The Chrysalis (10 page)

Gertruyd's eyes widen at the thought of the marketplace gossip.

Lukens purrs. “It will be for but a moment.”

Blush floods her cheeks at the unexpected attention. “Well, if it will be only a moment. Johannes, will you be able to mind the children on your own?”

“A pleasure, Gertruyd.” The unlikely pair saunters off, arm in arm.

Johannes places the children in the exact spots they had occupied days before and then disappears behind a screen secured around the easel. It is large enough to mask his identity, but it is angled such that he can see the subjects. He places the master's usual hat upon his head, its wide brim peeking out from the top of the screen.

Johannes claps and announces from behind the screen, “Places, children, the master is ready to begin.”

The children remain remarkably still as Johannes rushes to capture their likeness: the cherubic infant docile on the obedient eldest daughter's knee; the defiant toddler dressed like a miniature lady with her hand locked in the palm of a compliant middle daughter; the soulful young son caressing a lute; the eldest son with his hand gripping a spear, a lion in wait. Johannes lets those whispers guide his brush:
nette
strokes for the placid baby; bold strokes edged with controlled outlining for the reined-in toddler; an even blending for the obedient older girls; a misty cloud of color for the middle son; strong diagonal lines, jumping from the page, for the eldest.

A bowl clatters to the floor, startling Johannes. Frozen with fear, he hears a voice. “Not to worry, children, I'll clean up around your feet; you just stay in place.” It is Pieter. Johannes peers through a crack in the screen and watches Pieter tumble in a somersault toward the children, in an effort to soften the mood and garner laughter. Johannes smiles at the antics of his friend.

“Many thanks, Pieter,” Johannes bellows from behind the screen, in his best attempt at the master's voice.

“You are welcome, Master. I thought you might need assistance.”

A feigned love interest by Lukens and copious quantities of mulled wine help distract Gertruyd the next day as well. Johannes spends the nights in a feverish trance of work. The third and final day, the celebration day, he gathers together Lukens, Leonaert, Hendrick, and Pieter. Standing in front of the easel, he pulls back the fabric safeguarding the canvas.

         

The revelers cut a wide berth as Johannes helps the master to his seat. The master's hollowed-out face speaks of his loss, and his body tells the tale of the ravaging power of the disease. A different man than ten days before, he looks out of place amid the merriment of the burgomaster's celebration, yet he has insisted on attending.

The guards grant the uninvited Johannes access to the festivities only because of the gravity of the master's illness and circumstances; no other member of the studio is permitted entrance. Johannes takes a place standing behind the master, in the event of his need, in the long line of servants flanking the wall. Admiring the banquet table resplendent with platters of savories, porcelain vases of decadent tulips, and guests uncharacteristically colorful in saffron and crimson, Johannes longs for his easel to dissect the scene into genre paintings, portraits, still lifes.

The burgomaster stands, his hand curling around a jeweled chalice. He lifts the cup and toasts his guests the regents with particular flourish. He announces his special commemoration of the occasion, the commission, and then pays heed to the master's recent tragedy.

The burgomaster strides toward a wall where a painting enshrouded in plum velvet hangs. Johannes's stomach lurches as the burgomaster reaches for a golden cord and draws back the curtain. The portrait is unveiled.

A hush descends among the celebrants as they await the burgomaster's pronouncement. Johannes hears a sharp intake of breath from his wife, followed by a whisper. “It is unearthly. My children, they look so…so themselves.” The burgomaster steps back from it, staring at it from this angle and that, then issues his judgment. “Master Van Maes, you have outdone yourself.”

As the crowd returns to its gaiety, relieved, Johannes hears a clamor. The guards scuffle into the room, trying to hold back an intruder. The man breaks free of their grasp. It is Hendrick, shouting that Master Van Maes has misled the burgomaster. The painting was finished not by Master Van Maes's hand but by the hand of his apprentice. Hendrick lunges toward Johannes.

The burgomaster yells out to his guards to take the imbecilic man away, to put him in shackles. They seize Hendrick and whisk him toward the exit.

The master rises on unsteady feet. Johannes rushes forward to assist him but is brushed away. “Burgomaster, please order your men to let him go. He is one of my journeymen. He tells the truth—at least, in part.”

