Under the Egg

by Laura Marx Fitzgerald

  “Perfectly boring,” said Bodhi, who was now crouching next to me.

  “Well, you could say that. They’re idealized, is what they are. They aren’t meant to look like real people. They’re meant to be—what’s the word?—inaccessible. They’re supposed to be otherworldy—literally from another world.”

  “You mean heaven?”

  “Exactly.” I grabbed another book out of my bag. “Now look at this one. This painting is by Raphael, too. It’s a noblewoman named,” I checked the bottom of the page, “Elisabetta Gonzaga.”

  The face looking out from the book seemed to regard us with disdain, her lids lowered, not even a hint of a smile on her lips.

  Bodhi whistled. “She looks like a real—”

  “I know. Doesn’t she look like someone you would actually meet?”

  “She looks like someone I would avoid.”

  “Right! You get a sense of her whole personality, warts and all. Or look at this one.”

  I found an ancient, bearded man, cloaked in red.

  “That’s one craggy dude,” offered Bodhi.

  “That’s Pope Julius II, Raphael’s most important patron. He died shortly after the portrait was painted.”

  “Are you sure he didn’t die while the portrait was painted?”

  “He looks exhausted, right? Beaten down. Not what you’d expect in a portrait of the most powerful man in the world.

  “Or look at this one.” I showed Bodhi a fat man whose wandering eye was only somewhat masked by the way he gazed up at heaven. “Raphael didn’t ‘fix’ any of these people’s flaws. He presented them as they were. Not perfect, just human.”

  “Well, it’s no wonder they all look like real people.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jeesh, who’s the art expert now?” Bodhi cocked her head and looked at me. “They are real people. All of these paintings you just showed me are portraits.”

  Of course. They weren’t models, airbrushed into saints and angels. They were real people. These were portraits.

  So did that mean that our painting was also—

  “Why, can this be the fair Theodora Tenpenny squatting in our midst?”

  Bodhi and I looked up to find a tall but stooped elderly man in a starched linen suit leaning over us, his hands clasped around a silver-topped cane.

  “Mr. Randolph!” I pulled Bodhi to her feet and made her stick out her hand. “Hi! I was just showing my friend Bodhi here the wing.”

  “How do you do, Miss Brody?” The man shook her hand importantly, but before Bodhi could correct him, he turned to me with his arms out. “Now, Theodora, who is this ‘Mr. Randolph’? How many times do I have to tell you to call me Uncle Lydon?”

  I submitted to a limp-armed hug, my face crushing the fresh pink carnation in his lapel. As the head curator for the European Paintings collection, Lydon Randolph had been Jack’s boss at the museum. But for some reason, Lydon preferred to think of himself as an important patron of Jack’s career, providing the day job that allowed him to keep painting.

  As I retreated from the hug, Lydon caught my hand in his. “My sweet Theodora,” he purred in the nurtured accent of the displaced Southern aristocrat, “how sorry I was to hear of your grandfather’s passing.”

  I thought back to that stain on Spinney Street, and the term, “passing,” didn’t seem to capture it.

  “He was as much a fixture of this wing as a Rembrandt. As were you, come to think of it.” He dropped my hand and gestured at the marble floor. “I can’t tell you the number of times I found you in just that position, hunched over your crayons. But no more crayons, I see,” he said, his eye landing on one of the books at my feet. He leaned over with effort, plucking up the volume while using his cane for balance. “The People and Portraits of Raffaello Sanzio, eh? An excellent resource, though better in the original Italian.” He handed the book back to me. “A bit of light summer reading?”

  I stuffed the book in my bag and quickly gathered up the rest of the books scattered on the floor. “Well, like I said, I was just showing my friend Bodhi here around.” I turned to Bodhi and raised my eyebrows in warning. “Mr. Randolph—I mean, um, Uncle Lydon—is the head curator for the European Paintings wing,” I said emphatically.

  “Emeritus,” Lydon proffered with a gracious bow.

  “What does that mean?” Bodhi picked at a mosquito bite.

  “In layman’s terms, my dear,” Lydon tried the same bow again, “retired.”

  “So why are you here?”

  Lydon coughed up the faint laugh that adults use when they actually find you annoying. “Yes, well, one of many perks of five decades’ employment at the Metropolitan Museum is an office onsite for ongoing research and mentorship.”

  Bodhi’s face lit up, and I knew immediately that no good could come from whatever she was going to say.

  “Fifty years? That’s a long time. You must know everything about this place.”

  He chuckled. “Well, I’m not sure that my oversight would extend to—”

  “Like, you would know if a painting had gone missing or something.”

  I raised my eyebrows at Bodhi and again attempted to telegraph S-H-U-T U-P.

  Lydon drew up his lean frame a bit. “The Metropolitan Museum has not had a painting stolen since its opening in 1872. Now the Gardner Museum in Boston, there’s a fascinating tale—”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  Lydon looked silently at Bodhi, then even longer at me. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I heard”—Bodhi shot me what she must have thought was a secret wink—“we heard that you’re missing a painting. Any ideas what happened to it?”

  With a glance around the room, Lydon snapped, “Come with me, girls,” and turned on the heel of his freshly polished shoe, striding briskly—more briskly than you would expect of a man with a cane—out of the gallery.

  “What are you doing?” I hissed to Bodhi as I trotted behind him, just out of earshot.

  “We can tease out how much he knows!” Bodhi hissed back.

  “It doesn’t matter what he knows. Now he’s going to know how much we know!”

  “Whoops, didn’t think about that.” She shrugged. “Sorry.”

  We followed Lydon through galleries, elevators, semi-hidden doorways, and institutional-looking corridors, until we arrived at a book-lined office with a sweeping view of Central Park and Lydon’s name in brass on the door.

  Lydon gestured for us to sit in two straight-backed chairs and took his place behind an imposing mahogany desk.

  “Now, girls,” he produced a fountain pen and rested it under his chin with a composed smile, “what’s all this about?”

  I put my hand firmly on Bodhi’s arm before she could speak. “Nothing. We just overheard some guards talking about a missing painting. That’s all.”

  Lydon shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Well, then, you know better than to believe rumors.”

  “Sure, yes, just a rumor,” I agreed quickly.

  “People—employees especially—like to gossip. Turn a minor misunderstanding into something notable, something salacious.”

  “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 o
ver 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.

  Chapter Nine

  We 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 II
I’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—”