Under the Egg

by Laura Marx Fitzgerald

  “And you remember the painting?” Bodhi ventured gently from behind me.

  Madame Dumont released her hold on the canvas slowly, holding it out at arm’s length. “At the camp, I carried the suitcase with me wherever I went. The other children teased me, accused me of hiding food or even gold. Once some boys took it away and tried to open it, break the lock. But it was a strong, expensive suitcase. The lock had three numbers to dial: three-one-zero, my birthday, October third.” She smiled. “It was a hot summer, just like this one. One could not sleep with twenty in a room. So every morning I woke before the sun and went quietly to the window. I would open the suitcase and pull out the thread?—no, the stitches—of the lining again, just to let the dawn light the painting inside.”

  Madame Dumont lightly traced the surface with her fingertips. “This face became my mother’s face. I am ashamed to say that it did not take long before I forgot how she looked. But this one. She looked at me—you see, she still does—with worry and pain and, oh, such an aching love. It was a strange comfort, to think that someone would grieve for me, too.”

  “Grieve for you?” I asked.

  “Of course.” Madame Dumont looked at me. “I knew I would be dead quite soon. Like my parents. And like the baby in the painting.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Madame Dumont was right. Raphael’s child, the drawn, wasted child sprawled on his mother’s lap, had not been sleeping. He was dead.

  It had been right there on the surface (well, under the egg, technically) all along. Once we’d gotten Madame Dumont settled with a cup of tea and her beloved painting, I went home and dug out Reverend Cecily’s notes from the bottom of my sweater bag. She was right: the poem said it all.

  The baby was indeed the “bread of life” in question, brought into the world by Raphael’s favorite “baker”: La Fornarina. But, as the poem tells us, his soul ascended to heaven before he could grow up: “risen yet unrisen.” And the experience of having a son must have deeply touched Raphael, nourishing and comforting even the man who seemingly had it all.

  It wasn’t just the poem. The painting’s message was in every corner of the painting: the storm clouds in the distance, the ashen Christ Child. Even Bodhi had sensed something was wrong with our initial reading. Yes, that was a dove, but it wasn’t descending from heaven. It was ascending, flying away and leaving this world behind.

  Of course, you really didn’t need clues or symbolism at all. The entire painting lay in La Fornarina’s face, stricken with grief. How did I miss it? Maybe it’s that the faces of mothers I see are more consumed with worry about their kid’s pineapple allergy or preschool applications. Or in the case of my mother, the mechanics of number theory and her dwindling tea stash.

  But a sixteenth-century audience knew what a grieving mother looked like. And so did Anna.

  I think grief transformed Raphael, too. He may have initially tried to hide his family from society, but ultimately he refused to let his child go to the grave in secret. In those final days of the child’s illness, Raphael immortalized the boy and his family through one real, unidealized painting: a painting that showed things as they really were and not how his patrons wished things to be.

  Or at least, he tried to. Because when Raphael himself died not long afterward, the assistants from his studio sprang into action. After first packing Margherita Luti off to a local convent, they set to work painting out all evidence of La Fornarina’s marriage to Raphael, thereby preserving their teacher’s, and their own, reputation.

  (That family portrait must have proven particularly challenging, requiring his workshop to cover up an entire self-portrait of their master with a single, withered tree.)

  It worked. Because Raphael died young, he left behind a limited pool of unsold works. His reputation sterling and his works now rare, all of Europe went wild to secure a Raphael. The value of his paintings only rose from that point forward. The artists of Raphael’s workshop went on to successful careers of their own. And a young widow lived out the rest of her days in a Roman nunnery, just another girl whose secret was guarded by the convent walls.

  • • •

  In the end, the painting was priceless.

  Quite literally. Because, despite all the tests and authentications and expert opinions and, don’t forget, groundbreaking discoveries of two thirteen-year-old girls, no one ever placed a single bid.

