If I begin with purple cabbage as the prima facie evidence I must also begin with midnight, with me, my brother, my sister, our parents stiffened by a long car ride. Also here at the beginning is a white yapper of a toy poodle named Candy, and a bright light, such a bright light, bulbed above a dining-room table in a horizontal home at the foot of a hill in Tarrytown, New York.

For hours now, this cabbage, this yapper, this light have been waiting. Our father got a late start, there was traffic, this is  before cell phones, but our great aunt Ann in her sensible shoes and business suit is impervious to the prospect that cabbage and ham and pepper hash lose their appeal (if ever they had appeal) after ten pm. We are seated. Candy nips. Aunt Ann (we call her that) serves. 

I sit facing the china-cabinet wall and train my thoughts on the Boehm porcelain—the mountain lion with the red poppy, the bunny with the spots, the crispy-petaled rose. If I study these things, if I wonder about them deeply, I will not taste the midnight cabbage or the hash. I will get through this meal, to the room beyond, where Aunt Ann’s husband (we call him Uncle Lloyd) has hung the famous painting of his famous work. Uncle Lloyd Morgan is a major architect. He is the engraver’s son who slipped off to Paris and then brought his Beaux-Arts vision home to the jazz-age firm of Schultze and Weaver, which is the on-record architect of the Hotel Pierre, the Sherry-Netherland, the Miami Biltmore, Montauk Manor, the Breakers, and, of course, the Waldorf-Astoria on Park and Lexington. 

Uncle Lloyd’s famous painting has a title: Buildings Designed by Schultze and Weaver, Architects, from 1921 to 1936, and it is as long and nearly as tall as the wall beyond this room. The painting gleams and just slightly cracks, and I worry, as I try not to gag on the cabbage, that some of its gleam will have fallen away since the last time our family made the three-hour drive.

We eat assisted by sterling silver and linen napkins. We eat pretending that Candy has not peed on the piles of newspapers in the corner of the kitchen; that we do not smell the smell. Uncle Lloyd is not among us. He is elusive. That’s what genius does—it takes you away from people, it puts family at a distance, it puts the want in future storytellers. My brother and I will have to sneak around later or early tomorrow morning if we want to see the basement with all those drawings rolled, all those triangles and pencils. If we want to see the architect’s office with the stacks of books. If we want to see the stars through our uncle’s telescope. If we want to finally find him so that he can tell us about the structures he designed and drew and then oil painted into that mural of his. The mural presents a brave new world with a dark mahogany sky and a landscape of sandstone-colored buildings all set out in tiered rows. At its base is a lake of some kind, or perhaps a reflecting pool, so that the buildings appear twice—once upright with plenty of dark sky for their halos and once downright and interestingly truncated. 

The Waldorf-Astoria takes center stage. Built on the site of a former power plant and YMCA, built above the railway tracks of New York Central, the hotel itself was, I will read later, in a story written by Andrew S. Dolkart and published by The Journal of Decorative and Propoganda Arts, “the world’s largest and tallest hotel, a building with a massive footprint, complex structural requirements, vast service areas, transient and semi-transient rooms, apartment suites, facilities for the Junior League and Canadian clubs, restaurants, lounges, a multistory ballroom, and function rooms of various sizes.” The Waldorf-Astoria was, I will later read, in a book by Ward Morehouse III, clad inside with 1,585 cubic feet of Belgian black marble, 600 cubic feet of Italian Brech Montalto and 360 cubic feet of Italian Alps Green and 300 antique mantels, while its 47-story façade presented 800,000 cubic feet of limestone, which equaled two-hundred railroad carloads. And then there was the matter of the “2,595,000 square feet of terra cotta and gypsum block” and the fact that it was built at the height of the depression.

But when I am there in that house it is the painting itself that seems unquantifiable. All those tiny brush strokes across all those complex facades, all those windows, all those doors, all those tiers, all those reflections, all the sky-high stones and mansard roofs and pinnacles, ever ascending. I am overwhelmed by the idea of the man who painted every inch, and I wish he would come from wherever he is and save us with a story.

Genius is elusive.

Once, in a bit of fiction I wrote after Uncle Lloyd had died, I reincarnated him as a ghostly vision—ivory feet, ivory ankles, ivory arms, a white shirt, white pants, white hair thick and rumpled, neck the color of bone. I turned him into a man who led my brother and me out onto a roof so that we might dangle our feet in the night air, a man who afterwards vanished. The story was like a dream and the dream was like a memory, and now when I read my own words I think of how childhood impresses with its scents and lights and colors, and how childhood impresses with its absence.

I was ten when he died—a heart attack. Afterward, Aunt Ann wasn’t well, and when she died a few years later, my father, willed the famous mural of the famous buildings, had it hung on the long wall at the office where he worked. My mother took a handful of Boehm porcelain home, perhaps two smoky gray vases. There were rumors of diamonds hidden in the Tarrytown rafters, left there to the new owners, and I don’t know what happened to Candy or the bright, bright lights of the dining room. In time I went to a university where I studied the history of science, the history of medicine, the history of cities, and when I got done I went to work for an architect. I wanted to be near the rolled drawings, the yellow trace, the triangles and the pencils. I wanted to know the words I should have known when Uncle Lloyd was alive: entablature, quoin, chamfer, transom, buttress, cantilever, bracket, superstructure. I wanted genius and thought I’d find it in an architect’s world.

