“So-so.”
“You must not let them affect you this way. You must get on with your work.”
“That’s what I came here to talk to you about. I’m going to stop painting for a while, Doug. There’s been too much light these last years, and I need to rest awhile in the shade.”
He looked shocked. “No painting at all? You are not thinking of ending your career simply because the Paris critics showed you a bad time.”
“Not ending. Resting. Just resting.”
“For how long, dear boy?”
“I don’t know. Whenever it starts up again.”
“This is most disconcerting. I had hoped we would have something from you for the fall season.”
“Not this fall, Doug. Give my place to Max. Max always has something ready.”
“Well, this is distressing. I do hope you are not quitting. Not doing the Duchamp thing, are you?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Think? You are upsetting me, dear boy.”
We talked for a few more minutes about business matters and then shook hands. Normally he accompanied me to the elevator, but I told him I wanted to see the sculptures, and he went with me as far as the door to his office, a look of consternation on his face.
“You must take care of yourself. The art world cannot afford to lose an Asher Lev. There is too much ersatz work being done now, calculated gestures everywhere, cultural entertainment. Bear that in mind as you bask in your shade. Please give my very best wishes to Devorah and the children.”
I went past the receptionist and walked slowly through the gallery. It was a little before noon, and there were about twenty people inside. Plush light-gray carpeting, inviting creamy white walls, soft lights, sensuous sculptures. A handsome woman moving among the sculptures looked at me for a moment and then said quietly to the man who was with her, “I think that’s Asher Lev.” I moved away from them. The two crucifixion paintings had first been shown in this gallery. This was where my parents had seen them, on the huge wall before the turn to the elevator. The look of horror on my mother’s face; the frozen grimace of disbelief and shock on the face of my father. The murmuring of the crowd: “It’s their faces on the paintings.” Then my parents’ raging departure from the gallery. The paintings were in a New York museum now, where they hung side by side in a vast gallery. On occasion people would come over to me: “We saw your crucifixions, Mr. Lev. Stunning.” Or: “We saw your crucifixion paintings. What, exactly, were you trying to say? How does someone raised as a Ladover Hasid come to paint crucifixions?” In the early years I tried to answer their questions: I wanted to paint suffering, and there are no motifs in Jewish art that I could use as an instantly recognizable aesthetic vessel for the depiction of my mother’s anguish during all the years my father traveled for the Rebbe and I journeyed for my art. I wanted to put her pain into my painting. I needed an aesthetic mold that immediately said: Body and soul in protracted solitary torment. I wanted … I needed … I required …
Some nodded as if they understood. Most looked at me glassy-eyed. After a while I stopped answering their questions. It seemed to harden people’s anger, those attempts of mine to explain, justify, rectify, elucidate, make amends. Who really understood the mysterious clockwork of the artist? I wished I had never needed to paint those crucifixions. I wished I hadn’t caused all that pain. I wished they weren’t in that museum for everyone to see. I wished … I wished …
I went out of the gallery and rode the elevator down to the street and walked quickly to the subway.
I got out at Ninety-sixth Street and Broadway. A haze of brownish dust and gasoline fumes hung over the dense traffic and crowded sidewalks. I walked along Broadway for a while, then turned down a side street that sloped toward a parklike spread of hillside studded with trees and bordered by a low stone wall. Beyond the wall lay a highway and the wide slate-gray expanse of the Hudson River.
I stood in front of a tall old building and was barely able to recognize it. The once grimy façade had been sand-blasted clean and the graystone exterior glistened in the sunlight. It had been a building of high deep lofts, with a front door of rusting metal and dirty glass, and a dim and cavernous interior hall. Now a green awning led from polished glass entrance doors to the curb. The interior was of light-gray marble veined with branching bluish lines. A thin man in a dark suit sat at a desk near the elevator, and on the wall behind him was a bank of television monitors. Where the lumbering and clanking elevator had once been, with its ancient folding iron gate and sliding door, there was now a glistening brass door with a small window in its upper section.
