by Steve Stern
“Howdo, Mizriz Barbee,” Asbestos greeted the imposing woman, who cordially invited them in. Her moon face was buffed cordovan, a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from a meaty lip, a knit fascinator tied toothache-fashion round her bulbous head. Her breasts inside the gingham housedress might have helped to fortify the North Main Street seawall—which was the last antic thought Jenny would entertain that night. Suddenly struck by the enormity of what she was about to do, she was reduced to the condition of a tongue-tied little girl.
“Chile, don’t be skeered,” said the midwife in a voice like warm butterscotch. She waved a hand as if to introduce her patient to the reassuring tidiness of her apartment—the antimacassared armchair, the pot boiling on a wood-burning cookstove. But when she shambled forward on her thick ankles to pull back the curtain on the alcove she called her “surg’ry,” acrophile that she was, Jenny grew queasy and fought against falling into a swoon.
There was a table with an oilcloth and, in the corner, one half of an upright packing crate, painted red, which could serve as a modesty screen. A portrait of a bronze-skinned Jesus adorned a wall whose floral paper was unfurling from the plaster to reveal the thin laths beneath. On a stool beside the table was an orderly array of items—crotchet needles, curling irons, a catheter—in an emulation of clinical instruments, though their pitilessness was salient. The midwife was wiping her hands in her apron in what the girl assumed was a sanitary motion, but when she held out a pink palm Jenny realized she’d misread the gesture.
“I take y’all’s donation now,” showing ivory teeth interspersed with gold, the cigarette remaining somehow glued to her lower lip.
Jenny fished in the pocket of her middy skirt and surrendered the agreed-upon sum, a wad of cash comprising a year’s worth of tips. Mizriz Barbee fanned herself with the bills—as if the breeze whispered their amount—before stuffing them into her prodigious bosom. Obedient to his instincts Asbestos chose that moment to make a discreet exit from the apartment, while Jenny silently mouthed the word coward. A fly buzzed, a mouse skittered, the piano from the honky-tonk below played a syncopated rag. The girl was handed a clammy sheet with a hole in it to slip her head through and invited to undress behind the screen. Disrobed, Jenny glimpsed her tight belly, which had not yet begun to “show,” unkneaded dough that would never rise.
When she reappeared, the midwife pressed a tin cup into her hands, saying, “Swallah this yere medicine.” The words had a sacerdotal authority, and utterly passive now Jenny did as she was told. She breathed fire and began to cough from the scorching bite of the red-eye, while the midwife slapped her back and guffawed. Reclaiming the cup, she allowed the butt to drop from her lip into the liquid with a sizzle then swilled the rest of the contents herself. She enfolded the girl in her hammy arms and lifted her with an affable grunt onto the table. Still reeling from the whiskey, which had somewhat cut the fear, Jenny squirmed from the feel of the cold oilcloth on her bare buttocks. But if the dram did anything to diminish the pain of the midwife’s procedure, you couldn’t have proved it by the girl. The pain was its own voluminous province, with zones and latitudes and turbulent moods; her cries sounded like some far-off opera to her own ears. When she’d finally come through it, Jenny recognized the room and the woman with bloody hands, the fiddler returned to poke his head around the packing crate—which is not to say that she wasn’t still lost and a long way from home.
She had sufficient focus to take note, once she was helped to sit up, of the pail at the foot of the table and the mess it contained, which caused her to retch down her front. On the streetcar rattling north toward the Pinch, white passengers in rush seats craned their necks to glower menacingly at the girl. It wasn’t bad enough that she was seated beside a Negro in the Colored section, her head tilted onto his shoulder, but the scent of her sick was pervading the car.
