1908.
They slept together like brothers in the same bed, which Shmerl lowered each evening from the ceiling and raised again (sometimes with Max still in it) in the late mornings when he woke. For although Max had adjusted to Shmerl’s odd hours, he often continued to sleep in his borrowed longjohns through much of the day. In fact, during those first days after his rescue Max never set foot outside the automated shack, as if the ordeal of the previous months had finally caught up with him and laid him low. Even though his wound was minor and largely healed before the week was out, he remained convalescent, and Shmerl was happy to indulge him in his prostration. Having saved him, the dung carter now felt somehow responsible for securing his guest’s enduring safety and health. Though Max assured him the attack in the alley was merely a chance episode not likely to happen again, Shmerl remained anxious concerning his new friend’s welfare. He changed his head dressing daily, examined him for any symptoms of concussion, and continued to apply the vile medicinal compresses; he cooked him meals: mostly a gluey amalgam of kasha and eggs, though sometimes there was Jewish fish: “Is now my namesake, Karp.” And Max, who had eaten all manner of treyf these many months, was appreciative, not to say amused by the crucibles and alkaline cells Shmerl employed in his culinary endeavors, the results of which were more often than not inedible. Nor did it help that the aroma of every dish partook of the stables’ distinct bouquet. All the same, in a show of abiding gratitude (and in deference to Shmerl’s insistence that he keep up his strength), Max would dutifully sample the fare; though in time the guest, begging his host’s permission, revived Jocheved’s dormant skills and took over the cooking himself.
Of course the subject of the frozen rabbi had necessarily to be broached and dispensed with before the ice (so to speak) could be broken between them. It was Shmerl, protesting all the while that he had no wish to pry, who had nonetheless initiated the conversation on that very first night.
“So how by the old chasid did you come?”
Max demurred, not inclined to lie to the hunchback but also unready to state the plain truth. “He is in my family a cherished memento,” was his lame explanation.
“What he makes you to remember?”
Again Max was stymied, while Shmerl, to his relief, seemed to dismiss his waffling silence as an occasion to offer a theory of his own. “I think he is yet alive, di alter mensch,” he stated, a faraway look clouding his eye; “he is only asleep and dreaming. He dreams the dream of the world that we are all of us in it, and to wake him now might make already the end of the world.”
While questioning the dung carter’s sanity, Max acceded at the same time to Jocheved’s endorsement of a concept she regarded as rather sound.
At first Shmerl had worried that Reb Levine (who lived above the stables) might discover his guest and evict them both, but the contractor had little need to venture into the shack anymore, now that his employee had made himself so indispensable. In fact, thanks to Shmerl’s vigor and ingenuity, the old livery stable proprietor was enjoying a state of semi-retirement. As a consequence, his lad-of-all-work had never had to explain the jungle of gadgetry (the Otto cycle engine that ran on feces and moonbeams, the battery that alternated currents the way a prism divides a wave of light into a rainbow) that had overtaken the tarpapered outbuilding.
Rivaling his passion for invention, however, was the prospect of continuing his explorations of the Golden Land with a worthy partner; and solicitous as he was of his guest’s recuperation, after a reasonable time had elapsed, Shmerl invited Max to walk abroad with him. The invitation triggered in Max the first pang of alarm he’d experienced since taking advantage of Shmerl’s hospitality; then it passed, and he donned the shirt, trousers, and Kitchener vestee that the dung carter had bought him off a secondhand rack in Orchard Street. (His own clothes, beyond bloodied, were clownishly voluminous.) It was a late afternoon at the outset of spring, no doubt approaching Pesach, though who remembered holidays in this heathen land? Nevertheless, Shmerl was in a holiday mood. He had just returned from paying the livery stable’s weekly extortion fee to members of the Yid Black Hand in their fumy backroom behind Grand Street. There, he was brought up short upon recognizing a couple of characters seated at the bottle-laden table—the caddy cap in new knickerbockers and argyles, his sidekick stuffing burny up his beak—who thankfully showed no signs of recognizing him. Seeing them in their natural habitat left Shmerl with the conviction that they were merely a pair of garden variety gonifs of a type that were a common hazard in the Tenth Ward; they were finally no more a menace than bedbugs and rising damp. So when he arrived back at the wagonyard, Shmerl proposed to the yungerman, whom he decided had been idle too long, that they take a stroll; though just in case he carried along his galvanic cane.
Mild breezes nipped at the heels of a gusting wind in full retreat as the dung carter and the dissembler browsed the East Side streets, observing together the same sights they’d witnessed countless times on their own. But each, though he never said so, had the peculiar sense of seeing the neighborhood afresh, Shmerl as if peering through the eyes of his newfound friend, and vice versa. Outsiders for so long, together they felt what neither had before: that they were young men out on the town, a couple of rubbernecks ogling the ghetto’s attractions, gauging the potential of an East Broadway shmooserie or candy store for fellowship and intrigue. With only a spotty understanding of how his companion had survived the winter, Shmerl felt he was introducing a greenhorn to the omnifarious city, and Max reinforced his attitude by perceiving the streets for once as amusement rather than likely threat. Relinquishing a little his habit of eternal vigilance, he also let go of the impulse to cloak himself in yet another disguise, so protected did he feel in the company of his bed fellow, this patent meshugener with his strange avocations whom he was nonetheless growing to admire. There even came a point in their stroll when, watching some girls in their dove-gray shifts playing potsy, chanting “Chatzkele, Chatzkele, shpil mir a kazatzkele” and using a fisheye for a marker, Max’s spirits rose almost past containing. “What a jubilee!” he exclaimed, then was immediately embarrassed, feeling that such an indecorous outburst must be a joke of Jocheved’s at his expense (while Jocheved, from her concealment, wondered if Max had lost his mind).
Another awkward moment for Max came when they stopped for a bowl of borscht at a dairy café, and Shmerl—digging into his knippl, the little knot of cash he’d been hoarding since he’d become a hired hand—insisted on paying the tab. Having passed a dark season as the object of charity, the beggar now wished to be benefactor, despite having no material resources to speak of.
“It is for me my pleasure,” his host assured him, proud to be arm-inarm with such a silken youth, so delicate-featured and slight of frame, attributes almost unseemly for a man. With a sigh Max had accepted the refreshment, just as later he learned to graciously accept the ticket to a Yiddish theater production of Hamlet, der yeshivah bocher, translated and improved for the edification of the general public, or the price of admission to a cabaret. For his part, Shmerl felt heartily beholden to his companion for allowing him to show them both a good time. How long he had waited for someone with whom to share his enthusiasm for the knockabout streets and the institutions he’d been too shy to enter alone. It was as if he finally belonged to the teeming neighborhood and had at last arrived in America.
As for Max, he still couldn’t quite believe that he’d fallen into such agreeable circumstances. For one thing, despite the forced physical intimacy of their digs, it was relatively effortless to hide Jocheved’s gender from his host. This was thanks in part to Shmerl’s consideration of his guest’s privacy, that and his discretion regarding his own modest habits. As a consequence, even the concealment of Jocheved’s menstrual rags was not an issue, though the smell sometimes lingered; but Shmerl seemed to regard it as Max’s distinctive scent. Given Shmerl’s cavalier inattention to his own sanitary needs, and conditioned as he was by the fetor of the wagonyard, a fundamentally human essence was in no way offensive to him. In this environment Jocheved sometimes felt she might even relax a bit her tenacious secrecy; she might steal a peek on occasion from behind the mask of Max Feinshmeker, as if the world were not such a daunting place after all. This isn’t to say the girl didn’t sometimes have second thoughts about sharing such close quarters with a bunchbacked companion, involving as it did a moral compromise that Shmerl was not even aware of; there were nights when she lay awake on the flock-stuffed mattress acutely conscious of the fact that the creature lying next to her was male. Men, she must never forget, were the enemy, though this one, this luftmensch Shmerl, seemed of an entirely different breed; and in the end all her reservations with respect to their proximity were overruled by her host’s assurances that Max’s presence was a great relief from loneliness.
