Chapter 27 Lily
LILY
ON FRIDAY MORNING, I GOT to the library before it opened, waited for someone to come and raise the metal grate at the front door.
I wasn’t the only one lingering—a woman with a cart full of plastic grocery store bags and crumpled newspapers waited with me.
I shifted from foot to foot until someone came and rolled the grate up and unlocked the door.
The woman who worked on the archives, Sue, was small and tidy-looking with a neat crop of silvery hair. Once she arrived and settled in, I showed her the pictures of the paintings on my phone. At one—the diving girl done in blue—she reached out and held my wrist.
“That one. We have a photograph like that. Give me a few minutes.”
She left me at a linoleum table rutted with gouged-out initials.
Mil had texted me on Wednesday to say she hadn’t had any luck with her husband’s papers, but she hadn’t gone through everything (PACK RAT!
!! she wrote, accompanied by a frowning emoji) and would let me know if she found anything at all about the paintings.
I knew Mil was doing what she could, but it seemed less and less likely that she might find something useful in her husband’s notes.
Sue came back with a folder and tenderly removed a black-and-white photograph, laid it on the table in front of me.
The storage conditions must have been poor, too humid, because there were flecks of mold along the edges of the frame, but the correspondence to the painting was immediately clear.
The painter had adjusted the angle of the diving girl’s face, gave us more of her expression, adjusted the focus on the crowd so the expressions blurred, save for a few leering smiles.
“This is one of my favorite images in the collection, but maybe the painter worked from others. It would take a long time, though, to look through the whole collection and see if there are any other matches. I can try, but it might take a few weeks. We also have photos of the Thomas England Hospital, but none of those look familiar to me.”
“I’m mostly curious about figuring out who they are—the painter. Do you have any sort of record of who else has looked at these?”
“You can’t check them out, like a library book, so we don’t have the same information we would with a book or DVD, unfortunately.
The collection, as far as archives go, is small, and we get so few visitors who ask to see them, unfortunately—I guess that’s just as well now that I’m only here two days a week. ”
“Do you remember anyone coming to look at this photo in particular?”
She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples.
“Not this one, no. We had a man who’d come in quite often, but he was a professor over at Stockton and was researching something for a book.
Stiff sort, strictly a historian. And there was a woman who used to come in, every now and again.
Sometimes she’d bring her grandson with her, and she’d just look through things.
She’d been a nurse, so not sure how artsy she was. ”
“How long ago are we talking?”
“Oh God, this is the seventies. She and I got to chatting a few times. Her name was Maria. It’s a shame—if I remember this correctly, she died in a house fire a few years after I met her. The boy got out, but Maria and her husband didn’t. Such a sad thing. She was a lovely woman.”
I felt deflated, depressed. For a moment I had thought that this woman could have been my painter—a woman, too.
God, I would have loved that. But if she died in the seventies or eighties, it wasn’t possible—some of those pictures were from the late eighties, early nineties.
The big hair, the bulky costume jewelry, bright as candy, the saturated colors, then the entropy, the slow creep of decay. She would have missed all of that.
“Would you like to look through more of our materials? If you give me a little time, I can pull additional folders—we do have a decent collection from the war, Camp Boardwalk and all that. Not as many of the Thomas England Hospital, but you might be interested to see them.” I checked the time.
I was due to start my shift in half an hour.
I felt on the verge of something, though.
I thought that if I could only spend the day searching, thinking, locking myself away in the quiet upper room of the archives, then I would be able to make something out of it, inch toward a narrative.
There were so many issues plaguing the city: corruption, addiction, recession.
But I still thought that the paintings would help.
They could show people what we had survived before.
“I need to get going to work, unfortunately. But maybe I can come back the next time you’re here.”
“If you want to email me any of those pictures, I can also try to do some more matching today.” She wrote her email on a Post-it, rubbed her hands together. “It’s exciting to have a project. I have to say, these archives are underused, and it breaks my heart. There’s a lot to see here.”
