The Museum of Extraordinary Things (7 page)

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 something 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.

“Get out,” he growled. “I didn’t ask you here!”

But I felt he had, for he had shown me the light. In doing so he had opened another world for me, one beyond the darkness I had found on Ludlow Street and in all of my wanderings. Ever since that night upriver I had been able to catch a few restful hours of sleep, something that had always been so difficult for me. I now dreamed of photography, and because of this I looked forward to sleep for the first time.

In my dreams the world was mine to create, something brand new.

I bunked in the livery below the photographer’s rooms at first, paying off the stable owner so that I might stretch out in the straw beside the horses. “You’d better not make me regret this,” the landlord said to me, clearly concerned for his horses, for there were more horse thieves in New York City than there were in all of the western territories. I promised I wouldn’t, and luckily he believed me. It was the dead of winter by now and exceptionally cold. I had developed a hacking cough. At thirteen I appeared disheveled, maybe even dangerous. I had recently reached my full height of six foot two inches, and was so thin my wrist bones were knobby. I was made of sinew and muscle, even though I was starving, thinner than ever. My dark hair reached to my shoulders, as was our people’s practice, but on my first night in the stable I cut it off with a pair of shears, so short my scalp showed through. I did this to seal my commitment to my new life. I now looked nothing like my own people, who grew their hair and beards to show their faith and their obedience to God. I drank from the horses’ trough, and when I was hungry enough, I tramped down to the Twenty-third Street dock and caught oil-laden fish that I cooked over an open fire in the alleyway behind the stable. I suppose I could be heard hacking in the night. Most likely I kept the photographer awake. Snow fell and dusted the cobblestones on the streets, and in their sleep the horses groaned and I groaned along with them, miserable, nearly desperate.

Then one morning the great man himself, Moses Levy, came down with a cup of tea and some bread and cheese. Even before I thanked him, I begged to be his apprentice.

“You don’t think your father will miss you?” he asked when I told him of how we had left the Ukraine, a village not far from his own, and how we had worked at factories until our fingers bled, and how I had left without saying good-bye. I omitted the more questionable section of my life as one of Hochman’s boys, for in that profession I felt less like a detective than a rat and a snitch.

“He doesn’t know me, how can he miss me? I have my own life,” I insisted, exactly as I’d insisted to Hochman when I first stepped away from my original life and changed my fate. I wolfed down the food that had been offered me. “I make my own decisions,” I assured Levy.

Although I had not said the bar mitzvah prayers that brought a boy into his adult life, I thought of myself as a man. I had worked as a man, and I’d lived as one, too, outside my father’s view. The direction of my life would have shocked my father had he known anything of my actions on those nights when I slipped out of our room. I’d done as I pleased when working for Hochman. That was what I’d thought I wanted, a sinful and thoughtless existence. After the day when my father leapt from the dock, as if his life was so worthless he was willing to cast it away, I made a vow to look for pleasure in my own life. But despite the rules I broke, the women who’d raised their skirts for me, the money I’d made working for Hochman, nothing had made me happy until I’d stood in the locust grove and watched Levy with his camera. I couldn’t see the beauty of the world until I saw the trees looming in the moonlight.

M
ARCH 1911

THE AIR
was pale, as gray as smoke. March meant good fishing in the Hudson, with schools of shad running beneath the silver mist that settled over the water in the early hours of the day. Eddie Cohen could see the river from the domed window in his studio, and in his opinion it was one of the wonders of the world. Light moved through the water in bands, changing the color of the depths from violet to pewter to copper, and then, as spring approached, a heavenly blue. Eddie had inherited his quarters in a shabby neighborhood of storehouses and stables near the docks. The loft where he lived had been used for storing hay in a previous incarnation, and the stink of horseflesh still arose from the stable below, where a liveryman quartered a team of old nags. Eddie’s mentor had bequeathed his student all his worldly goods. Upon his death, everything the photographer Moses Levy had once owned, every cooking pot and blanket, every camera and print, came to belong to his protégé. Eddie was tall and often awkward, unaware of his good looks. He was agitated, a hothead with too much of a temper to enter into the conversations of most civilized men. Women were drawn to him, but he rarely noticed their attraction, not unless light fell upon their faces to illuminate their features. Then he did approach, his camera ready for use. These women might hope for his interest, but all he wanted was their image. The women he’d known sexually, he’d felt nothing for other than lust. He had never believed in a world where love was possible.

