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While Peter is off talking to the museum’s head of security, Dick takes the opportunity to wander the exhibit.
The focus is French Impressionism, and he’s happy to see it’s well-curated; clearly whoever designed it knew their way around a Degas and a Toulouse-Lautrec or two.
Across the hall, a portrait catches his eye. Its subject is a young woman, draped in a patterned shawl with roses in her hair. The style is early, he would say, maybe mid-1870s, and a young artist, early in their career - the black trim on one sleeve sits too heavily to be a matured painter.
But though the sleeve may be amateurish, the portrait itself is breathtaking. The young woman, her face half in shadow, gazes out at him. Something knowing lies beyond her expression. Her skin is sun-warmed; her eyes a piercing, stormy gray.
He reads the byline: Mary Cassatt, Spanish Girl Leaning on a Window Sill. 1872. Recently acquired for this exhibition.
There’s something about the woman he just can’t draw his eyes from. A depth to her gaze, maybe. Something in the dark curls framing her face, or the shading around her parted lips.
Dick has homeschooled himself into a bonafide art connoisseur in order to be Neal. He can list off, technically, a half dozen things this piece has accomplished, and comment on the career of Cassatt herself in great detail - but something about this painting speaks to him. Not to Neal, but to Dick.
“She is beautiful, no?” says an old, weathered voice from beside and slightly below him.
Dick startles, tearing his eyes from the portrait to find an elderly woman seated in a wheelchair to his left. Her eyes crinkle as she smiles up at him. Her hair is gray and curled, tied loosely behind her head. Stray locks cascade over a shawl draped across her shoulders; the shawl itself is a familiar pattern, something that touches on a long-lost memory.
Dick smiles.
“Stunning,” he says, and winks at her. “Not unlike yourself.”
The old woman’s smile grows, and her eyes twinkle with mischief.
It takes Dick a moment for his mind to catch up to his mouth - and for him to realize that he just responded in fluent Romani. A language Neal Caffrey is not supposed to know.
He glances over his shoulder. Peter’s just now exiting the far end of this room, still immersed in conversation with disgruntled-looking security personnel.
No one is particularly happy about their visit; as the local experts on art theft, they’d been sent here to poke holes in the museum’s security staff after a newsworthy theft of a Degas in San Francisco. Neal had delivered the (quite extensive) bad news on the security upgrades the museum will be expected to implement earlier in the evening; now Peter’s just smooth-talking the people in charge. He’s got his job cut out for him, getting them to abide by the FBI’s recommendations.
But Neal doesn’t particularly care if the museum ignores his advice. His own duty is over with. Dick cares, but only inasmuch as he’d hate for these pieces to be unavailable to the public. It’s mostly the principle of the thing.
Either way, what matters is that Peter is distracted and Neal doesn’t care to listen in on him.
“It’s been a long time since I spoke this,” he says, grinning bashfully at his new friend. “But it’s like coming home. I barely noticed.”
The woman gives him a bittersweet smile. “Not many know it anymore,” she says. “My granddaughter is learning now. But it is difficult for her. She is fifteen already. Very few to speak it with.”
Dick nods. His parents spoke Romani to him first, and his circus family knew enough of it and adjacent languages to hodge-podge together what he meant most of the time, as a child. He only learned English later, around when he began performing.
“The lady,” the old woman says. She draws him out of his thoughts as she points at Cassatt’s portrait, a fond look in her eyes. “I read in a book that the young lady was Roma.”
She means the subject of the portrait, Dick knows. He can see it, now that the woman has pointed it out. A hint of his mother’s jawline in the woman’s, the storminess in her eyes like a mirror to his own. And he feels it, too. He feels seen by the wistful look in her eyes. Somehow known, in a way he couldn’t put a finger on before.
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” he says. He gestures loosely over his shoulder. “She caught my eye from all the way across the room.”
The old woman sighs happily. “I came only for her,” she says, gaze falling back on the portrait. “To show my granddaughter.”
Dick glances around the exhibit quizzically; there’s no fifteen-year-old kids in sight.
The old woman laughs and swats gently at his hand. “She’s waiting outside! I just wanted to look a little longer. The girl can’t go one minute without gossiping amongst her girlfriends.”
Dick thinks of his own siblings - and in particular, of Tim, who grows visibly anxious when his phone’s not within reach.
“I know the feeling,” he says. And then, because Peter’s out of earshot and doesn’t even know this language, he speaks a little more freely than he otherwise would. “My younger brother is the same way. But I can’t say I mind it, when sometimes the person he’s texting at the dinner table is me.”
The woman laughs. “She calls me every week. She’s very attentive. She has me kvelling, our Sabina. She’s a lovely young lady.”
“I’m glad,” Dick says. He’s a little thrown by the Yiddish interjection - he supposes, from the old woman’s dialect, that her heritage is more Eastern European than his. He thinks his own family migrated through Western and Central Europe, maybe Germany, before emigrating to the states in the early 20th century.
