The Puzzle King (22 page)

Edith shrugged. “She just would. That’s why.”

The three of them brought the package to the postmaster and told him it was going to America. “America. Of course,” he said, as if he’d been in on the planning the whole time.

When the parcel reached Flora and Simon nearly a month later, the cord was frayed, though it still held its knots. The lettering on the address was faded, and the brown paper was pocked with yellow blotches that could have been coffee stains or somebody’s tears. “This looks as if it came from hell,” said Simon, before he
noticed the Kaiserslautern postmark. When they realized it had come from Edith, they sat down in the sunroom and placed the package between them. Slowly, they untied the cord and removed the paper without tearing it.

Flora read aloud the note on her gift: “For your beautiful corn kitchen.” There was no note attached to Simon’s gift: a booklet of a few pages stitched together, each with simple black-and-white sketches. There was one of a girl and a man at a baseball game shouting “Attaboy, Babe,” another of a girl and a man and a horse with
“clock-clock”
written beneath it, and the last of a girl and a man watching the sky explode and “bang bang bang” splashed across the page. On the cover, in a loopy script, was written: “
MAGIC UP CLOSE FOR UNCLE SIMON FROM EDITH.
”

Simon stared at Flora, then studied the pictures again. He wasn’t accustomed to getting gifts. Flora always gave him something for his birthday or for Hanukkah, but he knew it was a chore for her. He was a finicky man with particular tastes and, more often than not, what she got him was too flashy, and though he tried to act grateful, he could never be convincingly exuberant. Only once before had someone given him the perfect present. And that was the notebook and crayons his mother gave him when he was nine, right before he came to America.

“Not bad,” he said, swallowing. “She has real promise.”

Flora rubbed his back. “She must have learned it from you.”

Seema’s gift tumbled out last. They shook and squeezed it. A pillow. The note on it read: “I always remember our time together.”

“Sweet,” said Flora, scooping up the paper for the trash.

Out of curiosity, Simon unfurled the newspaper wrapping and spread the old sheets out on the floor. Flora noticed how he
pressed his lips into a straight line, the way he did when he was angry.

“Did you see this?” he asked, bending down to look closer. He pointed to a cartoon on one of the pages. “It’s grotesque,” he said, jabbing the drawing. Flora got down next to him to study the cartoon. She saw that one of the characters was a man with a hooked nose, a bald head, and stooped posture. “An idiotic caricature,” he said, ripping out the drawing and balling up the rest of the paper.

“What are you going to do with it?” she asked, not quite understanding what she’d seen.

“I don’t know,” he said, folding the cartoon into neat squares. “But I’ll tell you this. Germany is no place for Edith.”

His mother’s apron still hung in the pantry. It was yellowed and threadbare now, its onion-cinnamon nectar long replaced with the fusty odor of something needing to be thrown away. Simon still had the old checkered vest that she had sewn for him before he’d left Vilna. Sometimes when he was undressing for a bath, he’d reach into the armoire and pull it out. Because he was a slight man, he could still slip his arms into the armholes. He didn’t even try to stretch the vest across his chest for fear of unraveling it. Instead, he’d stand in front of the mirror in his undershorts and silk socks, the vest bunched up around his nipples like a doll’s clothes, praying that Flora wouldn’t walk in just then. He’d keep the itchy vest on as long as he could stand it. Then he’d strip down and sit in the bath reading the tiny welts the vest had raised on his chest—each one a scratchy hieroglyphic from the past.

At work, he kept an accordion file in his bottom desk drawer marked in his fine handwriting: future projects. The ink on
the words was smudged with fingerprints from his busy hands always hoping to find something new. The accordion file, so fat now it threatened to pop its pleats, was filled with old sketches of familiar faces, scraps of paper with dashed half-sentences, articles, sketches, and photographs torn from newspapers and magazines. Simon hoped they would add up to something someday, offer him a clue about his missing family. His compulsion to compile clues became his passion. Late at night, when everyone else had gone home, he’d often clear his desk and lay out the bits and pieces in front of him. There were phone numbers of people who knew people from Vilna, drawings of every item he could conjure from his childhood home (each detail, like the filigree on his mother’s silver napkin ring rendered with precision), every newspaper piece in which the word
Vilna
appeared. He’d arrange them in alphabetical and chronological order. He’d make lists, outlines, timelines, new pictures. Yet as patient and as logical a man as he was, the timelines always had missing years and the lists were filled with questions that never got answered. Even the drawings had blank spaces where the face of his mother or one of his siblings might have been.

