The Puzzle King (10 page)

Even as she said these words, Seema knew that would never happen. Her mother would not come to America. Her sister Margot would not come to America. Whenever Seema had broached it in a letter, her mother would write back, “You can’t uproot an old tree.” Her mother, Margot—they were both old trees who’d sunk their roots into the German soil to which they would cleave until the day they died. In truth, it would be fine with her if she never saw her mother again.

But this was a day to put thoughts like that out of her mind. If there was any day in her life she would try to be motherly toward Flora, this was it, even if Flora was marrying that earnest Jewish fellow who looked like a tortoise.

Seema held the woolen blanket around her shoulders as she picked up the clothes that were scattered around the floor. She couldn’t, for the life of her, remember how her shoes had ended up on the dresser, but there they were, with her stockings stuffed neatly inside of them and an envelope propped up against one of the heels. Inside were five dollar bills and a note that read:

The evening was spectacular but alas has come morning and the pursuant tasks at hand. Don’t take the enclosed funds as any more than an expression of my delight and deepest desire that you find your way home in the most convenient manner possible. I shall see you again soon, my lovely.

One thing that drove Seema crazy about these college boys was their highfalutin use of language. “Pursuant.” “Convenient manner.” What did all this mean? But she was glad for the cash. She had exactly an hour and a half to get home, change her clothes, and hop on a train at Grand Central in order to get to Mount Kisco by early afternoon.

She shoved the money into her purse, slipped her dress over her head, and pulled on her stockings. Last night’s clothes looked duller, felt heavier, in daylight. The inside of her mouth was dry and the sour taste of gin still lingered in the back of her throat. She went into the bathroom, where there was a single toothbrush. She’d shared more than that with the man last night, so using his toiletries didn’t seem like such a big deal. She brushed her teeth, washed her face with cold water, and put on the lipstick and rouge she carried with her in her bag. She was about to walk out the door when the thought struck her that she should leave a note or some memento for her young man. Seema couldn’t help
but smile as she reached up under her dress, pulled off her bloomers, and placed them carefully on the middle of his pillow.

S
NOWFLAKES THE SIZE
of tears bounced against the windowpane as the train shuddered toward Westchester. Seema rested her head against the cool glass, hoping the chill of it would dull the ache above her eyes. Mount Kisco, Mount Kisco. The name played in her head to the rhythm of the train. Mount Kisco. Those were the first words she had ever spoken in English. Before she and Flora left Kaiserslautern, they would talk about Mount Kisco with Margot, each of them giving a different face to Kisco, who must have been a great enough man to have a mountain named after him. Seema had envisioned Kisco as tall and bony with a thick black beard and a slight hooked nose—exactly the kind of man she would never be attracted to now.

But oh the dreams they had about Mount Kisco. The Grossman sisters took a piece from every fairy tale they had ever read and came up with a Mount Kisco where the sun always shone, where the flowers were round and plump, and where the houses were as big as castles. Aunt Hannah would be beautiful, with long blond hair and cherry red lips. Uncle Paul would be handsome and suave like the king’s son in “Rapunzel.”

Seema tried to conjure up a vision of her thirteen-year-old self. Newly arrived in America, she was afraid to speak English and became convinced that the reason her changing body was betraying her in such confounding ways was because she was a foreigner. That was before she had any inkling about the way she really did stand apart from other girls. Sometimes older men would hold her in their gaze for a few moments too long, and she would look away, discomforted by their intensity.

Shortly after Seema came to Mount Kisco, Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul invited a couple over for coffee. Mr. and Mrs. Holt had a daughter who was Flora’s age and Mr. Holt owned the new furniture and carpeting store in town. Mr. Holt was about two heads taller than Seema and had brown stained teeth. She couldn’t remember how he looked, only the feeling of him as he came into Aunt Hannah’s kitchen to help Seema carry out the coffee cups and blackberry pie. When she picked up the pie, he stood behind her and put his arms around her. “That’s a mighty heavy load for a little thing like you,” he’d said as he pressed himself against her. She’d frozen in place while he took the pie from her and held it above her head. She didn’t know what had happened, only that it made her feel queasy and like she wanted to cry. After that, every time the Holts came to visit, Mr. Holt would find a way to be alone with her, and the same kind of thing would happen. Once, he came into her bedroom while she was brushing her hair. “Let me help you with that,” he’d whispered, taking the brush from her hands and running it through her hair. Just then, Flora walked in. Mr. Holt’s voice suddenly got loud and deep. “Seema was just using me as a guinea pig to show off her new hairstyle, weren’t you Seema?”

