We Never Talk About My Brother Read online

  “She’s an angel,” Uncle Chaim said.

  “That’s not what I asked. Angels are all supposed to be beautiful, right? Beyond words, beyond description, the works. So?” He smiled serenely at Uncle Chaim over his folded hands.

  Uncle Chaim took so long to answer him that Jules actually waved a hand directly in front of his eyes. “Hello? Earth to Malakoff—this is your wakeup call. You in there, Chaim?”

  “I’m there, I’m there, stop with the kid stuff.” Uncle Chaim flicked his own fingers dismissively at his friend’s hand. “Jules, all I can tell you, I never saw anyone looked like her before. Maybe that’s beauty all by itself, maybe it’s just novelty. Some days she looks eleven thousand years old, like she says—some days... some days she could be younger than Duvidl, she could be the first child in the world, first one ever.” He shook his head helplessly. “I don’t know, Jules. I wish I could ask Rembrandt or somebody. Vermeer. Vermeer would know.”

  Strangely, of the small corps of visitors to the studio—old painters like himself and Jules, gallery owners, art brokers, friends from the neighborhood—I seemed to be the only one who ever saw the blue angel as anything other than one of his unsought acolytes, perfectly happy to stretch canvases, make sandwiches and occasionally pose, all for the gift of a growled thanks and the privilege of covertly studying him at work. My memory is that I regarded her as a nice-looking older lady with wings, but not my type at all, I having just discovered Alice Faye. Lauren Bacall, Lizabeth Scott and Lena Horne came a bit later in my development.

  I knew she was an angel. I also knew better than to tell any of my own friends about her: we were a cynical lot, who regularly got thrown out of movie theatres for cheering on the Wolfman and booing Shirley Temple and Bobby Breen. But I was shy with the angel, and—I guess—she with me, so I can’t honestly say I remember much either in the way of conversation or revelation. Though I am still haunted by one particular moment when I asked her, straight out, “Up there, in heaven—do you ever see Jesus? Jesus Christ, I mean.” We were hardly an observant family, any of us, but it still felt strange and a bit dangerous to say the name.

  The blue angel turned from cleaning off a palette knife and looked directly at me, really for the first time since we had been introduced. I noticed that the color of her wings seemed to change from moment to moment, rippling constantly through a supple spectrum different from any I knew; and that I had no words either for her hair color, or for her smell. She said, “No, I have never seen him.”

  “Oh,” I said, vaguely disappointed, Jewish or not. “Well—uh—what about his mother? The—the Virgin?” Funny, I remember that that seemed more daringly wicked than saying the other name out loud. I wonder why that should have been.

  “No,” the angel answered. “Nor,”—heading me off—“have I ever seen God. You are closer to God now, as you stand there, than I have ever been.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. She kept looking at me, but did not reply. I said, “I mean, you’re an angel. Angels live with God, don’t they?”

  She shook her head. In that moment—and just for that moment—her richly empty face showed me a sadness that I don’t think a human face could ever have contained. “Angels live alone. If we were with God, we would not be angels.” She turned away, and I thought she had finished speaking. But then she looked back quite suddenly to say, in a voice that did not sound like her voice at all, being lower than the sound I knew, and almost masculine in texture, “Dark and dark and dark... so empty... so dark....”

  It frightened me deeply, that one broken sentence, though I couldn’t have said why: it was just so dislocating, so completely out of place—even the rhythm of those few words sounded more like the hesitant English of our old Latvian rabbi than that of Uncle Chaim’s muse. He didn’t hear it, and I didn’t tell him about it, because I thought it must be me, that I was making it up, or I’d heard it wrong. I was accustomed to thinking like that when I was a boy.

  “She’s got like a dimmer switch,” Uncle Chaim explained to Aunt Rifke; they were putting freshly washed sheets on the guest bed at the time, because I was staying the night to interview them for my Immigrant Experience class project. “Dial it one way, you wouldn’t notice her if she were running naked down Madison Avenue at high noon, flapping her wings and waving a gun. Two guns. Turn that dial back the other way, all the way... well, thank God she wouldn’t ever do that, because she’d likely set the studio on fire. You think I’m joking. I’m not joking.”

