The Sea Beach Line (33 page)

The weather forecast held the next day. As soon as the table was set up, people started buying books. It was all we could do to keep up with the demand. I was happy to be busy.

An apartment-building super named Armando sold me a box of books. This wasn't uncommon; supers often had to clean out apartments when someone died or was evicted. The box was mostly English-language novels with some German, Hebrew, and Yiddish books at the bottom. I paid thirty bucks for the lot. Armando didn't try to negotiate; he just said “cool,” put the ten and the twenty in the pocket of his tan coveralls, and headed back west.

Rayna took out the Yiddish books and started to read through the titles. Even though her hair was a good bit shorter now, it still blew in her face, so she kept it back with a denim headband while we worked.

“This book is called
Masoes Benyamin Hashlishi
, by Mendele Mocher Sforim,” she explained. “It says that it's the story of a man's travels.” She read Yiddish better than English. In English, she sometimes had to stop and sound out words, but her Yiddish was fluid and natural. “This one is
Gedankn un Motivn—Lider in Proze.
Ideas and
poems.
Krieg Ein Zeik.
More poems.
Der Sheydims Tants.
It involves demons, I don't want to look inside.”

During the late-morning lull, she took a small Yiddish book with a red hardcover binding out of the box and went off to read it by herself on a bench in the shade. When she came back to help with the table at the start of the lunchtime rush, I asked about what she'd been reading.

“It is a little storybook,” she said. “It involves a girl who lives in a village with a blacksmith father, and three mean blacksmith brothers. They are cruel to her. Only, she finds out that they aren't her true family.”

“How does she find out?” Rayna was adding up the price of a stack of books. She waited until she'd finished and told the customer the price before she answered.

“She sees a vision of her true family in a bowl of water, when she is doing the washing.”

“So what does she do?” I asked.

“She goes off, through the forest and up the mountains, to look for her true family.”

“Does she find them?” Rayna shook her head.

“Not yet. So far, she only gets the glimpses in the water. But I didn't finish reading.”

When the afternoon lull came, I was ready for a break. Rayna and I sat on the curb and drank lemon seltzer. We were back on our feet every few minutes though; a steady stream of customers kept up all through the afternoon. Before we knew it, the after-work rush came upon us, consuming us with work, and it went on like that, through dinnertime and into the evening. A couple of tourists tried to snap photographs. To them, we were classic and picturesque. We all hid our faces. Our lives didn't belong to them.

At night in storage, Rayna counted our money. She was better at keeping records than I was, and copied the numbers neatly into photocopied tables. It was largely because of her bookkeeping that business was going so well. She said that our take for the day was two hundred and twenty-seven dollars, which was more than I'd been expecting.

We went on doing well. We were busy all day long when we were on the street, and we spent our days in storage working on inventory. We sold a good deal of Al's back stock, and had to constantly be on the lookout for books to buy. Occasionally, we stopped by apartments to buy books from people who were moving or who had inherited the books from a previous tenant. We kept the good books to sell and left the others on the curb, to be scavenged or recycled.

Business dipped for a week in late April, when the students were gone for spring break, but then in early May they started buying books for their final papers. More and more tourists appeared on the street. The weather got warmer. We stood out on the street in the sun and sold books.

“What are you reading?” Rayna asked, as she came into the storage space with groceries one rainy afternoon. The light spring showers had been enough to keep us off the street. We didn't have a refrigerator, and mostly ate from the deli, but we kept a few things like fruit, peanut butter, and bread on hand in a small plastic cooler.

“I'm not reading, actually,” I said. “I'm looking through one of my father's sketchbooks.” I hadn't shown her the books again, since she failed to recognize herself in the Galuth painting, but I hadn't stopped looking through them on my own. Since the newsstand arson, I'd begun to scrutinize the images of Roman and Timur in particular more and more.

“This little boy is you!” Rayna said, looking over my shoulder. She was delighted to see me as a small child.

“Yes.”

“So this with you is your mother? And your sister, Becca?”

“Yes, that's right. Can you take a look through the book?” I asked. “Maybe you'll recognize something. I don't know what everything is.” She took the book, hesitantly, and flipped through the pages, blushing at the pictures of the naked woman. As the images became more violent, her expression changed to one of fear.

“I don't recognize anything,” she said. “Your father has lived a very scary life.”

