Shadows of Berlin

4.

The Episode

Her shrink’s office is on the Upper East Side just past the planned site for the new Guggenheim Museum. The entrance is down a short flight of granite steps. An elegantly varnished door to a cellar office in a soapstone apartment house. A discreet brass plaque is fixed to the door. DAVID A. SOLOMON, MD, PSYD. Inside, the framed diplomas on his office wall confirm his degrees from Columbia and Harvard School of Medicine, a rare Ivy League accomplishment for a Jew of his generation. Also, a framed wartime certificate commissions “Lt. Col. David Albert Solomon” as a “Psychiatric Consultant of the First Service Command.”

He is supposed to be part of the solution, Dr. Solomon. The blinds are drawn, filtering light. It’s a well-­appointed space. Built-­in shelves crowded with books. Dr. Solomon is a balding, straight-­backed mensch with a gentlemanly beard fringing his jawline. He sits with a notepad on his knee, a quiet, thoughtful presence, yet he wields a probing gaze. Always trying to exploit the cracks in her story. Always trying to bore into the holes in her heart. He has good eyes, though, behind those horn-­rims. She does not dislike him, but of course neither does she trust him.

He maintains a calm posture. Nothing is ever rushed. Even his diagnosis sounds like a suggestion. Stress response syndrome. It’s a new category usually reserved for men mustered out of the army, where it was called battle fatigue and shell shock. But stress response syndrome? That doesn’t sound too terrible. “People have stress, and they respond to it” is what her husband has decided. “Who doesn’t?” he’d added. “You put a burger on a burner? It cooks. Turn up the heat? It burns.” She knows that this is how Aaron has learned to accept his bad luck at marrying a poor meshugana refugee from Berlin-­Wilmersdorf instead of the good Jewish girl from Flatbush that his mother had certainly envisioned for him.

After the Episode at the department store, her confinement to the madhouse is a blur of unreality. A harrowing remembrance of being locked up between gray walls facing a gray steel door. Later she would be informed that it was for her own protection, that she had been tied into a straitjacket. The suffocating nature of such helplessness, of such intimate imprisonment, is what pains her most. Sleeves fastened behind her back, her arms wrapped tightly around her body without her consent. The claustrophobia of a cocoon.

The blinds are drawn as they are always drawn in the doctor’s office. He fills the opposing leather club chair, but silence stands between them.

“So you have nothing to say today,” Dr. Solomon deduces.

The painting, she thinks. She sees it in her mind’s eye. The flush crimsons and scarlets of her mother’s palette. The luminous female gaze from the canvas, drilling into her. “Must I,” she wonders aloud, “always have something to say?”

“No. Not always.” And then he asks, “Did something happen?”

“Such as what something?”

“Something that has upset you?”

In her mind, she hears the whisper. Wo ist dein Stern, Liebchen?

Rachel replies to the doctor, “Not a thing.”

Dr. Solomon removes his horn-­rims and must rub his eyes as if rubbing away her obfuscation. “Rachel,” he says. He seldom speaks her name with such weight. “It seems to me that something has changed.”

“Really? Changed how?”

“In our discussions. Since I suggested that you start painting again, you’ve become more…” What’s the word he’s going to choose? “Resistant,” he tells her.

“No, Dr. Solomon. You’re wrong,” she says.

“Am I?” He slips his glasses back into place. “Still. I can’t but feel that there is something you’re avoiding. Something you’re denying, even to yourself.”

“That I’m crazy?”

“No. Sometimes I think you say things like that—­use the word ‘crazy’—­not as a provocation but more as a diversion.” And then he says, “There was a Dutch psychiatrist, after the war, named Eliazar de Wind. He’d been sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis, but he was one of the few who lived to be liberated. As a result of his experiences, he developed a theory that he called ‘KZ syndrome,’ describing the pathological aftereffects that often afflict those who endure such trauma.”

