Nothing about her face, always open, always so easy to read, gives the faintest hint of a concealed purpose behind her request. Aging grandparents wanting a year of life with their grandson, or their grandchildren; eager to make up for all the years of neglect; hungry for reconciliation and family peace before their lives ended and they slipped into the True World. And as an added incentive, the concern of the Rebbe that the grandson receive a proper Ladover education. All the purest of innocence. Or is it the deepest of concealments, one about which she herself is not aware? Can motivations be so hidden that even the holder is ignorant of their force? What if she both knows and doesn’t know at one and the same time? What if the entire community knows and doesn’t know? The Rebbe, whom we all love, will soon remove himself to the True World. And afterward? What of afterward? Splinterings? Chaos? Who would lead? My father is the natural choice. But how long will he live? And after him? Again, God forbid, splinterings and chaos? Therefore, afterward, after my father: Avrumel. Then don’t give it to my father, give it to someone else, someone equally worthy. You would deprive your father of such a destiny? You would remove the line of your family from such a linking with the Master of the Universe? You are prepared to live with such a decision the rest of your life? Think of the pain you have caused your father. Personal redemption is now offered you, a tikkun, a balancing, a transforming, a healing, a repairing, for all that pain. Asher Lev, artist. Asher Lev, father of a Rebbe. A Ladover redemption and a Ladover immortality. And my mother knows nothing of all this, sees it nowhere within her, has it so deeply buried I can detect not a glimmer of it anywhere in her wide brown eyes, her high-boned cheeks, her long bony delicate fingers. She knows her way through the byzantine convolutions of Kremlin power, writes of the Soviet mind as if the Russians were our next-door neighbors, and yet does not perceive the hot bright core within the Rebbe’s request. Most destinies come to us in simple declarative or interrogatory sentences: “Let there be light.” “It is not good for man to be alone.” “Am I my brother’s keeper?” “Some time afterward, God put Abraham to the test.” “Asher’s bread shall be rich.” There is destiny in this simple question: “Will you consider sending Avrumel to the yeshiva here for the coming year?” A simple sentence. Like some of the drawings of the Spaniard. Simple—and boiling as a caldron of fiery stars. And my mother knows nothing of this? How is that possible? A riddle! She is either all innocence or all guile. But she is incapable of guile. All of her is visible on the surface of her. That was why I was able to see all the years of her suffering. That was the reason I painted the crucifixions. If she is lying to me now, then the crucifixions are a lie, all my own life these past twenty years, lived in the shadow of the crucifixions, has been a lie. No, she knows nothing of what is beneath the Rebbe’s suggestion about Avrumel.
“Does Papa know you’re talking to me about Avrumel?”
“No.”
“Let Papa talk to me.”
“I don’t know when your father will return.”
“Whenever he returns, let him talk to me.”
Her lips stiffen; her face locks, wilts. She looks at me a moment, as if to say something more, seems to think better of it, and sits back in the chair. Then she nods and slowly rises and leaves the terrace through the sliding screen door.
I stare through the greenish-black underside of leaves and branches at the hot white sky. In the insect-infested shadows of the sycamore stand Max Lobe and John Dorman, looking at me angrily, accusingly, in silence.
I close my eyes. “We’re on a different track here,” I tell them. “A different train, a different destination.”
“Then get off,” John Dorman says. “Sometimes it’s my train, too,” I tell them. But it makes no difference: they stand there in the shadows of the sycamore, looking at me.
