DAUBS OF COLOR IN THE COLD (Pt. 5 - The End)

I don’t know how I forced myself out of the painting the way I did. I’d been standing there, tangled in the venom of Uncle Mason’s words. The clouds above had stopped drifting. The ripples of the canoe’s wake stood mid-crest. The waterfall had frozen over. I had to escape. I spun away from the painting and planted my face in my hands.

The Uncle Mason’s voice echoed through the gallery with unflappable calm. “Albert Bierstadt was born in Prussia, before Germany even existed. His father was a cooper, which in early eighteenth-century Europe made him next to worthless. They came here when Albert was only a year old. His parents did better here than they ever would have in Prussia. How could Albert not embrace America and everything that came with it? He traveled to Düsseldorf in his twenties to learn how to paint, but he came back and made America the subject of everything he did. At the time he caught a lot of shit for his showmanship and skill at advertising himself. But entrepreneurial flair and selling yourself—that’s baseball and apple pie, and it served him well. America gave Bierstadt everything. How could he not believe it was the work of God?”

I turned toward him slowly. Once I could lift my face out of my hands, I asked, my hands open in a plea, “Do you really believe that?”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe. He believed it.”

“Then he was an asshole.”

“Anna, our beliefs don’t take form in a vacuum. You know that. They take root in what we know, what we experience every day. You know a nice middle-class suburban existence, so you have the luxury of taking the time to learn about the roots of institutionalized injustice and then passing judgment. You don’t know what ‘hard-scrabble’ means. You don’t understand what it means to be so worried about keeping a roof over your head and feeding your kids that you don’t have the time or energy to worry about the predation of the system. To you fixing the system is a worthwhile goal. To people you’ve never even met the system is just a boot coming down on their throat, and they’re just trying to position themselves so that when it connects, they’ll still be able to breathe.”

“Are you saying I don’t have empathy?”

Uncle Mason’s head sank. He put his hands on his hips.

“Are you?”

He raised his head, his eyes cast to the ceiling. Or maybe the heavens. The pop and squeal of the fireworks were going off. In the gallery’s lachrymose silence they sounded closer than they were.

“Uncle Mason!”

His shoulders sank. His arms fell to his sides. His head drooped. He looked like the condemned hanging from a scaffold.

“Uncle Mason?”

“Shut up!”

His outburst struck with a bone-shattering thud. I was afraid to move. The sole of my flip-flop scuffed the cement floor, and I bristled at the inferno that would spill from my uncle’s face as he turned to excoriate me into ashes. But he never turned around. No conflagration. I steeled myself against the incoming worst.

“This was a mistake,” he said in a mohair whisper, more to himself than to me. He started to amble across the room. “I shouldn’t have brought you here.”

“Because I don’t agree with you?”

He shook his head. “Because of that. Because you think that’s why I’m frustrated.” He reached the wall, turned, and collapsed into it. Directly above his head was a painting called Marat Assassinated. “I’m sorry, Anna. I look at the young woman you’ve grown into over the last six years, and I’m… proud isn’t a strong enough word. I sometimes forget that you’re still a kid. I know you don’t like to hear that. No teenager does.”

Uncle Mason’s eyes drifted off me and into space, onto something I couldn’t see. “When I was your age,” he said, “I would fight with your grandparents all the time. The Iran-Contra hearings were on television every day, and… I could not understand how good people like my parents didn’t find it disgusting. I couldn’t understand why they weren’t as angry as I was. I remember screaming at my father, ‘Don’t you care what they’re doing down there?’ and him saying, ‘It has nothing to do with us.’ I felt like my parents, these people who gave me life, who I trusted for everything, weren’t the people I thought they were.”

He looked back at me. His face was soured by fear. “I want you to learn, Anna. I want you learn to not be so scared that you confuse frustration with hate. I don’t want you to hate your family.”

“I don’t hate you, Uncle Mason.”

“No. Not me. Your parents, your grandparents, everybody who doesn’t see what you see. Disagree with them all you want, but know that they will always love you.”

“What are you talking about?”

He swallowed. “Talk is cheap, Anna. It’s not what people say that matters. It’s what they do.” He bolted to his feet and marched. I followed.

To the muslin curtain.

