The Muralist: A Novel

by B. A. Shapiro

  “I knew all this cheese and beer was going to come with a cost,” Jack griped. Everyone else merely looked curious.

  “As you can see, I’ve got the mural all planned out, and I’ve bought almost all the supplies, but I need help with the actual painting.”

  Four pairs of eyes focused on her.

  “I know it’s a lot to ask, but it’s a good project. An important project. And if you could give me a hand I’d be forever grateful.”

  “You want us to work on it with you?” Lee was clearly astonished.

  “I can’t do it by myself,” Alizée explained, swallowing her annoyance. Why was Lee so surprised? It wasn’t that outlandish of an idea. “There’s just too much painting that needs to be done. The canvases are large, and the deadline’s December. So I was thinking that if each of you could find a couple of hours, maybe a couple of nights a week, then you could come here, and together we’d be able to finish it on time . . . I’ll supply dinner.”

  Their expressions ranged from disbelief to incredulity.

  “Please help me do something I care very much about. It would mean everything to me.”

  “You know it’s not that simple.” Lee studied her paint-stained fingers. “In so many ways. Just painting a mural is incredibly complicated. You know that, we do it every day. There’s so much more than just applying paint to canvas.”

  “I’ve made a detailed schedule, and I’ll take care of all the other things,” she said. “It’ll be more like you’re one of my assistants.”

  “You’re offering me a demotion?” Lee asked with a fleeting smile.

  “What if it gets out that you’re planning to switch the murals?” Bill asked.

  “The five of us are the only ones who know,” Alizée said. “The only ones who are going to know.”

  “I’m not saying we’re going to be blabbing all over the city,” Bill said. “But things like this have a way of getting out. Look at what happened when Mrs. Roosevelt bought Turned.” He chuckled. “Guess we’ll have to make sure no one talks about it in front of Louise.”

  Mark threw his arm around Alizée’s shoulder. “I know you’re thinking about your family, about all the refugees, but you’ve also got to think of yourself and what kind of toll this will take on your heath and—”

  “Forget about the risks or the logistics or my health.” Alizée looked each one of them in the eye, allowed them to see her, to connect with the portion of the project she knew they’d understand. “Sure, this is about my family and what’s going on in Europe, but it’s also about art. My art. About what’s in my soul. About how I have to get it out. About how I can’t do it without you.”

  Jack finally broke the silence. “What kind of dinners are we talking about?”

  37

  ALIZÉE

  The gang was being grand. Not because they approved of the switching but because they had great respect for Montage and felt bad about her family. Which was fine. Even though it annoyed her and she wished it wasn’t so, Alizée understood they felt safe and secure on their side of the Atlantic, content with a worldview that didn’t cross over much to the other. And they were wonderful friends; despite their initial reluctance, once they committed, all four began coming to her flat on a regular basis.

  Mark was there almost every night, Lee and Bill once or twice a week, and even Jack showed up now and then. He was fascinated by the size of the canvases, the whole concept of scale, and he relished the opportunity to argue about art and politics. Which wasn’t what she needed from him, but he worked hard and fast, was always entertaining, and he was good. All she could do was thank him for his efforts and try to avoid getting pulled into the quarrels he worked so hard to stoke.

  Mr. Schmidt, a retired carpenter who lived downstairs, had helped her construct four lightweight two-by-three-foot easels on which she placed the canvases. She could easily move them around by herself, and if need be, there was room for all five of them to work at one time.

  Never had she been more pleased with her large barren flat. Nor with the seemingly endless energy that fueled her. The drive to create. Élan like she’d never experienced it before, perhaps with a touch of mania, but that was just semantics. She didn’t need sleep, didn’t need food, all she needed was to paint. And this she was doing every second she could.

  Most evenings, only one person worked with her, but once in a while everyone came at the same time, and when that happened Jack was in his element. One particularly hot Indian-summer night, the five of them were working together. It was early, but Jack and Bill were already drunk. She, Mark, and Lee were catching up quickly. There wasn’t any ice, and the warm beer was far from refreshing, but that didn’t stop them. It was wet.

