The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness

by Joel ben Izzy

  Many were the nights he thought he’d captured one dream or another, in the form of a fantastic get-rich-quick scheme, an elixir that would restore his health, or an elaborate invention that would bring him fame, fortune, and, what he wanted most of all—happiness. Yet, time and again, he awoke to find that his hopes had slipped through his gnarled fingers. Then he would respond as he did to all the pain in his life—with a laugh.

  “What can you do?” he would say. “People make plans and God laughs.” As if for emphasis, he’d look toward heaven, his palms raised, and shrug. I would follow his gaze upward, then look back down at his hands. They fascinated and terrified me, with their knuckles swollen like marbles, fingers hooked like the talons of an owl.

  They hadn’t always looked that way. At one time, before I was born, they had been lithe and nimble, one dancing along the neck of a violin, the other gently holding the bow. That’s how they looked in the photograph I’d seen of him standing tall in his white dinner jacket and black trousers, the violin resting under his chin, on the night he debuted with the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra.

  He was in his early twenties when the arthritis began to show. I imagine it was subtle at first, his fingers moving imperceptibly more slowly between the strings. He must have heard it in the music before he ever saw it in his hands. Ankylosing spondylitis, the doctors would later call it, a rare form of the disease that caused the vertebrae of his spine to fuse into a single bone. Over the two-and-a-half decades I knew him, I saw his once tall body bend and twist into the shape of a question mark.

  I never heard my father play the violin; by the time I was born the instrument itself was all that remained of his once promising career. Throughout my childhood it sat in its case atop the mantelpiece in our living room. Each in turn my two older brothers and I tried to play it, but none of us had the knack. We put it back, and it lay there, gathering dust, until he died.

  As a child I did not understand his disease, or why it was that, as I grew taller, he grew shorter. With each trip to the hospital, he came back less able to walk—first with the cane, then the braces, then the walker. When he did walk, he moved so slowly that it was painful to watch. But, as with every other setback in life, he answered with a laugh.

  “You know, the bumblebee can’t fly,” he announced once when he came home from the hospital, this time with a walker. “It’s true. The laws of aerodynamics have proven that his wingspan can’t support the weight of his body. Good thing for the bumblebee, though, he doesn’t follow those laws, and goes on flying just the same.”

  My father had dozens of such sayings, words of wisdom that would become the legacy he left to my brothers and me. He’d say them whenever he met with failure and then go on chasing the next dream.

  After giving up the violin, he had become an inventor, pouring our family’s savings into one scheme or another. During the late 1960s he invested in what he thought would be the wave of the future—glow-in-the-dark plastics and paints. Like the remnants of all his other inventions, they littered the house. But by night, they glowed. Spilled paint was everywhere, even on the ceiling, like stars in the sky. That was my father—a rich man in the world of dreams, but poor again when daylight came.

  “You know what they say, don’t you?” he once asked me. “People make plans . . .”

  “. . . and God laughs,” I answered dutifully, handing him a brick. I sat on his bed and he sat on a folding chair in the bathroom doorway, attached to one of his inventions. It was a device that was supposed to straighten out his back, using rope slung over a chin-up bar, with a neck brace on one end and a soup pot on the other. It was my job to hand him bricks. Each time he placed another in the pot he would grimace in pain, then force himself to smile, looking for all the world like he was trying to hang himself.

  “But I don’t get it,” I said. “You say God laughs whenever something bad happens. Why? What’s so funny?”

  He stopped for a moment, brick poised in midair.

  “You want to know why?”

  I nodded.

  He shrugged, the pot full of bricks bobbing up and down. “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask someone wiser than me. But here’s what I do know. In this life you have a choice. You can laugh along with God, or you can cry all alone. Now, which are you going to do?”

  So I learned to laugh along with my father.

  • • •

  THE WEEKS WENT BY with no sign of my voice, and I found myself thinking more and more about my father. I tried to remember his laughter, and tried not to think about his fingers. There was a difference, I told myself; his loss was permanent. Mine was temporary.

