“That’s perfect, thanks again. Can I offer you a glass of iced tea? I just brewed it.”
“Oh, I’m okay, thank you.”
“No, really. Come in, I insist. Just one glass.” She put a perfectly manicured hand on my arm. “Now, your mother tells me you are here for a little while? From the city?”
My mother rarely mentioned the neighbors, but I supposed she and this woman might have chatted now and again.
“For now. Just the summer.” Walking through her garage door and into the kitchen, I was struck by the smell of her house. A combination of Windex, cigarettes, and kitty litter. “I’m sorry—I don’t know if we’ve met before. What’s your name again?”
“I’m Mildred. But you can call me Mil. Mildred is such a miserable name. You’re Lily, right? Your mother has told me all about you.”
“Yes.” I blushed. I wondered what my mother had told her. Chances were that any achievements my mother had bragged about were now out of date.
“Now sit there, and I’ll be right over with something to drink. I bet you miss the city. I used to go up there every fall and spring for the fashion shows.”
“You did?” I didn’t mean to sound so surprised.
“For a long time I owned a boutique on Pacific Avenue, back in the fifties and sixties. Oh, I carried the best stuff. Furs, beaded handbags from Belgium, Ceil Chapman dresses, the most drop-dead gorgeous shoes. Marilyn Monroe once bought a sweater from me when she was in town. Poor thing didn’t know it was still pretty cold here in May.” She eyed me up and down, a wry little smile coming into her face. “I still have a ton of the stuff upstairs, if you ever want to look. My grandkids all live in Washington so they’ll never get to see it.” I could picture the closets packed with thick velvet dresses. Beaded cashmere cardigans. Tweed suits in pastel colors. “Had to sell the store off, though, in the seventies. They were saying things were bad then, that the casinos would turn it all around. And get a load of them these days. Now there’s no one to turn them around. Anyway, while you’re here, you should come upstairs and have a look at some of these things. Follow me.”
“Oh, really, thank you, but I couldn’t.”
“Oh, come on. You’d make an old lady’s day.” She got up and left the room, and it seemed I had no choice but to comply. It made me nervous to watch Mil go up the stairs, though for a woman her age she was pretty quick on her feet. She opened the door to a room she must have used as a spare bedroom. It had a green chenille bedspread and a large art deco dresser, the top crammed with old perfume bottles, and I suspected no one had visited in a while. The vanity mirror was furred with dust.
She opened the door to the closet, and I was shocked to see that it was almost as big as the bedroom itself. She yanked thechain, and a light bulb mounted to the bare wood of a rafter cast a yellow glow over rows of garment bags. She started to unzip them and clacked through the hangers, pausing every minute or so to wrestle a piece from the bag and hold it to the light.
“Cute, but not right for you, perhaps. Let’s see … I think there’s another one like it but without the pleats.” She mostly seemed to want to talk to herself, hold her own council. I could picture what she had been like as a shop owner. Authoritative without being bossy. Never afraid to step in with a recommendation, but not too pushy either. I was scanning the rest of the closet, trying to add up how long it would take her to sort through all of the bags, when I saw that there were frames propped against the wall. I could only make out their bottom edges—someone had draped white sheets over the tops. I hesitated, pinched a corner of the sheet between my fingers. She had been so insistent on showing me upstairs that I figured she wouldn’t mind—just a look.
While Mil unzipped more garment bags, I lifted the fabric and took a small, almost involuntary sip of breath. I had expected some horrible 1970s paint-by-numbers, a velvet painting depicting a Playboy-esque nude, a tacky crewel made from fuzzy, fraying yarn.
