The Dutch Masters
Clara, 15
New York City, 2025
Clara stood in front of one of her favourites, Girl in Blue Reading a Letter. She always wanted to know what the letter said. Sam often came up with good ones – You’re adopted! You’ve won the Lotto! You’re an alien! But Clara thought it was a great, untold family secret. A letter from her grandmother or great-grandmother. The real story.
The light in the painting was so beautiful, so perfect, so still. She wanted to be able to create like that. Who didn’t want to paint like Vermeer?
And she needed serenity right now. She needed to be ready to meet this person.
Clara didn’t even remember him as a person, just a concept.
Her biological father. She lived with him until he walked out and then her mother and Clara and Sam had moved to New York. And that was it. Clara never saw him again. He tried to video call her when she was little but the timing was not good between New York and Perth. Her mother said video calls didn’t work well for children and that Clara and her brother would always get upset and didn’t really understand why he wasn’t with them. There were emails. There were sporadic gifts when she was younger. And then, one day, as her mother predicted it would, the contact stopped completely. The line went dead.
Clara and Sam had never been back to Perth. Her mother hadn’t actually got their biological father’s consent to take them overseas. There were potential legal problems with taking your children out of the country without the other parent’s permission, her mother was well aware. She had to stay out of Australia just in case he caused any trouble. He never had, but her mother didn’t fully trust him.
To Clara, David had always been her father. Just as her mother had always been her mother.
She wasn’t even sure how to refer to her biological father. Her friend Georgina’s parents were divorced and of course she called her biological dad Dad and her stepdad Frank. But Georgina’s parents broke up when she was ten. And Frank lived in the same building and she had said hello to him every day, even before he and her mom got together. It was completely different.
Clara decided that she had to refer to him as her ‘biological father’ or use his first name. Yes, she would call him Richard.
Clara knew the story was complicated, but it was primarily his fault. They possibly got married too young, had twins (she had read enough of the parenting section of The New York Times to know that twins can be a relationship killer) and he had affairs. He moved on and moved out, leaving her mother to look after her and Sam.
‘I’m sorry to do this to you, Clara,’ her mother said. ‘But he is your biological father. I know you haven’t seen him in more than ten years and don’t remember him, but I guess the right thing to do is to meet him.’
A tiny window opened in Clara’s mind. A new father?
‘But I really would like you to meet him in a public place,’ said her mother. ‘Just be around other people. I still feel a bit funny about it. I always had it in my head that he would try and steal you back. I know, it’s silly.’
‘Sam is refusing to come. Can I take a friend? What if I bring Georgina with me?’
‘I don’t think Georgina’s mother will be very happy with me if you did that.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, I – I could come with you but I—’
‘No, it’s okay. I’ll go alone. It’s fine, we’ll go to the Met.’
They could see Clara’s favourite paintings and sculptures and get something to eat. She had her parents’ special Met card so they could go to the upstairs restaurant and put it on the tab. Or perhaps he would prefer the café in the American Wing?
‘Just let him pay, Clara,’ her mother said. ‘It will make him feel better.’
Clara stood at the grand entrance of the Met next to the gilded vase sculpture, beneath the columns, in the hum of the crowd, waiting for him. She knew what he looked like, but would she recognise him among the swell of tourists?
But there he was. An older version of Sam. His hair was almost fully grey. He wore jeans and a sweater.
He saw her and his face momentarily froze, as if Clara were a ghost. Then he began to wave and call out.
‘Oh, Clara, look at you!’ he said, walking up the stairs towards her. He hugged her before she had a chance to resist. And then she had a brief memory print of him lifting her into the air in a forest, but maybe she had seen a photograph of it, or imagined it, or dreamed it.
There was something, though, that reminded her of some other time. Possibly.
Tears welled in his eyes and he wiped them away with his hand.
‘I’m sorry, but this is quite emotional for me,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
He took a deep breath.
‘It’s alright,’ she said. ‘You probably remember me a lot more than I remember you. I was so little. And this is kind of weird.’
‘I know.’
‘Mom says hi. She says that you probably wanted to meet me without her.’
‘You’re so grown up.’
‘I guess.’
‘And you’re so – American.’
‘Of course I’m American,’ she laughed. ‘Although my passport is Australian.’
He smiled. ‘I never thought I would have New Yorkers as children. The last holiday we had together before everything happened – I guess, I didn’t know it would be the last. And then it all fell apart. I was really surprised that Athena met someone so quickly and moved you guys over here. And then there was Covid. I kept hearing how bad it was in New York. I wanted to get you back. I did, you know.’