Still, they preserved between them a chummy formality, addressing one another as Feinshmeker and Karp, though each had been known on occasion to let slip the other’s given name. Naturally their honeymoon period couldn’t last indefinitely, nor did Max, now that his mental acumen was reawakening, wish to maintain much longer the purposeless status quo. Eager to repay his host’s generosity, he had begun to get ideas. One evening, a few hours before the start of the nightwalking circuit, at the time when they were accustomed to making their rambles, Max—or was it Jocheved? because it was getting harder to determine whence derived his lapses of voice into a reedy soprano—asked Shmerl to explain again how he had renewed Rabbi ben Zephyr’s compartment of ice.
“Zol zayn azoy!” replied Shmerl; “was a trifle.” He became abruptly animated as he began to describe how he had magnified sunlight through a filched headlamp in order to melt the original ice in the casket’s interior. Then the rabbi might have thawed out like a mackerel on a slab had he not refilled the casket, even as he drained it, with ground water pumped through a rubber hose. After that he’d caused the fresh water to freeze again. “Which is the part that to me it ain’t clear yet,” interrupted Max. But when Shmerl began his exegesis, using phrases for which there was no Yiddish equivalent—“volatile gas,” “pressurized ether refrigerant,” “homunculus” (since he regarded the rabbi himself as a stage in an alchemical process)—Max interrupted again to ask him, please, to demonstrate the operation once more. Then again his guest was transfixed by Shmerl’s performance, which he re-created in a tinned strainer pail. Such a presentation, he thought, could captivate the crowds on the Bowery; it could command a respectable billing at the Barnum Museum farther uptown. But then Max’s mind took a more expedient turn, which was possibly due to the influence of Jocheved, with whom he seemed to have entered into a period of detente.
Snapping out of his role of passive observer, he stood up from his seat on the floating bed. “Karp,” he said, “do you ever think you will like to make a gesheft?”
“A beezness?” Shmerl enjoyed showing off his expanding vocabulary, though the word tasted sour on his tongue. Of course, he seldom thought beyond his dreams, which, though they were lately more earthbound, had never God forbid included any commercial ventures. But so taken was he with his new companion that he felt himself inclined to go along with any scheme he might suggest, if only to maintain their close association. Still, he wondered exactly what it was about Max that so beguiled him and inspired his loyalty. True, he was physically quite prepossessing and unquestionably intelligent, and his connection with the deep-frozen tzaddik elevated him all the more in Shmerl’s eyes. There was also the possibility that his coattails might carry the inventor toward a prosperity he’d never sought, though for his friend’s sake he supposed he wouldn’t refuse it. But beyond all that, Max remained for the dung carter the embodiment of a nameless mystery, and Shmerl felt that he couldn’t part from him until he’d discovered its origin. So while there was much to be said in favor of solitude and bare subsistence, there was more reason to hang on to the yungerman’s company at any cost.
LESS THAN THREE weeks later, they were standing in the presence of the financier August Belmont II, who had risen from behind his desk as if to shoo away a pair of stray alley cats. “Get out of here!” He was wearing on his anointed head a plum fez with a tassle that looked to Shmerl like the roots of an upturned flower pot, though he was in every other respect a striking gentleman. The tall window at his back, which gave on to the verdant park across Fifth Avenue, outlined his trim figure in a coronalike glow as he pulled tight the cords at the waist of his dressing gown.
“A moment of your time, Your Excellent,” pleaded Max Feinshmeker, potato-shaped in the overalls and machinist’s apron he’d adopted for their artifice. Next to him, similarly clad, stood Shmerl, holding the handle of a device on wheels that resembled a dwarf pachyderm with a dangling snout. Unable to transport the ungainly thing by omnibus, they had hauled it all the way uptown in a rattling dogcart, marveling at how the city altered its character from block to block. The old-law tenements, waist factories, and warehouses gave way to the cast-iron fronts of offices and department stores, which were deposed further on by brownstone terrace houses. The brownstones ebbed at the hotel towers with their striped awnings and liveried doormen, the hotels shading into a rialto of Moorish theaters ringed by touring cars and flocked about by billboards proclaiming the virtues of Doan’s Pills and Russian Caravan Tea. Then, at Fifty-ninth Street, the commercial farrago halted in deference to the grandeur along the eastern border of Central Park. For adjacent the budding foliage of a spring afternoon in full spate stood a row of châteaux, palazzi, and fortresslike mansions, the architecture ranging the spectrum from ancient Egypt to Versailles. Amid this grand parade was the showy arabesque of Temple Emanuel, where, it being Shabbos, well-to-do yekkes removed their straw boaters before passing under its Olympian arches.
Confronted by such a density of splendor, both young men had experienced a momentary failure of nerve, though neither was willing to admit to the other how entirely out of his element he felt. Nevertheless, throughout the weeks they had already wasted in attempting to gain an interview with the man of commerce, they had become resolute, Max for the sake of a mission whose upshot would secure them a foothold in the New World, Shmerl for the sake of Max.
The choice of the philanthropist and financier Belmont as their quarry was not random; he was in fact the only millionaire (other than Rothschild) whose name Max was familiar with. (“I am with him very famillionaire,” he’d quipped, buoyed by his plan and an increasing aptitude in the language he and Shmerl now spoke almost exclusively.) For Belmont Jr. was that scion of an auspicious family whose name Zalman Pisgat the ice mensch had let slip in connection with the purchase of the bulk sturgeon roe, which commodity Max had spirited across an ocean. Didn’t such an undertaking constitute a bond between himself and the banking magnate? Moreover, despite having been christened after his father, a practice unheard of in halakhic convention, Belmont was rumored to have been born a Jew. Thus, in an act of unexampled optimism, Max had indited a letter to the g’vir, introducing himself and alluding to the service he’d once performed for him. In this way he hoped to gain an audience for himself and his associate with the celebrated gentleman.
Made privy over time to his friend’s shady past, with which he had no particular qualms (hadn’t he smuggled himself out of Russia?), Shmerl helped compose the letter, taking dictation from Max, who in that way concealed his functional illiteracy, though Shmerl’s own self-schooling in English left much to be desired. Together they labored for days over the epistle, which began “Esteemed & Darling [‘How do you say ongeshtopt?’] Man Made from Money, In the name of the great tradition that like the beluga fish eggs which from the sea of Riga to America I am bringing you has spawned us, I most humbly request by you an audition…” and continued in that vein. Satisfied that they’d struck a fine balance between dignity and groveling, Max posted the letter, but after a week had received no answer. Undaunted, however, he tried again with another even more fulsome communication. In it he and Shmerl assured the mogul that their meeting would serve the best interests of all concerned, but again they received no reply. Still Max was convinced that Belmont was their man, for the banker was known to enjoy taking risks. Besides trafficking in contraband (which a man of his means clearly did for the thrill of it), he had pioneered the first subway and kept his own lavish saloon car, and had invested a fortune in constructing a canal. Moreover, he had a reputation for being a wagering man, a tout with such a passion for the ponies that he was building a national race track in his own honor. But when the appeals had failed to get a response, the companions decided that a more straightforward approach was called for.
