Brush Back (12 page)

“Don’t preach to me. You don’t know what it was like growing up down there. The hypocrisy, the fear, not knowing who was part of what clique, who might beat you up after school because you were Jewish, or black, or a nerd who liked Japanese art.”

I looked up. “I grew up near Ninetieth and Commercial, Mr. Zukos. You can’t tell me much I don’t know about being a child down there. My middle name is Iphigenia. Kids used to dance around me shrieking ‘Iffy Genius’ at me because my mother had college ambitions for me.”

“It’s not like being beaten up because the other boys think you’re a pansy or a sissy,” he said, his voice low, shaking with passion.

“Maybe not. I’m afraid my reaction was to do as much damage as possible as fast as possible to anyone mocking me, instead of following my mother’s advice, which was to hold my head high and pretend it wasn’t happening. And she had her share of violent bullying in Mussolini’s Italy, so believe me, everyone has a hard story buried in them. Right now, today, I don’t care about your private life, what you did with Joel, or didn’t do. You seem to have made a good life for yourself.” I waved an arm at his building. “Joel’s a sad case; he lives inside a bottle, not a private art gallery.”

“Joel.” Zukos’s lips tightened in a bitter line. “Joel didn’t know who he was or what he wanted. Maybe he turned to me because he was unsure and was testing the water, although I thought he was trying to shock his father and mother: he had to be the role model for African-Americans, so that the people in the congregation who muttered against Eunice wouldn’t have any grounds for saying they’d been right all along, black people were rude or dirty or criminals. He had to be a model Jew in the black world so the goyim couldn’t say Jews were cheats or obsessed with money.”

“Heavy load.”

“I never knew what Joel wanted and he couldn’t figure it out, either. I don’t know what Joel looks like today, but back then he was pudgy, flabby. He was bright but the kids today would call him a geek. Girls didn’t respond to him. The only reason I did—all those years ago—I needed someone. And I hated being the rabbi’s model son; I could relate to Joel hating having to live up to Ira Previn’s halo.”

“He couldn’t do what you did,” I said. “Break away from the South Side, I mean—he went to Mandel & McClelland out of law school and he’s still down there, working for his father. But why did he get stuck with Stella Guzzo’s defense?”

A wind was starting to rise off the lake. Rafe pulled his silk jacket across his bare chest. “Joel thought Sol made him defend Stella as a punishment for being queer, although I thought it was because Joel had a crush on Annie and Sol wanted her to himself.”

That startled me so much I lost my balance on the boulder and slid onto the sidewalk. “Annie was having sex with Sol Mandel?”

Zukos hunched a shoulder. “I don’t know. Joel thought she was. Or he thought Mandel was a predator trying to seduce her.”

“I thought your family had moved to the North Shore years before Annie was murdered. He talked to you during the trial?” I picked myself up from the sidewalk and dusted the seat of my jeans.

“Joel and I stayed in touch. For a while. Force of habit.” Rafe was speaking slowly, as if the words were being squeezed from his diaphragm. “We were in the same bar mitzvah class, our parents sent us out of the neighborhood to the U of C lab school, we went off to Swarthmore together. I was doing an MFA in curatorship at the Art Institute when Joel was in law school. We’d meet for dinner and he’d whine how much he hated the law.”

The wind was getting stronger. Clouds blew in, like a conjuror’s trick: in an instant, the sky, which had been cornflower blue over Ira Previn’s office, turned gray.

“Rafe!” Ken was leaning over the side of the balcony again. “Are you coming in or do you want me to bring down a pullover?”

Rafe looked at the sky, at me shivering—the wind was coming straight in across the water. “Come in and see the art,” he offered unexpectedly.

BRUSH WORK

I followed him around
the lake side of the building to the entrance, which opened into a living area that seemed part museum, a gold kimono dominating it from one wall, a scroll of geese taking flight on another, and in between stands holding lacquer or pottery.

