The Puzzle King, page 26
“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.”
Part 6
Kaiserslautern: September 1935
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.
WHEN THE BACH 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.
Yonkers: October 1935
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?”
“Well, I’m not the one who keeps the bank books and pays the bills around here, so no, I’d have to say I don’t.”
“All right then, let me tell you. We have more than one million dollars. One point seven to be precise. And what do we plan to do with all that money? We have no children. You know, I’d happily support Edith and any other members of your family if they were ever to come over here. And, God willing, mine. Even then, we’d have plenty left over. Does it not seem to you, as it does to me, that it is immoral for us to be hoarding all that money with all that’s going on around us? If now’s not the time to use it, then when is?”
“Oh … it’s the letter, isn’t it?”
Several weeks earlier, they had received a letter from Edith describing her wedding. The letter had a curious quality about it: smudged fingerprints too large to be Edith’s, wrinkles in the paper, and words blacked out with solid, impenetrable strokes. These were the kinds of things Simon noticed as he held the paper up to the light. Edith wrote about her dress and described the flowers she carried. The next part, about somebody—a rabbi, Simon guessed—saying something, was blacked out. He had underlined the part where Edith wrote, “It’s a good thing we all have our memories because there are no pictures of the wedding so we’ll have to cherish those,” and he scribbled this in his notebook: “Were there no pictures taken because everyone thought that to photograph a large Jewish wedding was as perilous as having one in the first place?”
But there was something else, a note he had written to himself underneath his question. “Exactly a week before the wedding, on September 15, 1935, the German government adopted the Nuremberg Laws. The laws distinguished Germans from German Jews and deprived the Jews of all their rights, including the right to call themselves Germans.” After that, he’d added, “There’s no going back now.”
“It’s the letter and everything else,” said Simon. “I’m going to find it hard to sit around the table making chitchat with Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul stuffing ourselves with turkey and sweet potatoes this Thanksgiving. Hard and frankly, outrageous.”
“Now wait a minute. We give a lot of money to a lot of charities. I think it’s safe to say that the Jewish Center of Yonkers wouldn’t be standing without the generous donation of a Mr. and Mrs. Simon Phelps. So we’re not that ridiculous.”
“It’s easy to write a check and give to charities,” he said. “I’m talking about something more than that.”
“And what would that be? Are you proposing we hire Al Capone to go over to Germany and shoot Mr. Hitler?”
“God, Flora, you can be such a …”
“Bitch. Go on and say it. I can be such a bitch. I know I can.” Her voice relaxed. “I’m sorry, I don’t see the world like you do. I like it here. I like our lives. I don’t want anything to change. It scares me, the way you talk sometimes. I feel like you’re going to go out and do something reckless and stupidly heroic just because you think it would be the right thing to do. You can’t change the world, Simon. Even you can’t do that.”
“I’m not that much of an egomaniac,” he said. “I know I can’t change the world. But I can’t sit by and do nothing.”
“You’re not doing nothing,” her voice rose again. “You put in all that time at the Jewish Committee. What more are you supposed to do?”
“I don’t know,” he shook his head. “I really don’t know. But we can’t let them stay there. Not Edith and Werner. Your family. We really can’t.”
She stared out the window searching for the right words. “It’s funny,” she finally said. “Even though you’re the practical, down-to-earth businessman, sometimes I think that between us, you’re the romantic and I’m the pragmatist.”
“That’s not it,” he said. “The difference is that I see the consequences of things that are happening now and live with them. Don’t get me wrong, Flora, I’m not criticizing you, but you have your version of the world and you won’t be budged out of it. I envy you that.”
“I like my version of the world. At least it’s not filled with foreboding dark clouds.”
And so it went, all the way back to Yonkers. Even as they readied for bed, the argument continued. “Think of it this way,” he said after brushing his teeth. “They pass the Nuremberg Laws in America. Suddenly, we’re deprived of everything: jobs, schools, even walking in the park. We can’t even call ourselves Americans anymore. Picture that. Can you?”
Flora was exhausted from the drive, the constant bickering, the heavy meal. She lay back on the pillow and closed her eyes. “Please, can we take a break from this for just one night?”
“We can take a break from this forever if you promise me one thing.”
“Anything,” she answered.
“Promise me that we can go to Marseille and meet Edith and Werner.”
She could do that.
“Yes, I promise. Now can we get some sleep?”
But just before she fell asleep, she thought about the Nuremberg Laws. What must that mean to a man like Frederick, so proud of his service in the war, so German in the way he carried himself and thought about himself? She really couldn’t imagine.
Kaiserslautern: November 1935
No one could imagine how the news affected Frederick. Every day something else. The signs: jews not wanted. The rules: “Jews forbidden to perform works by Aryan writers and composers.” Old friends turned their heads and ignored him when he walked down the street. He and Margot were running out of money. He held himself in check when he talked about these things with Margot and told her, “Who we are is who we are and no one can change that with a bunch of laws.” He would search her face for a reaction, but she would elude his glance and rush off to repot some geraniums or hang out some laundry. He envied how she could retreat into her flowers, her domestic chores, or even those silly glass owls, fussing over them as if they were her only world.
He had nowhere to go with his feelings. Even if Margot were up to hearing what was on his mind, whatever he would say would come out mawkish and foolish:
Yesterday I had two arms and two legs, now I have none. The place that I have loved and cherished has thrown me out the door and put chains on the lock to make sure I never come back.
There once stood a man named Frederick Ehrlich. One day, a large boulder fell from the sky and crushed everything that was inside of him. Now, Frederick Ehrlich is like a character drawn on paper and the part of him that was a man is gone.
Part of him expected these Nuremberg Laws to be revoked. Expected any day he would receive a handwritten apology: Frederick Ehrlich, devoted patriot, and veteran of war, you will always be cherished and beloved by the fatherland. Please disregard any news to the contrary. And life, as it had been, would resume.
Round and round these thoughts went. Every day the same ones.
Lately, he’d wondered if he was the one with the nervous condition. Common sense told him that if ever there was a time not to call attention to oneself, this was it. Did no one else agree? Certainly not Mrs. Cohn, showing up at her son’s wedding in that gaudy diamond-and-emerald necklace sprawled across her chest like a traffic jam. Or Werner’s father, throwing that shindig of a reception, even after his arrest and his removal from the store. Or Seema and Karl, still unmarried but obviously sleeping in the same bed and riding around in that flashy car of his. And Edith. Over-the-moon Edith, who couldn’t give a thought to anything but her Werner.
He was happy for her. Werner was a good man and would take care of her. But what kind of a future did this country hold for them? They would go on their honeymoon in January and when they came back, he would tell them they had to think about leaving. He and Margot were too old to go anywhere else, but Edith had her whole life ahead of her. If she left, it would break Margot’s heart. The strain might be too much for her. Maybe things would be better by the time they came back from their honeymoon. But what if they weren’t? I worry too much, he told himself. I have too much idle time on my hands. Edith told me I was becoming an old fusspot. When I worked at the store, my thoughts were simpler, less fraught. I miss the people I worked with. I miss working. I miss making money. I miss my old life.