  That’s what the doctor thought. “It’s your vocal nerve,” he’d said when he heard my quiet, breathy whisper. “Must still be in shock. But I wouldn’t worry about it. They usually come back. Give it a couple weeks, maybe as long as a month. Two at the very most.”

  That’s how Taly explained it to the kids, as a temporary loss, the day I came home from the hospital.

  “Elijah, Michaela, listen to me,” she said. They ignored her, each one clinging on to one of my legs in a welcome-home embrace, as they pelted me with questions.

  “Did it hurt? Did they take out that thing in your neck? Can we see it? Were you brave? Tell us the story!”.

  “Kids,” she said, “I need to tell you something. Something important.” They finally stopped and looked up at her. “Your daddy can’t talk.”

  Michaela’s face took on a puzzled expression; Elijah looked betrayed, and shook his head. “Yes he can,” he finally said. “He talks all the time. Right, Daddy?” He looked to me for confirmation. I nodded back toward Taly.

  “No,” she said, “I’m afraid he can’t. His ‘owie’ is gone, and that’s the most important thing. But, for now, he can’t talk. But it’s just for a while. Right, Joel?”

  I nodded.

  “How long, Daddy?” asked Michaela.

  “Pretty soon,” Taly answered. “But we don’t know exactly when. Until then he’s supposed to rest his voice, so he can only whisper, just a tiny bit.”

  “And when it comes back, you’ll tell us stories?” asked Elijah.

  I couldn’t hold back.

  “Lots and . . . lots of . . . stories.”

  NEITHER OF THE CHILDREN quite knew what to make of their almost mute father. At first Michaela thought it was funny, a kind of running gag, because of the strange, improvised sign language I tried to use to communicate with her. I whispered only when I absolutely had to, partly because to do so stung my throat and partly because whenever I did, she screwed up her face and shook her head. “Daddy, talk louder!”

  For Elijah my missing voice meant a new job. When I was with Taly, she spoke on my behalf. But since she was working long hours to make up for some of my lost income, Elijah became my voice. As my whisper could not be heard over any other noise—the sound of a passing car, background music, or a plane flying overhead—he would come with me on errands. When I had something to say, I would whisper the words in his ear, then lift him up so he could repeat them aloud: “My daddy would like change for a twenty.”

  At first we were both excited about his new role. This was a good thing, I told myself, a father and son bonding, having adventures. He did his job well, but I began to notice that the attention from strangers was hard for him. Always on the shy side, he drew back from shopkeepers, grocery baggers, bank tellers, all of whom commented on how cute he was. One even asked if I was a ventriloquist. Elijah handled it stoically, but I could tell he was embarrassed, not just for his sake, but for mine. Sensing this, I tried to speak up whenever I could, but my whispers made it worse. He did not want people to know that there was something wrong with me.

  Hard as it was for him in public, it was tougher still when we were alone. He had entered that age of endless questions, when the world is one big mystery and your parents know all the answers. I had looked forward to this time since before he was born. But now, as the questions came, I s
crambled to answer them.

  “Daddy, why is there a dragon on the Welsh flag? Or is it a griffin? What’s the difference? What is mythology? You once told me a story about a troll. Where do trolls live? Can you speak French? How does time work? What’s a ventriloquist? Why can’t you talk?”.

  In response to each question, I squeezed out a word or two, then tried to fill the rest in with gestures. I drew on napkins. I pulled books off shelves and pointed to pictures. He would nod appreciatively and then, a moment later, ask another question, and the whole process would start over.

  A MONTH AFTER the surgery, Taly’s worry began to show. Though she tried to hide her concern, especially in front of the kids, it came out in the morning, when we awoke.

  “Do you feel anything? A twitch?” The doctor had said that I might feel a slight twinge or a tingle before the nerve came back to life.

  I shook my head.

  “How about now?” she would ask again, five minutes later.

  “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “It will . . . be all . . . right.” With my breathy whisper, I could only get out a word or two before I had to stop for breath.