The furniture was severely modern, which seemed to suit the art. I recognized an Eames chair, and supposed that the sofa, thin tan leather with chrome tube arms and legs, was also designer work. How had a rabbi’s son come by the money for this?

As if he’d read my thoughts, Rafe said, “Ken’s an artist—you’ll see his work upstairs. I was a curator and a collector and a wannabe—it was hard to admit that my only talent lay in admiring it in others. Anyway, I was working at the Field Museum, they were doing a special exhibit on the history of calligraphy as art, and two of Ken’s pieces were included. And then I had an incredible piece of luck: I recognized a
raku
pottery cup at a garage sale. Seventeenth-century work, very rare,” he explained, seeing my blank expression. “I bought it for a dollar and sold it for—let’s just say enough to buy this building and start collecting and selling.”

I made the noises we always make when we know nothing about the subject someone else is passionately discussing. Rafe led me up a broad wood staircase, pointing out lacquer in niches along the wall. The top of the stairs opened onto Ken’s studio, where Ken, in jeans and a sweatshirt, was closing the big glass doors to the balcony. Rafe went to help him and then introduced us—Kenji Aroyawa.

Rafe went to an alcove and fussed with a charcoal heater to make tea, leaving Kenji and me watching the lake through the glass window: it was starting to boil up, waves rocking back and forth, spume beginning to form.

“When it’s like this, it’s like Hokusai’s print of
The Wave—
you’ve seen it? The great wave that looks as though it could swallow the world?”

“Do you try to paint the water?” I asked. “I don’t know how an artist captures the motion.”

“Like this.” Ken turned to an easel set back from the front. He dipped a brush in a pot of ink and after a few short strokes, the water came to life on his sheet of paper.

My enchantment with seeing him work took my mind briefly from the question I’d been chewing on since Rafe’s comment about Mandel and Annie.

“You like it?” Ken said.

“I’m completely blown away,” I said. “I won’t pretend I can make an intelligent response, though—it’s the first time I’ve seen this kind of painting.”

Ken laughed and clapped his hands.

“You brought me a new disciple, Rafe,” he called. “Now sit down—what do we call you? Vic? I think Rafe has finished smelling up the place. Powdered green tea—I hate it, maybe from too many obligatory events as a child—my father was in Japan’s diplomatic service—but green tea is part of Rafe’s attempt to remind me I’m Japanese, or maybe to turn Japanese himself.”

He gave another loud laugh, then said he assumed I wasn’t with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, since Rafe had spent so much time with me.

“She works with another kind of witness,” Rafe said. “You know, law, courts.”

Ken cocked his head at Rafe. “Is someone suing you? Do you need to put all the art in my name?”

Rafe gave a perfunctory smile. “She’s a detective. She cares about a very old case where I was a witness to the torment of one of the lawyers.”

“Joel?” Ken asked.

Rafe turned his teacup round and round without looking at either of us. “I believe the dead past should bury the dead, but Vic wants to dig it up. I thought someone from my father’s old temple had sent her here to paw through old gossip about Joel and me, but she’s after different gossip. What exactly are you hoping to learn?”

“It’s that old trial,” I said. “But now—I can hardly say what I do want. If you’ve seen the news reports, you know that Stella Guzzo is saying she found a diary her daughter kept, implicating my cousin in her murder.”

“Rafe doesn’t watch the news; he thinks it’s vulgar,” said Ken, “but I do, I know what you’re talking about. Your cousin was the hockey star?”

Ken’s English was accentless and idiomatic. Perhaps the result of his childhood in Japanese consulates.

“Right.” I took a sip of the tea and decided I wasn’t crazy about it, either. “Stella Guzzo has a long history with my family and I let her rattle me. I don’t know why she’s trying to prove her innocence now, instead of twenty-five years ago when she was in court, and I got obsessed with finding a copy of the trial transcript, to see if she or Joel had tried to suggest my cousin could have come to the house and—and assaulted Annie while Stella was out playing bingo.”

“Someone must have a record of the trial,” Rafe said impatiently.

