Chapter 3 Reka

Chapter3 Reka

Dear Kitty, A year recovering from the late unpleasantness is long enough: I have a job! Shelving books at the Smoot Library down the street, alongside old Mrs.Muller. I thought I might get to know her better, but she ignores me except to call me a floozy in Hungarian when I shelved Karl Marx under Fairy Tales.

I wish you were here. —Grace

It was a special kind of hell, Reka Muller often thought, to be as old as she was and have to live among all these young women. Old women were largely invisible in the wide world, and for the most part she didn’t mind. If you were invisible, you were ignored, and that meant you could do whatever the hell you wanted. But young women noticed you . Often with a kind of superstitious, anticipatory distaste that made Reka want to cackle like iron-nosed Vasorrú bába and hiss dramatically Beware! As I am, you will one day be—yes, you, Arlene Hupp. You, too, Nora Walsh. Old, wrinkled, and creaky-kneed!

If it wasn’t distaste, it was compassion: Oh, the poor thing, why do you think she never smiles? Fliss Orton, who lived in 2A across the hall from Reka, was especially prone to that kind of look; there was nothing for it but to be so unpleasant in response that compassion turned to dislike. It had taken a solid year to achieve dislike from Fliss. If people didn’t like you, they left you alone.

But even though Reka disliked almost everybody, she couldn’t quite dislike Grace March, who never looked pitying, never wrinkled her nose in distaste, and wasn’t nosy. That is, she asked questions but wasn’t put off if she didn’t get answers. And Reka rarely answered anything.

“Going on a visit?” Grace asked as the two of them shelved books. Working as a page; that was all Reka was qualified for. With no proper degree or anything, it’s all I can offer you , the librarian had said when she hired Reka five years ago. “I noticed you brought an overnight bag to work this morning,” Grace went on. “And the clerk said you’d taken a half day today.”

Reka grunted, standing on tiptoe to push a volume of Proust onto the top shelf. Proust, now there was a cream puff for you. Couldn’t write without sitting in a cork-lined room to calm his fear of germs! Philosophers ought to toughen up, Reka thought, or their philosophy wasn’t worth much. Life wasn’t going to coddle most people in a cork-lined room while they worked out their demons.

“We’ll miss you at the Briar Club tonight,” Grace went on, reaching easily over Reka’s head. “Arlene’s hinting she’ll bring that beau of hers. I believe he’s a junior FBI agent...”

Chat, chat. Reka tuned it out, not bothering to listen, either, when the head librarian came over and began twittering about story hour. “If you can take it today, Grace? Reka can finish these books, can’t you? Finish—up—books,” the librarian repeated, miming. Five years Reka had worked here, and the woman still behaved as if Reka barely spoke the language. She had lived in this city over ten years, but she’d never lost her Berlin-Budapest clip no matter how hard she tried, and Americans made a lot of fuss about “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” but most of them definitely preferred a certain kind of immigrant: the kind with no accent.

And gratitude. Plenty of gratitude.

“See you tomorrow,” Grace said as they reached noon, with another of her easy smiles. “I hope!” Reka grunted, picking up her frayed bag and stumping off toward the door. Her heart was thumping in her chest, and she almost smiled. Home , she thought, going home —or at least the nearest thing she had to it, after leaving Berlin.

No one looked twice at Reka as she boarded the train. Just a woman in her seventies with a wrinkled nut-brown face, a knot of straggling iron-gray hair, bent shoulders, and a little potbelly she couldn’t get rid of even on the lean weeks when she was only eating once a day. An old woman with an ugly coat the color of a dirty sidewalk and a carpetbag sitting on her feet like a tired dog. Sometimes people dropped coins at Reka’s feet, thinking she was a panhandler, and she could imagine Otto shaking his head disapprovingly when she picked them up. “What?” she asked him now in the warm, rattling Hungarian they’d always spoken at home. “A dime is nothing to sneeze at. That’s a cup of soup at the Crispy Biscuit.”

The woman across the train compartment eyed Reka warily over an armload of baby blankets, clearly thinking Now the old foreign lump is talking to herself . Reka bared her tea-stained teeth and said in Hungarian, “Say one word, and I’ll eat your baby.” The woman looked hurriedly away.

Just over three hours, riding from Washington to New York City. Reka got off at Penn Station, using her elbows. Normally she’d limp over to the flophouse hotel where she’d be renting a room for the night, but today she was too eager. She went straight to the ladies’ washroom and lifted the one piece of finery she still owned out of her carpetbag: a jade-green velvet hat, a twist of a thing with a narrow swooping brim and a rhinestone clip. Otto had bought it in Vienna nearly thirty years ago; he said it set off her hair. Of course her hair had been russet back then, falling past her waist... Gently, Reka settled the hat over her gray bun, slanting the brim across one eye. It was a warm fall, too warm for her coat’s detachable fox-fur collar, but she took that out of her bag and fastened it on anyway. It wasn’t as lush as Nora Walsh’s chinchilla stole ( How on earth had she gotten it? Reka wondered—a priss like that wasn’t letting a man into her bugyi for a fur stole, but what else got a man to shell out for chinchilla?), but the reddish fox fur still brought a glow to Reka’s cheeks. It made her step out with something of her old swagger.

“Professor Muller,” Leo Castelli said as Reka took a catalog at the door of the decrepit storefront on Sixtieth East and Ninth Street. “I knew we’d be seeing you.”

“I hear you forked over seventy dollars to mount the showing here.” Reka peered up at the crumbling flophouse that currently housed the most revolutionary art show in New York. “I’d say they overcharged you by sixty-five.”

“So would I. And every single one of those lousy bastardi bitching about not getting the right lighting for his lousy painting. Why’d I get mixed up with artists again?”

“Not for the money. Any sales?”

“A sniff or two around the Pollock.”

“Jackson’s been insufferable since that LIFE piece. ‘Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States—’”

“He certainly thinks so,” Leo said, letting her in. Reka took a deep breath and held it. The smell of a gallery: the fizz of old lighting fixtures, the tang of oil paint, canvas, turpentine, cheap wine. Fancier galleries smelled of expensive perfume and Cuban cigars and hundred-dollar bills, but Reka preferred impromptu galleries like this: derelict buildings a step from condemnation where the plaster dust had to be swept out every morning and the mice shooed out of the storerooms. Galleries like this didn’t smell like patrons; they just smelled like art .

Early evening in the middle of the week—she had the space almost to herself, bare unshaded light bulbs glowing harshly overhead. She wandered among the paintings in a hush, drinking them down. A Kline, Study for Ninth Street , bold black brushstrokes like a Japanese kanji. Just a modest thing on cardstock, but rumor was he was reproducing it in large on a big canvas. Kline’s stuff was all speed and spontaneity; even in oil he worked like he only had moments before it dried; Reka could see the dash and certainty of the brushstrokes... Jackson Pollock, of course; The She-Wolf , the wolf snarling across the canvas in heavy lines, overlaid in hieroglyphs. Oil, gouache, and plaster. Reka had never worked in plaster herself—never liked the heaviness of it, but texturally Jackson had something here, no doubt about it. Even if the man was insufferable... Ah, one of Lee Krasner’s murals, overlapping blocks of color like an optical illusion... Reka leaned in close to see the layering of the paint stipples.

“There you are, Professor Muller.” The affectionate rasp of Betty Parsons’s voice sounded behind her. “When are you coming back to my gallery? I haven’t seen you since my Rothko exhibit.”

“I’ll come back when you show someone more interesting than Rothko.” Reka straightened, patting her fox collar. “Get that fellow from North Dakota back, Clyfford Still. Never seen anyone take a palette knife to a canvas quite like that. North Dakota’s finally produced something besides corn and cows.”

“Until Still came along, I wasn’t entirely sure North Dakota existed .” Betty Parsons laughed: a gallerist with a chin-length bob and the sharpest eyes in New York, Reka judged. The two of them had met in ’48, when Reka had come to a showing of some young artist expounding earnestly on why his work wasn’t cubism , it was revolutionary cubism —when Betty politely asked the old woman in the green hat what she thought of his work, Reka had answered, “He doesn’t know cubism hasn’t been revolutionary for a long time now, and he can’t draw.” Betty had retorted, “But what he lacks in skill he makes up in pretension,” and friendship bloomed.

“Anything new on the scene?” Reka wanted to know. The question she asked on every trip to New York. The art world was like a shark; it kept moving, always moving, or it died.

“Helen Frankenthaler’s experimenting with oils. Thinning them out with turpentine; says it’ll melt into the canvas.”

“Or right off it.”

“She lays everything flat on the workspace, lets it soak and pool. Says it makes for a cloudy effect, bonds with unprimed canvas...” The conversation turned technical; by the time both women were waving their hands and tripping over each other’s words, Betty checked her watch. “Spot you a beer at the Cedar Tavern?”

The Cedar was the best watering hole in New York for Reka’s bet—the drinks were cheap, the ambience horrendous, the art-world gossip top-notch. She and Betty slugged a ten-cent beer apiece in a sticky booth, happily trading the latest: Had Pollock really torn a bathroom stall door off its hinges and hurled it at Kline here last week? Had de Kooning urinated in an ashtray? Was Peggy Guggenheim coming back from Venice to reopen her gallery? Reka could feel her veins singing, paint running through her valves rather than blood. “You’re wasted in the District, Reka,” Betty said, signaling another round. “Sleepy little city full of Klan-minded southerners and crooked senators. Otto’s gone; what’s holding you there?”

Reka rubbed two fingers together, the universal gesture.

“You can be broke in New York just as well as in D.C.,” Betty said, laughing. “You said you taught in Berlin—you could teach here.”

“I was a lousy teacher.” Too quick-tempered, too inclined to go on tangents. She’d always put too much into the students with talent, not enough into the ones slouching in late with tepid pencil sketches reeking of their daddy’s money. You’d be teaching at Bauhaus if you could keep your temper , Otto scolded, but fondly—he’d been the one who got sacked from two successive newspapers for telling his editor he was a noodle-head runt who ought to stick to the society page. No, Reka had never made it to Bauhaus, but she’d taught nearly two decades at one of those explosive little offshoot art schools sprouting everywhere in the heady Weimar Republic days. Good times.

