When We Meet Again (32 page)

I stared at Fromm, stuck on the first few words he’d said. “Gaertner saw someone in the crowd?” I asked. I glanced at one of the paintings and saw the telltale girl in the red dress, her face turned away, the one who appeared in silhouette in so many of his images. The pieces clicked suddenly into place. “He thought he saw my grandmother,” I whispered.

Fromm looked me in the eye. “Yes.”

“And he loved her too.”

Fromm hesitated. “Yes.”

I could see something strange in Fromm’s eyes, something that looked like guilt and sadness. Was it because Gaertner had betrayed my grandfather in some way by pursuing my grandmother? What had happened between these three men? I stared at the painting for another moment. “But she
was
there,” I said.

Fromm’s eyes widened. “Margaret? She was at the March on Washington?”

I nodded. “With my father.”

Fromm’s eyes filled. “So he was right. My God, he always said he’d seen an older boy with her.” He leaned closer to one of the images and pointed to a gangly young man who stood partially behind the woman in the red dress, his face in the shadows. “Here,” Fromm said. “And here.” He pointed to another one of the series in which a man in his late teens was clearly visible. I had to admit, he bore a resemblance to my father.

“But why?” I asked. “Why was Gaertner painting my grandmother all these years later, if Peter Dahler was the one she had loved?”

“Because, dear Emily,” Fromm said, reaching gently for the painting in front of him, as if he could pull the scene back from the mists of time, “Peter Dahler and Ralph Gaertner are the same man.”

CHRISTMAS 1984

R
alph. Ralph, are you awake?”

“What?” Peter stirred and struggled to grasp the present. It had been more than twenty years since he had left his old name behind to take on a new one, and still, there were days that he forgot he’d become someone else. The reinvention was never complete, because there was still a part of him living in a past that was long dead. The world had changed—everything had changed—but for Peter, one thing would always stay the same: he would never be as happy as he had been on that warm June evening when he’d last held Margaret in his arms. So the transformation to a new life as Ralph Gaertner was forever unfinished, and there were days he simply forgot to respond to the name.

This morning, it was Ingrid Beck who was whispering his borrowed name, and despite the fact that Peter had been seeing her for a little over a year now, he was having a hard time bridging the gap between the old and the new. In his heart, he was Peter Dahler, forever committed to Margaret. But now, in this bed, he was Ralph Gaertner, the esteemed artist, who was waking up beside a woman his friends had wholeheartedly encouraged him to date.

Dating
. What a strange thought, at his age! He was sixty-three, for goodness’ sake! But Maus had insisted. Maus, who had been with him all these years. Maus was trying to take care of him, to give him someone to help him move on once and for all. And Ingrid—tall, cultured, beautiful, German-born Ingrid—was supposed to be his window to change.
You only get one life,
Maus had said sternly.
And you are wasting yours, my friend. What good will your paintings do if your heart is forever closed?

Peter hadn’t been a saint in the intervening years. There had been times—years after Margaret’s death, of course—that a pretty woman had caught his eye at an art exhibit or at a party thrown by a gallery owner. He knew that when a woman wanted him because he was Ralph Gaertner, she would never see beyond the artist to the man he was inside, so it felt safe to spend a night here or there with one of them. He was always gentle and kind with them, but he made sure they had no illusions about a future together.

Yet Ingrid was different. At fifty, she was thirteen years younger than he, and she too came from Germany, though her childhood there had differed vastly from his. She’d been merely a child when war had ravaged the country, and she’d come of age just as Germany began to rebuild. She loved the country of their birth in a different way than Peter did, and he had to admit, her passion for their homeland was rekindling a long-lost flame in his own heart. She was an art dealer who traveled to Munich and West Berlin frequently for work, and already, Peter had surprised himself by agreeing to go with her on her next trip.

She made him feel less lonely, and she didn’t seem as impressed by his credentials as many other gallery women did. In fact, right from the start, she had asked him different sorts of questions than he was accustomed to. She didn’t want to know why he painted sugarcane fields and feminine silhouettes in the distance; she wanted to know things like whether he believed in God, how he had dealt with the death of his mother, and how he liked his steak cooked. In other words, she wanted to get to know the
real
him. But he could never show her everything. He would always be Ralph Gaertner with her, never Peter Dahler. Peter Dahler was dead.

