The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

  “This was Asher Glass,” Richard said. “Big activist, a dynamo. The most beautiful voice, a big loud lawyer voice. The shoulders on him! Built like a brick shithouse, is what we used to say. I don’t think you can translate that into French. I have no idea who this one is. Cute, though. This one’s Hiram something, who owned a record store on Belmont. Belmont would be, like, I don’t know. What’s the equivalent?”

  Serge laughed. “All of Paris?”

  “No, dear, like some street in Le Marais. We weren’t that provincial. This was Dustin Gianopoulos. Teddy Naples. A pocket twink, as you can see. Never stopped moving. This one, I don’t remember either. He looks like a manatee.”

  “I don’t know this word,” Serge said.

  “A lumpy walrus,” Fiona offered, without looking at the picture.

  “This was Terrence, Nico’s boyfriend. Yale Tishman and Charlie Keene. That’s a saga there. Look how sweet they are. This one’s Rafael Peña. Remember him?” This was directed at Fiona, obviously, and she roused herself to nod.

  She said, ostensibly to Serge but really to Richard, in a harsh voice she didn’t expect, “They’re all dead.”

  “That’s not true!” Richard said. “Not all of them. Maybe half. Exaggeration never did any good.”

  “This is the American habit,” Serge said to Richard. “You exaggerate.”

  “Don’t listen to her. They’re not all dead.”

  Fiona said, “I need a sharp knife.” Her poor timing didn’t register until both men started laughing, and she realized she hadn’t said anything yet about the converter, the clamshell packaging. She explained, and Serge left the room to return with a massive pair of shears. He made quick work of the plastic, and soon her phone was charging happily.

  Richard said, “Two things I haven’t told you. One’s just a minor nuisance, and one is nothing at all.”

  “Not nothing at all,” Serge said. “A very big deal.”

  “But it shouldn’t affect you. I didn’t mention, when you wrote, that the next few weeks are a bit of a circus for me. I have a show going up.”

  “At the Centre Pompidou,” Serge added. “A big fucking deal.”

  “But it’s all done, all my work, until, you know, the day before. I have a number of interviews, though, and some of them will be kind enough to meet me here. So just ignore, ignore, ignore.”

  “But you come to the vernissage! If you’re still here,” Serge said.

  “The preview,” Richard explained. “For the press and the VIPs. They wanted to do two nights, but I told them I’m old.”

  “The sixteenth,” Serge said. More than a week from now. Fiona hadn’t thought that far ahead. “And a big party in two nights!”

  “I’ll—sure,” she said, in what she hoped was a vague way.

  “The other thing is the nuisance. They’re shooting some kind of film on this street. An American one, romantic comedy I believe. Or at least they promised no explosions, no car chases. It’s this block and the next two down. I don’t even know when they start, but it’s soon. I’m afraid you’ve walked into a zoo.”

  “It could be interesting,” Fiona said. She was thinking about how Claire used to want to be a director, the way she’d recite entire scenes of Annie Hall or Clue from memory. Maybe things had changed, but the old Claire would have wanted to scope out the filming, to stand behind the barricades and watch the action.

  Serge said, “This connects to the third thing.”

  “There’s a third thing?”

  “Oh, that’s a surprise, shush! Trust me,” Richard said, although Fiona didn’t think her skepticism had manifested on her face, “it’s a good one. A very good surprise. Listen, honey, I’m glad you’re here. I know the circumstances aren’t ideal, but it’s damn good to see you.”

  “It’s good to see you too.” Really she’d never seen this version of Richard before, this markedly old version. Everyone seemed to hit old at a different point, but sometime since she’d seen him last, Richard had hit it.

