Stolen Beauty

by Laurie Lico Albanese

The little girl puzzles over his words.

  “But how will we win, if the painting leaves home?”

  Hubertus sighs. His wife kneels in front of the child.

  “The pretty lady in that painting lived in Vienna a long time ago,” she says. “But her family doesn’t live here anymore. And they want the painting to go where they are. They want to have her with them in their new home, where she belongs.”

  MARIA

  2004

  We won. There was champagne and cake, and a small party in our honor, but it wasn’t over yet. The portrait was still in Vienna, and the final battle with Austria was still to come.

  With my sons and daughter beside me, and the last plastic cups full of champagne still scattered around my living room, I listened to Randy explain what he wanted to do next. It seemed I had been sitting there on my red sofa more than half my life, waiting for my aunt’s face to give me an answer or a sign.

  “We won the right to sue in the Supreme Court,” Randy said. “But we have the option of putting the decision in the hands of three Austrian legal experts. We choose one member of the trio, and Austria chooses the second. The two, together, choose the third,” he explained. “Everyone agrees that the decision is final and binding.”

  “What if they rule against us?” I asked. “Will there be any recourse?”

  Randy shook his head.

  “But I have a feeling that we can trust them to do the right thing this time,” he said.

  “Trust the Austrians?”

  “If we don’t do it this way, they’re going to tie the lawsuit up in the courts for a very long time,” Randy said. “That’s what I would do, if I were them. I think this is our best shot.”

  I was eighty-seven. My health was failing. My friend Czernin was dying. I looked at my three children, and each one nodded yes. I looked at my aunt’s face, and she urged me on.

  “Yes,” I said. “Let’s trust the Austrians to do what is right.”

  And they did. They did what was right, and ruled in my favor.

  MARIA

  2006

  When you’re an old woman, memories and days stand up beside one another like rows of lights along the Santa Monica Freeway. They come while you sleep in your La-Z-Boy chair, and appear as clear as the carrot cake muffins lined on the baking rack in the kitchen.

  They rain like notes from a piano, and fall among the pine trees in the yard. Bidden or unbidden, welcome or unwelcome, they come.

  When Randy and I stepped off the airplane in Austria, I knew right away that the city had become my Vienna once more. It was spring. The lost days of my childhood, when Vienna had been most enchanting, seemed to be just above the treetops and in the scent of flowers blooming in the Volksgarten.

  My cousin Eva was waiting just as she’d been before, and my friends from the symposium met us at the Belvedere with flowers and applause. When they parted, I saw Hubertus Czernin had come in his wheelchair. He smiled when I touched his hand, but he was too weak to speak.

  “This is all thanks to you,” I told him. “If you hadn’t written that first story and Eva hadn’t read it, none of this would have happened.”

  I was prepared to say more. My dear Hubertus, I wanted to tell him, if you hadn’t been such a brave and talented man, I would have died without saving the painting. My aunt would have been a face on teacups and kitchen towels, and my uncle would have been forever calling to me from another life.

  But before I could say any of that, Walter Frodl, who’d once told me he’d never let Adele leave his museum, stepped between us and cleared his throat.

  “We have limited time for our meeting this afternoon, Frau Altmann. I’m sure you can understand,” Frodl said. “The museum’s counsel, Fräulein Mueller, will help you with the transfer.”

  Fräulein Mueller was a very pretty young woman. She was wearing a yellow blouse that matched my aunt’s portrait.

  “It’s an honor and a pleasure to meet you.” She shook my hand and then Randy’s. “My name is Brigitte Mueller, and I think I have something that belongs to you, Frau Altmann.”

  She motioned for one of the guards, who stepped forward with a gold and white porcelain platter.

  “I believe this was in your uncle’s house,” the young woman said. “Where my grandmother Brigitte was a cook.”

  I was overcome with the memory of that morning in Vienna, when I’d gone for my uncle and found he was gone. The cook’s face had been as blank as a dinner roll.

  “I remember your grandmother.” I nodded slowly.

  “I don’t think you understand. The platter belongs to you,” the young woman said. “My grandmother must have taken it from the house. I’d like to return it to you.”

