by Lamb, Wally
“They were black,” Annie said. “When one of the brothers married a white woman—she was foreign born; European, I think—the three of them lived together in the house out back. The falling-out happened when whichever brother was the husband found the other brother in bed with his wife.”
“Oh, my. Miscegenation and a love triangle.” Viveca chuckled. “Quite the small town scandal, I imagine.”
I nodded. “Especially after one of the brothers drowned in the well behind their house. They found him stuck in there head first. The coroner ruled it an accident, but apparently there was some speculation that he’d been murdered. If you saw how shallow that well is, you’d know why. He would have had to try pretty hard to ‘fall into’ it.”
“Do they think he was murdered by the other brother?” Viveca asked.
“Or the people in town who didn’t like blacks mixing with whites,” Annie said. “From what Miss Galligan at the historical society told me, there was a KKK chapter in Three Rivers back then, and the Grand Dragon or whatever he was called lived just up the road.”
“And now we have an African-American family living in the White House!” Viveca noted. What was she implying? That Obama’s election had eradicated racism? Ordinarily, I would have challenged her on that assumption, but I didn’t have the energy. It was still a mystery to me what Annie saw in this woman. Was it money? Prestige? For as long as I’d known her, neither of those things had ever mattered that much to her. But maybe they did now.
Annie told Viveca she used to be a nervous wreck when the kids played in the woods out back. “They knew they weren’t supposed to go inside that dilapidated old house, but they’d sneak in there anyway. Their ‘clubhouse,’ they used to call it. One day I caught Andrew and his friends running across the roof, and all I could think of was that it was going to collapse under them. That, and the old well where the brother had died: that scared me, too. I was always afraid one of them was going to fall in and drown. It still gives me the creeps, thinking about that thing out there,” she said.
“The well wasn’t really a hazard,” I reminded her. I turned back to Viveca. “For one thing, it wasn’t very deep. And for another, Annie’s brother, Don, and I had lugged a heavy stone slab over the opening. No kid was going to budge that thing.”
“But still,” Annie said. A shiver passed through her. “Okay, that’s enough about that creepy well. Let’s talk about something else.”
It was a beautiful spring afternoon: blue skies, seventy-five-degree sunshine. We sat out on the back deck, having our coffee and scones. It had rained steadily the day before, and so the grass glistened and the stream made its music. In the middle of Annie’s updating me about Ariane, Viveca let out a quiet gasp. I followed her gaze. A doe and her freckle-backed fawn had wandered from the woods into the clearing. We three sat there in silence, watching them.
Shortly before they left, Viveca reminded Annie that she’d said she wanted to show her something. “Oh, that’s right,” Annie said. “It’s in the basement. Orion, do you mind if I go down there and get it?”
Her asking permission seemed strange. “Of course not.”
“Should I go with you?” Viveca asked. Annie said no, she’d bring it up. She’d be right back. Find what? I wondered but didn’t ask.
Viveca and I gathered up the plates and coffee cups and went inside to the kitchen. “Anna doesn’t know anything about this yet,” she said, her voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper. “But I have an ulterior motive in driving up to the Gardner today.”
I looked over at her. “Do you?”
She said she was meeting informally with one of the museum’s board members about seeing if Annie and she might exchange their vows in the museum’s courtyard. “They have a ‘no weddings’ policy, but they may make an exception for two women from the art world and their guests, some of whom have recognizable names and deep pockets. Wouldn’t Anna just love that? Being married at the Gardner?”
Looking away from her, I said yes, she probably would, then changed the subject. Asked her if they had ever recovered the paintings stolen from the Gardner several years back. “No, not yet,” she said. “From what I understand, it’s still an open case with the FBI.”
“Wasn’t that one of the biggest art thefts on record?”
“Indeed. They made away with a Vermeer, some Degas drawings, a Rembrandt self-portrait.”
“Then it’s probably just a matter of time before they crack the case, I imagine. I mean, it can’t be easy to unload works that are that valuable.”
“Oh, there are ways,” she said. “Art theft is a very lucrative business, Orion. But I hope you’re right. It’s heartbreaking to go there and see the empty frames where those priceless works used to hang—placeholders waiting for their eventual return.”
