The Color of Light

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  The school was saved.

  Rafe felt a kind of peace flow through his body, knowing that this place, this sanctuary for artists that he had created, could continue on without him. He wasn’t exactly happy; happy would have entailed different circumstances, and Tessa by his side; but he allowed himself a smile of satisfaction.

  A pretty, dark-haired woman was looking at him a certain way, he noticed. Then, just beyond her, he caught a glimpse of a small, familiar figure with a cascade of unruly hair, not red, not blond, not brown, falling down her back.

  Then he lost her; there were so many people, she was swallowed up by the crowd. Or he might have been mistaken.

  He sought out her friends. There they were, massed in front of a large painting of fancy layer cakes, contributed by the painter Wayne Thiebaud. Something was going on. Portia was grinning with delight, while luscious Gracie was elatedly jouncing someone in a hug, blocking his view. In the dull roar reverberating through the high-ceilinged room, it was impossible to hear what they were saying.

  And then, there she was, her bright head emerging in the middle of the circle. She wore a sleeveless dress with a low, round neck, printed all over with old-fashioned cabbage roses. The dress had a full skirt that swished and swirled when she moved. When she walked, she may have been favoring her left side.

  There was a fire burning in his chest now. Though he longed to be at her side, he contined to smile, to shake hands, to endure the myriads of well-wishers, clapping his shoulder in congratulation.

  He circled the room, trying to catch her eye. Every time he thought he had it, she glanced off in another direction. After half an hour of this cat-and-mouse game, the realization that she was avoiding him came stealing over him, and his heart sank.

  “How are you, my friend?” Anastasia was beside him.

  Now Ram was in her circle, wearing that stupid aqua cocktail jacket with the ridiculously wide lapels, hugging her, goosing her with a pelvic thrust or two, doubtlessly saying something outrageous.

  “Ah,” said Anastasia. “Our petite jeune femme is back.”

  “It looks that way,” he said.

  Her eyebrows rose. She looked at him, and the way he looked yearningly at the girl in the middle of the circle. “You know,” she said lightly. “Perhaps it was wrong of me to do what I did to you. I thought I could make you happy. I see now. I should have let you go.”

  He turned to look at her. The big round eyes were just barely visible behind her dark glasses. Anastasia deCroix. She had been many things to him over the decades; mother, sister, teacher, lover. His fellow traveler. His partner in crime. His murderer. His friend.

  He smiled. “Then I wouldn’t be here with you,” he said. He took her arm, put it through his. “Come on. Let me get you a glass of terrible white wine. I’m buying.”

  At nine-thirty, Tessa separated from her phalanx of friends. Rafe, chatting up a feminine hygiene products heiress, felt his heart give a little leap. She went to the bar, asked for and received a wine glass filled with something red. Still on her own, she dawdled over to the statue of the Pietà. He saw her stand back from it, tilting her head, taking in the dolorous beauty to be found in the body of the young man cradled in the young woman’s lap. Surreptitiously, she reached out a hand to caress the cold fingers.

  No one was watching. He swept her into the niche behind the large sculpture.

  She didn’t say anything. He gazed down at her, trying to read her expression. The memories of what had transpired in these past weeks came swarming over him. The look on Tessa’s face when she saw him with that woman behind the restaurant. Tessa terrified, as he crouched over her in the filthy alleyway. Tessa holding up a stake, however reluctantly, to defend herself. Tessa, telling him to leave her alone. True, she had almost given her life for him, but then again, she had been trying to save the school.

  He realized that he still had his hands around her waist; he released her and stepped back.

  “Sorry about that,” he said, reflexively raising his arm to smooth his hair. Not knowing what else to do with his hands, he let them drop to his sides. “This was a mistake. You can get back to your friends now.”

  He was even more beautiful than she remembered, she was thinking. He was wearing a dinner jacket with a shawl collar that showed off his wide shoulders and his narrow hips, and as he ran his fingers over his gleaming hair, she was remembering what those hands felt like as they ran down her sides.