  “No, Chaim, I know you’re not joking.” Rifke silently undid and remade both of his attempts at hospital corners, as she always did. She said, “What I want to know is, just where’s that dial set when you’re painting her? And I’d think a bit about that answer, if I were you.” Rifke’s favorite cousin Harvey, a career social worker, had recently abandoned wife and children to run off with a beautiful young dope dealer, and Rifke was feeling more than slightly edgy.

  Uncle Chaim did think about it, and replied, “About a third, I’d say. Maybe half, once or twice, no more. I remember, I had to ask her a couple times, turn it down, please—go work when somebody’s glowing six feet away from you. I mean, the moon takes up a lot of space, a little studio like mine. Bad enough with the wings.”

  Rifke tucked in the last corner, smoothed the sheet tight, faced him across the bed and said, “You’re never going to finish this one, are you? Thirty-seven years, I know all the signs. You’ll do it over and over, you’ll frame it, you’ll hang it, you’ll say, okay, that’s it, I’m done—but you won’t be done, you’ll just start the whole thing again, only maybe a different style, a brighter palette, a bigger canvas, a smaller canvas. But you’ll never get it the way it’s in your head, not for you.” She smacked the pillows fluffy and tossed them back on the bed. “Don’t even bother arguing with me, Malakoff. Not when I’m right.”

  “So am I arguing? Does it look like I’m arguing?” Uncle Chaim rarely drank at home, but on this occasion he walked into the kitchen, filled a glass from the dusty bottle of grappa, and turned back to his wife. He said very quietly, “Crazy to think I could get an angel right. Who could paint an angel?”

  Aunt Rifke came to him then and put her hands on his shoulders. “My crazy old man, that’s who,” she answered him. “Nobody else. God would know.”

  And my Uncle Chaim blushed for the first time in many years. I didn’t see this, but Aunt Rifke told me.

  Of course, she was quite right about that painting, or any of the many, many others he made of the blue angel. He was never satisfied with any of them, not a one. There was always something wrong, something missing, something there but not there, glimpsed but gone. “Like that Chinese monkey trying to grab the moon in the water,” Uncle Chaim said to me once. “That’s me, a Chinese monkey.”

  Not that you could say he suffered financially from working with only one model, as the angel had commanded. The failed portraits that he lugged down to the gallery handling his paintings sold almost instantly to museums, private collectors and corporations decorating their lobbies and meeting rooms, under such generic titles as Angel in the Window, Blue Wings, Angel with Wineglass, and Midnight Angel. Aunt Rifke banked the money, and Uncle Chaim endured the unveilings and the receptions as best he could—without ever looking at the paintings themselves—and then shuffled back to his studio to start over. The angel was always waiting.

  I was doing my homework in the studio when Jules Sidelsky visited at last, lured there by other reasons than art, beauty or deity. The blue angel hadn’t given up the notion of acting as Uncle Chaim’s muse, but never seemed able to take it much beyond making a tuna salad sandwich, or a pot of coffee (at which, to be fair, she had become quite skilled), summoning music, or reciting the lost works of legendary or forgotten poets while he worked. He tried to discourage this habit; but he did learn a number of Shakespeare’s unpublished sonnets, and was able to write down for Jules three poems that drowned with Shelley off the Livorno coast. “
Also, your boy Pushkin, his wife destroyed a mess of his stuff right after his death. My girl’s got it all by heart, you believe that?”

  Pushkin did it. If the great Russian had been declared a saint, Jules would have reported for instruction to the Patriarch of Moscow on the following day. As it was, he came down to Uncle Chaim’s studio instead, and was at last introduced to the blue angel, who was as gracious as Jules did his bewildered best to be. She spent the afternoon declaiming Pushkin’s vanished verse to him in the original, while hovering tirelessly upside down, just above the crossbar of a second easel. Uncle Chaim thought he might be entering a surrealist phase.

  Leaving, Jules caught Uncle Chaim’s arm and dragged him out his door into the hot, bustling Village streets, once his dearest subject before the coming of the blue angel. Uncle Chaim, knowing his purpose, said, “So now you see? Now you see?”