“But I wasn’t in a concentration camp, Doctor,” Rachel is quick to point out. “That was my mother. That was my uncle.”

“Regardless, I think my point applies. Think of your scrapbook of air disasters, Rachel. Think of your elevated levels of anxiety and depression. Your chronic nightmares. Your mood swings and loss of motivation. Even your breakdown at the department store. All these indicators suggest that you are suffering from what might be termed ‘the guilt of the survivors.’ Think of all those who died at the hands of the Nazis. Millions that we know of. Yet you did not. Why?”

For an instant, Rachel thinks he might be about to answer that question. Why? For an instant, Rachel believes he might be about to grant her some kind of absolution. Some psychological escape mechanism that will wipe the slate clean for her. But it turns out that all he has is the question itself. Why? A question to which she already knows the answer. Why? She survived because of her crime. The crime that saved her life.

No seats. Rachel is hanging again from a strap in the subway, her mind a jumble. Returning home, she is pursued by memories. Memories of Berlin. Memories of war. The noise of the lunchtime service at the Café Bollenmüller off the Friedrich. The accordion player, squeezing out “Du, du, liegst mir im Herzen.” Sitting with her mother, hoping for a roll and a cup of hot milk. The café is an enticement for Jews in hiding. U-­boats they are called. Submarine Jews on the run, who have submerged beneath the surface of the city in a bid to escape the transports east.

The Bollenmüller is a place they come to bargain for needed hiding places, black-­market rationing coupons, falsified identity papers. All such items are on the menu here, in addition to ersatz coffee and pastries baked from potato dough. But the U-­boats come also to escape the arduous life on the streets. To discreetly trade in gossip or simply settle quietly for a few precious moments and pretend. Pretend that they are still who they once were. Pretend that they can reinhabit their vanished lives just long enough to enjoy a fleeting respite from reality over a taste of Baumkuchen. But Eema is too anxious for that. And there is no money to waste on hot milk or a roll for her daughter.

Pulling into the 59th Street station, a seat opens up, and Rachel takes it. Beside her, a pair of well-­dressed middle-­aged women chat lightly. Their white-­gloved hands grip the handles of their shopping bags, each decorated by a spray of Bonwit Teller violets. Rachel inhales a wisp of Essence of Lilac, one of the favorite house scents at the perfume counter. On the morning of the Episode, she had spritzed herself with the same scent at home, the bottle an anniversary gift from Aaron that she’d picked out for herself. But she had been a tad too exuberant with it, and she smelled it on herself all day. All day and then all night, locked up in the bin like a dangerous animal, stinking of sweat and Essence of Lilac.

Even after a year, Rachel can relive the trauma of the event at will. She can call every moment into a fever of the present tense.

On the morning of the Episode, she is looking into the mirror above her vanity and asks Aaron about a scarf. It is a zebra print, this scarf, like the one she has seen Audrey Hepburn wearing in Vogue, and she has it loosely wrapped around her neck. But maybe it is too much for the sales floor at Bonwit Teller? They are supposed to be stylishly dressed, but not so stylish that they detract from the merchandise. So she asks her husband: Is it too much? He looks at her, his eyebrows raised in appraisal as he buttons his shirt cuffs, but all he has to offer is, “I dunno, honey. It’s a scarf. Looks fine to me.”

“You are such a fat help,” she declares crossly, whipping the scarf from her neck.

“A big help,” he corrects.

“What?”

“I’m such a big help.”

“No,” she says. “You are not.”

Riding the train into work, Rachel is still incensed that Aaron is so poorly equipped to live life with a woman. Displaying herself like a mannequin modeling the scarf, she had been willing to submit herself to his judgment, and yet he had carelessly shrugged her off. Simply tossed the opportunity into the trash like he was tossing the wadded remains of the mail into the wastebasket.

