Chapter 96 Jerome Avenue

Chapter 96 Jerome Avenue


The plans for the Bronx exhibition began on a Wednesday morning.

Not in a boardroom or a gallery or any of the formal spaces where exhibitions were usually planned. At Eleanor’s kitchen table in Brooklyn with tea going cold and Catherine’s notebook open and Isabelle on speakerphone from Paris and Daniel sitting across from me with the particular focused quality of someone who had decided that this specific thing was the most important project he had been part of and intended to treat it accordingly.

Isabelle had been awake since four Paris time when I had called her the previous evening with the full account of my mother’s letter and the nineteen Bronx paintings and Victoria’s connection and all of it. She had listened without interrupting, which for Isabelle was the most significant form of attention, and when I finished she had been quiet for a long moment and then said three words.

“The complete story,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Not an addendum to what we have already shown,” she said carefully. “A complete rethinking of the entire body of work with the Bronx paintings as the foundation and everything else understood in relation to them.” She paused. “Rosa Santos did not begin in the West Village. She began here. In the Bronx. On Jerome Avenue. In a neighborhood that the art world has never considered a place where this kind of work originated.”

“It is exactly that kind of place,” I said. “That is the point.”

“Yes,” Isabelle said. “And the exhibition needs to say that plainly.”

The venue question was the first thing Catherine raised at the kitchen table.

She had already made three calls before arriving at Eleanor’s and had the particular organized quality of someone who had been thinking about the problem since before the meeting began and had arrived with the thinking mostly done.

“There are three options,” she said. “A gallery in the South Bronx that has been working with local artists for fifteen years and has the wall space and the community connections. A museum in the north that is larger but less connected to the specific neighborhood. Or.” She paused. “We build something.”

Everyone looked at her.

“Not permanently,” she said. “A temporary exhibition space on Jerome Avenue itself. In the neighborhood where she painted. On the street she painted.” She looked at me. “The paintings of Jerome Avenue shown on Jerome Avenue. To the people whose neighborhood she was seeing when she made them.”

The kitchen was quiet for a moment.

Then Eleanor said “Yes.”

Just that. With the complete certainty of someone who had heard the right answer and recognized it immediately and saw no reason to spend time on the alternatives.

Damien looked at me across the table.

I looked at him.

“Yes,” I said.

The practical work of building a temporary exhibition space on a commercial street in the Bronx was considerably more complex than the yes that initiated it. Damien’s team spent the first week navigating permits and community board approvals and the particular bureaucratic architecture of New York City that existed between the decision to do something and the doing of it.

It was Marcus who suggested going to the community board directly rather than through the standard channels.

He said it at dinner one Thursday with the matter of fact confidence of someone who had built a logistics company in eleven countries and understood that the most efficient route between two points was usually the most honest one.

“Tell them exactly what it is,” Marcus said. “A woman painted their neighborhood in nineteen ninety two and the paintings have been in a storage unit for twenty three years and we want to show them to the people she was painting.” He paused. “That is not a complicated story. It does not require management. It requires telling.”

He was right.

Damien went to the community board meeting on a Tuesday evening in October and told them exactly that story and the response was not the cautious measured engagement of a board processing a permit application but something considerably more immediate and more human.

A woman on the board named Gloria, who had lived on Tremont Avenue since nineteen eighty four, stood up and said she remembered Rosa Santos.

The room went quiet.

Gloria was in her seventies with the particular upright quality of someone who had been paying attention to her neighborhood for decades and intended to continue. She said Rosa had come to the community center once, back in the early nineties, and had asked if she could sketch the people who came in for the afternoon program. She said she had said yes and Rosa had sat in the corner for three hours and had drawn with the focused quiet of someone entirely absorbed in what she was doing and had left without showing anyone what she had made.

“I always wondered what she did with what she drew,” Gloria said. “I never saw her again after that.”

Damien told her.

Gloria sat down slowly and looked at her hands and said nothing for a moment. Then she looked up and said whatever you need from this board you have it and the vote that followed was unanimous and immediate.

The community board approved the Jerome Avenue exhibition in a single meeting.

Word spread the way word spread in close neighborhoods, which was faster than any press release and more complete. By the following week three local business owners had offered their storefronts as additional display space. A high school two blocks from Jerome Avenue contacted Catherine and asked whether Rosa Santos’s work could be shown to their students as part of an arts curriculum unit. A retired woman who had grown up on the block where my mother had lived sent a letter to the community board saying she had a photograph of Elena Santos from nineteen eighty nine that she would like to offer if it was wanted.