  It was 9:07. She sat on the floor next to where the phone was still plugged in and dialed the PI’s number. A woman picked up, speaking rapid-fire French, and Fiona panicked. “Hello?” she said, and the woman repeated herself, even faster. Fiona handed Serge the phone, a hot potato. “Allô?” Serge said, and explained that he was calling on behalf of Fiona Marcus (“Blanchard,” she corrected) and that she was here now and ready to meet. At least this was what Fiona assumed he was saying. “Bien,” he said, and then covered the mouthpiece and whispered, “What time?” Fiona shrugged helplessly, and Serge said things she didn’t understand and hung up. “Half an hour, Café Bonaparte.”

  “Oh.” This was good news, great news, but Fiona didn’t feel prepared, hadn’t changed or looked in a mirror, hadn’t expected to meet the guy till the afternoon, had no idea where this café was.

  “No worries. I take you on my motorbike.”

  1985

  Cecily and her gold Mazda were already outside the gallery when Yale arrived out of breath. It was drizzling, and he hadn’t managed an umbrella.

  She said, “I brought coffee.”

  So he sat there, wet, in the passenger seat, holding the hot McDonald’s cup, trying to warm himself palms-first as she drove north.

  “The first thing you need to know,” Cecily said, “is that Nora’s granddaughter wants to be involved, as well as her lawyer. But there are no financial planners, which is either a gift from above or a very bad sign.”

  Yale wondered how Fiona fit into it all. Presumably, the granddaughter was her cousin. No, her second cousin. Was that right?

  “I’ve got music in the console.”

  Yale found some classical tapes and mix tapes and both volumes of Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits, the first of which he opted for. It started in the middle of “She’s Always a Woman.”

  He said, “So this could all be for nothing.”

  “Well. It could always all be for nothing. There are people we spend years on, we spend a lot of money on, frankly, and in the end they give everything to some cat-spaying charity.”

  “Okay, then I’ll say—the artists she mentioned, in that letter? They’re just very unlikely. Especially Modigliani. He’s kind of a red flag artist. Everyone thinks they have a Modigliani, and no one does.”

  “Hmm.” She took a hand off the steering wheel to twist her earring.

  “But good forgeries cost a lot of money. Forgers go after people with cash to throw away.” He didn’t want Cecily stewing for the whole trip. And, he realized, he didn’t want her to turn the car around. The make-up sex with Charlie had been good, if not worth the fighting, but he didn’t want to be home right now. He wanted to come home tomorrow afternoon, exhausted, with stories, and he wanted Charlie to be exhausted too, and he wanted Charlie to say, “Let’s get takeout,” and then Yale would say, “You read my mind,” and they’d sit on the couch eating Chinese with disposable chopsticks and watching prime time. If he came home tonight, that wouldn’t happen.

  They crossed the Wisconsin border, and they passed the Mars Cheese Castle and then the brown sign for the wooded Bong Recreation Area. Yale said, “I bet frat boys steal that sign constantly.”

  “What do you mean?” She’d had enough time to read it; she was looking straight at it.

  “I mean, to hang in the basement. They steal stop signs. I’d think they’d want a bong sign.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Oh. It’s just a funny word.”

  “Hmm.”

  They bought Yoplaits and Pringles at a gas station, and Yale took over driving. He hadn’t driven much since he’d moved to the city, but he’d learned in high school, had even spent two summers delivering pizza in his father’s car—and once he figured out the clutch, everything was muscle memory. Cecily opened a folder across her lap and said, “What we’re hoping f
or is a flat-out bequest. She hasn’t given to the annual fund since 1970, and those were small gifts. Which, optimistically, might just mean she’s a bit of a miser. Sometimes those wind up being the largest bequests, for obvious reasons. If she’s not on top of her finances, we might aim for a percentage rather than a cash amount. People like that tend to underestimate how much they have. She thinks she has five million, leaves us one million, when actually she has seven point five, and twenty percent is a lot more.”

  “But she was only—” Yale stopped, remembered to ask a question. “Why do you suppose the letter was only about the artwork?”

  “It might just be what’s on her mind. Maybe she’s promised the money to her family, but doesn’t want to disperse the collection.”