By now, Adler, Broder, and Phelps had become Phelps and Adler after Broder, a forty-seven-year-old amiable fellow with gray hair and a paunch left his wife of twenty-three years and took up with an eighteen-year-old girl he’d met when she came to the office one day to deliver sketches for the Sunshine Biscuit advertising campaign. The story was that the girl was pregnant and that Broder had taken her off to the West Indies so she could have the baby in private, away from the brouhaha that had been kicked up by their union. But that’s not the way Flora heard the tale from her friend Myra, who was in the sisterhood with her at
Temple Beth David of Yonkers. Myra was friends with the first Mrs. Broder, who told her that Mr. Broder’s new wife was, first of all, not his wife at all, and second, not the least bit pregnant. Trudi Broder had apparently snorted to her friend Myra, “That man hasn’t been able to arouse his member in years. And if he did, I seriously doubt he’d know where to put it.”

Flora was breathless when she repeated this story to Simon. “So what do you think? Do you think Broder made it all up so his friends would think he was, you know, a real stud, or was it just an excuse for him to disappear?”

“Oh for God’s sakes, Flora, with all that’s going on, do you really want to waste your time worrying about this sort of nonsense?”

“It’s not nonsense,” she answered. “This is a man you’ve known nearly half your life. You’ve been with him, ten, eleven hours a day for twenty years—you figure it out. You’ve spent more time with him than you have with me. And then he goes off on this lark, which may not even be a lark at all, and you aren’t concerned or even mildly curious? Are you really that above it all?”

Flora and Simon bickered infrequently, but when they did, she had no problem blurting out whatever was on her mind. More often than not, he would snap back at her, then immediately feel repentant. She never begrudged him his success and the fame that came with it. He was talented and a hard worker and earned everything he had. It just had all come so fast, like a train materializing out of the fog in a great huff and gone again before you can whisper its name. That’s how it felt to Flora: as if she were the one who’d been left behind at the station. Flora still kept the first drawing Simon had ever given her folded up in her wallet: “Mr. Blockhead and the lovely Miss Chatterbug.” It wasn’t nearly as skilled or detailed as his current work, but every time
she looked at it, she felt the wholeness of their marriage, and for that reason, she loved it the best.

Phelps and Adler had grown so much that they moved to their own building downtown on Bond Street. Simon had more than seventy patents for window displays and paper toys pending with the U.S. government. When
Forbes
magazine or
Advertising Age
needed a quote from a smart businessman, they often turned to Simon, who had become known for his terse yet pointed remarks and his fine haberdashery.

What he lacked in God-given good looks, Simon made up for with aplomb and dignity, and though he was spare, he carried himself as a man twice his size. He had all of his shirts and suits hand made by a Lithuanian tailor on the Lower East Side and always wore a silk tie and a sterling silver tiepin with a tiny diamond on the tip. His name and face had become so familiar in the press that they affectionately called him “Dapper Simon Phelps.” When his picture and a quote from him showed up in a wire service story that ran all over the country, Flora teasingly asked him if there was any muckraker he
wouldn’t
give an interview to.

“I want my name and face everywhere I can get it,” he said.

“You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m not. I’d even have my face plastered on billboards if I could figure out how to do it.”

“Am I to think that all of this fame and money has gone to your dapper head?”

“You know me better than that. Suppose just one person sees my name or picture and says, ‘Isn’t that the boy from Vilna?’ and that one person can lead me to another person who knows something about my family, then all this would be worth it.”

He had made nearly a million dollars. The way things were going with the business expanding from window displays to advertising designs, games, and now puzzles, it was pretty much guaranteed that he would make millions more. They still lived in the same house in Yonkers, though now they had a cook and someone who came in to clean two times a week. Flora had an ankle-length beaver coat and diamond earrings that could light a moonless night. They gave dinner parties for people like Gerard Lambert and Albert Lasker when they were in town. Lambert, from St. Louis, had recently put halitosis on the map with his chiding ads for Listerine: “Always a bridesmaid, but never a bride.” And Lasker, out of Chicago, made smoking a desired way for women to lose weight with his “Reach for a Lucky instead of a Sweet” campaign.

