The Genius (5 page)

There were no other Crackes in the phone book.

Father Lucian Buccarelli, of Our Lady of Hope, had never heard of Victor. He recommended that I talk to his colleague, Father Simcock, who had been around the parish a lot longer.

Father Allan Simcock didn’t know any Victor Cracke. He wondered if I had the right church. I told him I could be wrong. He made a list of all the neighborhood churches—a list far longer than I expected—and, wherever possible, gave me the names of people to talk to.

I did not follow up on them.

I am not a detective. And I owed Victor nothing. He could have been dead; he could have been alive. It didn’t matter to me. All that mattered to me was his art, and that I had, in spades.

PEOPLE DON’T APPRECIATE the creativity of dealing art. In the contemporary market, it is the dealer—not the artist—who does most of the work. Without us there would be no Modernism, no Minimalism, no movements at all. All the contemporary legends would be painting houses or teaching adult education classes. Museum collections would grind to a halt after the Renaissance; sculptors would still be carving pagan gods; video would be the province of pornography; graffiti a petty crime rather than the premise behind a multimillion-dollar industry. Art, in short, would cease to thrive. And this is because—in a post-Church, post-patronage era—dealers refine and pipeline the fuel that drives art’s engine, that has always driven it and always will: money.

These days especially, there is simply too much material out there for any normal person to be able to distinguish between good and bad. That’s the dealer’s job. We are creators, too—only we create markets, and our medium is the artists themselves. Markets, in turn, create movements, and movements create tastes, culture, the canon of acceptability—in short, what we think of as Art itself. A piece of art becomes a piece of art—and an artist becomes an artist—when I make you take out your checkbook.

Victor Cracke, then, was my definition of a perfect artist: he created and then he disappeared. I couldn’t have imagined a greater gift. My very own tabula rasa.

SOME OF YOU MIGHT DEEM my actions ethically squishy. Before you judge me, consider this: plenty of times art has been dragged into public without its creator’s knowledge—even against his will. Great art demands an audience, and to deny that is itself unethical. If you’ve ever read a poem by Emily Dickinson, you will agree.

Moreover, it’s not as though I lacked precedent. Consider, for example, the case of the so-called Wireman, the name given to the creator of a series of sculptures discovered in a Philadelphia alley on a trash night in 1982. I’ve seen them; they’re eerie: thousands of found objects—clock faces, dolls, food containers—cocooned in loops of heavy-gauge wire. Nobody knows who the artist was; nobody knows what motivated him to produce. We don’t know for certain that he was, in fact, a he. And while the question of whether the pieces were intended as art is open to debate, that they were pulled out of the garbage would seem to indicate quite clearly that they weren’t intended for public consumption. This misgiving, however, has not stopped galleries from selling the pieces at commanding prices; it has not stopped museums across the United States and Europe from mounting exhibitions or critics from commenting on the work’s “shamanistic” or “totemic” properties, speculating about its similarities to African “medicine bundles.” That’s a lot of talk and cash and activity generated by what might have ended up as landfill, were it not for a sharp-eyed passerby.

The point is that in creating his objects, the Philadelphia Wireman did only some of the work, and I would argue not the majority of it. He made
things
. It took dealers to make those things into
art
. Once anointed as such, there’s no going back. You can destroy, but you can’t uncreate. If the Wireman showed up tomorrow and began shrieking about his rights, I doubt anyone would listen to him.

And so I regarded as more than fair my vow that were Victor ever to turn up at my door, I would pay him according to the traditional artist-dealer split: fifty-fifty. In fact, I congratulated myself on my generosity, knowing that few of my colleagues would have made such an outlandish and indulgent promise.

I’LL SPARE YOU THE GORY DETAILS of prepping the show. You don’t need to hear about rail mounts and track lighting and the procurement of mediocre pinot. But there is something I don’t want to leave out, and that’s the strange discovery Ruby and I made late one night at the storage locker.