The front entrance of Bonwit Teller is a spacious, modern portico under a limestone deco facade that rises austerely twelve stories above the sidewalk. Flashing glass doors revolve like cylinders of light in the bright sunshine. But that’s for customers. Employees enter through a featureless door on 56th Street. The corridor is vivid with the sterile glow from the overhead fluorescents.

Rachel waits with the women queuing for their turn to punch in, listening to the mechanical ka-­thunk of the time-­clock stamp repeating itself in an assembly-­line rhythm. Ka-­thunk, stop, ka-­thunk, stop, ka-­thunk.

From the Fifth Avenue entrance, the grand dames themselves arrive to cruise the richly carpeted interior boulevards of the store. These are not the wily shoppers come to wrangle tooth and nail over bargains in Klein’s on Union Square. These are the ladies who have come to rack up towering charges to their accounts at the gleaming glass carousels of first floor fine jewelry and the perfume counters under the luminosity of ornamental chandeliers. These are the ladies who have come to lunch on watercress sandwiches in the Caffe Orsini, second floor, sip coffee from Italian demi-­cups as a pageant of shapely young models, their daughters’ age, parade the best-­selling creations of the Bonwit label for their perusal, fourth floor collections. These are the ladies who have come to consider their reflections in queenly mirrors, swathed in mink stoles and sable coats, second floor, West 57th Street wing.

On the sales floor, Rachel is covering for Suzy Quinlan—seventh floor, Miss Bonwit Jr.: junior dresses, junior sportswear, junior coats and accessories. Normally, Rachel works a different department: La Boutique, third floor bed and bath shop. But today, since they are so shorthanded with Gladys Mulberry down with a cold and Nancy Kirk having quit after her engagement, the floor walker, Mr. Bishop, has assigned Rachel to cover the section while Suzy catches a quick bite down in the store commissary. Rachel is busy refolding a white knit cardigan embroidered with pink and red roses. Such a sweet little sweater for a damsel in first bloom. Assez jolie. She feels the first pinch of heartbreak at this point yet ignores it.

When a customer appears, trailing a light mist of Yardley, she quickly summons her smile. The lady is obviously a regular by her air of imperial familiarity. She asks for Suzy by name but must settle for Rachel. She’s a slim specimen creeping toward the autumn of her life, wearing an azure silk blazer with snow-­white gloves. She’s looking for a little something as a gift. Just a little something for “my granddaughter, aged twelve,” the lady whispers, obviously unprepared for the news to leak that she could have reached such a grandmaternal age. She displays waxy bright lips that crinkle when she smiles. Hair expensively dyed, eyebrows erased and replaced by perfect penciled-­in arches. Obviously, a woman denying her age.

Rachel maintains her smile for the lady as she has coached herself to do. Even if she’s not on commission like the full-­time staff, she has learned to take satisfaction in the act of the transaction. Providing for customers’ desires permits her a feeling of utility that she seldom experiences otherwise. Certainly not when she opens her sketch pad or—­it shouldn’t happen!—­she is confronted by a blank canvas from the rack at Lee’s Art Shop.

So Rachel is happy to oblige, ready to suggest the freshly folded embroidered cardigan. An adorable choice, she calls it. Perfect for la jeune fille about to enter her première rougeur de féminité. The lady compliments her French. Votre français est très naturel, she tells Rachel. But the lady has a roving eye. Something else has caught her attention. “Oh, I like this,” she declares softly with an elevated chin, as if announcing the news to herself alone. It’s a beret. A simple thing. The lady has lifted it from the padded display stand and is modeling it for herself, boosting it aloft on her white-­gloved fingertips. She coos appreciatively. “Just darling. She’ll look si parisien, tu ne trouves pas? Tout à fait chérie!”

Yes, Rachel nods. Très charmante, such a thing. A burgundy beret. Eine burgunderrote Baskenmütze. Such a darling little thing. So stylish. So Parisian. And so vulnerable, a girl at that age. So very vulnerable to the world. So easily victimized. So easily extinguished.

