train, though, he had the quickening sensation he felt whenever he traveled beyond the neighborhood, which made him ask himself why he didn’t do it more often. Because Max wasn’t around to accompany him, that was why. Unlike the flat grid of the ghetto, Riverside Drive rolled uphill and down, a complement of elegant cliff-hanging apartments facing the sandstone palisades on the river’s New Jersey shore. It was, incidentally, the week of the festival of Sukkot, and a number of balconies sported pergolaed bowers, poles apart from the squatters’ sheds sprouting lulavs like donkeys’ ears on fire escapes all over the Lower East Side. Beneath the marquee outside Max’s building stood a massive doorman in an epauletted greatcoat, between whose legs Shmerl was prepared to scramble if the man tried to block his path. But once he’d announced himself, the man actually touched a finger to his visor and led him through the lobby into a hand-powered lift, which he proceeded to operate by hauling on a steel cable. A little breathless from their swift ascent and the pavonian wallpaper in the sixth-floor hallway, Shmerl was convinced that Max must have graduated to a whole new order of existence; he was only slightly heartened at the sight of a tin mezuzah on the jamb outside his friend’s door. Knocking, he half-expected to be greeted by a servant, and was further relieved when Max himself, dressed informally in an unbuttoned waistcoat and pin-striped shirtsleeves, opened the door.
“Gut yontev,” he greeted, then: “Forgive me, I’m a bit ongepatshket from toiling over the stove.” This vaguely disconcerted Shmerl, who wondered since when were apologies necessary between them, but in truth something about Max did look different, and as they shook hands, Shmerl was unable to meet his friend’s eye. Instead, as the yungerman showed him around the apartment, the inventor kept stealing peeks at his friend to determine exactly how he had changed. For one thing, his sable curls were a little longer, hanging over his forehead and ears in a manner as winsome as it was careless, and his features seemed to have softened a touch at the edges, as befitted his new affluence. He was still compact of figure, though he might have put on a pound or two, but otherwise there was nothing dramatically altered in his appearance. So why did Shmerl have the unsettled impression that this person was doing no more than a fair impersonation of his partner, Max Feinshmeker?
He tried his best to shrug off his nervousness and revive the ease he and his comrade had formerly shared. Nodding his approval of the roomy apartment, he remarked upon its modern amenities: the steam heat, indoor plumbing, the ornate gas girandoles; it was spacious without being pretentious (he actually said this), all “tishelekh un lompelekh,” little tables and lamps, and in the bedroom an iron bedstead with a cotton-batting mattress and flat springs. There were other homey touches: a mizrakh plaque on the eastern wall, a silver menorah and a sewing kit containing a color wheel of spools on the sideboard—all made the more haimish by the savory aromas wafting in through the kitchen door. Having no domestic sense of his own, Shmerl was impressed that Max had developed his to such a degree. Though he was content with his compartment in the ice house, its windowless walls so conducive to dreaming, the inventor was not indifferent to his friend’s feathered nest, admiring its creature comforts in their warm contrast to the crisp autumn evening outside. Once again he was struck with what a long way they’d come in so short a time; it was truly the kind of rags-to-riches story so often hymned in the popular press. If ever his own family emigrated—and he’d begun a correspondence with his still breathing papa toward that end—he would see them housed in similar accommodations. For himself, though, Shmerl had no immediate plans for relocating, nor had his improved financial straits brought him any sense of personal triumph. The fact was, he could have wished that the two of them, he and Max, were back in the stableyard where he’d never been happier.
His host invited him into the parlor with its oaken dining table set in a bay, spread with an embroidered cloth and hand-painted china, its centerpiece a seasonal bouquet of marigolds. “I was your guest,” said Max with a formal bow, “and now you are mine,” which statement had a certain spider-to-fly ring in Shmerl’s ears. Again he