“What kind of ways?” I asked her.
“Excuse me?”
“You just said there were ways that even famous works can be fenced. I’m just curious about how they’d—”
“Well, they could change hands a few times until they ended up with an unscrupulous dealer who’d make sure they disappeared into someone’s private collection. Or they could be disbursed and resold on the international market. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were hanging somewhere in Saudi Arabia or Dubai, one of the oil-rich countries. Or in the palace of some dictator who decries Western values but craves Western art. It’s a big world, Orion, with a multitude of hiding places.”
“Huh. Poor Isabella Gardner must be turning in her grave.”
“Indeed she must be. Her philanthropy was genuine. She meant for her collection to be enjoyed by the public after she died. It’s tragic, really.”
When Annie rejoined us, she was holding that strange painting I’d forgotten was even down there. “Found it,” she said. “One of those brothers we were talking about earlier had been an amateur painter. Obviously, he hadn’t had any training. But this picture has always intrigued me. It was up in the attic when we moved in—left behind by the Skloot family, I guess. Look at the colors, the composition.”
Viveca took it from her and held it at arm’s length. In the painting, a woman, her head and body strangely disproportionate, leers at the viewer. Outfitted in a risqué bikinilike costume, she sprawls lasciviously against the head of an elephant whose trunk snakes out from between her legs. The background is bucolic—a white picket fence, a grove of trees with painstakingly painted leaves, each leaf rendered so distinctly that the trees compete for attention with the figures in the foreground. Strangest of all is the malevolent, midget-size circus clown who peeks out from behind the trunk of a tree on the painting’s right side. He’s holding a spearlike pointer which he seems to be aiming at the woman’s crotch.
I was standing behind Viveca, looking over her shoulder. “The Freudians would have a ball with all the psychosexual goings-on in this thing,” I joked. Annie smiled. Viveca seemed not to have heard me.
“It’s unsigned,” she said. “But my god, it looks an awful lot like—”
Annie interrupted her. “Look at the back.”
When she did, Viveca read aloud what was written there. This painting is a gift to Mr. and Mrs. Skloot. I call it ‘The Cercus People.’ I hope you like it. Joe J. November 1957. Annie noted that he must have meant circus people.
Apparently, the Skloots hadn’t liked their gift. The Cercus People, painted on cardboard, not canvas, was unframed, and there was neither wire nor hook on the back. My guess was that they’d exiled it to their attic as soon as they received it.
Viveca looked from the painting to me. “What did you say the brothers’ name was?” she asked.
“Jones,” I said.
“Oh, my word, I thought so!” she said. “Do you know what I think you have here? An original Josephus Jones!”
She had been interested in Josephus Jones for years, she told us—had researched him but had never been able to track down or acquire any of his works. Still, despite the odds, it all fit. She kn
ew that Jones had lived in rural Connecticut, that he had died under questionable circumstances, that he had been employed as a laborer. He had created his art using whatever was available to him: oil-based house paint, particleboard, shirt cardboard. “One source I talked to several years ago, an elderly man who knew him, said he had been prolific—had painted obsessively. But very few of his works have ever resurfaced. A collector in Santa Fe owns two, I know, and the American Museum of Folk Art in New York has three. And now, apparently, we’ve discovered another. Orion? Do you own this painting?”
I said I guessed so. I didn’t go into it with Viveca, but Annie, during our divorce mediation, had relinquished the contents of the house to me. And as far as I knew, the Skloots’ daughter was their only heir, and she had died a spinster several years back. I remembered reading her obituary.
“Check with your attorney,” Viveca said. It came out more like an order than a request. She had shifted gears and was all-business. “And if you do own it, which I imagine you do, if it was left behind, I’d like to buy it.” I held up my hand like a traffic cop. “No, no. You’re right. Take your time deciding. I’m just very excited about this find.” She must have been. For the rest of their visit, she looked mostly at the painting instead of Annie or me.
