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TWO

J onathan Stein sent an email late last night with a short history of the life of Party on the Seine between the Nazi era and now, along with an attachment that contains information about my lineage, which I didn’t get a chance to look at because of an early-morning meeting.

Now, back in my office, I pause before opening it, left hand hovering over the touchpad.

Even I have to acknowledge that it would be an excessively elaborate hoax for him to hide some kind of software bomb inside the attachment.

It’s not like I’m famous or rich or have anything to hide.

And if he wanted to steal my identity, there have to be easier ways.

Without reading further, I get up and close my office door, lean against it for a moment, and stare out at the Charles River—or the sliver of it that I can see between the obstructing buildings.

A few bobbing white sailboats scurry across.

This view, narrow as it is, usually calms me, but not today.

My stomach is jumpy, and someone-walking-over-your-grave goose bumps ripple up my arms.

All my meetings go on too long, and as always, I’m cramped for time.

I need to review the revised marketing plan for our latest drug, Zymidline, but instead I pull up Jonathan’s attachment and scrutinize the diagram.

Working upward, there’s me, then my mother, my grandmother Josephine, my great-grandmother Genevieve, my great-great-grandmother Colette, and my great-great-great-grandmother Aimée, with my great-great-great-great-grandmother Berthe at the top.

I have a vivid memory of the first time I realized all the other kids had grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, family dinners and vacations and big holiday celebrations.

I was standing on the playground in second grade, waiting for my ups in kickball, and all around me everyone was jabbering about what they’d done over Christmas break.

With their grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins.

So much fun. So much excitement. Parties, tons of presents, skiing, beaches, a cruise through the Panama Canal.

While I, with the exception of a couple of movies and a smattering of random Hanukkah gifts, had done a whole bunch of nothing.

I was as disconsolate as a seven-year-old faced with serious FOMO can be.

Heartbroken and oh so alone, I’d struggled to keep myself from bursting into tears.

How could my parents have done this to me?

Not even a sibling? And then, in a future that wasn’t all that distant, they went off and died young to boot.

Even then, I knew it wasn’t their fault, but I was lonely for kin, and I suppose I still am.

But now, wonder of wonders, right in front me on the screen are relatives.

As I said, not that many, and all of them, obviously, dead.

Yet none of this matters, because they’re mine.

IT’S DAYS BEFORE I can get back to my family tree.

First, there was a trip to Washington, DC, to meet with regulators who wanted clarity on our request for an orphan-disease designation for clostridial myonecrosis.

Calliope specializes in drugs that treat rare diseases that affect only a small number of people, which clostridial myonecrosis, a life-threatening bacterial infection, is.

The first step in this process is for the Food and Drug Administration to add clostridial myonecrosis to its orphan list. After that’s done, we can request government assistance to finance the research and development of a drug to cure or treat it, a so-called orphan drug.

As much as I miss the money and staff at my previous job, I do appreciate that what I’m doing at Calliope helps people, which wasn’t the case at EVTX, a company mostly dedicated to corporate greed.

As I was quite convincing in Washington—if I do say so myself—I think the official okay will be coming down soon, and then we can jump on the challenging work of figuring out how to alleviate a devastating disease. See, I’m not always cranky and cynical.

Then there was a leak in my kitchen ceiling, because the lamebrain above me didn’t turn off his faucet, and my friend Holly’s knee surgery, which necessitated a number of trips to and from the hospital and baking two batches of lasagna. What single buddies do for each other.

Finally, I have a little time to get to know my family—even if it is a family of ghosts.

I’m familiar with my parents’ lives and the little bit my mother told me about her mother’s life, but unfortunately, Grandma Josephine had some kind of a falling-out with her own mother, and anything before that is a complete mystery.

There’s nothing online about Genevieve, Colette, or Aimée, whose lives were probably just as ordinary as those of my more recent ancestors.

Then I hit pay dirt with Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandma Berthe Manet, who painted under her maiden name, Berthe Morisot.

