Under the Egg

by Laura Marx Fitzgerald

  “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.”

  Chapter Ten

  No matter how urgent your medical emergency or dire your prospects, the ER staff always made sure you spent plenty of time in the waiting room. But for us it was time needed for Bodhi to explain her latest theory. And her unhinged arm.

  I found us some unoccupied plastic molded chairs in one corner, which was lucky because some drunks had claimed the other rows as beds. “Okay,” Bodhi sat down, arranging her right arm on her lap and checking her phone one-handed, “what do you know about La Fornarina?”

  I placed the Samsonite heavily on the floor. “Wait a minute. What happened to your arm?”

  “Sit down. I’ll get to it. But what do you know about La Fornarina?”

  “What do you know about La Fornarina?”

  “Well, tonight after dinner I was Googling Raphael-plus-all the different conservation technologies, to see if anyone had found any clues that way—you know, through infrared or whatever. And I found this one article.” Bodhi was swiping and poking furiously with one hand at her phone’s screen.

  “Okay, check this out. Do you know this painting?” The phone in my face showed the same topless painting I’d just flooded with tea.

  “Sure, that’s Raphael’s famous portrait of La Fornarina.”

  “Right. So a few years back they were restoring it, and they X-rayed it for some reason—”

  “Probably to see if there are original sketches underneath. Or changes that were painted out. Jack said artists sometimes make changes along the way, so the X-ray can reveal what their original intent was.”

  “Well, check out this original intent. They X-rayed La Fornarina and found this.” Bodhi zoomed in on the image and held it up for me to see.

  There, on Margherita Luti’s ring finger, on the left hand that lay demurely on her lap, was the outline of a ring.

  “It’s a ring with a square red ruby. Painted over, probably by Raphael’s student,” Bodhi checked the article again, “Giulio Romano, who sold the painting after Raphael died.”

  I blinked. “It’s on her wedding finger.”

  “Exactly!” Bodhi bounced in her chair.

  “But they weren’t married. He was engaged to someone else—”

  “—who he strung along for seven years, remember?” Bodhi had read the article and everything. “Now we know why.”

  “So Raphael had to hide his marriage to La Fornarina because . . .”

  “No,” Bodhi huffed impatiently, “you aren’t paying attention. Raphael painted the ring in. He wanted it there. After Raphael died, his student is the one who painted it out. Right before he sold it.”

  “Because—”

  “Because what would a painting by the recently deceased superstar of the art world sell for if it showed he was married to the daughter of a baker?”

  I didn’t know what surprised me more: the revelation of the ruby ring, or Bodhi’s transformation into a Raphael expert. Or how irritated I was that she’d made such a brilliant discovery.

  “So you got me out of bed—”

  “You weren’t in bed.”

  “I was going to bed,” I pouted. “You dragged me out of bed, got out my,” I lowered my voice, “suitcase, made me sit here in this creepy waiting room in the middle of the night—just to show me that article?”

  “No, stupid.” Bodhi pointed to her arm. “How else are we going to X-ray our painting?”

  • • •

  The ER night shift was skeptical of Bodhi’s arm injury, and at least wanted to wait for her parents to show up before green-lighting any expensive medical procedures. But after Bodhi squeezed out two fat tears and whispered, “I don’t want them to hurt me again,” the head doc went ahead and sent her for X-rays, with me for moral support, while they scrambled to find a social worker.

  I had
to admit, Bodhi had a certain talent—and not just for popping her arm out of its socket at will.

  “Okay, so what do we do next?” I whispered as Bodhi was wheeled toward the X-ray room.

  “Shut up, I didn’t think we’d get this far,” Bodhi said between clenched teeth.

  “You didn’t think we’d what?”

  I switched the suitcase to my other sweaty hand and fumed all over again. Having a partner in crime is nice and all. Except when they add medical insurance fraud to your list of crimes.

  But as they wheeled her into the X-ray lab, I saw Bodhi relax and smile. I followed her eyes to a copy of the New York Post, opened to Page Six, on the technician’s console. She composed her face back into that of a helpless waif and turned around to the orderly.

