on the widow, as if in her hoydenish habits she were yet another stray. Then there were the sorbets, tutti fruttis, and frozen custards that Jocheved served at their communal dinners, which had given Marvin a bright idea. Pixilated though she was, Jocheved was at the same time a fully functioning agent: He would set her up under an awning in front of his store “where she will reign supreme as the empress of ice cream.” He grinned his pleasure at the impromptu jingle. Always in great demand in the scorching southern summers, ice cream would draw more customers to Karp’s than his squad of schwartze pullers-in ever had.
For a while Marvin and Ida, whose affluence had estranged them from their old neighbors in the Pinch, began to warm to the windfall of their sudden family, and though they’d run out of reasons to prolong their visit, the guests found it difficult to give up such hospitality. The twins, schooled for decades in collective habitation, performed the household chores unsolicited and with jugglerlike sleight-of-hand; Zerubavel, who wore his high collar and silk four-in-hand to dinner, recited the Hebrew verse of Bialik and Tchernichowsky after meals, and Jocheved plied the table with tasty desserts. The only note of discord—the one that finally spoiled everyone’s good time—originated with Esther, who under the influence of her betrothed had become something of an ideologue. For all the gladness she’d expressed at their reunion, she soon after began to try her brother’s patience with her criticisms of his bourgeois lifestyle, even taking issue with his choice of residence in such a backward jerkwater town.
“What are they anyway doing in Memphis, the Jews?” she’d asked one night as the twins, mindful bulls in a china shop, were clearing away dishes from the dining-room table.
To which Marvin, a booster for whom the Bluff City had always spelled opportunity, replied testily, “What are they doing in Palestine?”
Things degenerated from there into name-calling, the host and his sister addressing each other coolly thereafter as Red Esther and the Baron. Within a week Zerubavel and his intended had departed in a huff for New York, where they would take passage on a steamship of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique bound for Marseilles, and from there ferry on to Haifa. But before they left, Esther had accompanied Yehezkel and Yigdal—satisfied now that their sister was in good hands—to Bloch-man’s Cold Storage, where they informed Jocheved’s son through the medium of his aunt that he would be sailing with them to Eretz Israel. Having observed him in action, his uncles had determined that the lad, despite his near hypothermia, could be of signal use in the development of the Yishuv; and since he was only marking time in America, why shouldn’t he be given the chance to apply his talents to a cause greater than himself? It never occurred to them, so habituated were they to self-sacrifice, that he might have plans of his own.
Though, beyond keeping company with the rabbi beside the reliquary of his packing crate, Ruby had none. But what was Palestine? He had only the vaguest notion: something about a country without a people for a people without a country: He’d heard the slogans. But to his hibernal mind it sounded as if each side of the equation might exclude the other, and then the Jews would be nowhere at all. Of course, reasoned Ruby, if he belonged anywhere it was nowhere. He knew also that Avner Blochman, proprietor of the facility wherein he was quartered, was fed up with his unwanted tenant, and had finally screwed up the courage to evict Ruby along with his frozen charge. “This ain’t no spookhouse,” the hangdog Avner advised, for such had been the reaction of his clients, whom reports of the rabbi and his custodian were driving away. Out on the tree-shaded Parkway, having gotten wind of Ruby’s dilemma, Marvin Karp’s guests elicited the last ounce of their host’s goodwill, prevailing on him to make room for his brother Shmerl’s bequest. Ultimately Marvin did agree to store the ghoulish memento in an old laundry tub in his wine cellar, but with the understanding that his benevolence would end upon the repeal of Prohibition, when the memento could be replaced by a case of sauvignon blanc. He also made it clear that his charity did not extend to the rebbe’s grim-visaged guardian.
Ruby received the news of his imminent eviction with a shrug. Separation from the rabbi would deprive him of his last