Clara smiled again and handed him a ticket.
‘I’ll pay,’ he said.
‘That’s okay, we’re members.’
‘Of course you are. I’ll make a donation then.’
‘Thank you. That’s nice of you.’
‘I thought of you a lot during the pandemic. Was it terrible here? I read that it was.’
‘I played a lot of video games with Sam. Read books. Painted. I painted a lot. I ran out of paint,’ she said. ‘And the Met and all the museums and galleries were closed for ages. The pandemic was terrible. We were lucky. Not everyone was so lucky.’
He listened as he followed her up the main stairs.
‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t ask you which wing you want to go to. You probably want to go to the American Wing, right? I’m taking us straight to the Dutch Masters,’ Clara said.
‘I don’t really know anything about art, Clara. I just wanted to see you.’
‘Okay,’ she said. It was interesting that her biological father was the only person she had ever met who had confessed to knowing nothing about art. That’s all anyone ever talked about!
There was nothing art could not teach her. Not a corner of the world or an era in history that wasn’t touched on at the Met, in some way. She liked going to the Guggenheim too, and MOMA of course, but Clara always returned to the classics. They had captured her heart long ago. Which reminded her.
‘Oh, I think there is something you’d like,’ she said. ‘It’s this way.’
He followed her through the labyrinth that she knew so well.
‘Here you go!’ she said, pointing to a huge dot painting on a canvas.
‘Oh, right.’
‘It’s Aboriginal art,’ she said. ‘Do you recognise it? It’s on loan from the National Gallery of Australia. Is it famous there?’
He smiled and nodded as if pretending to like it.
‘Like I said, Clara, art’s not really my thing.’
Clara understood then that he was telling the truth. There was not even a flicker of recognition in his eyes. He wasn’t looking at the dots and thinking, oh yes, the sunset or oh, I can see the colours of the earth. He wasn’t thinking about the art at all. So odd.
‘Are you hungry? Thirsty? Can we get a coffee?’ he asked, rubbing his eyes. ‘I think I’m going to be permanently jet-lagged.’
‘Oh, sure,’ she said. ‘There’s a restaurant upstairs or the café – but maybe outside is better?’
Outside it was fall in Central Park. It was probably more his thing than the Vermeers. It was Jazz in the Park this weekend. The brassy saxophones played amid the autumn palette of crispy leaves.
Mom and David had always loved this weekend. They would stroll around for hours together in their (unintentionally, so they said) matching cashmere coats, arms linked, sipping coffees. They often saw famous actors and influencers in the park. Sam cared about that stuff more than her. Whatever job Sam got in the future it would probably involve celebrities and parties and staying up all night. He was good at that.
As they walked down the stairs, back onto Fifth Avenue, she realised she really couldn’t imagine her mother married to this man. He was just so different from David. Looked different, acted different. And he sounded so strange. Maybe this is what Australian people were like? Australian men?
Her grandparents, Yiayia Koula and Pappou Evan, had come over a few times, but it was hard to think of them as Australian because they seemed so Greek. Their suitcases were crammed full of cookie tins filled with shortbread dusted in snowy icing sugar in crescent shapes and glass bottles full of marinated olives. Once her grandfather hadn’t sealed the jar properly and all Yiayia Koula’s clothes arrived completely soaked in olive oil. Somehow Yiayia Koula made out that it was her mother’s fault for living in New York. That was quite a strange day. They never brought olives over again after that.
‘Just play along,’ her mother would say to the twins before she took a car out to JFK to meet them.
The first time her mom had said that, Clara hadn’t known what she meant until they actually arrived – and then it was pretty obvious.
‘How’s my other father? Richard? Do you ever see him around?’ Clara asked Yiayia Koula once and only once.
Yiayia’s eyes squinted and her mouth frowned and wrinkled at the same time. ‘No. I never see that man. I knew that your mother should never have married him. I told her so many times, but she didn’t listen to me.’
So Clara never asked again.
And then the pandemic arrived. Yiayia Koula implored them to come back.
‘Finally, an upside to living in the most isolated city in the world,’ her mother said. ‘There is no Covid in Perth. Your grandmother wants us to leave New York while we still can. But I just can’t.’
Clara remembered her mother making that call. They would not fly back to Perth. They would stay in New York. It was their home.
Her mother always said the best thing about Perth was eating fish and chips on Cottesloe Beach at sunset. To Clara it remained a beautiful beach in photographs where her biological father and grandparents and uncles and cousins lived. Where her mother was so unhappy after being in London for a decade and her husband running off. David invited her to New York and she saw it as a chance to come back into the real world.
