The Museum of Extraordinary Things

MARCH 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.

Eddie went fishing on Saturdays, the day he would have been at prayer had he lived the life that had been intended for him. It was easy enough to avoid civilization; he simply skirted the river. Central Park, once a boggy area good only for goats and piggeries, and later populated by squatters, along with a town called Seneca Village, home to African American and Irish immigrants and destroyed thirty years earlier, had been remade into an opulent playground for the residents of the luxurious town houses of the East Side. Those wealthy New Yorkers preferred their experiences with nature to consist of clipped green meadows and waterfalls that were turned on and off with spigots. The Citizens Union had filed complaints with the parks department to stop Central Park from being popularized, which, if it was allowed to be used for sports and ball games, would ruin the greenery by giving it over to the immigrant masses. Though Riverside Park ran alongside the Hudson for several blocks, the land along the uppermost West Side was still wild, though for how long, no one dared to guess.

There was the fresh green scent of early spring. Mourning cloaks and cabbage white butterflies filled the air. Eddie had occasionally seen the prints of fisher-cats and fox tracked through the mud. It was not far from here that he had recently imagined someone had been watching him. His dog was a gleeful hunter of moles and mice, but, on this particular evening, there seemed bigger game at stake. The hair on Mitts’s back had gone up, and he’d taken off like a shot. The pit bull may have spied a deer in the undergrowth, or perhaps it was the old hermit Jacob Van der Beck, a Dutchman who lived in a rough-hewn cabin. Here was an individual so bitter toward his fellow men, so sure that the building boom in Manhattan would overtake his slice of the world, it was said he had a wolf tied up on his porch to keep interlopers at bay. His family had owned a large tract of land from the time of the Dutch settlers, with ties to the founding families, such as the Dyckmans. He still referred to the Hudson as the North River, as the original settlers had.

Eddie had once persuaded the old man to sit for a portrait in exchange for a bottle of rye. Beck had been a grumpy and withholding model; he’d crouched upon a moss-covered log and hadn’t batted an eye, vanishing back into the woods as soon as Eddie took his photograph.

On the evening Mitts ran away, galumphing through the woods, dead set on chasing after some sort of prey, Eddie had eventually found the dog in a clearing. There’d been no sign of Beck and no deer tracks, yet there was a presence. The ground was damp, as if the river had washed up into the meadow grass, leaving a soft path beaten down in the patches of trillium and bloodroot. There was no one in sight, but all the same, when Eddie returned to his campsite, he couldn’t shake the notion that he’d been followed.

Now, here it was, the last Saturday in March, and Eddie settled down with his rod. He’d left his studio in the dark, and it was hardly daybreak when he began to fish. On both sides of the Hudson the sky was struck with a hazy pink glow. He’d brought along night crawlers and crusts of bread in an old tin pail. Eddie avoided the Harlem River—it was overcrowded and overfished, even more so than the Hudson, littered with oystering boats. Several bridges had recently been built across the waters, disturbing the marsh birds. He knew it wouldn’t be long before the countryside disappeared, as it had in Chelsea, where there was pavement everywhere.

Through the new leaves of the locust trees, Eddie spied Beck fishing farther down along the bank. An encounter with the old man appeared unavoidable, for the hermit gazed over and nodded. Eddie returned the greeting, considering how to best keep his distance. Beck was known to chase off intruders with a rifle, and there were those who said he vowed to kill any man who hunted the wildlife that was rapidly becoming rare, coyotes and fox and the huge, cantankerous wild turkeys. Past the area of Washington Heights was Hudson Heights, the highest altitude in Manhattan, at 265 feet above sea level. There was the pastoral village of Inwood, and although the subway ran this far, this section of north Manhattan was still dotted with small farms, including a house once owned by the Audubon family. Eddie joined the hermit in his agitation over the constant building in Manhattan. Apartment buildings were rising everywhere. City officials had begun to shore up the ravines that led to Spuyten Duyvil Creek, an offshoot of the Harlem River, where peregrine falcons nested in the trees. The very banks of the Hudson were being fortified against the tides with rock and cement toted by gangs of city workers. The shore of the river had become cluttered with pockets of houseboats in the calm inlets, and their inhabitants washed their clothes and pots and pans with lye soap in the shallows, leaving a yellow scrim of grease at the shoreline.

Eddie looped a rope around Mitts’s neck to make certain the pit bull wouldn’t charge off and annoy the Dutchman. A fisherman, especially one such as Beck who despised company, was meant to be alone at his task. The river was choppy, because of the rising wind, so Eddie made his way to a small, clear stream that filtered into the Hudson. He hunkered down, his collar raised. Soon enough he found success, a trout that fought valiantly, until it had exhausted itself. When reeled in, the trout was such a lovely specimen Eddie hadn’t the heart to let it gasp its last on the grass. He sloshed some water into his tin pail, then slid the fish inside. The trout, frenzied to find itself captured, leapt up, banging itself against the side of the pail before at last settling to the bottom, spent, a slash of living light.

Eddie set his camera on its wooden trilegged stand. After all the hackwork he did for the papers, he wondered if he had lost the ability to take an honest photograph. If this was so, he alone was to blame. He was reminded of the Yiddish oath union workers took when setting out on strike lines. If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from this arm I now raise. Perhaps he had become a traitor to his art and to the man Moses Levy thought he might become. The photograph of the fish would be dependent upon skill, and Eddie worried over his talent. Without shadows the image would appear to be nothing more than a bucket of murky water. Without compassion, nothing but a fish, trapped and defeated.