  The painting never saw the light of an auction block. Once Madame Dumont got back that last link to her missing childhood, she wasn’t about to let it go. She even dug into her newly released store of generosity to host a viewing party at her tea shop one crisp Sunday afternoon that fall. She let Bodhi and me make the guest list, inviting all the people who aided in solving its mystery. Mr. Katsanakis offered to cater.

  “It’s all my fault, you know,” said Bodhi, nursing a cup of Indian chai in one hand and brushing spanakopita crumbs off her shirt with the other.

  “What’s your fault?” I said. “Stick to the stuffed grape leaves, by the way.”

  “Remember when I made that wish at the Temple of Dendur at the Met?” She snagged a dolmade as a plate sailed by. “I wished for the painting to be priceless. And now I guess it is, because we’ll never know what it would’ve gone for.”

  After the discovery in Madame Dumont’s closet, we’d been able to appeal to Goldie for guidance. Goldie hooked Madame Dumont up with a pro-bono lawyer who specialized in Holocaust restitution rights. That lawyer suggested we get the painting to an auction house ASAP for testing and appraisal and recommended a guy she knew: Augustus Garvey at Cadwalader’s. Reverend Cecily’s friend and Gemma’s boss. Gus ended up being a really nice guy who’d studied his way out of the wrong side of the Bronx. We hit it off right away.

  “It’s not you, Bodhi,” Gus explained, blowing on a peppermint tisane. “I don’t know that it would’ve sold anyway. There comes a point when there is just not enough groundswell of confidence to tip the scales. Who wants to be the only institution to gamble millions of dollars, not knowing if anyone else is willing to pay it? No,” he mused, “I don’t think there’s enough scientific evidence in the world to authenticate a discovery this big.”

  The painting loomed over us from a spot on the wall over the cash register, still as melancholy as ever. But the crowd was here to celebrate.

  Reverend Cecily sat drawing out stories from Mo, who had been brought by his daughter, and her son, and his twins, who were in turn distracted from their great-grandfather’s tales by their strategic position next to the cake table.

  Bodhi’s parents were there, too, her dad signing autographs, her mom in a corner captivated by my mom, whom we’d coaxed into a dress and out of the house. I wanted to think that they were trading stories about their ingenious daughters, but I’m pretty sure Jessica Blake was just studying her for an upcoming part as an eccentric recluse.

  Sanjiv alternated between cornering Cadwalader lab technicians and refilling bowls with Toasty Nuts.

  Goldie and Eddie had found a table away from the action, where they murmured sweet talk about archival storage and database management.

  Even Lydon was there, aggressively courting Madame Dumont in hopes of a future donation of the unsold Raphael. (“Are you nuts?” I said when Bodhi suggested inviting him. “Hey, if he hadn’t shown up at your house, you never would’ve moved the painting into Dumont’s closet and the mystery never would’ve been solved.” She had a point. “Also,” she continued, “we can rub his face in it.”)

  Whenever I attempted to get more hummus or find the bathroom, I was stopped by someone with a word or pat on the back or a “Can you believe . . . ?” I’d already received an invitation to both Bodhi’s and Mr. K’s for dinner, a nonnegotiable mandate to raid the Grace Church food pantry, and, most incredibly, an afterschool job offer.

  Well, because of child labor laws, an unpaid internship, really. But an internship
that carried a transportation stipend: twenty dollars that would stay right in my pocket each day as I made the long walk home from Cadwalader’s. Yes, Cadwalader’s. Gus had asked me to assist him three afternoons a week. You can guess how long it took me to accept.

  It seemed so long ago that I could walk the streets of New York an entire day without uttering a word to anyone. So long ago that Jack and I had barricaded ourselves in our little fortress of self-reliance, scavenging the city for crumbs. But since Jack’s death, the city had changed. I had changed. Now, when I ventured out, I saw not crumbs, but a feast of possibilities.

  Bodhi was right. The mystery was always bigger than just me. Somehow, along the way, I had become part of the city. And it had become part of me.

  Thanksgiving

  By November, I had a lot to be thankful for.

