The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

  Yale asked why he’d be inclined to leave the church, but Roman only shrugged. “I have trouble with some stuff,” he said, and Yale decided he shouldn’t press further. He remembered the feeling of suspecting someone was on to you when you weren’t even able to admit things to yourself, and he didn’t want to inflict that on Roman. There had been one old-lady cashier at the grocer’s who, when Yale was a teenager, would look at him like he was the saddest thing in the world. He’d question his purchases—would gum make him seem gay?—and after a while, he made excuses to drive to the store six miles south instead. And there was Mr. Irving, his guidance counselor, who cautiously, forehead scrunched, asked Yale if he planned to look for a college with “a cosmopolitan feel.” The assessment of those two hit him harder than the judgment of the peers who simply called him a faggot, who stuck Kotex to his locker. Because that happened to other kids too. Anyone could have their underwear thrown into the pool, anyone might have to use, night after night, a chemistry textbook that had once been drenched in piss. But only real fags got looked at with pity by adults. And so although Roman was hardly a teenager—he was only a few years younger than Yale, really—Yale dropped the subject.

  “Our biggest priority,” he said when they stopped for gas in Fish Creek, “besides any connection to full paintings, is dates. Can we help her figure out the year, at least, for the undated works. I know what she wants is to tell us stories, but Bill’s gonna be peeved if we come back without a timeline.” Plenty of the pieces were signed, but few were dated. The Modiglianis, frustratingly, were not.

  “I do have to be back by Friday,” Roman said.

  But it was only Monday, and although Yale wanted to stay in Wisconsin forever, away from Chicago, away from Charlie, he said, “I only think it’ll take two days. Big weekend plans?”

  “She’s really dying?” Roman squeegeed the windshield while Yale worked the pump. Roman wore a black coat and black jeans—Yale had never seen him in anything but black—and out of the context of the city, he looked odd, depressed.

  “Congestive heart failure is apparently a waiting game. We have to assume each visit could be our last. So, big picture first. Colorful details later.”

  Back in the car, Roman said, “I want to know how you made her trust you that fast.”

  Yale considered feigning ignorance, but instead he said, “I think I remind her of her grandnephew. We were good friends. He died in October.”

  “Oh.”

  “He had AIDS.”

  Roman looked out his own window. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  They had dinner in Egg Harbor and checked in at the bed and breakfast. Nora had told them the morning was her “best time,” and so—without the influence of Bill Lindsey and his endless bottles of wine—they settled in early. Through his bathroom wall, Yale could hear Roman brushing his teeth, spitting out water. The sinks must have backed right up to each other. He could say “good night” right through the wall, but why make things strange?

  They found Nora sitting in front of a meager fire. She was holding a plastic spray bottle, no wheelchair in sight. “Let’s get you some coffee,” she said, which sent Debra clomping to the kitchen like an underpaid waitress.

  “Roman,” Nora said, pronouncing it “Ro-mahn,” as if he were Spanish, “would you be a dear and help with this?” She meant the spray bottle. “Debra doesn’t think it will help. It’s peppermint water, for the mice.” Yale and Roman both scanned the room. Yale didn’t see any rodents. “It keeps them away. Could you spray along the floorboards? The windowsills too.”

  “I—sure,” Roman said, and left his notebook and pen on the couch next to Yale.

  Yale had wanted to ease into things slowly, logically; he’d thought of several ways to frame the conversation, none of which had to do with mint-bombing rodents. He searched his folder for the list of the works, but Nora was already talking.

  “I’ve been in quite a state,” she said, and then stopped and looked at Yale as if he should know exactly why. “Those papers we signed. I should have asked Stanley to explain more.”

  “Oh! Is there—”

  “Everything we said, about making sure the work was all displayed equally, it wasn’t in there.”

  Roman stood by the fireplace twisting the nozzle of the spray bottle, trying to get the mist right. Yale could hear, in the kitchen, the coffee percolating, Debra banging around.

  “Right. Right. That’s okay. Occasionally someone might do a tailored gift agreement, something with specifics, but they’re a lot of trouble. I can assure you I haven’t forgotten your wishes.”

