“Understood.” The owner’s son’s voice was surprisingly deep, as if he were a man masquerading as a boy, but one who was easily coerced into giving something precious away.
I carried his watch in my coat pocket from that day on. I have it still, nearly fifteen years later. It is the most precious thing I have ever owned. On the back there remains an inscription. “To my dear son.”
The night I stole the watch I came home late. My father was eating soup at our table. We had soup when there was nothing but potatoes and onions in our measly larder. My father shivered and wore a blanket around him. When I put the watch down in front of him, he raised his eyes, as if I was a stranger. And in fact, I was.
At night, I began to do as I pleased. If my father knew, he said nothing. Most likely he already understood that my path led away from him. I slinked out of our room, down five flights of stairs, into the dark streets, drawn to the roughest riverside areas as if I were a fish myself. I had stopped saying prayers with my father. He was an educated man who would have been a teacher if he’d stayed in our village. He still maintained his studies at a scholar’s level. I felt his disappointment in me on a daily basis. I often stood outside the shul and watched him gathering with the other men for the evening prayers. These men were overwhelmed by the huge, magnificent Eldridge Street Synagogue, reminiscent of a cathedral with its extraordinary rose window. They preferred their own place of worship, a small red-brick building in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge with a congregation made up of men from our town in the Ukraine. People called it the Tailors’ Shul. I never went inside, though I was supposed to be studying with the rabbi’s assistant. I slipped off my skullcap and kept it in my pocket. My father had begun to turn away when he saw me on the corner.
I had a secret life, one that earned me cash enough for us to live more comfortably. I wanted more than soup. That was why I began to work for Abraham Hochman, known as the Seer of Rivington Street, the author of such pamphlets as “Fortune Teller” and “The Key to Prophecy,” which sold for ten cents a copy. Hochman lived not far from us, in a large apartment with indoor plumbing. It was said he was fearless, hired to tell which horses would win at several racetracks by the mighty Sullivan mob, run by Big Tim, a kingpin of the Tammany political machine, the corrupt arm of the Democratic Party. His main business, however, consisted of mind reading, the interpretation of dreams, and, most important, finding the lost. Perhaps it was fate that he should become my employer. I had often seen him, overweight but stylish at all times, surrounded by his devoted followers, mostly adoring women who needed his help, many of whom got down on their knees before him, begging for his wisdom. Hochman owned the Hall of Love, one of the many wedding chapels on Sheriff Street, where he drew up ketubahs, Jewish wedding contracts that had been beautifully illustrated, often by Jewish-Italian artists. Here he presided over marriage ceremonies, though he was neither a rabbi nor a judge. He was considered to be a wizard and was, in my estimation, long before I met him, a fake. He was best known for tracking down missing persons, most often husbands and fiancés, men who had left behind their girlfriends or wives and families in Russia or Poland to come work in New York. Such men promised to send for their loved ones once they were settled, but instead disappeared into their new lives, pulling their bowler hats over their brows, and the wool over their wives’ eyes. There were so many of these devious individuals that the Daily Forward, the Jewish newspaper, had taken to printing a gallery of missing men. Women who had been deserted sold their wedding rings at Fass’s jewelry store on Clinton Street, right around the corner from Rivington, so they might pay for the Wizard’s services. It made it all the more difficult that they had to walk past H. Goldstein’s shop, which was famous for fashionable wedding dresses and silk hats made to order, on their way to sell what little they had remaining from their own failing marriages. Once they were in New York, these women could not return to their old lives—for even American Jews with passports were not allowed to pass over the border into Russia—not that they would have wished to do so. They wanted what they’d been promised, though they’d been cheated by those they loved best.
Hochman vowed that the angels led him to these lost husbands and fathers and fiancés, but in truth he employed dozens of boys as runners, young spies who tracked down those wretched individuals who had deserted their families. He taught his boys the tools of discovery for seeking out lowlifes: interview the owners of taverns, whorehouses, flophouses, hunt the alleys and tenement buildings, hang around the liquor store on Delancey Street that sold Vishniak whiskey, favored by men who’d come to New York from the Ukraine. We asked the right questions because Hochman taught us what they were. If we had a photograph we’d show it around, even if it was an old daguerreotype and the image was fading around its silvered edges. Do you know this man? we’d demand of as many people as we could find who would listen to our pleas. It will be worth your while to tell us, we went on. He’s won a contest, an award, a free meal, and there may be a reward in it for you as well if you take me to him. Did he grow up in your village back home, do you have pity for his family, are you sure you yourself aren’t running from something? We were posted in the places where men who disappeared were known to gather, whether they were drowning their sorrows or creating new identities. Once a boy had done his dirty work and the good-for-nothing individual had been located, Hochman claimed to have found the missing person with his psychic skills.
The Wizard didn’t seem to think much of me when I met him on the street and asked for work. As always he was fashionably dressed despite his girth. He wore a blue serge suit and a top hat. His secretary was with him, a thin bad-tempered man named Solomon, whose duty it was to keep the Wizard’s many admirers away. I pushed past the secretary and walked beside Hochman as if I had a right to accost him. He eyed me coolly, and yet a smile played at his lips. He liked people with spirit. He said he had never employed an Orthodox Jew, though he himself was a pious man. He feared my father would make trouble if I worked for him. He suggested that I should go back to my studies and leave the wicked world to men who knew how to deal with such matters.