A uniformed doorman stood at the entrance under the canopy, heavy-shouldered, olive-skinned, dark-eyed, muscular. I saw him looking at me.
“Help you?”
“Someone I knew had a studio in this building once, on the fifth floor.”
“Yeah? When was that?”
“Back in the fifties and sixties. I used to work with him.”
“Yeah? Well, it’s all condos now. The ones that owned the building, they made apartments out of the lofts.”
“When did they do that?”
“About ten years ago. Who’d you say had a studio here?”
“An artist named Jacob Kahn.”
“He didn’t buy in?”
“No. He moved to France.”
“Jacob Kahn. Don’t know as I heard of him. What does he paint?”
“He’s dead. He was a great sculptor. And also an Abstract Expressionist painter.”
“I don’t know anything about—what you call it. Is that the stuff with the paint all over the place? Yeah, I know about that. Lots of people couldn’t buy in when they went condo. All the artists left. The owners fixed it up real good and sold it and made a pile. You should see it inside. Nice. But I can’t let you in unless you got an appointment or know someone.”
“Well, thanks.”
“Sure. Don’t mention it.”
I walked down to the end of the street. It sloped steeply toward the river. Like the street I had lived on in Paris, where I had worked that first year and painted the crucifixions and met Max and Devorah: the narrow cobblestone street that ran into the boulevard. Max climbing to the top floor of the five-floor walk-up with Devorah that first time, bringing her to me because I had just completed the crucifixion paintings and would not answer the telephone and was oblivious to the world; telling her she could do a story on me for the magazine she wrote for; me answering the door naked to the waist and in my underpants and scurrying to put on jeans and a shirt, the two of them standing in the doorway, Devorah astonished and red-faced and Max laughing.
The urban highway beyond the wall was thick with speeding cars. A Circle Line tourist boat glided past on the water, going north, its passengers crowding the rails. River birds wheeled over a passing barge, white in the sunlight, calling. In a nearby playground children played in sandboxes and on monkey bars and swings, closely watched by mothers and maids. A young woman in a yellow sweater and jeans walked past me, wheeling a baby carriage. What did she see when she glanced at me? A middle-aged man, red hair and red beard going gray, a pale face, a windbreaker, baggy pants, a fisherman’s cap. How startled Anna Schaeffer had been the first time she met me in Jacob Kahn’s studio in that loft building now turned condominium! She had stared at my skullcap, my dangling sidecurls, which I no longer wear, my thin pale face. “You did not tell me,” she said to Jacob Kahn. And Jacob Kahn replied, “He is a prodigy, Anna. A prodigy in payos.” The glorious enormity of that studio. Its magnificent clutter. A tall wall of windows facing a cloudy sky that seemed to press down upon the sheets of glass; a skylight set in a slanted roof; bronze, stone, and wood sculptures scattered about everywhere; easels and canvases and worktables on trestles; and the heady smells of pigments and linseed oil and turpentine and raw stone and wood—the luscious perfumes of art. For five years I worked in that studio, traveling from our apartment in Brooklyn, once, sometimes twice a
week, some weeks every day. Starting at the age of thirteen. Thirteen from forty-five. Thirty-two years. Do people see in my eyes the sense of rushing time that sometimes leaves me hollow with dread?
There was a wooden bench under a tree near the stone wall, and I sat down and raised my face to the sun that filtered through the bare branches. A warm and comforting caress, that sun on my face. A wind blew across my eyes; the branches softly stirred. Were those buds on that lacy canopy? In Saint-Paul the spring was in full riot, our terrace an Eden of flowers. Max Lobe would be going to terrace parties in Nice; John Dorman would be wandering among the flowers in his garden. He liked peering into a flower’s heart. “The heart of brightness,” he called it. “A peek into the mystery of being.” Once I heard him refer to it as “the only opening worth thinking about anymore,” and immediately apologize. “I’m a drunken old man,” he said. “And a writer. What the hell can you expect from a writer?”
