Some minutes later, while the hotel clerk was helping a guest with his suitcases, Maxwell snuck behind the front desk and started flipping through the pages of the guest register, landing on February 1933, the same month his father had sent his first letter from Chicago. When he saw his father’s name, halfway down the page under Room 42, Maxwell started shaking. He thought about his new life with his father in Chicago, but then the hotel clerk saw him behind the front desk and told him in a calm voice (but a voice with traces of violence, like a claw) that if he didn’t leave the hotel that second he would personally take him out back into the alley, if the boy understood what he meant.
But a young maid who had heard the hotel clerk ran into the lobby, glared at him, and said, “Nobody’s taking nobody out back, Mr. Walker.” She then touched Maxwell’s back with her long fingers and said, “What’s wrong, child?”
“My father’s in Room 42,” he said carefully.
“Okay then,” she said.
The maid and Maxwell went up four flights of dimly lit stairs and she asked questions the entire time: where are you from, child? how old are you, child? are you hungry, child? her voice like low-lying waters running through a cypress grove, and Maxwell knew that she had children or badly wanted children of her own. On the fourth floor there were yellow light bulbs hanging by wires and whitewashed walls and rows and rows of doors, multiplying in the hallway, all black, like portals.
They came to Room 42, and the maid knocked. When no one answered, she opened the door for him with her keys. The room smelled musty. In one corner stood an iron bed with a paper bag hanging on one of the bedposts; in another, a cheap wooden wardrobe and a desk. Above the desk hung a faded painting of a prairie with a man and a woman on horseback and a white prairie schooner being pulled by two pairs of large oxen. A small, filthy window overlooked the alley below. There were no signs of his father, or anyone really.
“Lots of men come through like ghosts,” said the maid.
* * *
Afterward, for hours on end, Maxwell stood alone under the red and white awning of a large bargain store across the street from the Jonava, watching for his father in the crowds lining the sidewalks or in Chryslers and Fords on Halsted Street, watching for his tall self-assured gait, his sharp jaw, his weather-beaten forehead, his air of grief (just like Maxwell’s air of grief) but all he saw were semblances, men who seemed but never were. Something is wrong, he thought. The crowds were part of the same world he lived in and yet not one person could take his arm and say, “I knew you when you were born” or “I knew you before everything changed” or “I am your father.”
* * *
Later, after her shift had ended, the young maid saw Maxwell still standing under the awning of the bargain store. She approached, looked him in his eyes, which were full of tears, and said, “Oh, child.”
That night, after the young maid bought Maxwell a hot dog, she took him to a Roman Catholic orphanage for boys on West 15th Street. The director, a serious and obtrusive, if baby-faced, nun asked Maxwell if he was Protestant, on account of him being a Negro. After which Maxwell, instead of explaining that his mother had emigrated from the Dominican Republic, a country so Catholic the old mad pirate had once told him that even the Pope avoided visiting it, he just shook his head and lifted his gaze toward an immense and brightly colored mural of boys marching through a wheat field under a blazing sun, at the center of which was—impossibly—a wooden cross. The boys were German, Irish, and Italian immigrants (that much was clear), but their translucent white skin, the wheat field, and the sun were all hyperbolically American. Then, Maxwell imagined the boys marching beyond the wheat field, through towns with Indigenous and Spanish names that rose from rust-colored lands like hallucinations of towns, without stopping, until they came to the sea (a sea they feared because of the unknown boys on the other side), a perfectly gray sea, utterly gray and still.
At that moment, which hardly lasted a second, Maxwell decided that he didn’t want to be an orphan, but at the very same moment the director handed the young maid a paper and told her to sign. Now he was an orphan.
* * *
At 5:26 a.m. every morning, a young bird-like nun wielding a radiator brush woke the boys in Maxwell’s dormitory and for twenty minutes they performed military calisthenics—jumping jacks, push-ups, and sit-ups. After washing up, they were given a piece of bread and led single file to a church adjoining the orphanage, where they sat on long pews and listened to a deacon with a strange, sometimes incomprehensible sense of humor, as he delivered homilies about the Trinity (which later, in Maxwell’s mind, took the shape of a Pythagorean pyramid).
