by Joan Dempsey
“Damn him,” he said sharply.
He yanked open the door and took the corridor that led from Tommy’s room toward reception, telling himself that the last thing Tommy needed was his father going off on him. He punched the automatic door opener. Still, he didn’t like to think of himself as a man who walked away. He stopped short in front of the open doors. Outside the waiting room, milling around on the sidewalk outside the broad glass entryway, a reporter saw him, and the whole group turned as one to catch a glimpse. What if one of them asked about Tommy’s marriage? He held up a forefinger and mouthed “be right there.” The automatic doors swung closed. He stripped off his gloves and shoved them into his overcoat pockets.
There was a lot he could finesse, but this? He covered his face with his hands, rubbed his eyes, and thought angrily about how helpful it would have been to showcase his own son’s marriage over the past year. He patted the pockets of his overcoat and then reached in and searched through his suit for a tin of mints; the wretched taste of that coffee was nauseating.
A heavyset young man with woolly hair and a five-o’clock shadow materialized next to him. He wore navy scrubs, and purple rubber Crocs on his feet.
“Can I help you with something?”
“No, thank you, just catching my breath. My son is—”
The rising tears surprised him. He swallowed hard. He gazed beyond the man and focused on the opposite wall. A tiny hammer hung from a red fire alarm box. Lolek tentatively cleared his throat. If the man recognized Lolek, he was hiding it well, and Lolek was grateful for the private moment. He supposed hospital staff were trained to treat everyone equally.
“Is there a vending machine around, by chance?”
“Sure enough. Out into the waiting room, take a right around reception. Can’t miss ’em.”
Lolek sighed. The man followed Lolek’s gaze and saw the reporters.
“On second thought, you know what? We’ve got our own stash. You’re welcome to it. Come on through here.”
Lolek smiled gratefully, and the man led him around the corner and through a door into a galley kitchen with a sink, industrial coffee machine, fridge, and vending machine lined up along one wall. A narrow counter ran the length of the other with open shelves above it. Three boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts and a scattering of napkins lay on the counter.
“All yours.”
Lolek thanked him and the man headed out. He stopped at the door and turned back.
“I hope you know you can count on us.”
Lolek studied him, puzzled.
“You know, what they did to your son, to those other teachers. Unconscionable. Could just as easily have been nurses, any of us, really. People are scared. They think it’s only the beginning. The tendency is to put your head down, you know? Just get by, get through, keep your mouth shut. But you tell us what to do? You lead the fight? We’ll come out of the woodwork for you, Senator. Count on it.”
Lolek didn’t know if he could trust his voice. He nodded and offered the man his hand.
“Thank you, son, that means a lot.”
“Least we can do. And we’ll take good care of Tom, don’t you worry about that. He’s going to be just fine.”
He walked out of the room. Lolek shook his head and smiled, feeling fortified. From the vending machine he got a roll of peppermint Mentos and chewed one up, worked it around his mouth. He went out and made his way back to the hall, and glanced in the direction of Tommy’s room. Going back was the right thing to do.
Tommy’s room was darker than it had been. They’d pulled the curtain closed around them. Lolek was ashamed at his immediate relief, but he hesitated only momentarily before turning away. If a reporter asked about Tommy’s marriage, he’d have to answer honestly; honest vulnerability in a politician was a rarity, and constituents were incredibly forgiving when politicians shared human failings like this one. It was the cover-ups that got them into trouble, the denial when denial was no longer plausible.
In front of the waiting room doors he paused, straightened the knot of his tie, buttoned his overcoat, and squared his shoulders. The doors eased open. He strode across the room, composing a serious expression suitable for the circumstances. The media teams surged forward, and someone held open the outside door. Lolek began to pull on his gloves, and as he crossed the threshold into the cold and waded into their midst, a thought accosted him as sharply as the shock of frigid air: Marta knew. Marta had known all along.
