Uncle Chaim And Aunt Rifke And The Angel

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 as he ushered Jules out of the studio.

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 literally 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