The Afterlife: A Memoir

PART III

In the fall of 1988, six years after the close of my parents’ second marriage, four years before the death of Eldridge, my mother telephoned from Miami to inform me that her boyfriend, S., whom she had met in Alcoholics Anonymous, would soon be en route to New York. The reason for S.’s visit — his first since the mid-seventies, when, as a young man setting out to study painting and drawing, he’d fallen instead into drinking, and become, according to my mother, at least intermittently itinerant — was, my mother told me, to locate and, with any luck, authenticate a certain painting, a landscape that had, back when S. was an aspiring artist living in Manhattan, captivated his imagination.

“Painting? Authenticate?” I asked.

“He’ll have to tell you about it. It’s his trip,” she told me. Then she said, “Hang on a minute,” and there was a rustling sound — my mother’s open hand closing over the telephone’s mouthpiece — and I could hear her saying to S., in a stage whisper that revealed the faint nasality of her southern-Appalachian accent, “Go ahead and tell Don what you need to tell him. He’ll listen.”

S. spoke exceedingly slowly and quietly. I stood in the cramped and cluttered kitchen of the Upper East Side apartment that I shared, in those days, with my girlfriend, K. I pressed the phone receiver against my ear and heard S.’s soft, anxious voice, a voice made, as I think of it now, almost entirely of breath, of exhalations, saying, at the excruciating rate of about one word every ten seconds — I am exaggerating in fact, though not in spirit—“Oh,

“Mom says you’re coming to New York,” I said quickly, trying to use my own words the way an English bobby uses his nightstick to hurry vagrants along.

“New York …,” he said.

And I waited.

“ … Yes …,” he went on.

We waited. And eventually, gradually, infuriatingly, in bits and pieces, a story emerged — the story of the painting.

The painting, I learned, was old. It was rectangular in shape, maybe four feet tall and two feet wide. Its wooden frame was large and slightly ornate. As I understood things, the work belonged — or had once belonged — to a man who owned a brownstone in Chelsea, a boardinghouse, a building in which men lived in rooms. It is possible that this man had bought the painting somewhere in Europe or America. Or maybe he had simply found it.

Slowly, over the course of many minutes, my mother’s boyfriend in Miami told me that there had been another man on the scene in the downtown boardinghouse. For some reason, I am under the impression that this man was related to a friend of S.’s; he was, I believe, one of several cousins who at one time or another either had possession of or claimed to know something about the painting. Anyway this man remembered having seen, in an art magazine, a reproduction of the work. The cousin could not recall the name or the date of the magazine or even the content of the article. In fact, all the cousin remembered with any certainty, according to S., was the fact that the painting was “important.”

But in what way important? This was the question that was to become—had become — S.’s obsession.

For nearly fifteen years after he left New York, my mother told me, S. had wandered up and down the Eastern Seaboard, living in short-term lodgings, drinking, and working the kinds of temporary jobs — auto-body painting, sign painting, construction, and so on — that are often performed by people in his situation. At a certain point, he wound up back in Florida, where he was from, and where, after repeated attempts — in this he was like my mother; the movement from defeat to recovery was a bond between them — he had managed to get, and stay, sober. He had even begun, for the first time since dropping out of the School of Visual Arts in New York, to paint.

I have one of S.’s paintings from this period hanging on my living-room wall. Like all the works he made after joining AA and moving into my mother’s condominium in South Miami, it is signed with his middle name, Craig. It is small, more or less the size and shape of an LP record jacket, and it is, as were many of S.’s works, a landscape. But it is not painted from life. Or is it? It shows, in the middle distance, and to the right side, a steep-sided mountain, predominantly white and lavender in color, as if overgrown with flowering plants. In the upper-left foreground (hanging down from a corner, like decorative proscenium elements) are some delicately painted leaves that look almost prehistoric; far off to the right, against the mountain and a blue-white-lavender sky, a solitary, impossibly tall and narrow palm tree seems to be growing out of an impossibly deep and wide gorge. When I look at the painting, with its strange topography, its sliver of moon in an unnatural sky, and its dizzying, off-center palm tree, I feel there is something amiss in the relative sizes and positions of the objects. The effect is of a disturbance, either in the mind of the painter or in the world of the painting. And I feel, considering this disturbance, that the scene is missing something — a Tyrannosaurus rex, perhaps. Then I notice, in a way that has more to do with feeling than observation, the symmetry inside the disturbance, and I am aware that S., deliberately and skillfully, or maybe by accident, has painted a truly alternative world, which is to say a world that is different from ours not only by virtue of the imaginary elements of which it is composed but also in the laws of whatever nature governs the spatial relations between those elements.

