The Perseids and Other Stories (2 page)

“Don’t talk like that.”

“I’ll talk any way I like.”

“I have to go out tonight,” he said. “Will you be all right by yourself?”

“Of course I will.”

So she said. But she was irritable, not a good sign, and she mumbled to herself under her breath, an even worse omen. He was afraid she would hurt herself or set fire to the building. But he couldn’t warn her against those things because that would put ideas into her head, and then, God forbid, if something did happen, the fault would be his.

Rachel had been strange even before Mama and Papa died. Even as a small child: moody, often inarticulate, physically awkward. Papa had said there was a history of madness on his side of the family. Madness and genius: men who studied the Kaballah or wrote romantic poetry or killed themselves with pistols. Papa had been a scholar. Jacob was, in his way, a scholar too. Mama
had been an ordinary woman, a doctor’s daughter from Lodz. Rachel had inherited the madness.

Madness wasn’t so colorful at close quarters. Jacob had seen his sister tear off her clothing and rake her skin with her fingernails until she bled. Everything Jacob had witnessed of madness was ugly, demeaning, and obscene.

His fear was that Rachel’s deepening dementia would make it impossible for her to work, and what would they do then?

He tucked the blanket around his sister and hoped the warmth of it would coax her to sleep. Then he buttoned his cloth coat and walked through the falling snow to the rented room of Carlo Taglieri.

Taglieri always called Jacob “the Jew”—not in a brutal way, but persistently, as if challenging him.

Taglieri’s curse was his harelip, his short leg, and his temper. He wasn’t popular. People shunned him. He was thirty years old and unmarried. He lived in this dank room on Chandler Street, alone except for a bony black cat named Brivio.

“It’s the Jew,” Taglieri told Brivio as he opened the door. Taglieri spoke the Italian of Pisticci, his hometown. He wore a threadbare woolen sweater. “Come in, Jacob.”

Like most of Jacob’s students, Taglieri had attempted the English class at the Settlement House but had left in frustration. Taglieri was one of those people who translated everything in his head: if you said
cat
he would rummage through his mental ledgers until he found
gatto.
But by that time you might have said a dozen more words, of which he had registered none.

“English, please,” Jacob said.

“Welcome,” Taglieri told him.

Over the last several months Jacob had managed to impart to Taglieri a decent number of English verbs and nouns, which Taglieri had duly committed to memory. Currently he was strangling on tenses. Tonight Jacob worked through the labyrinth of
was
and
is
and
will be
and
has been
, hoping for some glimmer of understanding, but he sensed Taglieri stacking the verb forms like bricks, deaf to the music. The hour dragged.

“I was worked at the water mains,” Taglieri said suddenly, his ruddy face gone somber and earnest.

“Work,” Jacob corrected him. “You
work
at the water mains.” Taglieri dug sewers for the city.

“I work at the the water mains five years—”

Jacob understood that Taglieri was attempting the imperfect tense. “You
have worked
at the water mains for five years.”

“I have worked at the water mains five years and I want—wanted—want to asks—”

“Yes?”

“Your sister, your Rachel—”

Jacob said, in Italian, “Just tell me what it is you need to say.”

“I’ll give you money for her.”

Jacob stood up, his heart beating harder, wanting to believe that this time he was the one who hadn’t understood. “My sister is not a whore.”

“I know, I know! Don’t be insulted. Please, please, listen. All I want is companionship. I’m not a proud man, Jacob. You know how it is. The women don’t like me, because of my lip, because of the way I walk.”

Also, Jacob thought, because of the way Taglieri shouted obscenities at the children in the street, because of the way he smelled, because of the way he bullied anyone smaller than himself and simpered to anyone he feared. Taglieri had a respectable job. He might have married, in spite of everything, if he had cleaned himself up and attended mass once in a while and gone courting in a decent manner. But he wouldn’t.

“I know about Rachel,” Taglieri said. “She’s not good at work, they say. She’s a little crazy. She gets angry. Okay, I know all that. What I’m saying is, I can support her. I’ve worked for the city for five years now. I spend nothing except what it costs to keep this room and feed myself and Brivio.”

Jacob said, “You’re telling me you want to marry her?”