The hermit, who wrapped his own day’s catch in newspaper, had begun to climb up the bank toward the little stream. Eddie muttered to himself, wishing to be left alone. But Beck was headed straight for him, ferns flattening under his heavy, laced boots. Eddie regretted having given the Dutchman a bottle of rye, for such kindness led to intimacy and confidences, neither of which he wanted.

The hermit stood nearby to watch as the fish was photographed. When Eddie had finished, Beck peered into the bucket. His beard was long, unkempt, his expression concerned.

“You should let that fellow go. For his own good and yours.” The hermit was wise to wear a heavy coat. In town, the day was warm, but here beside the river the pale rays of sun did little to warm the chill that drifted off the water.

“Why’s that?” Eddie did not raise his eyes, so as to keep his distance. He continued to busy himself with packing up his camera. He’d dealt with madmen before. Best not to meet their glance or learn too much about their wretched histories.

“You took his photograph,” Beck said solemnly. “Now you’re responsible for his soul. You should give him back to the river. Otherwise he’ll take you somewhere you may not want to go.”

Eddie did his best not to laugh. “It doesn’t work that way.” Only a fool would believe that a soul could be stolen on film, or that a fish was no different than a man and had a soul of equal worth. “If a camera interfered with souls, I’d be equally responsible for yours, since you sat for a portrait.”

“Maybe that’s why I let you trespass on such a regular basis.” Beck’s expression was thoughtful. “This river used to have schools of shad so thick you could walk across the river on their backs and your boots would stay dry. But then the boats came, and the nets, and now we’re lucky to have what little we’ve got. That’s why I run people off. I’d be within my rights to kill you, but now we’re in this together, like it or not.”

“Surely we’re not in anything together,” Eddie was quick to respond. As far as he was concerned the only thing they were in together was the boggy, green woods. He might have argued further, but he quickly bit his tongue when he noticed a rifle under the hermit’s coat. At crime scenes Eddie paid attention only to the limp forms, the black blood, a collection of images that formed his photograph. He was there to observe and report, nothing more. He’d never wondered if the victims’ throats were dry at the time of their demise, if their hands had been clammy, if they’d gotten down on their knees to beg for their lives. Now his own hands were themselves quite clammy, his throat nearly too dry to speak, though he managed as best he could. “Although I must say I’m glad I’m not another man.”

Before Beck could respond, Mitts wrenched forward, pulling free from the rope so that he might trot over to the hermit. He cheerfully knocked his stocky body against Beck’s legs.

“What’s this supposed to be?” the old man asked, surprised by the dog’s good nature.

“He was supposed to be a fighting dog. Then he was supposed to be dinner for the fish.” Eddie lifted his rod over his shoulder. If need be, he could use it to protect himself if the hermit’s suspicious side took over. “Now he’s supposed to be my dog.”

“He looks more like a rabbit. My dog would eat him in one bite.”

“Then I’m glad your dog’s not here.”

“You should be. He’s a wolf.”

To appease the old man, Eddie offered up the trout in the pail. “Consider this my gift to you.”

Beck shook the rolled wet newspaper he carried, filled with his catch. He’d clearly done far better than his younger compatriot. “I’ve got my own. I’ve got my own whiskey, too.” He showed off a battered flask tucked in his waistband. There was a glimmer of metal as the rifle shone.

Eddie was suddenly aware that if he should die here, on this riverbank, on this day, only his dog would mourn him, for there was no one else who knew or cared he was alive. Perhaps that meant he’d led a worthless life, yet alive was what he wished to be. He knew this from his pounding heart, which hit against his ribs as the Dutchman shifted his rifle away from that fragile, beating target. He knew it from the greenness of the trees surrounding him, from the rushing of the river, a wonder and a miracle he could not bear to lose. He gazed at the hermit directly. “I thank you, sir, for the use of your river, but the fish and I are going home.”

Beck stepped in still closer, squinting, a thoughtful, unreadable expression crossing his weathered face. He stunk of liquor and fish. For a moment the tension was high, then the old man grinned. “Before you go, answer this. What sort of fish walks on two legs?”

Relieved, Eddie grinned in turn. Riddles didn’t intimidate him. He was quick-witted from his days of working for Hochman. He’d learned that what men most often wished to hear were their own thoughts repeated back to them.

“The kind that will take me where I might not want to go?” Eddie ventured to say.

The Dutchman laughed and jabbed his finger into the younger man’s arm. “Exactly.” Cheerful then, he stooped to pet Mitts. “Good-bye, rabbit.”

The dog slobbered gratefully at the stranger’s attentions, then bounded off when Eddie whistled to call him away. When Eddie glanced over his shoulder, Beck had already disappeared. Eddie broke into a sweat as he climbed down the hillock. The Hudson was churning as the spring melt from upstate washed into the waters, but there was great relief in walking beside it, free and alive on this green day.

It was a long way to Chelsea, and when Eddie reached home that afternoon, he realized it would have been wiser to have allowed the fish to perish on the riverbank. After more than a hundred blocks, Eddie was tired and not the least bit hungry, though he fed the dog some scraps. After setting the pail on his table, Eddie lay down in his narrow bed for a nap, still wearing his coat and his boots. He hadn’t slept for more than twenty-four hours. Soon enough he dove into sleep the way a drowning man might, headfirst, unaware of the rest of the world, dreaming that the fish he’d caught had turned into a woman whose long dark hair fell down her back. Her feet were bare and cold as she climbed into bed beside him.

IT HAD BEEN a beautiful springlike day, but at a quarter to five in the afternoon on that same Saturday the sky turned a deep, oily gray and the air was suddenly heavy, the pressure sinking quickly, as it does before a storm. There seemed an instant of clarity and quiet, and then all at once, without warning, the silence of the city was shattered by a wave of noise. Eddie awoke streaming with sweat, his pulse hammering away, his dream disappearing before he could hold on to it. He could hear fire bells and a roar echoing from downtown. He leapt from bed and hurried to shift a wooden chair beneath the skylight in order to climb up and push open the glass to look outside. A cloud of black smoke was spreading above the rooftops. Sparks flew in red bursts, and then, from the east, a great torrent of flame swirled into the sky. It was the way some people said the world would end, in a fire that would engulf both the wicked and the innocent.

