pedicure appointment. They sat in silence on Parisian-style black lacquered chairs under the shade of the gallery awning and sipped iced coffees bought from the grocer on the corner. The morning was hot and Lina felt sweat beading on her upper lip and her shirt dampening where it met the chair.

Marie arrived wearing flimsy pink paper flip-flops and a green silk sundress that reminded Lina of 1940s movie stars in the way it floated across her body and shimmered in the sun. She sat down beside Oscar and lit a cigarette.

“I am so very
paranoid,
” Marie said with a dramatic exhale of white smoke. Her voice was nicotine-hoarse, the French accent strong. “No one is allowed to see the new paintings until the opening. Only you, Oscar. Only for you would I do such a thing. And your lovely daughter.”

Marie leaned forward, directing her attention now to Lina. “We have no information on Josephine’s family,” she said. “Nothing. From what we know, she had no children, no brothers, no sisters. After 1852, she disappeared from the face of the earth. Just”—and here Marie snapped her fingers—“gone. And to be honest, that is fine with us. We have no familial estate contesting ownership of the works. It’s a windfall. It’s the largest windfall in the history of windfalls! The owner is an amateur collector, a man from the South—South Carolina? Or South … West Virginia? I never can remember. He bought all the paintings—fifty-two! For fuck’s sake! He bought them at an estate sale, an old lady who died with no will, no kids herself. But a white woman, very white. No actual relation to Josephine Bell, so it would appear.”

Marie dragged long and hard on her cigarette. “This … collector, he is looking at significant sums. Big money. He is happy as a little clam. I won’t even tell you how he came to me, it is a funny story.” Marie Calhoun rolled her eyes and smiled, more to herself than to them, and stubbed out her cigarette. She checked her toenails and slipped out of the paper shoes, changing them for a pair of vertiginous heels she fished from a purse as big and round as a man’s head. “Now. Shall we go inside? You must not tell anyone you have seen the pictures. Mr. South Virginia will be very upset.” Marie giggled, her mouth circled by little smoker’s wrinkles and colored a brilliant red.

At the gallery entrance, beside the empty receptionist’s desk, a tripod easel displayed a posterboard printed with a black-and-white headshot of a smiling man, his thick gray hair well coiffed, his teeth gleaming white.
THE ART AND ARTIFICE OF LU ANNE BELL
,
LECTURE BY PORTER SCALES, JUNE
24, 7
P.M.
was printed in large type beneath the photo.

“It is Porter who first questioned authorship,” Marie said to Lina as she paused to examine the poster. “He has spent many, many months examining these works. The new, and the old. But it is always hard to change people’s expectations. Change what they have so long believed.” Here Marie gave a quick frustrated shake of her head, and then turned to Oscar. “Oh Oscar,” she said, her tone now teasing. “Will you be here for Porter’s talk?” Marie gave a sly grin.

“I would answer that in the
negative,
” Oscar said with more force than seemed necessary. Lina tried to remember why the critic’s name rang a bell, and then she had it.

“Wait—isn’t he the one who called you
fidgety
? Who gave you that awful review?”

Oscar nodded once. “That would be him, yep.”

“Porter and Oscar have a—how should I say it?—a
long history,
” Marie said, turning to Lina. “But he is a very brilliant man. He knows everything about Lu Anne Bell. About many things in fact. He is very learned. An intellectual.”

“The guy’s a hack, Marie,” Oscar said. “He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, never had to work a day in his life. Couldn’t paint to save his ass so now he just criticizes what real artists do.” Oscar moved into the gallery, his boot heels echoing loudly in the empty room. Marie raised her eyebrows at Lina and followed him inside.

The show filled all three of the gallery’s white-walled rooms. Some of the pictures hung in simple frames; others leaned against the wall, waiting to be placed. There were primarily paintings, both watercolor and oil, but also some pencil and charcoal drawings, a few wood engravings. Veering away from Oscar and Marie, Lina started at the back of the gallery, where a row of landscapes hung, watercolors and oils of the tobacco fields, the Blue Ridge Mountains that surrounded the Bell farm, and numerous studies of the main house seen from different angles at various times of day and evening. In one image the house seemed monstrous and foreboding, and Lina stopped to examine it.
Bell Creek at Dawn (1848)
the label read, though the light seemed too murky and bleak for dawn. A flock of crows quivered in the upper left corner and a small group of slaves hovered on the lawn, seven of them, their figures dwarfed by the looming house, their faces indistinct. The stillness of the scene invoked in Lina a sudden and sickening claustrophobia.

She turned away from the landscape to a wall of portraits. Each of these was in oil, each of a slave, half-length and full face, realistically rendered, each devastating in its own particulars.
Winton, Lottie, Jackson, Calla, Therese, Otis
. The names were printed directly onto the gallery wall beside each painting, the dates ranging from 1845 to 1852.

“It is the imperfection, the authenticity, that is so striking in the Bell work,” Marie whispered, standing at Lina’s ear. “That woman, her name is Lottie. I have always found this to be the most moving of the portraits.” Yes, Lina could see why. Lottie’s hands, gnarled and bent as the roots of a tree, were clasped before her, holding a bouquet of flowers. Lottie’s eyes looked patient. She looked as if she were waiting for something, or someone, but with no expectation that it or he or she might ever arrive.