Most of the boys in the orphanage did not talk to Maxwell. Behind his back, one flat-faced kid, thirteen or fourteen, even gave him the nickname Kerchak, after the “savage king ape” who killed Tarzan’s father. He didn’t know Maxwell’s real name. Maxwell didn’t know his real name, either. The nuns didn’t call the boys by their names, but rather by their orphan case number followed by their dormitory. The flat-faced boy’s name, for example, was 23-7. Maxwell’s name was 72-9.
In the afternoons, after lunch, they were led single file to an outdoor playground, or to a classroom, where they sat silently under the smoke-eyed gaze of an old nun, filling out reading and math workbooks, which, to Maxwell (if to no one else in that classroom) were far too easy.
More often than not, dinner was bread, cheese, and salty tomato soup. Occasionally, after dinner, the young maid stopped by the orphanage to check in on Maxwell. Once or twice, he saw her from the distance talking to the director. He could see that the young maid, in turn, was watching him out of the corner of her eye, her look betraying an unfulfilled urgency, as if sunk in a well of compassion, until she stopped coming altogether.
At night, in the dark, he lay on his cot in dormitory number 9 still as a stone statue, thinking of the unknown whereabouts of his father and carefully planning his escape from the orphanage to find him.
* * *
A few weeks later, Maxwell had his chance. One afternoon, after lunch, the old smoke-eyed nun didn’t show up for their lessons. The boys, who assumed the nun was either dead or dying, her soul either floating upward like cigarette smoke, or, in all likelihood, being pulled quicksand-like into the hellish core of the Earth, marched up and down the classroom like they had scorpions in their pants, stood on their desks, threw paper balls, told dirty jokes, and even planned to strap the wooden cross over the blackboard to 65-9’s back.
During the commotion, Maxwell left the classroom and went to his dormitory to gather his belongings. The front doors were blocked by two nuns quietly talking, so he began to search for another way out, and that’s how he found the hiding place.
The hiding place was extremely simple, a small alcove converted into a janitor’s closet with a metal storage cabinet, a washbasin, and an old wooden door that looked like it had been taken from a confessional. The alcove was wide enough for Maxwell to crouch in the center with the door closed. While he waited, he stripped and washed his clothes in the washbasin. At some point, he heard the nun in charge of his dormitory yelling at a few boys in the hallway. “Where is 72-9?” she screeched like a hawk that delights in its territory, to which there was jittery silence, followed by the sylph-like sounds of the radiator brush smacking across a boy’s cheek.
Some hours later, long after his clothes had air-dried and the boys and nuns had gone to sleep, Maxwell left the janitor’s closet and snuck into the cafeteria, where he took two apples and a box of oatmeal. Nourishment, he thought. Then he walked out of the orphanage through the front doors without once looking at the immense and brightly colored mural above.
* * *
At night, in an alley next to the Jonava, Maxwell slept on a piece of cardboard. During the day, he wandered the market, searching for his father.
From time to time he stopped to examine a shop through a window or a stand br
imming with novelty displays: Civil War pistols, salves in green-tinted bottles, ivory-handled knives, crates of liquor sold out of the trunk of a Ford, ornate iron birdcages, and blankets and rugs with designs of golden insects.
On one occasion, he stood for hours near a vendor selling fading antique maps of the New World in the hopes that it would attract his father’s attention. Once, exhausted by his search, he spent an afternoon mesmerized by an old musician wearing black slippers who sang and played from a dented black guitar. Some of the musician’s songs were familiar to Maxwell, Southern songs about riverboats, blue skies, and lost loves, joyful and melancholic in turn, but some of his other songs were new and strange to Maxwell, songs that recounted violent love affairs and shattered landscapes and memories of home that were like burning fires, so, in one sense, these new songs ached and throbbed and bled (as his mother might have said) like Prometheus’ liver, but they also gave a sensation of regeneration, a tingling, cooling sensation like the cellular division and regrowth of Prometheus’ liver, which was the sensation of returning to a place never seen before but somehow still remembered.
