their time together had become more compromised, limited as it was to the evening hours after Lou Ella, who’d finally acquired a license despite years of driving without one, had dropped her mother off at work. It also meant that Sue Lily was always with them, though Bernie had come to accept the toddler as a docile appendage of his darling Lou.
His attempts at gainful employment were disastrous. The first was at the Shelby County Fair, where a seasoned carny gave him a trial run at operating a game of chance. It was a classic sideshow hustle where the patrons hurled baseballs at pyramids of milk bottles filled with lead. With only three throws allotted to knock down three sturdy pyramids, no one ever won the stuffed animals displayed above the concession, but that was before Bernie’s term as concessionaire. Open to persuasion, he allowed the patrons to negotiate extra opportunities to knock down the bottles, and ended by giving away a number of grand prizes. He was in the process of handing over a giant panda to the son of a man who’d talked him into extra throws when the manager of the joint appeared, demanding to know what was going on. Bernie’s explanation resulted in the manager’s wresting the panda from the arms of the shrieking child, as the father threatened legal action and the employee was dismissed in opprobrium. His second job was as a day laborer at a midtown construction site. There he was asked to carry sheets of plywood to a carpenter’s station via a ramp extending over freshly poured concrete. On his initial trip, a sudden gust caught the plywood, lifting Bernie from the boards and casting him down into the wet foundation. When he presented himself thus encrusted to Lou Ella in the parking lot of her video outlet, she remarked that he looked like the statue from Don Giovanni and proceeded to worry grievously about the boy.
Whereas the boy, otherwise exuberant, continued to feel anxious about the rabbi, with whom he had yet to rule out the possibility of joining forces. He was aware of course of Maimonides’ criterion for humbug as stated in The Guide for the Perplexed: how if the claimant by his life or teachings subverts established moral norms, then you have evidence of deception. But Bernie still believed in the Boibiczer Prodigy even as he wanted to save the old man from himself. Meanwhile besides the clergymen and journalists, a number of local politicians, albeit leery of running afoul of their constituents, had joined the chorus of challengers to the rabbi’s legitimacy. It was only a matter of time before malevolent forces would conspire to bring down the House of Enlightenment, and Bernie might be called upon to rescue the rebbe from the brink of his own self-destruction.
“Cool,” said the girl, wondering who was more in need of rescuing. Because now that his appetite for the terrestrial had supplanted his desire for transcendence, while those opposing desires were challenged by his passion for Lou Ella herself, she fretted over Bernie’s vulnerability. Feeling in good part responsible, she no longer urged him to declare his powers openly; she abdicated her role as his conscience and pressed him to please just get on with reading aloud the tale of the patricide. Since their mutual absorption in Grandpa Ruby’s journal had increased, the absence of a physical component to their intimacy seemed almost irrelevant, and it was sometimes possible to think of their relationship as ordinary. Lou was surprised to find that she wished her friend to be ordinary, just as she wished (as did Bernie himself on occasion) that the old man had never been released from the ice.
“Cool, Uberboy, save the rabbi,” she said, “save the whole fucking world for all I care, but first finish reading me the story.”
1929.
After his head was stitched and bandaged, his burnt hands wrapped in gauze mittens, Ruby was commended by one and all for his good intentions. He’d been heroic, really, a fact that even his stricken mother seemed to register, the failure to rescue his father notwithstanding. His withdrawn silence at the funeral—a redundant affair, given the inventor’s prior cremation along with his factory—was interpreted as inconsolable grief. It was a surprisingly large funeral for a man with no close friends. The burial itself took place in the Mount Zion Cemetery, a sprawling necropolis located in the borough of Queens, on a hill with a view of the Manhattan skyline rising