“Ralph?” Ingrid asked again, running her manicured nails along his spine, making him shiver. She pressed herself into him. “Darling?”

“Good morning, Ingrid,” he murmured, turning to her, taking her in. She was beautiful; that much was undeniable. In his experience, this wasn’t what women in their fifties were supposed to look like. He remembered his grandmother, round at the edges and graying, and he thought of his own mother, who had only lived to forty-five. She had looked like an old woman even then, ravaged by starvation and the anguish of wartime. But Ingrid—blond, beautiful Ingrid—was different. She was a vision, and Peter had to admit, he liked the way it felt waking up beside her. But it was his body responding to her, not his heart. He liked the feel of her in his arms. He liked the way people looked at him when she was by his side.

And he knew she loved him. It was in her eyes each time she looked at him. He wondered what Ingrid saw in his eyes. Shame? Sadness? Regret? He hoped there was love there too, but he was no longer sure what that meant.

For him, love had become almost like an illness.
You have to stop,
Maus had told him again and again, gazing at him with worry.
Keeping Margaret with you all the time like this, it’s not healthy.
He knew that Maus was concerned about the fact that Peter had converted his attic into a shrine to his lost love. He painted Margaret again and again and again—he couldn’t stop—and then he filled his attic with the images, so that whenever he needed to see her, she was always there. Maus thought Peter was doing something destructive, but what he didn’t understand was that it was the only thing keeping Peter sane. When he was painting Margaret, he was able to go somewhere else in his mind, a world in which he could create the rules, in which he could color in the twists and turns and rewrite the story. The real world, Peter knew, dealt out tragedy, unblinking. But the world he created was something to hold on to, to keep him from drowning.

But he could never tell anyone else that. So when Maus finally threatened an intervention, Peter bought an old warehouse building in Castleberry Hill and moved the paintings there, intending to slowly distance himself from them. Instead, the obsession grew, and he began to spend more and more time hidden and alone in the warehouse, imagining the life he could have lived with Margaret.

Since he had begun painting he had always inserted her into his images. He never showed her face in his public work, because he felt that to reveal her to the world would be to give a piece of her away. But she was everywhere, in his every thought, and so he couldn’t help himself. A painting wasn’t complete unless she was somewhere in it. Over the years, art experts had speculated about the shadowy woman whose face was always turned away, and it had become Peter’s trademark as an artist.
The Gaertner Angel,
the critics called her. Some thought she represented goodness; others said she was the symbol of the solidarity of mankind, and that’s why her face was never shown; she was supposed to be an everywoman. Some even suggested that she represented the devil, for why else would she often be wearing a red dress? But nothing could be further from the truth. Peter was simply painting her as he’d first seen her—as a vision in faded red, floating against a perfect dawn.

The violet sky frequently made an appearance in his paintings too, for to him, it represented the meeting of heaven and earth. The world had been an almost unbelievable shade of purple at the moment he first saw her, and since then he had come to believe that it had been God himself opening up the horizon to let all the light in, and that Margaret, his angel, had somehow slipped through. He wondered sometimes if he could still feel her presence because she was always close by, just above him in a violet heaven, looking down.

Then something had changed. Last month, the night before Thanksgiving, he’d had a wrenching dream. Margaret was floating above him, just out of reach, trying to tell him something. But he couldn’t hear her, and she smiled sadly and ascended toward the purpling sky. The clouds wrapped themselves around her like a perfect embrace, and then she was gone.

There was something strange left in the dream’s wake. Over the years, he had managed to mostly let go of the image of the son he’d never had, the baby who had been stillborn and cremated with Margaret. But after that night, he had begun dreaming something else. He’d begun dreaming of the face of his son, what the boy would have looked like if he’d grown into a man, and if that man had gone on to have children of his own. Now, when he awoke in the mornings, sometimes his paintbrush pulled those imaginary creatures from thin air. A man who’d be nearly forty now. A child—a granddaughter who looked like Margaret, Peter decided—who would be young and light, without a care in the world. He began to paint them, and because Maus rejoiced and complimented him for finally moving on, he didn’t tell Maus who the figures were. He knew it was unhealthy. He knew it was wrong. He knew it was a betrayal of Ingrid, who had no idea that he kept a warehouse full of the life he wished he had lived.

