The Puzzle King (4 page)

“I would like that fine,” he said.

“Okay then.” She smiled, as if she could read his pleasure. “I’ll meet you here in front of the school at eleven on Saturday morning.”

E
VERYTHING ABOUT THAT DAY
at the museum stayed fixed in his mind. Aside from the sculptures, he was mesmerized by a Giovanni Bellini painting called
Madonna and Child
. He studied the way the Madonna’s fingers caressed the child’s curly red hair and how she stared sidelong from the canvas as if to ward away intruders. Her lips were soft and forgiving. He thought about his mother. Then, in this place of beautiful paintings, he tried again to conjure up an image of his father. Still, nothing came.

My father is lost to me
, he thought. And as he often did when the reality of that loss sat heavy inside him, he consoled himself with the promise of seeing his mother again soon. He glanced up at the painting. Would anyone but his mother ever caress his hair this way or kiss his head or regard strangers with a suspicious eye when they came too close? Standing before the mother and child in this painting made him feel like an intruder. He was nobody’s child, and that was the saddest feeling he’d ever had. Mrs. O’Mara put her hand on his arm. “You miss your mother, don’t you?” she asked.

No one had touched him in an intimate way since he left home, and the feel of her fingers on his arm was familiar and soothing. He could feel tears come to his eyes, and he fought them back by turning to the Frans Hals painting across the room,
Portrait of a Woman
. Even that, a painting of a pleasant heavyset woman, reminded him of how his mother used to sit with her hands folded on her lap. “Is this the Metropolitan Museum of Mothers?” he said, trying to sound casual.

Mrs. O’Mara started to laugh. She put her hand over her mouth to squelch the sound of it, but despite her efforts, she made little snorting sounds. Simon started laughing as well,
harder and harder until tears ran down his cheeks, which made Mrs. O’Mara laugh even harder. In order to steady herself, she put her hand on the wall right next to the Hals painting. That’s when the uniformed guard came over to them and said, “Please, you are disrupting the other visitors. And madam, I’ll have to ask you to remove your hand from the wall.”

The pretentious way the guard said “madam” stirred them up all over again. “We’d better get out of here,” said Mrs. O’Mara.

Back in the street, they could see Central Park, forestlike in its expanse, and the sprawling lawns of the brick mansions on Fifth Avenue. As they walked east toward the Third Avenue El, the lawns got less gracious and the homes got smaller. Simon could feel himself getting farther and farther away from what seemed like a safe place. For however long they’d been in front of those paintings, he’d been home and happy and somebody’s child. As they walked, he tried to re-create the feeling he had inside the museum. He called Mrs. O’Mara “madam” mimicking the highfalutin tone of the guard, and he brought up “the Museum of Mothers,” but by the time they got back to Eldridge Street, he’d put a distance between himself and her, afraid that one of the other boys might catch him walking with his teacher.

That night, he tried to draw the women of Bellini and Frans Hals but all he could come up with were red-haired women who looked like Mrs. O’Mara.

Even though he’d been in the country for nearly eight years, Simon Phelps still hadn’t gotten used to the way things in America would appear to be one thing and then inexplicably change to another. For example, here it was late in September. A cold rain had been falling steadily for a week. The puddles in the streets were filled with shiny dead leaves. Simon had taken to wearing his warmest woolen sweater, and even so, he had to rub his hands together and walk doubly fast in order to stay warm in the early morning chill. And then yesterday, the last day of September, the sun came out and the air smelled young and fresh. It was as if July had momentarily skipped around the corner, and now it was back. The peak of summer coincided with Yom Kippur that year, and in synagogues all over New York, rabbis had moon-shaped sweat stains under the arms of their long black robes.

Simon normally paid no attention to Yom Kippur. He knew that Mr. Abner and Mrs. Futterman, the oldest people in the house, would fast on this day. Each year, they’d come home from
synagogue just after the sun set. They always looked pale and their hands would shake. The other people in the house would be waiting for them, and Mrs. Eisendraft would prepare a celebratory meal of chicken soup, gefilte fish, herring, a challah, and roast chicken. “It wasn’t a bad fast this year,” Mr. Abner would say, tearing off a piece of the challah and using it to sop up some chicken fat from the bottom of the pan. “Not bad at all.”

