The Frozen Rabbi (29 page)

Jolted out of his shock the moment that Max vanished from view, Shmerl gave forth an animal yawp of his own. He lunged into the street, leaping onto the backs of the gathered spectators as he tried to claw his way toward his friend. He was struggling frantically to part the crowd, ignoring the forceful tugging at his sleeve, until its urgency compelled him to turn toward the nuisance in anger. And there stood Max caked in blood but firmly on his feet, signaling Shmerl to hurry up already, let’s skidoo. Together they made tracks through the backstreets, ducking into a doorway only when they’d distanced themselves by several blocks from the site of the attack. During that interlude, while Shmerl tried blotting his tears with a sleeve, Max licked the clotted blood from his lips.

“Red currant,” he pronounced discerningly. “Geshmakh.”

FROM
BEHIND
THE
tarp in the stableyard shack where he was wiping the gory mess from his face and neck, Max explained that, despite his gesture of appeasement toward Zalman Pisgat, he’d thought it best to stay prepared for the worst. Recalling his skill in creating cosmetic effects, he’d kept about his person at all times a packet or two of the jellies used for stage blood. That way he might deceive any would-be assassins into believing they had inflicted the damage they intended. If in the confusion of an assault their victim appeared to have been mortally wounded, each assailant might assume that the other had delivered the coup de grâce. That was his plan, “which it worked!” declared Max, prompting Shmerl to snuffle skeptically through the tears he was still trying to stanch, while his heart continued to outrun itself. Having described his bluff in boastful detail, his partner then stated that, to further corroborate the demise of Max Feinshmeker, he would take immediate possession of his uptown residence on Riverside Drive. This was the legendary uptown avenue of grand apartment houses called Alrightnik’s Row by the ghetto Jews, far from the Tenth Ward with its plagues of consumption and suicide. He realized, of course, that the move might be viewed as inconvenient, given the distance it put between himself and Canal Street, but now that the plant was poised to begin full operation, Max surmised that his discretionary services no longer required him to show up on site.

Then it was true that, once launched, the ice factory seemed fairly to run itself. This isn’t to say there weren’t daily concerns, though nothing that Shmerl, wielding a monkey wrench in place of his retired animal prod, couldn’t handle. In fact, he welcomed the odd mechanical snafu as an opportunity to demonstrate to his apprentices how an oiled piston or a tightened crank pin, an increase or decrease in atmospheric pressure, could facilitate production several fold. Meanwhile Mr. Levine also had his hands full—the same horny hands he’d washed of his former medium in order to embrace a new one that was odorless and free of flies. Reinvigo-rated, the bandy-legged old stableman was everywhere at once, shmoozing potential clients, reviewing delivery routes, taking inventory, and dressing down machinists who failed to pay their union dues. But the plant was finally larger than the sum of its constituent parts, and once it was recognized by the public as more than a novelty, it began with breathtaking swiftness to establish its supremacy in the field of ice merchandising.

In a matter of months Karp’s New Ice Castle, as it came to be known, had surpassed its competitors still yoked to the costly process of harvesting, hauling, and warehousing what they continued to insist on calling God’s ice. Artificial ice (though unimpeachably real) could be produced at a fraction of the expense of paying contractors to carve blocks from frozen lakes as far away as Vermont and Maine—not to mention the loss through melting during transit and the short shelf life in the facilities where the ice was stored. Moreover, natural ice was subject to famines during mild winters; it was often contaminated by sewage and sometimes contained indescribable foreign objects. Whereas Karp’s Castle could manufacture tons of crystal clear ice a day, delivering it in wagons throughout Manhattan and the borough of Brooklyn in twenty-pound blocks at the giveaway rate of five cents a pound. Its low overhead enabled the Castle, having undersold all its competitors, to reduce its storage fees as well. Naturally the plant’s growing dominion inspired a belligerence on the part of the outmoded houses, and there existed a genuine threat of sabotage. But the Castle’s employees constituted a small army whose liberal wages promoted a fanatical allegiance to their product, and some were even heard to engage in battles with their rivals outside the workplace. As a consequence, it was not long before the weatherboard turrets of the New Ice Castle façade became a landmark and a testament to immigrant ingenuity among the institutions of the Lower East Side.