Eddie was thankful he’d slept in his coat and boots. All he needed to do was to grab his camera and lock up his dog before heading downtown. His heart was still pounding, as it had been in his dreams. He couldn’t shake his terror. He took the stairs two at a time; once outside, he quickly headed east on Twenty-third Street. Behind him, the river had turned black with ashes. Fifteen blocks downtown, a fire blazed out of control.

Despite the protests of the past years, workers were treated no better than they had been when Eddie had first learned the tailoring trade alongside his father. In the fall of 1909, a strike had led to the Uprising of the 20,000, and in the great hall of Cooper Union, where Abraham Lincoln had once spoken, workers took an oath to be loyal to their cause: the humane treatment of every man and woman who worked in the city of New York. There had been so many strikes that the past twelve months had been dubbed the year of the Great Revolt. But most agreed, workers still had no rights. Protesters were beaten and arrested on the barricades, then brought to night court at the Jefferson Market Courthouse, the men immediately jailed, the women sent to a grim prison workhouse called Blackwell’s Island. Manhattan Fire Chief Edward Croker had warned it was only a matter of time before a tragedy would occur due to the wretched unsafe conditions in the factories of lower New York. If nothing changed, every working man and woman knew there would be a terrible price to pay. Now, on this bitter afternoon, the time for that payment had come.

Huge crowds had gathered outside the Asch Building, just off Washington Square. Nearly ten thousand people would rush to this address before the day was through, though the police quickly set to holding them back, forming a human chain so that the public might be kept away from the blasts of heat and the danger of falling sparks. Because it was Saturday, the stores on Fifth Avenue were all open—Marshall Field’s on Fifteenth Street and Lord & Taylor on Nineteenth Street, and all the dozens of small shops that lined the Avenue, from corset shops to perfumeries, to Charles Scribner’s Sons publishers, which had offices on Twentieth Street and Twenty-third Street where Fifth Avenue met Madison Park, a location where there was always a line of horse-drawn cabs waiting to bring shoppers back uptown. On the east side of Washington Square there were factories and tenements, but on the west side stood some of the most fashionable addresses. Here, where the grid of Manhattan began, there were dozens of brownstone town houses and the most exclusive stores in the city.

The streets were crowded with shoppers, and many among them rushed to the site where garment workers, mostly women and girls, had been trapped inside a sewing loft at the end of the workday. Fire ladders reached only to the sixth floor of the building that contained the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where workers as young as twelve were employed. Seamstresses on the eighth and tenth floors had been alerted that a fire had begun by the switchboard operator via telephone, but by the time Eddie arrived at the scene, the entire ninth floor of the factory was in flames.

The streets were teeming and the air had become a cauldron of heat and ash. The wind carried bits of cotton and wool cloth aflame above them, as if the sky was raining down fire. Photographers were being turned away. Eddie, however, spied Matt Harris, a reporter from the Times who usually had no problem with the police; he quickly attached himself to the newsman. Harris held a handkerchief over his mouth to filter out the ashes, but he could be heard plainly enough.

“I guess you’re with me,” he remarked drily when he noticed Eddie beside him.

“I am. If you’ll allow it.”

“Only the devil would want to keep this to himself,” Harris muttered.

When the police let Harris through, Eddie slipped past the barricades unnoticed. He thanked the newsman, insisting he would return the favor sometime, but the reporter shrugged off his gratitude. “You won’t be grateful soon enough. We’re about to see a horror. Trust me, you won’t thank me for this.”

Like most news photographers, Eddie had the ability to vanish. He’d trained himself to fade into the background, aware that it was best to be ignored by the players in a scene so that they might, in being unaware of him, be their truest selves. He set up his camera where there was less chaos, on the Washington Place side of the building, then quickly got to photographing two elevator operators as the police interviewed them. These men had rescued as many girls as possible, nearly 150 by now, but were now themselves overcome by smoke, unable to go back up the burning elevator chutes. “What will the ones we left behind do now?” one of them cried. Eddie turned his camera to the building. Girls who could find no way out gathered on the windowsills, clustered together in frightened groups, their cries taken to heaven by the updraft the fire had created.

The stairway from the ninth floor had ended with no exit to the roof. There was only a shaky fire escape, which had melted in the heat. Those trying to make their escape via that exit, twenty-five in all, had fallen to their deaths in the alley below. Scores more followed, but found no way out. When they were unable to get through the flames, the only choice before them was the open air of the windowsills. The horse-drawn fire engines, with rolls of newly invented fire hoses onboard, had arrived, and firemen were unwinding their hoses, stretching them out on Greene Street. But it was too late for many as the fire billowed in cascades of flames. Girls had begun to leap from the windows of the ninth floor, some embracing so they might spend their last moments on earth in each other’s arms rather than face their fates alone. Some jumped with their eyes closed, others with their hair and clothes already burning.

At first, the falling girls had seemed like birds. Bright cardinals, bone-white doves, swooping blackbirds in velvet-collared coats. But when they hit the cement, the terrible truth of the matter was revealed. Their bodies were broken, dashed to their deaths right before those who stood by helpless. A police officer near Eddie groaned and turned away, his head in his hands, for there was no way to save those who were already falling and no way to come to terms with the reality before them. The life nets being held out were worthless; bodies soared right through the netting. Many of the desperate leapers barreled onward, through the glass cellar lights embedded in the sidewalk, to the basements below.

