The Frozen Rabbi (36 page)

His attempts at gainful employment were disastrous. The first was at the Shelby County Fair, where a seasoned carny gave him a trial run at operating a game of chance. It was a classic sideshow hustle where the patrons hurled baseballs at pyramids of milk bottles filled with lead. With only three throws allotted to knock down three sturdy pyramids, no one ever won the stuffed animals displayed above the concession, but that was before Bernie’s term as concessionaire. Open to persuasion, he allowed the patrons to negotiate extra opportunities to knock down the bottles, and ended by giving away a number of grand prizes. He was in the process of handing over a giant panda to the son of a man who’d talked him into extra throws when the manager of the joint appeared, demanding to know what was going on. Bernie’s explanation resulted in the manager’s wresting the panda from the arms of the shrieking child, as the father threatened legal action and the employee was dismissed in opprobrium. His second job was as a day laborer at a midtown construction site. There he was asked to carry sheets of plywood to a carpenter’s station via a ramp extending over freshly poured concrete. On his initial trip, a sudden gust caught the plywood, lifting Bernie from the boards and casting him down into the wet foundation. When he presented himself thus encrusted to Lou Ella in the parking lot of her video outlet, she remarked that he looked like the statue from
Don Giovanni
and proceeded to worry grievously about the boy.

Whereas the boy, otherwise exuberant, continued to feel anxious about the rabbi, with whom he had yet to rule out the possibility of joining forces. He was aware of course of Maimonides’ criterion for humbug as stated in
The Guide for the Perplexed
: how if the claimant by his life or teachings subverts established moral norms, then you have evidence of deception. But Bernie still believed in the Boibiczer Prodigy even as he wanted to save the old man from himself. Meanwhile besides the clergymen and journalists, a number of local politicians, albeit leery of running afoul of their constituents, had joined the chorus of challengers to the rabbi’s legitimacy. It was only a matter of time before malevolent forces would conspire to bring down the House of Enlightenment, and Bernie might be called upon to rescue the rebbe from the brink of his own self-destruction.

“Cool,” said the girl, wondering who was more in need of rescuing. Because now that his appetite for the terrestrial had supplanted his desire for transcendence, while those opposing desires were challenged by his passion for Lou Ella herself, she fretted over Bernie’s vulnerability. Feeling in good part responsible, she no longer urged him to declare his powers openly; she abdicated her role as his conscience and pressed him to please just get on with reading aloud the tale of the patricide. Since their mutual absorption in Grandpa Ruby’s journal had increased, the absence of a physical component to their intimacy seemed almost irrelevant, and it was sometimes possible to think of their relationship as ordinary. Lou was surprised to find that she wished her friend to be ordinary, just as she wished (as did Bernie himself on occasion) that the old man had never been released from the ice.

“Cool, Uberboy, save the rabbi,” she said, “save the whole fucking world for all I care, but first finish reading me the story.”

A
fter his head was stitched and bandaged, his burnt hands wrapped in gauze mittens, Ruby was commended by one and all for his good intentions. He’d been heroic, really, a fact that even his stricken mother seemed to register, the failure to rescue his father notwithstanding. His withdrawn silence at the funeral—a redundant affair, given the inventor’s prior cremation along with his factory—was interpreted as inconsolable grief. It was a surprisingly large funeral for a man with no close friends. The burial itself took place in the Mount Zion Cemetery, a sprawling necropolis located in the borough of Queens, on a hill with a view of the Manhattan skyline rising in the distance like spikes on a dragon’s tail. The entire dispossessed staff of Karp’s Castle, come to pay their respects, filed past the unvarnished pine casket after the rabbi’s graveside eulogy. Each man released a handful of earth in passing, which thudded hollowly atop the sealed casket containing the only identifiable remains of their putative boss: the charred violin scroll of a vertebra, an eggshell chip from his skull. The relict Mrs. Karp, whose natural pallor had retreated to a near transparency, was supported on the arm of her sister-in-law, Shinde Esther, both of whose parents had passed away the previous year and were buried in an adjacent plot. Flanking Jocheved and Esther were Jocheved’s twin brothers, who had arrived from Palestine in time for the wholesale incineration of their sister’s life. Ruben Karp, his vacant expression at variance with his rakish head dressing and natty suit, stood apart from the others in the shadow of a stranger’s stone.

