How to Find Your Way in the Dark

by Derek B. Miller

  “You’re telling me,” Sheldon said. “Oh, so that’s you. With the trumpet in the window?”

  “You want it? I’ll give you a good price.”

  “I don’t play.”

  “Never too late to learn.”

  “Too late to get good.”

  “Yeah, that’s true.” Bill plopped himself into a wooden chair a few yards away from Sheldon and crossed his legs. He removed a pipe from his pocket and raised his eyebrows at Sheldon, who waved him on, so he lit up. “You should come in. My place is the mirror image of your place. We’re neighbors, after all.”

  Sheldon glanced outside because the light had changed. A man’s legs had stopped outside his window. The trousers were gray wool and the shoes were black leather. They were a decade out of style and badly scuffed. Sheldon couldn’t see his face and waited for him to come down the steps, but he didn’t. He just stood there.

  “You were saying before . . . ,” Sheldon said, fading off deliberately.

  “Oh, yeah. Right. So, I owe you three months’ back rent,” said Bill, ignoring the shadow cast by the man’s legs. “I know that, and I wanted to let you know that I know that and that I’m not a deadbeat. I’ll pay you for one month on Friday, and if you don’t mind, I can pay you the remaining two months two weeks from Friday because I got this jackass over a barrel and he’s going to pay up for what he bought, and then I’m more than good.”

  “How’s that?” Sheldon asked. He was trying to understand why Bill owed him money at all, but Bill heard the question differently

  “Get this, he’s got a woman on the side, right? Comes to me and buys a whole apartment’s worth of furniture so he can set her up nice in her own place and then . . . boom . . . doesn’t pay up. So, what do I do? I find his wife! I threaten the guy. I say, ‘Look, you pay me, and you keep the good life. You don’t and it’s all over with the girls, plus you end up with two apartments full of furniture that you’re going to have to sell to me, assuming I’m willing to bail you out. By the way, what you owe me just increased by ten percent.’ Do you love it or what?”

  “That’s not a bad one. But I’m still back at you owing me money.”

  “I realize you don’t know me from Adam, but—my word of honor—I’m good for it.”

  “No, it’s not that. I don’t get why you owe me anything at all.”

  “You’re my landlord.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “You ever wonder why the basement’s not as wide as the town house?”

  “I have wondered that.”

  “They split it in two. I’ve been running my place for two years. I was a little older than you when I started. I paid the old lady. Now I pay you.”

  “No kidding,” said Sheldon, genuinely surprised that he owned not one store but two.

  “You’ve got to read the fine print. Not every building comes with its own Irishman.”

  The legs in the windows moved off. There was something vaguely familiar about those shoes, but Sheldon couldn’t place them.

  “My buddy Lenny’s performing a comedy thing at a supper club tonight. His first gig since his Catskill days. Food and booze and a few laughs. None of it’s good, but they cancel each other out. How about it?”

  * * *

  LENNY BERNSTEIN’S MOVE TO New York hadn’t been as smooth as he’d expected. At first, it had been a dream come true, which quickly became a challenge. For years he had talked about the move and spent his time coaxing Sheldon while making big plans, swimming in the ethereal possibility of it all. Now, however, he had to commit, like a diver standing on a rocky ledge over blue water. There were no half measures here and no going back except in humiliation and ruin. And if he did, then what? He didn’t have another dream.

  This was the world’s greatest stage. All it promised was an audience for the bold. This is partly what shook Lenny to his bones.

  New York was not a complete mystery, though. Having visited and now having lived there for a few months, Lenny could identify the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and Rockefeller Plaza. The streets ran in sequential numbers, which helped him navigate the city. None of this—not even the noise and energy—was the problem.

  Landing a job. That was the problem.

  It hadn’t occurred to him at the time, but the Catskill resorts were all family owned and that meant that the Mob wasn’t involved. New York City, however, was different. Back during Prohibition, the Mob ran the speakeasies and booze. When drinking became legal again, they turned the speakeasies into clubs and ran those. Since the Mob owned the clubs, the comedians had to work for the Mob. There was no way around it. Unfortunately, Lenny didn’t have an in with the Mob. Sheldon, of course, knew all of them but not in a helpful way.

