by Paula Champa
“No, it’s not. He wanted you to have it.”
The tears in my eyes blurred the outline of her pink glasses. She hugged me now in earnest.
“Thank you. Oh.”
Up close, embracing her, I felt relief, then thought: Just as her quest was being fulfilled, mine was starting again. It wasn’t that I was alone; it was that for a time I knew something different. Unknowingly I had rehearsed intimacy with Emerson for years, the glass wall shrinking and becoming more portable until it fell away. He had given me a taste of something, and I wanted it again; a deeper connection, as I had once envisioned in another form with Miguel. But I still could not decipher Webster’s words—that I was the one who had business with Miguel.
The Metro-North train glided to a stop at the platform in front of us, and Hélène gave me a questioning glance.
“If you’re going to drive this back to Manhattan, I need you to drop me off at my parents’,” I said. “It’s just down the road.”
She turned the key in the ignition. When she spoke again, her tone was more businesslike. “I want to be clear. My original proposal still stands, Beth. I am offering to purchase this car from you, or from Emerson’s estate.”
“I am his estate.” I directed her out of the station, thinking how disappointed Howard and Sissy Russell would be to know that I wasn’t going to make one red cent on the car after all. “It’s a gift,” I insisted. “His lawyer’s office can help us with the paperwork. And please, don’t thank me. It doesn’t have anything to do with me. He wanted you to have it.”
There was no more awkward silence after that. She spoke excitedly on the way to my parents’ house, working through her schedule and determining how quickly she could wrap up her business in New York. Her plan, seemingly hatched there and then, was to register herself and the car to rerun the Mille Miglia in Italy the following spring. It turned out that she had stayed in touch with Howard and Sissy Russell, and she intended to invite them to stay with her in Italy while she practiced for the road race.
“You’ll come for the race too?” she asked.
“I’ll try,” I said halfheartedly, picturing Webster’s stooped back as he walked away from us that afternoon. Was he alone tonight, reading his book of Rilke poems? “Loss. How do you tolerate so much loss?”
I meant it rhetorically, but Hélène answered.
“At first, I couldn’t,” she said. “I remember . . . Well, I was seven when we were told that my father was killed. Eventually we got the news about my brother. He was too young to be a soldier, but he joined the Resistance. It continued like that.”
“It must have been very hard for you.”
“Well, I was alive, and they weren’t,” she said, keeping her eyes focused on the road. “Was that all right? I didn’t think so.”
“You didn’t think you should be alive?”
She shook her head.
“You were a child,” I said. “That’s a child’s response.”
“It might have been. When I went away to art school, to Italy, it helped me a great deal.” She glanced at me. “I permitted myself, with maturity, to change my mind.”
“Did you ever live there again? After Alto?”
She sighed. “Not for any length of time. Though I love that country. And I hated the destruction Mussolini brought to it. Hearing that man speak today about what his wife went through in China . . .” Her voice trailed off. “What people have been put through in the name of progress. Even so, I am not political, though there are some who accuse me of it.”
“I heard something once—” I began, recalling Arthur Quint’s seemingly well-rehearsed denial of her political motivations.
She narrowed her eyes. “What?”
“Just—”
“Fascism,” she said flatly.
She drove on with her jaw clenched, and I wondered if she would say anything more. “There was a connection,” she said finally.
I looked to her, waiting for her to continue.
“But I had no idea how much.”
The gallery assistant, Katya, had known something after all. “I’m familiar with the Futurist movement,” I said.
“Yes, well, that happened thirty years before I was born,” she said dismissively. “But there were other links, coincidental.”
“What links?”
“The cars I used, the time I was working in—so many things exist as traces in the paintings. Some say Fascism because I used many Italian cars, and Mussolini’s government propped up the auto industry in Italy after the First World War, when those cars were built. His influence, shall we say, helped many of the companies survive at critical points. But it was the same across Western Europe. People were hungry, there was no work, like your Great Depression here. There was a healthy interest in supporting a promising industry with passion and talent behind it. This fascination with aerodynamics, speed, it caused a kind of glorious madness. Everything seemed open. The newness of the technologies and the materials—it inspired advances in art, music, literature, architecture . . .”
She steered the car through a corner.
“There were already concours in Europe, and the Fascist Party made a special effort to promote those kinds of events, to present cars as fashionable. Also racing—it had been a sensation since the twenties.” She seemed to rise to the memory, before adding: “And this was how the Reich demonstrated its technical prowess. Hitler was obsessed with racing. He promoted it heavily. He set workers to building the autobahn.”
She glanced at me miserably. “Everyone fell in love with cars. I was as mad for speed as the rest of them—for the freedom and all it promised. The engineers like Miguel’s grandfather believed in that promise. And it was overtaken by ambitions far more brutal than they could have imagined.” She paused. “Can you think how it must have been for them? Everything they built was used for war.”