The firemen from Company 20 did their best to soak the building, so that the gutters along the street turned to rivers. Charred belongings were scattered everywhere, and flames continued to burst through the air like stinging bees. Those workers who had survived, from the eighth and the tenth floors, huddled together, stunned. Eddie held a hand over his eyes so that his vision wouldn’t be blurred by heat waves. He couldn’t take in even a small portion of the destruction he saw. He turned back to his camera, the truer vision, the eye not tainted by human fear and regret. But the horror of the disaster was the only thing in sight, and the lens found the same anguish Eddie viewed. It was an even worse sight to behold through the eye of the camera, for its focus was sharper and more defined.

Girls and a few young men continued to gather on the windowsills, gazing out over the scene before closing their eyes and leaping. It seemed an endless stream of beautiful young people would continue to fly above them. The twisted fire escape still popped and shot off sulfurous bits of metal into the sky, the echo resembling gunfire. The only other sound was that of the water hitting the building, then running into the streets, a tragic waterfall. Before long Eddie was standing in a black pool up to his ankles.

It was then he spied the owners being ushered away in chauffeur-driven cars, behind them a carriage drawn by two fine black horses. The bosses and their associates had all managed to escape by climbing onto the roof, then making their way to the rooftop of the next factory. Eddie turned his camera, catching the moment when one of the owners gazed at the burning factory before a younger dark-haired man drew him back inside the curtains of the carriage. For an instant Eddie thought he knew this young man, though it was impossible; he wasn’t acquainted with anyone of this ilk. No one he crossed paths with would wear a beaver coat and ride in a coach with velvet curtains while girls leapt into the air with no net to catch them, and no salvation, and no carriages to carry them away.

By then there were scores of bodies on the sidewalk. Even those hardened men who saw death every day, firemen and police officers, were crying as they worked. Eddie did his job, but as he photographed the fallen he had the sense that he was standing at the end of creation. If the ground split open beneath the Asch Building and took them all into the fires of hell, this day could not have seemed any more horrifying. The heat of the Asch Building could be felt two blocks away, though the flames were now smoldering. The crowd was hushed, even as more and more people were drawn to the scene, witness to the worst workplace disaster in the history of the city. Eddie took one photograph after the other. He could not stop, his angry heart convinced that he needed to document every inch of the catastrophe. In those hours on Washington Place, as he stood in the water and ashes, he lost the ability to be detached. All of those times when he hadn’t felt another man’s losses now came back to haunt him. He saw not only in black and white but also in every shade in between. The effect was humbling. The pools that bloomed red on the concrete were indeed blood, the white shards flung upon the cobblestones, bone. The bodies of the girls and a few strong young men were illuminated; each shone with light, the silver-edged sorrow of the recently deceased. Many were so wounded from their falls that the policemen who’d been sent to move them and tag the bodies so they might later be claimed, were doubled over in shock, the toughest among them gasping for strength and breath.

It was then a wind seemed to arise suddenly, for there was all at once a roar cutting through what had been silence. But in fact what they heard was the sound of sobbing, for those who had managed to survive were already searching for sisters and friends, and what they discovered was devastating. As the families of the dead arrived, many had to be restrained. Eddie himself felt maddened as he wandered among those who’d been lost, documenting as many as he could. He let the camera make his choices, for his eyes were burning with soot and his head spun. He continued to photograph the scene until a company man came over, there on behalf of the bosses, the very ones who had refused to install sprinklers, who some were saying were known to burn down their buildings for the sake of insurance money.

“That’s enough,” the company man said flatly. He was wearing an overcoat, though the air was stifling. He carried a thick wooden club he seemed more than ready to use. “Get going now.”

Eddie hoisted his camera stand over his shoulder. “No problem. On my way.” He muttered a few ripe curses under his breath, but he let it go at that, though he was steaming. He would have liked to have it out with the stooge, but this wasn’t the moment to create an incident. Instead, Eddie went along Washington Place onto Waverly, but, as soon as the company man had moved on, he continued to work, despite the warning he’d been given. The air was cold and damp in the oncoming dusk, but his skin was burning. He was in a fever, and sweat washed down his back and chest. He couldn’t help but wonder if Moses Levy had experienced this same heat, if true images burned their maker. He wondered, too, if the hermit at the riverside was right, if there wasn’t some element of capturing a soul in each photograph, if he wasn’t responsible for those whose images he caught, whether they be a bird in a cage, a fish in a pail, or a girl on a windowsill.

Eddie wiped his lens clean of soot. He tried to disappear from view as he photographed families desperate to find a sister or daughter, and girls crying in the gutter, arms around each other, clothes covered with ashes, the hems of their skirts singed black. In deference to their grief, he turned to photographing a clutter of personal trinkets, hair ribbons, purses, love letters, combs, all floating like debris in the drenched gutters, scattered over the cement like confetti. But every object seemed to have a soul as well, a throbbing heart, a remembrance of small pleasures and true love. There would be sixteen engagement rings found on the pavement by morning.

When darkness fell the police chased everyone away so they might cordon off the street to bring in the wooden coffins for the dead. So many were needed they could not gather enough in all of Manhattan. Carpenters came to fashion dozens more from floorboards and doors. Eddie huddled in a doorway so that he could continue on. His skin was aflame, and a cough had settled in his chest. He was still positioned on the soaked pavement when the firemen went into the building to retrieve the dead who’d been trapped in the charred rooms. They wrapped the bodies in sheets of oilcloth, and when those ran out they turned to using burlap, though the fabric quickly became damp and some of the sodden threads unraveled as corpses were lowered to the street on heavy ropes. The last image Eddie photographed belonged to one such terrible bundle, the pale feet of a lifeless young girl as she was delivered through the air.

