by Steve Stern
A couple of luckless Litvaks in the mission, both of whom had submitted to baptisms for the sake of nominal cash rewards, exchanged confidential winks as they advised him concerning a situation. Taking Shmerl’s malformed measure, the more talkative of the two remarked, “It’s a job I think maybe this one was born for,” scribbling a Pitt Street address on a scrap of paper. Locating the street number only a few blocks away, Shmerl found there a small clutch of men milling about outside a wagonyard gate, stomping their feet and rubbing their hands to promote circulation—a dance the greenhorn found it natural to fall in step with. Around midnight the wooden gate of Levine’s Livery Stable swung stridently open, and grizzled old Levine himself appeared in his mangy mackinaw. He began without ceremony to count heads, then told the men in the mixture of zhargon and English that was a standard Tenth Ward parlance to line up. A motley bunch that included a pair of scarified Negroes and a monkey-jacketed Chinaman, they seemed familiar with the routine, forming a single file for the purpose of receiving long-handled shovels from the toothless contractor. Falling in with them, Shmerl asked the chap in front of him, the bill of whose cap was pulled over one eye, “What are we?” and was informed in a Galway brogue, “We be night scavengers.” Without comprehending, Shmerl had the impression he was participating in a mysterious rite.
The wagon, a storm lantern swinging from its rear axle, trundled out into the ghetto streets, as the men alongside it began shoveling horse manure from the pavements into the maggoty wooden bed. Sometimes the shit stood in pyramids like cannonballs, sometimes in delicately balanced coproliths, or in mounds like brittle meringue and fresh paddies spread over the cobbles and trolley tracks. Where the stuff lay on the macadamed roadway, it could be scooped up efficiently and tossed onto the growing heap, but often the more obstinate turds had to be prized from fissures and sinkholes and flung into the wagon like clay pigeons sprung from traps. A few of the men, between shovelfuls, pulled slab bottles from their reefer pockets and took deep drafts to stave off the cold; then they would reel and occasionally break into sentimental song (“She is more to be pitied than censured…”), some teetering and falling face forward into the slush where they were left to lie. Without the benefit of spirits, Shmerl nevertheless found the exercise bracing, itself sufficient to warm his bones, and the stench of excrement, mitigated by the frosty air, was no worse than the odor of anguish in the Oyzers’ shop. Hauled by a brace of stilt-legged plug horses that Old Man Levine had constantly to cajole, the wagon rolled as far as the East River wharves, where its contents were unloaded onto freight scales before being dumped into a garbage scow. The skipper of the scow exchanged some salty small talk with the contractor, handing him his commission as a gang of sparrowlike urchins crept from the shadows to leap atop the piles of drek. Hovered over by mewling seabirds, they picked through the shit in a futile search for trophies worth salvaging.
When the night cart returned near dawn to the wagonyard, Levine dismounted his squeaky vehicle to dole out their token wages to the stalwarts who’d survived the dung circuit. The laborers dispersed in their several directions, leaving Shmerl to totter alone in the odorous yard, chewing his chapped lower lip. “What’s a matter, you froze?” asked the shambling old contractor of the greenhorn, who replied with unguarded candor, “I dunno where I should go,” just before he crumpled to the ground from exhaustion. Examining him with a blood-rimmed eye, Levine grunted it wasn’t his problem; then, a soft touch for both animals and oddballs, he relented, scooping up Shmerl and half-walking, half-dragging him to an uninsulated tarpaper shack where he could sleep. The shack, hung with horsetack and bridles, abutted the stables, and in exchange for cleaning them, for watering the crow-bait horses and strapping on their feedbags, for delivering the tribute money to the Jewish Black Hand in their headquarters behind Sam Schnure’s saloon, and for shoveling shit, Shmerl could have the run of the rickety outbuilding. On top of that (and depending on the weekly levy imposed by the Yid Camorra) he would receive a salary of around two dollars a week. With his wage plus the chickpeas and potato peels he foraged from the Hester Street market—he was, after all, a seasoned scrounger—Shmerl was able to keep himself alive and relatively fit, as well as to sock away a little something for a rainy day. In most respects the wagonyard regimen was even more punishing than the sweatshop, but unlike the sweatshop it had its rewards.
