The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness

by Joel ben Izzy

  “What do I think? I think I was right. You’re no storyteller, just a kid with nothing to say.” This, I didn’t need. I turned to the door. “Leaving? Good. Come back when you’ve got a story worth telling.”

  I walked out without looking back and had not seen him since.

  AS I NEARED the two-month mark, I became obsessed with the return of my voice, and at Taly’s suggestion, I began to see specialists.

  They used every manner of contrivance to examine my vocal cords—old-fashioned tongue depressors, high-tech rods with strobe lights. One actually looked up my nose with a rubber hose. As I expected, they all agreed with my surgeon: There was a two-month window in which my voice would either return or not, and there was nothing to do but wait and see.

  There was a bright spot, though, something else on which they all agreed. There actually was one person who could say, definitively, whether my voice would return. He was the expert among experts, and so much respect did they have for him that they mentioned his name only in whispers, and preferred to write it down, on the backs of their own business cards. The name itself seemed to hold a certain mystique—a long Eastern European name, filled with unlikely consonants and scarcely a vowel, an unpronounceable word that would put an end to a game of Scrabble. He was the one I needed to see.

  “THE STORYTELLER HAS ARRIVED!”

  I stood up from the couch in the waiting room and turned to see the source of the deep, thickly accented voice. He stood there, one hand holding the tape I’d sent him, the other reaching out to shake mine. He looked the perfect picture of a mad scientist, with silver hair and horn-rimmed glasses, slightly askew, and I liked him instantly.

  “Very nice stories!” he said, holding out the tape. “I liked especially the tales of Chelm. These, I have not heard for a very long time. Now, let us see if we can find your voice.”

  I followed him into his office, which was lined with pictures of celebrities whose voices he had saved, so many photos that it looked like a deli. After motioning me to a stool, he read carefully over my records, then stared down my throat for a very long time.

  He looked again at my records, then spoke.

  “You wish to know if your voice will return. And if so, when. Correct?”

  I nodded.

  “I see from your records that it has now been gone two months.”

  “Only fifty- . . . seven days.”

  “Eight weeks,” he said. “And no movement in your vocal cord. This is not a good sign.” He paused, shaking his head, then sighed. “I am afraid the nerve is dead. It will not come back to life. I am sorry. Very sorry.”

  I stared at him, waiting for something better. After a long time, he spoke again. “This is very hard for you, I know. You are a storyteller, so perhaps it will help you to think of this as a story. What do the sages tell us?” he paused, lifting his eyebrows. “‘The voice is the gateway to the soul.’ And before that gateway stand two guards—your vocal cords. To make sound they must come together—like two rabbis arguing about Talmud. But in your case, one rabbi is silent. Why? I wish I knew.” He paused. Then, leaning in close to me, he whispered.

  “Perhaps he knows a secret.”

  STORY ORIGIN: CZECH REPUBLIC

  Optimism and Pessimism

  There once lived a king who had twin sons. Though they looked exactly alike, their personalities were different as night and day. One was a devout pessimist, the other an incurable optimist.

  When they came of age, the king decided it was time to open their eyes to the other side of life. He would do it through the gifts he gave them.

  For the pessimist, he went to the royal jeweler.

  “I would like him to have the finest watch ever made,” he said. “Money is no object. Jewels, diamonds, gold, platinum—the best. And I want it ready by his birthday.”

  For the optimist, he went to the palace gardener.

  “When he wakes up on the morning of his birthday, I want him to see, at the foot of his bed, a huge pile of manure.”

  So came the birthday. With great anticipation, he went to see his pessimistic son. He found him sitting glumly on his bed, holding a magnificent watch.

  “How do you like your gift?” asked the king.

  “It’s alright,” said the pessimist. “But it’s really rather gaudy. And even if it wasn’t, it’s the sort of thing that will probably get stolen, or I might lose it. It might also break . . .”

  The king had heard enough and went off to his son the optimist, whom he found dancing with joy. When his father entered the room, the son ran up and hugged him.