  She seemed to see this as only a minor inconvenience. Cecily must have been well practiced at cutting down the heirs’ chunk of an estate. It hit him that perhaps Fiona was in this old woman’s will. Hadn’t Fiona said that Nora had especially loved Nico? And wouldn’t it follow that she was fond of Fiona too?

  Yale learned, as they drove, that Cecily had an eleven-year-old son and an ex-husband, a small apartment on Davis Street, and a degree from Skidmore. She didn’t ask a single thing about him in return.

  When they reached Sturgeon Bay, at the bottom of the Door County spike, Cecily unfolded a giant Wisconsin map and pointed with a clear-polished nail to the two routes that climbed either side of the peninsula. “It looks like they meet again in Sister Bay, which is where we’re headed anyway.”

  “What have they got up here?” Yale said. “What’s the big attraction?”

  “Lighthouses, I think. Honeymooners.”

  “It is beautiful.”

  She snapped her head up and looked across Yale, out his window, as if she’d just realized where she was. “Yes. Very.”

  “So, you’ll run the show?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  Yale did mind, in principle. The letter was intended for him. But this was an issue of rank. And he’d wind up glad it wasn’t all about the art if the art proved forged.

  He had chosen the western route, and Cecily directed him to County Road ZZ. “I wonder if they say Double Z,” she said. “Or just Z.”

  “Or Zee-Zee,” Yale said. “Like ZZ Top.”

  Cecily actually laughed, a small miracle. But then, as she watched out her window, he saw her shoulders tense, her face fall. These were not mansions. They’d driven past some large estates on the way, but now they passed modest farmhouses, small places set in big fields. Stunning, in fact, but not millionaire land.

  They pulled up in front of a white house with a screened porch out front and a single gabled window upstairs. Hanging baskets of flowers, neat cement steps to the porch door. Two old Volkswagens sat outside a freestanding one-car garage in disrepair.

  Cecily checked her hair in the rearview. She said, “We’re screwed.”

  “Maybe she’s senile,” Yale said. “Could she be delusional?”

  Before they reached the door, a young woman came out on the steps. She waved, not happily.

  Cecily and the woman shook hands. This was Debra, the granddaughter, and she apologized that, although Nora was dressed and ready, the lawyer wasn’t here yet. She bore no resemblance to Fiona or Nico. Black hair, dark circles under her eyes, skin that was somehow both tanned and pasty. Maybe it was makeup, the wrong shade of powder.

  They followed her through the screened porch and into a living room that reminded Yale of the house where he took piano lessons as a kid. Like his piano teacher, Nora had covered every inch of shelf and windowsill with carefully chosen objets—glass figurines and seashells and plants and framed photographs. The books looked read, and a stuffed record case abutted the fireplace. The couch back was frayed. This might have been the home of a college professor or a retired therapist, someone of relative means who didn’t put stock in pretentious furnishings. But it was not, no, the home of a major art collector.

  Nora—it had to be her, though while the dossier said she was ninety, this woman’s face looked no older than seventy-five—appeared in the opposite doorway, aided by a walker. She took a long while to start speaking, her lips moving silently before the sound came out. “I’m so glad you could make it up.” Her voice, surprisingly, was assured, quick, and as she kept talking Yale realized it wasn’t her mind or her mouth that had tripped her up, but something else. “Now Debra’s going to bring us some tea,” she said, “and Stanley, that’s my lawyer, Stanley will be here in a minute. And we can get acquainted!” She lowered herself, with Debra’s help, into a chair that was still brown at the creases but putty-colored where the sun hit. She stared intensely at Yale, and only Yale, the entire time, and he began to wonder if he was why she’d paused in the door, why she’d hesitated. Perhaps Fiona had filled her in, explained how Yale fit into Nico’s world. Yale was suddenly conscious of his shoes, worried she’d recognize them.

  Yale and Cecily sat on a low blue couch whose gravity pulled them both toward the middle. Yale had to fight sliding in that direction and colliding with Cecily, who had anchored herself by holding onto the couch arm. She’d been silent since they walked in, and he could feel her seething beside him.

