The Frozen Rabbi (37 page)

But sometime during the stagnant days that followed the week of mourning, Esther had a radical idea: Why not make the journey with the widow? After all, what did Jocheved have to look forward to in New York other than sitting alone in an apartment appointed in obsolete account books and revenant memories? At the very least the trip might distract her, at best jar her into a renewed interest in life. It might even turn out that the town of Memphis, devoid of unpleasant associations, was a desirable place in which to make a new home. Esther talked over her plan with Yehezkel and Yigdal, who agreed it was worth a try and even volunteered to escort the women as far as their destination. They discussed their intentions with Comrade ben Blish, who suggested that, since his itinerary might be altered to include a swing through the southern states, they make the trip together in easy stages. For despite his self-possession on the podium, Zerubavel was a timid man, insecure in the face of traveling alone into the remoter regions of this goyish nation.

When it came time to present the proposition to the widow, all were braced against her expected resistance. But once her wishes had been honored with respect to the insurance benefits—the attorneys were instructed to distribute them as severance packages among the unemployed staff of Karp’s Castle—the emotionally destitute Jocheved became almost lamblike in her docility. She accepted the judgment of her fellow mourners that the trip would be good for her with the resignation of a prisoner receiving a sentence that could not be appealed, a sentence she felt she deserved. Of course, arrangements had to be made: The apartment must be sublet, Shmerl and Jocheved’s joint account liquidated, the Canal Street property placed in the hands of brokers licensed to sell it at auction, its profits allocated as a sop to the Ice Castle’s investors. Finally it was almost exhilarating how quickly the life the widow had shared with her chimerical husband had been revoked, and with it the able woman she once was. More than merely neglectful of her appearance, she seemed to have reverted to the ambiguous being she had been before her marriage: She’d either hacked off or shed her luxuriant hair until it resembled the bristles of a seven-cent brush, and exchanged her mourning dress for a pair of her dead husband’s trousers; she had also acquired a stoop from the dowager’s hump that had recently risen between her shoulder blades. She was judged now to be frankly unhinged, but at least she was pliant, a small blessing for which all gave thanks.

There was meanwhile one last detail the brothers had yet to see to, one that when it was mentioned to the widow caused her to stuff her fingers into her ears and cry “Yemakh shmoy!” May his name be blotted out. For hadn’t both her father and her husband made a sentimental fetish of the ghastly thing in its ice-bound hibernation?—and just look at the untimely ends they had met. Jocheved flared up at the rabbi’s mention and let it be known she would be content to leave him atop some rubbish heap where he could melt and decompose as food for the crows. So it was up to her brothers, in deference to the memory of their father and a dead man they had never met, to take care of him. They arranged for his temporary storage in a basement locker at Duckstein’s Funeral Salon on Henry Street, where they supervised the recaulking of his wooden container; they had the zinc lining refilled with water, thus reconstituting via an ammonia absorption agent the frozen mass that had been diminished in the fire. Then once the holy man’s protruding toes and furry ears were again sealed for safekeeping in ice, the twins agreed that the continued maintenance of this reverend family tradition should fall to young Ruben Karp, who needed something to do.

He had been lurking about the margins of the apartment, an unkempt, brooding figure to whom everyone gave a wide berth. Since the fire he had refrained from washing his face, thinking perhaps that the ashes that smudged his forehead belonged to his father. The neglect was due not so much to reverence as the wish to be marked like Cain for his deed on that fateful night. He kept aloof from participation in the mourners’ minyans that took place whenever there were sufficient visitors to say Kaddish; though from time to time he was compelled by some vague instinct to plant himself beside the chair of his mother, who despite her general inattention might consent to acknowledge his presence with a touch. This he would suffer with a stoic shiver, mildly amazed at the disdain he felt for the woman his actions had so effectively undone. On occasion he had the urge to add insult to injury by confessing his crime. It was certainly no secret, notwithstanding the insurance company’s pressured decision, that the fire had been the result of arson; so intimate were the cops with the trademark methods of the local arson mechanics that they doubtless could have fingered the culprits off the bat. But Naf the Sport had always been punctual in distributing his sweeteners among the local authorities, so the heat from the icehouse fire never touched his tribe. For this Ruby was almost sorry, as a lifetime of penal servitude would have suited his mood.

