a meal of canned applesauce and pork ‘n’ beans that she had been compelled to prepare herself.
“What’s this?” asked her husband.
“It’s called dinner,” replied Mrs. Karp.
“Maybe at the county penal farm,” said Mr. Karp, pleased with his riposte, “but on Canary Cove”—which was their bosky residential enclave—“we call it something else.”
When she was satisfied that her husband’s patience was sufficiently stretched, Mrs. Karp plumped her frosted shag and explained that Nettie had quit.
“That’s impossible.” For Nettie had been a fixture in the family for nearly a decade.
Mrs. Karp gave her signature shrug, as if to imply that the impossible had become the order of the day. Then she let it drop that the maid was upset on account of the disappearance of the frozen old man.
“What’s that you say?” exclaimed Mr. Karp in disbelief. His wife asked languidly if he were deaf and repeated the information, which her husband challenged. “Do you think he could just up and walk away?”
Mrs. Karp shrugged why not.
For the second time in as many months, Mr. Karp was moved to interrupt his evening meal with a peevish harrumph. He rose, removing the napkin from his collar, descended the stairs to the rumpus room, and returned after some moments to announce, “This is a calamity,” though without much conviction. He sat back down and heaved another sigh, which seemed to signify (along with his puzzlement) a measure of heartfelt relief. Because if the heirloom had truly vanished—never mind how—it was now somebody else’s responsibility, for a change. Of course, as head of the family, it was incumbent upon him to get to the bottom of this enigma, wasn’t it? He couldn’t in good conscience simply let the matter drop. “Bernie,” he asked, “you don’t know anything about this business, do you?”
Since his father’s words were more statement than question, rather than contradict him, Bernie assured Mr. Karp that he knew nothing about anything—a response nobody would gainsay. Then he darted a glance at his sister, whom he had silenced with threats of revealing her late-night basement trysts. Clearly counting the minutes until she could quit this bughouse and return to college, Madeline took the cue from her loathsome little brother and volunteered her ignorance as well.
Mr. Karp made an authoritative moue, which his wife parodied with a lopsided face of her own, and that seemed, for the moment, to be that. Then it was as if the thing in the basement had never existed at all. Bernie, too, was greatly relieved, feeling that he now had a license to continue his sub rosa relationship with the defrosted old gentleman he was harboring in the guest-house apartment behind the family domicile.
Bernie himself would have been hard pressed to explain why the secret had to be so diligently guarded, but aware that one person could not technically belong to another, he nevertheless felt that the rabbi belonged to him. It was an attitude he’d conceived almost from the instant the old man had emerged from the freezer, when Bernie had overcome his initial repugnance to swaddle the rabbi’s frail bones in bath towels. Then he’d outfitted the creaky old party in a pair of his father’s flannel pajamas before installing him in the guest house out back. This was the independent efficiency unit that had remained unoccupied (excluding Nettie’s periodic dustings and Madeline’s romantic rendezvous) since the death of his Grandpa Ruby soon after Bernie was born.
During his first few days in the world the hand-me-down holy man had remained in a relatively stuporous condition, stunned and cranky after his sudden awakening, while his convalescence stirred the boy to action as nothing in his experience ever had. At first he’d brought the rabbi table scraps, which were meager during the period between Nettie’s departure and the hiring of a new maid-of-all-work. Later, squirreling away portions of his own meals in napkins, Bernie was able to smuggle the old man more substantial fare: a sparerib, some boiled shrimps in cocktail sauce, a nibbled ham and cheese omelet, cookies rich in butter and animal fat. Weak from having fasted for over a century, the rabbi could at first only manage to pick at the food, but soon his appetite returned with a healthy gusto and he began to gobble up everything the kid set before him. Bernie, whose religious education was limited to a few Bible verses from his forgotten Sunday school days, nevertheless sensed that these offerings might be in violation of some primitive dietary code. Feeling he