  Debra said, “I’m happy to get the tea, but would you refrain from discussing things while I’m gone?”

  Yale assured her, and Nora, behind her granddaughter’s back, mugged—a child-behind-the-substitute-teacher roll of the eyes.

  Nora wore a pink tracksuit, velour, and moccasins with ripping seams. Yale wondered if it was her haircut that made her look younger than her age. Instead of short curls, the classic old lady cut, her white hair fell in a straight, smooth bob. She was built like Fiona, small and slender. There were older people you couldn’t imagine young, and there were those whose faces still held on to what they’d looked like at twenty-five. Nora was of another breed, the ones who had apparently reverted to their own childhood faces. Yale looked at Nora and saw the five-year-old she’d been, impish and precocious and blue-eyed. Maybe it had something to do with her smile, too, the way she touched all her fingers to her cheeks.

  Cecily was just sitting there, so Yale filled the silence. “You’re Fiona’s great-aunt,” he said.

  Nora beamed. “Don’t you just love her? My brother Hugh, that was her grandfather. Hers and Nico’s,” she said. “Nico and I were the artists in the family. Everyone else is so literal-minded, every one of them. Well, we’re still waiting on Fiona. We’ll see about her. Don’t you worry a bit? But Nico was a true artist.”

  Yale said, “We were close friends.” He didn’t want to get emotional now. What would Cecily think if he broke down here on the couch? This old woman didn’t look much like Nico, but she was beautiful, and Nico had been beautiful, and wasn’t that enough?

  Nora rescued him. “Tell me about the gallery.” She coughed into the balled-up Kleenex she’d held, this whole time, in her hand.

  Yale turned to Cecily, who shrugged. And though Yale had no serious illusions left about the woman’s art collection—the only framed things in the room were snapshots and studio family portraits—he began talking. “We started five years ago. Right now we only do rotating exhibitions, both our own and from peer institutions, but we’re starting to build a permanent collection. That’s my job.”

  “Oh!” Nora looked agitated, impatient. She shook her head quickly. “I hadn’t realized you were a Kunsthalle.”

  Yale was surprised by the word, and Cecily looked confused, irritated. “It just means a rotating gallery,” he said to Cecily, but perhaps it was the wrong thing to do, making her seem uninformed. To Nora he said, “But we’re building a permanent collection. We have the power of a world-class university behind us, plus the donor potential of a successful alumni base and one of the world’s major art cities.” He was talking like a fundraising robot, not like someone who’d slow danced with this
woman’s grandnephew last New Year’s Eve, someone who’d stood over Nico’s hospital bed and said that no matter what happened, he and Charlie would take care of Fiona. Nora blinked, expecting more. He said, “We’re already strong in prints and drawings. I understand some of your works are sketches.”

  He stopped, because here was Debra with a tray and a real old-fashioned tea service: thin, chipped cups with little flowers, a steaming teapot.

  Nora looked at Cecily and said, “And you’re his assistant?”

  Yale was so offended for Cecily that he almost answered the question himself—but that would only make things worse. So he poured everyone tea while Cecily explained her role and said, “I thought I could offer perspective on the broader picture of planned giving.”

  Nora said, “Debra, would you be a dear and stand out front to flag down Stanley? He always drives too far and has to turn around.”

  Debra threw a coat over her baggy sweater. She was almost chic, in a careless way, and too young to look as tired as she did. She was probably Yale’s age, early thirties, but with all the charm of a sullen adolescent.

  Once Debra was out the door, Nora leaned in. “My granddaughter doesn’t like this, I have to tell you. She has the notion that if we sold the art instead, she’d never have to work. I don’t know when on earth she got so spoiled. Now, my son—her father—he has a new wife, younger than Debra, and they already have two little children, just as spoiled as anything. I hate to say my son is the problem, but he’s the common factor, isn’t he?” There was a wheeze to her voice, as if she were squeezing her words down a narrow hallway.