The Puzzle King, page 15
In the third inning, Babe Ruth hit a ball so high it disappeared into the clouds. People yelled and stomped their feet so hard Edith worried that the stadium would crack. Simon jumped from his seat, cupped his mouth with his hands, and screamed, “Attaboy, Babe.” The announcer said over the PA system that there were nearly fifty thousand people in the stadium that day. Edith guessed that was more people than in all of Germany. After the seventh inning, the crowd stood up and sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” They all knew the words, and when they sang, “Let me root, root, root for the Yankees,” they raised their voices and pumped their fists in the air. Just before the end of the game, Babe hit another homer. Edith jumped to her feet with Simon and, together, they cried, “Attaboy, Babe.” They turned to each other and laughed. Simon thought, So this is what it would be like to have a daughter.
Edith had felt joy before, but it was always something quiet and private. She had never seen it splayed out before her this way with thousands of other people apparently feeling as she did. Life in Kaiserslautern was filled with muted greens and browns and hushed voices. After this day, her America was loud and gaudy and permeated with the blazing white lights of the electronic scoreboard in right-center field. Although she never would quite understand the rules of baseball, she became a diehard Yankees fan nonetheless.
New York City: July 1923
Could there ever be anything more dazzling than Yankee Stadium? That would be impossible, thought Edith. But that was before she was introduced to her Aunt Seema on Park Avenue a few days later. First of all, there was the doorman in a gray coat and matching cap. His sleeves were too long, the coat hung below his knees, and the cap hid most of his face. Only the sweat that dribbled down his forehead and clung to the tip of his nose gave away his discomfort at wearing a wool coat and cap on this sweltering morning. “We’re here to see Seema Grossman,” said Flora.
“Grossman. Grossman.” The doorman studied a leather-bound notebook that he kept behind a mahogany podium. He ran his fingers up and down the column of names, while shaking his head. “I’m sorry, madam, but I don’t think we have anybody of that name in this building.” He spoke in a formal, overly enunciated English, which seemed to irritate Flora.
“Grossman. Seema Grossman. She lives on the sixth floor.” Her voice was filled with bees. “I am her sister, and I’ve visited her here many times before.”
He raised his head suddenly and Edith could see how the sweat stained the rim of his collar. “Ah, Grossman. You mean 6-A. We have her down as Seema Glass.” He picked up an earpiece and pushed some buttons on a switchboard. “Who shall I say is calling?”
“You shall say it is her sister, Flora Grossman Phelps, and her niece, Edith.” Flora’s mouth tightened as she waited for the doorman’s reply.
Edith would have kept staring at the doorman and her agitated aunt, but the mural behind them suddenly caught her attention. It was a painting of statues. One of the statues was of a naked young man. Naked! She’d never seen a naked boy before. Only once had she glimpsed a penis, and that was when she had sat opposite her friend Franz in a rowboat last summer. He had been wearing shorts and his legs had been spread as he rowed the boat. Suddenly, there it was, a reddish purple blob like an overcooked knockwurst lying not two feet away from her face. Poor Franz, he had just kept prattling on and on about his trip to St. Moritz and how he had learned to ski, never suspecting that the reason Edith’s face had become flushed had less to do with the Alps and everything to do with knockwurst.
Then, it had felt like worms in her stomach. She had been afraid to stare for too long. Now, she could stare all she wanted. The penis in this painting was more streamlined, more elegant than what she had seen in the rowboat. It pleased her to look at it and she wished she could get a little closer. Just then Flora nudged her. “Art. Do you like art?” she said, not seeming to notice how Edith was blushing. “We’ll have to take you to the Metropolitan Museum of Art sometime. C’mon now, it’s a little stuffy down here.” She turned and glowered at the doorman. “Let’s go up and see Seema.”
