The Puzzle King (13 page)

For the next couple of weeks, he studied photographs of Barrymore. He memorized his features: his patrician nose, the twist of cruelty on his lips, the cleft in his chin. He was a man whose earnest gaze and blue eyes revealed little of his nature, other than he seemed to stay inside himself. In that way, he was like the hand-carved wooden Indian that stood outside the tobacconist store in Yonkers. Simon visited the statue several times, running his hands over the concave planes of his face and squinting back at the Indian’s unflinching stare. And when he was ready to draw, he could feel the creases on either side of John Barrymore’s mouth when he smiled, and how the thick arches of his eyebrows lifted imperceptibly when he was curious or amused.

The night before the ball, Flora and Simon were sitting at their kitchen table. Flora had prepared a roast chicken and some rice. Simon was just about to tuck his napkin into his shirt when he snapped his fingers and opened his eyes wide. “Oh wait!” he said, as if a new thought had just flown into his head. “I have something to show you.” He folded up the cloth napkin, set it next to his fork, and excused himself. “Start without me,” he shouted to Flora from the living room. “I’ll be right back.”

Flora was poking the chicken thigh in front of her. She had a tendency to undercook chicken. The last time she made it, Simon had refused to eat it after he cut through a pink rubbery thigh and a stream of blood oozed into his mashed potatoes. “Flora, nobody likes rare chicken,” he had said.

When he returned to the kitchen, she was still stabbing at her
meat. “How do I look?” he asked, his voice sounding as if someone’s hand were covering up his mouth.

She glanced up. “Good God!”

“What do you think?” he asked.

“John Barrymore! You look like John Barrymore!”

He pulled the cardboard mask from his face. “Does it work?” he asked, holding it up in front of Flora.

“Let me see that,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron and grabbing it from him.

He had fashioned a mask from a single sheet of pliable cardboard that fastened behind the ears with elastic and curved around the entire face. On the mask, he replicated John Barrymore’s features with tempera paints. He cut a flap for the nose and crafted peepholes for the eyes that were actually cut into the shaded part of the lower lid so that Barrymore’s fixed blue-eyed expression was not sacrificed.

Flora put the mask over her own face. “How do I look?” she asked.

“Funny, you look like John Barrymore, too, only your physique is more pleasing than his.” He grinned as he picked up his knife and fork and cut into the chicken breast on his plate. The white meat was moist and supple and nearly fell off the bone. Although he had impeccable manners, Simon still ate with the anxiety of someone who had known hunger. He used his knife and fork to scrape off every shred of meat on the bone and made sure not to leave a grain of rice on his plate. He also ate fast, poised over his plate as if he were expecting someone to snatch it away. “Slow down,” Flora would urge. But it was as futile as telling a man on fire to lower his voice.

“That was delicious,” he said to Flora when he finished eating. “I think you’ve mastered chicken.”

“And you’ve mastered John Barrymore,” she said, leaning across the table and rubbing her hand up and down his forearm. “Why don’t you take off your glasses?” The question always made him flush, and he did so now as he squeezed her wrist and answered, “There is nothing that I’d rather do, I think you know that. It’s just that John Barrymore and I have a lot of work to do before tomorrow night.”

F
OR SEVERAL REASONS
, Simon Phelps became the talk of the LANY ball the following evening. First of all, there was Flora. While most of the women that night wore their hair swept up, Flora let her saucy blond curls fall around her white mask. Behind it, her brown eyes gleamed like amber against the teal satin gown she wore that accentuated her statuesque figure. The members of LANY could be forgiven if they stopped and stared. She was a real looker, at least three inches taller than her husband, and she couldn’t keep her hands off him. Those are the kinds of things that engender respect, and curiosity, in other men. None of them would have guessed that the earnest young Mr. Phelps would be married to a woman like that.

Then there was Simon’s mask. Everyone was handed a papiermâché half-mask when they entered the ballroom at the Waldorf. The men’s were black, the women’s were white, and they all were attached to wooden sticks. At first, no one seemed aware of the face behind Simon’s mask. Then someone did a double take and nudged someone else, who pointed him out to another, until everyone in the room noticed that Simon wore the face of John Barrymore. The resemblance was downright eerie. Instead of the usual peepholes for the eyes, there were John Barrymore’s eyes. Not only that, but until then, no one had seen masks that weren’t made of wood or papier-mâché. This one was pliable and fitted
the face perfectly. People began to gather around Simon. Someone rubbed his finger across Barrymore’s bushy eyebrows. Someone else reached beneath the flap and tweaked Simon’s nose.

