Page 17 of Drawing Home
“No, smart-ass.” He separated out one key. “This opens the cabin on Bob Anderson’s thirty-five-foot Chris-Craft. I’m taking care of it for two weeks. What do you say we take this party onto the water?”
“First of all, no,” said Alexis. “Second of all, Emma was just about to tell us something. So what happened today?”
The three of them looked at her expectantly.
“Um, well, before I left for work, this guy showed up at the house. A lawyer.”
The rest of the story came out in a rush, sounding even more unbelievable as she related it than it had felt as it happened.
Sean let out a low whistle. “Next round is on you,” he said.
“Very funny,” Emma said.
“Have you seen it yet?” Alexis said.
She shook her head. “Maybe tomorrow. I’m curious but…”
“Does Jack know?” said Chris.
“Jack? Why would I tell Jack?”
“I mean, are you going to keep working?”
This conversation was getting absurd. “You guys, the point is there’s no way this is actually happening. And even if it is, there are weird constraints on the whole thing. It’s Penny’s house, not mine. I can’t sell it or anything. It doesn’t really change my financial situation today.”
“But you get to live in a mansion on the water for free,” said Sean.
“Well, yeah. There’s that. I’m totally freaked out.”
“Look at it this way,” said Alexis. “This summer, you’ll get a taste of how the other half lives.”
They raised their glasses.
Bea, wearing her nightgown and a quilted robe, rested on top of the white comforter, staring at the wooden ceiling beams. The great charm of the room was its simplicity. No television, no placards with a Wi-Fi password. The phone next to the bed was a black rotary. The hotel harked back to a better time.
A time when she did not have one of Henry Wyatt’s paintings hidden in the trunk of her car.
Oh, how could it have come to this? After all she had done for his career, after all their years together, she was reduced to smuggling his work out of his house like a common criminal. She couldn’t leave it in the trunk, but she also couldn’t carry it up the stairs by herself. Securing it in the room would have to involve Kyle. His attitude had already turned so sour, she didn’t relish the idea of enlisting him in her questionable endeavor.
And yet, she felt justified in her action. The thought of leaving that painting behind, of letting some stranger do heavens knew what with all of Henry’s precious work, was stomach-turning. If taking one of the paintings helped get her through the night, then so be it. Bea had always done things her own way—even when she made life harder for herself.
She’d moved to New York City in the fall of 1960. Just a year earlier, she’d made the shocking decision not to enroll at Vassar College, and as a result, she left Newport on terrible terms with her parents. It was a choice they saw as rebellious, as a rejection of all they had raised her to value in the world and what they had raised her to do with her life. What they didn’t realize was that the seeds for her life-changing decision had been planted years earlier.
It happened when Bea was twelve, the summer the town hosted the first Newport Jazz Festival. Her parents were among several residents who were appalled by the prospect, certain it would bring an “undesirable” crowd into town. Her mother stopped speaking to her friend Elaine Lorillard, who organized the event, even though just the September before Elaine had wangled the Winsteads an invitation to the social event of the season: the wedding of Jacqueline Bouvier to Jack Kennedy.
After months of hearing whispers about the festival and seeing posters all around town, Bea was obsessed. The Saturday night of the event, after telling her parents she was babysitting for a neighbor, Bea sneaked off to the grounds of the Newport Casino. She took a moment to pray to God that she wouldn’t get caught. Then she looked up and saw the glorious full moon. Decades and decades later, she could remember the feeling she’d had then, the sense that her life was really beginning.
The casino lawn seemed to be filled with a million people. It wasn’t just the vastness of the audience that astounded her; it was the mix of black people and white, sailors and schoolgirls. And the music! Eddie Condon. Dizzy Gillespie. Ella Fitzgerald. Jazz was unlike anything she’d heard before. The songs broke all the rules, and the musicians looked like they were from another planet. But, as she learned that night, they were not from another planet or even another country. They were from New York City.
It was the place Bea wanted to live when she grew up.
She never forgot it, not even when she held the Vassar acceptance letter in her hand. Especially when she held the Vassar acceptance letter in her hand. She saw Robert Frost’s diverging roads ahead of her.
Bea didn’t want to waste four years at Vassar and then return to Newport to make a “good” marriage. She had no interest in that kind of life. And the only escape she could imagine was New York City.
Her parents wouldn’t hear one word about the move, wouldn’t give her a dime, and so she landed in New York City broke and very much on her own. AVillage Voicead led to an apartment share on the Lower East Side with an NYU student who worked a few hours a week at an art collective on the Bowery. The scene captivated Bea.
When she wasn’t hanging around one of the artist-run galleries on East Tenth Street, she was crashing any party where there was a chance that a gallery owner or up-and-coming artist might show up. She needed a job, but no one was handing out positions in galleries. She had to find a way to make a name for herself. This was her all-consuming thought the night she managed to get herself invited to a party at a massive Spring Street loft.