13
The Warning Note
There was no question in Ludka’s mind that Stanley had tampered with the Chopin. The average person wouldn’t notice it, but Ludka had an eye for evenness and she lay there in bed, staring at the way the portrait hung imperceptibly off true. A nervous perspiration dampened her palms. Izaac was still puttering about in the bathroom, so she drew off the covers. She couldn’t simply sit up and swing her legs to the floor anymore; she had to inch her entire body to the edge, then lower her legs while simultaneously pushing herself up with both arms. And then she had to sit for a moment, righting the world, before she could stand. She and Izaac both got out of bed this way, or off the daybed on the porch. They’d taken to calling it the maneuver.
She sidestepped her boots and hurried on bare feet over to the bureau, her silk long johns cooling quickly outside the covers. Carefully she lifted the small portrait off the wall, turned it around, and smiled with relief at the familiar sight of the thumb smudges on the back of the hidden canvas, the note about the buried provenance papers stapled to the frame. It had been a project to determine how to affix one stretched canvas behind the other while leaving enough room for the Chopin to breathe. She’d finally chosen a wooden frame with a deep rabbet that could accommodate both portraits; two hooks and eyes did the trick of holding the Chopin firmly in place. She’d been mistaken, then, about Stanley, and felt glad of it, for Oskar’s sake. But her smile quickly morphed into a frown—the left hook was jammed halfway between opened and closed.
“What are you doing there, kochanie? I thought you were already in bed.”
Ludka gave a start and nearly dropped the paintings. She quickly positioned her body as a shield so Izaac wouldn’t see. She pushed home the hook into its eye.
“Only I remembered I meant tonight to inspect for the dust. Earlier on the tour it was an embarrassment.”
Izaac snorted disbelievingly, sat on the bed, and took off his slippers. “This room hasn’t seen dust in decades. Come to bed, you’ll catch a chill.”
Izaac was right about the chill. She set the nested paintings on the bureau and leaned them against the wall.
In bed, they lay on their backs, and Ludka rubbed her feet together. She stared wide-eyed at the portrait, wondering if it was possible for Stanley to have had the forethought to bring with him a used canvas, if he’d even gone so far as to bring a forgery! You could find images of the Chopin online, after all, thanks to the survival of black and white photographs.
“You look after your grandson,” he’d said. “I can see myself out.” The weasel.
“You can glare at it all you want, kochanie, but I promise the dust will still be there in the morning. Settle down now, and turn off that light.”
He sounded sterner than he’d intended, but he was still irked by the way she’d talked about Tommy. And mój Boże but she was obsessed with that damned portrait! All the art they’d invested in, and this was the one that commanded her unflagging attention? He’d never understood it.
Ludka turned out the light but kept her eyes wide open. A shaft of moonlight cut across the floor, raced up the bureau, and landed on the upper corner of the portrait, casting a shadow that ballooned the frame to twice its size. Maybe she could sneak out of bed. Waiting until morning seemed an impossibility. Izaac rolled away from her and lifted the covers off her sore shoulder in the process, wafting in a bit of chill air. She adjusted the comforter, tucking it in more tightly. After a time, Izaac sighed heavily and lifted his head, turning it in her direction
.
“Stop all that thinking.” He dropped his head back on the pillow. “You could drown out a snow plow, for god’s sake.”
“Only I am lying here! Go to sleep, old man.”
They lay together in tense silence.
As Izaac began to relax, he thought about the proficient way Robert had taken charge of the intake process at the ER; he’d provided Tommy’s date of birth and social security number as if they were his own and handed over the insurance card, which covered them both. Robert’s law firm was one of the first in the country to offer full coverage to domestic partners, something that conveyed a degree of legitimacy any judge or jury would recognize. Abe should be apprised. But what if Ludka was right? What if there was something they didn’t know about Tommy? Damn her for planting doubts. He exhaled forcibly, as if he could expel his thoughts along with his breath.
“Sleep in other room if I am too much of bother!”