It was Shmerl, not ordinarily known for his diplomacy, who pointed out that reminding the rich man of his connection with illicit activities might not be the best way to gain his confidence; better they should simply make their case in person. So they spruced themselves up as well as they were able and presented themselves at the banker’s princely Wall Street offices, where, having no appointment, they were promptly shown the door. Rejection, though, seemed only to fuel their shared sense of purpose. Thus, on the following Saturday, when they supposed the odds were likeliest of finding their man at home, the immigrants, posing as workmen hired to vacuum-clean the carpets, arrived at the merchants’ entrance of the banker’s Fifth Avenue mansion. There they were met by a broad-bottomed manservant who, complaining that he should have been informed prior to their calling, nevertheless let them in.
“You can start with the vestibule,” he told them shortly, and waved them in that direction, saying he had business elsewhere and would check on them by and by.
If they’d had second thoughts on beholding the uptown houses from without, the interior of the Belmont residence—said to be the least of the family’s holdings—staggered them to near paralysis. “I think,” whispered Max, attempting to articulate what had occurred to them both simultaneously, “we are from the East Side as far as is the East Side from the Russian Pale.” The entrance hall was a circular chamber with a stained-glass dome that loomed (said Shmerl) like God’s own skullcap above a black marble fountain with a single dancing jet. A naked nymph was balanced on one arched foot atop the fountain, from which Shmerl, as if in the presence of some celestial mikveh, was unable to budge until Max shoved him forward. From the hub of the fountain the hallways appeared virtually endless, their walls hung with mirrors facing mirrors, creating transepts that stretched to infinity. Between reflections there were fantasias of antique tiles and hardwood cabinets inlaid with mother of pearl, coves thick with palm fronds, giant bell jars in which swarms of butterflies were suspended in flight. Doors opened onto the Middle Ages, the Late Empire, Byzantium. Trundling over the parqueted floors, the creaking wheels of Shmerl’s wooden cart threatened to alert the domestics to their nosing about, though the sound of the cart was soon upstaged by an ear-splitting vibrato that caused the screens to tremble like typanums and bade fair to shatter the vases on their pedestals. The companions froze in their tracks, until Max, who’d done his research, remembered that the rich man had married an opera diva. The explanation did little to dispel Shmerl’s impression, which he related under his breath, that they had stumbled into the hekhalot, the very corridors of heaven as described in the Seder Gan Eyden, though the book had failed to do the place justice.
Having inspected one whole wing of the mansion without encountering either master or servants, they were less disappointed than relieved. Still, duty-bound to press on, they reversed direction and, after another quarter-hour’s exploration, found themselves in front of a door at the end of a passage framed by columns with gilded capitals. The door was slightly ajar and, peeking in, they saw bookshelves climbing the walls to a cambered ceiling, a fireplace above which hung the portrait of a mutton-chopped ancestor, and a desk as broad as a catafalque. Behind the desk, unsealing letters with an ormolu file, sat a well-kempt gentleman Max was able to identify from newspaper photos as the lord of the manor himself. Bestowing an incautious wink on his friend, Max nudged the door wide open, and the two companions stepped over the threshold dragging their camouflaged apparatus behind them. The banker rose from his chair in a show of vexed agitation, demanding “What are you?” while enfolding himself in the skirts of his moiré dressing gown. Then even as he shouted for them to be gone, Max gave Shmerl a nod, upon which the inventor removed the accordion nozzle from his contraption and, like a waiter unveiling an entrée, snatched off the paper canopy to reveal his perpetual winter machine.
“Your Eminent,” said Max, assuming the role of impresario, “if you please.”
The financier fixed them with a baleful stare. “Wexelman!” he called, and the servant arrived, huffing. “Did you let these persons in?” Dabbing at the folds of his brow with a hankie, Wexelman tried to mutter an excuse—the housekeeper had mentioned having the carpets cleaned—but his master cut him off, directing him to notify the authorities at once.
As Wexelman withdrew, Shmerl turned a crank that sparked a flame, the flame igniting a pilot the feathery length of a dragon’s tongue. Almost instantly wheels began revolving, a cylinder to rise and fall, the inventor explaining that his was an ethyl ammonia compression system: “The piston compresses in the vessel to a pintele from its normal volume the ordinary air,” then releases the pressure which allows the air to expand. The chilling effect of the expansion pulls the heat from the brine surrounding the vessel, which in turn draws the warmth from the water inside the receptacle. This method was opposed to the absorption system favored by his predecessors. Of course, you could also use sulfur dioxide or methyl chloride, though these were toxic compounds and might result in the ultimate death of the operator.…
“What’s he talking about?” the irate financier demanded to know.
Over Shmerl’s giddy discourse Max submitted matter-of-factly, “Making ice, Your Honor; he’s talking how by this machine we can manufacture industrial ice. My colleague Mr. Karp—”
“This is not a patent office,” protested Belmont, aghast at the sight of this troll-like individual fiddling with an infernal mechanism that might for all he knew explode. It might in fact be an elaborate anarchist’s bomb. These ostjuden were mostly anarchists, weren’t they? who targeted the wealthy with their insane ideological program. It was at this point that Wexelman returned, preceded by the medicine ball of his paunch and a pair of liverish-looking policemen whom he was shepherding with imperious gestures into the study.
“Gentlemen,” said Belmont, “these men are trespassing. Apprehend them.”
The cops, in mackintosh capes and cupola helmets, chin straps hooked beneath pursed lower lips, exchanged an arch glance between them. Then they at once commenced to lay hands on Max (still petitioning the millionaire’s patience) and Shmerl (still explaining the dynamics of mechanical refrigeration). Seeing, however, that his friend was in the grip of an arm of the law whose opposite arm brandished a nightstick—and despite being in identical straits himself—Shmerl managed to wriggle free of his captor and fling himself upon the other officer, grabbing his upraised club. Taking advantage of that cop’s distraction, Max broke free of the head-hold to make a dash as if for protection behind the financier’s desk, where he was presently joined by Shmerl who now wielded the billy club. Spitting curses despite Wexelman’s admonishments that they should watch their language in the presence of Mr. Belmont, the cops approached them from either side of the desk, while the banker stood as a hostage between the pair of imposters who flanked him. Meanwhile a steady chugging issued from Shmerl’s device, its hoarse combustion counterpointed by a silvery aria (from Tosca?) that rang throughout the mansion. It was here that August Belmont II, clapping hands to elegant temples streaked with gray like the wings on Mercury’s helmet, cried out, “This is most irregular!” Then, because he knew a good thing when he saw it, he called an immediate halt to the pandemonium—because Shmerl’s machine, coughing and sputtering, had begun to regurgitate transparent ingots, one of which cracked apart from an impossibly high note struck from somewhere beyond the study walls.
THE GRUMBLING OF Officers Golightly and McCool was soon assuaged by the banker’s generosity in compensating them for their troubles. Then, after Shmerl had returned the billy club with all the pomp of a surrendered saber, the bank was contacted and an attorney brought in to draw up the terms of the loan. Five thousand was the figure that was proposed, but as Shmerl looked to his partner to join him in nodding agreement, he was astounded to hear Max counterrecommend a cool ten. Without missing a beat the banker altered the sum to seventy-five hundred as sufficient to cover the cost of venue, equipment, and preliminary labor; it would also provide the proprietors (insolvent at present) with an adequate salary they might draw from the surplus capital. The language of the promissory note was intimidating (“For value received, the undersigned jointly and severally promise to pay to the order of the lender the sum of———, together with interest of twenty-five percent per annum on the unpaid balance, etc.”), but the new corporation of Feinshmeker & Karp was assured that the contract was pro forma; and at least one of the partners understood that the sum was a drop in the bucket for the banker, who stood to benefit disproportionately from the transaction. While business was negotiated, the two friends, their work clothes in disarray from their recent dustup, were served brandy and offered Cuban cigars by the same retainer who had set the authorities upon them earlier. Moted sunlight poured in through the high windows, making the room and its contents—the brass cartouches and crystal decanter, the nickeled pince-nez perched on the financier’s regal nose—appear as if viewed through a jar of golden honey; and it seemed to the immigrants that they had passed, in a single day, from civilization’s wild outer reaches to its very core.