  “Listen,” she said, “I’m no fool. I know Ranko’s work isn’t something you’d normally feature. But it’s not bad.”

  “I love the two paintings!” Roman said. He was spraying beside the record shelf. “The perspective is way off, right? Sort of tentative and haphazard at the same time. But in a good way, like he was on the verge of figuring something out.” Roman had never said this before, and Yale wondered if he was lying or if he’d just kept quiet about it around the gallery, knowing Bill’s opinion.

  “I like your intern,” Nora said. “Your boss, I’m not so crazy about.”

  “I’m your advocate in all this,” Yale said, and he was gearing up to say more, but Nora spoke again.

  “I’m going to tell you about Ranko. I know you have your own agenda, but you can find out about Soutine at the library. The art historians can tell you more than I can about most of those pieces. You’re not going to find much of anything about Ranko, though, and I need to do it while I have the chance.” And then, as an afterthought, “Sergey Mukhankin too.”

  Yale said, “We can go through the works chronologically, and when we get to Ranko’s you could give us those details. I have some catalogs in the car that—”

  “No.” She shook her head like an obstreperous little girl. One who happened to be in charge. “I’m going to tell you the most important stories first, and then the next, and so on. And the first is about the time before the war, when Ranko was locked away for the Prix de Rome.”

  “Locked away?”

  “Don’t move any furniture,” she said to Roman, “but if you aim it under the couch that should do.”

  Yale lifted his feet while Roman did so.

  “He was a Serb,” she said. “But born in Paris, raised there.” Roman was supposed to be the one taking notes, but since he was busy, Yale grabbed the notebook. The air smelled like peppermint now, pleasantly antiseptic.

  “We were at different schools. Now, my father was French,” she said, “and when I decided to study art he took it seriously, and he thought there was no point to studying in Philadelphia.” She spoke quickly but paused between sentences for breath—a swimmer coming up for air. “The big school in Paris, as I’m sure you know, was the École des Beaux Arts, but they didn’t admit women, and even if they had, they were fusty. I wrote to two schools, and one was the Académie Colarossi. And”—she laughed—“I’ll tell you what impressed me most: They were going to let me draw from nude male models. This was the excuse for keeping women out of most schools, you know. We can’t have women here, there are nude men! So it was set for me to go to Colarossi”—she spelled it for Yale, who’d seen the name before but was still two sentences behind—“and my father took me over. It was 1912, and I was seventeen.”

  Roman crouched to spray the threshold to the dining room, the back of his black T-shirt riding up.

  “I was meant to stay with my father’s aunt, Tante Alice. She was senile and never left her bed. The idea was her nurse would keep me in line, but the poor nurse had no idea how. She’d make me toast in the morning, and that was the extent of her supervision. That fall there was an anatomy class at Colarossi that was open to the public. You know, the interior workings of the knee and so on. Beaux-Arts had similar courses, but this was a special deal, someone was vis
iting to teach it, so a few of those students came.”

  Roman was back, like a relay runner, to grab the pen. Yale returned to his own list, the hopeful empty spaces for dates beside each piece, but he found he had nothing to add to the timeline but 1912—arrival in Paris.

  “And next to me was a man with dark, curly hair—quite like yours, Yale, although his face was longer—and as he sat there, he made himself a crown of paper clips. Linked them in a circle and put it on his head. He sat there like it wasn’t the least bit unusual, the sun glinting off him. I wanted to paint him, that was my first thought, but the next instant I was smitten. I’d never understood it before, how artists fall for their muses. I thought it was just a bunch of men who couldn’t keep it in their pants. But there was something about the need to paint him and the need to possess him—they were the same impulse. I don’t know if that makes sense, but there it was.”

  Yale tried to say something, but didn’t know how to begin. It had to do with a walk he once took with Nico and Richard around the Lincoln Park lagoon, the two of them sharing Richard’s Leica. It struck Yale that day how they both had a way of interacting with the world that was simultaneously selfish and generous—grabbing at beauty and reflecting beauty back. The benches and fire hydrants and manhole covers Nico and Richard stopped to photograph were made more beautiful by their noticing. They were left more beautiful, once they walked away. By the end of the day, Yale found himself seeing things in frames, saw the way the light hit fence posts, wanted to lap up the ripples of sun on a record store window.

