The Puzzle King (5 page)

Instead, he closed his eyes again and brought back the memory of his father. He let himself smell his father’s beard, an earthy, grassy smell. He imagined his father’s strong arms around his tiny chest. He had no cause to recite the mourner’s Kaddish. His father was more alive to him on this day than he had ever been. And so he mustn’t think of his mother and sisters and brothers as dead. They were still back in Vilna, and he would see them soon. If he didn’t believe these things, then what did he believe? What other reason did he have for working so hard? Why else come to this synagogue?

He was seventeen, and Pissboy was right, he was old enough to have sins. He knew exactly what they were. He remembered how Mrs. O’Mara had told him he was all head, and how she’d said to him, “Where’s your heart?” Why did he always think such mean thoughts about the other people in the house? They were good people, and they’d been kind to him. But their lives were small and suffocating. None of them, it seemed to him, could see beyond the present. Same with the kids at school; it’s not that he thought that he was better than they were but he just didn’t want to grow up to be a policeman or a fireman the way the rest of them did. And Pissboy, he thought, was a sorry case: stealing the things he couldn’t afford to buy. There were words for the way he felt. Although he didn’t know what they were, he
guessed that this God, who was writing people into the Book of Life on this most sacred of Jewish holidays, would find him lacking for having passed those judgments on the people he knew.

What Simon did next could not exactly be called praying. He imagined that he was holding on to a large balloon. The balloon was filled with his mama and papa and brothers and sisters and sins and wishes and everything else he’d thought about in the synagogue on this afternoon. He let the balloon go and watched it until it floated out of sight into the sky. Maybe it would bump against the gates of heaven and pop open at the feet of God.

That afternoon, as Simon left the synagogue with Pissboy, the sun was dropping into the Hudson River, leaving licks of purple in its wake. “Pretty boring, wasn’t it?” said Pissboy.

“Not so bad,” said Simon.

“I’m so hungry,” said Pissboy. “I kept thinking about the roast chicken and mashed potatoes. And the vanilla ice cream with Himbeersaft. The best thing about this holiday, as far as I’m concerned.” Pissboy licked his lips, just imagining the ice cream melting under the sweet raspberry syrup. His mother kept the sauce hidden throughout the rest of the year. Pissboy had searched all the cupboards, and once even went through the drawers in her armoire. But she was sneaky that way, always shoving a box of the best butter cookies under her bed, or wrapping some prized marzipan in one of her scarves and tucking it behind a stack of books. Pissboy was on to her secrets, but even he wasn’t wily enough to figure out where she hid the Himbeersaft each year after the Yom Kippur dinner.

As Pissboy daydreamed about his favorite dessert, Simon noticed a white hill of flesh where Pissboy’s stomach was bulging through his shirt. “Race you home,” said Simon. “If you win, I
have to get you a whole bottle of Himbeersaft; if I win, I get to choose one of your souvenirs.”

“Holy smoke, are you kidding?” Pissboy jumped at the offer. This would hardly be any kind of contest. Skinny Simon with his wire spectacles was no athlete; Pissboy had never even seen him run. Pissboy spent his life running from neighborhood bullies or streaking down alleyways with his souvenirs tucked under his shirt. He was already envisioning where he’d hide his own bottle of Himbeersaft. It would have to be somewhere where his mother couldn’t get her hands on it. “Okay,” he shouted. “On your mark, get set …”

Simon, confident that he could outrun the fatter, older boy, clenched his fists together, bent his knees, and tucked his head down. In Vilna, he used to run through the hills for what seemed like miles. He ran for no particular purpose other than that it felt so good to watch the clouds skim by and feel the stones and roots of the trees under his feet. When he ran, the world seemed an expansive place with no obstacles. Since he’d come to New York, Simon had hardly run at all. New York was all edges and boundaries, and besides, there was no place to run other than the few blocks to his paperboy post. And then he only ran in the early morning frost, to beat the other boys and get the largest stack of newspapers. That wasn’t the kind of running you did for fun.

“Go!”

