The Muralist: A Novel

by B. A. Shapiro

  BL: Once?

  LK: Well, not really. But there was another influence I didn’t mention, Alizée Benoit, a true talent. Her work had a huge effect on all of us. Especially her ideas about transformation, about pulling the abstract into the real. And about the big canvas.

  BL: Never heard of her.

  LK: She disappeared in 1940.

  BL: What do you mean, disappeared?

  LK: (sighs) She went to a sanatorium for a rest—one where more than a few of the gang ended up at different times—and never came back.

  BL: And her work?

  LK: Also gone. A real loss.

  BL: (hesitates) That’s too bad, but let’s get back to the people we do know about, you and your friends. I’m really curious about how it all worked. The cauldron, so to speak, that started a movement. Who was at . . .

  17

  ALIZÉE, 1939

  8 October 1939

  Arles

  Ma petite soeur,

  This is a very difficult letter to write. Two nights ago three policemen came to the house and arrested Oncle. They said he’d been fired from university and was being detained because he was teaching communist propaganda in his American literature class. Apparently he was discussing Call of the Wild and An American Tragedy. When he told them the books had nothing to do with communism, they sneered, put him in handcuffs, and took him away.

  Tante called and we went directly to the police station. There they pretended to know nothing about his arrest, but one of the policemen who I recognized from l’école told me Oncle was already on his way to Drancy. We had no idea why they would send him to a tiny village outside of Paris but have come to learn a camp d’accueil is located there. I will go as soon as my shift ends tomorrow.

  We have heard of many cases in which people are arrested with no basis and are let free after a few days, and hope this will be the case. Maybe by the time you are reading this Oncle will be home safe with Tante and Alain. She will send a telegram as soon as this happens.

  I know I should try to cheer you with lighthearted stories, but I cannot think of any. As you can see, things are growing more dire here. Please try to get the visas as soon as possible. Leaving France and the rest of the continent is getting more difficult every day.

  I have received only one letter from you since June, and Oncle and Tante have received none. In the one dated August 15, you said you weren’t receiving mine either, so I do not know if this will ever reach you. Tante mailed one yesterday with this same news, and I am sending this with a friend who is going to England. He will mail it from there.

  Ton frère qui t’aime,

  Henri

  The letter fluttered to the floor. Camps d’accueil? What did that mean? A reception camp? A euphemism for something much more grim, she was sure. Oncle arrested for being a communist? Another euphemism.

  She paced in large circles around her flat, touching a canvas, a cluster of paintbrushes, the table, a chair. She needed to be sure the objects were real, solid and tangible, because nothing else seemed to be. She herself felt ephemeral, not of the world. Or not of a world she recognized. Arresting a professor for teaching literature?

  She picked up the letter and studied the hands holding it. The fingers were different. Someone else’s? They were thinner and longer, more clawlike than hers. When had this happened? She held up the hand mirror sitting next to the sink and cried out. Maman was staring back at her.

  Of course it wasn’t Maman, whom she resembled, it was her own reflection. She was not going to allow herself to succumb to fear. It was not going to happen again. It was not. Could not. She splashed water on her face and went to the drugstore to call Gideon. He agreed to meet her at a bar on the Lower East Side, near his apartment.

  The bar was a hovel within a labyrinth of narrow streets that made her neighborhood seem well appointed. She’d never been in this area before and wasn’t planning on coming back anytime soon. As she told Gideon what had happened, she ran Maman’s ring up and down its chain. Oncle in handcuffs. In prison. Or worse. She fought back the images. “Do you know of any way to help him?” she begged. “Anyone who might know how?”

  “I’ve heard about this,” Gideon said. “French Jews arrested on trumped-up charges. But I’ve also heard they aren’t being held long. It’s not Germany, after all,” he added, then checked himself. “At least not yet.”

