How to Find Your Way in the Dark

by Derek B. Miller

  Lenny stood up again and the spotlight followed him. The audience was having a wonderful time and showing their appreciation. They thought he was hilarious. The guy in the corner of the stage was tapping his watch, but Lenny wasn’t having any of that. Whoever was scheduled for the next slot might as well drop dead as far as Lenny was concerned. He was on a roll.

  “When I was a child, these parents I was introducing you to a moment ago, they lied. I don’t mean on one occasion. They lied to me about everything. Topics large and small. Do we have any more cookies? No. But we did. What are we having for dinner? Chicken. But it wasn’t, it was fish. It was like this every day. One day, when I reached the age of sixteen, I found the courage to confront them. I said, ‘I know you’ve been lying. I want to know why. Why have you treated me this way?’ And my mother, without missing a beat, says, ‘You started it!’

  “I was taken aback. What had I done? Had all this been set in motion by . . . me? What if this was all my fault?

  “ ‘How?’ I asked.

  “My mother is not a dramatic woman. But this time she answers by putting on a Broadway show. The cast is her and a tiny little me. I’m two and a toddler, and she’s playing both parts.

  “Hands on her hips, she turns to Little Me, and asks, ‘Did you poo?’

  “Little Me is aghast. How did he get pulled into such a conversation? I know this because he has turned his head and placed his hand on his chest and looked up at his inquisitor. Little Me is befuddled. Be-baffled. Even slightly offended.

  “ ‘No,’ says Little Me.

  “ ‘You didn’t poo?’

  “ ‘Nope.’

  “ ‘So . . . it’s me then. I pooed,’ says my mother to Little Me.

  “Little Me is starting to get anxious. He is only two but already understands that just because a proposition isn’t true doesn’t mean the inverse is automatically true. Little Me already learned this lesson when he asked for a cookie last week. He learned that just because he couldn’t have a cookie, it didn’t automatically mean that she could. Every time Little Me asked for a cookie and the answer was no, she didn’t automatically stick one in her own mouth. Sometimes no one gets a cookie. Damned if he knew why, but my point is this: Maybe, in this case, no one had pooed. That made perfect sense.

  “ ‘Or maybe you’re suggesting,’ she said, leaning into it, ‘that I’m having a stroke.’

  “Stroke? A stroke?” Lenny yelled, walking around onstage with the microphone in his hand, “What’s a stroke? I’m two. I don’t know what a stroke is. I’ve been splitting my conscious time between learning the fundamental building blocks of human reason and trying to figure out whether I can push my belly button deep enough into my body to touch my own spine! And she’s talking about strokes.”

  Lenny stood up very straight, put a hand on his hip, and took a long, long beat.

  “Not here,” he said to everyone in the audience, breaking from his story and shaking his head at everyone. “Wait until you get home.”

  The audience was barely able to breathe. Sheldon thought Lenny was rather funny, but none of this was that far from conversations they’d actually had. Maybe putting it onstage under a spotlight had a magical power he didn’t understand.

  When the audience stopped laughing to inhale, Lenny pressed on.

  “ ‘So, you’re saying,’ this is sixteen-year-old me again, my mother is done performing, and I’m trying to understand this, ‘that I lied to you about having pooed and now, when you tell me I’m adopted and really Irish, that it’s just your way of getting back at me for the hardship you suffered for being the parent you chose to be.’

  “ ‘That’s exactly right!’ she said!

  “I look to my father. The patriarch. This son of David. I wait for him to rescue me from the crazy that I now know goes all the way down. But he doesn’t. My hero is chewing his cud in the corner of the living room and nodding at whatever my mother says.

  “Despondent, I go to visit my grandparents at the nursing home to try to understand the source of this. At the nursing home is my grandmother. The woman who raised my mother. The woman who walked out of Russia with a sack on her back so we could thrive in the United States and have the freedom and safety that she and her family never experienced. The moment I walk into the room, every serious question is wiped from my mind and a new one pops in that I have to ask. ‘Grandma . . . did you poo?’