  We’d had a fairly meager harvest after that hot summer, but I’d finally taken up Reverend Cecily’s offer of the church food pantry, which allowed us to experience the wonders of boxed mac and cheese and lots of tuna fish alongside our pickled beets.

  Another score: Madame Dumont had waived all of my mother’s past and future tea purchases. So Mom was kept happy through the chilly fall with infinite pots of hot tea.

  I still had Bodhi. We’d gotten used to the paparazzi buzzing around, although they soon discovered that Bodhi didn’t vary her new uniform (now from her private school) anymore than the old one. (For my part, I’d started reworking the attic’s castoffs into a fall wardrobe, including something I call “faux-veralls.”)

  I had my internship at Cadwalader’s, where a different art history mystery awaited me every time I walked in Gus’s office. I loved it.

  But there was only so far my weekly taxi stipend could take me. Which is why, as of Thanksgiving, the heat was still shut off and our holiday feast consisted of rice, beans, and packaged stuffing from the food pantry.

  After our early and brief dinner, Mom retreated to her room and I headed to Jack’s studio. The summer’s breezes were long gone, replaced by chilling gusts that rattled the windowpanes. But in the late afternoon, the sun’s last rays came bursting through the windows, creating a greenhouse effect of light and warmth.

  Like a cat, I stretched out on my belly and surfed the sunbeams as they crept across the floor, my book open in front of me. It was one that Gus had recommended to prep for some Flemish still lifes that were coming in from the London office, and I was soaking in the ornate details when the sunbeams dried up, instantly transforming the light-drenched studio into a cold and drafty garret.

  Shivering, I looked up at the fireplace and wondered if there was any reason I couldn’t build a fire. To be fair, I’d never seen Jack do it, and I imagined the chimney had been bricked in. Or maybe he’d been reluctant to make the paint-strewn room any more flammable than it already was. Wrapping myself in a quilt I’d dragged up, I crept over to investigate more closely and was surprised to see a visible crack, maybe an eighth of an inch wide, between the marble mantel top and the mantelpiece below.

  On closer inspection, it appeared that the mantel top had been raised a couple of inches with a piece of wood. In all my searches this summer, I’d never noticed it. It had been polished and painted to such an impeccable faux finish that it exactly matched the marble that sandwiched it. I ran my fingertip along the crack, then wedged my fingernail underneath the mantel top. It shifted every so slightly.

  As the wind howled at the windows, I realized suddenly that it had loosened the mantel as well. The heat and humidity must have swollen the wood all summer, wedging the marble in. But now, with the cold, dry air filling the studio, the wood was contracting, revealing a seam that begged to be opened.

  I carefully picked up my grandmother’s bowl and Adelaide’s egg and set them down next to my book.

  The mantel, while heavy, lifted up fairly easily once I figured out where to grab hold. I set that on the floor, too, then peered inside the marble mantelpiece.

  Right there, under the egg. Just as Jack had promised.

  It was a space about four inches deep, filled neatly with stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills, laid side by side like sardines in a can. I started to count the rubber-banded bundles—one thousand, ten thousand, twenty, thirty, one hundred thousand!—when I came to a yellowed envelope.

  The front was addressed in flowing, fountain pen script to “Angelika.” That name had been crossed out with ballpoint, and written over with “Theo.”

  It was a letter from Jack, of course.

  My dearest one,

  If you have found this letter, it means that I am dead.

  It also means that you have found the money. This—and the house—is all I have to leave you, and I have worked hard to maintain it, occasionally to add to it, a little here and there whenever I could. If you treat it the same way, working hard to save it and add to it, it will live on indefinitely.

  I make only one stipulation. As I write this, I have spent thirty years—here the “thirty” had been crossed out with ballpoint again and replaced with “sixty”—attempting to right a wrong. I am asking you to succeed where I have failed.

