The Puzzle King (33 page)

Beautiful German-made car. Why emphasize German-made?

Unusual horn goes “Tee-poo-peep-pa.” Why bother telling us this?

Church!!! Flora says she remembers seeing a cross in Seema’s suitcase when they went to Germany together. Related?

Filled with romantic plans. Probably just a pretentious “Seema” turn of phrase.

In his impeccable script, he wrote under
Edith:

Why is she getting married on a Sunday?

Father retired?? Since when? Frederick would never retire! Still relatively young.

Things
peaceful
at home. Why bring it up?

Werner’s father resting after journey. What journey?

Model Wife—doesn’t sound like Edith.

Meet them on their honeymoon? Think about it.

And under
Margot
he jotted:

Again about Frederick’s retirement?

What is
the mood
around here?

All this could mean nothing or everything. So far, despite his various trips to the State Department and the detective doggedly following through on every clue taking him to Baltimore, Charleston, and as far as Carson City, Nevada, Simon had still found out nothing about his mother, sisters, and brothers. Sometimes he thought that his family was like the characters he’d created on paper. One moment they were full of life, and then, with the turn of a page, they were gone. It frightened him to believe that the world was like that, and he was even more determined that Flora’s family—particularly Edith—not meet the same transient fate. The news trickling out of Germany was alarming: Harassment. Arrests. Brutality. Rumors of camps. The Gestapo was becoming more oppressive.

Among the sisterhood at Beth David, there was much talk of the stringent immigration laws. Ever since the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, the number of immigrants who could be permitted to enter from any country was only 2 percent of the number of people from that country already living in the United States. Now there was even more red tape involved in getting a visa, making it virtually impossible for Jews who wanted to leave Germany to find a place to go. Even if someone could secure a visa, there was the matter of the coveted affidavit of support. Normal immigration
visas required proof of the LPC clause, that the applicant had enough resources so that he was not “likely to become a public charge.” If they couldn’t show proof of that, they had to have an affidavit of support from friends or relatives in the United States that promised they would be willing to provide for the applicant. For the past three months, the Beth David sisterhood had been going door to door in Westchester County circulating a petition that urged President Roosevelt to intervene on behalf of the Jews in Europe.

It was Flora’s job to mail the two hundred-page document to Washington, but before she did, she brought it home so that Simon could see for himself what she and the sisterhood had accomplished. “The president won’t know what hit him,” she said plopping the hefty manuscript onto Simon’s desk. “Take a look. Five thousand names from all over the county.”

Simon put his hand on top of the petition and shook his head. “Flora, honey, it won’t matter. Roosevelt doesn’t care about the Jews in Europe. The Jews in America don’t even care about the Jews in Europe. The last thing they want to do is call attention to themselves. Particularly now, when half of the country is blaming us for the Depression. You could have gotten a million signatures, but as long as people are scared that immigrants, mainly Jewish immigrants, are going to take away jobs here, no one’s going to pay attention. I’m afraid that’s how it is.”

“Well then, what are we supposed to do?” said Flora. “Just give up?”

As soon as Flora spoke those words, she wished she could have swallowed them. For the past few months, Simon had been doing anything not to give up. Once a week he volunteered at the American Jewish Committee, where one of his jobs was to make
public the names of missing Jewish people from all over Europe and Eastern Europe. Of course he hoped that somewhere in the reams of paper he’d come across his own family names, but so far that hadn’t happened. And then there was the business. As quickly as it had exploded, the puzzle business dried up. All new ideas seemed stale and the old ones used up, and for a while it looked as if Phelps and Adler would disappear as new board games like Monopoly and the comic book
Famous Funnies
became the rage.

At the end of 1934, the Kellogg Company asked Phelps and Adler to create a premium for their Toasted Corn Flakes cereal. Their mandate: No puzzles. Puzzles were passé. They wanted something eye-catching, economical, and modern. For weeks everyone at the company brainstormed, but nothing seemed to work. In his new position as chairman, Simon had been coming into the office once or twice a week, but since the crisis he’d been there every day, tossing out suggestions, reacting to others. Privately, he worried that he’d run dry. “Maybe I’ve had every new thought I’m ever going to have,” he said to Flora one night.

