Well, except I did read Colleges That Change Lives. There was that.
The following Sunday Lewyn and I went to Red Hook together, and together we went through the warehouse, checking every corner, storage area, and crawl space of the building for something that might have been overlooked. There was nothing: not a single work of Outsider Art by a person named Achilles Rizzoli, let alone an entire trove comprising most of the artist’s life’s work.
Even without success, it was lovely to see Lewyn at the warehouse, watching him go through the paintings, canvas by canvas and frame by frame. Each work was stored in low light, braced and padded, dehumidified and recorded, with physical files of supporting materials and Lewyn’s reference library. He spent a couple of days each week out here, sometimes opening the collection to scholars or curators and doing administrative work related to the loan requests that came in constantly. Over the years he’d found, in addition to his own general interest in the selections our father had made, a specific interest of his own in what he called “abstract depictions of tension around the expression of religious faith,” which sounded very much like the kind of thing you’d read about in the art journals he contributed to, if you could actually comprehend that stuff. It was a topic he said he’d first encountered in Utah, during the period even he now referred to, with no small degree of sarcasm, as “my wandering in the wilderness.” Abandoning our search after every conceivable part of the building had been checked, we went to pick up Italian sandwiches at F & M and returned, unwrapping them on the warehouse steps to take advantage of the late-afternoon sun. There was a steady stream of dogs, pulling their owners along toward the park and pier at the end of Coffey Street.
Neither of us had experienced Red Hook in its prior incarnations, so the proliferation of art galleries and whiskey bars along its side streets, the very hip young moms and cunningly attired children, and the more than locally famous lobster pound and key lime pie shop—not to mention the Fairway—had never struck us as out of step for the Brooklyn we had always lived in. With its cobblestones underfoot and the beautiful harbor at the bottom of the street, our father’s indefensible purchase in the early 1980s now appeared every bit as shrewd as certain of his earliest purchases of art had been. The houses on either side of the warehouse had all been sold in the years after his death, and in the warehouse itself Lewyn had upgraded the systems, bringing the technology of preservation and security into line for the twenty-first century, and carving out an office for himself in one corner of the cavernous first floor. Otherwise he had left the building pretty much alone.
“Did you ever come out here when you were a kid?” I asked, unwrapping my sandwich.
“No. He never took me. Though, to be fair, I don’t think I ever asked to come. I had no special feeling for art back then. Pretty ironic that I had all of this in my own family and I still had to find it through an art history survey in college, just like anyone else.”
“But you knew about it?” I said. “You knew he was buying paintings and keeping them here?”
“Oh, sure. But it was more in a negative context—this was the place he went to not be with us. It represented his absence, not anything good. I don’t know how the others felt, but it’s been pretty painful for me.”
“What do you mean?” I was trying to get my mouth around my sandwich.
“Well, just the lost opportunity, for the two of us. This was something we might have been able to do together. But it was a hidden thing, and I had no idea. Not just what was in the warehouse. What was in him. Do you understand?”
I wasn’t sure I did, but I nodded.
“Okay. So after Dad died I don’t think Mom came out here right away, she just kept up the security and the bills and that was it. Then, maybe a year or two later, she came with an appraiser so he could make an inventory. Then, after I was back from Utah, I came by myself. I had the inventory, but I don’t think I really believed it until I actually saw the paintings. The first time, I just sat on the floor and cried. I mean, for hours.”