“My father has no say in my life,” I told Hochman. In the newspapers the Wizard was referred to as Doctor or Professor, but I was fairly certain he had no degree. He took out a cigar and offered me one, but I refused. I didn’t want him to catch me choking on the smoke.
“Why is that?” he asked. “A father is a father, Orthodox or not.”
“You’re so smart, you tell me.”
I had nerve, but my matter-of-fact retort did the trick. Hochman all-out grinned as he hired me, thinking an Orthodox boy dressed in black with long hair would have a special sort of access, and that people would confide in me. As it turned out, he was right. Men told me their loathsome tales, how they’d run away from their nagging wives or fallen in love with a Christian woman, how they had a right to their freedom. I was a good listener, and I didn’t make pronouncements. I was so accomplished at what I did that Hochman soon paid me double what I earned at the factory. Much to my father’s distress, I quit my job as a tailor. I spent my mornings sleeping, and my nights on the streets. Hochman was quite famous, and even the Times went to him when children were missing or when there was a crime the police could not solve. My status in the neighborhood either ascended or was deeply tarnished by my new occupation depending on who you were and what you believed.
That winter I found one of the missing children who had been written up in all the papers. It was front-page news for a time. An Orthodox boy of seven was missing. It was thought he’d been kidnapped, perhaps by an employee of one of those houses on Third Avenue where sex was cheaply bought. I questioned several of his friends on the street where he lived, and they all told me the same thing—this boy was a wanderer. He often climbed down the fire escape in the middle of the night. He liked to ramble along the East River, where he dreamed of running away to sea. I began to search the pathways that ran along the river. Every now an
d then I came upon a group of displaced individuals, lost men with no homes and no goal other than to stay alive. These poor souls lived on the edge of the city, scavenging what they could. I knew enough to stay away from these men, who would bash in a fellow’s head in order to steal his boots. Because I was tall I seemed older than my age, and I cursed a blue streak if anyone approached, therefore no one accosted me. I had taken to carrying a knife for my protection, and once or twice I showed it when someone began to follow me.
I discovered the missing boy beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, a feat of construction considered to be one of the wonders of the world. The boy lay in a pipe that allowed water to rush from the streets into the river. I guessed he had sneaked out, then gone too far. It was likely that he’d become exhausted and had curled up to sleep, freezing to death as the snow fell. I understood what it was like to want to run away from home, and maybe that was why I felt so disturbed. I shook his shoulder, but he didn’t respond. I pulled him out of the pipe and sat beside him for a long time. The truth was, for all my bravado, I had never seen a dead body before. Though many in our village had been killed, they had become cinders that rose up with the wind. I could not look into this boy’s face. I thought I would be haunted if I did, and he would then follow me from that place. I kept my eyes averted as I covered him with a blanket I found nearby. I was naïve; I thought the dead could still feel cold. I folded my coat into a pillow, for I was convinced that the dead wished for comfort as well. As I left, snow began to fall again, and I was grateful, hoping when the police brought the boy’s mother here, she would be spared the aura of death that clung to this miserable place, and would instead see something that might resemble heaven, a bank of white, a boy who slept peacefully, his head resting on my coat.
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.”
But it was too late. I had already seen the light spilling down around me. The night was aglow. I wanted to look through the lens of his camera. I wanted it so badly I felt an ache in my chest. There was another world I had never known, one of great beauty that could make me forget what I had seen in my short time on earth.
I LEFT HOME a few weeks later. I had very little to take with me. My new coat, a pair of boots I’d bought for myself, the watch that had once belonged to the factory owner’s son. That was som
ething I would never give away, for it reminded me why I’d made the decision to go my own way. I left a packet of cash underneath my father’s prayer book; whether or not he used it was his decision. I took up the feather quilt from the floor and folded it, knowing I’d never sleep on it again. I thought of my mother’s hands at work. Then I stopped thinking about her. It was not possible to hold on to ashes. In my dreams I had always walked out of the past, and it shut behind me, a door I couldn’t unlock. Now I intended to do the same in my waking life. At the factory, other boys my age were working for the labor movement, trying to change the world, but I couldn’t even see their world; it seemed a prison to me. Hochman had treated me fairly, and I knew he had high hopes for me, but I never told him I was leaving. I didn’t feel the need. If he were as adept at locating the missing as he claimed, he would know where I had gone.
The photographer’s name had been printed on the wooden chest that held his equipment: Moses Levy. He was one of us, from the Ukraine, and our world was small enough for me to track him down. Finding people was what I did, after all. As it turned out, Hochman’s secretary, Solomon, was the one who led me to Levy. In his files I found the address of Levy’s studio. The photographer’s services were often used when there was a wedding. Thinking back, I believed I had seen him at the Hall of Love, a stooped, elegant figure setting up his camera. Levy had been considered to be a great artist in Russia but was now forced to take marriage portraits simply to make a living.
I found my way to Chelsea, heading toward the river, for it was here that the great man lived and worked, in a workshop loft above a livery stable. I climbed the stairs, but when I knocked on the studio door there was no answer. I’d never found the lost by giving up, so I knocked harder. I was already impulsive, not easily dissuaded or turned away, and my methods for getting what I wanted could be considered obnoxious. I knew how to rattle people, how to make them respond when all they wanted was to slip away from my prodding. I kept rapping at the door. After a while it opened a crack and the old man peered out with his fierce eye. Perhaps he recognized me, or perhaps I was simply an annoyance like any other.