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The Puzzle King




  Praise for The Puzzle King

  “The kernel of Betsy Carter’s third novel, The Puzzle King, is a powerful bit of family lore … A work of genealogical fiction from the late 19th century to the eve of World War II … It balances the Jewish immigrant experience in New York—both the achievement of the American dream and the curdling of it—against the insidious anti-Semitism of Germany and Eastern Europe.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Skillfully using ties to her own family, Carter weaves a compelling story and a rich, multilayered novel around three Jewish sisters and deftly captures the squalor and bustle of early 20th century New York … A masterful puzzle, a fine novel with twists and turns and pieces that interlock tightly. The Puzzle King is Carter at her best.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “Carter’s third novel is all the more poignant for its provenance.”

  —People

  “Everybody loves an inspiring rags-to-riches story, and The Puzzle King delivers that in spades … [It] manages to tell the immigrant story from a uniquely relationship-and family-based perspective, all the while honoring their bravery and stoicism in the face of great odds.”

  —San Francisco Book Review

  “Tracks the differing responses immigrants have to America’s open arms and turned-up noses.”

  —The New York Times

  “It’s a rare treat when a novel’s literary merit can compete with its capacity to entertain, but Betsy Carter, who’s slam-dunked it before with Swim to Me and The Orange Blossom Special, has netted another winner with The Puzzle King… Carter, a consummate storyteller, cobbles declarative sentences from diction so unexpected that readers rush from one vivid image and scene to the next until the book’s characters, their culture and the caveats of their existence are as real as anyone and anything has ever been.”

  —The Louisville Courier-Journal

  “A wonderful story, overflowing with history, intrigue, bravery, and redemption.”

  —Examiner.com

  “A vibrant portrait of a time and some unexpectedly courageous people.”

  —BookPage

  “A tale of immigrants succeeding despite the odds, a passionate marriage, sisters who love each other despite their differences, and bravery in the face of ultimate evil. The characters feel real because they are—the story’s based on true-life events you’ll ponder long after the final page.”

  —Parenting

  “A beautiful tale of one family’s experiences in America and Germany prior to the start of World War II … Carter’s lyrical prose captures the era and retains a personal touch … The Puzzle King is an engaging and moving novel.”

  —The Salisbury (NC) Post

  “Readers will be swept away with the story … With spiraling tension and a fearless ending that leaves one breathless, the author has created a rich, multilayered novel.”

  —Mobile Press-Register

  “The Puzzle King is an engrossing and especially timely novel.”

  —The East Hampton Star

  “Betsy Carter writes with deep drama and astute historical validity.”

  —Knoxville News Sentinel

  “A poignant story of love, longing, and the truths of family connectedness.”

  —Booklist, starred review

  “A moving tale … Drawing on family legends (no one could invent a story line like this one), Carter deftly paints a panoramic portrait of life during the turbulent 1930s. The pieces of her gripping story fit together so neatly that they cannot easily be torn apart. Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal, starred review

  “Betsy Carter has written a haunting and stirring story of heroism in the shadow of horror. The Puzzle King is a deeply human drama, a powerfully affecting novel that enriches history by giving a face to the faceless whose lives hung in the balance as the holocaust approached.”

  —Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler

  and The Shakespeare Wars

  The Puzzle King

  Also by BETSY CARTER

  Swim to Me

  The Orange Blossom Special

  Nothing to Fall Back On:

  The Life and Times of a Perpetual Optimist

  The Puzzle King

  a novel by

  BETSY CARTER

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2009 by Betsy Carter.

  All rights reserved.

  First paperback edition, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, November

  2010. Originally published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2009.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by Anne Winslow.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary

  perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters,

  places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination

  or are used fictitiously.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Carter, Betsy, [date]

  The puzzle king : a novel / by Betsy Carter.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-56512-594-0 (HC)

  1. Jews—Germany—History—1933–1945—Fiction.

  2. Immigrants—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.

  3. Family—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.A7768P89 2009

  813’.6—dc22 2009021152

  ISBN 978-1-61620-016-9 (PB)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Paperback Edition

  For F.E. and M.E.

  The Puzzle King

  Prologue

  ON A MARCH MORNING IN 1936, an American woman in her forties named Flora Phelps stood in line at the American consulate in Stuttgart, Germany.

  For these times, in this place, this was an extraordinary fact. But Flora gave the people in line even more reasons to stare. For one thing, she was beautiful. While they all wore drab, ill-fitting clothes and the weariness of terrible times on their faces, Flora wore a floral-patterned silk dress that accentuated her ample curves. The raspberry-colored cloche she wore drew attention to her eager brown eyes. Vanities such as this had all but disappeared in Germany.

  She carried an envelope and a bundle wrapped in brown paper tied up with twine. Anyone who saw the way she held the package, with both arms around it, understood that whatever was inside had everything to do with her visit here on this day.

