its rubber bands and envelopes (Bill had neglected to bring anything better for storage), the general counsel was still not there. It was 11:20. Debra was spinning the key ring again.
Roman said, “Should I phone someone? At Northwestern?”
They sent him to call the bed and breakfast from the lobby to see if there’d been a message. He came back shaking his head.
But meanwhile, Nora had opened the shoebox of papers, started sorting them into stacks. She said, “There’s more than I remembered.”
“The more the better,” Bill said.
“Yes, but I wanted to go through it with you—really I have to—and I don’t see how we’ll get it done.” Stanley leaned over and pulled out half an inch of papers with bare hands, and Bill inhaled sharply. “Sit down,” Nora said, and Yale and Bill and Roman all did, on the cold metal folding chairs. Yale sat at her left elbow. Debra paced. “This one here,” Nora said, “now you see it’s signed ‘Fou-Fou,’ and I’m sure you could figure out that was Foujita, but look.” She showed them a small sketch of a ragged puppy next to the signature. “You wouldn’t know that this was because he called me ‘Nora Inu.’ Nora means ‘stray,’ you see, in Japanese, and he thought this was wonderful, that I was a stray who’d found my way across the ocean. ‘Nora Inu’ is ‘stray dog.’ That sounds like an insult, I suppose, but it wasn’t.”
“Amazing,” Yale said, and he met Bill’s exuberant eyes. “That—details like that, I think, will help a great deal with authentication. Maybe we could record you, what you’re saying—”
“Well yes, someone should be taking it all down. Isn’t that what you’re for?” This was directed at Roman.
“I have a notebook in the car,” he said, helplessly. And when they all kept looking at him, he bounded from the room to fetch it.
“Well,” Nora said, “my point is you’re going to need these stories. And I don’t see how we’re going to do that if you take this all back to Chicago. And I’m going to want to sort things too. I can see now they’re out of order. Couldn’t you stay up here a week or so?”
But they couldn’t, not right now. They had meetings, they had a gallery to run—plus as soon as the papers were signed, they wanted to get the art away from Frank. They hit on the idea that Roman could take the shoebox to the public library that afternoon, along with a load of dimes, and Xerox everything. The originals could remain in Wisconsin for now. “Not in the house, though,” Yale put in. “So much more could happen to them there.”
“Yes, yes,” Nora said. He didn’t need to spell it out.
They’d leave it all at the bank, and next week Yale and Roman would come back up, help her sort through.
When Roman returned, out of breath, Yale felt a knocking on his knee. Knuckles. He understood that he wasn’t to jump or ask what Nora wanted. He looked down as subtly as he could at her closed fist. When she raised it slightly, he put his palm beneath it. She was passing him something. She let it drop into his hand, and he closed his fingers around a complicated object, metal and pointy. He could feel a chain. A necklace.
He didn’t understand, but he shoved it into his trouser pocket, shifted so the sharp part dropped next to his groin.
She said to them all, “Listen, I feel dandy today, but I don’t know how I’ll feel next week, and if nothing else I want you to take this down.” She pointed at Roman. “Everything I read about Modigliani says he drank himself to death. That’s bunk. He died of tuberculosis. The drinking was only to cover up the illness, because there was such a stigma. He’d be at a party and start coughing, and he’d pretend to be falling-down drunk and take off. Now, he really was a bit of a drunk, that’s why it worked. He was trying to save his dignity, isn’t that funny? I don’t think he imagined that decades later people would still be saying he drank himself to death. It makes me terribly angry. Did you write that down?”
Roman read from his notebook: “Modigliani died of tuberculosis, not alcohol.”
“Ha. Well, you missed a bit. Next time, a tape recorder. Now I need to tell you about Ranko, because you won’t find anything in a book.”