One morning, a taxicab pulled to the curb, and two women emerged. One was noticeably tall, the other smaller, her hair cut in a bob. Together the women toured the house’s bedrooms and the front and back parlors, the kitchen with its double oven, the small glass conservatory. They inspected the carriage-house, and saw that it could easily be converted into living quarters. They walked back down the drive and stood beneath the green ash, and considered what they’d seen.
“What do you think?” Sophia asked.
The Golem gazed around at the house and the trees, the weed-littered lawn, the drive that she thought ought to be pea-gravel instead of asphalt. She bent to the base of the ash and sifted a handful of dirt between her fingers, then laid a palm upon the trunk and felt the life that hummed inside.
“I think I’ll take it,” she said.
* * *
The construction site in Midtown belonged to a steel-frame “skyscraper,” one of the newer breed that had begun to appear across the city. The architect who’d designed it was often at the site, monitoring its progress—and soon he began to notice a tall and striking man who’d appear each day on the sidewalk, watching the construction as well. The man seemed especially interested in the problem of steel bracing, and the mechanics of loads and stresses. He’d track each beam as it was lifted into place, holding up a hand to mimic its position, trying to guess the angle at which it would be attached. Usually, his guess was correct. When he was wrong, he’d ponder the problem, often sketching it in the air with his hands until he found the answer. One afternoon, he seemed particularly stuck for an explanation—and at last the architect went to the fence and told him, “It’s to do with the opposing forces on the beam. It needs cross-bracing at that point.”
The man frowned at this. “But why? It’s perpendicular to the ground. The compressive strength should be more than enough.”
“Unless you’re building on top of fill. Then you’ve got to account for the shear.”
The man thought a moment, then grinned. “Thank you. That was bothering me.”
“You in the construction trade?”
“Not like this,” the man said, nodding to the building.
The two men watched the progress for a while, and then the man on the sidewalk said, “If someone told you that he wanted to learn to design buildings like these, and could go anywhere in the world to do it—what would you tell him?”
“I’d tell him to go to Chicago,” the architect said at once. “That’s the new frontier. The things they do with steel in that city, I don’t understand the half of them.”
“Chicago,” the man said in mild surprise, as though he’d just been handed the key to a vexing mystery. “How interesting. Thank you.” He smiled, and walked away—and the architect never saw him again.
* * *
Toby Blumberg stood frozen in the sunlit dance hall, his wrists held in the grip of a grinning old man.
I know your name, Toby told him.
The man’s grin wavered.
It’s Yehudah Schaalman. You aren’t really here, you’re in a flask buried on the other side of the world. All of this happened to my mother, before I was born. Say, do you want to know what comes next?
A touch of confusion, in the old man’s eyes.
In just a minute, Chava Levy and Ahmad al-Hadid are going to come through the door and rescue me—and then they’ll stick your sorry ass in that flask for good.
The man snarled, angered in defeat—
And Toby woke upon his pallet.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Even now, months after his mother had told him everything, it still surprised him to wake without that desperate need for movement. He tended to laze about in the mornings now, until Anna yelled at him to quit loafing and eat his breakfast.
But this was a Sunday, and Anna had left for work already, so Toby was alone. He lay there for a few minutes more, mostly out of principle, then washed himself and found a clean shirt and a pair of dungarees. He’d quit his job at Western Union; the uniform was gone, to be worn upon the back of some other boy. He’d enrolled at Stuyvesant High instead, with an eye toward the Cooper Union entrance exam. All summer long he’d studied at the library: geometry, algebra, basic chemistry. It shocked him how long he could sit still and study, now that he didn’t need to move around so much.
He wolfed down a few slices of raisin challah, slung a heavy rucksack across his back, and carried his bicycle downstairs.
By now, he could navigate the trip to Brooklyn without much thought. He crossed the columned plaza and climbed the Manhattan Bridge, feeling, as always, as though he were about to be launched into the air. At the exit, he circled around and rode the waterfront past Wallabout Channel and the Navy Yard, then turned south, pedaling past brownstones and frame houses, to the eastern edge of Clinton Hill and the house on the double lot.
He leaned the bicycle against the porch and rang the bell. The woman who opened it wore a housekeeper’s dress and a clean white apron tied at her waist.
“Good morning, Chava,” he said.
“Good morning, Toby,” she said, smiling. “Kreindel’s upstairs.”
Kreindel sat at the desk in her bedroom, pencil in her hand, frowning at her composition book.
Her bedroom was the smallest in the house. She’d been offered one far larger, but had quailed at the idea of living in so much space, like a pea rattling in a can. Even her own little room had felt too big until the bookshelves had arrived and were
