The Puzzle King, page 13
She’d tell herself that she was being overly dramatic and that her mother was right, she was too gullible. Then she’d repeat what Frederick often said: This was Germany, and Germany would never let her people break in such awful ways.
She hadn’t lied to Flora about the meat. They did eat it sometimes twice a week. Frederick would scavenge pieces from the neck or hindquarters of a pig or cow after they’d wrung all they could from the animal. Sometimes what he brought home was little more than bone or gristle. But no matter: he would wrap it in brown paper, place it in the center of the table, and declare, “Tonight we eat like kings.” Margot would boil the scraps with potatoes, onions, paprika, and anything else she could find that would add up to a meal. Edith and Frederick would eat so fast that sometimes they used their fingers to scoop food into their mouths. Then they’d rub their stomachs and start the game. “Mmm, wasn’t that the best Rindfleisch with red wine sauce and mushrooms you’ve ever eaten?” Or “That raspberry cake with the dark chocolate icing was exactly what I had in mind for dessert.” It was a game that hungry people played.
On the night that she wrote the letter to Flora, Margot had lashed out at Edith and Frederick after they’d finished a make-believe menu of sauerbraten and noodle pudding: “I am cold and hungry and so sick and tired of these silly games. Surely you see what’s going on! Am I not the only one who is frightened?”
“We are all here now,” said Frederick evenly. “At this moment, in this place, you and Edith and I are together and healthy. We are blessed, Margot. Don’t you see that?”
Later that night, Margot bolted up in bed, her nightclothes soaked with sweat. She’d been dreaming of a man who used to live on the other side of Frau Schultz. He was sleeping, face down, in the street. One foot was bare and swollen and leaking pus. She wanted to give him bread or some money, but she had neither. She thought he might be dead and tried to call for help. That’s when she woke herself up, trying to cry out.
She wanted to wake Frederick so that he could comfort her, but as she moved closer and studied his face, she thought as she had so many times that, in sleep, he had the startling sweetness of a child. She wouldn’t disturb him. Instead, she lay next to him, trying to synchronize her quick heart to his slow breathing. What seemed like hours passed until the chalky light of morning filled the room. Bad dreams were all she had to show for this sleepless night and her head throbbed behind her temples. She got up with Frederick and went with him into the kitchen, where he lit a fire.
They boiled water for a cup of what was passing for coffee these days. He took one of her feet in his hands and rubbed it in front of the fire. When it got pink, he put it down and picked up the other one. This was how they started each day. On this morning, after he massaged her feet and they poured a second cup of coffee, she pulled her hair back from her face, clasped her hands behind her head, and said, “Frederick, I’ve come to a decision. The time is right now. Edith should go and stay with Flora and Simon this summer.”
New York City: May 1923
The skies of New York were filled with crosses. That’s what Seema noticed when she moved to the city over twenty years earlier. Every time she’d look up, there’d be the cross of St. James, the cross of St. Thomas, or the gilded cross of Trinity Church soaring over the harbor. In those years, when she worked for the White family, the only doors that were open to her were back doors. The crosses were a comfort to her. It was inspiring, the way they withstood the sun and wind and harsh winters of New York. She loved the way they looked against the early evening sky, and when robins perched on them in the spring.
She got to know each one of them by their distinct characteristics: The limestone one that hovered over the Episcopal church on Forty-third Street was dignified despite being covered with soot; the one atop the Baptist church downtown was fussy and spindly, unlike the no-nonsense iron one on top of the Lutheran church on Madison Avenue. Her favorite was the roughly hewn wooden crucifix that seemed to bear all the weight of the Catholic church on Park Avenue. Sometimes these crosses welcomed her with their outstretched arms; other times, hands on hips, they turned her away. Either way, they never failed to move her.
On bright days, the sun would bounce off the heavy bronze doors of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue and turn them gold. But it was the flickering lights of the votive candles by the entrance that always drew Seema inside. She loved the smell of the melting wax and the incense and how the light refracted through the stained-glass windows seemed to melt down the sides of the walls. It was dark, and it was the quietest place in New York City.
When Seema took the Whites’ ten-year-old daughter to Saint Patrick’s during one of their walks, she told her, “This is the kind of a place where you can listen to your heart.” But the girl was not interested in what her heart had to say. She spent the whole time fidgeting and flipping through the pages of the prayer book looking for pictures. Seema told her that if she would be quiet for just a few more moments, she would buy her a present. So the girl barely took a breath until it was time to go.
At the back of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral was a little shop that sold assorted medals and statues of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The girl pulled Seema toward the shop. “Here, I want my present from here,” she demanded.
“No. This isn’t the kind of store one buys presents from,” Seema said softly.
“You promised. You said if I was quiet …” Her shrill voice resonated in this house of whispers. Rather than make a scene, Seema followed her into the shop.
Next to the cash register was a row of wire baskets. Each one contained rosary beads. They were divided by materials—silver, glass, wood. The girl stuck her hand into one of the baskets and pulled out a crystal rosary. “I want this one.”
