The Genius

by Jesse Kellerman

  All that changed when I opened the mail that afternoon. Tucked in with the bills and postcards was a plain white envelope bearing a New York postmark, addressed to E. Muller, the Muller Gallery, fourth floor, 567 West Twenty-fifth Street, NY, NY 10001.

  I opened it up. Inside was a letter. It said, five hundred times,

  STOP

  The handwriting—cramped, uniform, shaky—I recognized as I might my own. Although it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to notice that the very same handwriting hung all around the gallery, calling out the names of rivers, roads, nations, landmarks—thousand of examples by which to confirm that Victor Cracke had written to me.

  Interlude: 1918.

  And Solomon Mueller rebegat himself, Solomon Muller.

  And Solomon Muller begat daughters, who married into other firms.

  And his brother Bernard, lazy as always, wed late and had no children. His chief interests—horses, parties, tobacco—kept him occupied until he died at the ripe old age of ninety-one, having outlived all three of his industrious brothers.

  And the third brother, Adolph, begat two boys, Morris and Arthur, neither of whom proved financially adept. At first Solomon extended them a long leash. “People must make mistakes to learn,” he told Adolph. But soon enough the elders came to understand that the only lesson the boys had taken from their mistakes was that they could make mistakes without consequence. Adolph turned his hair white trying to find them jobs worthy of their surnames yet that did not imperil the family fortune.

  And the youngest brother, Simon, begat Walter, who became like a son to Solomon, and who inherited the crown when his cousins proved worthless. Walter had an old-world quality to him, a refinement and slyness that spoke of the noble European roots the Mullers now boasted.

  That Solomon had come penniless, that he had begged seed money, that he had pushed a cart for ten thousand miles—all effaced from the family history. Everyone came together to decide that no, contrary to popular opinion, the Mullers came from regal stock. They hired a genealogist, in whose hands Jewish paupers (Hayyim, Avrohom, Yonason) became German aristocracy (Heinrich, Alfred, Johann). A coat of arms appeared on the company letterhead. Churches were joined, clubs established. Loans to the Union cause, extended by Solomon, came due, leading to dinners eaten at the White House, the signing of lucrative government contracts, the passing of motions on the Senate floor, declaring the Mullers First Citizens of the United States of America.

  Isaac Singer spoke the truth. You became your claim.

  And Walter, fashioned in his uncle’s form, begat Louis.

  And Louis begat consternation when he was discovered receiving fellatio from a kitchen boy. What was wrong with the scullery maids? They had suited Bernard just fine. What was wrong with women, with the debutantes falling all over themselves for the handsome young millionaire, swooning at their cotillions, competing to see who could stand longest in his presence, by silent consensus electing him the most eligible bachelor in Manhattan—if not the entire Eastern Seaboard—what was wrong with them? What was wrong with women? Daughters of partners to strengthen bonds, daughters of competitors to forge new ones, daughters of foreign dignitaries and of city politicians and of state senators, daughters from the old country; what was wrong with any of them? What was wrong with a woman, a polite and pretty and proper and sturdy-hipped heir-bearing woman, what was wrong? What? What in the world could be wrong with women?

  Louis got married.

  EARLY EVENING, APRIL 23, 1918. Louis walks the halls of the house on Fifth, a gift from his parents on the occasion of his wedding two years ago. On the day he and Bertha moved in, his mother said to him, “Fill every room,” and since then all he has heard are complaints. One would think they are on death’s door, so crazed are they for grandchildren.

  Fill every room. A preposterous idea, that. He’d have to have a harem. He’d have to be Genghis Khan. Five towering stories of wood, marble, glass, gold, and gemstones, done in the French Gothic style, groined and soaring and drafty—the house on Fifth will never be full. Every year they burn thousands of pounds of coal just trying to keep the place warm enough for human habitation.

  All that stone makes the screaming echo like the very depths of hell.

