Still Life with Bread Crumbs (25 page)

“I know,” said Rebecca. He’d missed the night that he’d stayed at the cabin. She reached across the dining table, lifted the round stone, and handed him the small blue envelope with his name on the front.

“Thank you,” he said after he read it.

“I should have gotten your address.”

“I’m just glad you thought of it.” He turned the cheap note-paper over in his hands. “I’m really tired,” he added. “I’m not sleeping too well.”

“Lie down on the couch,” Rebecca said. She covered him with the blanket from the bedroom, and then she went into the back room and took down all the images she had tacked to the wall from the White Cross series. He was right; she looked at each one differently now.

Other people used photographs as a way to keep close to the events of their lives; she had used them as a way to stand apart. She had never looked at the Kitchen Counter series and remembered the days before and after, the grocery shopping or the leftovers in the refrigerator, didn’t look at the photographs of Ben’s action figures or even the plateau of his baby back and think of which toys he’d preferred (the Ninja Turtles) or when those faint dimples at the base of his spine had given way to the firmer flesh of childhood. She’d denatured parts of her own existence by printing and framing and freezing them. And they’d become denatured even further by being written about, analyzed, lionized by other people, by strangers. Sometimes even she had believed that
Still Life with Bread Crumbs
was about women’s work.

She looked at the White Cross photographs again with her new knowledge about what had come before and after them, and instead of static images they seemed an infinite prolonging, as though even now Polly Bates wandered, barefoot, shucking her past in preparation for a foreshortened future, pushing the crosses into the earth, laying down the beloved detritus of her life, saying goodbye: goodbye, card; goodbye, ribbon; goodbye, mother; goodbye, brother. She wondered if the great artists had ever considered this, da Vinci with the woman who would become the
Mona Lisa
, Sargent with Madame X, whether they had ever considered the terrible eternity of immortality. She could not even claim that Polly Bates lived forever through her work. Only her loss, her despair did.

What Jim Bates had said, his voice rough and trembling, had finally destroyed the wall for her, between two dimensions and three, as though at any moment a white hand would appear at one corner of a photograph to reposition the trophy, to straighten the cross. “People seem to find the cross imagery challenging,” the gallery owner had said, and she had nodded. Now she could tell him: it was meant as a challenge. Keep me alive if you can.

When she went back into the living room the invitation from
her opening and the note she had written had both fallen to the floor, and the dog was sleeping next to the couch with one of Jim Bates’s scarred hands atop his head. She sat in a chair in the dark watching the two of them, and when she was tempted to use her camera she was suddenly ashamed of herself for the very first time.

For decades students of photography believed that Rebecca Winter would be remembered for and defined by the Kitchen Counter series. But the White Cross series surpasses the images of domesticity for which she first became known. These photographs, taken together, are her masterwork.

—ARTnews

She sold only three of the photographs, two to the Greifers and one to the Russian woman, whose decorator told her it was a good investment. Everyone was surprised. “I’m not concerned,” said Paige Whittington, who sounded as though she truly meant it.

Neither was Rebecca, because of the phone call from the appraiser, and because of the desk. And because she knew that
ARTnews
was right.

The International Center of Photography is pleased to announce that the estate of Edward and Sylvia Greifer has given the entire White Cross series, the acclaimed series of photographs by Rebecca Winter, to the center’s collection.

The photographs will tour the United States and Europe during 2018 and will appear in an exhibition in Beijing before becoming a permanent part of the center’s collection.

Jessica, James, and John Greifer acquired two of the original photographs from other collectors so that the complete set of Ms. Winter’s original prints could be bequeathed to ICP.)

Early in June, Jim Bates and Rebecca Winter spent a Sunday morning working in the tree stand, and that evening he showed up at the cottage with a tray of lasagna and a six-pack of beer. “It’s not fancy beer,” he said, as though he had to apologize for it.

“I’ve always liked beer,” said Rebecca, which happened to be true. When his truck had pulled in she had closed her bedroom door without thinking why she was doing so.