  “I see.” Jules’s voice was dark and flat, and almost without expression. “I see you got an angel there, all right. No question in the world about that.” The grip on Uncle Chaim’s arm tightened. Jules said, “You have to get rid of her.”

  “What? What are you talking about? Just finally doing the most important work of my life, and you want me...?” Uncle Chaim’s eyes narrowed, and he pulled forcefully away from his friend. “What is it with you and my models? You got like this once before, when I was painting that Puerto Rican guy, the teacher, with the big nose, and you just couldn’t stand it, you remember? Said I’d stolen him, wouldn’t speak to me for weeks, weeks, you remember?”

  “Chaim, that’s not true—”

  “And so now I’ve got this angel, it’s the same thing—worse, with the Pushkin and all—”

  “Chaim, damn it, I wouldn’t care if she were Pushkin’s sister, they played Monopoly together—”

  Uncle Chaim’s voice abruptly grew calmer; the top of his head stopped sweating and lost its crimson tinge. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Jules. It’s not I don’t understand, I’ve been the same way about other people’s models.”

  He patted the other’s shoulder awkwardly. “Look, I tell you what, anytime you want, you come on over, we’ll work together. How about that?”

  Poor Jules must have been completely staggered by all this. On the one hand he knew—I mean, even I knew—that Uncle Chaim never invited other artists to share space with him, let alone a model; on the other, the sudden change can only have sharpened his anxiety about his old friend’s state of mind. He said, “Chaim, I’m just trying to tell you, whatever’s going on, it isn’t good for you. Not her fault, not your fault. People and angels aren’t supposed to hang out together—we aren’t built for it, and neither are they. She really needs to go back where she belongs.”

  “She can’t. Absolutely not.” Uncle Chaim was shaking his head, and kept on shaking it. “She got sent here, Jules, she got sent to me—”

  “By whom? You ever ask yourself that?” They stared at each other.

  Jules said, very carefully, “No, not by the Devil. I don’t believe in the Devil any more than I believe in God, although he always gets the good lines. But it’s a free country, and I can believe in angels without swallowing all the rest of it, if I want to.” He paused, and took a gentler hold on Uncle Chaim’s arm. “And I can also imagine that angels might not be exactly what we think they are. That an angel might lie, and still be an angel. That an angel might be selfish—jealous, even. That an angel might just be a little bit out of her head.”

  In a very pale and quiet voice, Uncle Chaim said, “You’re talking about a fallen angel, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know what I’m talking about,” Jules answered. “That’s the God’s truth.” Both of them smiled wearily, but neither one laughed. Jules said, “I’m dead serious, Chaim. For your sake, your sanity, she needs to go.”

  “And for my sake, she can’t.” Uncle Chaim was plainly too exhausted for either pretense or bluster, but there was no give in him. He said, “Landsmann, it doesn’t matter. You could be right, you could be wrong, I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter. There’s no one else I want to paint anymore—there’s no one else I can paint, Jules, that’s just how it is. Go home now.” He refused to say another word.

  In the months that followed, Uncle Chaim became steadily more silent, more reclusive, more closed-off from everything that did not directly involve the current portrait of the blue angel. By autumn, he was no longer meeting Jules for lunch at the Ukrainian restaurant; he could rarely be induced to appear at his own openings, or anyone else’s; he frequently spent the night at his studio, sleeping briefly in his chair, when he slept at all. It had been understood between Uncle Chaim and me since I was three that I had the run of the place at any time; and while it was still true, I felt far less comfortable there than I was accustomed, and left it more and more to him and the strange lady with the wings.

  When an exasperated—and increasingly frightened—Aunt Rifke would challenge him, “You’ve turned into Red Skelton, painting nothing but clowns on velvet—Margaret Keane, all those big-eyed war orphans,” he only shrugged and replied, when he even bothered to respond, “You were the one who told me I could paint an angel. Change your mind?”

  Whatever she truly thought, it was not in Aunt Rifke to say such a thing to him directly. Her only recourse was to mumble something like, “Even Leonardo gave up on drawing cats,” or “You’ve done the best anybody could ever do—let it go now, let her go.” Her own theory, differing somewhat from Jules’s, was that it was as much Uncle Chaim’s obsession as his model’s possible madness that was holding the angel to earth.

