The Frozen Rabbi (31 page)

“If it don’t disgust you what I got,” she challenged, “then maybe makes you sick what I don’t got, fallen creature that I am.”

But Shmerl was of another turn of mind. Rising from the table, dragging with him the tablecloth as the flowers and leftover dishes slid clattering to the floor, he came around to enfold the girl’s bare shoulders in the damask material. It was a gesture whose unconditional tenderness inverted Jocheved’s topsy-turvy logic and robbed her of her capacity for shame. Then both of them were sobbing feverishly, the girl for her joyful reunion with the lost daughter of Salo Frostbissen, the youth for the gift of a transformation that he alone, wizard that he was, had effected: for he had caused by simply wishing it the metamorphosis of his beloved companion into the woman of his dreams.

T
hat night, from his coign of vantage somewhere in the empyrean, Bernie Karp viewed his body convulsed on a pastel toilet seat from the bout of diarrhea that had beset him after his encounter with the rebbe. Something about their meeting had apparently not agreed with him. Floating free, the boy felt what he’d felt so often before: a deep compassion for his own suffering self, the pity extending from his specific case to a general homesick concern for the wretched of the earth. It was a pity that compelled him, in the spirit of solidarity with his species, to want to reinhabit the poor kid doubled over with abdominal cramps, his pajama pants gathered around his ankles. In that way he would assume his share of the pain that was an inescapable part of the human experience. Previously, however, his embrace of mortal pain had resulted in the corresponding desire to escape the human condition altogether, thus perpetuating the ongoing tug-of-war between Bernie and the cosmos. Settled into his skin again, he would instantly conceive an impulse to shed his physicality and reinvite the shefa, the inpouring of divine emanation that displaced his consciousness, which was then free to wander in time and space; though the exile would in turn leave him lonely and pining for the human vessel he’d left behind. But tonight, while his parents slept a wall away, dreaming the dreams with which their “interface” with Rabbi ben Zephyr had filled their heads, Bernie discovered that, knotted intestines aside, he wanted achingly to hang on to his earthbound self and, by extension, the world.

It was then that Bernie thought he understood what the resurrected rebbe was up to: He was practicing the discipline known as aliyah tzrichah yeridah, descent for the sake of ascent, an extreme corrective measure the boy had first heard mentioned in the writings of the eighteenth-century teacher Yakov Yosef of Polnoy. The Polnoy Zayde, as he was fondly called, had descended from his lofty rung of holiness to raise the fallen souls of his abject community to the source of light. “Sometimes, for the sake of the evildoer, the adept must fall from his height.” Familiar with the odious concept of redemption through sin as espoused by those guilty of the Sabbatean heresy, Bernie realized that this could be a dangerous undertaking. He knew the perils: “Descent is certain while ascent is not.” And furthermore: “The tzaddik must take special care how he will again ascend, and not, God forbid, remain below. For I heard from my teacher [said the wise Polnoy Zayde] there are many who did remain.” On the other hand, “Only he who is himself guilty can help remove the guilt of others.” It was time, thought Bernie, that he got himself truly defiled.

Surrendering to what was at first a nebulous desire to coalesce with his own kind, he soon narrowed his focus to a single object manifest in the squirrely person of Lou Ella Tuohy. Her milky flesh, it suddenly seemed to him, was a necessary prerequisite for his own redemption, if not the redemption of the race at large. By the same token, the stay-at-home handmaiden who had so often blessed his solo flights to glory would also (Bernie flattered himself) be carried away. This was why, the next evening when they’d parked her mother’s Malibu in a long-abandoned drive-in theater, Bernie was resolved that their bundling should be more than just another mechanical prelude to his own transcendence. They had visited that petrified ruin on the southern edge of town before, a spot still anchored to the 1950s, with owls perched on posts that once sported metal speakers and skunk cabbage overrunning the wavy asphalt like a Sargasso Sea. Lou Ella liked to sit on the hood of the coupe of a starry evening, imagining black-and-white movies projected onto the kudzu-choked screen, its torn fabric illumined to saffron by the car’s high beams. Tonight she envisioned another monster movie of the type she’d seen on late-night TV.

“There’s this kid gets a chameleon at the circus, the kind you fasten to your collar and it turns the color of your shirt. He visits his mama in the hospital where she’s getting radiation treatments and the chameleon is exposed and by morning it’s grown to the size of the Rock of Gibraltar.”