But what about the other painting, the one from S.’s days as a young artist living in New York? For S., that painting had been, during his transient years, a source of creative contemplation, and a symbol of whatever remained in him of the will to escape his circumstances and work as an artist. More to the point — and especially during the period when he was, to use an expression that is popular in AA rooms everywhere, hitting bottom — it had, I believe, served as a symbol, maybe the spiritual symbol, of his desire to live. He had thought about, and pondered over, that painting almost every day of his life as an alcoholic. When he was spraying paint on rusted cars, when he was hammering carpentry nails, when he was sitting at a bar, in New York or Florida, he thought about the painting. S. thought about the man who had first suggested the importance of the work, and about the magazine article that he had heard about but never seen; and these thoughts led him to think about European and American painting traditions, and about the history of art in general, and, I suppose, about all the famous paintings that he had seen only in books. The memory of the important painting in its huge and heavy wooden frame — not to mention a preoccupation with the thought of one day verifying his evolving ideas about the painting’s provenance — had, I realized in my conversations with both S. and my mother, helped keep him alive.

“What do you think it is?” I finally asked him at some point in our phone conversation, that day in 1988.

“A what?” I said.

“ … a Leonardo da Vinci,” he said.

“Put Mom on the phone, okay?” I said.

“Hello? Don?”

“What’s going on?”

“He believes the painting may be a Leonardo da Vinci, dear.”

“I know. I heard him.”

“He’s going to spend a week in New York and he wants to research this and he wants to know if you’ll help.”

“Help?”

Which is what I did. After a fashion. When you are, as I was — and as I am — the anxious child of a volatile, childlike mother, you learn how to appear to accept, as realistic and viable, statements and opinions that are clearly ludicrous.

You may learn, too, as a defense against the absurd disappointments caused by fragile and unhappy parents, the crude art of sarcasm. “When is he coming on this vision quest?” I asked my mother, and she filled me in on the details. A month or so later, S. took up temporary lodging with — and here the story becomes somewhat foggy — one or another of those above-mentioned cousins, the man who, following the death of the owner of the downtown boardinghouse in which S. had first seen the painting, now had possession of the painting. S. promptly photographed it, then took a pair of scissors and cut swatches from the spare canvas tucked away along the inside perimeter of the stretcher. This seemed to me to be an act of mutilation, or, at the very least, one of proprietary aggression, and probably out of keeping with whatever protocol might exist for the care of old artworks. Were you supposed to chop up the canvas? On the other hand, what concern was it of mine? Why should I care what S. might do to some painting that was, in all likelihood, just a piece of junk sitting in an apartment?

Questions like this — any and all questions, for that matter, concerning S., my mother, and the painting — frequently became points of division between me and K. Long before any of this crazy art-historical family business ever got started, K. had learned that whenever my mother and I got involved in each other’s lives, even over matters of no apparent consequence, there was likely to be trouble on the way for her, trouble in the form of fighting between us. In those years, I was terribly unskilled at managing the consequences of my loyalty to my mother, a person who was constitutionally incapable of staying out of her children’s affairs, or of coping with what she regarded as hostile infractions—“Mom, do you think the painting is a Leonardo da Vinci?”—against her own liberal and openminded worldview. Thus I found myself repeatedly subjecting K. to antagonistic appraisals of my mother’s cultivation of fantasy. When K. went along with my negative assessments, I turned the tables on her and rushed to my mother’s defense.

S., in the meantime, had arrived in Manhattan. He was coming full circle. I remember that he visited me and K. in our apartment on Eighty-fifth Street. I also have a memory of going with him to see the painting. What I chiefly remember about the painting now is not how it looked, precisely, but how I felt, standing next to my mother’s boyfriend, a man on a mission to find a Leonardo da Vinci.

