How to Find Your Way in the Dark

by Derek B. Miller

  Sheldon stood there, and for the first time in his life, he couldn’t find an angle. The Krupinskis, Grossinger’s, Lorenzo, Thaleman—there was always a play. Now? When it actually mattered?

  “So the new doctor finds the file and sees it’s wrong. Big deal. So, he fixes it, right?”

  “No. Because he’d be obligated to report the error, and now you’d be repaying the guy who repaid your father by getting him in a heap of trouble. Honor is a system, Sheldon. That’s why they call it the honor system.”

  “What if I ignore you and drive to Ohio and sign up there? Or Rhode Island? Or Mississippi? You can’t stop me. It’s not like that file’s everywhere. Or maybe I jump across this desk and wrestle you for it.”

  “You’d be in jail before you got to basic training.”

  “This bites.” Sheldon backed off the desk and flopped down in a chair.

  The man let Sheldon stew for a minute before he walked around his desk and sat beside him. He offered Sheldon a cigarette, which he took and even lit, but he only toyed with it because he didn’t like smoking.

  “Remember what I said last time you were here?” the man asked.

  “ ‘Go fix something,’ you said.”

  “It was good advice. The world’s even more broken now.”

  “Tikkun olam,”Sheldon mumbled.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a Jewish thing.”

  The officer didn’t like standing between a father’s obligation to his son and a son’s obligation to his father. It felt like the wrong place for the government to be. There he was, though.

  He had also come down hard on the father’s side. Why? Because he was a father too. And despite Sheldon’s sour puss, he felt no guilt whatsoever.

  “What does that mean, a Jewish thing?” he asked, mainly to kill time.

  “It’s Hebrew. It basically means any activity that improves the world.”

  This was bar mitzvah stuff. Lenny stuff. The fact that it was coming up at an army recruiting station in Springfield struck him as two parts ridiculous and one part inevitable, like everything else on this planet.

  Sheldon explained it with a flat and uninterested voice, as though he were talking to someone while changing a tire. “Jews believe the world is inherently good because God said it was good seven times while making it. But we also believe he made it imperfect and that we were all placed in the Garden of Eden to work it and protect it. Tikkun means ‘repair’ and olam means ‘for all of time’ or else ‘the world.’ ”

  “Jews are supposed to do this?” the man said, leaning forward. “The chosen people? That sort of thing?”

  “No. Everyone is,” said Sheldon. “God chose us to receive the law and share it, not fulfill it by ourselves. We’re God’s carrier pigeons. Maybe that’s why everyone keeps shooting at us.”

  “So, is there anything you want to fix?”

  Anything? Sheldon thought. Sure. Movie theaters and fire prevention, the rate at which film burns, the safety of cars, our ability to make God account for Himself. All kinds of things.

  “My dad’s clock is broken. I want to fix that,” Sheldon muttered.

  “Perfect. You can go repair time like that Hebrew thing said you should.” The man smiled. He was an engineer. He’d solved a puzzle. This was success. This was happiness to him.

  “A clock,” Sheldon repeated.

  “Listen, kid. Maybe someday you’ll save someone else’s life because I just saved your life, and maybe I did it because your father saved someone else’s life, and all of us are keeping our ledgers balanced. My suggestion is, do what your father told you to do, go fix his clock, and wait for your moment. You never know. Someone might need you someday and—just maybe—today is what makes that possible.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Don’t be so sure. You’re still in the morning of your life.”

  * * *

  The cottage that Sheldon built in Whately was a traditional Cape house with a center door and a window on either side of it, a second-floor attic with windows on the sides, and a porch in the back facing the woods. Sheldon had presented the builder with a budget, and the builder gave him three choices on how to spend it. Sheldon chose the one that looked the most familiar.

