I woke up, thrust up, threw back the sheet, sat on the edge of the bed in the lightless room, gasping. No residue of sleep clouded my mind. I was clearheaded, alarmed, alert. What I feared was not the nightmare, but that I might hear the voice of Miss Pearl and see her silhouette, a moving darkness in the dark, which would mean that the horror seen in sleep must be prophetic.
How greatly relieved I was when she wasn’t there, but just then I glimpsed a paleness at the screened window, where the lower sash was raised to cool the room. I thought it must be the face of someone who had been watching me sleep, as Fiona Cassidy had once watched me and even photographed me slumbering unaware. If the long-awaited but unknown crisis drew nearer by the day, as Mr. Yoshioka and I both believed that it did, cowardice—even mere hesitation—might be the death of me, and so I rose and rushed to the window to confront who might be spying on me. I found no one, just a mosquito jittering against the metal mesh, such a frail visitor that it made no sound that I could hear above the pounding of my heart. If some watcher had been there, face ghostly in the waning night, she or he had fled, though perhaps it had been only a figment of my imagination.
59
Thursday morning, after feeding and walking Toshiro Mifune, Mrs. Setsuko Nozawa drove well below the speed limit on her way through Charleston, Illinois, to Eastern Illinois University. The dog was in the mood to ride with his head out the window. To drive above twenty-five miles per hour would put his eyes at risk if the wind carried in it sharp flecks of something.
Although she traveled by a roundabout route, staying mostly to quiet residential streets on which the speed limits were low, a few impatient drivers blew their horns at her. She drove with her head high, unfazed by their discontent, and she would not deign to reply in kind when crude words or gestures were flung her way. Each time a horn blew, she said, “Namu Amida!” which meant “Buddha have mercy.” Those might have been words of forgiveness, directed toward the rude motorists, if she had not pronounced them with such an edge. The dog agreed with her, sensitive creature that he was, and matched every “Namu Amida” with a growl.
In the Alumni Affairs Office of the university, an attractive redhead with a constellation of freckles and an imposing bosom was most charming and helpful. Mrs. Nozawa repeated her invented story about a student who years earlier had done a great kindness for her and her husband, and the flame-haired woman explained that they were not at liberty to give out alumni addresses. Mrs. Nozawa said that she understood and appreciated their discretion, but that she only wanted to know if the Alumni Affairs Office would forward a letter from her to the kind young man if he had in fact graduated from the university. That was, of course, a courtesy that the university would be pleased to extend to her. Mrs. Nozawa was most gratified by the cordial tone of the exchange.
She doubted that Lucas Drackman had attended the university under the name Douglas T. Atherton. More likely, he had forged the Social Security card and Student Activities card with which he had qualified to rent the mailbox from Betty Norbert. Therefore, she gave the redhead the Drackman name and a likely year of graduation—1963. In minutes it was confirmed that Lucas Drackman was indeed a graduate, and Mrs. Nozawa promised that, in a few days, she would return with her letter in a stamped and sealed envelope, which she had no intention of doing.
Mr. Tamazaki of the Daily News had hoped only that she would find that Drackman had been living in the area at the time Mrs. Renata Kolshak had disappeared from a ship in the Caribbean, thus establishing that he could have rented, under a false name, the mailbox to which a ticket to the same cruise had been sent to one Douglas T. Atherton. Mission accomplished.
A short while later, in her office in the dry-cleaning shop from which she oversaw the Nozawa commercial empire, she called in her report to Mr. Tamazaki, who was most grateful for her efforts. She assumed that was the end of the matter, but mere hours later, she would learn otherwise.
60
I had been in Midtown before on outings with my mother, but never in the company of another boy with my sense of humor and never guided by a cute teenage girl who made people smile when they looked at her. When she hustled us across a street or when she hurried up a long run of stairs, her ponytail bounced and swung from side to side.