  “I’m scared. Is that social worker here yet?” She blinked rapidly and summoned a fresh tear to trail down her cheek.

  “Lemme go check, hon. You’ll be okay with Larry here.”

  As soon as the door closed behind the orderly, Bodhi jumped out of the wheelchair and yelped as she popped her arm back into the socket, much to Larry the X-ray technician’s surprise.

  “Okay, Larry, here’s the deal. My arm is fine. We need you to X-ray something else.”

  Larry, a pasty man who’d apparently spent too much of his life in dark rooms, stopped his Krispy Kreme in midbite. Bodhi kicked my leg and gestured to open the suitcase.

  “It’s this painting. If we do this fast, you won’t get in trouble. Just one good image is all we need.” By now, I had the painting out, and Bodhi was directing me to position it against the wall. “Okay, let’s go. That orderly will be back any minute.”

  Seeing a painting where he usually saw body parts finally roused the technician. “Hold on, what’s going on here?” He put down the doughnut and reached for the phone. “I’m calling Dr. Chen.”

  Bodhi left the painting and sprung across the room to the technician’s station. “Wait a minute, do you know Jake Ford? The actor?”

  Larry’s interest was piqued. “Yeah, of course. So what?”

  “What about Jessica Blake?”

  A twinkle of excitement appeared in the man’s dull eyes. “Jessica Blake? Sure!”

  “Would you like her autograph?” Bodhi rummaged in a tote bag I hadn’t noticed before and pulled out a glossy head shot, which she dangled over the buttons and knobs of the man’s desk. Then she whisked it away. “Or maybe you’d like something . . . more valuable?”

  The technician’s eyes stayed fixed on the head shot. “Like what?”

  Bodhi turned the head shot over and grabbed a Sharpie off the desk. “This is the number of the editor of Page Six,” she muttered with the Sharpie cap between her teeth, jotting a series of numbers on the back of the photo. “You call her in the morning—she won’t get in before ten—and you tell her that Jessica Blake will be at this address,” more jotting, “at this time tomorrow. Trust me, she’ll be very grateful for the information. Very.”

  Larry nodded slowly. “Okay. Okay, yeah, that sounds . . . doable.” His sticky hand reached for the head shot, but not before Bodhi could yank it off the table again.

  “First, let’s take some pictures.”

  I’d never had the misfortune of needing an X-ray, but in my head, I thought they used some big machine and an hour later you got some film that the doctor held up to a lightbulb to read.

  But it seems that X-rays have gone the way of Bodhi’s phone, with computerized functions, on-screen zooms, digital enhancements. Luckily Larry was as good at his job as he was at putting down doughnuts. He zoomed in on La Fornarina’s ring finger, and by adjusting the contrast, color spectrum, and a bunch of other things I didn’t understand, was able to find what had been hidden for five hundred years.

  There on his computer screen, sketched lightly in white against the dark gray of the third finger, was a ring with a square-cut stone.

  “It’s there! It’s there!” Bodhi hugged me with her left arm and started jumping up and down. “I knew it! It’s a Raphael for sure. I told you it was!”

  “You never—”

  “Oh, shut up. It’s a Raphael, okay? You’re rich!”

  Larry looked up. “You’re what?”

  I started jumping along with Bodhi. “We did it!”

  “Do you guys need these files?” Larry started dragging files around on-screen.

  “Yeah, burn us a CD. And we need hard copies, too!” Bodhi turned to me. “Eat our X-rays, Gemma! Am I right?”

  “Bodhi, that orderly is going to be back any second. We’d better get packed up.” I moved to grab the painting, but Bodhi stopped me.

  “Wait a second. Larry, let’s get one more shot of the whole picture.” She looked at me. “Hey, maybe there’s some more original intent under there.”

  Larry zoomed out, made a little more dashboard magic, and brought the entire canvas in view on his screen.

  It was strange to see the painting, with its intricate coloring, reduced to a grayed-out skeleton sketch of images.

  But it was even stranger to see a ghostly apparition lurking behind the Madonna and Child.

  • • •

  The city was just coming to life by the time we made it out of the hospital, the official X-ray films hidden in the Samsonite along with the painting and the CD in Bodhi’s back pocket.