And so Jenny joined the handful of citizens who remained impervious to the enticements of North Main Street’s unending fling. The discontent she’d expressed over the years had been mostly for the sake of conversation; she understood that now, understood what it really meant not to belong. Her desperate action, she felt, had disqualified her from participating in the everyday life of the old neighborhood, not that much of the everyday had survived the quake. When she’d recovered her strength, Jenny was stony in her resolution. She took in the clothes that hung on the line suspended between the delicatessen and the general store, then clamped shut the lock securing the pulley and, barefoot in her muslin chemise, mounted the rope. It was neither entirely static nor loose enough to qualify as slack. The tightrope was for the classic equilibrist, the slack for the clown, but the unevenness of her legs since her accident had left her—the girl discovered—peculiarly suited to both types of performance. Once her joints were again lubricated by movement, it seemed to her that none of her gifts had been lost in retirement. She was versatile, could enact her routines with or without a weighted pole; she could balance on a chair, prance (notwithstanding her limp) like a ballerina. With gymnastic maneuverings she could swing in giant circles, executing twists and airborne releases. The transports she enjoyed upon experiencing once again her body’s death-defiance of gravity rivaled, she’d have wagered, the loftiest spiritual acrobatics of ben Yahya’s disciples. It went without saying that she didn’t deserve to feel such exhilaration.
Of course nobody paid attention to her efforts, least of all the sedulous Muni Pinsker outside whose window she performed. Ineffable occurrences having become so commonplace in the Pinch, what interest had her neighbors in the perfectly natural phenomenon of a girl on a wire?
It was Asbestos, traveling back and forth at his leisure between the great world and North Main, who alerted Jenny to the fact that the circus had come to town. The news came as no surprise to the ropewalker, who’d seen the gaudy posters on hoardings during her journey to Beale. Hadn’t they helped spur her motivation to take up her art again? This particular circus, Forepaugh & Broadway’s Floating Carnival of Fun, had sailed downriver from north of St. Paul and was docked at the foot of the levee. Its quarters were composed of a steamboat that doubled as a menagerie, which towed an ornate wooden “palace.” The palace sat astride a huge flat-bottomed barge and housed an extravaganza of several rings. If they knew of its arrival, the North Main Streeters, enjoying a floating carnival of their own, were not the least bit curious about such a flea-bitten exhibition. Though the piping of its steam organ could be heard in the Pinch, it was nearly drowned out by the music of the Shpinkers’ improvised niggunim, their chants tweaked in turn by the blind man’s soulful cadenzas. But for Jenny Bashrig, so out of place in the old neighborhood, the circus calliope was a siren song she had no choice but to follow to its source.
Lacking the price of admission, she avoided the matinee and evening hours and made her way down the bluff to the riverfront on a breezy October (was it?) morning. The wind was whipping up whitecaps on the surface of the mile-wide river, compared to which the grand canal of North Main Street—thought Jenny—was a ditch. The broad floodplain on the Arkansas side flashed light and dark beneath the scudding shadows of clouds like wandering atolls; and the girl felt her perspective beginning to shift, her own drama starting to shrink to a shameful inconsequence in the presence of the wider world. The sideshow tents erected at the foot of the levee flew banners displaying crude images of Siamese triplets and the monster rats of Sumatra. The trunk of an elephant and the neck of a camel protruded through the open portholes of the wallowing steamboat, its promenade deck perched upon by grooming chimpanzees. A lion shuddered the planks of the pier with its deep bass roar, and Jenny, brightening, couldn’t help but think “Noah’s Ark,” though she rejected the thought as the kind of association her neighbors might make.
As the ticket booth was empty, she ascended the creaking gangplank onto the deck of the barge unobserved. She entered the so-called palace via a draperied companionway that led between tiers of bleachers into a tawdry, tabernacle-sized amphitheater.
An animal pungency stung her nostrils. Painted tapestries, gilt mirrors, and carved woodwork ornamented the interior in a faded pastiche of Gilded Age splendor; raffish sunlight, invaded by flitting barn swallows, slanted through the high windows to illumine three sawdust rings. In the nearest a stocky equestrienne in a tatty leotard stood erect astride the back of a cantering steed. The spotted horse circled a midget with a whip, his stance duplicating the bareback rider’s as he balanced upon a pig in full harness. The middle ring was vacant, but in the farthest from Jenny a pair of men in matching dressing gowns were inspecting a heavy net that lay folded in the sawdust and sand. Jenny’d seen the trawlers of Happy Hollow examining their seines with a similar diligence, but it thrilled her to think of the bigger fish this net was designed to catch. The rigging above them was hung with the properties of various aerial acts like a playground for weightless children; a rope ladder extended upward to a platform from which a taut cable was stretched.