The attorney, there to notarize the document and issue the check, seemed unfazed by the incongruous appearance of the partners. If he perceived any impropriety in the proceedings, as he handed the friends a gold-nibbed fountain pen, he never showed it, and his ease in officiating the affair inspired the companions to sign with unreserved zeal on the dotted line. They exchanged handshakes all around, first with lender and witness, then with each other, both tacitly acknowledging that notwithstanding the glacier of ice cakes heaped in the tray of Shmerl’s machine, a miracle had occurred, both supposing they would now live in a world where they would have to accustom themselves to miracles.
Invited to use Mr. Belmont’s own venerable institution, the young men politely declined, preferring to deposit the cashier’s check closer to home, in an account in Jarmolovsky’s Immigrant Bank on Canal Street. It was to be a joint account, nor did they feel the need to formalize the pact between them; the terms were understood, that Max, a fast learner in the area of finance, would handle the fiscal end of the business while Shmerl saw to technical matters. They placed the loan document in a safe deposit box and straightaway began their search for a property they might convert into a plant for manufacturing ice. They hadn’t far to look, since as it turned out the Gebirtig & Son’s facility, just a few doors down the road from the bank, was for sale. Owing to an anonymous tip, the police had raided the thriving East Side business, where they’d uncovered a large cache of illegal goods. The owners were promptly arrested and charged with several counts of receiving black-market merchandise and evading tariffs, the cost of their bail and ongoing legal fees (and the bribes to underworld parties who reneged on their promises) having forced them into bankruptcy. As a result, their business was placed on the auction block and the partnership of Feinshmeker & Karp, handily outbidding the competition with their newly acquired funds, purchased the Ice Castle at a virtual steal. Then they proceeded with all due haste to hire contractors to revamp the several cavernous floors of the old warehouse into a factory for the large-scale production of ice.
Neither of the immigrants could have anticipated the speed with which things progressed. Drawing on a business sense he owed in large part to Jocheved’s prior experience, Max set about purchasing equipment according to Shmerl’s detailed itemizations and then turned to the more complex issue of labor. Since the modified Ice Castle would continue the cold storage operations of its previous owners, it would be possible to keep on much of the staff laid off in the wake of the police shutdown. A number of employees would naturally have to be trained to operate the ice-making machinery; they would have to acquire the skills necessary to regulate a steam generator, adjust levels of absorption and compression according to the effects of temperature on the solubility of gases, and so forth. But the workers, once educated by the journeyman Shmerl Karp, could then expect a rise in salary, and their promotion would mean the promise of upward mobility to those menials aspiring to be “apreyters” and engineers. It was a situation sure to increase the level of performance at every stage of the operation—or so Max theorized, surprising himself with his newborn interest in commercial productivity, an enthusiasm he also attributed to the Frostbissen girl. Meanwhile Shmerl made his calculations and supervised the assembly of machinery on a scale that for once nearly matched his imagination. Of course, due to practical considerations, he was forced to eliminate some of the aesthetic features of his original ice-making contrivance in favor of the more strictly functional. He had to admit that his elaborate new machine, impressive as it was, had no real value beyond the utilitarian, but as he oversaw the mounting of the turbine with its floating vertical shaft fashioned according to his own specifications, or watched the metallic bellows fill like a bullfrog’s throat with gas as it expanded to rev the motor, Shmerl was as elated as if he were present at the Creation. He was, however, uncomfortable in his role as foreman, awkward at delegating authority to others, a problem he eventually confided to his friend.
Too busy to think about changing their current address, the companions still resided in Levine’s rank stableyard. In his unfailing gratitude to the old man, Shmerl had continued to fulfill his nightwalking duties, giving up much needed sleep and exhausting himself in the process. Worried about his friend, Max decided it was time he was emancipated from the shit patrol and, also well disposed toward their spry old benefactor, proposed this solution: Offer Levine the foreman’s position at the ice plant. Which was how Elihu Levine, after personally escorting Akivah and Bar Kochbah, his beloved bags-of-bones, to the glue factory, took up the management of New York’s premier facility for the high-volume production of economical and sanitary block ice. Shmerl was amazed at how readily the veteran stableman, when presented with so speculative an opportunity, had been prepared to scrap a decades-long livelihood. But released from circumstances defined by animal waste, the old drek shlepper was fairly rejuvenated; he threw himself into his new role with a passion, assiduously adjusting prices and filing invoices, inspecting meat lockers and equipment, hiring laborers with the shrewdness of a captain interviewing a crew for a dangerous voyage. He also appointed himself shop steward of the IMU, the Ice Man’s Union, a collective of his own formation for which he obtained a national charter, making him both an essential liaison between management and labor and a thorn in the side of his employers ever after.
In private moments, of which there were lately precious few, Shmerl asked himself if this was really the life he desired; was he a hypocrite for his headlong entry into the world of free trade? But such questions, he had to admit, came more from force of habit than any genuine consternation on his part, since for better or worse his total immersion in temporal affairs kept him in a state of mild intoxication. He was gratified as well by the way his partnership with Max seemed to consolidate the friendship that had preceded their business arrangement. While he remained puzzled at times by the yungerman’s periodic aloofness and inordinate modesty—Max still refused, for instance, to attend the public baths despite Shmerl’s example, opting instead to reduce his gaminess by the occasional sitz-bod behind a canvas tarp in the shack—these were trivial imperfections that in no way impeded the inventor’s ever increasing admiration for his friend.
Their division of labor, however, left them less inseparable than they’d been before commencing their entrepreneurial relationship, which made Shmerl cherish the time they spent together all the more. Sometimes they might take a meal at a Grand Street cafeteria (they could afford it now), then repair to an East Broadway tearoom where the intelligents gathered and the companions, feeling a little like capitalist spies, kibbitzed conversations about rallies, strikes, and the impending revolution. Once in a while they took in a Yiddish play on Second Avenue, where they saw Mrs. Krantsfeld and a pop-eyed Ludwig Satz sink into deepest depravity in Zolatarevsky’s Money, Love, and Shame, and hailed Boris Tomashevsky wearing tights that made sausage links of his legs as he strutted the boards in Alexander, Crown Prince of Jerusalem. Once, taking a rare holiday, they rode the New York & Sea Beach Line out to Coney Island to see the Elephant; they had their weight guessed and their fortunes read by a gypsy (who seemed diverted by Max’s soft palm, troubled by something she saw in Shmerl’s); they tested their strength, ate chazzerai, and threw baseballs at the head of a Negro, then strolled the boardwalk past couples spooning along the Iron Pier.
Max teased Shmerl because he was leering at the girls gamboling in the surf in their revealing costumes. “Perhaps they are numbered your bachelor days.” But no sooner had he poked fun at his friend and seen his subsequent chagrin than Max flushed a deep crimson himself.
On the eve of the grand reopening of the Ice Castle, the partners celebrated over dinner at Virág’s Hungarian Noodle Shop in a cellar on Forsyth Street. For all intents and purposes, their business was already under way. Ads had been placed in both Yiddish and mainstream papers, sparking a small controversy, some of the natural ice houses having complained in the press that “artificial” ice was ungodly. To counter the attacks, Max had managed a deft feat of public relations, engaging local clergy, both Jewish and gentile, to endorse their product. In the end, having focused attention on the Ice Castle’s innovation, the discord proved a useful marketing ploy, and already there were orders from several breweries and meat-packing companies; in addition, the Gebirtigs’ legitimate cold storage clients had renewed their contracts with the novice owners. The lockers and vaults of perishables were stocked to near capacity, making the official launching of the plant somewhat after the fact. Nevertheless, decked out in sporty new threads for the occasion (dress worsteds with pencil stripes) the two friends dined on hot shtshav and goulash and, characterizing themselves as “two corpses gone dancing,” toasted each other with sweet Muscat wine.
