How to Find Your Way in the Dark Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I: Tragedy

  God’s Promise

  Home

  Burn

  Hartford

  Inmates

  The Factory

  Lenny

  Pawns

  Cher Ami

  Storm

  Flood

  Underwood

  Graduation

  Part II: Comedy

  Sliced Bread

  The Sweet Spot

  Pigeons Again

  Life and Death

  Everyone Comes to Grossinger’s

  The Truth

  Neversink

  The Guest

  Hunter and Trapper

  Mrs. Ullman

  The Master Plan

  Sheldon Horowitz: Live

  The Catskill Shuffle

  Killer

  Part III

  Taming of the Shrew

  Funeral

  Pearl

  French

  1944

  Lenny’s Prayer

  After: 1947

  Mabel

  Acknowledgments and Denials

  About the Author

  Connect on Social Media

  Copyright © 2021 by Derek B. Miller

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Miller, Derek B., 1970– author.

  Title: How to find your way in the dark / Derek B Miller.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021. | Series: A Sheldon Horowitz novel

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020057651 (print) | LCCN 2020057652 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358269601 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358450337 | ISBN 9780358450498 | ISBN 9780358270096 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3613.I5337 H69 2021 (print) | LCC PS3613.I5337 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057651

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057652

  Cover design by Jim Tierney

  Cover photographs: icholakov / Getty Images (bomber); © Sirachai Arunrugstichai / Getty Images (clouds)

  Author photograph © Erlend Mikael Sæverud

  v1.0721

  For Camilla, Julian, and Clara.

  You are my light.

  twi´light cr´imes, law. a. crimes of a lesser degree b. crimes of a questionable moral nature c. crimes of possible moral virtue (controversial)

  Part I

  Tragedy

  God’s Promise

  IT WAS ONE YEAR and one day since the Palace Theatre fire in Hartford where his mother burned to death, and now twelve-year-old Sheldon Horowitz and his father were on their way back from the headstone unveiling in the battered Ford truck they had inadvisably borrowed from the Krupinski brothers to make the journey. Joseph glanced at his son to see whether he’d fallen asleep but he hadn’t; instead, he was a chorus of unspoken words.

  There had been a brief event at the synagogue, and then they left Joseph’s brother and his two children behind. They had their own loss to contend with. Sheldon’s head was flopped back on the seat. He was tired and moody after their visit, and Joseph knew that the long drive back was taking its toll on his beloved son.

  The question of whether to get him talking or not was a delicate one.

  Long silences between them over the past year were nothing new, and in Joseph’s view, they were mostly his own fault as he had been the one to abandon words first—although, when he was feeling more gracious with himself, he sometimes thought the words had abandoned him. It made no practical difference: Sheldon’s withdrawal from verbiage was a response to Lila’s death itself. It was one more thing Joseph could blame himself for, and it wasn’t the worst one.

  “There was a fire” was all Joseph had been able to say after pulling Sheldon out of class and onto the schoolhouse steps last year. It was a Monday. She was expected that morning. Instead, he received an official call. The next two words were going to be “your mother,” but he didn’t get that far.

  “Your mother,” he is now grateful he didn’t have to say, “burned to death with your aunt Lucy in a movie theater in Hartford. She was there because of me.”

  If he could have gone on? At the time, nothing. Sheldon was eleven. Joseph knew enough not to burden a boy with a man’s sorrows.

  Sheldon—perceptive, emotional, and connected to Joseph like a magnet to iron ever since he was a baby—had understood immediately what the fire had done even if his father couldn’t say it. On the schoolhouse steps, he had reached out to comfort his father rather than the other way around.

  Since then, silences have appeared in their lives; they arrive as unpredictably, and are accepted as easily, as an evening rain.

  On most occasions, Joseph left Sheldon to his peace, both for the boy’s benefit and his own. Sheldon Unleashed, Sheldon Provoked: These were formidable characters that Joseph avoided. It wasn’t only the intensity of Sheldon’s emotions, it was also the range of his mental gymnastics and argumentative tactics. The kid was a young Sherman on the intellectual battlefield, and Joseph lacked his agility.

  Tonight, Joseph knew, was not the time to raise Cain. Not in an unfamiliar moving vehicle in the dark with weather coming in. Not after hours of a journey. Not after seeing his mother’s name carved into a stone on the ground and tragedy itself seemed to be testing the boy’s will.

  It was going to be slick soon too. Joseph could feel it in his fingers on the wooden steering wheel. New England can teach a man more than he’d ever want to know about weather, and Joseph had long since taken those lessons to heart.

  Sheldon shifted in his seat and Joseph realized the Beast was going to wake itself.

  “What’s on your mind, Donny?” Joseph said, calling him what the toddlers used to call him back in kindergarten when they couldn’t pronounce his name. He was the only one who still did and Sheldon seemed to tolerate it.

  Sheldon flopped his head over and looked at his father.

  “Well?” Joseph prompted. “Who else you going to tell?”

  “The Krupinski brothers,” Sheldon said, which is not what Joseph had been expecting.