  “But I am worried. I’m worried about you. What if your voice doesn’t come back?”

  “My father . . . used to say . . . that ninety- . . . five percent . . .” I stopped, out of breath. I’d meant to repeat another of his sayings, that ninety-five percent of the things we worry about never come to pass, which shows that worrying is a very effective means of dealing with problems. But it missed the mark.

  “Yes,” she said. “I was thinking about your father.”

  She didn’t say another word, but we’d been together long enough that she didn’t have to. Though Taly had never met my father, she had heard enough of his life story to see it as a worst-case scenario for mine.

  I found myself thinking of my father often, and of one story in particular—a joke, really—that he used to love, about a man who goes to a tailor to order a new suit. The tailor takes measurements and tells him to come back the next week. The man does, but when he tries on the suit, it fits terribly.

  “What is this?” he says. “This sleeve is way too long and the other is too short. And the pants are tight on this side and baggy on the other!”.

  “Relax,” says the tailor. “The suit is fine. Look.” He leads the man to the mirror. “You’ve got to bring your right shoulder back, like so. Then tilt your head to the side. That’s right. Now lean like this, with your left foot forward. . . . Perfect!”.

  “Okay,” says the man, scrunching before the mirror. “Yeah, I see. It looks good.” He slouches back and hobbles out of the shop and onto the street, where two women notice his strange walk.

  “My God!” says one. “What happened to him?”

  “I don’t know,” says the other. “But that’s a great-looking suit!”

  I’d heard him tell it many times over the years. He especially loved acting out the part of the customer, and I loved watching him until one day, when I was about fifteen, I realized that his body looked no different when he was done acting out the character. He had become that man in the suit. It wasn’t just his body; it was his whole life, twisted around to avoid seeing his failure.

  As he neared death, his visions of success grew more vivid. In one of my last visits with him, in a nursing home, he motioned for me to come close, then pointed to the top of a closet. “See those three guys up there?” he whispered. “They’re Turkish coffee merchants. And we’ve just signed a deal—a big one. But it’s not for coffee, it’s for cheese! We’re rich! But keep it a secret. . . .”

  I nodded, loving him for who he was. Even so, I made two promises to myself. One was that I would never let myself be deluded into thinking I had succeeded. The other was that I would not fail.

  THE ONLY THING between me and happiness, I decided, was my lost voice. Some evenings, after Taly and the kids had gone to bed, I would go down to my office, a beautiful redwood-paneled room, which has long been my place of refuge. I had filled it with puppets and masks that I had collected on my travels, and on one wall I’d hung a huge map of the world, with pins and yarn marking the places I’d been and the stories I’d found. At night my office would be silent, and in this silence I would sit, awaiting the return of my voice.

  Sometimes I would imagine energy flowing to my throat, the nerve suddenly springing to life.

  It was on one of these nights, as I sat in this meditative state, convinced I was on the verge of success, that the phone rang. I jumped up and very nearly answered it. But I managed to hold myself back, then cringed as I heard, yet again, the message I’d recorded months earlier: “Hi! Joel here. Can’t talk now—I’ll call you back when I can!” Beep.

  I waited for the caller’s voice, knowing it would be someone offering to pay me money to do the one thing I could not do.

  “Hi Joel! We’re big fans of yours here in San Francisco. Look, we’ve got a bar mitzvah coming up next month, gonna be one hell of a party. We got a DJ and a magician and you would be the icing on the cake. I know it’s not much notice, but for what it’s worth, you can name your price . . .”

  The machine clicked off and I sat there, in its echo, staring at the map. I did not want to think about the money lost from that gig, or about all the other gigs I’d canceled. Instead, with my future now a question mark, I turned to thinking about my past. My eyes traced the yarn on the map from pin to pin. Budapest. Hong Kong. Rome. As I looked at each one, a place came to life, filled with people, smells, tastes, and sounds, reminding me of the stories I had told and loved. The stories led me backward in circles, over the years, all the way to where my career had begun, not far from Berkeley, just outside of Santa Cruz, which was marked by a pin with a bright yellow head.