  “Oh, thank you, father, thank you! It’s just what I wanted!”

  Perplexed, the father asked the son what he was thanking him for.

  “Why, father—for the horse!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Optimism and Pessimism

  “A DOOR CLOSES, A WINDOW OPENS.”

  That’s what my mother always said to me and my brothers. It’s the sort of thing mothers often say, but for her the words became a mantra, recited again and again as doors closed around her. Yet with each slam, she became more optimistic.

  She and my father had left Cleveland for sunny Southern California, where she dreamed of starting a new life and pursuing her love of journalism. A born interviewer, she had a gift for asking just the right question and listening between the lines of the answer. Her skills had served her well as a cub reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where she showed a natural ability to draw stories out of people. Once she found a story, she would follow it from the time she found it on the street until the next morning, when the paper rolled off the presses.

  Years later, audiologists suggested it was the noise from those presses that caused her hearing loss. The first signs came when my brothers and I were young, as bits of conversation she missed, and in the fights she had with my father. He had trouble turning to face her when he spoke, and she strained to understand his words.

  “What’s the matter?” he’d shout. “Are you deaf?”

  She wasn’t, yet, but was well on her way. And as her hearing went, so did her career in journalism. For someone else it would have been a bitter disappointment, but she managed to see the bright side; no longer would she have to hear bad news.

  After my father died, her hearing loss became her calling card. She moved to a condominium in Alhambra, east of Los Angeles, and began campaigning for the rights of the hearing impaired. Joining an organization called Self Help for the Hard of Hearing—SHHH!—she even managed to find the humorous side of hearing loss, attending workshops with titles like “What do you say after you say ‘What did you say?’” She also began to write again—articles for the organization’s newsletter, as well as human-interest features for local newspapers, finding people who would either answer her questions in writing or submit to the grueling process of an interview, in which they would have to repeat each answer several times. I was the subject of many such articles: “Local Boy Travels World, Telling Tales.” “Have Stories, Will Travel.” “My Son the Storyteller.”

  Each time I made a new storytelling tape, I would send her a copy. She would sit before her tape recorder, holding the little microphone that hooked up to her hearing aid, struggling to understand. I would give her written transcripts, too, but she wanted to hear the stories, and when she picked up a few of the words, after many attempts, she glowed with pride. Sending her the tapes was my part of an agreement we had long honored, but never spoken—the “good-news rule.” I only sent her those things that would make her happy and proud—newspaper articles about me, along with photos of Taly and the kids. For her part, she sent me articles she wrote, along with envelopes full of clippings from newspapers and magazines, schmaltzy stories she thought would make me smile.

  I suppose that’s why I hadn’t told her about the cancer. It’s not that I meant it to be a secret, but it’s hard to bring up bad news, and I didn’t want to worry her. At first, I had decided to wait until after the operati
on, then tell her the whole story, in person, the next time I was performing in Los Angeles. Since returning from the hospital, though, I had avoided her calls, waiting for my voice to return. There were many calls I had not returned; both my brothers had phoned wondering why I was so out of touch, and when I didn’t answer their calls, they wrote letters. Friends wrote, too, as did fans, asking what was up with me. But my mother’s calls pulled at me.

  Then, the day after I’d seen the experts’ expert, I was in the kitchen spreading cream cheese on a bagel for Elijah when the phone rang. He picked it up and handed it to me, then sat down to eat his bagel. I stared at the phone for some time before finally whispering a tentative hello.

  “Elijah?” she guessed. “This is Grandma Gladys!” Her voice was very loud.

  “No, Mom . . . it’s me.”

  “You must be excited about starting kindergarten?”

  “Mom, it’s not . . . Elijah, it’s me!”

  “That’s good. I bet you’ll be a wonderful student. Is your daddy there?”.

  There was the squeal of feedback, then a long pause as she adjusted her hearing aid. “Hello?” she said. “Just a minute.”

