In 1936 a representative of the Hatters Young Men’s Benevolent Association, the businessman James Faulhaber, came back to the town where he had been born. He was an American citizen now, a New Yorker, and wore instead of suspenders a belt. A camera was looped over his shoulder. The plan was to work out an arrangement whereby American cotton would be turned by our local mills into trousers with matching caps. Of course, while he was there, Faulhaber wished to inspect the various projects of the HYMBA. Thus Anton Schneour, the Chairman of the Public Health Department, and as such the Director of the orphanage, brought him one night to the Asylum door. Said Schneour: “This is our staff, both Jews and non-Jews.”

Rabbi Lunt, Miss Bibelnieks, and the schoolmaster, Bettsack, stood against one wall of the downstairs hallway. The cook, the two maids, and the mute, microcephalic gardener boy curtsied and bowed on the other.

“Everybody together!” said Faulhaber in his rusty Polish. “And everybody smile!” With his photoflash camera, he took a picture of the crowd.

“And here,” said Schneour a few minutes later, “here are our future scholars and rabbis and captains of finance.” He meant the rows of male orphans, asleep in their beds. What a pretty sight! Each head on a pillow, a curled fist beneath every chin. The light from half a moon came through the window.

The American held his camera against his chest, peering down into the box. Something, alas, moved in the viewfinder. It was Usher Flicker, the four-year-old, blurring the picture. He threw his legs over the side of his bed; he stood straight up and down. Then, with his arms held before him, dragging his white sheets behind, he began to walk slowly across the floor.

“What’s this? Halt at once! Return to bed!” Anton Schneour hissed at the orphan.

“Shhh! He is walking in his sleep.” Bettsack, with Miss Bibelnieks, had come upstairs in the nick of time. The young schoolmaster held his derby, the way Faulhaber held his camera, against his chest. “It might be fatal to wake him.”

Like a bride with a train, the boy moved down the row. Only his toes and his ankles showed beneath his long cotton nightgown. His eyes were closed, like those of any sleeper. When he reached the bed of Julius Szypper, a strange thing happened. The older boy—also with his arms out, with his sharp chin pointed ahead—slid from his bed and began to walk about, too. Nor was that all. Whether it was the power of suggestion, of unconscious imitation, or simply because of the moonlight, more of the orphans began to move silently, slowly, in various directions about the room.

The adults stood in the doorframe, dumbfounded. Perhaps it was they who were sleeping, who were having a dream? A feeling—it was like fear, like awe—went through them. The sleepwalkers, each with his sheet trailing after, seemed to be gliding through space, floating like phantoms, like ghosts.