  “And she looks at me the way I looked at my mother, and the tumblers fall into place. She says . . . ‘No. Did you?’

  “Thank you, everyone. I’m so glad to be here with you here in the Catskills and not in Germany with a bunch of Nazis and all their many, many friends! Good night!”

  * * *

  Lenny got fired much faster this time.

  * * *

  As the audience clapped and cheered and Miriam wiped her eyes with a napkin, Sheldon excused himself and joined Lenny offstage in the dark, where Mr. Feynman—tall, skinny, red-faced even in the dark, and with a thick Brooklyn accent that made it sound like he was yelling no matter what he said—was shaking a bony finger at Lenny like he was conducting a demonic orchestra.

  “And what’s more, you’ll never work this circuit up here again! I’ll tell everyone!”

  Lenny looked as dumbstruck as his two-year-old little self. “Why?”

  “Aside from your going on for more than twenty minutes when you were allotted ten?”

  “Yes,” Lenny said defiantly. “I know the guy scheduled after me. I did you a favor. Leibowitz could bore the dead.”

  Mr. Feynman counted off on his freakishly long fingers the reasons he was firing Lenny. “You talked about baby poo. You hit on an actual woman from the actual audience. You talked about her left . . . what the hell did you call it?”

  “Ba-boo-bage.”

  “You can’t talk about a woman’s ba-boo-bages!”

  “How about breasticles?”

  “You called this place a dump,” Feynman yelled. “You insulted a guy in the audience—a guy who could have been a cop or a thug . . . I’ve heard of men’s throats being slit for less than this. You’re making advances on his girl in front of everyone! You insulted Mexicans and the Irish. The Irish, who are all cops, by the way. You compared my audience with a bunch of Nazis!”

  “Favorably!”

  “That’s not the point!”

  “Why does everyone keep saying that to me?”

  “You’re never gonna work in this town again. What’s your name again?”

  Lenny looked at Sheldon and Sheldon shrugged.

  “Bruno Krupinski,” Lenny answered.

  Lenny always seemed to have an extra round in the chamber.

  “Krupinski, you’re out of here. You’re blacklisted, you hear me!”

  “This isn’t the last you’ve heard from Bruno Krupinski!” shouted Lenny, though clearly it was.

  Feynman was gone in two enormous strides.

  Alone at the edge of the stage, Lenny lost interest in Feynman and looked at Sheldon with a pleading eye. “Did you like it?”

  “It was funny. I liked it.”

  “You weren’t laughing much. It was making me nervous.”

  “I knew the bicycle joke because we both heard it last week. I thought the bit about stealing the jokes while complaining about people stealing jokes was funny.”

  “What about the other stuff?”

  “Well . . . you know. We both knew this about your parents. The stroke thing was new. I like the bit about the belly button.”

  Lenny nodded. It explained why Sheldon hadn’t laughed much. He needed strangers, and the stranger the better. He vowed right there never to tell jokes in his hometown.

  “I’m starting to understand why everyone changes their names in show business,” Sheldon said, as they started to walk back toward Miriam. “You try, you die onstage, you come back as someone else and try again. There’s a lot of death and reincarnation. You’d think the Hindus would dominate in this profe
ssion rather than us.”

  “Can I be you for a while?” Lenny asked. “I got a spot tomorrow night at the same time. I think the name Sheldon Horowitz could be a good name. I don’t want to be Lenny Bernstein until I’m accepted, and we already killed off Bruno Krupinski.”

  “Sure, whatever. You’re gonna need some new material, though.”

  “Maybe I’ll steal some like everyone else does.”

  “Is it OK to steal?”

  “Everyone steals. Knowing who to steal from is the real art.”

  That was it. That was the piece Sheldon was missing. Knowing who to steal from.

