Chapter3 - 3

“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.”