For instance: Shmerl would sleep through the mornings and wake to perform his appointed duties, which were generally completed by early evening. Then his time until the dead of night was his own. He would stroll into streets whose mercantile tenor had begun to take on by that hour a more recreational mood, the cafés filling with drones from the factories who shed their torpor on the spot, transforming themselves into poets and firebrands. Among their ranks were the artistic young ladies in their tulip-shaped walking skirts, whose ordinarily drawn faces appeared flushed with public and private passions. Admiring them through plate glass, Shmerl thought that, given his own double life (for he was a drek shlepper with the soul of a dreamer), he had much in common with these zealous young people, though he lacked the self-assurance to mingle among them. Besides, temptation was itself a form of idolatry—or so he told himself before finally turning away from the cafés and dancehalls to go meet the nightwalking crew.
Once, during a twilight constitutional, lonely and full of a yearning he dared not name, Shmerl ventured as far afield as the Bowery, amazed as always that he could see so much of the world in the space of so few blocks, that he needed no stamped document or visa to travel from one district to another. Here was Babel all right, though he seemed to have lost the capacity to judge it; predators and victims alike now appeared to him as merely the naturalized citizens of the urban landscape, just as the borderline between the spirit and the flesh was virtually indiscernible in this corner of the globe. The storefront chapel rubbed elbows with the hot-sheet hotel, the oyster bar with the Yiddish theater, beneath whose bulb-studded marquee a band of Chasids had gathered to exorcise the abominations within. Sandwiched between a music hall and a shooting gallery, with the Third Avenue Elevated roaring overhead, was a gasoliered façade with an ornate triple M painted above its arched entryway: The Museum of Miracles and Misfits, admission one thin dime. It was no doubt wasteful to spend a whole dime to see “miracles” when there were sights enough along any city street, but lured by the garish monstrosities depicted on the banners outside the building, Shmerl impulsively turned over a coin to the man in the booth and entered the hall.
Inside was a great gaslit firetrap of an exhibition hall hung with cheap tapestries, smelling of peanuts or broken wind, where human curios sat beside here a water pipe, there a gramophone, on raised tinsel thrones. There was a fat lady with chins spilling glacier-like toward her fardel-size breasts, her proscenium skirts lifted slightly to reveal a boy with leopard spots peeking from underneath. There was a living skeleton with cheese-straw bones, the bearded girl in crinoline billed as an “infant Esau,” a pair of wild Patagonian children said to be the link between the orangutan and man. A giant in a military tunic held an identically uniformed dwarf in the palm of his hand; the two-headed Liesl-Elise, Siamese twins joined at the buttocks, obligingly showed their point of juncture without (as the high-flown barker assured the families) any infringement upon their modesty. There was a leather-skinned Indian who claimed to remember Captain John Smith. They were all a little unnerving, not so much for their abnormalities as for their frank and accomodating manner, more than willing as were most to impart their singular histories. More disturbing to Shmerl than the breathing oddities, however, were the inanimate ones: the monstrous so-called mermaid abob in a jar of formaldehyde, the cabinet containing the head of President Garfield’s assassin, the four-legged rooster, the man encased in a block of ice.
The barker, a tiddly gent in shop-soiled evening dress who called himself Professor Nimrod, with a monocle and a permanently flexed brow, explained the attractions that couldn’t explain themse
lves. But despite his extravagant claims for their authenticity, the pickled grotesqueries—the “mermaid” resembling the hybrid of a fish and a marmoset, the ice man scarcely visible in a berg the green of rancid milk—remained less popular among the spectators than the vital and articulate exhibits. Still, Shmerl saw no reason to disbelieve: The Professor’s ballyhoo (“This frozen phenom is your actual corpus of a medieval Israelite mage preserved en glace like a fly in amber, imprisoned by the curse of a rival sorcerer…”) was certainly arresting. And if you peered hard enough into the cloudy ice, its edges ebbing away from the box that enshrined it, you could just make out the lineaments of a beard and belted caftan, the prayer shawl and courtly fur shtreimel of a rabbi or holy man. Then there was the canted, half-rotten casket the specimen was displayed in—which hadn’t Shmerl seen somewhere before? It troubled him that he couldn’t place it, as did the fact that, notwithstanding the frigid temperatures outside, the museum’s interior, warmed by steam heat and the legions that passed through it, was causing the ice to melt slowly away. Which was why, after the Professor had completed his narrative, Shmerl approached him cap in hand, rehearsing a hesitant proposal in his head.
