When We Meet Again (25 page)

“Think that means the spirit of Ralph Gaertner is hanging out here, waiting to point us in the right direction?”

My father laughed. “Maybe. I’ll keep an eye out for ghosts with paintbrushes.”

The sign for the Schwab Gallery loomed ahead of us a moment later, and I pointed out a parking spot on the side of the road.

I would have liked to see the neighborhood a bit, but we were already fifteen minutes late. We hurried inside, where three twentysomethings dressed all in black were admiring a huge painting on the wall across from the entrance. It was, I realized with a start, a painting of what appeared to be a sugarcane field, with a beautiful sunset sky overhead. On the far right of the painting, you could just make out a small farmhouse. Perhaps I was connecting the wrong dots, but to me, it looked a lot like the home I’d visited last week, the home where Louise and my grandmother had been raised. In front of the house, barely visible, was a woman, her back to us, walking through the yard.

“I think that’s Belle Creek,” I whispered to my father, nodding toward the painting. “I think Ralph Gaertner was there. Outside Grandma Margaret’s house.”

He looked surprised. “What? You’re kidding.”

We checked in at the front desk, and a young man who had several ear piercings and a purple Mohawk told us that the gallery director, Bette, was expecting us. He stood and gestured for us to follow him down a narrow hallway. “Bette,” he said, coming up behind a small woman with short-cropped black hair and deep brown skin. “Your guests are here.”

“Ah,” the woman said, turning to us. “Welcome to Savannah. You must be Victor and Emily.”

She was older than I expected her to be—at least in her sixties, with black-rimmed cat-eye glasses and lines framing her mouth like parentheses. She indicated that we should follow her back into the gallery, where she led us into a smaller, more private room lined with paintings. “I thought it appropriate that we talk among the Gaertners,” she said with a smile. “Now what can I help you with?”

I gazed around for a moment while my father explained our interest in Gaertner, our new suspicion that he may have been a German POW imprisoned in Florida during World War II, and our guess that he might, in some way, be connected to my long-lost grandfather. I could tell that he had Bette’s attention, and I heard her ask a few questions, but as I looked closely at painting after painting, my heart began to pound, drowning out the conversation behind me.

Every single image in this room reminded me of something I’d seen in Belle Creek. I couldn’t swear that every scene was from there, but they all looked familiar. There was a beautiful portrait of an old oak tree, sagging with moss, and in the background, Gaertner’s signature female silhouette walking toward the horizon. There was a painting of two alligators baking in the sun, their scales so intricately rendered that it looked more like a photograph than something created with a talented hand. Again, in the background, there was just the shadow of Gaertner’s trademark girl, slipping away behind a far-off tuft of palm trees.

In another image, there was a close-up of an old-fashioned tractor that I could have sworn was in the middle of a sugarcane field, and in one particularly searing painting, there was a young African American boy crumpled to the ground, his face turned away, his back stripped raw with peeling, red gashes that had left his dark skin chillingly shredded. Even that image felt somehow familiar to me, and it wasn’t until I stared hard at the horizon of the painting that I noticed a house that resembled the one next door to Louise’s farm. In this image, Gaertner’s signature female form was a mere dot in the distance, running toward the foreground, her face obscured by shadow.

“He was there,” I said, turning to my father and Bette. I could see from the surprised look on their faces that I had cut in midsentence, but I didn’t care. “Gaertner was in Belle Creek. I’m almost positive.”

Bette looked mildly annoyed at the interruption as I pointed out the familiar-looking farmhouse and explained how everything else I was seeing looked just like the town I’d visited.

“But you have to admit,” Bette said, “there are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of sugarcane-growing towns in the country, right? And there’s nothing particularly remarkable about the farmhouse you’ve pointed out. Perhaps it is this Belle Creek you’re referencing, or perhaps you only have part of the story. Maybe Gaertner was indeed a prisoner of war, like you suggest, but he could have been stationed anywhere. Or this could be the place he moved to after the war.” She must have noticed my dejected expression, because she held up her hands and added, “I’m just playing devil’s advocate.”