  “I need your help,” she said, the words not yet reverberating in her ears. “We have to get him out. Right away.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be home in a few days. Like I said, it’s the French police, not the Nazis. But even if he isn’t, I wouldn’t have any idea how to go about it. The resources for that kind of thing are completely different from those that ANL—”

  “But we have to,” she protested. “He’s not the kind of man who can survive long under those—”

  “I’m sorry about your uncle, you know I am, but we’re a political organization. In the United States. Committed to finding political solutions to political problems, not personal ones.”

  “But this is a political problem,” she argued. “He wasn’t arrested for personal reasons. He was arrested because he’s Jewish.”

  Gideon shook his head, but his eyes were full of compassion.

  “Couldn’t you make an exception?” she begged. “They might . . . they might . . . You never know what they might do to him. He’s got a young son. A wife . . .”

  “I’m sorry, Alizée, really sorry, but I wouldn’t know how to go about it. And anyway, we can’t be about a single individual.” He placed his hand over hers. “As terrible this is for you and your family, ANL can’t be diverted. We’ve got to stay focused on what we know how to do, what we do best.”

  When she left the bar, Alizée headed west toward the Emergency Rescue Commission office to speak with Mr. Fleishman again; the ERC was trying to help individual people. She pulled her coat tightly around her as she made her way along the shabby blocks filled with even shabbier people. Pushcarts filled the streets and the sidewalks, blocking store entrances and forcing her, as well as a stream of other pedestrians, onto the cobblestones to fight for balance while watching for horse droppings.

  If only someone had killed Hitler years ago . . . If only her paintings were selling . . . If only she had money to give Mr. Fleishman toward the visas . . . If only that graduate student hadn’t left the gas open on the Bunsen burner in the lab . . . But after so many years of “if onlys,” she knew these thoughts were pointless.

  Out of the dreariness, Judy Garland smiled luminously from a theater marquee, beckoning viewers to The Wizard of Oz. If only she had twenty-three cents to lose herself in a movie . . . A newspaper boy ran by, calling out the news. “Dutch passenger ship hits German mine! Sixty-nine dead! SS Simon Bolivar sinks. Sixty-nine dead!”

  Amid the cacophony, she noticed a storefront. UNCLE JOHN’S PAWN SHOP: YOU CAN PAWN ANYTHING FROM A SHOESTRING TO A LOCOMOTIVE. She stopped on the sidewalk. A man bumped into her, swore under his breath, then moved on. She stayed where she was.

  Handwritten flyers were splattered on the windows. BUY & SELL & LOAN; CASH FOR DIAMONDS, SILVER & GOLD; HIGHEST $$$ PAID FOR ANYTHING OF VALUE. Behind the signs were racks of guns and musical instruments, shelves laden with radios, silver tea services, tools, cameras, and just about everything else.

  She pulled her mother’s engagement ring forward and looked at it. Closed it inside her fist. How many times had she heard the story of her father, all awkward and blushing, pushing the ring box into her mother’s hand and disappearing into the restaurant’s bathroom before she could open it? It was all she had of Maman. Of Papa, too.

  “Vienna must be ‘Jew-free’ by March 1!” another newsboy cried. “Four thousand Jews sent to reservations in Poland!”

  She crossed the street and entered the store.

  18

  MARK

  Mark and Edith had split up three times during their seven years of marriage. The most recent separation bega
n the previous spring when Edith, furious that he wasn’t making more money, told him if he couldn’t contribute to the rent, he couldn’t live in the apartment. It was now early November, and he hadn’t returned since. Edith was always peeved at something, usually at him, and he didn’t think he could stomach listening to her complain about how Macy’s and Gimbels were taking too large a cut from the jewelry she sold there.

  The problem with Edith, one of the many problems with Edith, was that she always wanted things. She wanted a toaster. She wanted a couch. She wanted to live in a larger apartment that wasn’t above a synagogue. He thought about Alizée’s sparse apartment without a bathroom or hot water and felt a rush of tenderness for her. Edith wanted him to wash the dishes. She wanted him to iron his shirt. She wanted him to help her sell her jewelry instead of working on his painting. The bohemian artist he’d fallen in love with, the girl who’d gloried in their relaxed, unconventional life together, had transformed into a middle-class nag.

