I looked at him. “But why?”
He smiled, but sadly. “It was the passion. The love and the passion, all over the walls out here. This was what he’d given it to. Not to me, certainly. I don’t think to Sally and Harrison, either. I don’t think to Mom, which in a way was worst of all. I didn’t need the appraiser to tell me what he’d done. This,” he pointed back over his own shoulder, at the front door, “is a world-class collection, assembled without any oversight or guidance, and as far as I can tell, without any interest in artist reputation, or likelihood of appreciation. He completely ignored abstract expressionism, which was all anyone was trying to acquire in the 1970s. He bought the paintings he responded to, personally, and so many of the purchases were just astonishingly prescient. A Twombly blackboard painting! That was the first piece he bought, and it was a very intentional purchase. No internet back then, and he didn’t just stroll into some gallery off the street, either. He had to have actually seen it somewhere, or at least a picture of it, but I have no idea where. It was with a dealer in Turin. I don’t think it had ever left Europe. Having it shipped over, not to mention the purchase, itself—that would have involved many letters, bank transactions, trans-Atlantic phone calls. Probably took months, or even years. Today the paintings in that series are at MOMA, the Tate, the Whitney, the Menil. And a warehouse in Red Hook. It blows my mind, actually. He bought these California painters no one was paying attention to then, like Diebenkorn. There are two Ocean Park paintings in there! He went to an auction in London and came back with a Francis Bacon triptych. There’s a Hockney sprinkler painting and a slab painting by Hans Hoffman! And two Ruschas. Jesus.” He shook his head.
I was getting the gist of this, though most of the details escaped me. I didn’t say anything, and in a moment he continued.
“And you could say, well, okay, Bacon and Hockney. Twombly—you didn’t have to be a genius to see what was going to happen with them. And even a couple of years ago there were paintings in the collection that had been pretty but not worth very much back when he bought them and they were still pretty but not worth very much—just pictures he’d loved and wanted to own, by artists who never really broke through. But I’m telling you, the world’s caught up to a lot of those painters, too. Agnes Martin, for example. No idea where he even came across her in the late seventies, but there she is. Alma Thomas. Okay, she had a show at the Whitney in ’72, but nobody bought her work for another generation. And some of the Italian artists—Piero Manzoni and Lucio Fontana. Arte povera. Dirt cheap when he bought them. Not today. This is a treasure house. I can’t believe I get to work here.”
“Almost makes up for what you didn’t get from him,” I said carefully. “When he was alive.”
My brother sighed. “Yeah. Almost.” He took another bite of his sandwich.
I wrapped the rest of my sandwich back up in the butcher paper it had come in. I’d managed to get through less than half of it.
“Lewyn,” I said, “can I ask you something?”
He turned to me. “If you have to ask permission to ask me a question, it’s probably not about the weather.”
It wasn’t about the weather.
“Would you tell me what happened out in Utah? I mean, I don’t actually know. I’ve never asked.”
“No one in this family has ever asked,” said Lewyn. “Isn’t that interesting?”
“Well, I was so young when you came back.”
“Yes. You’re excused.”
“But I’m not so young anymore. So would you?”
Lewyn seemed to consider. He was halfway through his own sandwich, but he was slowing down.
“My freshman-year roommate at Cornell was Mormon,” Lewyn said. “He was from Utah. He was at the vet school.”
Like Paula, I nearly said. I hadn’t mentioned Paula to Lewyn. Or to our mother.