Not so good , she reminded herself. It hadn’t been funny or picturesque, those days you needed to wheel a barrow-load of marks to the baker to buy a single bag of sesame seed Kartoffelh?rnchen .

But my god, the ideas . The color, the paint, the dizzy joy of the new. It had run red and riotous through the city like a torrent. Reka would eat a barrow-load of those worthless Weimar marks just to have a whiff of that torrent again.

She finished her beer, wanting another, knowing she shouldn’t have it. She wasn’t the woman she’d once been, downing a bottle of absinthe and a bottle of vodka at a cabaret and waking up the following morning bright-eyed and ready to rip apart thirty-plus Dadaist student still lifes. She could get drunk on three beers now, and when she got drunk, she brooded. Don’t brood, r?slein, she could hear Otto saying, but he’d done plenty of brooding at the end, hadn’t he? “I should go,” Reka told Betty, waving off the inevitable protests. If she left now she could catch the last train back to the District, save the meager cost of a flophouse room for the night. “I got what I came for, and that was a look at the exhibit.”

Six hours on a train in one day, all for a single art exhibit—Reka paid that price every month she could afford it.

“And when am I going to get what I came for, you old bat?” Betty asked, grinning. “Otto used to brag about your work, back in the day. Color block portraits, wasn’t it? I’d be happy to take a look, if you’ve got anything up your sleeve.”

“Cheap Picasso knockoffs,” Reka said dismissively. “Haven’t held a brush in years—” And she got out of the Cedar Tavern before she started crying, or before she had to admit she couldn’t afford canvases, or oil paints, or anything.

The train back was freezing cold, dark, smelling of urine. With her jade green hat and fox collar back in the carpetbag, Reka could feel her back hunching into its snail shell curve, that second beer churning in her empty stomach. “Watch the old lady, she’s drunk,” Reka heard a couple of boys snicker as they barged toward their seats. No more Professor Muller ; just the old lady . Otto had started growing old the day he realized a degree from the University of Pécs wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on here; that a journalist with three decades’ discourse on political philosophy under his belt was going to end his life emptying dustbins in a janitor’s overalls.

If we’d just had the sketches , Reka thought, but she shut that line down before it could plume into rage. No good. No good.

“I really can’t have you breaking curfew like this,” Mrs. Nilsson sniffed, patting her curlers as Reka rang the bell at nearly midnight. “Did you fall asleep in the park like a tramp?” If Reka had been young, she’d have caught hell; old Doilies would have assumed she was out with some man and up to no good. But no one ever thought an old woman was up to no good. You should have seen me in my prime , Reka thought, catching a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror. Her own reflection infuriated her—when would she stop being surprised that so much time had passed? When would she stop thinking What the hell happened ?

What had happened to lithe, russet-haired Reka Takács who could eat her own weight in haluski and argue politics all night over ink-black Budapest coffee and French cigarettes, who had oil paint under her nails and kissed painted boys who danced in corsets and fishnets on cabaret stages? Where did you go? Reka sometimes wanted to shout. Where did that girl go, and who was this iron-nosed old witch?

It wasn’t the supple skin she missed, necessarily, or even a set of knees that didn’t creak. It was the blithe, oblivious stride of the young, skipping down a wide velvety path toward a future they assumed was all peaches and cream. Headed for a meat grinder, more like, but they didn’t know it—and they looked at Reka like all she’d ever been was old and sour, like she’d never skipped down a wide velvety path, too, with exactly the same blithe assurance.

Wait till you hit the meat grinder , Reka thought, hobbling up the stairs on swollen, aching feet, passing Fliss’s closed door, hearing Claire and Arlene clattering around one floor up. Just you wait.

Reka refused to admit she attended the Briar Club supper nights every Thursday for the laughs, the gossip, or the music. I only go for the food , she told herself. One can of anything—beets, corn, tuna—was the unofficial price of admittance, and that was cheap for a full plate of something home-cooked. Reka’s icebox in her second-floor room tended to be as bare as a gallery full of minimalist art.

The next Thursday, the usual bustle and clatter filled Grace’s green-walled room and spilled out onto the landing. Nora curled up on the floor with her back against that gigantic dog she’d somehow acquired, the one who took up nearly the entire rug and ate like a horse (although at the last Thursday supper, he’d utterly refused to touch the remnants of Arlene’s Red Crest Salad of chopped tomatoes and pickles in strawberry Jell-O, much to Reka’s delight). In the doorway, the Italian girl Bea stood talking to Pete about the Giants’ chances in the World Series. Reka elbowed past so she could add her can to the bright-labeled pyramid Grace had stacked atop the icebox, labels all faced out and dusted off. Something a bit obsessive about Grace March and food, Reka thought. These dinners, the cans, the way she’d box up even the smallest crumb of leftovers... though it was hard to tell when a woman had gone strange about food, and when she had just read too many diet tips in women’s magazines, like Arlene, who was always swearing off dessert and eyeing everyone else’s slice of pie with slitted eyes. One advantage of being old: no more squeezing into some fashionable silhouette, turning down dinner rolls and cursing at a girdle.

“I’m afraid Arlene is cooking tonight,” Grace murmured to Reka. “I think she’s trying to prove she’s a domestic angel—the elusive Harland is coming to dinner at last! Not that she’d normally break house rules about gentlemen callers, but Claire got just a little too loud last week wondering if Harland was imaginary...”

“He is imaginary,” Claire snorted, pushing a glass at Reka. “Bet you a dollar she tells us he had to work late.”

Reka tuned her out—Claire Hallett was a loud, annoying kurva , and she’d slopped sun tea on Reka’s sweater—and looked at the painted vine flowering across the wall. It now climbed clear to the ceiling, and the first painted tendrils had started spilling onto the wall of the landing outside, where Grace had replaced the old bare bulb with a soft-shaded new light. Every week there were more flowers on the vine, pretty little daisies and clumsy rosebuds, fit for a candy box, and Reka disapproved. If you were only going to slap paint on a surface to make something pretty , you might as well be in advertising slopping those flat little flowers on Carnation Instant Milk labels.

“Coconut Clusters,” little Lina announced, thrusting into the crowd with a plate of unappetizing brown lumps. Everyone reached for one, chewing heroically. Reka thought she felt a molar crack.

“...just a little more sugar next time, Lina-kins,” Pete said, swallowing with an effort.

“A little less time in the oven,” Nora reassured Lina’s scowl, dusting off her hands to hide the fact she was deftly feeding the other half of her cookie to the Great Dane.

“Maybe more coconut,” Grace said, tousling Lina’s lank hair.

Reka kicked the discarded cookie out from under Duke’s nose into the middle of the floor, since the dog refused to eat it. “Or just give up,” she grunted, getting a little spurt of spiteful pleasure at Lina’s answering pout. Burned cookies and saccharine painted flowers and annoying children—Fliss’s baby was squalling again—sometimes Reka could shrug these things off, the things that annoyed her, and sometimes they racketed around her skull till she couldn’t help but snarl.

“Oh, Mrs.M, you didn’t mean that,” Fliss said, that blond flip of hers bobbing over her pink blouse. “Be nice, now!”

“Why?” Reka said rudely. Why did she have to be nice? Russet-haired Reka Takács had never been nice—she’d been unabashed, untethered, unmaternal, and bold. Why did she have to become nurturing, sweet, nice , just because she was now old? Wasn’t being old hard enough without having to dredge up a saintly smile when Claire was a bitch and Fliss was annoying and Bea droned about the Red Sox?

“This bevy of feminine pulchritude must be the Briar Club ladies,” a man’s voice drawled from the doorway, and it turned out Arlene’s beau wasn’t imaginary after all, because here he was: Harland Adams of the FBI, ducking through the door hat in hand, lean and sharp-featured, a hint of Virginia honeying his voice. Reka studied him with an artist’s squint. Faces had always been what fascinated her, back when she was painting. Her work had mostly been abstract portraits, the intricacies of human faces rendered tilted or fantastical with a few twists of perspective. Every person had one feature that summed them up, one thing you could bring out while letting the rest of the features recede. Claire’s was that loud red hair springing out in wiry curls; Nora’s was that delicate chin pointing hard as a flint arrowhead under her soft skin... Arlene’s G-man had a foxiness about his eyes; something watchful. Reminded Reka of a colleague in Berlin, a sharp-faced little sculptor from Potsdam who drank French champagne like milk and could work cast bronze into the most delicate shapes imaginable, like he was plying wind between his fingers and not stubborn metal. Was he the one who’d been beaten up in the street by Brownshirts, or...

Stop , Reka told herself, stop .

“Just in time, Harland!” Arlene sashayed over from the kitchenette area, decorative apron over her candy-striped skirt, so she could steer her beau around the tiny room like a show dog. “This is Mrs.Muller,” Arlene enthused, dialing up the Texas vowels. “Reka, darlin’, let me get you a shawl, you’re sitting right in that draft!” Fussing in that way girls do when they’re trying to impress men: See how caring I am, how I’ll wait on your mother hand and foot when she’s my mother-in-law?

“My mother-in-law told me I was a Magyar floozy who couldn’t make schnitzel ,” Reka told Arlene in Hungarian. “I told her her son screwed divinely and knew exactly what to do with a woman’s nipples.”

“So you’re a bureau man,” Nora said when Arlene vanished coyly toward the icebox with a parting squeeze of Harland’s hand. “Is it true Mr.Hoover has a room full of John Dillinger memorabilia?”

“The anteroom to his office.” Harland smiled, brushing a hand across his brilliantined hair. Never trust a man with hair oil , Reka thought. “A plaster copy of Dillinger’s death mask, the cigar in his pocket the night the FBI shot him down—”

“Is the cigar just a cigar?” Claire smirked, waggling a little finger. “Or is it representing something else to Mr.Hoover?”

