The Muralist: A Novel

by B. A. Shapiro

  “And what do you suggest we do?” Phil asked Grant. “Throw him out on the sidewalk?”

  “I didn’t say that. I just don’t think we—”

  “So no one’s heard from him in the last two days?” Lee interrupted the argument, which had been going on for at least a week. She looked around the table. Everyone shook their heads.

  Lee sighed. She’d been almost as devastated as Mark when they discovered Alizée had gone missing. Even though she’d been missing for three months, they’d searched for her everywhere they thought she might possibly be. And many places they didn’t think there was a chance in hell they would find her: the train station; the airport; the wharf; the charred ruins of her apartment building; the benches and outbuildings of Union Square, Washington Square, and Central Park; every museum, gallery, restaurant, and bar she’d ever visited and all the streets and alleys in between. Nothing.

  Jack, Bill, Gorky, and the rest of the gang did the same. Nothing. Then they retraced their steps. Lee even managed to contact Eleanor Roosevelt, who promised to do everything she could to find Alizée. Still nothing.

  Mark took the train up to Boston but came home empty-handed. A woman who lived in the neighborhood where Alizée grew up remembered the family—or more correctly, she remembered that Alizée’s parents had been killed in a fire at their laboratory at Harvard. “A goddamn fire!” he cried to Lee, his face haggard with grief. “No wonder she went crazy. Her parents! Why the hell didn’t she tell me? Tell us?”

  Lee shook her head, indicating she had no answer, but she wasn’t all that surprised. Alizée held her secrets close. She was almost glad that her friend wasn’t around to hear what had caused the fire. The fire department concluded that it had started in Alizée’s apartment, but not by Louise or the WPA or whomever Alizée thought was trying to punish her. It was much more mundane: something electrical, most likely paint and turpentine ignited by a random spark, combusting all that was left of her oeuvre. So sad.

  Mark complained that Harvard was less than forthcoming when he’d visited and admitted he’d wept all the way back to New York. As soon as he got home, he burst into Louise’s apartment yelling that if she didn’t get the hell out of the city, he would strangle her with his bare hands. Louise had cried, begged his forgiveness, claimed she had nothing against Alizée, hadn’t meant anything to happen to her, just thought the WPA should be informed that their property was going to be destroyed. Mark screamed, “Bullshit!” and punched a hole in her wall. She was gone the next day.

  Lee and Mark took another ride up to Bloom, but there was no doctor on duty, and the nurse he’d spoken with before wasn’t there. The young receptionist shifted terrified glances between Mark and her hands, repeating in a shaky voice that Alizée wasn’t listed as a patient and that she had no further information.

  The girl had good reason to be scared: Mark was a fright. He’d been drinking constantly, picking up where he’d left off before he went to bring Alizée home. His face was ravaged by sorrow, alcohol, and fury, and he didn’t appear to have showered in weeks, or at least he didn’t smell like he had.

  “Someone’s got to check on him,” Lee said. “He may be sick.”

  Phil rubbed his right cheek, which was slightly bruised. “I’ll do it.”

  “He might still be sore at you,” Bill said, standing. “I’ll go.”

  “You’ll need this.” Phil handed Bill a key. “He won’t answer.”

  “I’ll come.” Lee stood also. “Two’s better.” As she turned to go, she couldn’t help but notice the relieved expressions around the table. The young girl at Bloom wasn’t the only one afraid of Mark.

  They pounded on the apartment door, yelled for Mark. As Phil had predicted, there was no response. Bill raised an eyebrow and took the key from his pocket. Lee nodded, but she was squeamish about bursting uninvited into someone’s private life, private space, private hell. And she was afraid of what they might find.

  “Hello!” Bill called out as they entered the main room. “Mark! It’s Bill and Lee. Hello?”

  No answer. The couch was empty, surrounded by upended glasses as well as empty and half-empty bottles. A basement apartment, it was stuffy, overheated, and oppressive with its low ceilings and low light. She wondered how he could paint here. And it did smell like garbage. Maybe something worse.

