Pierson
2011
In the last phase, Becky worked harder than she’d ever worked before. She had two extra phone lines put in at the farmhouse, and the international deals had her up at all hours of the night, as she sold and traded endlessly in order to finance what she hoped would be her final big buys. In the Art Barn she had put together completed sets of works that focused on method and mode: preliminary sketches in graphite, in crayon, in ballpoint. She had sets defined by genre and image and era: every photorealist painting of a seated older woman who was a relative of the artist, completed in the year 1999. Textile wall hangings but only single-color by heterosexual male artists of the American South.
Becky had lived for the intensity of these searches, one-upping herself for every challenge she set. So much mental effort, so many variables to consider, so many hours and hours of research and phone calls and bids and failed bids and reversals and . . .
Sometimes she’d drive home from Town Hall in the middle of the workday, dizzy from fatigue, and fall hard asleep for an hour or more, shoes on, keys in the door. She ate three-course meals before dawn, drank four pots of coffee a day, and lost all sense of when a bowel movement might occur. Although her mind stayed sharp, the toll was taken on her skin: dermatologist after dermatologist couldn’t cure the hives on her throat, the rosacea behind her knees, the delicate rash in the folds of her eyelids. Though meticulous facials and pricy skin creams meant she could hide most anything. Sometimes, clumps of red hair would come out in the shower, and that did scare her into a week or two of vitamins, brisk morning walks, spinach in her salads.
The chest pain, though, was what worried her the most, and therefore what she paid attention to the least. Others noticed, she could tell, when a wince seized her, cut her off mid-sentence. She took to knocking her sternum with a fist, shaking a bottle of Tums, which allowed people to commiserate about acid reflux. But it wasn’t acid reflux.
Becky had come around to panic attacks in theory except—this was the weird part—now the pain in her chest sometimes started as a poker in her back, or a burning low sore throat. Her bad thoughts and feelings about getting caught, more frequent than ever since Ken caught her in Springfield, only sometimes overlapped with these pains. One type of distress might set off the other, or might occur a few hours later, and who could tell how, or if, they were related? Terror and chest pain chased each other night into day, day into night.
It was brilliant, what she’d made in the Art Barn, even if no one else would ever know. But it was time, more than time, to give it up. All she had to do was complete this last project. Complete the completing.
Miles Green, Self-Portrait at the Docks, 18 by 20 inches, watercolor, 1934–1935. A young black man, staring out of the canvas, cigarette lodged in the right corner of his mouth, its single smoke plume obscuring one eye. The other eye leveled straight at the viewer, giving nothing away. Behind the man, washy gray water, green-brown hulk of a crate, slats of a pallet. Ambiguous time of day.
Becky couldn’t stop thinking about it. Night and day, she saw the man—Miles, as she thought of him—with his back to the Delaware, smoking, daring anyone to come for him. She wanted this painting more than she’d ever wanted anything, even that Eric Fischl at her first Art Expo, even the Caitriona Molloy she’d screwed the Babies over for.
For more than a year she hunted down the Green watercolor portraits, four of the five that existed. One by one she got her trophies, clearing a wall in the central room in the Barn to make way. There was much less interest in the watercolors than in Green’s later oil work, but this group had been surprisingly hard to find and buy. Two retired dealers (New York and Paris), an African-American literacy foundation in Georgia, and the provost of Howard University: each had owned their Green watercolor since purchase. Each transaction took months, for Becky to procure the right introductions, get to know the owners, travel to and from various cities during negotiation.
Miles Green’s later work, the 1950s civil rights paintings, were wall-sized oils in museums around the world, action scenes of horrific violence and chaos: clashes between protestors and police, tear gas, dogs, water cannons spraying with a heavy brutal sting. These were canonized works. They were studied in art history, history, social studies, black studies, cultural studies. Green’s own story—son of Pennsylvania sharecroppers, self-taught while working as a postal carrier, worked his way into a long series of teaching appointments, met MLK, met RFK, loaned his images and time wherever they could help the movement, death by heart attack in 1981—cemented his reputation. The watercolor owners could ask what they wanted, and they did. She paid it.
But the Docks portrait remained at large. This stupid, maddening square of canvas, this missing piece, wouldn’t let her go.
Greta Dreiser, the director of Philadelphia’s American Museum, had declined to speak with Becky over and over, despite Becky calling in favors from every connection she knew they shared. When Ms. Dreiser finally consented to a phone call, she refused to answer any questions about Self-Portrait at the Docks: Why hadn’t it been on display in over a decade? Could the museum show the terms of purchase? What would it take for an offer to be considered? At this, Ms. Dreiser simply hung up the phone.
The Green family was spread across the Eastern seaboard, and consisted of at least ten middle-aged sons and daughters from Miles’s three wives. Most—but not all—were involved in the Miles Green Foundation dedicated to managing the artist’s works, holdings, and rights issues. The foundation’s executives coolly informed Becky they had no comment on the terms of purchase for Docks and in any case they discouraged museum sales whenever possible. It was impossible to approach the matriarch, Miles’s widow: she was legendary for imperiousness, capriciousness, venom. And closely guarded by all her children. So Becky began to work her way through the Green siblings and grandchildren (writers, actors, one was an art director at ICP), traveling to New York, DC, Philadelphia, and the Connecticut suburbs at least nine times over a period of three months. She took them to dinner, to coffee, to baseball games. She learned their favorite foods, writers, their children’s names, pet peeves, schedules, college teams. It didn’t help that she was white, of course, while she tried to make inroads in these most elite black communities, but the Greens were familiar with the art world’s asks.