Because she and Flora were still new enough to the country to believe that everyone in America was touched with magic, Flora didn’t seem to find Mr. Holt’s behavior unusual. But instinctively Seema knew it was best to keep what she knew of Mr. Holt to herself.

The snow was falling harder now, and it seemed as if the train were traveling through a cloud. Seema pressed her thumb and middle finger to her brow. Her mind was webbed with so many secrets. She remembered a morning shortly after her father had
died. It was cold and snowy, like now, and the windowpanes were opaque with frost. She, Margot, Flora, and their mother were huddled around the kitchen table. As her mother studied the three of them, Seema noticed the lines around her mouth, newly inscribed by her widowhood. She could still hear the hurt in her mother’s voice as she stared out the window up at the sky: “What kind of God leaves a woman alone with three children?” she said to no one in particular. “My days as a woman are over now. But you girls, you have it all ahead of you.” Then she went around the table and pinned a future on each of them. Flora, “my merry one,” would always have men dancing around her, “like a maypole.” It might take her “shy, peculiar child,” Margot, a longer time to find a husband, but when she did, he would be as “loyal and true blue as she was.” Then she turned to Seema. “My unknowable one,” she said harshly. “She doesn’t even bother to chew her secrets; she just swallows them whole.” It was the first time she remembered thinking how much her mother disliked her.

Now, as she replayed that morning in her mind, three things leapt out at her: Her mother was thirty-four when she declared an end to her days as a woman. She wondered if her mother had ever seen an actual maypole. And she knew that had she ever confided to her mother about Mr. Holt, she would have somehow figured a way to put the blame on her. What kind of God, indeed?

She thought about Flora, the merry one, with her clear brown eyes and the easy way she had of talking to people. No unchewed secrets in her history. What must that be like? She was such an innocent, and now she was getting married. “Shy and peculiar,” Margot had outfoxed them all by being the first to marry at
eighteen, just two months earlier. That left Seema as the spinster in the family. Everyone assumed that she would marry soon. But she was in no hurry. She liked going to dance halls, meeting handsome new men. The way things were now, she understood what men wanted from her and, frankly, she wanted little more from them. A husband would expect her to wash his clothes, prepare his food, care for the children—all the things she was doing for the White family, but at least they paid her. She never talked about her life to her family, and she wondered what, if anything, they knew about her.

Her mother’s letters were brief and infrequent; she rarely asked about Seema. From time to time, Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul would make some comment about the bloom coming off the rose or fruit being too ripe, but then they’d turn it into some kind of a joke and they’d all end up laughing as if they were in it all together. And Margot? She couldn’t even imagine what Margot would think of the life she was living here.

She wondered what Margot was doing now. She imagined her puttering over the window box that overlooked the yard behind their house in Kaiserslautern. She could see the curve of her back as she bent over the bright red flowers, smelling their sweet leaves and cupping a blossom in her hand as if it were a soft-boiled egg. Margot kept the window box filled with geraniums, even during the coldest months. She doted on these flowers as she did on her collection of tiny porcelain owls and the assortment of hatpins she kept on the table by her bed. “It could be worse,” she’d say when anyone teased her about her quirky hobbies. “I heard about a man in Hamburg who kept two snakes in his room for five years before the police found him out.
That’s
what I call an eccentric hobby.”

S
EEMA HAD THE GORGEOUS
hair and sexy bearing and Flora had the curvy feminine body, but it was Margot with her winter-pale skin and long slender legs who was the real looker. She was the youngest, and as far as Seema knew, she’d never had any more unhappiness than the usual theatrics that play out in a young girl’s life. Yet even as a child, Margot was inclined to extremes. She collected stories from the kids at school and later from newspapers and magazines. The more bizarre, the more she favored them: the little Indian girl born with eight limbs whom everyone thought was the reincarnation of the Hindu goddess of wealth and prosperity, Lakshmi; or the man in Brussels who weighed 850 pounds and couldn’t get out of his house until the fire department came and broke down his door. Along with stories, she collected symptoms. God forbid any of them got a rash or a cold. Margot would become convinced they were on their way to malaria, pneumonia, or some other dreaded disease. From as early as Seema could remember, Margot had that hairline furrow in her brow, which grew deeper as she got older. She remembered how their mother would rub her finger on that spot between her eyes and say, “It’s a shame. You’re such a pretty girl, if only we could clear your head of all that nonsense and make your worry go away.”

When Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul first suggested that the Grossman girls come to America, there was never a question of whether or not Margot would go with them. She’d read about the hooligans in the Gas House Gang in New York and the Indian massacre at Wounded Knee, and that was all she needed to know about America. “No, thank you, it’s not for me,” she’d said.

Right before Flora and Seema left, Margot began to get violent headaches. Sometimes she would take to bed for days at a time
and lie in the dark, a damp cloth over her eyes, her skin so translucent that her temples and arms were a map of veins. The merest sound made her flinch. Seema remembered how their mother would tiptoe into their room and whisper, “Would you like a bowl of soup,
mein Schatz
? Something to warm your stomach?” Margot was convinced she was going blind, which was another reason she gave for not going to America. Who would take care of a blind young girl except for her mother? No, she’d stay right here in Kaiserslautern.

Margot was the only one of them for whom their mother had a pet name. Maybe it was because Margot was the most like her and had inherited her nervousness and streak of melodrama. Whatever the reason, the two of them were emotionally tethered. One day, when the sisters were very little girls, a bird flew into their house and couldn’t find its way out. The bird was shiny with a black head and a black beak—a crow, Seema realized now. It swooped and zigzagged and made piercing caw-caw-caw cries as their mother chased it with a blanket. When its wing glanced Margot’s shoulder, she began to shriek, “A bat! A bat!” Someone at school had told her about a vampire bat in Budapest who had sucked all the blood out of a child while he was sleeping, and when his mother came to wake him up the next morning, he was dead. Seema shushed her and whispered, “It’s not a bat at all, it’s really the wicked witch from ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ and if you aren’t quiet right now she’s going to pick you up and eat you alive.”

Margot gulped back her tears and froze in place. The air went out of her and she crumpled to the floor. Her mother dropped the blanket she was using to trap the bird, turned on the balls of her feet, and slapped Seema across the face. “You are the cruelest
child I have ever known,” she shouted, before kneeling down to hug Margot. “It is your job to protect your little sister, and if you ever do anything like this again, your punishment will be worse.”

Seema was glad her mother was thousands of miles away.

A
S SHE GOT OFF
the train in Mount Kisco, Seema rubbed her fingers over her right cheek, where she could still feel the fire of her mother’s handprint. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Aunt Hannah, who was wrapped up in her brown wool cloak and hugging herself to keep warm. She was the only person waiting at the station on this frosty morning. Seema quickened her step and put a smile on her face as she braced herself for Aunt Hannah, a small but effusive woman with a big hug.

“Seema, finally you’re here. I thought you’d be on the last train,” shouted Aunt Hannah. She spread her arms, and the cloak billowed, making her seem twice her size as she swaddled Seema in her wooly embrace. “Now everyone’s here. Ruth and Lev came last night. Flora’s been waiting for you all morning. She looks absolutely radiant. Oh, you girls. You must miss your mother so on a special day like today. Uncle Paul and I want you to know that we are your family and couldn’t love you more if you were our own children.”

Seema tried to turn her face away from Aunt Hannah, afraid that the liquor was still on her breath. Their cheeks touched. Aunt Hannah’s skin was smooth and cold. She thought about the man last night and his stubble and the red scratch marks he’d left on her cheeks. If Aunt Hannah smelled gin or noticed any nicks on her face, it didn’t distract her from her chatter. “It’s so sad that your mother and Margot couldn’t be here. But, of course,
it’s such a long and expensive trip. Oh, but let’s not dwell on the negative. There are so many happy things to talk about. Flora. What a dream she is in her dress. She even found some gardenias for her hair. And Simon. We are so lucky to have Simon in the family. He’s shy. A little hard to get to know. But a fine man, don’t you think?”