Rachel doesn’t really remember what happens beyond that moment, once the Episode begins. The darkness floods her consciousness and scalds her heart. And then she sees the face. The innocent caramel-­brown eyes. The brunette braid and the burgundy beret. For so many years, she has kept the memory of this face submerged. Suppressed. Locked in an iron vault. Yet suddenly the past confronts her on the seventh floor of Bonwit Teller. The schoolgirl is there before her, conjured from the past, her velvety eyes staring out from death. Rachel feels the world turn on its ear. She hears the sound of shattering glass. Hears a scream that might be her own or might not be. Hears the lady shouting frantically. There’s blood splattering and a trembling pain shooting through her hand. That’s the last thing she remembers.

“Do you love your husbands, ladies?” This is the question posed by a sweetly smug voice on the radio. “If you do, then you should serve him only the finest of instant coffees, Imperial Blend. It’s freeze-­dried for a richer coffee taste!”

Gray light hangs outside the wrought-­iron fire escape over West 22nd Street like dingy, overbleached sheets clothespinned to a line. In honor of the reappearance of her mother’s work, Rachel has decided it’s best to destroy her own. Eema had always talked about her daughter’s God-­given talent, but again and again, the real lesson to be learned was that there was only room for one superior artist in the space between them, and it was never going to be Rashka. So Rachel has just set her latest shmittshik afire, lighting it from the stove burner and washing the remains down the sink. It made her feel good to burn it. A satisfying pain to see her own face turned to char. Eingeäschert is the word in German. Reduced to ashes.

Now she lights a cigarette to mask the smell of the burned paper as she hears the sound of Aaron’s key in the door.

“I got you the vegetable lo mein,” he announces as he enters, crossing to the kitchen table with the paper sack smelling of hot fish oils. He is wearing his Brooks Brothers overcoat and a felt Alpiner with the silk headband and a tufted feather. A narrow maroon necktie divides the crisp white of his shirt, and he’s smoking a cigarette. But his face is blotchy and tired. The end of the day, dealing with the Wednesday matinee crowd, dealing with Leo’s craziness, dealing with the help. The grindstone. The salt mines. The calamity before curtain time. That’s his joke. “You said to surprise you, right? So surprise.” His voice is drained. He removes his cigarette from his lips as he bends down to kiss her.

“Yuck,” she says.

“Yuck to the kiss or yuck to the lo mein?”

“The kiss. My husband tastes like an ashtray.”

“What a coincidence,” he says, screwing out his Lucky in the ashtray. “So does my wife.” He sets the paper sack on the kitchen table and starts to unload it. “Do we need plates?” he wonders. Sniffs at one of the cartons.

“Yes.” Rachel has opened the cabinet in the kitchen galley that stores plates and cups. “I hate eating from the containers. They drip.” She clunks the plates down on the table.

Aaron’s mother gave them this china as a wedding present. Eight place settings of Syracuse China dinnerware, the Edmonton Blue Old Ivory pattern, plus one sugar bowl and one creamer, the handle of which Rachel has already had to reglue. Nice, but nothing too fancy, and good enough for every day. “I’ve had the same set for fourteen years, and there’s hardly a chip,” her mother-­in-­law had assured her confidentially, as if Aaron would not possibly understand such intimately household matters, which was absolutely correct.

Rachel can recall an evening as a child in Berlin when a young scion of a poor but ennobled Viennese family was dining at their home. The young man had insulted Eema with his impertinence by turning over his dinner plate to examine the backstamp, as if he could hardly be expected to eat his dinner off any dish that did not bear a crown mark. Fortunately for all concerned, Eema’s porcelainware was Berlin KPM. Le Cabinet Hohenzollern.

“What did you get?” Rachel asks Aaron.

“The kung pao shrimp.” He’s opened his container and picks out a shrimp with his fingers, popping it into his mouth.

