“Apparently not the first time they’ve tried to contact her,” I said.
“About somebody named Achilles Rizzoli. And we supposedly own nearly all of his paintings. Which is very strange, since I’ve never heard of him.”
“I googled him. He died in the 1970s. He’s an ‘Outsider Artist.’ I googled that, too.”
Lewyn got up from the couch and retrieved his laptop. “Well, I’m quite sure they’re mistaken. We don’t own a single piece of Outsider Art. He came close to buying a Warhol once, but he decided against it. He didn’t want to open the door to Pop Art, I think. He was such a purist.”
“Too bad,” I said. I wouldn’t have minded owning a Warhol. Who didn’t like Warhol?
“Oh, this is interesting,” my brother said. He had the laptop open on his kitchen counter. “There are a couple of Achilles Rizzoli works in the Bay Area, one in a private collection and one at the De Young. Nothing else has been seen since the first Outsider Art Fair in 1993. A lost collection!”
“Very dramatic,” I said. But the truth was that I wasn’t all that into art, any art, not even Warhol. “Are you going to say something to Mom?”
But he didn’t answer. He was looking at the letter again.
“Lewyn?”
“Oh,” said Lewyn, looking up. “I just saw … I think, maybe there’s a connection after all, but I still don’t…” He returned to the letter from the museum and stopped talking.
“Lewyn! What?”
“It’s just … this documentary filmmaker. Give me a second,” he said.
I watched him lean closer to his laptop. This was obviously going to be very annoying, waiting for him to spit it out. I walked across to his desk and picked up the letter myself.
“S. S. Western,” I read. “Never heard of him.”
“Her,” said Lewyn, but he didn’t look away from the screen.
“Okay. Never heard of her.”
“I have. Or at least, I saw her name once, on a letter. In a lawyer’s office. S. S. Western.”
“What lawyer?”
“Mom’s. You were there, too. Just a baby.”
“So Mom knows this woman?”
My brother shrugged and read aloud from the Wikipedia page. S. S. Western’s film about three generations of an Oakland family had been broadcast on PBS. Her film about a lesbian/separatist record company had been shown at Sundance. And her portrait of a Nebraska Klansman who converted to Judaism had won a human rights award.
“Is there a picture?” I asked, and he nodded. I got up and stood behind him. The photo was of a slender African American woman posing before a backdrop that read Visions du Réel. She had gray dreadlocks to her chin and a broad smile and a bright pink scar below her neck.
“Have you ever seen her before?” I asked, and he said he hadn’t. I hadn’t either, so that was everything we knew, which in this case was pretty much the same as nothing at all.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Existentially Defrauded
In which Sally Oppenheimer achieves one of her therapy goals
My first sit-down with one of Walden’s cadre of tenacious （yet principled!） college counselors had taken place the winter of my junior year, and it featured a glossary of admissions-speak that included the words “holistic,” “fit,” “range,” and that perennial favorite, “outside the box.” The gist of it all, and this was of primary importance to students and parents alike, was that you couldn’t just walk into the Ivy League today, no matter who you were, or where your parents went to college, or how many AP classes you’d taken （a moot issue at Walden, where AP classes weren’t offered because every class was considered AP-equivalent）。 It was different now.