The burgomaster raises a hand, staying the guards for a moment but not signaling Hendrick's release.

The master explains, his voice strong in conviction but weak in intensity. “My Lord, I apologize for the intrusion of my journeyman into your celebration; he has stolen from me the ability to make a planned announcement at a more opportune time. As you so graciously acknowledged, illness recently came to my family home. It took my wife and baby boy and felled me for a period…before I could finish the portrait. A gifted painter from my studio, fresh from his master test, completed the unfinished portion—the likenesses of your children—in time for this evening. I had hoped to introduce his work tonight and to present him as my partner.”

“This is the man here? This boy?” The burgomaster gestures to Johannes, his brow arched quizzically. Johannes freezes in fear, in disbelief.

“Yes, his name is Master Johannes Miereveld.” The master bows his head, surrendering to his sentence.

A long pause ensues while the burgomaster considers the master's fate, weighs the impact of it on his own. He settles on acceptance. “Master Van Maes, I shall consider myself fortunate to be the first recipient of Master Miereveld's work; I am certain I shall not be the last.” The burgomaster welcomes Johannes to the table.

thirteen

NEW YORK CITY, PRESENT DAY

O
VER THE COURSE OF THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS, MARA
spent her days at work and her nights with Michael. Their relationship moved forward with an intensity she had never known before. For the first time in a long time, Mara felt joyous. Although she'd dated since Sam, the men always seemed two-dimensional: the clever banker, the brooding artist, the humorous marketing executive. She had neither the time nor the inclination to animate those possibilities. With Michael, such investment wasn't necessary: He was fully, immediately enfleshed.

The impulse to share her delight tugged constantly at her. Despite all her earlier reservations, Mara wanted to introduce Michael to her friends and colleagues—especially Sophia, with whom she'd shared nearly everything for years and with whom silence felt like a sacrilege. She wanted her father to meet him; wished her grandmother were alive to approve of him. But she knew better than to act on her whims. Once she opened the door and fully welcomed Michael into her life, even if it were just to family and friends, her professional goals would be jeopardized. For at least as long as the
Baum
case continued and he qualified as a client, their relationship needed to remain a secret.

In the nighttime hours, Michael pursued her, forcing her to come out of hiding, even from herself. She told him stories she'd kept locked away even from Sophia, saying them aloud in the cocoon they created for themselves, a private hibernation made easy by the cold winter nights. She toppled the myth of her father, the successful politician. She revealed his shady connections, forged in his desperation to bury his South Boston, Irish roots in political success. She disclosed the story behind his marriage to her mother, the prize daughter of a family with means substantial enough to launch his career, a woman willing to forgo her own ambitions to provide her father with a Junior League wife and a Ralph Lauren life. She divulged the pressure her parents had felt to produce children. For the first time, she revealed the way her father had pushed her mother to the periphery once she was born. Mara had been the picture-perfect trophy child pursuing success whom he pressed forward into the light as her mother retreated into the shadows. Her father needed Mara's legitimate achievements to wash clean the taint of his own political rise. Mara shared how she had learned to become whomever her father needed her to be, a skill she now wielded at work.

Not that her father didn't love Mara, in his way. It was just that his love, such as it was, was won by tangible accomplishments: grades, Ivy League schools, advanced degrees, name-brand positions, mammoth salaries, and an advantageous marriage—the one area in which she'd disappointed him. She told Michael how, whenever she set her target sights wrong, she would retreat to her grandmother, her father's mother. Her father ran from this relationship, but for Mara, her grandmother's simple rooms at the parish rectory where she lived, worked, and had raised her son always felt like a warm embrace, where all of her accolades and awards didn't matter. Nana inhabited a world where plain, meaningful work meant far more than public recognition or remunerative jobs. In her role as rectory housekeeper, her grandmother served as confidante, intercessor, helpmate, friend, and surrogate grandparent for the Catholic congregation, and Nana could envision no greater honor. Michael, who had been raised in a similar Catholic environment, could understand her grandmother's world. Her death in Mara's junior year of high school had created a void that Mara could not imagine anything would ever fill.