I explained that most trials didn’t have complete transcripts unless someone paid for them. “I hoped Joel’s old firm had kept one, but they don’t exist anymore. You talked to him while the trial was going on. Do you remember what he said—besides whining, I mean.”

Rafe grimaced at my repetition of his word. “It was a long time ago and I wasn’t paying attention. I kept asking Joel why he’d gone into law when he didn’t like it, but he didn’t have a métier of his own and it was too easy to do what Ira and Eunice wanted.”

He steepled his hands, put his chin on his fingertips. “He was scared. Not of what his parents thought or wanted. Someone had frightened him. I didn’t want to know about it at the time, because I thought— He and I had sex together when we were teenagers, sixteen, seventeen. It didn’t last, but I thought someone was threatening to expose him, and that it could land on me. It’s hard to remember now, but twenty-five years ago, public outing could kill a career. Mine, I mean. That’s why I stopped listening to him. I told you I was a coward.”

“No,” I said, “when you’re struggling to survive, no one gets to label you a coward, not even you yourself in your private thoughts.”

Ken clapped my shoulder. “I like this Jehovah’s Witness.”

I smiled absently but spoke to Rafe. “You were afraid of exposure, so if Joel said anything that showed he feared something else, you didn’t register it at the time. Think back now. What did he say, why did you realize he was afraid?”

Rafe thought for a long moment, but shook his head. “Sorry. I can’t remember nuances or words from back then. Just the feeling.”

“And the possibility that Annie was sleeping with Mr. Mandel? Stella says Annie told her terrible things and that’s why she beat her to death. It—I—” I shook my head, trying to clear it.

“Annie was one of my mother’s pupils, she was ambitious, but young and inexperienced. Maybe Joel was right, maybe Mandel was preying on her—it’s a commonplace, older man in a position of power, vulnerable young woman. But what if it was the other way around? What if Stella was right about this one thing?”

“That justifies her killing her own child?” Ken was scornful.

“Of course not,” I said impatiently. “Nothing justifies that, not even Stella’s claim that Annie attacked her. I can’t explain it—it’s twisted up in my childhood, my memories of my mother, my cousin—”

I broke off, unable to put it into words, and even a bit embarrassed at blurting it out in front of these two strangers.

“I want to see the diary Stella claims she found,” I finally said. “It seems too pat that it showed up right after I went to see her. If she knew about it during the trial, why didn’t Joel use it in her defense?”

“Yes, Vic, but what if Annie wrote about Joel in it?” Ken suggested shrewdly. “He wouldn’t want his bosses or the judge and so on to read it.”

“You’re right. He enters it into evidence and it’s a public record, everyone in Chicago gets to know that he—what? Is harassing Annie? That she’s making fun of him? If it painted him in any kind of unflattering light, he was so morbidly sensitive he couldn’t bear the humiliation of it being made public. Maybe that’s what he was afraid of—does that ring a bell with you, Rafe?”

Zukos flung up his hands, annoyed. “You mean, did anything he said back then make me think he knew about a diary? I can’t possibly remember. But was he so sensitive he wouldn’t use a document that betrayed his private feelings? Yes, I can believe that.”

So if Stella had found the diary before the trial, Joel might have persuaded her to keep it quiet on the grounds that laundering Guzzo family business in public would harm her. It made a certain sense.

“Also, I can’t picture the way my cousin is being painted in this lurid picture. He was reckless and attractive and a lot of women went for him, but I can’t see him threatening a woman the way Stella’s claiming is in Annie’s diary.”

“You think it’s a fraud?” Ken asked.

“Yes, even though your argument makes good sense. However, I don’t understand one thing about the trial, about Mandel & McClelland involving Joel, about Stella doing her time and now trying to get exonerated. Maybe Rafe’s right: I’ve been like Ahab chasing a great white whale of paper, and it’s time to let it go.”

When I got up to leave, Ken went back to his easel. He added a few more strokes, which made it look as though a leaflet was in the waves, the pages blowing so that you could imagine they formed the wide-open mouth of a whale.