  The underpainting was complete on all the canvases, and working as she did with her assistants at the warehouse, she’d sketched the major elements over the underpaint and told her friends which color and style she wanted them to use. She’d decided to use pieces of newsprint in spots, which they were all having a blast with, although if anyone noticed the articles were about the war and the refugees—one even about Drancy—no one mentioned it. They were all sweating profusely and kept bumping into each other as they maneuvered around the oversized canvases, but their spirits were high, and the work was progressing masterfully.

  She leapt from canvas to canvas, singing “Frère Jacques” at the top of her lungs to everyone’s great amusement. She sketched changes. She ground pigment. She climbed ladders. She moved canvases. She painted. She instructed. It was wild, it was wonderful, and it kept thoughts of anything else at bay.

  “Jesus.” Bill, who was painting a series of abstractions of fearful farm animals on canvas 2, wiped his forehead with his arm. “What a box to sweat in.”

  Alizée didn’t raise her eyes from the row of sunflowers she was working on. They stretched from canvases #1 to #3, starting out tall and affirming and ending bowed and defeated. “There are a few bottles of warm beer left.”

  “Tastes like piss and makes you piss.” Jack put down his brush and pulled two beers from the icebox that contained no ice. He threw one to Bill and opened the other. “Might as well head downstairs to the can before I drink it ’cause that’s where I’m going as soon as I do.”

  Everyone laughed, and Lee asked, “So why bother to drink it?” She was painting a surrealistic depiction of a group of men in tuxedos so intrigued by their own conversation that they saw nothing beyond the small circle of themselves.

  Jack poured half the beer down his throat without swallowing, one of his many drinking skills. He grinned at Lee, their eyes locking. “Now what fun would that be?”

  Lee grinned back. “What about the rest of us? It would be a hell of a lot more fun for us if you weren’t lurching around here pontificating.” The caustic acidity of their conversations had increased lately, and although Lee still denied she cared anything for Jack, the heat between them was as sweltering as the night.

  “I take great umbrage with that position,” Jack declared, downing the other half of the bottle. “I have not been pontificating at all this evening. I have been hard at work helping the sad-sack refugees wheedle their way into a country that doesn’t want them—and wheedle us into a war we don’t want any more than we want them.”

  The room fell silent.

  “Is that what you really think?” Alizée knew he was an isolationist, but Montage didn’t have to do with war; it had to do with innocents suffering. “Helping the refugees has nothing to do with going to war.”

  “Yes, yes, pretty Alizée, please forgive me,” Jack said with the sweeping bow of a nineteenth-century nobleman. “I completely agree. I was just pon-ti-fi-cating as the devil’s advocate.”

  Her grip on her paintbrush was so tight the edge dug into her skin.

  “You’re tight, Pollock.” Mark moved in close to Jack. “Time to go on home.”

  “But Alizée needs me.” Jack pushed by Mark, stumbled, then pulled himself up and pointed to the canvas he�
�d been working on. “Look at the brilliant way I’ve rendered this corner of #4 so it flows from #3, just as our oh-so-talented girl ordered. ‘Pulling the deep tones of sadness across the sky of the canvas’ as she so artfully directed.” He started to laugh. “Artfully directed, that’s a good one, don’t you think?” He sat down cross-legged on the floor and grinned up at them. “Good one.”

  “Do yourself a favor and do what Rothko says,” Bill told Jack.

  “Oh,” Jack slurred, “you’re all just a bunch of wet towels.”

  “Better a wet towel than a horse’s ass,” Lee said.

  Jack stood and pounded his chest. “Apologize, woman!” he cried. “You don’t mean a word of what you’re saying. You know you have a yen for me.”