But as much as Mara revealed at night, she stashed away during the day. She could not risk candor or self-disclosure at work, particularly with Sophia, so a double life became her daily fare. To her friends, to work, to her family, to Sophia, she was as she had always been: an attractive, hardworking lawyer fulfilling grand ambitions for her career. And as always, she remained entirely, inexplicably alone. What no one could see was that now she could tolerate their pity, because her life included Michael.

         

In the deep hours of the night, she awakened to Michael stroking her hair. Lying on her side encased in his arms, she struggled to turn around. Then, nuzzled against his chest, she fell back asleep.

But increasingly, Mara's sleep was full of dreams about
The Chrysalis,
and not the serene smile of the painting's subject or the tranquil touch of its light. These dreams were filled with disturbing images of its wartime journey. Mara saw it passing from pitch-black crates to murky train cars, from skeletal hands to the gloves of soldiers in swastika'd uniforms. The dreams woke her. They lingered, and she didn't want to be alone with them in the dark. “Are you awake?” she whispered to Michael one night.

“Not really,” he murmured.

“I've been dreaming of
The Chrysalis.
”

He wrapped her up, like ropes around a cargo chest. “Good dreams, I hope.”

“Not really. It was more like a nightmare. I pictured it during wartime.”

“It's only a dream, Mara.”

“I know, but I can't shake it.”

He yawned. “Tell me about it, if it'll make it go away.”

She described
The Chrysalis
's voyage as she had seen it in her dream. She compared the painting's travails to the passage of looted art from other wars, to the famous four horses decorating the façade of the Venetian Church of San Marco, for instance. A creation of the ancient Greeks, the horses had journeyed with military campaigns from Constantinople to Venice to France and back again, as part of the Crusades, the Napoleonic Wars, and World War II—whoever won them in battle carried them as a victory banner. But, really, she wondered aloud, who rightfully owned them?

She felt Michael disentangle his sinuous arms from her body. “You sound as if you're thinking twice about our case.”

“No, not at all,” she rushed to reassure them both. “The research I've been doing just churns all this up.
The Chrysalis
is different—clean.” She pulled his arms back around her and tightened them.

“Really?” She heard the unease in his voice, sensed it in the slackness of his limbs, and felt it echo in the corner of her own mind.

“Really,” she insisted, and initiated a more intimate embrace, involving their whole bodies. Afterward, delicious, protected sleep.

“Mara.” Somewhere she heard a whisper. “Mara, honey, I don't want to wake you, but I need to leave. I don't want to, but I have to.”

She knew he had to leave. He was scheduled to meet with friends she had never met to travel to the bachelor party of his last bachelor friend. From there, he had a business trip to Europe, where he'd be for weeks. She feigned sleep, as a way to savor the last few moments.

“Mara, honey, I don't want to leave without saying goodbye.”

She opened her eyes to the morning light and stretched to the very tips of her toes. “I know. I don't want you to leave with saying goodbye either.” She shut her eyes again.

He kissed her closed eyelids. “It's okay, baby. I'll call you every day.”

She unraveled herself from the bedcovers and appropriated his T-shirt, wrapping herself into it to cover her nakedness. They padded to the door.

Stooping down as if to kiss her, he instead rested his head in the curve of her neck.

“I'll be thinking about you. Missing you.” He encircled her. She breathed him in. His musky morning aroma was so different from his crisp day smell, the scent of pressed Thomas Pink shirts and money.

“Me, too. Travel safely.”

After he left and she secured the door behind him, Mara put her back against it for a moment, eyes closed. Then she buried herself deep under the tangle of sheets he had left behind, hoping to recapture some of the gift of sleep he granted.

         

With Michael gone, Mara allowed her day life to take over. She longed for him at night, but she felt his presence in her work, and her hours were spent endeavoring to win him his victory and secure her advancement. She formulated lists of information that she needed to procure from within and without, she crafted a roster of witnesses and testimony, and she spent day after day foraging and scavenging in Lillian's sacred library of provenance, amassing defensive and offensive weaponry.