As I recall, the painting appeared dirty. It was leaning against a wall. Its carved and filigreed frame was, as S. had indicated, massive and even oppressive; it had the look of mahogany, stained to a shade of darker brown, that I have come to associate with the woodwork inside Victorian-era brownstones; the frame was about the size of a headboard for a bed. The painting — imprisoned, as it were, inside this boxy frame — looked somehow out of scale with itself. I should point out that at that time in my life I knew practically nothing about the history of painting, European, American, or otherwise, and that what little I know today would in no way qualify me to appraise a work of art. That said, the painting did not strike me as an Old Master. It did not, in fact, look like an obvious find, regardless of its period. In the bottom half of the picture was a rocky stream or small river that tumbled directly toward the viewer. Trees grew along the banks of the stream, and green hills sloped up and away from the center of the painting. The foreground was dominated, interestingly, by a number of tall and leafy marsh reeds; on the stalk of one sat a bird — in the dove family? — rendered large for the sake of perspective. The sky above this nature scene was radiant, glowing, painted in an almost white shade near the horizon, and growing, with increasing altitude, darker and grayer, as if the unseen sun had barely begun to rise.

But something about those round rocks and the water cascading over them did not look right to me. The colors, I thought, seemed odd; the trees were luridly dark, while the river was sparkling and bright. The light in the painting, the light from the invisible though rising (or possibly setting) sun, originated in the background. Wouldn’t that background light argue for a darker foreground river? And what about those leafy Southern Hemisphere plants? What about the single, fat songbird? Overall, the scene looked romantic in a faintly unpleasant way It looked, I thought, offi-puttingly Victorian — as did the frame. I couldn’t help thinking of turn-of-the-century stained glass. I did not find the work beautiful.

And yet I have to admit that it affected me. Whenever I think about it, I am struck by a desire to see it again.

All I have to look at, though, is the photograph S. took during his stay in New York, a badly aimed, poorly lit snapshot printed on Kodak paper. I also have a few scraps of the canvas that S. scissored off the painting’s stretcher. And I have copies of the replies written to S. by curators to whom he had sent letters of inquiry and, presumably, duplicates of the photograph. One letter to S., dated November 28, 1988, and sent to my mother’s address in Miami, is from the Frick Collection, and it suggests that S. contact the European Paintings Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The letter is a clear blow-off. Who could blame the people at the Frick? An undiscovered Leonardo? Another letter, from the New York Public Library, proposes that S. get in touch with the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, in reference to the Leonardo da Vinci collection there. A December 9, 1988, letter from Sotheby’s indicates a lack of interest in offering the work at auction.

What was S. doing?

In addition to posting letters to museums, he was going to the Frick Art Reference Library, on Seventy-first Street, where he spent days paging through old art books in the hope of finding a plate that matched the snapshot he carried everywhere he went. He stressed to me the value of old art books, reasoning that the painting — which, he theorized, had been either stolen or lost from a private collection — might have been in currency in former times. When I wondered aloud why he didn’t throw the painting into a taxi and haul it straight to the Met, he made the excuse that, after all, it was not his painting to cart around town. Besides, he told me, he enjoyed looking through those old books in those fascinating archives, which were, I realized, a world away from suburban Miami and his life as an underemployed artist with a history of dead-end jobs.

In Miami, my mother waited for word. We spoke more and more frequently. “Have you heard any news from S. about the painting?” she’d ask me. Or I might ask her, “Have you heard any news from S. about the painting?” But I’m not sure that I ever told her, in so many words, what I thought of S. and his ideas about the painting.

“Mom, can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Why doesn’t he take the painting to be evaluated by someone who knows about these things?”

“Don, this is his project. I think we ought to just let him do things his way. It’s important to him.”

“I know that. But his way isn’t very productive.”

“We don’t know that yet.”

“Well.”

“This means a lot to him, and he needs to sort it out in his own good time,” she told me, and I could hear, in her voice, the serene detachment so crucial to ongoing sobriety. But I also heard — and maybe this was what that detachment was meant to hide — something that sounded a lot like fear. She was, after all, S.’s partner. She was implicated in his scheme to identify what might become, if he could prove its authenticity, one of the most famous paintings in the world. My mother, in the years after she got sober, had shown an alarming gullibility in matters relating to mental and spiritual health. By 1988, I had become adept at listening to her describe workshops devoted to past-life channeling, to radical forms of astrology to speaking in dead languages. What was her angle on the painting? Did she truly think that her boyfriend had stumbled on a Leonardo da Vinci? Or was she simply concerned about the effects on S. of what might, were he ever to actually identify the painting, come as a shattering disappointment?