She was absent from Pierson so much that a rumor started, which she didn’t discourage, that she had a new boyfriend somewhere out East. When she was in the office she watched Ken carefully, though it didn’t appear as though he meant to do anything different. He still ate lunch with her several times a week, sharing takeout in the conference room with anyone else who wanted to join them. She’d doubled down on all covert procedures, even making herself wait a long three weeks after Springfield before putting one dollar through the Activity. But she couldn’t wait longer than that, and carefully, slowly, and thoroughly she restarted the fake invoices and diverted funds.
Corrine Green Garland, an exec at ColorComm, listened without judgment and said she had no interest in persuading American to sell any of her father’s work. Gregory Green, an orthopedist and professor of medicine in Philadelphia, gave Becky twenty minutes in between classes at Perelman, and laughed: I stay out of that as much as I can, nothing good can come from me in Berta’s business. Roberta Green had an assistant take Becky on a tour of the Green Foundation offices and gave a pro forma response that all museum holdings were to be treated under the original terms of sale. No, she would not care to hear Becky’s pitch. No, she did not care to meet to discuss further. Jim Green couldn’t be found; Freda Green Johnston was in the hospital from diabetes complications; Jan Green grew so suspicious of Becky she had a lawyer send a cease and desist.
She sent flowers and made donations to charities. She slept with an ex-husband of one of the daughters even as she doubted his shady claims of influence at the Foundation. Becky knew she was pushing all the limits: she’d sold off as many other items as she could to fund this pursuit, she let all the other opportunities, other artists she might come to love, slip away. She stopped making the rounds, attending the shows, cultivating the future. One by one she burned through art world connections and influencers, and any dealers who might help, her biggest bluest chips.
You sure, Reba? She could hear the unspoken question behind every call, every searching conversation. These were the big players, people at Emmerich and Boone and Saatchi. It had taken years to build up these relationships and you only got one ask of this magnitude. Green was a master, to be sure, but . . . all this for one lesser portrait? In watercolor? Becky would laugh a bit, passing it off as whim, eccentricity. In any case, none of them could make it happen, and she’d cashed in every connection.
One evening in the United Club at Philly International Becky idly leafed through a left-behind issue of The New Yorker, stopping for some reason on what seemed like a medical article called “The Itch.” Halfway through, with a growing horror of recognizing herself, Becky stuffed the magazine into her purse. She finished it on the plane.
The article, written by a surgeon, was about people who suffer from repeated, continuous itching in one spot with no apparent cause, a kind of neurological oddity. Nothing alleviated the maddening sensation, no drug or procedure. The sufferers exhausted practitioners, got labeled mentally ill, tied themselves up at night to prevent damaging their skin with endless scratching. One woman scratched at the side of her head so intensely that one morning she woke up leaking fluid from the area. The clinic doctor who examined her immediately called for a transfer by ambulance—the woman had scratched through her skin to brain matter.
Late that night Becky lay in bed and sobbed. What was it like to have just your one regular life and to be content? She was almost forty-seven years old and she had so much and it was never enough. Sometimes after she got a cherished painting up on her wall the sense of satisfied quiet that welled up inside, the only peace she ever knew, didn’t last a week. Sometimes it didn’t last an hour. Behind any happiness Becky could always feel the monster ready to awaken, ready to make her burn with longing and need.
It was Pierson that gave her the key to getting Docks. A Pierson wedding, one she never would have found time to attend if she hadn’t been, in fact, the officiant. Mrs. Fletcher, now retired, had somehow extracted a promise that Becky would run the show when her son got married, if he ever got married. Becky had no memory of agreeing to this. It was half a joke; Robby was always falling in and out of love with one woman or another. But the joke was on Becky, because Robby found the real deal with an actor named Tim and on an October Sunday in 2011, there she was at the front of First Presbyterian reading out a short speech she’d come up with on a San Francisco red-eye twelve hours before. It was Pierson’s first gay civil union, the church was full and buzzing, and Becky couldn’t help smiling back at Mrs. Fletcher beaming with joy in the front row.
(She tried to repress the sting of the story about the photographer, who wanted to get shots of the happy couple and their families down by the Rock River earlier in the day, per Pierson tradition. By the time everyone had gathered at the Galena bridge, the photographer and his assistant had called it off. They’d taken one look at the abandoned riverwalk and determined there was no angle that could avoid its decrepitude.)
That was when it hit her, in the church, when her gaze slid across the aisle to Tim’s family’s side. His much more complicated family, sprouted along several divorce and remarriage lines, including his two stepmothers and his grudging father who had only recently come around to Tim’s “lifestyle choice.” Mrs. Fletcher had related the entire saga, the convoluted arrangements and reception politics, and what Becky had not paid attention to at the time but remembered now, looking at all the drama-causers, was one line: That man’s new wife gets all the attention but it’s Tim’s mother I’m going to give the best seat in the house.