I realized then that this was a story I knew—one my father had taught me inadvertently through years of battle scenarios. After Hitler invaded Poland and the war spread, the workers in factories across Europe, and later the United States, found themselves, as they had in the First World War, applying a generation’s worth of advances to military vehicles and munitions: engines used as weapons, engines for tanks and jeeps and fighter planes, defended by more engines, like the Merlins that had powered the Spitfires to victory. The capacity for destruction was unprecedented as engines pursued one another through the sky, dropping bombs that destroyed much more than the auto factories themselves.
Hélène nodded as I spoke. “Can you blame Miguel for wanting to make something new? Destruction comes with creation, advances—I find these things uncomfortable to reconcile, though the truth was there in my paintings.”
My mind filled with images of the museum halls in Denmark: torn canvases that recorded the force of speed for what it was, an irreversible rupture. Out from the jagged rips flew a century’s worth of evidence that what had once been revolutionary needed to become more evolved. Out from the rips flew Miguel’s blackbird with its lament: Still, we demand nothing new.
I directed her along a series of small streets, reflecting soberly on these revelations, until we crawled to a stop in front of my parents’ mailbox. One glance at the house told me that my mother and father were in the kitchen eating dinner—I could see the light shining at the end of the hallway through the darkened living room. I forced a smile, dispirited at the prospect of watching Hélène drive away. I was gathering my things to climb out of the car, wondering again how to say goodbye to her, when she touched my arm.
“There’s something else. Something personal. Alto’s family in Rome—”
She seemed to be studying my face, assessing my trustworthiness before continuing:
“They were Fascists, Beth. They supported Mussolini. Before and during the war. Among their gestures of loyalty, the Bianco family gave over their fleet of grand cars to the Duce and his officers.”
“What do you mean, gave them over?”<
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“Permitted the use of them—like you would pay protection money. All of their fine coach-built cars were used for . . . the business of the Fascist Party, and this favor managed to protect their collection of motorcars through the war. While living people weren’t protected.” She paused. “That rumor you heard about me. It’s because my Speed Paintings collaborated with them also. With the ones who were responsible for the death of my father and brother, and the horrors suffered by so many others.”
“What are you saying?”
“Alto’s father—in truth, he was a sadistic man—he decided it would be amusing to tell me the history of his fleet, or I might not have been burdened with this knowledge.”
With a chill, I sensed what she was trying to say. “You mean, those are the cars you used to make the Speed Paintings?”
“The earliest ones, yes.”
“But you didn’t know.”
She was shrinking beside me in the seat, curling into herself like a nautilus.
“I knew.”
I was too confused to speak.
“The war was over. The lives were lost. I had to decide: What was the greater action? I used them. I worked with whoever I needed to in their circle to do it.”
She searched my face.
“For me, the car was the paintbrush, you see. A very costly one. I had no money, no way to obtain those materials. This was how it began . . . The first ones, they were anti-painting, anti-aesthetic. They were pure rage.”
“What if his father was lying, just to upset you?”
She turned to me with pitying eyes. “He showed me photos, Beth.”
“Photos?”
“The one he especially treasured was from 1938, before the war. It was a black car, with a grille like a hundred arrows. There in the back seat was Mussolini. Beside him was Hitler, riding through Rome on a state visit. It was the first car I used.”
My mind returned to a comment she had once made—she had kept many of the early paintings, and then given them to the museum in Denmark. Paintings more savage than those in her later racing series, as I had sensed when I saw them all together. She had flirted with destroying them, as the Futurists had once prescribed.
She twisted her lips. “In my nightmares I am driving those animals . . .”
I didn’t know what to say.
“But I don’t forget. And I can’t forget. There was a photo taken of me in that car for Life magazine, recording the making of a Speed Painting. It has followed me for forty years. Every opening, every article. When I see it, I can’t tell you the grief that pours in.”
“But you made artwork . . .”
“Does that redeem something? I hope so.” She touched the dashboard of the Beacon. “This was the first car I used that wasn’t tainted. It has always been separate.”
Alto’s message to her on the engine seemed to have more than one meaning. “Does this have something to do with what happened between you and Alto?”
She curled down tighter into herself.
“But he was practically a child during the war, like you,” I argued, unsure why I was defending him. “It was his family’s crime, the crimes of a regime. Wasn’t he the one who brought you this Beacon?”
She nodded. “If you can see that, then . . . Beth, maybe I don’t know you well enough to say this. But I watched you with that man Miguel, in Monterey. I saw you cheer with him when the car received its ribbon—you were so alive. And when I entered that circle around the car I could tell he was protective of you. I don’t know what happened, but from what was said earlier, with Mr. Tang’s father, it sounds like something about him is bothering you. I would suggest you find out what you don’t know. I learned some things about the Beacon company when I went looking for this car, and I can tell you: Miguel’s parents squandered nearly everything he could have used to build his future. But something remains. Some courage, some desire to progress. Miguel seems to remember enough from his grandfather to try.”
I leaned over and hugged her delicately.
“I know something now about Alto,” she said as I climbed out. “About love, he said: You have to believe you deserve it. He didn’t believe. But all this time, I thought I failed. And it wasn’t true.”