  “How’s your arm?” I asked Bodhi as we grabbed a window seat at the diner. (“Breakfast is on me,” said Bodhi. “Eggs?” I shook my head. “Pancakes.”)

  “S’okay.” Bodhi rubbed her right shoulder. “It hurts when I pop it in and out like that. But it was worth it.”

  We laid out the X-ray films on the Formica, careful not to splash our bottomless cups of coffee.

  “So it’s a person?” Bodhi yawned.

  I held the film up to the window for a better look. “A man. It must have been painted out, too. Maybe at the same time as the ring.”

  “That’s weird.”

  I thought for a second. “Not necessarily. Raphael painted some Holy Family paintings—you know, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus together. Maybe that student, Romano, who painted out the ring—maybe he thought it would be worth more with just Mary and Jesus.”

  I hauled out the trusty monograph again and found a few examples of Holy Family paintings clustered together toward the back of the book. “See, it’s a pretty common composition. There’s Mary sitting with Jesus. And then Joseph is usually standing behind them, kind of looking over them, like our painted-out man is. Joseph usually has this staff or cane or big stick of some kind.”

  Bodhi snatched up the X-ray. “I can’t tell a lot from this, but there’s definitely no stick.” I took it back and looked, too. It was true. The man behind the Madonna and Child held nothing, resting one arm on the Virgin’s shoulder and the other reaching toward the Christ Child.

  “There’s something else weird,” I ventured. “No beard.”

  “What are you talking about?” Bodhi tapped at the man’s outline. “There’s a beard right there.” She was right. The man sported the outline of a mustache and closely cropped beard, which matched the dark hair that he wore in a pageboy parted down the middle.

  “But not the right kind. Joseph is supposed to have a long, gray beard and a bald head. It’s part of his iconography.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You doofus, didn’t you hear anything Reverend Cecily said?” It thrilled me a little to have a friend I could insult so casually. “Iconography. Like, every saint or figure has things that identify them. So John the Baptist is always wearing animal skins, because he wandered the wilderness. And Saint Peter always has keys, because he holds the keys to heaven. And the Virgin Mary is always wearing blue, because it was the most expensive color in the artist’s paint box. They made the paint out of crushed jewels.”

  Bodhi took a slurp
of her coffee.

  “Well, our Virgin isn’t wearing blue. She’s wearing gray. Gray and white.”

  Bodhi was right. A drab gray dress with white sleeves.

  “And another thing,” Bodhi peeked at the monograph again, “these guys in the book are wearing—what are those? Togas?”

  “Yes, togas. It was part of the whole Renaissance obsession with classical Greek and—”

  Bodhi tapped the X-ray and the window behind it again. “Well, there’s no toga here. No toga, no long beard, no stick.”

  There was something familiar about the specter behind the Madonna and Child. The way he gazed directly at the viewer with his large, round eyes. The familiarity of the hand on the Virgin’s shoulder. The hair and the beard and the—

  “Oh. My. God.”

  I dropped the film and paged frantically through the monograph, stopping at a painting of two men.

  “What’s that one called?” Bodhi asked.

  “It’s a painting called Self-Portrait with a Friend.” I propped up the book for Bodhi to see. “Look at the man standing in back.”

  “Self-portrait?” Bodhi’s eyes widened. “That’s . . . ?”

  “Yes,” I nodded. “That’s Raphael himself. And so,” I held up the X-ray again, “is that.”

  Chapter Eleven

  It wasn’t a Madonna and Child. Or even a Holy Family. It was a family portrait.

  A family portrait of Raffaello Sanzio, his secret wife, and his sleeping child. Making this the only painting—the only record of any kind—that proved the existence of Raphael’s family.

  Suddenly everything made sense.

  It explained why the woman and child looked so human, so complex, and nothing like gods.

  It explained why Margherita Luti—not the Virgin Mary—was identified with the pearl (margarita) in her hair.

  It explained the hand on the boob. For once my mother was right: Raphael was trying to tell us—across three different paintings—that she was not just a mistress, but a mother.

  But I still didn’t understand what had transformed the sexy and sensuous Fornarina into such a melancholy figure.