She feels a lift under her heart. Such a lovely creation. She slips it from the box and automatically holds it up against herself to size it, knee lifted and toe pointed, a hand pressed to the waistline. Long fitted sleeves, with a shoulder wedge silhouette and a standing collar. It breaks perfectly below her knees.
Again comes the squeak of the chair. “There are rewards for those who work,” he tells her, then waves her away and returns to his call.
16.
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is still weeks away, but Christmas shoppers are starting to crowd the sidewalks and jam the trains. Women labor to manage packages. On the Eighth Avenue Local, Rachel gives up her spot to an overloaded middle-aged lady, because men seldom surrender their seats unless the woman is pregnant or struggling with an infant. An armload of shopping bags from B. Altman’s, they seem to agree, she brought upon herself. Rachel stands staring at a poster of a well-barbered husband embracing his smiling wife who sports a polka-dot apron and holds a feather duster.
Growing up in Berlin, Rashka had compared all advertisements designed to attract women to her mother. How would that dress look on her eema? How would that perfume smell compared to the smell of oil paints? But in America, Rachel has often relied on advertisements to construct her own makeshift identity. Ads offer lessons on how to shop, how to behave, how to fit in, and she has tried to learn from them. She has tried! If she buys Heinz condensed cream of tomato soup, her husband won’t yawn over her cooking. Even a woman can open Alcoa Aluminum’s bottle caps—without a knife blade, a bottle opener, or a husband! The most important quality in coffee is how much it will please your man.
Out of the subway, the sky is white above the city. The café radiators hiss with steam. She has finally tracked down her Feter Fritz. He is still dressed in his secondhand suit, but there is a certain zippiness about him. She notes that he acquired a bamboo cane as if he’d plucked it out from the past, when such a thing was required by every metropolitan gentleman. “How is your blintz?” he inquires, and Rachel realizes she is actually
“It’s good,” she is pleased to report, nodding. Her uncle has a gossipy tongue this morning. Artists he’s known and their fated decline from their zenith back in Berlin. Wolfgang Schnyder, Paul Genz, George Grosz. “Grosz left Germany to teach here in New York City at the Art Students League but now lives upstate. It seems he’s given up the old chaos of his canvases for the tranquility of Hudson River landscapes. But can one blame him? Who could maintain Dada for three decades and remain sane?”
But then Feter, as he inevitably does, gets down to business. “So, ziskeit,” he begins, smiling to himself. “I have something for you.”
She feels a perk of interest, foolishly, childishly. “Something?”
“Yes,” says her feter, removing a kraft-paper envelope from his jacket and placing it on the table beside her plate.
Rachel frowns at it, confused. Chews slowly and swallows. “What is this?”
“This is the money you paid to Mrs. Appelbaum for my rent,” he tell her brightly.
But Rachel still frowns.
“It’s what I owed you,” her uncle says. “For your kindness,” he must explain, his brightness dimming.
“But where did it come from?”
“Where does money usually come from?” A slightly insulted smile. “It came from hard work. Your feter is not a man without ingenuity, Rokhl. I don’t make a habit of living on other people’s charity. Go on,” he bids her gladly. “Take it.”
She lifts her eyebrows at the yellowed envelope. Taking money from Feter Fritz feels irregular. On the other hand? She can stop worrying about Aaron’s reaction if she can replace the rainy-day twenty in the
“Have I said? I’m moving out of our old rat hole.”
Rachel looks up. “You call it a rat hole?”
“I call it what it is, zeisele. I’ve found, uh, a much more
“So. You’re leaving the Lower East Side?”
Her feter raises his eyes from his bowl to give her a closer look. “That distresses you, Daughter?”
“No. It’s just that you’ve been there so long.”