As ordained, the rank and file of the Castle were kept in the dark about Max Feinshmeker’s existence, to say nothing of his importance to the company as pecuniary brain trust. Of course it was taken for granted that such an elaborate enterprise couldn’t function without its cadre of lawyers, accountants, and executive administrators; higher-ups had to be keeping books, checking balance sheets, fixing rates, and gauging budgets and expenses. But other than Shmerl only Elihu Levine knew that a single hidden hand served in all these capacities, and as contrary as he could sometimes be, the old man never questioned the arrangement. Loyalty itself, he generally approved the judgments that came down from above; indeed, having as yet no reason to dispute it, he accepted the word from its nameless source as a kind of gospel. Why shouldn’t he? Since becoming the Ice Castle’s foreman, his lot had improved immeasurably; he made a handsome salary and, with that and the proceeds from the sale of the livery stable, had begun life anew in his wintry years.

His migration from the stables to a hotel suite off Second Avenue, however, had uprooted his former hired hand, who was forced to dismantle the shanty and relocate his own base of operations. This Shmerl accomplished with the help of some Ice Castle workmen and a small caravan of delivery wagons, reestablishing himself and his accumulated impedimenta in the plant itself. Their newly acquired wealth could, of course, have secured him accommodations as lavish as he imagined Max’s to be (he’d yet to visit), but he found it more advantageous to sleep where he worked—on a cot in a thermally insulated locker with eight-inch-thick walls, which he sometimes shared with dressed sides of beef. There, scratching on rolls of butcher paper spread over recessed shelves, he improvised calculations and drew up blueprints for improvements to the factory. Among these were plans for a chain-hoisted thaw tank, a pre-piped compressor and water-cooled condenser, and an automated conveying system with a vertical comb, a scale model of which he’d meticulously constructed. When not involved in devising newfangled refinements, he turned to more theoretical projects; for despite having disavowed it, he’d begun again to entertain the possibility of reversing the fall of man through technology.

He was also pleased that his living quarters allowed him to maintain close proximity to the frozen rabbi, who had his very own chamber in the icehouse. In fact, he was ensconced in his original lodging, the sanctum the Gebirtigs had once reserved for black-market goods, which they’d called the Castle’s Keep. Only, now Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr had it all to himself, since Shmerl saw to it that he remained in his vault behind lock and key. But late at night, in the sheep’s pelt he wore at all times due to the pervasive cold, Shmerl would unlock the Keep and sit like a mourner on a crate next to the rabbi, who had been his companion throughout his solitary months. These vigils beside the casket with its opened lid, its contents effulgent in the light of a naphtha lantern, gave the inventor a proprietary sense, as if the rebbe were a gift from Max, one he was nevertheless prepared to return on demand.

But if he were mourning anything, it was the absence of his partner, who had yet to visit the factory since its opening. Driven as he was to hard work, Shmerl sometimes wondered if all his activity was by way of distracting himself from making an occupation out of missing Max. He missed reading aloud to the yungerman the appeals for sympathy if not outright love in the “Bintel Brief” column of the
Jewish Daily Forward
; missed relating the preposterous dreams which Max, covering his ears, refused to hear, though he might sheepishly submit some incubus of his own later on. He missed—what didn’t he miss?—his partner’s eyes when their black opal irises reflected the sap green of a gas flame. But this was all baloney. Then Shmerl would try to isolate the features of his friend’s face—the burnt rose lips, the aquiline nose, the hint of a widow’s peak at the height of his calcimine brow—in an attempt to find fault with each, but they kept coalescing in their perfect symmetry. He tried to hate the rhythmic snoring and soft petards that had issued from the lithe form that had lain beside him so many nights. Because finally such feelings as he had for the yungerman were improper; men did not feel such intense affection for other men, did they? There were David and Jonathan, of course, Hillel and Shammai—he ransacked the tradition for other examples; there was Weber & Fields. But here was the thing: Shmerl was unable to disentangle his longing for his friend from his baser instincts, from fantasies concerning the ladies which had lately beset him. For it seemed he had needs that were reaching the point of obsession and might require the intervention of the Allen Street nafkehs to release the ache. The Law, which he only selectively observed, explicitly forbade consorting with professional women, but “A minhag brekht a din,” as the proverb said. “A custom breaks a law.” Whatever the case, Shmerl was of an age when the young men of Shpinsk were already married householders experiencing the joys of Shabbos copulation, while he had yet to know a woman in any true sense. Rocking himself on his crate in the Castle’s Keep, he might turn toward the porous casket as if expecting the saint to hatch already from his block of ice and offer counsel.