Simon and Pissboy ran past the Jews in their black hats and wool suits walking slowly home from the synagogue. They ran through the narrow streets, past the old knife sharpener, who was packing up his pushcart, past the other tenements, where young children were still sitting on the stoop and the smell of onions cooking in chicken fat floated out from the windows. The
early evening light softened the buildings’ edges and cast the city in shadows. For the few moments before the sun sank into the river, Simon could believe he was running through the rutted hills toward his home in Vilna.

But the silhouette of underwear and a lady’s dress waving like flags from a clothesline stretching from one window to another across a small courtyard brought him back to New York City, to America, where things would appear to be one thing and then inexplicably change into another. On this summery Yom Kippur day, the memory of his father had been restored to him. And he’d learned something from Pissboy that he would never forget: that you didn’t have to be dishonest to get what you wanted, as long as you were shrewd.

It was dark by the time Simon reached the front door of 262 Eldridge Street. Hardly out of breath, he could hear Pissboy grunting behind him. He leaned against the front door, wiped his glasses with his shirt, and waited for Pissboy to come so close that he wouldn’t be able to miss his smile and hear him say, “Sorry about the Himbeersaft, but since I won, I’ll take the magnifying glass.”

“You stinkin’ piece of shitball,” said Pissboy.

Simon took the magnifying glass to work with him the next day. His boss, Arthur Wade, would surely find some use for the instrument; at the very least, he’d find it a handy tool for composing the tiny type that ran on some of the show cards they were designing.

J
UST OVER THREE YEARS EARLIER
, Arthur Wade had wandered into Simon’s life on the afternoon of the great Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight. For the weeks leading up to St. Patrick’s Day,
the papers were bloodthirsty with anticipation of the upcoming fight between Bob Fitzsimmons and Jim Corbett, the heavyweight champ. Fitzsimmons, an Englishman who had come to America via Australia, was the middleweight champion and gave away fifteen pounds to Corbett. With his skinny legs, short neck, small head, and strapping shoulders, Fitzsimmons reminded Simon of the ancient sculptures he’d seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had stood before these heroic figures—the runners, the discus throwers, the gladiators—and felt their strength and brazenness. Now these figures had come to life in the real-life persons of these fighters. The size of his sketchbook paper was not large enough to contain them. He needed a bigger canvas, where he could draw them life-sized just as he imagined them. Only the slabs of sidewalk outside his building offered that kind of space. All he’d have to do would be to clear away the newspapers, horse manure, and rotting vegetables, and then he could draw from here to Orchard Street.

While Corbett was the bigger man, it was Fitzsimmons—with his square chin, piercing blue eyes, and broad chest—who was every boy’s fantasy of a brawler. Day after day, Simon would use the chalk he had bought with his paper money to copy the images from the newspapers onto the blocks of cement. It was the middle of March, and occasionally gentle gusts of warm air would nudge winter’s grip, and the men would take off their woolen jackets, push up their shirtsleeves, and gather around the chalk drawings in front of 262 Eldridge Street. They regarded the boundaries of the drawings like a street marked off with police tape, and no one dared to step on a single line of the sketches. Their conversation knew no such boundaries, and the men battled with each other for who could be the most insulting.

“Fitzsimmons is a bum, not even an American.”

“He’s a pipsqueak. Corbett’ll bust his head open.”

“Corbett’s a rich boy sissy.”

“He’s got a head like a rabbit. You know what they say about guys with small heads, don’t you?”

And so it went until the day of the big fight, which took place in a packed amphitheater in the frontier town of Carson City, Nevada. Every sports reporter west of the Mississippi was there, as was the legendary lawman Wyatt Earp. The newspapers would have a field day reporting fact by bloodied fact. In the fourteenth round, Fitzsimmons landed a left-handed blow under Corbett’s heart. He followed that with a jab to his face. Corbett sank into the ropes, hoping they would support him. His hair fell across his face as he tried to keep himself upright; the blood mixed with sweat spreading across his features. His ears swelled like mushrooms; his eyes turned upward until all you could see were the whites. Fitzsimmon’s face looked haunted. After one minute and forty-five seconds in that round, Corbett sank onto his left knee and the referee declared Bob Fitzsimmons the new world heavyweight champion.

