to stuff her fingers into her ears and cry “Yemakh shmoy!” May his name be blotted out. For hadn’t both her father and her husband made a sentimental fetish of the ghastly thing in its ice-bound hibernation?—and just look at the untimely ends they had met. Jocheved flared up at the rabbi’s mention and let it be known she would be content to leave him atop some rubbish heap where he could melt and decompose as food for the crows. So it was up to her brothers, in deference to the memory of their father and a dead man they had never met, to take care of him. They arranged for his temporary storage in a basement locker at Duckstein’s Funeral Salon on Henry Street, where they supervised the recaulking of his wooden container; they had the zinc lining refilled with water, thus reconstituting via an ammonia absorption agent the frozen mass that had been diminished in the fire. Then once the holy man’s protruding toes and furry ears were again sealed for safekeeping in ice, the twins agreed that the continued maintenance of this reverend family tradition should fall to young Ruben Karp, who needed something to do.
He had been lurking about the margins of the apartment, an unkempt, brooding figure to whom everyone gave a wide berth. Since the fire he had refrained from washing his face, thinking perhaps that the ashes that smudged his forehead belonged to his father. The neglect was due not so much to reverence as the wish to be marked like Cain for his deed on that fateful night. He kept aloof from participation in the mourners’ minyans that took place whenever there were sufficient visitors to say Kaddish; though from time to time he was compelled by some vague instinct to plant himself beside the chair of his mother, who despite her general inattention might consent to acknowledge his presence with a touch. This he would suffer with a stoic shiver, mildly amazed at the disdain he felt for the woman his actions had so effectively undone. On occasion he had the urge to add insult to injury by confessing his crime. It was certainly no secret, notwithstanding the insurance company’s pressured decision, that the fire had been the result of arson; so intimate were the cops with the trademark methods of the local arson mechanics that they doubtless could have fingered the culprits off the bat. But Naf the Sport had always been punctual in distributing his sweeteners among the local authorities, so the heat from the icehouse fire never touched his tribe. For this Ruby was almost sorry, as a lifetime of penal servitude would have suited his mood.
Already crushed, his mother would most likely be shattered beyond a hope of retrieval by his confession, but wasn’t that how restitution was made? He knew from the Yom Kippur services of yore that guilt was something you expiated through atonement, and knew also that for what he had done he could never atone. But surely, as action had always been his medium, there was some course of action he ought now to take. It occurred to him that, having destroyed his own father, the next obvious step should be to destroy himself. Then it struck him that this was his conscience speaking—had he suddenly developed a conscience? But the logic it asserted was as foreign to him as a conversation overheard by chance, and if he tried to listen a little harder his brain would cramp up, as if squeezed like a sponge leaking toxins that rankled in the gut. This Ruby supposed was remorse. It was the single identifiable emotion left in his depleted arsenal, while on the other hand it didn’t seem to belong to him at all. He was in any case paralyzed by his present circumstances… until his mother’s brothers lumbered toward him with a proposal.
He glowered at them from the kitchen table, as who were they, this meddlesome Tweedledum and Tweedledee? True, they had saved his life (thanks for nothing), which he grudgingly supposed gave them the right to an audience. Since the brothers had virtually no English and the Hebrew they’d been speaking for two decades had left them impoverished of their mameloshen, they anticipated some difficulty in communicating with Ruby—who had little enough Yiddish himself, never mind his disinclination to speak to anyone at all. So they engaged his aunt Esther as an intermediary, since, once she’d determined he wouldn’t bite, she had been