When the orchestra announced that they were playing the last dance, Simon handed out twenty copies of his John Barrymore mask to twenty random men in the room. Inside each mask, in an elegant script, he had written the words: “Face it, Adler, Broder, and Phelps will get you noticed!”

That night, when they came home from the Waldorf, Flora held onto Simon’s arm as he opened the front door. “You were a sensation tonight,” she said.

Still wearing his John Barrymore mask, he answered her in a throaty baritone he thought appropriate for the actor: “And you, my dear, were the most beautiful woman in the room. The belle of the ball, if I may say.”

Flora took his cardboard apple cheeks in her hands and in her own throaty voice said, “Take off your mask.”

This time, Simon didn’t hesitate. Both of them took the stairs two at a time.

T
HEIR HOUSE IN
Y
ONKERS
had three bedrooms, two of them just waiting for the children they knew they were going to have. Sometimes, when Simon wasn’t home, Flora would stand in one of the empty rooms and envision the nursery. Often when she was in the local Woolworth, she’d wander into the baby clothes section and pick up a snowsuit or a crocheted blanket and hold it in her arms imagining how it would feel with their child bundled inside. She’d already picked out names: Kate or Rose if it was a girl, Sam, after Simon’s father, Samuel, if it was a boy.

Six years into their marriage, Flora was twenty-five and Simon
thirty-two. Flora was still not pregnant, though not for lack of trying. Each time her period came, she’d feel betrayed and ashamed. “Maybe this is God’s way of telling me I don’t deserve a child,” she confided to Seema. “Or maybe I’m not womanly enough.” Margot had gotten pregnant twice. And here she was, the picture of health, barren. She hated herself for thinking that. It was nothing personal toward Margot. In fact, she had a warm spot for the child Edith. Everyone said how much alike they looked and she felt an odd connection to the girl, even though she’d not yet met her.

Wanting a child was the furthest thing from Seema’s mind. She’d had her own brushes with motherhood and they were anything but sentimental. Last summer, after she was three weeks late, she suddenly got violent cramps and started bleeding heavily. She was out with a group of friends at a roadhouse on the New Jersey shore and had to go lie down on the cold stone floor in the washroom. After about ten minutes, she felt strong enough to wash up and rejoin the group. They hadn’t even noticed her absence. She spent the rest of the afternoon pretending nothing was wrong and stealing backward glances to make sure that the blood hadn’t soaked through to her skirt. Then, in the fall, a friend of hers nearly died after douching with lye in order to flush out an unwanted baby. She’d watched pregnant women, their bodies stretched and distorted, wobbling down the street like overstuffed clowns. No sir, there was nothing about motherhood that appealed to Seema.

“You are so beautiful now,” she said to Flora. “But you have children and just like that—” she snapped her fingers “—your complexion is pale, you have dark circles under your eyes, your prettiness is gone. And that’s not all that goes. I see the way Simon
stares at you. Do you think he’d look at you like that with two brats hanging off you? Do you know what having children does to your body?” Seema ran her hands around the curves of her breasts. “I’m two years older than you and I still have my shape. If I had children, by now I’d be a fat old horse. No man would give me a second glance.”

Flora studied Seema’s face. She noticed the lines around Seema’s mouth: faint, but the shape of disappointment. “I’m sure Simon would love me, even if my belly was fat with babies,” she said.

“I know something about men,” said Seema. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

S
TILL THE BABIES
didn’t come. Simon and Flora never spoke about it; they just filled the bedrooms. Flora moved her sewing machine along with a box for threads, needles, and buttons into one of them. She added a trundle bed with a calico spread for Seema, who would come to stay with them when she needed a break from her job and friends. The other room became Simon’s office. It was where he kept drawings, window displays, and drafts of proposals that he was sending to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Things had changed on East Twenty-ninth Street. Now he had the big office that looked out onto the street. Still, there wasn’t enough room for all of the ideas that crowded into his imagination. They came faster now: the characters, the memories, the gadgets for advertisements. Living in his head as he did, Simon often had trouble separating the real world from the one he was creating.

