The Frozen Rabbi (32 page)

Our apartment, which had seemed so ample in my infancy, shrank as I grew, crammed as it was with heavy furniture—the vaultlike wardrobes and diamond-tufted divans, with Mama’s library of ledgers, Papa’s journals and mystical books, the newspapers in a Yiddish I could barely read; though I soon enough absorbed the headlines of their American counterparts:
RITES
OF
FLAMING
YOUTH
EXPOSED
,
SACCO
AND
VANZETTI
FRY—items suggesting that the world was full of a number of things unaccounted for in Mama’s budgetary meditations or the harebrain researches that kept my father away from home so much. Occasionally the perfect harmony was disturbed by an invasion of my papa’s family (my mother had brothers but nobody knew where they were), or anyway those members of it that had not been seduced by the Bolsheviks or scattered upon reaching the shores of America. They consisted of Grandpa Todrus and his wife Chana Bindl, both apparently shellshocked from their encounter with the New World, and their daughter, Shinde Esther, youngest of an otherwise exclusively male brood. Papa had brought them over from Russia, settled them comfortably in a nearby residence, and had them outfitted in factory-fresh ready-mades. But the young men, emancipated after their long confinement to shtetl and steerage, set off (as who could blame them?) in their several directions to seek their fortunes. Only the plain Shinde Esther, whom my mama took under her wing like a little sister, stayed at home to care for her infirm parents. But distraught as they were—Todrus complained of a lingering seasickness, Chana Bindl of harassment by the ghost of her mother-in-law—even their visits stirred my restlessness, if only for the fishy odor that clung to their clothing bespeaking a voyage from distant lands.

I was sent to a local school, an academy, along with the sons of garment manufacturers and department-store magnates. They were a toffee-nosed, knock-kneed lot in their tub suits and riding breeches, predestined by their families for high-toned professions, and I disliked them from the start. You wouldn’t have called me a bully, exactly, since the kids I picked on were usually bigger than me, but I quickly established a reputation for being incorrigible. Often I was sent home with notes to my parents that I made certain they never received, and frequently punished for what my teachers called poor deportment. They were feeble punishments, cloakroom detention and half-hearted paddlings, that only made me the more defiant. When my teachers, nervous women despite formidable busts and behinds, complained that my behavior was a waste of a good mind, I got even with them by refusing to learn anything at all. There were also girls in my school, some of them pink and comely, but for reasons I never examined I begrudged them their prettiness, as if they’d cultivated their attractions only to taunt me with. Often I was truant, trolling the uptown streets in search of an unpredictability that always eluded me in my own neighborhood. Then sometime during the summer of my sixteenth year, my papa, ostensibly to keep me out of trouble, invited me to come work in his ice house on Canal.

As the first facility in the city to manufacture industrial ice, Karp’s Ice Castle (no longer New) had once been the pride of the ghetto. But competing houses had since sprung up like mushrooms all over town, while the advent of the refrigerator (five dollars down and ten a month) had diminished their need to exist at all. For a while Karp’s had tried supplementing the sale of ice with a sideline of frozen custards, the proprietor himself having custom-built for that purpose a servo-motorized ice cream – making machine. But Karp’s Frozen Delight, sold in swirls to look like the Statue of Liberty’s torch, could never compete with the near monopoly of Good Humor wagons circulating throughout the city. Still, many families remained dependent on their outdated ice boxes, and though the fleet had been reduced in favor of expanding the storage capacity of the warehouse, Karp’s delivery vans endured as a staple of the East Side’s congested streets. Thus, while Papa’s business had to struggle to maintain its standing in the industry, it remained a going concern that continued to keep the wolf from the door. Not that it concerned me a whit whether the business succeeded or failed, nor was I especially eager to enter my papa’s employ, but I leapt at the chance to smirch myself with something akin to real life.