My mother sat across from me at the empty kitchen table, mending a pair of biking shorts. I watched her pull a thread from her sewing box, an old cookie tin manufactured to look like Wedgwood china. The pale blue tin was ringed with marble-white figures, a miniature scene of goddesses, cupids and hounds. In the center of the lid, two women in togas leaned over a man collapsed on a rock, his wings folded—was he asleep, or dead? One woman touched a hand to his shoulder, the other extended a long branch to his wing, as if to say, We are not the same, but we are not separate.
Even in that faux-porcelain tableau, there was no escape from grief, I decided as I followed my father through the house after dinner. At the door to his workroom, he paused with a sense of occasion, allowing me to take in the scene. Before us, the Battle of Britain was in full swing, the air thick with wings. A mechanical flock of Spitfires was diving and soaring its way to certain victory.
“Imagine what it would have been like up there.” He gestured to the blue ceiling with its picturesque scattering of storm clouds. Beneath the painted sky sat Garrett’s old desk, nearly covered with a sprawling papier-mâché reconstruction of the Cliffs of Dover. I spotted an unfinished plane on one of the workbenches. “Is this another Spitfire?” I asked, picking it up.
“Careful,” he said. “This part here’s not dry. The key with painting is patience.” He directed my attention to the backlog of aircraft waiting to receive their colors. “It’s tempting to rush it, but you’ll end up with fingerprints in the paint if you hold pieces that aren’t fully dry. That’s what makes the difference, Beth. You can always tell an amateur—there’ll be fingerprints in the paint.”
I bit my lip, considering whether to say anything.
“I don’t have any fingerprints.”
“Oh?” He glanced down at my hands with mild curiosity.
“No. I found out when I was living in Europe. Mine are missing.”
He chuckled.
“I’m not kidding,” I protested. “The government almost didn’t extend my visa. I don’t know if it’s funny.”
“No, it’s odd,” he said. “But it would give you a huge advantage in painting models.”
“It’s like I don’t have a mark of my own—like you, like other people.”
“You’d probably want to keep a damp sponge next to you anyway, to wipe off any glue that gets where you don’t want it to. Like the glass canopy on the fighters . . .”
As he went on talking, the wind through the attic windows kicked up a sharp perfume I always associated with him, with home, filling my mind with a lost memory from the hospital: my father smelling of craft glue, singing quietly to me in the skinny night-lighting of the hospital room.
He was busy wiping a stray smudge of glue from the canopy of a German fighter plane when I asked him the question I had never been able to answer.
“What happened to me that night? In the hospital.”
His shoulders flinched. He gazed at the plane in my hands. Then he rested the one he was holding on a piece of newspaper and sat down beside the Cliffs of Dover.
“What do you want to know?”
“When did you know I was dead?”
“In the hospital.”
“What happened?”
He studied the cloudy sky on the ceiling as if examining it for defects. “You turned blue.”
“And then what?”
“Then I had to call your mother.” He shook his head. “I had to tell her . . .”
“Where was I then?”
“They moved you into a special room with oxygen, to try to work on you—I had to stay outside. That’s when they called the priest. They were trying to get tubes into your lungs. To remove the fluid that kept you from breathing. No one could do it. Everything tha
t happened that night—it was harrowing.” He paused. “I was brought to a police officer, there in the hospital, and he questioned me.”
“What?”
“Well, they had to determine what happened before we got there, to make sure that your mother and I hadn’t done anything wrong. I told him how we called the doctor when you spiked such a high fever—we didn’t understand how serious it was.”
I waited, then—waited for him to admit what I had always felt.
“You were dead, honey. Your life was over.”
His face, his expression. I see them still, as if frozen in chunks of amber—those primeval archives—the flecks of his eyes caught forever in the very emotions they exuded, looking out, flightless, from the exquisite prison of memory hardening around them.
We both knew what had followed in the next hours and days, when they had finally let him into the room where I was kept in a plastic oxygen tent. For a time, the door between life and death was held open, and I bounced back and forth over the threshold, tentatively attached to both sides. For as long as I lay in that tent of torture, they did not know whether I would slip back, slip over again for good. It would have been so easy to surrender to that sublime peace.
Why did I fight it?
Like a gift, the words of Mr. Webster’s poet offered themselves to me. “Love has led me here,” sang Orpheus. He sang it to Death, to bring his Eurydice back.
I felt it then: my father’s hand against the plastic, pressing through the tent. Mano a mano. His hand against mine. In those long hours, what was closest was love. It was no sacrifice of mine to be alive. It was only selfish. I had wanted more time, with him, with my mother and brother. And I had fought for it, just like Emerson.
My father stood then, beside the Cliffs of Dover, and reached for me, as I had wanted to reach for Mr. Webster. We stood together under the frantic sky, and when we pulled away again, he was hunched in uncertainty, his eyes brimming.
“I know how lost you’ve been, Beth. And it’s hard to stand by because . . . I see what you’re going through, and I can’t help thinking—” His voice broke. “That’s what you spared your mother and me.”