  He said, “I get it, I do.”

  Roman, meanwhile, was sweating, his face shiny. Yale wondered if it was this talk of love that made him nervous, or if he was getting sick. The way he shifted on the couch made Yale suspect the former. Well, the last thing Yale himself needed right now was a love story.

  “Ranko was hosting a picnic the next day and he invited me along. And that was it, I was lost. He smelled right, like a dark closet. So much of sex is in the nose. I do believe that. And he was in love with me too.” She stopped, held a finger up, appeared to concentrate on breathing. Yale was tempted to ask a question, just to fill the silence, but here was Debra, with big white mugs of coffee for both Yale and Roman. No sugar, no cream: just coffee so thin you could see the cup bottom through it. Roman took the mug awkwardly, rested it straight on the coffee table. Debra leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, a statue of bored impatience.

  “Is this still about Ranko?”

  Yale nodded. Roman said, “We’re at the paper clips.”

  “He’s the entire reason she gave you the art. You know that, right?”

  “I don’t deny it,” Nora said before Yale had to decide how to respond.

  Roman asked what she meant, but Debra laughed loudly. “Seventy years is just a really long time to be obsessed with someone,” she said. “Don’t you think? Like, I’m sure he was a great guy, but he’s been dead forever, and she’s still choosing him over her family.”

  Roman said, “I don’t get why that means she had to give the Brigg—”

  “Debra,” Yale said. And then he found he had no idea what to say next. He’d just been desperate to break the tension, to change the subject. “Is there any sugar?”

  And when she stormed back to the kitchen, Yale got up to follow, signaled Roman to keep writing.

  Debra opened the refrigerator and stared into it; this surely wasn’t where the sugar was kept, but Yale hadn’t really wanted any, anyway. He’d been hoping Debra didn’t hate him as much as she once had. She’d be a valuable resource after Nora passed away.

  He said, “It has to be so stressful, taking care of her.”

  Debra didn’t answer.

  “Emotionally and financially, both. Hey, look, if you want to get that jewelry appraised, I’d be happy to introduce you to the right people. You don’t just want to go to some shop up here. If you’re interested in the monetary value—I mean, you might be surprised. I know someone in Chicago who would even drive up here. As a favor to me.”

  Debra turned. She was holding, for some reason, a bottle of mustard. She had tears in her eyes, but they must have been from a minute ago. She said, flatly, “That’s sweet of you.”

  “It’s no problem.”

  “You know, I’ve never been mad at you personally. It would be easier to hate you if you were an asshole. This is how you get stuff from people, isn’t it. You’re nice. And it’s not even fake.”

  Yale used to believe he was nice, but Charlie might say different. Teddy would too. He shrugged and said, “No, it’s not fake.” To his great amazement, Debra smiled at him.

  Nora was telling Roman, when they returned, about moving in with a divorced fellow student from the Académie. “We were in a little flat over a shoe repair shop on Rue de la Grande Chaumière. Oh, dear,” she said to Roman, “do you speak French?”

  “I do, actually. I’ve—my dissertation is on Balthus, and I’ve—”

  “Ha! That pervert! Well, good, you can spell. The husband supported her still, sent money every month. I bribed my aunt’s bonne with a few francs, and my poor aunt was too far gone to notice I’d left.”

  Yale sat, tried to skim Roman’s notes, but he hadn’t written much. Debra pulled a dining room chair in.

  “So those were my student years. Drawing, painting, being with Ranko. Those cow sketches are from that time, from a trip we took around Normandy. March of 1913, I’d say.”

  Yale jotted the date next to the three Ranko Novak sketch slots. The absolute least important of the details he’d been sent for. If he returned with only the cow sketch dates, Bill would think it was a prank.