Odors waft across the lawn: roasting meat, charcoal smoke. Afternoon summer sounds: indistinct voices, the song of a bird, the barking of a dog. I am alone in the house. Devorah is at a meeting. How solidly she has settled into the Ladover community, embracing it as family. Have I kept her from family all these years? There was no community on the Rue des Rosiers, and only Max and John in Saint-Paul. We had little to do with the glitter and pleasure seeking of Nice society. Max went to its parties, and sometimes John; mostly, we stayed home, me painting, Devorah writing and caring for the children. In our apartment on the Rue des Rosiers, she would sit up nights at the kitchen table, writing. She wrote her master’s thesis on the kitchen table of Max’s parents’ apartment—that once-sealed apartment—where she lived before we were married: “Vardaman’s Fish and Addie’s Coffin in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.” Accepted by the faculty of the humanities; special notice taken of her facility with the English language—a gift to her from Max’s mother, who, from the mid-twenties to the early thirties, had lived in New York, returning to her native France because of the havoc wreaked on the American branch of her family by the stock market crash and the Depression. Devorah wrote the thesis on those French pads that John disliked so much. Lately she has stopped writing. I’ve noticed that. She doesn’t talk about it. She would write every day. Now? Nothing, for weeks. A temporary halt, as with my painting? White canvas, white paper. Curious how white the sky is, heat pressing against it and bleeding it of color. A vast arc of white paper crushed by the burning air. The hottest summer in the one hundred and thirty years that the world has been keeping records. Catastrophes everywhere. News stories about the strange disappearance of fish in one-fourth of the lakes in the Adirondacks; forty percent of the counties in the United States drought-ridden disaster areas; floating sewage on long stretches of East Coast beaches; huge holes in the ozone layer. Disaster and apocalypse heralding the redemption. Sound the trumpets! And the Rebbe, he should live and be well, very tired now and ready to give a sign. Press the hot metallic world against the white paper of the sky and see if the sky yields new textures, new fields of vision, or cracks and shreds apart. Max working the carborundum process, his face sweaty with the effort; a new success for him; another triumph; more dealers made happy. And why not? He earned his triumphs during those years in that sealed tomb of an apartment. Buried alive. Alive and not-alive. And Devorah: alive and not-alive. No vision of the sky for two years. A grave. Max painting his way out of that grave; Devorah writing her way out of that grave. Devorah suddenly in a living community and the feeling of the grave now gone. Uncle Yitzchok in his grave has made it possible for Devorah to emerge from her grave. Ironic. Am I right, Uncle Yitzchok? Am I right? From the other side of the hedge that separates my parents’ house from the house of my aunt comes a rustling sound, and I think I see my uncle in the hedge, deep in the tangled cluster of thin branches and leaves, but no one is there. Beyond the hedge is his house and, a few doors down, the house of the Rebbe. Will my parents move into that house one day? The questions one thinks about! The sky is white, veined here and there with wispy threadlike pale-gray lines. Lucien carrying the large, heavy packs of white drawing paper up the five flights of stairs as I follow, my heart pounding. Thin and barely visible gray lines lacing the white surfaces of the paper. “What is the maître planning to draw on these? More pictures to trouble the world? The maître’s last drawings were formidable.” Sketches in oils went onto those sheets of paper until I saw the painting clearly and then put it on a huge canvas, Devorah watching in tense silence as I brought it to life, her astonished eyes telling me how much she disliked it; and my father showing up at the apartment during one of his trips through Europe for the Rebbe and staring in trembling anger and bewilderment at the finished painting, his face white, and saying, “What have you done? He did not kill him,” and I replying, “There is a midrash that states he did,” and my father saying, “But it is only a midrash. This is what you will show the world? Abraham slaughtering Isaac?” And I replying, “It’s how I feel about it.” And he finally excusing himself and leaving and never returning to that apartment all the rest of the time we lived there, because he was genui
nely fearful of what he thought he might find on my easels and walls. Uncle Yitzchok came to the apartment twice during diamond-buying trips in Europe, and once years later to our home in Saint-Paul a few weeks after Avrumel’s ritual first haircut at the age of three; he gazed in silence at the walls, puffed on his cigar, stayed overnight, and left the next morning, saying not a word about what he saw. Douglas Schaeffer came to the apartment on one of his periodic trips to his European artists and stared at the painting that had disturbed my father, murmured something about “your bloody devilish master-pieces,” and with Lucien’s help had it removed through the balcony doors and shipped to New York, where he called it The Sacrifice of Isaac—I had wanted to name it Legacy—and made it the centerpiece of my next show and sold it to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. I was glad to be rid of it. Why had I painted it? I don’t know. My eyes and hands painted it.