* * *
I don’t know what I’m doing here, Maxwell said to himself after he’d been searching for his father in the market for two weeks. He said it at night in the alley next to the Jonava while trying to fall asleep on the piece of cardboard. But by then he had already twice seen the Jewish boy who had told him not to leave the city yet.
The first time was during a particularly cool morning when Maxwell was looking through an old geometry textbook at a bookstall. The Jewish boy, who was a full head shorter than Maxwell and who had black curly hair and long wiry arms, was inspecting a milk crate full of old magazines and talking confidently to the owner in a guttural foreign language. Then, for some reason unclear to Maxwell, the Jewish boy turned to him, smiled (an awkward electric shock of a smile), and told him in English he was having a hell of a time that day looking for werewolf stories in old issues of Weird Tales. He’d already been to three other bookstalls that morning, to no avail. The first one he had ever read was a novella entitled The Werewolf of Ponkert by H. Warner Munn in the July 1925 issue, and this led him to the short story “The Werewolf of St. Bonnot” by Seabury Quinn in the May–July 1924 issue.
Some months later, in the April 1926 issue, he found an unexpected werewolf story by C. Franklin Miller entitled “Things That Are God’s.” Then, following this logic he also found The Wolf-Woman by Bassett Morgan in the September 1927 issue. After scanning a few more issues in reference to both werewolves and women, he realized with some melancholy that he had come full circle, more or less, with The Werewolf’s Daughter by H. Warner Munn, a novel in entirety spanning three issues in 1928 from October to December. The year 1929, he observed, was suspiciously absent of werewolves and he suspected that this had something to do with the pale and predatory men of Wall Street who had caused the Panic and were probably werewolves themselves and now trying to hide the fact, but he didn’t have proof, at least not yet.
After the boy stopped talking, he let out a deep sigh of resignation, waved goodbye to the shop owner and Maxwell, who was by then a little stunned, and left.
* * *
The second time Maxwell saw the Jewish boy was a few days later, when he went to a grocer on West 14th Street to look for his father. It was getting dark, but Maxwell could still make him out standing under the globular lights of a delicatessen next door. He was wearing a large sandwich board with the words Only the Best on the Planet.
When he saw Maxwell, the boy waved him over. Then he took off the sandwich board and took out a cigarette to share with him. Since Maxwell didn’t know what to say, he nodded and took the cigarette. The boy smiled and, without skipping a beat from a few days earlier, started to explain that since the last time they’d seen each other he’d visited the editorial offices of Weird Tales on 840 North Michigan Avenue, where none other than Mr. Wright, the editor of Weird Tales, had told him that there was a very good reason for the omission of werewolves in the 1929 issues, a reason he couldn’t just tell anybody off the street, but one that could still in all likelihood be rooted out from a dime novel published that same year called The Werewolf of New York City by Margaret Bok.
It was a blood-soaked and uncanny dime novel which had taken him nearly two days to find if only four hours to read and which was about a solitary wealthy banker who, at night when the moon was bright and full, metamorphosed into a werewolf and prowled tenement buildings of the Lower East Side looking for unsuspecting, newly immigrated, and impoverished victims, all of which not only proved his theory correct but also gave an entirely new historical significance to the Panic of 1929.
“I don’t believe in conspiracies all the time, Joe,” he said, “but I had to tell someone.”
Maxwell and the boy passed the cigarette back and forth.
“So, Joe,” he said, “what brings you here? You need any more math books?”
Maxwell told the boy that he was looking for his father. “I was supposed to meet him at the Jonava, but I don’t where he is,” he said. Then he added: “I think I’m going to go home.”
