Gray light hangs outside the wrought-iron fire escape over West 22nd Street like dingy, overbleached sheets clothespinned to a line. In honor of the reappearance of her mother’s work, Rachel has decided it’s best to destroy her own. Eema had always talked about her daughter’s God-given talent, but again and again, the real lesson to be learned was that there was only room for one superior artist in the space between them, and it was never going to be Rashka. So Rachel has just set her latest shmittshik afire, lighting it from the stove burner and washing the remains down the sink. It made her feel good to burn it. A satisfying pain to see her own face turned to char. Eingeäschert is the word in German. Reduced to ashes.
Now she lights a cigarette to mask the smell of the burned paper as she hears the sound of Aaron’s key in the door.
“I got you the vegetable lo mein,” he announces as he enters, crossing to the kitchen table with the paper sack smelling of hot fish oils. He is wearing his Brooks Brothers overcoat and a felt Alpiner with the silk headband and a tufted feather. A narrow maroon necktie divides the crisp white of his shirt, and he’s smoking a cigarette. But his face is blotchy and tired. The end of the day, dealing with the Wednesday matinee crowd, dealing with Leo’s craziness, dealing with the help. The grindstone. The salt mines. The calamity before curtain time. That’s his joke. “You said to surprise you, right? So surprise.” His voice is drained. He removes his cigarette from his lips as he bends down to kiss her.
“Yuck,” she says.
“Yuck to the kiss or yuck to the lo mein?”
“The kiss. My husband tastes like an ashtray.”
“What a coincidence,” he says, screwing out his Lucky in the ashtray. “So does my wife.” He sets the paper sack on the kitchen table and starts to unload it. “Do we need plates?” he wonders. Sniffs at one of the cartons.
“
Aaron’s mother gave them this china as a wedding present. Eight place settings of Syracuse China dinnerware, the Edmonton Blue Old Ivory pattern, plus one sugar bowl and one creamer, the handle of which Rachel has already had to reglue. Nice, but nothing too fancy, and good enough for every day. “I’ve had the same set for fourteen years, and there’s hardly a chip,” her mother-in-law had assured her confidentially, as if Aaron would not possibly understand such intimately household matters, which was absolutely correct.
Rachel can recall an evening as a child in Berlin when a young scion of a poor but ennobled Viennese family was dining at their home. The young man had insulted Eema with his impertinence by turning over his dinner plate to examine the backstamp, as if he could hardly be expected to eat his dinner off any dish that did not bear a crown mark. Fortunately for all concerned, Eema’s porcelainware was Berlin KPM. Le Cabinet Hohenzollern.
“What did
“The kung pao shrimp.” He’s opened his container and picks out a shrimp with his fingers, popping it into his mouth.
Setting down forks and paper napkins, she says, “So then you’ll be up half the night with a sour belly.”
“You know, my mother didn’t eat a single shrimp until she was thirty-two years old,” Aaron announces. “And it wasn’t ’cause she kept kosher, either, ’cause
“And what if your mother saw her only son eating with dirty fingers?
“Yes, ma’am.”
Rachel removes a pair of water glasses from the shelf and plants them on the table. She is clinging to normal routine. Her normal paths of dialogue with Aaron. The jolting discovery of her mother’s painting knocked her off course. Home after the pawnshop, she had taken another two tablets of Miltown, off schedule. But instead of feeling balanced, she feels brittle. Vulnerable. The painting’s unwelcome incursion into the present has made her defenseless against the intrusion of her own past. It has ignited her memory of green eyes raw with feline hunger. The fiery red tresses. The monstrous beauty of a murderess.
Eema called her la muse du rouge.
A red-haired feline, who possessed both la beauté de Vénus and le feu de Feronia. But her name was not divine. It was Rosen. Angelika Rosen. A pretty Jewish girl from the crooked streets of the Scheunenviertel, scarcely nineteen when she first stood posing on the dais in Eema’s studio, more slum-born than foam-born. And now the painting has emerged. That terrifying, mesmerizing portrait in oils on canvas, which until that morning had been lost to the bonfires of history. But now? Resurrected from its ashes. A phoenix in an ugly frame, held captive in a pawnbroker’s prison between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.