Lair of Dreams

“Yeah. Sure,” Henry said, and he and Theta watched the people walking past on Forty-second Street rendered momentarily insubstantial as they stepped through the steam rising from the city’s manholes. In the alley, he and Theta stood side by side, but they’d never been farther apart.



Between his new role as Evie’s pretend fiancé and putting in more hours at the museum now that Will was gone, Sam had found little time to follow up on his Project Buffalo leads. Finally, he managed to slip away and down to his old neighborhood on the Lower East Side. Many businesses were closed due to the sleeping sickness, and Sam had no luck on Orchard Street until a pickle vendor informed him that the Rosenthals had made good and moved to the Bronx.



Now Sam and Evie waited outside the sprawling apartment building on the Grand Concourse, an aspirational Tudor made for Jews who wanted to reinvent themselves once they’d left the crowded tenements of Orchard and Hester Streets—those tenements themselves a remove from the shtetls and ghettos of Russia, Poland, Romania, and Hungary. Every building had its ghosts, it seemed.



“I don’t see why I had to come,” Evie groused.



Sam put his fingers to his cheeks, making dimples. “Because you’re my darling fiancée. Everybody loves the Sweetheart Seer!” he said sarcastically. “Oh, one more thing—if she asks, you’re converting to Judaism.”



“What? Sam!”



“Don’t worry. Everything’s jake, Baby Vamp. Just follow my lead.”



“If that’s supposed to be reassuring, it’s not,” Evie grumbled.



They took the stairs, dodging a handful of merry children running amok, and knocked at Mrs. Rosenthal’s door. Anna Rosenthal was rounder and older than the young woman Evie had seen in her vision. She wore glasses now, and a few threads of gray showed in her dulled red hair, but it was unmistakably the same woman. Mrs. Rosenthal uttered a small cry before crushing Sam into a fierce hug. She stood back, shaking her head affectionately as she assessed him. “Sergei!”



She spoke to Sam in Russian, and he answered in kind, faltering a little. “Sorry, Mrs. Rosenthal, my Russian’s a little rusty these days.”



“Everyone forgets,” she said, and Sam couldn’t tell if it was said with sadness or gratitude.



Evie cleared her throat.



“And this,” Sam said, hugging her, “is the apple of my eye, my lovely bride-to-be, Evie O’Neill.”



“Charmed,” Evie said, curtsying.



“Yes, I read all about it in the papers! But I had no idea the famous Sam Lloyd was our Sergei Lubovitch until you telephoned and told me. But, please—come in, come in!”



Mrs. Rosenthal welcomed them into a parlor whose every stick of furniture wore a doily yarmulke. From the kitchen, she brought out a plate of mandelbrodt and a pot of coffee.



“Sergei Lubovitch!” Mrs. Rosenthal exclaimed, pressing her fingers to her lips. “I haven’t seen you since you were a baby. And here you are, grown. And so handsome.”



“You don’t look a day older, Mrs. Rosenthal. Why, I’d know you anywhere,” Sam said.



The charm didn’t fail to work on Mrs. Rosenthal, who laughed and waved away the compliment. “Tell me of your mother and father.”



“My father runs a fur shop in Chicago. My mother, I’m sorry to say, died many years ago.”



Mrs. Rosenthal put a hand to her chest and bowed her head. “Such terrible news. Poor Miriam. I remember on the ship coming over, she was so sick with you.”



Sam had heard this story quite a few times from his parents. The “We Left Everything Behind and Braved a Treacherous Voyage to a New World in Order to Give You the Best Possible Life” story. Usually it was leverage to get him to do whatever they needed—study the Torah or help his father in the store. He wanted to ask Mrs. Rosenthal about the letter, but he couldn’t rush into this and insult her or she’d know this was more than a social call, so he sipped his coffee and waited for an opening.



“The ferries brought us to Ellis Island, and when we see the Statue of Liberty, like an angel in the harbor, we are crying. From joy. From relief. Hope. We had nothing.” Mrs. Rosenthal’s voice quavered with emotion. “This country took us in.”



“God bless America,” Sam said. He needed to cut off Anna Rosenthal before she devolved into further sentimentality and, possibly, folk singing, so he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the mysterious envelope. “Mrs. Rosenthal, I came across something of my mother’s that had me scratching my head, and I wondered if you might know anything about it. It’s from someone named Rotke Wasserman.”