Clara was unintentionally leading Richard towards the coffee and bagel vendor at the entrance of the park. The coffee was terrible but she didn’t know if he would notice.
‘Coffee, Clara?’ he asked.
‘Yes please.’
‘Bagel?’
‘No, just a coffee. But you have one. Mom said that bagels aren’t an Australian thing.’
‘I can’t imagine your mother eating a bagel.’
‘She prefers croissants.’
Something flashed in his eyes and then it was gone again. He handed her the coffee and they sat on a bench under a tree with orange foliage. A woman sounding like Ella Fitzgerald was singing in the distance, deep and raw.
‘So why didn’t you come over here until now?’ Clara asked.
‘Well, it’s a long way. I had plans earlier but I – I have another family.’
‘Yes. I guess it is a long way.’
‘And your mother wanted me to stay away, I think. We both agreed it was better to just move on with things. I mean, you and Sam are also my children, but I – I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know if I’m your child or you don’t know if it was the right thing to do?’
‘Of course you’re my child. It’s just that – I assumed that you and Sam were better off with her and your new father. And I’d already met Paulina. And, she was already pregnant. So, it was easier like that. And it was hard for both of us, your mother and I, being married. I wasn’t so good at being married to her.’
‘So I hear.’
‘But Athena wasn’t always easy to live with either. She really struggled after she had you and your brother when we came back from London. Maybe I should have helped her more. But it was a long time ago now. I guess from the outside I’m always going to look like the bad guy.’
Clara didn’t say anything. She knew her mother wasn’t perfect but didn’t want to hear it from him. She thought about asking more questions, but instead sipped her coffee. She knew she would never get any proper answers, because when you’re fifteen nobody ever gives you the whole story about anything. Especially relationships.
‘Oh, you’ll find out,’ her mother always said. ‘I can tell you now but it might spoil the journey for you. The journey is what’s important. Trust me. If there was a book, nobody would read it. And it wouldn’t be your book, it would be my book. And, although you are my daughter, we have different books.’
Mom loved saying things like that.
And so they watched people in the park go by. There were young families with kids in strollers, cocooned in their sleeping bags. A guy with dreadlocks smoked a scented cigarette, carrying a saxophone case with his other hand. Old people in woollen hats and scarves shuffled along commenting on the brooding weather overhead. And yet at the same time everything was very still.
Sitting next to this older, greying version of Sam, their coats not quite touching, Clara realised she felt nothing. Whatever it was, whatever they shared was far, far, away and would never be in Central Park. Never be at the Met. He would be a memory, lifting her up in that forest, wherever that was. And even that, she conceded, may have been a dream.
What did she want from this anyway? Was she going to pour out her heart to him and then finally have someone in the world who would understand her? She was far too cynical for that.
‘So, is there anything you particularly wanted to talk about or see since you’ve come all the way over here?’ Clara asked. ‘I feel like we should be talking.’
‘Look, I really wanted to see you and Sam. I have always thought about you both. You were my first children. That was special. Can you tell Sam that too?’
‘Okay.’
‘And I guess I wanted to apologise.’
‘Apology accepted,’ Clara said, and then immediately regretted saying it so quickly.
Her mother had said to her and Sam: ‘Never marry a man like him. And, if you do, split up before you have kids. I mean, it was my own fault. I knew what he was like when I married him.’
‘But, Athena,’ David would say. ‘If you hadn’t come to my book signing we never would have met. If you were happily married to Richard then our story would never have happened.’
‘Oh, yes,’ her mother would say. ‘The book signing. Where we met.’
Clara always thought it was lucky for her mother, really. David was so lovely. It was impossible to think that he hadn’t always been there with her. David’s parents and his first wife’s parents were so happy that David met someone in Perth, a young Australian – with twins. Athena slotted into the family, and David’s first son, Oscar, visited all the time. Clara loved her older stepbrother. Oscar was far less annoying than Sam, that was for sure.
Clara smiled at Richard, who was engrossed in his bagel spread with cream cheese and possibly trying to think of something to say. It was like a very awkward date.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I hope that you have a nice time in New York.’
‘There’s another thing—’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m actually here with my family. You have another brother and a sister, you know. Just in case you wanted to meet them. I mean, they would love to meet you. I think it would be great for them to know someone in New York and for you to know them.’
