The Frozen Rabbi (22 page)

They arrived at her second-floor walkup, where the broad-beamed widow bustled about rattling coals in the grate and removing baggy undergarments from a line strung across the kitchen, while Max sat in a slump at the deal table. She continued nattering about how she’d yet to take in a boarder herself, but surely Mr. Opatashu would not begrudge her the extra income. Still, she paused to speculate while primping her wig, there was the landlord’s potential jealousy to consider… Weary as he was, Max was alert enough to feel squeamish at finding himself in the woman’s charge; this wasn’t what he’d had in mind. But the apartment was warm and he was glad to be out of jail and off the street, doubly grateful for the stuffed chicken neck and lokshen noodles that Mrs. Weintraub (he couldn’t bring himself to call her Esther) served him with his tea. She also boiled a cauldron of water on her cookstove, fogging the windows, tooting her horn all the while about what a resourceful lady she was. “Agunah they would call me in the Old Country, but here the husband leaves, you are free to find another, no?” Max didn’t think so but held his peace, realizing it wasn’t necessary for him to speak at all. The widow poured the steaming pot into a large tin washtub, then carried a basin out to a common spigot in the stairwell, returning to mingle the cold water with the hot, testing it with her fingers as she might have done for a child. When she was satisfied that the temperature was tepid enough, she told Max to go ahead and wash himself; afterward, while she laundered his own (pinching her nostrils theatrically to indicate them), he could change into some of her husband’s old clothes. Then she retired to the bedroom to give him his privacy, humming a music-hall air as she departed.

Looking warily over his shoulder, Max shucked his filthy garments, then couldn’t help remarking the satin-smooth contours of Jocheved’s body, graceful despite its sour pungency, hateful for its latent provocation. He lowered himself with a deep sigh into the tub, his inky hair (badly in need of a trim) fanning the surface of the water, the cares of the moment seeping out of his pores along with the rising steam. So relieved was he for this respite from his trials that he began to think of Mrs. Weintraub as a godsend. But no sooner had he relaxed in the luxury of his bath than the widow herself waddled back in, and snatching up a loofah mitten from the washstand set upon Max.

“Don’t worry,” she assured him, “I’m a old married lady; you got nothing I ain’t already seen.”

When he felt the sponge stroking his neck and shoulders in fluid figure-eights, Max practically swooned, so soothing was it to be touched by another; but when the mitten began to slide over his collar bone and down the gentle slope of his chest, he came to his senses and, crossing his arms in front of him mummy-fashion, abruptly submerged himself. Under water he supposed there were worse things than revealing his true gender to this wanton woman, which surely would have discouraged her overtures. But Jocheved was more resolute than that; she thought she might prefer to drown. Opening her eyes under the sudsy water, she was almost wistful, imagining herself sinking to her rest in a watery grave where wrecked galleons were guarded by undulant octopi. But despite the seductive submarine vista, the girl’s eyes were smarting, her lungs rebelling in their hunger to breathe, until Max resurfaced with a huge gulping intake of air. He found himself alone again in the kitchen, Mrs. Weintraub having apparently taken the unsubtle hint. Climbing hurriedly out of the tub, he snatched up the absent husband’s clothes that the widow had left folded over a chair, and without stopping to dry himself pulled them on as he fled the dumbbell flat.

Looking back, Jocheved mourned the loss of her father’s mossbacked funeral suit, which Max had left behind.

After the relative calm of the apartment, the street seemed even more riotous than before. A milk float collided with a beerwagon, the drivers climbing down from their respective vehicles to pummel each other’s ears. The bitter wind whipped the pantlegs and flapped the coattails of Mr. Weintraub’s ill-fitting garments, and a steam-driven motorcar, braking too late for an alley cat, sounded an unearthly horn. America was tohubohu, a madhouse, and it galled Max that he had endured such an arduous journey to reach it. Surely there must be more to this country than met the eye; there must be places scoured of sweaters and shmeikelers, with room to breathe. But the Lower East Side of New York was where the Jews were, and given the mameloshen that was his sole means of communication, Max saw no alternative but to lose himself in the melée of the ghetto. He decided, as what choice did he have, to rededicate his energies to survival, but when he tallied up the talents he might call upon to that effect, he found himself wanting. He could make ice cream, couldn’t he? though Jocheved was adamant in her contempt for the profession that had led to her downfall, and Max had already proven that he had no gift for sneak thievery. Of course, there were any number of menial jobs, but to remain at a single occupation over time would leave him exposed in a way that would put his life in further jeopardy.

