The pastor walked to the front with the donation forms he had been checking, and he looked at Pam, and he said the thing that ended the auction and a good deal of Pams standing in that church.
My mother in law had donated my late mothers painting, worth more than a hundred and eighty thousand dollars, to the church auction under her own name, claiming a thing that was never hers to give.
My mother painted the lake behind my childhood home every morning of her life. The one I kept was the big one, the lake at sunrise with a little girl in a yellow raincoat on the dock, and the little girl was me. Pam called it too dark, too sad, and one Saturday while I was at work she took it off my wall and donated it to the St Marks spring auction under her own name, so the church would know our family gave.
It is for charity, my husband Doug told me. Do not be petty. So I did not stop her. I just did not come to the auction alone. I brought a man in a gray suit who had flown in from New York that morning, David Kessler, who represents my mothers estate for the Whitney Museum, because my mother had a show in New York in 1998 and never told anyone here, she did not want the fuss.
When the auctioneer announced the painting, donated by Mrs. Pam Whitley, opening bid two hundred dollars, Mr. Kessler raised his paddle and said fifty thousand, and told the room to turn it around and read the back.
The back said, Margaret Ellis, Sunrise at Tanner Lake, 1996, on permanent loan from the estate of the artist to her daughter, Claire. Not for sale.
Not for sale. My mother labeled it herself, years ago, because she knew the worth of what she made even when the people around me did not, and she wanted it in writing that it belonged to me and could not be given away by anyone.
The pastor had been checking the donation forms while all this happened, because a fifty thousand dollar bid on a two hundred dollar donation makes an honest pastor look closely at his paperwork. And what he found was that Pam had signed a donation form claiming sole ownership of the painting, and had asked for the tax receipt in her own name.
So he said it plainly, to Pam, in front of the whole fellowship hall. This church cannot accept a donation of property that does not belong to the person donating it. That is not charity. That is using charity to launder a thing you took. The painting goes back to its owner, today, and St Marks will have no part in how it left her wall.
A donation receipt claiming ownership of a hundred and eighty thousand dollar painting you took off your daughter in laws wall is not generosity. It is a paper trail, and it is the kind a tax authority finds interesting, and Pam is answering some questions about that now that have nothing to do with the church.
The painting came home. It hangs in my front hallway again, the lake at sunrise, the little girl in the yellow raincoat on the dock, me, where my mother meant her to be.
Doug did not defend his mother once the pastor read the label. It is hard to call your wife petty about a thing a museum flew a representative across the country to recover.
Too dark, Pam called my mothers painting. Too sad. It turned out to be worth more than her whole house, and worth more than that to me, and the only dark and sad thing in the story was a woman who looked at a daughters grief on a wall and saw a tax receipt. The little girl in the yellow raincoat is home now. So is her mothers name, on the back, where it always was. Not for sale.