Jocheved’s brothers had come to America to help raise funds for the settlement movement in Palestine, which advertised itself as the advance guard in the establishment of a Jewish national homeland. Longtime veterans of the struggle to colonize Eretz Israel, Yachneh and Yoyneh, since become Yehezkel and Yigdal, had been elected to accompany the Zionist spokesman Zerubavel ben Blish on his tour of the Eastern states. Soldiers as well as pioneers, the twins served in a dual capacity, functioning as bodyguards if needed while applying, by virtue of their brawn, a little pressure toward encouraging contributions to the Yishuv. As it happened, the very first speaking engagement on Comrade ben Blish’s calendar was at the Baron de Hirsch Synagogue on the Upper West Side of New York, where Mrs. Shmerl Karp, deserted that Shabbos eve by her nocturnal husband, was also in attendance. A young man with the formal manner of an elder statesman, the bespectacled Comrade ben Blish took the stage after the service and the rabbi’s brief introduction, while posted on either side of him, like a pair of mamelukes with their folded arms and buffed heads, stood the imposing Frostbissen brothers.

As Comrade ben Blish launched into his standard recital of miracles performed in the desert, cataloguing fruits that had not been grown there since the time of the prophets, Yigdal and Yehezkel surveyed the congregation. It was their habit even in the friendliest environments to stay alert to the possibility of trouble; to the enemies of Zion no place was sacred. They scanned the faces of the prosperous men in their velvet skull caps and their caparisoned wives in the gallery, focusing on one whose disturbing beauty struck a chord. They turned briefly to each other as the chord thrummed musically in their barrel chests, increasing in volume; then, though it was unseemly to leer for any length at the weaker sex, they turned back toward the handsome woman. Jocheved, from her own angle of vision, felt a similar tug of attraction, the tremor building to a quake that opened a fissure between the moment and a long-buried past. As the speaker began to wind down his talk, he looked ceremonially left and right, which was the signal for his assistants to step from the altar and begin circulating the blue tin collection pushkes. But the twins had already fled the altar, having made a beeline for the stairs to the women’s gallery, where the ladies were astir over the impetuous exit of the decorative Mrs. Karp from their midst. From the staircase beyond the high-domed sanctuary the assembled could overhear peals of laughter signifying a joyful reunion.

She invited them back to the apartment to meet her absentee family, apologizing that her son Ruben was seldom around and her husband Shmerl often worked late on projects at his plant. She tried phoning him but as usual got no answer, since it was after hours and, on nights when he planned to stay over, the inventor would send the watchman home. She busied herself with serving tea and homemade schnecken; there was also—as despite Prohibition Jews were allowed a portion of wine for ritual purposes—some sugary muscatel. She wouldn’t cease her bustling about until the brothers forcibly sat her down in a wing chair, urging her not to be nervous, it had after all been no more than twenty-two years since they’d said good-bye. “Look on you,” exclaimed Jocheved when she’d collected herself enough to take in their brute demeanors, “like overgrown Boy Scouts.” The twins grinned with damp eyes as if to acknowledge that their rubashka shirts and bandannas, khaki shorts and chukka boots, did perhaps resemble the uniform of some children’s brigade. For their part Yehezkel and Yigdal, between whom Jocheved made no attempt to distinguish, assured her that the pretty sprig they remembered had blossomed into exquisite fruition in her married estate. She touched her thick curls, blushed in an excess of pride in her truant boys, despite the fact that one was given over to wickedness and the other a hostage to his own loopy imagination. Reunited with her brothers, it seemed to Jocheved, at least tonight, that her life had progressed in a triumphal arc from the pestilent ghetto in Lodz to the Upper West Side of New York City.

