Aunt Rifke came to him then and put her hands on his shoulders. “My crazy old man, that’s who,” she answered him. “Nobody else. God would know.”
And my Uncle Chaim blushed for the first time in many years. I didn’t see this, but Aunt Rifke told me.
Of course, she was quite right about that painting, or any of the many, many others he made of the blue angel. He was never satisfied with any of them, not a one. There was always something wrong, something missing, something there but not there, glimpsed but gone. “Like that Chinese monkey trying to grab the moon in the water,” Uncle Chaim said to me once. “That’s me, a Chinese monkey.”
Not that you could say he suffered financially from working with only one model, as the angel had commanded. The failed portraits that he lugged down to the gallery handling his paintings sold almost instantly to museums, private collectors and corporations decorating their lobbies and meeting rooms, under such generic titles as Angel in the Window, Blue Wings, Angel with Wineglass, and Midnight Angel. Aunt Rifke banked the money, and Uncle Chaim endured the unveilings and the receptions as best he could—without ever looking at the paintings themselves—and then shuffled back to his studio to start over. The angel was always waiting.
I was doing my homework in the studio when Jules Sidelsky visited at last, lured there by other reasons than art, beauty or deity. The blue angel hadn’t given up the notion of acting as Uncle Chaim’s muse, but never seemed able to take it much beyond making a tuna salad sandwich, or a pot of coffee (at which, to be fair, she had become quite skilled), summoning music, or reciting the lost works of legendary or forgotten poets while he worked. He tried to discourage this habit; but he did learn a number of Shakespeare’s unpublished sonnets, and was able to write down for Jules three poems that drowned with Shelley off the Livorno coast. “Also, your boy Pushkin, his wife destroyed a mess of his stuff right after his death. My girl’s got it all by heart, you believe that?”
Pushkin did it. If the great Russian had been declared a saint, Jules would have reported for instruction to the Patriarch of Moscow on the following day. As it was, he came down to Uncle Chaim’s studio instead, and was at last introduced to the blue angel, who was as gracious as Jules did his bewildered best to be. She spent the afternoon declaiming Pushkin’s vanished verse to him in the original, while hovering tirelessly upside down, just above the crossbar of a second easel. Uncle Chaim thought he might be entering a surrealist phase.
Leaving, Jules caught Uncle Chaim’s arm and dragged him out his door into the hot, bustling Village streets, once his dearest subject before the coming of the blue angel. Uncle Chaim, knowing his purpose, said, “So now you see? Now you see?”
“I see.” Jules’s voice was dark and flat, and almost without expression. “I see you got an angel there, all right. No question in the world about that.” The grip on Uncle Chaim’s arm tightened. Jules said, “You have to get rid of her.”
“What? What are you talking about? Just finally doing the most important work of my life, and you want me…?” Uncle Chaim’s eyes narrowed, and he pulled forcefully away from his friend. “What is it with you and my models? You got like this once before, when I was painting that Puerto Rican guy, the teacher, with the big nose, and you just couldn’t stand it, you remember? Said I’d stolen him, wouldn’t speak to me for weeks, weeks, you remember?”
“Chaim, that’s not true—”
“And so now I’ve got this angel, it’s the same thing—worse, with the Pushkin and all—”
“Chaim, damn it, I wouldn’t care if she were Pushkin’s sister, they played Monopoly together—”
Uncle Chaim’s voice abruptly grew calmer; the top of his head stopped sweating and lost its crimson tinge. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Jules. It’s not I don’t understand, I’ve been the same way about other people’s models.”
He patted the other’s shoulder awkwardly. “Look, I tell you what, anytime you want, you come on over, we’ll work together. How about that?”
Poor Jules must have been completely staggered by all this. On the one hand he knew—I mean, even I knew—that Uncle Chaim never invited other artists to share space with him, let alone a model; on the other, the sudden change can only have sharpened his anxiety about his old friend’s state of mind. He said, “Chaim, I’m just trying to tell you, whatever’s going on, it isn’t good for you. Not her fault, not your fault. People and angels aren’t supposed to hang out together—we aren’t built for it, and neither are they. She really needs to go back where she belongs.”