Harland frowned. “Mr.Hoover is a great man. There’s a great deal of work to be done in this country if we don’t want it going to the dogs.”

“Better the dogs than the Reds,” Fliss said, rocking the ever-present bundle of pink blankets. Thank god the baby had stopped squalling. “Isn’t that what Mr.Hoover says?”

“He does, and so do I.” Harland sipped at his glass. “You wouldn’t want Commies on your school board and in your neighborhood watch, would you?”

“I wouldn’t mind a bit,” Reka said and had the pleasure of seeing Arlene’s beau choke on his sun tea.

“I don’t think you know quite what you mean by that, Mrs.Muller,” Harland said. “The threat to our children—”

“Oh, who cares about the children?” Reka cut him off, and she took pleasure doing it. The trouble with men like Harland Adams was that they hadn’t been interrupted enough whenever they started holding forth about the country, the law, the children . “Stop hiding behind the children. Children are in no danger from Communists, because most Communists are about as dangerous as garden snails. Just college boys who think quoting Marx and drinking vodka makes them rebels. Lock ’em up for boring people to death, but don’t lock ’em up for the children .”

“I assure you, Mrs.Muller, that Communists are dangerous. If you had any real experience of their insidious practices—”

“I did,” Reka said, knowing she shouldn’t, not especially caring. Sometimes she got tired of sitting like a bump on a log at these dinners, just waiting for the food to come so she could eat up and leave. “I was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in Germany before the war, young man.” She saw him blanch and wanted to roll her eyes. It hadn’t been a crime , for god’s sake. It hadn’t even been unique. Half of Berlin flirted pink in those days; Marxism had been fashionable. “A lot of it was pretentious idiots quoting Lenin and talking about the proletariat while waiting for someone else to pick up the check,” Reka said. “But it was also a lot of young people who thought maybe the children , the ones you’re flag-waving about now, the ones who were starving in gutters back then, deserved more of a slice of the pie than they were getting.”

Frankly, Reka still didn’t know what was wrong with that idea. It hadn’t all been cabarets and absinthe, cubism and boys dancing in tights back in those Berlin days. It had been hunger, real hunger, and real fury at those who weren’t hungry but refused to share.

Fliss and Nora looked anxious, the way they always did when voices rose. Claire leaned back on her elbows; she always enjoyed verbal fencing.

“Goodness, Reka.” Grace chuckled softly, not sounding derisive, just amused. “Look at you. A firebrand at heart.”

“That’s an arrestable offense these days, if men like Mr.Adams here have his way,” Reka retorted.

“Goodness, I hope not. Firebrands are good for the country, or so I’ve always thought,” Grace mused, ignoring Harland’s sputtering. “Firebrands ask questions, and a nation where you can’t ask questions is one that is going downhill.”

“Questions that make allowances for Communists are a different matter.” Harland looked quite red in the face now, to Reka’s enjoyment. “The threat the Communist Party poses—”

“You know who we really posed a threat to? Herr Hitler,” said Reka. “Who do you think were some of the first people he rounded up and arrested? The Communists and Socialists, that’s who. The ones telling everyone he and his Brownshirts were a threat back when boys like you were saying America First and At least these fascists make the trains run on time! A little history for you, Mr.Adams.”

“I know my history,” he said stiffly.

Reka was willing to bet he hadn’t known that part of it. Socialists and Reds arrested and beaten up, shipped off to camps alongside the Jews and the Romani and the homosexuals. And somehow the Socialists and Reds were still the enemy here in the land of the free, still the ones being arrested and hauled away by clean-cut young men like Harland Adams.

“You’re not still a member of the Party, are you?” he asked, as if Reka was going to reach under her cardigan and whip out a hammer and sickle.

“If I wanted to be a Communist in America, I’d just join a church.” Reka enjoyed his double take. “What kind of principles do you think Christ and his disciples are embodying? Living together in communal spirit, sharing everything equally between all—Lenin would approve.”

“Jaysus Mary and Joseph,” Nora said in the broad brogue she trotted out to make them all laugh. “I should tell my mam that, just to hear her screech.”

She was trying to deflate the tension in the room, Reka knew. Herself, she didn’t particularly feel like letting Arlene’s beau off the hook. “Put that appalled look away, Mr.Adams, I’m not a Communist Party member or a church member these days. Live as long as I have and you’ll realize that whether the organization you put your faith in brandishes a Bible or a copy of Das Kapital , the haves in that organization are rarely interested in sharing with the have-nots .” Besides, being a Party member meant meetings, and if there was anything Reka hated, it was meetings. Almost as much as she hated complacency—at least she’d knocked that plastic smugness off Harland Adams’s sharply handsome face tonight.

And then he surprised her: “Is that why you left Germany, Mrs.Muller? Your... political beliefs?”

“I left so I wouldn’t be shot.” Left, fled, emigrated... lots of words for it, that panicked rush to leave your maddened country before the bullet, the cattle car, the camp did to you what it was already doing to your friends, and turned you into a much simpler, starker word: dead .

“You left, and this country took you in,” Harland continued, rotating his glass between his hands. “So maybe a little less scorn for our values would be appropriate, Mrs.Muller.”

“This country did take me in,” Reka acknowledged. “And she’s my country now, yes. But does that mean she gets a pass on criticism, forever, even when she’s wrong? Wouldn’t that go against freedom of speech and all that?” After enduring Hitler’s Berlin, Reka was never going to let a thing like freedom of speech go unappreciated, or unused, even if it did make her a firebrand.

“You are twisting my words,” Harland began.

“Oh, go put a few more movie stars in jail,” Reka snapped. “Maybe you’ll win a medal—” and Arlene swooped in then with a big false smile and eyes that screamed murder.

“Goodness, you really are feelin’ feisty today, you old sweetie. Let’s hope you’ve got an appetite to match!” and soon a series of Grace’s mismatched plates came out, Arlene placing the biggest into Harland’s hands with a flourish. “Candle Salad,” she cooed. “My specialty.”

For a moment, they all stared at their plates: a lettuce leaf on each one, a pineapple ring with a halved banana standing upright from the center, a cherry at the tip trailing a runnel of whipped cream...

Grace’s mouth twitched, Reka saw distinctly, and Nora’s face went perfectly blank in the way that meant she was suppressing a giggle. But it probably would have passed—Arlene was already nattering about how cute presentations like Candle Salad got children to eat their fruits and veggies; trotting out her credentials as a perfect mother to the future Harland Adams Jr.—if Reka hadn’t just thought hell with it and given in to the bellow of laughter that tore all the way up from her stomach. “It’s a p?cs ,” she choked, remembering Otto’s p?cs waggling between his legs when they went swimming naked in the icy blue Grundlesee on their honeymoon. The banana even had a slight curve to the left like Otto’s had, and Reka was really howling now.

“It is a candle ,” Arlene said, red-faced. “The banana is the candle, the cherry is the flame—”

“Definitely a circumcised candle,” Claire snickered, and that did everyone in. You couldn’t find a more different batch of women than the Briar Club, Reka often thought, but after so many suppers together they had somehow acquired a shared funny bone, a way of setting each other off that made the laughter contagious when the right joke caught fire. Fliss was barely managing to contain her giggles, choking out I’m sure it’s scrumptious, Arlene! but Nora had fallen on Pete’s shoulder in mirth, and the black-haired girl named Bea had turned to the wall with her shoulders heaving. “It’s a candle ,” Arlene kept hissing, and that just set everyone off all over again.

At last, Reka got up. “I’m too old to eat p?cs for dinner,” she said, plunking her plate in Harland’s lap. To do him credit, he was doing his best not to laugh at his girlfriend’s embarrassment, or the culinary pornography she’d whipped up. “Nice to meet you, G-man—” Reka said and hobbled back down the stairs to her own room, still cackling.

By the time she boiled herself a cup of instant Sanka, nibbled a few stale Crax out of the cracker box, and settled into her dilapidated armchair, it was nearly nine and Arlene was banging on the door. Harland must be gone by now; she’d never unleash that rusty-spike screech if there was an eligible man around to hear it. “You old bitch , how dare you talk like that to Harland, he probably thinks I’m some pinko slut now—” Reka didn’t bother opening the door, just cackled and sank deeper into her chair, folding her wrinkled hands around the chipped mug. And after a while the cackles faded, and she was left staring at her barren room.

Twenty-year-old Reka Takács might have found it romantic. A narrow bed, an icebox, and some dingy walls didn’t matter when you were young, when everything had a sheen of bohemian glamour and it was all just a stepping-stone to greater things. When you were old, it just looked grim. When Otto was alive, spaces like this had seemed unbearably cramped, two of them trying to maneuver their aging bodies around each other and the roaches. Trying not to miss their flat in Berlin with the burgundy red curtains and the Chinese screen, the smell of ink from Otto’s midnight scribbling, turpentine and linseed oil from Reka’s easel in the corner; eighteen minutes’ walk to the Opernplatz where they queued to see the premiere of Wozzeck —where, eight years later, they’d stood hand in hand like two mute, terrorized children and watched as the books burned. Knowing in that moment that it was done, their time in Berlin.

“We got out, Otto,” she whispered, barely aware that Arlene had stopped banging outside and clicked away in a huff. “We got out.” Maybe it wasn’t much, this life—the room and its smell of stale cooking fat from the kitchen below, her occasional cheap treat of bad beer and a scrimped-for train ticket to New York to remember there were galleries with color and life and that much-missed smell of oil paint and acrylic. But it was a life, and any life was better than being dead. If she could walk back through the doors of those old Berlin cabarets now, they’d be peopled by ghosts: the less fortunate, so many of whom had died under pink triangles, red triangles, yellow stars, and all the other badges of hatred.

Still, at some point on the way to becoming an old woman, gratitude began running side by side with despondency. So she wasn’t dead—so what? She was shelving books for pittance wages when she’d once taught a generation of artists how to push their boundaries clear off the edges of their canvases. Sleeping in an empty bed because the firebrand journalist who used to share it had died of frustration and shame as much as from old age, withered into uselessness the moment he realized life in America held nothing for him but a janitor’s mop.