Uncle Mason grabbed a corner and pulled. The curtain fell and revealed a painting of postmodern watercolors, abstract non-patterns that seemed to depict nothing.

“This… isn’t Guernica?” I asked.

“It’s the only piece in this whole gallery that’s an original.”

“And we can go in it?”

“Yes.”

“Who painted it?”

“I did.”

“This is yours?”

He didn’t answer.

“Uncle Mason?

He was drowning, flailing. And he was fighting but not the water. Every line of rescue tossed at him he was grabbing and throwing back. He drew a deep breath and said, “The people who created the prints in this gallery made me paint this. It was part of the price.”

I turned back to the painting, tracing the brush strokes with my pupils, trying to see what kind of tithe this was supposed to be.

Uncle Mason said. “I want you to go in without me.”

“Why?”

He wouldn’t look at me. “Once you’re in, you’ll see.”

I kept looking at him, trying to read him, to feel him. He looked old, and I felt tired. His eyes quivered, and I felt frightened. His jaw was viced, threatening to shatter his teeth.

I took a breath of adamantine resolve and turned back to the abstract. At first it was a series of swirls that overlapped, interlocked, and bled into one another. Different shades of red from a deep crimson to a milky pink. As I circled the painting with my eyes, I noticed lines, sharp delineated bolts of black that darted in and out of the red. At the outer boundaries of the painting they were wisp thin, barely noticeable. I followed them through the whirlpool of red to the center of the picture. The crimson was mottled with black mold. At its heart, small enough to barely draw attention, was an ember of darkness beyond black, a deep puncture that exposed a void weaving through reality. I stared into the absence and found myself enveloped in a chill so bracing I clutched my arms around me. I looked back into the red, almost as if expecting to find warmth. Instead an indefinable horror joined with the cold. I felt like I was choking, and as I jerked for air, I entered the painting.

I found myself standing in an alien netherplace, an enclosed rotunda that had risen from a swamp like a desiccated hand and threatened to curl into a fist. Obelisks stood dripping with putrefied flesh. A penannular pool of ichor and tar hissed and belched flights of obscenity. Steps, pock-marked and eroded by rage, starved to devour the feet that would tread on them. Columns excreted by some long-slain menace in its death throes. Every accent and flourish of the rotunda had been mined from open wounds. The entire edifice was a violation.

Five figures stood before me, their faces hidden by impenetrable shadow. Drawn over their heads were hoods that grew out of their shoulders and chests like necrotic tissue stitched together. They stood otherwise naked, pale sexless humanoid malignancies with blackened veins visible through what served them as skin. Their hands were pressed together in prayer. Each finger was a wriggling tuber loosing noxious secretions from its head.

The figures were gathered around a cauldron that was roiling in an unknown tongue. Above, spread-eagled and suspended by chains at her hands and feet, was a woman. She was beautiful, no older than thirty, and dressed in an intricately woven robe with a plunging neckline. She was crying, begging for her life.

Uncle Mason bled out of the darkness. He walked in slow deliberate steps, weighted down by grim imperative. In his right hand he held what looked like a bronzed paintbrush. The teardrop bristles glittered in the cauldron’s iridescence. He held it like a dagger as he approached the woman. She cried out his name in a hysterical plea.

Uncle Mason drove the paintbrush into her heart.

He watched the anguish drain from her face as her life poured out of her chest, into the cauldron. He watched the blood spiral down the bronzed handle of the sacrificial stylus. The light in his eyes was snuffed out, and in the darkness his resolve abandoned him, leaving him alone with just the agony of consequence. He stood still as stone. As he watched the stream of blood slowly die to a trickle, he retraced every step he’d taken on the road to this moment. A freezing wind was sweeping away his tracks, leaving him lost in a cold waste, his only company the wind’s haunting moan. He held his goal in hand and found it weightless.

I backed away until I was in the gallery once again. I turned and saw Uncle Mason seated on the floor, a condemned man. I backed into the wall.

I whispered, “Was that—?”

“Melissa.”

I slid down until I was seated on the ground across from him. All I could do was cry and look at the man.

He couldn’t look at me. “She didn’t want to have kids. She… didn’t want me to be a father.” He looked up at the painting. “She was right. That is my self-portrait.” He bowed his head before his tears erupted.

