ecclesiastical robes and top hat preached pap to the choir. I would grind my teeth while Papa, to calm me, whispered that I shouldn’t be fooled by the tiresome ritual: there were creatures, golems and kapulyushniklim, hidden away in the attic.
“I thought you said the Jews left all that stuff back in Europe,” I protested, but he explained that this was “some of the stuff that in the hold of the Hamburg-Amerika Line they stowed themselves away.”
Only once do I recall having been to the old immigrant district in my early years. That was when my father took me for a ride on the top of a bus to visit his Canal Street ice plant, where he showed me around the workings of the whole operation. He also introduced me to an otherwise vacant locker in which a cedar casket propped on trestles contained an old man in a block of ice. Both the business and the boisterous neighborhood captured my interest, but the old man made so little impression that over time I came to confuse him with a dream.
They were an odd couple, my parents: my mama with her Dresden china complexion and cascade of blue-black hair, which from vanity or indifference she refrained from bobbing in the fashion of the day; Papa with his rooster comb and camel hump, his bughouse ideas and the curdled Old Country accent he never lost. Sometimes I think I hated him for being a cripple, or rather for not realizing he was a cripple and behaving accordingly. I never understood how my mama could be so adoring of a character that should have embarrassed her by his very presence—or did she think he was a complement to her beauty? Not that Mama ever seemed to notice the way she turned heads. They doted on me, the pair of them, so much that from the first I felt I might suffocate; their brand of devotion could shrivel your petsel like a salted slug. Meanwhile their affection for each other was such an exclusive affair that it kept me confined to the circle of their intimacy. “Don’t love me so much,” I pleaded from as far back as I can remember, and when they persisted I set about proving I didn’t deserve it.
Our apartment, which had seemed so ample in my infancy, shrank as I grew, crammed as it was with heavy furniture—the vaultlike wardrobes and diamond-tufted divans, with Mama’s library of ledgers, Papa’s journals and mystical books, the newspapers in a Yiddish I could barely read; though I soon enough absorbed the headlines of their American counterparts: RITES OF FLAMING YOUTH EXPOSED, SACCO AND VANZETTI FRY—items suggesting that the world was full of a number of things unaccounted for in Mama’s budgetary meditations or the harebrain researches that kept my father away from home so much. Occasionally the perfect harmony was disturbed by an invasion of my papa’s family (my mother had brothers but nobody knew where they were), or anyway those members of it that had not been seduced by the Bolsheviks or scattered upon reaching the shores of America. They consisted of Grandpa Todrus and his wife Chana Bindl, both apparently shellshocked from their encounter with the New World, and their daughter, Shinde Esther, youngest of an otherwise exclusively male brood. Papa had brought them over from Russia, settled them comfortably in a nearby residence, and had them outfitted in factory-fresh ready-mades. But the young men, emancipated after their long confinement to shtetl and steerage, set off (as who could blame them?) in their several directions to seek their fortunes. Only the plain Shinde Esther, whom my mama took under her wing like a little sister, stayed at home to care for her infirm parents. But distraught as they were—Todrus complained of a lingering seasickness, Chana Bindl of harassment by the ghost of her mother-in-law—even their visits stirred my restlessness, if only for the fishy odor that clung to their clothing bespeaking a voyage from distant lands.
I was sent to a local school, an academy, along with the sons of garment manufacturers and department-store magnates. They were a toffee-nosed, knock-kneed lot in their tub suits and riding breeches, predestined by their families for high-toned professions, and I disliked them from the start. You wouldn’t have called me a bully, exactly, since the kids I picked on were usually bigger than me, but I quickly established a reputation for being incorrigible. Often I was sent home with notes to my parents