At least you got out. Those words had been hurled at Reka before, in bitter grief by Berliners who had lost whole families into the swastika’s maw. But the question she couldn’t help but contemplate now, staring into the future: What did we get out for ? No one had an answer for that. Not a slick young G-man who believed in his God, his flag, and his badge; not Grace March and her sun tea and her weekly suppers; not this country with its copper-green Lady Liberty and her false promises of Give me your huddled masses .

No , Reka thought, not willing to be unfair even inside her head. Not false promises. Lady Liberty had taken her in, after all—and many others—and Reka would never lose the bone-deep thrum of thankfulness for that. She just wished that so many of the huddled masses this country took in hadn’t found themselves treated like a resource: stripped of what little they’d brought with them so it could be given to someone else, someone better off. Communism in reverse. I wasn’t asking to be given everything on a silver platter when I came here , Reka thought, still thinking of Lady Liberty. I was always willing to pay my way, earn my share. So why did you have to welcome me with one hand and take everything I had left with the other?

Reka, édesem, she heard Otto chiding. Don’t think about the sketches. There’s no point. Not unless she wanted another sleepless night chewing on her own rage, gazing at the place on her wall where her future should have hung. The future that had been stolen out of her hands.

Don’t think about it , Otto said again .

But the rage was always there, always simmering—and tonight, her belly empty, she thought she might as well welcome it.

Arlene’s Candle Salad

Iceberg lettuce Canned pineapple rings 1 firm banana for every two dinner guests Whipped cream Maraschino cherries

Arrange a lettuce leaf on a salad plate, and top with a pineapple ring. Cut the bananas in half widthwise, and fix one banana half in the hole at the center of the pineapple ring, sticking up. Add a dab of whipped cream at the top for the “candle wax,” and a cherry at the tip of the banana for the “flame.” Eat without snickering, if you can manage it, while listening to “The Thing” by Phil Harris.

October had turned to November, Halloween had come and gone (that big damned dog of Nora’s had howled bloody murder when the boys down the street set off some firecrackers), Mrs. Nilsson’s autumn haul of parsnips and beets ripened in the Victory Garden under her NOT for briarwood house boarders! sign, and Reka stood on the top step of the Smoot Library with her jaw hanging slack. “Fired?” she repeated stupidly.

“That’s right, Mrs.Muller,” the chief librarian said with pursed lips. She hadn’t even let Reka step over the threshold; just zipped straight out the doors with her hand outstretched like a traffic cop the moment she saw Reka hobbling up the steps. “I’m afraid we cannot employ your kind at the T. Nealey Smoot Library.”

“My kind?” Reka repeated, at a loss. What kind was that, ugly old women? You’re not exactly a comely spring chicken yourself, MissSexton.

“It has been brought to our attention that you have”—MissSexton’s voice dropped—“ Communist sympathies . You understand that as a sanctum of American ideals, a place where children congregate—well, we cannot employ such a person.”

“I have not been a member of any party for nearly twenty years,” Reka said, but she could tell it was useless, the way MissSexton’s cat’s-eye glasses glittered like knife blades. “Who told you I had Communist sympathies? Mrs.March?”

Grace, who also shelved books here, who had heard her pick a fight with Harland Adams over the Candle Salads. Grace had seemed more amused than appalled by the notion that her neighbor had waved a flag for the Reds a few decades ago... but if there was anything Reka had learned from Hitler’s Berlin, it was that you never knew which of your neighbors would turn you in.

“Never you mind, Mrs.Muller.” A shoo of MissSexton’s hand like she was getting rid of a stray cat. “You’re lucky we don’t report you to the authorities! The T. Nealey Smoot Library would be entirely within its rights—”

She won’t do that , Otto snorted. Neither HUAC nor the FBI will concern itself with a hired page at a third-tier branch library, édesem. But there was a deep-seated fear in Reka that got her feet moving anyway, had her hobbling back down the steps with her heart thumping sickly. The ingrained fear of the refugee, which never quite disappeared—the feeling that you might be asked to show your papers, to justify yourself, to leave . A feeling that sent her scuttling away from the library, head down, the taste of copper in her mouth.

How her younger self would have jeered.

Shut up , Reka told her younger self. Being jobless at twenty-one was a lark. Mornings to sleep in, making jokes about spending your last marks on schnapps, always confident another job was around the corner. At seventy-one, the thought sent her reeling sickly into Prospect Park beside the library, breath coming in gasps. No job. No money, even the pittance library pages were paid by the hour. She had maybe two months’ rent in an envelope under her mattress, squirreled away coin by coin for a rainy day—well, on a clear-skied afternoon where sunlight shone down on the absurd bronze statue of Councilman T. Nealey Smoot beaming across the duck pond at his namesake library, storm clouds had gathered over Reka Muller’s head.

Two months of rent. Then what?

Who was going to hire a seventy-one-year-old woman? She couldn’t put in ten-hour shifts at the Crispy Biscuit like Nora; didn’t have the typing skills to join a steno pool like Claire; couldn’t teach junior high like the Italian girl Bea.

Two months of rent. All the savings Reka had.

It would be a lot more. If—

Otto warned her not to think about that, but she couldn’t hear Otto over the roaring in her ears. She stumped across Prospect Park and down Briar Avenue, knowing exactly where she was going, knowing she shouldn’t go there again. You promised yourself you wouldn’t. You promised Otto. But her feet kept moving as she pulled her coat tight against the sharp November breeze.

Astonishing how close Georgetown was to Foggy Bottom—how close the haves really were to the have-nots . Just a trudge across the C her feet screamed, and she had a stitch in her side like a dagger. Even a mile or so was too long to walk on a cold autumn day, when you were over seventy. Unless you were so angry you cared nothing at all for pain. “Mr. Barrett Sutherland.”

“He’s at his office, Mrs.—?”

“Senator Sutherland, then.” The father had a gracious white-pillared place in Virginia, but weekdays he’d be found more often than not at his son’s house—closer to Capitol Hill and the martinis at Martin’s Tavern, he’d been known to joke. Years of concentrated hatred for the whole Sutherland clan had taught Reka a lot about their movements. “I’ll see the senator, if he’s in.”

The maid looked wary. She must be new; the previous maid had known to just shut the door in Reka’s face. “Do you have an appointment, ma’am?”

“He stole from me.” Reka peered past the maid to the familiar strip of luxurious Persian carpet, the crystal chandelier. Sometimes she’d gotten as far as the sitting room, but usually that imposing brass-knockered door shut in her face before she got a toe inside. Reka saw someone move at the end of the foyer and raised her voice. “The senator stole something from me. I want what is mine —”

Reka , Otto begged, but she couldn’t stop. Maybe once a year she got angry enough to come make a scene. Useless, stupid. She still couldn’t stop.

“I want what is mine,” she repeated, voice rising, trying to elbow past the maid, peering into the shadowy foyer. Was that the senator back there, or his son? She hadn’t seen either for years, except at a distance. The son with his Clark Gable jaw, his patent-leather hair, his pin-striped suit; the father the same but older, the dark hair grayer, the paunch behind the same vest and the pocket square now solidified into hard, complacent prosperity. “He took what is mine and I need it back.”

Need. That was why she was here, she supposed. It wasn’t just a matter of ownership and justice anymore; it was a matter of rent and food.

“Trudy?” A woman’s voice drifted from the foyer—young, light, a British accent. “Who’s at the door?”

“Just a tramp, Mrs.Sutherland.”

“I’m not a tramp ,” Reka gritted out. “You ask the senator or his son if they know the name Professor Muller ; they know. They know—”

The maid flapped at Reka like she was flapping at a housefly, starting to close the door. Reka wedged one foot in the way, raising her voice to a shout again. “ I want to see Mr.Sutherland— ”

“He’s not here.” The maid fell back as a slim, beringed hand opened the door back up, and Reka blinked up at a tall young woman. Elegant, black-haired, endless neck roped with pearls and endless silk-stockinged legs under the trim mint-green skirt of what Reka guessed was a Chanel suit. “Thank you, Trudy,” she continued in her soft British-accented voice. The maid disappeared, and the woman turned back to Reka. “I’m afraid my husband is chairing a committee meeting until late this evening, and my father-in-law is away in Virginia. Can I help you instead?”

The wife. Reka had never seen her before, though she knew that the younger Sutherland had a wife and son. Methodically picked up somewhere after Yale Law School, from wherever it was politicians’ wives were cooked up in some sterling silver incubator so the family picture would be complete when it came time to run for office. That was how these Washington families did it. Reka looked at the big square diamond on the woman’s hand, resting on the door, and said bluntly, “Your father-in-law is a thief, and your husband knows it.”

The fastest flicker on the woman’s face, there and gone before Reka could parse it. “What is it you think the senator took from you?” she asked, as if this was a perfectly normal conversation to have on a Georgetown front stoop.

“I don’t think he stole. I know he did. From Otto and me. From who knows how many others.” Reka caught a ragged breath, forcibly calming herself down. “Could I trouble you for a glass of water?”

“Of course. Trudy, if you don’t mind—” And Reka found herself on a cushioned bench in the foyer, sipping from a cut-crystal glass. Once you were in, it was much harder to get you out—she didn’t waste time, looking up at the elegant lady of the house who had so far been more receptive than any of her menfolk.

“Your father-in-law— Does Senator Sutherland boast about how many he helped save from Germany? How many he sponsored, to make their way from Berlin to America in the thirties?”

“Yes, he’s very proud that—”

“Does he tell you he stripped them of anything they had? Anything of value, that is. He let us keep the scraps.”

The woman’s face changed again. Probably wondering if Reka was Jewish, if that was why she’d fled Germany. Or wondering why she’d left it so late that she needed American help in the first place. The question Reka had heard over and over: Why didn’t you leave sooner?

