She hadn’t set foot inside the Johnson since arriving on campus, but she knew about the family paintings that were supposedly there, the ones that had once belonged to her father’s parents, Hermann and Selda. They’d been donated to Cornell when Salo was—by purest coincidence, no doubt—a high school senior applying for admission. She had never actually seen those paintings, it occurred to her. Then again, she had never actually cut a class before this morning, so maybe it was just a day for firsts.
Sally turned and walked across the Arts Quad to the museum, unzipping her parka as she entered the sleek stone lobby. Inside, the mess of wind and muddy snow retreated, framed by narrow horizontal windows as something mild and reassuringly traditional: college in winter. She looked around, half expecting to see her own name on a sign or doorway. When she didn’t, she went over to the kiosk and took a folding map of the exhibition halls. No Oppenheimer there, either.
“Excuse me,” she said, approaching one of the guards. This was a stout woman who couldn’t have been much older than herself. “I’m looking for the Oppenheimer paintings?”
“The…” The woman frowned, considering. For one awful moment it occurred to Sally that she might have mispronounced her own name. “Oppenheimer is the name of the artist?”
Sally nearly smiled. As if. As if anyone in her family could ever produce a work of art on their own.
“The donor was Oppenheimer. The paintings were Old Masters.”
“Okay.” The woman had taken up a clipboard and was now consulting it. “I don’t think we have anything by Old Master. At least not on current display. It could be in storage.”
“No … I…” But words, obviously, had failed her. That noted artist, Old Master? Then suddenly she saw Lewyn, who was calmly emerging from the stairwell at the far end of the lobby, and this took all other thought away with it. She turned her back and hunched her shoulders forward. It was instinctive, involuntary.
“Do you want me to check?” the guard was saying. “We have the Shaker exhibition on now. I know they moved out a lot of stuff, to storage. It wouldn’t take more than a couple minutes.”
“No, it’s okay,” Sally said. She had forgotten about the Oppenheimer paintings. Now all she wanted was to get away from her brother. She rushed up the stairs he had just come down, listening to the slap of her wet boots as she climbed, up to the second-floor landing （Art of Korea and Japan, 1800–1910） and then the third （Arts and Crafts Colonies of Upstate New York, 1885–1920）， and upward again, as if she still thought they might be up here, the mythic Oppenheimer paintings, that umbilical between herself, her father, her grandparents, and Cornell. Then, finally, she ran out of staircase, and stopped.
THE GIFT TO BE SIMPLE: A SHAKER AESTHETIC read the sign beside the gallery doorway, below a drawing of a spreading tree with large round green and red fruits and a block of text about the exhibition. Not that Sally stopped to read any of that. She was inside the room before she was aware of entering it, and standing, dumbstruck, at the foot of a chair.
A chair, a chair, Sally thought, as if someone were trying to persuade her otherwise.
An ordinary chair. A massively extraordinary ordinary chair, with a seat of rushes woven into a delicate pattern that looked incapable of supporting a fairy. It had … finials, she supposed. That shouldn’t be much of a talking point. And yet they were so exquisitely perfect, and the slats that made the back of the chair also no bigger than they needed to be, but no smaller, and just plain, beautiful, not at all … decorated, was the word that came to her. It was not decorated, not in any way. It needed nothing.
The chair sat （stood?） on a raised white cube, which brought the seat level to her eyes, but there was no glass or plastic around it to protect it from anyone who wanted to … what? Touch it? Make off with it? This appalled her, somehow, though she was very far from being able to think why. She only knew that this object, so unadorned and yet so clearly contained by its purpose, its basic and primitive purpose of enabling a human body to relieve itself of its own weight, was a pure expression of beauty. It outshone the sun.