“Where’s home?” the boy asked.
“New Orleans.”
The boy took one final drag of the cigarette before snuffing it out on the curb. He then put the cigarette butt in his front right pocket. “Shit, Joe, don’t leave just yet,” he said, finally. “I’ll help you look for him. Meet me at the bookstand tomorrow morning.”
Then they said goodbye, but not without first introducing themselves:
“My name is Benjamin Drower,” the boy said, “what’s yours?”
He told him it was Maxwell Moreau, after which the boy said, “Like the market and the doctor. Got it.” They shook hands and went their separate ways.
All of this Maxwell recalled as he tossed and turned on the piece of cardboard in the alley next to the Jonava, unable to sleep. What was it about the boy that made Maxwell tell him about his father? Was it his short height, his vague foreignness, the fact that unlike anybody else in the market he had talked to Maxwell, or even the sudden impression that, like an impossible perpetual motion machine, he had never stopped moving? And he wondered again: I don’t know what I’m doing here, should I return to New Orleans? is there an unopened letter from my father waiting for me there? would I even know him if I saw him again after all these years? Finally he grew tired of all the questions and he focused instead on the unequivocal shapes of a geometry problem floating like dust under his closed eyelids, and fell asleep.
* * *
By the time Maxwell went to the bookstand the following morning, Benjamin was already there waiting for him. Wandering the market, they questioned vendors like detectives. Had they met a man named Titus Moreau from New Orleans? they asked. Had they met anybody staying at the Jonava looking for work? Had they seen a man writing letters or reading the sky? Had they heard any rumors about someone called the Last Pirate of the New World? Etc., etc. To which some of the vendors looked askew, and to which others simply said, “Some men might have a name like that,” or “Lots of men from the South here,” or “Lots of people from everywhere here.”
In any case, the vendors, many of whom Benjamin knew personally, knew nothing. Two or three times, he fell into heated arguments with the vendors in the same guttural foreign language Maxwell had heard him speak earlier. Maxwell didn’t ask what language he and the vendors were speaking. But later, Benjamin explained to him, a little frustrated, that it was next to impossible that nobody in the market knew anything, but the problem was that the vendors thought and often spoke in Yiddish, a language that, at least according to his father, a tailor originally from Vitebsk, suffered from a sense of Weltschmerz, which was the melancholic suspicion that there was never enough knowledge or reality to go around.
Later still, as they sat on a curb in front of the delicatessen on West 14th Street, sharing a sticky
bun Benjamin had purchased and watching the coral sunset as it swirled above the market stands, Benjamin asked Maxwell where he was staying.
“I was staying at the Catholic orphanage,” he said, “but I snuck out.”
“Why’d you sneak out?” asked Benjamin.
“They’re Catholics,” he said, “they wouldn’t let me leave.”
Benjamin laughed. Then he told Maxwell he had an idea.
“Follow me,” he said.
They hopped the metal bumper of a streetcar heading west and then another heading south. They passed through several neighborhoods and a park with worn-out tents surrounding a steadily burning fire in a steel drum. Some minutes later, they hopped off the streetcar and walked a few blocks west until they reached a limestone building. Out front, a group of older boys stood talking with two middle-aged men wearing black suits and black hats, one of whom, Benjamin whispered to Maxwell, was his rabbi. As they walked by, an obstinate silence descended inexplicably over the quartet.
They entered the limestone building and climbed five flights of stairs until they reached a locked door to the roof. Benjamin took out a key and opened it and they walked outside. The sky was black and the lights of the endless city were like thousands of incandescent anemones floating on the surface of a black sea. At the far end of the roof stood a small storage shed. Inside was a bookshelf, lined with dime novels and old issues of Amazing Stories and Weird Tales, and a single, spotless cot in the center. On the cot was a wool blanket, a flashlight, and a black skullcap, which Benjamin picked up and put in his back pocket.
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau Page 17