As a boy, Simon had shaped his vision of America from newspaper headlines and photographs. But these days he found that advertisements gave him an even clearer picture of Americans. He understood that they adored modern gadgets: the record player, the meat-slicing machine, anything that glittered and went fast. Cleanliness was a virtue; women wore revealing lace robes and silky undergarments and were always available for romance yet were still expected to get dinner on the table; children were as guileless and iconic as the Baby Jesus; and men in their leather driving gloves and fedoras were always roughing it in fine suits or preparing for important outings. Beyond all else, Americans loved their dogs. Simon absorbed all this and developed a marksman’s instinct for coupling the right image with the right emotion. Smart consumers could spot a Phelps and Adler ad anywhere.

James Walter Thompson himself had put Simon’s name up for membership at the Granite Club. The club was in one of the
townhouses down the street from the new public library building on Fifth Avenue. Thompson had told him it was where New York businessmen took clients for lunch. It was the kind of place where a man could sip a whiskey, smoke a cigar, and sink into an overstuffed chair. When Simon visited the club for his interview with several of its board members, it was below freezing outside. A warm fire in a stone fireplace greeted him as he walked through the heavy oak doors. Upstairs, he had been taken with the oil portraits of distinguished members—including Theodore Roosevelt—and the rich smell of leather-bound books.

The interview had taken place in the dimly lit director’s office. An umbrella that had been propped up on the windowsill held the peeling window open. Lithographs and photographs of famous golf courses filled the walls. The director was a slim, immaculately dressed man well into his seventies. He had fine white hair and shook Simon’s hand firmly, pressing his thumb into the spongy part between Simon’s thumb and forefinger. Four other men, members of the admissions committee, sat in a semicircle around the walnut chair with the ornately carved back in which Simon sat. The men laced their fingers together and nodded with interest as Simon fielded questions about what kind of business he was in, what he foresaw in the Machine Age, and whether he thought America would continue to prosper.

At one point, he even pulled out a scrap of paper and drew them a sketch of how he imagined the robots of science fiction might look in the future. His answers made the men sit up and listen. The questions went along like that until the director, in a voice so casual it seemed like an afterthought, leaned forward and placed his bony hand under his chin. “This is all very fascinating. So tell me, if I may ask. What kind of a name is Phelps?”

Two of the men crossed their legs at the same time. Another cleared his throat. All of them looked somewhere else rather than into Simon’s eyes.

“Jewish,” he said, imagining the word splattering across their faces. “It’s a Jewish name. Lithuanian Jewish to be exact. Comes from the Lithuanian name Filips. I think that will be all for today. Thank you for your time, gentlemen.” Simon stood up, grabbed his brown felt hat from the hat rack, and walked out. When he’d gotten down to the lobby and put the hat on his head, it fell well below his ears. He’d taken someone else’s hat, someone with a head the size of a possum, which meant he’d have to go back upstairs and face those men again. In his anger, Simon took the stairs two at a time. The men were still seated around his empty chair, as if they hadn’t yet realized he’d left. He placed the oversized hat on the rack and took the one that belonged to him. “Stinkin’ shitballs,” he said under his breath, and he stuck the hat on his head. It had been Pissboy’s favorite phrase. At the time, Simon had found the phrase crude. Now it brought a smile to his face, as he realized that Pissboy had been the first person he knew who’d intuitively grasped the basic tenets of advertising: See it. Say it. Feel it.

B
Y THE TIME
he’d gotten back to Yonkers that evening, Simon had composed a letter to the
New York Herald Tribune
. He’d written about his interview at the Granite Club and how, as a foreigner to this country, he’d learned to interpret codes: “When a man asks another man, ‘And what kind of a name is Phelps?’ particularly when the man being asked the question has the residue of a foreign accent and the kind of nose that suggests something other than a direct bloodline to the Mayflower,
that man must assume his interrogator is not asking an innocent question.”