Such idiots. Do you know how hard it was to leave? she wanted to scream. Do you? Every week there was some new piece of paper you needed to emigrate, some new permission a smug faceless bureaucrat didn’t want to grant you, some milestone you weren’t meeting. Even if you could get all the bits of paper, it was near impossible to come to America without someone to sponsor you. An American sponsor: such a thing was like getting touched by the wand of a fairy godmother.

Or in their case, a fairy godfather.

And when your fairy godfather said you should send your valuables in advance, because you’d likely have to surrender anything precious on the way out of Berlin—did you question that? You did not. You were too used to Hitler’s thugs and how they helped themselves to whatever they wanted. You were too numbed and grateful to be getting away from the country that was no longer your home, the place where your friends were disappearing and you knew that any day you’d be next. So you sent your things ahead, the most precious ones, the things that would help you build a new life.

Including that one slim, irreplaceable package.

Let’s not send the sketches ahead , Reka had argued at the time. They should travel with us. I’ll tie them around my legs, under my stockings.

And see you stripped and beaten at the Lehrter Bahnhof if the guards catch even a crinkle of paper? Otto had demanded. We can’t risk it.

She wished they had. Those three flimsy pieces of paper could have bought them a new life in America. Maybe not prosperity, but some measure of ease. Could have salved, at least, the utter shock of realizing there were no valuables waiting for them when they arrived in Washington. That they had their visas, and they might be on the right side of the Atlantic at last, but that everything of value—the silver from Otto’s Viennese grandmother, the emerald earrings from Reka’s great-aunt in Debrecen, the embroidered wall hangings she and Otto had bargained for in Istanbul when they’d fulfilled a much-scrimped-for dream of riding the Orient Express—was gone. Removed from the packed clothes and sundries, which had been carelessly stuffed back into the crates without even the smallest effort to make it look like everything hadn’t been rifled.

You got your passage and your papers , they’d been told—the one meeting Otto had managed to obtain with Senator Sutherland. Barely a junior senator then, a sharp Capitol Hill climber with his eye on the main chance. Be grateful, hey?

That was the day her Otto had started to look old.

“Mrs.— What did you say your name was?” The young Mrs.Sutherland was looking down into Reka’s face with concern. “You don’t look well.”

She thinks you’re crazy , Otto said. Reka opened her mouth to shout, but felt herself sagging instead, suddenly exhausted. The Sutherlands weren’t here—father or son. If they were, she’d have been escorted firmly down the steps by now. “They stole from me,” she repeated, but her voice sounded feeble in her own ears.

“Would you like a cup of tea? Or—”

“I don’t want your charity. I want what’s mine. They stole from me when my husband and I were fleeing for our lives. When we were so thankful to have reached the land of the free. Who does that?” But Reka didn’t have the strength to crane her head up at this woman, with her impossibly glossy hair and her impossibly expensive skin, and keep arguing. She rose, setting down the crystal glass, and turned for the door. The maid leaped forward to open it.

Polished alligator pumps clicked behind her. “I’m calling you a taxi,” Mrs.Sutherland said, taking Reka’s arm as she reached the front steps.

Sure , Reka thought, leaning on that costly worsted sleeve that smelled like Shalimar. You’ll insist on paying for the ride, and probably slip me a five-dollar bill at the door. That was how the rich could pretend they’d done everything they possibly could.

The woman insisted on riding with her in the taxi, which surprised Reka. “Where do you live, ma’am?” but Reka wasn’t letting the Sutherlands know where to find her. “Leave me at the corner of Prospect Park,” she grunted, seeing Fliss come clipping through the park gates with her baby carriage, and she was surprised again when the senator’s daughter-in-law insisted on helping her out of the cab.

“Of course, Mrs.Sutherland,” the startled-looking Fliss said then, finding herself deftly roped in. “Haven’t I seen you and your son at Trinity Presbyterian on Sundays? I’ll see Mrs. Muller home safely. I can look after her, I used to be a nurse...” And the bill Reka found in her coat pocket later wasn’t a five, it was a fifty.

But it was still what the rich did, wasn’t it? What the Sutherlands did. Threw a few scraps, patted themselves on the back, and went home to their Georgetown mansion stuffed with what wasn’t theirs.

“Reka, is that you?”

Reka looked up in the doorway of the Briar Rose Beauty Shoppe, still unbuttoning her coat, and saw Grace March beckoning across the double row of women reading old issues of Photoplay and chattering under beehive hairdryers. “It’ll be at least an hour’s wait—every woman in the District wants a rinse and set in time for Thanksgiving.”

“So I see,” Reka said gruffly. “I’ll come back later.”

“Nonsense, come keep me company—” And Reka found herself picking her way past the housewives with their fresh manicures and the beauticians with their drilled curls, clear to the back where her housemate waved her into some sort of storeroom.

“I’ve been hired to repaint their sign,” Grace explained, waving at the paint-splattered smock she was wearing over an old pink paisley skirt and ballet flats. Her curls were tied on top of her head with an old scarf, and she moved a tray of paint so Reka could sit on a packing crate. “The owner here saw the mural I painted last month in the children’s section at the library—that was after you left. Fairly insipid, cartoon children skipping hand in hand under a smiling sun, and of course Sexless Sexton didn’t pay me for it— it’s for the children, Mrs.March! But at least it got me this job here.” Grace waved at the sign, which was propped high against the wall on a trestle, its old lettering showing ghostlike under a coat of primer.

“Were you the one who got me fired from the library?” Reka asked bluntly, not sitting. She hoped to shock a response out of her neighbor, but Grace only gave that sleepy, amused smile.

“No, I’m fairly certain it was Arlene Hupp. She really was quite irked after that fight you picked with her Harland.”

“That wasn’t a fight . If a Hungarian picks a fight with you, all the plates end up broken and knives are sticking out of walls.” Reka sank down on the packing crate, not taking off her coat. The back room was chilly without the rosy-walled cheer of the main shop space with its framed prints of coiffed movie stars and stacks of LIFE and the Ladies’ Home Journal . Here there were only boxes of rollers, brooms and buckets and old dishrags, the chatter of the main shop a beehive buzz through the door. “So it was Arlene who told,” Reka mused, thinking it sounded like the truth, rather surprised how glad she was that it hadn’t been Grace. “That kurva .”

“I’ve started calling her the Huppmobile. The way she motors around, all efficiency and no soul...” Grace paused, delicately. “Do you have another job?”

Reka grunted. She did not. That fifty from the young Mrs. Sutherland had bought some breathing room, she was ashamed to say. She’d be able to get through Christmas, but she was already scrimping miserably. She was only here for the cheapest possible wash and trim, and that only because she’d so badly botched trimming her own hair, she looked like she’d backed into a lawn mower. She wasn’t going to get hired anywhere if she looked crazy as well as ancient.

“You know, you should come up to my room Monday nights as well as Thursdays. Lina and Pete come every week since that new show I Love Lucy started, and you know how that boy eats, so there’s always sandwiches and cake.” It was Grace’s way of slipping her another free meal each week; Reka felt her cheeks heat. But she couldn’t afford to turn it down, so yes, she’d probably be clumping upstairs next Monday to sit grimly through goddamned Lucille Ball and goddamned Desi Arnaz, all for a sandwich and a piece of cake.

“Mind you,” Grace added, probably reading Reka’s thoughts, “Lina provides the cake, so it’s a mixed blessing. I don’t think last Monday’s Pineapple Upside-Down Cake started out upside-down.”

“Did you ask her?”

“Goodness, no. I said it was wonderful. That child is starving for praise.” Grace reached out and dabbed a finger at the sign, testing the primer. “Nearly dry... One more coat, and I’ll be ready to start.” She unrolled a tube of paper from the pocket of her smock. “What do you think?”

Reka examined the sketch for the new sign. Briar Rose Beauty Shoppe had a rose blooming in the loops of the A ’s and the O ’s, and a vine curled out from the tail of the Y to underscore the whole thing. Predictable; pretty. But the lettering was meticulously blocked and the petals prettily done. “Commercial but competent,” she judged.

Grace laughed, not offended at all. “Commercial pays the bills, Attila.”

“ Attila? ” Reka’s brows rose.

“Attila the Hungarian.”

Reka heard herself laughing, rustily. “I’ll take it over Sexless Sexton or the Huppmobile.” She’d always wondered what Grace had nicknamed her.

Grace nodded at the signboard, sitting there like a new canvas. “What would you paint there? If not my commercially competent little rosebuds.”

Reka lifted herself off the crate with a grunt, going over to the tray where a brush rested next to a container of turpentine and a can of primer sat open. And some charcoal sticks... Not letting herself think too much about what she was doing, she picked one up and made a long sinuous line on the blank, primed board.

Painting and drawing were muscle memory as much as they were eye and mind. Her muscles were old, rusted—she couldn’t have done anything new, but the figures in her mind’s eye were as familiar as the face in her mirror. No, more familiar: the face in the mirror changed over time, but the images in her mind were sharp-edged and eternal. Even if she hadn’t seen them since they’d been boxed up and sent to America.

She didn’t make any particular order out of them. A woman like a pillar, headdressed in flowers, a cup in one hand and her other arm draped with the sinuous curling lines of a serpent... A naked man, his head drooping, gaunt shoulder blades and wrinkled haunches etched in harsh lines... A scatter of stars like a cosmos, swirling into a face neither male nor female...

Crude. God, it was crude! She’d lost her touch along with everything else. But she kept going till she’d covered the entire board and her fingers were gloved black in charcoal dust, and then she stepped back and her heart clutched.

“Sorry,” she told Grace, because it was appalling, an artist muscling in to take over someone else’s canvas. That was the kind of thing that saw blood and palette knives fly in studios. “I shouldn’t have presumed.”

“Not at all. It’s between coats of primer; do whatever you like with it.” Grace came closer, examining the woman with the snake. “I hate to paint over it. You’re good, Reka.”

“I was,” Reka said without conceit. She had been, back in the day. She wasn’t Gustav Klimt, she wasn’t Max Ernst, but she was good.

Grace reached out to touch the charcoal serpent. “How did you come up with such ideas?”