The elevator rumbled and shimmied and Edith, who had never ridden in one, clung to the brass railing. Flora paid her no attention and kept tapping her foot as if she were keeping time to some song in her head. When they reached apartment 6-A, Flora jammed the bell several times. From the other side of the door came the sound of someone running and an eager voice shouting, “Hold your horses, I’m coming, I’m coming.” Then a svelte figure wearing a clinging long coral silk robe and apparently not much underneath answered the door. Her fingers were pale with a perfect crescent moon on each buffed nail. The smell of cigarettes and lilies and something bitter gathered around her. She had black shiny hair and green eyes. But it was her lips that Edith noticed first, thick lips that fanned out into a cherry red smile—just like an American movie star.
So this was Seema.
“What’s this ‘Miss Glass’ nonsense all about?” Flora demanded, before they were even inside the apartment.
“It’s simpler to spell Glass than Grossman,” said Seema. “Besides, people have trouble pronouncing Grossman. Oliver and I thought we’d make it easier for everyone.”
“Oh really? Gross Man. How hard is that to say?”
“Flora, it’s no big deal, honestly.” She placed her hand on Flora’s shoulder and gently pushed her aside. “And you’re Edith,” she said, her voice rising. “I am so happy to finally meet you.” She studied Edith as if she were looking at her own reflection in the mirror. “It’s odd, you resemble Flora the most, yet everything about you looks familiar. You don’t look so bad for someone who’s had whatever that was you had.”
She is perfect, thought Edith, who did not yet know the English word for “seamless.”
They might have stood at the door all morning if Flora hadn’t said to Seema, “Aren’t you going to invite us inside?”
“Oh, of course. I was just staring at our niece. You didn’t tell me she was so pretty. She does have a lot of Glass—I mean Grossman—in her, doesn’t she?”
Was that a slight smirk on her face? Edith couldn’t tell.
Flora placed them back to back. “The two of you are about the same height, both of you skin and bones. She’s got my eyes. Her hair is more like mine than yours, though all of us have the same brainy forehead. How about that? I think she’s got your nose.”
Seema flinched. She hadn’t gotten used to her new imperfection. She studied Edith’s nose. It was definitely a Jewish one. She wondered if hers gave her away as concisely.
Flora continued, “Lucky girl, she’s inherited her mother’s gorgeous long legs.” Now it was Edith’s turn to start. Her mother seemed so old and unstylish compared with her two beautiful sisters. She wondered if they knew how consumed she was with worry, how shrunken her world had become. “She comes to America,” she said, hoping they would believe her.
Flora ignored the comment, as she was in a hurry to move on with her plan. “I’m going to let you two girls catch up on the last twelve years by yourselves. I’ll just be in the way.” She laughed, trying to disguise her relief at escaping. She would go downtown and window-shop, buy herself a new hat maybe. She could use the break: Edith had not left her side in the weeks since she’d arrived. Children took up an awful lot of time; she hadn’t quite realized that.
Seema was alarmed at being left alone with Edith. What would they say to each other? How much English did Edith understand? She didn’t know a lot about Edith other than that she’d been sick and had to have her rib removed. Pleurisy, or something like that. She would ask about Edith’s life and hope that Edith wouldn’t ask about hers. “Come, let’s sit down,” she said, pointing to the couch. But Edith remained standing, looking out the window straight across Eighty-third Street. She pointed to the large building on the edge of Central Park. Seema craned her neck. “That’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” she said. “Art.” She raised her voice and spoke slowly. “Do you like art?”
Until twenty minutes earlier, Edith had never thought about art. But that was before she’d seen the mural. “I like art.” She grinned. Buoyed by the passion in her niece’s voice, Sema ventured, “What else do you like?”
Edith gestured as if she was swinging a tennis racket. Then she made swimming motions with her arms. She lifted her left arm. “Not good,” she said, then lifted both arms to show how she could only raise the left one to about three quarters the height of the right one. “Pappa says I get crooked.” She stood up and walked around the room stooped over. Seema shook her head and laughed. Edith exaggerated her movements, placing her hand on her back and lurching around the room like a hunchback. Seema laughed harder as she tucked one leg underneath her.
