Cracking open her billfold, Rachel produces the five and the rainy-day twenty, handing it over. “Now he’s paid up.”
Mrs. Appelbaum looks surprised and frowns but not unhappily. “Well,” she says. “Who could say no? A sheynem dank,” she thanks Rachel formally, folding the money into the pocket of her house dress.
“Ni’t do kein farvos,” Rachel answers her tightly. Her eema has disappeared from the steps.
“I’ll write out the receipt and slip it under his door,” Mrs. Appelbaum assures her. “Rent paid in full with sixty cents in credit.” She is smiling now like a contented bubbe. “Such a thoughtful person you’ve grown into, mammele,” the lady observes, calling her “little mother.” An endearment reserved for obedient, well-behaved daughters. “And so pretty too. Your uncle? He should know how lucky he is to have such a devoted niece,” she says and then looks up at the creak of footsteps on the stairs. “And here we are,” she announces with the brightness of a hostess greeting her guest. “Speak of its wings and the angel appears.”
For an instant, Rachel feels her nerves tingle at the mention of an angel, but when she turns about, she sees it is only Feter Fritz, a wary expression hung on his face that he is attempting to mold into a smile.
“Look who’s come for a visit, Mr. Landau,” the old lady sings. “Your little plimenitse, a married lady now, pretty as the moon!”
Smiling very cautiously. “So I see, Mrs. Appelbaum.”
“And with such a pretty head! You must be proud!” the old woman declares as she continues her laborious journey downward, gripping the rail. “I’ll leave you two to your own company. Be healthy!”
Feter Fritz inspects Rachel with eyes that are pleasantly suspicious. “So this is a surprise,” he points out.
Inside? The apartment is no different than when Rachel left it five years before. No different, only dustier without someone to sweep. Only dirtier without someone to clean. Only with a coat of downtown grime dulling the window glass. And the smell? Maybe it smelled this way even when she lived here fresh off the boat back in ’49 and ’50. The upholstery and rugs polluted by the stale reek of her uncle’s smoking habit and the interior stink of ancient plumbing. Maybe it smelled back then too, and her nose was blind to it. But now it hits her as if she’s walked into a wall. Her uncle, though, is obviously inured to the stench as he busies himself clearing a spot on the horsehair settee that’s dribbling its stuffing. “Sit! Sit!” he is commanding graciously. “I’ll make some tea.”
But instead of sitting, Rachel surveys her surroundings. A few bleach-stained shirts hang on metal hangers from a nail tacked into the wall. Yellowing editions of Forverts, Dos Eydishe Aoyg, and the New York Post clutter the same wobbly old table where she and Feter Fritz used to take their meals and play their games of cribbage and backgammon. Also there is an open box of Phillies Panatellas, empty of cigars but now a receptacle for loose change, vending machine slugs, and train tokens.
“I’m sorry that I’m out of coffee at the moment,” he apologizes, setting an aluminum kettle on his old hot plate. “But there’s some very decent tea from Zabar’s.”
“Tea is good,” she assures him.
“I’ll see about some sugar,” he buzzes, maintaining his industrious tone till Rachel puts an end to it.
“So where do you have it hidden?”
“Hidden? You mean the sugar?” He really is a perfect liar. Vos a talant!
“No,” Rachel tells him. “I mean Eema’s painting.”
Her uncle is frozen for an instant in the act of holding open the door of the cabinet above the sink. Then he turns, looking painfully mystified. “Her painting? Here I was hoping you’d changed your mind about the fifty dollars. But instead you think I have her painting now?”
“I went to the pawnbroker, Feter,” Rachel says in a tone that declares the jig is up. “The one on Forty-Seventh Street. I had money. Not fifty. Perhaps not enough, but I was hoping to strike a bargain. Yet when I arrived there, it was already gone. So,” she asks again. “Where is it hidden? Behind a cabinet, perhaps? Or under your bed?”
Oddly, her feter is not chastened but bleakly amused at such an idea. He pulls down a half-empty sack of sugar from the cabinet, the paper at the top crimped closed. “I sleep on the same Murphy bed, Rokhl, don’t you recall? I pull it down from the wall every night, so hiding secret contraband underneath would prove futile.”
“Then where, Feter?”
“What on earth makes you imagine, Rashka dear, that after begging my dear niece for a few dollars the day before, it was I, your poor Feter Fritz, who this morning waltzed in and purchased it?” He smiles grimly at his surroundings. “With all my riches abounding?” He actually picks up the cigar box and shakes it, rattling the change to prove his point. “You think I collected enough pennies from the gutter, do you? Or perhaps you think I bought it with a smile?”
A blink. It’s now Rachel herself who feels chastened. She looks down at her shoes. The penny loafers she bought with her Bonwit Teller employee’s discount.
“Ziskeit!” he calls her with a dry laugh. Sweetness!
“I thought you must have found the money somewhere,” she says. “You are usually so talented at such work, Feter, when it’s essential for you. But if it was not my uncle, then who could it have been? Who else would have known its true value but you?”
A shrug over the serendipity of life. “We had our chance, my dear. Our chance,” he says, “to rescue your eema’s name from obscurity. But it was not to be. Fate is impatient; it doesn’t wait on the indecisive. So now it’s gone. To where? Who knows? Perhaps it went to some nishtikeit with a new sofa looking for a picture to hang above it. I have no idea, Rashka. I’m just a poor Jew trying to eke through his final years before the grave.”
“Don’t say that.”
He switches on the hot plate, no longer smiling. “Everyone dies, Ruchel,” he reminds her.
“But not yet.” She feels her eyes go damp. “You still have a long life to live.”
“Do I?” he wonders. And now when he smiles, it is with no more than a hint of paternal condescension softening his eyes. “If you say so, child. From your lips to God’s ear.”
Rachel breathes in and then makes her admission. Her admission that proves her devotion to him, though why does it sound like a crime she’s confessing? “I paid your rent.”
“Say again?” A crooked expression of confusion. “You did what?” He has removed a package of Wissotzky Tea from the shelf above the hot plate, the coil now glowing red.
“Mrs. Appelbaum told me that you were two months in arrears.”
A flash of embarrassed anger streaks across his eyes. “Oh, she did? She thought that was news for the front page?”
“She remembered me. From when we both lived here.”
“And so you decided to what? Empty your bank account as a remedy for an old man’s financial dilemma?”
“It was an impulse,” Rachel attempts to offer as an explanation. Now that his theatrics are done, she knows that she must suffer through her uncle’s genuine embarrassment over money, even though yesterday he was, as he’d reminded her, begging her for it. But money for a painting? That was a deal. Paying his overdue rent? That’s charity. C’est une insulte!
Feter Fritz turns his back on her, busy filling a small mesh tea ball. “An impulse,” he says. “One of which I’m sure your good husband will disapprove.”