Mazzy showed me some images of his work, which were indeed ghostlike, the figures tall and narrow and almost turning to mist in front of you. But they were beautiful. And then she showed me a photo of Henry, who was, holy moly, so handsome. Crazy handsome. Like a farmhand-who-wins-a-modeling-competition-and-then-gets-to-marry-a-princess kind of handsome, with curly brown hair and bright blue eyes and rippling muscles under a loose linen shirt. If you looked like that, I decided, everyone else probably looked like they were dissolving in front of you. How could you paint anyone who wasn’t as pretty as you, so you made it up to them by turning them into ghosts so they wouldn’t feel too bad.

“So,” Mazzy continued, “I went to see Henrietta when I began to research Henry’s life, and she was incredibly reluctant to talk about Henry, really protective of him, and there wasn’t much information available about him, and so I had to really charm her, to tell her how much I loved his paintings, and I think she eventually realized that I could bring her husband’s work to the larger world, which had, you know, mostly ignored him when he was alive. I rented an apartment in Keene, above this old general store, and I’d meet with her every few days. And then, one day, she just kind of, I don’t know, decided that she wasn’t long for this world and Henry was dead, and it was okay to tell me everything. And so she did.”

Henry, Mazzy informed me, had been gay, and Henrietta had known this going into the relationship, but she liked him and he was sweet and he had a huge farm that she loved. And it was nearly impossible for Henry to have many lasting relationships with men in the area, so he was hers more than he was someone else’s. At some point, he met Randolph Avery during a gallery exhibition in Los Angeles, and the two of them formed an intense friendship that lasted the rest of their lives, though it wasn’t physical. Or at least Henrietta had assured Mazzy that it wasn’t. And they stayed in close contact until Avery died. Avery, I knew, had died of AIDS, only a few years after that summer in Coalfield.