My mother had given me fifty cents, the cost of a student admission to the art museum, plus money for lunch. I felt rich and free and ready for fun … but a quiet paranoia plagued me.
At the bus stop from which we had departed, as we waited for our ride, I’d become obsessed with a black Chevrolet parked half a block away, in which two men sat. They were under a tree, in shadow, and I couldn’t see their faces, but I became half convinced that they were Lucas Drackman and my father.
I remembered what Miss Delvane had shared with Mr. Otani when he chatted her up on New Year’s Eve: that her boyfriend, recently divorced, talked constantly about one day getting his son back. If these men in the car were my father and Lucas Drackman, they might follow us. In Midtown, where I’d be far from home and vulnerable, they might try to snatch me.
When we disembarked from the bus, no black Chevrolet idled at the curb or passed by in the jostling traffic, which suggested that my fear was irrational. Nevertheless, it remained with me, a coiled tension at the back of my mind.
We had arrived at the corner of National Avenue and 52nd Street, the historical center of the city. Within two blocks in any direction stood the courthouse, the labyrinthine central library, the finest of concert halls, the cathedral, our oldest synagogue, and several ornate long-standing theaters. The architecture offered beauty at every hand, with buildings of granite and marble and limestone, even the towers, not a single hideous and inartistic glass monolith within two blocks of this core. Here was the most wonder-evoking part of the city, the beauty of order and the ordering power of beauty.
At our backs loomed the First National Bank on the ground floor of its thirty-story Art Deco financial center. Across the street, columned like a Greek temple, stood Kalomirakis Pinakotheke, where we would see a special exhibition, Europe in the Age of Monarchy.
“Kal-oh-what? Pin-ah-what?” I asked.
As we climbed the front stairs, Amalia said, “Mr. Kalomirakis was an early immigrant from Greece.”
“He made beaucoup bucks,” Malcolm said. “I mean, the guy made Scrooge McDuck look like a pauper.”
“He built this beautiful place,” Amalia said, “bought just scads of great art for its permanent collection, and established a trust to ensure its continuation. Pinakotheke is Greek for gallery—but people here tend to call it a museum. I call it bliss.”
I’d always had an ear for beauty, and maybe I’d had an eye for it as well, but until that day, I’d not recognized that the truth in great music could be found also in great art, that the heart could be lifted and the mind sharpened equally by both. By the power of her charm and the contagious nature of her enthusiasm, Amalia that day enormously expanded my world, threw open doors deep within me that otherwise might have remained closed for many years or perhaps even forever.
The paintings in the exhibition were on loan from museums as far away as the Netherlands and Paris, but also from as near as New York City. We saw work by Rembrandt and Vermeer and van Dyck, Georges de La Tour, Jean-Marc Nattier, Caravaggio, Procaccini, and others.
Often, Malcolm would say to his sister, “Tell him the story,” by which he didn’t mean the story of a particular painting but of the painter’s life or an arresting portion of his life. Some were amusing, some terribly sad, and each drew me into the work of the artist more than I, at that rough age, could have imagined.
I most clearly recall what she said about Johannes Vermeer, as we stood before his enchanting Girl with the Red Hat. That story has haunted me for almost half a century. Why it haunts me I won’t say just yet, but soon. When Vermeer’s story comes to mind on nights that sleep eludes me, I feel acutely the fragility of life, the ephemeral nature of everything we seek and create in this worl
d.
The girl in Girl with the Red Hat stared at us from that small canvas, the sensuous details and the illusion of light creating a vision as liquid as reality, mesmerizingly dimensional, and Amalia said, “Vermeer may be the most masterful painter who ever lived. He was a perfectionist who worked hard but painted slowly. Maybe sixty pieces. Thirty-six have survived. Twenty-nine are masterpieces. His life was hard. He was poor, though he worked other jobs in addition to painting, desperate to feed his family. Fifteen children. Can you imagine me and fifteen Malcolms? I’d be insane. But wait, no, it’s not amusing. In those days, the sixteen hundreds, many died in childhood, and Vermeer grieved over four of his own. He, too, died young at forty-three, admired by other Dutch painters, but penniless and in his own mind a failure. His widow and eleven children, whom he’d loved as much as life, were left destitute. For two hundred years, his work was forgotten … two hundred years. But tastes change. To generations of the willfully blind, true beauty can remain unseen in plain sight, but beauty sooner or later asserts itself—always, always, always—and is at last recognized, because there’s so damn little of it. He died a broken man, but now till the end of civilization, his name will be spoken with respect by many and even with awe by some.”
