The Genius Read online

  But for the girl? An eternity of faux pas. She stood to suffer. What Louis failed to grasp was that Bertha had been acting with mercy.

  For David’s tenth birthday she threw a luncheon, hired entertainment, and opened the ballroom. After dessert David played his violin for the guests, most of whom were adults, friends of hers; in those days, he did not have many friends. All told a pleasant afternoon, at least until Louis bolted from the room. She found him on the edge of his bed, face in his handkerchief. It disgusted her: this soft cruelty he had the gall to call mercy. He did not know what true mercy meant. He had never suffered. He had been coddled, fawned over, given a pass on the most vile transgressions. So naturally he assumed that the world would do the same for the girl. Bertha knew better. She knew disgrace. All she wanted was to spare the girl the same.

  She wanted to think fondly of him but bitterness seeps through. The girl’s fate began as an argument but grew, over the years, into a towering obstruction between them, a wall of thorns, curling in on itself until they lost sight of each other completely.

  It would be easy for a novelist to write And though they continued to live in the same house, they never spoke again. It would be easy but untrue. For the truth is, she still felt kindly toward Louis at moments, and she sensed that he, too, had a kind of lukewarm desire to be in her good graces. In forty years of marriage they laughed many times, shared much mutual pleasure—though not often sexual—and raised a son.

  When Louis died, everything came out. By that time the boy was eleven. Eleven years old! Living like a hermit. One old woman to care for him; God knows what sort of perversions took place between them. He barely spoke. The woman, whose name was Greene, said he’d never been one to babble. Bertha told her to be quiet until spoken to.

  She wanted to ship the boy as far off as possible, to Europe or Australia, but Dr. Fetchett advised against it, and in a rare moment of equivocation, she had consented to send him to the farthest point in New York state. The problem went away again. This time permanently.

  But as she lies high above the earth, full of drugs, wired to electronics, she worries that her efforts have been in vain. The bills come directly to her; she pays them from a personal account. What will happen when she stops? They will come looking for her; they will contact David. With horror, she realizes that they might have done so already.

  “David.”

  “Mother?”

  “How long have I been here.”

  “In the hospital, you mean? Six weeks.”

  Six weeks sounds like ample time for a bill to come past due. The crisis is upon her, then. David will find out. The story will emerge and everyone will know. She needs to make him understand the need for secrecy. But he comes from a different generation; smugly they call themselves enlightened, without the faintest notion of how quick life is to knock out your teeth. Louis’s softness has found its way into him. She must find a solution. She thinks. Her mind stumbles back and forth between the present and the past. She talks to her husband and her maid. She talks to the television. The room David got her looks less like a hospital and more like a hotel. The walls are wood-paneled; a leaded window in the shape of a star glows gently. She squeezes down on her mind and the answer comes: she will pay the fees now, in advance. She will establish an endowment. She has done that before. At Harvard and Columbia and Barnard people work and learn because of her generosity. She has given money to charities of all stripes, been feted by politicians from every side of the aisle… she squeezes down. A problem at hand, she will solve it. She will call the man at the school in Albany and give him an enormous sum of money. Where is her checkbook. Where is the telephone.

  “Mother.”

  They hold her arms.

  “Mother.”

  “Call the doctor.”

  No, don’t call the doctor. The doctor is dead. He died in 1857. He died in 1935. He died in 1391, he is nothing but bones. Memories are his flesh and she can burn him up with the blink of her eye. Memories are fickle. Memories taste smoky. They taste like Kirschkuchen. Everything withers and turns to bones. Walter is bones. Louis is bones. Soon she too will be bones. Give enough money and problems turn to bones. She will grind them up and cast them upon the water; she will be remembered forever in the minds of people who have never met her; she will live in their minds the way memories live in hers, the way she so starkly recalls the flood that destroyed their basement; lightning seen from the bow of a ship; the pain of childbirth; the pain of childbirth; the dullness of intercourse; the men who attempted to woo her when Louis died, imagine that, she a wrinkled old woman and men thirty years younger offering her roses; she remembers and remembers and remembers and it is not a flashing of her life so much as a cascade, events superimposed and time seesawing, people who never met shaking hands, conversations a moment ago crystalline now fizzy and roaring like the surf, the frame of her mind creaking and buckling inward, a mineshaft, rivers of dirt snaking down the incline toward blackness.

  “Mrs. Muller.”

  “Mother.”

  Mrs. Muller.

  Mother.

  Yes, she is Mrs. Muller. She had a husband. Yes, she is a mother. She has a son.

  • 20 •

  It took an afternoon of phone calls, but I managed to track down the New York School for Training and Rehabilitation, right where Joe said it would be: ten miles outside Albany, operating under the name Green Gardens Rehabilitation Center. An assistant director named Driscoll told me that in its previous incarnation, the place had been an honest-to-goodness asylum, of the padded walls and shock treatment ilk. Like many such institutions, it had fallen victim to the civil rights movement, its programs disbanded and its charter revised to reflect a kinder, gentler approach: Green Gardens specialized in spinal injuries. Driscoll took evident relish in recounting all this to me; he seemed to consider himself the unofficial historian.

