The Color of Light

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  With a sigh, she turned back to her studio. The mother and child painting peered reproachfully at her from the wall. She frowned at it. Though it had been completed weeks ago, she had never been satisfied. Something was still missing.

  Tessa crossed her arms, leaned against the radiator. She thought about the girl she had been when she had started classes last September, unformed, naive. She had been a blank canvas then, unaware of her own singularity, hunting for an identity among other people’s lives.

  Her thoughts traveled further back now, into the past; she thought of a girl who’d gone to art school in the long ago winter of 1939, a girl just like her, blazing with talent, burning with a passion she did not dare reveal.

  She thought about Yechezkel and his first wife, Sara Tessa. About their children, and the millions more just like them. She thought about her father, growing up under his uncle’s watchful, unloving eye. She thought about her family, fifty years later still shackled to the catastrophic damage Hitler had wreaked upon the human psyche. She thought about Isaiah, sentenced to death for the unpardonable crime of being a Jewish child on the continent of Europe in 1943. About Sofia, whose last independent act as a human being was to be a choice between the unspeakable and the unthinkable. She thought about Rafe, who’d witnessed it all.

  Taking a clementine from the little wooden crate on the octagonal Moroccan table, she stood before her wall, as she had a thousand times before, looking to the postcards of famous artworks for inspiration. As she peeled the clementine, her gaze roamed across the playing field of art history. Hopper’s Nighthawks, the loneliest painting in the world. The rich reds, blues and browns in Titian’s palette. The fierce bravado in Velasquez’s brushwork. The tenderness in a Raphael Madonna. The densely muscled back of a Sibyl in the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The pink-cheeked innocence of a Bouguereau angel.

  Finally, her eye fell on the photograph Leo had given her, the one titled Saint Valentine’s Day, Paris, 1939.

  Studying it again, Tessa felt excitement bloom inside of her. She looked at her watch. It was eight o’clock. Perhaps…if she worked all night.

  Lifting the heavy canvas back onto the easel, she began to paint.

  At three in the morning, she was finished. Which was good, because the porters were coming at eight to move the paintings to the Cast Hall for the show.

  It was too late to go home. She collapsed onto Gracie’s couch, falling promptly and deeply asleep.

  When she awoke, it was already morning. Sunlight streamed in through the window. Her side ached. For a moment, she was confused, and then she remembered the night before, and swung her feet onto the floor.

  Something was going on. There was a babel of noise from one of the other studios, growing louder as she sat there. She boosted herself up, feeling a little wobbly, then pushed aside the curtain that opened onto the aisle.

  A crowd of people was gathering around Portia and David’s doorway. Two first-year students ran by, nearly knocking her over. “Can you believe it?” One of them said to the other. “I never thought it would be—” and then they were past her; she didn’t catch the name. With growing unease, Tessa pushed her way through the throng of students.

  The sight that greeted her was so strange she thought she might be dreaming it. Sunlight filtered in over Portia’s neat wall of postcards and sketches. There were art books and sketchbooks, a teapot with a matching teacup, a box of Celestial Seasonings herbal tea. Her crock of brushes, her can of turpentine. The usual stack of paintings against the radiator.

  David’s side of the studiºo was empty, stripped down to the bare walls. Everything was gone. Even the floor had been swept clean.

  The only thing left behind was his easel. The crossbeam supported a large canvas, newly coated with a thick layer of white paint. His thesis painting.

  Ben and Clayton were huddled together with Portia. They glanced up at her as she came in, as stricken as if they had discovered his body.

  “What?” she said, bewildered, fumbling for words. “When?”

  Portia was shaking her head. “It must have happened some time during the night. I came in this morning and found it like this.”

  “I was up painting until three. I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Us too,” said Ben, nodding towards Clayton. “I crashed at around three-thirty.”

  “The last time I saw him was around two o’clock, heading down to the deli for a cup of coffee,” offered Clayton. He was in a daze, from the shock, or from the exhaustion, Tessa didn’t know which. “He was going on about how he couldn’t get the transition of light right on the watering can. It looked fine to me.”

