Chapter 3 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—”