“That’s nonsense, you’re just exhausted,” she told him. “You have so much going on in your brain, you just have to push it all aside to make room for corn flakes. Don’t worry, it will come.”

When it came, it did so in the sorry form of Pissboy, who walked into Simon’s office one afternoon carrying a tube under his arm. “I hope I’m not bothering you, but I have something to show you,” he said. “May I?”

“Of course,” said Simon, still not used to his old friend’s deference.

Even before Pissboy took out the brittle yellowed sheets of paper, Simon recognized them immediately. They were his drawings
of the Fatsos, Strongman, and Mrs. O’Mara that Pissboy had stolen from him. Pissboy spread the pictures on the desk. “I think I might have an idea for the Kellogg project. Flip books. You know, you flip ’em quickly and if the drawings are right, they look like moving pictures. We use these characters to create a story around Toasted Corn Flakes. Of course, you’d have to do the drawings, but—I don’t know, maybe it could work.”

Simon remembered the primitive flipbook he’d created for the screaming little girl on the ship coming to America, Rita. She’d looked him up after the story appeared in
Time
. He’d taken her to lunch—nothing fancy—a local luncheonette. She’d been pretty in a frantic, excessive way but also charming and intelligent. What had unnerved him about that lunch was how she’d treated him like a famous man, a middle-aged famous man. He had had no thoughts about fooling around with Rita but would have enjoyed a flirtation or at least the recognition that she might find him attractive. It was stupid vanity on his part, and he never bothered to tell Flora about the lunch.

As he thought about Rita, he remembered how, with her at his side, he’d watched the ship’s stokers and come up with the character of Strongman. It pleased him that now, after all these years, Strongman would make a comeback. He created a story for the flip book about Strongman rescuing a sinking ship at sea. In the last frames, all the passengers he has saved, still wet from their adventure, sit around a table with Strongman slurping up their bowls of Toasted Corn Flakes. The animated
Strongman: A Cereal Adventure of Bravery at Sea
turned out to be the idea that glued the company together again. The Kellogg Company ordered 1.5 million of them, and by Christmas, the story had been so successful, they placed an order for two million more
for the spring of 1936. Now Simon spent his days sketching the characters he had created in his youth, long before he’d learned anything about the advertising business, selling toothpaste, or what it took to make a good premium.

One evening, after hours of drafting forty-two versions of Strongman, Simon said to Flora, “My drawings were more spontaneous and energetic forty years ago than they are today. It’s ironic that the best I can do now is to copy myself.”

“As ironies go,” Flora pointed out, “that’s not it. Pissboy’s the one who put you back in business. And with the drawings he stole from you.”

Edith and Werner’s wedding took place on September 22, the third Sunday of the month that year. They were married at the Synagogue of Kaiserslautern, a grand Byzantine structure with four cupolas, Moorish archways, and sturdy ivory buttresses. The synagogue seated 620, and on that Sunday, every seat in the temple was taken. When the string quartet began to play the Allegro from the Brandenburg Concerto no. 4 in G Major, the setting sun spilled through the stained glass windows like watercolors and splashed across the stone walls. It was a wedding that few would forget; a marker between before and after, the last Jewish wedding in that venerable building.

Werner Cohn walked slowly down the aisle with a parent on each arm, his expression somber. His father had just been released from prison, where he served time for violating the government’s ruling that no department stores be run by Jews. Many of the seats were filled with his current and former employees. As a man accustomed to containing his emotions, the elder Mr. Cohn found the presence of all these people so overwhelming
that all he could do was stare ahead impassively. Werner’s parents left him under the chuppah, where he stood and watched as Seema walked down the aisle by herself. He wasn’t the only one who wondered why Karl wasn’t beside her. Seema had told Edith that Karl had an important story he had to cover in Munich that day, but the way her voice dropped and the way she wouldn’t look Edith in the eye when she said it made Edith think there was more to it than Munich. Seema and Karl had been fighting about the wedding since the day the invitations arrived. Karl had said as a Christian he wouldn’t feel right coming inside a temple. Seema had said that was ridiculous, that there would be many Christians at the service. “They will be noticed,” Karl said. “In my position, I can’t afford to be.” Seema had told him he was a pompous ass. He’d told Seema she was a spoiled brat and that she’d get along fine without him. And so it had gone, a bottomless argument that had laid the groundwork for many more to follow.