Kids—and perhaps not just kids—are suckers for stories about underdogs who triumph in the end, even if they have to die first, and Vermeer became a hero of mine that day. By the time we were halfway through the exhibition, my paranoid expectation of being kidnapped was forgotten, and thereafter—for a while—I felt safe in the city.
61
Meanwhile, in Charleston, Illinois, Mrs. Setsuko Nozawa sat in her small office at the back of the dry-cleaning shop, balancing the business checkbook, while Toshiro Mifune slept at her feet. One of her employees appeared at the open door and interrupted to say that a professor from the university, Dr. Jubal Mace-Maskil, had come to speak with her about an urgent matter.
At the front counter stood a tall, lean man with a bird’s nest of prematurely white hair. His gaunt and hard-lined face was softened only by bushy white eyebrows, and his gray eyes, flecked with green, seemed wild to Mrs. Nozawa, like the eyes of something that ought to be kept in a securely locked cage.
She disliked him on sight, partly because of how he was dressed. In her opinion, a college professor—and a doctor yet—should not be seen in public wearing badly wrinkled khakis, a T-shirt bearing the letters MYOB—whatever that meant—and a thin, baggy khaki jacket with several patch pockets bulging with, if you asked her, all manner of things that would probably interest the police. The jacket had been torn and crudely patched in places, but of course it had come from the store that way, because distressed clothing was chic these days. She knew he wasn’t unique. There were other rebels at the university, rebels everywhere these days, eager to forge a shining future by rejecting the past and all its evils. But she much valued tradition. The past was a trove of hard-won wisdom. Anyway, the human heart being what it was, those who erased the past would in fact purge only the wisdom and preserve the evils.
No sooner had Mrs. Nozawa introduced herself than Dr. MaceMaskil launched into a tribute to Lucas Drackman, a former student of his, to whom he’d been mentor, a student of exceptional brilliance and integrity, majoring in political science, a young man of the most tender sensitivity and keen intellect and boundless energy. Did she know that Lucas had come to the university less than a year after his parents had been murdered in their sleep by some savage intruder? Did she know that in spite of his crushing grief and bitter loss, Lucas applied himself to his studies as few others, carrying his terrible burdens, could have done? Did she know? Did she? His future could not be brighter, for he possessed both honor and charisma, humility and noble ambition.
At first puzzled by these torrents of words, which spewed from the professor like water gushing from a fire hose, Mrs. Nozawa in time realized that those extravagant plaudits were a defense. Dr. Mace-Maskil apparently operated under the incorrect assumption that she had gone to the university and inquired about Drackman because she had some accusation to level against him.
When she was finally able to interrupt the professor, she repeated her story about the young man having done a great kindness for her and her husband, a kindness for which they never adequately thanked him. She only wished to express to Mr. Drackman the gratitude that he so richly deserved.
The professor listened at first intently, then impatiently, and soon revealed his disbelief by launching once more into unqualified praise for his former student. The more adulatory his words became, the more emotional he became, as well—and increasingly incoherent. His face reddened, and spittle sparkled around each word launched from his lips. If his eyes had previously looked like those of some creature in need of caging, they now suggested that he might soon need to be shot down as rabid.