Edith knew she was going on too much. Between meeting a new person and trying to converse in English, she was nervous, and when she got nervous, she fell back on what she knew how to do best, which was to ingratiate herself. She was particularly eager to delight this woman. What could she tell Seema that Seema would find interesting? The Baldies’ Club! That was some story. The trick was to tell it in a way she would understand.
She knew the English word for school, and as she talked about Fräulein Huffman, she puffed out her chest and pursed her lips together. “Oh, Fräulein Huffman, your teacher. I get it,” said Seema.
Then she ran her fingers through her hair as if they were crawling bugs. Going back into her Fräulein Huffman pose, she made a chopping scissors motion with her hands. This was becoming like a game, and Seema grew excited as she deciphered Edith’s clues. “Your teacher,” she shouted. “She cut your hair!” Edith repeated the crawly bugs gesture and Seema guessed that it was lice. Only after Edith repeated the motions and said the words “Das Juden” a few times did Seema also understand that it was the Jewish children who had to shave their heads. “So you were bald?” she asked.
“Yes. Bald. All the hair gone. My mother makes a pillow from my hair.” Then she pointed to the hurt spot on her back and walked her funny walk.
“And your rib,” said Seema, running her hands over her own ribs. “Well, you must have been quite a sight.” It was a dumb remark, but she was so taken aback by what she was hearing, she didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t heard about the hair or the lice and wondered what else she didn’t know.
Edith kept on. She pointed to the same spot on her back that she had articulated earlier, and then to Seema.
“Do I want to see your scar? Is that what you’re asking me?”
Edith knotted her brow.
“Scar.” Seema made a slashing motion against her stomach. Edith got up and took a pad and pencil from the nearby desk. She handed it to Seema. “Scar,” she said, indicating she wanted Seema to write it. So Seema printed the word and handed it back to her. Underneath “scar,” Edith drew a picture of a girl with a smile on her face. The she drew an arrow pointing to the smile and wrote, “Mein scar.” Again she pointed to the place on her back and said, “I show you.”
Seema studied the picture. “I see, so your scar is a smiling face.” She reached over to an ebony box on the coffee table, opened it, and pulled out a cigarette. She bent her head as she lit a match, cupped her hand around the tip of the cigarette, and inhaled. Her glossy black hair fell in front of her face and her movements were slow and silky. When her robe fell open revealing her knee and most of her thigh, she didn’t pull it closed. Edith had never seen a woman this mysterious and beautiful. Although her mother was also slim, she carried herself heavily, as if bundled in the doorman’s oversized coat. Her mother had often told her what a beauty Seema was and that she “had a way with the men.” Edith never knew what that meant, but sitting here this close to her, she felt privileged. Seema caught Edith staring at her. She tilted back her head, exhaled the cigarette smoke, and said, “Sure, I’d love to see your scar.”
The way Seema looked at her, not straight on but out of the corner of her eyes, made Edith think of the mural she had seen downstairs. Things forbidden, she thought. Her eyes have seen things forbidden.
“I show you,” Edith repeated. She got down on the floor on all fours and put her head on the Persian rug, preparing to do a headstand. The carpet tickled her scalp and smelled of cigar smoke. She was wearing one of the chemises that Flora had bought her, and as she kicked her long legs up in the air, she became aware of the chemise slipping over her body. She would be naked but for her knickers, though it was not the kind of thing that would embarrass her. Since her illness, she’d gotten used to all sorts of people seeing her undressed and prodding her in private places. Besides, Seema was a relative. So she stood straight as an exclamation point as her chemise gathered around her head.
Seema hadn’t considered what she was asking Edith to do when she said she’d love to see her scar; she had merely been trying to make conversation. Now this young girl was standing upside down before her. Seema stared at her scrawny ribcage. And her arms, whispers of flesh so slight Seema wondered how they could support her. Edith kicked her legs back and forth. Her face turned purple.