  What Lenny learned in time was that the Mob might be in charge but they were still running businesses and—at least at the day-to-day level—those businesses operated more or less like all other businesses. The Mob needed people to do normal things like serve drinks and cook and clear tables and—as it happened—tell jokes. And so Lenny decided to give it a shot. He’d been going to the same nightclub every night to adjust to the comic sensibility of New York City and see how he might fit in. Eventually, he walked up to the proprietor and asked for a gig.

  “You got experience?”

  “Catskills. Three summers. Knocked ’em dead. I’m offended that you haven’t heard of me.”

  “Uh-huh,” said the guy who hadn’t smiled at Lenny’s joke, but maybe he had on the inside because he allowed Lenny to try a few lines and finally—tonight—gave him his first job.

  Lenny waited on a stool beside the bar in a room that smelled like wood, steak, and lies. He was watching an act dragged over from vaudeville that involved a dog running between spinning plates as a guy played “Sing, Sing, Sing” on a kazoo. The guy must have spent years on this and here he was.

  Success? Who knew?

  New York had a comedic affinity with the Catskills—a shared timing, a shared dramatic tone—but it was also the Big City, and the audience wasn’t already happy and on vacation and liquored up. Lenny noticed that they were more demanding and their standards were higher because they had plenty of choice. And some guys were back from the war. You could tell.

  His heart beat a little faster when the plates stopped spinning, the dog came to a halt, and the song ended. It was fear more than stage fright. If there was one truth about this place—the kind of fundamental truth where the shovel hits bedrock and you know you’re on solid ground—it was that New York didn’t care if you lived or died.

  Lenny’s biggest problem, though, wasn’t facing the dream, landing a job, or even adapting to the local color. It was carrying the weight of what he knew that he hadn’t previously known.

  Sheldon had never stopped stacking newspapers. He stacked them now in Gramercy the way he’d stacked them at Grossinger’s, and in Whately, and in Hartford, and in his new house. Lenny knew the habit had started with Abe, but he’d been hoping that it would end. It didn’t. If anything, it became worse as the news became worse, and the news became much worse as the war came to an end and the facts of Germany’s conduct became known. And not only Germany’s.

  Lenny had been avoiding newspapers. In his commitment to stay away from topical matters—per the instructions of everyone who’d ever fired him and in line with the Motion Picture Production Code that deemed what was acceptable and unacceptable in American society—Lenny had been working diligently to make jokes about only the most everyday of human experiences. The newspapers, he reasoned, would only fog his mind and confuse him about what was important and what was not. It had not occurred to him that not reading the newspapers might do exactly the same thing.

  What Lenny eventually learned was that the Russians had found the first of the camps in July of 1944. He learned this when he heard a well-dressed woman talk about it with her friend on the bus outside Whately. The woman was whispering as though the Jews should be ashamed, as though we
akness of that magnitude must be hidden.

  Lenny had asked Sheldon about it when he arrived home. Sheldon fished out a Boston Daily Globe article called HOW NAZIS MURDERED 2,000,000 that had the subheading of BABIES, WOMEN AMONG VICTIMS OF LUBLIN CAMP and handed it to Lenny by way of explanation.

  Sheldon had known exactly where the article was.

  The article was written by James Aldridge and Lenny had been shocked to see that it hadn’t even been the day’s headline; in fact, it was below the fold on the front page and placed directly next to another article called U.S. COMPUTES TAX ON NEW SIMPLIFIED RETURNS BEING PRINTED.

  LUBLIN, Poland. Wednesday, Aug. 30 (NANA) (By Wireless)—This is the Majdanak concentration camp of Lublin. It is the first German concentration camp seen by war correspondents in Europe, and this is one of the most notorious.

  Here more than 2,000,000 people were killed by the Germans and that figure becomes believable when you see the camp.

  The article had explained how Aldridge had entered the camp through fields of vegetables that included cabbage; all of it rotting. Lenny remembered how odd it had seemed for the journalist to mention this seemingly insignificant detail until he learned the real reason later.

