The Color of Light (25 page)

Usher helped himself to salad. “I think I did know that. I heard it at a Shabbos lunch once.”

“Oh, good,” she said grimly. “So I’m the last one to know.”

“No, no, you’re not the last one to know,” he corrected her. He turned to his right. “Hey. Suri. Did you know that Zaydie had a different family before the war?”

“What?” Suri said, engaged in shooting peas at her sister Rifkie.

“There,” said Usher. “Now Suri is the last one to know. You’re in the clear.” He passed her a bowl of pasta. She sniffed it suspiciously. She detected sweet Italian sausages, penne pasta, broccoli rabe, tomatoes, red peppers.

“This is not traditional Moss Thanksgiving food, unless Auntie Barbara is trying something different with her zucchini kugel,” she said.

“This is my contribution, courtesy of my
goyishe
gourmet education,” said Usher. “And may I say, to die for.” Tessa tried the pasta, swooned. It was, indeed, to die for.

The turkey made its entrance. Her mother had taken it off the bone, sliced it up, and put it back together again, a feat of mind-boggling skill. The platter was passed around for everybody to admire before it was placed before Zaydie. On the table were gefilte fish, stuffed cabbage, fried rice with onions, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, green bean casserole with mushroom soup and fried onions, challah stuffing, the aforementioned zucchini kugel, and cranberry sauce from a can. Tessa tried everything except for the zucchini kugel.

At seven o’clock, Zaydie lifted himself from the table. “Where are you going?” Sender said swiftly. “Do you need something? Can I get it for you?”

“No, no. Just going to take my pills.” He waved off Sender’s help. “I’m fine.” He pushed up onto his cane, steadied himself, and disappeared into the kitchen.

For a moment, there was silence. And then Allen said, “Sender. What’s the matter with her? Does she have to rile him up? He’s an old man. She should have some pity.”

Her father sank further down into his seat.

“Hey,” said Bernie. “Don’t be so quick to criticize. Pa can come down really hard sometimes. Remember when you came back from yeshiva in Israel and told him you wanted to be a rabbi?”

Allen smiled. “Oh, yeah…he didn’t think that was such a good idea.”

“He called you an idiot.”

Uncle Allen, Auntie Eva, Uncle Bernie and Auntie Barbara all laughed. Sender smiled.

“Sender. Remember when you wanted that Lionel train set,” Allen said. “Your friend Hershel had one. With the really heavy cars, and the metal tracks. You spent a whole week washing dishes, taking out garbage and making your bed. And when you finally worked up the courage to ask him, Pa said, ‘I had enough of trains on my way to Auschwitz.’” The adult table erupted in shrieks of laughter. The tension in the room dispersed.

Zaydie hobbled back in and took his seat at the head of the table. Tessa’s mother came to the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, holding an enormous sheet cake covered in silver white frosting. Everyone oohed and aahed. Someone turned the lights down. Zaydie was beaming. Sender didn’t take his eyes from his father’s face, basking in his reflected happiness. Bernie got his camera ready.

She set the cake down in front of the old man. Suri and her sister Rifkie ran to sit in Zaydie’s lap. He leaned forward on his cane to inspect it through lenses like the bottoms of Coke bottles. “Beautiful, Marta,” he said to Tessa’s mother, delighted. “Beautiful.”

All together, the three tables sang
Happy Birthday. “
Come on
shay-falehs,”
he said to the little girls, stroking their hair. “Help me blow out the candles.”

Together, they blew out the flames. Tessa’s mother cut the cake into squares and passed them around. Rosie poured coffee and tea. The littlest cousins sang a song they had made up about Zaydie to the tune of
The Anniversary Waltz.
Cilla played piano. Usher juggled. Bernie took pictures. Suri chased Rifkie around the living room, knocking over a crystal vase. Ari pulled Maya’s hair. The party was winding down.

Bubbie, a tiny, wizened wisp of an old lady, finally sat down in the chair to Zaydie’s left. Tessa’s grandmother barely spoke English. Mostly she smiled bashfully at them, her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She showed her love in other, more concrete ways; her apartment was always redolent with the smell of chocolate cake in the oven, sugar cookies in a jar on the counter.

