Postcards

Daedalia: Chapter 27

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Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.

Previously…

Kelly returned to work in New York after a fight with Lefty over Greta, trying sex, drugs, and dancing before admitting that art was the only thing that steadied her. She reconciled with Lefty, began a new series of painted portraits, and, after reading about Hildegard of Bingen, started to wonder whether her work carried a responsibility she could no longer outrun.

My mother produced fourteen canvases in the eight months she was away from us in New York City. I received eight postcards from her, each one with her ghostly fingerprint smudges in ink or paint at the edges that created an accidental frame for her near-perfect, comic book style script.

Dear Maribear,

This week I was a wizard’s apprentice. He had a long white beard and could conjure spells with just his voice. I’m making a picture of him and I can’t wait for you to see it. How is school? I heard you won the spelling bee. What?! You are a genius.

Love,
Mommy

The others were similar. They weren’t traditional postcards with a glossy photo of the Empire State Building on the front. They were blank and she drew elaborate pictures for me. As much as I pretended not to care about these postcards when they appeared on my desk in my bedroom, I would stay up for hours studying them and reading them over and over. She had passed along her love of puzzles to me, and each drawing was part maze, part story, like her earliest work. I’ve kept them all these years in a little wooden box, my own private Daedalia collection.

The series she produced during this period was not a critical success. If there’s one thing critics of any stripe relish more than discovering a new talent, it’s tearing down an established one.

“Daedalia fingerpaints the homeless exploiting their plight for profit,” the critic from the New York Times wrote.

“A miserable mess of sentiment and excrement smeared across the canvas,” said the L.A. Times.

Lefty still managed to sell all the pieces, but it had taken some extra maneuvering. When I read Kelly’s journal entries about this time, the way she described the work and her connection to the people she painted made me want to see the paintings for myself.

Ten of the fourteen were bought by Regina Hasselblad, the wife of a self-made billionaire who had made his money from patents on invisible, necessary things that make the heating and air conditioning in all automobiles work. They weren’t a high society couple, didn’t attend galas or donate huge amounts of cash to hospitals and universities. It wasn’t easy to track them down twenty years after Regina had made the staggering purchase at auction. They weren’t collectors. They had never bought art before. I learned that Regina had done it out of spite, angry at her stodgy husband, who was twenty years older and kept her like an exotic bird.

Regina died from a brain aneurysm a couple of years after buying the paintings. Her husband, Harry, never recovered from her death. At sixty-two, he liquidated all four of his private residences in Miami, Aspen, Houston, and Cape Cod. He sold off his patents. I could find no record of him selling the paintings. He disappeared from the reach of Google at that point.

It took me a year to track him down, and I had to hire an investigator to do it. When the investigator gave me his address, I was stunned to find out he lived just five blocks away from me in a historic old building off Washington Square.

It took me a couple of days to work up the courage to knock on his door. On a late October afternoon, I entered the lobby and told the doorman I was there to see Harry Hasselblad. I expected to have to perform the story I had rehearsed about being his niece visiting from out of town. To my surprise, the doorman didn’t ask any questions. He simply led me to the elevator, swiped his card, and punched the button for the thirtieth floor.

The elevator doors opened on a high-ceilinged marble foyer and I was staring at one of my mother’s paintings on the opposite wall. It was my favorite of the series, featuring a black woman’s face so close that her wrinkles appeared as deep furrows or hedgerows. The enormous eyes captured a light and emotion that made it hard to look away. The painting was flanked on either side by two smaller canvases from the series. The hallway was cluttered with stacks of cardboard boxes that looked like recent deliveries. While the penthouse was easily worth ten million dollars, it didn’t look or smell like money. It smelled lived-in, like someone cooked daily.

I heard several voices in the rooms beyond the foyer. A small brown-skinned child who couldn’t have been more than four peeked around the wall. She called out, “Mama, come!”

A striking woman in her mid-thirties appeared and placed a hand on the girl’s shoulder.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“I was looking for Harry Hasselblad. I’m sorry to just show up, but I couldn’t find a number to call first.”

“Are you a reporter? Because if you are, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

“No, I’m a writer, but not a reporter. I wanted to see Mr. Hasselblad’s Daedalia collection.”

The woman narrowed her eyes and didn’t say anything. She knelt and whispered something to the little girl, who ran off into the rooms on the other side of the wall.

“This is a private residence, not a museum. You can’t just show up and expect a tour.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t do this. I’m not a reporter, I don’t want anything from Mr. Hasselblad.”

“Well, you must want something or you wouldn’t be here.” The woman squinted her eyes again and tilted her head slightly. “Why do you look familiar?”

“My name’s Marabelle Moody.”

The expression on her face transitioned from suspicion to delight and I felt an immediate warmth from her.

“Oh my God, of course you are! I loved The Town Where We Used to Live. So good. Please come in. I’m Sadie,” she said, offering her hand.