We had been working for four months. The space heaters were gone, replaced by a series of fans strategically placed so as not to send piles of paper flying. For weeks we had been searching of panel number one, the point of origin. The boxes had gotten mixed up in transit, and we’d start on one that seemed promising—whose top sheet numbered, say, in the low hundreds—only to find that the page numbers went up, not down.

We did eventually find it—more on that later—but on that night it was a different page, from the 1,100s, that caught Ruby’s eye.

“Hey,” she said, “you’re in here.”

I stopped working and came over to have a look.

Near the top of the page, in slashing letters three inches high:

All the warmth went out of the room. I can’t say why the sight of my own name terrified me the way it did. For a moment I heard Victor’s voice shouting at me over the whirr of the fans, shouting at me through his art, clapping his hands in my face. He did not sound pleased.

Somewhere, a door slammed. We both jumped, I against the desk and Ruby in her chair. Then silence, both of us embarrassed by our own skittishness.

“Odd,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And
creepy
.”

“Very.”

We looked at my name. It seemed vaguely obscene.

“I guess it’s reasonable,” she said.

I looked at her.

“He did live in Muller Courts.”

I nodded.

She said, “Actually, I’m surprised you’re not in there more often.”

I tried to resume work, but I couldn’t concentrate, not with Ruby clicking her stud against her teeth and that drawing radiating ill feelings. I announced that I was heading out. I must have sounded paranoid—I certainly felt paranoid—because she snickered and told me to watch my back.

Normally, I take a cab straight home, but that night I ducked into a bar and ordered a soda water. As I sat there watching people trickle in, gasping and cursing the sultry night, my uneasiness began to change shape, to soften and turn to encouragement.

Ruby was right. Victor Cracke had been drawing the universe as he knew it. Naturally, the Muller name would loom large.

The bar had a jukebox. Somebody put on Bon Jovi, and the place filled with off-key singing. I got up to leave.

I gave the cabbie directions and sank back into the sticky vinyl. If anything, I reflected, my name in Victor’s art could be interpreted generously. I was no intruder. Quite the contrary. I had every right to be there. I was there all along.

Solomon’s cart has many miles on it, and holds the entire world. Cloth, buttons, tinware. Tonics and patent medicines. Nails and glue, writing paper and appleseeds. So many different kinds of items, unclassifiable except perhaps as What People Need. He works a kind of magic, showing up unexpected in some dreary Pennsylvania town, drawing a crowd with shouts and theatrics, laying out his wares, defying the townsfolk’s attempts to stump him. I need a hammer. Yes, sir. Glass bottles, about so big? Yes, ma’am. People joke that the cart is bottomless.

He understands much more English than he speaks, and when forced into a particularly heated negotiation he will resort to the use of his fingers. Seven cents? No, ten. I’ll give you nine. Okay? Okay.

Everybody speaks bargain.

The same rigamarole applies when he needs to pay for a room, although he avoids that if he can, preferring to sleep outside, in a field or an open barn. Every penny he saves will bring his brothers over that much sooner. When Adolph comes they will be able to earn twice as much money, and when Simon comes, three times. He plans to bring them over in that order: first Adolph, then Simon, and last, Bernard. Bernard is the second oldest; but he is also the laziest, and Solomon knows that they will achieve much more, much more quickly, if they leave him behind for now.

But sometimes… when it is so cold outside… when he craves the dignity of a roof… when he cannot face another night on the dirt, in a pile of hay, bugs crawling all over him like an animal… Too much! He caves in, wasting an entire day’s earnings on a featherbed—only to spend the rest of the week chastising himself. He is not Bernard! He is the eldest; he should know better. Their father sent him first for a reason.

The crossing nearly killed him. Never had he been so sick, nor had he ever seen so much sickness around him. The fever that took his mother could not be compared to the horrors he witnessed on that boat, people dissolving in piles of their own waste, wracked and groaning bodies, the wet stench of physical and moral failure. Solomon took care to eat alone; against his nature, he did not socialize with his fellow passengers. His father had commanded him to keep to himself, and he obeyed.