  “We wanted to get married but we needed to wait, because in April, Ranko entered the Prix de Rome. It wasn’t just a prize, it was a contest for students, a yearlong thing, and they’d eliminate you one by one. It was like Miss America, the way each round they send those poor girls off crying. And—can you guess?—it was only open to unmarried men. You had to be French, and of course another student raised some nonsense that Ranko wasn’t truly French—it was his name, I suppose, the fact that he wasn’t named Renée—but they let him go forward anyway. It upset him, though.

  “He was quite fragile. And strange! Now, he’s one who should not have been at the Beaux-Arts. It was the establishment, you know, and they wanted to tame him. It was the age of the bohemian, and the last thing you’d want was a pat on the back from the old standard-bearers. He was always tamping down his oddness for them. It worked, unfortunately, in the end. He sanded his work down till they loved it.”

  Roman said, “Those two paintings don’t seem sanded down.”

  “Well, exactly. Those weren’t ones his teachers ever saw. The one of the little girl—he did that around the same time, dashed it off. It was supposed to be me; he was painting me as he imagined I’d looked as a girl. He got it all wrong, I’m afraid, but still that piece has a soul. The work he did for them, though, it was polished and flat and religious. And he was an atheist!

  “He progressed and progressed in the contest, and the end of the whole ordeal was that they sequestered you in a studio in the Château de Compiègne for seventy-two days. Seventy-two! Can you imagine? And they gave you a theme to paint on. First you had twelve hours to sketch, and then you had the ten weeks to paint, and you weren’t allowed to vary from the sketch. Whoever decided an artist shouldn’t change his mind? So for seventy-two days he was locked up, and there I sat pining away.”

  Roman said, “Could he write you letters?”

  “No! It was the worst time of my life. Now, I say that, but really I fell more in love every day. What’s more romantic than waiting for a lover who’s locked up in a chateau? I lost twenty pounds.

  “I can’t remember what theme they gave, but what he produced was this stiff pietà. It looked like a bad Easter pageant, is what I thought. And he w
on. Three students won, in fact, which was a scandal. They hadn’t awarded the prize the year before, and someone before that had to give his prize back for some silly reason, so there were three spots open at the Villa Medici in Rome, which is where the contest winners were sent. Any other year, to be honest, Ranko wouldn’t have won. Everyone knew it was really third place, and he knew it too.

  “So you can imagine: The love of my life sequesters himself for months, and his prize is three to five years in Rome. And we can’t get married now, because there’s no room there for a wife. He was elated, and I was just devastated.”

  “This is the thing,” Debra interjected. “I understand devoting your life to the memory of someone great, but he was a jerk.”

  Yale had to silently agree. Maybe Ranko hadn’t been a bad guy—the prize sounded like the opportunity of a lifetime—but if a young Nora had come to Yale for relationship advice, he’d have told her to cut her losses and move on.

  “Then that summer, two things happened. One you already know: That terrible man had to go shoot the Archduke and start the war, and I could have just kicked him. But the other is that my father died suddenly. So in one instant, Ranko’s travels to Rome were put off, and in the next, I was called home.”

  Roman made a sympathetic noise, underlined the word died in his notes.

  “Everything was chaos, you can imagine. I wasn’t going to leave, I was going to stay with Ranko. I was almost happy for the war, in a horribly selfish way. But Paris was becoming dangerous, and my father’s death meant I had no money to stay in school—and then, in August, Ranko broke it to me that he was being mobilized. I hadn’t even known it was a possibility.

  “I cried for two days straight, and I decided I’d go. I had a hell of a time getting out, what with everyone booking passage at once. I went back to Philadelphia, where my mother was, and I taught drawing classes to some insufferable children.”

  “But you came back,” Roman said. “All the other pieces, they’re later, right?”

  “Yes,” she agreed, and then she launched into a deep, wet cough that rocked her whole body. Debra shot out of her chair and vanished into the kitchen, and Yale stood, not knowing what to do. He’d become used to the PCP cough, a dry bark he’d heard on the streets and in the bars, a cough that made him think of a more medieval type of plague. He remembered Jonathan Bird, Nico’s old roommate, saying, “I just wish that with all this hacking I could cough something up.” Whereas Nora sounded like she was drowning. Debra was back with a paper towel and another glass of water.