In fact, Ingrid had her own idea of what the Gaertner Angel of his paintings represented.
Perhaps you were just waiting for me,
she said.
Perhaps now the woman in your paintings can have a face, for you have fallen in love
.

And because he wanted very much to love her, because he wanted his world to be centered in reality rather than fantasy, he made a decision. After that dream of Margaret, he decided to try to let her go. He knew he could never stop painting her, but he had to force himself to move on. Maybe the dream was somehow her good-bye. So on this morning, waking up beside this beautiful woman, he intended to finally make the change that he probably should have made years ago. Maus would be proud.

“Merry Christmas, Ingrid,” he said, giving the woman in his bed a sweet kiss on the lips. He waited, as he always did, for the kind of firework sensation he’d had each time he’d kissed Margaret, but it eluded him. “I will bring you breakfast, my dear. Just wait here.”

She smiled at him, seduction in her eyes. “You won’t come back to bed?”

He blinked. He wanted to. Of course he wanted to. But he had made himself a promise. He had to do this. Perhaps it was the way to become whole again. “Please, I will be right back.”

He prepared a tray for her in the kitchen. Scrambled eggs. Strawberries. Freshly squeezed orange juice. Strong coffee. And a jewelry box. He carried it upstairs, arms shaking, and set it down beside her. He could tell that she’d gotten up and applied a bit of makeup before he’d returned, and there was something about it that twisted his insides. She should know he already found her beautiful. Why did she have to put on layers of artifice? But there was no time to think about it, for she had already spotted the little blue box, was already tearing the white ribbon off, cracking it open. “Oh, Ralph!” she exclaimed, looking up at him with wide eyes.

“Will you marry me?” he asked, swallowing the mysterious lump that had suddenly lodged itself in his throat.

“Oh yes! Yes, my darling, yes!” She pulled the Tiffany solitaire from its perch and slipped it onto her own finger before Peter had the chance to do it for her. “Oh, we will have such a wonderful life together!” she exclaimed, diving toward him on the bed to wrap her arms around his neck. The coffee spilled a little, sloshing onto the bedsheets, and they both laughed. But as she pulled back, already making plans about who she would call first and when they might marry and what kind of dress she would wear, Peter had to look away, because his eyes were wet and cold.

He wanted it to work. He wanted to love her. He wanted to put his thoughts of Margaret to rest at long last. It had truly been his intention.

And yet as the years swept by, he began to realize it was impossible.

He grew to care deeply for Ingrid, but it was a different kind of love than he’d had for Margaret. He felt an enormous sense of affection, and when Ingrid was happy, he was happy. When something good happened to her, he rejoiced with her. And on the nights when she was traveling for business, he missed her.

But was that love? Was that how it was supposed to feel? He tried to discuss it with Maus once, but his friend would have none of it.
You have a perfect, beautiful woman who loves you deeply,
Maus had said.
Why can’t that be enough? Why can’t you see how lucky you are?

Why indeed? It was the question constantly ringing in Peter’s head too. Why couldn’t he close his eyes without seeing Margaret? Why couldn’t he pick up his paintbrush without wanting to bring her alive in watercolor once again? Why couldn’t he make love to Ingrid without having to hold Margaret’s name back from his tongue?

He knew Ingrid could feel it too. She flinched, sometimes, when he looked at her, and he knew it was because the things reflected in his eyes were wrong. She could read emotions that shouldn’t be there. In bed, there was a growing gulf between them too. Sometimes, at the beginning, she tried to hold him, as if the cradle of her arms would let him be reborn. But with the passage of time, she moved further and further away, retreating into herself. He knew she loved him, and he knew that with each refusal, he wounded her a little more. There was an emptiness inside of him that she could never fill, and after a while, it was a gulf too wide to cross.