if he were mourning anything, it was the absence of his partner, who had yet to visit the factory since its opening. Driven as he was to hard work, Shmerl sometimes wondered if all his activity was by way of distracting himself from making an occupation out of missing Max. He missed reading aloud to the yungerman the appeals for sympathy if not outright love in the “Bintel Brief” column of the Jewish Daily Forward; missed relating the preposterous dreams which Max, covering his ears, refused to hear, though he might sheepishly submit some incubus of his own later on. He missed—what didn’t he miss?—his partner’s eyes when their black opal irises reflected the sap green of a gas flame. But this was all baloney. Then Shmerl would try to isolate the features of his friend’s face—the burnt rose lips, the aquiline nose, the hint of a widow’s peak at the height of his calcimine brow—in an attempt to find fault with each, but they kept coalescing in their perfect symmetry. He tried to hate the rhythmic snoring and soft petards that had issued from the lithe form that had lain beside him so many nights. Because finally such feelings as he had for the yungerman were improper; men did not feel such intense affection for other men, did they? There were David and Jonathan, of course, Hillel and Shammai—he ransacked the tradition for other examples; there was Weber & Fields. But here was the thing: Shmerl was unable to disentangle his longing for his friend from his baser instincts, from fantasies concerning the ladies which had lately beset him. For it seemed he had needs that were reaching the point of obsession and might require the intervention of the Allen Street nafkehs to release the ache. The Law, which he only selectively observed, explicitly forbade consorting with professional women, but “A minhag brekht a din,” as the proverb said. “A custom breaks a law.” Whatever the case, Shmerl was of an age when the young men of Shpinsk were already married householders experiencing the joys of Shabbos copulation, while he had yet to know a woman in any true sense. Rocking himself on his crate in the Castle’s Keep, he might turn toward the porous casket as if expecting the saint to hatch already from his block of ice and offer counsel.
Meanwhile, from his vantage on the sixth floor of a Beaux-Arts apartment house with a view of the Hudson, whose surface was flecked with the skittering of crescent sails, Max judged himself to be in some respects as good as dead. Having sent a final remittance to the ice mensch back in Lodz, labeling it a bequest, he felt he had laid Max Feinshmeker—never more than an unfinished work-in-progress—officially to rest. It was an attitude the girl Jocheved, who’d begun to express herself more openly, nevertheless thought somewhat premature. Habitually cautious, she had never reassumed women’s apparel, not even in the privacy of her West Side apartment, though on the sidewalks along Upper Broadway she might pause to appreciate a stone marten muff in a furrier’s window or a milliner’s straw bonnet trimmed with lacquered cherries. Not that Jocheved had ever been vain of her appearance, but tentatively she began again to explore the distaff side of life. Purchasing a noodle board, she rolled the dough into circles, cut the circles into strips, and draped them over the backs of chairs like clothes wrung through a mangle and left to dry. Later she would boil the noodles in chicken broth or bake them into kugel on a gas-burning range. She acquired two sets of pots and dishes, for meat and for dairy, and, reviving a long defunct passion, bought a pewter mold and a bag of rock salt for making syrupy sherbets and frozen desserts. Despite having a bathroom that featured a clawfooted tub, she thought she might even like to visit a mikveh again. While such concerns could never comprise the whole of life, business having taken precedence over all (as witness the ledgers heaped atop the drop leaf of a mahogany desk in the parlor), she delighted in her secret dabbling in womanly pursuits, a pleasure that in no way diminished the contempt she felt for the woman she had been.
Since the partial resurrection of Jocheved tended to keep the girl largely shut in, she communicated with Shmerl (as Max) via messengers, which was unsatisfactory to them both. For Jocheved still shared Max’s fellow feeling for