  When it was done, he’d bought furniture from estate sales and filled it up with as little as necessary. Hudson Bay blankets like the ones he had as a child. Double beds in the third bedroom, a queen for the spare, and a king for the master. A desk in the corner. A country-style pine dining set and hutch. A sofa and rug in the living room. His books from Hartford and some more he’d bought at a church fundraiser.

  He placed the broken clock on the wall and hung some landscape paintings he had found at the yard sale as if he were preparing a stage for new actors who might never arrive.

  * * *

  When it was done, Sheldon had a ghostly feeling that the house was not his. Nothing from the fire remained—everything there was new to him. The family he was preparing it for didn’t seem to be his own future. He had thought that the house would anchor him anew in Massachusetts, but once it was finished and the door painted a lovely teal—bursting out, modern and vibrant, against the traditional grays of the shingles—he didn’t feel connected to what he’d created. He was glad he had built it, but it wasn’t until he returned from Springfield after trying to enlist again that he understood the problem. The house had no soul.

  It wasn’t the house’s fault. He was simply restless and it didn’t feel like home. Somehow and someday, Sheldon knew the house would find a purpose. He just wasn’t sure what it was.

  When Sheldon returned from Springfield, rejected and resigned to having missed the war despite its not being over, Lenny asked him if he was ready for New York.

  * * *

  They were sitting on the grass in front of Sheldon’s new house. The door was open behind them and the leaves of early autumn were starting to turn. The calendar and the earth saw this as a time of endings, but for former schoolboys, it still felt like the start of a new year and a new beginning. Lenny wanted to get on the road.

  “You really want me to come?” Sheldon asked.

  “It’s time,” Lenny said sagely.

  Lenny was right. Sheldon had been living frugally and working odd jobs and even trapping and hunting. Nate, to his credit, had arranged the paperwork as he’d promised. The house was built, and with Thaleman’s cash, Sheldon had money to burn but very little of it coming in. It was time to step out as an adult.

  He didn’t have a plan, but Lenny—as usual—did.

  “New York?”

  “Bingo.”

  “What am I going to do there?” Sheldon asked. “My only skills are hunting, trapping, stealing, and revenge. Is there a club there for people like me?”

  “I know what you’re not gonna do. You’re not gonna sit on the grass for another year and wish you were killing Nazis.”

  “I should be standing?”

  “You should be wishing something else. Remember when you were little and your dad worked as a cobbler during the winters when the hunting season was over?”

  “What about it?”

  “And he let you add up the costs of things and put them into that big book with all the complicated lines in it?”

  “Again, Lenny—”

  “You always seemed calm when you were doing that. I thought maybe you could be an accountant.”

  Sheldon threw a clump of grass at Lenny, and it struck him on the shoulder, leaving a patch of dirt that Lenny didn’t wipe off.

  “Or a cobbler?”

  “I don’t want to make shoes. He didn’t either. It was money in the off season. I liked sitting with him in the quiet, that was all.”

  “My great-aunt lives in a neighborhood called Gramercy in Manhattan. There’s a fancy park nearby. The place is on . . . I don’t remember . . . Seventeenth and Third or somewhere near that.”

  “This means nothing to me,” said Sheldon, trying to plu
ck enough grass from elsewhere to fill in the hole he had made hurling dirt at Lenny.

  “Doesn’t matter. What matters is, she owns a town house, and there’s a separate entrance to a basement where you can build a workshop or start a store or . . . whatever. She’s more than seventy, she’s put it on the market, and what I’m saying is, you need to buy it.”

  “You want me to buy a town house in Manhattan with a basement workshop?”

  “Yes, I do. And I’ll live in it for free, obviously, as I break into show biz, and you’ll set up a repair shop or whatever in the basement, which has an entrance for the customers from the street.”

  “I see why you like this plan.”

  “I don’t know the details, but my dad was talking about the sale of the town house. You can buy the whole building for less than you have in that green bag and the leftover from the insurance. You’d still have some cash on the side. And if I get to live there, my aunt will definitely sell it to you. We get hard up, we take in a tenant. But eventually we’ll have some money and then . . . you know . . . a life.”