“This is wonderful lasagna,” she said.

“Mario’s Ranchero in Bentonville. You been there?”

“Is there actually a place called Mario’s Ranchero?”

He nodded with his mouth full, held up a finger, which was his index finger, which meant half a finger actually, took his time, and swallowed. “Not just covering his bets, either. They make good Mexican and great Italian.”

“And you can just drop by and buy an entire pan of lasagna?”

“I do their roof.”

“Ah.”

“I can’t actually see Buddy being up for any free photography. That’s the owner, Buddy. He’s got pictures everywhere, but they’re pictures of himself with famous people who have eaten at Mario’s. And by famous people I mean the weather girl on Channel 12 and some boxer who won one fight and lost all his other fights. Those kinds of famous people. You could get up on the wall easy.”

“I may not be their idea of famous.”

“He offered to put me up there for the roof.”

“Did he keep the flag up?”

“What?”

“The white flag you put up after you’ve fixed a roof. Did he keep it up?”

Jim Bates got up and got himself another beer, and one for Rebecca. “I only did that for your house,” he said. “For my sister. I put up the white flag to show her that your house was okay. From certain angles she could see your place from her place. Or she used to be able to. Whatever. She used to get strange ideas about people, that they were spying on her, listening to her. She used to look at your place with binoculars, searching for the bad guys. There were always bad guys. I didn’t want her to think you were one of them. So I told her I’d inspected your place and it was clean. I put the flag up so she could see it and know there were no bad guys there.”

“It kept falling down.”

“It doesn’t matter now, right?”

There was one of those long chewing silences, and then they both started to talk, and then they both stopped. Finally he said, “What happened?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I never saw you after that one night.”

“You never came over.”

“The hell I didn’t! I plowed you out three times!”

“You never came in.”

“You never came out.”

“I thought you had had second thoughts.” Rebecca could feel her face turning red.

“Me, too.”

They were both quiet for a long time, and then Jim Bates said softly, ruefully, “He sold his watch to buy her combs, and she sold her hair to buy a watch chain.”

Rebecca smiled, and he looked at her with his heart in his eyes, and she looked away. “O. Henry,” she said.

“My mother made us all read that story in seventh grade. I thought it was so damn sad, but she said it wasn’t. She said it wasn’t really sad at all.”

He got up and put more wood on the fire, though it was too warm for it, and stopped to look over the mantelpiece. “That’s a really beautiful painting,” he said.

Rebecca turned in the shaky splintery wooden chair to look at it, as though she hadn’t seen it her whole life long.

“I’ve always thought so,” she said.

The woman’s dress was white with a full skirt, the little girl’s white with small pink flowers. They seemed to be sitting on the grass, although there was no background to speak of, really. Both figures were a little indistinct, but Rebecca, even when she was very young, had felt that the mother loved the child and the child loved her back. It had always stood in for something in her own life, although for her own mother the content had not seemed important, only the provenance. “Oh, a Mary Cassatt, but only a small one,” she used to say casually to guests, but she always managed to fit it into the conversation somehow.

“It’s not a Mary Cassatt,” the appraiser had said sadly. And when he had said it Rebecca had been both shocked, disheartened, and somehow certain that he was right and that she’d known it all along. Of course her mother’s Cassatt was not a Cassatt at all, just something that could pass as a Cassatt, just as
“Bebe’s a wonderful pianist” was not true. Bebe was a halfway competent pianist. But that must never be said, or acknowledged, or even thought, as though the thought would leap from the mind to the keyboard and run across it, playing “Chopsticks,” laughing.

Bebe is a wonderful pianist. She practices constantly, hours a day. She will never stop practicing until she gets it right. Even now.

“But,” said the appraiser, “I do have some good news.”

“Remember Pop Pop’s old desk, the one he always worked at at home?” Rebecca told Ben on the phone, sitting at the gas station.

“The really big boxy one?”