  Outside, the white birches slipped past them like specters. The sleek black of the road became as something living when the rain started to fall—slowly for a moment and then a downpour. The asphalt river slithered beneath their thin wheels as the truck began to rattle in the winds. The darkness encroached on them because the sky was as black as the forest and the headlights were too weak to illuminate any future.

  Joseph gripped the large wheel tightly and leaned into it as if he were driving a tractor.

  “What about them?” Joseph asked, trying to drive and talk.

  “I don’t think we should have borrowed their truck.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think we should owe them anything.”

  “We don’t. When we dropped off the pelts in Springfield, we were doing Old Krupinski a favor. So, we’re even.”

  “We’re not even,” said Sheldon flatly. “Lenny and I think they’re selling your pelts down in Hartford for more than they’re telling you and we’re not getting our fair share. We do all the hunting and trapping and preparing the pelts and they only sell them. They’re thieves and they think we’re suckers who haven’t got the bal
ls to call them out.”

  “We?” asked Joseph with a smile.

  “I help.”

  “You do,” Joseph said, glad that Sheldon was coming around.

  Lenny Bernstein was Sheldon’s best friend and the only other Jewish kid around for a thousand miles as far as either of them knew. He was a year older, but the boys were in the same grade because Sheldon was reading more and faster. They often took off after school on their bicycles, and Joseph was glad that Sheldon had someone to confide in and bond with, though he wished their conspiracy theories about the Krupinskis’ nefarious ways would end—even if the boys weren’t entirely wrong.

  “What are you proposing?” Joseph asked.

  “I think that when we get back home, without overthinking it or anything, we should run them over and call it an accident.”

  Joseph smiled and squinted past the wipers that were no match for the storm.

  “Running over two people is pretty tough,” he said, as though considering it. “They’ve got to be lined up like bowling pins and be just as blind.”

  “Maybe we could tie them up first. Then run ’em over,” Sheldon suggested, relaxing into the kind of banter they both always enjoyed.

  Joseph saw a flaw in the plan. “Accidentally run over two people? As an alibi, it’s a tough sell.”

  “We could say Ronny and Theo jumped out in front of the truck as a practical joke and it all went horribly, horribly right. Everyone would believe it. They’re idiots.”

  “I wonder if that imagination is going to get you into trouble someday.”

  “Or out of it,” Sheldon countered.

  “Probably both, I suspect.”

  They drove on silently for half a mile. Joseph concentrated. The road had no curb and no lights, and the rain played tricks with the headlights. After a time, Joseph addressed Sheldon’s accusation. “I’m sure they are skimming a bit. But the arrangement’s a stable one, and it keeps away people I don’t want near us. The garment business, the fur trade, the factories, the retail—there’s a lot of money in that sector and there are dirty hands greasing those wheels. I’m on the quiet end of it out here. There’s no need to be greedy, and I think me and you and . . . well . . . I think we live OK. And besides, Old Krupinski served in the Great War too. He and I have an understanding. We have everything we need.”

  “We don’t have everything we need,” Sheldon said.

  Joseph didn’t want to push further, but for the moment, Sheldon was talking without exploding, and it was better to have him come clean when he was in this state of mind. So, Joseph said, “Come on. Out with the rest. We’re all we’ve got left.”

  “Uncle Nate acted like he was in charge of everything,” said Sheldon. “And we went along with it. The stupid clothes, the stupid prayers. Standing around like a couple of dolts pretending it all means something when we all know Mom and Aunt Lucy weren’t even there.”

  Joseph had been wearing his only suit, which was black because he had only one need for a suit. Sheldon’s funeral jacket had been bought in Springfield on their way down to Connecticut. They’d found a secondhand clothing store that smelled like mothballs and wood polish. For fifty cents, it fit him well enough. Using scissors, Joseph had dutifully ripped the lapel in line with Jewish custom to show that vanity was not distracting them from thinking about those they had lost.

  At the cemetery, the Massachusetts men looked like country versions of Mutt and Jeff compared to Nate’s three-piece suit from G. Fox & Co. Sheldon’s older cousin Abe was in a tailored hand-me-down, and Mirabelle—sixteen already and looking like a lady—was wearing one of Lucy’s gowns.

  Joseph knew Sheldon wasn’t wrong about Nate’s domination of the proceedings, but it wasn’t the most interesting thing Sheldon had said.

  “When you say they weren’t there, what do you mean? You mean their spirits?” Joseph asked.

  “I mean their bodies.”

  There had been nothing but ash. The film reels were made of nitrate. Nitrate, when burned, creates its own oxygen. A nitrate fire is a hell machine. It burned in Hartford for two days; water only made it burn hotter. When the ground was cool enough, the firemen sifted through the ash. All the gold had melted, but they found Lila’s diamond pendant in what had been the aisle; proof to Joseph she’d been trampled on the way out.

  The rabbi collected some of the ash and buried it, calling it “Lila Horo­witz” like it had once been a person or maybe still was. Joseph brought the diamond home and put it in her jewelry box. Ever since the funeral a year ago, he would occasionally glimpse Sheldon touching it. He never interfered.