As I walked them out to her car, Viveca handed me her business card. She said she’d call me midweek to see what my lawyer had said and what my thoughts were about selling The Cercus People. She advised me that, whatever my decision, I should have the painting appraised and insured. I shouldn’t hesitate to e-mail her with any questions, and if I needed a referral to a top-notch appraiser, she could certainly provide me with that. I nodded. Closed their car doors for them and waved them off.
I was struck by what had happened in the last fifteen or twenty minutes. Viveca had gone on the hunt and Annie had gone silent—had become almost opaque. I wandered out to the backyard, wondering why, when I suddenly recalled something she’d said in that once-upon-a-time Connecticut magazine article. How, when she’d just started making her art, she’d seen something mysterious out here. Someone: a black man in overalls who, a second or two later, was gone. Was that why she’d gotten so quiet just now? Was she remembering that she’d told that reporter she might have seen a ghost? . . .
When I looked up at the deck, I saw the daffodils. The sun was shining so brightly on those yellow blooms, they looked almost electric. Before, while we were having our coffee, I’d gone back into the house and gotten them—had put them on the table in front of Annie. She’d said nothing but had smiled, fingering them. I’d meant to wrap them in wet newspaper and give them to her to take with her, but in the excitement about the painting, I’d forgotten.
Back inside, staring at Joe Jones’s freaky painting, I recalled something else I hadn’t thought about in years—something that had happened when Andrew was what? Fourteen or fifteen, maybe? When I’d gotten home from work that afternoon, Annie had met me at the door, fit to be tied. “Do you know what I caught your son and his friends doing out at their ‘clubhouse’ this afternoon? Sitting up on the roof, smoking marijuana! I made them come down and I could smell it all over them—in their hair, their clothes. I sent the other boys home. Then I picked up the phone and called their mothers. I told Andrew he was grounded for a month. And you’d better back me up on this, Orion! Don’t you dare pull any of this bad mom, good dad stuff!”
I assured her that, although I wished we could have discussed Andrew’s punishment before she doled it out, I would back her. Still, Andrew and his buddies hadn’t done anything that terrible. God knows, I’d done my share of experimenting when I was their age. But Annie had her Irish up, so I didn’t dare suggest that she might be overreacting to the situation.
“You know what I think we should do?” she’d said. “Pay someone to go out there and bulldoze that goddamned house down to the ground. Have you noticed how the roof sags in the middle? Do you know what could happen if they started horsing around up there and it fell in under them? Somebody could end up with a broken back or a broken neck or worse! Can you imagine the lawsuit if something like that happened? Or if one of those boys—Andrew, even!—had gotten killed? We’d never forgive ourselves.”
“Sweetie, relax,” I said. “Take some deep breaths.”
“Oh, you and your deep breaths! You’re not the one who has to worry about what goes on around here all day long. I am. And if I want to get worked up, I’ll get good and goddamned worked up!”
I told her I’d go up and read the riot act to Andrew. And that the next day—Saturday—I’d go out there and board up the windows, put a padlock on the door. She nodded, still scowling. Climbing the stairs to Andrew’s room, I thought, well, this is just what I need after a long day’s worth of listening to the college kids’ tales of woe: to come home to a half-hysterical wife and a kid who may be turning into a doper.
“Yeah, but Dad, it’s like having the Gestapo for a mother!” he protested.
“That’s bull. You’re just mad because she busted you.”
“But a whole month? Nobody else’s parents are this strict!”
“No? Well, I guess you got the short end of that straw.”
He flopped facedown on his mattress, squashed his pillow over his head, and groaned. I heard Marissa before I saw her standing in the doorway. She was harassing her big brother with an impromptu ditty. “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Andrew’s in troub-le.”
“Hey, you,” I told her. “Am-scray.”
But Andrew had bounded off his bed and was chasing her down the hallway. “Shut the fuck up, you little brat!” he screamed, flying after her down the stairs. Marissa was screaming, too—more theatrically than from fear.
“Mom! Help! Andrew’s trying to hurt me! And he’s swearing, too!”