  When it came her turn to speak with the consul, he was immediately taken with her. Flora was as charming as she was beautiful, and it wasn’t long before she and the consul were engaged in a conversation that went far beyond the parameters of his station. The talk turned to Flora’s relatives. Flora was born to a Jewish family in Germany, and, as a young girl, was sent with her older sister to America, where she lived in a prosperous suburb with her aunt and uncle. Her other relatives stayed behind. Only a miracle would get them out of Hitler’s Germany now.

  DIRE TIMES BREED unexpected heroes. Flora was one of them.

  Part 1

  New York City: 1892

  Three years to the day after Simon Phelps was born, his father died unexpectedly. Simon’s mother told him it had to do with a vision his father had right before his death: “He saw you being snatched up in the claws of a giant bird and taken away. He ran after the bird with his hands grasping at the air hoping to save you, but you were already lost to him. The stones of sorrow set heavy in his heart until, eventually, they crushed him.”

  Simon had no memories of his father, only a black, formless guilt that his birth was responsible for his father’s death. Sometimes he would try to reach back into memory and draw a picture of him, but all that surfaced was the image of a small man disappearing underneath the weight of large stones. He sketched everything before him—his mother cooking, his sister braiding her hair, the maple trees at the botanical garden—and he drew other things that existed only in his imagination. He hoped that by re-creating what he saw inside his head, the image of his father would untangle and present itself to him.

  Before she sent Simon away from Vilna, his mother bought him a notebook and some colored crayons. Only a mother who understood how much her son relied on his imagination would indulge in that kind of extravagance.

  The family got by with little. She supported her seven children by taking in sewing: jackets, dresses, and pants with seams so worn that the wind blew through them. Of course she made all their clothing, which was passed down from one child to the next.

  The future seemed as bleak and tattered as the clothes she tried to mend. It took months for her to scrape up the eight dollars it would cost to send Simon, her youngest and, in her mind, smartest, child to America, where she was certain he would find a better life. Vilna was no place for a child, not now, in 1892, when a knock on the door at the crack of dawn or in the middle of the day could mean that any boy over twelve would be taken away and sent into the army. It could be months or even years before his family would hear from him again. Or maybe never, if he was Jewish.

  She promised him that she and his six brothers and sisters would follow. Someday, she told him, after he’d made some money and had a house, he’d be able to afford to
bring them to America. “You must be brave for all of us,” she’d said, turning her face away from his. To herself, she repeated the prayer that God would help him find his way. Her God would reunite them soon. She had to believe that.

  Because he could take only what he could carry, she agonized over what else besides the notebooks and crayons she should pack in his satchel. She made the choice to include her apron because she wanted something he could touch and smell, and for her own selfish reasons, it gave her comfort to think that at night he might roll the apron into a ball and rest his head on it. The thought of how it felt to run her fingers though his wavy hair before he fell asleep hurt her heart, so she moved on to worrying about more practical matters. She stuck in a few coins she had saved because she’d heard that he could trade them in at the money exchange when he got to Ellis Island. She also packed a brown-and-white checked sweater vest that she had knit for him.

  For weeks before he left on his voyage, she told him things about America. Of course, no one who had gone there had ever come back to Vilna, so everything she told him was based on rumor, scant pieces of knowledge, or what she wanted to believe was true. “You must dress well in America, everyone there does,” she said. “It is important that you go to school and get an education. With an education, you can do anything. And it’s important to keep your chest warm and stand up straight.”

  Simon’s mother was not a typical Litvak mother. She was a warm, embracing woman, stout and tall for her generation. The last time he saw her, he was just tall enough so that when he leaned into her, his head nestled in the crook of her arm. He was nine years old.

  AT NINE, SIMON was a runt of a boy, the kind who could easily have been swallowed up by the squalor and homesickness that consumed him. When the first-class passengers would throw nuts and oranges down below to steerage, he refused to get on his hands and knees like the others in order to grovel for the prizes. Instead, he’d turn away and put his hands over his ears to tune out the laughter from the people above them. It wasn’t as easy to ignore the stench of rotten food, sweat, feces, and urine that stung his eyes and clogged his throat. It was so crowded that when passengers got seasick, more often than not they would lean over and vomit on another passenger before they could make it to a window or landing. When his own stomach ran sour, Simon searched for a place to be sick in private. Only once had he lost control and puked on someone else’s shoes, and the memory of it, years later, still made his face go red.