“I didn’t.” It was faces Reka had usually painted; portraits, not abstract philosophical concepts. She grimaced at the figures she’d just dashed off, so rough they embarrassed her. Nothing like the sinuous, smoky lines of the original. But those had been sketched by a genius, not an old art professor who hadn’t touched paint or charcoal in years.

Still. It had felt good to get them out. Sometimes she saw them pressing on the backs of her eyelids till they writhed.

“If you didn’t make them up, what are they?” Grace asked, examining a woman’s face half covered in swaths of what might have been black hair or might have been smoke.

“The preliminary sketches for a triptych of paintings by Klimt,” Reka said. “The Faculty Paintings: Philosophy , Medicine , and Jurisprudence .”

Klimt. People thought of his Woman in Gold , his famous Kiss . Reka revered his stranger work, the unflinching nudes and abstract swirls and monstrous beasts. The stuff that wasn’t so pretty, that flirted with the obscene and the nightmarish, the reality-bending and the taboo. You didn’t marry me for my haluski or my red hair , Otto had sometimes teased her. You married me for my Klimt sketches.

Your haluski and your hair come in a very close second , Reka had assured him, laughing.

Three sketches, the pride of Otto’s family, passed down to him when his grandfather died. Three charcoal drawings by Klimt himself—studies in preparation for Philosophy , Medicine , and Jurisprudence . Valuable enough in their day, but now...

“The Faculty Paintings?” Grace frowned. “I’ve never heard of them.”

“You wouldn’t.” Reka dropped the charcoal back into the tray. “They’re gone.”

Grace raised her golden-brown eyebrows.

Reka wiped her blackened hands off on the canvas drop cloth, trying to sound matter-of-fact, failing. “You know how much degenerate art Hitler burned?”

“The paintings these sketches were based on—they were destroyed?”

“Confiscated first. From a Jewish family.” The Lederers; with the greatest Klimt collection in Europe. “Sent to a castle in Austria, Schloss Immendorf.” Reka took a long, shaky breath—she had seen the books burn in the Opernplatz, but she could only imagine that wealth of canvases, panels, and paint crisping and curling in their frames under the licking fires. The image burned her mind, far more obscene than anything Klimt had painted in his life and heard denounced by prudes as degenerate . “The Germans put the castle and everything in it to the torch.”

Which made Reka and Otto’s trio of charcoal sketches, purchased for a song at the turn of the century, suddenly a great deal more significant than just an artist’s experimental early drafts. A very great deal more, with the originals lost forever.

“That makes me even less inclined to paint this over,” Grace said quietly, looking at Reka’s charcoal daubs.

Reka turned, picked up the brush beside the can of turpentine, and dipped it in primer. She splatted a wide arc across the woman with the snake (the Greek goddess Hygeia, supposedly, turning her back on mankind) and watched the white droplets obliterate the cup in the goddess’s hand. “A Jackson Pollock touch,” she said harshly, dropping the brush into the can. “Truth be told, I don’t know if I’m a fan of drip technique. He can pull it off, but now we’ll have every young idiot who can splatter a brush thinking he’s a genius, too.”

“You say the paintings were destroyed.” Grace was still studying the splattered figures. “What about the sketches?”

“Decorating a millionaire’s house in Georgetown. My tax for entering this country.” Reka picked up her handbag. “I’d better go see if I can get my wash and trim. Surely a few of those old bats next door are out from under the dryer by now.”

“Don’t let them talk you into any blue-rinsed curls, Attila. You need a sharp bob.”

“I’m too old for a bob. What is this, nineteen twenty-seven?”

“You’re not old enough for permed blue curls, that’s for sure. A bob,” Grace said, clearly visualizing it. “Let the gray shine, just shape and edge it so it looks like it’s been cut by a razor.”

“I’ll think about it.” Reka turned to go, wrinkled hand stealing self-consciously to the nape of her neck. She felt oddly—well, not naked. Seen.

“Reka.” Grace waited until Reka turned back. Standing there in her paisley skirt, swirling the turpentine in its can, her gaze thoughtful. “Be careful.”

“Why?”

“Whatever it is that’s eating you up... It’ll poison whatever time you’ve got left, if you aren’t careful.” She took up the brush, reached for the primer. “Let it go.”

It was Fliss—annoying, perky, pink-cheeked Fliss—who gave Reka the idea.

“Have you been watching the Christmas decorations go up around the square?” she chattered in the hallway when December came rolling around. Reka had come down for her mail, glower fixed firmly in place so Pete at the hallway table knew better than to say Good afternoon . But Fliss, wheeling the baby carriage through the front door, was impervious to glowers. “Angela just loves the Father Christmas in the drugstore window—Santa Claus,” Fliss corrected herself. “What are you doing for Christmas hols?”

“I hate Christmas,” Reka stated. In Berlin, she and Otto had stayed in bed all day drinking pálinka and eating stollen , getting powdered sugar on the sheets and exchanging presents at midnight, utterly ignoring the world outside. She’d at least kept up with the last part of the tradition.

“Why don’t you come to Christmas Eve church service with us?” Fliss reached down to rearrange the fluffy pink blankets around her daughter. “The candles at Trinity Presbyterian are always so pretty. Grace and Claire and Pete and Lina are coming—”

I’d rather be drowned in pálinka, Reka nearly said, but the idea hit then like a bolt. Fliss’s voice, not today but weeks ago, addressing Mrs.Sutherland when the woman escorted Reka home in a cloud of Shalimar: Haven’t I seen you and your son at Trinity Presbyterian on Sundays?

The Sutherlands. A churchgoing family; all politicians were. Nothing like a little public piety in this land of God, country, and McCarthy. And even if most politicians were too busy sleeping off their Saturday martinis to make every Sunday service, all politicians would be front and center in that pew on Christmas Eve. A night when all servants were off, when all families went to church, when almost every house from Foggy Bottom to Georgetown would be empty.

Otto considered this train of thought a very bad idea. Reka , he said sternly as soon as she made it back to her room on the second floor, having left Fliss midsentence in the front hall. Reka, don’t.

“Did I ever pay attention when you told me don’t in real life?” she scolded aloud, tossing her mail aside. Nothing but advertising circulars, anyway.

Or not... A letter with a New York postmark. Reka ripped it open, ignoring Otto, who was now sputtering in Hungarian, and saw a familiar decisive scrawl on Betty Parsons Gallery stationery. Jackson’s fifth show with me , Betty wrote. Better get a look before it closes on the 15th!

“I can’t go to Jackson’s show, Otto,” Reka said, addressing the worn armchair in the corner as if her husband were actually sitting in it, glaring at her. “I can’t afford it. I can’t afford one ticket to New York, one admittance fee to the gallery, one lousy ten-cent beer at the Cedar. That’s what life is now, Otto. Every last small pleasure being stripped away one by one.”

No excuse to do what you’re planning , he said inexorably. Reka put down Betty’s card, thinking oddly of a voice that wasn’t Otto’s. Grace March’s voice, Grace’s golden-brown eyes. Let it go, whatever it is that’s eating you up.

“It is eating me up, Otto,” Reka whispered, feeling the ache deep in her throat, her swollen feet, her arthritic hands. It felt like her entire body, every joint and fold of it, was holding back tears. “I know it is. But I need to try—one more time. After that?” She blinked, and this time she almost could see him there in that armchair, black-haired and vigorous, young and still unembittered. “After that,” Reka said slowly, “if I fail, I let it go.”

She’d made promises like that before. Broken them. But she thought she meant it this time.

One more disappointment was all this bitter old woman had left in her.

Christmas Eve, a faint lace of snow frosting the sidewalks. Reka stood in her old coat, watching the postcard-perfect families parade inside Trinity Presbyterian for the evening service. Little girls in velvet holiday frocks, fathers with a sprig of holly in their buttonholes, mothers in Christmas pearls... Reka didn’t dare get too close, but she was positive she saw the Sutherland men in a swirl of flunkies and expensive overcoats. The senator would have passed out Christmas bonuses and cigars; his son would have finished his holiday brandies with all the important Capitol Hill people, both of them making plans for the new year when the son would run for his first term in office. Prayers and politics, the one flowing into the other. It was the District way.

Stille nacht, heilige Nacht ... Humming the carol as the first strains of music wafted out from the church, Reka crammed her green hat down over her tightly permed curls (she hadn’t had the energy to talk the beautician into any kind of bob) and set off for Georgetown, her biggest handbag swinging over one arm. Even if your goal was a spot of burglary rather than a church pew, one should look appropriately festive on Christmas Eve.

You could go to jail, Reka , Otto warned, but it was a feeble thrust. He’d already said everything there was to say on the subject; Reka was going anyway. Could she walk into the Sutherland house on Christmas Eve, the holiest day of the year, and walk out again with her Klimt sketches? Probably not. She had no guarantee she could get in; she had no guarantee she would find the sketches hanging on a wall or if they’d long since been sold. She only knew she had to try one last time, that it was running through her like a madness. One last try—and this time she wouldn’t try begging for what was hers.

She’d just try to fucking take it.

So this time Reka didn’t come to the front door but headed to the back where the staff came and went. Locked, but she put it at a coin toss there was a key under a mat or a flowerpot nearby... Still, she knocked first with a story prepared about collecting for a Christmas charity if the Sutherlands (bastards) really had made that poor maid work on Christmas Eve.

No answer, no sound from the darkened house. Reka exhaled and began searching under the mat, along the sill, among the flowerpots for a key when she heard footsteps inside. Her heart barely had time to sink when the door opened.

But it wasn’t the maid.

“Can I help you?” slurred the young Mrs.Sutherland.

Reka forgot her story about the Christmas charity and stared. Normally she would wonder why an ambitious political hopeful would leave his wife home for the Christmas Eve service, when you wanted future voters to see you looking like a devout family man. But Reka wasn’t wondering at all. No woman with a swollen cheekbone, a cut lip, and a black eye like this could show her face in church, probably not until after New Year’s.