  Bertha despises the house. She has told Louis that she’d rather live in a mausoleum. He doubts that this is literally true, although the family resting place is in fine taste, and he assumes that fewer things break there. Homeownership holds not the slightest appeal to him, what with its tendency to disappoint: a ruptured pipe, a buckling floor. Such petty disasters would not concern the dead. Let them live on Fifth; he and Bertha will move to Salem Hills!

  At least he goes to work during the day. Bertha, left alone, has had to hire staff in order to prevent herself from going mad. An average day at the Louis Muller household finds twenty-seven full-time employees, every one of them screened personally by the mistress of the house. To those unfamiliar with Louis’s proclivities, Bertha’s requirements must seem entirely backward: they must be women or men old enough to have lost their looks.

  She got what she wanted. She always does.

  On April 23, 1918, the day staff have all been sent home early, and those who reside permanently at the house ordered to take the evening off—leaving a silence unlike anything Louis has heard since their first, terrible night alone together, a silence that turns a ticking clock into a falling axe; magnifies, too, his anticipation, as it is only between screams that the silence prevails. A spring shower has kicked up, smudging the view from the third floor, where he stands and waits for another.

  There she goes.

  What sounds! Louis admires his wife’s energy. He supposes that she has proven as appropriate a companion as he could have hoped for. She does not waste time, money, or words. When she became pregnant she stopped demanding that he come to her room at night; she even threw him a bone, in the form of a new sous chef. She had achieved her goal. “One child,” she told him. “We will be happy with whatever we get.”

  Already he understands that even a single child will work many changes. Every year since he was a boy Louis has gone—first with his parents, and then with his wife—to take the waters at Bad Pappelheim. When he told his mother that Bertha had canceled their upcoming summer tour, that she demanded he stay and instead accompany her and the child-to-be to the house in Bar Harbor, he expected a show of maternal support.

  Instead, she defected to Bertha’s side. “Naturally she won’t be ready to sail. We’ll all stay. We’ll all go together; your father will love the idea.”

  Big changes coming, seismic changes.

  Again she screams, causing him to tear the delicate antimacassar he has been kneading between his fingers. He lets it flutter to the floor and paces the room, massaging his earlobes, which is what he does in moments of crisis.

  He should be grateful, he knows. His shame could have been much worse. Nobody raised a finger to him, nobody shouted. They merely took him into a room and introduced him to a girl with wavy brown hair and a beauty mark underneath her left eye. Pretty, he knew, the way girls are meant to be. She had a sleepy smile, as though forever sinking into a warm bath, and appeared unaware of the proceedings. All an act, he later discovered; nobody noticed more, took more precise social notes, than Bertha.

  They have that in common, the fight to maintain an outward appearance. He must look the Muller man, and she must look a normal woman— when in fact she could run the company with one arm.

  The company. At least he has not let his father down in that regard. They have different styles, he and his father, but they work well together. In his middle age, Walter has become something of a fat cat, his obsession with destroying unionism bordering on the pathological. On several occasions, he and Roosevelt have exchanged words. “I have never liked the man. He reminds me of a child in need of a spanking.”

  Louis, on the other hand, prefers to conciliate. You most often get your way by allowing others to believe that they ar
e getting theirs.

  The screams grow more frequent. A good sign? Or a bad one? Is she near the end? Childbirth mystifies him. Pregnancy, too. He hardly saw her the entire time; he would leave for work in the morning before she had risen, come home and find that she had already gone to bed. Each time he saw her she seemed to have doubled in size, so enormous by the end that she seemed not a person but an egg with legs.

  Dear God, listen to her.

  Should she sound like that? He paces. He might not love her in the way people assume, but nobody could listen to that sort of yowling without feeling a twinge of sympathy. The doctor has sequestered her on the fourth floor, along with a trio of nurses and two of her most trusted maids, two unrelated women who look identical to Louis’s eye. He never addresses them directly, because he can never remember their names, Delia and… Delilah. As if they were not difficult enough to tell apart! Too many names to keep track of, in general. Why is life so complicated? Many days he does not want to talk to anyone but simply to crawl back into bed and sleep.