Seema’s eyes wandered to Edith’s back. She had the smooth skin of a child except for the left side of her back, which was the color of bananas. Embedded in the banana skin was a red gouge and sloppy Xs that looked as if someone had used a shovel to hack out a piece of her back. This was not what Edith had described. It looked gaping and toothless: nothing smiley about it.
Seema tempered her voice. “Yes, I see it,” she said. “Very impressive. And the headstand. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anyone stand on their head for so long.”
Edith allowed her legs to fall to the floor. She straightened her dress and ran her hands through her hair. “Is good?” She pointed to the picture of the smiling face she had drawn. “Jah?”
“The real McCoy,” said Seema. “A smiling face if I ever saw one.” Seema’s laugh was tense. There was something about this young girl and the shabby things that had been done to her that made Seema want to cry. She felt a swift kick of shame for allowing Edith to show her nakedness, her ugly wound. Life had borne down hard on Edith, yet she seemed unaware of it. There was no self-pity or sadness about her. In fact, she was joyful, someone who could see the colors in blackness and make jokes out of misery. Seema imagined the doctors butchering her—one of their charity cases—as they chatted among themselves and took as little time as possible. A poor girl. A Jew girl at that. Seema could picture it all too well and it made her heart hurt.
“I have scars, too,” said Seema, wanting to return Edith’s intimacy.
Edith lifted herself off the rug and moved closer to Seema. “You? Scar?”
For a moment, Seema dropped her elegant pose on the couch and slumped back into the pillows. She considered what she was about to do and wondered if Edith was old enough to understand. She didn’t want to frighten her. More than that, she worried about whether Edith might judge her. “Well, they’re different kinds of scars. You might not really call them scars. They’re more like secrets. My secrets. Things that nobody knows about me, things nobody has ever seen.”
Everything involved with trusting another person went against Seema’s nature, but for some reason, she felt safe with Edith. The girl seemed kind, not the type to look for the flaws in others and then ridicule them. If she did what she was about to do, the two of them would be even. She would reveal something about herself. Not the slapdash work of a surgeon, but something personal that she’d never meant for anyone to see.
Seema took Edith by the hand and led her into the bathroom, where she knelt down in front of the cabinet next to the toilet. Edith couldn’t imagine why Seema had brought her here. All she knew was that there was urgency in Seema’s voice and that she held her hand too tight, as if she were rushing a child across the street. One month before she’d come to America, Edith had begun to menstruate. Even though her mother had told her that all girls her age menstruated, Edith found the sight of the reddish brown bloodstain in her pants as terrifying as it was mortifying. With the same fervor that she had begged her mother not to tell her father, she prayed that Seema would not pull something out of the bathroom cabinet that would have to do with menstruation or any of the other private things that women kept hidden in their bathrooms.
For a moment, it seemed as if her prayer would go unanswered, as Seema pulled from the cabinet a lavender tin big enough to hold the secrets of all womanhood. She put the tin in her lap then handed something to Edith, who was standing by the porcelain sink. It was a cross, made out of stone the color of a blackboard. Then she handed Edith another, this one green, and another, mother of pearl. Seema kept her head down as she handed Edith one cross after another. When she was finished—there must have been twenty of them in all—Seema lifted her face. “There they are, my scars. My secrets. Now you’ll really have something to write home about, won’t you?”
Edith didn’t understand what Seema said, only that her voice got gruffer and she kept studying Edith’s face. Edith remembered the basket of yellow daisies the Catholic church at home had sent to her when she was sick. A cross made from twigs had been tucked inside it. She had liked the twig cross because it had reminded her of the forest, so she kept it by her bedside. When her father noticed it, he’d snatched it away. “We don’t keep these kinds of things in this house.” It wasn’t like her father to be so harsh. Although she hadn’t understood why, she had felt ashamed at the time. Now, as she watched her Aunt Seema act so on edge, she thought that she must feel the same way.
Seema watched Edith study each one of the crosses. “Ahh,” she nodded at the mother-of-pearl cross and the one made out of black onyx. “Sehr hubsch.” At others, like the one made out of painted tin, she shook her head and said nothing.