The room was emptying out as the crowd, to make way for a new influx of patrons, was encouraged to pass through a curtained portal toward a melodrama entitled “Mazeppa’s Last Ride” that was about to commence in the little theater beyond.
“The ice that it’s melting,” Shmerl humbly volunteered, “I can for you restore.”
The Professor studied the immigrant a moment, as if he were an item presenting itself as a potential exhibit. Then, in a voice that gained volume as he spoke, he let the young crookback know that his offer had indeed struck a nerve. He told Shmerl that frankly nobody was much interested in the old back number anyway and it was a fact that the ice would soon deliquesce, leaving him with nothing but a moldy Hebrew cadaver on his hands. The truth was, he continued, increasingly exercised, that the thing wasn’t really worth the trouble of its upkeep; the museum was doing just fine with its live curiosities. Then having reached the height of his dudgeon, he relaxed his features, allowing the monocle to drop out of his eye and dangle medallionlike from its cord.
“You want him?” he said at last to his petitioner, “he’s yours.”
ON THE TROLLEY ride over to Norfolk Street she introduced herself, holding forth a pudgy palm: “Mrs. Esther Weintraub, widow,” as if being relict were her occupation, “but please you can call me Esther.” Then shouting over the lurching horsecar and its yammering passengers, she qualified her title: She was a grass widow, actually, her husband among the multitude of the missing whose photos were posted daily in the gallery of farshvoondn menschen in the Forward. She’d been in court as her landlord’s witness in a suit against a defaulting tenant and had stuck around to watch the nogoodniks receive their due, when she’d taken pity on the bewildered immigrant. “To my own big heart I am a slave,” she declared, squeezing an ample breast. She was a dressmaker by trade but admitted to an arrangement with her landlord, Mr. Opatashu, a fine gentleman and scholar who like herself was a native of Velsh. In his magnanimity he’d allowed her to remain in her apartment free of charge in exchange for her services as “janitress.” She gave the word a certain dashing cadence, then immediately assured Max he shouldn’t get ideas; there was nothing improper about their relationship. She chattered on, a bit hysterically, Max thought, about what a useless lump of suet was her husband and how well rid of him she was; in fact, she was doing fine on her own, a sheynem dank, and therefore in a position to lend assistance to a newcomer such as… What was his name again? “Oh yeah, Max; don’t worry, Max, I will waive for you your first month the rent till you make a salary,” grazing his cheek with her fingertips. “Connections I got with a certain garment manufacturer. What you mean, you got no skills? Everybody gets off the boat is lickety-spit a Columbus tailor…”
They arrived at her second-floor walkup, where the broad-beamed widow bustled about rattling coals in the grate and removing baggy undergarments from a line strung across the kitchen, while Max sat in a slump at the deal table. She continued nattering about how she’d yet to take in a boarder herself, but surely Mr. Opatashu would not begrudge her the extra income. Still, she paused to speculate while primping her wig, there was the landlord’s potential jealousy to consider… Weary as he was, Max was alert enough to feel squeamish at finding himself in the woman’s charge; this wasn’t what he’d had in mind. But the apartment was warm and he was glad to be out of jail and off the street, doubly grateful for the stuffed chicken neck and lokshen noodles that Mrs. Weintraub (he couldn’t bring himself to call her Esther) served him with his tea. She also boiled a cauldron of water on her cookstove, fogging the windows, tooting her horn all the while about what a resourceful lady she was. “Agunah they would call me in the Old Country, but here the husband leaves, you are free to find another, no?” Max didn’t think so but held his peace, realizing it wasn’t necessary for him to speak at all. The widow poured the steaming pot into a large tin washtub, then carried a basin out to a common spigot in the stairwell, returning to mingle the cold water with the hot, testing it with her fingers as she might have done for a child. When she was satisfied that the temperature was tepid enough, she told Max to go ahead and wash himself; afterward, while she laundered his own (pinching her nostrils theatrically to indicate them), he could change into some of her husband’s old clothes. Then she retired to the bedroom to give him his privacy, humming a music-hall air as she departed.
