Ravage & Son

Prelude 1883

He was a seller of metal pipes and bones who had accumulated his own dross, a graveyard of fittings and clamps and screws, and had to employ a blond she-cat as big as a church, with paws that could swipe at any intruder, twist a doorknob, or paralyze a monstrous rat that thrived on the lead inside his pipes. Her name was Chlöe, and she answered to no one but the boss himself. She'd hiss at strangers and his employees, but all he had to do was shout 'Chlo-o-o-eeee,' and she'd abandon the gray rat she was toying with, rise above that graveyard of pipes, and leap right into his lap. Sometimes the whirling force of her would knock him out of his chair, and she clung to him without her claws, while his shop steward muttered under his breath, 'Lionel and his lioness.'

But he couldn't spend his whole day with a cat. He wandered about and hunted like Chlöe, when he should have gone home to his wife. He'd tired of Henrietta before they were even married at Temple Emanu-El. He slept with her out of some rabbinical rule that had never made sense to him. He preferred Chlöe's musk to Henrietta's. He'd married into a tribe of Bavarian merchant princes, when his own papa was a prince of another sort, a hardware man, like Lionel, a speculator in real estate with husky arms, who collapsed when he was fifty-six and died in the street like a dog, without a soul to offer him a cup of water.

Lionel kept his papa's signboard, Ravage & Son, continued to grab up tenements below market price, and went to Allen Street, hunting for female flesh. All he found were rotten sinks - fleabitten sisters who couldn't amuse him with their practiced steps. And whenever he tore up a brothel and blacked out in a maddening fit, a merchant prince would arrive with a detective from Mulberry Street and bliss was soon restored at the brothel, even if Lionel was covered in blood after all his rampaging.

'Ah, Mr Ravage, a gentleman like yourself shouldn't be mingling with this kind of trash. These ladies have their cadets, and they might carve you up one fine afternoon. You'd leave us with a stinking mess of paperwork if we found you in the morgue.'

So he had a weapon handcrafted for him by a silversmith on Baxter Street. It was much more fashionable than a policeman's billy or a baseball bat. Lionel Ravage had his own pinewood walking stick with a handle in the shape of a wolf's head, burnished in silver. He could crown any cadet with his walking stick, and fend off robbers who wanted to relieve him of his rent bag. He sent more than one of these lowlifes to the Hebrew hospital with a good thwack. Lionel preferred to be his own rent collector. It was his way of meeting a plump housewife who was behind in the rent and whose husband was coughing his lungs out in some charity ward. Lionel was never crude. He wouldn't hammer an eviction notice on her front door, wouldn't call upon the services of the county sheriff. He'd permit three or four months' rent to slide. The housewife would stare into his silver-blue eyes. He'd recite poetry to her. He'd had a semester at Amherst College before his papa pulled him back into their hardware empire, which occupied more and more of Canal Street. Lionel missed the countryside, not the college. His intimate sense of sewers and the arcane world of pipes had made him Amherst's prize plumber. But he'd had to leave. And now, near enough to a bachelor of arts in plumbing, he'd deliver lines from Shakespeare to the housewife in the Yiddish he had picked up from his papa's customers, and Lionel would play all the parts - Prospero one moment, Caliban the next.

You taught me language; and my profit on't

Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you

For learning me your language!

The housewife was enthralled. She undressed in front of her lyrical landlord. And if a certain housewife was hard to get, he might offer to marry her on the sly. He plucked a renegade beadle from a Norfolk Street synagogue, produced a wedding band from a variety shop, kissed the bride under a prayer shawl, and drank a cup of kosher wine. Soon Lionel had a dozen mistress-wives, and was sick of every one. He returned to Allen Street with his silver club, like some Caliban of the Lower East Side, master and servant of his own appetites and ambitions, with a crippling anger against his papa's associates, who tried to cheat him out of his patrimony. He ruined them all, bought up their assets, and increased his graveyard of pipes and fittings, with Chlöe as his constant companion. But he couldn't make love to a cat with whiskers and claws, no matter how often she crashed into his lap. Lionel had to troll.

