The Puzzle King (3 page)

Mr. and Mrs. Eisendraft, the old couple who rented out the rooms at 262 Eldridge Street, took Simon under their wing and never raised his rent beyond the original eight dollars a month. They enrolled him in the same public school their son attended, the boy who’d initiated the pissing match. His name was Aaron, but when Simon tried to say “Aaron,” his tongue would trill over the
r
and it would come out sounding more like a command. “Never mind,” Aaron said one day after Simon had stumbled over his name a few times. “Just call me Pissboy. That way you’ll always remember me.”

Simon immediately got work as a newsboy. Up at 3:30 each morning, he’d be at Newspaper Row to pick up that day’s bundles by 4:15. He’d stand out on Delancey and Orchard in the punishing sun or the numbing cold, and there he’d stay until every newspaper in his stack was gone. “Getcha
New York Sun
, only two cents.” “Fire on the Bowery, read all about it.” He learned the language of the city while his mind’s eye captured its contour and nuances.

His pictures filled the apartment at 262 Eldridge Street. In the rooms without windows, he hung sketches of windows looking out to sunlit skies with birds in the trees. For the kitchen, he made drawings of the pushcart vendors and of peaches and bananas and the other exotic fruits he’d discovered in America. He drew real likenesses of the people in the apartment, not caricatures with exaggerated features and swipes of brushstrokes. In Simon’s pictures, Mr. Abner’s mole above his right eyebrow looked as smooth and pink as it did in real life, and the purple veins in Mrs. Futterman’s nose were as clear and visceral as the coarse hairs sprouting out of Mr. Selig’s ears. Simon’s drawings were almost obsessive in their exactitude. He drew fast and constantly, as if he was trying to make the pencil or crayon keep up with the images that played in his head like a zoetrope.

The others at 262 Eldridge Street called him Rembrandt, although with their Yiddish, Hungarian, and Russian accents, it came out with too many
r
s at the beginning. He nodded and accepted their compliments with a smile. “What a polite boy,” they said. “How remarkable for a child to be that sensitive to adults. And no parents, to boot.” Mostly, he looked serious and old for his age, but sometimes, when his blue-gray eyes were open wide behind his rimless glasses and his mouth was round and slightly puckered, it was easy to look at Simon and find the face of a helpless child.

What they couldn’t see was how Simon was locked up inside. Unlearning one language while claiming another, he owned few words to give voice to his feelings. All he could do was travel through his eyes, tracing the lines and flows of what he saw in his head. Like the other people at 262 Eldridge Street, he was
from somewhere else that didn’t want him. He was stuck with them in this little house, all of them as poor as they’d been before they got here. Only now there was no America to look toward. Simon hoped that he would find his place, that he would be one of the lucky ones whose pictures he had seen in the newspaper: the ones who found a foothold in this world. In that way, he felt separate from the other people in the house, and even, at times, disparaging of them.

These people. They talk all the time. They talk in the language of the old country. And what do they talk about? They talk about nothing. They talk about food and money and the work they do, and they talk about each other. They will never be Americans if they don’t learn to speak English the way Americans do. They never go anywhere, just to their jobs and back. The same four blocks every day. I will learn to speak so that no American will be able to tell that I am not one of them. I’ll talk about the crimes and the fires and the prize fights and I’ll go to far away places like the Bronx and Brooklyn. I won’t end up here like the rest of them. God will put me in jail for having bad thoughts like this, I know He will. But when my mama and my sisters and brothers come to America, they have to have a house and money. I promised
.

O
N THE WALL
in the place where he slept were two drawings that Simon had made the day before he left the ship: one of his sisters and brothers, and one of his mother. Often, he would close his eyes and try to conjure up his father, but the image would never come to him. He’d envisioned pieces of each family member then put them together as best he could. In the
drawings he made, the lines were faded or creased with age but the forms were unmistakable and the strokes were the broad and simple ones of a child’s hand. These were the only pictures that lacked the concentration and fluidity of the others.