I wanted to ask him for the full story, his complete biography that detailed his every decision, the thoughts that had nudged him toward his every crime, even the ones I was afraid to imagine. But I couldn’t bring myself to make the simplest stammering utterance. An angel had cut off his wings and presented them to me. I thought of The Night Café and how Van Gogh had given a prostitute his severed ear, gift-wrapped and all. Was Uncle Mason crazy?

No. He wanted me to learn something.

I watched the man weep as I puzzled through the lesson, starting at the sides and working my way to the center. He’d lied when I first asked what was behind the curtain. And it was a lie to scare me out of ever wanting to peak beneath that veil. He had never wanted me to know who he was. Had been. That wasn’t who he was anymore. Or was it? Wait, why did he keep this gallery at all? Uncle Mason had wanted this gallery to learn to understand people he didn’t agree with. He had committed murder to achieve it, a murder he instantly hated himself for. He found the crimes of the white men who commissioned the paintings, who painted them, who committed the acts glorified in them as disgusting as I did. Because he was one of them. But he showed me his self-portrait. He’d decided that I needed to know who he was. He made that decision in the middle of our argument, after I’d challenged him to accuse me of having no empathy. Then he’d said, “This was a mistake.” He’d brought me to the gallery for a different reason.

And I was seized by a horror I’ve never since experienced again. I understood why he’d brought me down in the first place, and I remembered my mother was still above me, watching the fireworks. I understood that he’d showed me his self-portrait because he’d changed his mind, and I remembered Melissa, dying, shattered by the shock of what the man she had loved was doing.

I looked at Uncle Mason seated across from me. I was revolted by what he had done, but I couldn’t deny the guilt spilling out of him. I felt betrayed, but I had no desire to exact vengeance. I stood and walked over to him. I placed my hand on his shoulder. He never looked up at me. I walked out of the gallery.

I never saw my uncle again. A week later the compound would be completely cleared out and put on the market without a word to any of us. My mother would call him as soon as she found out. He would tell her that he was moving the offices to Toronto and would need to base himself out of there, but he would still take care of anything anyone needed. My mother would say that was typical of him.

I have no memory of walking upstairs, through the house, into the backyard. But I remember looking up once I was there and seeing the fireworks still going off. The clouds had rolled in and swallowed the moon and stars. All the lights on the property had been snuffed off. The only illumination in the oceanic darkness was from Uncle Mason’s fireworks.

I saw my mother standing among some of my other family. It was a random grouping. Her, Uncle Rick, Aunt Theresa, one of my older cousins, and one of my younger. I was only able to see them by the light of the pyrotechnics. As the incendiaries exploded, they painted my family in rainbow fire. Every color wrapped around them and made them glow.

I wedged myself beside my mother. She turned to me, smiled, and pulled me close. I rested my head on her shoulder. There was no discord, no divorce. Mom and I just watched in silence as fiery daubs of color painted the cold above.

DAUBS OF COLOR IN THE COLD (Pt. 4)

He walked me to a wall and, with a flourish of his hand, presented a painting of ancient Greece. Great. Aristotle thought some people were born to be slaves.

“This is A Reading from Homer,” he said, “by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Romanticism from 1885. Look at it.”

I did. For quite a while. The key to entering one of Uncle Mason’s prints was to relax your brain and not think about what you were seeing, to just let it wash over you, but that was an impossibility right then. I was too angry and was swimming against the current. I saw the painting and wanted to scream at every gray vein in the marble. I wanted to grab the woman in repose, slap her hand away from her man’s, and shake her. I wanted to shake her and disrupt the whole languid scene, stir the placid blue of the Aegean in the background into tumultuous stormbidden sackcloth.

But I kept watching the still-life play before my eyes. I couldn’t deny there was something welcoming and comfortable about the vision. My shirt and shorts felt clingy, like they were tugging at my skin. The fur-tunicked man on the ground was lying prone, a faun having settled into a field for a nap. The stone of the agora looked more relaxing, more agreeable than a plush sofa. I started to hear the voice of the poet, the lines of ancient Greek dactylic hexameter pinging off the strings of the cithara across the frame. The scent of the sea filled my nose. I gave myself over, and I was inside.

