The Museum of Extraordinary Things(15)

There was a huge funeral, paid for by Hochman. The dead child’s mother clung to the Wizard’s arm as if he were her savior. There were photographs on the front page of every newspaper. I knew Hochman’s business would double and because of this my pay would increase. At the age of twelve I earned enough to buy myself a new coat, and I bought one for my father as well, but he never wore it. It stayed in a box, kept beneath the bed. From then on, I spent the money on myself.

I soon became the boy Hochman turned to with his difficult cases. I had a sense of where the lost might go, since I was, in my own way, one among them. Still, I was not prepared for the degradation that I saw. I was a harsh judge of the men who left the families they’d once claimed to love, but I didn’t set myself above them. I judged myself as well. That is why I knew how to find them, and why I was Hochman’s best boy. I knew what it was like to fail someone.

I saw the alleyways and tenements of the Lower East Side as a place where good people could not win out against the devil. There was an underworld that decent men like my father knew nothing about. It could pull a person down into it when he least expected it to, and it tugged at me. I did things I was not proud of, mostly behind the alehouses where women all but gave themselves away. Still, I excelled as a finder of lost men, my habits of insomnia and mistrust benefiting me in this work. I was such an asset to Hochman that he told me he wished he had a son as bright as I. I’d heard that before, from my father’s friends.

I could not think of anything I would have wanted less.



The streets that I knew made me sick at heart, and, though I provided my father with a better life, with food we could have not afforded on his factory salary, when he looked at me I felt he despised me. I still had the urge to be alone.

One night I found myself walking to the hills of upper Manhattan, farther north than I’d ever been before. The city fell away beyond Morningside Heights. Between the residential areas there were patches of dark greenery, and then, at last, the woods that were filled with a weave of birdsong. There were still a few farmhouses on the cliffs of hard, white marble, and I heard cowbells ringing, as if I had stumbled upon a world of pastures. I passed the flooded juncture where the Hudson ran into the Harlem River in the area the Dutch called Spuyten Duyvil. Here there were oysters as large as a man’s hand, and herons lingered over the marshes, building nests out of sticks in the tall locust and sycamore trees. Fishermen stood on the bridges angling for striped bass, bluefish, porgy, and flounder, as well as the mysterious hard-to-catch eels. Skiffs floated near the best fishing holes. I imagined I might never go home; I could live in the woods, feed myself with oysters and rabbits, foods that were denied to me because our people kept kosher and were forbidden from eating such creatures.

It was November, and frost was forming in patches on the grass. I would soon be turning thirteen, but I knew I wouldn’t be standing with the men in the shul to recite the bar mitzvah prayers, though my reading of Hebrew was perfect, taught to me in the years when I was still my father’s obedient son. The leaves were brown and the river ran darkly, but the moon was full and it was nearly as bright as day. I had no home, other than the city of New York. I had no people, for I had forsaken them. And yet on this night it seemed I had walked into the dream I had longed for ever since I’d lost my faith, as if I had discovered a world apart and separate from all those who had been in my life, the men in black hats loyal to a path that was no longer mine, although there were times when I wished that it were. If I were still an obedient son, I might be able to sleep at night, and not wander through the streets, into taverns and trouble, into the sorrows of lost men, into the arms of women who would do anything for a few pennies, into the woods where the herons stalked through the tall grass.

I saw a flash of light and followed it up a bluff. Perhaps God was calling to me as he had called to Moses in the wilderness, perhaps he would punish me and berate me for my fall from grace. I had spied on men. I’d followed them like a shadow. I wrote down their trespasses and their sins. I made no sacrifices and held nothing dear, and in doing so I became one of those creatures I’d heard about, a dybbuk made of straw, with nothing inside.

Pheasants were flushed from the underbrush as I walked along. It was hard to believe that the teeming streets of lower Manhattan were less than a day’s walk from what was still a sort of wilderness. The wild tulip trees were two hundred feet tall. There were said to be bear here, come down from the Palisades in the winter, crossing the Hudson when it froze, along with wild turkeys, fox, muskrats, and deer. I thought of the forests of the Ukraine, where cuckoos sung in the trees and owls glided through the dark. My father and I had stopped to make camp for several nights on our travels. I was only a small child, but it was there, listening to the voice of the forest, that I had lost the ability to sleep.

I wondered if there was a reason for my insomnia and if, indeed, it was God’s plan. Had I been able to sleep I would never have ventured out to stand before a grove of twisted locust trees on this particular date. My cold breath rose into the chilly air. Before me stood a man in a white shirt and black trousers. His head was covered by a piece of burlap, which served as a makeshift dark tent. Beside him there was a large wooden trunk filled with chemicals and solutions, funnels, a pail for rinsing water, and several glass plates on which the images would be captured. The stranger peered into a large camera he had arranged on a stand in the grass. He was photographing trees in the moonlight, his attention riveted. When he heard the game birds in flight, he withdrew his head from the burlap and turned, quite annoyed to spy me there. He had a long beard, and long gray hair held back with a strand of leather. He raised his arms and gestured, to shoo me away. “Go on,” he shouted. “Leave me in peace.”