That night Eddie went to the covered pier at East Twenty-sixth Street. The city morgue was too small for the sheer number of the dead, 147 in total, and so a makeshift morgue had been set up along the East River. The water was black as oil, and the night was black as well, illuminated by the lanterns the police held as they patrolled the pier. Eddie saw a cop he knew from the Tenth Precinct. For a fiver the officer let him past the barriers, but he told Eddie to hurry, for the families would be allowed in soon enough. One hundred thousand people would line up to view the dead before the night was through, families alongside gawkers who simply wanted to see the tragedy for themselves. The police would work through the day and night, holding up lanterns in the murky air so that the dead might be identified. Some of the bodies were so charred they were unrecognizable; others were oddly preserved, with so little damage Eddie half-expected them to rise from their coffins. Moses Levy had told him that, in Russia, children who had died were photographed in their finest clothes in the instants after death, propped up on velvet couches, to ensure that their images would be captured before their souls had flown. Perhaps it was true and a soul lingered close by after a person had passed on, for Eddie had found some of Levy’s one-of-a-kind hand-tinted ambrotype prints tucked away in a drawer after his mentor’s death. The technique, using nitric acid or bichloride of mercury, was so difficult and time-consuming it was rarely employed anymore. Some photographers considered it a cheap substitute for the more well-made daguerreotypes, but, in Levy’s hands, these prints were magic. Silvery beads appeared upon the heads and clothing of the departed, as if they had been touched by something far greater than any human form. Looking at the serene faces of the two boys in one photograph, Eddie realized they must have been Moses’s sons, children he’d never spoken of but whose images he’d managed to preserve for all eternity. And so it seemed, a soul could be captured after all.

IN THE DAYS that followed the Triangle Fire a dark lens was placed over Manhattan. The sorrow did not ease with time but instead seemed to multiply. There was a rising indignation over what had befallen the victims of the fire. Meetings at Cooper Union saw thousands attending, reminiscent of the protests of 1909 and 1910, when the city was forewarned that the conditions of the garment workers would lead to tragedy. Now the bloody portents had come to pass.

More workers gathered in the streets, their confusion turning to pure rage when it was discovered that the doors of the factory sewing loft had been locked, making it impossible for the girls to escape. A bolted doorknob had been found by investigators, there among the debris on the ninth floor, but because the door it had been attached to was nothing more than a few black planks, it could not be used as proof in a court of law. Still, every working man and woman knew what it meant. The dead had been locked into their death chamber, like common beasts, sheep penned up and forsaken. Eddie found a dark doorway from which to watch the mayhem. He bowed his head and let the words of the workers wash over him, a river of anger he understood all too well. In truth, he had been outraged all of his life.

When his insomnia gave way in the early morning hours and he at last found sleep, Eddie dreamed of the river and of his father’s black coat. In his dream he was thirteen again, sleeping beside the horses, as he had when he first came to beg Moses Levy to take him on as his apprentice. He heard a knock on the stable doors and awoke within his dream. Inside his dream life, his father was waiting on the rough cobblestones. The elder Cohen had the suitcase that he kept beneath the bed. In real life, Eddie had once opened it, though he knew it was breaking a trust to do so. Inside there was a change of clothing for both Eddie and his father, along with a prayer book and a photograph of Eddie’s mother.

In his dream he went to his father and stood beside him, a dutiful son once more.

“Are we going somewhere?” his dream self asked.

“No. But if we have to, we’re ready,” his father said reasonably.

Eddie pinned the images of the dead to the wall of his loft. He studied their faces, committing them to memory. There was a girl with freckles on her cheeks, her complexion turned chalky in death. Another donned a hat decorated with white silk daisies. Eddie thought it odd that the hat had stayed on her head despite a sheer fall of nine stories. Upon close inspection with a magnifying glass, he spied the reason for this: a hatpin in the shape of a bee. There were two sisters, neither one more than sixteen, each with lovely arched eyebrows and coils of auburn hair. At night, when he tried to sleep, he saw their faces. He listened to the fish swimming in the pail. The trout had grown larger, and it bumped against the bucket with every turn. By now there was an attachment. Eddie knew he couldn’t bring himself to eat his catch. Instead, he fed it bread crumbs and worms dug from beneath the stable floor, caring for it as though it were a pet. He took photographs of his new companion at the end of each day. After so much death, there was a real pleasure in recording the image of a living creature. Still, he wished the day he’d caught it had never happened, and that he’d never gone down to Washington Place to watch those girls fly from the windowsills.

One night there was a knocking at the stable door. Eddie was deeply asleep, helped along by gin, in the thick black fog that is every insomniac’s eventual fate if he stays awake long enough. He assumed it was his dream again, his father once more arriving with their suitcase. When at last he rallied long enough to realize the knocking was real, he guessed the caller wanted the fellow who had taken over the rent of the stable for the past few years, letting out his carriage and raising birds in large cages kept in the tack room. He pulled the blanket over his head and sank back into his pillow. But the banging on his door continued, and through the fog of sleep Eddie heard someone shout out for him. It was the wrong name, but he was too groggy to realize that, and, in all honesty, it was the only name he would have answered to, for in his darkest dreams he was always called Ezekiel.

He crawled out of bed, pulled on his trousers, then took the stairs two at a time. As he opened the door there was a moment when he thought his father was before him. If this was a dream in which Joseph Cohen had come to bring him home, Eddie might have agreed. On this night, he might have given up his new life in exchange for erasing the vision of the bodies of the young girls at the morgue. But it was another man at the door. The visitor was Orthodox and wore a black coat and hat. His stooped posture made Eddie yearn for his father, for this stranger was clearly a tailor who had hunched over a sewing machine for many years.