“But this can’t just be a coincidence,” I protested. “This could be the link we’re looking for.”

She gave my father a look. “Emily, I was just saying to your father here that Ralph Gaertner had many students, especially in the seventies. He was a generous man, and he always said that art had opened a lot of doors for him and he wanted to do the same for others. Perhaps your grandfather was one of his students. And maybe they did indeed meet during your grandfather’s prisoner of war days. Anything is possible, is it not?”

I nodded. “Do you know whether Gaertner was even a POW?”

She shook her head. “I’ve made it my business to become an expert on Gaertner, since I’ve long wanted to host an exhibit of his work. But unfortunately, he was a very private man. There’s very little known about his life prior to 1964, when he sold his first major piece. In fact, we have it here. Would you like to see it?”

She beckoned for my father and me to follow her. In the main room of the gallery, the three twentysomethings were gone, and the sun was peeking through the front window, which was made of frosted glass that filtered and diffused the light. It made the room look almost magical. “Here’s the painting that made him famous,” Bette said, walking us over to the largest image in the room, a huge painting that was at least seven or eight feet tall. “It is believed among art scholars that this painting’s incredible success is one of the reasons why Gaertner chose to include his signature female silhouette in all of his future work. It was sort of like intentional branding, a way of creating a trademark that would earn him recognition.” She paused. “I’ve always thought it was an ingenious strategy. It gave him that extra
something,
and it really kick-started his career. As you can see, he dabbled in tempera, though he was better known for his watercolors.”

I stared at the image, feeling more and more certain that Gaertner had indeed worked with whomever had painted the picture of Grandma Margaret, because the sky—rendered in the pink and purple hues of a southern sunrise—looked very similar to the sky in the painting I had received. In the foreground of the painting stood a woman, her back to the artist. She was the painting’s central image, the focus of the image rather than just an ornament in the background. Every brushstroke felt intimate and perfectly executed, and although the woman was turned away, her features obscured by shadow, she almost seemed to ripple from the painting, tangible and real. She was standing in a field, but it was impossible to tell whether it was a sugarcane field or simply a field of grain. The background seemed less developed in this one—Gaertner had clearly grown as an artist as his career progressed—but it seemed he had nailed the female image from day one. No wonder he had decided to make it his signature; he obviously had a gift.

“Did he use some sort of special paint?” I asked, leaning forward to inspect the painting more carefully. The woman seemed to shimmer and catch the light in a way I’d never seen before in another painting.

Bette smiled. “No, it’s simple tempera—one of Gaertner’s favorite mediums—but I believe that the reaction you’re having now is exactly what catapulted Ralph Gaertner to stardom. The image looks so dynamic because he used a series of tiny—almost minuscule—brushstrokes. In fact, he crafted his own paintbrushes, because he couldn’t find any on the market that were small enough. If you look more closely, you’ll see that his almost microscopic strokes move in a way that hadn’t been done before. He once said in an interview that painting this woman took him almost a full year. It’s a piece of art that is studied extensively in art schools now, which makes me even more honored to have the opportunity to have it here for a time.”

“How did you manage that?” my father asked.

“I wrote for years to Mr. Gaertner, explaining why I think Savannah is a perfect place for a retrospective show on his life and career,” she replied. “He never wrote back—by the time I began writing in the late nineties, he had already become very secluded and private—but after his death, his widow reached out to me and said that I was the only gallery owner who had tried so hard to get a Gaertner show. She wanted to loan me several pieces from her private collection, including this most famous piece, which she bought back from an art collector the week after his death. Sadly, we only have it for a few more weeks, and then I have to send it back to her.”

“So you have her address?”

She smiled. “No. She’s sending a courier who will take care of returning the painting to her.”

“Maybe we could speak to the courier. Do you have any contact information?”

“No. We’re apparently to be notified forty-eight hours in advance of his arrival. We haven’t heard a thing yet.”

“Oh.” My heart sank. Another lead out the window.