For one hopeful moment, Ludka thought he might comply. She lay there, rigid with waiting, feeling the beat of her riled-up heart. But Izaac just rolled toward her and fumbled around under the covers until he found her hand. He rubbed at her chilly fingers, then cupped his hand loosely around hers, his customary peace offering. With each of Izaac’s breaths she caught the familiar whiff of peppermint toothpaste, a vestige of sausage, and something like crushed summer clover that was uniquely Izaac; for one aching moment, she wanted to whisper a confession, release herself from decades of deceit, but the moment passed as quickly as it had come. Telling him could only lead to relinquishing the painting, an idea which never failed to send her mind into a resistant scurry, for fear of losing the portrait itself, or revealing her secret, or something else entirely, she didn’t know and didn’t allow herself to consider. All she knew was that any thought of confession stirred a burgeoning anxiety that threatened to turn to outright panic, and so any flight of thought would do, as long as it outran her impulse to confess. So many times she had been tempted to tell him, but Izaac was a devotedly principled man who’d made a public career of being above reproach. In the early years, she’d been too ashamed to tell him, and the longer she waited the harder it became. Later, when he was running for reelection, it became impossible. Ludka didn’t want to put him in a compromising position; if he knew she was harboring stolen art, he’d be forced to either collude or turn her over to the authorities. In either case, who would believe he could have been so easily deceived? Who would believe he hadn’t been colluding? His career—not to mention her own—would have been over. This had been a helpful rationale, and she’d seized on it; she could never endanger Izaac.
Now she pressed his fingers before extricating her hand. She rolled away and breathed the cool, clear air. She closed her eyes. Nothing more to be done tonight.
Just as she was about to slip over into sleep, she startled awake at the sound of crunching snow. She lifted her head, her neck straining with the effort of listening. One more crunch and then nothing. She thumped Izaac on the shoulder.
“Something is there! In the snow.”
“Mój Boże, Ludka! It’s just the deer. They’ve gotten desperate and are browsing on the juniper. Now go to sleep.”
She tried to relax, and even though she didn’t hear another sound, she knew she wouldn’t be able to settle down. She got up and told Izaac she was going downstairs.
She made her way down, stopping every second step to switch the nested paintings from one hand to the other, the hanging wire sharp inside the curl of her fingers. Halfway down she once again thought she heard something outside, but when she stopped to listen, there was only the hum of the refrigerator and then its sudden whine as it powered down. After that, silence. She held her breath. Nothing. Downstairs, she perched the frame on one of the ladder-back chairs in the dining room. She turned on all the lights, trying to make the room feel like it would at an ordinary hour. She adjusted her robe more snugly around her throat, tightened her belt, and turned up the thermostat. The furnace ticked and ignited immediately, then quickly began its steady drone. From the kitchen she retrieved a pair of white cotton gloves from a new twelve-pack, and from a drawer in the dining room sideboard she fetched a thin felt pad wrapped in plastic. She unwrapped the felt and smoothed it out on the dining room table, then carefully unfastened the Chopin’s hooks and lifted it out onto the felt. She smiled with relief; nothing seemed amiss. As so often happened when she took the time to see the portrait, a feeling of calm descended.
“Sukces,” she’d told Oskar in 1939 when she’d gone to his attic studio at the prearranged time. “The Mieroszewski is liberated. Chopin has been saved.”
Oskar had pressed his hands together, pointed them at her, and smiled.
“It is Poland you are holding. Keep her safe.”
Five days later, on the twenty-fifth day of the Nazi siege, when the terror bombing of Warsaw was incessantly fierce, a four-thousand-pound Satan had fallen from the body of a Heinkel twin-engine bomber and exploded on Swietojanska, blasting through the rear wall and blowing out the front windows of the empty Zeilonka apartment on Piwna. The next day, one day shy of Poland’s surrender, Ludka had emerged from the bomb shelter and found the Chopin lying face up on the street in front of her apartment, miraculously unharmed but for one small dent and a coating of plaster dust. She could still see the young Chopin—pale countenance, sunken consumptive cheeks, and pronounced Adam’s apple—lying on the ruined cobblestones, gazing up through the dust as if lost.
Now the pipes from the furnace clanked and shuddered as hot water rushed to the downstairs radiators, which set about releasing their pressure through sudden hisses of steam. In the bottom left corner of the canvas was the repaired dent that none but a conservator would notice, but which Ludka could see as clearly as the face of Chopin. After the siege, while the Nazis had made themselves at home in the surrendered city, it had been a challenge to find the hidden time to steam and press out the dent, but Ludka and Oskar had managed.