Meanwhile, from his vantage on the sixth floor of a Beaux-Arts apartment house with a view of the Hudson, whose surface was flecked with the skittering of crescent sails, Max judged himself to be in some respects as good as dead. Having sent a final remittance to the ice mensch back in Lodz, labeling it a bequest, he felt he had laid Max Feinshmeker—never more than an unfinished work-in-progress—officially to rest. It was an attitude the girl Jocheved, who’d begun to express herself more openly, nevertheless thought somewhat premature. Habitually cautious, she had never reassumed women’s apparel, not even in the privacy of her West Side apartment, though on the sidewalks along Upper Broadway she might pause to appreciate a stone marten muff in a furrier’s window or a milliner’s straw bonnet trimmed with lacquered cherries. Not that Jocheved had ever been vain of her appearance, but tentatively she began again to explore the distaff side of life. Purchasing a noodle board, she rolled the dough into circles, cut the circles into strips, and draped them over the backs of chairs like clothes wrung through a mangle and left to dry. Later she would boil the noodles in chicken broth or bake them into kugel on a gas-burning range. She acquired two sets of pots and dishes, for meat and for dairy, and, reviving a long defunct passion, bought a pewter mold and a bag of rock salt for making syrupy sherbets and frozen desserts. Despite having a bathroom that featured a clawfooted tub, she thought she might even like to visit a mikveh again. While such concerns could never comprise the whole of life, business having taken precedence over all (as witness the ledgers heaped atop the drop leaf of a mahogany desk in the parlor), she delighted in her secret dabbling in womanly pursuits, a pleasure that in no way diminished the contempt she felt for the woman she had been.

Since the partial resurrection of Jocheved tended to keep the girl largely shut in, she communicated with Shmerl (as Max) via messengers, which was unsatisfactory to them both. For Jocheved still shared Max’s fellow feeling for Shmerl; and Max, who had essentially swapped places with Jocheved and was reduced now to a residual voice, missed his comrade with a fervor that made sense in no category the girl could understand. Missing him made the uptown streets, awash in fallen leaves and garment magnates with their stout, bedizened wives, seem as much exile as refuge. But Jocheved reproved Max for such thoughts. Shmerl Karp was after all tsedrayt, was he not? A screwball. That much was even more apparent from her West Side elevation. And God knew he wasn’t that easy to look at. Though she’d always averted her eyes from his unclothed body, she thought that his hump had become more pronounced during the relatively short time of their acquaintance. His bandit eyes were beadier, and his ginger hair resembled the ruffled feathers of a turkey cock. Then there was his odor, the scent of the stables (despite his much trumpeted visits to the Rutgers Square baths) having never really left him. Of course, he had his talents: There was that rogue brain of his that made him some kind of a deluded crank, perhaps even a visionary of a specialized nature, and so impetuous was his energy that he seemed never to yawn. That had always impressed Max. Also, he was fearless in his devotion to his friend and apparently without an ounce of guile, which made him vulnerable in ways that would surely be a burden to any woman who would have him; though who would have such a total shlemiel as Shmerl Karp? As for herself, for Jocheved, the whole issue of men and women was in any case moot. The stigma she’d incurred in her former life—lest she forget—was still heartsickeningly active and would expose to infamy any man who entered her purview. But for all that, she sometimes had an impulse to award Max’s bosom friend with some token of her esteem, some gift of a rare significance… though what should it be? The rabbi was already effectively his.

With or without Max’s presence, however, the business prospered; the creditors were soon paid in full. The ice men circulated throughout the city in wagons bearing the Ice Castle trademark (a castle carved out of ice—what else?). They had become a fixture in the neighborhood streets, the Castle’s agents, cutting ice to order with their picks before swinging the blocks onto broad shoulders protected by hemp, carrying them up several flights to deposit in enameled ice safes. In the factory, Shmerl’s crew of engineers took pride in their increasing expertise at maintaining the machinery, sometimes even anticipating their supervisor’s improvements, so that the inventor was able to spend more time in his “laboratory.” He enjoyed working in his locker in the heart of the industry, surrounded by the clatter of equipment and the rowdy exertions of men moving goods. Still, he never neglected his responsibilities as chief technical engineer and met regularly with Mr. Levine to ensure that things were in order. They were not always in order, nor did he and Levine always see eye to eye, but Shmerl suspected that their disagreements had more to do with the old man’s enjoyment of a heated exchange than with any urgent bone of contention; and the inventor tried his best to hold up his end of the argument. It was diverting enough, his life, to counteract from time to time his inveterate yearning, and there was always the satisfaction of knowing that his efforts were making his absent friend rich.