  “I understand.” I took a small step back. “But I want you to keep the platter, Fräulein Mueller. I’m giving it to you, rightfully. As a gift. Please accept my deepest gratitude.”

  Vienna of my youth had been a shining, vital city of marble archways and inviting streets. Everywhere I’d turned, there’d been music and people who loved me—my mother with her arms open wide, my father with his cello beneath his chin, my uncle Ferdinand saying, “Maria Viktoria, the little girl who makes my heart sing.”

  When I ran from Vienna, it was a city hung with swastikas and streaked with blood. The lions that stood at the entrance to the great museums had been mute and impotent, and in the end they’d roared like the bloody jaws of my enemy. There was still anger in Austria, and I knew that. But for one young woman to do the right thing meant there was goodness in Austria, too, as I’d always hoped there was, and always believed in my heart I would find.

  Accompanied by two guards and three men from the freight company, Randy and I followed Brigitte Mueller along a gleaming hallway, through a sliding panel in a rear gallery, and up a long staircase to a gallery with no windows, where Adele was waiting.

  In the small room, she glowed. Her jewelry seemed priceless, her face was beautiful. The necklace that Landau had stolen from me was around her neck. It was so true to life, I could remember its weight on my wedding night.

  I hadn’t wept when they’d taken Fritz, I hadn’t wept in Berlin, I hadn’t wept when I fled home or when I left Liverpool, or when they called me names in the Austrian press. But I wept then.

  Randy nodded to the men from the American freight company, and they wrapped the portrait. They began with white linen, then shrouded her in black, then slid her into a wooden crate and onto a dolly. Then Randy, Adele, and I left the museum together.

  Outside, the city was filled with posters printed Ciao, Adele. Ciao means good-bye, but it also means hello. Hello, Adele.

  “What will you do with the painting?” a reporter asked as we left the museum. He had round glasses and kind eyes. He reminded me of Hubertus.

  My aunt had been a great patron of the arts. She’d believed that art is one of the greatest things that a culture can build and create. In her final wishes, she’d said very specifically that she wanted her portrait to be in a museum.

  “She’ll be in an American museum, where everyone can know the truth about her life and the things that were important to her,” I said.

  “Then you will sell her?” he asked.

  I was grateful for the truth when it came to me so clearly. I saw my aunt standing beside me in front of the tiger’s cage, and knew exactly what she’d wanted of me, then and now.

  “Yes, I will sell the painting,” I said. “Because I never wanted to possess Adele. I wanted to set her free.”

  I was almost to the car when Fräulein Mueller caught up with me, breathless from running.

  “Please take this, Frau Altmann,” she said. “I almost forgot about it. This book belonged to your aunt, too.”

  She handed me an old book with a brown leather cover that felt smooth and cool in my hands. I tucked it into my tote bag almost without thinking.

  “Come on, Maria, or we’ll miss our plane,” Randy said.

  I got into the taxi, and we pulled
away from the Belvedere. The pretty young curator faded from sight, and the journalists disappeared, too. Randy was quiet, the windows were rolled up, the excitement was over. Our task was done. The ghosts that had called and whispered when I’d arrived were quiet as if they, too, were stunned.

  Somewhere farther along the road, I looked down into my lap. The book was Emma, by Jane Austen. I ran my hands across the cover, and opened to the first page. My aunt’s bookplate was engraved there, the black ink fading, the letters the same style as the ABB on the letter opener that I’d kept with me for more than sixty years.

  I flipped the pages, and the smell of the old ink and paper brought back the long, quiet afternoons we’d spent in the countryside reading on the porch and drinking lemonade. I remembered running barefoot across the lawn at Jungfer Brezan, jumping into my uncle’s arms, dancing while my father played a polka on his cello, and being fitted for my first silk dress with my mother by my side.

  I remembered kissing Fritz, and tasting cinnamon stars.

  I could almost feel them in the car with me, as if everything that was going to happen had already happened and my aunt was urging me to be sure that none of it, and none of them, would ever be forgotten.

  I was lost in that world when a sepia postcard fell from the book and landed in my lap.