“How do you feel?” Uncle Mason asked me.

“Calm. Relaxed.”

“Good. Now tell me what’s happening here.”

“A poet’s reading Homer,” I said.

“For what purpose?”

I looked around the agora, hoping to find the answer etched in marble.

“Have you ever read Homer?” Uncle Mason asked.

“In school, yeah.”

He indicated the scene before me with an upturned hand.

“This is a class?” I asked.

“Absolutely. Homer was the bedrock of Greek and Roman education practically from the moment he started writing.”

I stared into the faces of the four students. They were transfixed by the poet, by the words from the scroll. I could read the flaring lights in their eyes, having spent most of my life seeing rows of faces struggling to stay awake at their desks.

“What’s with them?” I asked.

“The students?”

“Yeah. He’s laying on the floor, she’s reclining, those two are leaning against the wall. What kind of classroom is this?”

“That’s the question,” Uncle Mason said. “When did I say this was painted?”

“1885.”

“When you hear that year, what do you think of?”

“Not this.”

“Right. So, what do you think of?”

“Men with pocket watches and pince-nez. Women in ostentatious hats and huge skirts.”

“What else? What big things were happening at that time?”

“I don’t know. Queen Victoria. The Industrial Revolution.”

“Exactly. The Victorian Era, the Gilded Age, the Belle Epoque. This was painted at a time when rapid industrialization was ushering in seismic changes in the way all of civilization functioned. It was changing so drastically, so rapidly, that a lot of people found the whole thing confusing and frightening. A lot of them weren’t sure how to adjust, just as we’re now living through a radical change in societal expectations due to the digital revolution. Don’t be surprised if in your lifetime the term ‘digital revolution’ ends up being capitalized. Now, based on what I’ve just told you and what this scene depicts, can you make an educated guess what one of those big changes of the Victorian Era brought?”

“Education?”

“Standardized education for all. It’s because of the Victorian Era that you guys sit at desks arranged in ranks and files. Formalism in all things was one of the key virtues of the day.”

“Okay,” I said, “but I still don’t get what this painting has to do with that?”

“Before we came in here, I told you the title, who painted it, when it was painted, and what else?”

“Romanticism.”

“Right. Now I’m going to clue you in on something most people should know but have forgotten. The word ‘romantic’ has nothing to do with being in love.”

I looked at Uncle Mason like he was speaking in tongues.

“It’s true. Look at this painting. What does this image have to do with love? Nothing, but we associate the word with it because of love stories. Quick—name a love story.”

“Romeo & Juliet.”

“Good. How does it end?”

“They both die.”

“Good. Name another.”

“Uh, Before Sunrise.”

“How’s it end?”

“They go their separate ways, and we don’t know if they meet again until the sequel.”

“Name another.”

“Um… that, what’s that German book about the guy who kills himself for a girl?”

“Sorrows of Young Werther. You’re starting to see my point?”

“I’m not sure.”

“The word ‘romance’ comes from Anglo-Saxon and Old French words that meant ‘Roman.’ The word ‘roman’ is right there in ‘romance.’ And you’ve already taken enough world history to know how much European history is predicated on one kingdom or another using the legacy of the Roman Empire to give itself legitimacy. Romance is about loss and trying to reclaim what’s been lost.” He turned me to face the agora. “That’s what Alma-Tadema is trying to do. He wants the staid, formalistic existence-by-rote of his time to learn from the vibrancy of what has come before but no longer exists.”

I thought of all the times a teacher had delayed the start of class, trying to wrangle two kids back into their assigned seats. I remembered the occasional lively discussion in a room between the teacher and the students, instigated by an idea or morsel of knowledge expelled from one of the kids, how adroitly the teacher would talk around the subject without admitting that all they knew about it had come from the curriculum-approved study guide. It had always made me feel like the police outside our home had stepped aside and allowed the intruders entry. With a few words, Uncle Mason had made the assortment of gold stars and stickers that had adorned my elementary school quizzes stink of industrial runoff, and I saw them spilling into the rivers and oceans. All those uplifting pieces of signage that had graced the walls began to emit the pro forma honk of the teacher from Peanuts. Every shred of positive reinforcement I’d ever received, from teachers or coaches or my parents, took on the bark of a pedagogical sadist warning me to eat my meat if I wanted my pudding. I felt confused, twisted, a snake oblivious to the fact that the tail it was devouring was its own.