  Mirabelle’s boyfriend had come to Grossinger’s to sell the jewels to someone who was still at the hotel, this Thaleman guy. Did Thaleman know him or was this an arranged thing? Sheldon didn’t know. What he did know was that Thaleman must have a suitcase of cash and was waiting for the jewels to show up and so far they hadn’t; the cash he must have in his room, a room that Sheldon had a key for. If he played this right, Sheldon could frame Lorenzo and get rich at the same time. The problem with his plan was that he needed some jewels and he’d just thrown his in the river. Miriam’s guests, however, had given him an idea.

  “Lenny, what time are you going on as me tomorrow night?”

  “About nine.”

  “That’ll work. I can’t be there.”

  “Is that a joke?”

  “No. I’m serious.”

  “That’s too bad. Why not?”

  “I’ve got to be in two places at once.”

  “You mean that you can’t be in two places at once.”

  “No, I meant the first thing.”

  Miriam wasn’t listening to either of them. She was watching some fifteen-year-old punk named Jerry Lewis fall around on stage. Sheldon wasn’t sure whether all that clowning around was funny, but Miriam was in stitches and Sheldon immediately didn’t like the guy.

  Mrs. Ullman

  IN THEIR ROOM, LENNY slept as Sheldon stared at the ceiling. In his chest, he could feel the light thrumming of the very distant dance music that would end at one o’clock. He was wrecked from a long day, but he wanted to visualize his plan over and over the way Lenny memorized his comedy routines.

  Sheldon tried to picture his plan, but his mind kept returning to their bicycle ride home. He, Miriam, and Lenny rode back at 11:30. Lenny swerved over the street to test the grip of his rubber wheels, and Miriam stood in her pedals as she glided down a long hill, raising one hand over her head and catching the wind in the folds of her skirt that flapped behind her.

  The temperature had finally dropped, and the ride warmed their muscles as the air cooled their faces. The mosquitos weren’t as bad as they’d expected, and the little gnats that usually swarmed around them on forested walks couldn’t keep up with the speed of their bikes.

  They’d felt good.

  On this day, Sheldon had seen Mirabelle and lost her. He’d visited a town that would soon vanish from the face of the earth. He’d thrown a fortune in jewels into a river, and someday all of New York would drink the water that hid those sparkling gems. He’d heard his best friend fill a room with laughter and joy and be punished for it; and he’d seen how beautiful a girl can be when she feels happy.

  It was exhausting. He fell asleep imagining Mirabelle on that bicycle instead of Miriam, her yellow dress leaving a trail of blinding light behind her.

  * * *

  Sheldon woke in a panic. He sat up in his bed and spun so his feet touched the ground. Every possible error he might have made came into his mind.

  What if Lorenzo had broken into Mirabelle’s room in the middle of the night and not found them? The guy was a murderous gangster, after all. He could probably break into a room. Would he have realized they were gone and returned immediately to New Haven or Hartford? That was possible. And what about the buyer, Thaleman? How long was he going to wait around for the seller to show up? Did Lorenzo know Thaleman? Probably not, because the whole point of Mirabelle’s boyfriend’s line of work was to fence hot jewels from a seller like Ernie Caruso to a buyer like Thaleman. Why use a middleman at all if they all knew each other?

  Sheldon needed to get to the register to find Thaleman’s room number. After that, he would need to work fast.

  * * *

  Showering and dressing as fast as a marine on maneuvers, Sheldon left Lenny snoozing as he made his way down the carpeted hallway toward the main lobby at 6:30. His own shift didn’t start until ten so he had some time he wanted to use. He wore his full bellhop uniform to blend into the landscape.

  A woman named Dorothy Reiser worked the night shift at reception. She was a widow who had lost her husband to cancer fifteen years ago and worked at Grossinger’s during the summers because it reminded her of happier times. For the rest of the year, she was a teacher.

  “Good morning,” she said. “You’re up bright and early.”