  Odd as it may seem, this was not such an unusual conversation for us, even when I could speak. She would get flustered because she couldn’t hear, and I enunciated until my face hurt. We had not had a good phone conversation in years, and those in person were little better.

  “Hello? Elijah?” she said, when she finally came back on the phone.

  “MOM!” I whispered as loudly as I could. “IT’S JOEL! YOUR SON!”

  “Oh, Joel! Hi. I had such a nice talk with Elijah—he sounds excited about kindergarten. And how are you?”

  This was the time to tell her. But I paused, not knowing what to say, and the moment passed.

  FALL BROUGHT BIG TRANSITIONS—the start of kindergarten for Elijah and of preschool for Michaela. He boldly marched off to his new school, but she had a tougher time, and her first day ended in tears. The second did, as well, but then, on the third, she jumped out of our arms and dashed into the classroom to play.

  With the kids away at school and Taly at work, the days dragged on for me, my waking hours spent hoping, wishing, and praying that the expert had been wrong. Hard as the days were, though, evenings were tougher, my attempts at speech throughout the day having reduced my whisper to near silence.

  Bedtime was especially hard. It had always been my special time with the kids—a book, a story, and a kiss goodnight—the ritual that had brought to a close every day they’d ever known. At first Michaela would forget. “Daddy, tell a story! A Chelm story! Or the one about the lost horse! Or the Irish king!”.

  Then, Elijah would remind her. “No, Michaela. We don’t want to hear a story, do we?” She’d look puzzled at first, then shake her head in agreement. “It’s okay, Daddy. We don’t want to hear a story tonight.”

  One night I came up with a plan. I chose one of their favorite books, The Little Engine That Could. Elijah could very nearly read it, and Michaela had all but memorized it. I hid Michaela’s tape recorder under the bed, with one of my tapes cued up. I turned down the lights and we huddled together. Between the two of them, they recited the book, word for word. Then I reached down to the recorder and pressed “PLAY.”

  “Long ago, in Ireland, there lived a king. He was not a kind king . . . but a mean king, and he decided to play a little trick on his adviser . . .”

  Their eyes opened wide. Elijah must have known what I was doing, but he didn’t seem to mind. Michaela broke into a huge grin. I lip-synched along, adding gestures and facial expressions, until I got to the ending, when the storyteller must answer the king’s riddle: How many stars are there in the sky?

  “Your highness, there are exactly forty-seven milllllion, twooo huuuundred aaand eiiiighty-sixxxx thousssssand . . .” My voice came to a garbled stop.

  They stared at me, waiting.

  “Then what happened?” Elijah asked.

  “Daddy, keep going!” said Michaela.

  The tape recorder clicked loudly, its batteries dead. They looked up at me, waiting.

  “They lived . . . happily ever . . . after.”

  • • •

  I WAS FAR FROM HAPPY. And with each day that passed, what remained of my happiness drained steadily away. Finally, one rainy Saturday afternoon, I drove across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco in a last-ditch attempt to regain some control.

  The man who’d left a message on my answering machine had left an e-mail address, and so I’d booked the bar mitzvah gig—for no small fee. I began to regret my choice as soon as I crossed the bridge. Trying to perform was a ridiculous thing to do, driven as it was by my relentless optimism. You do your best under pressure, a voice inside me had said. Maybe, just maybe, your voice will return the moment you get on stage. Through the pouring rain, I could see the marquis of the swank San Francisco hotel, where the boy’s name flashed in bright lights. I’d told stories at wonderful bar mitzvah receptions in my time—beautiful, heartwarming events to mark a coming of age. I could tell that this was not one of them.

  As I made my way into the lobby I saw a life-size cutout of the bar mitzvah boy. Above it were the words “The Greatest Bar Mitzvah Ever!” with quotes all around: “Riveting!” “Irresistible!” “Two thumbs up!” This was a movie-star-theme bar mitzvah and, judging from the picture of the boy smoking a cigar and holding an Academy Award, it was his idea.