After a while, I left the bench and started back up the hilly street toward Broadway. Afternoon sunlight shone on the gleaming façade of Jacob Kahn’s old building. The uniformed doorman looked at me as I went past him. The street seemed oddly disquieting, its shaded areas queerly angled, its noises muted: a Chirico street of uncanny shadows and dreams.
I took the subway back to Brooklyn. The sun was pale when I came out of the ground onto the parkway. I walked up Kingston Avenue and turned the corner into the street where my parents lived and saw immediately the flashing lights of the police car. The car stood in front of my parents’ home. A small crowd of neighbors had collected on the sidewalk. The lurid red and blue revolving lights of the police car reflected off their anxious faces. I heard the crackle of the police radio as I went quickly through the crowd.
The front door was open. Two uniformed policemen stood in the entrance hall with Devorah and my parents. Avrumel was near my father, clutching his Shimshon doll.
“Rocheleh hasn’t come back from school,” Devorah said when she saw me. Her eyes blinked nervously, and she looked ashen.
Rocheleh had sent Avrumel home with one of her classmates and had gone off somewhere alone. Devorah had called classmates, teachers, friends, acquaintances. Rocheleh was more than two hours late.
The policemen stood by, listening to Devorah talking to me in French. One of the policemen politely interrupted and asked Devorah for a description of Rocheleh. Hair. Eyes. Clothes. Distinguishing marks. Had there been a quarrel at home before she went off to school? Had she ever done anything like this before? Had she been in a fight with anyone in school?
“What did she tell Avrumel?” I asked Devorah in English.
“To go home with one of her classmates, who lives on this block.”
“She didn’t say anything about where she was going?”
“No. We’ve been through this, Asher.”
My parents stood very quietly near the wall mirror. I saw my mother close her eyes and her lips move. My father did not put a supporting arm around her; they never held one another in someone else’s presence.
“Does she have her medication with her?” I asked.
“Of course,” Devorah responded.
“What medication is that?” one of the policemen asked.
“For asthma,” I said.
He made a note in his pad. “Could that be disorienting?”
“No.”
“We ought to call this in and get it to the hospitals,” the second policeman said to his partner.
I felt the back of my neck go cold and a sudden chilling weakness in my legs.
“I have already telephoned the hospitals,” my father said. “No child of her description was brought into emergency today.”
“We’ll do it anyway,” the first policeman said. He went out. Through the open door I saw the crowd on the sidewalk and the police car and the flashing lights on the faces and on the trunks and branches of the trees.
“There are many cars with our people going through the entire neighborhood,” my father said to me in Yiddish. “With God’s help, she will be found.” His face pale, his eyes dark with dread, his white hair in some disarray beneath his velvet skullcap, my father wore his fear visibly but with reserve.
“Exactly like her father,” my mother said. She was trying to lighten the fear, and failing: her voice too high, her eyes wide and darting. “He went off on his own. Long walks, came home late, worried me sick. I would stand at the window, waiting. Exactly like her father.”
“The gendarmes will find Rocheleh,” Avrumel said in French to his Shimshon doll. “Wait and see.”
A girl about Rocheleh’s age came through the crowd and walked up to the house. She stood in the doorway: wide, dark, frightened eyes; long pale face; dark braided hair; high gray stockings.
“Rocheleh isn’t home yet?” she asked in Yiddish.
“No,” Devorah said. “We are very worried.”
I recognized the girl, had seen her playing with Rocheleh on the terrace. “Sarah, what did Rocheleh say to you?”
“She said to walk Avrumel home and bring him to the front door.”
“That’s all?”
“She said to tell her mother that she would be home soon.”
“In which direction did she go?”
“I don’t know. She told me this in the schoolyard.”
“Did anything happen in school today? Was there a fight?”