“Thanks, Sue. I’ll see you on Monday.” As I made my way downstairs, I thought about how the whole city felt that way. A lot to see and no one willing to look. Except for this painter, whoever they were.
I had my hand on the door when I heard a man’s voice behind me.
“Excuse me, but did I hear you talking about some paintings?” he asked. I turned to see him, in his mid-thirties, tall, dark-haired. He hadn’t been a part of the group waiting at the front door in the morning—he must have come in when I was with Sue.
“Yes.” I tried to keep the annoyance out of my voice. I didn’t want to have to explain the paintings to this eavesdropper. Words didn’t do them justice.
“It’s just that … well … my grandparents have always had a few of them in their house—paintings of Atlantic City—and I wonder if maybe they were done by the same person. Portraits. Mostly.”
I was, despite myself and my fear of getting my hopes up, intrigued. “Like what?”
“Someone on the boardwalk. Another one of a politician in a sort of weird old hat.”
“Where did they get them?”
“You know, I’m not sure. But I would be happy to ask.”
“I don’t suppose you have any photos of them.”
“No, but I can take a few.”
I tried to temper my optimism—it seemed too convenient, too much of a coincidence. And yet, what if this was it? A missing link? The thing I needed to see?
I looked down at my phone, hoping he would get the hint and move on. Clara had texted me again. Lily, we NEED to talk. Please.
“I’m sorry but I need to get to work. Excuse me.”
“Where do you work? I could meet you after your shift?”
I turned over my shoulder and told him the name of the spa. What was going on with Clara? News about Peaches?A blowup with Des?
“I’ll try to get some photographs, soon!” he called after me.
“Okay, thanks,” I said, waving as I left.
WHEN I got into the spa, Emily was leaning over the desk, trimming the brown edges from the petals of the orchids with a pair of nail scissors.
“I’m glad you’re here. The visit from corporate was moved to tomorrow afternoon. Apparently Whitney needs to fly out to Tokyo early Monday morning to investigate some sort of snail sludge facial.”
“When will they be here?”
“Three o’clock. Carrie’s been freaking out all day. I think she’s probably just locked herself in her office with a plate of loaded nachos and it’s up to us now.”
“So much for the captain going down with the ship. What do we need to do?”
“I know. Well, they’ll be looking in every fucking corner. And I haven’t seen Luis for like an hour. I’ve tried calling the number we have for him, but no one’s picking up. It’s an answering service for a social work office, and I just keep getting a recording.”
“Has he ever skipped out on a shift before?”
“Not that I know of. But this glass is a wreck, and someone needs to polish the floors. And the Jacuzzi is making that weird noise again. I’m assuming Carrie never called anyone about it, so I have to get maintenance to get down here stat.”
“Are they really going to turn on the Jacuzzi?”
“We have to assume they will. You’ve seen what it’s like here. This company is all about punishment. They’ll dock us points for every strand of hair curled in the shower drain.”
“Points?”
“Each spa gets evaluated and scored on a hundred-point basis twice a year. We haven’t been open long, so this is our first proper evaluation.”
“So …”
“So what?”
“Emily, what do you care?”
She sighed. “Lily, this is how I spend most of my time. I know you are just buying time before you start your career over and move back to the city, but me? This is all I have. If I have to spend forty hours a week in this godforsaken shithole, then I sure as hell need something to show for it. I need to have a little pride. I don’t know about you, but I feel like if I don’t make something of myself, I’m going to get obliterated.
I’ll end up like my mother. Popping out a bunch of kids, making peanut butter sandwiches all day, up to my eyeballs in laundry.
With no idea who I am anymore. People are always saying you have your whole life ahead of you, but that’s not true.
If you’re a woman, you need to set yourself up.
You need to make your path before you get steamrolled by everything everyone expects you to do.
Kids, house, all that shit.” Her face was steely, but her voice had gone high and thin.