“Is it still attached to his collar?” asked Bernie.

“No, fool. It wadn’t but a dinky plastic chain. But there’s still like a bond that connects the boy to the monster. Anyway, the monster devours whole cities but the army can’t find it ‘cause it blends into whatever landscape it’s in. So—”

“Lemme guess. The army enlists the kid, who’s the only one that can see the monster, and he feeds it an A-bomb concealed in a giant meatball.”

“You saw it too.”

“So what becomes of his mama?” He knew she was fond of sentimental endings.

“Oh, her and every other cancer patient on earth is cured by the green cloud that surrounds the planet after the monster explodes.” She made to dry her eyes with her sleeve. “Your turn.”

Bernie had to think, though not for long. “There’s this kid”—there was always
this kid
—“who wakes up on a day that’s like an extra calendar day, a day that contains all other days.”

Lou yawned demonstratively. “Here it comes,” she said, because Bernie’s tales always involved some occult concept with no discernible plotline.

“Everything that’s ever happened is happening all at once, and the kid—he’s past puberty—meets a woman who’s Bathsheba but also Queen Esther and Bess Myerson and Penelope Cruz…”

“Another chameleon,” remarked Lou, who despite her feigned boredom had a weakness for Bernie’s peculiar line of guff.

“And she invites him into her tent or boudoir,” he continued, and here began to describe the seduction in graphic terms: “She asks him to suck her nipples like they’re jujubes, and part her thighs—”

“Like the handles on a posthole digger. You didn’t tell me this was a porno.”

It was then that Bernie believed he could see on the tattered screen all the mythical ladies melding into the single image of the girl beside him, the soft whorls of whose ear he had begun to trace with his tongue. She let him, allowing their canoodling to reach an intensity that her companion, despite some lingering frailty from the previous night’s intestinal purge, was single-mindedly advancing. He had initiated, to his way of thinking, actual foreplay leading toward an inevitable consummation. Over time Lou Ella had come to regard their groping as merely a means of launching her “friend” into astral realms; it was more like an exploratory intimacy between schoolkids than lovers. But although she was dressed provocatively as usual, a paste ruby stuck in her navel, the low-riding jeans grazing her pubic bone, she was nonetheless alarmed by Bernie’s ardor.

“Cool your jets, dude,” she cautioned him, having had enough of false hopes. “Put a lid on your id,” shoving him away to arm’s length.

But when Bernie persisted blindly she detected that some new dispensation was afoot.

“What is it you want?”

“Oo,” mumbled into her neck.

“Me or my bones?”

“Phame differumph,” he panted while gnawing her shoulder.

She cocked her head quizzically. “That’s a mouthful coming from alias Mr. Incorporeal.”

Still she asked him to hang on a minute while she transferred the car seat that Sue Lily was quickly outgrowing from the backseat to the front. Having traded places with the lackluster infant, they proceeded to tear at each other’s clothes. In the throes of a carnality that had clearly infected the girl as well, Bernie felt her fingers beginning to invade his fly, taking him in hand with a hopefulness that, for her part, she hardly dared to indulge. But while her touch did not elicit the combustion that routinely catapulted him into Elysian precincts (leaving behind a body in which passion was no more memorable than an aborted sneeze), neither did it result in their long-deferred union. Instead, her touch caused the seed to spill forlornly from his drooping organ. When he recovered from the paroxysm that had blasted his thoughts and defibrillated his racing heart, Bernie observed that the girl was holding in the palm of her hand what appeared to be glowworms lit by golden filaments.

“Next time,” advised Lou, “as a precaution against your hair trigger, when I touch it, try to think of something gross.”

M
y mama was a sensible lady, my papa a dreamer,” Bernie read to Lou Ella Tuohy from the dogeared journal of Ruben (called Ruby) Karp, “and from them I inherited exactly nothing. Sometimes I even thought I wasn’t their son; I’d been dumped in the cradle in place of their real child by demons, the ones my father said the immigrants had left behind in the Old Country when they came to the New World.”