It was only after we’d exited A Reading from Homer that Uncle Mason told me about the man who’d commissioned it: Henry Gurdon Marquand. Gilded Age industrialist and banker. “The irony,” Uncle Mason explained, “was that he was almost single-handedly responsible for the popularity of the Old Masters of the era. He was considered a trendsetter in the art world, and it was the formalism and technical precision of the Old Masters that determined how he valued them.”

I turned back to A Reading, appraised it again, then turned back to my uncle and asked with some volume, “What the fuck?”

He looked at me like he was about to pick me off at first.

“How am I supposed to take that seriously?” pointing to the painting. “The whole thing is hypocrisy.”

“Well,” Uncle Mason said, “you have to bear in mind that, like Carnegie and a lot of other industrialists of his day, Marquand thought it was his duty to bring culture to the people. He could afford to collect the finest works of art and create a metropolitan museum for them to be housed in and exhibited for the benefit of people who couldn’t.”

“Yeah, but wasn’t he also an archangel of avarice like Carnegie and Rockefeller and all them?”

“Was he?” he asked. “You’ve heard stories of what Carnegie and Rockefeller and Vanderbilt and Morgan did to their employees and competitors and their customers, and you can walk into any bookstore and find volumes on any of those guys that will tell you even more horror stories.” Uncle Mason held up his pointer finger and said, “But what do you know Henry Marquand did?”

After a brief but irritating eon I said, “Okay. So, what did he do?”

“I don’t know either. I’ve never found anything on him online beyond his artistic legacy. He probably did have business practices we would call predatory. Why wouldn’t he? And I’m sure if we took a deep dive into the Library of Congress or something, we’d find them. But this is all beside the point. You know why all those guys thought it was their duty to bring culture to the plebs?” He took a dramatic pause, then answered, “God.”

“What?”

“They genuinely believed that, as good Christian men, it was their responsibility to help elevate society.”

I screamed, “How about paying their employees a fair wage? Letting them unionize without calling strikebreakers in? Health care?”

Uncle Mason had a finger in each ear. “Anna, honey, it’s so reverberant in here. Please.”

“Omigod!” I kept throwing my hands up, shrugging as if I was trying to buck my head off my shoulders. “Uncle Mason, what is the point of this? What are you trying to teach me?”

“The point is to get you to look at history through the eyes of the people that lived through it. I want you to look at them as people just like you and me.” Uncle Mason stepped toward me and stood inches from my face, looming over me like Christ on the cross above the altar. “We know more now about the natural world and how it works than ever before. We have millennia of recorded history from all over the globe and a multitude of perspectives on all of it to learn from. Innovation and advancement is occurring more quickly than it ever has. We right now are the most intelligent population that has ever inhabited this planet. And we still know nothing! We’re all flailing about, scared out of our wits, trying to put all this together into something that resembles a kind of order.” Uncle Mason marched over to A Reading from Homer. “The greedy cutthroat who commissioned this was as clueless as you and I are. He was trying to make sense of a universe that feels chaotic and arbitrary. Anna, no one is absolutely virtuous or absolutely sinful.”

“Hitler,” I said.

“Loved animals,” he countered.

My lower lip drooped, hairline fractures spider-webbing my heart. “Apologists always trot that bit out.”

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t take a step in my direction. But for the first time ever he frightened me. “Anna,” he said, “I introduced you to my gallery and agreed to teach you about history because you’ve always struck me as having good critical thinking skills. But I’m going to have to re-evaluate that if you’re just going to stand there and parrot self-serving rhetoric you got off Twitter.”

It was cold, almost robotic. For a moment he sounded like a man who knew how to get away with murder.

I was too frightened to pass judgment, to even form an opinion. I had to look away. As I turned, I caught in the background the gentle flag of the long black curtain over Guernica.

Uncle Mason put his hands behind his back. He rocked on his feet as he said, “Can we continue our lesson?”

I nodded, my head still pointed elsewhere.