I am on the street outside my parents’ house, with no memory of how I got here. I have forgotten my sunglasses; the white light stings my eyes, bringing tears. The air is heavy with moisture. African jungle heat on the paved streets of New York. I turn into the wide traffic-choked street that leads to Brooklyn Parkway. The sidewalks are filled with bearded dark-garbed men, pregnant kerchiefed women, baby carriages. Gasoline fumes cloud the stagnant air. The bookstore is crowded. The food shops are jammed. It is the last Thursday of August; people are shopping for Shabbos. The parkway is dusty with construction. They are still working on the road—thready-muscled men in hard hats using massive equipment: bulldozers, asphalt scrapers, earthmovers, jackhammers—tearing up this stretch of the parkway to replace antiquated conduits and pave it anew. The rush-hour traffic crawls through the construction areas. I walk beneath the dusty trees and the white sky to the camp bus stop in front of the yeshiva to pick up Avrumel.
How weary he looks, strangely subdued, his T-shirt and shorts grimy, his sneakers mud-caked, his baseball cap battered. We walk together, he beside me, tense, his eyes to the ground.
“How was your day in camp?”
“It was all right, Papa.”
He is in a hurry, eager to get off the street. Unusual for him. Always he stops to look at the progress of the construction, the machinery, the new holes cut into the earth. Or something else catches his attention: the slow advance of an aged person across the width of the parkway; the faint rumble of the subway beneath our feet; a jetliner sailing by overhead; a booming radio in the hands of a lithely moving black teenager.
“Why are you in such a rush?”
“Want to talk to Shimshon.”
“Did something happen in camp today?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Something happened. What was it?”
“Nothing, Papa.”
“Avrumel.”
“A boy in my group was hurt.”
“Badly?”
“He fell with his mouth on a rock.”
A sudden sensation of ice on the backs of my knees. “Is he all right?”
“They called an ambulance and took him away.”
“How did it happen?”
“We were playing baseball.”
“Who was it?”
He gives me a name I do not recognize. “He is one of my friends. We all said a chapter of Psalms for him. There was a lot of blood.”
I put my arm around his thin shoulders. He feels deeply; too hard, perhaps. I want to hold him. At such moments he senses the edge of the blade that from time to time pierces the fabric, enabling us to catch a fiery glimpse of the Other Side, its black and boiling nothingness.
“Why did God do that to him?”
Another riddle. “I don’t know.”
“I will ask Grandfather when he returns.”
“Grandfather may not know, either.”
“Then I will ask the Rebbe.”
Nearly six years old. A frenzy of feeling.
“There was blood on the rock and the grass and all over the counselor.” He keeps his eyes on the ground. “I will ask the Rebbe. Will we see the Rebbe again soon?”
“I don’t know.”
“I want to talk with Shimshon, Papa. Can we go faster?”
We walk home quickly together. I get him a fresh T-shirt and shorts. As I throw the soiled clothes into the hamper, I see the caked blood in the dirt and grime and feel again the stiletto thrusts of coldness on the backs of my legs.
The house is quiet. We are home alone. I bring him a glass of milk and his favorite cookies. Later, I glance in the door of his room and see him sitting on the floor, talking softly to Shimshon. He tells Shimshon about the accident and listens for a moment. He nods and asks how such a thing could happen, and leans forward, listening. I do not hear Shimshon’s reply.
The heat continued into the next week: blazing rainless days, black swamp-air nights. A sulfurous haze settled over the city. On Monday I took the subway into Manhattan to see Douglas Schaeffer about the show and sensed everyone close to the edge, saw people talking to themselves on the streets. Douglas told me that three of my collectors had begun a bidding war on two of the drawings. A most pleasant way to begin the show, he said.
Afterward I came out of the gallery and walked through the sun and shade of Fifty-seventh Street and saw a show of small-scale canvases by the Spaniard, and a show of drawings by Jackson Pollock, one of them, the half man-half beast in the colored Psychoanalytic Drawing, looking as if it had stepped right out of the Guernica. There was a show of splendid unsettling drawings by Philip Guston: allegories of pessimism and doubt—old shoes, piles of junk, light bulbs, hooded men. In a show of drawings by Richard Diebenkorn, I marveled at the skill with which the artist put pieces together as in the most intricate of puzzles to achieve fragile balanced works. At the Pace Gallery, I stood a long time before a barely readable drawing by Malcolm Morley—tremulous, quivering lines—called Ghost Drawing of the Barcelona Cathedral.