Mrs. Futterman would barely make it up the stairs on her wobbly legs. “Bring me a chair,” she’d cry out. “I’m getting too old for this. I’m sure God, or whoever thought up this fasting business, just meant for us to atone a little, not to die.”

Mr. Abner and Mrs. Futterman always invited Simon to join them in the synagogue, and every year he would conjure up an excuse, like he had to go to school or he didn’t have a suit. He wouldn’t have gone had Pissboy not said to him two days earlier that, according to the Torah, he was a man now. “You’re seventeen,” he’d said. “You’ve been a man for four years. How’re you going to get God to give you what you want if you don’t repent for your sins? You’re old enough to have sins, aren’t you?” Pissboy punched his shoulder, and Simon wished he had something to confess to the older boy: a fight, a girl, a petty crime.

“Aw come on,” Pissboy continued, “don’t tell me you’re pure as snow? I seen you with Christina, I seen the way she looks at you. You gonna tell me nothin’ ever went on? Never stuck your hand underneath her shirt, never let your hand
accidentally
slip between those creamy thighs of hers?”

Pissboy was eighteen now. When his shirt was unbuttoned you could see a crease of fat sitting as a necklace would under his chin. Like many pudgy boys, he held his arms bowed and his hands in a beseeching position, which gave him an odd penguinlike
gait. Already he’d lost two teeth to fights with other boys in the neighborhood, and more than once Simon had seen him stuff a bloodied or torn shirt into the trashcan outside the house.

A few weeks earlier, Pissboy had told Simon that he was going out to hunt down some souvenirs and asked if he would he like to come. When Simon told him that he really didn’t understand what he meant by souvenirs, Pissboy shook his head and put his hand on Simon’s shoulder. “You know, I’d call you a mama’s boy, but you don’t even have a mama,” he’d said. “So that either makes you a sissy or some oddball foreigner. Nothing that can’t be fixed with a little guidance from someone who knows the ropes. Know what I mean? Come with me. I’ll show you some souvenirs.”

He took Simon down to the basement. In a dark corner, behind the washboard and underneath a wooden bench, was a wad of old rags. Pissboy scooped them up using both hands and carefully unwrapped them. Simon could see that he was holding something small and round. Whatever it was, it picked up the narrow band of light that shone through the basement window. A thick link chain slipped through his fingers and in the palm of his hand he held a gold pocket watch. “Lookee here,” said Pissboy, holding the watch close to Simon’s face. “This is no fake. Heavy as a rock. She’s a real beauty, isn’t she?” Carefully, he placed the watch on the bench. Simon noticed the initials on the watch cover: GMC. He didn’t know anyone with those initials.

Pissboy unfolded another rag. This time he pulled out a magnifying glass. The glass was beveled and the handle and rim were made of pewter. “Ever see one of these?” he asked, placing the magnifying glass into Simon’s hand. The handle fit perfectly into Simon’s palm and felt cool in his grip. “Go ahead, look through
it. You won’t believe it.” Simon always carried some paper and a pencil in his back pocket because he never knew when he’d see something he wanted to sketch. He pulled out the wad of paper and drew some swift lines across it. He examined them under the glass. Seen this way, the pencil lead formed tracks and branches and spidery gullies on the paper, which itself was knobby and textured. Simon could have spent hours looking through the magnifying glass but for Pissboy, who was watching over his shoulder. “Never had anything like it, have you? I’ll bet you want one of these.”

Simon held the glass at arm’s length and ran his fingers around the edge. “It’s a beautiful thing,” he said.

“See, that’s the point,” said Pissboy. “I’ve got lots of souvenirs like this, things you want but you never think you can get. But if you’re clever enough, you can get whatever you want.” His head jerked as he winked, “Know what I mean?”

