We made her join us. And once she did, we made her let go of many things.
One of the first things our mother gave up was the Rizzolis. There was no great drama about their “disappearance” in her own view, mainly because, to her, they had never “disappeared” in the first place. Leaving her for Stella Western had literally cost Salo his life, and yet only a year afterward Johanna was locked in deeply upsetting negotiations with this person. One day in the midst of all that, she’d been driven out to Red Hook with Mr. Evan Rosen of the law firm Burke Goldman Finn & Emerson, and the appraiser. The appraiser had been dumbstruck, it was fair to say, and she had left him to his professional duties and private excitement and walked around the warehouse on her own, reacquainting herself with a few of the works she remembered: the orange scribbled one, the mustard-colored one with the green stripe, the bad-fairy triptych that had overseen her unwieldy pregnancy. This visit to Red Hook, our mother’s first ever, was also notable for a number of things completely unrelated to art, however. First, she finally understood that Salo’s warehouse was not located anywhere near Coney Island, and second, she had the indelible experience of actually seeing, from one of the warehouse’s upper windows, the small house at the end of the street where her late husband had lived his other life. In its backyard, a woman in long dreadlocks was throwing a ball to a five-or six-year-old boy. A couple of years had passed since Johanna had last seen them at the bookstore on Court Street, and the boy was obviously bigger. He still looked like Lewyn, though.
She was reeling, then, a few minutes later, when the appraiser called her attention to this distinct collection of pictures in a room of their own. To him, they were not very important （in fact, they might well belong to the genre now being referred to as “Outsider”） and, compared to the treasures downstairs （Bacon! Twombly! Marden!）， they were a bit of an incongruity. Did she know anything about them?
She did. She knew immediately that they were by the artist who turned people into buildings, the one her late husband’s mistress had described over dinner, many years before. And she also knew they were important to that woman, because the query sent from Stella Western’s attorney to hers had laid it all out: an entire collection of drawings which Stella Western said should belong to her, because Salo had given them to her, or bought them for her, or intended them for her, or some such devastating thing. They caused our mother pain, those pictures. A great deal of pain. And so she had sent them away. It was not a devious or even a complicated gesture. It was not strategic. It was not even particularly rational. She wanted them out, and she wanted them out immediately.
A mover was called on the spot. Hours later the nearly entire catalog of works by Achilles Rizzoli was safe in its new home, a very ordinary storage locker in Queens, indistinguishable from the many thousands of equally ordinary storage lockers in Queens in which spatially challenged New Yorkers stashed the things they didn’t want to think about. And Johanna didn’t think about the drawings again, not for many years. Not until that first letter from the American Folk Art Museum arrived.
Lewyn and I went with Stella to the facility in Woodside, and we tried to stay back as she was reunited with the pictures, one by one, after so long, but she kept calling us to look: The Kathredal, The Sayanpeau, The Mother Tower of Jewels. Technically it all belonged to Stella—our mother, having forced herself to confront this particular difficulty, had given it all away and this time she truly did not want to think of it again. Stella had everything moved to the American Folk Art Museum to be assessed and fawned over in advance of the exhibition that fall, but she also wanted each of Salo’s kids to have a picture of their own. Harrison declined, but Lewyn requested The Kathredal to remain in the Oppenheimer Collection. Ephraim chose one of the schematics for Rizzoli’s imagined city, Yield to Total Elation, and I asked for the sign Rizzoli had hand-lettered for his yearly exhibition.
ACHILLES TECTONIC EXHIBIT ADMISSION .10c
I’m not sure why. I guess it just spoke to me.
Sally, graciously, turned down the offer. She said she had never gotten over her first encounter with Outsider Art.
Stella was deeply fond of Lewyn, and she thought Rochelle was a wondrous firecracker, small like herself but coiled to spring. She thanked them for their wedding invitation but she wanted Johanna to be able to enjoy the day completely （having Ephraim there was going to be challenging enough）。 Still, everyone got invited to a screening of her Rizzoli film that June, and Harrison actually did go to that. Harrison would never be easy with Stella, but he drew upon his native dignity and considerable charm to make their points of contact as tolerable as they could conceivably be. On the other hand, he did come to greatly respect his brother Ephraim. The departure of Eli Absalom Stone from his life （from everyone’s life, in fact） had left a void that was obvious even to him; in Ephraim, who started at the Times after graduation, he at least found a person he considered capable of engaging with him on intellectual matters. The two of them fell into the routine of a weekly breakfast, alternating （for the sake of principle） between the Harvard and Yale clubs, and no one was more surprised by that than, actually, both of them.