Seema had noticed people in church rubbing their fingers over the beads and moving their lips in prayer. It felt so intimate, the way they’d sometimes lean over and kiss them. Now she picked up the crystal beads and held them in her hand. They were cool to the touch and heavy. She ran her fingers over the brass cross. All the times she’d looked at crosses, she’d never actually touched one, though she’d memorized their contours. She squeezed the cross tightly and brought her closed fist up to her cheek. She looked to see if the little White girl had noticed, but she was too busy wrapping another rosary, this one made of wood, around her fingers. “This is the one I want,” she said, spinning it in the air like a lariat. “I like this one best of all. Please, you said I could have it.”
Seema bought them both. The White girl spun her beads around for a few days then threw them over a doorknob. “Watch this,” she said to her sister one morning, grabbing at the beads then yanking them so hard that the chain holding them together broke. The beads spilled onto the floor, rolling under chairs and behind the bed, and stayed there until years later, after the Whites moved from that house and when the new occupants, finding pieces of wood and a small brass cross scattered about, dumped them in a bag with the rest of the trash.
But Seema held onto her rosary beads long after she left the Whites. In the winter, she tucked them into her coat pocket and would close her hand around them the way other people did with a rabbit’s foot. In summer, she hid the beads in her purse. When she was alone in the bathroom of a restaurant, or in the dark of a movie theater, she’d stick her hand in the purse to reassure herself that they were still there. Seema never considered herself a Catholic. She had no interest in the religion itself. The beads were reliable and familiar, and that was the point; they could have easily been a child’s top for all that the symbolism meant to her. But it was the way her fingers wrapped around the cross and the perfect symmetry of its design that reassured Seema that some things in life were permanent. That it was sure to shock anyone who found her, a Jewish girl, secretly clasping a cross in her pocket only added to her mystique.
Oliver was an Episcopalian. His father had been one of John D. Rockefeller’s boys, and now Oliver was a banker. He was also married, a fact that Seema kept to herself. He’d put her up in the Park Avenue apartment so she would always be nearby. That’s what he said when he told her he would never marry her. He didn’t say that men like him never married women like her, but he didn’t have to. She knew that his wife was also an Episcopalian, that they’d grown up together in a small town outside Hartford, that they’d married one week after he graduated from Princeton. Their children were named Cornelius and Ginny, short for Virginia, and that was all she needed to know.
They had an understanding. He could tease her about anything—her accent or the funny way she held her knife and fork—and she would laugh along with him, lucky to be at the party. But under no circumstance could she ask about his wife or children. He would take her to the best speakeasies in town and introduce her to his buddies from Princeton. She was not to mention her relatives in Germany. If anyone should ask, her name was Seema Glass, not Seema Grossman. And if he was to boast about how this beautiful woman catered to all of his whims, she was to laugh and throw him a look that said his boasts were true.
OLIVER INSISTED THAT there be a library in the Park Avenue apartment, though neither of them found reading books to be particularly interesting. There was a formal dining room, a master bedroom suite, and a living room that looked down Eighty-third Street and had a view of Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When they first looked at the apartment, Seema said she had no idea what she would do with all of those rooms. Oliver winked at the real estate agent and ran his hand over Seema’s stomach in a way that made the agent look away. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” he said. “We’ll figure out something.”
He was funny, Oliver. He made people around him feel as if they were at a party even when they weren’t. If Seema didn’t always understand his punch lines, his booming laughter immediately roped her into the joke. Despite his robust personality, everything else about Oliver was thin: his pinched nose; his lips, which sometimes disappeared into his face; his eyes, which could be brown or green depending on the light; his blond-gray hair, a color that has no name; and his body, so long and reedy that it seemed to fold in the middle. Only his head, square as a die, was thick. Or maybe it just looked that way because of his small ears and goggle-shaped rimless spectacles.
Rich men didn’t have to be handsome to be considered attractive. Whenever they spoke, no matter what they said, people leaned forward to catch their words. It was no different with Oliver. Once people knew who he was, they hovered around him; even those who knew him well tended to be acquiescent and eager in his presence. Seema felt honored that he had chosen her, and he indulged her in ways that only a man of his wealth could. He loved the way diamonds shone against her throat and how Dom Pérignon made her kisses tangy. “Where would you be without me?” It was a question he asked many times, and she would always answer, “I’d be nowhere without you. Certainly not on Park Avenue.”
But his money wasn’t the only thing she found alluring. She liked that she could wrap her arms around his lithe body and the way his cool fingers felt against her skin. In public, he would slip his hand under the waist of her skirt or brush her ear with his tongue as he whispered something to her. She’d blush when he’d pat her on the rear end and linger there a little too long. He was bold and unashamed about his desire and unpredictable in his lovemaking. Sometimes, he’d curl up next to her and put his head on her lap. Other times, he’d pin her down by the wrists and furiously pound his body into hers. It excited her—the sounds they made, the welts and scratches they found on each other after—and she could never get enough of him. He nicknamed her “Seema Glass, Sweet Ass,” and sometimes he called her that in public.
