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  • An Amount of Discretion
  • Lauren Alwan (bio)

Her husband’s instructions were clear. Within a year of his death, the sum of his collected work—the notebooks, drawings, prints, and paintings— would go to the institute where he’d taught painting for nearly five decades. As Jonathan’s executor, Seline was entrusted with the task, charged with inventorying the studio and dispatching the gift to the provost (the same provost who at the wake informed her, Scotch on his breath, that there would indeed be a posthumous retrospective with color catalog and scholarly overview). Knowing his art would have a home at the institute was Jonathan’s comfort in those final months. It meant the collection would not be divided and sold off, but remain intact, stewarded by an institution that knew and understood his work. Once the immediate legal and personal matters settled, Seline’s work commenced. But as it happened, she’d only just begun her inventory when she came across her husband’s field journals.

It was summer, a glum Los Angeles June, and sitting cross-legged on the studio floor she studied the journals. There were eight in all, and some she was seeing for the first time. Most contained notes on the weather, varieties of light and shadow, observations that couldn’t be made with a drawn line, even one as good as Jonathan’s. But there was one notebook, bound in green, she’d never seen before, and opening it, she found it was filled with marvelous sketches—deer, quail, details of lupine and monkey flower, globed brown hills with scrub oak clustered in the gaps. Her first thought was to make the green journal a gift to Finn. But then she couldn’t bear to break up the lot, and soon resolved that her stepson should have all eight. He was Jonathan’s only child and he’d spent countless weekends hiking the foothills with his father. While mindful of Jonathan’s instructions, Seline believed her executorship gave her the latitude, and the notion quickly became an imperative, not just for Finn, but for her, too. In those first months without Jonathan, Seline had wanted to reach out, but felt she had nothing to offer, and her wish to do so didn’t seem like enough.

Now it was July, and Finn, a music major at San Francisco State, was about to start his final year. She planned to ship the notebooks by FedEx, but on the morning [End Page 87] she sat down to write the e-mail found a message from him. He was coming to Los Angeles, he wrote, for his mother’s birthday, and asked if he could stop in on the way. Reading that, her eyes lifted from the screen. Finn was twenty-two, and she’d been his stepmother for nearly sixteen years, but she’d always relied on Jonathan for their connection. Might she yet have some closer bond with her late husband’s son? She replied to Finn saying yes, of course, to come, and mentioned she had something for him. Something she thought he might like.

Maybe she should have stated her intention up front—she’d never been one for surprises herself—but her reasons for the gift struck her as too personal for e-mail. Better, she decided, to simply present the books in person. That way, she could explain herself, assure Finn that the gift conformed with his father’s wishes, and see firsthand his response. That point in particular was important, since the gesture expressed what she could not—her regret at the distance she’d put between them when Finn was young. There had been so many chances for them to be close.

She’d never had much of a maternal temperament, yet on those weekend visitations and the annual two weeks each summer, she’d found surprising pleasure in the Lego building and story reading and the cooking of macaroni and cheese. Finn had been an even-tempered, pleasant child, with an independent nature that made her task easy. Still, it was always a relief when the visits were done, and, released from having to care for...

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