“To the Ice Castle…,” proposed Max. “
…that ice folly it don’t turn out to be,” said Shmerl, clinking his partner’s glass.
“L’chayim.”
Beneath a hat rack in the corner a fiddle and bass played an apathetic schottische as the partners discussed their joint venture, waxing nostalgic over the distance they’d traveled together in so short a time. Whatever misgivings Shmerl may have had about abandoning his autonomy were dispelled by his attachment to his capable friend; while for his part, Max, basking in the inventor’s fond regard, felt at ease enough to bring up a touchy subject.
“I lied to you, Karp,” he confessed, eyes inclined toward his small hands folded almost prayerfully before him on the table. “I lied that was a chance occurrence the attack in the alley.” He admitted that, while he’d never felt so safe as when in his partner’s company, he was in effect still a marked man, targeted for an untimely end by the agents of a party who believed Max had cheated him.
Appalled by the information, Shmerl snapped at his friend for the first time in their mutual history, “Why you didn’t tell me before!” All these weeks Max had spent in harm’s way could have been avoided. Shmerl knew where the culprits hung out; he would go there and challenge them to their face, he would blow them all farplotzn with a chemical cocktail, he would… But Max calmed him down with the assurance that he’d taken the liberty of sending a small portion of their capital to Pisgat, the offended party, as an installment on his lost money, promising the balance in due course; so it was possible that by now the ice mensch had called off his dogs. In the meantime, however, just to stay on the safe side, Max Feinshmeker would remain “by the Ice Castle a silent partner.”
The inventor tilted his head in an effort to see better the logic of his friend’s proposal.
But Max had not been entirely candid. He’d neglected to say that this intended arrangement had as much to do with distancing himself from Shmerl as it did with protecting his own neck and their business. For he’d come to feel that he and his associate had grown too close; they depended too much on one another. It was an attitude prompted in part by Jocheved, with whom Max no longer felt so much at odds. Both he and the girl were painfully aware of the danger of overmuch intimacy with a member of the opposite sex, even one as ultimately harmless as Shmerl Karp. But was he harmless? Because the inventor had become altogether too necessary to the yungerman, who was ever more conscious lately of being female. Lately he felt he was equal parts Max Feinshmeker and Jocheved, with Jocheved beginning to tip the balance as he deferred more and more to her native commercial flair. Moreover, Max was growing weary of always pretending. Sometimes he wanted simply to set the girl free, if only for a little while, but for that a greater privacy was needed; for that, he admitted, “I rented also an apartment uptown.”
Assuming at first that the apartment was for both of them, Shmerl protested albeit mildly, “What if I don’t want to leave the East Side?”
“You don’t got to,” replied Max.
“But…”
“It’s for me the apartment.”
A rush of conflicting emotions fought for dominance in Shmerl’s brain: Max was tired of his company; perhaps he had met a girl; funny they never talked about girls. Shmerl could feel himself beginning to seethe with jealousy, never mind how irrational the response; he was on the verge of starting a quarrel. I’m mad on you, he had it in mind to say, but the words stuck in his craw, arrested as he was by Max’s obsidian eyes, his cream-pale cheek that seemed never to require a shave, his swanlike throat minus (interestingly) an adam’s apple. Then the inventor reasoned with himself that his friend’s independence was his right, and in the end he merely mouthed a silent Oh. When he could find his voice, Shmerl said it was natural Max should want a place of his own, though as for himself he preferred to remain in the ghetto where he belonged.
Max settled with a pomatumed waiter, who bowed in a kind of haughty self-effacement, and rose to leave the cellar while Shmerl, still seated, said he’d meet him outside in a minute. “They got here a indoor water closet.” Sodden from overmuch wine and spent emotion, Shmerl was just getting up from the table when he heard from the street a cry that pierced his ear like an awl. He looked about for his stock prod only to remember that, a technician now, he no longer carried the thing; then he bolted up the stairs from the sunken eatery, reaching the sidewalk in time to see his friend cornered between a waffle wagon and a haberdasher’s stall. Surrounded by a pack of assailants with kerchiefs pulled over their faces, among whom the caddy cap and his sidekick were still recognizable, Max remained standing, though the blood coursed in a muddy torrent from his head. Then letting loose another heart-stopping shriek that alerted the whole street to his extremity, he sank out of sight in the midst of his attackers. Alarmed by the attention they’d drawn, the attackers lowered their cudgels and, exchanging quizzical looks, beat a hasty retreat in unison from the scene. No sooner had they departed, however, than a crowd of pedestrians closed ranks around the mauled victim, while in the near distance the skirl of a siren could already be heard.
Jolted out of his shock the moment that Max vanished from view, Shmerl gave forth an animal yawp of his own. He lunged into the street, leaping onto the backs of the gathered spectators as he tried to claw his way toward his friend. He was struggling frantically to part the crowd, ignoring the forceful tugging at his sleeve, until its urgency compelled him to turn toward the nuisance in anger. And there stood Max caked in blood but firmly on his feet, signaling Shmerl to hurry up already, let’s skidoo. Together they made tracks through the backstreets, ducking into a doorway only when they’d distanced themselves by several blocks from the site of the attack. During that interlude, while Shmerl tried blotting his tears with a sleeve, Max licked the clotted blood from his lips.
“Red currant,” he pronounced discerningly. “Geshmakh.”
FROM BEHIND THE tarp in the stableyard shack where he was wiping the gory mess from his face and neck, Max explained that, despite his gesture of appeasement toward Zalman Pisgat, he’d thought it best to stay prepared for the worst. Recalling his skill in creating cosmetic effects, he’d kept about his person at all times a packet or two of the jellies used for stage blood. That way he might deceive any would-be assassins into believing they had inflicted the damage they intended. If in the confusion of an assault their victim appeared to have been mortally wounded, each assailant might assume that the other had delivered the coup de grâce. That was his plan, “which it worked!” declared Max, prompting Shmerl to snuffle skeptically through the tears he was still trying to stanch, while his heart continued to outrun itself. Having described his bluff in boastful detail, his partner then stated that, to further corroborate the demise of Max Feinshmeker, he would take immediate possession of his uptown residence on Riverside Drive. This was the legendary uptown avenue of grand apartment houses called Alrightnik’s Row by the ghetto Jews, far from the Tenth Ward with its plagues of consumption and suicide. He realized, of course, that the move might be viewed as inconvenient, given the distance it put between himself and Canal Street, but now that the plant was poised to begin full operation, Max surmised that his discretionary services no longer required him to show up on site.
Then it was true that, once launched, the ice factory seemed fairly to run itself. This isn’t to say there weren’t daily concerns, though nothing that Shmerl, wielding a monkey wrench in place of his retired animal prod, couldn’t handle. In fact, he welcomed the odd mechanical snafu as an opportunity to demonstrate to his apprentices how an oiled piston or a tightened crank pin, an increase or decrease in atmospheric pressure, could facilitate production several fold. Meanwhile Mr. Levine also had his hands full—the same horny hands he’d washed of his former medium in order to embrace a new one that was odorless and free of flies. Reinvigo-rated, the bandy-legged old stableman was everywhere at once, shmoozing potential clients, reviewing delivery routes, taking inventory, and dressing down machinists who failed to pay their union dues. But the plant was finally larger than the sum of its constituent parts, and once it was recognized by the public as more than a novelty, it began with breathtaking swiftness to establish its supremacy in the field of ice merchandising.