  “How are you?” he said awkwardly.

  “Fine,” she said. “Those doctors. They exaggerate everything.”

  “I tried to see you,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me in.”

  “I don’t remember,” she said. “I was kind of in and out. You were telling me a story. Then I was on an airplane. I woke up in a hospital bed in Chicago.”

  He took her hand, turned it so that it was facing up. Kissed the soft pink palm.

  “You know, I never heard the end of that story.”

  “Oh…something about Grandma’s house. A huntsman. Doesn’t end well for the wolf.”

  “Hmm. I thought I remembered something about Seven Dwarfs. And a tube of Naples yellow.” She was smiling. “What do you think Little Red Riding Hood wears under that cloak, anyway?”

  She launched herself at him then, throwing her arms around his neck, her pink lips seeking his mouth. His arms went around her as he staggered back against the enormous sculpture.

  “I’ve missed you so much,” she panted, and then her mouth was on him again, and his hands were in her hair drawing her closer, and her fingers were tunneling under his tuxedo jacket, as if she wanted to climb inside him.

  “I tried to call you. No one would put me through. They said you were too sick.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to see me anymore.”

  “God, no. I missed you desperately. I was a wreck. I wore the same pair of pajama bottoms for two weeks. Why wouldn’t you look at me? I kept trying to catch your eye in there.”

  “I didn’t want to get you into trouble,” she said.

  At that, they both exploded into laughter. Afterward, they smiled at each other before he touched his fingertips to her face, bowed his head, spent a long time savoring her berry-colored mouth. For a moment, he moved his lips to the small scar on her throat. He felt her suck in her breath, then exhale.

  “Levon said you weren’t coming back.”

  “My family wanted me to stay in Chicago,” she said. “The ambulance driver told the ER that I had been the victim of a drive-by shooting. Get this! It’s illegal to own an unregistered handgun in New York City.”

  “Really. Even if it’s only to be used against werewolves?”

  She put her arms around him, laid her cheek against his chest. “I told my father Sofia’s story.”

  Sender. Tessa’s father, Sofia’s son. “How? What did you say?”

  “I told him that I’d been in touch with Holocaust researchers. That they found Zukowski, who’d hidden Sofia and her little boy for a few months during the war. As far as my dad knows, the story came from him.”

  “How did he react?”

  “He was very quiet,” she said. “The next day, he said, ‘Go to New York, my shayna maidel. Be an artist.’”

  His arms went tighter around her. He felt her flinch, and he released her, frightened that he had hurt her. She touched her side.

  “I’m all right,” she said quickly.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No. A little. Sometimes.”

  “You idiot.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Thank God you’re back,” he said fervently. He burrowed his face into her hair, tickled a place just behind her ear with his lips. “You saved me a lot of trouble. I was just about to start an art school in Chicago.”

  “Rafe,” she said hesitantly. She loosened her arms and stepped away from him. “While I was home, I spoke with some researchers. I really have been in touch with Zukowski. He’s still alive, still livin
g in Wlodawa. He remembers everything. My great-grandparents. My cousins. The tea warehouse. The villa. Sofia, Isaiah. Skip, believe it or not. Zukowski didn’t abandon Sofia. The Germans shanghaied him into a work detail at one of the camps. He was very excited to hear from me, happy that some part of the Wizotsky family had survived.”

  She took a deep breath. “Why didn’t you tell me Sofia was my grandmother?”

  So she knew. “I always meant to tell you.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Since Winter Break. I’ve been in touch with researchers too, you see.”

  He’d gotten the call the week she lay in his bed, sick with fever, fleeting in and out of consciousness. Crouched by her side for hour after hour, he’d been captivated by every breath, every sigh, alternately exultant and filled with dread, marveling at how this small piece of his life had been returned to him.

  Cautiously, he asked, “What did they say?”