In one of them, two girls and four boys of varying heights were standing in front of a house. One of the boys, the smallest in the group, had a pronounced cowlick. A girl with pigtails held on to a doll with only one eye, which appeared to have been made from a button. The other girl was slightly stooped and did not have the same smiling face as the rest of them. A purple ribbon around her long hair culminated in a bow that was far too showy and carefree for the rest of her. It was clear that Simon took time drawing the pattern of the bow: different sized squares with different shadings that suggest a particular plaid. The house was lopsided. There was no sun, no grass, no trees.

The picture of his mother showed her with a big bosom, soft smile, and hair knotted on top of her head. She was wearing a striped dress underneath an apron with roses, and she was holding a child, a stick figure, by the hand. Most of the picture was scribbled, except for the fingers of the mother and child, which were intricately drawn and tightly entwined. The two hands were darker than the rest of the picture, as if by bearing down on the charcoal, the young artist could make them indelible. Sometimes at night when he thought everyone was asleep, Simon would press his cheek against the wrinkled paper and stare into its charcoal folds, trying to draw out of them a new fact or forgotten moment. Then he would try to pray. It was so simple when his mother did it. She’d press her palms together, lower her eyelids, and talk to God as casually as if she were talking to a next-door neighbor. “Oh God, help me see my way clear to cleaning up this mess of a
house.” “Dear God, save us from persecution and poverty.” She’d ask for the simple and miraculous with equal intimacy.

As she did, Simon would close his eyes and press his palms together. He’d think about how he craved the noise of his six brothers and sisters and the way his mother smelled like mint and cloves. In the dark silence, he could hear their voices, each a different timbre, and in his brother Jurgis’s case, a slight lisp. He searched for words, but he had nothing to say to this God, this old friend of his mother’s. He didn’t have the words for the longing and fright that lived like worms in the pit of his stomach and startled him out of sleep each morning. It was as if the part of his brain that held language had room for only so much, and as the new words moved in, the old ones moved out. Until the transition was complete, he’d keep it all to himself.

What the world saw was a boy as clean and shiny as a lacquered box. In daytime, in public, he learned how to keep the worms at bay. Each morning, before he left for his job as a newsboy, he’d spit-shine his shoes, slick down his hair with some coconut oil he’d found in the bathroom, and run the palm of his hand over his shirt and trousers to straighten any wrinkles.

When he finished selling the newspapers, he’d walk to school. Often, he arrived there before the teachers. There, he’d hunch down in a corner of the schoolyard and pull out his sketchpad or his grammar book. At around seven-thirty, Mrs. O’Mara, his teacher, would show up. “Well, Mr. Early Bird, here you are again. You’d better come inside before you turn to ices, ay?” Every morning, it would be the same words. Something about the way she said
ices
made this the best part of his day.

Mrs. O’Mara wore her red hair piled on top of her head with tiny curls escaping down the sides of her face. Her cheeks were
pink with rouge and, possibly because she wore a corset, all the plumpness from the rest of her body was squished up into her soft round face, which was filled with anything but ices.

She seemed tall and grand in her green gabardine coat and brown ankle-high boots. Simon always smiled up at her, though he never said anything back, afraid his English would come out muddled. He heard it all the time: twists of the tongue that sounded clumsy and ugly. Not him. Sometimes the class would sing “Yankee Doodle.” Afraid that he’d stumble over the word
Yankee
, Simon never sang along, even though he’d find himself humming it when he was alone. Only when Mrs. O’Mara had them stand up, face the flag, place their hands over their hearts, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance did he speak out loud. And then he took great care to enunciate his words, arcing the
r
s in “America” and coming down hard on “justice for all.”

What he lacked in words, he made up for with his drawings. He drew pictures of the other kids in the class with gaps where their baby teeth used to be, and others with freckles just the right color brown. He drew a picture of Mrs. O’Mara using only rose-colored crayons. Her mouth was the shape of a heart.

One afternoon, Davey Mullett, a skinny kid with twine-colored hair and yellow teeth, said to Simon: “You draw so good, did you learn it from your father?”

With uncustomary boldness, Simon answered: “My father is died.”

“And your mother?” asked Davey. “Is she died, too?”

“My mother lives in another country,” said Simon. “She and my brothers and sisters live with her. Soon they will come to America.”

It was the kind of answer that could have gotten Simon into
trouble: a punch to the stomach, cruel taunting.
Sissy boy, misses his mama
. Simon had seen other boys beaten up for lesser crimes. In this neighborhood, someone always seemed to want what you had even when you had even less than nothing.

