When We Meet Again (31 page)

Fromm beckoned to a waitress, who hurried over. He asked if I wanted anything to eat or drink, but I declined, because my stomach was full of butterflies. I just wanted to hear what he had to say. He ordered himself a cup of coffee and a glass of water for me, and she nodded and hurried away.

“And how have you come to be here today?” Fromm asked when we were alone again. “Why, after all this time, are you searching for Peter?”

“We never knew anything about my grandfather,” I began. “And then, a few months ago, I received a painting.”

I explained the arrival of the painting, my trips to Munich and Atlanta with my father, and my drive down to Belle Creek. When I mentioned Louise’s name, Fromm’s expression turned cold.

“She was very determined to keep Peter apart from Margaret,” he said. “She was very angry. Her fiancé had died, and I think she resented not only the fact that Peter was a German, but also that he loved her sister. It was jealousy, plain and simple.” He paused. “You know, Peter returned to Belle Creek, of course. And Louise told Peter that Margaret was dead.”

I stared at him. “And Peter didn’t question it?” I asked. “Knowing that Louise didn’t like him?”

“Of course he did. He stayed in Florida for years, hoping beyond hope that Margaret was still out there. He even used the last of his savings to hire an investigator. But she was gone, my dear Emily. Completely gone. My guess is that your grandmother also thought Peter was lost forever and left to begin a new life for herself and their child. But where did she go?”

“Philadelphia and then Atlanta,” I told him, and his eyes widened.

“But Peter settled here in Atlanta too! How is it possible that their paths never crossed?”

I shook my head. “Maybe by the time they moved here, they had both finally accepted that the other was gone forever and therefore stopped looking.”

“What a waste.” Fromm sighed deeply. “A tragic waste.”

“Please, you have to help me understand what happened,” I said. “I don’t know anything about my grandfather. I didn’t even know his name until just a few weeks ago.”

“Your grandmother never spoke of him?”

“Maybe it was too painful.” I hesitated. “She used to sing to me in German, though. I was too young to question it at the time, but now I wonder if she was trying to make Peter a part of our lives after all, in her own small way.”

He smiled slightly. “I suppose that sounds like Margaret.”

“You said you were in Belle Creek too?”

“Oh yes. There were many of us from the
Afrika Korps
who wound up there. It was said that Belle Creek was one of the worst POW camps in America because of the working conditions—the heat, the arduous labor, the blazing sun—but I always figured that the people who said that had never spent any time in the war. Belle Creek was a cakewalk compared with the conditions in Africa.”

“Werner Vogt mentioned that too.”

He stared at me. “Vogt? My goodness, I haven’t heard that name in years. You’ve spoken with him?”

“Just last week.”

“And was he able to tell you anything about Peter?”

“He had no idea where he’d gone. He also wasn’t sure whether the artist Ralph Gaertner was in Belle Creek with you.”

“Ralph Gaertner?” Fromm chuckled, a faraway look in his eyes. “Oh yes. He was there.”

I leaned forward. “He was? Is that how my grandfather knew him?”

He sat back in his seat and stared at me for a moment. “And what makes you think that your grandfather knew Ralph Gaertner?”

“The painting I received was apparently sent by Gaertner’s widow. And when my father and I spoke with people at galleries in Munich and Atlanta, they agreed that the work was very similar to Gaertner’s but that it couldn’t actually be a Gaertner, because the painting featured a woman in the foreground with her face clearly visible. Gaertner never painted faces.”

“Ah.”

“But it sounds like Gaertner mentored a handful of artists in the sixties and seventies. We thought my grandfather was perhaps one of Gaertner’s students. Or maybe he knew one of Gaertner’s students.”

“I see.”

“Did Gaertner mentor you too?”

Fromm smiled. “I suppose you could say we all mentored each other. There were several of us from Germany who moved to the States in the 1950s, and we formed a sort of community. Of course there’s no doubt that he—Gaertner—was the most talented among us. And yes, he was very generous in helping others hone their craft early on. But as the years went by, he withdrew more and more into himself.”

“Is that why his output of paintings declined so sharply in his later years?”