  “Like Ella and Sam,” she said to me, referring to the perpetually quarrelling parents of my favorite cousin Arthur. “Locked together, like some kind of punishment machine. Thirty years they hate each other, cats and dogs, but they’re so scared of being alone, if one of them died,”—she snapped her fingers—“the other one would be gone in a week. Like that. Okay, so not exactly like that, but like that.” Aunt Rifke wasn’t getting a lot of sleep either just then.

  She confessed to me—it astonishes me to this day—that she prayed more than once herself, during the worst times. Even in my family, which still runs to atheists, agnostics and cranky anarchists, Aunt Rifke’s unbelief was regarded as the standard by which all other blasphemy had to be judged, and set against which it invariably paled. The idea of a prayer from her lips was, on the one hand, fascinating—how would Aunt Rifke conceivably address a Supreme Being?—and more than a little alarming as well. Supplication was not in her vocabulary, let alone her repertoire. Command was.

  I didn’t ask her what she had prayed for. I did ask, trying to make her laugh, if she had commenced by saying, “To Whom it may concern....”

  She slapped my hand lightly. “Don’t talk fresh, just because you’re in fifth grade, sixth grade, whatever. Of course I didn’t say that, an old Socialist Worker like me. I started off like you’d talk to some kid’s mother on the phone, I said, ‘It’s time for your little girl to go home, we’re going to be having dinner. You better call her in now, it’s getting dark.’ Like that, polite. But not fancy.”

  “And you got an answer?” Her face clouded, but she made no reply.

  “You didn’t get an answer? Bad connection?” I honestly wasn’t being fresh: this was my story too, somehow, all the way back, from the beginning, and I had to know where we were in it. “Come on, Aunt Rifke.”

  “I got an answer.” The words came slowly, and cut off abruptly, though she seemed to want to say something more. Instead, she got up and went to the stove, all my aunts’ traditional querencia in times of emotional stress. Without turning her head, she said in a curiously dull tone, “You go home now. Your mother’ll yell at me.”

  My mother worried about my grades and my taste in friends, not about me; but I had never seen Aunt Rifke quite like this, and I knew better than to push her any further. So I went on home.

  From that day, however, I made a new point of stopping by the studio l
iterally every day—except Shabbos, naturally—even if only for a few minutes, just to let Uncle Chaim know that someone besides Aunt Rifke was concerned about him. Of course, obviously, a whole lot of other people would have been, from family to gallery owners to friends like Jules and Ruthie; but I was ten years old, and feeling like my uncle’s only guardian, and a private detective to boot. A guardian against what? An angel? Detecting what? A portrait? I couldn’t have said for a minute, but a ten-year-old boy with a sense of mission definitely qualifies as a dangerous flying object.

  Uncle Chaim didn’t talk to me anymore while he was working, and I really missed that. To this day, almost everything I know about painting—about being a painter, every day, all day—I learned from him, grumbled out of the side of his mouth as he sized a canvas, touched up a troublesome corner, or stood back, scratching his head, to reconsider a composition or a subject’s expression, or simply to study the stoop of a shadow. Now he worked in bleak near-total silence; and since the blue angel never spoke unless addressed directly, the studio had become a far less inviting place than my three-year-old self had found it. Yet I felt that Uncle Chaim still liked having me there, even if he didn’t say anything, so I kept going, but it was an effort some days, mission or no mission.

  His only conversation was with the angel—Uncle Chaim always chatted with his models; paradoxically, he felt that it helped them to concentrate—and while I honestly wasn’t trying to eavesdrop (except sometimes), I couldn’t help overhearing their talk. Uncle Chaim would ask the angel to lift a wing slightly, or to alter her stance somewhat: as I’ve said, sitting remained uncomfortable and unnatural for her, but she had finally been able to manage a sort of semi-recumbent posture, which made her look curiously vulnerable, almost like a tired child after an adult party, playing at being her mother, with the grownups all asleep upstairs. I can close my eyes today and see her so.