Dear Mrs. Oppenheimer,
（The letter read.）
As you are aware, the curatorial staff of the American Folk Art Museum hopes to mount a major exhibition in conjunction with the upcoming PBS documentary Celestial Visions by S. S. Western, concerning the life and work of the American Outsider Artist Achilles G. Rizzoli, which is currently scheduled to air in the fall of 2018. As the owner of nearly all of Rizzoli’s known works, we are reaching out to you once again in hopes that you might reconsider allowing the works to be exhibited at the museum. Obviously, the museum considers your collection of Rizzoli’s work to be of crucial value and importance to our understanding of this great, albeit neglected, artist and our exhibition can only enhance the significance and value of that collection. Our curatorial staff would be delighted to meet with you or your representatives to reassure you that your Rizzolis will be professionally handled and highly secure during the entirety of the exhibition process.
We hope very much that you will agree to discuss the matter with us.
With all best wishes,
Denise Kelly
Director, American Folk Art Museum
The kettle whistled. I set the page down and turned off the flame, then I made a pot of PG Tips, the only tea I drink. I was also hungry, as I usually was after practice, but there was, as usual, no sign of dinner in the “gourmet” kitchen, food prep having ceased to be a major activity in the house when Gloria, our housekeeper, retired four years ago. Mom might have hired somebody else, but by then culinary Brooklyn had flowered all around us, and the delivery app had been born. Our evening meals, in other words, tended to come after a perfunctory exchange—likely by text—about what to order, and the two of us would eat separately, without further contact.
The letter, to be honest, didn’t make much of an impression on me that first time through. I folded it and slid it back into the envelope, then I turned it over to examine the olive rectangle of the American Folk Art Museum’s logo. I was familiar with the museum, of course—it had been a destination for class trips at Walden Lower, and it was right there across from Lincoln Center, and next to the New York Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints （a place I’d long been aware of, thanks to what Harrison referred to as our brother Lewyn’s “pioneer debacle”）。 But then again, the American Folk Art Museum does not occupy the same psychic real estate as the Museum of Natural History does in the minds of every young New Yorker. I’d never been to it outside of those class trips, or ever heard Johanna mention the place.
Still, this letter was obviously neither random nor impersonal; it was specific in its intent and “reaching out to you again” definitely implied that this was not the first communication. I wasn’t familiar with the artist called Achilles G. Rizzoli, which was itself almost a parody of an artist’s name, with its mash-up of Greek mythology and fabled Italian art publisher （I knew about that from Lewyn）。 Also, though I was hardly well-informed about any art, “Outsider” or otherwise, I was well aware that our father had collected works by twentieth-century painters, most of which were now fabulously valuable. They were stored in a warehouse in Red Hook, but sometimes went out on loan to museums around the world. My grandparents, Hermann and Selda Oppenheimer, who died before I was born, had also collected paintings, but they were Old Masters, and all of those had been sold or donated after their deaths, so no crossover there, either. All in all, it struck me as the height of improbability that any Oppenheimer of either generation might ever have purchased even a single work by a so-called Outsider Artist, let alone such a person’s entire oeuvre. And the only work of art my mom herself had ever purchased was a portrait of me by a Walden art teacher, at the annual fundraising auction. And it was horrible.
When I passed through the living room again, holding my mug in one hand and the heavy backpack with the other, the two of them stopped talking. They had their heads close, a posture I couldn’t help noticing because while those two had always performed a kind of pantomime of sisterliness, I had never believed that they were really intimate. And yet there was a definite cessation of the conversation when I passed through the room, and then a definite recurrence when I departed. That was interesting. I took my mug and my backpack to the foot of the staircase and began to ascend.