  On the front was a brown photograph of an old café beside a fountain, men in white suits and women in long, corseted dresses. On the back, in a strong bold hand, was a scrawled message—

  Will you come?

  —GK

  The auction hammer comes down with three resounding thuds, and Adele Bloch-Bauer I is sold for $135 million to American collector Ronald Lauder.

  In 2006, the portrait is installed at the top of a sweeping white staircase on the second floor in the Neue Galerie in New York City. It hangs in a sun-filled room along with Kokoschka’s cluttered landscapes and Schiele’s gaunt self-portraits, surrounded by silver tea sets and carved furniture that once decorated Vienna’s finest homes.

  George Minne’s graceful white statues stand beside Adele’s portrait, just as they did at 18 Elisabethstrasse. A brass clock styled with two hearts at the ends of the sweeping arms mark the hour, and downstairs in the Café Sabarsky there is dark coffee, strudel, and sacher torte with cream. Little girls lunch with their grandparents, and lovers slide into velvet seats. Old women watch young waiters in white shirts and black ties, and remember dancing in ballrooms on the arms of their husbands and sons.

  Gustav Klimt’s spirit enlivens every room, and Adele’s eyes seem to follow each of her visitors. When the lights are out and the moon shines through the windows, the golden symbols and red squares on her portrait dance with life, and the voices of yesterday seem to whisper about the world that they made modern, and the world that was almost lost.

  Vienna was ours, they say, and we loved it almost as fiercely as we loved one another. We found truth in art there, and we bequeath it to you. Do not waste it. Remember.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A modest oil portrait of my Hungarian-born great-grandmother hung for years over the couch in her old house in Seaford, Long Island. In it she was fair-haired and blue-eyed, a beautiful young woman in a corseted dark blue jacket.

  I was ten years old when I learned that she had been raised Jewish and not Roman Catholic as my sisters and I, and our parents and grandparents, had been raised. Regina Solitar followed her brothers from Budapest to America in the late nineteenth century, and fell in love with an Italian barber. When she married him in secret, her family disowned her. Her Judaism, along with the rest of her past, was expunged and replaced by a life of raising Italian-American children, making a living as a seamstress, and, finally, quilting for her family.

  When my great-grandmother passed away, the house was sold and her portrait vanished. But I held on to a secret ambition to write a story that would honor her heritage and independent spirit. Adele Bloch-Bauer and Maria Altmann gave me the opportunity to write about two strong-willed women united by art and family who, like my great-grandmother, lived separated from their faith and yet bound to it in ways both beautiful and terrifying.

  To write a novel about real people is no small challenge. Maria’s and Adele’s lives and spirits proved worthy of the burden my fictional scrutiny put upon them. Many books, court records, news accounts, and films informed the story as I reconstructed real events and created internal lives for my characters. This includes an interview with E. Randolph Schoenberg and extensive records that he made available online for a time, as well as Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Sophie Lillie and Georg Gaugusch, The Lady in Gold by Anne-Marie O’Connor, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna by Carl E. Schorske, The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, and A Nervous Splendor by Frederic Morton. I also highly recommend the documentary films The Rape of Europa and Maria’s Story.

  The novel is fiction based on fact, with conversations imagined but dates, movements, allegiances, and betrayals all sourced in truth. Two liberties I feel obligated to report concern Maria. While she did tell the journalist Anne-Marie O’Connor that her sister was sexually intimate with a Nazi in order to save her family, there is no stated record of Maria having relations with a Nazi officer. Second, while there are many allusions to Fritz Altmann’s wandering eye, details of infidelities are imagined.