More than a thousand people had gathered at City Hall Park, where bulletins were posted blow by blow. But anyone who came to 262 Eldridge Street just hours after the fight saw the final moment come to life, come to larger than life, in concrete and chalk: Corbett on his knee, balancing on his right hand, struggling to stay aloft; the referee counting down, jabbing his finger like a pistol in the air; Fitzsimmons, looming over his wounded opponent, his arms akimbo, his brow furrowed, looking more like a worried parent than a new world champion. While Pissboy ran back and forth delivering periodic updates, Simon spared no detail.

That day, the clouds loomed low in the sky, their gray pockets stuffed with rain. The threat of a storm created a sense of urgency about the chalk pictures on the sidewalk and word spread quickly to as far away as the Upper East Side about the boy on Eldridge Street who’d captured the already famous countdown.

Simon was on his hands and knees on the sidewalk, starting to make another drawing of the referee holding up Fitzsimmons’s gloved fists in victory. A heavyset man in a gray gabardine suit and a white linen shirt kneeled down next to him. “So you’re the kid that’s been drawing all these pictures,” he said, losing his balance and pitching toward Simon.

“Yes, that’s me,” said Simon, instinctively moving backward.

The man placed his hands on the sidewalk in order to steady himself. “Your pictures are real good, particularly that one.” He spoke in a wheezy voice and pointed to the one of Fitzsimmons scoring his knockout. “I’ll buy that one off you for five bucks.”

Simon was still on all fours. He drew himself up to his knees and was now the same height as the gentleman crouched down next to him. “Five bucks?” Now it was Simon’s turn to lose his balance. He was fourteen years old and to him five dollars was a small fortune. It was nearly half the money he’d brought from Vilna.

“Yeah, you draw me that exact picture on paper, and I’ll pay you five bucks. I’ll make a poster from it. Plenty of people are keen for it.”

Simon paused, trying to figure out if he’d ever seen such a thing as a poster. The man mistook his silence as hesitation. “Tell you what, give it to me by tomorrow and I’ll give you a penny for every one I sell. Not bad, eh?”

“I’ll do it,” said Simon. “Five bucks and a penny for every one sold.”

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” said the man.

They shook hands.

When the man came back the following day, Simon handed him the drawing. The man held it out in front of him and studied it for a long while. Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out five dollars, and handed it to Simon. “I don’t hate this,” he said. He rolled up the drawing, careful not to crease it, and walked away.

The man hadn’t told Simon his name; Simon hadn’t told him his.

Maybe the man sold a thousand posters or maybe he sold two. Either way, Simon never received another penny for his drawing.

Arthur Wade was the man who’d bought Simon’s picture. He’d come around again this past summer and asked people around Eldridge Street if they knew where he might find the kid who’d drawn all those pictures of the fighters on the sidewalk. Everyone told him the same thing. “Go find the
Spazierer
, he knows everything.”

“What kind of name is that,
Spazierer
?” asked Arthur Wade, spitting out the syllables of the word for dramatic effect.

“Spaz-i-er-er.”
They said it slowly and phonetically. “It means ‘the stroller’ in German.”

“How will I know him?” asked Arthur Wade.

“You’ll know him by the way the sun has made his skin nearly black,” they said. “You’ll know him because he walks up and down Eldridge Street all day. That’s what he does.”

In a neighborhood filled with sallow people who worked indoors as many as eighteen hours a day, the
Spazierer
wasn’t hard to find. Stooped over and leaning against a bamboo cane, the spazierer slowly made his way from one end of the block to the other and back again, from seven-thirty in the morning until the sun went
down each day. Some said he was a crazy old man who had nothing better to do with his time than to patrol the streets. No one ever asked him who he was or where he came from, nor could anyone ever remember how it happened that the women set out bowls of porridge for him in the morning and pots of boiled cabbage and potatoes at night. This was simply how it had always been.

It was a steamy afternoon when Arthur Wade found the
Spazierer
making his way down the street. Despite the clinging humidity, the
Spazierer
wore a black cape and a black derby. His long white hair and white mustache glistened against his dark craggy skin. His legs were bowed and his eyes were so blue they were nearly silver. “You mean Rembrandt, don’t you?” he said, in answer to Arthur’s Wade’s question. “He lives over there.” He lifted his cane and pointed in the direction of 262. “What’s your business with him?”