“If you’re here to lease a carriage, I’m not your man,” Eddie remarked groggily. “There’s no one here till six.”

“I don’t want a carriage,” the caller said. “I’m looking for my daughter.”

The hour was so early that the horses were still asleep on their feet, their breath turning to clouds in the chilly predawn air.

“I can’t help you with that.” The only women Eddie knew were ones from the taverns, and he never brought them home. “You’ll have to leave.”

The older man squinted, his expression grave. Beneath his glasses he had pale rheumy eyes, hazed over with cataracts. “You’re the photographer?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re who I want to see.”

When the visitor started upstairs without an invitation, Eddie had little choice but to follow at his heels, doing his best to persuade his unwanted guest a mistake had been made. “I don’t have any women here. But look if you want. See for yourself. Then you can go.”

The visitor plainly intended to do so. He entered the loft and peered through the chaos. Eddie had been working nonstop, and the pitted wooden table was littered with prints, including the shining image of the trout. It had turned out better than he had expected. Enough to give him a glimmer of hope that he might one day be good enough to call himself a student of Moses Levy.

The visitor bumped into the bucket where the fish swam in a forlorn circle. “You sell fish?”

At this point all Eddie knew was that he kept the fish because he was alive and had as much right to a life as any other creature. He shrugged and felt a fool. “He’s a guest.”

“He’s a guest, but you didn’t want to let me inside?”

“Because you’re at the wrong address. Listen, there’s no one here you’d know or want.” It then struck Eddie that his caller might have another photographer in mind. “If you’re a friend of Moses Levy, you’re too late. He died five years ago.”

The visitor removed his wire-rimmed glasses and cleaned the lenses with a pocket handkerchief. “I’m a friend of your father’s. He sent me. That’s how I came to have your address.”

Eddie took a step back, confused. “That’s impossible. My father doesn’t know where I live.”

“He gave me your address. Therefore he knows something.” The visitor spied the photographs of the dead girls tacked to the wall. “Yes. I’m in the right place. You were there.” The older man crossed the room, his steps echoing on the wide-planked wooden floor. He wore heavy shoes, one heel built up with wooden filler to even out his gait, for his legs were mismatched in length. “You’re going to find my daughter.”

Eddie’s visitor was Samuel Weiss, a tailor and the father of two daughters, Ella and Hannah, both employed by the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Ella was safely at home, but Hannah could not be found. Weiss had been to St. Vincent’s Hospital, established by the Sisters of Charity in 1849, then he’d gone on to Bellevue, and finally to the morgue on the pier. His beautiful daughter with the white-blond hair had not been among the wounded or the dead. No one in the neighborhood had seen her since Saturday, not even her closest friends. Now Weiss searched the images on Eddie’s wall, but again, Hannah could not be found. When he had gone through every photograph, he sat in a wooden chair, overwhelmed, his face streaming with tears, his eyes rimmed red. The light filtering through the skylight was a pale, creamy yellow. Between Weiss’s sobs Eddie could hear the horses in the stable below, restless in their stalls now that morning had risen, waiting for the liveryman and their breakfast of oats.

“Hannah worked on the ninth floor. Do you know what that means? No survivors. Or so they say. How do you believe a pack of liars? I for one don’t trust anything we’re told.”

“Mr. Weiss, I’m sorry. I truly am. There were no survivors.”

“I don’t need you to be sorry! Help me! That’s what I need. Your father said you could find her.”

His father, whom he had not seen or spoken to in twelve years, almost as much time as they had lived together, who knew nothing about what his son was capable of. Eddie often wondered if they would recognize each other if they passed on the street, or if they had become such strangers to one another they would merely keep on walking, having no idea that they shared the same flesh and blood, that they had once slept together under the same black overcoat in the forest, in shock and mourning.

“How is it possible that there’s no sign of her?” Weiss went on. “How many girls have hair so pale it’s the color of snow? How many come home every night right on time and are never late?” His voice was raspy. He had been searching through the debris on Greene Street and had breathed in cinders. “They found not a scrap of clothing, not her purse, not a bit of jewelry, nothing. She wore a gold locket that belonged to her mother. I gave it to her on her last birthday. She wept with tears of gratitude and swore she would never take it off. Gold does not burn, I know that much. It melts, but it doesn’t disappear. None of her friends saw her that morning. What do you think of that? I questioned everyone who survived, even her best friend, Rose, who’s still in St. Vincent’s Hospital, with both of her legs burned.” He glared at Eddie. “Don’t tell me nothing remains of a human being.”

Eddie went to the bureau for some whiskey and glasses. Before the fire he would have merely insisted his visitor leave, now he felt the thorn of compassion. He put down a glass in front of Weiss and asked, “Have you been to the precinct? Spoken with the police?”

“The police?” Weiss’s face furrowed with distrust. “No.” He gulped the whiskey and tapped his glass on the table for more. “I wanted someone I can trust. That’s why I came to you.”

“Me? Why would you trust me?”

Weiss shook his head, amazed by how dense the younger man was. “Because you are one of us, Ezekiel.”

“I’m not! Look at me.”

Eddie wore a blue shirt and black trousers. He had no tallit around his shoulders, a garment that showed a covenant with God, and no remnants of his Orthodox upbringing. His hair was cropped short, and he’d long ago forsaken the practice of wearing a skullcap. His large, pale feet were bare, allowing a glimpse of a tattoo of a trident he’d had inked on his ankle, a true embarrassment, even to him. He’d gone to the infamous Samuel O’Reilly’s shop one drunken evening, where the owner used Edison’s newly invented electric tattoo machine. Eddie had immediately regretted his choice when he awoke the next morning with a throbbing headache. Tattoos were strictly forbidden for his people, and men of his faith so marked could not be buried in a religious cemetery. Eddie’s regret, however, had less to do with faith than with the fact that the tattoo was so crudely drawn.

