Art Appreciation

“Come,” Billy said, circling my wrist with his fingers and pulling me to the garage. I’d just finished transplanting the daffodil bulbs, a mucky mindless operation that Charles used to do each spring, and I welcomed the interruption by this gangly gap-toothed kid. Or, perhaps I should say, young man, because Billy was turning twenty that day.

I looked around our garage: lawn mower, gardening hoops, and heaped-up boxes of Charles’ things that make me weep when I open them. Propped against the nail board hung with saws, shovels, and coils of rope, stood a painting.

The image was instantly recognizable: an asymmetric pine tree clinging by its ancient, knobby roots to a cliff, its stunted body almost but not quite falling off the precipice. I remember thinking: this is one helluva good reproduction.

“From the flea market on Harbord Street?” I asked.

Billy grinned. “Nope.”

“From the antiques shop?” I asked. The painting had been sitting somewhere for a while; there was a small clump of lint, a fetal dust bunny, in a lower corner of its frame. If it was from the pricey antiques shop, I wondered how Billy got the money. I gave him an allowance, but he hadn’t really grasped the concept of putting aside some money week after week.

“Nope.” He waited, and as I glanced cluelessly around the garage he finally said, “Factee Club.”

“Faculty Club?” I tried to remember seeing recent notice of a sale there. Living in the university neighborhood, we are kept well informed of rummage sales, used book sales, and all manner of art shows. Another thought, an ugly one, came to me. “Billy,” I said, “did you actually buy this picture?”

He looked down at his feet.

“Did someone say you could have it? … Billy?” I was using my bad-doggy voice, but it lost its oomph when Charles died. I tried to look stern, or if not stern, at least deeply concerned.

Billy just kept grinning and shaking his head. “Birfday present! Me!” he declared. “Today!”

“But it’s not yours,” I said. “Your birthday present is waiting for you—later, once Gran gets here and we eat some cake.” It was a basketball theme this year—I’d bought him a regulation ball and self-mount hoop, a Raptors T-shirt, and their championship DVD. Best part was wrapping it all in shocking orange and purple gift-wrap last night, imagining Billy’s excitement at tearing it apart the paper.

It had never occurred to me that Billy wanted Art.

I studied the painting, suddenly aware that my hands were crusted with dirt.

I’d been to the Faculty Club on two occasions, once when Charles was deciding to accept the university’s offer, and once when he became chair of his department. I remembered well the hush-thick carpet, the dark panelling, and velvet drapes the color of money.

I squinted at the artwork now in my garage. Charles was a respected and beloved professor, and his name still had clout. The best thing to do, I decided, would be to wrap the painting in a quilted movers’ blanket, pop it in the back seat of my Toyota and drive Billy right on over to confess.

Plan B—and there was always a Plan B, because Billy was sometimes mule-headed or just plain uncomprehending—was to drive the painting there and smooth things over by myself. Explaining Billy’s situation, and his tendency to intensely adore certain things. Most places prefer not to press charges. Widow, young miscreant with intellectual disability: it all boils down to “optics.”

I grabbed a movers’ blanket from the garage shelf, stirring up a cloud of dust. Ugh, I couldn’t stomach the thought of such dust on the painting, so I dashed inside and pulled the quilt off my bed. It would protect a fine painting, the most valuable painting I would ever touch in my life.

I returned to the garage, clean quilt bunched in my arms. But the painting was gone.

I headed to Billy’s bedroom. On the floor, leaning against the foot of the bed, was a poster of the painting he had taken it down from his wall. The lower part said, “McMichael / Group of 7” in that annoyingly self-evident way of art posters. The poster was faded and slightly rippled in its frame. Billy had hung the original painting in its place and now stood, arms akimbo, feasting his eyes. “Dad buy at Michael,” he said.

“He bought you the poster,” I said. “He did not buy this one. He is—” I could not finish the sentence.

Billy’s face darkened; I had to quickly pivot or we would end up as a weeping, screaming mess.

“He bought the poster at the McMichael collection,” I said. The trip to the gallery in Kleinburg, ten years before, was memorable for Billy’s temper tantrum. When he really gets into something, Billy has a hard time leaving it, so we used to let him know when we were fifteen, ten, and five minutes away from leaving. A countdown.

But that day at the McMichael, for some reason—maybe we were distracted by the art or the heat or maybe we were feeling a little devil-may-care—we didn’t give Billy any forewarning. We just up and left. Oh, how he screamed! Finally, Charles drove back to the McMichael and bought him the poster. Later that night Charles and I had quarrelled about it. Buying our way out of a temper tantrum was rewarding such behavior, I’d said.

“Mom?” Billy said.

I snapped back to the here and now. “Billy, we’ve talked about stealing things,” I said. “It’s not right. It makes the other person feel sad. Do you remember when your new shoes got stolen at the pool?”