As if to authenticate his story, Simon turned to a blank piece of paper in his sketchpad and drew a beautiful woman with long yellow hair and six perfect children standing before a red house high on a green hill. Then he took a black crayon and drew the outline of a seventh child with no features and no color. He held the picture up to Davey. “That’s them,” he said.

“Who’s that?” asked Davey, pointing to the shadowy outline.

“That’s me.”

“Could I have the picture?” asked Davey.

“Sure,” said Simon, ripping the page from the notebook.

Davey Mullet wasted no time in telling the other kids. Sometimes, he’d ask Simon for a particular picture he’d drawn and Simon always gave it to him. Davey Mullet never said as much, but it was clear from the way he and the other kids treated Simon that, while they thought a boy with a dead father was a big deal, a boy with a dead father and a mother living in a foreign country was even bigger. The boys thought he was heroic and lucky not to have any parents to boss him around. The girls wanted to mother him. One day, Christina Ryan, a pale, skinny girl with sad, walnut-shaped eyes and long, wavy brown hair, waited for Simon after school. “Can I walk with you?” she asked. Christina was more than a year older than he was and lived down the street from him. Her father owned the milk cart, which he would push around the neighborhood shouting, “Milk here, milk here, fresh from a cow’s teat. Milk here, milk here, fresh from a cow’s teat.” Mrs. Futterman said that the milkman was coarse, but Mr. Selig
said, “Yeah, but you buy his milk, don’t you?” He’d heard the boys make crude jokes about Christina, who was curvier than the other girls in the class.

Simon walked down Orchard Street with Christina, aware that she towered over him by at least a head. She stared straight ahead; he had a tight, concentrated smile. It wasn’t often he walked with a girl, particularly a nice-looking one. He walked slowly to make sure everyone in the neighborhood could see him.

The next day, the same thing happened: Christina waited after school and asked if she could walk with him. Again they walked in silence.

On the third day, the news of it reached 262 Eldridge Street. “So, I hear you have a sweetheart?” said Mr. Selig, as they sat down to a dinner of roasted chicken. Simon could feel his face get hot. Pissboy looked up from his soup. “She’s got bazooms out to here,” he said, cupping his hands in front of his chest. Mr. Selig slapped his hand and tried to hide his smile. Simon would always remember that gesture, Pissboy holding his hands as if they were weighted down with grapefruits—not because of its coarse nature but because after that Pissboy punched him in the arm and called him a “stinkin’ piece of shitball,” just as he would have any of the other boys.

The next day in class, Simon drew a picture of a girl with brown wavy hair, big wide eyes, and oversized cherry breasts. Mrs. O’Mara happened to walk by just as he was finishing it. She stood over him and stared at the picture, squinting as if she was trying to take it in. “You have real talent. You could be an artist someday.” Then she did a strange thing. She knocked on Simon’s head as if she were knocking on a door. “You’re all head,” she said. “But heart, where’s your heart?” She did the same tapping
gesture on her own chest. “Why don’t you put that drawing away before someone’s feelings get hurt?” Shame dragged over Simon as he crumpled the picture into a ball and threw it into the trash.

“There’s a place uptown where they have beautiful pictures from people all over the world. Do you know where I mean?”

Simon shook his head no.

“It’s way uptown, on Fifth Avenue. It’s called the Metropolitan Museum of Art and it’s filled with paintings and sculptures, beautiful art by people who knew about heads and hearts. It’s real pretty up there with all the mansions and Central Park. Sometime you could take the Third Avenue El to Eighty-sixth Street and take a look.” Simon thought that if Mrs. O’Mara believed that they were beautiful pictures, he would like to see them.

“I’ve never been there,” he said.

“Maybe I could take you there this weekend,” she said.

Could this be possible? What would the other kids think if they found out he went to a museum with his teacher? The other boys would never let him hear the end of it. He’d go, of course, but he’d tell no one. Chances of him bumping into anyone way up there were next to nothing. He tried to imagine what it would be like to travel on the El with Mrs. O’Mara and walk with her through those fancy streets. Simon decided not to risk having her change her mind by expressing his disbelief.