  “We’re talking what, seven thousand or more for a town house?”

  “You can take out a loan like you did with this place. I think the town house is a good investment. I don’t think New York’s at the top of the market yet. Meanwhile—you can rent this place out.”

  “We’re in the middle of nowhere. Who’d want it?” Sheldon muttered.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  The answer was so obvious that Sheldon had somehow missed it but Lenny’s expression triggered his brain. “You mean Mirabelle and Louis.”

  “You told me that Louis was offered a teaching position at Smith College in Northampton. Engineering or physics or something. It’s a short ride down the road from here. You should rent the house to them for whatever they can afford and help them get on their feet. Give ’em a break. Keep the place in the family, you know.”

  Sheldon nodded, as much to himself as to Lenny. This was the obvious thing to do.

  Lenny stood. He brushed himself off, including the dirt on his shoulder, and without humor or doubt in his voice, he said, “It’s time to move on.”

  Lenny’s Prayer

  BILL HARMON WAS A RUDDY Irishman from New York who walked into Sheldon’s basement workshop one afternoon in early August 1945—a few months after Sheldon closed on the town house and a few days before Emperor Hirohito announced the Japanese surrender—and confessed that he owed Sheldon money and told him not to worry because he would have it in a few days.

  Sheldon had no idea who the guy was.

  “Bill?” the man prompted him. “Bill Harmon?”

  Sheldon thought that the man looked familiar in the way that everyone on his block had started to look familiar. But since he and Lenny had moved in, they’d been so busy that they’d barely looked up. The basement had been the biggest nightmare, with a half century of junk piled in there, mostly waterlogged newspapers, magazines, 78 records that had warped or cracked, clothing that had been eaten away by moths and mildew, and furniture that someone was probably supposed to have repaired but was either too half-assed to do it or died too soon.

  Or just in time.

  It was a tough call.

  Cleaning out the three upper floors had been a hassle too as neither Sheldon nor Lenny was especially strong. They were wiry and had spirit, but neither one wanted to be the low man on the sofa when they had to spin it around the corner of the staircase.

  “You’re doing great, Sheldon!” Lenny had yelled from up above.

  After the basement had been cleaned out and disinfected and turned into a clean sheet of paper for a new purpose, the two of them had stored the nicest antiques down there until Sheldon looked at the furniture and lamps and shelves and mirrors—all styles the boys couldn’t stand keeping in the house itself—and said, “Huh.”

  “Huh, what?”

  “Huh, let’s hang out a shingle and sell the stuff.”

  “We’re using this place as a closet until we can figure out what to do with it all,” Lenny said.

  “Let’s say we’re done. Let’s say we’re an antique store and that all this is for sale. Rather than hire a bunch of goons to take it away, let’s get people to pay us to take it away. It’s what Tom Sawyer would have done.”

  The timing turned out to be auspicious because when the war had ended, everyone in Europe had come home and they needed furniture. And lamps. And irons for those shirts they needed to wear when they interviewed for jobs or got one.

  They also needed clocks, and that was something Sheldon had only one of, and that one wasn’t for sale.

  One boring Thursday, while he was babysitting the furniture and Lenny was out doing Lenny things for Lenny reasons that Sheldon didn’t want to know about, Sheldon unpacked his father’s clock and placed it on his workbench to assess the damage.

  The Krupinski brothers hadn’t been nice to it. They hadn’t deliberately harmed it, but they clearly had had no sense of how delicate the thing was inside and how gently you’re supposed to handle it.

  He’d had it stored up in Whately, and now that he was in New York there was a good chance he could get it repaired. Or a reasonable chance, anyway. The clock still looked OK. The face was a sheet-metal bronze with roman numerals, the hands were thin and elegant, and the case was wooden with some garish flourishes. Inside were two weights that dropped slowly after being wound to the top, thereby uncoiling the balance spring and granting the machine life. When it functioned, as Sheldon vaguely remembered now, it struck once on the half hour and then chimed the hours accordingly. Now it did nothing.