Weiss eyed the younger man sadly. “You think your father would send me to the wrong man? You think he doesn’t know his own son? You’re the one who can find people.”

“Mr. Weiss, please.” Eddie downed his whiskey and began a second glass. He wouldn’t mind getting drunk.

“He said you worked for Hochman.”

“He knew that?”

“A father knows his son.”

Eddie shook his head. “No.” He would get drunk, he had decided, without a doubt.

“He told me it was you, not that fake wizard, who discovered the boy under the bridge. The shyster took the credit, but you were the one who found him. Your father said you always had this talent. You guided him through the forest when you were a little boy. He said he would have been dead without you, or wandering there still.”

Eddie was stunned. He’d never thought he’d been the one to lead them out of the woods. And surely he’d never told his father how he earned his money. He knew that his father would have disapproved of Hochman and his methods. Now it seemed the elder Cohen had known precisely what Eddie was doing on the nights he’d sneaked out. He wondered if his father had lain in bed, eyes open, as Eddie let himself out the door. Perhaps he’d gone so far as to rise from the thin mattress, slip his coat over his pajamas, and track Eddie to the Hall of Love so he might stand in the dark on Sheriff Street and mourn what his son had become. Perhaps he’d had their suitcase in hand.

“You shouldn’t go around trusting people you don’t even know,” Eddie advised his visitor. “You’ll get into trouble that way.”

“I know your father, and that’s enough for me.” Weiss narrowed his eyes. “Do you want money? Because I have it.” The older man reached into the pocket of his overcoat, but Eddie stopped him.

“No. No money.” Eddie sat back in his chair and rubbed at his temples. His head was throbbing. “Even if I could do what you want, there’s no guarantee you would like what I found.”

Weiss shook his head, disagreeing. “If you find the truth, then you’ve found what I want.”

“What if Hannah is dead? You want to know that?”

“If she is, show me the locket. That’s when I’ll believe it. That’s when I’ll say the Kaddish and lay her to rest.”

Weiss reached for a photograph in his vest pocket. It was a poor example of the craft, snapped in one of those new ten-cent machines so popular at photo galleries at Coney Island and on Fourteenth Street. The image was already fading, turning milky, but the beauty of Weiss’s daughter was unmistakable. She had long, pale hair and delicate features.

“Your father said you would find her,” Weiss said, his voice seized by emotion. “Don’t make him into a liar.”

After Weiss’s visit, Eddie slept, awaking in the morning on the floor. He’d finished the whiskey after Weiss had gone, and added a good measure of gin, a lethal combination. Apparently he’d fallen asleep beside the dog. Now his back and legs ached. He had a cough and the room felt damp. If he wasn’t careful, he would find himself coming down with pneumonia, as Moses Levy had.

Eddie went to retrieve a tin box stowed beneath the floorboards. There was cash inside, his savings. He had hoped to buy a camera that would allow him to use flexible film, a new style in the art that made the development process faster and easier, but he could forgo such things. He’d gotten in the habit of hiding his earnings when he was a boy, choosing a clever spot, just beneath the table where he and his father took their meager supper each evening. In his loft he kept his savings in the same place. Eddie folded the bills into an envelope.

As he grabbed his coat to go out, Eddie spied a flash of silver light in the pail beside the sink, as if a star had fallen through the skylight. It was the trout, motionless at the bottom of the pail. He felt a rush of regret. He should have taken it back to the river, for a fish was born to be a fish, whether or not he’d been caught. He quickly folded the trout into a sheaf of newspaper, for he couldn’t leave it to stink, nor had he the heart to toss it into the trash pile in the alley. He whistled for Mitts and, with the wrapped fish resting in the crook of his arm, set out.

The liveryman had recently arrived to divvy out oats and hay. The stable tenant was a short individual, with broad ugly features, his face pocked with scars. Several of his teeth were capped with gold, and he often made reference to the fact that he’d given up his wild ways, not caring to elaborate further.

Sometimes the liveryman called himself Joe, sometimes it was Johnny. He started out as what was called a sheriff at various saloons, a bouncer who kept the peace while enjoying the violence of the job. At one time, he’d risen as high as a man could in the criminal world, working for Tammany Hall and the politicians who ran the city. But a long term in prison had taken his wildness out of him, and he’d sunk to working in the stable, renting out a carriage. He had a love of animals and birds, especially the pigeons he raised in the tack room, for they sat on his shoulders as he went about his chores. He’d begun his days in a pet store, and he often told Eddie he should have stayed with that. The horses ran to him now, and he treated them kindly, greeting each by name. Sally, Spot, Little Girl, Jackson. He lived round the corner, at a flophouse on Twenty-second Street where shared rooms could be had for the night, but should one of the horses take ill, he brought over his cot and slept in the stable. He could frequently be found smoking a foul mixture in the alley, bowls full of opium, but he never did so inside the stable, to ensure his creatures would be safe and no sparks would fall into the bales of hay. Eddie had chosen to ignore the stink of opium. In his opinion, there were far worse neighbors to have. There were thousands of men who visited the opium houses of the Lower East Side. Most of them couldn’t get a job, let alone keep one, but the liveryman managed well enough.

“You’re keeping early hours,” the fellow called as he tossed Mitts a biscuit. “Or is it that you never sleep?” He’d heard Eddie pacing at odd hours, seen him come in or leave when most men were safe in bed.

Eddie grinned and stretched his aching back. “I slept on the floor like a dog.”