Members of the ring crew were lugging in, anaconda-fashion, a large rolled tarp through the wide-open carriage doors. In the stands a bald man with a handlebar mustache was playing cards with a giantess in a pinchbeck tiara whose tights appeared to be stuffed with cannonballs. Could that be Professor Hotspur of Hotspur’s Pantomimic Pachyderms, and the woman Madame Hortense the Female Hercules, as advertised on the panels outside? Jenny wondered even as she shed her peacoat, kicked off her shoes, and toddled over to the farthest ring. There she mounted the wooden curb, grabbed hold of the narrow rope ladder, and began to clamber up its jittery length.
Nobody noticed when she stepped from the lofty platform onto the polished steel cable, until a roustabout happened to look up and inquire, “Why ain’t that gal wearin’ her mechanic?” Another, shading bloodshot eyes, offered the stunned reply, “That’n ain’t even with the show.” Then the laborers shared a collective groan: they’d seen this kind of thing before—circus-crazed civilians sneaking in after hours to enter a tiger’s cage or dangle from a trapeze. The bad ends they came to invariably spelled trouble for the whole company. Dropping their burden, the crew scrambled into the ring to begin frantically hoisting the safety net to catch the harebrained girl when she fell. The two men who’d been contemplating repairs to the net took their time in moving out of their way. Standing at the side of the ring, they began blithely discussing the girl’s technique, commenting on the relation of her center of mass to her base of support. “Not too wide in her lateral acceleration,” judged the taller, his arms shoved into the silk sleeves of his robe like a Chinaman. “Nor too narrow in her sagittal direction,” remarked his partner, arching a brow over a drowsy eye.
“But that business of gripping the wire between her great and second toe …”
“Definitely out. We’ll have to buy her a nice pair of buffalo hide slippers …”
“… and slather the soles with molasses to limit the torque.”
When the circus cast off from the Memphis levee to make for more southerly ports, almost no one in the Pinch was aware that La Funambula had gone with it. For them, anyone who strayed beyond the neighborhood was instantly lost to memory. Of course the Rosens knew she was gone, Mr. Rosen attempting to comfort his wife as she shed a torrent of tears over the nearly illiterate scrawl of Jenny’s note. (The note, with its clumsy profession of gratitude, was so damp from the combined tears of Mrs. Rosen and her foster daughter that it was later pinned pennant-wise to the highwire clothesline to dry.) Pinchas Pin was also aware of her departure, since it was Jenny who’d informed him—cradling his inconsolable head in her lap before saying good-bye—that his Katie’s suffering was finally at an end. But Muni Pinsker, in the fever dream of his chronicling, remained unmindful of her absence while dedicating every word he wrote to his precious girl.
9
Hide and Seek
I was carrying away a stack of books that comprised the better part of Avrom’s Judaica collection, when his lizardy eyelids snapped open.
“It makes you feel good that you steal from an old man?”
“I’m borrowing them,” I said, slightly chagrined. But Avrom’s income came mostly from Social Security and the odd reparation from Germany; from his shop with its phantom clientele he got bubkes. Besides, I knew I had only to ask, but theft lent my relation to the books an element of intrigue.
Avrom squinted over his thick lenses in an effort to make out the titles. “What are you, becoming a yeshiva bocher?” How to tell him that perusing The Pinch meant resorting to no end of reference materials? That becoming Muni Pinsker’s ideal reader involved the assimilation of a whole history and culture. “Maybe you should go instead in synagogue,” he suggested, this from a skeptic who cursed God at every turn.
“I went already,” I said (I was starting to sound like him). “They confirmed me at sixteen; I thought I was a Methodist.”
Avrom studied me with rheumy eyes that seemed to be struggling to focus. Was I starting to disappear? “I’m laughing,” he said, though he showed no signs of it. He hawked some phlegm into the coffee tin on his desk and peered inside to examine its contents.
I set down the stack of books, raising dust from the floor I’d neglected to sweep. “Avrom,” I was suddenly moved to confess, “I don’t hardly seem to live here anymore. It’s like I learned another language and now I’m forgetting my mother tongue.”
“‘Thou art greatly despised,’” he replied. “Obadiah chapter one, verse two: ‘for Rome possesses neither script nor tongue.’” “Come again?” I asked, when he fairly barked at me, “Here you didn’t never live.” He endeavored to raise himself upright amid the cushions that buttressed his rump. “Poor pisher”—saliva sprayed from his lips—“the lostest of the lost generation.”