  “In October of 1942, a workman brought a baby boy to the orphanage in Chelm. He told the nuns that the mother, from a well-to-do tea importing family, was going into hiding with an older child. After the war was over, the nuns gave the baby to the Red Cross. That’s how my grandfather—um…I guess he’s not my grandfather anymore—found my dad. Yechezkel was already married again, to a distant cousin. It was easier to adopt the baby without telling him about his real parents than to go into a lot of complicated explanations.”

  Rafe nodded. That was the story he’d heard, too. “I was going to tell you. A week went by, then two…I couldn’t, Tessa. I just couldn’t. Can you forgive me?”

  In reply, she put her arms around his waist, leaned into his shirtfront. After a moment, she said, “There’s something else.”

  Even in the dark, something in her expression made him fearful.

  “Zukowski knew about you,” she went on gently. “He’d heard that Sofia had lost a lover before the war. He remembered how sad she was.”

  He was surprised to find that this could still make him cry. He turned from her, receding further into the niche behind the statue. She followed slowly behind him. He could hear her dress swishing in the darkness.

  “I keep coming back to this one thing. Why didn’t she tell you about the baby?”

  He thrust his hands into his pockets, gazed into her dear, sweet face. He already knew why.

  “I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. When Sofia went into hiding, Germany was still winning the war. For all she knew, there really would be a thousand year Reich. Maybe she was afraid that you would try to do something foolish and heroic. Go after Sender yourself, something like that. Both of you might have been killed. I think she was trying to protect you.”

  He came very close to her, then, because he wanted her to hear everything he was about to say. “Tessa,” he said. “She didn’t tell me for one simple reason. Because of what I am. A vampire. And she knew it from the moment she opened the door and invited me in.” His eyes sparked a frosty blue, then faded back to their familiar shadowy gray. “She knew me at my worst, and she loved me anyway.”

  She was shaking her head, disagreeing, but in his heart, he knew he was right. He felt a certain lightness. This was the answer. Knowing she had loved him was enough.

  “Raphael,” she said hesitantly. “There was one more thing the researchers helped me find.”

  Something new roiled the darkness in the niche, filling him with fear. The sleeping demons stirred. He took an involuntary step back.

  “When the Berlin Wall fell, all these records became available. I have a xerox of a page in a ledger. From Auschwitz. With Sofia’s name on it.”

  She said the next words so quietly he could barely hear her. “And a date.”

  He turned from her, braced himself against the wall, slid to his knees. A harsh and guttural cry escaped him.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. There were tears in her eyes. “Do you want me to go?”

  He reached for her, pulled her against him, buried his face in the folds of her dress. His words were inaudible, lost in the swelling noise of the crowd.

  If anyone had been looking, they would have seen a girl in a flowered dress emerge from behind the Pietà, combing her fingers through her long, curly hair in a vain attempt to impose some order on it, straightening her skirt. A few minutes later they would have seen a man buttoning his tuxedo emerge from this same spot, a man with a face so handsome it was almost a sin.

  At some point, as the crowds began to thin, these two people glanced at each other across the room. She was with a group of friends. He was with a striking woman in a couture dress. They shared an unusual, intimate look. And then the girl left with her friends, and the man smiled politely to a coquettish dark-haired woman who said she was dying to meet him.

  18

  There were three weeks left until the end of school. Tessa had two paintings to finish. If she was going to graduate along with her class, she would have to work twice as hard.

  They agreed to observe the ban that Rafe himself had written. But that didn’t preclude long, heated looks when they passed each other in the hallway, or the brush of their fingertips if they met accidentally on the landings between floors.

  She asked him not to visit her studio. He understood; she had to concentrate fully on her work, without fear of distraction. That was all right, he was busy, too. By day, he slept alone, warmed by the knowledge of her love for him. In the evenings, there were gallery openings with Giselle, galas to attend with Anastasia. And late at night, he could still sit on the steps of St. Xavier, watching over her after the lights went out. There were no rules against that.

  Upon returning to her studio after class, she would find souvenirs of his love for her; a bowl of chicken soup in a footed porcelain bowl; Earl Grey steaming away in a Hall teapot; pastrami on rye wrapped in wax paper on a white china plate from Wolfman-Gold; Romanian tenderloin from the Second Avenue Deli, still warm on a covered silver tray.

