The Museum of Extraordinary Things

^FOUR THE MAN WHO FELT NO PAIN

I PLANNED to sell the watch I’d stolen as a boy to pay for Moses Levy’s funeral, but, as if it knew of my intent, it broke that very day. I wound the crown, and still it would not tell time. And so I kept it and instead sold the camera I had learned my craft upon, an American Optical. Moses had left me several other cameras, including his own ancient large-format wooden bellows camera whose images were developed as eighteen-by-twenty-four glass dry plates, and a Leica held together with tape that had an exquisite Petzval lens. From then on, I used these as my own. Moses’s favorite camera was the old battered one, oversized and heavy to carry around town. Someone else might have thought the camera I sold was the best of the bunch, but it wasn’t. A camera has its own eye, my mentor had told me. He insisted his could see the truth even when he’d begun to grow blind. I hoped it would do the same for me, for I was blind to much in this world.

Certainly I’d been blind when it came to Levy’s poor health and age. He’d told me of his bouts with pneumonia, which had weakened him, but he had such passion for his work I forgot how ill he was and ignored his labored breathing. I often accompanied him to meetings at 291, the gallery where Stieglitz showed photographs alongside paintings that seemed to come from a far-off universe, each unique and haunting. I stood in the back, an awkward apprentice, listening to the real photographers argue and talk. Once Moses went to shake Stieglitz’s hand and introduce himself. Stieglitz of course knew of him, although the rumors were that Moses Levy was dead. He had disappeared from the art world and from his compatriots. Perhaps he preferred these stories to the truth, and wished to keep secret the fact he made a living photographing brides and grooms at the marriage halls of the Lower East Side. His great work had been destroyed by officials in the Ukraine, who felt that Jewish artists were dangerous, rebels by nature, untrustworthy at best, demons at worst. He could not bring himself to think, let alone speak, about his lifetime’s lost work.

“Here’s one of the originals,” Stieglitz called out to those in the gallery. “One of our forefathers!”

Few paid attention. The mantle of genius had already been handed to younger men, such as Stieglitz himself, who quickly moved on to speak to his own admirers. Now Levy’s great work had been burned and forgotten, and there was little interest in him, even though many of his techniques had been taken up by these same young men. He was a master of the ambrotype print, in which the photographer is the conduit to the photograph, so that each is as individual as a painting, and later his use of silver nitrate or potassium cyanide to illuminate his landscapes had led the way for those who wished to take photography into the world of art. He had a unique toning technique that tinged some of his prints a golden color. Many of the younger men who gathered to speak of themselves and their work had no idea Levy had invented some of the processes they now used on a daily basis, nor did they care. I saw this was the way of the future, to leave the past behind as if it were a dream.

On the wall of Levy’s studio were the two remaining prints taken in the forests of the Ukraine. Trees so tall and wide they were true giants, their limbs saddened by the sorrows of the world, filled with the sepia shades of songbirds. It was much like the place where my father and I had camped when our village was destroyed. I had led him by the hand through the tall grass and the wild asters so that he would not lose himself and give up the life he no longer valued now that my mother was gone. We did not speak to each other in the forest, for fear of what we would say. We mourned in silence so that we would not curse the world we walked through. I saw owls in the locust trees and wondered if these creatures were the spirits of the dead, for there were so many murdered in our homeland there was not room enough for all of their ghosts. I half-believed they had turned into birds instead.

Moses Levy left me his lustrous silver nitrate prints. I had them on the wall of the studio, in frames I’d built myself of plain pine, for this cheap wood was the best I could afford. But the photographs hadn’t been treated properly in Moses’s travels across the continents, and they faded more each day. To avoid the ravaging effects of direct sunlight, I took to covering them with a white sheet, as people of the faith I’d left covered mirrors after a death in the family. I once believed this practice had arisen to make certain there was no vanity in a time of sorrow, but now I think it was so a man could not see his own hopelessness reflected in the glass.

Sometimes as darkness fell, I tore off the sheets so I could study the gift Moses had left me. The trees became illuminated in the fading light, struck by shades of yellow on some days, and at other times enveloped by the red glow that pours over Manhattan after sunset. When I stood there before the greatness of my teacher’s vision, I was reminded of the day I found my second life. I thought perhaps I did indeed have a purpose, and that purpose was to see the true beauty of the world and, like my teacher, to capture a single moment of that beauty.

