and things he heard about but never intended to follow up on, like the fifth-floor bathroom at Marshall Field’s being a tea room. He’d just wanted to know those places were there, wanted to feel at all times exactly as he’d felt in a cab flying down Lake Shore Drive. And for some reason, in this white-walled room of this little house, the city pulsed around him again.
“How much time do you think I have?” he asked the agent. “Honestly?”
She said, “Gosh, I don’t know. I imagine this place will go fast.”
If everything worked out with Nora’s donation—and when would he know that? In a month? A year?—he’d feel, at least, secure in his job. He’d be ready. And if the house was still on the market when that happened, he’d take it as a sign.
He walked her back to Halsted, and the agent asked if he knew that the theater on the corner used to be a horse stable. Yes, he did. They stood together looking at the walled-in archway that must have been built to let carriages through. The agent said, “Imagine that.”
* * *
—
The night of the Howard Brown fundraiser was so windy and brittle that Yale and Charlie joked about taking a taxi the quarter mile to Ann Sather. The fact that this was a Swedish restaurant, that the food would be meatballs and mashed potatoes, had seemed silly when the planning began in August, but now sounded perfect. He’d had a glass of scotch at home to warm him up for the walk, and it buzzed nicely through his hands, his feet.
Yale had been in a heightened state lately, waiting to hear back again from Nora, jumping every time his office phone rang for fear it would be Cecily. And now, on the street with Charlie, with nothing to worry about till Monday, that nervous energy had turned to pure elation. He was thrilled to walk beside a handsome man in a black wool dress coat, thrilled to give a dollar to a punk kid on a sidewalk blanket.
Every day that week, Bill Lindsey had dropped into Yale’s office with more news from some Pascin or Metzinger expert who’d told him, off the record, what the works Bill described might be worth. “Not that I care about the money,” Bill said, “but the farther over two million this estimate gets, the better I feel.”
Bill was a “paper and pencil man” to begin with—he said it the same way Yale’s uncle used to say “legs and tits man”—and he was more excited about the drawings than Yale was, but he was also particularly drawn to the painting of the bedroom, which was supposedly the work of Jeanne Hébuterne. Hébuterne, Modigliani’s common-law wife, had been an artist herself, although after her early death her family hadn’t allowed her work to be exhibited. Authentication would be particularly difficult, but perhaps its existence might bolster the claims on the Modiglianis. Yale loved the bedroom himself, the crooked walls and shadows.
Ranko Novak and Sergey Mukhankin were unknowns, but with a little digging, Yale found that a Mukhankin drawing not unlike the one in Nora’s possession—both were charcoals of nudes—had done decently at Sotheby’s in ’79. Bill was taken with that piece, anyway.
The Novak works, the ones Nora was so adamant that they display, were the only disappointments. Five of the pieces—two small, rough paintings and three sketches—were his. Curiosities, but not valuable. Yale didn’t mind the painting of a man in an argyle vest, the way the lines of the argyle extended beyond the bounds of his clothing, the dark depth of his eyes, but Bill hated it, and he hated the other painting, of a sad little girl, and he hated the sketches, which were all of cows. “Don’t promise her this stuff’s going on the wall,” he said. Yale cringed and Bill said, “Well, maybe she’ll, ah, pass away first. She’ll never know. But look, minus these cows, the collection holds together. I’m a happy man. There’s balance, there’s contrast, there’s a story, and it’s just the right size. You know, it’s a show. Someone is handing us a show.” He’d clapped Yale on the back like Yale had drawn the stuff himself.
And so although the cold air had bored its way into every pore of his body, Yale was floating.
The restaurant, already festively Swedish with its folk art walls, was now a Scandinavian wonderland, festooned with Christmas lights and greenery. They headed up the stairs, fashionably late—Charlie,