He took me across the gallery, to a large load-baring pillar in the middle of the floor, patchworked with a number of smaller paintings, nothing like the enormous vistas we’d entered previously. We stood before one that was maybe a foot and a half by two and a half feet.

“This is Indians Spear Fishing by Albert Bierstadt,” Uncle Mason told me, then crossed his arms.

The last thing I wanted at that moment was to give my uncle what he wanted, but his arctic tone was still whipping around, and I heard the elegiac whistle of a heartless wind. I wanted to wrap myself in blankets and sit in front of a fire.

The painting was already in front of me. I lifted my head and focused my eyes. To my surprise I found the crippling chill receding, the ghostly wind dying in the light of a sun beginning to escape the horizon. I couldn’t deny the painting its grandeur, its elegance, its full-throated choir’s song for the natural world. The pink and yellow of the sun spilled over and into the background. I could feel the cool blue cotton candy wisps of the low hanging clouds brush past my fingertips. Every shade of the woods’ stippled green, from shadow-cloaked near-black to sun-baked almost-yellow, popped off the canvas with the warm alarum of rustling leaves and the call of birds in the thicket. The waterfall cascaded with a roar that lulled and crashed into the rocks like a leaf settling onto a gentle river. And the river was a spotless mirror held up to the heavens, reflecting infinity upon itself. And in the middle of it all were the Indigenous People in a canoe, a tiny hillock of furs among them, fishing with spears. Afloat beneath the rocky monolith of nature’s wondrous power, they simply existed, unaffected by the vampirism of modernity, desiring nothing but to live in the flow of the world as it was.

Bierstadt’s work simply opened its arms and allowed me to drift into its virgin wilderness. I hadn’t even noticed I’d entered the painting, and now that I was there, I found myself in a thrall that made my heart trill. I could feel the blood coursing through my body at a gallop backed by the steady race of drums. The idyll was a rollercoaster at a Kiss concert. Goosebumps rose on my arms. I was trembling, a six-year old entering the world’s most famous theme park for the first time, eyes as big as the moon, tears threatening.

“Exciting, isn’t it?” Uncle Mason asked me.

“It’s…” I couldn’t finish a sentence. The audacity of adrenaline was overwhelming me and stealing the words from my mouth. “It’s spectacular,” I finally got out.

Uncle Mason nodded. “That’s a fitting description. When Bierstadt painted this in 1862, landscapes were largely about spectacle, especially when they were of the American West.”

“This is… this is what they mean when they say God’s Country.”

“Yes, it is.”

As a child does when she can accept that the source of her excitement is real and tangible, my breath started to calm. “It really is glorious,” I said.

Uncle Mason said, “That was the point, to make God’s glory palpable.”

I turned to him. “What do you mean?”

“1862,” he said. “Transcendentalism was happening. The Civil War was happening. So was westward expansion, and the government promoted the hell out of it.

“The first time Albert Bierstadt ever went west of the Mississippi River, he was part of a government commission. The U.S. had all these tracts of land that went further than you could see in every direction.” Uncle Mason pointed to the mountainous wall swallowing the right of the frame. “All those deposits of stone and minerals.” He pointed to the river. “All those natural highways and the fish to pluck out of them.” He pointed to the woods on the left. “All that timber and the land beneath it to cultivate.” He pointed to the Indigenous fishermen. “And not that much standing in the way of it all. All that land at the disposal of the United States, placed at its feet by the grace of God, and remember that God gazed down on America and chose it to be his instrument.”

Uncle Mason’s arm swept across the unsullied splendor before me. “See how exciting Manifest Destiny is?”

DAUBS OF COLOR IN THE COLD (Pt. 3)

We passed beneath an architrave, turned a corner, and stopped before a large painting over six feet tall and nine feet wide. Half a dozen white men dressed like Puritans lorded from on-high.

“Have you ever seen this painting before?” Uncle Mason asked.

There was something familiar about the faces wreathed by the long hair spilling from under those absurd hats. “I want to say yes, but…”

“Maybe when you and your friends are rolling a blunt?”

“Uncle Mason!”

He smiled. “I was a teenager once too, and I’m not your father.”

I shook my head and scoffed as I turned back to the painting. “I don’t know how to roll a… Wait a minute,” I said. “The cigars.”