  Mark grabbed Jack by one arm and Bill took his other, but Jack was both wiry and wily, and he easily slipped from their grasp. Bill started to lose his balance, but Mark caught him with an awkward lunge before he could topple over. They both straightened up and started to laugh. Jack plopped himself down on the floor again and began to howl. Lee threw Alizée an apologetic glance and joined in. Tears streamed from their eyes as paroxysms of laughter distorted their faces.

  Alizée put down her paintbrush and walked out of the flat.

  It was cooler on the street than it was inside, but she barely noticed the difference. Without any real awareness, she headed down Christopher toward Washington Square Park. But she never got there and somehow found herself walking in circles within the blocks of Grove, Barrow, and Jones. But the roads kept intersecting at odd angles. Hadn’t there been hard corners before? Nothing looked familiar. And her friends. They were suddenly alien to her as well. As apparently she was to them.

  The streets were deserted, but here and there shadowy figures seeking a nonexistent breeze sprawled on the fire escapes that crisscrossed the fronts of the brick buildings. These people were unconnected to her, too, distant and strange.

  Images bombarded her brain, so fast and so distinct that her head felt like it was exploding. Playing rounders with Henri. Painting in the fields of Arles. Reading at the house with Oncle. Alain. Tante. Shopping with Babette. The avenues of Paris. These were her memories. Yes, they were hers. In France. But when had she been there? One moment yesterday, another decades ago. Or maybe she’d dreamed it all.

  She saw the despondent horses, the lost children, the wilting flowers, the arrogant men concerned only with themselves. Saw her friends relishing a carefree bout of hilarity while her family was being held hostage by madmen and bureaucrats. Saw Breckinridge Long, giving a speech, blustery and self-righteous. Saw Nathan shooting him in the head.

  A surge of exhaustion almost knocked her over. She was so tired. More tired than she’d ever been. She looked around at the unfamiliar landscape. Where was she? What was she doing in the middle of the night, standing alone on a cracked and grimy sidewalk in front of row upon row of dark tenements? Drenched in sweat, covered with paint, lost in the bowels of a foreign city?

  Her knees gave way, and she was sitting at the bottom of a towering set of stairs that reached into the darkness above her. She pulled into herself, dwarfed by the stairs, the buildings, the city, by the sense that she was truly and deeply alone.

  Then she felt it. She wasn’t alone. Someone was watching her, someone with evil intent. Someone who had heard about the memo? Who’d found out about Montage? Or worse, someone who knew they’d been discussing assassination.

  Every hair on her body flared, the sense of impending doom so strong it thrust her into a stand and then a run. She could hear his breathing behind her. Or was it her own? Either way she had to keep moving. Fast. Even though she had no idea where she was going.

  38

  DANIELLE, 2015

  After my exasperating meeting with George, I tried to put both Alizée and the squares out of my mind, but this proved impossible. Especially now that I had Lee’s square, carried with such hope in Grand-père’s rucksack across thousands of miles, tossed aside in heartbreak. I’d been looking at it for months now and never failed to find something new.

  I took out my magnifying glass and managed to pick out a few words from the newsprint embedded in the paint. One of which was Drancy, followed by camps d’accueil. A reception camp? Whatever that meant, it was the place where Alizée’s uncle had been imprisoned, from where Grand-père had escaped.

  So Alizée knew about Drancy, about her uncle perhaps, maybe about her brother. Could this mean she did go back to France in 1940? That she tried to find them? I thought about my conversation with Charlie Nolan, the NYU historian; he’d said it was unlikely but not completely out of the question.

  I’d checked out Drancy after I read Grand-père’s letter. It was an unremarkable town outside of Paris with a troublesome history. Home to one of the most brutal World War II transit camps in France, the Drancy Deportation Center was the main terminus from which French Jews were sent to Auschwitz. It was run by the Gestapo and manned by French guards, many of whom were more than happy to oblige their Nazi commanders, humiliating and beating prisoners, separating small children from their parents and sending them off to the death camps by themselves. Not the best moment in French history.

