The Frozen Rabbi

by Steve Stern

  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 ma
gnified 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.