The Forgery of Venus Read Online Free Page B

would ask Charlie how she could stand it and she’d say it was charity, a lonely old woman needing companionship, and after a while I learned not to tease her about it, and I took it as natural that my sister could be two completely different people, the quiet little nun-in-training and thetomboy in shorts and a T-shirt, palling around with me down on the beach, in our boats, always covered in sand, tracking it through the house.
    When she died, I mean Grandma, it turned out that all the smarm was for naught. She left the bulk of the estate to the Church, with life grants to me (small), Charlotte (larger), and Mother. Mother got the house. In the will she said she expected Charlotte to pursue her vocation and enter religious life.
    That’s a scene etched into my brain, the bunch of us sitting around listening to the lawyer read it out, all of us in black, like it was 1880, and when that part got read I rolled my eyes and nudged Charlotte, who was sitting next to me, expecting her to give me the elbow back, but she didn’t, she just turned and looked at me, and there was someone else looking out from behind her eyes and it fucking froze my blood.
    Why he never left her, I guess, why he never had a real French-type mistress in a Manhattan apartment like he must’ve wanted. I remember looking at him when he realized he wasn’t going to get a dime, that he was stuck with us more or less forever; he went white, like he’d been punched in the gut. Funny, because his income was pretty high then; he was at the peak of his fame as a second-rate Rockwell, he could’ve split then, but he didn’t, he just kept grabbing the maids and the locals, waitresses and cashiers.
    But he loved her once; you couldn’t paint a woman that way unless you did, or I couldn’t anyway, and there are photographs, God, are there photographs! They met in the last summer before the war, they were both at the Art Students’ League, he was an instructor, she was a student for her bohemian summer before she got serious and started settling down with a good Catholic boy, and I think he just blew her away with sheer talent. The Petries must’ve loved it when she dragged him home that summer, a heathen with no money, no family. ButMother was a hardhead when she wanted to be, and she was Daddy’s girl, the only child, a bit of a disgrace there in a fine Catholic family, only one kid, what’s wrong with them? And he converted, naturally, more Catholic than the Pope after a while; he could be charming too, charmed the old guy, but never Grandma, as it turned out. I bet she was praying that a Jap bomb would solve her problem, but he came back and they got married and he got famous, and then came Charlotte and then a set of miscarriages and a little girl who died of polio at age two, and then me, and that was it.
    There it is, the sad story, for the record, this record, or at least what I’ve been able to gather. Not that anyone actually ever sat down and told me the truth. I get versions. Who to believe? More to the point, how to avoid it?
    I finally settled on a plan to go to Europe—the geographic cure, always attractive at that age. I didn’t have enough money of my own and I thought he’d never give me any of his, although he spent enough of it on himself. I guess he assumed that I’d stay here, he had the stupid idea that we were going to be a father-and-son thing like the Wyeths or the Bassanos, a little atelier here in the cultural desert of Long Island. He was talking about how I could do the lesser portrait commissions, or maybe the liquor ads. But as it turned out he sprang for the whole thing. That’s what was so maddening about the bastard, you thought he never considered another human being besides himself, and then he goes and does something like that; he said, take as long as you want, you’re only young once, and remember to use condoms.
    Of course I’d asked my mother for it first, and she’d said, ask your father. I couldn’t