Already crushed, his mother would most likely be shattered beyond a hope of retrieval by his confession, but wasn’t that how restitution was made? He knew from the Yom Kippur services of yore that guilt was something you expiated through atonement, and knew also that for what he had done he could never atone. But surely, as action had always been his medium, there was some course of action he ought now to take. It occurred to him that, having destroyed his own father, the next obvious step should be to destroy himself. Then it struck him that this was his conscience speaking—had he suddenly developed a conscience? But the logic it asserted was as foreign to him as a conversation overheard by chance, and if he tried to listen a little harder his brain would cramp up, as if squeezed like a sponge leaking toxins that rankled in the gut. This Ruby supposed was remorse. It was the single identifiable emotion left in his depleted arsenal, while on the other hand it didn’t seem to belong to him at all. He was in any case paralyzed by his present circumstances… until his mother’s brothers lumbered toward him with a proposal.

He glowered at them from the kitchen table, as who were they, this meddlesome Tweedledum and Tweedledee? True, they had saved his life (thanks for nothing), which he grudgingly supposed gave them the right to an audience. Since the brothers had virtually no English and the Hebrew they’d been speaking for two decades had left them impoverished of their mameloshen, they anticipated some difficulty in communicating with Ruby—who had little enough Yiddish himself, never mind his disinclination to speak to anyone at all. So they engaged his aunt Esther as an intermediary, since, once she’d determined he wouldn’t bite, she had been almost as attentive to the son as to the mother during the past few weeks. Tolerating her ministrations with disregard, Ruby had allowed her to change the dressings on his hands and head, applying salves and ointments as a result of which his wounds were practically healed. But now Esther appeared a little puffed with importance in her office as mouthpiece, and Ruby was almost amused to see how her baked-apple face puckered in the effort to translate the twins’ Hebraized Yiddish into American.

“As you know, must not be abandoned, our family treasure,” she submitted, turning to ask the twins: “Vos iz der taytsh ‘treasure’?” The twins advised her to please just repeat after them, which she did tugging at her corset in a show of displeasure at having been left out of the loop: “‘We offer to you the privilege exceptionalary that you should escort it, the legacy—’ What legacy?”

At that point Ruby, having already heard enough, pronounced one of the few Yiddish expressions he knew, “A klug tse eykh alemens (Screw you all),” after which the brothers made it clear to him through an esperanto of persuasive gestures that
no
was not an option.

The plan was for Ruby to watch over the casket, much as he’d once guarded truckloads of contraband hooch, on the trip down to Tennessee. He would travel with the rabbi by freight train to Memphis, while his recently extended family took a more leisurely route via Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, with Zerubavel ben Blish promoting the Zionist dream along the way. Once Ruby had grunted his tepid assent, things happened swiftly: He left the apartment for the first time in weeks with his strongarm escort. They took a subway to Hell’s Kitchen, where it was Ruby’s turn to play translator, a function he performed with brusque economy on the loading dock of the Armour Star meathouse adjoining the Hudson railyard. Having assumed that the company men in the freight office would either balk or up the ante, Ruby decided to bypass them in favor of going straight to the dockhands, with whom he and his uncles soon struck a deal.

A few days later on a misty morning in early April, a freshly waxed Phaeton hearse from Duckstein’s Funerals drove into the gravel yard. From the rear of the hearse the rabbi in his moldering sarcophagus was transferred by an overhead conveyor directly into a Union Pacific reefer car filled with hanging hams. “You can’t put him instead with flanken?” the twins had inquired, disturbed by the indignity, but Ruby scoffed at their concern. Throughout the operation the railroad laborers, whose palms had been previously oiled, looked the other way. In the meantime, so active was the yard with its switching and shunting, with the clamor of coupling and the hiss of hydraulics, the thud of truncheons cracking hoboes’ heads, that the loading of an old coffin onto a boxcar went virtually unnoticed. Ruby had already swung his duffel along with his father’s salvaged sheep’s pelt onto the refrigerated car. He was in the process of stowing Aunt Esther’s hamper containing a three-day supply of knishes and a thermos of tea, and was about to climb on board himself, when a flashily dressed contingent stepped onto the platform through a billow of steam: a delegatz as it turned out from the mob captain Naftali Kupferman. Ruby wondered what had taken them so long.