  Techno music spilled from the ballroom into the lobby, and other hotel guests covered their ears as they rushed past. Once inside the room I found blinding strobe lights reflecting off of mirror balls onto gold streamers, gold balloons, and gold lamé. The e-mail had said it would be a “dressy” affair, and I had grudgingly put on the suit I usually reserve for weddings and funerals, which left me feeling underdressed and overdressed at the same time. I began to panic.

  As I stood there, a woman in a gold flapper’s dress and stiletto heels teetered up to me, sloshing half of her martini out of the glass. “We’re so glad you’re here! You must be—oh, what’s your name? Don’t tell me. Izzy? Ben? Joel? You’re the storyteller—you’re on next, right after the magishishian.”

  I made my way to the stage. Nearby I could see the bar mitzvah boy, looking much like he did in the poster, the buttons of his tuxedo straining to contain him as he held court. Meanwhile, onstage, the magician wearily linked and unlinked metal rings. It’s usually the loudest of magic tricks, but in all the noise, the sound was lost. I watched him a moment longer, and then it came to me. A plan, and a good one. Maybe, I told myself, just maybe, no one would notice me. After all, no one was paying any attention to him. That was it. I would simply mouth the words.

  “They’re all yours,” he said, as he scrambled offstage, table full of props in one hand, rabbit in the other. I took my place before the microphone, smile on my face, ready to pretend I was telling a story. As for choosing the story, I would go through the same ritual I always did, just before every performance—wait patiently for one to come tap me on the shoulder. Sure enough, along came “The Beggar King,” and I launched into my pantomime.

  At first it worked like a charm. No one noticed me, and after ten minutes I thought I was home free. Then, something went wrong. It began with the bar mitzvah boy, who I could see staring at me with a quizzical look on his face. He shushed the boy next to him. As they grew quiet, other people began looking at them, then at me. A silence spread through the room. What was happening? The DJ turned off the music. People settled into their chairs, and even the adults at their tables stopped talking. Within a minute the place was dead quiet, with every eye looking right at me.

  I watched the expressions on their faces turn from curiosity to bewilderment, thinking how the magician would have loved this response. They leaned forward and squinted, gesturing with their hands as though to extract the words from me. Several people rubbed their ears, worried they’d suddenly gone deaf, and those with hearing aids adjusted
them. Others merely stared at me, their heads tilted to one side, curiously attentive. I waited for them to start talking again—after all, how long could they stare at me?—but instead the silence grew louder. There was not even the clink of silverware. Something else overtook them; en masse, they became cruelly polite. They were trying to help me, and I could feel their pity flowing up to me in waves. I had no choice but to try telling the story I’d been faking, the microphone amplifying my whispers and gasps.

  I was up there for what seemed like hours. Finally I got to the end of the story, grabbed my bag, and took a bow I didn’t deserve, to polite applause. The last thing I wanted was to stick around and try to explain why I couldn’t talk. Yet no one mentioned it. My scratchy excuse for a voice had become the elephant in the room, that thing no one talks about because it’s too obvious. Instead, as I went to collect my check, reeling with guilt, the mother gushed appreciation.

  “What charming stories you must have told! Now, where is that husband of mine?” She searched the room, then pointed to a larger version of her son. “Wait right here.” She winked. “He has the checkbook.”

  As I waited, other guests made polite conversation, asking questions I couldn’t begin to answer over the noise in the room. “Have you been telling stories long?” one man asked. “Is this your full-time living?” asked another, who looked somewhat concerned. As I did my best to nod and gesture answers to their questions, a frail elderly woman put her hand on my arm. “Your performance was . . .” Her face went blank and I could tell she had forgotten whatever kind words she had been about to say. She smiled, nodded, and began again. “Your performance was . . .”

  “Unbelievable!” said a voice behind me. “Absolutely unbelievable!”

  I did not have to look to see the face; I knew the voice. It was Lenny.