If she were diligent, and very, very lucky, she might be able to build an impenetrable barricade to Hilda Baum's attack on the painting. Mara knew firsthand that Hilda's personal story had a strong emotional appeal, and she did not want the judge to hear too much of it. So she outlined a summary judgment motion to make at the close of discovery, to prove to the judge that the undisputed facts warranted final judgment for Beazley's, thereby obviating the need for a public, damaging trial. She hoped her motion would become a blockade, forcing the judge to one conclusion only, no matter how unpalatable—that Hilda Baum should lose her war for
The Chrysalis.

Mara made the first move and served a series of document requests and interrogatories to Hilda Baum's lawyer. She hoped to gather additional admissions that would help her cause. Hilda Baum produced the expected papers, not the roomfuls of discovery Mara handled in her typical cases but a few critical boxes. Alone, they told a tragic, compelling tale, but Mara knew how to combine them with Beazley's documents to cast a less sympathetic light on her story.

A date was set for Hilda's deposition. Mara knew that the war could be won or lost on Hilda's tale of
The Chrysalis
's lineage and her recitation of her long quest. But in the days before the deposition, a calm descended on her. Unlike any deposition she had taken before, there was little more she could do to prepare; everything rested on her performance at the deposition and before the judge at the summary judgment argument. She would lurk like a panther as Hilda's story unfolded and, in the subtlest way, pounce to elicit the testimony she needed to defuse the compassion.

The day finally arrived, and when Mara awakened, her heart was racing. Her hands and mind, however, were steady, like a soldier ready for battle. She selected a light gray suit, with an ice-blue sweater underneath. The sweater highlighted her eyes and made her look younger and, she hoped, deceptively vulnerable. She wore only the simplest of jewelry and makeup and tied her hair in a barrette, low at the back. She wished Michael could see her.

Mara arrived in the conference room first and took her time settling in, arranging notepads of questions, manila folders of documents, and a paralegal at her side. Then she sat and waited for her opponent.

A grandmotherly woman toddled in on the arm of a stooped, elderly gentleman. She was dressed in an A-line plaid skirt with a sweater set and a tiny pearl cross. A near halo of fluffy white curls encircled her face. Her eyes sparkled as she stretched out her hand to Mara. Her English was perfect, but the cadence different, a staccato punctuated with crescendos. The accent was European and somewhat British, but not otherwise placeable.

Pleasantries completed, Hilda Baum and her lawyer took their seats, and Mara signaled for the court reporter and videographer to begin. The battle commenced:
En garde.

“Ms. Baum, isn't it true that your father, Erich Baum, often used Henri Rochlitz of Nice, France, as his agent to sell paintings on his behalf?”

“Yes, Ms. Coyne, that is true.”

“And, Ms. Baum, isn't it correct that, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, your father actually sent several paintings to Henri Rochlitz to sell on his behalf?” Mara spread out exhibits, bills of sale procured by Lillian from the bowels of Beazley's, in front of Hilda Baum. “These paintings?”

The older woman reached for the documents with a withered, sunspotted hand and perused them with care. “Yes, Ms. Coyne, that is correct.”

For a moment, Mara felt buoyant. She was poised to prove her argument that Erich Baum had sent
The Chrysalis
to Nice not for safe storage with a family member but to his longtime agent, Henri Rochlitz, with authorization to sell it to Albert Boettcher, from whom Beazley's had procured it. But before Mara could ask her next question, Hilda Baum parried, doing her best to protect the detail that Mara sought. “But, of course, the letter my father sent me stated simply that he had forwarded certain paintings, including
The Chrysalis,
on to Nice. It does not say anything about sending the paintings to Henri Rochlitz for him to sell. That is how I know they were sent to our family in Nice—my father's aunt—for safe storage. In fact, he told me during Christmas of 1939 that if the war situation worsened, this is what he would do.” She paused for effect. “Surely you've seen the letter? We produced it as part of our document production.” Indeed, Mara had seen the handwritten note, more like a scribble, from Erich Baum to his daughter stating that he had sent certain paintings, including
The Chrysalis,
to Nice. She had spent long hours pondering it, as the note was a problem with which she'd have to contend. But Mara hoped that the exhibits helped establish that it was Erich Baum's pattern to send his paintings to Nice for sale, not storage.