  “We talked about this, didn’t we?” Joseph asked.

  “Yeah,” Sheldon said. “I wanted to bring her ashes back to the woods and scatter them there. Uncle Nate said, ‘No,’ mumbled something about expectations, and you accepted that. Now we’ve borrowed the Krupinski truck to see a rock placed over a cup of ash.”

  Sheldon’s voice was calm, and this pained Joseph even more.

  “I wanted that too,” he confessed.

  Sheldon turned fully and placed a leg up on the bench seat. “So why didn’t we?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry” was all Joseph could say. More than that and he wouldn’t have been able to see the road.

  “I know you are,” Sheldon said. “That’s why I haven’t said anything.”

  After nearly a minute, Sheldon added, “I’m sorry too.”

  * * *

  Joseph had been encouraging Lila’s trips. She came back refreshed and energetic and more affectionate. Hartford may not have been as sophisticated or glamorous as Boston, but it was the big city life that Lila was missing and Joseph didn’t want her to miss anything. He thought he was a good husband and father, but he also knew that he was reclusive. That he was still shaken from his experiences in France. That the round and full life his wife deserved was beyond his capacity to provide. All he could do to honor that reality was try to be permissive.

  The newspapers later said that the projectionist was a man named Arnold Krevich. He was a heavy smoker and often puffed away as the films played. Krevich had seen bad things during the Great War and everyone knew his nerves and temper were frayed, which is why he had taken a job sitting alone in a dark room with nothing but the rhythmic whirr of the reels for company. He wasn’t supposed to smoke, but management feared telling him to stop.

  In reading the accounts, Joseph was sympathetic to Krevich’s condition because he understood that aversion to noise; the endless, pounding, arrhythmic, explosive noise that went on day after day after day until it fell silent long enough for a whistle to blow, sending men over the top of the trench to be cut down as machine guns rattled.

  Krevich escaped the fire, having seen it first. In the hospital—being treated for smoke inhalation—he said an errant ash, still too hot on the way down, ignited the film that burst immediately into flames, lighting up the other reels he’d never bothered returning to the studios because he was a half-assed man.

  The fire spread to the white canopy on the ceiling that was soaked in a flammable material to keep it pristine.

  Burning tar from the roof ignited the skirts of fleeing women, turning them into human lanterns.

  “There isn’t even a body,” Joseph had tried to tell Sheldon but didn’t. “Smoke. Your mother has become smoke. Your mother is part of the sky now.”

  * * *

  In Hebrew the word for sky is sh’myim. Broken into two words, it means “there is water.” Hidden, there in code, is God’s promise of life in the heavens.

  * * *

  Joseph had wanted to explain what he and Sheldon had really needed to Nate and the rabbi last year when it was time to make decisions; he had wanted to do what Sheldon had wanted and take the ashes home, but the fashionable brother and the learned man were both adamant that it was wrong and disrespectful.

  He should have told them he didn’t care and made a separate peace for Lila and himself and Sheldon, safe in the certa
inty that his actions would have been countenanced by a forgiving God, and if not, it was no God he needed.

  He’d seen hundreds of men gassed to death on a battlefield that was nothing but a killing floor. Dismissing God’s concerns was no challenge.

  Not Sheldon’s, though. His concerns were at the center of Joseph’s attention. He knew he had failed—from the boy’s perspective—and given in to both Nate’s wishes and the rabbi’s instructions. He’d presented the decision with platitudes rather than truth. He had said how funerals are for the living, not the dead, and if burying them brings comfort to others, it is a mitzvah—a blessing—as it is our job to ease the burden of others as best we can.

  It was all true and it was all bullshit also. The truth of his motives was that a refusal to bury the women side by side would have ruptured the family, and something inside Joseph told him not to do this. Some instinct told him that Sheldon would be better served with his remaining family intact. Joseph would have to find a way of keeping Lila present and close to their home in Whately. He had tried to cook the foods she made, and he brought her up in conversation when he and Sheldon spoke. But it was forced and they both knew it. Her distance—the distance of the ash—was always on their minds.

  * * *

  “Maybe an hour more,” Joseph said, as the rain splattered off the curved hood of the Ford. Sheldon said nothing and Joseph answered what Sheldon didn’t ask: “If it gets much worse, I’ll pull over. We can wait it out like we do when we’re hunting.”

  Sheldon looked over at his father’s hands holding the wheel. When Sheldon watched bus drivers, their hands barely seemed to touch the wood, but his father’s hands—scarred from barbed wire, snares, and a youth cutting and hauling ice on Fresh Pond in Cambridge and Breeds Pond in Lynn—held the wheel like it was a rope and the two of them were dangling from a mountain.

  When Joseph was a teenager, he worked the tail end of the ice trade—cutting, stacking, hauling the ice for transport back to Boston where it was shipped down to New York for drinks before Prohibition or peddled door-to-door locally in the Back Bay. Summers he went to Maine, where he’d cut the trees for the sawdust that would line the ship hulls where the ice was stored below the waterline.