  Through the efforts of scholars, advocates, provenance researchers, and organizations—from Ronald Lauder, Sophie Lillie, and Hubertus Czernin, to the Commission for Art Recovery, the World Jewish Restitution Organization, the Institute for Art Research, and others too numerous to mention—thousands of stolen pieces of art have been restituted to their rightful owners. However, many thousands of works stolen by the Nazis remain lost or unclaimed. This fact compelled me to write this story through some of the dark and long days of its creation. Mostly it was a joy to discover and construct this novel, but the enormity of what was done to the Jews in the days immediately following the Anschluss in Vienna in 1938 cannot be overstated. My great-grandmother’s portrait is but a tiny start in a galaxy of lost art, and this story is one victory in a universe of torches still waiting to be claimed and passed on.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m so lucky to have a friend, researcher, and colleague as smart, talented, and industrious as Dr. Laura Morowitz. An expert on early twentieth-century European art, she introduced me to Gustav Klimt’s work, and her scholarship and insights were indispensable to the foundation of this book. Laura and I traveled together three times to Vienna, where we studied Klimt’s art up close, traced the footsteps of Adele and Maria’s lives, and had a fabulous time in Café Central imagining spirited conversations between Adele, Berta, and their friends. Laura’s shared knowledge about the aesthetics and politics of fin de siècle Vienna and the Nazis’ rise can be found throughout the novel. I’m thrilled that her book in progress, on art exhibits in Nazi Vienna in relation to collective memory, grew out of our time together. I’m very proud that this woman is my intellectual partner and fierce friend.

  I am grateful to my aunt, Rosemary Diaz, and to my father, Larry Lico, for telling me what they could about my great-grandmother and her life before and after she came to America. I miss my mother, and thank her for encouraging my writing from a very young age. For every family member who cheered me on during the writing of this novel, thank you. You all know I’ve always felt partly Jewish in my heart and this is why; this is how. That includes Rosanne and Jimmy Joos and Linda and Donna Lico, as well as my mother-in-law, Rosemarie (Roro) Helm, who is my role model in life, my dear sisters-in-laws Anna Albanese, Paula Brotman, Andrea Little, and Mary Albanese, as well as my brothers-in-law and extended Lico, Albanese, Lawrence, and Rovito peeps—you know who you are. Love to you all.

  Heather Schroder, agent extraordinaire, thank you for recognizing what this could be and for making it happen. Sarah Cantin, editor of my dreams, you made the book golden in all ways. Leslie Wells, you helped bring Adele to life with invaluable and deft insight. Laura Morowitz,
your friendship and scholarship mean the world to me, and to this book. Albert Tang and Donna Cheng, bravo, bravo for this brilliant cover. To Judith Curr, Peter Borland, and Suzanne Donahue; Ariele Fredman in publicity; Hillary Tisman in marketing; the awesome sales team including Wendy Sheanin, Michael Selleck, Janice Fryer, and Paula Amendolara; Kyoko Watanabe for a great interior design; Kimberly Goldstein and Mark LaFlaur for keeping the train running on time; and Haley Weaver for endless good cheer—thank you to the whole fabulous Atria team.

  The novelist Pamela Redmond Satran and journalist Toni Martin went above and beyond to help me imagine this novel. E. R. Frank (aka Emily Rosenblum), Judith Lindbergh, and Dr. Ariella Budick read early drafts and shared keen insights. Christina Baker Kline, talented and generous, came through when I needed her most. Lisa Amoroso, gifted art director and lifelong friend—thanks for all of it, and for everything. Thanks to Dan Salzstein at the New York Times for running my travel pieces about Austria, and to the charming Erika Messner, owner of the Villa Paulick, for sitting with me on her veranda overlooking Lake Attersee and recalling days of yesteryear. Thanks to Adam Goss for the excellent Heuriger vineyard tours in the Wachau Valley. Klaus Pokorny and Dr. Robert Holzbauer at the Leopold in Vienna gave me their time and more than they know. Thanks to Sandra Tretter, curator at the Gustav Klimt Center, and to my guide Katrin Mekiska in Seewalchen. Marina Budhos, I’m sorry I never met your mother-in-law but am grateful for our shared affinity for the Viennese avant-garde. To my library writing partners Benilde Little and Anastasia Rubis, I love you and I love our Tower—I can’t wait for your books to come out. Ditto journalists Leslie Brody and MaryJo Moran: our group is the best. Richard Satran, David Goldstein, and Peter Vigeland were helpful in very important ways, as were Martha Kolko and Nanci Naegeli—hugs and kisses, and thanks for the walks and talks. Jack Albanese and the other young people who tore through Vienna with us in June 2012, I’ll never forget those days and nights.