“Then you must have dreamed, for dogs do so nightly. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Isn’t that right?” the carriage man said to Mitts, who had offered his paw before following his master out the heavy stable door.

Eddie loved the city when it was first waking. Energy surged through the concrete and cobblestones the way mist rises in the woods. In fact, his sleep had been deep and empty. If the liveryman was right and his dog dreamed, then Eddie envied him, for there had been no sign of the dark-haired woman who sometimes came to his bed in his dreams. Now Mitts trotted briskly along beside him on their journey downtown, clearly happy to be alive, with no thought to the future or the past. For this, Eddie envied Mitts as well, how light his burden was, how clear his purpose. He was to be his master’s companion, and in doing so he became himself, the essence of a dog. When all was said and done, it was conceivable that a being’s purpose remained the same throughout his life, and Eddie’s purpose was exactly what it had been when he was a boy, to pursue the light and find what was lost.

His destination was little more than twenty blocks downtown. He crouched on a stoop across from the building where he had lived with his father, pulling up his long legs, leaning against the ironwork railing. It was drizzling and the sky hung down. The gutters were wet and filthy. A boy came out of the house across the street. It was Eddie’s good luck that when he signaled the boy approached. He was six or seven years old, shy, Orthodox, hanging back when he reached the stoop. Clearly, he’d crossed the street because of his interest in the dog. He could barely take his eyes off Mitts, who cheerfully slobbered and returned the boy’s gaze.

“You know Joseph Cohen?” Eddie asked the child.

“No.” The boy most certainly had been told not to talk to strangers. He didn’t raise his eyes. To gain the boy’s trust, Eddie switched over to Yiddish.

“Mr. Cohen, the tailor. You know him?”

The boy glanced up, surprised that this lanky, gruff young man spoke his language. He didn’t look like one of them, but the boy accepted Eddie now that he knew they were of the same faith. It was obvious that the boy was more impressed by the dog than by anything Eddie had to say. He tentatively held out his hand, and Mitts sniffed it. Startled by the dog’s wet nose, the boy drew his hand back. He shifted from foot to foot, nervous but more interested than ever.

“Go ahead,” Eddie suggested, recognizing a fellow dog lover. “You can pet him. He won’t bite.”

The boy remained suspicious. It was likely that his mother had warned him not only to stay away from strange men but to avoid strange dogs as well.

“Go on,” Eddie said. “He’s friendly.”

The boy’s curiosity got the better of him. He edged nearer, grinning when Mitts sat before him.

“Someone I met said he’s a rabbit, and maybe that’s what he thinks he is. A big rabbit with white feet.”

When the boy petted the pit bull’s broad head, a smile of delight crossed his face. “He’s like silk.” Mitts licked his face, and the boy laughed and wiped his cheek. “He is a big rabbit.”

Eddie returned to his initial questioning. “You know the man who lives on the fifth floor? The tailor. The one that doesn’t like noise and doesn’t talk to anyone? He has a long, dark beard.”

The boy nodded, but he corrected Eddie. “His beard is gray.”

That piece of information made Eddie’s throat grow tight. He held out a dime. “For you,” he said, to the boy’s great surprise. He then handed the boy the envelope he’d brought along. “Bring this up to him and you can have the dime.” There wasn’t much cash in the envelope, but it was enough to purchase new boots, a few bags of potatoes and turnips, a scarf, even a new coat, for the one Eddie had bought his father long ago must certainly be threadbare by now. “Don’t open it. Understand?”

The boy accepted the dime and the envelope. Before he went on, Eddie grabbed him. “My dog can judge who’s trustworthy and who’s not, that’s why I’m giving this job to you. He trusts you.”

The boy nodded, his eyes on the dog. After Eddie let go of him, the young messenger patted Mitts one last time. “Good boy,” he said in English before he ran across the street.

The Cohen apartment was at the front of the building, its single window overlooking the street. Eddie had often sat there, watching the dusk sift past the glass, waiting for the time when he could sneak away. Now he wondered if his father had been aware each time he opened the door, just wide enough to make his escape.

After several minutes, Eddie looked up to see the curtains move. He lifted his hand to wave before the curtain closed. He had no idea if his father would keep the envelope that had been delivered, or if he would burn it in one of the two soup bowls he owned, or perhaps donate it to the poor box in the shul. Eddie wondered if he’d even recognized the man across the street as his only son.

Being back in the neighborhood gave Eddie the jitters, and his skin prickled. He considered stopping at the druggist’s shop on Grand Street where the pharmacist was said not to have left his store for more than twenty years, a self-imposed prisoner, the victim of love gone wrong. But the shop was often closed, and there was no cure for Eddie’s ailment. He wandered, so deep in thought he didn’t notice that the streets where he’d grown up had melted away. He found himself at the river. Water slapped at the row of wooden docks on stilts. He still had the trout, which he now unwrapped from its casing of damp newspaper. The silvery scales were cold and wet. The trout belonged to the river, and that was where Eddie would dispose of it. Rain had begun in earnest, a cold spring shower that left a haze of blue over the mirrored surface. Eddie could barely see New Jersey or make out the ferries that cut through the water. He leaned down, holding the trout in both hands. When he let go he expected it to sink. The rain was falling too hard to see clearly, yet he could spy a trail of light, as if the trout was racing through the water, headed for the depths, his freedom restored.

Eddie sat back on his heels, stunned. He did not believe in life everlasting, or in the prayers of his forefathers, or in miracles of any kind. The movement of the fish was most likely a trick of light, but light was something he did indeed believe in. He had the urge to leap in himself so that he might discover whether or not it was alive, and whether, if he followed the trout, he would find what he had lost when he left his father’s house, when he shut the door and found himself on the dark streets of New York.