what with her androgynous appearance and her maundering about being a container for her dead husband’s soul. As far back as his childhood Julius was mortified to be seen with her in public, though daffyness aside she had managed his father’s accounts with skill. Then her senescence caught up with the papery skin and mole gray hair she’d had for decades, and diagnosed with advanced dementia she was confined until her unminded end to the B’nai B’rith Home near Overton Park.
In the meantime, left alone on Hawthorne Street (from which he’d refused all these years to move, despite deepening pockets and the decay of the neighborhood around him), Ruben Karp surprised his son by accepting his perfunctory offer to occupy the guest bungalow behind Julius’s home. His tastes being simple to the point of austerity, the old man, whose age like his mother’s had exceeded his years, resisted any attempts on the part of his son and daughter-in-law to decorate his quarters, preferring to leave them as ascetically spare as a monk’s cell. There was never any formal announcement of Ruben’s retirement, but one day he simply ceased to show up for work and thereafter devoted his time to no one knew what. So excited was the family in any case over their daughter’s first steps and the recent birth of a son that they practically forgot the old man’s existence. The smell that ultimately led them to his remains—the coroner’s report stated that the old man had effectively starved to death, though Julius never accepted the judgment; hadn’t he always seen to it that the guest house had a well-stocked refrigerator and fully functional kitchen?—took weeks to fumigate. Among his scant belongings they found, on the night-stand beside the bed, an old icepick tucked into a limp ledger whose pages were strewn with a script that resembled an augur’s tossed bones. There was a small shelf of disintegrating Yiddish books that Julius threw out and of course the grisly tenant of the Kelvinator freezer, which his father had transferred from the rear of Karp’s Showroom when he came to live in the little house behind the house on Canary Cove.
Of the latter Julius seldom spared a thought. After all he had a family to raise and his position in the community to consolidate, his televised ad campaigns to manage. It was a good life in which he laid claim to the full complement of middle-class chattels, and wasn’t there also some precept of the Jews that stated that a man was not a man without a wife and children? Though never observant, neither was Julius ashamed of his heritage. Regarding religious attendance as a more or less civic duty, he went to services with his family on the High Holidays. It was important to him that he not be perceived as in any way un-American, an unease that perhaps had its source in his having been born abroad. So while he purchased his annual share of Israel Bonds along with the other members of the Temple Brotherhood, he had no relation to the so-called Jewish homeland; his own place was here in the South, where he belonged to a number of fraternal organizations in whose fund-raising activities he participated with zeal. Much as he desired the renaissance of his ill-starred city, however, Julius thought it just as well that the great world not interfere overmuch in local affairs. That’s why he was relieved when the relic from the deep freeze—notwithstanding the perversity of its defrosting—had adapted to the climate of these interesting times, and that its (his) message, while retaining its spiritual essence, did not contradict the basic values of the marketplace.
Nor had it seemed to upset the status quo when that message was translated into a profitable enterprise from which Julius Karp, as the rabbi’s chief investor and financial consultant, had benefited as well. So much had he profited, in fact, that he’d begun to contemplate selling the Showroom in order to devote himself exclusively to the operations of the New House of Enlightenment. Lately, however, that venture had come under fire from the municipality. Hysterical rumors abounded and a stink had been raised in the editorial pages of The Commercial Appeal, whose bloodhounds demanded full disclosure of New House dealings—which, despite Sanford Grusom’s facility for cooking books, were perfectly aboveboard. Nevertheless, Julius had started to wonder if, in getting involved with the recycled old huckster, he was perhaps in over his head, though his share in the