“Dutch Masters,” he said. “This painting is on that box because that’s who these guys are. The Syndics of the Drapers’ Union.”

“What’s a syndic?”

“The syndics were a five-man board of governors who oversaw Amsterdam’s union of clothmakers.”

“Two paintings about Amsterdam, blunts. I think you’re more into herb than any teen I know.”

“Kindly shut up. Their job was to judge the quality of cloth made and sold by guild members and make sure it met the standard.” He pointed to the man furthest to the right. “See Joachem de Neve feeling the tapestry laid out?”

“You know the guy’s name?”

“I know all of them.” His finger led me from the right side of the painting to the left. “Aemout van der Mye, Willem von Doevenberg, Volkert Jansz, Jacob von Loon.”

There was a sixth man standing behind them who caught my eye, probably due to his lack of headwear. “What about him?” I asked. “In the background?”

Uncle Mason’s grin grew more satisfied. “Good eye, Anna. That’s Frans Hendricksz Bel. He was a servant for the Drapers Union.”

“So, he doesn’t get a hat? What is it with men and hats?”

“He commissioned Rembrandt to paint this.”

“I’ve heard of him!”

“And this may be his most iconic piece. Without Bel it would never have been created.”

“Why’d the employee have to commission a painting for his bosses?”

“Well, I’m sure the union itself paid for it, but he was the point man between them and Rembrandt. He told Rembrandt that it was going to be hung above the fireplace in the Staalhof, where the syndics met. He gave Rembrandt the dimensions of the space and told him what he wanted the painting to convey.”

“What was that?”

Uncle Mason gave me a knowing look. “Ready?”

“We’re going in?”

“Remember how you did it last time?”

“Sure.”

Uncle Mason stepped behind me. “Okay, whip it out.”

“Eww!”

I let my eyes float over the brush strokes. They traced Rembrandt’s signature over the beige and brown of the wall. They fell to the golden chestnut of the crown molding, and I ran a mental finger along its polished gleam.

Uncle Mason whispered, “Look at the perspective. We’re looking up at them, as if they’re seated above the mantle of the fireplace, watching us, judging.”

I did, and we were in the Staalhof. The syndics were giants before us, and we were mice that had ventured into the room. They were staring at me with something not far from condemnation. They reminded me of my parents, looming over me as a child, considering my punishment after I’d done something wrong.

I didn’t like it. They made me feel small. I kept looking at their black robes and wide white collars, and I again thought of the Puritans. Of how they heralded the extinction of the Native Americans. Of witch trials and paranoid anti-intellectualism.

“How do you feel?” asked Uncle Mason.

“Pissed.”

“Why?”

“They’re passing judgment on me.”

“Not on you,” he said. “They’re not considering you.”

“Of course they’re not.”

“They’re considering the syndics who will come after them. In Calm at a Mediterranean Port we saw Amsterdam trading with the Duchy of Naples, but is that the only polity they traded with? No way, right? These men are responsible for what today would be a multi-million dollar-a-year industry, one that every facet of life in Amsterdam was dependent upon. These men knew their job wasn’t just to ensure the money kept rolling in, but that the lifeblood of their entire society kept flowing. They knew how integral they were to keeping the people of Amsterdam alive. That’s an epic responsibility. These men took that responsibility seriously, and they wanted their successors to do the same.”

I heard what Uncle Mason said, but I was trapped deep in a cold lightless cave, and the search party calling my name passed the mouth and disappeared. The only one in there with me was the servant. “Why’s he smirking?” I asked. “Bel. What’s with him?”

Uncle Mason looked at the servant and the slight upturn of the right corner of his mouth. “I’ll be damned. I never noticed it before. Good job, Anna. I suppose he’s a little proud of the role he’s played in the union fulfilling its responsibility. He commissioned the painting. I guess he’s allowed a little extra commemoration.”

I stared at the servant’s smirk. It seemed to grow without changing into an idiot’s Cheshire flash of ivory. I felt like I was watching a cow dance into an abattoir and nuzzle up to the butcher.

“Can we go now?” I asked.

Uncle Mason looked at me. For a second his eyes belonged to the Dutch masters above us. “Sure,” he said. “We’ve got a lot more to see.”