In a matter of months Karp’s New Ice Castle, as it came to be known, had surpassed its competitors still yoked to the costly process of harvesting, hauling, and warehousing what they continued to insist on calling God’s ice. Artificial ice (though unimpeachably real) could be produced at a fraction of the expense of paying contractors to carve blocks from frozen lakes as far away as Vermont and Maine—not to mention the loss through melting during transit and the short shelf life in the facilities where the ice was stored. Moreover, natural ice was subject to famines during mild winters; it was often contaminated by sewage and sometimes contained indescribable foreign objects. Whereas Karp’s Castle could manufacture tons of crystal clear ice a day, delivering it in wagons throughout Manhattan and the borough of Brooklyn in twenty-pound blocks at the giveaway rate of five cents a pound. Its low overhead enabled the Castle, having undersold all its competitors, to reduce its storage fees as well. Naturally the plant’s growing dominion inspired a belligerence on the part of the outmoded houses, and there existed a genuine threat of sabotage. But the Castle’s employees constituted a small army whose liberal wages promoted a fanatical allegiance to their product, and some were even heard to engage in battles with their rivals outside the workplace. As a consequence, it was not long before the weatherboard turrets of the New Ice Castle façade became a landmark and a testament to immigrant ingenuity among the institutions of the Lower East Side.
As ordained, the rank and file of the Castle were kept in the dark about Max Feinshmeker’s existence, to say nothing of his importance to the company as pecuniary brain trust. Of course it was taken for granted that such an elaborate enterprise couldn’t function without its cadre of lawyers, accountants, and executive administrators; higher-ups had to be keeping books, checking balance sheets, fixing rates, and gauging budgets and expenses. But other than Shmerl only Elihu Levine knew that a single hidden hand served in all these capacities, and as contrary as he could sometimes be, the old man never questioned the arrangement. Loyalty itself, he generally approved the judgments that came down from above; indeed, having as yet no reason to dispute it, he accepted the word from its nameless source as a kind of gospel. Why shouldn’t he? Since becoming the Ice Castle’s foreman, his lot had improved immeasurably; he made a handsome salary and, with that and the proceeds from the sale of the livery stable, had begun life anew in his wintry years.
His migration from the stables to a hotel suite off Second Avenue, however, had uprooted his former hired hand, who was forced to dismantle the shanty and relocate his own base of operations. This Shmerl accomplished with the help of some Ice Castle workmen and a small caravan of delivery wagons, reestablishing himself and his accumulated impedimenta in the plant itself. Their newly acquired wealth could, of course, have secured him accommodations as lavish as he imagined Max’s to be (he’d yet to visit), but he found it more advantageous to sleep where he worked—on a cot in a thermally insulated locker with eight-inch-thick walls, which he sometimes shared with dressed sides of beef. There, scratching on rolls of butcher paper spread over recessed shelves, he improvised calculations and drew up blueprints for improvements to the factory. Among these were plans for a chain-hoisted thaw tank, a pre-piped compressor and water-cooled condenser, and an automated conveying system with a vertical comb, a scale model of which he’d meticulously constructed. When not involved in devising newfangled refinements, he turned to more theoretical projects; for despite having disavowed it, he’d begun again to entertain the possibility of reversing the fall of man through technology.
He was also pleased that his living quarters allowed him to maintain close proximity to the frozen rabbi, who had his very own chamber in the icehouse. In fact, he was ensconced in his original lodging, the sanctum the Gebirtigs had once reserved for black-market goods, which they’d called the Castle’s Keep. Only, now Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr had it all to himself, since Shmerl saw to it that he remained in his vault behind lock and key. But late at night, in the sheep’s pelt he wore at all times due to the pervasive cold, Shmerl would unlock the Keep and sit like a mourner on a crate next to the rabbi, who had been his companion throughout his solitary months. These vigils beside the casket with its opened lid, its contents effulgent in the light of a naphtha lantern, gave the inventor a proprietary sense, as if the rebbe were a gift from Max, one he was nevertheless prepared to return on demand.
But if he were mourning anything, it was the absence of his partner, who had yet to visit the factory since its opening. Driven as he was to hard work, Shmerl sometimes wondered if all his activity was by way of distracting himself from making an occupation out of missing Max. He missed reading aloud to the yungerman the appeals for sympathy if not outright love in the “Bintel Brief” column of the Jewish Daily Forward; missed relating the preposterous dreams which Max, covering his ears, refused to hear, though he might sheepishly submit some incubus of his own later on. He missed—what didn’t he miss?—his partner’s eyes when their black opal irises reflected the sap green of a gas flame. But this was all baloney. Then Shmerl would try to isolate the features of his friend’s face—the burnt rose lips, the aquiline nose, the hint of a widow’s peak at the height of his calcimine brow—in an attempt to find fault with each, but they kept coalescing in their perfect symmetry. He tried to hate the rhythmic snoring and soft petards that had issued from the lithe form that had lain beside him so many nights. Because finally such feelings as he had for the yungerman were improper; men did not feel such intense affection for other men, did they? There were David and Jonathan, of course, Hillel and Shammai—he ransacked the tradition for other examples; there was Weber & Fields. But here was the thing: Shmerl was unable to disentangle his longing for his friend from his baser instincts, from fantasies concerning the ladies which had lately beset him. For it seemed he had needs that were reaching the point of obsession and might require the intervention of the Allen Street nafkehs to release the ache. The Law, which he only selectively observed, explicitly forbade consorting with professional women, but “A minhag brekht a din,” as the proverb said. “A custom breaks a law.” Whatever the case, Shmerl was of an age when the young men of Shpinsk were already married householders experiencing the joys of Shabbos copulation, while he had yet to know a woman in any true sense. Rocking himself on his crate in the Castle’s Keep, he might turn toward the porous casket as if expecting the saint to hatch already from his block of ice and offer counsel.
Meanwhile, from his vantage on the sixth floor of a Beaux-Arts apartment house with a view of the Hudson, whose surface was flecked with the skittering of crescent sails, Max judged himself to be in some respects as good as dead. Having sent a final remittance to the ice mensch back in Lodz, labeling it a bequest, he felt he had laid Max Feinshmeker—never more than an unfinished work-in-progress—officially to rest. It was an attitude the girl Jocheved, who’d begun to express herself more openly, nevertheless thought somewhat premature. Habitually cautious, she had never reassumed women’s apparel, not even in the privacy of her West Side apartment, though on the sidewalks along Upper Broadway she might pause to appreciate a stone marten muff in a furrier’s window or a milliner’s straw bonnet trimmed with lacquered cherries. Not that Jocheved had ever been vain of her appearance, but tentatively she began again to explore the distaff side of life. Purchasing a noodle board, she rolled the dough into circles, cut the circles into strips, and draped them over the backs of chairs like clothes wrung through a mangle and left to dry. Later she would boil the noodles in chicken broth or bake them into kugel on a gas-burning range. She acquired two sets of pots and dishes, for meat and for dairy, and, reviving a long defunct passion, bought a pewter mold and a bag of rock salt for making syrupy sherbets and frozen desserts. Despite having a bathroom that featured a clawfooted tub, she thought she might even like to visit a mikveh again. While such concerns could never comprise the whole of life, business having taken precedence over all (as witness the ledgers heaped atop the drop leaf of a mahogany desk in the parlor), she delighted in her secret dabbling in womanly pursuits, a pleasure that in no way diminished the contempt she felt for the woman she had been.