And yet I was blinded to so much around me, stubborn and arrogant in the way many young men are. Could a blind man know beauty? I hadn’t noticed the milky film over my teacher’s eyes, nor had I realized the difficulty he had in taking the stairs in his last months on earth. To me he was indomitable, an icon who was more than human in both talent and virtue. I toted his equipment, as any apprentice would, but soon I was developing his negatives as well. He said it was so I could learn the skill of this process, but it was most likely he had me do this work because he could not stand steadily for more than a brief time. There were a few occasions when he was too tired to leave his bed, and I was forced to take wedding photographs alone. I’m sure the bridal parties were not pleased by my sour demeanor, but I did the job and learned to keep my mouth shut. I did not tell anyone to smile or to embrace—I photographed them as they were, delighted or terrified, brides who seemed too young to be married, and those who were grandmothers, grooms who shook with fear and those who rode triumphantly into the hall on the shoulders of their brothers and friends. There were occasions when my photographs were rejected by an angry bride or mother of the groom. I didn’t blame them. I showed them what I saw, and what I saw was not always pretty.

I did not realize that Moses’s death was coming until my teacher could no longer stand or speak. On the day of his passing, I was the one who found him. I slept in a storeroom then, and he in the bed that later became mine. Everything in the loft changed when his spirit left him, as if a whirlpool had drawn the light from the room. I sat beside his body and wept, not only for the loss of this great man but also for the darkness that settled upon me once more.

I was the only one at the funeral at the Mt. Zion Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens. I hired a rabbi who went from cemetery to cemetery for a fee. He was an old man from Russia, who owned a single suit that he wore every day. There was sorrow in the seams of his clothes, but he was used to death. It seemed that life was a bolt of cloth to him, and he was there to fold it and set it in a drawer. He said the prayers over the open grave, then, after being paid, quickly went on to his next appointment. I shoveled the dirt onto the coffin, as was the custom of our people, while the gravediggers looked on, arms folded across their chests. In our faith we are instructed to bury our own, and in doing so grant them that last favor.

I could not completely rid myself of my first life, though I tried my best. On several occasions I went to photograph rallies and strikes, sent there by the editors I sometimes worked for. This was not by choice. I gave excuses, and I often managed to get other assignments. But occasionally I was forced to go to events I dreaded. Though I looked nothing like the boy I’d been, there were times when I was spotted by ghosts from my past. Once I’d gone to photograph a meeting of hundreds of shirtwaist strikers in Washington Square. This park had once been a public gallows, with bodies still buried beneath what were now paved paths; it seemed as good a place to be haunted as any. Just as I turned onto Great Jones Street, I found I could go no farther. I felt a chill spreading through my chest. There, among the strikers who held up signs in Yiddish and Italian, I thought I saw my father. I dodged into a doorway, as if I were a common thief, and from those shadows I peered out at the crowd. Upon closer study, the person in question was revealed to be someone else entirely, a much younger man than I’d initially imagined, perhaps the age my father had been when I first began to work for Hochman. I felt an odd mixture of relief and disappointment, for in all honesty, I wanted to see for myself that he was alive and well. In a haze of emotion, I realized that my resentment as a boy had arisen not only from the idea that he was willing to end his life and leave me when he leapt from the dock but from the fact that I felt, from that moment on, responsible for him. I was too young, or foolish, or headstrong to meet that responsibility. I did not want it, and I paid for my choice dearly simply by knowing the sort of man I’d become.

I went back into the crowd and set up my camera stand. When I scanned the mob, I noticed several young men shouting and glaring in my direction. I heard the name I never used, and then I knew their taunts were directed at me. I turned and slinked away, convinced I had been marked. Those who’d known me in my other life saw me for who I truly was, Ezekiel Cohen, traitor, the boy who had not leapt into the river to rescue his own father.

Soon after that I was sent by the Tribune to photograph a rally at Cooper Union on Third Avenue. I was young, little more than twenty-one, and I thought I could express an opinion in such matters when working for the papers. I said I preferred crime scenes, which was true enough. I went so far as to declare I had a fever and might be ill, hardly the truth at all. But no one else was available, so I had no choice but to go, even though my guts churned. I knew it would be bad for me, and it was. I came upon several leaders of the Workmen’s Circle, an organization for the betterment of the workingman that was concerned with community and social justice, serving as a welfare agency, especially in times of tragedy. There among them, I spied my childhood companion, Isaac Rosenfeld. Unfortunately he spied me as well as I set up my camera.

“Here he is. The anti-Jew,” Rosenfeld called out, nodding to me. “I hear you’re Ed now. To some people at least.”

“I’m here to do a job,” I told him.

“To watch us? To stand outside of us? Maybe to judge us? You’re very good at that it seems. You don’t care what happens to anyone else, even your own people. What would your father think?”

“I don’t know what other men think,” I said. “That’s God’s business, not mine.”