His address was in the westernmost point of the city, beyond Tenth Avenue, the gritty edge of an outer sphere that became more and more fashionable as one headed eastward, reaching a glamorous zenith at Fifth Avenue. All of the land in the area had once belonged to Clement Moore, the author of
The Night Before Christmas,
a scholar of Hebrew and Greek who had called his estate Chelsea after the district in London known for its opulent Georgian town houses. When the grid of Manhattan streets was created, in 1811, a grand project that would forever change the city, filling in streams, ridding the map of meandering roads, Ninth Avenue cut through the center of Moore’s estate. The scholar was so appalled at the way the future had swooped in to claim the farm he so loved that he donated much of his land to the General Theological Seminary and St. Peter’s Church. He left open sixty lots of orchards, assuming this gift would ensure that Chelsea would never be completely overtaken by mortar and stone. But after Moore’s death the lots were sold, with most of the trees hurriedly chopped down. Only the churchyard and garden remained the same, and there it was still possible to find remnants of the old orchard. Neighborhood women often stood near the walls of the churchyard, holding out their skirts to form baskets into which the apples might drop. Seeds scattered, and stray saplings appeared in yards and beside shops and warehouses, flowering pink in the summer, reminding residents that the fruit that had tempted Adam and Eve, which many believed had not stood a chance against the builders of Manhattan, could still bloom within the confines of the city.

Eddie had set out to photograph every one of these apple trees, some little more than twigs, others quite massive, with thick trunks and twisted limbs. He used the dry-plate process, which included an emulsion of gelatin and silver bromide on a glass plate that gave images a heightened depth, along with an inner light that gleamed. Each tree was an individual, a soldier in the fight against pavement and bricks. In the boughs of one tree a raven had been perched, one Eddie hadn’t noticed until the print was in the developing bin. In another, the wind had come up so unnoticed that he was stunned to see that outside his vision, blossoms had been shivering down to earth as a rain of white flowers, a visual snowstorm in August. Eddie had come to understand that what a man saw and what actually existed in the natural world often were contradictory. The human eye was not capable of true sight, for it was constrained by its own humanness, clouded by regret, and opinion, and faith. Whatever was witnessed in the real world was unknowable in real time. It was the eye of the camera that captured the world as it truly was. For this reason photography was not only Eddie’s profession, it was his calling.

The photographer Alfred Stieglitz had headed a conference in New York so that the business of photography might be elevated and seen as an art form, no longer considered a hodgepodge, half science half magic, but rather as elements that, when sifted together into a photographic image, yielded truth, beauty, and a measure of real life that was often more miraculous than the original miracle of flower or fish, woman or tree. Stieglitz had opened Gallery 291, on Fifth Avenue, which showed photography alongside drawings and paintings, promoting the most avant-garde artists. On that fateful day when photography was seen in the true light of its worth, Eddie had stood among the crowd who’d come to hear Stieglitz, brought there by his mentor, though he was nothing more than an apprentice at the time. He was transfixed by all he witnessed. More than ever, he was converted to his art in some deep, immutable way that struck his spirit, as it had on the night he saw the locust trees in the woods of upper Manhattan. It was there, for the very first time, that he had felt truly awake.

Still, every man had to make a living so that he might afford bread and beer and cheese. Every man was human, moved by human desires and needs. Eddie was too hotheaded to photograph weddings, as Moses Levy had. He could never tolerate clients who shouted out instructions and demanded certain poses, especially those who gave orders to an artist as noble as Levy. As an apprentice, Eddie had often been forcibly removed from a wedding hall when he’d faced off with the father of a bride or a groom. “How dare you tell him what to do!” he would say in defense of his mentor, even as he was being escorted to the street by a group of burly guests. “You’re dealing with one of the greatest photographers of our time!”

On these occasions Levy would have to make apologies for Eddie, then finish the work without an assistant. “Are you such a fool that you don’t understand? You must see what others cannot,” Levy told his wayward helper once they were on their way back to the studio in Chelsea. “In our world of shadows, there is no black and white but a thousand different strokes of light. A wedding is a joyous event. There’s no shame in catching those moments for all time.”

When Levy lay dying, the result of childhood pneumonia that had weakened his lungs, Eddie had wept at his bedside. He was a man of twenty by then, but his emotions got the best of him, and made him critical of his shortcomings. He wished he had been a better man and a better protégé, for he feared that his art failed both his mentor and himself. He yearned for the ability to see into the world of shadows, as Levy and Stieglitz did, for he saw only the light or the darkness, black or white, and all that lay in between was invisible to his eyes.

In the five years he’d been on his own since Levy’s death, Eddie had focused on crime scenes and disasters. He gravitated to street life, perhaps because he’d known this world so well as a boy. He soon had contacts with editors at most of the newspapers in town, though he was certain his mentor would have disapproved of the sheer commonness of his employment, which, by its very nature, focused on the degradation of mankind. Levy wouldn’t hear of it when Eddie had once suggested they might work for the papers.

“We don’t need to make a living off of other people’s pain,” the older man had insisted. “A portrait is one thing. We can celebrate the great occasions in our subjects’ lives and not veer so far from our true calling that we become traitors to our art. But the newspapers want violence, retribution, crime, sin. In short, it’s hell they’re asking for. Is this a place you’d like to enter?”