  Lee caught Bill’s attention and put a finger to her lips. “Mark?” she said more quietly. “Mark, it’s Lee. We just stopped by to see how you’re doing. Are you here?” She walked toward the rear, calling softly, Bill at her heels.

  They poked their heads into the two small bedrooms, back-to-back in the railroad-car apartment. Neither smelled much better than the living room. “You’d think they’d never heard of a Laundromat,” she muttered. The silence was ominous. Why wasn’t Mark here? Where could he have gone? Where had he found the energy? Something was very wrong.

  As soon as she stepped into the kitchen, she saw what it was. There on the floor, in a pool of blood, lay Mark. He was faceup, and his arms were flung out as if he’d unexpectedly fallen backward. But the incisions on both arms and the two empty pill vials beside him revealed there was nothing unexpected about it.

  The doctors told Lee that if she and Bill hadn’t found Mark when they did, he would have bled out in another hour. When he recovered enough to leave the hospital, Edith took him home with her. It was a long time before Mark returned to the Jumble Shop.

  51

  ELEANOR, 1946

  Eleanor received Alizée Benoit’s brother at the New York apartment where she stayed when she wasn’t at Val-Kill. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to meet you, Dr. Benoit.” She clasped his hand in hers. “I was a great admirer of your sister’s.” It still rattled her senses that Alizée had never been found. She’d tried to help, done what she could, but everything was going haywire then. It was 1941, right before the war, and no one had the time to help her find a missing girl. She longed to know what had happened to that lively child, so talented, so troubled. Was she gobbled up by the war like so many others? Or more likely, gobbled up by her own demons?

  Dr. Benoit swallowed hard, clearly nervous in her presence. “I . . . I, too, am pleased to meet you.”

  She could see a family resemblance, the height and the strong chin, although his hair was dark where Alizée’s had been light. “I only wish it were happening under happier circumstances,” she said.

  “I have spoken to everyone else I could find who might have information on where Alizée went. You are the last. I understand you came to her home and she came to yours.”

  “Yes. Yes, we did.” It had been over six years since Alizée disappeared, yet the girl was in her thoughts surprisingly often.

  The brother’s face was guarded as he waited for her to continue, hopeful still. After all this time.

  “I’m very sorry I don’t have the answers you want, Dr. Benoit. But you can rest assured that I, and a great number of Alizée’s friends, searched everywhere we could.”

  “It is as I expected,” he said with great dignity.

  “You’ve been to that hospital? What was it called? Bloom Sanatorium?”

  “There is nothing there.” He paused. “I have been many places, and there is nothing anywhere.”

  Eleanor started to tell him again how sorry she was, but caught herself. It had already been said. It changed nothing. “I have a gift for you.”

  “A gift?” His voice croaked as if he were a boy on the edge of puberty. He cleared his throat. “A gift for me?” he asked in a more normal tone.

  “Come.” She gestured for him to follow her into the parlor.

  Alizée’s two paintings were propped up against a set of chairs: Turned and Lily Pads. Eleanor hated to part with them, particularly Turned, which was her reminder, along with her memories of Alizée, to stand her moral ground above all else. But the paintings belonged with the family. It was all they had of her.

  Dr. Benoit knelt in front of them. He reached
out and touched one signature then the other: A. Benoit. “These are nothing like the paintings she did in France. Lee Krasner gave me another like this,” he pointed to Turned, “but it is very hard to believe this is my sister. It troubles me that I do not understand what they are.”

  “At first I didn’t understand them either,” she told him. “But Alizée taught me that just because there aren’t any objects in a painting, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a subject. She said you’re not supposed to recognize what’s in it as much as feel the artist’s emotion.”

  He stared hard at the two paintings. “I am afraid all I feel is sadness.”

  Eleanor wanted to reach out and hug him, take him under her wing as she had Alizée, but he was a grown man, and she had nothing more to give.

  “These are for me?” he asked, looking neither at her nor at the paintings.

  “I’m certain she’d want you to have them.”

