Chapter 3
It was a pleasant walk from the Fifty-eighth Street library to the Met, surrounded by the whir of traffic on one side and the happy squeals of kids and distant thumps of boom boxes emanating from Central Park on the other.
The early morning brought a light breeze, and Magda was reminded how much she loved New York City.
Long walks buffeted by the sounds of the city always blunted the sting of loneliness she’d felt since her brother Peter died.
The rare ringing of her cell phone shattered her serenity. Spying the number on the caller ID, she girded herself to answer. “Hi, Dad.”
“Magdalen, dearest! How’s my little butternut?”
"Oh, I’m alright,” she sighed. "I—”
“Your mother is very upset with you, you know.”
And just like that, her father executed his greatest signature move, the sudden flip from Daddy-boisterous to Daddy-business.
It was a skill she could just picture him using in the boardroom.
Skip Deacon lets them in with his chumminess, gets their defenses down, then goes in for the kill.
And damned if she didn’t get sucked in every time.
“We had a lovely time at last night’s Founder’s Gala,” he added, “though your presence was sorely missed.”
“Uhhh . . . oops.” Magda had forgotten her mother’s latest benefit. The usual parentally induced headache seized the top of her skull. Rubbing between her brows, she couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Remind me, what’d mom found this time?”
“Magda, you know how much your mother does for the community.”
“Sorry,” she said. And she did know, having witnessed her mother’s glory from the sidelines as she was raised by a series of well-meaning, albeit thickly accented, nannies. “I got pulled into a project at work and couldn’t get away.”
“Your mother and I do not understand why you keep that job. If you’re so set on a museum, join your mother on the board. You’ll never—”
“I know, I know,” she interrupted. “I’ll never meet a nice man cooped up in the basement at the Met.
I said I was sorry I missed it.” She’d dated her share of well-to-do boys in school, and then moved on to rising young businessmen after college.
None of them ever quite took, though, and now her folks no longer even bothered to be subtle about their matchmaking.
“She’ll be happy to hear it. Call and tell her yourself.”
“You mean actually speak to her?” Magda’s attempt at humor fell flat, and she added, “How about I just send some flowers instead?”
“Call her, Magdalen,” he scolded. “Though flowers would be lovely too. And please?”
“Yes?” she asked, the trepidation clear in her voice.
“Don’t forget, it’s off to Saratoga come June!” And there he was, Daddy-boisterous peeking his head up again. “I don’t expect you to make it for the Tipton auction, but I’ll see your shining face in our box for opening day.”
“You guys don’t even own a racehorse.” She massaged her temples, squeezing her eyes shut tight. “Your fascination with the track is beyond me.”
“Don’t be difficult, butternut. You know your mother likes to summer on the lake, and many of her friends have their own boxes.”
“I’ll go to the races.” She stopped walking. Hand still on her forehead, her vacant gaze landed on a street vendor selling Indian-print skirts and scarves. “I’ll even wear one of those ridiculous hats, but I refuse to join you at your lake house.”
“Our lake house,” he chided. “Try as you might, you will not forget you are a member of this family. Saratoga opens at month’s end, and we expect you in attendance there and at the lake afterward.
And this time you will dress in a manner appropriate to a young Deacon daughter.
” And there it was, the full shift. Daddy-business was back, and he stuck his landing.
After a moment of tense silence, Magda pleaded, “Please don’t make me go to the lake. You know I hate it there.”
“Well, we all need to move on. Your mother and I are in terrible pain every day, but it’s what Petey would have wanted.”
“Move on?” she blurted. “I can barely make it through the summer and you suggest I move on? ” Magda knew that even though they mourned differently than she did—in fact, did most things differently than she—her parents had been heartbroken at Peter’s death.
And yet she heard herself say, “Meanwhile, you and your pals toodle around all season in your boats—”
“That’s quite enough,” he snapped. “Just . . . just . . .” Flustered, he fumbled for words, then finished, “Just promise you’ll make it to opening day. Now go send your mother some flowers. She’s on a peony kick.”