Rosenfeld spat upon the ground. I didn’t react, though I suppose he wanted me to. He was a decent man and would not strike me first, but I didn’t give him the pleasure of hitting him. I merely took a photograph of the crowd that had gathered, Jews and Italians who worked in factories and wanted more for themselves and their families, basic rights at the very least. Rosenfeld’s father had worked with mine in the second factory where we’d found employment, and Rosenfeld and I had spent a portion of our boyhood together. We had once been friends, when such things were possible for me. I didn’t react when he shoved his hand in front of my camera’s lens. “Well at least you know what this man thinks,” he said. And yes, I knew. He despised me.

I kept the photograph of his hand and have it still. The lines of his palm are like a map to a country I cannot name. I kept the broken watch as well, stored in my pocket after Moses’s death. Soon after my run-in with Rosenfeld, I happened to pass a watchmaker’s shop on Houston Street. The sign proclaimed the shopowner could repair any timepiece. If stumped he would present a customer with a new gold watch at no cost whatsoever. The proposition sounded fishy, but I could hardly afford to have the watch fixed, so I went in to see what he could do. The watchmaker was working when I entered. He was an elderly fellow, and a sign informed me that his name was Harold Kelly. It was likely clear to him that I was a young man with a chip on my shoulder. I cared little about my appearance and wore a frayed blue jacket, baggy trousers, boots, a black cap with a brim. I kept my hair clipped to my scalp, as a convict newly released from prison might have. I suppose I looked ragged in every way, lanky and dark, headed for trouble. I had spent so much time photographing criminals, I may have taken on some of their airs. I assume Kelly thought I wasn’t a customer worth the bother. He ignored me until I placed the watch on his counter. He glanced at it, and as soon as he did, he stopped working so he could peer over his glasses at me.

“Yours?”

“Inherited,” I told him. I suppose that’s the way I thought of the watch, not as a stolen object but as a reward I deserved. From the skeptical look on the watchmaker’s face I could tell he thought it was much too good for the likes of me.

He picked it up, turned it over in his hand, and read the inscription. “ ‘To my dear son.’ ”

“I have a father,” I said, embarrassed by the sort of son I’d become, for I was dear to no one. I thought of Isaac spitting on the ground so he could let me know what he thought of me. The day after I’d stolen the watch I’d gone to sit beside him under a long table, where we did piecework, stitching pockets onto women’s shirts. We were only boys, but boys who knew too much of the world. When I opened my hand to reveal my take, his eyes had widened. “The owner’s son,” I’d whispered, not needing to say more. “Good,” Isaac had whispered back. “It’s what he deserves.”

The watchmaker removed his glasses and used an eyepiece to examine the watch further. “Made in London.” He showed me a hallmark I hadn’t noticed before, a leopard’s head. “That marks the city of origin.” Then beneath that mark, a crown with the number 22. “Pure gold. Excellent quality. Your father gave this to you? He must be quite wealthy.”

“You don’t need wealth to appreciate something beautiful.” I now feared this fellow Kelly might call the police on me, and therefore manage to keep the watch for himself. Over the years I had grown attached to it, as men grow attached to their miseries and their burdens.

The repairman took a tiny set of tweezers and opened the back of the watch, then went deeper into the cogs, fishing around. He came upon a cog that was stuck in place, which he removed and cleaned, then reinserted. Immediately the works began again. The sudden sound startled me, and I took a step away from the counter. Kelly nodded, fully understanding my reaction. “It’s alive,” he said. “A watch is like a man. You have to know how to approach it, and each one is unique. This one, for instance, has its own fingerprint.” Kelly tapped upon the back with just the right amount of pressure. A small circular panel slipped up to reveal a single blue stone. “Sapphire,” he informed me. “Your father truly does appreciate beauty. And of course there is your name in print for all eternity,” he said with a mocking tone.

A hidden inscription had been revealed, there below the stone.

“To Harry Block, on the occasion of his eleventh birthday.”

“It’s a fine watch, Harry.” The watchmaker smirked as he congratulated me. He had already guessed that wasn’t my name. In truth, I startled at the sound of it. “If you ever want to sell this watch, I’m an interested party. Or any other watch your father presents to you. Just bring it here and I’ll give you a fair price.”

I paid the fee for the repair with all the money I had at the time, and slipped the watch inside my pocket. Walking down Houston Street I remembered that Harry Block had told me his age, the same as mine, as if that had mattered and had somehow made us colleagues. He’d only had the watch for a brief time before I’d relieved him of it. At that point I had already been in possession of the timepiece for so long perhaps it did belong to me.