ON A RAINY SUNDAY afternoon in early May, Seema brought Oliver to lunch with Flora and Simon at Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul’s house in Mount Kisco. For months they had been asking to meet “the famous Oliver Thomas,” and when he agreed to go with her, she couldn’t figure her way out of it. She tried to convince herself that Oliver would be his usual boisterous self. “I’m great with people’s relatives,” he assured her. “I’ll have them eating out of the palm of my hand.” He was swell with his Princeton friends but it was hard to picture where he and Simon would find common ground.
For lunch, Aunt Harriet served pot roast and a cucumber salad along with Margot’s kugel. It got them to talking about how ill Edith had been and the desperate situation in Germany. “We’re hoping she’ll come here for the summer. It would do her a world of good, don’t you think?” Flora had asked the group.
“She’d be crazy for Coney Island,” Simon said.
“Poor little Edie,” said Uncle Paul, already giving her a nickname. “We’d spoil her rotten. We’d take her to the Hippodrome and all the stores on Fifth Avenue.” Seema glanced over at Oliver, waiting for him to show some interest. But Oliver sat silently with both elbows on the table, staring at the kugel. Foam from his beer washed over the lines of his mouth.
On the way home, she said to him, “You were so quiet. Is everything okay?”
His eyes narrowed. “That was a funny little group of people.”
“That’s my family,” she said, somewhat startled.
“I’m your family, sweetheart. Without me, you’d be living in some cute house in the middle of nowhere eating krugel, or whatever you people call it.”
“I guess Cornelius and Ginny eat steak and caviar then,” she said without thinking.
The rain was falling harder now, and in the darkness it was difficult to know exactly what happened next. Maybe a deer ran in front of the car, or the car in front of theirs had stopped abruptly. Whatever it was, Oliver slammed his foot down on the brake.
Seema lurched forward and hit the bridge of her nose on the dashboard. Her nose felt numb at first, but when she moved her head even a little, she could feel pain fill her face. The blood trickled, then gushed. It was thick and vivid and the only color she could see on this dark night. She leaned her head against the leather backrest and tried to staunch the bleeding. Something felt terribly out of place. “Broken,” she said in a clogged voice.
He didn’t reach over to comfort her, just stared at her and handed her his handkerchief.
AFTER THAT IS WHEN Seema started to bring crosses home.
By the time Edith came to visit in early June, nearly a dozen of them were hung around the house. At first, she placed them unobtrusively: one propped up against a volume of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, another in her dressing room, between two bottles of French cologne. Seema didn’t pray to her crosses. Prayers imply hope for change, and at this point in her life, that wasn’t a possibility. The crosses made her feel less alone. There was a miniature mother-of-pearl cross next to the icebox in the kitchen and a wooden one shoved into a shelf above the liquor cabinet in the pantry. Oliver noticed the filigreed one from Spain. “You a Catholic now?” he’d asked.
“No, I just thought it was pretty,” she’d said.
“As pretty as a horse’s ass,” he’d answered.
SEEMA WAS GOOD about remembering to hide the crosses before Flora visited. It used to be that she and Flora had no secrets from one another, but now it was different. Flora never told Seema how she thought it was her own fault that she and Simon couldn’t have children, how she believed that the same bad blood that had killed her father was now poisoning whatever chance they had of making a baby. Seema didn’t tell Flora that Oliver was married or how she worried that having her twelve-year-old niece around would disrupt her life with him. And now there were the crosses. Some things were too hard to explain, even to a sister. So, to be on the safe side, just before Edith came to New York, Seema went around the house and collected them, hiding them in the lavender tin box where she kept her nail polish, lipstick, and other makeup. She slid the box into a cabinet next to the toilet. No one would ever think of looking there.
Yonkers: June 1923
Margot rehearsed how she would say it, like a child learning her lines in a school play. She wanted to be able to tell Edith that she would be going to America for the summer in a way that made it sound like an adventure. “The child mustn’t sense that we are trying to be rid of her,” she said to Frederick. Mostly, she worried that Edith would pick up on her own fear, that by sending her across an ocean to a foreign country she was letting another child slip away.
So she practiced with Frederick until the words came out effortlessly. Late one afternoon after Edith came home from school, Margot was ready, though Edith was tired and hungry and had deep pockets—like wounds—under her eyes. “How was school today?” Margot asked, her voice lifting.
Edith stretched out on one of the kitchen chairs and yawned. “Emmy’s father lost his job last week. They told him that business was slow in the grocery store so they had to let people go, but Emmy says that because he’s Jewish, they don’t want him there anymore. She says they’ll have no money and her mother is afraid they’ll starve. Emmy says her father has been sitting in his room since it happened and won’t do anything. She said that we should be careful, that Pappa could lose his job for the same reason, but I said that he’d been there for so many years that they would never let him go, even if he is Jewish. That’s right, isn’t it?”
Margot took a deep breath. “Oh Liebchen, don’t become a worrier like your mother,” she said. “Of course Pappa will be all right. He is the best wurst maker in the country. Can you think of Germany without wurst? It’s not imaginable. Besides, let’s not dwell on sad things. Let’s talk about happy things, shall we? We have a surprise for you. Aunt Flora and Uncle Simon want you to come and stay with them in America for the summer. They have even booked passage for you on a ship that leaves for New York on June 2. You’ll live with them in their house in Yonkers. Isn’t that the best surprise?”