And what about me? Why was I going along with this nonsense, phoning museums and antiquarian booksellers and dealers, and asking them, on S.’s behalf, what a person might do, in the event that such a person might or might not know about a painting that might or might not be a missing priceless European treasure?

After a handful of humiliating phone calls, I gave up. I simply couldn’t do it. I wished S. well — he had by then returned to Miami — and I asked him to keep me informed of his progress. I put the snapshots he’d given me, along with the swatches of decaying brown fabric, in a drawer. And I tried to stop thinking about the problem of the painting.

One aspect of the problem, however, had me bothered. For many years, back in the days when she was drinking, my mother (in the manner of so many high-functioning alcoholics who get a lot done) had run a college department that specialized in costume history, fashion design, and textile chemistry. She knew how to date a fabric sample. Or, if she didn’t know how to do it herself, she knew how to contact people who did.

I asked her about this. “Mom, does that canvas seem to you to be about five hundred years old?”

“It’s so hard to tell, Don.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can’t you take a piece over to the University of Miami and see if anyone there can subject it to some tests?”

“Oh, I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I need to respect the fact that this is not my affair.”

“You don’t want to find out, do you? You don’t want to know!” I said to her at some point along the way.

Most likely, I was getting squared off to pick a fight with K., who, in fact, had been more than decent about this whole enterprise.

“How’s your mother?” K. would sometimes ask, when she saw me stagger off the phone like a person who’d drunk from a goblet that had smoke billowing over its rim.

“They’re out of their minds! They’re out of their minds! Leonardo da Vinci? Fuck me!”

“Donald, you knew it was insane.”

“I know.”

“So what’s the surprise?”

“It’s not — it’s not that it’s a surprise. It’s not a surprise.”

“Okay? So?”

K. had a point. Unfortunately, an understanding of reality is a liability in a situation in which reality is inadmissible — or, rather, in a situation in which people’s feelings and hunches, their hungers and appetites, serve as reality. Hidden inside the unfolding narrative of the painting — a narrative not only of feelings and hunches but also of grandiose hopes and dreams — was, I felt, the story of my alcoholic family. This story, now being told through the story of a moldy old painting that might, until shown otherwise, be a Leonardo da Vinci, was, I thought, a story in which pretty much everything that could ever happen in life — everything that could come true tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that — might, until shown otherwise, be the miraculous, transformative thing that, like a great work of art, brings us closer to salvation.

“Your mother,” K. would say to me whenever I got off the phone. Then she would sigh.

A few years before S. undertook his pilgrimage to the art libraries of New York, I boarded a plane and flew to Miami to visit my mother. It was a trip I had been looking forward to. In some ways, I suppose, I had been looking forward to this trip for much of my life. The time had come, my mother and I had agreed, for us to have a talk about our past. Specifically, she had invited me to sit at the table and tell her what it had been like, during the years in which she’d lived in and out of a blackout, to be her child.

It was, as I recall, the week of Thanksgiving. My grandparents were driving down from North Carolina. They, S., and I were gathering at my mother’s apartment to give thanks for her relatively new sobriety, which, however insecure, had nonetheless been hard won.

A night or two before this celebration was to take place, I sat in the dining room with S. and my mother. I suppose I must have been twenty-seven years old at the time. I remember — and I should have been more savvy about these kinds of signs and portents — that the two of them sat in chairs that had been pulled out from the table and pushed hard against the dining-room wall. I, on the other hand, sat in an improvised place lacking defined coordinates — the ambiguous middle of the room. In the scene as it was set, my mother and S. were positioned like heads of state, listening, in their official capacity, to the appeals of a supplicant. But they were also a couple of nervous alcoholics with their backs to the wall, waiting to be attacked. As usual, my mother was smoking up a storm. Her ashtray, her cigarettes, her lighter, and her coffee in its brightred mug sat close to her on the table. Somewhere in the apartment, her fluffy white cat with a skin disease was lurking.