“That one was before my time,” I countered, sorry to have made myself vulnerable to the old man. But he wasn’t finished.
“What do you want I should say to you? I should give to you wisdom like I’m some lamed vovnik? I’m the prophet Elijah in disguise? Okay: for virility, mix with ground kohl a seven-hued scorpion; against a succubus say, ‘Bar tit, bar tamei, bar tina, kashmaggaz …’” Then, with gnashing of dentures, “Tahkeh, from my own life I didn’t learn nothing!”
I’d never known him to get so worked up. “Why are you being such a”—what was the Yiddish for “bastard”?—“momzer?”
“Because,” he said, still exercised, squeezing his beard like a sponge; a molasses-like tear formed at its tip and plopped onto his desk, “because, Reb Pinocchio, you got in your life no strings attached, you can go where you want, even in Paradise. Me, I got only memories that by them I’m pinned in this farshtunkener chair.”
His gouged face showed a ferocity that dared me to contradict him, and for a moment we were deadlocked in our feelings of mutual inadequacy. Then, defeated by his stare, I hung my head and made a mumbled effort to change the subject; I had to clear my throat to hear myself speak. “Are there other copies of it, The Pinch?” It was a question I’d been meaning to put to him for a while. There was after all no copyright, no Library of Congress number; I knew nothing of its provenance. Maybe a fellowship of readers were plodding even now through Muni’s tangled narrative, encountering one another in and out of time.
Avrom sighed as if heaving a demon from his pigeon breast and reverted to his usual bemusement. It was, he attested, the one and only volume. “The meshuggener Tyrone that he gave me for safekeeping the manuscript. Then I gave with his cockeyed pictures to Shendeldecker the printer when they locked him up.”
“So you were responsible for its printing?”
He didn’t say no.
“But you said you never read it?”
“I opened,” Avrom shrugged, his eyebrows like caterpillars rampant. “It’s the same story that I heard it already from the horse’s mouth, or anyway the nephew of the horse. I heard in the lager and wondered can you get to North Main Street from here. When I arrived, is mostly gone with the wind, the street. It’s anyhow better I should reside here
in this charming dacha.”
He looked out through the glass door where a garbage striker with a sandwich board was passing.
“Avrom,” I asked, ignoring his mood—as what could I do about it anyway?—“what became of Muni Pinsker?”
He turned back to me and belched softly, made a face at the ill wind he’d expelled. “Happened what always happens: he died there like everybody else. Mr. Hanover that he died there. Mr. Elster died there. Mr. and Mrs. Sebranig died over there. Everybody stayed and they died there. Didn’t nobody just run away.”
That night I’m involved in a business transaction at the back of the bar when the heat burst through the front door. They were wearing duty jackets and graven expressions, standard issue guts lapping over belts that drooped in turn from sidearms, radios, handcuffs, and pepper spray. For a few moments they seemed implausible, so out of place was their martial presence amid that ethereal crowd. Then the cold facts kicked in and I recalled that Lamar, so generous with his illicit gifts, had never bothered to secure a proper beer license for the 348. Moreover, the barroom was dense with muggle smoke and cellophane packets of legend drugs, a quantity of which could be found on my person. I remembered that I was a felon, a concept I’d never quite gotten my head around. Outlaw, yes, but felon?
I expected the cops to begin arresting every acid eater and underage drinker in sight. But instead, parting the patrons like tall grass, they made straight for my landlord, spruce in his plantation attire, his insouciant posture advertising his proprietorship. They yanked him out of his chair and read him his rights. He received the handcuffs as if he were being attended by valets, while an unripe nymph draped his coat over his shoulders like an opera cape. As the cops frog-marched him toward the door, I turned tail and made for the rear of the premises. If Lamar was busted, wouldn’t his associate be next in line? With the draft hanging over my head and now the threat of police, it occurred to me I was a desperate character. I ducked into the musty storeroom at the back of the bar, which contained a pyramid of aluminum kegs and an oxidized toilet from a bygone era. Scrambling up the kegs—some of which rolled from under me to trip up imagined pursuers—I reached for the narrow casement window, yanked the rusty latch, and threw open the sash as far as it would go; then I slithered through the casement, tumbling headfirst into a paved backyard.