  “Did he tell anybody?” said Tessa, bewildered. The sculptors glanced at each other, shook their heads. “Leave a note?”

  Portia looked haunted. “No.”

  Clayton was still shaking his head. “He seemed so…normal.” he said, summing it up for all of them.

  Suddenly the porters were there. Slowly, reluctantly, the artists parted from one another, returning to their studios to oversee the safe transit of their thesis paintings, most of them still wet, down the freight elevator to the first floor.

  19

  The Graduation Exhibition took place, as did all other events of importance at the Academy, in the Cast Hall. It had been painted white for the occasion, the wooden floors sanded and polished to a high gloss. Special full-spectrum lamps were installed overhead, positioned so that they would cast light, but not glare, onto the varnished paintings. The skeleton from the anatomy room had been wheeled in, a diploma clutched in the bony metacarpals of its right hand, dressed formally for today’s occasion in a cape, gown and mortarboard.

  No decorators had been called in, no fancy hors d’ouevres from Glorious Food, no candles or smoke or waiters or special effects. There was a discreetly skirted table bearing glasses of white wine, some platters with cheese and fruit, a tasteful floral arrangement. Tonight was about the art.

  Rafe ran his hand through his hair, checked his clothing yet again for lint, for invisible traces of plaster dust. He was nervous. Had he still been in possession of a heartbeat, it would have been racing.

  The Exhibition was what the Academy held instead of a traditional graduation ceremony. Engraved invitations had gone out weeks ago to family members, to galleries, collectors, curators and the press, as well as to the board members and the faculty. At the end of the evening, Giselle would announce the winner of the Academy’s prestigious Prix de Paris, awarding a single lucky student an all-expenses-paid year of study in Paris. And then the second-year students formally became Masters of Fine Arts.

  Portia’s family was coming, and so was Ben’s. Harker’s family was driving up from Texas. Clayton’s father was flying in from Mississippi. Graham’s parents were making the trip in from the Midwest. If there were a prize to win for traveling the shortest distance, Gracie’s parents would win; they just had to traverse the few blocks from Mulberry Street to Lafayette.

  Tessa would be on her own. She had already graduated once, her parents had seen it, they were not flying out to New York to see an art show. Besides, they were invited to a bar mitzvah on Shabbos, and Cilla had delivered a baby boy, his bris falling, by coincidence, on the same day as the show. His name was Isaiah.

  Rafe glided into the Cast Hall. Allison was poised near the door, handing out programs. She looked healthier; perhaps she had put on a little weight.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Sinclair,” she said hurriedly, before he could speak. “I was failing two classes. Mr. Turner told me he’d change my grades if I just…” she looked down at the floor, then determinedly met his eye. “It was all true, though. Everything I said. I wanted to die.” She looked helpless again, remembering. “That night was kind of a bottom for me. I got help the next day.”

  “It was a bad time for me, too, Allison,” he said.

  “Thanks for not taking advantage of me,” she said, and handed him a program.

  He smiled at her and went in
.

  He was late; the Cast Hall was already packed with graduates and their families. He himself had not yet seen the show; Giselle and a team of board members had overseen the hanging of the paintings, holding long heated discussions about which paintings should go next to which, and where. Temporary walls had been constructed so that each artwork could be viewed separately, without being crowded together or hung atop one another. He set off through the aisles searching for Tessa.

  A critic from ArtForum was staring at him. So was someone from the Marlborough gallery. Rafe was used to being looked at, it was nothing new for him, he was looking particularly sharp tonight, and he knew it. After tonight, Tessa was no longer a student at the American Academy of Classical Art.

  A critic he knew vaguely from the Times regarded him with interest. Wylie Slaughter and his group of supercool artist friends glanced at him and whispered furiously.

  Self-consciously, he checked his suit, smoothed his hair. Nothing seemed to be out of place. He shrugged it off.