  As Sheldon knew nothing about clocks, what he was really assessing was whether it looked repairable. Was the glass intact? It was. Were the pieces all there? They seemed to be but who knew? Was the case beyond repair? It was a bit scratched up, but it was structurally sound. As Sheldon was spinning gears around trying to get a sense of the whole, a man rapped on the window of his door and Sheldon opened it.

  “Fix clocks?” the man asked. He wore a three-piece suit and a tie. Everything about him screamed money. He looked busy and was the kind who wanted straight answers even if they were wrong. Sheldon had his number immediately. “Yup,” he said as convincingly as possible.

  “I’ll drop it off tomorrow,” said the guy as he turned and left.

  The next day the man came back with a clock smaller than Sheldon’s but far more elaborate and obviously very expensive.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Sheldon asked.

  “It’s broken.”

  “I’ll give you an estimate in a few days. Leave your number and I’ll call, or else you can drop by. You agree to it, I’ll fix it. If not, take it home, no charge. If you don’t come back for three months without collecting it—broken or fixed—it’s mine. We good?”

  They were good. The guy left and Sheldon practically followed him out the door to find someone who knew how to fix clocks.

  Three blocks away, Sheldon found a general fix-it shop run by a guy named David Cho. Cho was Asian, in his forties, and had relocated from San Francisco after a nasty divorce he didn’t want to talk about but talked about anyway. He knew everything there was to know about clocks.

  Though Cho’s shop was on the ground level, it was twice as dark and uninviting as Sheldon’s workshop. Nothing inside looked fixed or for sale. Sheldon couldn’t figure out the business model. Maybe everything behind Cho was spare parts.

  Cho didn’t strike Sheldon as someone highly motivated or on the move.

  Cho looked at Sheldon’s client’s clock and spotted the problem right away. He explained it in gibberish and Sheldon nodded because nodding kept Cho talking.

  “So . . . you’ll fix it?” Sheldon asked when Cho paused.

  Cho lit a cigarette.

  “Eight bucks, three days.”

  “OK.” It seemed steep but what did he know? “I got another one. You like to work on these things? You sticking around for a while?
”

  “She took the kids,” Cho said by way of an answer.

  Sheldon called his client when he returned to the shop.

  “Fifteen bucks, four days,” Sheldon said.

  People started showing up for repair services, not just furniture and lamps. Sheldon built a network of shops specializing in everything from watches to phonographs and brokered the transactions for a cut. Everything was going swimmingly until Bill Harmon walked in.

  * * *

  “Who are you?” Sheldon asked, trying not to sound unkind.

  “Bill Harmon,” the guy said, taking off his jacket and hanging it on the rack beside the door like he owned the place. “Jesus, you’ve really turned this place around. Your back must be broken.”

  Bill Harmon was in his midtwenties, a bit older than Sheldon, but he carried himself like he was in his forties. There was a sure-footedness to the way he strolled around, and he wore his clothes as if a suit felt natural on him and he might know how to talk to women, the police, and other scary people. The guy was making himself very comfortable in the shop, and for no reason he could put his finger on, Sheldon liked him.

  “You’ve been here before?” Sheldon asked, taking off the cobbler’s bib that he liked to wear while fiddling with things. He rolled up his sleeves.

  “I came over one time when I was chasing a mouse. Little bastard slipped through a hole in the wall that led over here, and I thought, Not this time, pal, so I popped by and the old lady let me in. As soon as I saw what this place looked like, I knew the mouse had won. I mean . . . my God, the things she had packed in here. Then again, you take an immigrant, put her through the Great War, the Depression, widowhood, and then another war, and you got to cut her some slack, you know? Hold on to stuff ! That’s what my parents always said to me. So, I did. Now I got a pawn shop. Or it’s got me. I don’t know.”