  Not that he didn’t sometimes need nagging. It was just the relentless constancy of it. She’d been aware he was an artist when she married him. Hell, she once was an artist herself. But now that her aesthetic sensibilities had turned commercial, she expected him to follow suit. Something he wasn’t prepared to do. Ever. He couldn’t imagine Alizée considering such a thing. It would be as blasphemous to her as it was to him.

  Mark wouldn’t even be here now if he hadn’t been inspired by Alizée’s reversal paintings. He wanted to try something like them, although focused on the emergence of form and color rather than objects. The problem was that all his failed canvases were stored in their apartment, and Edith both lived and worked there, the back room given over to her business. He knew she preferred to design jewelry early in the day and make sales calls in the afternoon, so it was two o’clock when he climbed the crumbling granite stairs of the dilapidated brownstone on the Lower East Side. He hoped she hadn’t changed the locks.

  “Mr. Rothkowitz!” a voice called up to him. “It’s so nice to see you again.”

  Mark turned and smiled at the sight of the tall, thin man at the bottom of the stairs. They had enjoyed many conversations, sitting on the stoop, discussing philosophy, art, and to Mark’s surprise, physics. Rabbi Fuchs was a brilliant man. “Rebbe,” he said. “Nice to see you, too.”

  “You are here on a Friday, Mr. Rothkowitz.” The rabbi’s blue eyes were playful. “Does that mean you’ll join us for Shabbat services this evening?”

  Mark grinned. This was a game they’d been playing since he moved into the building, including the part where the rabbi referred to him by the name he’d anglicized to Rothko years earlier. “Maybe next week.”

  “I’ll look forward to seeing you then,” the rabbi said cheerfully, then ducked into the street-level door of his synagogue.

  Mark had forgotten how much he liked this neighborhood. The arguments in Yiddish, the smell of corned beef and pickles, the tenements spilling over with immigrant families. Kaplan’s Fine Jewelry, Schapiro’s Kosher Winery, Gould’s Deli, which was owned by his friend Norm, who was fascinated by art and was always happy to lend his truck when Mark needed to move large canvases. Mark had been raised in Portland, Oregon, in a nonreligious family and didn’t remember much about the shtetl in Russia where he was born, but there was something about this place that made him feel like he was coming home.

  So he was in better humor when he let himself into the apartment. It was the second floor of what had once been a single-family house, and the rooms and windows were large, an uncommon thing in an area better known for its dark, crowded tenements. He missed painting here. The brightness and space, nothing like his current place in the Village, third man in a two-man apartment, half the size of this with a fraction of the light. It also smelled better here. But just about anywhere would.

  He listened and heard nothing. He’d timed it right; Edith was out, and he’d be able to grab the canvases and be gone well before she returned. He headed straight for the bedroom, where his paintings were lined up against the walls and stacked in the closet, and began to gather them up.

  He figured he could manage around twenty if he took the smaller ones, fewer if he went with the larger. He scanned the unfinished works, searching for ones that might hold the best possibilities for his emergent forms, but then stopped. Alizée said it was better not to try too hard, to just let it happen. So he focused on getting the largest number of canvases he could carry.

  “Well, look who the cat dragged in.”

  Mark whirled around. Edith leaned against the doorjamb in her loose-limbed, supple way, her long brown hair pulled back in a bun with tendrils falling around her face. Her smile was half mocking, half pleased.

  “You’re here,” he said stupidly.

  “Very observant of you.” She was wearing her smock, which meant she’d been working in her back room. He just hadn’t heard her.

  “How are you?” he asked, surprised that he actually cared. “How was the camp?” He’d heard, unfortunately after the fact, that she’d taken a job teaching art at a summer camp in Woodstock, New York. If he’d known earlier, he would have painted here while she was away.

  “I’m sure much better than spending the summer in hot, sticky New York.”

  He thought back to his hot, sticky summer, and heat rushed to his cheeks. Was he actually blushing? From guilt? Or perhaps from the pleasure of the memories.

  Edith narrowed her eyes. “It wasn’t hot and sticky?”

