The Puzzle King (12 page)

Often, he had drawn the taut muscles of prizefighters and the milky flesh of characters like the Fatsos. But until now, he had never held a real body in his hands. He had never understood its warmth, the way it hummed and yielded, or the power it had to make him want to bury himself in it until he wept. For nearly twenty years, Simon had not allowed himself the luxury of tears. Even when the voices of his mother and brothers and sisters snapped his dreams apart at night or teased his memory in the day, he always pushed the sadness down. If he didn’t, he imagined, it would burn through him. Now, as he and Flora lay back on the perfumed pillows, he could feel his throat tighten with desire and his eyes fill with tears.

“Take off your glasses.”

She was the only one who ever asked him to do that, the only one to see him as he was. “Take off your glasses.” In the years to follow, those four words became their code for wanting each other.

He felt Flora was his destiny, a wondrous quirk of fate. What else would explain why he had allowed Pissboy to take him to the New Irving Dance Hall that night and what drew him to Flora during the Mirror Dance? He could never get over that a beautiful woman like her would fall for a plain-looking man like him. He
used to tease her by telling her that he came from a family of toads. “I am the ugliest man in the world, and I have ended up with the most beautiful woman in the world. If there is a God, then He has a preposterous sense of the absurd, don’t you agree?”

Whichever God put the two of them together was secure in His knowledge that opposites attract. Flora was taller than Simon, and while he was a man of straight lines and spare dimensions, she was all circles and curves. She moved slowly and fluidly, with hips that swayed like the tide. He had a brisk stride. With her thick, curly blond hair and eager brown eyes—Simon liked to describe them as the color of fresh pumpernickel—she put people at ease immediately. He was the standoffish one—a nice enough fellow, but hard to know. His head was small and his ears were large and floppy, so he wore hats only on the coldest days. She loved hats and did them justice. They reveled in their differences. The origins of their names said it all: Flora was the goddess of blooming vegetation, while Simon was an obscure form of
cement
.

But the same fate that brought him Flora had also impulsively snatched up his father and separated him from his mother and siblings. And so he remained wary of it, always keeping one eye out for its spidery footsteps. Those who didn’t know him thought him earnest and dour. Even those who thought they knew him well would say of him that only Flora could make his eyes light up and the clouds on his face part. He carried an umbrella even when the sun was shining, and he always had a spare linen handkerchief neatly folded in his inside pocket. Like any man who is skittish about fate, he tried to be prepared for anything.

She lay on the bed, the stiff linen sheets twisted around her fingers. The sticky mess between her legs smelled like iron. Her knees were pulled up to her chin and she squeezed her eyes shut. Her husband sat by her side. “Just a little more, Margot. It will be over soon,” he said, dabbing a cold cloth on her sweaty forehead. Her face was the color of old snow, and there were small lines etched down the sides of her mouth that he’d never seen before. She made a sound that came from deep inside her. It wasn’t so much a human sound as the heaving sound of something being unearthed, something that was never meant to move.

She felt cold and clammy, and while she could hear her voice cry out, it felt separate from the rest of her. The last thing she remembered was tasting her own breath; it was sour and pungent. Gratefully, she gave herself up to the darkness that rocked her and carried her far away from the pain.

Then it was over. The child that was not meant to be bled out from inside her. When she opened her eyes again, the pain was
gone. She reached for her husband. It was reassuring to feel the coarse hair on the back of his hand and his sturdy knuckles. He cupped her hand in both of his and brought it to his lips. “Sleep now,” he whispered into her fingers. “Next time we will do better, I promise you.”

The child, unformed and mistaken, was nevertheless intended. It had lived in their minds and daydreams, and to not give it a name was implausible. So they called her Gilda, and though they rarely said the name out loud, Gilda lived on for them as the ideal. They knew it made no sense, so they kept it as a secret between them. Only Margot’s mother dared to talk about the dead child. And then it was to bemoan the fact that none of her daughters—two of them lost to her now in America—had borne her grandchildren. “My Margot is the only one of them who has the motherly instinct,” she would say in a sorrowful tone.

