Rachel glares blankly at him. She feels shame like she feels anger—deep down in the middle of her heart.
“Perhaps your old uncle should be going in any case,” Feter declares as he stands, abandoning his bowl of lentil bean. Setting his old roll-brim at its customary angle on his head, he slides his tweedy coat over his shoulders. “Consider my request, Rashka,” he offers softly. “For what does money matter, compared to the chance to restore your mother’s name to its proper standing? Imagine that, Rashka, within your grasp.” And with that, Feter Fritz is sailing toward the door and the gritty traffic of East Broadway, leaving his niece with the bill.
3.
God Laughs
A person plans and God laughs. This is what’s said. Rachel is standing in a weak drizzle outside a shop window on 47th Street, her head covered by a rain scarf. The grimy glass is dotted with the same sprinkle of raindrops that she blinks away from her eyelashes. A display of once-coveted objects fills the window, objects traded for cash loans, now ticketed with price tags. Over the door, a sign features a troika of golden balls hanging from a bar. The ancient symbol of the pawnbroker.
A bell jangles as she pushes into the shop. The glassed-in counters are filled with more of the hocked treasures never collected: watches, rings, necklaces, silver plate, precious brooches, all the sad glitter. The rest of the shop resembles a cluttered attic filled with items slowly devolving into junk. Appliances, a dress dummy, musical instruments hung from nails, cameras, vacuum cleaners, a dragoon’s saber, ugly prints in ugly frames, a stuffed bear’s head mounted on the wall. The bear growls glass-eyed at eternity.
A man with a cigarette in his mouth appears, squinting one-eyed through the smoke. He wonders what he can do for her in a slack-jawed manner. His hair is in need of a trim or at least a shampoo. His chin is pimply. He’s tall and slouches and wears a brown pullover, frayed at the cuffs, and a closed-collar shirt. This must be the bedbug. The anonymous little man of Feter’s description.
“I’m looking for a painting,” she tells him.
He sniffs, removes the cigarette from his lips, and taps ash into a dirty enamel ashtray. “Yeah? Okay. Paintings I’ve got. What’re you looking for? Something for what? Like over the sofa? Over the mantel?”
Rachel swallows. She brushes her rain-damp hair away from her forehead. She looks up at the bear. “Is that real?”
“Oh, you mean Smokey Bear up there?” The bedbug smiles. “Yeah, he’s real. Shot him myself when he tried to kick my campfire out,” he offers. Rachel looks back at him without comprehension.
“It’s a particular painting,” she reveals. “A painting of a woman.”
“Oh, so it’s something you know we’ve got. Why didn’t ya say so?” he asks. Rachel licks her lips. She finds it hard to describe, she tells him. But what she doesn’t tell him is that she finds it hard to describe because finding it terrifies her. That it could have survived, indestructible. That it could have followed her here to America.
“It’s a painting of a woman,” she repeats. “A painting of a girl. She was only a girl back then. A teenager. Painted all in monochrome. All in red.”
Oh, and now the bedbug gets it. “Ah, red. Sure! You mean the nudie,” he announces with a touch of emphasis that is both lecherous and disdainful. “It’s in the back,” he tells her, parking his cigarette in the ashtray. “But I gotta warn you, sweetheart,” he prepares her. “It ain’t exactly cheap.” Disappearing through a door marked PRIVATE, he leaves it standing open so he can still talk. “And I should also mention? I’ve already got an interested buyer on the hook for it. But here we go. Let’s give it a look, because why not?”
Rachel feels a wave of panic strong enough to pull her under. She’s not ready. Not ready to see that face again. Not in her mother’s painting. A voice emerges from the past inside her head. A woman’s voice. A purring, menacing voice:
Wo ist dein Stern, Liebchen?
Where is your star, little darling?
Rushing toward the door, Rachel pushes it open as the bell jangles and the damp air strikes her face. But she is stopped by the figure of her mother, blocking her exit, naked, a victim of the Konzentrationslager, her hair nothing but a cropped scrub of gray, her yellowed, pockmarked skin gloved tightly over her skeleton, and her eyes oily with death.
“Hey, where you goin’?” the bedbug wants to know. “You wanna see this thing or not?”
She stares starkly into the pit of her mother’s gaze, then turns swiftly, eyes wet with fear. “I’ll see it,” she says. Rachel steps back into the shop, her breath a slow bellows in her chest. She approaches the counter with the reluctance of the condemned.
Her mother always favored large canvases. They made her feel at ease with her subject and with herself. Herr Lemberg, the Galician Jew who constructed her frames, also stretched her canvases, always according to la standard française for sizing. Eema insisted that painting on anything smaller than une toile de quarante gave her hand cramps.
The canvas that faces Rachel now is trapped in an ugly gilded salon frame. But it must be une toile de cinquante. A canvas of fifty. Converting to American measurement? An approximation would be called three feet by four feet, standing taller than little Rashka stood when it was first painted.
She hasn’t set eyes upon this painting in nearly twenty years, but she remembers as vividly as she would remember a lightning strike.
Even as a child, she liked to watch her mother at work in her studio. Every canvas began simply with the application of an imprimatur of Dammar varnish and turpentine. Then a dry-brush underpainting of umber followed by what was then called la couche morte. The Dead Layer. An underpainting of grays. Once applied, the hidden palette of the work would lift the colors of her brushwork into the heavenly realms of translucence.
The figure before her throbs off the canvas.
A sensual inferno of red pigments. It both repulses Rachel and draws her in. The long, willowy body. The beatific face with the untamed eyes of a leopard. Persephone erupting from the Underworld. La muse du rouge. She glares at it as if staring straight into a furnace.
“So for a lousy fifty bucks, I wrap it up,” the bedbug informs her. “And this little gem is all yours, hon. I’m sure it’ll kill over your sofa.”
Rachel blinks. Her eyes shoot to this skinny specimen with his buggy eyes.
He presses. “So what’ll it be?”
Rachel’s head is a tangle. She is desperate to flee, desperate to return to a world where her mother’s work has been completely incinerated by the past. But knowing this piece has survived…this terrifying canvas. How will she live now without it?
“Fifty dollars,” she repeats blankly back to the man. She has, perhaps, a dollar in her billfold, plus a quarter in her change purse and a couple of vending machine tokens. Fifty dollars, when they pay eighty-nine dollars a month for their apartment? How can she possibly lay hands on such a sum? She could try to what? Raid Aaron’s wallet at night after he undresses, even though she knows he doesn’t carry more than cab fare.
She could write a check. She thinks there’s some money in their checking account, because Aaron was paid last Friday, but that would leave them too broke to cover their rent and monthly bills. The only possibility that remains is the twenty dollars her husband has stashed in his copy of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Only for emergencies. “Rainy-day cash” he calls it. Well, it is a day, and it is raining.
“Will you take less?” she probes.