“I see you’ve done your research,” Fromm replied. “And yes, I suppose that’s why he created fewer and fewer things for public consumption. But he always painted. Once you discover that you can make magic with a brush, painting becomes like breathing. You can’t live without it. Ralph continued to paint well into his nineties.”

“So you were close friends with him?”

Fromm sighed. “We had a falling-out toward the end. I’ll always regret that. There was a distance between us in that final year, and I’m afraid it was my fault.”

I wanted to ask Fromm more, just out of curiosity, but I wasn’t here about Ralph Gaertner. I was here about my grandfather. “Can you tell me more about Peter Dahler?”

“Yes, of course.” He signaled to the waitress, who hurried over with our check. “But as you know, I am a painter. I believe images tell a story better than words. And that’s why I would like to show you the story of your grandfather rather than tell you. Will you come with me?”

Fifteen minutes later, I was parking behind Arno Fromm’s vintage Cadillac in front of a squat, brick warehouse that looked like it dated back to the nineteenth century. It looked like the kind of place where bodies were dumped. There was something about Arno Fromm that seemed trustworthy, though, so although this visit made little sense, I had to believe that there was a purpose in bringing me here.

Fromm got out of his car, slammed the door, and turned to me with raised eyebrows, obviously wondering why I hadn’t made a move to follow him yet. I got out of my rental car, locked it behind me, and followed Fromm toward the front of the warehouse building. When we reached the door, Fromm stopped and stared at it for a long time.

“It’s been quite a while since I’ve been here,” he said, putting a hand on the door and sighing.

“Are you okay?” I asked when he didn’t move.

“Just awash in the memories.” He took a deep breath. “Emily, dear, would you mind entering the code?” He gestured to the keypad to the right of the entrance. “My hands are shaking.”

I nodded and stepped forward.

“The code is oh-seven-oh-five-two-six,” he said.

It wasn’t until I punched in the numbers that I realized why they seemed familiar. “My grandmother’s birthdate,” I murmured. “July fifth, 1926.”

“Yes.” Fromm smiled sadly as he pushed the door open and gestured for me to enter.

The building was musty and stuffy inside, as if no proper air circulation had taken place in months. The atmosphere made it feel like we were walking into a place that had somehow been frozen in time. “Can you tell me where we are and why we’re here?” I asked as our footsteps echoed through the long corridor. We seemed to be heading for a room at the end of the hall.

“You’ll see in a moment,” Fromm said without turning. “Then, it will all be clear.”

He stopped in front of the last door in the hallway and entered another series of numbers on a keypad. I could hear something click into place, and then Fromm turned the knob and stepped into the room, flicking a switch on the right to turn the lights on.

I followed him in, my eyes adjusting to the sudden burst of illumination, and when I realized where we were, I stopped dead in my tracks. All I could process were the hundreds of paintings in the enormous room—some hung on the walls, some on easels, some simply tacked to the sides of cardboard boxes. The ceiling itself was even painted to look like a beautiful sunrise sky, with more graduated shades of purple than I’d ever seen in my life. The windows were all covered with blackout shades, keeping the sunlight out and the paintings preserved.

“What is this place?” I whispered, transfixed by the barrage of images. But I already knew the answer to my own question, and I think Fromm knew that as he turned to me with a sad smile.

“Your grandfather’s private studio.”

“My God,” I murmured as I finally stepped fully into the room and began to take in each painting, one by one. There were rows and rows of them, in clusters and alcoves, and as far as I could tell, they were all of the same woman. My grandmother. In almost all of them, she was wearing the same red, wispy cotton dress that she was wearing in the painting that had been mailed to me. And in most, she was standing in the middle of sugarcane fields, or on the edge of backdrops that reminded me of the Everglades. I was positive now that the paintings were of Belle Creek. “My grandfather
was
a painter too.”

“Oh yes. And Margaret was the love of his life,” Fromm said quietly. “He couldn’t stop painting her, no matter how hard he tried. So he did it here, where he could keep every one of the paintings. It was his own private place, a place where she always surrounded him.”