Setting down forks and paper napkins, she says, “So then you’ll be up half the night with a sour belly.”

“You know, my mother didn’t eat a single shrimp until she was thirty-­two years old,” Aaron announces. “And it wasn’t ’cause she kept kosher, either, ’cause she didn’t. She just grew up in Flatbush.” He pops another shrimp in mouth. “Who served shrimp on Utica Avenue?”

“And what if your mother saw her only son eating with dirty fingers? Go,” she shoos him lightly. “Wash.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Rachel removes a pair of water glasses from the shelf and plants them on the table. She is clinging to normal routine. Her normal paths of dialogue with Aaron. The jolting discovery of her mother’s painting knocked her off course. Home after the pawnshop, she had taken another two tablets of Miltown, off schedule. But instead of feeling balanced, she feels brittle. Vulnerable. The painting’s unwelcome incursion into the present has made her defenseless against the intrusion of her own past. It has ignited her memory of green eyes raw with feline hunger. The fiery red tresses. The monstrous beauty of a murderess.

Eema called her la muse du rouge.

A red-­haired feline, who possessed both la beauté de Vénus and le feu de Feronia. But her name was not divine. It was Rosen. Angelika Rosen. A pretty Jewish girl from the crooked streets of the Scheunenviertel, scarcely nineteen when she first stood posing on the dais in Eema’s studio, more slum-­born than foam-­born. And now the painting has emerged. That terrifying, mesmerizing portrait in oils on canvas, which until that morning had been lost to the bonfires of history. But now? Resurrected from its ashes. A phoenix in an ugly frame, held captive in a pawnbroker’s prison between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

Yet how can Rachel possibly ransom it? Fifteen dollars short. Fifteen dollars! And even if somehow dollars fall from heaven like manna and the painting drops into her lap, what then will she do with it? She can’t give it to Feter Fritz, because he’ll sell it to God knows who for either a minor fortune or a bag of subway tokens, depending upon the madness of his moment. But how can she herself dare keep it? Where will it go? In her closet? Under the bed? And then what? It stays there until the eyes slowly burn through the bedsprings and mattress and the bed goes up in flames? Rashka had been a dusky little five-­year-­old when it was painted. Dark-­eyed and dark-­haired. But even as a child, she had been captivated by those wavy red tresses and jealous of them. Jealous, too, of the intensity this maidel drew from her eema’s gaze. It’s easy to see the proof of that intensity in the painting, even after twenty-­some-­odd years. Maybe she can convince Aaron that she bought it from the Goodwill in the Village for twenty cents. Or better yet, found it abandoned on the sidewalk beside the trash.

Of course there is another solution. She can hear her own rage whisper from deep inside her, urging her to destroy it. It’s a whisper that wants to see it burnt. Reduced to ashes or torn to pieces. A whisper that presses her to slash it into ribbons with the butcher knife from the kitchen drawer. Wouldn’t that be justice? Though, for now, her guilt is stronger than this whisper. Her guilty devotion to her mother. Her guilty terror of the dead.

Aaron lathers his hands in the kitchen sink with the sliver of Ivory Soap while, for the umpteenth time, the radio is playing “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” prompting Aaron to break into song. “‘Day-­vee—­Day-­vee Crockett—­Took a dump on the wild frontier.’ I’m sorry I gotta turn this off,” he says. Snapping off the volume, he wipes his hands on a dish towel. “Any mail?”

Rachel plops the cardboard takeout containers on the plates. “A bill from the electric company and a bill from the telephone company.”

“The two biggest crooks in town.”

Rachel opens the refrigerator. The old Kelvinator often emits a dull, mechanical drone like it’s thinking too hard. “Will you have a beer?”

By now, Aaron has collapsed into his chair at the table. “Sure, why not?”