  Rounding a corner, he saw a large crowd gathered at the far wall. A student he didn’t know noticed him, then whispered to his friend. The friend elbowed a third boy, who turned around, too. Two first-year students glanced at him, then returned to staring at whatever was on the wall.

  Rafe shouldered his way to the front of the throng, and found himself face-to-face with Tessa’s painting of the mother and child, the one that had affected him so deeply when it was just a pencil sketch, that long ago day in September.

  Only now, it was Sofia.

  Once again, the look of horror dawned across the face shaped like a heart, a wall of flames leapt in her wild and tragic eyes. Once again, she held tight to a sweet and pink-cheeked little boy, her fingers covering his eyes.

  A grieving young man wrapped his arms protectively around them, his head turned away, as if he couldn’t bear to watch. Great black feathered wings rose from his shoulders. Raphael Sinclair, the Angel of Healing. He clapped his hand over his eyes, shutting out the sight.

  Someone took his hand. “I’m sorry,” he heard Tessa whisper beside him. “Is it all right? I didn’t know how to tell you. I’m so sorry.”

  Tessa’s painting was only the beginning. The gallery was filled with tributes to the embattled founder of the school. Graham had painted him as St. Sebastian, looking to the heavens, his body pierced with arrows. Harker had included him in his portrait gallery of downtown denizens, his collar pulled up, the brim of his hat pulled low over his eyes. In her tower of edenic female nudes, Gracie had found room for just one perfect man. Portia had painted two children holding hands in a green and threatening landscape, children who looked suspiciously like Rafe and Tessa. Ben had sculpted him struggling to free himself from the Devil’s grip, alongside small tortured figures of Harker, Portia, Gracie, Clayton, and, of course, himself.

  But the biggest surprise was the centaur. Displayed on a pedestal in the middle of the Cast Hall, grafted onto the body of a horse, was the muscular torso of Raphael Sinclair.

  “There was this eureka moment,” Clayton was explaining in his juiciest Southern twang to a plump journalist who was scribbling away in a notebook and nodding vigorously. “Artists. Half human, half something untamed that the rest of the world doesn’t understand.”

  “Historic,” the journalist was muttering ecstatically. “This is his-tor-ic.”

  Anastasia materialized from the crowd to take his arm, “Well, my dear,” she said. “You have succeeded. Your students are quite gifted. Really, I am impressed.”

  He turned to her and smiled. “They are, aren’t they.”

  She was dressed in a little blue cocktail dress with insets of lace and studs, tiny pleats set all around the skirt. Between her breasts hung a large bejeweled cross, perhaps four inches in length, made from black metal and burgundy stones. “Made by one of your children,” she said, holding it in her palm. “That Allison girl. We are featuring it in the September issue. My last.”

  Rafe wasn’t listening. He was watching Leo Lubitsch converse animatedly with Tessa Moss, part of a circle of people that included Ram, Portia, Giselle, and Sawyer Ballard.

  And as he looked upon them, his contemporaries, aged and wrinkled, spotted and stooped and shuffling and gray, he thought back to a time when they were all young and wealthy and ambitious and talented together, sitting around a table at a bistro in Paris, each of them half in-love with the same mysterious dark-haired girl, completely unprepared for the monumental changes history was assembling to wreak upon them. It seemed like only yesterday. It seemed like a hundred years ago.

  Portia leaned over to say something to Tessa, resting a hand on her shoulder. Whatever she said made Tessa laugh. And as he looked upon the easy friendship between the granddaughter of Sofia Wizotsky, and the granddaughter of Sawyer Ballard, he realized that time had its own way of meting out punishment, making restitution, healing old wounds.

  “I don’t know if you heard,” said Anastasia. “Margaux died two weeks ago.”

  He turned to her. “I’m sorry. I know how close you two were.”

  She sighed moodily. “There is more. Leo is retiring. I have met his replacement, some hot new boy from L.A. I am being kicked upstairs.”

  “How can that be? You’ve been the editor of Anastasia since…what was it, 1975?”