I’d found instead a painting of a man with a bandage over his eye. He was seated, and it took me a moment to realize that he was in a wheelchair, but then I noticed the arms of his chair at the bottom of the frame, the handles jutting out behind him. His gaze was turned away from the viewer, and his expression gave me the feeling that he hadn’t wanted to be seen, that he felt ashamed, even. I crouched to look at the brushwork: precise and delicate on the face, while the broad strokes of his shirt gave the impression of haste. The discrepancy made his expression all the more intense, the evasion in his eyes all the more legible. Behind me, Mil was saying something about box pleats versus kick pleats. I lifted the rest of the sheet: another portrait, of a woman, in whatlooked like an old nurse’s uniform. Her hair fell in limp curls around her chin, and even though, unlike the man, she stared straight out of the painting, there was something withholding about her, something crimped about her expression. As though she were pinching herself outside the frame. Mildred turned, holding out a belted navy dress.
“Oh, you found the pictures, I see. My husband collected them.”
“What are they? Who did them?”
“Someone around here, I think. The ones you’re looking at are portraits of patients from the Thomas England Hospital, but there are others, too. My husband used to buy them from a friend of his. I don’t know who the artist is, though. Wonder if they’re still around. Not much left to paint, I guess.”
I didn’t know where to begin with the questions. “Wait. Thewhathospital?”
“Oh, it’s been torn down for decades. It’s where Resorts is now. But it was the largest hospital in the country during World War II. My husband was a vet, so he was most interested in the history of the hospital. Those were the first ones he bought, and then it just expanded from there. He kept bringing them home. Didn’t bother me, because I don’t think he paid much, and they made him happy. You like them? Those hospital pictures are so depressing.”
The portraits made me feel melancholy, wistful, even a little bit angry. I was looking at a third that showed a man—no, a boy, he had a boy’s apple cheeks and dense, sun-bleached eyelashes—with a line of stitches along his cheekbone, holding his hand to his chest. The tips of his fingers were missing. I lifted another sheet. This one showed a woman in a bathing cap, with a smile that edged toward a grimace. She was turned to the side with a slice of crowd behind her, and she had reins gathered in her hands, beads of water running down her face like tears. One of the girls whoused to ride horses off of diving platforms on the boardwalk and land in those shallow pools. The thought of the impact made my teeth ache. Boardwalk and street scenes, façades of shops and billboards that had been torn down for years. Woolworth’s. Planters Peanuts, Irene’s Jewelry, the Schmidt’s Beer clock. A woman with her mouth painted into a perfect cupid’s bow and a Miss America sash draped across her chest as she looked out across a stage, wringing her hands.
“I love them. I mean, theyaresort of depressing. But they’re so … human. Vulnerable.” I thought of the artists Philip Louis had been signing at the gallery the past few years. The post-modern, post-beauty, post-meaning types. Everything they did was ironic, arch. I had almost forgotten that painting could make you feel like this. That the right work brought you into it, then sent you back out into the world, ready to reinvest in the details of your surroundings. They were so different from so much of the work I was seeing in the city: These paintings were simpler, unafraid of approaching sentiment, of asking people to feel something. They didn’t give me the sense that I’d had when looking at a lot of contemporary stuff, like I wasn’t in on the joke. After everything with Matthew, I craved that kind of earnestness.
“No argument there. A little too human, if you ask me. I prefer landscapes and still lives, myself. Snowy woods and fruit arranged nicely in a bowl, all that, thank you very much. But you can come look at them some time, if you’d like. There’s more in the other bedroom.”
There was a signature on the bottom right corner of each canvas, but I couldn’t make it out, just the swoop of an S at the beginning of the last name. Most of them had dates, too, ranging from the eighties to the late nineties, but nothing since. “Have you ever showed them to anyone?”
“Other than you?”
“Like a professional? They’re really interesting, Mil. Someone might want to buy these. Maybe even a museum. Or the Atlantic City Historical Society?”
“Oh, I doubt that. He bought them for nothing, a few dollars each, I think. They don’t have anyvalue. God, I wish this was one of thoseAntiques Roadshowsituations. I’d get myself a nice little condo in Palm Beach in a second.” She turned and rustled through another garment bag. “Aha! Here’s what I was lookingfor.”
She held up a red gingham sundress with a halter neck. It looked, I thought, more like a tablecloth than something to wear.
“Take this. It will look adorable on you. Perfect for this time of year. Now all you need is some handsome boy to take you on a beach picnic.”