She snatches two Ballantine Ales from the back of the fridge with a light clink of bottles and brings them to the table, where she sits and uses the wood-­handled opener to pop the caps. She tries to settle herself into the streamlined mood that Miltown offers, but even after another eight hundred milligrams, the painting has stirred her. She feels her blood churn too recklessly, so she tries to center herself using Aaron as a touchstone, as she so often does. The regular guy, her husband, a boychik from Brooklyn, steady as a heartbeat. His face has filled out since they married. He’s lost the boyish leanness of his cheeks he possessed in pictures while he was in the service. Sometimes she spies on him as he checks his hair for threads of silver in the bathroom sink. It makes him so human and so vulnerable.

But does she love him? Does she love her husband, ladies? Yes. Or at least she loves much about him. The quietly invested way he reads the newspaper. That thick disorder of his curls right after he wakes. Yes, she loves those curls. The strength of his hands opening the unopenable jar of Vlasic Kosher Dill Spears. And she depends on him too. She knows this. She depends on his eccentricities. His tastes for salty and sour write her shopping list. His restaurant hours underpin her nights and days. She depends on his punchy wit, their snappy to-­and-­fro, and even their ongoing arguments to give her structure that helps her breathe evenly on a daily basis. She can imagine herself continuing to depend on him for the rest of her life, though there are times when she suddenly goes dead to his touch. When darkness overtakes her, and she knows that they will always be separate, regardless of how long they are together. It makes her want to flee. To escape it all. Aaron, the apartment, their furniture, the impossibly slow drain in the kitchen sink. Herself.

Yes. If she can just keep running, perhaps she can escape herself as well. Is such a thing possible?

“So,” Aaron says, busying himself opening the mail, ripping open the envelopes with his fingers. “You got to your whatchamacallit today, right?”

Spooning out a large helping of rice for Aaron, Rachel raps the spoon against his plate. “I don’t know. What is the whatchamacallit?”

“You know. Your appointment,” he says and frowns at a bill. He doesn’t like to speak the word psychiatrist aloud.

Spooning out a small helping of rice for herself with only a light tap of the spoon against her plate, she says, “You mean my appointment with the shrink?”

“Do you have to call it that?”

“What do you want me to call it?”

“I dunno. Call it whatever. I’m just asking is all.”

“Yes. I went,” she says. “I told you I would.”

“Okay, just checking up. If I’m gonna be laying out all this dough for him…”

She spoons kung pao shrimp onto Aaron’s plate. “Yes. You must get your money’s worth.”

Rachel spoons out her lo mein. “Do you want to use the chopsticks?”

Aaron waves them off with a shake of his head and uses his fork. Rachel decides on the cheap takeout chopsticks and stirs her food absently.

“So what happened with your uncle?” her husband wonders out loud.

Rachel sniffs, frowns lightly at her plate.

“I mean, you saw him for a coffee someplace this morning, didn’t ya?”

“Yes,” she answers as if confessing.

“So how’d it go?”

She clips a bite of the lo mein with her chopsticks and lifts it from the plate. “He doesn’t look so well,” she announces, causing a crease in her brow. “I’m not sure how he’s been eating.” She chews, swallows, not tasting.

Aaron sighs. “H’boy.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” he says and shovels in his food. “It’s only that I know what that means. How much is it gonna cost me this time?”

“That’s an ugly thing to say. Must you make him sound like a beggar?” Rachel despairs. “He’s the only family I still have.”

“Except for a husband and a whole mishpocha of in-­laws,” Aaron points out but then relents at the pained expression that strikes Rachel’s face. “Okay, okay. Sorry. Not the same thing, I know. Sorry I brought it up.”

“It’s not the same thing,” she confirms.

“All right, please,” he begs, frowning over the bill from Con Edison. “Let’s just have dinner, can we?” he says, chewing, then loudly tsks. “Aw, now will ya look at this?” he complains. “Four dollars and twenty-­two cents for what? Turning on a light bulb.”