“She can’t. Absolutely not.” Uncle Chaim was shaking his head, and kept on shaking it. “She got sent here, Jules, she got sent to me—”
“By whom? You ever ask yourself that?” They stared at each other.
Jules said, very carefully, “No, not by the Devil. I don’t believe in the Devil any more than I believe in God, although he always gets the good lines. But it’s a free country, and I can believe in angels without swallowing all the rest of it, if I want to.” He paused, and took a gentler hold on Uncle Chaim’s arm. “And I can also imagine that angels might not be exactly what we think they are. That an angel might lie, and still be an angel. That an angel might be selfish—jealous, even. That an angel might just be a little bit out of her head.”
In a very pale and quiet voice, Uncle Chaim said, “You’re talking about a fallen angel, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what I’m talking about,” Jules answered. “That’s the God’s truth.” Both of them smiled wearily, but neither one laughed. Jules said, “I’m dead serious, Chaim. For your sake, your sanity, she needs to go.”
“And for my sake, she can’t.” Uncle Chaim was plainly too exhausted for either pretense or bluster, but there was no give in him. He said, “Landsmann, it doesn’t matter. You could be right, you could be wrong, I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter. There’s no one else I want to paint anymore—there’s no one else I can paint, Jules, that’s just how it is. Go home now.” He refused to say another word.
In the months that followed, Uncle Chaim became steadily more silent, more reclusive, more closed-off from everything that did not directly involve the current portrait of the blue angel. By autumn, he was no longer meeting Jules for lunch at the Ukrainian restaurant; he could rarely be induced to appear at his own openings, or anyone else’s; he frequently spent the night at his studio, sleeping briefly in his chair, when he slept at all. It had been understood between Uncle Chaim and me since I was three that I had the run of the place at any time; and while it was still true, I felt far less comfortable there than I was accustomed, and left it more and more to him and the strange lady with the wings.
When an exasperated—and increasingly frightened—Aunt Rifke would challenge him, “You’ve turned into Red Skelton, painting nothing but clowns on velvet—Margaret Keane, all those big-eyed war orphans,” he only shrugged and replied, when he even bothered to respond, “You were the one who told me I could paint an angel. Change your mind?”
Whatever she truly thought, it was not in Aunt Rifke to say such a thing to him directly. Her only recourse was to mumble something like, “Even Leonardo gave up on drawing cats,” or “You’ve done the best anybody could ever do—let it go now, let her go.” Her own theory, differing somewhat from Jules’s, was that it was as much Uncle Chaim’s obsession as his model’s possible madness that was holding the angel to earth.
“Like Ella and Sam,” she said to me, referring to the perpetually quarrelling parents of my favorite cousin Arthur. “Locked together, like some kind of punishment machine. Thirty years they hate each other, cats and dogs, but they’re so scared of being alone, if one of them died,”—she snapped her fingers—“the other one would be gone in a week. Like that. Okay, so not exactly like that, but like that.” Aunt Rifke wasn’t getting a lot of sleep either just then.
She confessed to me—it astonishes me to this day—that she prayed more than once herself, during the worst times. Even in my fam
ily, which still runs to atheists, agnostics and cranky anarchists, Aunt Rifke’s unbelief was regarded as the standard by which all other blasphemy had to be judged, and set against which it invariably paled. The idea of a prayer from her lips was, on the one hand, fascinating—how would Aunt Rifke conceivably address a Supreme Being?—and more than a little alarming as well. Supplication was not in her vocabulary, let alone her repertoire. Command was.
I didn’t ask her what she had prayed for. I did ask, trying to make her laugh, if she had commenced by saying, “To Whom it may concern….”
She slapped my hand lightly. “Don’t talk fresh, just because you’re in fifth grade, sixth grade, whatever. Of course I didn’t say that, an old Socialist Worker like me. I started off like you’d talk to some kid’s mother on the phone, I said, ‘It’s time for your little girl to go home, we’re going to be having dinner. You better call her in now, it’s getting dark.’ Like that, polite. But not fancy.”
“And you got an answer?” Her face clouded, but she made no reply.