Looking warily over his shoulder, Max shucked his filthy garments, then couldn’t help remarking the satin-smooth contours of Jocheved’s body, graceful despite its sour pungency, hateful for its latent provocation. He lowered himself with a deep sigh into the tub, his inky hair (badly in need of a trim) fanning the surface of the water, the cares of the moment seeping out of his pores along with the rising steam. So relieved was he for this respite from his trials that he began to think of Mrs. Weintraub as a godsend. But no sooner had he relaxed in the luxury of his bath than the widow herself waddled back in, and snatching up a loofah mitten from the washstand set upon Max.
“Don’t worry,” she assured him, “I’m a old married lady; you got nothing I ain’t already seen.”
When he felt the sponge stroking his neck and shoulders in fluid figure-eights, Max practically swooned, so soothing was it to be touched by another; but when the mitten began to slide over his collar bone and down the gentle slope of his chest, he came to his senses and, crossing his arms in front of him mummy-fashion, abruptly submerged himself. Under water he supposed there were worse things than revealing his true gender to this wanton woman, which surely would have discouraged her overtures. But Jocheved was more resolute than that; she thought she might prefer to drown. Opening her eyes under the sudsy water, she was almost wistful, imagining herself sinking to her rest in a watery grave where wrecked galleons were guarded by undulant octopi. But despite the seductive submarine vista, the girl’s eyes were smarting, her lungs rebelling in their hunger to breathe, until Max resurfaced with a huge gulping intake of air. He found himself alone again in the kitchen, Mrs. Weintraub having apparently taken the unsubtle hint. Climbing hurriedly out of the tub, he snatched up the absent husband’s clothes that the widow had left folded over a chair, and without stopping to dry himself pulled them on as he fled the dumbbell flat.
Looking back, Jocheved mourned the loss of her father’s mossbacked funeral suit, which Max had left behind.
After the relative calm of the apartment, the street seemed even more riotous than before. A milk float collided with a beerwagon, the drivers climbing down from their respective vehicles to pummel each other’s ears. The bitter wind whipped the pantlegs and flapped the coattails of Mr. Weintraub’s ill-fitting garments, and a steam-driven motorcar, braking too late for an alley cat, sounded an unearthly horn. America was tohubohu, a madhouse, and it galled Max that he had endured such an arduous journey to reach
it. Surely there must be more to this country than met the eye; there must be places scoured of sweaters and shmeikelers, with room to breathe. But the Lower East Side of New York was where the Jews were, and given the mameloshen that was his sole means of communication, Max saw no alternative but to lose himself in the melée of the ghetto. He decided, as what choice did he have, to rededicate his energies to survival, but when he tallied up the talents he might call upon to that effect, he found himself wanting. He could make ice cream, couldn’t he? though Jocheved was adamant in her contempt for the profession that had led to her downfall, and Max had already proven that he had no gift for sneak thievery. Of course, there were any number of menial jobs, but to remain at a single occupation over time would leave him exposed in a way that would put his life in further jeopardy.
On the other hand, cold and bedeviled as he was, Max also felt somewhat revitalized; he had a full belly and was reasonably protected from the elements by the errant husband’s hand-me-downs, the shell coat and the large bowler hat that jugged his ears. Maybe, thought Max—though the thought flew in the face of his better judgment—things would work out after all. Perhaps Pisgat’s operatives would never find him on this side of the Atlantic, in this roistering district where everyone strived to reinvent himself. Who knew but that the old so-and-so was bluffing with his threats, playing on the youth’s gullibility; surely prospects would present themselves to such a well-knit lad as he.
