My papa. Though he had an office adjoining his foreman’s on the Ice Castle’s upper tier, complete with a monkey puzzle of pneumatic tubes for sending messages, he was seldom in it, keeping mostly to the so-called laboratory where he conducted his “experiments.” It’s true that he was credited with certain technical innovations, the fruits of which outfitted the ground floor of his gesheft, but any contributions of his to the material world were in large part accidental: The material world was a place he visited for his family’s sake. His employees, if they regarded him at all, treated their titular boss with the deference you’d pay to a holy lunatic. Only once during my tenure at the Castle, where he often passed me with no hint of recognition, did Papa (think of Lon Chaney in The Forbidden Room) drag me into his airless locker to describe the current project. The place was dense with conflicting odors: brimstone and ozone and human sweat; there were shelves of what appeared to be objects out of the Middle Ages sitting cheek-by-jowl beside cutting-edge technological devices: a glass furnace containing a luminous residue next to a crackling electrical transformer, cathodes and diodes nestled among jars of quicklime, asafetida, and dragon’s blood. There were Hebrew texts by authors with names like Abraham the Python lying open across articles on polyphase-induction engines; there was the cot where Papa catnapped and sometimes spent the night.
The project he was presently at work on, with its pulleys and zinc alloy gears, had the look of an amusement park ride.
“When complete, will simulate, my machine, the bang at the birth of the world,” he declared, eyes aswim behind the horn-rimmed spectacles he’d recently affected. He further explained that the explosion he referred to had resulted from the volatility of the divine light stored in the vessels that contained the original Creation. Why he wanted to perform this particular imitation of God, he never made clear, but where his previous inventions had had (often despite his intent) some practical application, he was determined this one would defy all usefulness. Of course he was nuts, my papa, and although he was the acknowledged executive head of the business, I knew it was really Mama, consulting account books and telling the beads of her abacus, who actually ran the Ice Castle from our West Side apartment.
Papa’s mishegoss aside, I don’t mean to imply that I didn’t like working at the icehouse. Physical labor had a certain appeal for me, and slinging lettuce crates or lugging giant sea bass across sawdusted floors, I felt my body becoming toughened and strong. Sometimes I would ride the ice, sliding toboggan-style down aluminum flumes straight into an insulated van in which I would later ride shotgun, swapping indecencies with the drivers as we navigated the city streets. I liked swinging the iron tongs to hoist the cakes onto my shoulder and the sense of my own surefootedness as I carried the dripping burden up steep flights of stairs. In garlicky kitchens I drew the pick from its scabbard to split apart the ice cake, spraying shards while the daughter of the house admired the knotted muscles of my arms. Once or twice I even imagined taking over the Castle from Papa and expanding it into a veritable empire of ice. But when Naf the Sport’s ambassadors strolled onto the premises declaring that Karp’s owed their agency a fortune in back subscriptions, I was as impressed with their brass as I was outraged by their demands.
Schultz, Papa’s horse-faced foreman, shoving hands deep in his overall pockets, said he would have to discuss the issue with the proprietor, that the gorillas should come back later—which, I could tell from the smirks they exchanged, the gorillas had been told before.
“Sure, sure, take your time,” replied the spokesman of the pair, his novelty jacket pasted to his broad back with perspiration. “Take all the time you need. We’ll be back tomorrow for the cash.”
Observing all this from under the eel I was wrestling onto a meathook, I was so struck by their effrontery that I straightaway hung up my apron and followed them out into the muggy afternoon. They seemed to be in no hurry, pausing at here a candy butcher’s, there a newsstand to threaten the merchant, fanning themselves with their skimmers as they ambled leisurely over to Forsyth and Grand. There they mounted dusty stairs and entered the door of an office on the second-floor landing, gilt letters