The Puzzle King (23 page)

He’d said that he’d wished this had been an isolated incident rather than more evidence of the “underlying bigotry that threatens to corrode the city’s institutions” and lamented that “the longer we ignore these manifestations of hate, the greater the risk grows that they will eventually destroy the democracy we hold so dear.”

His indignation in full throttle, he’d signed the letter, “Simon Phelps, Citizen of the United States, Jewish Citizen of the World.”

He’d read the letter one more time before he got off the train. He’d rewrite it when he got home and maybe take out the sign off. It was too much. Why give them ammunition?

Flora often wondered how Simon could go through a day at the office plus nearly three hours of commuting and never come home with a wrinkle on him. His shirt was always buttoned to his neck, and his silver tiepin was always exactly in the same spot as it was when he left in the morning. She still washed his shirts, so she knew that he rarely sweated. Only the ink stains on his fingers and occasional smudges of blue or black that rubbed off on his shirt gave a hint of his work. But on the night he’d come back from the Granite Club, Simon had stormed through the front door with his top button undone, his shirtsleeves pushed up above his elbows, and the swampy odor of a man who’d been chased.

“What happened to you? Did you walk home?” Flora had asked, greeting him at the door.

“I’m not in the mood for jokes, Flora.”

“Well, then, I’m not either, darling. Shall I get you a Manhattan?”

Lately, bits of Seema had crept into Flora: “Darling” and the trill in her voice when she said “Manhattan.” It irritated him, these affectations, but he would mention it to her later, after he’d had the Manhattan and put his feet up.

She poured herself a glass of sherry and they sat in the sunroom, where Simon described what had happened at the Granite Club.

As he told her how the man had asked about the name Phelps, he threw his hands up in the air and knocked over his Manhattan. The drink spilled onto the red-and-orange diamond-patterned Persian rug under his chair. Flora ran to the kitchen to get a dishtowel. She got on her hands and knees to blot up the whiskey and vermouth when she noticed she was using the towel that Edith had sent her. “It’s amazing how she got the yellow just right,” she said. “I don’t think whiskey stains rugs, do you? But you know what, I’ve been thinking we could certainly perk up this room a little. A new carpet wouldn’t hurt, something a little more modern maybe.”

Usually, it amused Simon how easily derailed Flora could become. But that day, he found it annoying. He wouldn’t tell her about the letter or how he’d gone back and cursed the man under his breath. She’d only have said that the letter was overwrought and he was overreacting. Silently, he fought back.
Well, at least someone in this family has one foot in the real world. Okay, I’ll take out the part about Citizen of the United States, Jewish Citizen of the World, but that is all
.

Simon stared at his wife. As he often did, he stepped back and watched his thoughts as if they were panel after panel in one of
those newspaper comic strips. Flora would be a round character, beautiful with a wide smile and sparkling jewelry. She would have an adoring, and mostly out of the picture, husband and a madcap sister who lived in the big city. Flora would live in a glow of sweetness and innocence. He’d draw it like a pink cloud filled with goose feathers. It would hang over her head wherever she went and make her impervious to anything ugly or mean. During the day, she would have quixotic, pastel-colored adventures, but at night, no matter how far she’d traveled in the day, she’d come home to her husband: an earnest black-and-white fellow with the downcast demeanor of a beagle. In the last panel of the strip, they would always lie together in their bed—she with her pink cloud hovering, he with his eyes wide open and his teeth locked in a grimace. The husband’s head would be oversized, so that his brain was visible. It would look like one of those new-fangled machines with pieces fitted together at right angles, and in big letters over the brain, he’d write:
CLICKETY CLACK CLICKETY CLACK
.

While Simon was creating his fantasy, Flora finished cleaning the rug and sat across from Simon watching the agitation play across his face. Now in his forties, Simon was becoming set in his habits. He’d taken to reading half the paper out loud, not really to her, but to some imaginary audience who would share his outrage when he’d yell, “Those morons, who are they kidding? Doesn’t anyone pay attention to history? Look what’s happening in Europe!” He was always preoccupied with something, whether it was the state of the world or his business. And then there was the obsession with finding his family. Always calling this one or that one who might have a connection to someone who knows someone. The endless scraps of papers and lists and envelopes filled with God knows what. She loved him for his devotion to
them, yet pitied him for what she feared was their fate. All this worrying seemed to wear him down. By the time he came home at night, he wanted to do little else than put his feet up, read the paper, and fret about the state of the world.

