AS AN old man, Bill Landsmann doesn’t like movies. He prefers slides, leaving context to the imagination, writing his own script. Instead of a movie, Bill Landsmann might have presented, to anyone who wanted to see it, a single image: his father sitting in the window writing a letter, framed only by possibility, unaware that this moment was already buried under so many other moments that came after it—unaware, sitting behind the thin pane of glass, that he was drowning in all the choices that would ultimately destroy him.

Chapter 4 The Missing Link

CHAPTER 4

THE MISSING LINK

THREE YEARS after Jason, on Amsterdam Avenue, Leora finally found the tefillin.

Work had become the focus of Leora’s life, and she excelled at it. She had mastered her own journalistic method after a single conversation, which had taken place when she was twenty years old, at her college’s newspaper office. She had come in a bit late that evening, and when she arrived, the office was buzzing as it hardly ever did. Most of the time, the paper ran front-page stories about things as pressing as the retirement of a dean. But that night several phones were ringing at once, editors and reporters were shouting into them, and computer printers were spitting out pages and pages of type. Leora stood at the door utterly confused, like a lost foreign exchange student trying to decide whether she had entered the right room. Jessica, one of the senior editors who would later be hired by a major metropolitan daily, saw her and jumped to the entrance.

“Why didn’t you get here earlier? We’ve got a big story today,” Jessica told her. “It’s going to be a really exciting night.”

“Why, what’s going on?” Leora asked.

“Some junior named Joe Solovey killed himself. They found his body on the train tracks downtown,” Jessica swooned, breathless.