  The screaming goes on for another hour and then, just as Louis has begun to adjust to the noise—as he begins to wish they had kept at least the chef around, for his hunger is becoming unbearable—the house goes dead still.

  His heart hiccups. A wild thought: she is dead. Bertha is dead, and he is again a bachelor. The best of times, the worst of times. He will be free, blissfully free—but only until they force him to remarry. And they will do that as quickly as possible. They will find him some pink flower, an innocent ten years younger than he, a girl who knows nothing of his history; who will perceive him as slain by grief; who will want to attend to him, soothe him; who will strive to supplant Bertha’s ghost by climbing into his bed every single night… Every single night! Oh, God!

  His chest aches. He will have to produce another heir. He wishes she would scream again, just to let him know that she’s alive. Scream, for God’s sake. Scream and I’ll know you’ve gotten your child. He might not love Bertha but he could do worse. More than that—more than that: he has a sort of affection for her. If she died he would be stuck in that house, all alone, incapable of giving orders. Bertha runs the ship. Bertha knows everyone’s name and how much they are paid; it is fear of Bertha that prevents them from running off with all the valuables. He holds her in high esteem. She is the Prime Mover. He might even love her a little, as one loves a longtime friend. He does not want her to die, even as visions of liberation whirl through his mind; the stress of clashing emotions speeds up his pacing, the enormous brass coat of arms above the fireplace winking at him malignantly with each circuit. Scream, for God’s sake, scream!

  Unable to stomach any more, he barges up the stairs and through the door to the designated suite. Beyond the sitting room is a bedroom they have covered in heavy sheets of rubber and canvas. He saw them setting up several weeks ago and wondered what in the world could possibly require such precautions. Did the baby explode out?

  The bedroom door is locked but inside they are murmuring. Louis pounds.

  “Hello! Hello, what’s happening!”

  The murmuring ceases.

  From within, the doctor says, “Mr. Muller?”

  “What’s happening with my wife.”

  The doctor says something Louis cannot make out.

  “Bertha?” Louis has had enough. He rattles the knob and the door swings out abruptly, a nurse barreling into him, ushering him away from the threshold. He tries to see past her but a second nurse has already shut the door.

  “I demand to know what’s happening in there.”

  “Please come this way, sir.”

  “Did you hear me? Tell me—”

  The nurse takes him by the arm and pulls him from the room.

  “What are you doing.”

  “Sir, it’s best for the mother and child if you came with me.”

  “I—I will not—” He wrests away. “What was all that screaming about? Answer me or I’ll put you out into the street.”

  “The birth was normal, sir.”

  “Then what was all that screaming?”

  “That’s normal, sir.”

  “Then why did it stop like that? Where’s Bertha?”

  “She’s resting, sir. She had a spell.”

  “What do you mean a spell?”

  “Labor can be trying, sir.” She has no expression but Louis feels distinctly mocked.

  “I want to see her,” he says.

  “Please, sir, why don’t you return downstairs, and when the doctor feels it safe—”

  “Nonsense. She’s my wife, it’s my house, and I intend to go where I please.” He starts to move forward but the nurse blocks his path.

  “It’s better if you let her rest, sir.”

  “You’ve made your position clear. Now move.”

  “I can ask the doctor to come speak with you, if you’d like.”

  “Right away.”

  She bows her head and turns to go, leaving Louis in the middle of the hall.

  Five minutes later, the doctor emerges. He has done his best to tidy up, but Louis is still aghast to see flecks of blood on his collar.

  “Congratulations are in order, Mr. Muller. You have a new daughter.”

  A daughter? Unacceptable. He needs a son. He wants to tell the doctor to try again. “Where’s Bertha.”

  “She’s resting.”

  “I need to speak with her.”

  “Your wife has undergone a terrific ordeal,” says the doctor. His hands are trembling. “It’s best if we let her rest.”