All the same, the work suited Eddie. He was detached and professional in the face of tragedy. It was possible that his training with the wizard Hochman had caused him to become immune to other people’s sorrows. He’d been raised in the world of sin, after all, inured to the grim reality of the evil people were capable of. He’d had his time in hell and knew its corners and alleyways. The runaway husbands and philandering fiancés, the whores willing to divulge secrets for the price of a drink, all had prepared him for the cruel visions he faced in his current work. Death did not faze him; a body was not a human being in his eyes, merely skin and bone. As for blood, it showed as black when caught on film. He had built up connections at police stations in the downtown wards and was able to gain information regarding crimes or disasters in exchange for small bribes. Because of this he had photographed thieves at the moment of their arrest, con artists shackled and wobbly with regret, denying their guilt at all cost. He would get down on the ground beside a corpse to obtain the best angle. Once, quite memorably, he’d taken a formal portrait of a man who had dispatched his entire family with a carving knife. There was not a glimmer of emotion on the murderer’s face. The subject had stared directly into the camera with pale, heavily lidded eyes without a flutter of remorse. Even Eddie had been rattled by the murderer’s unearthly calm. He knew evil when he saw it. The
Sun
ran the photograph on its front page, the perfect image of a cold-blooded killer.

Recently Eddie had begun to wonder if Moses Levy’s work had been so imbued with greatness not merely because of his technical skill but because of his compassion, something Eddie did not feel for his subjects. In Levy’s photographs each tree possessed a soul, each field a beating heart. As for Eddie, he remained unmoved by the plights of both criminal and victim. He kept his opinions to himself, but his judgments were brutal. He’d always believed there were some who belonged in the hell of their own making, and so it came to be that they were his subject matter.

The newspaper editors knew him as Ed Cohen, unaware that his given name was Ezekiel. This was the way he preferred it, with the past left as far behind as possible. He’d heard rumors that his father had long ago said the prayers for the dead for him, tearing his clothing as he recited the Kaddish. It seemed especially fitting that he’d been named after the prophet whose wanderings and visions had given the mourning prayers their first words to God, for it was the Book of Ezekiel from which the words were drawn.
May His great name be exalted and sanctified in the world which He has created according to His will.

In truth, the boy who’d been unable to sleep in the forest, and who’d led his father out of the woods by the hand, had vanished many years earlier. Perhaps that was best. Eddie wanted to escape the burden of his identity. In his current life he was a twenty-five-year-old man with no family and no history and no allegiance to anything other than New York. A motherless boy is hardened in many ways yet will often search for a place to deposit his loyalty and devotion. Eddie had found this in the city he saw as a great and tormented beauty, one ready to embrace him when all others turned away.

One remnant from his past clung to him. He was still an insomniac, unable to sleep for more than a few hours at a time unless he drank himself into a stupor. The night continued to call to him. Something was waiting for him in the darkness, a part of himself he couldn’t deny. Instead of returning to the taverns he’d frequented while working for Hochman, he now made his way to upper Manhattan when he felt the darkness inside. In those craggy acres where the city fell away, there was a still sense of the wilderness that had once been everywhere on this island. When he was beside the quiet inlets where streams crisscrossed through the marshland, he found himself uplifted, as if he were a believer and the wretchedness of his childhood had never happened, for at one time he had possessed a certain purity of spirit, though it had drifted away from him.

Eddie was not entirely alone on these outings, for he had the best of company; he had become the owner of a dog, an arrangement he’d never intended. Beside him trotted a broad-chested pit bull, as loyal as they come. A year earlier, Eddie had spotted a bundle of rags tied with rope floating near the pier at Twenty-third Street. When he noticed movement inside, he latched on to it with the hook of his fishing rod, pulling the bundle close to shore. He discovered a waterlogged pup wrapped up inside, ears cut into stubs. The animal was meant for fighting but had clearly been too good-natured for the terrible business that went on in cellars all over lower Manhattan where dogs were set against rats, and raccoons, and each other. Eddie called him Mitts, for although the pup’s body was brindle, all four feet were white. Loyalty bred loyalty, and from the time of his rescue, Mitts refused to leave his master’s side. When Eddie went out alone, the dog needed to be locked in a stall in the stables below the studio to ensure he wouldn’t leap out the window to chase his beloved rescuer into the chaotic onslaught of automobiles and trolleys and carriages that caused many to refer to Tenth Avenue as Death Avenue. On several occasions, Mitts had managed to leap over the stable wall, leaving a frantic Eddie to grab him by his collar to pull him back from the street. The leather collar had been specially made by a cobbler, with the dog’s name burned into the leather. Eddie imagined he was overly attached to the dog because the pup had been too young to be taken from his mother and had slept in his owner’s bed for the first few nights, a practice Mitts reverted to whenever his master wasn’t
at home.