“Sure. Bye, Dad.” Magda flipped the phone shut before he could say any more.
Growing up, she’d idolized her father. He’d appear in their Upper East Side apartment every night, just about the time she was about to slip into bed, and scoop her onto his lap for a goodnight hug and kiss.
She had visceral memories of these moments: tracing her small fingers along the top edges of his crisp shirt collars, hugging her nose into the powdery dry-cleaning smell of his suit jackets, rubbing her cheek along the cool silk of his ties.
Magda walked on, pushing away the memories. In some abstract way she loved her parents, and in their way they loved her, but that only meant they knew the most effective ways to hurt each other. Mostly they were just strangers.
She silently thanked Walter for giving her work to do that weekend. Her routine reassured her—padding around the workshop barefoot and silent with just a cup of tea and her tools for company—and slipping into it was like shrugging on an old cardigan.
Missing last night’s fund-raiser was a gaffe, but her mother spearheaded so many organizations and boards and benefits, they were impossible to keep straight.
Magda had always had her brother for reality checks after those sorts of missteps with her parents.
The two of them had gone away to boarding school for their high school years, and it’d been best for everyone.
Their mother could tend to her busy social calendar without the complications of messy childhood faces and feelings, and Magda and Pete had forged their own, however unconventional, mini nuclear family.
But now that he was gone, the only thing that managed to bring her back to the realm of the ordinary was, ironically, her very unordinary work.
She’d felt aimless since Peter’s death, as if some inner light that once filled and guided her had been snuffed out.
Tunneled in her workroom and immersed in a single painting, though, she’d wonder at all the emotions the artist had poured into the work and feel her old vitality return, imagining the energy that had been directed toward the subject, musing whether the artist had been happy, or aloof, or moved, marveling that each brush-stroke was a purposeful gesture made by that person so long ago.
She could almost sense how it might be to tap into such a consuming passion, remembering for a moment what it had been like to feel joyful, expansive.
The landscapes had taken her all of Saturday and into the night, but, in all, the job had been surprisingly easy.
A bit of melted beeswax took care of a small area of flaking along the edge of one of the paintings, and she was able to bypass solvent completely when cleaning the other.
Walter had been right: The pieces had been in almost mint condition already.
Somebody had restored them not too long ago, and done a decent job besides.
The only flaw she found was some repair putty, visible only under the UV light.
Some brushes and her wonderfully unorthodox bread took care of the light cosmetic cleaning.
Wadded-up bits of dough pressed methodically along the surface pulled the soil right off.
It was her favorite trick, and she’d learned it not in graduate school, but from the Deacon family housekeeper.
Followed with a dusting from a clean, soft paintbrush, the paintings were exhibit-ready.
She’d thought to spend Sunday catching up on rest and errands, but dreams of the mysterious man in the portrait had haunted her sleep.
That roguish face, captured on canvas, came alive in a dream to break into a mischievous smile.
In another, the silk of his shining brown hair was wavy and soft under her fingertips.
And what had startled her awake over and over through the night: witnessing the flint in his eyes dampen to a flat black stare, as he stood to face his fate on the gallows.
She’d woken that morning compelled to return to the museum.
She needed just one more look at that curious portrait before Walter took it and stowed it away.
And so she was off to her basement workroom, by way of the library for a book on Scottish history, to pay a visit to the brown-haired Mister Universe.
She flipped through the pages as she walked and was surprised to find that James Graham was actually a famous figure.
He had been a man of wealth and status when he sacrificed everything to fight for Scotland.
He’d fancied himself a poet, and Magda pored over lines he’d written that now felt tragically prescient.
But how to conquer an eternal name: So, great attempts, heroic ventures shall Advance my fortune or renown my fall.