Since the partial resurrection of Jocheved tended to keep the girl largely shut in, she communicated with Shmerl (as Max) via messengers, which was unsatisfactory to them both. For Jocheved still shared Max’s fellow feeling for Shmerl; and Max, who had essentially swapped places with Jocheved and was reduced now to a residual voice, missed his comrade with a fervor that made sense in no category the girl could understand. Missing him made the uptown streets, awash in fallen leaves and garment magnates with their stout, bedizened wives, seem as much exile as refuge. But Jocheved reproved Max for such thoughts. Shmerl Karp was after all tsedrayt, was he not? A screwball. That much was even more apparent from her West Side elevation. And God knew he wasn’t that easy to look at. Though she’d always averted her eyes from his unclothed body, she thought that his hump had become more pronounced during the relatively short time of their acquaintance. His bandit eyes were beadier, and his ginger hair resembled the ruffled feathers of a turkey cock. Then there was his odor, the scent of the stables (despite his much trumpeted visits to the Rutgers Square baths) having never really left him. Of course, he had his talents: There was that rogue brain of his that made him some kind of a deluded crank, perhaps even a visionary of a specialized nature, and so impetuous was his energy that he seemed never to yawn. That had always impressed Max. Also, he was fearless in his devotion to his friend and apparently without an ounce of guile, which made him vulnerable in ways that would surely be a burden to any woman who would have him; though who would have such a total shlemiel as Shmerl Karp? As for herself, for Jocheved, the whole issue of men and women was in any case moot. The stigma she’d incurred in her former life—lest she forget—was still heartsickeningly active and would expose to infamy any man who entered her purview. But for all that, she sometimes had an impulse to award Max’s bosom friend with some token of her esteem, some gift of a rare significance… though what should it be? The rabbi was already effectively his.
With or without Max’s presence, however, the business prospered; the creditors were soon paid in full. The ice men circulated throughout the city in wagons bearing the Ice Castle trademark (a castle carved out of ice—what else?). They had become a fixture in the neighborhood streets, the Castle’s agents, cutting ice to order with their picks before swinging the blocks onto broad shoulders protected by hemp, carrying them up several flights to deposit in enameled ice safes. In the factory, Shmerl’s crew of engineers took pride in their increasing expertise at maintaining the machinery, sometimes even anticipating their supervisor’s improvements, so that the inventor was able to spend more time in his “laboratory.” He enjoyed working in his locker in the heart of the industry, surrounded by the clatter of equipment and the rowdy exertions of men moving goods. Still, he never neglected his responsibilities as chief technical engineer and met regularly with Mr. Levine to ensure that things were in order. They were not always in order, nor did he and Levine always see eye to eye, but Shmerl suspected that their disagreements had more to do with the old man’s enjoyment of a heated exchange than with any urgent bone of contention; and the inventor tried his best to hold up his end of the argument. It was diverting enough, his life, to counteract from time to time his inveterate yearning, and there was always the satisfaction of knowing that his efforts were making his absent friend rich.
Then a message arrived at the icehouse, relayed from the foreman to the chief engineer, requesting Shmerl’s presence for dinner at a posh address on the Upper West Side. Scarcely able to contain his excitement, Shmerl instantly tried to damp it down, pretending that there was nothing unusual in the invitation. No doubt Max only wanted to talk business, as what else did they have in common these days? Perhaps, now that the Castle had acquired its own head of steam, Max would inform Shmerl that his services were no longer needed. But that wasn’t right, they were partners, though Shmerl always deferred to Max as the de facto head of the Ice Castle, which nevertheless bore the name of Karp: a paradox. Then Shmerl remembered that he was essential to their enterprise and that this line of reasoning had no basis in reality—so why was it with such a mixture of dread and anticipation that he took the Elevated uptown that evening?
On the train, though, he had the quickening sensation he felt whenever he traveled beyond the neighborhood, which made him ask himself why he didn’t do it more often. Because Max wasn’t around to accompany him, that was why. Unlike the flat grid of the ghetto, Riverside Drive rolled uphill and down, a complement of elegant cliff-hanging apartments facing the sandstone palisades on the river’s New Jersey shore. It was, incidentally, the week of the festival of Sukkot, and a number of balconies sported pergolaed bowers, poles apart from the squatters’ sheds sprouting lulavs like donkeys’ ears on fire escapes all over the Lower East Side. Beneath the marquee outside Max’s building stood a massive doorman in an epauletted greatcoat, between whose legs Shmerl was prepared to scramble if the man tried to block his path. But once he’d announced himself, the man actually touched a finger to his visor and led him through the lobby into a hand-powered lift, which he proceeded to operate by hauling on a steel cable. A little breathless from their swift ascent and the pavonian wallpaper in the sixth-floor hallway, Shmerl was convinced that Max must have graduated to a whole new order of existence; he was only slightly heartened at the sight of a tin mezuzah on the jamb outside his friend’s door. Knocking, he half-expected to be greeted by a servant, and was further relieved when Max himself, dressed informally in an unbuttoned waistcoat and pin-striped shirtsleeves, opened the door.
“Gut yontev,” he greeted, then: “Forgive me, I’m a bit ongepatshket from toiling over the stove.” This vaguely disconcerted Shmerl, who wondered since when were apologies necessary between them, but in truth something about Max did look different, and as they shook hands, Shmerl was unable to meet his friend’s eye. Instead, as the yungerman showed him around the apartment, the inventor kept stealing peeks at his friend to determine exactly how he had changed. For one thing, his sable curls were a little longer, hanging over his forehead and ears in a manner as winsome as it was careless, and his features seemed to have softened a touch at the edges, as befitted his new affluence. He was still compact of figure, though he might have put on a pound or two, but otherwise there was nothing dramatically altered in his appearance. So why did Shmerl have the unsettled impression that this person was doing no more than a fair impersonation of his partner, Max Feinshmeker?
He tried his best to shrug off his nervousness and revive the ease he and his comrade had formerly shared. Nodding his approval of the roomy apartment, he remarked upon its modern amenities: the steam heat, indoor plumbing, the ornate gas girandoles; it was spacious without being pretentious (he actually said this), all “tishelekh un lompelekh,” little tables and lamps, and in the bedroom an iron bedstead with a cotton-batting mattress and flat springs. There were other homey touches: a mizrakh plaque on the eastern wall, a silver menorah and a sewing kit containing a color wheel of spools on the sideboard—all made the more haimish by the savory aromas wafting in through the kitchen door. Having no domestic sense of his own, Shmerl was impressed that Max had developed his to such a degree. Though he was content with his compartment in the ice house, its windowless walls so conducive to dreaming, the inventor was not indifferent to his friend’s feathered nest, admiring its creature comforts in their warm contrast to the crisp autumn evening outside. Once again he was struck with what a long way they’d come in so short a time; it was truly the kind of rags-to-riches story so often hymned in the popular press. If ever his own family emigrated—and he’d begun a correspondence with his still breathing papa toward that end—he would see them housed in similar accommodations. For himself, though, Shmerl had no immediate plans for relocating, nor had his improved financial straits brought him any sense of personal triumph. The fact was, he could have wished that the two of them, he and Max, were back in the stableyard where he’d never been happier.
His host invited him into the parlor with its oaken dining table set in a bay, spread with an embroidered cloth and hand-painted china, its centerpiece a seasonal bouquet of marigolds. “I was your guest,” said Max with a formal bow, “and now you are mine,” which statement had a certain spider-to-fly ring in Shmerl’s ears. Again he expected a cook or a maidservant, but excusing himself, Max disappeared into the kitchen, returning momentarily with bowls of creamy mushroom and barley soup. When they’d finished the soup course, there was baked fish with horseradish, knaidlech, and spicy brisket; a meal, commented Shmerl inanely, like a regular Belshazzar’s feast. Other attempts at conversation were just as forced, such as when Shmerl tried in vain to alleviate the tension with a jest—“Feinshmeker, you will make for someone a fine wife”—and heard how blustering and unnatural was Max’s surname on his lips. After that gambit, though food was never for him a priority, Shmerl limited his observations to the tastiness of the meat and roast bulbes. For dessert there was homemade lemon sherbet with macaroons followed by bronfen, the rye whiskey usually reserved for kiddish ceremonies, one sip of which went straight to the inventor’s head.