  The lights on the studio floor burned day and night. The sculptors, having already cast their pieces in plaster, were deeply engaged in the process of sanding down the blips and edges as a prelude to gilding them with paint. Footprints marred the layer of fine white plaster dust that settled on the floors.

  Models posed behind drawn curtains. Tempers grew short, then exploded. Sudden bursts of inspiration occurred, changing the entire focus of certain paintings. Late at night, under pressure, people made strange, irreversible decisions. Early one morning, Tessa walked into Graham’s studio to find sexy St. Sebastian suffering without a head. “Don’t say anything,” Graham had growled at her between gritted teeth, pinching a place between his eyes as if he had a hangover. “Just. Don’t. Say. Anything.”

  As the days counted down to the show, students passed ever more frequently in and out of each others’ studios, called in for frantic final consultations, clutching the day’s tenth cup of coffee. Is this dark enough? Bright enough? The right size? The right color? Too colorful? Should it be more in the light, or more in the shadow? Will this win me the Prix de Paris? Do I have any talent at all? Should I go back to Ohio? Should I go back to law school?

  One by one, the artists began to finish their thesis paintings. Those who did began building frames. Sawdust joined the light coating of plaster that seemed to be everywhere. Harker was done, then Graham. Gracie followed Portia.

  David was still working on his lone still life, two studios down. The last time Tessa had seen it, it was magnificent, nearly finished. The colors and composition were exquisite; the light seemed to be sifting in from another world.

  “It’s perfect,” she said. “Step away.”

  “I told him the same thing,” said Portia.

  “It’s almost done,” he said, squinting at it. In the past week, he’d repainted the background, the hat, the face of the clock. The Barbie doll twice, the watering can three times. Personally, Tessa thought he was being a little obsessive.

  “What’s left to do?” she
asked.

  He looked at her speculatively, his china blue eyes cool and veiled. “The light’s not right yet,” he said. He no longer visited her studio. While she was away, he’d gotten back together with Sara. They would be married at the end of the summer. Though she was swamped with work, and deeply in love with another man, Tessa couldn’t help but feel a twinge of regret.

  Eat. Sleep. Drink coffee. Mix colors. Paint. Sleep. Do it again.

  Slowly, her visions came to life; in a darkened room, the babushka-ed grandmother’s face glowed in the amber light of a hundred yahrtzeit candles.

  “Great,” Levon told her. “Now finish the other one.”

  The twisted vortex of human beings climbing towards the sky took on dimension, the faces, expression. At the bottom of the canvas, where the whirlwind sprang from a still green savannah, the figures were in full color, dressed in fashions from the 1930s; overcoats, suits, hats, round glasses. By the time the eye of the viewer reached the top of the canvas, the figures had lost everything, evolving into gray ghosts. The arms of a child dissolved into smoke; a woman’s long, drifting hair melted into a passing cloud.

  The night before the exhibition, Tessa laid the last stroke of paint on the last figure on the last canvas. She lowered her brush and stepped back.

  She should have been happy.

  It was a warm evening in Manhattan at the end of May, the kind that promises that summer will break out at any moment. Orange streaks could still be seen in the western skies over the chimneys and water towers.

  She went to the window, felt the soft breeze on her face. She closed her eyes. Rafe would be waking up right about now. She imagined him getting up out of bed, raking his fingers through his tousled hair, the breathtaking beauty of his body as he glided across his room to the shower.

  Across the street, people were gathering for the eight o’clock performance of Blue Man Group. Someone was practicing the violin with the windows open. An opera singer was warming up in the acting school that occupied the top floors of the building. She could hear the excited chatter of NYU students, or perhaps they were from Cooper Union, walking by on the sidewalk below. She smelled lilacs, and remembered that they were in bloom this time of year. Perhaps there was one flowering in one of the impromptu gardens that peppered the roofs of the nearby buildings.