“I know you,” the senator’s daughter-in-law said, squinting. She wore an old cardigan over a silky lilac negligee, woolly socks showing incongruously below, black hair hanging lank in her face. “Don’t I know you?”

Reka stiffened. She’d counted on the maid not recognizing her—not with her smart hat and fox-trimmed coat, unlike the snarling woman in the old sweater who’d come to the front door weeks ago. But Mrs.Sutherland had ridden in a taxi with her, talked with her... “Sorry to bother you on Christmas, ma’am,” she began, doing her best to tamp down her German accent, edging away. This had all gone wrong; her last try was done. But Mrs.Sutherland’s next words froze her.

“You’re the one who said my father-in-law stole from you.”

Reka froze. Half turned away, then turned back. “He did,” Reka heard herself answering, looking dry-mouthed into those bruised, puffy eyes.

“Sounds like him.” Mrs.Sutherland turned back into the house. “Want a drink?”

However Reka imagined the night going, she had not imagined this. But she found herself following the younger woman into the empty, echoing house. Not a servant here; all the lamps turned off; a Christmas tree dark and silent in a huge drawing room as Reka followed the other woman’s unsteady footsteps past the archway. Mrs. Sutherland reached for a crystal decanter on a side table and sloshed out a generous measure of whatever was inside. “Whiskey suit you?” she asked, pushing the glass over. That British accent was a good deal less crisp, with her perfect mouth so swelled up on one side. “Or maybe it’s bourbon, I don’t know. What’s the difference, anyway?”

Who could hit a face like that? Reka couldn’t help but think. She’d have bristled to see any woman so battered, no matter what she looked like—but the artist in her felt an additional pang to see anything beautiful damaged. It would be like taking boxing gloves to the Mona Lisa .

She expected Mrs.Sutherland to slosh out a measure of whiskey for herself—judging from the slurring, it wouldn’t be her first—but the woman stoppered the decanter without pouring more. “I don’t drink,” she said, seeing Reka’s glance. “I hate it. All those cocktail parties we have to go to, I end up pouring my martini into the nearest plant. I’ve killed potted palms all over the District.” She looked up, and Reka revised her opinion that the slur came from drink. Her dark eyes were all pupil, dilated black.

“What did they give you?” Reka heard herself ask. “A few slaps, or more than a few, then call the doctor for a little pick-me-up?”

“Oh, no one has to call the doctor for chemical assistance around here.” Mrs.Sutherland pushed a lock of hair behind her ears—she wore huge amethyst earrings like chunks of purple glass. “We have tablets on hand for these occasions. My little boy thinks I fell down the stairs this afternoon. Mummy’s so clumsy. It’s part of the family lore by now.”

“I’m sorry.” Reka had no idea what else to say.

Mrs.Sutherland pushed a floppy cardigan sleeve up her slender arm. “I asked the senator about you, you know. Or not you , but a woman with a German accent, saying something about theft.”

“Is that why he did this?” Reka’s hand fell away from the whiskey glass before she’d even touched it. If she was to blame for this...

“Oh, no. My father-in-law wouldn’t hit me. He’s a thief, but he’s a gentleman. He just told his son, You keep your wife in hand, she’s getting mouthy , and Barrett did it for him. That wasn’t this, though—” She made an unsteady gesture at the black eye, the split lip. “Normally Barrett’s very good at hitting me where people won’t see the bruises. No, that time it was a cracked rib. Right before Thanksgiving. Made it easier not to eat too much. He weighs me every week, see, so I always get tense around holidays. All that pie sitting around...”

Reka’s spine did its best to shiver its way right out of her skin. She’d never given the younger Sutherland much thought—just a junior version of the man she really hated. “Leave him,” she heard herself saying harshly. “Just leave. Surely—”

The woman looked bitterly amused. “Aren’t you adorable,” she said in a Virginia drawl just like the Sutherlands and dismissed the whole subject with a chop of her hand. “What did my father-in-law steal from you, anyway?”

“Three sketches by Klimt.” This had to be the most surreal conversation Reka had ever had in her life, and she’d done opium and absinthe at the Moulin Rouge with a group of surrealist painters in Paris. “Studies for the Faculty Paintings, Philosophy , Medicine , and—”

“Oh god, not those horrible things.” Mrs.Sutherland turned away from the side table, reversing across the shadowed hall for the staircase. Reka hovered, unsure whether she was supposed to follow, and then that British voice floated: “Are you coming or not?”

Into the lion’s den , Reka thought, hobbling up the stairs. Not a lion’s den, though; just a private study with blue watered-silk walls. “Mine,” Mrs.Sutherland said, carelessly throwing lights on. “Though why I need a study when I never write more than the occasional thank-you note is beyond me.” The desk was heaped with creamy stationery and crystal paperweights, but Reka only registered those things in shadowed glimpses—because on the wall very nearly behind the door, she saw them.

Three charcoal sketches, each no more than eighteen inches square, carefully framed and held behind glass.

“I can’t stand them.” Mrs. Sutherland shuddered. “All those eyes and those tortured faces. My father-in-law doesn’t like them, either, but he says they’ll appreciate in value . Just the kind of thing to give a bride at her wedding: pictures of nasty creeping eyes that follow you around a room, and a son who splits your lip if you tell him maybe he shouldn’t have quite so much bourbon before church on Christmas Eve.”

She lurched across the room, so suddenly Reka put out a hand to stop her from tripping, but she didn’t fall. She just pointed at the pictures in their frames. “Take them. Just... take them.”

“I can’t.” The words flew out of Reka’s mouth. She wanted Otto’s sketches but she wasn’t taking them at the cost of this woman’s bruised flesh.

“Barrett never comes in here. Neither does my father-in-law. It’ll be months before they notice.” Mrs.Sutherland shrugged. “If they notice at all.”

She lurched forward again as if to wrench the sketches off the wall. More in alarm than anything—envisioning broken glass shredding fragile paper—Reka flew forward and lifted Klimt’s work down, moving carefully. The weight of them, after all these years... I can’t , she thought again, but her arms were already locked around the pile of frames. “Have a story if they notice the bare spots on the wall,” she said instead.

“I’m sure they’re insured against theft. I could report some of my jewelry stolen too,” Mrs.Sutherland mused. “Hock it later.”

“You should,” Reka agreed, ludicrously polite. “Every woman needs money of her own. An escape fund.” Because even if her own situation had been entirely different, she still knew what it was to bristle defensively when someone advised you Just leave . It was hard to just leave when you didn’t have money. Reka took a deep breath. “If they hurt you for this—”

“They hurt me anyway.” Mrs.Sutherland coughed out a laugh. It clearly pained her ribs. “Look, take the sketches or don’t. They’re yours, aren’t they?”

“Yes—”

“You want them back, don’t you?”

Yes , Reka thought. She could keep them a little while, just enough to cherish what she’d lost... then she could find them a home in a museum. And, yes, money was a part of that decision, money that would make her old age a little easier, but it was more than that. The sketches, with their originals consigned to the flames by Nazis, deserved to hang somewhere the world could see.

“So stop arguing.” Mrs.Sutherland turned away before Reka could reply, wandering out of the study. “You’re welcome,” she called over her shoulder, “Mrs.— I don’t remember your name.”

Better you don’t , Reka thought, wrestling the three frames into her big bag. They didn’t really fit, but it would have to do: if she cut the sketches out of their frames the delicate charcoal was at risk of smudging. Was she really going to walk out of here with what was rightfully hers? Her heart was thumping painfully.

This could still be dangerous , Otto warned. Reka knew he was right, but she was still moving down the stairs. What was that saying the senator had thrown in her husband’s face? Possession is nine-tenths of the law here in America. Well, if she was in possession of the sketches, the game changed. Even once the Sutherlands realized they were gone, they’d have no proof she was involved.

They could beat it out of that poor woman , she thought. Your name—she might remember. And after they’re done with her, they’ll beat you into a pulp as well.

But Reka couldn’t stop, not when she was so close to having it back—the piece of Otto, the piece of their past, the piece of their future taken away by a bureaucrat’s smug smile. She just kept going, toward the back door. Had she touched anything here tonight except the sketches? No, not even the glass of whiskey Mrs.Sutherland had poured her. She’d followed from room to room, but her hands hadn’t so much as grazed a doorknob...

She was almost free, almost through the back door, when light footsteps sounded behind, almost running.

“Wait!”

Her stomach lurched as she swung around.

“I need to bolt the door behind you,” Mrs. Sutherland said, slurring even more now. “If Barrett finds it unlocked, he’ll fire poor Trudy. She’ll never work again in Georgetown, and she’s so nice , she has a grandmother in Mobile and she sends money home—”

“Good idea,” Reka said gently. “You lock up behind me. No one needs to get fired on Christmas.”

“My god, it’s still Christmas.” Mrs.Sutherland opened the door, waving her through. Tall and beautiful under her bruises, but looking like a sad little girl. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas,” Reka called over her shoulder, clutching her bag. And walked up the street humming Stille nacht .

Christmas Day. Time to celebrate , Reka thought, somewhat determinedly.

Too late to do much decorating, but she snagged some tinsel Grace had cajoled Mrs.Nilsson into letting her festoon all over the Briarwood House banisters and parlor and draped it over her radiator as though it were a mantelpiece. She thought about making a pot of haluski —Otto’s favorite—but she was out of energy. She turned on the radio instead and heard Bing Crosby: It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

“Merry Christmas, Otto,” she said aloud, voice echoing in the empty room. Maybe more festive feelings would sink in once she arrived in New York tomorrow. Too late to catch the Pollock show at Betty’s, but even in the slow time after Christmas there were little out-of-the-way galleries with a gem or two on display.

And while she was there, she would take out a safe-deposit box, one large enough for three glass-paned pictures. Until she decided what museum would be the best home to approach for her Klimt sketches (price was a consideration, but more so was visibility, and a complete guarantee of anonymity), she didn’t want them in the same city as the Sutherland family.

Maybe that was why the giddy jubilation of her Christmas Eve victory last night had slowly seeped away as morning dawned.