In the end it was Max who punctured the strained atmosphere, rubbing his palms together expressively as he asked the inventor how he’d enjoyed the sherbet. For just as Shmerl had assumed, his partner wanted to talk about business; he had ideas, born in good part from Jocheved’s nostalgia, for the diversification of the plant: “How about, along with ice, we should manufacture different kinds ice cream?” It was already a popular item throughout the city, the hokey-pokey vans ubiquitous in the ghetto streets during summer. “So why we shouldn’t hop on the band wagon?” He began to discourse excitedly about the molds, caves, and various implements involved in the ice cream – making process, the palette of available flavors from vanilla and pistachio to bergamot orange. Shmerl was himself briefly caught up in the idea, picturing giant mechanized churns containing Ararats of frozen custard—which no sooner materialized than melted in his mind, so abbreviated was his span of attention due to strong drink. He was also a little stunned by the breadth of his friend’s ambition, and had actually to remind himself that whatever made Max happy made him happy as well. But even his less than wholehearted response seemed enough to encourage Max further, who had changed the subject again. He was recalling his recent reading of socialist tracts by the East Side’s own Morris Hillquit, who recommended progressive strategies for success in business: The reconciliation of capital and labor, he contended, could be achieved through profit-sharing alliances that would revolutionize the workplace of the future. What did Shmerl think?—not that Max gave him an opportunity to respond.
With no head for the various isms so dear to the hearts of the citizens of the Lower East Side, Shmerl gave in to a general sinking feeling; he ceased listening and satisfied himself with simply observing his animated friend, his treasured companion whom God help him he wanted desperately to kiss. That’s when the inventor, his cheeks burning, realized he was well on the way to being shikkered. To try and distract himself, he picked up an apple from a bowl on the table and began to peel it with the bone-handled paring knife. The peel, still attached to the naked apple, assumed the shape of a corkscrewing tail like the trajectory of a small planet spinning out of its orbit. Contemplating it until his eyes crossed, Shmerl was aware that Max was also focused on the apple, and had slowed his galloping monologue almost to a standstill—at which point, seized by a spasm of pot-valor, Shmerl interrupted his host to ask with sham devil-may-care: “So, Feinshmeker, do you think you will ever get married?” Replacing the uneaten fruit still trailing its spiral skin, he helped himself to another shot of the ritual whiskey, his throat having gone suddenly dry.
Max, still fixated on the apple, snapped out of his trance to reply, “I like my freedom.”
Shmerl nodded in emphatic agreement; they were on the same page. But in the awkward silence that followed, prey to the creeping mischief the alcohol inspired, the inventor was moved to pose another question. “Was you ever in love?”
The yungerman looked abashed. “Was you?”
“I’m asking first.”
Max’s sloe-black eyes narrowed nearly to reptilian slits. “What kind question is this!” he protested.
Taking his friend’s show of temper for a negative, Shmerl assured him, “Me too never,” giving his head a sharp shake, which set his brain throbbing, his ears aflame, his entire anatomy in revolt against the lie. “That is,” he began again, “I mean…” But what did he mean? That he loved Max Feinshmeker, a man? Of course he loved him, but in a way that had nothing to do with the kind of love they were talking about. That kind was impossible between men in the world as he understood it, an abomination, in fact. But why? He realized it was only his intake of spirits that even allowed him to entertain such a question… despite which he took another drink. As if not to be outdone, Max followed suit. Then Shmerl felt the words rising like some kind of volcanic rudeness from deep in his gut, an utterance he could no longer withhold. “I—,” he pronounced, while at the same time Max fell victim to a sneeze.
“Gezuntlikheit,” said Shmerl, grateful for the reprieve. Then realizing his slip of the tongue—he’d wed the blessing with the word for a cozy congeniality—began helplessly to giggle, making an effort to bite off the laughter when he saw that Max remained unamused. “They say,” he tried again, apropos what?, “is not so important between men and women the division as it is the multiplication,” which only triggered another fit of giggling.
His host had shut his eyes as if against a sudden cloudburst, and Shmerl endeavored once more to get hold of himself. Clearing his throat, he attempted yet another conversational sally, this time trying hard to preserve a neutrality of tone. “Do you know perhaps from the false messiah Shabtai Zvi?”
This at least elicited a sardonic, “Not personally.” Max’s eyes opened one at a time.
“The Jews in olden times, that they believed by him they would ascend to Gan Eydn until he converted to the cult of Ishmael. He was famous for the saying, ‘Praise God who permits the forbidden.’”
Max squirmed in his chair, took another drink. “Apostates and epicurians we may be,” he offered, “but leastwise we ain’t in his camp, eh, Karp?”
“God forbid,” said Shmerl, though with faint conviction, after which, feeling sufficiently chastised, he fell silent. He was surprised when a mirthless tear escaped his eye, and as he dragged it with the palm of his hand to his tongue, he clenched his stomach as if to close his ribcage like floodgates around his heart. So harsh was his judgment of himself at that moment that he thought he must have absorbed his friend’s censure as well—because Max had clearly let go of his disapproval. His expression had softened as he gazed at his friend with a sympathy that Shmerl had not invited and did not want. The inventor was on the verge of asking the alrightnik what he was looking at, but Max spoke first, the edge gone from a voice pitched perhaps an octave higher than its normal tone. “Shmerl,” he said, using the familiar form of address, “you can’t love me, you know.” And there it was.
“I know,” Shmerl was quick to respond, though he didn’t know; he knew nothing then but that they seemed, the two of them, to have entered a zone wherein all bets were off. The universe was again formless and void, there were no laws or even names of things, and if the righteous so willed it, they could make a world—that was in Talmud. But who here was righteous?
“No you don’t,” insisted his friend, his speech melodious if a little slurred. “You don’t know.”
“I don’t?” Shmerl tried to remember exactly what it was he didn’t know.
“You think you can’t love me because I’m a man.”
Shmerl could see no contradiction.
“But I’m not a man.”
“You’re not?”
Max shook his head.
Thoroughly befuddled, Shmerl asked, “Then what are you?”
His host took an instant to deliberate, then submitted evenly, “A who-er.”
Shmerl wasn’t sure he had heard him correctly. “Vos du zogst?”
Max was on his feet, repeating hotly, “I’m a who-er!” Whereupon he removed his waistcoat, shrugged off his suspenders, and tore open his collarless shirt, spraying a volley of studs that forced the inventor to duck. He lifted his head in time to see the yungerman haul the undervest over his head, upon which Shmerl had to shield his eyes again—because he was gazing at a pair of breasts so orient and ripe, their nipples like the stems of marzipan pears, that they stirred what he felt was a life-threatening ache in his vitals. It was an ache Shmerl thought he might be glad to die of.
“You still don’t understand?” inquired his friend, disappointed that the revelation had apparently not had its anticipated effect; since instead of being revolted by a body deformed by abnormal appurtenances, the inventor appeared to be merely struck with awe. Furious now, tears starting in freshets down his cheeks, Max pulled apart the flies of his pants, launching another salvo of buttons as he shoved the pants to his ankles along with a pair of frilly drawers. Then the spare ivory legs stood exposed to their fur-brushed juncture and the bald nub nestled like a cleft fig therein.
“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.