  I asked about the old patient records, and he said, “A couple years ago we had a problem with the boiler, so I go down to the basement with a flashlight. I’m crawling around, sneezing my head off, and I stumble right through a big pile of letters, medical records, all the physicians’ notes. Nobody had touched any of it for twenty years. The paper was disintegrating.”

  “So you still have them,” I said.

  “No. When I told Dr. Ulrich she had them shredded.”

  My heart sank. “There’s nothing left?”

  “There’s probably one or two down there that we missed, but even so, I couldn’t give you access to them. They’re confidential.”

  “That’s really a shame.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful.”

  I thanked him and started to get off the phone when he said,

  “You know what, though.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I’ll have to look into this. But we have some photos.”

  “What kind of photos.”

  “Well—and this gives you an idea of what ideas about privacy laws used to be like—they’re up on the walls in one of the old wings. They’re black-and-whites, sort of like class photos. Groups of patients in ties and jackets. I even think there’s one where they’re wearing baseball uniforms. Some of them have names and some don’t. I don’t know if the person you want is there, but I might be able to show them to you. I don’t see what kind of rules we’d be breaking, considering that they’re already on display.”

  “That would be fantastic. Thank you.”

  “I’ll talk to Dr. Ulrich and let you know.”

  I called Samantha, finally back from South Carolina.

  “Strong work,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “I mean, really, you’re turning into Columbo.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Like, a metrosexual Columbo.”

  “Tell me you have good news, too.”

  “I do,” she said.

  “And?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “Oh come on.”
/>   “I’ll tell you when I see you.”

  We agreed to meet up the following week. In the interim I went back to the doctor for a checkup. He looked into all the orifices in my head, pronounced me well, and offered to give me more painkillers. I filled the prescription and set it aside to give to Marilyn when she got back from France.

  That Sunday, the second in January, I received a second e-mail from her. This one was in German. I turned to an Internet translator for assistance.

  On 24 October 1907 the Vossi newspaper reported: “During the daily of yesterday emperors had, Empress, princesses and prince the magnificent Building of hotels visits and Mr. Adlon their acknowledgment here in glorious capital the work in most honoring way expressed.”

  Taking this to mean she had gone to Berlin, I swallowed my pride and responded with a second long, pleading e-mail. As soon as I pressed SEND, I regretted it. I had already put myself out there in my first letter, already degraded myself. Now I didn’t know what I was trying to achieve. Reconciliation? I wasn’t sure I wanted it. For the past two weeks I had been entirely Marilyn-free, and while on some level I missed her, I also felt for the first time in years like I could fully relax. That’s the way you’re supposed to feel about your parents, not your lover. Not that I was an authority on either.

  Mostly I wanted her to forgive me so I could feel less guilty breaking things off, assuming it came to that—which I assumed it would. Or else I wanted her to be so livid, so beyond reason, that I could walk away without any fanfare. I wanted a starting point: she was either totally okay or not okay at all. I could work with either. What I couldn’t deal with was limbo, and so that’s where she kept me. She knew me well enough to have predicted the effects of her silence. She was drawing out my discomfort on purpose. It made me mad, although looking back, I suppose I deserved it.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON I got a call from Detective Trueg of the major case squad, who asked if I had time to come over to the station. Eager to be out of the gallery, I hopped in a taxi, and upon arrival was escorted to a cubicle, where he sat ensconced in a ring of discarded Burger King wrappers. Andrade, too, had his lunch out: a half-finished Tupperware container of tofu and brown rice.

  “You want a Coke?” Trueg asked me.

  "No, thanks.”

  "That’s good,” he said. “Cause we don’t got none.”

  The investigation, the detectives informed me, had taken an odd turn around the time they decided to question Kristjana Hallbjörnsdottir.

  Trueg said, “We go over to her studio, we’re talking to her. She’s not saying anything too suspicious or not suspicious, one way or the other. I excuse myself and ask if I can use the restroom. Down the hall I go and what do you know, up on the wall are some drawings that look a hell of a lot like yours.”

  I sat up straight.

  Trueg nodded. “Yup. Right out there for everyone in the world to see. Naturally, this is very interesting to us, but we don’t say anything about it. We finish asking her about her relationship with you, we say thank you very much, and then we go and get a warrant.” He smiled crookedly. “That lady is one live wire when she’s mad.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “We had to have someone take her outside to calm her down.”

  “You’re not the first.”

  “What did you do to her, anyway? I never was clear on that.”

  “I canceled a show of hers,” I said, trying to contain my impatience. “She has the drawings?”

  Andrade reached into his desk and took out a handful of pages sealed in evidence bags: a dozen Crackes, easily identifiable by their wild sense of scale, their surreal imagery, the oddball names and recurrent faces. The backs were numbered in the mid-thirty-nine thousands. As Andrade spread them out in front of me, I felt a rush of relief that Kristjana had not destroyed the pieces out of spite. But then it occurred to me that these might be all that remained from the several thousand she had stolen.

  “The box I had was full,” I said. “It had probably two thousand drawings.”