  In the camp, Aldridge went to visit one of the gas chambers. He described looking through the small window that the executioner had used to regularly watch men, women, and children suffocate and die. There were holes in the ceiling and walls where the gas came in.

  The dead were taken to the furnaces. Aldridge described seeing the condition of the bodies; how the arms and legs had been snapped at the joints so they could be folded up and thrown inside to be burned.

  But even then the killing and dishonor and evil wasn’t done.

  Then there is a siding where trucks took the ashes from the furnaces to the field. I saw the ashes in high piles, and mixed with manure and weeds to form a compost for fertilizing the cabbages. Looking at the quantity of ashes that one man was reduced to and looking at these piles and piles of ashes, it is easy to calculate that hundreds of thousands of human remains are scattered around these fields.

  On one field there is a pile of shoes—perhaps 500,000—and half of these, I noticed, were women’s and children’s and babies’ shoes.

  The story continued. But Lenny turned to another; the one that came flooding back to him now, moments before he was to go onstage with his act. There had been many other stories since then. But this had been the first he’d read, and so it haunted him.

  * * *

  On page four there had been an article by Daniel De Luce headlined, 4 GERMANS BLAME ‘ORDERS FROM ABOVE’ FOR LUBLIN MURDERS. Halfway down was the subheading WOMAN BURNED ALIVE. The article quoted N. A. Stalb, “a blond, six-foot German butcher, arrested in 1939 for selling meat in the black market.” He had become a member of the barracks police detail while incarcerated at Majdanek.

  “I have seen a tractor haul as many as 400 corpses at one time from the ‘bath and disinfection house’ to the ovens on the hill,” he said. “One day I saw the bodies of 157 Polish children who had been gassed. Another time I saw a group of Polish women marched up a hill to be shot to save the trouble of gassing them. They were ordered to disrobe. One refused, a girl of about 28 or 29. Two men tied her hands and legs, put her on a steel stretcher and thrust her alive into the white-hot oven.

  Waiting for his turn in the spotlight, Lenny tried to imagine this girl, this real human being who was modest and shy, or maybe proud and strong and rebellious. Someone who refused to strip naked and be shot, and was instead burned alive. He thought about her and the kind of people who would do that and why they were willing or even happy to do it.

  The article didn’t mention when Stalb saw this. It could have been in 1944 but it could have been earlier. Could Lenny have been at Grossinger’s with a thousand Jews who were laughing it up as millions—six million was the estimate now—were being murdered across the Atlantic?

  But then again, they had known. Not the numbers, not the methods, not the details, but the accounts of murder, brutality, and marginalization had been in the papers since the late 1930s. He and Sheldon had put those papers in front of hotel room doors every morning. You had to step over the information to get to breakfast.

  How had they kept laughing through it all?

  Lenny needed to answer this question. He needed to understand how the world was laughing its greatest laughter while also crying its greatest tears. He felt as though the soul of man had been split in two and that the sound of the rupture had silenced all talk.

  Laughter is a great defense. Had Jewish Americans been defending themselves?

  Laughter, like love, makes us forget the rest if only for a moment. Were we pushing back the knowledge?

  Comedy can create pleasure in others who might hate us. Were we trying to be loved in a world so full of rage?

  Comedy forces us to look anew at what we consider normal and reassess it. Were we doing this every minute of every day with small things because we lacked the courage to face the big ones?

  They wouldn’t hire us or publish us or educate us at their universities or let us into the inner circles. Was comedy the only space for us to spread our wings?

  Lenny asked his rabbi and his rabbi said, “The Greeks separated comedy and tragedy. We never did.”

  Was that an answer?

  Or was all of this too generous? Lenny wondered. Were we simply oblivious? Were we too focused on survival or selfishness to hear those screams that weren’t in English? Too proud of our own achievements in America to see others as ourselves? Too glad to have left that hellhole called Europe and too scornful of those who hadn’t been courageous enough to have done the same?