He met her by accident. He was collecting rent on Attorney Street, and she came to the door in a silk robe with loose threads that unraveled all around her. She had the carved cheeks and wild blond hair of a dybbuk. His tenant, Rabinowitz, was a consumptive philosopher from Vilna who sold apples in the street whenever he was lucky enough to locate a pushcart and a consignment of apples. Lionel didn't care about the rent. He could discuss the notion of gravity with Rabinowitz, and the elevator cars that would soon command taller and taller buildings in Manhattan and miles of pipe that only Ravage & Son could furnish.

Lionel didn't believe in dybbuks. He'd been to a college in the middle of Massachusetts. He hadn't come to America in a cattle car - he was an aristocrat with an artisan's grip. Still, he couldn't take his eyes off this blonde in threadbare silk. She'd hooked herself to his own interior plumbing with those high cheeks of hers. She couldn't have been more than eighteen or nineteen.

'Hey,' he said, in that rough vocabulary of a rent collector, 'are you one of those imported brides, huh? How did the old man pay for the passage? He doesn't have a cent.'

She slapped his face. It was a wicked blow, with all the force of Chlöe, but Chlöe wouldn't have been that unkind.

'I'm his daughter,' she said, in an accent that couldn't have come from any school in Manhattan. 'And he's not your old man.'

'Yeah, he's an apple polisher who can't pay his rent.'

She slapped him again, and those magnificent cheeks throbbed with malice. 'I love this crazy girl,' he muttered under his breath, and it frightened him. Lionel had never been in love, not with errant housewives, nor uptown princesses like Henrietta, with all their fine breeding, nor brash downtown girls, who would have robbed him blind if they could. All he had was Chlöe. Now he had to deal with this one, and he was at a disadvantage. Rabinowitz's girl with the wild blond hair had much sharper claws than Chlöe.

Her name was Manya, she said. And she'd been raised at her father's feet. Her mother had died giving birth to Manya. She had neither brothers nor sisters. Her father was a maverick in a community of religious Jews. He'd studied the laws of Russian grammar rather than the Talmud. A servant in the castle of a Lithuanian lord, hired to polish silverware, he became, in a matter of months, tutor to the nobleman's son - only Rabinowitz, the Jewish polisher, could instruct the boy how to read and write. Manya lived at the castle with her papa, wearing the discarded silks of the nobleman's daughters. The other servants grew jealous of this self-taught savant, and plotted to kill him and Manya. He couldn't return to the Jewish quarter, where he was considered a pariah.

'So you escaped to the Promised Land,' Lionel said. 'But I've visited your father many times. Where the hell were you?'

'Hiding in the closet,' she said. 'Papa says you have an insatiable lust. He didn't want you to feast on my flesh.'

'And where did you learn all that pretty talk?'

'From Papa,' she said. 'He's an alchemist who can breathe languages.'

When he's not polishing apples like the silverware he used to polish, Lionel reassured himself. Manya must have had the skills to work as a bookkeeper or a salesclerk, but Rabinowitz wouldn't allow her to descend into the Lower East Side, where some cadet might capture her, and anonymous men with filthy fingernails could ogle her like wild beasts. So the princess would sit in the back room of their tenement palace and recite to her father the Russian and English classics he himself had taught her. And whenever she had to shop on Hester Street, she disguised herself in her father's hat and overcoat.

'Then what made you answer the door? You could have hid in the closet.'

'I'm not a child,' she said. 'And I was curious. I could see you through a crack in the closet door. You have beautiful eyes, you know, when you're not playing the landlord.'

Lionel was losing whatever little stature he had left. 'But I am the landlord.'

'Who allows Papa to live rent-free,' she said, and laughed for the first time; her sweet roar was like the rasping jingle of toys he'd had as a child: Manya could have been Lionel's own music box.

'But how many savants do I have on my rent rolls?' he asked. 'Our talks enrich me. I don't need to collect from him.'

And that's when Rabinowitz returned in fingerless gloves, with a torn blanket as a cloak. He was in a dark mood. He couldn't control the tremors in his jaw. His stoic nature was gone. He'd have butchered Lionel if he'd had a hatchet in his hand.

'Papa,' Manya said, 'why such a long face? I'm a debutante...