Alice Hoffman - The Museum of Extraordinary Things

Indeed it was. “Perhaps you can comfort it,” I suggested. “Lord knows I have no business with children.”

The lovely girl came forward and, after looking around a bit, lifted up the baby and hushed her.

“Be careful,” I said. “It’s a monster.”

The woman laughed. “This beautiful girl? Don’t be silly.”

I pointed out the child’s hands. “Look at the webbing. It may be a seal for all I know.”

The red-haired girl shook her head. She seemed quite sure of herself. “That’s God’s mark of how special she is.”

If I believed in God I would have thought this woman had been sent to me, for the baby seemed to wish to suckle at her breast and I got an eyeful that pleased me.

“I had a child but lost her,” the woman said simply as a way of explanation.

“Perhaps you’d like to take care of this one, and take care of me as well.”

She looked at me with a steady, even gaze, and I saw she wasn’t so dim. She knew I was referring to my bed.

I told her I would take no nonsense from any employee.

I won’t disappoint you, the girl told me.

Don’t, I told her, or you’ll live to regret it.

The mother from France who dressed in black, who always wore gloves and was so beautiful and gracious and had left Coralie her pearls, had never existed. She was nothing more than an orphan abandoned on the porch. Had Maureen not come along, she would have been given over to a hospital ward, or perhaps been drowned in a bucket, then buried beneath the pear tree. People say some facts are best left unknown, but those people have never had their own histories kept from them. As Coralie read on, it was as if she was moving backward through time. Everything that had ever happened shifted from the realm of black and white and was infused with color, the gray turning to red and indigo and a wavering spring green seen only in the month of March. All that she’d known and all she had ever been had turned to ashes. From those ashes, emerging through the earthen floor that the roots of the pear tree twisted through, she saw the truth. It was 1893, the year in which a serious man took in a baby and a red-haired woman and claimed them as his own.

I CAME upon the Wizard of the Lower East Side exactly as I had the morning I first met him. As I turned the corner onto Ludlow Street suddenly there he was, in the very same spot where I’d first spied him all those years ago, when I was just a boy. Perhaps he could tell the future, as people said, and therefore knew where he might find me, or perhaps it was the way New York City worked—it was a huge teeming place of strangers, until you stumbled into what seemed to be a village made up of people you’d known in your youth whom you couldn’t seem to avoid. Hochman wore fashionable clothing, perfect for the season, a white linen waistcoat, a straw hat, white trousers, and cream-colored leather boots. He was on his way to a luncheon, he told me, given in his honor by the Workmen’s Circle. He had recently helped them find a boy of twelve who had come to New York from the Ukraine on his own, only to be trapped into near slavery by a sly, unscrupulous businessman who made a practice of selling the services of young immigrants to farms in New Jersey, where they labored in the fields with nothing more than a roof over their heads in return.

“You’re a union man?” I said, surprised.

“I’m a man of my people,” he said. “Wherever that brings me. If the Workmen’s Circle wants to recognize my good deeds and call me a hero, who am I to disagree? They may honor you one day as well. You’re quite famous at the moment. I heard about the girl you found.”

“As of today, I’m not in that business anymore.”

Hochman studied me. “No,” he agreed. “It was never for you. There was only one thing you were searching for.”

I admit I was curious as to his psychic powers, in which I’d never had any real faith. Now I tested him. “And what was that?”

I imagined he would say love, as I’d recently found the woman of my dreams and could think of little other than Coralie. Unfortunately, the feeling was not mutual, as she had fled and disappeared. Could I have found her? Probably. But if she had no wish to be found, I saw little point in doing so.

Hochman motioned me to follow him, and I surprised myself by accompanying him. I wished to hear what he had to say. We went in the direction of Essex Street, not far from the funeral home, to a saloon frequented by men of our faith. We went inside and sat at a rear table where we might be afforded some privacy. After ordering our drinks, Hochman continued.

“You were looking for the truth about your father, something I happen to have. But maybe so much time has passed, you don’t want to know. The truth frightens people because it isn’t stable. It shifts every day. If you’d prefer to remain in the dark, I would understand.”

Our drinks were delivered, and I gulped mine down. Perhaps that gave me the courage to say, “Go ahead. Tell me your great secret. Let’s have it.”

“You’ve resented your father all this time for running away and attempting to drown himself. You judged him as a coward. Am I correct?”

I shrugged, but my answer was clear.

“That day on the dock, there were other men who’d been let go from the factory. They had arranged to meet to plan what action they should take. A member of the Workmen’s Circle had been sent to meet with them.”

I laughed and thought the Wizard’s report preposterous. How could Hochman know this information when he wasn’t there? “And you divined these facts out of thin air?”

“The man presenting me with my honor today at the luncheon was the representative from the Workmen’s Circle. When your name came up in regard to Hannah Weiss, he told me your father’s story. The bosses sent some thugs after your father and his friends. If you hadn’t been there with him, your father would have stayed and fought; instead he saw that you had disobeyed when he told you to run. He went after you to ensure your safety and bring you home, but one of the henchmen sent to disrupt the union meeting came after him. Your back was to him when he was pushed into the river.”

I had always been convinced of my father’s weakness because he was in mourning for my mother, because he had cried in the forest in Russia. I couldn’t stand to hear him weep. I’d covered my ears every evening. I had assumed he had leapt, a lost and helpless man. Never had I thought he’d meant to rescue me.

“You can say I don’t have the power to see the future,” Hochman went on, “but when you stopped me all those years ago on the same corner where we ran into each other today, I saw that we would meet again, and that the river would run through your life. I knew I’d be the one to tell you the truth about your father, although I didn’t know what that was until just a few days ago, when your name came up in conversation.”

I called for another drink. Without my resentment toward my father, the hatred I’d been carrying around was now directed at myself. The terrified boy in the forest who thought the owls could carry him away. The boy who believed there were ghosts in the grass. I was the coward who had cried in the forest. I was the one who could not stop mourning my mother.

Because I could not endure who I was, I had changed my name so that I might be someone brand new. I had placed upon my father’s shoulders my many flaws and faults.