  First, some background:

  Like many men, I went to Europe in the war. There I had the misfortune of being taken prisoner and interned in a Nazi work camp called Berga. I was one of the lucky ones. I was assigned to kitchen duty, while friends and fellow soldiers fell almost daily to the inhuman conditions in the mines where they worked. This was the greatest lesson of war, in my estimation: the entirely arbitrary line between life and death.

  At Berga, I met a man named Max Trenczer. He was a Jew from Paris who owned a successful gallery under his own name. Please make a note of this.

  Max was an extraordinary man—brilliant, witty, brave—and I wish you could have met him. We made a plan to run away from this camp, but he was caught as we tried to escape, and instead of stopping to fight or even help, I am ashamed to say that I fled to save my own life.

  But that is my own burden. While in the camp, Max told me how, before the Nazis invaded and took over his business, an aristocratic Italian gentleman brought in a few paintings to sell. He was hoping to stockpile some cash before the impending war. Max was intrigued by one work in particular, not just because of its distinctive style, but also because of its cryptic inscription. He had reason to believe the painting was a missing work by Raphael, and because the Italian did not know anything of the painting’s origins, Max was able to buy it for a very good price.

  Max had planned to confirm its authenticity and sell it on the open market. But then the war broke out. He was able to hide the painting as the Nazis seized his gallery, and because of his friendship with a Nazi officer—everyone, even Nazis, loved Max—he was able to trade the painting for his daughter’s escape.

  His daughter’s name was Anna. Anna Trenczer. Please make a note of this name also.

  Now imagine my shock when, after finding my way back to the Allies and a newly formed division of art experts, I was cataloging Hitler’s personal art collection and stumbled upon a work matching, down to the very last detail, Max’s own painting.

  I thought at first of appealing to my commanding officer (a man you now know as “Uncle” Lydon). Unlike the many other ownerless works of art, which flooded us in wave after wave of shipments, I actually knew this painting’s owner.

  But before I could speak up, I noticed something curious. Lydon, and many of his cronies, did not seem very interested in finding the owners of these works. They made some nominal effort at restitution, but ultimately, an orphaned work could be absorbed into a museum’s collection for “safekeeping.” And just how much effort do you think these museums would go to, finding the long-lost relatives of a long-dead owner, when they could instead keep selling tickets to see their newfound Rembrandt, Vermeer, Leonardo . . . or Raphael?

  I saw other items pouring in, too—not just paintings a
nd sculpture, but rugs, silverware, antiques, jewelry, even silver menorahs, bells stripped from Torahs. Personal—very personal—items, but with real, concrete value. Belongings that could have been traded for a man, woman, or child’s freedom.

  I saw that returning Max’s painting wasn’t a simple matter of property rights. It was a matter of self-determination. With that painting in his possession, Max had had the power to determine one young girl’s destiny.

  And now I could restore that power.

  I said nothing to Lydon. I quietly removed the painting from the collection, changed its records to read “damaged beyond repair,” and began to plot how to bring it back home with me.

  I worried that my bags or shipments home would be checked and the painting found. Luckily, I had worked at a paint store in New York where the owner had been working on a new water-based polymer paint formulation whose key feature was—unlike oil—its easy removal. I asked him to send over samples and then used them to paint my own composition over the canvas below. From there, I was able to camouflage it quite easily among several other original paintings and smuggle it past any curious military police.

  That’s where my luck ended. Despite my efforts with various refugee organizations over the years, I have not found Anna Trenczer. The fact that her painting ended up in Hitler’s own collection means that the trade was made. I am guessing her escape may not have gone through traditional channels; it’s likely she was smuggled out of the country, possibly without papers or passport.

  But back to the purpose for this letter. My search has ended. Yours is just beginning.

  Find a bottle of basic rubbing alcohol and some rags. Take down the painting that hangs over the fireplace in my studio, the one with the egg. (This part may be difficult for you, but trust me.) If you soak a rag in the alcohol and slowly blot the surface of the painting, my own composition should lift off easily, revealing the original painting underneath. Enjoy. I have not seen it since those days in Germany, but I remember it was quite stunning.