All the same, I began to look for the original owner. I did so without thinking, since finding people came easily to me. It was what I’d been trained for, and searching for the lost had become part of my soul. I couldn’t let things go, even when I should. I did as Hochman had always instructed, looked into my subject’s past. He insisted to the press that he used numerology and herbs to divine a man’s future and his dreams, but he told me that a man always revealed his own inner story in his actions and expressions. A man’s past deeds foretold his future, and allowed anyone with half a brain to divine the path he would take.

I discovered which factories Block’s family owned and made a list that I carried with me. I stood outside each one, including the loft where my father and Isaac Rosenfeld’s father had worked years ago. For several years Block disappeared. I found out later he had gone to Harvard College, then to law school. When he moved back into his family’s house after his residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was still around. Sometimes I stationed myself across from his family’s home. In the half-light I gazed through the tall arched windows. It was a brownstone mansion on Sixty-second Street, built by the architects Hunt and Hunt with beautiful cornice pieces and elaborate stone carvings. Surely, it could not compare to Mrs. Vanderbilt’s block-long monstrosity of red bricks and limestone, built in 1882 across from the Plaza Hotel, inspired by a chateau in the Loire Valley. All the same, the Block mansion was grand enough. I felt even more like a criminal when I lurked there. I felt trouble course through me. I had photographed some gang members in the Tombs prison before their hangings, moments before they crossed from the courthouse to their incarceration and death over a connecting bridge that prisoners called the Bridge of Sighs. I’d wondered if these men had always known they would murder and rob and that their fates would lead them to ruin. As for me, I had no idea what I was capable of. Was the future set, or could a man change his destiny and make his own decisions as to what came next? Perhaps it was as Hochman had once said to me, that a man had many lives. Each day we chose the path we would take by our own actions.

And yet I did not feel that way whenever I turned onto Sixty-second Street. I felt pulled there by something far beyond my control.

I was jumpy and unpredictable as I stationed myself outside the mansion, like the arrested men I photographed. They often hung their heads and would not look full face into the camera. It was difficult to get a decent portrait of a criminal. Surely the same could have been said of me had my photograph ever been taken, not that it ever had been. I did not wish to be anyone’s subject, or to expose what the lens might reveal.

I took to the shadows when I was positioned outside the Blocks’ mansion, and in doing so became a shadow of myself. I became acquainted with the people who lived in the house by merely observing them. The scullery maids and the liveryman I knew by name. There was a maid called Agnes, and another called Sarah. Several workingmen who were in charge of the upkeep of the mansion cleared the grounds, among them a fellow they called Stick, who seemed to be their boss and who occasionally threw me a look. I slinked down the street at such times, but soon enough I was back, reckless in my need to stalk the family. I knew the schedules of the well-dressed women, Block’s grandmother and mother, and an attractive younger woman with a serious expression who went in and out with her friends, all wearing large, extravagant feathered hats and silk cloaks. She was the girl I’d frightened long ago, the one with the rabbit coat. My timing was always off, and I never caught a glimpse of Block himself. Then at last I saw him headed for the doorway, Harry Block, the boy who’d handed over his watch without a fight, now a gentleman of means and responsibilities. He exited a carriage, wearing a fur-collared coat and a silk bowler. He thanked the liveryman, whom I knew to be named Marcus, clapping him on the back good-naturedly before he took the steps two at a time. Block was handsome and well mannered, at ease in the world, as rich men often were. My rage was white-hot. I felt it in my blood. It was as if the day when my father stepped off the dock had happened only hours before. Hochman had been right, the past was what we carried with us, threaded to the future, and we decided whether to keep it close or let it go. Fate was both what we were given and what we made for ourselves.

I hadn’t given up the hatred I carried.

I took to following Block, and soon enough knew his routine. Once I leapt unnoticed and caught onto the rear of his carriage. I hung on as it made its way down Broadway, only inches away from him. My heart pounded as the wooden wheels hit ruts in the street, but my hands clenched the brass railings. I stepped off before the carriage stopped, leaving to ensure I didn’t assault him. He oversaw the factories that belonged to his father, and also had a legal practice in which he served as the attorney for many other factory owners. He was on the boards of several charities, well known for his fund-raising abilities.

I positioned myself outside his family’s mansion on the night an event was held to celebrate the new library that was being built in the Beaux Arts style between Fortieth and Forty-second Street. The building would stand in the place where there had been a man-made four-acre lake with water from the Croton Reservoir, surrounded by a twenty-five-foot Egyptian-style wall. Now a new, larger reservoir had been built in Westchester County, and the library would be considered a true wonder of the city, elegant, enormous, a free education for the people of New York. The party was to raise funds, but it was a gathering outside the usual social hierarchy, for it was unlikely that these donors would ever be invited into the parlor of the Astors, who had given the bulk of the funds. These were Jews, after all, wealthy, but still separate.