They filled each other in on the histories they’d missed the way you’d pitch stepping stones from either bank of a stream. Each item of information—Jocheved’s silent partnership with her husband, Yehezkel and Yigdal’s labors on a collective farm in the Galilee—constituted another stone that brought them a little closer to connecting their respective pasts. They chose, however, only the steadiest and least slippery stones, letting lie the more misshapen and bruising to the touch, for both parties had memories that might not advance their proximity. In this way the ordinarily taciturn brothers and the sister intent on drawing them out passed several charmed hours together; they ate the rolls, drank the cloying wine, and determined that all concerned could not be more content with their lot. The twins had remained unmarried, though in the communes the men and women felt little need for official sanctification of their unions; but they were without wives or issue, having dedicated themselves with the zealotry of the Essenes of old to the creation of a Jewish state. Jocheved listened with a slightly affected awe to their tales, since her time as a man among men had made her no stranger to the anomalies of human behavior that her brothers described. In the small hours when their sister despaired of her husband’s returning home that night, Yigdal and Yehezkel, enlivened by the happy occasion, declared they would go downtown to fetch him. Jocheved protested: No subways or buses would be running at that late hour and taxis would be scarce; they should sleep awhile and wait until morning. But the brothers were restless, insisting that they would walk if they couldn’t find transport; they could in any case use some air, and besides, sleep was something they had learned to do without in the Holy Land.

THE
FIRE
AND
its attendant explosion, about which a number of unresolved theories had evolved, took three hook-and-ladder brigades and a corps of volunteers to put out. Since the Ice Castle occupied the entire block, the devastation had been largely contained; the neighboring structures suffered only minor damage, and though several firefighters collapsed from inhalation, only one life was lost. But the ash pit which was all that was left in place of the Castle smoldered for days, as if some volcanic landscape complete with smoking fumaroles had erupted in the midst of the ghetto. In the dreary aftermath of the event the twins found themselves unable to abandon their newfound (and newly desolated) sister. Her son, whom they’d discovered in his reckless effort to extract his father from the catastrophe, remained in apparent shock, and was therefore incapable of tending to his mother in any useful way. Informed of the misfortune, their compatriot and charge, Zerubavel ben Blish, was sympathetic. He downplayed the inconvenience, assuring the twins he could manage on his own, though he nevertheless delayed the continuation of his tour and accepted more invitations to speak at Jewish venues around the city.

In the meantime it seemed to the brothers that they had become re-acquainted with their beautiful sister only to see her fade into a black bombazine specter before their eyes. They’d encountered her luster just in time to see it cruelly snuffed out. Overnight her native composure had folded into a grim passivity, her sable hair uncoiling into gunmetal gray. If she said anything, it was only to utter some self-indictment, such as, “This is my fault for the obscenity I was,” while the untidy attitudes she assumed in the chair she never vacated during the week-long shivah period were oddly genderless. Only on the subject of money did she recover any of her former energy. Due to receive a generous settlement for the factory, whose destruction the twins urged the insurance company to declare an act of God, she said flatly that she didn’t want it; and though her brothers respectfully argued that she was being unreasonable, she refused to accept any benefits from her husband’s death. Needless to say, she had no heart for rebuilding the business; she had scarcely the impetus to feed or clothe herself, and were it not for the efforts of the spinster Shinde Esther, who coaxed her to take a little nourishment, she might ultimately have followed her Shmerl to an early grave.

As it happened, the inventor’s premature passing had come on the eve of a trip that Esther had been planning for some time. Ever since the loss of her parents over a year ago (one from a terminal mal de mer, the other frightened to death by her husband’s ghost), she’d decided to accept an invitation to visit the only surviving brother save Shmerl that she was still in touch with. The others had been swallowed up by the mammoth American interior, and only Melchior, now Marvin and residing in the exotic fastness of Tennessee, had continued to write. But the trip had been repeatedly postponed due to Esther’s cold feet. It wasn’t until the family-minded Marvin had proposed her outright relocation, offering her a position in his retail emporium—and adding somewhat illogically that her marital prospects might be more promising in a warmer clime—that the top-heavy little woman made up her mind to go. Her parents’ caretaker and crackpot brother’s dependant for far too long, she craved her autonomy. Then came the fire and once again the trip had to be deferred for the sake of looking after the sister-in-law to whom she’d grown attached.