Unknown - The Genius

And so I regarded as more than fair my vow that were Victor ever to turn up at my door, I would pay him according to the traditional artist-dealer split: fifty-fifty. In fact, I congratulated myself on my generosity, knowing that few of my colleagues would have made such an outlandish and indulgent promise.

I’LL SPARE YOU THE GORY DETAILS of prepping the show. You don’t need to hear about rail mounts and track lighting and the procurement of mediocre pinot. But there is something I don’t want to leave out, and that’s the strange discovery Ruby and I made late one night at the storage locker.

We had been working for four months. The space heaters were gone, replaced by a series of fans strategically placed so as not to send piles of paper flying. For weeks we had been searching of panel number one, the point of origin. The boxes had gotten mixed up in transit, and we’d start on one that seemed promising—whose top sheet numbered, say, in the low hundreds—only to find that the page numbers went up, not down.

We did eventually find it—more on that later—but on that night it was a different page, from the 1,100s, that caught Ruby’s eye.

“Hey,” she said, “you’re in here.”

I stopped working and came over to have a look.

Near the top of the page, in slashing letters three inches high:

MULLER

All the warmth went out of the room. I can’t say why the sight of my own name terrified me the way it did. For a moment I heard Victor’s voice shouting at me over the whirr of the fans, shouting at me through his art, clapping his hands in my face. He did not sound pleased.

Somewhere, a door slammed. We both jumped, I against the desk and Ruby in her chair. Then silence, both of us embarrassed by our own skittishness.

“Odd,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And creepy. “

“Very.”

We looked at my name. It seemed vaguely obscene.

“I guess it’s reasonable,” she said.

I looked at her.

“He did live in Muller Courts.”

I nodded.

She said, “Actually, I’m surprised you’re not in there more often.”

I tried to resume work, but I couldn’t concentrate, not with Ruby clicking her stud against her teeth and that drawing radiating ill feelings. I announced that I was heading out. I must have sounded paranoid—I certainly felt paranoid—because she snickered and told me to watch my back.

Normally, I take a cab straight home, but that night I ducked into a bar and ordered a soda water. As I sat there watching people trickle in, gasping and cursing the sultry night, my uneasiness began to change shape, to soften and turn to encouragement.

Ruby was right. Victor Cracke had been drawing the universe as he knew it. Naturally, the Muller name would loom large.

The bar had a jukebox. Somebody put on Bon Jovi, and the place filled with off-key singing. I got up to leave.

I gave the cabbie directions and sank back into the sticky vinyl. If anything, I reflected, my name in Victor’s art could be interpreted generously. I was no intruder. Quite the contrary. I had every right to be there. I was there all along.

Solomon’s cart has many miles on it, and holds the entire world. Cloth, buttons, tinware. Tonics and patent medicines. Nails and glue, writing paper and appleseeds. So many different kinds of items, unclassifiable except perhaps as What People Need. He works a kind of magic, showing up unexpected in some dreary Pennsylvania town, drawing a crowd with shouts and theatrics, laying out his wares, defying the townsfolk’s attempts to stump him. I need a hammer. Yes, sir. Glass bottles, about so big? Yes, ma’am. People joke that the cart is bottomless.

He understands much more English than he speaks, and when forced into a particularly heated negotiation he will resort to the use of his fingers. Seven cents? No, ten. I’ll give you nine. Okay? Okay.

Everybody speaks bargain.

The same rigamarole applies when he needs to pay for a room, although he avoids that if he can, preferring to sleep outside, in a field or an open barn. Every penny he saves will bring his brothers over that much sooner. When Adolph comes they will be able to earn twice as much money, and when Simon comes, three times. He plans to bring them over in that order: first Adolph, then Simon, and last, Bernard. Bernard is the second oldest; but he is also the laziest, and Solomon knows that they will achieve much more, much more quickly, if they leave him behind for now.

But sometimes … when it is so cold outside … when he craves the dignity of a roof … when he cannot face another night on the dirt, in a pile of hay, bugs crawling all over him like an animal … Too much! He caves in, wasting an entire day’s earnings on a featherbed—only to spend the rest of the week chastising himself. He is not Bernard! He is the eldest; he should know better. Their father sent him first for a reason.

The crossing nearly killed him. Never had he been so sick, nor had he ever seen so much sickness around him. The fever that took his mother could not be compared to the horrors he witnessed on that boat, people dissolving in piles of their own waste, wracked and groaning bodies, the wet stench of physical and moral failure. Solomon took care to eat alone; against his nature, he did not socialize with his fellow passengers. His father had commanded him to keep to himself, and he obeyed.

Once he saw a woman go mad. Solomon, alone on deck, up from the hold for fresh air, joyous to feel the light rain, saw her come up the stairs, shaky, green, bloodball eyes. He recognized her. The day before she had lost her son. When they pried the body from her arms she had let out a noise that stood Solomon’s hair on end. Now he watched her stumble to the bow where she did not hesitate but leaned over the railing and dropped into the churning sea. Solomon ran to where she had existed a moment ago. He looked down and saw nothing but whitewater.

The shiphands came running. She fell! Solomon said, or tried to say. What he said was Sie fiel! But the crew came from England. They did not understand him, and with his babbling he was getting in the way. They ordered him belowdecks, and when he protested, four of them picked him up and carried him away.

By the time the Shining Harry dumped its human cargo at Boston Harbor, Solomon had been at sea for forty-four days. He had lost twenty percent of his body weight and had developed a painful rash on his back that would persist for months, making his nights spent on the ground all the more miserable.

At first he lived with a cousin, a cobbler, their relation so distant that neither of them could quite pinpoint where their blood mingled. Right away Solomon could tell that the arrangement would not last. The cousin’s wife hated him and wanted him out of the house. While he tossed and turned on the workbench that served as his bed, she would tramp around upstairs in wooden shoes. She fed him rotten fruit and made his tea with muddy water and let bread stale before cutting him a slice. He planned to leave as soon as he had enough money and English, but before he managed to get there she came downstairs one night and bared her breasts to him. Early the next morning he loaded what little he had in a burlap pack and set out walking.

He walked to Buffalo, arriving in time for an awful winter. Nobody bought his odds and ends. Chastened, he hurried south, first to New Jersey, then into the heart of Pennsylvania, where he met others who spoke his language. They became his first regular customers: farmers who came to depend on him for specialty items that did not justify a long trip into town, indulgences such as a new razor strop or a box of pencils. He filled his burlap sack to bursting, but soon it could not hold enough to meet his clients’ demands, and he got another, one as tall as he was. As his inventory grew, so did his route and his clientele; and despite his limited vocabulary, he revealed himself as an able salesman: quick to laugh, firm but fair, and always aware of the latest trends. The second sack did not last long. He bought himself a cart.