Sometimes Flora envied Seema’s glamorous life with its cocktail parties and evenings at the theater. Not that she wanted to go out every night, but once in a while it would be fun to get all dressed up and go out to a fancy restaurant or the opera. She thought about her looks. She was pretty, and because she’d never had children, she still had her figure, even near forty. But what good was being pretty and having a good figure if no one ever saw you? She noticed how men looked at her. It was not the way they looked at Seema, but with steady, appreciative eyes. It wouldn’t last much longer. Seema told her that by the time a woman reached forty-five, all her sex organs started to break down. “They’re no better than a scrap heap,” she’d said. She’d told Flora that when that happened, women gave off an odor, a very subtle odor that only men could smell, even though they didn’t always know that they were smelling it. The odor went to the part of their brain that was responsible for reproduction and gave off a chemical signal that let the man know her time had run out, that she was no longer capable of bearing his children. Because men were biologically put on this earth to procreate, Seema said, the chemical reaction in their brains caused them automatically to reject this woman. “It’s sad,” said Seema. “So many nice women over forty-five. But that’s just how it works.”

Flora never questioned how Seema knew all this, although it sounded like the kind of thing Oliver would tell her. By this logic, Flora had only seven years left. It seemed impossible that in seven years her sex organs would be a scrap heap. She’d forgotten to ask
Seema if husbands could smell their wives’ dying sex, or if it was just men who were out looking for women with whom to procreate. Would Simon be the only man she would ever know in that way? She wondered what it would be like to touch another man or go to bed with him before her time ran out. She daydreamed about spending a week in New York City with Seema. They’d go to speakeasies and dances and maybe a cabaret—anywhere that wasn’t in Yonkers and didn’t involve Phelps or Adler or any of the women of the Beth David sisterhood.

E
VEN THOUGH IT
was the first week of November, New York was enjoying the kind of Indian summer that made people believe that they’d outwitted winter. Flora was in the backyard planting anemone and tulip bulbs. There were even new rosebuds on the bushes, and Flora was deciding whether or not to prune them or wait for cooler weather. Her train of thought was interrupted by a young male voice.

“Sorry to bother you, but are you Mrs. Simon Phelps?”

Flora wiped her muddy hands on her slacks. “Yes, I am.”

“Then I’ve come to the right place,” he said, handing her a yellow envelope.

It was rare to get a cable. She assumed it was for Simon. Maybe there was some good news about his family.

“Hope you get a good crop of whatever you’re growing back there, ma’am,” he said, heading back to his truck.

She ripped open the envelope and saw the following words pasted side by side:
OUR MUTTI IS DECLINING. COME IMMEDIATELY. MARGOT
.

She could imagine how Margot must have agonized over those words. But why did she use the word “declining”? In the last letter Flora had received from Margot several months ago, Margot
had mentioned that their mother was losing words, as many older people do. Margot had said that when she couldn’t remember names, she’d make up unsettling substitutes. Frederick became the
Fleischmann
and Edith,
der Buckel
, “the hunchback”—a reference to the days right after her pleurisy surgery. In the letter, Margot had written that “our
Mutti”
can be so silly sometimes. At the time it struck Flora as odd. She knew there wasn’t a silly bone in her mother’s ferocious body. But Margot hadn’t mentioned anything about “declining.”

Flora went inside and put the cable down on the kitchen counter. She needed to call Simon. No, she should call Seema first. Of course she and Seema would go to Kaiserslautern right away. Simon wouldn’t want her traveling with Seema. Seema wouldn’t want to go at all. Maybe she’d call Simon first. Oh, but he would be too upset about her possibly missing Thanksgiving. Okay, she’d call Seema.