“Christ, no. I can’t marry a Jew. Much less a crazy Jew. What would people think? She would be my housekeeper.”

“Housekeeper.”

“Yes.”

“I have to go,” Jacob said.

“I’ve hurt your feelings.”

Jacob didn’t know whether this was sincere or sarcastic. His Italian wasn’t sufficiently nuanced. Anyway, with Taglieri, it was always an open question.

“Look,” Taglieri said. He took a number of crumpled bills out of his hip pocket. “Five dollars. Everybody else is saving money so they can buy steamship tickets for their families back home. I don’t have any family back home. I spend my money on what I want. Five dollars, Jacob. All she has to do is come over and clean the floor. Just one day! Then we’ll see how we can get along, Rachel and I.”

It was a lot of money.

“No, thank you, Signor Taglieri.”

A great deal of money. Thus, obviously, not for the service of scrubbing a floor.

Taglieri added, in English, “Please don’t say no.”

Jacob closed the door behind him.

The bookstore was closed on Sunday, but Jacob knocked and Ziegler opened the door for him and locked it quickly after.

Outside, the air was bitter and thin. In here, the heat and the smell of the old books made his eyes water. Ziegler’s books were all secondhand. They had lost their glossy newness but gained something, Jacob thought, in the rich smell of tobacco and aging paper.

Ziegler set up the chessboard while Jacob confessed his problems with Rachel. He had confided in Ziegler before. Ziegler always listened patiently.

Jacob said, “I wish I could believe she was getting better. There are times when she’s almost normal. Other times….”

“She’s not getting better,” Ziegler said flatly. “She has a disease. In fifty years they’ll call it ‘schizophrenia’ and admit that it’s incurable. In a hundred—”

“How do you know that?”

He waved away the question. “Don’t count on Rachel getting better, is what I’m saying.”

“I can’t support her by myself. Even if I could, I can’t be with her all the time. If she gets worse she might hurt herself. I don’t know how to protect her.”

“You can’t.”

“She’s my sister. She doesn’t have anyone else.”

Ziegler balanced the white queen in his hand, walking it between his fingers like a stage magician with a coin. “There are asylums. Or even this man, what’s his name, Tarantula—”

“Taglieri. To be honest, I thought about it. A warm house and decent food, who knows? Maybe it would help her. But taking money for my sister….” He didn’t have words to express the vileness of it. And how could it matter if Rachel was warm and well-dressed, when the price was Taglieri forcing himself between her legs every night?

But didn’t every married woman face the same troublesome bargain?

Ziegler said, “You know the story in the Bible, the story of Abraham and Isaac?”

“Of course.”

“God instructs Abraham to offer his son as a sacrifice. Isaac makes it as far as the chopping block before God changes his mind.”

Yes. Jacob had always imagined God a little appalled at Abraham’s willingness to cooperate.

Ziegler said, “What’s the moral of the story?”

“Faith.”

“Hardly,” Ziegler said. “Faith has nothing to do with it. Abraham never doubted the existence of God—how could he? The evidence was ample. His virtue wasn’t faith, it was
fealty
. He was so simplemindedly loyal that he would commit even this awful, terrible act. He was the perfect foot soldier. The ideal pawn. Abraham’s lesson: fealty is rewarded. Not morality. The fable makes morality
contingent
. Don’t go around killing innocent people
that is, unless you’re absolutely certain God wants you to. It’s a lunatic’s credo.

“Isaac, on the other hand, learns something much more interesting. He learns that neither God nor his own father can be trusted. Maybe it makes him a better man than Abraham. Suppose Isaac grows up and fathers a child of his own, and God approaches him and makes the same demand. One imagines Isaac saying, ‘No. You can take him if you must, but I won’t slaughter my son for you.’ He’s not the good and faithful servant his father was. But he is, perhaps, a more wholesome human being.”

“What does this have to do with Rachel”

“My point,” Ziegler said, “is that sacrifice is a complicated business. If you give Rachel to this Taglieri, are you harming her or helping her How can you be sure? And if you
don’t
give her up—if you spend the rest of your enviable youth and all of your innate kindness protecting her from her own lunacy—have you put
yourself on
the altar”

Jacob was startled. “There must be another choice.”