Reka got down to her knees—hurting even more than usual, it felt like—and pulled the sketches out from under the bed for the dozenth time. A few sweeps of charcoal; Hygeia’s face was little more than a smudge... but you could see genius in those sweeps. Or at least Reka did. And even with Bing Crosby warbling and the sounds of merriment floating through Briarwood House, she couldn’t help a single, hard, dry sob pushing out of her throat as she thought of Klimt’s lost originals. Philosophy , Medicine , and Jurisprudence , licked by flames, curling and crisping as Nazi eyes jeered.

So much destroyed. So much lost.

Reka , Otto chided. No tears. You got our sketches back—everything you wanted!

But she couldn’t stop. She kept weeping, sobs tearing out of her throat in ugly surges. Because it wasn’t everything she wanted, was it? She had the sketches; justice had been done; precious art would be restored to the public, and there would be a little money now to ease her last years.

She still didn’t have Otto.

She still had the memories of him at the end, so bitter and beaten down.

She still lived old and alone.

And she had a sudden mad urge to pound her fists on those glass-paned frames until they shattered and the frail paper beneath tore into shreds. Because what use was art in the end? What use was anything ?

“Merry Christmas, Attila,” Grace March’s voice called from the other side of the door. “Are you in?”

Reka was sobbing too hard to tell her to go away.

“Reka?” The door pushed open and there was Grace, looking festive in a dark green skirt and scarlet sweater snugged over her full figure, holding a ribbon-wrapped bottle in one hand. “What on earth is wrong?” she said in her soft voice, coming in.

“Go away,” Reka choked.

Grace ignored her, nudging the door shut with one heel. “Maybe what you need is a dose of your Christmas gift,” she said, holding up the bottle. “ Pálinka —that brandy you Hungarians like, or so I’m told. Took me a while to hunt it down.” The sounds of rummaging issued from Reka’s little kitchenette, and then she came back with two glasses. “A touch of the Christmas blues?” she asked, then her gaze went wide as she got close enough to see the sketches on the floor. Framed, unmistakable, the same figures Reka had drawn on the Briar Rose Beauty Shoppe’s half-primed sign.

Reka made an ineffectual, far-too-late motion to push them under the bed.

“Oh, honey,” Grace said. “I hope you didn’t kill someone.”

Somehow that arrested Reka’s tears. It might have been a labored joke, a bit of hyperbole. But Grace’s eyes were calm, her gaze taking in the rest of the room in a single pragmatic flick as if checking for blood or some other sign of violence. “What would you say if I had killed someone?” Reka blurted, half horrified and half fascinated.

“That it generally takes two to hide a body.” Grace curled up on the floor beside Reka, neat as a cat. “Do you need help?”

You wouldn’t bat an eyelash if I did. This woman, Reka felt suddenly certain, understood something about violence. Understood enough to contemplate the prospect of it without turning a hair. This was the other side of Mrs.Grace March of 4B, behind the Iowa vowels and sun tea. Reka felt a flicker of admiration. If there was anything she appreciated in a person, it was unshockability.

Szar , was that even a word? It should be.

“I haven’t killed anyone,” she told Grace at last. What else she’d done, she wasn’t going to say.

“That’s good,” Grace said calmly, sipping pálinka . “So what on earth has you sobbing along to Bing Crosby on Christmas Day?”

Reka bolted a swallow of her own drink, wanting the burn. “I have these,” she said, indicating the three charcoal sketches. “But what else do I have?”

Grace made a gesture at the four walls, Briarwood House around them. “All this?”

“It’s not enough,” Reka cried out, knowing she sounded ungrateful. She was here, alive, when she could so easily be dead back in Berlin... But she still hurt. She hurt so much .

“What would be enough, Attila?”

Reka opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again, as the last thirty years flashed through her head. “Grace, I never thought I’d make it this far.”

They sat in silence as Bing Crosby gave way to Nat King Cole’s “Frosty the Snowman.”

“I think I hate Frosty,” Reka said, mopping her eyes. “I always hope someone will start chasing him around with a hairdryer.”

“I think I hate pálinka ,” Grace replied. “It tastes like rubbing alcohol with a touch of apricot.”

“It’s an acquired taste.”

“So is happiness, to some people.” Grace tilted her head, her gaze assessing, and Reka’s fingers suddenly itched for a stick of charcoal. The eyes were the feature to bring out, if you were drawing Grace March: a smudge of a face, a tumble of indistinct curls, all focusing around that tiger-cool gaze. “Try it,” she said at last.

Reka blinked. “Try what?”

“Happiness.” Grace rose, smoothing her skirt. “It’s a choice as much as anything. Or you could choose to be angry, and if you stay angry long enough, it will become comfortable, like an old robe. But eventually you’ll realize that old robe is all you’ve got, and there isn’t anything else in the wardrobe that fits. And at that point, you’re just waiting to trade the robe for a shroud—or at least, that’s what I’ve always thought.”

Reka stayed where she was, staring at the sketches. She was, she thought, a little bit hungry after all.

“Merry Christmas,” Grace said, and let herself out.

Reka’s Haluski

1 package egg noodles 8 strips thick-cut bacon 1 small green cabbage, sliced 1 medium onion, sliced 4 garlic cloves, minced Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Cook the egg noodles according to the package directions in salted boiling water until al dente. Drain and set aside, reserving 1cup of salty pasta water.

Set a large skillet over medium heat. Cook the bacon until crisp, then remove from the skillet and chop into 1 / 2 -inch pieces. Drain off a tablespoon of bacon fat if the skillet is very greasy.

Add the cabbage and onion to the skillet, and sauté for 5minutes. Add the garlic and sauté for another 5minutes. Once the cabbage is tender, add the cooked egg noodles and bacon to the skillet. Stir well, adding a dash of reserved pasta water to combine the flavors.

Season with salt and pepper, and eat on a cold winter day after the holidays, while listening to “Because of You” by Tony Bennett and His Orchestra.

“Hey, Mrs.Muller,” the tall Italian girl named Bea said as Reka came up to the fourth-floor landing. The usual Thursday-night noise spilled out of Grace’s apartment: Joe noodling at his guitar, Grace leaning out the window to call the stray cat named Red, Claire and Nora with their feet resting on the Great Dane as they debated whether Kirk Douglas or Stewart Granger was handsomer. “We didn’t think you were back from New York yet,” Bea continued, ruffling her short black hair.

“Back this morning,” Reka said, juggling a big steaming pot against her hip. “Is it brighter in here?” The landing had always looked dark and unwelcoming, but Grace had strung the new hall lamp with Christmas holly, and the walls looked lighter...

“I volunteered to repaint the hall,” Grace said, edging around Joe onto the landing behind Bea. “It turns out Doilies Nilsson doesn’t object to house improvements; she only objects to paying for them.”

“It’s pretty,” Reka admitted. A soft buttercream instead of stained off-white, and the flowered wall vine had climbed out of Grace’s apartment and was now making its way clear across the landing. “How’d you get her to agree to the vine?”

“I pointed out the flowers hide the cracks in the wall. She’s keen to cover up the fact that the house needs a carpenter.” Grace gave the wall a playful thump, and nodded to the pot on Reka’s hip. “What’s that?”

“Dinner.” Reka handed the pot over. “My turn to cook for the Briar Club.”

“I believe this might be the first time you’ve cooked for us, Attila,” Grace said, and Reka winced. It was, wasn’t it? Usually she just brought her one can of food in payment and ate as much as she could pack away.

Well, she was going to start taking her turn. Maybe even start adding her share of flowers to that vine, too. “I can’t stay tonight, but I thought I’d cook anyway. Haluski ,” Reka added gruffly. “Not quite the version you’ll find in Budapest, but still a fine meal for a cold night.”

“Aren’t you a five-tool neighbor after all, Mrs.M.” Bea beamed as Grace smiled and took the pot inside. Reka started to ask what on earth she meant, but Fliss squeezed into the doorway.

“Has anyone seen my pink scarf? I just put it down and now it’s disappeared— Oh!” the Englishwoman exclaimed. “Reka, you cut your hair!”

“In New York.” Reka smoothed the sharp-clipped ends of the bob swinging just below her ears.

“Well, it looks marvelous.” Fliss had the baby in her arms as usual, rocking and joggling. It’s the baby that would be her feature in a portrait , Reka thought. Somehow Fliss herself—her blond flip, her fluffy pastel skirts—disappeared behind that bundle of blankets in a pretty smear of maternal anonymity.

“Thank you.” Reka’s eyes landed on the smudgy yellow daisies someone—probably Bea, she always painted daisies—had dotted all over the wall vine in the hall. How was it that all those painted flowers, however badly daubed on by the Briar Club amateurs, seemed to harmonize somehow into the whole? Some magic there.

Maybe some of it would rub off on Reka.

Her room downstairs smelled of haluski , and it looked different. Every bit of furniture was shoved away from the windows, and she’d rolled the rug back. Reka had gone to New York with her three sketches, and they were still there, snugged up in a safe-deposit box taken out officially by Betty Parsons so nothing would show in her own name—and Reka had come back with something else. A few things, in fact: a low-slung easel, some artist’s pencils and chalk, some proper paper.

She stood looking at the easel. “This is a stupid idea, Otto.”

Maybe so , he agreed. Better than cocooning yourself in blankets and old bitter memories, édesem .

But bitterness, Reka thought, would be a hard habit to shed. She was still brimful of it, but she was feeling an itch as well—the itch to draw, to create, to make something even if it was only a badly sketched mess. She even knew what she wanted to draw: portraits, always her specialty. Start with her neighbors’ familiar visages, maybe linked by Grace’s wall vine... instead of blooming into flowers, it might bloom into abstract, color-blocked faces.

She stood there before the easel, sweating in the cold, terrified. Inspiration wasn’t enough; her painting muscles were old and atrophied. Useless, probably. She looked down at her newly sharpened pencils.

“Come on now,” she grunted, and prayed for a little courage.