  He rocked back on his feet, as if to put some distance between him and the paintings. “Thank you,” he said after a long pause. “That is very kind. These mean very much to me.”

  Eleanor didn’t believe him; he was just being polite. It was clear the paintings made him uncomfortable as well as sad, and he was sad enough already. But this wasn’t her decision to make. “I’ll send them to your home tomorrow morning. When you look at them more, maybe they’ll start speaking to you as they do to me.”

  He stood. “I do not understand how such a thing could happen. I looked for her in New York City when I was here during the war, and I looked for her in France when it was over. Then I came back to America to look again. But she is nowhere. Poof in the air.”

  “You can take some comfort—and much pride—in the fact that your sister was fighting for what was right,” Eleanor said. “She was a brave girl who took dangerous chances for what she believed in. And it wasn’t just for her family, she wanted desperately to help everyone running from Hitler. She tried through activism and she tried through art. Her passion was a wondrous thing to see.” Eleanor took a deep breath. “I failed her. Let her down. Along with many others.”

  Dr. Benoit looked doubtful. “You?”

  Eleanor had never said this out loud, although she’d been thinking it for many years. And who better to hear than Alizée’s brother? “The truth is that neither Franklin nor I did enough for the refugees. He was unwilling to take the political risks, and I didn’t try hard enough to change his mind.” Her voice caught, and she had the unchristian thought that if Breckinridge Long had been killed instead of wounded in that assassination attempt back in 1940, so many lives would have been saved.

  “I am sure this is not true. You have done much for so many people.”

  “We could have saved tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands some people suspect now, and we didn’t. Alizée gave me the ammunition, I had it in my hands, and I allowed myself to be silenced.” She closed her eyes and pressed a finger to the spot between her eyebrows. “I will tell you that this is the greatest regret of my life.”

  Dr. Benoit was silent for a long moment, then said, “So many regrets. They change nothing.”

  Eleanor accepted his rebuke, but when she opened her eyes, she saw it wasn’t a rebuke at all. It was an acknowledgment of shared regrets, of shared guilt, of a shared future that was to be lived no matter what had come before.

  He held out his card. “I cannot thank you for your many kindnesses to both me and to my sister.”

  Eleanor gripped the back of a chair to steady herself, unsettled by her confession, relieved to have put it into words, sickened by the truth of it. She took the card. “What will you do next?”

  “I have seen and experienced many difficult things, and I believe it is now time to put this all behind me. That is why we left France. Why we will never go back. There is no more past. My wife has heard Connecticut is a nice place. I will start a medical practice there, and we will start a family and have many children who will not be burdened by any of these difficulties.”

  Eleanor touched his arm. “Godspeed.” It was all there was left to say.

  52

  DANIELLE, 2015

  When I discovered the next bus wasn’t due for another hour, I continued to wander around Drancy. I had to keep moving. It was the opposite of my stroll through Paris: nothing of architectural interest, no history except for the ugly apartment complex behind me, no stylish shoes. I passed an art school, the École d’arts decoratifs, and a few stores with dusty window displays.

  I noticed a small art gallery on a corner and glanced in. There were some engaging pieces. Mostly conceptual: a large metal sculpture made of paperclips and yellow stickies, a floor-to-ceiling woven spiderweb that took up an entire corner, an assemblage of hats. Presumably the work of students at the school down the block. A series of paintings along the back wall caught my eye and I went inside.

  A balding middle-aged man barely raised his eyes from his computer when I entered. “Please do look around,” he said in English. “I can give you more information on the art if you would like to hear it.”

  “Thank you,” I told him in my best-accented French. “I will certainly ask.”

  He nodded, unimpressed.

  The paintings that drew me in were the only oils on canvas in the gallery. Actually they were the only paintings in the gallery, abstract but with a sprinkling of realism, jewel tones. As I approached, I saw they were two triptychs or maybe a sextych, if there was such a thing. The shapes and colors undulated from one canvas to the next, somehow flowing both forward and backward, pushing and pulling each other, throbbing with movement. Clearly influenced by the Abstract Expressionists. By Hans Hofmann.