Shortly after that, a man named Joseph Caponnetto visited my parents’ house with a carousel of slides and a proposition, a desire, as he later wrote in a letter to my father, “to convey some of the wonderful character of the man and his work” and “to put LM on the map as he very well should be.” Capponnetto, an architect who had worked with Uncle Lloyd, who had spoken with him, who had exhausted all of the available research, came with half a story told, hoping that somewhere in us, somehow among us, we would have half a story to return.

We had little to give. We were ashamed (I felt ashamed) by the paucity of our memories, by the dreams we couldn’t imagine, by the ways in which, each time we stretched toward truth, we were, in fact, stretching toward fiction.

When my father left his job in the building with the long wall, the mural came to live at my parents’ home, in the basement, on the only wall long enough to house its expanse. The air was humid there. The mahogany sky blackened. The reflective pool went swampy. The windows and the doors of the painted buildings began to crackle and to shut, and whenever I would go home, I would visit the great mural and worry over how its gleam was rubbing off. I would show my husband—an architect I had found at the firm that employed me, an architect of delineating elegance, an architect of yellow trace and transparent triangles with a Yale education, an architect who told his stories best through line and color and who, even when he was sitting right there beside you, right there across from you, had a vanishing talent. I would show my husband what my Uncle Lloyd had done and tell him all that I did not know and what I couldn’t remember.

And then my mother passed away. And then I was holding in my hands The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts. I was on page 14 of Dolkart’s contribution when, beneath a photograph of the famous mural, I found these words: “Lloyd Morgan, Buildings Designed by Schultze and Weaver, Architects, from 1921 to 1936, photograph of a lost oil painting, 1936. The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, the Mitchell Wolfson Jr. Collection. WFIU-147. From left to right, the Hotel Pierre, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and the Sherry-Netherland Hotel.”

Photograph of a lost oil painting. But it wasn’t lost. It was hanging in my father’s basement afflicted by humidity. It was hanging there, growing dark. 

My father had the painting repaired. He had it restored by two expert women who worked in a leafy neighborhood in an unfancy garage—the painting held up on mason stones and brushed and tinted back into life, and I would give the process its proper cliché, painstaking, except that every time we visited those restorers seemed so happy. They would stop in mid-stroke to show us what they’d done, to show us something new they’d found in the newly unobscured inches. Not painstaking, it seemed, at all, this unburying, this uncovering, this getting to the facts of the matter. When they were done, my father hired a truck and the truck conveyed the painting south, all the way to the Wolfsonian museum, where there were more of Uncle Lloyd’s famous drawings and a wall bright and long enough to display them. 

I visited once, in 2013. I was, again, overwhelmed. The lost oil painting had been found and now it hung in a well of proper light on the proper side of a wall.

Not long ago, a Wolfsonian curator got in touch. She was at work on a book about the museum collections, she said, and she was hoping for more about the un-lost painting and the man who’d made it. In preparation for a conversation, my brother rooted through a box he’d recently acquired from my father’s house—a box of Uncle Lloyd memorabilia that had, before my father’s most recent move, remained, at my father’s request, untouched. There, in that box, was something I did not know we had—the early pages of Joseph Caponnetto’s unfinished book about the man, my Uncle Lloyd, about whom too little seemed known. Typewritten and mostly double-spaced with only occasional errors, the 37 pages drew, and here the cliché works, back the curtains. They introduced me to Uncle Lloyd. They walked him into the room: 

It was his father who had taught him to draw.

He was in possession of a fine singing voice.

At school, at night, while the cleaning crew cleaned, he worked by candle light.

During the war, he was shot twice through the leg and crawled to safety.

While working as an architect he taught at Yale, sometimes drawing for the students with a mop and dirty water.

When he resigned from Yale, the students honored him with a scroll that read,  “To Mr. Lloyd Morgan: WE, members of Yale School of Architecture, wish to express our appreciation of the privilege of working under you last year. Your Mastery of your subject, your joy in your work, your unstinted giving of yourself for our advancement, all were an inspiration. You are not forgotten. Be assured that where your work may take you, you carry our sincerest wishes for your success.”

He placed his hand upon a thumbtack when working on his Waldorf-Astoria presentation and his arm grew infected right away; it “festered.” He did not stop. He had the arm lanced. He wore a sling. He got the job done.

As I write this my husband is outside charcoaling images that he will never (I’ve learned not to ask him) explain. As I write this I study the scans of the few photos my brother also found in the box—my Uncle Lloyd’s elegant face, my Aunt Ann’s determined one. As I write this I try to remember one actual word my Uncle Lloyd might have said to me, one moment when he might have really seen me, one moment when I might have been interesting enough to the man who was so perpetually interesting to me that he might have been delighted to assist me in my learning. That he might have mentioned the lanced arm, the Corona cigars, the students that he loved, the dose of gas, the power of my curiosity.

But I don’t remember. We are mysteries to one another, and the elusion is the seduction is the story.