The old Tenth Ward, as I came to understand, had changed since my parents’ greenhorn days. For one thing, the rag trade, grown ever more prosperous, had moved steadily uptown so that the sweatshops were no longer as prevalent in the area. Many of the original immigrants, having unshackled themselves from pushcarts and sewing machines, became shop clerks, office hacks, bookkeepers, and the like, while those who stayed in the factories also saw improved conditions owing to the ascendency of the trade unions. Their children were moving out of the ghetto altogether—across the river to Williamsburg, uptown to Harlem and the Bronx—and since the government had had its fill of foreigners and put the kibosh on immigration, the old neighborhood enjoyed a bit more breathing room. I don’t mean to suggest that the Lower East Side had become a hospitable place; there was still plenty of squalor and disease to go around, and Prohibition had incited everyone, Jews included, to get drunk. But until Naf the Sport’s lieutenants waltzed into the icehouse to lean on my father, I had supposed that the underworld existed only in films, and it cheered me to discover that Jews could be ruthless as well.

Since the Castle’s inception Papa’s foremen had all been steadfast union men, beginning with old Elihu Levine (deceased) who’d inaugurated the tradition of resisting the arm-twisting of the local syndicate. This was a dicey position to take. But the heyday of the ice plant had coincided with a time when Yoshke Nigger, the ghetto’s chief goon, had withdrawn his energies from the standard extortion rackets to place them squarely in the service of Tammany Hall. Then along came the Volstead Act and Tammany be damned: Peddling hooch was now the order of the day. Yoshke’s successor, Naf the Sport, né Naftali Kupferman, however, was a more ambitious breed of felon with a penchant for diversifying. After his mentor’s unnatural death (via cement galoshes), he decided to reactivate old accounts, sending his gorillas to collect tributes from the businesses that Yoshke had exploited in the past. Meanwhile Karp’s Ice Castle still refused to cave in to mob intimidation, while Karp himself, absorbed in his latest pipe dream, paid no attention whatever to the renewed demands for protection gelt.

My papa. Though he had an office adjoining his foreman’s on the Ice Castle’s upper tier, complete with a monkey puzzle of pneumatic tubes for sending messages, he was seldom in it, keeping mostly to the so-called laboratory where he conducted his “experiments.” It’s true that he was credited with certain technical innovations, the fruits of which outfitted the ground floor of his gesheft, but any contributions of his to the material world were in large part accidental: The material world was a place he visited for his family’s sake. His employees, if they regarded him at all, treated their titular boss with the deference you’d pay to a holy lunatic. Only once during my tenure at the Castle, where he often passed me with no hint of recognition, did Papa (think of Lon Chaney in
The Forbidden Room
) drag me into his airless locker to describe the current project. The place was dense with conflicting odors: brimstone and ozone and human sweat; there were shelves of what appeared to be objects out of the Middle Ages sitting cheek-by-jowl beside cutting-edge technological devices: a glass furnace containing a luminous residue next to a crackling electrical transformer, cathodes and diodes nestled among jars of quicklime, asafetida, and dragon’s blood. There were Hebrew texts by authors with names like Abraham the Python lying open across articles on polyphase-induction engines; there was the cot where Papa catnapped and sometimes spent the night.

The project he was presently at work on, with its pulleys and zinc alloy gears, had the look of an amusement park ride.

“When complete, will simulate, my machine, the bang at the birth of the world,” he declared, eyes aswim behind the horn-rimmed spectacles he’d recently affected. He further explained that the explosion he referred to had resulted from the volatility of the divine light stored in the vessels that contained the original Creation. Why he wanted to perform this particular imitation of God, he never made clear, but where his previous inventions had had (often despite his intent) some practical application, he was determined this one would defy all usefulness. Of course he was nuts, my papa, and although he was the acknowledged executive head of the business, I knew it was really Mama, consulting account books and telling the beads of her abacus, who actually ran the Ice Castle from our West Side apartment.

Papa’s mishegoss aside, I don’t mean to imply that I didn’t like working at the icehouse. Physical labor had a certain appeal for me, and slinging lettuce crates or lugging giant sea bass across sawdusted floors, I felt my body becoming toughened and strong. Sometimes I would ride the ice, sliding toboggan-style down aluminum flumes straight into an insulated van in which I would later ride shotgun, swapping indecencies with the drivers as we navigated the city streets. I liked swinging the iron tongs to hoist the cakes onto my shoulder and the sense of my own surefootedness as I carried the dripping burden up steep flights of stairs. In garlicky kitchens I drew the pick from its scabbard to split apart the ice cake, spraying shards while the daughter of the house admired the knotted muscles of my arms. Once or twice I even imagined taking over the Castle from Papa and expanding it into a veritable empire of ice. But when Naf the Sport’s ambassadors strolled onto the premises declaring that Karp’s owed their agency a fortune in back subscriptions, I was as impressed with their brass as I was outraged by their demands.