Tim’s mother. Heart pounding, Becky’s eyes sought her out, an older woman, unassuming, wiping her eyes. The first wife.
As soon as she could, she excused herself from the festivities.
It wasn’t Miles Green’s widow she needed access to, that imperious, well-guarded figure, it was his first wife. That’s who would have sold the portrait to American!
Five weeks later, Tarek and Mrs. Green’s chauffeur helped Adaline Green Remington into the Barn. They carried her wheelchair in but it was Becky who steered her down the ramp and into the gallery.
Mrs. Green—Becky knew that wasn’t her name anymore, but she couldn’t help thinking it—took her time settling herself. She was thin and straight-backed in her chair, a pale African American with dark speckles across her nose and cheeks, glossy hair neatly curled and pinned. Once she’d arranged her scarf and straightened her trousers, her hands lay heavy in her lap, pink palms up.
Then she looked at the work. Tarek had rehung the four portraits at Becky’s precise measurements so they’d be at eye level for Mrs. Green in her wheelchair.
“Well.”
If the portraits unsettled her, this woman who’d been married to Miles Green for only four years, no children, before the boom of his fame and fortune, she didn’t show it. Becky knew she couldn’t have seen these paintings since they were made in the drafty railroad flat the two of them had shared in the 1930s.
“So you really did. Get these together, almost all of them.”
“I did.”
“That one—” Mrs. Green pointed with her knuckles to Self-Portrait, Pool Hall. “You got it from that fellow in Canada?”
“Maybe,” Becky said.
“He bilked you.”
Becky laughed. “Probably.”
“Let me see that one. The third one.” Becky went to the painting and carefully lifted it off the wall, offering it to Mrs. Green with both hands. When it was on her lap, Mrs. Green breathed a long sigh. Becky crouched down and they both studied the exquisite little masterpiece.
For a long time they were quiet. Becky wondered what these paintings looked like to Mrs. Green, all these young faces of the man who’d left her for another woman, after many other women. That was so long ago in her full life. A private investigator had found her, married and comfortable, surrounded by kids and grandkids, in a Houston suburb. Becky had expected to have to woo hard, but it had taken only one heartfelt handwritten letter to persuade Mrs. Green to come see these pieces (all expenses paid, of course). Becky had offered to pay for her husband or son or anyone else to accompany her, but aside from the chauffeur arrangements, Mrs. Green had wanted to come alone.
At last Mrs. Green handed the frame back. “What does the Foundation say?”
“It doesn’t matter. Your name is on the papers.”
“And what’s the museum say?”
“They wouldn’t say much to me, unfortunately.”
“But you want it, the one of him at the docks.”
“Very much.”
Mrs. Green was nodding slow and heavy. “You’d keep it here, with the others?”
“Right there.” Becky pointed at the space reserved for it.
Mrs. Green laughed, a dry cough of a laugh. Becky didn’t understand, smiled uneasily. “I don’t mind,” the woman said eventually, still chuckling. “I don’t mind at all. Sure, put it here. Put him all the way down here.”
Becky was afraid to clarify, but she stumbled through it anyway, the embarrassing need to confirm that it was happening, it was true, it was yes. Yes, yes, yes. She pushed Mrs. Green’s unwieldy chair back up the ramp herself. Floated them both up to the waiting chauffeur.
The day Tarek hung Self-Portrait at the Docks didn’t arrive for nearly six long months, as American dragged out all the paperwork and legal proceedings for the sale. But when he did, Becky was frantic, barely contained, barely breathing until she could be left alone in the room.
Miles Green, self-portraits in watercolor. A completed circle, completely perfected. Five strong faces, one face. Together for the first and only time.
Look at what I did. Oh look. Look.
Becky stayed down in the Art Barn with those portraits for as long as she could. She would make it last, this moment. As soon as she was up there again—out there again, in the world—she would have to think about the long strips of yellow caution tape strung along Pierson’s riverwalk on both sides of the banks. The boards nailed to block the stairs that led down to what had been deemed a public hazard. She’d have to think about the op-ed that displayed a photo of the ugly damaged walkways next to one from thirty years ago, kids holding balloons and dangling their feet off the still-pristine concrete. It’s a shame, everyone said. It did shame Becky, every time she drove across a bridge and had to glimpse the crumbled mess that ran the length of the town.
She couldn’t fix the riverwalk now. The time to have done that was ten, maybe twenty years ago, according to the last surveyor team they’d had out. Their official recommendation was a complete tear-down, strip the banks and install blocks of mesh-wrapped rocks, a miserable low-cost retaining wall. Even all the money Becky had spent chasing these Miles Green portraits couldn’t bring back Pierson’s beautiful riverwalk. Time and the river’s endless flow had eroded the town’s shores irrevocably.
“Crumbled things from the inside,” is how one of the engineers had put it.
But in her subterranean gallery was this small piece of perfection, these portraits brought together for the first and maybe last time. Becky had done that, so she would stay down with them as long as she could.