Ziegler held out two clenched fists. Two hidden pawns. He smiled. “Choose.”

As the game progressed Ziegler said, “I have to tell you something, Jacob. You’re the best chess novice I’ve come across. Not terribly experienced and not subtle at all. But the way you
think
chess is genuinely remarkable.”

“You play very well yourself.”

“Thank you. I played Anderssen once, when he was a child.”

“Adolph Anderssen, the German master? My father talked about him.” Jacob frowned. “But Anderssen was an old man half a century ago.”

Ziegler shrugged. “Some other Anderssen, then.” The shopkeeper attempted an exchange of queens, which Jacob declined. The end was inevitable now. For once, Ziegler capitulated before the actual checkmate. He tapped his king with a thumbnail and sent it teetering against an impotent rook. Then he sat back in
his chair and wrapped his hands over his belly. “You know, Jacob, there’s another way to play this game.”

“Another way to play chess?”

“A revision of the rules.”

“I don’t have time.”

“Stay. Please. This won’t take long.”

The coal furnace roared and the bookshop’s floorboards moaned with the heat. Jacob let himself be convinced to spend a little more time in the warmth. The game Ziegler proposed was something he called lateral chess: this involved an assumption that the chessboard was (in Ziegler’s own strange words) “topographically looped”—that is, the final squares at the left edge of the board were connected immaterially to the first squares at the right. The rook, for instance, could take a pawn on the rank even with another piece interposed, simply by coming at it from the opposite direction.

Once Jacob grasped the idea, he enjoyed working out the possibilities. In effect, the new rule took away the center of the board. A conventionally dominant position looked suddenly very different: a knight or a bishop could dominate from the rim. Castling became moot.

And this time, Ziegler won the game. Jacob wanted to play again.

“If you like,” Ziegler said mildly.

Jacob failed to take note of the dusky winter sky beyond the window. He had always enjoyed his chess trances but he found this kind of chess even more enthralling, if only for its novelty. He longed to abandon himself to it, one more time, one more game, win or lose…. “Good,” Ziegler said approvingly as he set up the pieces once more, “but this time we wrap the board in
both
directions—rank and file, fore and aft. If one of my pieces reaches your first rank, it can keep going.”

In effect, the looped board had become a sphere, a sphere represented on a plane, like a Mercator projection of the Earth. It would have meant instantaneous mutual checkmate if Ziegler had not added a set of first-pass rules. The consequences were subtle, at least until the endgame when the ranks had been
thinned; then Ziegler took him with a knight fork Jacob had completely overlooked.

Spherical chess! He longed to play again.

But this time Ziegler wouldn’t. “Look at the window, Jacob. The moon is up. You can feel the cold through the walls. Go home. Come see me again next week.”

There was no new book this time. But that was all right. Spherical chess was a better gift. Anyway, Jacob hadn’t finished
The Time Machine and Other Stories.

Rachel had been alone for hours. She stared at him accusingly when he came through the door. She had let the fire in the stove die away to nothing. The shack was brutally cold. The water in the wash pots had grown brittle lids of ice.

The February rent was due, and Jacob worked hard to make up the inevitable shortfall. He taught English to the Goldbergs, the Walersteins, the dimwitted Vincenzo sisters. He crept into Greek and Macedonian coffeehouses to accept bets on his chess prowess. He was punched once by a humiliated Galician dairy worker but escaped before he could be robbed. He developed a hole in his shoe.

Rachel had passed deeply into the orbit of her madness this winter. She was hostile and withdrawn, hardly eating, and Jacob had to remind himself of what she had been when they were younger: Rachel at the Brant Street School, her hair in red ribbons. For all her moodiness, she had seemed golden in those days. She would take Jacob on long walks to the docklands or to the fancy English shops. They had shared stories with each other. Rachel had been a great reader of fairy tales. She had read to him from
Struwelpeiter
, her favorite book.

In those days it had been possible to eke some kindness out of Rachel, before she closed herself to the world. He couldn’t
remember the last time she had said a kind word to him, though she sometimes admitted being frightened.

Was she dying? People don’t always die all at once, Ziegler had told him. Sometimes they die a little at a time. That makes it hard.