  “I like getting an early start,” Sheldon lied.

  “That’s not common with teenagers.”

  “I walk to the beat of my own drummer, Mrs. Reiser.”

  “Your name’s Sheldon, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “There’s not much for you to do yet. The boys on the shift are still here, and they won’t want you taking their tips from people coming in now.”

  “I understand, ma’am. I’m going to check the registry to see if anyone’s coming in that I know.”

  “Whom I know. Not that I know. They are people, not objects.”

  Sheldon opened the heavy red guest book and ran his finger down the pages. Mrs. Reiser had other things to do than talk with one of the dozen teenage bellhops. So she didn’t notice that Sheldon was flipping the pages backward, searching for the time Mr. Thaleman checked in and where his room was located.

  Room 236.

  That was in the same hallway as Lorenzo in 218. They’d probably walked right past each other and not known. Which was how Sir-Lies-a-Lot made money, Sheldon figured.

  But still.

  Mrs. Ullman—the woman with the sapphire and diamond necklace he saw in the lobby last night—was in room 122.

  It was a pity that his plan had to involve her, but he couldn’t think of another way. The tricky part was going to be getting inside Mrs. Ullman’s room at a time when she wasn’t there. If she’d been at the party all night, she might be sleeping in.

  All of these problems were caused by Mirabelle—or at least they had started with her. But his solution had come from her as well. Mirabelle’s old story about that war pigeon had given Sheldon the idea of using messages to move the players around on his chessboard at his command.

  The third drawer down on the left side of the telephone contained all kinds of stationery. Some of it was for the guests who wanted to write letters, and some of it was for the staff who needed to fill out forms. The fourth slot down was used for messages between guests. Staff would often jot these down, place them into a fine envelope, and deliver them or else leave them beside the room keys that hung at reception. When the guests returned for their keys, the notes would be handed over.

  Sheldon turned to look at the wall of keys. Ullman’s key to room 122 was hanging there. That meant she was out of the room and possibly at an early breakfast, and that surprised him even though old people do tend to sleep less. Thaleman’s key to 236 and Lorenzo’s key to 218 were both off their hooks, so the men were still in their rooms.

  “Mrs. Reiser?” Sheldon said. “Do guests have more than one key to their room?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I found one by the lake the other day,” Sheldon lied, “and returned it to the slot here, but I wasn’t sure whether the guest might still have been able to get in the room. I was just curious. It’s my first season here.”

  “No. There’s only one guest key per room. When they leave the room, they give the key to us for safekeeping. I’m sure the guest in question came right back here to inquire, so I’m sure all was well.”

&
nbsp; “Right. Of course. Sorry.”

  “No need to apologize,” she said, without looking up from her paperwork. “It’s good that you’re curious. Most bellhops don’t ask enough questions. If you keep at it, you could graduate to reception one of these summers.”

  When Mrs. Reiser left reception to attend to a back-office matter, Sheldon snagged both Ullman’s room key and the key to the vacant room across the hall from hers, and left.

  * * *

  Mornings could be lazy times. The bars were open late, and many guests played cards and drank and socialized long after the bands had packed it in. The only person Sheldon passed in the hall was a woman walking dutifully after her two sons who were dressed for the lake. It was quite cool outside, and the sun had barely begun to work on the dew. Walking through the grass at this hour would soak their feet.

  He tipped his hat.

  “Ma’am,” he said, without looking at her.

  When they had passed, he opened a linen closet and removed an armful of towels that helped cover his face. Proceeding slowly to room 122, Sheldon calmed himself by remembering that—at this exact moment—he was only a bellhop carrying towels. He was not yet a person who had committed a felony.

  He arrived at Mrs. Ullman’s door and knocked, cover story ready in case she was there.

  The longer he waited, the more chance that he’d have of being seen. He didn’t like the waiting.

  Without knocking a second time, Sheldon used the room key to let himself in.