“Don, I want you to know that I know there are things you need to say to me,” she said. And I had to wonder: What was he doing here? She leaned forward. “You go ahead.”

“Um.”

“I suspect you must be upset and curious about some things.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve got a lot of serenity in my life now, so I can hear you.” She turned to S. “Isn’t that right?”

“Do you have serenity, Don?” my mother asked me.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Yes and no.”

“That doesn’t sound like serenity.”

“I guess it’s something I’ll have to work on.”

“You’re angry.”

I sighed. Things weren’t getting off to a good start. I said to my mother, “Really, I just wanted to be able to say a few things.”

“I’m listening.”

“I was hoping we’d talk. About the way things were when Terry and I were little. When we were growing up.”

But what, after all, did I want to tell her? Did I want to tell her how scary she’d looked to me when she was drunk? Did I want to tell her what it had been like to lie awake at night, waiting for the house to be quiet? Or did I want to tell her that I, her son, lived every day with the fear that I would never know how to love another person? Were these the kinds of things that a man could say to his mother? Were these the kinds of things that a man could say to his recovering-alcoholic mother while her recovering-alcoholic boyfriend was sitting beside her?

I sat in my chair. They sat in their chairs. Not one of us, I think, was serene. Everywhere on the white walls of my mother’s condominium were the framed Art Deco prints that my father had bought for her, fashion illustrations by Icart and Erté, and a large series of magazine plates of the sort that had been featured in popular French publications of the early twentieth century. The plates showed women wearing improbable dresses and enormous hats, some of them walking the favored dogs of the day, borzois and other distinguished breeds. This was my mother’s art. It was from a period in history, and represented a set of styles, that she loved. I now have most of it — about a dozen pieces — in my apartment in New York, wedged behind furniture, propped against walls, where it can’t easily be seen. For a while, after my mother died, I tried hanging one of the Icarts, a beautiful illustration of a woman undressing in a darkened bedroom. I gave it a prominent place over a low sofa in the living room. But after a while I couldn’t bear to look at it. I had to take it down and put it away.

That night in Florida, the night in the dining room, I watched my mother smoke her cigarettes and drink her coffee. Every now and then, she reached downward and made tiny come-hither motions with her hand, in the direction of the cat, which stood off in the shadows, as if uncertain whether it was safe to come all the way into the room. I had watched my mother smoke cigarettes and drink coffee my entire life. Never at night, though. At night it had been Jim Beam in a large glass.

She said to me — and I could hear, again, that nasal, southern-Appalachian sound in her voice—“Everything you want to talk about is in the past.”

“I know.”

“Why do you need to live in the past?”

“I’m not living in the past.”

“You are. You live in the past. I’ve let the past go. I don’t live in the past. I won’t.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

“Don’t come into my home and attack my serenity. I don’t need your hostility. If you have something constructive to add to this conversation, go ahead. But if you’re going to tear me down and get at me with your hostility, that’s something I don’t need. You want to live in the past, and you want to drag me back into all that shit. You’re angry. You’re angry and you’re hostile.”

“Wait a minute,” I begged. And I went on: “In the first place, there’s a difference between anger and hostility.” What a mistake. My mother glared at me, and then turned away and looked at S., who, frankly, seemed terrified. She said to him, in a kind of scream, “I don’t need this hatred from my own child!”

And to me she said, “You can be a supportive member of this family or you can get out of my house.”

It was not long before I found myself lying on the carpet in my mother’s dining room, curled up, weeping. From time to time, I looked up and saw my mother or S., or the pair of them, peering out of their bedroom on the far side of the apartment. It was as if, like the cat, they were afraid to step into the room. Were they afraid of contamination? Contamination by the Past? I was the Past. The bedroom door would open a short way, and light would spill out, and, by that light, I could distinguish their figures. My mother looked tall and imposing in her plain white housedress. S., by contrast, was small and slight and wiry, a thin man whose gestures and movements, like his voice (and the cryptic signatures he gave his own paintings, and the haphazard research methods he would use, years later, to avoid properly identifying the painting in New York), conveyed his need to remain unseen, undetected, and, like the creator of the work that became his obsession, unknown.

I do not recall precisely how things played out over the remainder of that dismal trip to Florida. Nor do I recall at what point I became certain that S. and my mother were conspiring to leave the identity of the painting a mystery By the middle of 1989, the matter seemed to have been dropped.