  ALL STORYTELLERS REMEMBER the teller who first inspired them; it leaves a lifelong impression. In storytelling circles, this person is known as a teller’s “mama duck.” Lenny was my mama duck.

  I’d first heard him telling stories one night at a pub, nearly twenty years earlier, in downtown Santa Cruz. I’d seen a flyer on the door and walked in, with no idea what to expect. He stood alone, in silence, on a platform in a corner of the room. His appearance was not particularly striking—somewhat stocky, with a beard and bushy hair. He looked no more like a storyteller than anyone else in the bar.

  Yet when he opened his mouth, everything changed. The room fell into complete silence, and I found myself transported, first to a crumbling castle in the Scottish highlands, then to a schoolhouse in New England, and finally to a tiny village in Eastern Europe. There I met and fell in love with characters painted by his words, people more real to me than many I knew. I left at the end of the evening, nostalgic for places I’d never been and missing people I’d never met, knowing I had found my life’s work.

  The next day I found out where he lived and rode my bike ten miles through the redwoods to his cabin, where I begged him to be my teacher.

  “You?” He laughed as though I’d told a joke. “But you’re just a kid! Do you even know why you want to tell stories?”

  I shrugged, noticing something I had not seen the night before. When he spoke, he gestured using only his right hand.

  He shook his head, laughing again. “You’re like the guy who goes to the rabbi to study Talmud. You know the story?”

  I didn’t.

  “A young man asks a rabbi to teach him the wisdom of the Talmud. The rabbi tells him he’s not ready. The man insists he is, so the rabbi gives him a test.

  “‘Two burglars climb down a chimney to rob a house,’ says the rabbi. ‘One’s face gets dirty, the other stays clean. Which one washes his face?’

  “‘The one with the dirty face, of course,’ says the man.

  “‘No,’ says the rabbi. ‘It’s the one with the clean face. Because he looks at the one with the dirty face and assumes that his own face must be dirty. Meanwhile, the one with the dirty face sees the other and assumes that his own face must be clean.�
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  “‘Ah-ha!’ says the man. ‘Now I understand.’

  “‘No, you think you understand, but you do not. Try again: Two burglars climb down a chimney to rob a house. Which one washes his face?’

  “‘The one with the clean face, right?’

  “‘Wrong again,’ says the rabbi. ‘If they both go down the chimney, both of their faces get dirty. You see,’ says the rabbi, ‘you’re not ready. Someone like you wastes time looking for answers, when you should be looking for questions.’”

  He then closed the door in my face. But I came back the next day, and before he could close the door again I shouted, “Wait! I have a question.”

  He stared at me, eyebrows raised.

  “Since when do burglars stop to wash their faces?”

  “Ah!” he smiled. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  FOR THE NEXT six months I rode my bike to his cabin twice a week, to sit before his wood-burning stove and listen to him tell tales. He seemed to know every story ever told—as well as all the same jokes my father knew—and when I told him one I’d learned, he already knew three variations of it.

  I followed him to all his performances, amazed each time as I watched the effect his words had on the crowd. He seemed to drink in their affection, and mine as well. He called me his star pupil, though I was his only one. One afternoon, when I finally told him a story he had not heard before, he laughed a long, deep laugh, then disappeared into his bedroom. He emerged a moment later with a large box.

  “I’ve been waiting for this,” he said, handing it to me.

  Inside I found a beautiful gray fedora. It fit perfectly, and I wore it to all my performances.

  But Lenny had a dark side, a bitterness that began to creep into our visits. It came out unexpectedly, usually triggered by something I would unknowingly do or say. Then he would turn critical, and sometimes even hostile. One night he showed up late and drunk to a performance I was giving at the community center in downtown Santa Cruz. He stood in the back of the room, shaking his head, and he left early. When I saw him at his cabin the next day, he was hungover, and when I asked him what he thought of my storytelling the night before, he shrugged.