A small cloud scudded over his face. “Go buy more,” he said, and it was true: Charles had returned to the shopping mall and replaced Billy’s stolen shoes.

“This is different,” I said. “This painting is ‘one of a kind.’”

He sat on his bed, skinny pale arms propping him up, a troubled glare on his face.

“Oh my Billy, Billy,” I whispered, wanting to fold him in my arms like I used to.

“Factee Club no care,” said Billy. “I do.”

I blinked. Maybe he had a point. “Appreciate” has two types of meaning.

“Is bent. Is really bent.” He walked nearer to the painting.

I held my breath.

“Is—so—bent!” He began to dramatize his last sentence—the gnarled tree stretching its branches over a cliff, bending to the point where you think it will lose its balance—and I smiled in spite of myself.

Maybe that’s where things began to go wrong.

But wait, no, maybe they were going wrong much earlier. You see, I used to pitch my tent squarely in the “tough love” camp. I used to say that Billy must experience the consequences of his actions. Charles had been the indulgent one. When Billy came home with a plastic singing budgie snitched from Gran’s, or a tin of grape soda from the store, I used to march him back, make him apologize and replace or pay for what he had done. What had happened to my backbone?

I looked at the painting, I looked at my son the twisted tree, and I left the room.

* * *

While Billy watched a cartoon, I finished icing his birthday cake and stuck candles amid the miniature basketballs and sneakers equidistant from each other on the cake. I saw Charles’ mom’s station wagon gliding, boat-like, into the driveway. Billy’s cartoon kept playing, so I seized my chance.

“Can you drive me past the Faculty Club?” I asked. Somewhat surprised, she did, and I noted the locations of campus security. “I’ll fill you in on the mystery after lunch,” I promised.

Lunch was a simple menu of Salisbury steak, peas, and smashed potatoes: Billy’s favorite. Around us was an invisible salad of thoughts: Billy, rosy excitement about the painting and more gifts to come; Gran, fresh suspense over the errand; me, a piquant tangle of plans and second thoughts.

After lunch, Gran said, “Billy, now that you’re a man of twenty, you should know what the men in the family are expected to do.” She produced a blue velvet jewellery box and snapped it open.

Inside was the family kilt pin, a miniature sword with a forbidding thistle in the middle. The pin bore the Latin motto Aut agere aut mori. “This is worn only by the brave and good men of the clan,” she said solemnly. “Do or die, it means.”

“Wow!” Billy took the box from her. “Die!” He opened and shut it several times. The spring-loaded hinges made a satisfying “snap.”

I worried he was going to either pinch himself on the snapping lid or stab himself with the kilt pin.

“Hey, let’s put up the hoop,” I said. Distraction is a time-honored strategy.

Gran and Billy held the stepladder while I fastened the new basketball hoop to the garage. The other end of the garage opens into the alley and, although Billy has good sense to watch for cars, he easily forgets. On this end, though, with the enclosed backyard, I figured he’d be fine. Billy quickly became engrossed in trying to shoot hoops.

I put the kilt pin out of sight and set Gran’s and my chairs close to the window, where we watched him bounding after the ball. I poured an extravagance of white wine. Midway through my tale we traipsed upstairs to see the painting, holding our wineglasses as if viewing recent acquisitions at a small private gallery.

“Oh dear.” Gran shook her head slowly. But she kept smiling; after all, Billy was her only grandchild, and naughtiness often co-exists with cleverness. “First the plastic budgie and now this,” she mused. We sipped our wine and enjoyed the painting. I could see her gaze snag on the same dust bunny I’d seen, too. “Do you think they’ve even missed it?” she asked.

“That’s beside the point,” I said, straightening.

Her eyebrow arched. “Mm.”

“Should be a snap to sneak it back,” I said.

“Maybe not,” she said. “Yesterday I had a hard time going down that street—so many studio trucks! They’re filming something at the Club. That must’ve been how he did it, just blending in like a stage hand.”

My theory was that Billy’s vintage Bundespost jacket looked semi-official, like what a courier might wear. Who knew, really? Stage assistant or courier: the main component of Billy’s disguise would have been his unshakable belief that it was his God-given right to take that painting out the door.

Gran nudged the corner of the poster leaning against the side of the bed. “Too bad he hadn’t put something like this in its place. Without the words, I mean. They wouldn’t notice it as quickly, would they.”

* * *

Maybe that was where things started to go wrong, when Gran was not as hardline as she normally was. She got me thinking about Plan C, sneaking the picture back, when I ought to have stuck with straight-arrow Plans A or B.

At nightfall I went upstairs with a bottle of tung oil, a lint-free cloth, and a Q-tip. Billy was sorting the colored jellybeans Gran had given him. I only wanted to whisk out that dust bunny, put a little gleam in the oak frame, and admire (but not touch! no, certainly not touch!) the painted canvas.