I slipped inside by assuring the doorman—whom I recognized as an elderly fellow called Barker—that I’d been sent by the Tribune to take photographs of the event. I had my camera with me, and I showed my press pass, which didn’t mean much but seemed to satisfy the servant. I felt a thief simply walking over the plush carpeting. It was blue and red, a grand Chinese tapestry, and the floors of the entranceway were polished slabs of black and white marble. Another servant of some sort, one who must have been hired for the evening, for I failed to recognize him, led me past a telephone room fashioned of golden oak into the great hall, where there was a hanging Tiffany lamp of enormous proportions that cast a warm glow. The woodwork gleamed, and there were angels carved into the wooden cornices. The family was gathered here, including the father, my own father’s old employer. The senior Mr. Block seemed to have some illness, as he was unable to leave his chair. I took my time in setting up my camera. I was not the only photographer. The family had hired a society fellow I knew, Jack Hailey, who had access to Manhattan’s elite, and acted as if he wasn’t a lowly newsman. He was annoyed by my presence and told me in no uncertain terms he planned to sell photographs to the papers so I shouldn’t bother trying to sell mine.

“Fuck you, Hailey,” I said. “Kiss their asses if you want. I’ll do as I please.”

The young woman who was Harry’s sister happened to overhear. She was tall and refined with a solemn demeanor. She gazed at me, concerned, then turned to whisper something in her brother’s ear. He patted her arm in a comforting but somewhat condescending manner. Harry’s sister had turned out to be attractive though she hadn’t been a pretty girl. When she wasn’t surrounded by her silly friends, her expression was thoughtful, her eyes bright with intelligence. I’d seen her turn down glasses of champagne, and I noticed she kept to herself. Her personality seemed rather serious, and I imagined that she would have chosen to walk away from the festivities and have a moment to herself, preferring to sit on a park bench under an elm tree, for instance, watching the dark filter through the branches like any common woman. But she wore so many diamonds she would have been robbed in an instant.

I took two “official” photographs, then managed to take another when the family wasn’t posed and were moving apart from one another. Juliet seemed in a hurry to be gone from that setting. In that photograph, Harry Block is the only one staring directly into the camera. When I look at that image now, I think he understood that he had been seen in some deep way, and that everything he was at his core had been caught on film. I did have a moment where I wondered if I’d stolen not only his watch but his soul.

I quickly packed up and made my way through the crowd. My hatred of those in attendance was simmering, and I suppose I was a thug if thugs are those who come uninvited to a party with murderous intentions in their hearts, acted upon or not. How was it that a terrible son such as I was able to feel such vengeance for what this class of people had done to my father? I detested how they’d caused his fingers to bleed and how they’d stripped him of his pride.

Harry Block stopped me in the hallway. The room was shaped like a teardrop, the plaster walls painted a glossy peacock blue. We stood on the enormous Oriental rug, stitched by laborers for pennies, causing some of the workmen to go blind from the smallness of their stitches and the closeness of their work. It was a beautiful creation, one I despised.

“You! Wait a moment.”

The camera stand was over my shoulder. If I hoisted it, it could be used as a weapon. Moses Levy would have despaired had he known of my willingness to consider a piece of equipment meant to illuminate beauty to be equally useful in an act of brutality.

“Did you hear me?” Block called.

I turned and gazed at him directly, my enemy.

“Did I get your name?” he asked. “I was told you work for the papers.”

“I’ve got your name,” I answered. I barely recognized my own voice, for it carried a flat, dangerous tone. “Harry.”

My companion was accustomed to being called Mr. Block, particularly by servants, which he clearly considered me to be. He narrowed his eyes and gazed fully into my face to see if he could conjure up some remembrance of who I might be. I could tell he saw an utter stranger. I was nothing to him after all.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the watch. I quickly flipped it open to check the hour. “Time for me to go,” I informed him.

He hadn’t recognized me, but he knew the timepiece well enough. He looked at me again, even more puzzled. All the same, he didn’t try to stop me as I made my way out of the mansion. I went through the darkened streets, my anger burning through me. But after twenty blocks, it was gone. It vanished and left me hollow. I thought of the grave expression on my father’s face when I’d tossed the stolen watch on the table. He hadn’t known me any more than Harry Block did now. From that time on I was a stranger to my father and to myself. I wished I’d never taken the thing in the first place. I wished I could have returned it. But like it or not, the watch belonged to me now, and every day I carried it, it served to remind me of who I had become.