Only Flora, licorice-sweet and welcoming, was able to straddle both. Always Flora.

Edith’s father, Frederick Ehrlich, was in the butcher business. He’d worked at the same store since he’d gotten out of the army in 1917 after taking a superficial wound to his left shoulder. All that Edith remembered from his time away was how her mother would sit staring out the window, as if she expected him to come up the path at any moment. That and how she’d hug Edith to her and say, “You must always be proud of how your father serves his country.”

Back home, his job was to grind the meat that was used to make sausage and wurst. Frederick always had about him a vaguely sweet smoky smell that Edith thought suited his personality. He was round with pink soft cheeks and a shiny bald head. He was not a handsome man, but with his amiable smile and strong barrel chest, he was not unpleasant looking either. When he spoke, he did so with a tempered voice and words chosen to be soothing: “Edith, can you be so kind as to bring me a sweater” or “Margot, maybe it would be nice if we took a little walk this afternoon and got some air.”

Her nature was more like his, and she had the same crook in her nose as he did. Otherwise, she resembled the Grossman side of the family. She had her mother’s high forehead and unruly auburn-colored hair. Her mother kept hers knotted up in a bun while Edith wore hers loose, her curls seeming sometimes to spring out of her head. Both of them were tall and thin and had eyes that, in the sun, turned the color of moss. Edith had a rosy complexion and a flock of freckles around her nose. Her mother’s skin, in the past years, had become translucent and drawn with worry.

Although they were only three living in the small stone farmhouse at the edge of town, Margot’s melancholia took up the space and attention of a truculent fourth. They felt blessed by Edith’s cheerfulness, which kept them afloat for the first ten years of her life. Then, right before Christmas of 1921, the trouble came.

As Edith walked to school on a Thursday morning that December, she blew air out of her cheeks slowly so she could watch cloud shapes form in front of her. There was a light snow falling and the earth felt soft beneath her feet. She’d woken up that morning feeling warm and a little light-headed. Not wanting to alarm her mother, she said nothing of it. Now, as she spat out air puffs, her throat caught, and she began to cough a rumbling cough that sounded like something coming out of a squeezebox. She felt so dizzy she thought she might fall to the ground. When she tried to catch her breath, the cough erupted again. There was a sharp pain in her ribs that made it difficult to take in more air. If she could only make it to school she’d feel better. She’d get warm and would be able to sit down. By the time she finally did get there, her legs felt rubbery, as if all of her energy was draining through
them. She slumped down in her desk without removing her coat. She couldn’t stop shivering or coughing. She’d cough until she ran out of breath, then suck back as much air as she could get into her lungs before the pain in her ribs seized up again.

After a while, the sound of her cough was the only thing that filled the quiet classroom. Exhausted by the pain of trying to breathe, Edith crossed her arms on her desk and cradled her head in them. She fell into a woozy sleep until the touch of her teacher’s skirts against her ankles roused her from it. Fräulein Huffman leaned over. “You’re not feeling so well, are you?”

“No, no, I’m fine,” said Edith, embarrassed to be noticed in this way. She sat up. “Really, I’m—” But the cough intervened. Fräulein Huffman placed the back of her hand on Edith’s forehead. It felt cool and reassuring, and Edith wished she would keep it there.

“You’re burning up,” the teacher said. “I think we need to send you home.” She put her hand on Edith’s shoulder. “Come now, let’s get you on your way.”

Edith knew she was supposed to stand up, but all she wanted to do was go back to sleep. She was ashamed of how weak she felt and hoped no one noticed. Slowly, she pulled herself onto her feet and tried to smile. “Stranger things have happened,” she said. It was the other half of her thought that somehow she would make it home, though right now it was impossible to imagine.

Fräulein Huffman walked Edith into the hall. Edith leaned against the gray wooden door that led into the classroom. Her eyes fixed on the peeling paint and nicks in the wood. It seemed a world unto itself, so vast and textured. Surely, she could rest here for a while.