The Puzzle King (17 page)

Seema bought them both. The White girl spun her beads around for a few days then threw them over a doorknob. “Watch this,” she said to her sister one morning, grabbing at the beads then yanking them so hard that the chain holding them together broke. The beads spilled onto the floor, rolling under chairs and behind the bed, and stayed there until years later, after the Whites moved from that house and when the new occupants, finding pieces of wood and a small brass cross scattered about, dumped them in a bag with the rest of the trash.

But Seema held onto her rosary beads long after she left the Whites. In the winter, she tucked them into her coat pocket and would close her hand around them the way other people did with a rabbit’s foot. In summer, she hid the beads in her purse. When she was alone in the bathroom of a restaurant, or in the dark of a movie theater, she’d stick her hand in the purse to reassure herself that they were still there. Seema never considered herself
a Catholic. She had no interest in the religion itself. The beads were reliable and familiar, and that was the point; they could have easily been a child’s top for all that the symbolism meant to her. But it was the way her fingers wrapped around the cross and the perfect symmetry of its design that reassured Seema that some things in life were permanent. That it was sure to shock anyone who found her, a Jewish girl, secretly clasping a cross in her pocket only added to her mystique.

Oliver was an Episcopalian. His father had been one of John D. Rockefeller’s boys, and now Oliver was a banker. He was also married, a fact that Seema kept to herself. He’d put her up in the Park Avenue apartment so she would always be nearby. That’s what he said when he told her he would never marry her. He didn’t say that men like him never married women like her, but he didn’t have to. She knew that his wife was also an Episcopalian, that they’d grown up together in a small town outside Hartford, that they’d married one week after he graduated from Princeton. Their children were named Cornelius and Ginny, short for Virginia, and that was all she needed to know.

They had an understanding. He could tease her about anything—her accent or the funny way she held her knife and fork—and she would laugh along with him, lucky to be at the party. But under no circumstance could she ask about his wife or children. He would take her to the best speakeasies in town and introduce her to his buddies from Princeton. She was not to mention her relatives in Germany. If anyone should ask, her name was Seema Glass, not Seema Grossman. And if he was to boast about how this beautiful woman catered to all of his whims, she was to laugh and throw him a look that said his boasts were true.

O
LIVER INSISTED THAT
there be a library in the Park Avenue apartment, though neither of them found reading books to be particularly interesting. There was a formal dining room, a master bedroom suite, and a living room that looked down Eighty-third Street and had a view of Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When they first looked at the apartment, Seema said she had no idea what she would do with all of those rooms. Oliver winked at the real estate agent and ran his hand over Seema’s stomach in a way that made the agent look away. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” he said. “We’ll figure out something.”

He was funny, Oliver. He made people around him feel as if they were at a party even when they weren’t. If Seema didn’t always understand his punch lines, his booming laughter immediately roped her into the joke. Despite his robust personality, everything else about Oliver was thin: his pinched nose; his lips, which sometimes disappeared into his face; his eyes, which could be brown or green depending on the light; his blond-gray hair, a color that has no name; and his body, so long and reedy that it seemed to fold in the middle. Only his head, square as a die, was thick. Or maybe it just looked that way because of his small ears and goggle-shaped rimless spectacles.

Rich men didn’t have to be handsome to be considered attractive. Whenever they spoke, no matter what they said, people leaned forward to catch their words. It was no different with Oliver. Once people knew who he was, they hovered around him; even those who knew him well tended to be acquiescent and eager in his presence. Seema felt honored that he had chosen her, and he indulged her in ways that only a man of his wealth could. He loved the way diamonds shone against her throat and
how Dom Pérignon made her kisses tangy. “Where would you be without me?” It was a question he asked many times, and she would always answer, “I’d be nowhere without you. Certainly not on Park Avenue.”

But his money wasn’t the only thing she found alluring. She liked that she could wrap her arms around his lithe body and the way his cool fingers felt against her skin. In public, he would slip his hand under the waist of her skirt or brush her ear with his tongue as he whispered something to her. She’d blush when he’d pat her on the rear end and linger there a little too long. He was bold and unashamed about his desire and unpredictable in his lovemaking. Sometimes, he’d curl up next to her and put his head on her lap. Other times, he’d pin her down by the wrists and furiously pound his body into hers. It excited her—the sounds they made, the welts and scratches they found on each other after—and she could never get enough of him. He nicknamed her “Seema Glass, Sweet Ass,” and sometimes he called her that in public.

O
N A RAINY
S
UNDAY
afternoon in early May, Seema brought Oliver to lunch with Flora and Simon at Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul’s house in Mount Kisco. For months they had been asking to meet “the famous Oliver Thomas,” and when he agreed to go with her, she couldn’t figure her way out of it. She tried to convince herself that Oliver would be his usual boisterous self. “I’m great with people’s relatives,” he assured her. “I’ll have them eating out of the palm of my hand.” He was swell with his Princeton friends but it was hard to picture where he and Simon would find common ground.

For lunch, Aunt Harriet served pot roast and a cucumber salad
along with Margot’s kugel. It got them to talking about how ill Edith had been and the desperate situation in Germany. “We’re hoping she’ll come here for the summer. It would do her a world of good, don’t you think?” Flora had asked the group.

“She’d be crazy for Coney Island,” Simon said.

“Poor little Edie,” said Uncle Paul, already giving her a nickname. “We’d spoil her rotten. We’d take her to the Hippodrome and all the stores on Fifth Avenue.” Seema glanced over at Oliver, waiting for him to show some interest. But Oliver sat silently with both elbows on the table, staring at the kugel. Foam from his beer washed over the lines of his mouth.

On the way home, she said to him, “You were so quiet. Is everything okay?”