Once he saw a woman go mad. Solomon, alone on deck, up from the hold for fresh air, joyous to feel the light rain, saw her come up the stairs, shaky, green, bloodball eyes. He recognized her. The day before she had lost her son. When they pried the body from her arms she had let out a noise that stood Solomon’s hair on end. Now he watched her stumble to the bow where she did not hesitate but leaned over the railing and dropped into the churning sea. Solomon ran to where she had existed a moment ago. He looked down and saw nothing but whitewater.

The shiphands came running.
She fell
! Solomon said, or tried to say. What he said was
Sie fiel
! But the crew came from England. They did not understand him, and with his babbling he was getting in the way. They ordered him belowdecks, and when he protested, four of them picked him up and carried him away.

By the time the
Shining Harry
dumped its human cargo at Boston Harbor, Solomon had been at sea for forty-four days. He had lost twenty percent of his body weight and had developed a painful rash on his back that would persist for months, making his nights spent on the ground all the more miserable.

At first he lived with a cousin, a cobbler, their relation so distant that neither of them could quite pinpoint where their blood mingled. Right away Solomon could tell that the arrangement would not last. The cousin’s wife hated him and wanted him out of the house. While he tossed and turned on the workbench that served as his bed, she would tramp around upstairs in wooden shoes. She fed him rotten fruit and made his tea with muddy water and let bread stale before cutting him a slice. He planned to leave as soon as he had enough money and English, but before he managed to get there she came downstairs one night and bared her breasts to him. Early the next morning he loaded what little he had in a burlap pack and set out walking.

He walked to Buffalo, arriving in time for an awful winter. Nobody bought his odds and ends. Chastened, he hurried south, first to New Jersey, then into the heart of Pennsylvania, where he met others who spoke his language. They became his first regular customers: farmers who came to depend on him for specialty items that did not justify a long trip into town, indulgences such as a new razor strop or a box of pencils. He filled his burlap sack to bursting, but soon it could not hold enough to meet his clients’ demands, and he got another, one as tall as he was. As his inventory grew, so did his route and his clientele; and despite his limited vocabulary, he revealed himself as an able salesman: quick to laugh, firm but fair, and always aware of the latest trends. The second sack did not last long. He bought himself a cart.

On its side he painted

“Dry goods” has always sounded wrong, as some of the items he sells are not, in fact, dry. He merely copied what he saw on the sides of other carts, belonging to other men—the competition. He is not the only Jew walking these back roads.

He knows that he has plenty to be thankful for, having exceeded his own expectations. When he dons his tefillin, he praises God for sustaining him through these dark days and begs for yet more assistance. So much remains to be done. In April he turns eighteen.

WITH ADOLPH’S BIRTHDAY COMING UP, as well, Solomon has decided that the time has come to send for him. In Punxsutawney he starts a letter, in Altoona he mails it. The thought of having his brother with him brings a lightness to his step that carries him humming over the Appalachians, though his cart and back creak with fatigue.

York, Pennsylvania, sounds like the place to treat himself to a night indoors. Though he knows that he really should wait until he
needs
a bed, wait for a night of blistering cold or pounding rain, rather a balmy evening that predicts spring. But what good is life if you cannot enjoy it? He has been prudent, perhaps too much so. Luxury reminds us of the purpose of toil. With his remaining money he will allow himself a taste.

Taverns glow along the main thoroughfare, which is rutted and damp with urine. He pushes his cart and thinks about beer. His mouth waters with the remembered taste of yeast. He misses his home. He misses his sister, who makes the most delicious cakes, tender and light, recipes their mother passed along before she died. The coarse bread and beans on which he currently subsists make him want to weep. He has not eaten meat in four months. The most available—not to say affordable—is pork. That he refuses to touch. He has his limits.

Some of the taverns offer rooms, and when he steps inside one to inquire about vacancies, a wave of hot air and body odor breaks over him. In one corner a piano roars. Every table is full. He shouts his request at the bartender, who misunderstands and brings him a glass of beer. Solomon considers giving it back, but his thirst gets the better of him. The bartender comes back to collect the glass and offer another, but Solomon shakes his head and points to the ceiling. Upstairs?