  “Oh, yeah. It sure was. Very hot and, ah, very sticky.” He tried to maintain eye contact and look innocent, but the description of his summer as hot and sticky was just too funny, and he started to laugh.

  “Are you tight?” she demanded.

  Mark forced himself to think about Nazis. “Perfectly sober.”

  “You’re not acting like yourself.” She crossed her arms. “Although that’s not entirely a bad thing.”

  “Oh, you know,” he said, regaining his composure. “My usual ups and downs.”

  “More of your bouts?” she asked with real sympathy. “Are they affecting your work?”

  He hesitated. If he told Edith he’d been suffering, which he had, her mothering instincts would take over as they always did, and a part of him wanted that. Alizée was wonderful, but she wasn’t particularly indulgent with his anxieties. “They haven’t been too bad.”

  “Oh, Mark,” she said, taking a step closer. “It’s the darkness, isn’t it? The shorter days?”

  “Yeah, I guess. You know how it gets.” He examined his hands. “Been kind of rough, to be completely honest. A real battle at times.” Although he was telling the truth—he’d had more than a few dark moments, despite Alizée—he felt as if he were lying. Or maybe exaggerating, which he supposed he was. He just needed a bit of coddling. And what was wrong with that? “The painting, too.”

  Edith reached her hands up to his shoulders and began to massage the tight muscles.

  He groaned and leaned back into her expert, knowing fingers.

  “What are we to do with you?” she asked in the deep breathy voice he knew meant sex.

  And suddenly, he wanted her. Edith was a stunning woman, always had been, and God damn it, she was his wife. He envisioned himself swooping her into his arms, carrying her to the bedroom, laying her on the bed . . . But no. She’d assume it meant he was moving back in, that this separation, like the others before it, was a thing of the past. It would break her heart when this didn’t happen.

  And although he wasn’t ready to officially declare the marriage over, he was not returning to her anytime soon. In truth, he loved Edith, maybe not with the passion he had for Alizée, but he cared for her deeply, for their history. She was a good person, and hurting her was the last thing he wanted to do. Even as he acknowledged that was exactly what he was doing.

  He pushed her hands away and stood. “I’ve, ah, I’ve got a meeting with Aaron.”

  “Really?” Edith asked, pleased. “Another sho
w at Contemporary Arts? That’s swell. I thought you said the work wasn’t going well.”

  “It is and it isn’t.” He began to pick up the canvases. “But no. No. Not another show. But maybe. I guess. I don’t know.”

  “Then what is it?” Edith eyed him suspiciously.

  “Just a meeting,” he said, and it came out more sharply than he intended.

  “What kind of fig have you got?” she demanded.

  “The work is coming well,” he said, hoping to get back to her original question. “Had a couple of bouts. But before and after I’ve been productive. Surprisingly so. But I never asked: how’s your work going?”

  She waved her hand dismissively. “Oh my gosh, that commercial stuff?” Her laugh was thin, hard, and mean. “Why would you have any interest in something as ragged as all that? It’s not real art, not like yours. Just doing it to make money. To pay the rent, you know. Which, by the way, Mrs. Segal raised in September.”

  “And that’s my fault, I suppose?”

  “I didn’t say that it was, but if you were able to help out in the money department, it wouldn’t be such a problem.”

  He jammed as many canvases into his arms as he could, even wedged a few under his chin. It was always the same. Nothing ever changed with Edith. It was a rotten shame, but there was nothing he could do about it. “So move to a cheaper place.”

  Her eyes widened. “Without you?”

  “If I’m not ‘helping out in the money department’ then what do you need me for?” He marched across the living room and out the door.

  19

  ALIZÉE

  “And what exactly is this Drancy?” She fingered the thick envelope in her coat pocket.

  Mr. Fleishman was still slouched in his chair, but the piles of paper on his desk had grown since the last time she was here. He looked even more troubled and overworked than before, still in need of a haircut, and the expression on his face only grew more uneasy when he heard the word Drancy. “It’s a town outside of Paris.” He cleared his throat. “But it’s also the name of a prison in the town. Why?”