(2/4) “It was an article announcing a new gallery show by the...

(2/4) “It was an article announcing a new gallery show by the painter Alice Neel. Only one of her paintings was shown in the article. It was titled: ‘Fuller Brush Man.’ And it was Dad. Physically there were some exaggerations, because that was Neel’s style. The hands were prominent. So were the folds in his suit. But the face was unmistakable. She nailed it: the smile, the upbeat gleam in his eyes. It was my father. It didn’t take me long to figure out what had happened. Neel’s studio was on 107th Street. That was Dad’s territory. Alice Neel must have been his customer. That weekend my wife and I drove down to the show. It was at a fancy, downtown gallery. The painting was striking, and it was for sale. We could have owned it. But it was $35,000. We just couldn’t do it. It’s probably worth millions today. Three months after the show Alice Neel passed away. I never got a chance to meet her. Over the years I’d occasionally see an article about her work, but life got busy for me. I had two children of my own. And that’s when I really started missing Mom and Dad. My wife’s parents were around. My sons had this great relationship with them. But I had to reconstruct my parents in absentia. All I could say was: ‘You have these other grandparents, and they would have loved you so much.’ Both my sons are grown now. They’re older than I was when Dad passed away. And my relationship with them has evolved. It’s still father-son. But it’s father, and adult son. We can get a beer together. We have real conversations: about the world, and politics, and graduate school. My dad and I never made it that far. He’d tell me these stories, and I was kinda listening. I knew what happened to him back in Germany. But I didn’t really know. I was a teenager. I wanted to go out. And he was just my dad. On the 100th anniversary of Alice Neel’s birth there was a huge retrospective of her work at The Whitney. Seventy-five paintings. A massive advertising campaign. Dad’s picture was everywhere: in the newspaper, on the subway. I’d be walking down Madison Avenue, and the number four bus would whiz past, and there’s Dad, blown up on the side. Except nobody knows it’s Dad. He’s just ‘Fuller Brush Man.”