“The appraiser says it’s worth four hundred thousand dollars.”

“Holy shit!” Ben said.

“Exactly.”

($548,000, actually, when it sold at auction.)

“The Mary Cassatt is a fake. It’s probably by an admirer who became an imitator.”

“Wow. That’s mind-blowing, too. Any chance Pop Pop knew?”

Rebecca remembered the arguments between her parents, art doing battle with commerce, as so often happens, Bebe resistant, her husband insistent:

“What sort of people tote up the worth of their own home?”

“People who want insurance!”

“Really, it’s so vulgar, some stranger looking at everything. I won’t have it.”

“It’s got to be done. Sooner or later it’s got to be done!”

He’d had it done and discovered that the painting was not a Cassatt but had never told her. She’d insisted on not having it done because she suspected it was not a Cassatt and didn’t want to know, didn’t want anyone else to know. Her parents were like an O. Henry story if O. Henry had been more cynical.

“It’s like that picture of Polly and my mom, like you can really
feel that they’re connected,” Jim Bates said, looking closely at the painting.

“It’s a fake,” Rebecca said.

“A fake what?”

“It belonged to my parents. They always insisted it was by a very famous painter and was very valuable. But it’s not by her, and it’s not valuable.”

“But it’s so beautiful, right? So who cares?”

People who know about art would care, she thought, and my investment adviser would care. I care, she thought. But that wasn’t true. Because the painting was fake, she could afford to keep it. Because the desk was eighteenth-century American, she could afford to go back to her old life. Except that, walking from the minimalist hotel in which the gallery owner had put her up, in which she had had to call the front desk to identify the workings of the shower, she had begun to feel like her old life was a snow globe, something she’d once loved the look of and then outgrew. Or maybe it outgrew her. Everyone was so young. All the skirts were so short. All the heels were so high. All the eyes were so hungry, so wanting.

“Three of the photographs have found buyers,” she said.

“Only three?” he said. “I figured you’d sell them all.”

“I suspect my new agent thought the same.”

“I have to say, I really appreciated what you said about not selling them. That’s not what I was getting at when I told you all that stuff, but it was really meaningful that you would make that kind of offer.” He took a deep breath, like he was ready to dive underwater, and then he clamped his hand down over hers on the table, and took a deep breath again. For just a moment, seen with his head down, he looked so young, and then when he looked her in the eye, she could see the wear and tear of life, and sadness. His hand was hard and rough. He was the first man she’d ever been with who had calluses.

“Sarah says you’re moving to Pittsburgh,” he said.

“I’m going for a semester, as a visiting professor.”

“Don’t go to Pittsburgh,” he said.

“I agreed to go.”

“Don’t,” he said, and he lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed the end of each finger, and Rebecca honestly thought she might keel over.

“Can I stay here tonight?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Not on the couch.”

“Not on the couch,” she said.

“Ah, man, a second chance,” he said, his fingers grabbing at her hand, turning it over, holding it hard. “Thank you.” And he raised his eyes to the ceiling, to the crawl space, to the roof, and said it again: “Thank you.”

In the morning she woke up to the smell of bacon frying in the next room. The dog had gone to stand at the stove, alternately looking up hopefully and licking grease from the worn vinyl floor.

“No way, pal,” Rebecca heard Jim Bates say from the other room.

“This is insane,” she thought, and then to make it more real she said it aloud. It was no more compelling said than thought.

“There’s breakfast out here,” said Jim Bates, standing over her, his wet hair almost transparent on his forehead.

“It’s early,” she said and pulled back the covers while he pulled off his T-shirt.

“That bad dog has probably eaten the bacon,” she said.

“There’s more where that came from,” he said.

But that was later.

Tad got a job at the restaurant in New York City where all the waiters sang opera. It turned out that he hadn’t forgotten his early training. When he sang the
Pagliacci
aria dressed in full clown regalia he would weep unself-consciously, and some of the older women would clasp their hands and hold them over their hearts. His tips were enormous.