Clara felt a chill. She had not expected this. She’d thought that he was here alone. But how stupid she was: of course he had brought his second wife and their children with him. He wouldn’t have come all the way over here just to see her.
‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t really—’
‘No, it’s fine. I mean, I just thought I would ask, you know.’
She nodded. She was selfish, she knew. But she did not want to have other siblings.
‘I better get back. I have some study to do. I hope you have a great time on your vacation,’ said Clara.
‘You say vacation. I say holiday,’ he said.
‘Oh, right,’ she said.
‘Well, thanks, Clara,’ he said, shaking her gloved hand.
She wasn’t sure if she should leave him there, on a bench in Central Park. But she had to see how David was doing after his chemo and this other guy was a stranger in the city, in her life. She wasn’t sure there was anything left to say. And she wondered if the whole thing had somehow been a ruse to get her to meet his other family.
‘If you ever need anything, please let me know and I’ll try and help,’ he said, drawing her back into a hug.
Clara smiled and let him hug her, although it went on a little too long.
‘Okay, bye then,’ she said, and started walking home. She didn’t look back or wish that she knew him better. He was too strange, too foreign, too not her father. And the half-siblings. No, she did not want a bar of them. Or Paulina.
_____
‘Soooooo, how was it?’ her mom asked, as soon as she walked into the apartment and took off her coat.
‘Oh, hi, Mom. Yeah, it was weird, I don’t know.’
‘Are you feeling alright? Do you want to talk about it?’ she asked from her chair, which overlooked the park.
‘I just – no, not really,’ she said, although her mom clearly wanted to talk about it. ‘Did you see us on the bench?’
‘No, I just sat down.’
‘He wasn’t really into the Met. We went to Jazz in the Park and got a coffee from the van.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘He had a bagel.’
‘I probably don’t need to know that level of detail.’
‘Well, I kept thinking that you and David would walk past. Is he going okay?’
‘He’s not feeling very well after the chemo. He’s having a nap now.’
Clara sat down opposite her mother and looked straight at her.
‘I’m sure David will get better soon. He has to.’
‘I’m sorry if he’s not what you expected, Clara.’
‘It was just a bit weird.’
‘Yes, well,’ said her mom, tucking her hair behind her ear.
‘Aren’t you curious? What he’s like now?’
‘Clara, we were together for a very long time. We gave it a real red-hot go. I know what he’s like. I don’t feel like reliving any of it. The best part was having you and Sam, so I’m obviously grateful for that, but him as a person – no.’
‘He wanted me to meet his other children. And his wife.’
‘I knew it.’
‘I don’t want to,’ said Clara.
‘You can if you want,’ her mom said, shrugging.
Clara shook her head.
‘What are you reading?’ Clara asked.
‘Just looking at this book David gave me a long time ago,’ she said. ‘His favourite poems. If you’re in the mood for Prufrock.’
‘Might help make sense of a few things,’ Clara said, taking the book.
‘Actually, I might have a rest too,’ her mother said, standing up. ‘There’s some leftover Japanese in the fridge for lunch.’
‘Okay,’ Clara said. She felt like miso soup and soba noodles.
Her mother walked out of the lounge and she heard her open and shut her bedroom door.
Clara smoothed her hand over the gold printing on the front cover and opened the book. Dear Athena, Sorry I couldn’t say goodbye. Hope everything goes well for you. Hope to see you in New York one day. Best wishes, David. She noticed the date: May 27, 1993. It was a long time ago, way before she was born. But no, it couldn’t be.
Had Mom and David known each other years earlier? That didn’t make sense. They’d met at a book signing. That was what they’d always said, but this was proof of something else. Although she wasn’t sure of what.
Should she tear out the incriminating page? Burn it? What did this mean?
Clara closed the book. Perhaps there were two sides to the story of her mother’s marriage to Richard. Could she have been in love with David all along?
Clara suddenly felt like she was Vermeer’s girl in blue, reading the letter. She imagined her brother coming up with another scenario: Your mother and stepfather knew each other all along! Even when your mother was married to your birth father!
She wished she had never read the inscription in that book. Her version of events, of her life, was the way she wanted it to read. But something had changed today. Now there were other versions, other stories. Her story was possibly not her own.
She would ask Mom and David in the morning, or once David was feeling better. She wanted to know the truth. The real truth.
Clara stood and looked out the window on to the park. She thought she could see her biological father on the bench where she had left him. Sitting and waiting for her to return so she could meet her half-siblings. But then the man stood up and started walking and she realised it wasn’t him.
It wasn’t about him. It was never about him. The story was about her.