Suddenly, Tessa remembered the name Raphael Sinclair had given her. “Bubbie,” she said, leaning forward. “Did you ever know a Sofia Wizotsky?”

As if they were on strings, all the heads at the adult table jerked around to stare at her in unison. But nothing was more extraordinary than the change that came over Zaydie.

“What did she say?” said the old man.

“Nothing, Pop,” said Bernie swiftly. “Nothing.”

Sender was watching his father anxiously. “You okay, Pa? Can I get you something?”

“Sofia Wizotsky?” The old man’s voice began to rise, crackling and popping like an old radio. His breathing became harsh, ragged as sandpaper.
“Tell me, did she say Sofia Wizotsky?”
He was struggling to rise, staggering to his feet, staring at her with an ugly expression that looked like hatred. His face went white, then red, then purple, then white again. And then, as if someone had flicked a light switch, his eyes closed and he went limp, keeling over onto the carpet.

Bedlam. The adult children leaped out of their chairs, knocking them to the floor. Someone called 911. The smaller children pushed in for a closer look. Maya was crying. Tessa’s heart was hammering. She could feel Usher’s hand on her shoulder, pushing her back into the living room, hear him saying,
it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault.
And as the paramedics rushed in and performed CPR, and as they loaded him into the ambulance and sped him to the hospital with sirens wailing, as she stayed up through the long November night waiting for the phone to ring with news, any news, she knew only one thing was for certain; they would never, ever forgive her.

18

H
e didn’t really say that,” said Portia with a kind of hushed awe.

“He would.” Tessa confirmed. “He did.”

“Wow,” said David.

It was a week after Thanksgiving. The second-year students of the American Academy of Classical Art were out celebrating Tessa’s birthday, clutching beers and sitting on barstools in Burritoville, where the food was, a sign advertised, Mexellent. Tessa hung onto the neck of a Dos Equis like she was holding onto life.

“No big deal,” she said, and closed her eyes. She was feeling a little woozy on one margarita and half a bottle of beer.

A waiter reported that their table was ready. They got unsteadily to their feet and eased around the other customers to an empty table in the crowded restaurant. Tessa sank into the peaceful reverie afforded by the warm glow of alcohol, letting the conversation flow over and around her.

It was official, Zaydie had had a heart attack. Tessa spent the rest of the weekend under a cloud of shame and disbelief. The little time her parents weren’t at the hospital, they were either sleeping or running out the door.

The flight from O’Hare to JFK was flat, uneventful, drawing a numbing veil over the disastrous weekend, and she settled back into her seat and closed her eyes. A little over an hour later she was jolted awake by the plane’s slow descent, the bump and grind of the unfolding landing gear. As always, there was an excited tingle in the pit of her stomach at the thought of returning to New York City, and she leaned forward for her first glimpse of the twinkling lights, unfurling over the many miles like a magic carpet.

Monday morning, she finally had her first appointment with her adviser. Josephine was predictably late, blowing in with the November wind, her cheeks apple red. She had raced over after a meeting, she told Tessa as she heaved her coat and bag onto the couch, of faculty, staff and board members. There had been a heated exchange over bringing in additional celebrity teachers, an idea embraced in some corners of the faculty and vociferously rejected by others. Harvey and Tony lashed out against hiring instructors with modernist backgrounds, warning that they were ill-equipped to teach classical technique, while Turner, Blesser and April smiled smugly and Levon tried to keep the discourse at a professional level. All the while, Raphael Sinclair had audited the proceedings from a corner, half hidden in the shadow of
Night.
Or
Dawn,
Josephine could never remember which one of those Medici tomb sculptures was which.

“What do you think?” Tessa wanted to know.

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, I always say,” said Josephine, checking her lipstick in Tessa’s mirror. “Also, we could bask in the reflected glory of having some of those big names around. Lend us the sheen of relevancy. And then my paycheck might get larger. Let me tell you, honey, life as an artist is expensive, with a couple of children, a mortgage, and a Guatemalan housekeeper.”

Finally Josephine turned to Tessa’s sketches. She immediately dismissed the mother and child, the drawing of the family on the railroad siding, and the landscape with the boxcars, calling them “too illustration-ey.” On the other hand, the sketch of her grandmother with the
yahrzeit
candles made Josephine positively green with envy. “Wish I’d done that,” she told Tessa admiringly. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on. But I can’t stop looking at it.”