Schultz, Papa’s horse-faced foreman, shoving hands deep in his overall pockets, said he would have to discuss the issue with the proprietor, that the gorillas should come back later—which, I could tell from the smirks they exchanged, the gorillas had been told before.

“Sure, sure, take your time,” replied the spokesman of the pair, his novelty jacket pasted to his broad back with perspiration. “Take all the time you need. We’ll be back tomorrow for the cash.”

Observing all this from under the eel I was wrestling onto a meathook, I was so struck by their effrontery that I straightaway hung up my apron and followed them out into the muggy afternoon. They seemed to be in no hurry, pausing at here a candy butcher’s, there a newsstand to threaten the merchant, fanning themselves with their skimmers as they ambled leisurely over to Forsyth and Grand. There they mounted dusty stairs and entered the door of an office on the second-floor landing, gilt letters across its pebble-glass pane reading Acme Insurance Group. Hesitating only long enough to give my cap a cunning tilt, I opened the door into an anteroom that was bare but for a desk, a telephone, and a young woman applying makeup to a theatrical degree. Under the desk I could see the sheen of her crossed legs in their rolled-down stockings; I could hear a radio playing “Ukelele Lady” from beyond the inner office door.

Several moments elapsed before the young woman deigned to acknowledge my presence. When finally she did, she ran her eyes over the length of me and seemed not displeased with what she saw, though she said in a tone of bedrock boredom, “What do you want?” closing her compact with a gesture like snapping teeth.

Remembering the sign on the door, I submitted: “I wanna take out a life insurance policy.”

The feather aigrette in her sulfur-yellow hair shimmied beneath the ceiling fan. “We only deal in property insurance,” she announced in a listless impression of an actual receptionist.

“Then I wanna life insurance policy on my property.”

She smiled with her tight mouth only, apparently used to wiseguys. “You look like a nice boy,” dropping the charade. “Better get outta here if you know what’s good for you.”

Removing my cap which I used to wipe the sweat from my brow, I decided to try a different tack. “Is Mister, um…,” I began, but “Mr. the Sport” somehow didn’t seem right. “Is Mr. Kupferman in?”

“Who wants to know?”

I considered. “Tell him Ruby Kid Karp.”

She said with her kohl-ringed eyes that I had to be kidding. At that point the door to the inner office opened a crack, the radio blared, and one of the characters I’d tailed from the ice plant, the spokesman, in fact, poked his eagle beak into the anteroom. The height of his head suggested that he was seated, his chairback probably propped against the wall as he twisted his neck to peek beyond the door. “Hey, Birdie,” he said in a voice like an emery board, “how bout a shtikl your sweet pierogie later on?” Then he noticed me. “What’s this?”

She raised her plucked brows. “This,” she announced with a sigh, “is Kid Karp. Kid, meet Shtrudel Louie Shein.”

“Howdja do,” said the tough guy, whose reputation (like his boss’s) had preceded him in the lore of the neighborhood. “Now get lost.”

That’s when the righteous anger came over me again. “My papa don’t need your protection,” I practically spat at him, thrilled by my own impertinence.

Shtrudel Louie frowned, his head disappearing from view as the door shut again. I heard a muffled mumbling under the voice on the radio cautioning the audience to stay tuned; an orchestral arrangement of “Runnin’ Wild” was next on the program after a message from “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” Then the door opened again and out stepped Shtrudel Louie with his shnozzle and monobrow, his crooked bowtie, from a room I now saw was as barren as the one I stood in: a few items of furniture paying homage to the radio receiving outfit with its tuba-size speaker that served as centerpiece. Shtrudel was followed by his shorter, stockier companion from the icehouse, who was tugging his waistcoat like a corset over his tumid belly. They took up their stations on either side of me like groomsmen, as a third man emerged from the office to confront me, his expression—as he gave me the once-over—seeming to infer that this was going to be fun.