BETWEEN
THE
two of them my parents had a corner on most of the virtues on earth, so there was nothing left for me but to become a black sheep. My papa for all I knew was a tall man, though his crimped spine caused him to stoop as from a heavy load, but I was short like (okay) my mama; I was pint-sized but wiry and handy with my fists, with a temper that could take me to the brink of delirium and beyond. In a fight I was blind, while my body, compact and fierce, followed instincts of its own, and when my vision cleared, I would find my opponent (or opponents, since I never backed down from the odds) unconscious or fled. Growing up, I was oppressed by the prevailing tranquility of our household, so that once I was old enough to seek it out, I put myself in the way of brute behavior. I attended prizefights, dogfights, instigated back-alley brawls; wherever a shemozzle was likely to break out, there you’d find me, rubbing elbows with the disreputables that frequented such places. At first they challenged me, my lowlife cronies, then they initiated me, and afterwards I was a member in good standing of their tribe. Of course the old guard hoodlums, the Yid Mustache Petes like Monk Eastman and Dopey Benny, were all dead or gone straight by then; the climate had changed since the days when the shtarkers were content to poison horses and set fires, and labor-racketeering was in the toilet since the rise of the unions. This is not to say that old-fashioned mayhem was obsolete. The gangs still kept their hand in the traditional rackets, but the real action since the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment was in illegal whiskey. The whole ghetto had been colonized by homemade cookers and bootleg stills, speakeasies having cropped up in every cellar and barber’s closet, so there was no end of trouble available to the resourceful young man.

Naturally my family saw to it that I remained unacquainted with the city’s seamier quarters during my childhood, which must have looked from the outside to be more or less idyllic. My world then was mostly restricted to the Upper West Side, its tidy streets populated with Jews-made-good, but every least excursion whetted my appetite to stray farther afield. They dressed me in middy suits and Buster Brown caps and took me for strolls along the river or boating in the Central Park basin, where I might try to rock the dinghy till it was swamped. I was equally bored by our family outings to the Yiddish Art Theater on Second Avenue, where Muni Weisenfreund would age half a century while waiting on stage for a messiah that never came. Nor did I have much patience for the flickers we viewed from the jewel-box balconies of picture palaces; all those blood and thunder romances featuring foppish John Gilberts and Valentinos gave me a pain—though I’ll confess to a weakness for the Raoul Walsh three-reelers in which Bowery toughs battled the cops over downtown turf. I was a witness to some of the premier attractions of the day: Shipwreck Kelly swaying atop a flagpole above the Hippodrome, Harry Houdini escaping a straitjacket while dangling from his heels twenty floors above Times Square—all of which made me the more anxious to commence some exploit of my own here on earth.

On high holidays my mama and papa would take me to the Greek Revival synagogue on West End Avenue, where a rabbi in ecclesiastical robes and top hat preached pap to the choir. I would grind my teeth while Papa, to calm me, whispered that I shouldn’t be fooled by the tiresome ritual: there were creatures, golems and kapulyushniklim, hidden away in the attic.

“I thought you said the Jews left all that stuff back in Europe,” I protested, but he explained that this was “some of the
stuff
that in the hold of the Hamburg-Amerika Line they stowed themselves away.”

Only once do I recall having been to the old immigrant district in my early years. That was when my father took me for a ride on the top of a bus to visit his Canal Street ice plant, where he showed me around the workings of the whole operation. He also introduced me to an otherwise vacant locker in which a cedar casket propped on trestles contained an old man in a block of ice. Both the business and the boisterous neighborhood captured my interest, but the old man made so little impression that over time I came to confuse him with a dream.

They were an odd couple, my parents: my mama with her Dresden china complexion and cascade of blue-black hair, which from vanity or indifference she refrained from bobbing in the fashion of the day; Papa with his rooster comb and camel hump, his bughouse ideas and the curdled Old Country accent he never lost. Sometimes I think I hated him for being a cripple, or rather for not realizing he was a cripple and behaving accordingly. I never understood how my mama could be so adoring of a character that should have embarrassed her by his very presence—or did she think he was a complement to her beauty? Not that Mama ever seemed to notice the way she turned heads. They doted on me, the pair of them, so much that from the first I felt I might suffocate; their brand of devotion could shrivel your petsel like a salted slug. Meanwhile their affection for each other was such an exclusive affair that it kept me confined to the circle of their intimacy. “Don’t love me so much,” I pleaded from as far back as I can remember, and when they persisted I set about proving I didn’t deserve it.