She turned and gestured to the paintings along the wall as she walked. “Some of the pieces are here but the rest of the collection is upstairs.”

The foyer opened up onto a great room with a stunning view of the city across two walls of glass. There were four people seated on a low sectional sofa talking. The little girl who greeted me was playing trucks on the floor with a boy who appeared to be a couple of years older. The adults ranged in age from late twenties to early fifties. I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t this. I knew Hasselblad didn’t have any kids or surviving family.

The majority of the floor space in the expansive room was crowded with medium-sized canvas duffels, all uniform in size and shape. It looked like the supply room for a platoon about to deploy. But then I noticed the group on the sofa had an assembly line going. At their feet were cardboard boxes filled with travel shampoos, energy bars, blankets, ponchos, and other essentials. The four of them looked up at me.

“Everyone, this is Marabelle. Marabelle, this is Peter, Janelle, Patrice, and that’s Mongo on the end who keeps eating the Snickers.”

“Great, another pair of hands,” the woman she called Patrice said.

“No, she’s not here to help. She’s here to see the paintings. Marabelle’s a famous novelist.”

Patrice didn’t respond, except to nod warily.

“What are you guys doing?” I asked.

“It’s Thursday so we’re stuffing kits for Brooklyn,” Sadie said. “We do this four days a week.”

I nodded as if I understood. If I was a reporter I would have figured it out or asked a few questions, but I was too busy trying to reconcile this scene with what I had expected to find in the penthouse of an eighty-three-year-old billionaire recluse. The people on the couch resumed their conversation and restarted the assembly line. My books had obviously never made an impression. The children continued to play on the floor. I thought of my Transformers.

“Come on, I can take you to see the paintings,” Sadie said.

I followed her across the great room, through a dining room and a library with beautiful wall-to-wall built-in bookcases filled with books I would have loved to have spent some time with, but she was moving quickly to a spiral staircase. As she ascended, she looked back over her shoulder.

“Careful on the stairs, it’s easy to trip.”

In contrast to the rooms below that were echoey and filled with natural light, the room we climbed into was dimly lit and hushed, like a gallery but much smaller, intimate, and cave-like. The gallery was circular and when we exited the spiral staircase, we were standing at its center. Spaced evenly around the room and perfectly lit were the eleven remaining paintings of my mother’s series. Hasselblad must have acquired the rest of the collection at some point.

I was suddenly overcome with emotion and struggled to keep from sobbing and making a complete fool of myself. I moved quickly to one of the paintings and stood before it as if I meant to study it intently. I felt Sadie behind me. I stared into the portrait of a ragged-looking man missing a leg. He had an enormous dog by his side sitting on its haunches like a regal tiger protecting his king. But I wasn’t really looking at the painting. I could barely make out any detail through the prism of tears in my eyes. I was feeling my mother, her presence in the swirls and eddies of living paint that once moved beneath her hand but were now fixed in time like a slate of trilobite fossils.

“Are you okay?” Sadie asked.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Thank you.”

“They have that effect on some people when they see them for the first time.”

“Really? Do you get many visitors?”

“No, just the volunteers.”

“You guys run some kind of outreach program?”

“Something like that. We provide support for the unhoused community of the greater metro area.”

“So Mr. Hasselblad started this program? Why haven’t I heard about it?”

“We’re not a formal nonprofit or anything like that. It’s a completely private thing, off the books. That’s how Harry prefers it. No press, no stress, no vultures, he likes to say.”

I began to walk slowly, moving along the wall to study each piece in turn. I had seen them all before in photographs but in person, they communicated so much more. Unlike my mother’s other work, this series was wild and visceral, even muscular. She had shape-shifted in this period, a trick she would do throughout her career.

“Have you known Harry for a long time?”

“Oh yes. He’s like a father to me.”

“How did that happen, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“The painting you saw getting off the elevator, that was my mother.”

I turned to look at her. I could see it then, in the shape of her face, the warmth in her eyes. We were both quiet, studying each other and then she smiled. Her eyes narrowed with curiosity.

“Can I ask why you’re here? Are you researching a book or something?”

“Yes, kind of. I’m not sure yet.”

It wasn’t yet public knowledge that my mother, Kelly Mudd, was the wizard pulling the levers behind the curtain. I had kept her secret my whole life, never once telling the handful of lovers I’d had.

“Are you writing about Harry or Daedalia? Sorry, I’m just a fan. You don’t have to answer…”

“No, it’s fine. It’s Daedalia I’m interested in mostly, but this,” I gestured around the room, “you, and how all this came to be seems like quite a story.”

I was startled when someone cleared their throat behind us. I turned around to see a very old man in a wheelchair.

“It is,” he said, “and it’s not one you’re going to hear. Sadie, who is this woman and why is she in my home?”

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