“None of the Bell works are signed, but the names of the subjects are written on the back of each portrait,” Marie said. “Handwriting. This will help us prove it was Josephine who made them, not Lu Anne. As soon as we have access to the full Bell archives.”

“What’s the problem?” Lina asked.

“Well, the Stanmore Foundation, they own nearly all the Bell works, of course, and it is a very dramatic shock to them, the idea that Lu Anne was nothing more than a fabricator. A liar. So they are not as …
cooperative
with us, with Porter, as they should be. That is why we are having the show now, to push the question. To take it public.”

Lina nodded. This was a strategy she understood: wasn’t this what Dresser was doing with the reparations claim? Pushing the question.
What were their names? Isn’t it time we made the effort to remember?

Lina continued farther into the gallery, through a wide archway to an open middle space where a large drawing was displayed alone.
Children No. 2
read the title on the wall. It was in charcoal, done on rough, perhaps homemade paper. Several heads of babies and children floated disembodied in the background, a row of them, all similar in appearance but none of them quite the same. A larger head of an older child dominated the foreground. Lina guessed the child to be three or four years old; his (her?) face was expressive, full of an expectant joy, but the eyes were closed. It was an odd juxtaposition—the face conveyed a strong emotion, it made Lina’s throat catch, but the closed eyes cut the viewer off from sharing the joy or understanding it.

Suddenly Oscar was there, standing beside her. “Just look at that,” he said. “She must have been warming up, experimenting with the smaller ones. Studies, looks like. But that face, holy shit, she nailed the bigger face. Look at that kid, Carolina. Just look at him.”

Lina looked. The closed eyes, the smooth full cheeks, the lips turned in the barest suggestion of a smile, and the picture hit Lina with a force she wasn’t expecting, in a way her father’s paintings never had. Her reaction here was emotional, not intellectual, and for once she wanted to leave it at that, without searching for clues to analyze, references to dissect. She couldn’t explain why this boy’s enigmatic face captivated her, nor did she want to explain it. Looking was enough.

Just then a phone buzzed from across the room. Marie answered in clipped urgent syllables, then hung up and clicked across the gallery expanse toward Lina and Oscar with her arms held wide.

“Darlings, I’m afraid I must be off.” She raised herself up on tiptoe and kissed Oscar on each cheek, then stood for a moment holding his face with both hands. He looked down at her and smiled, it seemed to Lina, with a rueful, half-there apology, but also with delight, and an energy, a look passed between them. Lina felt as though she were watching the scene through a peephole, something she should not see, and yet fascination held her gaze steady: this unknown sliver of her father.

Oscar dated, of course he did, but Lina never met them, never saw them. These women existed for Lina only as a stray blond hair across the back of his jacket, a feminine voice on their answering machine, and, once, a photograph of Oscar and a leggy brunette in one of those free, glossy Manhattan magazines. But Marie—Lina remembered her from Oscar’s parties, the ones he used to throw regularly with a pauper’s abandon throughout Lina’s childhood; she’d heard Marie’s name spoken over the years, a gallery move, a marriage, a divorce. Lina felt now as if she’d missed something vital, a clue to Marie’s significance. And what else had she missed?

The night Oscar had shown Lina the Grace pictures, he’d said,
I’m okay, Carolina,
the words flying naturally from his mouth as though he had said them a thousand times before. After all these years, and Lina’s constant, lurking worry.
I’m okay
.

I wasn’t a perfect husband,
Oscar had told her.

That small word etched at Grace’s throat:
Enough
.

Marie released Oscar’s face and turned then to Lina. “Carolina, my dear. You are a lucky girl, you look nothing like your father here.” She gave a sideways wink to Oscar. “You have grown into a beauty, just like your mother. I am so very glad to see you again after all these years. Good luck with your case.” She pulled Lina close and made a quick pass to the right and to the left, planting a dry kiss on each cheek.

Marie turned, fishing through her bag for her keys, and then she disappeared out the front door, Oscar behind her. Lina paused for a moment in the empty space and focused again on the drawing of the children. The child with closed eyes seemed older than the others, sketched with more skill and more detail. It was only this one that truly demanded the viewer’s attention. What was that child thinking? What did he not wish to see?

With reluctance Lina turned away from the drawing and followed her father outside. She emerged from the gallery, squinting with the sudden rush of sun, and stood silently beside Oscar as Marie locked the door with a hard twist.

“Lina, I hate to admit it, but I hope you do not find any of Josephine’s relations,” Marie said. “It would make life much more complicated for me. Bye now!” And Marie Calhoun ducked into a waiting car, a suited driver closing the door behind her.

O
SCAR AND
L
INA CAUGHT A
cab back to Brooklyn. There was no air-conditioning and all four windows were opened wide, the rush of the wind flinging Lina’s hair around her face. She wanted to ask her father about Marie, not because she really wanted to know but because the alternative—wondering, imagining—gave her a hollow ache in the back of her throat.

“Dad, what is
up
with you and Marie?” Lina asked, shouting to be heard above the wind. She tried to make the question into a joke, hoping that he would reply with a laugh, some funny story.