On the other hand, cold and bedeviled as he was, Max also felt somewhat revitalized; he had a full belly and was reasonably protected from the elements by the errant husband’s hand-me-downs, the shell coat and the large bowler hat that jugged his ears. Maybe, thought Max—though the thought flew in the face of his better judgment—things would work out after all. Perhaps Pisgat’s operatives would never find him on this side of the Atlantic, in this roistering district where everyone strived to reinvent himself. Who knew but that the old so-and-so was bluffing with his threats, playing on the youth’s gullibility; surely prospects would present themselves to such a well-knit lad as he.

It was then that the character in the turned-around golf cap and tatty plus fours drew alongside him. “You’re so pretty,” said the fellow, dressed as if for the links of Gehenna, “you just got to be Max Feinshmeker. My Uncle Zalman ain’t too pleased with you that you didn’t send him his cash.”

In an instant the broad world shrank to the size of a slum, the Balut having overtaken the Tenth Ward, and Max understood precisely what had transpired: how this raffish character with the lazy eye had lain in wait for him from the outset, betraying the old ice mensch by snatching the money that was owed him and leaving the greenhorn to take the blame for the theft. Now the fellow, recalled by loose ends, had come back to complete what he’d begun, and if Pisgat never recovered his cash, at least he would be avenged.

Suffused with a fatalism that nearly neutralized his fear, Max responded, “So why you didn’t send him the money yourself?”

“Who, me?” The fellow feigned indignation. “What do I know what happened to my uncle’s money? Maybe in a game of chance you lost it? You greenies do get fleeced so easy. Shtrudel,” nodding in the direction of a sizable crony who had closed in on Max’s left flank, “ain’t this the one made off with Uncle Zalman’s gelt?”

But Max didn’t wait around for Shtrudel’s verdict. Spurred by Jocheved’s memory of assault and abduction, he shrugged off the hands that attempted to grab him and broke away, making a headlong dash around a corner and diving into the first alley he saw. The alley was blind, with a slat fence at its terminus, which Max hit at a dead run and scrambled over, dropping into an unpaved courtyard on the other side. Afraid to look back, he flung himself over a low brick barrier, crossed another yard, and climbed another fence into yet another alley, fueled in his flight by equal parts exhilaration and terror. The alley debouched into a doglegged defile of a street that smelled of the river, in which a few stolid residents were roosting like teraphim on their wooden stoops. The slate roofs of the narrow houses leaned conspiratorially toward one another, so that only minimal sunlight was admitted into the street, where a small party of pedestrians were making their way toward the end of the block. Distinctive for their shared disabilities, they progressed with a will: a man with a single leg who swung himself along on a pair of crutches like a fugitive pendulum; another in an opera cape, wearing opaque spectacles, flailing left to right with a Malacca cane. A woman veiled in a woolen shawl emerged from a tributary alley hauling a wagon containing a quadruple amputee, his face like a prow, his trunk a fat bowling pin decorated with medals. All were advancing in the direction of a decrepit brick building with a tin-plated door and no sign.

Wherever those poor souls were headed, Max figured it was a place no healthy citizen was likely to go, and so he followed. He reached the tin door, got a foot in just before the door slammed shut, and squeezed inside, where he nearly tumbled into the wagon that the cowled woman was dragging behind her. Its wooden wheels clanked loudly down the short flight of ill-lit stone steps, and Max, once his eyes adjusted to the dimness, marveled at how the little sack of a man managed to remain so steadfastly erect in his bouncing conveyance. At the foot of the stairs there was a windowless catacomb lit by flickering sconces, where patrons in various stages of affliction were seated at tables and milling about a whiskey bar mounted on wood-staved kegs. Having hopped on his good leg to the bottom of the steps, one of the cripples who’d preceded Max hung up his crutches and unfastened a leather harness to release his stump, which he unfolded into a perfectly serviceable limb. The blind man had meanwhile cast off his cane and smoky glasses with a flourish to elbow his way toward the bar, where a couple of customers took turns sucking beer from a tube protruding out of a bunghole. In his wagon the limbless veteran, wriggling on his back like a bug attempting to right itself, had also begun to regenerate missing arms and legs; while his female attendant dropped the shawl and peeled away the festering sores stuck to her cheeks, revealing herself as a woman of tolerably pleasant features.