  I leaned closer, scrutinized the signature. The first initial was either J or G, the last something with lots of syllables that started with V. No one I recognized. I sighed, weighted down by the many sadnesses of the last two days, by my many disappointments—Alizée, my marriage, my art, the stagnation of my life—by a sudden and powerful longing for Grand-mère, for home. By grief, I suppose.

  The proprietor walked over. “I see you are admiring the work of our own Madame Villeneuves.”

  I straightened. “Yes,” I said. “Yes I am.”

  “It is good, no?”

  “Very good.”

  “She was the matriarch of a large local family, Josephine Villeneuves. The mother of three sons who had many sons, daughters also. Great-grandchildren now.”

  “Did she study here? In Paris, I mean.”

  “No. She did not study art. She worked in a bakery.” He let his eyes glide from one painting to another. “A pity.”

  At the bottom of the third painting an abstracted stand of trees appeared to rise from nothingness, magical and comforting. Flickers of Lily Pads. “She’s not alive anymore?”

  “She’s been dead for, oh, at least five years. I like her work very much. It is always saying something new to me.”

  “Are there more?” I asked. “More of her paintings?”

  “The family must have others.” He perked up. “Would you like me to inquire for you? And these are for sale also. Alone or together.”

  I checked the price and saw it was more than reasonable. A hundred euros apiece.

  He sized me up as a possible client and held out his hand. “Tristan Bazin.”

  “Danielle Abrams. Dani.” I shook his hand. “You said she was a baker?”

  Tristan smiled. No more sidelong glances. “The Villeneuves own three bakeries in Drancy. The family business for generations. Josephine, like everyone else in the family, worked there her whole life.”

  “She was from here?”

  “She was already an old woman when I first remember her. Behind the counter, sneaking me cookies I thought my mother did not know of.” He chuckled. “She was maybe fifty then, Madame Villeneuves, only ten years older than I am now. But yes, she must have been born here. Not many people came to Drancy from the outside in those days.”

  I figured this was probabl
y true in those days, too.

  “I can call Nicolas if you wish,” Tristan offered. “Nicolas Villeneuve. Her eldest son. Perhaps he will know if she has others.”

  I shrugged. “Why not?” I had the time.

  While Tristan made the call, I looked at the paintings more carefully. The way the elements shifted from one canvas to the next—growing, changing, sometimes almost leaping—bore a resemblance to Turned. Josephine had died only recently, so she must have had access to books on abstract art. Maybe found the time to slip off to the museums in Paris between baking bread and cookies.

  Tristan returned and told me Nicolas was at the bakery down the street and was happy to speak to me about his mother’s art. “Please come back anytime,” he said, pressing a business card in my hand. “And if you have interest in any of these, I am sure we can come to a price that is mutually agreeable.”

  I thanked him, feeling a little guilty about his misapprehension, but I’d never actually said anything about purchasing a painting.

  It was easy to find Boulangerie de Villeneuves, the scent of almonds—pain d’amande, I hoped—was like a leash pulling me straight to the front door. If I’d been ten miles away, it still would have drawn me: irresistible, thick and sweet and warm. Stirring almonds and butter with Grand-mère, flour in my hair, crystals of golden sugar under my fingernails, how she laughed at my impatience for the dough to rise.

  The shop was smaller than I’d assumed, given Tristan’s description of a large family enterprise, but it was full of every luscious bread, tart, croissant, and cake one would expect from a French bakery. And yes, pain d’amande.

  A handsome older man with a full head of curly white hair stepped from behind the counter. “You are the American asking about the art of my mother? I am Nicolas Villeneuves.”

  I introduced myself and explained that I’d seen the paintings through the gallery window and had to go in. “I’m an artist, too,” I said, feeling as if I was an impostor, pretending to be something I wasn’t. “Which is why I was so taken with her work. It’s amazing that she did this without any training. She must have been a remarkable talent.”