But Rachel isn’t ready to relinquish the topic. “You didn’t have a single person from your family poisoned in a gas chamber.”

“I said I surrender, okay?” Aaron reminds her, his face blanching. “I know. I’m just the big American dope who doesn’t understand a thing. I get it. I spent the entire war in Culver City, while the rest of the world was going insane, and all I got to show for it is the Good Conduct Medal. So what do I know anyhow? I’m just a Jew from Flatbush.”

“Don’t say that. I hate it when you say that.”

“Well, it’s the truth,” he says, getting steamed. “Sorry to tell you.” Then he frowns down at his kung pao shrimp. “Don’t believe me? You can look at my birth certificate.”

Rachel’s eyes dampen, and she stirs her rice with the chopsticks absently. The oil gleams on the lo mein. “You don’t understand.”

“Yes, I think we’ve established that. Of course. The idiot husband doesn’t understand because you never tell him anything. It’s all some unspeakable thing, and anytime I dare mention a word about it, all I get is ‘You don’t understand.’”

“Because you don’t. You can’t.”

“And this is exactly what I mean! You shut me out. You say you hate when I say that I’m just a Jew from Flatbush, but that’s how you make me feel. Like some fucking schlemiel from the neighborhood.”

Rachel freezes up, glaring at the table. Aaron returns to his plate, scowling, sticking his fork into the rice, but she remains tightly contained.

“It’s the space heater,” she says.

Chewing. “What?”

“I get cold, so I bought the space heater. That’s why the electric bill is high.”

Aaron slumps, but his voice is charged. “Rachel, forget about the farkakteh electric bill, will you?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m so much trouble! I’m sorry I’m not somebody better. I’m sorry I’m only me. Only a worthless Stück!” she cries.

“And now you’re angry with me for no reason! I don’t know what I did or said or didn’t say to set you off, and I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Whattaya mean by ‘stuck’ anyway? I got no idea. It’s like this morning when I asked about your birthday, and suddenly ka-­boom.”

“It’s too much.” Rachel feels herself falling apart. “Too much,” she repeats. Ein Stück! A piece, the Germans called them. Less than a human. “Who cares about my birthday? You have to make a big tsimmis because a person turns another year older? There are plenty who didn’t, who never will. Who cares if I do?”

“Who cares? I care,” Aaron informs her. “I’m your husband, for god’s sake. And I think that your birthday should be a big tsimmis. Please. All I want to do is something nice for you. Why is that so frigging impossible?”

“You never wanted me to paint,” she suddenly declares, a full-­bore accusation that leaves Aaron looking confused, maybe constipated.

“I never what?”

She repeats the accusation but more slowly this time, so the Jew from Flatbush can understand. “You never wanted me to paint. You didn’t approve. You didn’t want a wife who was an artist. It was embarrassing for you,” she decides. “You wanted a wife like your mother was a wife, to cook and clean and be a hausfrau.”

A half cough at the shock. And then an angry expression screws up his face. “Well, if that’s true, I certainly didn’t get one, did I?”

“You see? That’s an admission.”

“No, it’s… I don’t know what it is. Where do these things come from? We’re sitting here at dinner and suddenly bang. I’m the guy who stopped you from painting.”

“But isn’t it true, Aaron?” she says, adopting a tone as if she wishes he could just confess it. Could just get it off his chest.

“No,” he answers firmly, fixing the word in place. “It is not true. I thought it was great that you were painting. I was sorry when you stopped, ’cause I knew how important it was to you.”

“I stopped because I went insane,” Rachel declares.

Aaron surrenders. “H’boy. I dunno how to answer when you say things like that.”

But Rachel has shut down.

Aaron huffs and shakes his head as he returns to the mail. Paper rustles over the silence. “Oh, for cryin’ out loud,” he whispers to the air. “Three dollars and twenty cents for that fucking toll call when Ma was down in St. Pete for Uncle Al’s funeral.” He pops another shrimp into his mouth with his fingers, sulking. “Crazy,” he pronounces glumly.