Seema answered on the first ring. Flora wondered what she did all day and why she would be that close to the phone at eleven o’clock on a Wednesday morning.

“I just got a telegram from Margot.” Flora read her the message. “I guess that means we have to go to Kaiserslautern as soon as possible.”

“Why do we have to go?”

“What do you mean, why do we have to go? Our mother is dying. That’s why.”

“I know our mother is dying. It’s just that she’s lived without us all these years, she can die without us, too.”

Flora had tucked the phone under her ear and had been picking the dirt out from under her nails. But Seema’s words made her stop and grab the receiver with both hands.

“Seema, what an awful thing to say. We have to go.”

All Seema could think about was how harsh her mother had been to her as a child, and how, since she’d come to America, she’d heard from her infrequently, and then only to extol Margot’s virtues as a mother.

“I don’t have to go. I don’t like that woman and I never have, you know that.”

They’d had this discussion many times. Seema would say, “She sent us away when we were little children so she could have her darling little Margot all to herself.” And Flora would answer, “Yes, but she sacrificed a lot to send us here. You’ve got to be grateful to her for that much.”

Usually, when the subject of their mother came up, Flora would let Seema’s comments pass, but today she found Seema petulant and even cruel. Flora didn’t disdain their mother the way Seema did, though whenever she’d thought about having children of her own, she’d hoped that they would love her unsparingly and that they would always live nearby. She understood why a mother would do what she did. But with that kind of time and distance between them, how could her children not be, at best, indifferent, and at worst, resentful toward her?

“Look Seema, we don’t have time for this nonsense now. We’re going and that’s that. I’ll find out when we can book passage and I’ll get back to you.”

“Christ, Flora,” said Seema, “You really can be so annoying. Has Simon given you his permission to leave?”

“I haven’t asked him yet. But of course he’ll say yes. What’s the matter? Are you afraid to leave Oliver alone in the big city?”

“Don’t worry about him, darling, Oliver will be fine. He’ll miss me, of course, but honestly, I don’t expect to be gone that long.”

Flora called Simon. He was always terrible on the phone. He had no time for chitchat and was abrupt and impatient. So she said what she had to say as plainly as she could.

“I just got a cable from Margot. My mother is dying and Seema and I are going to Kaiserslautern.”

There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line. “Oh God Flora, that’s awful,” said Simon. “I’m so sorry, that’s really awful.”

He seemed more upset than she did. “Of course you must go. I’ll go with you. I’ll call up the Hamburg American Line and book us all passage on the first boat we can get.”

“Oh Simon,” she said, “I knew you’d understand. And of course I want you to come. It’s just that—how shall I say this? It’s just that she’s dying, but she’s not dead yet. It could be days or weeks or, I don’t know. Can you really miss that much work?”

She heard the rustle of paper and figured that he was looking through his calendar. “Hmm, there could be a problem. But I can’t have you traveling alone.”

“But I won’t be alone. I’ll be with Seema.”

“I know,” he said. “In some ways that’s worse.”

“Oh, you worry too much. I can take care of myself. And besides, we’ll be on the boat for only a few days and then we’ll be in Kaiserslautern. Even Seema can’t get into trouble in Kaiserslautern.”

“Pff, I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Okay, so the two of you go and if you’re there—God forbid—for too long, I’ll come.”

“Okay, that’s good.”

Again she heard the rustle of paper. “Flora, you’ll be back in time for Thanksgiving, won’t you?”

Of all holidays, Simon embraced this one the most. Each year
they went to Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul’s and stayed for the entire day. Lev and Ruth would be there plus a crowd of friends and of people who had nowhere else to go. It always amazed Flora how, on that day, Simon, “Dapper Simon Phelps,” would unbutton his collar and roll up his sleeves and play football in the yard, and how later he would throw himself into the game of charades, making funny faces, getting down on all fours, doing a little dance in place—anything to win.

“Ooh, I hope so,” said Flora. “But it could be tricky. One week going over, another week coming back, and we’re already in the first week of November. I don’t know.”

They were both quiet as they realized how long they might be apart.

Finally, Simon spoke. “Well, Flora, you’ll do what you have to do.”