After spending a few more minutes pointing out various Gaertner paintings in the main room, Bette led us back to her office and asked us to tell her a bit more about what we were after.

“We think my grandfather—my father’s father—is a former German POW named Peter Dahler, who was imprisoned in the States during World War II,” I explained. “It’s a long story, but we’ve only uncovered his identity recently, and we don’t know what happened to him. My father never knew him at all.” I told her briefly about the painting that had been sent to me and the way we had traced it back to the Ponce Gallery in Atlanta, where we’d been told it had come from Ingrid Gaertner.

Bette’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Ingrid Gaertner? That seems highly unlikely. She’s as reclusive as her husband was in his later years. I’ve only spoken to her myself through letters mailed to a post office box.”

“That’s how the instructions with the painting arrived—by letter,” I said. “But there was no explanation. But why would Ralph Gaertner’s wife have a painting by my grandfather or someone who knew him? It must be that the artist was a student of Gaertner’s, right?”

“That makes sense,” Bette said.

I pulled out my phone to show her the picture of the painting, and her brow furrowed as she studied it. “Definitely not a Gaertner,” she murmured, almost to herself. “Not with the woman’s face so visible. But yet . . .” Her voice trailed off. “What did you say your grandfather’s name is?”

“Peter Dahler.”

She thought for a moment. “The name rings a bell . . .”

My heart was in my throat as she turned and rifled through some papers in a filing cabinet. I exchanged looks with my father. Could this be it? Could we have finally found him? But a few moments later, Bette turned back with a frown. “I thought I had some paperwork from a Gaertner event I’d attended in Miami Beach in the early eighties. But I don’t have the program anymore. However, I do recall that a few German contemporaries of his spoke at the dinner. Perhaps that’s where I remember the name from. Yes, I’m almost certain of it. There was a man named Dahler who was one of Gaertner’s protégés.”

I took a deep breath. “You’re sure?”

“Ninety percent. It was a long time ago, but the name certainly sounds familiar.” She thought for a moment and then swiveled to her computer, where she typed in a few things. Her face fell. “The gallery that hosted the event closed many years ago, and I’ve just found an obituary for the gallery owner. I’m not sure how you’d track down anyone with information about who spoke at the gala.”

My heart sank. I’d worked as a journalist for long enough that I knew a dead-end trail when I saw it. I’d dutifully follow up on whatever information she had, but finding the featured speakers at an art event in Miami Beach in the early 1980s might be impossible. “Any idea what year the event was? Or the name of the gallery that hosted it?”

She told me that she believed it was in 1982 or 1983, and that it was the Thomas J. Trouba Gallery, which had long since closed. The dinner was at the Hotel Carbonell, which had been torn down a year later. I jotted down the information, just in case. I would do a newspaper search, and perhaps we’d get lucky.

“Honestly, I think your best bet of finding this Peter Dahler might be to hope that Ingrid Gaertner will speak with you,” Bette said.

“I thought you said she was a recluse and didn’t talk to anyone.”

“But if she was indeed the one to send you the painting, she was reaching out, wasn’t she? Perhaps your grandfather asked her to do it. The only address I have for her is a post office box, but I’ll give it to you. It’s a long shot, I suppose, but it’s all I have.”

“Thank you,” I said as she clicked around on her computer and printed out the address.

She stood to walk us out and shook our hands at the door. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to be more helpful. But I do feel confident that if your Peter Dahler is out there somewhere, you’ll find him.”

We had arranged to drop off our rental car at the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport, and after a tight connection in Charlotte, we were back in Orlando just after 7:30.

“I’m exhausted,” I admitted to my father as we walked to the parking garage together. We’d only been gone for a few days, but it somehow felt like weeks. The oppressive humidity of the evening was almost comforting, a familiar embrace that felt like home.

“Well, jetting to Europe and back, confronting your past, and almost finding a long-lost family member will do that to a person,” he said with a smile. “Are you going to be okay?”

“I’ll be fine. How about you? Are
you
okay?” I noted with concern that he looked more exhausted than I did, and I wondered for the first time if he was being honest about the seriousness of his illness.