“I found one of my mother’s canvases,” Rachel quietly admits.

Aaron looks confused, as if she’s started speaking gibberish.

“You found who’s what?”

“One of my mother’s canvases. One of her paintings. Well, it wasn’t me who found it,” she corrects. “It was Feter Fritz. At a pawnbroker’s shop.”

Still, Aaron looks baffled, his expression squished. “Honey, whatever you’re saying, I’m just not following. Your uncle was at a pawnshop?”

“Yes. On West Forty-­Seventh Street.”

“Uh-­huh.” His expression is still compressed. Ready to judge such a ludicrous story. “And so there? There on West Forty-­Seventh Street, in the middle of New York City, he discovers a painting that your mother did how many years ago back in Germany? Decades ago? Is that the gist of it?”

“Yes.”

“Just like that. There it is. Boom.”

“Boom, yes.”

“A painting. Your mother’s painting—­that everybody thinks was destroyed—­reappears outta nowhere. And your uncle Fritz,” he says, as if the very name is greasy with larceny. “Your uncle Fritz happens to find it in a hock shop in Midtown.”

“Correct.”

“So how can that happen?” is what Aaron is trying to say. “How can that be true?”

“Because it is true,” she tells him. “I know it is because I saw it too.”

There’s a touch of the clucking chicken head tuck in the motion of Aaron’s chin jerk. It comes whenever he disapproves of what he’s just heard. “So,” he says, just to get this straight, “you were in this hock shop together?”

“No. Not together. I went afterward,” Rachel tells him and tries to enlarge her side of the feud. “It could be worth a minor fortune, Aaron.”

“Oh, really,” he replies, unconvinced. “ A minor fortune. Not a major fortune, but a minor one.”

“Feter Fritz knows of these things,” she defends. “He knows from what he speaks,” she tells him, thinking: especially when it comes to this painting. Especially when it comes to the portrait of Angelika Rosen. How Eema and he had sparred over the girl, the desired but unpossessable treasure. Even after decades, her uncle’s voice was still ripe with covetous greed. Not even five months in an Auschwitz barracks block quelled it. Astonishing, Rachel thinks. To still feel so deeply. To desire so feverishly.

“Ohhh,” her husband begins roundly. “I get it now. Feter Fritz says it’s worth a minor fortune. Oh, well then, it must be true, because God knows Feter Fritz is the trustworthy authority.”

“When it comes to art? Yes,” Rachel insists, but she knows she is losing this battle. “He is. He was one of the most sought-­after art dealers in Berlin. You know this!”

Aaron shakes his head. His voice softens, becomes conciliatory in a paternal fashion. “Honey, look. I know you’re fond of the old guy. More than fond. And I know he was a big shot once, a long time ago. I know,” he assures her. “But times,” he points out, “have changed. Can you argue with that fact?”

Rachel keeps her mouth closed.

“No. I didn’t think so. Anyhow, considering all that, I don’t know what you want me to do here,” he says.

And then the phone rings. It rings and rings again. Rachel does not move.

“So I guess we’re letting it ring?” Aaron observes. “Never mind. I’ll get it. It’s probably Abe telling me Leo took a whiz in the deep fryer.” He is up and crossing the room. She listens to him snap up the phone.

“Hello! Abe, for cryin’ out loud, I just got home!”

Rachel wipes a tear from her face covertly.

“Okay, okay,” Aaron is telling the receiver. “Okay, I get it. Tell Mr. Big Shot to keep his goddamn shirt on, will ya? I’m coming.” And hangs up heavily before he speaks the same sentence that he always speaks when called back to work, back to the grind, back to the salt mines: “So guess where I gotta go?” It’s a rhetorical question that he no doubt learned from his father, the late and long-­suffering Arthur Perlman, may his name be a blessing. The original Jew from Flatbush.