Then, after what seemed a long stretch of time, I got a phone call. It was S. He said that he had something important to tell me concerning the painting, which, as it turned out, was still in the hands of one of the cousins. S. told me that he had been doing a lot of thinking about the painting. He told me that he was, by the way, grateful for my help during the months when he had worked so hard to establish the painting’s authenticity. But he had been wrong, he said, wrong about the painting. After much meditation on the problem, he had come to realize why he—we—had failed to identify the painting. He told me that this realization had caused him much pain, and a great deal of soul-searching. He told me that the painting was not what he had taken it to be.

Of the many silences in all the conversations I had with S. in those years — the years before he fell out of AA and out of my mother’s life — this seemed the longest. I held the phone to my ear. What was S. trying to tell me?

“Excuse me?”

“Frederic Church,” he said again.

Frederic Church? The Hudson River School painter? Nineteenth century? Owned that Persian-style mansion overlooking the Hudson in upstate New York? Famous for his landscapes? Spent some time in South America? Painted animals and birds?

“Frederic Church,” I said to S. “Thank you for telling me that.” And a while later we finished our conversation and hung up.

K. and I had, by this time, moved to another, smaller, apartment on the Upper East Side. For the better part of a year, I had been depressed, and our relationship — confined, as it were, to a space far too cramped to permit either privacy or a comfortable intimacy — was beginning to unravel.

“He says he now thinks it’s a Frederic Church,” I told her when, later that night, she got home from work, slammed the door to our apartment, and dumped her shoulder bag on the floor.

“Whatever,” K. said, capturing perfectly, I thought, the strange and sad and true essence of everything.

And, really, that should have been that. But there was more to come.

Over a year had passed since S.’s first trip north to look at the painting. Now, in early winter, he came back. For a period of months, he lived in Manhattan, in a Chelsea boardinghouse, a building, as I imagine it, similar to the one where years earlier this story had begun. It must, for S., have been something of a homecoming. Shortly before Christmas, my mother got on a plane and flew to New York for a weeklong visit. Together, she and S. camped out in his room. There was no phone; my communication with my mother was restricted to times when she could manage to fight the winter winds and get to a pay phone on the corner. Because her circulation was bad from smoking, this was a hardship for her. Also, she was beginning to have trouble walking. During the days, S. visited galleries and museum libraries. Of course, he came up with nothing.

I had thought, I remember, that this would be a good time for my mother and K. to meet. I suggested the idea to both of them. K. said she was ready to meet my mother, and my mother crowed at the thought of meeting K., whom she had spoken with on a few occasions, when I’d shoved the phone into K.’s hand and suggested that she say hello. But what was I thinking? Did I imagine that the four of us — my emphysemic mother, her passive-aggressive boyfriend, my increasingly fedup girlfriend, and I — would go out to a restaurant and order a meal together? Did I picture us sitting down like a family and talking about Leonardo da Vinci and Frederic Church? Nothing came of it. K. and my mother never met. And before I knew it my mother had packed her bags and gone home. A while later, S. was gone, too.

This time, though, he had something to show for his trouble. Of the cousins who at one time or another had, or had had, some connection to the painting, two were now dead, and a third — and this was not the man who had read the magazine article dedicated to the important painting — had gone ahead and given the painting to S. I learned from my mother that the cousin had said to S. something along the lines of “You’re the only person in the world crazy enough to give a damn about the thing. Take it.”

“What is he going to do with it?” I asked my mother during one of our long-distance phone calls. This was sometime in — I’m guessing — late 1990 or early 1991.

“I don’t know, Don. He says he’s going to put it in fine-art storage. He says he doesn’t know what else to do with it.”

“Does he still believe it’s a Frederic Church?”

“You’d have to ask him.”