A
LTHOUGH ONE YEAR
later the pain came from the same place, this time it was pain with a purpose. And pain with a purpose, she said later on, was bearable, because it wasn’t all there was. Frederick had kissed her on the forehead and called her “my brave little woman.” That night, he made her a beefsteak all her own and said it again. “My brave little woman, this will help you get your strength back.”

They named this baby Edith. She had large eyes like a squirrel’s and a chin that jutted out enough so that you could wrap your index finger around it. Their mother wrote to Seema and Flora in America:

She is a beautiful baby. Frederick says she is a real Ehrlich and looks like his side of the family. But let
me tell you, she is Grossman through and through. Flora, she looks like you did when you were born. Finally, I am a grandmother.

From the moment she drew her first breath, Edith was a happy child and a child who intuitively understood that her survival depended on not fussing too much, even when her diaper was dirty. She smiled easily and gave off a sweet vanilla baby smell. Her parents called her their gift from God. But while they bounced her in the air and gave her endearing nicknames like
Liebchen
, the two of them wondered in the silent ways in which families share their secrets whether little
Liebchen
could ever usurp the place held in her parents’ heart by a seedling whose name was spoken only in whispers.

In 1910 in the western German town of Kaiserslautern, there was no language for the troubled spells that afflicted Margot, even before the death of her firstborn. For no apparent reason, her eyes would suddenly fill with tears, or her stare would become distant and frozen. After hearing a secondhand story about a hurt child or a fire in Frankfurt that killed dozens, she would become engulfed by a sadness that would take her far away. Frederick said she lived too much in her imagination; the doctor said it was melancholia. Whatever it was, it became as much a part of the Ehrlich family as the shadow of Gilda.

Edith grew up with her mother’s melancholia looming over her when she went to sleep and beckoning her inside when she went out to play. From early on, she knew how to make her laugh pleasing and her jokes lighthearted. “My sunny one,” her mother called her, as if there were another. Sometimes Margot would hug her so tight that Edith could feel her mother’s boney
landscape. “You are my sunny one,” she’d say. “What did I do to deserve one with this easy disposition?” When she was old enough to understand her mother’s words, Edith would try to find a lighthearted retort. “It was your lucky day, I guess.” One time she said, “God made a mistake. He meant for me to born into a rich family in Berlin.” Her mother’s eyes darkened and she stared past Edith. “That would have been His second mistake. Careless, don’t you think?”

The way things went during their first six years of marriage made it hard for Simon and Flora to imagine that their lives together would be anything but peaceful. Simon made enough money in the window display business to afford a nice size Tudor house not too far from where Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul lived in Mount Kisco. Flora took up gardening and became active in the sisterhood of the synagogue. Each morning, Simon would commute to his office on East Twenty-ninth Street. Because he was a junior partner at Adler, Broder, and Phelps, he had no window next to his work table. His view was the bland green wall on which he had hung a map of the United States. It was better that way. So much of Simon’s life went on in his imagination that watching the traffic outside or the change of light and weather would only be a distraction.

Until Simon Phelps got his hand into the window display business, storefronts had the usual flat scenery and mannequins. Lately, window-shoppers did double takes at coffee beans popping out of their cans and sexy ladies swinging their legs back
and forth showing off their side-buttoned shoes. He borrowed from memory as much as he did from his fantasy life. Many of the characters he drew as a boy showed up in his early window displays. There was Strongman streaking across the storefront with a bar of Fels Naptha laundry soap in his hands, and Mr. Machine rigged up by special wiring to bob up and down over the new Smith Premier typewriter.

Even Flora didn’t know the extent to which Simon invented his own world. Because he took the 7:15 train into work every day, getting a window seat was easy. He’d stare out the glass and begin what became a daily daydream. He’d check in with family as if they’d seen each other yesterday. With Europe at war, he tried not to think about what might be happening to them. Instead, he’d imagine what his mother planned to cook for that night’s dinner and what the younger children would learn in school that day. Sometimes he’d think in Lithuanian, sometimes in English. Other times, there’d be no words, only smells and sounds and the feeling of familiar skin and clothes. In that way, and through his work, Simon was able to keep his family alive.