They were led by Naf’s chief stooges Shtrudel Louie and Turtletaub, both wearing belted topcoats over their tropical suits. The moron Little Lhulki was also in tow, along with a couple of rookies in Oxford bags that Ruby didn’t recognize. The lot of them appeared to him now as figures of make-believe, caricature gangsters with cute nicknames stepped from the columns of Damon Runyon, the newspaper scribe.

Shtrudel Louie gave Ruby a neutral salute with a finger to the brim of his Stetson: “Naftali says sorry for your loss but it’s not nice to leave town without you should say good-bye.” Mr. Turtletaub seconded the sentiment, adding that the boss’s feelings were deeply hurt, while Shtrudel narrowed his eyes to assess the duplicate brutes that stood in their short pants beside Kid Karp.

Indifferent to the menace in their voices, Ruby said only, “I’m touched.” He had supposed they were keeping tabs on him, had even expected they might try interdicting him if he left the apartment, though he hadn’t thought they would wait till the last minute. Still he knew better than to believe he could simply waltz out of Naftali’s orbit scot-free. Nobody just walked away. For one thing, he knew too much about Naf the Sport’s organization to be allowed such an uncurbed liberty. Though assured as he was that one could never turn his back on the rackets, turn his back was precisely what Ruby did, as he began again to board the train. That was the cue for Naf’s senior cat’s-paws to haul out their heaters from the holstered concealment of their armpits. Almost simultaneously Yehezkel and Yigdal dredged their pockets to produce weapons of their own, waving Mausers that held the Browning semiautomatics in a stalemate of silent respect. In the ensuing standoff Ruby felt a twinge of fellowship, even gratitude toward his uncles for backing him up, a feeling that just as quickly dissipated. Then, allowing his cardigan to slip from his shoulders onto the concrete dock, Kid Karp was once again prey to eruptive reflexes. Seeing his nostrils flare and the vein throb at his temple, Shtrudel Louie and Turtletaub, who recognized the symptoms, lowered their pistols and took a step backward, then seeking the better part of valor turned about and reluctantly quit the field. Left to their own bewildered devices, Little Lhulki and the fledgling goons also fumbled for their sidearms, but Ruby was on them before they had a chance to draw. In his rage he began to feel a familiar rapture that was as short-lived as his gratitude had been; there was finally no pleasure in throttling his enemies, no pleasure to be had by any means, a realization that slowed his battling limbs not at all.

As they watched their nephew’s one-man juggernaut, the twins exchanged sidelong glances, Yigdal raising his left eyebrow in an approving gesture complemented by the raised right brow of his brother.

THE
TRAIN
WAS
already in motion, the station bulls blowing their whistles as they charged down the platform toward the scuffle, and Ruby, disengaging himself from his flagging opponents, dove into the reefer car. He peeked out to see the hoodlums dispersing at a stumble in their several directions (the twins had already vanished), then slid closed the heavy boxcar door. If he’d been listening, as the train nosed under the Hudson and resurfaced in the industrial wasteland on the other side, Ruby might have heard what sounded like the belated echo of that slamming door—but was in fact the crash of the New York Stock Exchange. Not that the noise would have meant much to Kid Karp, for whom the party was already over. Without checking to see if the door would open again from the inside, he had pulled on his dead papa’s sheep’s pelt and hunkered down with his back against the rotting casket. The dense air machines moaned as they circulated a polar draft tinged with the stink of ethyl chloride from the bunkers at either end of the car, while Ruby huddled in the pitch dark, shivering on the wood-sheathed floor. Already a numbness had begun to infect his extremities, a corollary to the numbness that gripped his brain. Never once during the journey was he tempted to get up and inspect the cargo the casket contained; neither did he relieve himself in the bucket his uncles had provided for that purpose behind a rack of cold pork shoulders and butts, so bound up were his insides with frost. His limbs became rigid, eyelids stuck at half-mast, ice riming the sparse stubble of his beard, and his lips were aniline blue. Transporting the rumor of a man trapped in a block of ice, he was himself becoming solid ice in the shape of a man.