  “Has something happened to her?”

  “Not at all, sir. As I said, she’s tired, but otherwise perfectly healthy.” Louis is no fool. He knows something is wrong. He repeats his question, and the doctor again assures him. But those shaking hands… A new thought occurs to him.

  “Is something wrong with the baby?”

  The doctor opens his mouth but Louis interrupts him.

  “I want to see her. Now. Take me to her.”

  Again the doctor hesitates. “Come with me.”

  As they pass through the sitting room, Louis thinks about what will happen if the baby dies. They must try again—but wouldn’t they have to do that, regardless? A girl will not do. If the baby dies, he will be sad most of all for Bertha, for whom the entire process—conception to delivery— has been a project undertaken virtually single-handedly. Having invested so much hope and desire in one moment, she will be inconsolable until she has a real, live child at her breast. He owes her that much. He promises himself that if the baby dies, he will put up a brave face and get her pregnant again as soon as possible.

  The doctor is talking but Louis has not paid attention: “…such things happen.”

  What is he talking about, such things. Stillbirths aren’t rare. Louis knows that. His mother had one before him. Out with it, he wants to tell the doctor. Be a man.

  A second bedroom branches from the sitting room. The maid—for the life of him, Louis cannot recall which one—has a bundle on her lap, and her rocking chair creaks soothingly. A flash of red flesh; a brief cry; it’s alive.

  He did not expect to feel joy. He has not prepared himself. Without having seen the child’s face he knows that he will love her, and that this love will be different from any of his previous loves—all of which have revolved around his own gratification. What he feels now is a crushing need to protect.

  The doctor takes the bundle from the maid. Louis almost leaps to snatch the baby away. His child. He doesn’t want her held by those shaky hands.

  The doctor shows Louis how to support the head, resting the bundle in the crook of Louis’s arm. Her face is still mostly obscured by a fold of cloth.

  “I can’t see her,” he says.

  Looking queasy, the doctor peels back the cloth. “You must understand,” he says. “We have no means of predicting.”

  Louis looks at his daughter and is confused. They appear to have given him a Chinese baby. Bertha has been unfaithful?
He does not understand. His daughter has a small mouth, and her tongue protrudes in a sloppy way… and her eyes. They are narrow and slanted, the irises spotted with white. The doctor speaks of mental defects and therapies of various sorts, words Louis hears but does not understand.

  “As I said, we cannot be sure why such things occur, as they are impossible for science to predict, yet, and unfortunately I cannot offer you a definitive course of treatment. Very little success has resulted thus far, although much research remains to…”

  Louis does not understand any of this babble, does not understand talk of “mongoloidism,” does not understand why the maid has begun to weep quietly. He understands only that he has a new cause for shame, and that some things cannot be hidden, not even in America.

  • 8 •

  As soon as I saw the letter, I called McGrath.

  He said, “You remember how to get here?”

  This time I did some advance planning and hired a car and driver for the following day. It took me the better part of an afternoon to unmount and pack up the journals, which I took along with photocopies of the Cherubs and the newspaper portraits that I’d dug up. I couldn’t think of anything else that would help except the letter itself, and that I had in a large Ziploc bag, imagining that McGrath would whip out a fingerprint kit and plug the information into a database yielding Cracke’s location and life history.

  Instead he just chuckled. He put the bag with the letter on the table and stared at its tight command: STOP. After a few moments he said, “I don’t know why I’m still reading this. I’m pretty sure I know what’s going to happen next.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Do?”

  “With that.”

  “Well, you could take it to the police.”

  “You are the police.”

  “Ex,” he said. “Sure. You can take it to the police if you want. I’ll call ahead for you, if you’d like. Let me save you some time: they’ll won’t be able to do a thing. You don’t know who he is, you don’t really know that he wrote it, and even if you had those two nailed, he hasn’t broken the law.” He smiled like a death’s-head. “Anybody can send a letter like this, it’s in the Constitution.”