For one of his new clients, the Hoover vacuum cleaner company, he devised a model of a woman rolling the new contraption back and forth under the banner that read, sweeping changes. Though the woman he created was more slender and modern looking than his mother, he gave her his mother’s apron, the one that he’d kept all these years that tied around the waist and had blue and gray roses with a white ruffle around the bottom and hip pocket. He’d brought the apron to work with him, telling himself that it would be helpful to have it on hand while he re-created it for his Hoover lady. But in truth, he liked keeping it tucked away in his bottom drawer, where he could look at
it whenever he wanted, run his hands through it, and use it to evoke the smells from his boyhood kitchen.

It seemed impossible that he was still uncertain about his family’s fate. Word had gotten back to him about the outbreak of typhus in the region where they lived. Also, there were the pogroms: the vicious attacks on homes and businesses that decimated the Jewish population. And of course, the war itself, which sent waves of new immigrants to New York. Whenever he could, he would meet with immigrants who had recently arrived from Vilna and ask if they had any news of his family. One, a man roughly the same age as his brother Isaac would have been, stared at him before answering in a halting broken English, “There are so many who are gone, it is hard to keep count.” He even tried to hire a private detective to go there and search, but he was unable to find anyone either.

Simon kept his family alive the only way he knew how, by using their faces as characters for his window displays. For a store that sold Buster Brown shoes, he used a smiling girl with pigtails. A little boy with a cowlick became the centerpiece of a window advertising vacations in Palm Beach, Florida. But it was his display for the Gillette razor that caught people’s eye and put the name of Simon Phelps on the lips of every advertising man in New York City. He had figured out how to mechanize a cardboard robot that sat in drugstore windows and sharpened razor blades. Until then, nobody knew that cardboard could do more than contain pottery jugs or nutritious wheat cereals. But Simon saw life in the mud-colored paperboard. He gave it color and found new ways to bend it and cut it.

So it was no surprise when he and Flora received a hand-embossed vellum invitation from the Lithographers Association
of New York requesting their presence at their annual masquerade ball. This year, the Lithographers Association, or LANY, as they called themselves, was holding its party at the ritziest hotel in town, the Waldorf-Astoria. For a young man like Simon to be invited meant that the most prominent members of his profession recognized his talent. There was no question that he would have to attend. Even so, the idea of it made him ornery. “Why should I stand around with a bunch of self-congratulatory men holding up silly masks?” he asked Flora.

“Because they just might invite you to join.”

“You know how I feel about clubs. I’ll never belong to any of them.”

For the umpteenth time, he told her how, in the eyes of the world, he would always be a Jew. “A Jew is a Jew first and foremost,” he said. “And in this country, no matter what else I do, I will still be a foreigner—masquerade ball or no masquerade ball.”

Flora resisted the impulse to roll her eyes. He was obsessed with being a foreigner even though he’d lived here for more than two-thirds of his life. “But you’re an American now. What’s more is, you’ve tossed your hat into this advertising business and you’ve worked awfully hard at it. How unlike you it would be not to finish something you started. Of course we’ll go to this ball. And you know what? We’ll have a good time. Think of it this way, you’ll be wearing a mask, so no one will be sure who you are anyway.”

“Sure,” said Simon, suddenly taken by the idea of creating a different persona. He took her hand. “But now I’m thinking that I don’t want to be just another guy in a white half-mask. I want to be John Barrymore. Do you think I can be John Barrymore?”

“Of course you can.” Flora laughed. “No one’s stopping you.”

Simon saw how funny it would be if he, the short and nearsighted foreigner, could somehow figure out how, for that night, he could become the swaggering, handsome, and very non-Jewish actor John Barrymore.