“Yes, he has. I don't know if it's been scary for him. But it would scare anyone else. It would scare me.”

“Everyone gets scared, Isaac.” Her fingers traced the clouds of smoke like she might push through the page, into the world of the drawings.

“I guess that's true. I mean, that's probably why he ran away, and why he's hiding somewhere. Because he's scared of something. Maybe something in one of these books.”

“When he comes out of hiding, he's going to return here?”

“I believe so. I hope so.”

“So he could appear here at any time?” She looked frightened.

“Sure. But there's nothing to be scared of. He's my father. He always looked out for me. He'll look out for you too. He'll like you.” She nodded, but looked unconvinced.

A few days later, Rayna handed me a crumpled flyer.

“Isaac,” she said, thrusting the piece of paper into my hands, “look.” It was folded into four quarters, and had apparently been in her pocket for a while.

“What is this?” I asked.

“It was stapled to a temporary wooden wall, for when they build something?”

“Like around a construction site?” She nodded.

“I got it two days ago, on a walk. But I wasn't sure if I should give it to you.” I unfolded it. At the top of the photocopied flyer, the following words were written by hand in thick black marker:

Madame Yemaya will answer all your questions.

Am I on the right path? And what is my destiny?

Psychic Readings – Astrology – Tarot Cards

Underneath was a photograph of a woman wearing a long white robe. She gazed toward the camera. Her long black hair and some sort
of jeweled tiara framed her face. She looked familiar, but I couldn't place her. At the bottom of the photograph was a West Village address.

“In your father's picture books is a nude woman. I blushed when we looked at her.”

“Yes?”

“It's the same woman. I recognized her from the wall, then. But I went and got a flyer the next day to be sure.” We took out the sketchbook, and held the psychic's photograph next to the face of the reclining nude. Rayna was right. Al and Madame Yemaya were intimately acquainted.

“Why did you wait two days to show me this?” I was annoyed.

“I don't think you should go find this woman.”

“Because she does black magic?” King Saul fell because he visited the Witch of Endor, to summon the spirit of Samuel, the seer and leader who had anointed him as king. Saul knew what he was doing was wrong, but he needed the guidance of Samuel's prophecies. When Samuel rose, with other spirits at his side, he was angry, and told Saul that his action had cost him the throne. Divine favor passed from Saul to David. Coming from the religious world, Rayna feared the occult. I thought of Andrew, and wondered how he was faring with his conjuring.

“No.” Rayna shook her head. “Not just that. I don't think you should go searching so much. Things are okay. We are all right here. We are safe. You want to upset everything for yourself. You'll tear open your own world. I felt guilty lying to you, not showing you the flyer. But I wish you would just throw it away now that you've seen it.” I understood that she was afraid our little world would collapse around us when I found Al, and I wondered if she was right. Maybe I had misinterpreted the signs in the beginning, and the postcards were leading me to this place, to my new vocation and my life with Rayna, and I was supposed to be focusing on what was in front of me, rather than chasing more shadows. This was an appealing thought, but ultimately it felt like an excuse, a cop-out.

“If there's a chance to find my father, Rayna, I have to look.”

On the next overcast day, a Thursday, I left Rayna at the storage space and went to Madame Yemaya's storefront, on Carmine just off of Hudson Street. The place was tiny, but the neon sign made it easy to find. Madame Yemaya sat inside at a small table, reading the
Daily News
. She looked tired. She was draped in scarves and beads, but they were all carefully arranged so that her ample breasts were largely exposed.

Seeing me hesitating at her door, she jumped up. She held me with her big black eyes until she could get close enough to grab my hand and pulled me inside.

“Come in! Come in! You have a question? You have a problem? Madame Yemaya will help you out! You look like you are very much troubled.” Her accent reminded me of old vampire movies. “For you, I will only charge ten dollars for a reading.” She pushed me down into a chair, and took her own seat, without letting go of my hand. “I can see you are a troubled young man. I can see that you are adrift on a raft in a sea of mysteries. I can see you chase ghosts into their graves. I can see you must change—”

“Look, I'm not here to have my fortune told.”

“No? I see.” She put her other hand on top of mine and leaned close. “What is it you are searching for then? You do not have questions about the future? You are looking for a mystical experience in the present?” Her words were accompanied by ornate hand gestures.

“No, I actually wanted to talk about Alojzy Edel.” She dropped my hand on the table and cursed in Spanish.