  At night, he slept on one of the wooden bunks lined up two in a row with no mattresses, with whatever blanket he could find. Simon would be so wedged in between the other unwashed bodies that at least once a night a meaty arm fell on his chest or someone rolled over on top of him and all but smothered him. The cries and moans of the others were so palpable sometimes he couldn’t be sure that they weren’t his own. When he thought no one was looking, he would reach into his valise and pull out his mother’s apron. It was the kind that ties around the waist, and it had blue and gray roses and a white ruffle around the bottom and hip pocket. His mother had worn that apron every day, and he could imagine her wiping her hands on it after cutting up a chicken or quartering an apple. He would bury his head in the apron and retrieve its history of cinnamon and onions. Breathing deeply, he could also smell yeast and paprika. For those few seconds, he was back in his mother’s kitchen in Vilna.

  His mother was right about the notebook. During the dreary days on the boat, he filled both sides of every page with colorful drawings of his fellow passengers. He’d focus on a few characters at a time and make up stories about them. The Fatso family slept near him, and although all they ate was the rancid food and watery soup that everyone else ate, they seemed to get bigger and bigger as the days went on. He sketched them all as roly-poly characters who gobbled up chairs and whole lambs and anything else in sight. “They made farts that smelled of gefilte fish,” he wrote under one picture. Under another: “My stomach’s going to explode.”

  He thought he would make some drawings of the Screamers, a man and woman and their dimple-cheeked daughter, who was about six or seven. He recognized the Screamers from Vilna, where they had brought his mother clothes for mending. Little Rita hadn’t stopped sobbing since the moment they had boarded the ship; at night, her cries were commanding enough to cause the thin planks of wood to vibrate beneath him. In the daytime when she howled, he could see her eyes, wide and fear filled. Her mother would yell at her father to make the girl stop, and the father would shout terrible things back: “I am pulling out my hair. If this child doesn’t shut up, someone will go overboard: her or me or all of us.”

  One morning, Simon came upon the wailing Rita. She was sitting at the edge of a crowded bench and looked as if she might fall off at any moment. He drew a picture of her with a happy face instead of a teary pouting one. In his version, she wasn’t sitting on a bench but was nestled in the limb of a tree on a sun-filled day in front of a pretty house with flowers all around it. And her dress wasn’t the soiled white frock she wore every day—it was pink and clean. She had a big purple bow in her hair, just like the one his sister wore the morning he went away. He tore the sketch from his notebook and handed it to her. Rita stared at the picture with disbelief then looked up at Simon. “It’s you,” he said.

  That night, before she went to sleep, he gave her something else. He’d made a drawing of her with her mother and father, and once again he saw it through his prism of sunny days and pretty houses. Only this time, he carefully tore the picture into odd random shapes and wrapped them up in another sheet of paper. “It’s a puzzle,” he told her. “Try to put it together.” Rita and her mother and father pieced together Simon’s gift, and that night she slept quietly.

  After that, Rita rarely left Simon’s side. She came with him when he snuck upstairs to where the first-class passengers were taking their morning coffee on deck. They eavesdropped on their conversations, and, for both, it was the first time they heard English spoken. Their movements, it seemed to Simon, were rigid, and when they spoke, they’d move their heads mechanically from side to side in a way that struck him as funny. That’s where he came up with the character Mr. Machine, whom he drew at stiff right angles. It was Rita’s idea to have his head shaped like an upside-down pot. They’d have Mr. Machine grinning a toothy cartoon smile and saying things like “Please tanks you” and “Mine name es Walthur.”

  Sometimes they’d creep into the bowels of the ship and watch one of the ship’s stokers, a small man with shiny balloonlike muscles. He became the inspiration for Strongman, a character with no neck and throbbing biceps, which Rita insisted that Simon emphasize by drawing wavy lines around them. Strongman would pick up first-class passengers and dump them into the ocean. One of his victims was a skinny woman with pointy features carrying under her arm a tiny dog with the same angular features. As Strongman hoists them into the choppy waves, the two of them are screaming, “Yap yap yap!” and wagging their tongues. Another Strongman victim was a young boy flying through the air, his shirttails flapping around his ears and a wurst shoved down the front of his pants.

  The water in the pictures varied. It was blue or greenish or calm or stormy. Sometimes the characters in the background were vomiting. On this boat, time melted into a perpetual gray twilight wrapped around the rhythm of the water and the intervals between seasickness. Only Simon, the Fatso family, Strongman, Mr. Machine, and Rita lived in a world of pastels. On their last day at sea, Simon gave Rita a farewell present he had made for her. It was a series of consecutive drawings stacked one on top of the other and tied together with a piece of string from his own luggage. He showed her how, if she flipped the pictures quickly with her thumb, she could see his happy version of Rita in her pink-and-white dress with the purple bow in her hair jumping up and down with the word “America” coming from her lips. On the last page, in the bottom right-hand corner, he printed his name.

  AS THE SHIP pulled into New York Harbor, Simon’s colors became muted and his images more specific and less buoyant. He drew the ship’s bow cutting a V through the gunmetal waters of the harbor. The brick and limestone New York skyline was sharp and angled, a far cry from Vilna, with its sensual silhouette of rolling hills, gothic church spires, and turreted castles.