Mrs. Nozawa became convinced that Dr. Mace-Maskil had been high on some illegal substance when first he’d heard about her inquiry at Alumni Affairs, that he had misinterpreted what he’d been told, and that between then and now he had ingested more of that drug or maybe also others with contraindications. Either her astonished expression or her hand reaching for the telephone on the counter alerted him to the fact that he was by then making little or no sense, for his eyes widened, and he clamped one hand over his mouth to silence himself.
Having heard enough to be no less astonished than his mistress, Toshiro Mifune abruptly stood with forepaws on the counter and raised his big head. He regarded Dr. Mace-Maskil with limpid golden eyes, did not bark, did not growl, but expressed his opinion with a loud protracted snort.
The professor fled. No other word could adequately describe his sudden departure. Legs so long they seemed to have two knees each, arms flailing the air as if it must be more resistant than water, his rumpled and patched designer khaki ensemble rustling like a sack full of frantic rats, he careened to the left and then to the right as he sought escape. He made thin sounds of distress, as if he had wandered into the Little Dry-Cleaning Shop of Horrors and expected never to be allowed to leave. Meeting the glass door with his shoulder, he bulled through it, stumbled into sunshine, squinting as if it seared him, hurried west along the strip-mall sidewalk and out of sight, only to reappear a moment later, this time hell-bent toward the east.
Mrs. Nozawa came out from behind the counter and went to the door and stepped outside to watch the eminent educator make his way to his car. A gray Volvo. He seemed to have some difficulty figuring out how to start it. She imagined that he might be trying to insert the key into the cigarette lighter. Pulling out of his parking space, piloting the sedan toward an exit from the mall lot, Dr. Mace-Maskil blew his horn at every motorist and pedestrian he encountered, as though to warn them unequivocally that they were driving or walking recklessly. Even after the Volvo reached the street and disappeared, Mrs. Nozawa waited, listening for what seemed to be the inevitable shattering crash of a high-speed collision.
Being a shrewd businesswoman who could read people accurately, Setsuko Nozawa thought the strangest thing about the encounter was how the man had reacted to her story about Lucas Drackman having done a great kindness for her and her husband some years earlier. Although he had no reason to doubt a word she’d said, he hadn’t believed her for a moment. In spite of the extravagant praise he had heaped upon his former student, perhaps Dr. Mace-Maskil found it impossible to imagine that Lucas Drackman was capable of a kind act.
62
As Amalia and Malcolm and I moved on from Girl with the Red Hat, proceeding deeper into Kalomirakis Pinakotheke, I asked if she could not just tell me about the artist but if she could explain also what each painting meant, why its maker made it, what he wished to say.
Rapping my head with the rolled-up brochure each of us had been given when we paid at the entrance, Malcolm said, “That’s a pretty stupid thing for a prodigy to ask. Tell him why it’s stupid, Amalia.”
“If I recall correctly,” she said, “when I brought you here
for the first time, you asked me the same thing.”
“That’s not the way I remember it,” Malcolm said.
“How do you remember it, dear brother?”
“You were in a stormy mood that day.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Stormy?”
“And you were drinking.”
“Oh? What was I drinking?”
“Just everything. Brandy, beer, vodka, wine.”
“Did you have to carry me over your shoulder?”
“Not at all. I said you were brain-damaged at birth, and they gave us a courtesy wheelchair.”
“You’re terrible.”
“I don’t believe you were drunk,” I told Amalia.
“Thank you, Jonah.”
To me, Malcolm said, “You are painfully naïve, child. Anyway, as I wheeled her from painting to painting—she would point at each one and in an embarrassing drunken way, she’d demand to know what the picture meant. Sis, do you remember what I told you that day? Jonah needs to hear it.”
“Why don’t you tell him, Malcolm?”
“I’m not sure I remember it word for word.” To me, he added, “The dear girl will have committed it to memory. Even drunk, she hangs on my every utterance.”
“Utterance?” Amalia said.
“I heard a really cool British actor say it in a movie. Sounds sophisticated. From now on, I’m not going to say anything, I’m going to utter.”