  “Well, that’s all she wrote,” said Trueg.

  “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

  Andrade shook his head.

  “Oh, no.” I put my head in my hands. “Oh, shit.”

  “Before you get too upset—” said Trueg.

  “Did you search her apartment? Shit. I don’t believe this. Shit.”

  “Hang on,” said Trueg, “that isn’t the half of it. I’m just gettin warmed up here.”

  “Shit.”

  “I think you want to listen to this,” said Andrade.

  “Shit…”

  Trueg said, “So we take her in and question her, and as soon as we bring up the drawings she gets this very offended look on her face and says—” He looked at his partner. “Go on, you do it. You do it good.”

  Andrade said, in a stilted Scandinavian accent, “‘But I made them myselv.’”

  Absorbed by the thought of my destroyed art, I barely heard him. When what he said finally did register, I said, “Excuse me?”

  “Go on,” said Trueg. “Do it again.”

  “She claims she made the drawings herself,” said Andrade.

  “Aw, come on, Benny, one more time.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Wait a second. She made what herself.”

  “The drawings,” said Andrade.

  “Which drawings.”

  “These,” said Trueg, indicating the Crackes.

  I stared at him. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Well, that’s what she said.” He seemed disconcertingly calm, as did Andrade.

  “Well,” I said. “But that’s ridiculous. Why would she do that?”

  “She says someone hired her to make copies,” said Trueg. “You know, in the style of.”

  “What?”

  “I’m just tellin you what she said.”

  “Who hired her?”

  “She wouldn’t say,” said Andrade.

  “Nope,” said Trueg. “On that she got real stubborn.”

  I sat back and crossed my arms. “Well. That’s—I mean—that’s ludicrous.”

  “We thought so, too,” said Andrade. “So we asked her to produce one for us. I sat in the room and watched while she did it. See for yourself.”

  He opened his desk again and pulled out a second batch of evidence bags containing drawings virtually indistinguishable from the first. I take that back. They were indistinguishable. I kept blinking and staring and blinking, certain that I was hallucinating. Most disorienting of all was that the drawings connected, seamlessly, just as the Crackes did—and not only that, but they connected to the first set of drawings, the ones confiscated from the studio, as though Kristjana had taken a smoking break and then carried on working. I asked if she had been looking at the first drawings at the time and Andrade shook his head and said no, she’d done them from memory. Suddenly I began to sweat, and what I’d once said to Marilyn popped into my head: “She used to be a good painter.” Kristjana was classically trained, after all, and it would be just like her to get a kick out of copying the work of the very artist who had displaced her. It probably tickled her sense of martyrdom, that preachiness that made her worst work intolerable. It fit, all right; but at the same time I could not accept that the work was so easily parodied. I was the expert on Victor Cracke’s iconography; I knew what was and what wasn’t; I had the goddamned droit moral goddammit, and the work I was looking at was as authentic as anything I’d dragged out of that shitty stuffy little apartment. Had to be. Look at it, for crissake. Both sets of drawings on the desk had to have been done by the same person; even the tone of the inks—which in the Cracke drawings varied from one section to another, depending on age—were a perfect match. And then the room began to spin: what if the drawings I had in storage didn’t belong to Victor Cracke. What if the whole thing was part of an elaborate prank orchestrated by Kristjana herself ? Victor Cracke was Kristjana. In my agitation, this idea seemed absurd enough to be plausible.
She loved that sort of self-referential swill, and I could imagine the masochistic frisson she would get from getting me to cancel a show of her work in order to put up another show of her work. Who was Victor Cracke, anyhow? Nobody. Nobody that I knew, or that anybody else knew. It was all Kristjana. Everything was by Kristjana. The Mona Lisa? That was her. The Venus de Milo? Also her. Everything that Kevin Hollister wanted to hang in his office, from Allegory of Spring to Olympia—all her! I began to wonder how she had gotten Tony Wexler in on the joke, not to mention Superintendent Shaughnessy, the neighbors, the fruit vendor, Joe the checkers champion… double agents, all. But—but—but I had talked to people who’d seen Victor Cracke, passed him in the hallway… and but none of them could give me a complete physical description… but wasn’t that more realistic, wouldn’t people retain differing impressions?… but wouldn’t Kristjana know that, and account for it, couldn’t she script something just so… ?

  My headache returned, with gravy.

  Mixed in with my confusion was a strong sense of annoyance that she’d been wasting her time planning destructive installations involving one-ton sea mammals when she could so easily produce shit that people would buy.

  I don’t know whether Andrade and Trueg thought I was having a breakdown or what, but when I said, “It sure looks like the real McCoy,” they nodded sympathetically, the kind of nod you give a crazy person to keep him calm while the men in white coats get their nets out of the van.

  Trueg said, “Hang on, show’s not over yet. We also found this in her apartment.”

  Andrade opened his desk again—what was he going to pull out now? A picture of Kristjana and Victor having tea?—and handed me another bagged piece of evidence, this one containing a half-completed letter, written in the same tiny, threatening hand as the two letters I had supposedly gotten from Victor himself. It said, many times, LIAR.