Tessa fought for the mother and child, protesting that it was the central image of her projected series. Tilting her head this way and that, Josephine frowned at the little drawing, leaving her with, “I don’t know. I’m still not convinced. Make it better.”

She had other questions, as she thumbed through Tessa’s sketchbook. How big are you planning to make them? How many will there be? Are they a triptych, or are they just three paintings with the same theme? What
will you do for models? When do you plan to start? Tessa struggled for answers. Truthfully, she hadn’t thought that far ahead.

The sketchbook fell open to the drawing of Raphael Sinclair on the couch. Josephine surveyed it for a long moment before speaking, and then her voice was serious, devoid of its usual homey folksiness. “Honey,” she said. “I don’t like to interfere with my students’ love lives. I think every experience is valuable. But I gotta say here, I don’t think this is such a good idea.”

“I’m not
—
it’s not like that,” said Tessa, blushing.

Josephine looked at her curiously as she handed her back her sketchbook. “All right,” she said, shouldering her purse. “All right, honey. Say. Do you really work for Lucian Swain?”

After her meeting, Tessa went in search of Portia, but found only David at work in their shared studio. He was standing over his work table, the sleeves of his denim shirt carefully rolled up, a waiter’s apron tied around his hips, meticulously mixing colors for a studio painting class at noon, while Harker idly picked at his electric guitar, black cowboy boots propped up on Portia’s table.

He glanced up when she came in, used a rag to wipe the paint off of his palette knife. David’s palette was an object of art in itself, dabs of perfectly modulated color set at perfectly regular intervals all around the edges of the glass surface.

“Portia around?”

“I haven’t seen her yet.”

David already knew what he was doing for his thesis project, a series of still lifes. Tessa was puzzled. They were at a school of figurative art, after all. Figurative implied, well,
figures.

“Still lifes aren’t necessarily about fruit and flowers,” he explained. “It’s all about metaphors. A skull is a symbol for mortality. So are all those dead rabbits and decaying fruit. A pomegranate implies fertility. An apple is an allegory of temptation.” His words were measured, his gaze steady, but something in his look was asking questions, suggesting possibilities.

“You sound like a teacher.”

“That’s what I plan to do after I finish here. Well, that and paint. Sara will put in a good word for me at SUNY.”

Like everyone else, David had postcards pinned to his walls, hung in neat rows of five, the edges meeting seamlessly. Finely-detailed Flemish compositions with tulips, hares and rotting fruit. Bowls of Fantin-Latour’s rapturous roses, the color of lingerie, petals splayed promiscuously across the canvas. Platoons of Cezanne apples standing at attention on ice blue tables.

There was a new postcard, separate from the others. A woman with upswept honey-colored hair set a silver bowl of fruit down on a cherry red tablecloth. Cobalt blue vines swam across the cloth, climbed up the walls painted in the same vibrant hue as the table.

“Who did this?”

He came to stand beside her. “Matisse. It’s called
Harmony in Red.
I just saw the exhibition yesterday.”

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “It makes me feel…” she hesitated, searching for the right words. “like I’ve come home.”

“Me, too,” he said. “And I’m not a big Matisse fan.”

A shaft of weak winter sun found its way through the dirty window and washed her hair gold. Suddenly he understood that the painting reminded him of her Friday night dinners, Tessa with her bright hair setting the table with a colorful patterned tablecloth, her apartment warm and welcoming, full of good smells and promises of good company and lively conversation.

The same beam of light illuminated his eyes, already the blue of a Bellini sky. Once again she realized how attractive he was. It occurred to her that David was exactly the kind of man she should be dating, smart, sensitive, articulate, steady. She knew he would make an excellent teacher, just as she was sure he was a considerate and thoughtful lover.

He smiled at her, and she knew he was correctly guessing at what she was thinking. She had turned to study a framed painting on his wall, a knobbly branch of apple blossoms set against a jade-colored background. The rendering of the pink and white petals was exquisite, with subtle gradations of transparency and opacity, mixed in minute titrations of hue and saturation. It was deeper and richer than a photograph, lovelier even than real apple blossoms. In small red letters at the bottom, were two sets of initials.
BC
and
SD, 1991.