As I walked around the room, dazed by the sheer volume of images dedicated to a woman I loved and missed so much, I realized that small pockets of the studio were dedicated to different settings. One corner, for example, included paintings of my grandmother walking through the streets of what appeared to be a Bavarian town. It might even have been Munich. “I think this was during a time when he was imagining what life would have been like if he’d been able to simply take her home with him,” Fromm said from behind me. “You see, there are even some where your grandmother is holding a baby.”

“He was thinking about what life could have been like if he’d known his son,” I murmured. “Do you mind if I take a few pictures with my phone?”

“Snap away,” Fromm said.

I knew I’d have to show my father these paintings, to let him know that he’d been loved, even if his father had wrongly believed him dead. Loving someone from afar was a powerful thing too. It was the way I’d felt about Nick for the last nineteen years, although I’d never had the courage to reach out across the divide. It was the way I’d always felt about Catherine, although there was no way to find her. But the lack of physical contact hadn’t made me love them any less, and I realized that perhaps it had been the same for my grandfather. He had never stopped loving the woman and child he thought he’d lost.

I found more paintings of my grandmother as a young woman in Belle Creek, and another cluster where she was painted as an older woman. I knew my grandfather had imagined how she might have looked if she had aged, and he had been almost completely right in his depictions of her. There were crow’s-feet exactly where they’d been in real life, and the tilt of her head and the shape of her smile were so accurate that it was like he had painted her in person. But he’d gotten one thing wrong; her eyes were missing the constant sadness that they’d always carried in the time I’d known her. It took me a split second to realize why. Here, she was painted by a man who loved her, who would have filled her life with happiness. If they had truly found their way back to each other, the sadness that defined her would never have been there. She had grieved for him, I now believed, and if things had been different, she wouldn’t have had to carry that weight.

I was so absorbed in the paintings, and in the way that they took me down my own memory lane, that I lost track of where Fromm was until he walked up beside me. “Emily? I’d like to show you something else. Can you follow me?”

I nodded and let him pull me away from the series that included my father as a baby. I followed him down a row that featured paintings of my grandmother as he imagined her in the 1950s, and then in the 1960s. I could discern the era from the fashions and the backgrounds, but also from the way she aged gradually and gracefully as the years went by.

“So he
was
the one to paint the image Ingrid Gaertner mailed to me,” I said softly as we walked.

“Oh, almost certainly.” We stopped in front of a cluster of paintings in the back right corner of the enormous warehouse room. “Here,” Fromm said. The entire space was filled with paintings that were different from the rest. None of them featured my grandmother in the foreground, and although a few of the paintings seemed to include a woman in a red dress far away in the crowd, the work didn’t match the others. But clearly, the artist had been obsessed by the scene. The paintings seemed to depict the 1963 March on Washington. Sunlight gleamed from the Reflecting Pool, and in some of the paintings, I could make out the figure of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a podium in the background. But what made the paintings so extraordinary was the sea of life spreading all across the image. The artist had taken care with each figure, though none of the faces were clear; they were all obscured by the light or turned away.

“These weren’t done by my grandfather, were they?” I asked, turning to Fromm. There was something familiar about the images.

“Emily,” Fromm said slowly, “do you know what these are?”

They were paintings of the March on Washington, and suddenly, I remembered what I’d read about how Gaertner got his start. “They’re Ralph Gaertner paintings, aren’t they? These are drafts of his famous March on Washington series.”

Fromm nodded. “The series that established him once and for all as an artist to be watched.”

“But what are they doing here in my grandfather’s warehouse?” I asked, leaning forward in awe. To think that such a famous painter’s works would be sitting in a darkened warehouse on the outskirts of the city was strange. “They must be worth a fortune.”

Fromm didn’t speak for a moment. “This was the day that changed him.”

“Ralph Gaertner?” I asked.

Fromm nodded slowly. “He saw her in the crowd. He was sure he did. But he couldn’t find her after that, so he wondered if he had imagined it, or if he had seen an angel. He had gone to the March on Washington because he felt it was his duty to capture and advocate for social change. I think he still felt a lot of guilt about fighting for Germany at a time when Hitler was trying to eliminate all but the Aryan race. I think this was his atonement, this sort of work that advocated for civil rights.”