W
HEN THE
B
ACH FINISHED
, the pristine notes from Handel’s
Water Music
filled the hall. At last, Edith appeared at the back of the temple in a floor-length white organdy sleeveless gown. It was clear that, had Margot and Frederick not been by her side, she would have bounded down the aisle in great leaps.

It took more than a little urging, and even some pleading on Edith’s part, to get her mother to appear in front of so many people. “I swear,” she said, “you’ll never have to do this again.” The three of them walked with their arms around each other. Margot had a fixed smile on her face and kept looking at Edith. Frederick wore a tuxedo jacket slightly too large for him, and he’d allowed Edith to convince him to use pomade in order to
slick back what was left of his hair. Edith’s cheeks shone so hot and brightly, it seemed they might burn through her veil.

Later, Frederick would say that he thought he spotted his old boss, Gustave Reinhart, in the crowd, but he couldn’t be sure. Margot remembered that her legs were shaking so badly that she thought she would fall down. Only Edith’s strong arm around her waist kept her going.

Late at night, after Flora was asleep, Simon worked on his paintings for the flipbooks. He had just finished a series of sketches of the Fatsos. In this one, they were launched in a rocket ship to the moon and the only thing they had to eat was cereal. The last animation was of the Fatsos in the rocket heading back to earth as the man in the moon winked and smiled a milky smile while seated atop a box of Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes. Tomorrow Simon would begin a flipbook based on Mrs. O’Mara and Pep Bran Flakes. It pleased him to visualize how he would draw her voluptuous form and use the persimmon watercolor for her hair. Preparation for his sketches took him back to when drawing was the only way he could express himself and being reunited with his family was a real possibility. While he painted, he was not the businessman who had made his fortune in puzzles and games but the young boy with the great talent who needed to use his head less and to find his heart. He could almost feel Mrs. O’Mara’s white little fist gently rap him on the head. These were the moments in the hollow of the evening that lifted him above the sediment of his worries.

Lately, whatever spare time he had he spent at the American Jewish Committee in Manhattan. The names were piling up faster than he could sort through them. He felt desperate about what he couldn’t do. What no one was doing. Last spring, he and Flora had gone to hear the physicist Albert Einstein speak at a dinner for the AJC. Einstein, who had emigrated to the United States from Berlin two years earlier, had a thick German accent, yet when Simon replayed the speech in his mind, his words were as clear and penetrating as if they’d been spoken by Franklin Roosevelt:

Learn from the destiny that has befallen the German Jews! Preserve your independence by the creation of an appropriate institution, which you will need in the hour of oppression. Do not trust that this hour will never come, but keep the international community of all Jews sacred and holy!

It impressed Simon the way Einstein was using his fame and power to help the Jews. As a part of the International Rescue Committee, Einstein had begun another organization to help the Germans who were being persecuted by Hitler. He was also calling for a plan of action on behalf of the German Jews and writing affidavits of support for a large number of them.

Lately, as he sat drawing Mrs. O’Mara, the glamorous movie star who eats her Pep Bran Flakes while men fall at her feet and duel for her honor, he found it almost impossible to daydream away the sense of doom that enveloped his corner of peace night after night.

On the drive back from a Sunday dinner at Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul’s, Simon said to Flora: “I wonder, do you have any idea how much money we have?”

She laughed off the comment. “Enough to keep me in hats and you in your Brooks Brothers suits, I presume.”

“I’m being serious, Flora. Do you have any idea?”