The Puzzle King (20 page)

“Do I want to see your scar? Is that what you’re asking me?”

Edith knotted her brow.

“Scar.” Seema made a slashing motion against her stomach. Edith got up and took a pad and pencil from the nearby desk. She handed it to Seema. “Scar,” she said, indicating she wanted Seema to write it. So Seema printed the word and handed it back to her. Underneath “scar,” Edith drew a picture of a girl with a smile on her face. The she drew an arrow pointing to the smile
and wrote, “
Mein
scar.” Again she pointed to the place on her back and said, “I show you.”

Seema studied the picture. “I see, so your scar is a smiling face.” She reached over to an ebony box on the coffee table, opened it, and pulled out a cigarette. She bent her head as she lit a match, cupped her hand around the tip of the cigarette, and inhaled. Her glossy black hair fell in front of her face and her movements were slow and silky. When her robe fell open revealing her knee and most of her thigh, she didn’t pull it closed. Edith had never seen a woman this mysterious and beautiful. Although her mother was also slim, she carried herself heavily, as if bundled in the doorman’s oversized coat. Her mother had often told her what a beauty Seema was and that she “had a way with the men.” Edith never knew what that meant, but sitting here this close to her, she felt privileged. Seema caught Edith staring at her. She tilted back her head, exhaled the cigarette smoke, and said, “Sure, I’d love to see your scar.”

The way Seema looked at her, not straight on but out of the corner of her eyes, made Edith think of the mural she had seen downstairs.
Things forbidden
, she thought.
Her eyes have seen things forbidden
.

“I show you,” Edith repeated. She got down on the floor on all fours and put her head on the Persian rug, preparing to do a headstand. The carpet tickled her scalp and smelled of cigar smoke. She was wearing one of the chemises that Flora had bought her, and as she kicked her long legs up in the air, she became aware of the chemise slipping over her body. She would be naked but for her knickers, though it was not the kind of thing that would embarrass her. Since her illness, she’d gotten used to all sorts of people seeing her undressed and prodding her in private places.
Besides, Seema was a relative. So she stood straight as an exclamation point as her chemise gathered around her head.

Seema hadn’t considered what she was asking Edith to do when she said she’d love to see her scar; she had merely been trying to make conversation. Now this young girl was standing upside down before her. Seema stared at her scrawny ribcage. And her arms, whispers of flesh so slight Seema wondered how they could support her. Edith kicked her legs back and forth. Her face turned purple.

Seema’s eyes wandered to Edith’s back. She had the smooth skin of a child except for the left side of her back, which was the color of bananas. Embedded in the banana skin was a red gouge and sloppy Xs that looked as if someone had used a shovel to hack out a piece of her back. This was not what Edith had described. It looked gaping and toothless: nothing smiley about it.

Seema tempered her voice. “Yes, I see it,” she said. “Very impressive. And the headstand. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anyone stand on their head for so long.”

Edith allowed her legs to fall to the floor. She straightened her dress and ran her hands through her hair. “Is good?” She pointed to the picture of the smiling face she had drawn. “Jah?”

“The real McCoy,” said Seema. “A smiling face if I ever saw one.” Seema’s laugh was tense. There was something about this young girl and the shabby things that had been done to her that made Seema want to cry. She felt a swift kick of shame for allowing Edith to show her nakedness, her ugly wound. Life had borne down hard on Edith, yet she seemed unaware of it. There was no self-pity or sadness about her. In fact, she was joyful, someone who could see the colors in blackness and make jokes out of misery. Seema imagined the doctors butchering her—one of their
charity cases—as they chatted among themselves and took as little time as possible. A poor girl. A Jew girl at that. Seema could picture it all too well and it made her heart hurt.

“I have scars, too,” said Seema, wanting to return Edith’s intimacy.

Edith lifted herself off the rug and moved closer to Seema. “You? Scar?”

For a moment, Seema dropped her elegant pose on the couch and slumped back into the pillows. She considered what she was about to do and wondered if Edith was old enough to understand. She didn’t want to frighten her. More than that, she worried about whether Edith might judge her. “Well, they’re different kinds of scars. You might not really call them scars. They’re more like secrets. My secrets. Things that nobody knows about me, things nobody has ever seen.”