Ludka left the painting on the felt and went into the spacious study, which was buffered from the rest of the house by the stone chimney and the stairs. She sat at the scarred hardwood desk and woke up the laptop. She gathered the robe more closely around her neck and turned on the portable heater next to the desk.
Sodomite, she typed into the search engine. She’d expected the Wikipedia entry and competing dictionaries’ definitions, as well as the references to Sodom and Gomorrah. She was surprised, though, to discover that someone had accused Cuba of “dumping its Sodomites into Florida” during the Carter administration, and that newly elected President Obama apparently had a Sodomite past, which was coming back to haunt him. She was also flabbergasted to see smiling American children holding colorful, vicious placards declaring God’s hatred for people like Tommy. One boy, probably no more than seven, with blond lamb’s-wool-tight curls, pale eyebrows, and deep-set, serious eyes that stared straight out of the photo, bothered her more than the others, perhaps because he had Tommy’s coloring. She would have expected restlessness in a boy his age, or boredom, or fatigue from hoisting in his outstretched arms two poster boards nearly as tall as himself, but his countenance was chillingly determined, verging on angry. Still, there were bruise-colored bags beneath his eyes that didn’t belong on such a young face, and Ludka wondered about his burdens. How naive she had allowed herself to become, sheltered in this eastern American university town. Somehow she had shielded herself from contemporary vitriol, from the kind of vile, unyielding beliefs she had dared to let herself believe she’d escaped long ago. She took a piece of scrap paper from the desk drawer and laid it out on the desk. She ran a hand over it as if she’d never before seen paper, hesitated, then reopened the drawer and grabbed a pencil. She quickly sketched the boy’s face, flanked by the placards. She drew in the lettering and got lost in the work. When she was done, she sat for a long time, scrutinizing what she’d drawn. The last time she’d done such a sketch, she’d been breathing smoke and brick dust, documenting
Warsaw’s decimation. Abruptly she crumpled the sketch and threw it into the recycling bin beneath the desk.
A further online search indicated these children might be the exception, from some tiny and incestuous church in Kansas, and Ludka allowed herself to latch on to a slight feeling of relief, which amplified when she saw the usual sorts of churchy items on the Hampshire Redeemer Fellowship’s website: Sunday school schedule, social service projects, gatherings and study groups, theology, sermons, community. Pastor Royce Leonard had a wise, compassionate face. While she printed out his long biography and statement of approach for later reading, she turned her attention to Stanley.
After five pages of irrelevant results, when she’d begun to wonder if Stanley wasn’t who he said he was, she finally found the Fisherman’s Wharf gallery about which he had bragged. The site was minimalist but appeared legitimate, complete with rotating photos of seascapes and the glass-fronted building with its modern, sea-foam-colored logo: Stanley Brozek | San Francisco. She dug a bit further, though, and was disturbed to discover he wasn’t registered with the art dealers’ associations of San Francisco, California, or America. Back on his website, the contact information was for e-mail only: no physical address, no directions, no phone number. Hours by appointment.
Ludka picked up the phone and dialed information. No listing anywhere in San Francisco. Ludka switched off the portable heater and moments later the furnace, too, kicked off. Even the refrigerator had finished its cycle, and in the advent of the sudden silence Ludka’s body drained of a tension she’d not even known she was holding. She pressed her fingers into the hollow of her neck and closed her eyes. Perhaps she should go back to bed. Stanley had seemed kind, wringing out the rag for Tommy, cleaning up the kitchen. She was just about to call it a night when she caught sight of Stanley’s name coupled with the word shoplifting in the search results. Dated last fall, it accompanied a small news item from the police blotter in the Potrero Hill News, a weekly online newspaper. He’d been questioned for allegedly taking two pairs of sunglasses from a Safeway supermarket. The paper quoted him as saying that the whole episode was a complete misunderstanding: “I’m wearing $345 Modos. Why would I need to steal from Safeway?”