In the summer of 1991, I moved out of the apartment I shared with K., and began a period of bouncing from place to place. For a while, I lived in a small rented room. At about this time, down in Miami, S. packed up and left my mother’s apartment. My mother told me later that he had begun drinking again; he wasn’t, according to her, in good shape. She bumped into him every now and then at AA meetings — he seemed to be in and out of the program — or spoke with him on the telephone. She said, in one conversation, that he had taken a job matching house-paint colors for a paint and hardware store. On another occasion, she told me that he was working as a sign painter. She did not have an address for him, but she believed that he was living somewhere out on Miami Beach. At one point, she told me that she thought he might be sleeping in his car. In the event, S. did not, she said, look as if he was getting much to eat. He was drunk a lot, drunk even when attending AA. He looked bad. She did not expect him to live long. She did not expect to see him around much, as time went on.

The matter of the painting was, as far as I was concerned, now dropped in earnest. One day, though, I got a phone call — yet another update — from my mother. It seemed, as I remember the story from her, that S. had gone to a bar on Miami Beach where he fell into conversation with a pair of foreign men, or maybe it was just one man. The men, or man, claimed to have connections to art dealers abroad, perhaps in Holland. After a while, S. got up his nerve and pulled out the photograph of the painting. I had the impression, listening to my mother, that S. did not explain his ideas about the identity of the painting; rather, he dug the picture out of his wallet, handed it over, and waited for a response. The response was one of amazement. Where had S. found this picture? Had he taken it himself? Where was the painting? Had S. seen the painting? Did he know its whereabouts? Did he realize the importance of this find?

According to my mother, the men informed S. that this was, without a doubt, a work by the American painter Frederic Church. It had, S. had told her, belonged to a collection in Europe, and had gone missing in the early years of the century, possibly between the wars, and had been presumed destroyed. This was what she reported to me.

“Jesus!” I said to my mother that day on the phone.

“How about that?” she exclaimed, as if the matter of the painting were now settled.

I said, “Are you serious? Do you believe any of this? What’s he going to do with the painting? Where is it? Is it still in storage? What kind of storage? One of those outdoor sheds? Is the shed waterproof, I hope? Wait a minute. Does the painting belong to him? Is it insured? Did whoever it was in the bar say anything about its value? What bar was it? How do we know that any of this is for real? A Church? I can’t believe it’s a Church. Shit. What else did S. say?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know the answers to any of your questions. All I know is what I’ve told you,” my mother said, and I said, speaking of S., “How in the world is he going to cope with this?”

“I’ve told you, I don’t know, Don.”

“Is he living out on the Beach?”

“I think so.”

“Is he drinking?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know you are. I am, too.”

“There’s nothing to be done?”

“Don, I’ve done everything I can do. He’s in God’s hands now. He’s in God’s hands.”

In August 1992, Hurricane Andrew struck the southern tip of Florida, with winds measured as category four. The storm tore its way through Miami, causing billions of dollars in damage. My mother’s condominium was ripped apart — one whole wall was effectively dismantled and removed by the winds that rushed in from the Atlantic Ocean. All across the neighborhoods in which I had lived as a teenager, streets, homes, and businesses were wrecked.

My mother told me that the storage facility in which S. had deposited his Frederic Church — I had, I realize now, come to think of the painting as belonging to S.; and, with this in mind, and on the strength of hearsay evidence transmitted through channels that I knew from long experience to be unreliable (S. and my mother), had come to regard the painting as a genuine Church — the storage facility, as I was saying, was, according to my mother, very badly damaged. There was, I recall my mother telling me, no hope that anything would or could be left of the painting. For years, I imagined that it had been annihilated. It had been swept out to sea, or blown up the coast, or drowned in the marshlands of the Everglades.

But was that true? Was the painting really gone?

In the summer of 2003, I made an attempt to find S. I assumed he’d passed away, though I did not know for certain. My search led me to a former employer of his in Miami, the owner of a sign-painting business, who believed that S. was alive. But he did not know where, or how, to locate him.

And then — suddenly — I received a message from S., leaving a number in Florida where he could be contacted. I’d called him, and he told me that he was getting his life together again, after thirteen years of drinking. In that time, he had moved up and down the East Coast and had rarely had a proper mailing address or a phone. He had heard only the day before about my mother’s death. We talked for a long time, remembering her, and then he set me straight on a few matters regarding the painting, which, as it turned out, had been water-damaged but not destroyed. He had given it away, he told me, to a former friend, a bartender, who, he believed, had in turn given it to his parents in Connecticut. “It had been haunting me for a quarter of a century. I figured that was enough,” S. said. I noticed that his speech was less halting than it used to be, his voice firmer.