“You didn’t get an answer? Bad connection?” I honestly wasn’t being fresh: this was my story too, somehow, all the way back, from the beginning, and I had to know where we were in it. “Come on, Aunt Rifke.”
“I got an answer.” The words came slowly, and cut off abruptly, though she seemed to want to say something more. Instead, she got up and went to the stove, all my aunts’ traditional querencia in times of emotional stress. Without turning her head, she said in a curiously dull tone, “You go home now. Your mother’ll yell at me.”
My mother worried about my grades and my taste in friends, not about me; but I had never seen Aunt Rifke quite like this, and I knew better than to push her any further. So I went on home.
From that day, however, I made a new point of stopping by the studio literally every day—except Shabbos, naturally—even if only for a few minutes, just to let Uncle Chaim know that someone besides Aunt Rifke was concerned about him. Of course, obviously, a whole lot of other people would have been, from family to gallery owners to friends like Jules and Ruthie; but I was ten years old, and feeling like my uncle’s only guardian, and a private detective to boot. A guardian against what? An angel? Detecting what? A portrait? I couldn’t have said for a minute, but a ten-year-old boy with a sense of mission definitely qualifies as a dangerous flying object.
Uncle Chaim didn’t talk to me anymore while he was working, and I really missed that. To this day, almost everything I know about painting—about being a painter, every day, all day—I learned from him, grumbled out of the side of his mouth as he sized a canvas, touched up a troublesome corner, or stood back, scratching his head, to reconsider a composition or a subject’s expression, or simply to study the stoop of a shadow. Now he worked in bleak near-total silence; and since the blue angel never spoke unless addressed directly, the studio had become a far less inviting place than my three-year-old self had found it. Yet I felt that Uncle Chaim still liked having me there, even if he didn’t say anything, so I kept going, but it was an effort some days, mission or no mission.
His only conversation was with the angel—Uncle Chaim always chatted with his models; paradoxically, he felt that it helped them to concentrate—and while I honestly wasn’t trying to eavesdrop (except sometimes), I couldn’t help overhearing their talk. Uncle Chaim would ask the angel to lift a wing slightly, or to alter her stance somewhat: as I’ve said, sitting remained uncomfortable and unnatural for her, but she had finally been able to manage a sort of semi-recumbent posture, which made her look curiously vulnerable, almost like a tired child after an adult party, playing at being her mother, with the grownups all asleep upstairs. I can close my eyes today and see her so.
One winter afternoon, having come tired, and stayed late, I was half-asleep on a padded rocker in a far corner when I heard Uncle Chaim saying, “You ever think that maybe we might both be dead, you and me?”
“We angels do not die,” the blue angel responded. “It is not in us to die.”
“I told you, lift your chin,” Uncle Chaim grunted. “Well, it’s built into us, believe me, it’s mostly what we do from day one.” He looked up at her from the easel. “But I’m trying to get you into a painting, and I’ll never be able to do it, but it doesn’t matter, got to keep trying. The head a little bit to the left—no, that’s too much, I said a little.” He put down his brush and walked over to the angel, taking her chin in his hand. He said, “And you… whatever you’re after, you’re not going to get that right, either, are you? So it’s like we’re stuck here together—and if we were dead, maybe this is hell. Would we know? You ever think about things like that?”
“No.” The angel said nothing further for a long time, and I was dozing off again when I heard her speak. “You would not speak so lightly of hell if you had seen it. I have seen it. It is not what you think.”
“Nu?” Uncle Chaim’s voice could raise an eyebrow itself. “So what’s it like?”
“Cold.” The words were almost inaudible. “So cold… so lonely… so empty. God is not there… no one is there. No one, no one, no one… no one….”
It was that voice, that other voice that I had heard once before, and I have never again been as frightened as I was by the murmuring terror in her words. I actually grabbed my books and got up to leave, already framing some sort of gotta-go to Uncle Chaim, but just then Aunt Rifke walked into the studio for the first time, with Rabbi Shulevitz trailing behind her, so I stayed where I was. I don’t know a thing about ten-year- olds today; but in those times one of the major functions of adults was to supply drama and mystery to our lives, and we took such things where we found them.