That thought brings up an old ache. It’s pure conjecture, his family’s history. Just a guess based on faint memories and gut feelings. It’s one of the many things he’ll never get to ask his parents about.
Still - their dialects have enough in common for him and the old woman to understand each other easily.
“You, my boy - I feel you have an old soul,” the woman is saying. “You and your brother, you call your grandparents regularly, as you should?” She gives him a faux-stern look, masking an impish grin.
Dick feels the words like a weight sinking even deeper into his stomach. His smile slips, and he glances away.
“No,” he says. “I would, if I could. I… my family now is not Romani.”
“Oh, child. I’m sorry,” the woman says. Her fingers, soft and wrinkly, squeeze lightly at his. “You are so young for a loss like this. Tell me. What do you remember of them?”
And, well. Even old wounds need stretching, some days. Dick’s not going to pass up the opportunity to reminisce about his mother’s stuffed peppers with someone who understands.
It’s nearly half an hour later, long after Ethel’s granddaughter Sabina (who eventually came looking for her dallying grandmother) has been looped into the conversation in stuttering, slow-going phrases, when things get a little out of hand.
Ethel is just so excited to meet one of the Flying Graysons.
She’d brought her daughter, Sabina’s mother Lavinia, to Haly’s circus nearly forty years ago. She says one of her father’s friends was friends with Haly - the elder Haly, not the one Dick knew. They can’t track the community connection much further than that - a friend of a friend of his father’s friend’s father, at best - but Dick is nonetheless touched at how their histories weave together.
He thinks she saw his father perform as a young boy that day, although there’s no way to know for sure. But her eyes lit up when he described the red and green of their costumes, and… he just can’t not, at that point.
The gallery has a vaulted ceiling, anyway.
He sticks the landing of his double-twisting double back perfectly.
Ethel, back across the room, looks absolutely delighted. Sabina is somewhere between embarrassment and the giddy, teenaged enthusiasm of breaking the rules.
Unfortunately, his perfect landing happens to be right in front of Peter, who had wandered off into another section of the gallery earlier and is now very much back inside this room.
Dick turns around to Peter’s horrified expression, feeling like a bucket of water crashes him back to the present day. But he is, after all, a Grayson; he steels himself and faces his consequences head-on.
“Neal!” Peter splutters, looking as if he’s about to have a heart attack. He glances frantically between Neal, the very unamused head of security to his left, and the Degas on the wall to his right.
“Hi, Peter, hope your talks have been going well,” Dick says, smiling brightly and smoothing his button-down. “Chats all wrapped up? I’m ready to head out whenever.”
Peter gapes at him, and then turns to the head of security.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into him,” he says, hoarsely. “I’ll take him away. Right now. We’re leaving. Neal?” He turns back to Neal, looking as frazzled as Dick’s ever seen him. “We’re leaving!”
“Sounds good! Just one moment,” Dick says, turning and hurrying back to Ethel and Sabina.
“Wait! Neal!” Peter calls after him, but Dick just shrugs off his pleas for Neal to not pull any more stunts.
“I have to go,” he says, apologetically. He grasps Sabina’s hand, and then Ethel’s. “It’s been so wonderful to meet you.”
“Don’t rush off just yet,” Ethel says, clinging to his hand as he starts to move away. “Sabina, dear, could you give him my telephone address?”
Sabina rolls her eyes fondly and then holds out her own phone. “Put your number, please,” she says. “I am…” she pauses, looking a little uncertain, and then continues, “Um. To give, I think? I am giving her number for you.”
“Thank you,” Dick says, typing in his non-Bureau phone number and then returning the phone. He smiles warmly at both of them, and then winks at Ethel as Sabina steps around to push her wheelchair. “I’ll call you for lunch, perhaps. I would love to stay in touch.”
“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t,” Ethel says, nodding gravely.
He grins, and then with one last wave, returns to Peter.
Peter grabs his arm as soon as he’s close enough and frog-marches him out of the building.
“What the hell was that?!” he gripes, as soon as they’re no longer in the presence of security personnel. “Neal, you can’t just - you can’t just go flipping around like that in a museum of this caliber! Or of any caliber! Do you have any idea how hard I’ve been working to get them to take us seriously?! And what language were you even speaking to those women?!”
“I plead the fifth,” Dick says, beaming. Talking to Ethel has him feeling reckless, has him itching to leap from great heights. Which is why, against his better judgement, he adds, “Not like you’d be able to find a translator for it, anyway.”
“Neal,” Peter says, pleadingly.
“I’ll stop, I’ll stop,” Dick says, cackling.
Peter just groans and walks off toward the parking garage. Dick skips after him.
This afternoon has definitely not been good for his cover. He’ll have to think of some plausible explanations for why Neal Caffrey has acted the way he just has.
But for Dick Grayson? He hasn’t felt the warm embrace of nostalgia like this in years. And in an hour or two, he’ll get to relive all of it when he gives Wally the play-by-play recap.
Spanish Girl Leaning on a Window Sill
Mary Cassatt, c. 1872. Oil on canvas.