Afterward, Billy and I communed with the painting in the warm yellow lamplight of his room. “Boo-ti-ful,” he murmured.

Watching Billy study that painting gave me an odd feeling. My heart used to be a nest with a love-egg for Charles. When Billy was born, it was like some jaybird took over the nest, fed twice as often, and grew twice as big as anything else there.

I watched the evening news, and there was no mention of a missing local masterpiece. Had anyone noticed?

Next morning, Billy appeared briefly for breakfast. When I tiptoed past his open door, he called me in to hear a song he had made up for the tree. His knobby white fingers went plunk-plunk-plunk on Charles’ old guitar. His hair looked like a pencil had been scribbled, slanting forward, then slanting backward. Billy sang in his breathy voice, “Pine tree, pine tree. Oh, pine tree, pine tree,” as he strummed the open strings. Then loudly he sang, “Just like me! Pine tree… just like me!”

After the second repeat, I slunk out.

Later that morning, Gran dropped by to say she had driven by the Faculty Club. “The tape is up, Carol, that yellow and black crime-scene tape…?”

“They can’t trace it to us,” I said.

“I bet they’re canvassing everyone for blocks around. Someone must have seen him.”

“Since when have the police turned to the community?” I said.

“They’ll investigate thoroughly,” Gran said. “This is high art. It’s always a mistake to underestimate the enemy.”

Just hearing Charles’ mother, a respectable citizen, say “enemy” when referring to the police gave me a frisson of excitement.

The news broke the next day. The Faculty Club manager, perceptibly sweating, admitted to the local news-hounds that “police are looking into a small irregularity.” The university was in no rush to publicize the fact they had been burgled in broad daylight. No doubt there was a lot of behind-the-scenes finger-pointing going on. One journalist trumpeted that “the devastating loss of a treasured heritage masterpiece from a world-class university is a blow to national identity.” Another asked about the film production company, rumored to be on premises at the time. (I imagined the production company furiously checking its props trucks.) A university spokeswoman declared the matter had shifted from campus police to city police.

Billy watched the televised news conference, mouth agape. Yes, said the police, there were leads—but none they wanted to go public with at the moment. No, said the university, this had nothing to do with the alleged cost over-run of the ugly new graduate residence. Yes, said the film production company, they could confirm that Carey Mulligan had a walk-on part in the segment being filmed. Yes, she might be in town next week. No, they did not know if she had heard of the Group of Seven.

The whiff of celebrity was accelerant to the small brush fire of news. By six o’clock, a police spokeswoman was making noises about a “ring of international art thieves.” She emphasized in closing: “the miscreants will be shown the full force of the law.”

Billy whooped.

I sat there as if the energy from a bomb inside the TV had flattened me against the sofa. Any appetite that I had to apologize for a mistake vanished.

I used to play by the rules. “Justice” had meaning. But lately, as I see big scoundrels evade punishment and powerful entities persecute the most vulnerable—sometimes to be murdered while in custody—I could not stand idly by as Billy was sucked into the system.

I could not, would not, see my Billy receiving the “full force of the law.”

The landline rang. I jumped.

Billy answered, “Hi Gran,” and thrust the receiver at me. He ran upstairs and serenaded the pine tree picture.

Gran’s voice emanated from the receiver: “The odds of this ‘just blowing over’ are officially zero, you realize.”

“Thank heavens,” I said. “I needed some excitement. Gardening just doesn’t cut it anymore.”

“That’s the spirit,” said Gran. I could hear the smile in her voice.

The next day the police circulated a description of the “person of interest”: short white male, dark-haired. I could not eat. My insomnia reached a breaking point at three the next morning. “Do or die:” was that not the family motto? I went around the house, throwing our stuff into a duffel bag. At 5 AM I gently shook Billy awake. First thing he did was go look at the painting, then I got him seated in the car with his headphones and snacks. At 6 AM Gran came by with her station wagon. Together we transferred a bulky, quilt-wrapped package into the back.

We traded car keys.

As we drove away, Billy began bawling. “We’re going to Georgian Bay, the home of the real bent tree,” I said. “You can touch the real tree, Billy.”

He grew quieter.

We stopped in Owen Sound where I stocked up on tarps, bungee cords, camping supplies, and a two-person all-season tent. I resurrected skills from several summers spent backpacking with Charles, an activity we gave up shortly after Billy was born.

And now, we spend time at one camp, then another. Always on the move. We see other trees—on different shores. They are stunted and misshapen. If the stony soil doesn’t damage them, the bitter winds will. They are tough and resilient.

I don’t know what scares me more: fear of being found out, or fear of the effect of the wilderness on our precious cargo.

Winter draws nigh. Perhaps it’s time to surrender. Unwrap the painting. Let Billy sing his pine-tree song.

Let true art appreciation burn bright one last time.

THE END