The Puzzle King Read Online Free

bananas and the other exotic fruits he’d discovered in America. He drew real likenesses of the people in the apartment, not caricatures with exaggerated features and swipes of brushstrokes. In Simon’s pictures, Mr. Abner’s mole above his right eyebrow looked as smooth and pink as it did in real life, and the purple veins in Mrs. Futterman’s nose were as clear and visceral as the coarse hairs sprouting out of Mr. Selig’s ears. Simon’s drawings were almost obsessive in their exactitude. He drew fast and constantly, as if he was trying to make the pencil or crayon keep up with the images that played in his head like a zoetrope.
    The others at 262 Eldridge Street called him Rembrandt, although with their Yiddish, Hungarian, and Russian accents, it came out with too many
r
s at the beginning. He nodded and accepted their compliments with a smile. “What a polite boy,” they said. “How remarkable for a child to be that sensitive to adults. And no parents, to boot.” Mostly, he looked serious and old for his age, but sometimes, when his blue-gray eyes were open wide behind his rimless glasses and his mouth was round and slightly puckered, it was easy to look at Simon and find the face of a helpless child.
    What they couldn’t see was how Simon was locked up inside. Unlearning one language while claiming another, he owned few words to give voice to his feelings. All he could do was travel through his eyes, tracing the lines and flows of what he saw in his head. Like the other people at 262 Eldridge Street, he wasfrom somewhere else that didn’t want him. He was stuck with them in this little house, all of them as poor as they’d been before they got here. Only now there was no America to look toward. Simon hoped that he would find his place, that he would be one of the lucky ones whose pictures he had seen in the newspaper: the ones who found a foothold in this world. In that way, he felt separate from the other people in the house, and even, at times, disparaging of them.
    These people. They talk all the time. They talk in the language of the old country. And what do they talk about? They talk about nothing. They talk about food and money and the work they do, and they talk about each other. They will never be Americans if they don’t learn to speak English the way Americans do. They never go anywhere, just to their jobs and back. The same four blocks every day. I will learn to speak so that no American will be able to tell that I am not one of them. I’ll talk about the crimes and the fires and the prize fights and I’ll go to far away places like the Bronx and Brooklyn. I won’t end up here like the rest of them. God will put me in jail for having bad thoughts like this, I know He will. But when my mama and my sisters and brothers come to America, they have to have a house and money. I promised
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    O N THE WALL in the place where he slept were two drawings that Simon had made the day before he left the ship: one of his sisters and brothers, and one of his mother. Often, he would close his eyes and try to conjure up his father, but the image would never come to him. He’d envisioned pieces of each family member then put them together as best he could. In thedrawings he made, the lines were faded or creased with age but the forms were unmistakable and the strokes were the broad and simple ones of a child’s hand. These were the only pictures that lacked the concentration and fluidity of the others.
    In one of them, two girls and four boys of varying heights were standing in front of a house. One of the boys, the smallest in the group, had a pronounced cowlick. A girl with pigtails held on to a doll with only one eye, which appeared to have been made from a button. The other girl was slightly stooped and did not have the same smiling face as the rest of them. A purple ribbon around her long hair culminated in a bow that was far too showy and carefree for the rest of her. It was clear that Simon took time