Everything involved with trusting another person went against Seema’s nature, but for some reason, she felt safe with Edith. The girl seemed kind, not the type to look for the flaws in others and then ridicule them. If she did what she was about to do, the two of them would be even. She would reveal something about herself. Not the slapdash work of a surgeon, but something personal that she’d never meant for anyone to see.

Seema took Edith by the hand and led her into the bathroom, where she knelt down in front of the cabinet next to the toilet. Edith couldn’t imagine why Seema had brought her here. All she knew was that there was urgency in Seema’s voice and that she held her hand too tight, as if she were rushing a child across the street. One month before she’d come to America, Edith had begun to menstruate. Even though her mother had told her that all girls her age menstruated, Edith found the sight of the reddish
brown bloodstain in her pants as terrifying as it was mortifying. With the same fervor that she had begged her mother not to tell her father, she prayed that Seema would not pull something out of the bathroom cabinet that would have to do with menstruation or any of the other private things that women kept hidden in their bathrooms.

For a moment, it seemed as if her prayer would go unanswered, as Seema pulled from the cabinet a lavender tin big enough to hold the secrets of all womanhood. She put the tin in her lap then handed something to Edith, who was standing by the porcelain sink. It was a cross, made out of stone the color of a blackboard. Then she handed Edith another, this one green, and another, mother of pearl. Seema kept her head down as she handed Edith one cross after another. When she was finished—there must have been twenty of them in all—Seema lifted her face. “There they are, my scars. My secrets. Now you’ll really have something to write home about, won’t you?”

Edith didn’t understand what Seema said, only that her voice got gruffer and she kept studying Edith’s face. Edith remembered the basket of yellow daisies the Catholic church at home had sent to her when she was sick. A cross made from twigs had been tucked inside it. She had liked the twig cross because it had reminded her of the forest, so she kept it by her bedside. When her father noticed it, he’d snatched it away. “We don’t keep these kinds of things in this house.” It wasn’t like her father to be so harsh. Although she hadn’t understood why, she had felt ashamed at the time. Now, as she watched her Aunt Seema act so on edge, she thought that she must feel the same way.

Seema watched Edith study each one of the crosses. “Ahh,” she nodded at the mother-of-pearl cross and the one made out of
black onyx.
“Sehr hubsch.”
At others, like the one made out of painted tin, she shook her head and said nothing.

In this way Edith and Seema became friends. Edith recognized the sadness that filled her aunt. It was silent but constant, like the cigarette smoke around her. Edith carried her sadness in silence, too, but hers had definition. What they shared was the belief that their grievances were an indulgence to which they were not entitled. Edith hid hers behind her cheerfulness and friendliness. Seema chose other ways to keep hers under wraps. It snuck into her laughter, girlish but brittle, and her eyes, alluring yet distant. She was different from her mother, who, it seemed to Edith, had cause to be anxious. Edith couldn’t imagine what would make a woman like Seema this disappointed. Yet as different as they were in age and personality, there was an immediate intimacy between them that happens when two people look inside each other and see shadows of themselves. Seema was confident that Edith would never mention her collection of crosses to anyone. Certainly, Seema would never talk about Edith’s headstand.

T
HE SUMMER OF
1923 was a summer of firsts for Edith. She tasted a tuna fish sandwich, ogled the naked Greek boys at the Museum of Art, sipped a martini at a picnic with Seema and her friends; washed a car with Uncle Paul, and bought a brassiere with Flora. Nearly every Sunday, they’d drive to Mount Kisco for dinner at Hannah and Paul’s. Lev and Ruth were there once and treated her as if they’d known her forever. Simon said those dinners were the closest thing to Thanksgiving. And then there was the magic.

Late on the first Saturday in July, Simon announced that they would be going to a special celebration. “Have you ever seen magic
up close?” he asked Edith. When she said no, he told her that she was about to see a spectacle that she would never forget.

Edith looked quizzically at Flora, who shrugged her shoulders and said, “Don’t look at me. Your uncle’s the magician.”