  When Grand-mère’s will was read, it turned out she left each of the grandchildren ten thousand dollars with the stipulation that we use it for something we’d always wanted but didn’t have the money to buy. An indulgence, she said. I knew she’d been thinking about an object, but I figured a trip would also qualify. Reenergized by this windfall at this particular time, I put in for the six days of vacation I’d accrued. Maybe Jordan Washor at the Louvre could be persuaded to look a little harder. Maybe more paintings from small collectors had arrived. Maybe I’d take a trip to Drancy.

  I hit the Internet to prepare. But soon I found I wasn’t looking at websites for cheap airfares or centrally located hotels. I was cruising sites for ways to find missing persons. And boy, were there lots of ways. Searchable arrest records and prison databases abounded, as did sites belonging to private investigators who are more than happy to take your money to find—or most likely, not find—your missing loved one. There were frequent references to “loved one.”

  I studied photographs of the lost, most images so poor I couldn’t imagine they would be of help to anyone. I found myself worrying about these blurry souls, about the families who wanted to find them. It was all very sad. Where are you? Who are you? Did you want to be lost?

  Had Alizée wanted to be lost? Maybe. But if she’d gone to France, she wouldn’t have wanted to be lost there; she would have gone directly to Arles, maybe to Drancy, to her family. I shifted over to websites specializing in finding Holocaust survivors—or as many tactfully described it: getting closure on the fate of the victims.

  There were almost as many Holocaust sites as there were in the general missing persons category, most of which started with the disclaimer that they couldn’t actually help you find a particular person. You could register your missing relative, add them to existing databases or visit the hundreds of blogs dedicated to this purpose. There were Jewish genealogy sites, the International Tracing Service, the Yad Vashem central registry, the databases at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC.

  I learned that most concentration camp deaths weren’t documented by the Nazis—and here I’d thought they were such anal-compulsive record keepers—but there was something called the “Death Books from Auschwitz.” If your relative had been lucky enough to survive the selection process on arrival at the camp but unlucky enough to have been killed there, it was possible he or she was one of the eighty thousand murder victims listed in one of the three volumes. There might even be a photo. You could purchase the boxed set for $365.

  The American Red Cross had a Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center whose staff actually did attempt to find individual people for you. A caseworker was assigned, and he or she searched all the victim databases and registries as well as the archives of hundreds of organizations and
museums across the world. And it was completely free. According to the website, the Red Cross had confirmed the missing person’s fate almost a third of the time, and in one thousand cases the relative had been found alive and the family reunited. Not that I expected that to happen, but still I got goose bumps reading about it.

  I didn’t have any specifics on any of the other Benoits, so I spent the rest of that beautiful Saturday afternoon going down the list of websites and entering what little of Alizée’s information I knew—name, nationality, date of birth—into every registry, database and blog I could find. I contacted my local Red Cross chapter and filled out the Tracing Inquiry Form (1609). Then I turned my attention to websites for cheap airfares and centrally located hotels.

  39

  LEE, 1940

  When Alizée didn’t come right back, Lee and Mark decided to go look for her. Bill and Jack went also, and the four of them fanned out in different directions, agreeing to meet back at the apartment at three o’clock. No one had much confidence that Jack would do anything other than stagger home and pass out, but Lee, and she presumed Mark and Bill, was propelled into that painfully clear sobriety that follows a drunken scare.

  She took Christopher toward Washington Square Park; Mark headed to the river; Bill went south toward SoHo; Jack stumbled east. They all ended up on the steps of Alizée’s building an hour later, empty-handed. Lee wasn’t surprised they hadn’t found her—it was a vast city, after all—but she was worried. Everyone was. Jack was in the worst shape.

  “This is all my fault,” he moaned, holding his head in his hands. “It was just a joke. I had a little too much to drink. Just because I don’t like political art doesn’t mean I like Nazis. I’m an idiot. Why did I say such a stupid thing?” He looked up. “What exactly did I say?”

  No one answered him.

  “I checked upstairs,” Lee said. “She’s not there.”