I came out of the Pace into the sunlight. A block from the gallery, an old man with a dirty white beard lay very still in the middle of the sidewalk. He was dressed in torn brown trousers and a grimy shirt. A policeman and two uniformed men from a rescue squad were working over him. A small, silent crowd had formed. I stood amid the crowd and reached into a pocket for my drawing pad and made a swift sketch of the fallen man. His face was blackened with dirt above the line of his beard; his eyes kept darting about, wide with terror. That look of terror seemed to rise from him and hover in the poisonous air of the street, and from time to time I saw it in the crowded subway I rode back to my parents’ home.
Rocheleh returned from her camp that day. How lovely she looked: two months away and suddenly grown, the beginnings of womanhood touching her fragile being. She bubbled over with stories about the camp: a canoe trip along the Delaware; overnight cookouts in the woods; the friends she had made. The young woman who had been her division head was the daughter of the Bonrover Rebbe in Borough Park, a Brooklyn neighborhood crowded with Hasidic sects, not all of them friendly toward the Ladover Hasidim, whom they considered too hospitable toward modernism, too eager to evangelize, too quick to use the media, too adept at the trappings of contemporary communication, and therefore probably too prone to produce an Asher Lev. That young woman had been like a mother to her a week ago, Rocheleh said. During a sports competition, Rocheleh had participated in a swimming race, which she lost; immediately afterward she suffered a mild asthma attack, so mild the infirmary elected not to call us about it. The division head was with her all the time. Avrumel listened to his sister’s stories, pretended not to be interested, and held whispered conversations with Shimshon. Rocheleh spent a good part of her first evening home talking quietly with Devorah, and afterward Devorah told me, “Our daughter is grown,” and there were tears in her eyes.
Later that night, I was sitting at my desk with the drawing pad open, and Devorah was in her bed, reading, when someone tapped on our door. It was my mother. She was in her housedress; a kerchief covered her head. The Rebbe’s office had just call
ed, she said. My father was returning the following day from Israel.
The next afternoon, a hot windy dust-blown day, Baruch Levinson brought him in from the airport, and I stood in the doorway of the house with Devorah and Rocheleh and watched my mother and Avrumel hurry along the cement walk to the car, this one new and gleaming. My parents exchanged greetings but did not embrace, and Avrumel sprang forward and was suddenly in my father’s arms, hugging and kissing him, and my father held him and, singing a Ladover melody, did a little dance with him right there on the sidewalk in front of the house and in the presence of neighbors who had come out to greet him. I glanced at Devorah, and she caught my eyes and looked at me a moment, troubled, and looked away. Baruch Levinson brought my father’s bags into the house, said to me cheerfully, “Have a nice day,” got into the car, and drove off.
We ate supper quickly and my father went to his office and returned after Devorah and I had gone to bed. I did not hear him come in. The next day he left for his office directly from the synagogue. I took the subway to the warehouse in lower Manhattan where Douglas Schaeffer had stored my uncle’s art collection.
In a large, clean, brightly lit, temperature-controlled room, I stood looking at the canvases and drawings and prints arranged for me against white walls by white-garbed workers. The books he had collected were there, too, as were the magazines, scholarly monographs, articles, and notices of my openings through the years. There was my first carborundum print, the one I had worked on with Jacob Kahn in Paris nearly twenty years before and of which the bon à tirer was now in the collection of the widow of Lucien Lacamp, who had written to Douglas Schaeffer, informing him she intended to hold on to it and telling him how astonished and full of thanks she was for the kindness of Asher Lev. All I could think of when Douglas told me about the letter the previous morning was Lucien climbing the stairs to my apartment with the artist’s proofs of my first carborundum print and Lucien helping me carry Rocheleh through the rainstorm to the hospital and Lucien blown to pieces by the bomb in the restaurant on the Rue des Rosiers.