I received this news in the West Village studio on a Friday morning with the west facing light doing its October afternoon thing through the window.

I sat at Rosa Santos’s table with my tea and read Catherine’s message about the photograph and felt the particular specific feeling of something that had been invisible becoming visible in ways that extended beyond what any single person had planned or could have planned.

My mother was becoming visible too.

Not through the painting Rosa Santos had made of her, though that was part of it. Through the neighborhood’s memory of her. Through Gloria’s vote and the business owners’ storefronts and a retired woman’s photograph from nineteen eighty nine.

Elena Santos who had grown up on Tremont Avenue and could see through the surface of things and had kept paintings in a storage unit for twenty three years for a daughter who was coming.

The Bronx remembered her.

I had not known that.

I had grown up with the small specific version of my mother that grief produced when it arrived early, the version assembled from memory and the absence of the person and the particular incompleteness of knowing someone only as a child knew them before you were old enough to ask the right questions.

The Bronx had a larger version.

I wanted to know it.

I called Gloria.

She answered on the third ring with the alert quality of someone who had been expecting the call and was prepared for it.

“Miss Santos,” she said warmly. “I was hoping you would call.”

“Tell me about my mother,” I said.

She told me.

For forty five minutes she told me about Elena Santos on Tremont Avenue. About the way she laughed. About the particular gift she had for making people feel seen without making them feel exposed. About the community center and the block association and the way she could walk into a room where people were disagreeing and find the specific true thing that everyone agreed on underneath the disagreement and say it plainly until the room remembered it was on the same side.

I sat at Rosa Santos’s table in the West Village studio and listened to my mother being described by someone who had known her as an adult and found her extraordinary and I felt something fill in that had been empty for twenty three years without my fully knowing it was empty.

Not grief filling in. Something else. The particular specific relief of a person becoming more complete than grief had left them.

When Gloria finished I thanked her and she said come to the neighborhood and I said I will and she said soon and I said soon and we hung up.

I sat at the table for a while.

Then I picked up my brush.

What came out was not planned and did not need to be. A street in the Bronx in October. The elevated train. People moving through the particular quality of late afternoon light that fell differently here than it fell in Manhattan or Paris or anywhere else.

Each person carrying their own interior illumination.

The way Rosa Santos had always seen them.

The way my mother had always seen them.

The way I was beginning to understand I had always seen them too.

Without knowing where it came from.

Now I knew.

I painted for two hours and then I set the brush down and looked at what I had made and understood that this was the painting that needed to open the Bronx exhibition.

Not Rosa’s work.

Mine.

Jerome Avenue in October seen through the eyes of a woman who had inherited the seeing from two women who had loved this neighborhood and had kept going regardless.

I photographed it and sent it to Isabelle with no message.

She replied in four minutes.

Three words.

This is it.

I smiled.

Outside on the West Village street the October afternoon was doing its gold specific thing entirely indifferent to Jerome Avenue and the Bronx and the elevated train and the particular interior light of people moving through a neighborhood that had been seen and not known it was being seen.

It knew now.

And then my phone rang.

Not Isabelle. Not Catherine. Not any of the numbers I had been expecting.

A number with a Barcelona area code.

Sofia Reyes from the museum.

I answered with the particular alertness of someone who had learned that calls from Sofia contained information that rearranged things.

“Miss Santos,” she said. “The elderly woman who brought the letters. Anne Beaumont.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know Anne.”

“She came back to the museum this morning,” Sofia said carefully. “With something she says she forgot to bring the first time. Something she found after she returned home from New York in March.” She paused. “Miss Santos, she has a recording.”

I went very still.

“A recording,” I said.

“Audio,” Sofia said. “From nineteen ninety three. Rosa Santos speaking. About the work. About why she was making it. About who she was making it for.” She paused. “Miss Santos, it is forty minutes long and in it Rosa Santos says your name.”

The West Village studio was completely still.

The west facing light came through the window and fell across the table with the two cups and the painting of Jerome Avenue in October and all of it was very quiet and very present and entirely real.

“Your name,” Sofia said again quietly. “Specifically. She knew your name.”

I looked at the painting on the table.

At the interior light of Jerome Avenue.

At the seeing that had been sent to me before I existed by a woman who had known my name before I was born.

“Send it to me,” I said. My voice was entirely steady. “Send everything.”