And the painting’s identity? S. had indeed met, in a Miami bar, a Belgian whose father in Antwerp had some connection with the art business. The father in Antwerp, upon seeing S.’s photograph of the painting, had inquired into its whereabouts. According to S., the Belgians offered cash for the painting. A meeting was set up. S. told me, though, that the father in Antwerp never properly identified the painting. Something about these Belgians spooked S. The meeting didn’t take place. S. was left with the feeling that the Belgians knew something they weren’t saying. He told me that he even went so far as to contact the State Department about them. How my mother had decided that the painting had been definitively verified as a Church, S. could not imagine.

And there was one more thing. I had always pictured S., upon first taking possession of the painting in New York, removing it from its stretcher and carrying it in a tube on the plane to Miami. In fact, the painting had been smuggled to Florida by a stewardess, an acquaintance of S.’s, who hauled it in its frame on board an airplane, where, unable to cram the thing into the coat closet, she locked it, against FAA regulations, in a rear lavatory. “She handed it to me in the airport, after we landed,” S. told me. When I asked him if he had gone back to his own art, he told me that he had. I wished him Godspeed, and we rang off.

In early 2003, before I’d ever dreamed of hearing from S. again, I went to Paris. It was the middle of winter, and unseasonably cold. As a result, I spent most of my time indoors. One place I went for warmth was the Louvre. Because of the weather, and because, I suppose, tourism had fallen off in anticipation of the war in the Middle East, the museum was unusually empty, and it was possible to march right up to the Mona Lisa. Until then, I had seen this painting only in photographs; now, standing before the real article, I was struck not only by its beauty but by its oddness. I was taken, in particular, with the way in which the landscape recedes, in balanced, serpentine patterns, behind the figure of the Mona Lisa. It is a distant, verdant landscape, viewed from what appears to be an elevation; looking at the painting, it is difficult to judge, with certainty, the exact spatial relationships between the background and foreground elements. The Mona Lisa herself, though framed by this background landscape that seems to lie far away and far below — I picture her, for no good reason, sitting high on a battlement — nonetheless exists less in relation to the immediate and visible countryside than to some larger world, the world of which the painted landscape is merely a small part. Thus the figure, looking toward the viewer and away from the background vista, occupies a position in the painting that is central in more ways than one, a position defined not only by the optical perspectives that control the painting as a whole but by a subtly disorienting perspective that feels, for want of a better word, spiritual. Standing in front of the Mona Lisa, I thought of S.’s landscapes — the one he’d painted, which was hanging in my living room; and the supposed Church, which at that time I thought was gone forever. In both paintings, I realized, the physical perspectives are destabilizing, to the extent that the viewer is asked to communicate — visually — with the artist in a way that is not, in essence, only visual. During the years when S. was traveling to and from New York, I’d asked myself what had prompted him to consider the landscape in the giant frame a Leonardo. Of course, in asking this question I was only a question or two away from other questions, questions having to do not with paintings or with painting techniques but with the ways in which painting techniques had become the vehicles for S.’s fantasies and delusions.

But what if I had asked, instead, a different kind of question? What had S. seen in a Leonardo da Vinci, even in a reproduction, that had led him to imagine the world (or, at least, the world represented in paintings) as a place where even formal perspectives become wholly subjective, private creations; a place where even a realist landscape — a simple and apparently straightforward depiction of the straightforwardly known world — can utterly disorient us and, in our momentary disorientation, cause us to see into worlds governed by laws other than those we rely on as somehow universal, worlds that are, in effect, governed by the traumas and hopes of others?

The question is not easily answered. S. loved my mother, and my mother loved S. She loved him for his spirit, as he tried to survive and to make, in his own paintings, and in his relationship with her, a world that looked like the world he longed for. She loved him in spite of, and because of, his preoccupation with da Vinci and with Church, his grand lost cause.

Recently, I showed the photograph of the painting to a friend, an art historian. This person seemed to think that the painting in the photograph was likely not a Church. But then she said, “You know, wait a minute. Church spent time in South America, right? He painted animals and birds into his landscapes. Could this be an oil study from his time in South America? A study for a larger work?”

That could be. I don’t know. I suppose I’ll have to wait for the phone to ring, and hear what comes over the line.