They drove to a park right on the Hudson River, where hundreds of people were already sprawled out on blankets. Children ran barefoot in the grass while the adults pulled sandwiches and bottles of wine from the oversized wicker baskets that they’d brought with them. Flora, Simon, and Edith sat as close to the water as they could. The sun was starting to set, leaving in its wake plumes of purple, yellow, and orange. They unpacked their own wicker basket and ate the feast that Flora had prepared: fried chicken, potato salad, coleslaw, baked beans, and a blueberry pie. It was almost dark by the time they finished and as Edith scraped the last of the blueberries from her plate Simon moved closer to and whispered, “Are you ready?”

“Ready for what?”

“You’ll see,” he said.

Just then, the band started to play brassy marching songs. The people on the blankets clapped their hands to the music; some sang along. A sound like a gunshot rang out before the sky exploded into neon yellows, pinks, blues, and purples. Edith jumped. Was someone shooting at them from the river? Had the sunset imploded?

Simon put his arm around her. “Happy Fourth of July,” he said, watching as her jaw hung open and the reflection of the pyrotechnics sparkled in her eyes.

Later, as they waited in traffic with the rest of the crowd, Simon explained that nearly 150 years ago, on July Fourth, the United States had signed a document making them independent
from the British. “There’s nothing Americans are more proud of than their freedom,” he said.

“What about baseball?” asked Edith.

Simon laughed. “That’s my girl.” She smiled a purple blueberry smile back at him. Something tugged at his heart. It was the same feeling he had whenever he thought about his mother or his sister with the purple bow.

But miraculously, this child Edith was sitting right next to him.

An autumn chill blew in through Seema’s living room window as she and Flora sat and talked on the last Thursday in August. The day before, Edith had sailed back to Germany. They had all gone to see her off at Pier 49: Flora, Seema, Simon, Aunt Hannah, and Uncle Paul. The women cried, and so did Edith. Simon dabbed his eyes with his handkerchief and made a point of mentioning his allergies. “He’s a softie at heart,” Flora said to Seema, “though he’d prefer to keep that to himself. But Edith and he …” she stared as if she were fixed on an image straight ahead. “Well, it made me see what a good father he could be. The two of them had something special between them. Neither of them said anything, it’s just one of those things you know when you see it. She could make him laugh and tease him out of his serious moods. She followed him like a puppy and hung on to his every word. You know how guarded Simon is—a picket fence around him when it comes to human emotions. Sometimes I think that he doesn’t let himself get close to other people because he can’t stand the thought of
losing them. But Edith …” She held her hands over her heart. “She just wormed her way in there. Like a daughter. Do you know what I mean?”

Seema bit into a piece of praline candy. A morsel lodged in her teeth and she tried to pry it out. So like Flora, Miss Chatterbug, to keep talking no matter what. Seema loosened the gob then handed the box of candy to Flora. “You ought to try this,” she said. “Oliver brought it back from New Orleans.”

“Simon told her that when she was sixteen, she should move to America and work for him,” Flora continued. “He said he’d teach her everything she needs to know about business and numbers and all that. Says she has a real talent in that direction, he can tell.” She broke off a piece of candy as she talked and seemed to swallow it whole.

“He told her that we’d go visit her in Kaiserslautern before that. Have you thought about going back there, Seema?” She snapped off another piece of the candy and, this time, chewed it more slowly. Just for a moment, it diverted her attention. “What did you say this was?”

“Praline,” said Seema, studying the cocoa-colored box. “Oliver brought it back from New Orleans.”

“It’s good. A little too sweet, but I like the pecans.”

“Even Oliver liked her,” said Seema, grabbing the conversation away from Flora. “At first he wasn’t that interested in meeting her.”

She quickly corrected herself. “What I mean is that he was so busy with work. But then, one night when she stayed over, he happened to come by. You know how people always get polite and reserved around Oliver? Edith didn’t. She acted as if she’d known him always. Asked him rude questions like how come his
hair was so stiff and where did his father work. He was charmed by her. Thought she was pretty.” Seema blushed and tried to hide her smile. “He said we looked alike.”

The two of them talked until the sun set and they found themselves sitting in Seema’s darkened living room with an empty box of praline candies. They talked about things they hadn’t discussed in years. Flora confided to Seema that, while she was proud of Simon’s success, it sometimes made her feel irrelevant. “I am a nobody. I am nobody’s mother. I love being Simon’s wife, of course, but I need something more. Something of my own.”