His eyes narrowed. “That was a funny little group of people.”

“That’s my family,” she said, somewhat startled.

“I’m your family, sweetheart. Without me, you’d be living in some cute house in the middle of nowhere eating
krugel
, or whatever you people call it.”

“I guess Cornelius and Ginny eat steak and caviar then,” she said without thinking.

The rain was falling harder now, and in the darkness it was difficult to know exactly what happened next. Maybe a deer ran in front of the car, or the car in front of theirs had stopped abruptly. Whatever it was, Oliver slammed his foot down on the brake.

Seema lurched forward and hit the bridge of her nose on the dashboard. Her nose felt numb at first, but when she moved her head even a little, she could feel pain fill her face. The blood trickled, then gushed. It was thick and vivid and the only color she could see on this dark night. She leaned her head against the
leather backrest and tried to staunch the bleeding. Something felt terribly out of place. “Broken,” she said in a clogged voice.

He didn’t reach over to comfort her, just stared at her and handed her his handkerchief.

A
FTER THAT IS WHEN
Seema started to bring crosses home.

By the time Edith came to visit in early June, nearly a dozen of them were hung around the house. At first, she placed them unobtrusively: one propped up against a volume of Stephen Crane’s
The Red Badge of Courage
, another in her dressing room, between two bottles of French cologne. Seema didn’t pray to her crosses. Prayers imply hope for change, and at this point in her life, that wasn’t a possibility. The crosses made her feel less alone. There was a miniature mother-of-pearl cross next to the icebox in the kitchen and a wooden one shoved into a shelf above the liquor cabinet in the pantry. Oliver noticed the filigreed one from Spain. “You a Catholic now?” he’d asked.

“No, I just thought it was pretty,” she’d said.

“As pretty as a horse’s ass,” he’d answered.

S
EEMA WAS GOOD
about remembering to hide the crosses before Flora visited. It used to be that she and Flora had no secrets from one another, but now it was different. Flora never told Seema how she thought it was her own fault that she and Simon couldn’t have children, how she believed that the same bad blood that had killed her father was now poisoning whatever chance they had of making a baby. Seema didn’t tell Flora that Oliver was married or how she worried that having her twelve-year-old niece around would disrupt her life with him. And now
there were the crosses. Some things were too hard to explain, even to a sister. So, to be on the safe side, just before Edith came to New York, Seema went around the house and collected them, hiding them in the lavender tin box where she kept her nail polish, lipstick, and other makeup. She slid the box into a cabinet next to the toilet. No one would ever think of looking there.

Margot rehearsed how she would say it, like a child learning her lines in a school play. She wanted to be able to tell Edith that she would be going to America for the summer in a way that made it sound like an adventure. “The child mustn’t sense that we are trying to be rid of her,” she said to Frederick. Mostly, she worried that Edith would pick up on her own fear, that by sending her across an ocean to a foreign country she was letting another child slip away.

So she practiced with Frederick until the words came out effortlessly. Late one afternoon after Edith came home from school, Margot was ready, though Edith was tired and hungry and had deep pockets—like wounds—under her eyes. “How was school today?” Margot asked, her voice lifting.

Edith stretched out on one of the kitchen chairs and yawned. “Emmy’s father lost his job last week. They told him that business was slow in the grocery store so they had to let people go, but Emmy says that because he’s Jewish, they don’t want him there anymore. She says they’ll have no money and her mother is afraid
they’ll starve. Emmy says her father has been sitting in his room since it happened and won’t do anything. She said that we should be careful, that Pappa could lose his job for the same reason, but I said that he’d been there for so many years that they would never let him go, even if he is Jewish. That’s right, isn’t it?”

Margot took a deep breath. “Oh
Liebchen
, don’t become a worrier like your mother,” she said. “Of course Pappa will be all right. He is the best wurst maker in the country. Can you think of Germany without wurst? It’s not imaginable. Besides, let’s not dwell on sad things. Let’s talk about happy things, shall we? We have a surprise for you. Aunt Flora and Uncle Simon want you to come and stay with them in America for the summer. They have even booked passage for you on a ship that leaves for New York on June 2. You’ll live with them in their house in Yonkers. Isn’t that the best surprise?”

Margot searched her daughter’s face for a hint of what she was feeling, but she saw no clue.

“Does Pappa know?” Edith asked.

“Of course he does. We’ve talked about it many times. We both think it would be good for you to have a change. American food is healthy, and we want you to get stronger. We know how much you love Flora and Simon and they are so eager to have you come. And finally, you’ll get to meet your Aunt Seema. Can you imagine, Edith, New York City?”

Edith raised her eyebrows. Their world had gotten darker in the past few years. Suddenly there was a crack and light was streaming in.

“I don’t understand. What did you say about New York City?”

“You heard me. I said Flora and Simon would like you to visit them this summer and Pappa and I think you should go.”

Edith’s first impulse was to throw her arms around her mother’s neck and say, “Yes, I shall start packing now!” But she drew back, knowing how that might hurt her feelings. “I don’t know anyone who’s been to New York City,” she said. “I can’t imagine being away from you and Pappa, but yes, I think I would like to go.”

“We’ll miss you, it goes without saying,” said Margot, trying to sound casual. “But New York City? An offer like this doesn’t come along often.”

“No, it doesn’t, does it?” said Edith.

“So it’s decided then,” said Margot.

“I suppose it is.”

Margot knew that her daughter was kind of an actress. She intuited who people wanted her to be and without any effort became that person. It came from a lifetime of anticipating and pleasing, and it served her well. Although Edith’s face was impassive, Margot had to smile when she noticed how her daughter kicked her leg back and forth, like a metronome, under the table.