Rabbi Stuart Shulevitz was the nearest thing my family had to an actual regular rabbi. He was Reform, of course, which meant that he had no beard, played the guitar, performed Bat Mitzvahs and interfaith marriages, invited local priests and imams to lead the Passover ritual, and put up perpetually with all the jokes told, even by his own congregation, about young, beardless, terminally tolerant Reform rabbis. Uncle Chaim, who allowed Aunt Rifke to drag him to shul twice a year, on the High Holidays, regarded him as being somewhere between a mild head cold and mouse droppings in the pantry. But Aunt Rifke always defended Rabbi Shulevitz, saying, “He’s smarter than he looks, and anyway he can’t help being blond. Also, he smells good.”
Uncle Chaim and I had to concede the point. Rabbi Shulevitz’s immediate predecessor, a huge, hairy, bespectacled man from Riga, had smelled mainly of rancid hair oil and cheap peach schnapps. And he couldn’t sing “Red River Valley,” either.
Aunt Rifke was generally a placid-appearing, hamishe sort of woman, but now her plump face was set in lines that would have told even an angel that she meant business. The blue angel froze in position in a different way than she usually held still as required by the pose. Her strange eyes seemed almost to change their shape, widening in the center and somehow lifting at the corners, as though to echo her wings. She stood at near-attention, silently regarding Aunt Rifke and the rabbi.
Uncle Chaim never stopped painting. Over his shoulder he said, “Rifke, what do you want? I’ll be home when I’m home.”
“So who’s rushing you?” Aunt Rifke snapped back. “We didn’t come about you. We came the rabbi should take a look at your model here.” The word burst from her mouth trailing blue smoke.
“What look? I’m working, I’m going to lose the light in ten, fifteen minutes. Sorry, Rabbi, I got no time. Come back next week, you could say a barucha for the whole studio. Goodbye, Rifke.”
But my eyes were on the Rabbi, and on the angel, as he slowly approached her, paying no heed to the quarreling voices of Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke. Blond or not, “Red River Valley” or not, he was still magic in my sight, the official representative of a power as real as my disbelief. On the other hand, the angel could fly. The Chassidic wonder rebbes of my parents’ Eastern Europe could fly up to heaven and share the Shabbos meal with God, when they chose. Reform rabbis
couldn’t fly.
As Rabbi Shulevitz neared her, the blue angel became larger and more stately, and there was now a certain menacing aspect to her divine radiance, which set me shrinking into a corner, half-concealed by a dusty drape. But the rabbi came on.
“Come no closer,” the angel warned him. Her voice sounded deeper, and slightly distorted, like a phonograph record when the Victrola hasn’t been wound tight enough. “It is not for mortals to lay hands on the Lord’s servant and messenger.”
“I’m not touching you,” Rabbi Shulevitz answered mildly. “I just want to look in your eyes. An angel can’t object to that, surely.”
“The full blaze of an angel’s eyes would leave you ashes, impudent man.” Even I could hear the undertone of anxiety in her voice.
“That is foolishness.” The rabbi’s tone continued gentle, almost playful. “My friend Chaim paints your eyes full of compassion, of sorrow for the world and all its creatures, every one. Only turn those eyes to me for a minute, for a very little minute, where’s the harm?”
Obediently he stayed where he was, taking off his hat to reveal the black yarmulke underneath. Behind him, Aunt Rifke made as though to take Uncle Chaim’s arm, but he shrugged her away, never taking his own eyes from Rabbi Shulevitz and the blue angel. His face was very pale. The glass of Scotch in his left hand, plainly as forgotten as the brush in his right, was beginning to slosh over the rim with his trembling, and I was distracted with fascination, waiting for him to drop it. So I wasn’t quite present, you might say, when the rabbi’s eyes looked into the eyes of the blue angel.
But I heard the rabbi gasp, and I saw him stagger backwards a couple of steps, with his arm up in front of his eyes. And I saw the angel turning away, instantly; the whole encounter can’t have lasted more than five seconds, if that much. And if Rabbi Shulevitz looked stunned and frightened—which he did—there is no word that I know to describe the expression on the angel’s face. No words.