Her lower lip trembled. She was nearly in tears. “I don’t know about any fight.” She said she had to go home for supper and went out the door.
“Master of the Universe,” I heard my mother say in Hebrew. Her eyes were mirrors of the memories of all her own waiting—for my father, for me. The past had suddenly been returned to her by her grandchild.
The policeman was standing on the sidewalk and talking into the radio transmitter. The red and blue car lights rotated and flashed across his face and uniform. He seemed a character in a grisly crime movie, the sort that Ladover Hasidim would never permit themselves to see. A car came slowly along the street, its emergency signals blinking. The policeman looked at the car. It stopped behind the police car, but I could not see who was in it because of the crowd. Avrumel loudly asked my father if the Master of the Universe would soon find his sister. I saw my father lift him and hold him and Shimshon in his arms. The policeman who had made the radio call was walking back through the crowd. There was a man with him I thought I recognized. It was a moment before I remembered he had met us at the airport in his car and brought us to my parents’ home. He walked with his hat tilted back jauntily, a smile on his face. The two men came out of the crowd, and between them walked Rocheleh, carrying her briefcase. She seemed calm and poised, unperturbed by the crowd around her.
“Hello, Asher Lev,” the man said. “I bring you your daughter.”
“Rocheleh is home!” Avrumel shouted happily in French to Shimshon from his perch in my father’s arms.
“Where was she?” I asked.
“On the parkway, walking home. She is a very bright girl.”
“Thank you.”
“You are welcome. A mitzvah on my patrol night.”
“Thank God,” my mother said.
“You did well, Binyomin,” said my father. “I thank you.”
The man bowed slightly toward my father. Devorah was with Rocheleh.
“Where were you?” Devorah asked. “Do you know what time it is?”
“In the library,” Rocheleh said, gazing at the crowd and the police.
“The library at the beginning of the parkway?” I asked.
“Where you took us, Papa.”
“Rocheleh, this is New York, not Saint-Paul. You do not go for long walks here by yourself. Couldn’t you call us when you saw it was late?”
“I used up all my money on the copying machine. I had to borrow twenty cents from the librarian.”
We were talking in French. The two policemen stood listening patiently. I told them where Rocheleh had been.
“The library,
” one of them echoed.
“The Grand Army Plaza library?” the other asked. They looked at each other. “Are you all right?” the first policeman asked her. “No one hurt you or bothered you in any way?”
“I am very well, thank you,” Rocheleh said.
“Sorry about this,” I said.
“Glad it ended this way,” the second policeman said. “Got a kid of my own this age.”
“We are very grateful to you,” my father said.
“Doing our job,” the first policeman said.
They went out of the house. My mother closed the front door on the street and the crowd.
We stood there in the entrance hall, looking at Rocheleh.
“I am very sorry for causing you all to worry about me,” Rocheleh said.
“Why didn’t you tell Sarah you were going to the library?” Devorah asked her.
“I was afraid she would say it was too far away and wouldn’t take Avrumel home. You didn’t have to call the police. I am not a child.” She then announced that she was very hungry and was going to her room to put away her books and wash up for supper.
“Call your friend Sarah and tell her you’re alive,” I said. “And next time you’re out late somewhere, use the telephone first and then the copier or whatever. That’s why God let us invent the telephone. So we could save each other heartache.”
Avrumel followed his sister out of the entrance hall.
A few minutes later, I passed by Rocheleh’s room and asked her what she had been looking for in the library.
“I put it on my bulletin board, Papa.”
My mother was calling us in to supper, and I did not stop to see where Rocheleh was pointing. After supper, I looked into her room and saw tacked to the cork bulletin board over her desk half a dozen clear photocopies of my two crucifixion paintings.
She had made one copy of each of the paintings, one enlargement of my face, one of my father’s, and two enlargements of the face of my mother. The photocopies, each eight and a half by eleven in size, were arranged in three vertical rows and took up the entire surface of the bulletin board.