She whipped her head up at the careening trombone blare of a car horn, just as she felt the collar of her sundress tug tight against her throat.
“What the hell, lady?” The man took his hand off the back of her dress and stepped back as if Magda were infectious. He had pulled her back from stepping blindly into the crosswalk, right in front of a speeding cab.
“I . . . I . . .”
“Yeah, well, I’d come back to earth if I was you. This is New York, not some walk in the country, so watch it.”
“Yes, I . . .” Magda’s heart was pounding from the near miss. Cheeks flushing red, she mumbled a quick thanks and darted across the street as the light turned green.
The unnerving intimacy tightened her chest, constricting her breath.
Magda had brought the portrait into the windowless workroom where she examined everything under ultraviolet light.
She didn’t know why a painting of a man long dead would be different from any other work of art, but her hand trembled over the remaining light switch.
She felt vulnerable, like some preyed-upon animal, sharing such a small, dark space with his unblinking gaze.
Magda shook her head, flicking the light off and the UV wand on. The painting buzzed to life in an eerie, Technicolor glow. Immediately engrossed, Magda slipped off her sandals and, squinting her eyes, leaned in to study the bright hum of light wavering across the painting’s surface.
She scanned for signs of tears, punctures, or even old repairs, but remarkably, there were no telltale dark purple blotches under the ultraviolet light.
What she did see were centuries of grime and soot that had discolored the varnish and now glowed in a pale greenish yellow UV haze.
Dust, visible as small bullets of electric blue, jangled across the surface.
“Where have you been? All these years”— switching the UV wand off and the lights back on, her eyes roved the surface of the portrait— "and not a single bit of harm done to you.”
Magda studied his face, and her cheeks flushed at the strange feeling that those black, almond-shaped eyes stared back.
Though his brown hair waved to his shoulders, it wasn’t styled in a way she imagined court fashions required, falling loosely around his face and tousled over his brow.
Magda studied his mouth intently and fought the sensation that, if she stared hard enough, his lips would curve into a slow smile.
Without thinking, she broke a cardinal rule of museum work and extended her ungloved hand, touching the utter blackness of the portrait’s background. Gasping, Magda pulled back as if stung.
The painting was cold.
Maybe she was just chilled, she thought, as she chafed her hands together. Although cool to the touch, paintings definitely did not generate their own temperatures.
Magda slowly lowered her palms to the portrait, one on either side of the man’s face, and she drew in a breath with the shock of it.
The portrait’s black background wasn’t just chilled—it was a raw, dead sort of cold.
An ache crept up Magda’s forearms as she tried to puzzle out the growing impression of damp paint under her fingertips.
She eased her hands along the surface. The typical hard peaks and valleys of any oil painting were absent.
Instead, Magda had the sensation that her hands would sink into the paint if she let them, like penetrating the surface of an inky black pool.
The fluorescent tube overhead began to flicker, echoing the dull hum that had begun in the back of her head.
Once again she pulled her hands back, but slowly this time, and her eyes met those of the man in the portrait.
The urge to touch him overwhelmed her; she had to feel the smoothness of his cheek, trace the light arc of his eyebrow beneath the muss of hair that rested on his brow.
Magda flexed her hands and, mesmerized, reached out, hovering just over the painting’s surface.
The drone in her head became a loud buzzing as she stretched a single fingertip out to brush his face. A breathy sigh escaped her. Magda had known, somehow, that it would be warm. That he would be warm.
Dizziness nagged the edges of her consciousness.
Magda fought to focus on the painting, her compulsion driving her.
She gently cupped the side of his face with her palm, and again, it wasn’t like touching dried paint on canvas.
Unlike the cold black of the background, his face felt as if it had been heated by that candle’s glow, warm and soft like velvet under her palm.
The dizziness burst through her, consuming her, and Magda flung both hands out to steady herself on the painting.
Vertigo whirred in her skull like a fan’s blade as she fell through the cold blackness.