Simon knew exactly what Pissboy meant. There was something he wanted. He wanted money so that when his family came to America they would be able to buy a house. He wanted to know that his family was safe in Vilna, because in all the years that he’d been in America, he’d heard nothing of them even though he’d written to them innumerable times. He wanted to see them again, and he would do almost anything to get that, even if it meant going into a strange synagogue and making amends to an unfamiliar God. He thought he’d used up all of his wanting on them, but that was before he saw Pissboy’s magnifying glass.

On this Yom Kippur morning, Pissboy stood before him in a suit that was too tight across his chest to button and a shirt whose sleeves hung way below his fists: hand-me-downs, most likely. Only his cufflinks, almond-shaped onyx stones, looked
new and expensive and sharper than all the rest of him. They were obviously another of Pissboy’s souvenirs.

They walked the two blocks to the synagogue together. From the outside, it might have been another tenement on Chrystie Street. The synagogue was on the second floor: a large un-imposing room with wooden straight-back chairs, a podium, and a hand-carved walnut case in the front of the room, where the scrolls of the Torah were stored. They took seats near the back. The rabbi and cantor chanted in Hebrew, and the people in the audience followed along in the prayer books, moving their lips as they read. The exotic words they sang sounded ancient and impenetrable to Simon, yet they provoked in him such a palpable longing that he closed his eyes so as to move out of its way.

As he stood there in his self-imposed darkness, a memory, long forgotten, was being dislodged. He could feel himself rocking back and forth. But he wasn’t the one who was rocking. It was a man with a beard. The beard smelled fusty and was tickling the side of his cheek. He was in the man’s arms, and the man was chanting words that sounded like these words. He was a little boy, little enough to be held in his father’s arms as his father prayed and sang and rocked back and forth. He could feel his father’s warm words in his ear and smell his breath, stale and sour. It must have been this same Yom Kippur service, and it must have been the last one his father would live to see.

Simon became aware of the wooden seat rail of his chair banging against the back of his knees. How long had he been swaying like this? How many years back in time had he traveled? He opened his eyes and wondered if Pissboy had noticed anything out of the ordinary, but Pissboy was staring down at his shoes and absentmindedly jiggling the coins in his pocket. Simon looked straight ahead at the rabbi, who stood with his back toward the
congregation before the walnut cabinet. As he touched his finger to the doors, they swung open slowly. Simon could see the red velvet cloth that lined the ark and the golden Hebrew letters embroidered on the Torah cover.

The rabbi wrapped his arms around the Torah, lifted it from the ark, and carried it to the podium. Simon felt as if he were seeing all of these things for the first time, and yet he was seeing them again. Again, he could feel a man’s arms around him, holding him as tenderly as the rabbi held the Torah. A pleasurable warmth shot through his body, and for the first time since his father had died, he allowed himself the thought that he was once a father’s son.

At the end of the service, when it came time for the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, the rabbi asked all who mourned to rise. Without thinking, Simon started to stand. Then he paused. He looked at the others who had come to their feet. Most were old, with shiny cheeks and wrinkled skin where hair no longer grew. He would leave the praying to them, he thought, as he sat back down. Their voices were croaky and tired. Some closed their eyes; others bent forward.

Yis’ga’dal v’yis’kadash sh’may ra’bbo
,

The prayer had a somber cadence.

b’olmo dee’vvro chir’usay v’yamlich malchu’say
,

The words sounded as if they were weighted down with stones.

b’chayaychon uv’yomay’chon
…

Simon wondered if they were the same stones that had crushed his father’s heart and killed him.

He’d never understood how sadness could stop a man’s heart.
His mother had a flair for making things more dramatic than they were, and when she told him that his father died from stones of sorrow, he assumed that she was exaggerating. But now, as he sat so close to Pissboy that he could see the dots of perspiration beading his upper lip, he felt a pressure in his own heart that was heavy and absolute. Only Pissboy’s proximity kept him from crying out.