And from the kitchen: “Andrew Joseph Oh! You’re in enough trouble with me as it is! Don’t you dare lay a hand on her!” I had to grab her wrist to stop her from whaling on him, and when I did she freaked. Yanked her arm back and stumbled backward, sobbing. “Hey,” I said. “Annie? It’s okay.”
“Don’t you ever grab me like that again!” she screamed.
At supper that night, Ariane shared the good news that she’d gotten a 96 on an algebra quiz and that, in her French class, her group had placed first in their Parisian culture presentations. “That’s great, honey,” I’d said, a little less enthusiastically than I’d intended. Pouting into his plate, her brother mumbled, “Yeah, way to go, Brainiac.” Annie’s attention was drawn to Marissa who, with her straw, was blowing bubbles in her milk. “What have I told you about not doing that?” she asked, slamming her hand on the tabletop. “If you don’t cut it out, I’m going to reach over there and smack you one!”
“Go ahead,” Marissa said. “I’ll just report you for child abuse.”
Annie’s lower lip poked out and she left the table in tears. “Well,” I said. “I don’t think we’re ever going to be mistaken for a Norman Rockwell family.” One of the kids asked me who Norman Rockwell was, and instead of going into it, I told them to get their butts off their chairs and clean up the supper dishes. Addressing Marissa, I said, “And you, Little Miss Smart Mouth, sweep the floor and then sit down and write an apology to your mother.” Marissa wondered why she was the one who had to apologize, when it was Annie who had threatened to hit her. I stared her down. “Okay, fine,” she muttered. Then she turned to her brother. “What are you smiling at, Dogbreath?”
At the entrance to our bedroom, I looked over at Annie. She was facedown on our bed. The lights were off. “Hey?” I said.
“Hey what?”
“Rough day, huh? You all right?”
I waited. “I just need to be alone,” she finally said. Later, after I’d turned off all the lights and climbed into bed myself, she rose and left the room. The next morning when I woke up, I realized she hadn’t come back to our bed all night. I found her asleep on the window seat that looked out on the back of the property. My suspicion was that the ev
ents of the day had triggered some old, unresolved stuff for Annie. Something from that rough childhood of hers that she was always so unwilling to talk about. Concerning my wife’s history, I had long suspected that she’d been abused, either physically or sexually. Most likely when she was in foster care. But from the start, Annie’s rule about her childhood was crystal clear. She didn’t want to go there, and she was adamant that I not go there either. I knew precious little about her life before the day I walked into the dry cleaner’s that first time, and that was the way she wanted it.
But anyway, good for my word, the next morning I loaded up our van with plywood and two-by-sixes, hammer and nails, and a padlock I’d picked up at the hardware store. I inched the car down the narrow packed-dirt footpath to the Jones brothers’ old cottage, steering around rocks and ruts, bending tree branches as I went. When I got to the cottage, I laid the planks across the brook, but there hadn’t been much rain that season. The water was down to a trickle. Out behind the place, there was evidence galore of Andrew and his buddies’ clubhouse shenanigans: spent firecrackers, empty pint bottles of applejack, a rain-wrinkled Hustler magazine. Someone had toted a hibachi out there. In the grass beside it were a rusty can opener and three or four scorched aluminum cans with blackened food on the bottom.
Inside, on the windowsill by the back door, marijuana seedlings were sprouting from half a dozen flowerpots. So those little shits were cultivating, too. The floor was littered with playing cards, someone’s ripped and stained backpack, several more skin magazines, and half a dozen roaches at the bottom of an empty Pringles tube.
There was something else in there, too, I now recalled: a number of strange-looking paintings on cardboard, similar in style to The Cercus People. There was one larger painting: Adam and Eve naked in the Garden of Eden. When I looked at the back, I saw that he’d painted it on a legless old card table. From that one and the ones on the floor, I realized that Andrew and his buddies had propped up the four or five that featured naked or bare-breasted women. The paintings were garish, amateurish; the women looked misshapen, more bizarre than sexy. But then again, to pubescent fifteen-year-old boys, female toplessness of any kind could rev up the testosterone. Hadn’t those saggy-breasted native women in National Geographic, some of them smiling toothlessly, stirred my ardor way back when?