  “1976,” she said. “It was the Bicentennial.” She smiled, remembering. “My first issue, I had to marry patriotism with fashion and sex. The lingerie shoot almost got me lynched.”

  “What does it mean, you’re being kicked upstairs?”

  “They’ve given me a fancy title, Vice President in charge of New Media, they’ll find me an office somewhere, but I am being quietly, politely, fired. The new boy wants to bring in his own people, shake everything up.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I will do as I have always done, my dear Raphael. Move on. Perhaps I’ll go to Eastern Europe. Prague seems to be very exciting right now.”

  Rafe went to work, circling the Cast Hall. He shook hands with magazine editors and critics and curators and gallery owners, and charmed an old school chum of Giselle’s who had married an Italian Count. Several board members told him this was the best graduate show they had ever hung. He spotted April Huffman in a corner of the room, looking haunted. Word had it that Lucian Swain was already cheating on her.

  All night long, he watched as people approached Tessa. Wylie Slaughter and his friends bent her ear for a while. Rafe recognized a magazine editor, a collector or two, someone from a gallery in Soho, someone from a gallery in Williamsburg. One woman in particular seemed very excited, she kept gesturing at the paintings as she talked. He saw her hand Tessa a business card.

  In the middle of a sentence, he would feel her eyes on him, and he would glance furtively at her and smile. Immersed in explaining her paintings to yet another curator, she would feel the hairs prickle up on the back of her neck, and just for a moment, her eyes would search him out across the room.

  Finally, at seven-thirty, Giselle took the microphone, and an excited burst of murmuring filled the hall. “That’s right guys,” she said, nodding her sleek blond head, “It’s time to announce the winner of the Prix de Paris.”

  “You are all talented,” she continued, looking fondly at the graduates. “If I could afford it, I’d send you all to Paris. But there can be only one winner.”

  Rafe smiled politely, waiting with the rest of them. Deep in his heart, he prayed; Not Tessa. Not Tessa. Not Tessa. Not Tessa.

  “This year’s winner surprised us all. Not for lack of talent—she always had that—but for the many obstacles she had to overcome to complete her project.”

  Giselle continued, her voice throaty and strong. “Halfway through the year, our winner lost her job, her scholarship and her adviser. Not once, but twice, it looked as though she wouldn’t be able to finish at all. And when she did complete her thesis project, not only was it a showstopper, a shining example of everything we teach a
t this school, but it made us look at something we thought we already knew, in a completely different way.”

  “The winner of this year’s Prix de Paris is…Tessa Moss!”

  Just for a moment, Tessa was overwhelmed. Blinking back tears, she wished that her family had come, she would have liked them to witness this, to share in this part of her life.

  A few feet away, Rafe smiled at her, his beautiful face filled with light, so proud. Portia threw her long arms around her in a hug. Clayton grabbed her, bouncing her up and down and whooping with joy.

  Suddenly, she understood. Portia was family to her now, and so was Ben. Clayton was family, and so was Graham. Gracie was, and Ram, and Gaby, and Harker, and Leo, and Anastasia, and even David, wherever he was. Rafe, of course. It went without saying.

  It was all very clear to her now. She could not change the family she came from, but she could create a new one. A family that accepted her for who she was, not what they thought she should be. So in a sense, her family was there, after all.

  She stepped forward to accept her prize.

  The graduates posed together for a group photo under the Pietà. The camera flashed. The class of ‘93 hugged each other and promised to stay in touch.

  By all standards, the show had been a smashing success. A collector had bought Clayton’s centaur on the spot. Harker was going to have a one-man show in a new gallery opening on the Lower East Side. Ben’s Gates of Hell had so awed one of the board members that he had offered then and there to become his patron. A well-known restaurateur commissioned Gracie to paint a mural for the hip new place he was opening in Tribeca. A handsome young curator from the Jewish Museum had given Tessa his card and asked if she would be part of an upcoming exhibition showcasing art of the Holocaust.