Painted Ladies

44

Susan managed to serve the pizza as if it deserved the good china. She had some white wine with hers. I had beer. Old school. Susan took a barely measurable bite off the very end of a slice and chewed it carefully. Then she sipped her wine and put the glass down. I often had trouble putting the glass down.

“I acquired Ashton Prince’s doctoral dissertation,” she said, “from the BU library.”

I drank some beer.

“It’s about Lady with a Finch,” she said.

“How long?”

“One hundred and seventy-three pages.”

“About one painting?” I said.

“Oh, don’t pretend to be boorish,” she said.

“Oh, good,” I said. “You think it’s pretense.”

“You know there is much to say about a great painting, just as there is about a great poem.”

“Anyone done one hundred and seventy-three pages on Sonnet Seventy-three?” I said.

She smiled.

“Probably,” Susan said. “It is difficult to imagine a topic too small, or too silly, for a doctoral dissertation.”

“So,” I said. “He like the painting?”

“Yes,” Susan said. “But that’s not really the thrust of the dissertation. It traces the history of the painting, as artifact, from Hermenszoon on.”

“Really?”

“Or at least to the time when the dissertation was written.”

“Did he trace it to the Hammond?” I said.

“No,” Susan said. “At the time he finished the dissertation, the painting was still missing.”

“Where did he last locate it?”

“In the possession of someone named Amos Prinz, who had been in the camps with the only surviving member of the Herzberg family. Judah Herzberg looked out for his son Isaac, and for Amos Prinz, who was fourteen when he was sent to the camp, and already orphaned. Isaac was nine when he arrived at Auschwitz.”

She paused and drank some wine. And swallowed it slowly and shook her head.

“Nine years old,” she said. “My God.”

“I’ve always claimed,” I said, “that if I could think of it, someone would do it. But I don’t know; I’m not sure I could have thought of the Holocaust.”

“I know,” Susan said. “Should I go on? Or is it too boring.”

I waited until I had chewed and swallowed the large bite of pizza I had taken. Then I said, “It’s not boring.”

“Okay,” she said. “So after a while Judah dies, and Prinz takes over the care of Isaac, you know, sort of like a big brother. They both survived, and when they were liberated, Amos took Isaac back to Amsterdam, where the family had lived. The house had been looted and was boarded up, but Isaac found the painting in a secret place he remembered. His family had hidden it there when the Nazis came.”

“Probably the most valuable thing they owned,” I said. “What happens next.”

“They sold it,” Susan said. “Two kids, about fourteen and eighteen by then, destitute. They sold it to an art dealer in Rotterdam for . . . I think he calls it ‘a pittance.’ And where it went after that, the dissertation doesn’t know.”

“Do we know the name of the art dealer?”

“No,” Susan said. “But I thought it a fascinating story, especially for a doctoral dissertation.”

“It’s more fascinating than you know,” I said. “Did Prince offer any further identification of Amos Prinz?

“No,” Susan said. “He says that both Prinz and Herzberg disappeared, as he puts it, ‘obscured by the fog of historical events.’”

I nodded and ate some more pizza, and drank some beer, and gave Pearl a crust.

“You know we don’t feed her from the table,” Susan said.

“Of course we don’t,” I said.

“It just encourages her to beg.”

“What could I have been thinking?” I said.

“Your capacity for tough love gets very low scores,” she said.

“Always has,” I said.

“However,” she said, “your capacity for other kinds may have retired the trophy.”

“Pizza,” I said, “beer, and you. This is the trophy.”

“So how much more fascinating is it?” Susan said.

“Ashton Prince is Jewish, like you,” I said. “His real name is Ascher Prinz. His father was at Auschwitz.”

“His father?” Susan said.

“I found a phone number and the name Herzberg on a note tacked to the corkboard in his home office.”

“Did you call the number?”

“I did,” I said. “The answering machine said that it was something called the Herzberg Foundation.”

“Did you leave a message?”

“No.”

“Did you ever get a live person?”

“No.”

“Did you call the phone company?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a nonpublished number.”

“So they wouldn’t give you an address,” Susan said.

“No.”

“But you can find a way to get it,” she said.

“Quirk or Healy,” I said.

We were quiet.

“You think it’s the same people that Prince wrote about in his dissertation,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You think he’s Amos Prinz’s son,” she said.

“Yes.”

“That would be how he would know the things in the dissertation.”

“I’d say so.”

“So what does it all mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Yet.”

“If he was guilty of some kind of criminal behavior,” Susan said, “or even if he just wanted to conceal his identity, wasn’t it foolhardy to get that close to it all in his dissertation.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Or maybe,” Susan said, “he had to write a dissertation, and that’s what he had.”

“Maybe.”

“Or maybe he felt some need to sort of confess,” Susan said. “In which case, where better than a dissertation?”

“Your secret will be safe?” I said.

Susan smiled.

“Yes,” she said. “I think mine went from my typewriter direct to university microfilms, unseen by human eye.”

“You mind that?” I said.

Susan grinned at me.

“I was grateful,” she said.

“Bad?”

“It took me two weeks to write it,” she said.

“But it got you the Ph.D.,” I said.

“That’s what it was for,” she said.