  Or were we too frightened to feel the pity that would have forced our self-reflection and prompted us to action?

  At ten o’clock that night, Lenny stood in a corner of the restaurant and waited patiently for his turn onstage. He looked at Sheldon, who was sipping a whiskey and sitting beside a man Lenny didn’t recognize.

  Lenny didn’t know the answers to the questions he had asked. He wasn’t sure if the questions had answers, and if there were answers, whether they were the same for everyone. It seemed enough, though, to realize that all his thoughts directed him toward the same prayer that he now uttered under his breath to a God he hoped was listening.

  “Dear God,” said Lenny Bernstein,“give me the strength to be joyful.”

  * * *

  SHELDON, LENNY, AND BILL left the supper club at 1:30 in the morning after having had a few drinks. Lenny was sleepy and wanted to go to bed, so Sheldon sent him ahead through the bright lights and flow of people on Third Avenue to their town house. Bill, true to his culture, true to his commitments, had taken it upon himself to teach Sheldon how to drink properly. Bill’s left arm was flung over his new landlord’s shoulder for both camaraderie and support as they finally arrived at Sheldon’s diminutive stoop and walked down the few steps and entered while Sheldon listened with a grin to Bill explain how Irishmen drink (and how Sheldon can too if he applies himself). “It involves not only whiskey,” Bill explained, “but its consumption. Just having the whiskey alone isn’t enough. I hear people say, ‘Oh, I had whiskey,’ but . . . so does the grocery store! Grocery store’s not drinking, though, is it? No. That’s why it has so much whiskey, but it isn’t drunk. Or happy. I’ve never met a happy grocery store. ‘As happy as a grocery store.’ No one ever says that. That’s because a grocery store doesn’t understand what it means to be Irish.”

  With plenty of booze still inside an old globe bar Sheldon had forgotten to empty, the two settled into fine furniture and tested their limits.

  As the night progressed, Bill became—in turns—generous, funny, chatty, emotional, confessional, and finally a bit weepy. Once that settled in, it was time for singing songs that Sheldon didn’t know, and that was the first time in the entire evening he felt as though he’d let Bill down. Which is part of the reason he had hauled Bi
ll up and walked him out of the shop while he listened to how much Bill loved his own dad and how bad he felt for Sheldon for losing his own father, “who sounds like he was a helluva guy.”

  Sheldon smiled as he opened Bill’s door for him (keyholes move and Sheldon had better aim) and he smiled a farewell smile as he tossed Bill onto the brown sofa in the back office, where Sheldon was pretty certain Bill had napped before.

  “Do you want to stay for a drink?” Bill mumbled facedown into a pillow as Sheldon switched off the light. “There was something I was meaning to tell you and I forgot what it was. It’s gonna come back to me. Mark my words.”

  In high spirits—in all the best ways—Sheldon walked out the door and took the trumpet with him.

  * * *

  Harry James’s band was back on the charts with a new song called “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” and while Sheldon couldn’t play the trumpet, it was fun to sit back in his workshop in the black of a New York night and pretend to play it. He’d discovered that Kitty Kallen’s singing on this track came through beautifully on the Zenith phonograph that a guy named Walters had dropped off to have fixed.

  “You fix these, right?”

  “Sure, sure,” said Sheldon.

  Did Sheldon fix these? Of course not. A guy named Frank Bromley on Eighth and Lex fixed them, and Sheldon transported them back and forth and collected a cut. And now that Walters’s Zenith was working properly, Sheldon spun up some records.

  He played the flip side first.

  This city life did have something going for it, he thought, lighting a pipe. Everything was close by. Every sensation was intensified and existed, indiscriminately, beside every other one. As the James record spun, Sheldon thought again about Nate’s talk of Yankee ingenuity and Hartford. If his uncle was here now, Sheldon would say to him, “Maybe, Uncle Nate, but that was then. New York has the ball now.” Manhattan was a place without much greenery or trees, no animals roamed the woods behind him, and every movie theater was a haunted house that whispered to him like a graveyard as he walked by, but all the same, it was a place pulsing with life and vitality.