I’ve never heard of her, but she was an artist, an Impressionist like édouard Manet, and she exhibited her paintings along with Monet, Renoir, Degas, and lots of other famous people.

Even better, it turns out good ol’ Grandpa Times Four was édouard’s brother, Gène Manet, lending more weight to a possible Party on the Seine connection.

Okay, Mr. Stein, I’ve got to give you some points here.

I call him. “So you’re thinking édouard Manet gave the painting to his brother Gène, who passed it down to his daughter Aimée?” I ask without preamble.

“I have no idea—nor does the Conference—but I suppose it’s a possibility.”

“How can you not know when you just gave me my family tree from the nineteenth century?”

“We only have that because an intern got interested and created it on her own. We hardly ever go back to anything before Hitler’s rise, so we only know for sure that the Nazis stole Party on the Seine from the Bernheims. We traced and verified your connection to them, but—despite the intern’s attempts—have no way of knowing how they came to possess it. ”

“Okay,” I say, slightly disappointed, and check the tree again. “So it must have been that Colette, Aimée’s daughter, inherited it from her mother, and the Nazis stole it from her.”

“Could have been.”

“But it doesn’t say anything about the Manets being Jewish.”

“As far as I know, they weren’t.”

“So were they resisters or Roma or any of the other folks the Nazis wanted to get rid of?”

“Samuel Bernheim was Jewish. Colette’s husband.”

I close my eyes and imagine I’m at my desk at home instead of at the office.

The French doors of my study open into the living room, where there’s a triptych of mixed-media pieces between the two windows.

From the photographs I’ve seen of Party on the Seine , it seems likely the painting would fit there.

Roughly four feet tall and five feet wide, if I remember correctly.

Large, but, yes—the space is well over five feet.

I open my eyes and turn my chair around to try to catch a sailboat on my tiny piece of river. Are there any people on a boat having a party? Am I really picturing a painting by édouard Manet, worth millions of dollars, hanging in my apartment?

“Tamara?” Jonathan asks into my silence.

“It’s so off-the-wall.”

“These cases often are.”

“But you and your Claims Conference and all those experts who investigated this are sure that it’s mine?”

“As sure as we can be.”

This is huge. An Impressionist masterpiece, believed lost to the world, now risen from the dead. But along with ownership will come a slew of unknown consequences. Good and bad. Am I rich? “What the hell am I supposed to do with it?” I blurt.

Jonathan chuckles. “I wondered when you were going to get to that.”

My suspicions flare. “And I suppose you have an answer for me? Like your conference buying it? Or brokering it to get your cut?”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re a cynical woman?”

I’m not about to tell him they have, and I ask instead, “Do I have reason to be?”

Now his laugh is full-throated. “You finally accept the fact that one of the greatest pieces of art ever created belongs to you, and your first thought is that I’m cheating you?”

“I’ve been thinking that from the first time you contacted me,” I grumble, thawing.

“Good point.”

I sigh. “So do you have any answers?”

“I’m in no position to tell you what to do, but it seems to me you have a few options.

One is to give it to a museum and get a big tax write-off.

Or you could sell it to one, but you’ll only get a fraction of what it’s worth on the open market.

You could lend it to a museum, retaining ownership and maybe, although not likely, getting them to pay you a fee.

The other alternative is to have an auction house sell it for you.

They take a pretty hefty cut, but given what they can probably get for it, you’ll still end up with a nice windfall. A very nice one.”

“What if I want to keep it?”

“I’d strongly suggest that you don’t take physical custody of it now. Or probably ever.”

“Why not?” I think again about the multimedia triptych, which I’ve never particularly liked.

I could move that to the empty wall in the guest room, over the futon.

Party on the Seine needs to hang between the windows, where I’ll be able to see it from both my desk and the living room couch.

A family heirloom, an inheritance from ancestors I never knew I had.

A gift that will bring me closer to them, remind me of my roots, of who I am. A comforting presence.