Where some recovered lost appendages and faculties, others were busy pruning and abrading themselves, applying jellies and scabs, rubber bald caps with wens, prostheses that simulated bone diseases and malformations. Some worked with straps and trusses to achieve amputations, while others hunkered around a woodstove heating fixatives and gels for sculpting artificial wounds. A bird-breasted gent with a pedagogical manner demonstrated on his own person before a small circle of students how to counterfeit furuncles, lesions, stigmata, and gangrene. Those not involved in inflicting or healing mutilations admired their own handiwork in murky mirrors; some inspected a well-stocked wardrobe rack or contented themselves with conversation over needled beer.

Max recalled having heard of places where the blind were made to see and the lame to walk, but those were holy places, and this dank dungeon didn’t seem particularly sacrosanct. Of course, there’d been any number of phony beggars in Lodz, but who knew that they were the products of such elaborate industry? Having edged wide-eyed down the steps into the cellar proper, Max could overhear English spoken all about him in a variety of broken dialects and accents, including Galitzianer. He made bold to inquire of a landsman with a bleb the size of a cupping glass on his forehead, “Where am I?” and was told in stagey Daytshmersh, “This is what is known as a cripple factory.” Grinning with a show of black-capped teeth, his informant continued: “A western franchise, if you will, of what in Europe they call a court of miracles, though some would say a court of last resorts.”

It was further explained that the customers might have the use of the costumes and props that the beer cellar provided gratis, so long as they signed a contract, notarized by the proprietor, promising to share a fixed percentage of their supplicant’s proceeds. This guaranteed that the majority of patrons would return the fruits of their mooching to the cellar as to a company store.

That was how Max initiated the series of impersonations that would see him through the lean winter months. Panhandler by day, he took shelter by night in a shadow Manhattan, sometimes sleeping in the Municipal Lodging House on its barge locked in North River ice, or in the faded opulence of the
HIAS
quarters in the old Astor Library. There were hapless periods when, lacking the price of a flop, he slept outdoors with one eye open on top of a steam vent or a heating grate; nights when his daylight appeals had gone well and he might rent a closet-size crib above a barroom, the company of mice being preferable to the public sanctuaries that left him vulnerable to deviants and thieves. Occasionally, sick and tired of dissembling, he might briefly forgo the accessories that rendered him maimed or blind to take an unskilled job: once as a buttonhole puncher, another time a suspenders peddler—the latter activity affording its own style of camouflage, adorned as he was in galluses like a willow tree. With each new occupation he assumed a new name: Chaim Fut, Itche Grin; but mostly he remained under cover and hustled. Every so often he was granted a holiday, as during elections, when the Tammany bosses provided free lunches to anyone who voted repeatedly for their candidates, but even then Max was afraid to lower his guard. Of course, as a girl, as Jocheved, he would have been eligible to take shelter in more benevolent refuges such as the Daughters of Rachel Home for Wayward Jewish Girls, a place of tender mercies or so he’d heard. But Jocheved had as good as drowned in Mrs. Weintraub’s washtub, so little was her voice heeded anymore in Max’s affairs; and Max himself was so lost in his Igs, Chaims, and Abednegos that he’d forfeited the memory of precisely who he was supposed to be.

As a consequence, Jocheved’s pleas that he should continue the quest for Rabbi ben Zephyr, which alternated with her disturbing indifference to her own fate, fell on deaf ears. Doubly disguised, Max tended to forget about the submerged Jocheved altogether, except during those functions whose privacy Max had to make no end of degrading efforts to secure. Then there were the fiddles, his expanding rag-bag of deceits, the latest involving the sale of little sacks of sand scooped from the gutters, which he pitched as Jerusalem earth. Still, it was only a matter of time before the current ruse was discovered: the charities that dispatched their itinerant ambassadors—some begging alms for the outworn parasites of Jerusalem, others for the young pioneers of the Yishuv—often clashed with each other, while both factions were on the lookout for impostors. So on this particular night Max had decided to retire old Reb Saltpeter. Then, unthinking in his marathon weariness, he put on the shell coat and bowler of Mrs. Weintraub’s absconded husband without resorting to any cosmetic effects. Only half conscious of having returned to his original disguise—though aware enough of having missed it—he ventured out into Delancey Street to purchase a bit of kippered herring or maybe a piece of fruit. It wasn’t lost on him either that the evening’s weather showed signs of a warming trend, or that he was lonely.