The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  Several of the men rushed forward to help disengage him from the hook. As they lowered him, Hershel shifted the bread to his left hand in order to dip his right into the breast pocket of one of his assistants. When they set him down in front of the blacksmith, whose body was still heaving from its Homeric exertion, the boy’s feet (both of them shod) made squelching sounds in the mud. Removing from his mouth the biblical passage with which Oyzer had baited the shoe, he said sheepishly, “Straight from the hearth, Papa,” as he offered his father the golden loaf. Then, with the wisdom he’d acquired during his confinement in the fish, Hershel began to read the Hebrew script in a stentorian voice.

  “‘Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, or press down his tongue with a cord? Can you fill his skin with harpoons, or his head with fishing spears? Lay hands on him; remember the battle—but never do it again!’ Job forty-one, one.” And assuming a dignity he had not previously been known to possess, the son enjoined his father the fisher-smith to “Ess gezunterhait, Papa. Eat in good health.”

  With a sigh that rocked his entire frame and admitted a seepage of tears, Oyzer took a bite of the warm challah baked in the heat of a monster’s bowels. It had a cottony texture that tasted of sweet divinity and ashes, and melted in his mouth before he could swallow. In that moment the blacksmith forgave his son for having forgiven him. Then the stationer Seymour Lipow, noticing that his breast pocket was empty of his seven-jewel Swiss, shouted that he’d been robbed, and Hershel took off at a sprint. His bandy-legged father gave chase, roaring after him: “Marinated imbecile! When I catch you I throw you back!”

  Somewhere there was a war. There was also a mass jailbreak from the county clink at Auction and Front Street and a surefire cure for pellagra concocted in a basement on Beale; there was an evening when Rose and Morris Padauer took along their proxy son, Benjy, to dinner and a show on the roof of the Peabody Hotel. They might have chosen a venue more suitable for children—a circus or a zoo—but the old rebbe had assured them that the roof garden cabaret specialized in family entertainment. So, despite their desolatation over the plain truth that their child was not their child, they took the old man’s advice. Of course, if they were honest they would have had to admit to experiencing as well a measure of relief: for the unsightly specimen they’d nurtured these several years had not, it seemed, sprung from their own loins. In the interim, however, they’d lavished so much fondness on the wizened little chap that, regardless of Benjy’s tenuous relation to humanity, it was too late now to withdraw their affection.

  To save money—since Mama Rose’s pillaged piggy bank had disbursed only a pittance—they spared themselves the trolley fare by walking the dozen blocks to the hotel at Main and Monroe. Crossing the unmarked border between North Main and Main Street proper, they realized yet another instance of relief. Because once they’d begun to stroll beyond the neighborhood, the world reverted blessedly to three dimensions, as opposed to the dizzying multitude observable in the Pinch. The last to find out what everyone else already seemed to know, the Padauers felt like strangers in their own community, and so breathed easier at having left it for a turn.

  “Mama,” said Morris, admitting a roguish smile as he swung one of Benjy’s horny hands in his own, “I feel like we keepin’ company.”

  “Fresh!” chided Rose, flushing vermilion while squeezing their creature’s other hand.

  On the Peabody roof they were seated by a maître d’ with a permanently arched brow at one of the farthest tables from the stage, below a parapet hung with paper lanterns. The air was pervaded by the caustic scent of citronella from the candles on every table; the potted palms stood about like discreet chaperones. Looking around, the Padauers tried to quell the sense that the other patrons were of an altogether better class than they; they were further disturbed to find no children in evidence at all. They consoled themselves that it was in any case a warm summer night, the stars low-hanging fruit above their heads.

  They would have liked to order, say, a plate of mamaliga or noodle pudding but were served instead the singularly unkosher entrée—chicken-fried steak and pinto beans stewed with ham—that came with the bill of fare. (The haughty waiter in his waist-length jacket advised them there were no substitutions.) Unaccustomed to worldly pleasures as they were, the Padauers were nevertheless determined to enjoy their evening out. So they sipped their sweet tea, into which a neighboring couple were pouring something from a brown paper bag, and speculated on the ingredients of a menu item called shoofly pie. They rubbed the sparse thatch atop Benjy’s outsize head and solicited his assurance that he was having a good time. (“I’m havink a ball,” he croaked, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at him.) Then they applauded enthusiastically when the penthouse curtain parted and the New Pygmy Minstrels pranced onto the low stage.

  High-stepping in procession around a semicircle of chairs, they played a ragtime number whose base melody the Padauers identified as, remarkably, the fraylekh standard “How Does the Czar Drink Tea?” They played an array of instruments—clarinets, bass fiddles, snare drums—with exaggerated gestures and flourishes, marching about the raised platform long enough to give the audience an opportunity to appreciate their gnomish anatomies and outlandish garb. Their burnt-cork features beamed from globular heads like faces painted on balloons, balloons from which dangled stringy torsos and bantam legs. Shod in spangled buskins, they wore top hats and spike-tailed coats stitched together from swatches of calico, croker sacks, and colored glass. When the general hilarity was subdued enough for the tune to be heard, the bandleader, no taller than the others but perfectly proportioned, signaled the troupe to halt. “Gemmun,” he called in a nod to Negro dialect, “be seated.” Though forceful enough, his voice was that of a child, as were the soft honey curls that peeked from under his tall hat in contrast to the minstrel makeup.

  Once seated, the players performed another spirited number, this one a syncopated but ill-disguised version of “Zing, Faygele, Zing.” The Padauers exchanged puzzled glances, wondering that the goyim didn’t lose patience with such a hybrid program—though in fact the audience, unacquainted with Old Country klezmer, seemed to accept the performers as a variety of authentic blackface minstrelsy. Then the bandleader doffed his stovepipe, releasing his profusion of curls, and presented himself as “Your humble interlockator.” Again the juvenile voice was at odds with his authority, as he begged permission to introduce “two chaste and elegant gen’lemen.” “Mr. Tambo,” he called, and a sprightly little musician leapt forward from one end of the orchestra, shaking his tambourine. “And Mr. Bones.” Another pygmy musician sprang forth from the opposite end of the chairs, clacking knucklebones. “In their inimminable Ethiopian pah-de-do.” Upon which the interlocutor surrendered the stage to Tambo and Bones, who bowed to one another, bumping heads.

  Tambo (earnestly inquiring): “Mistah Bones, yo’ mammy and pappy, am dey siblinks?” The dialect was Negro but the accent pure Galitzianer.

  Bones (just as concerned): “Nu, Mistah Tambo, do y’all still have from nature a ’fection for it, despite what it done to you?” Again Negro with a Litvak inflection.

  Tambo: “How mizzable am our lot, Mistah Bones. Plagues we got, pogroms, the Ku Klux Klan … Sometime I tink we been better off not to be born.”

  Bones: “But who has dat much luck, Mistah Tambo? Not one in a thousand.”

  Their dialogue accelerated to a rapid-fire exchange, each joke graduated in saltiness (“Do y’all with your wife make love doggy style, Mistah Tambo?” “I sit up and beg while, tahkeh, she rolls over and plays dead, Mistah Bones”), punctuated with rim shots on the drums. So shocked was Rose Padauer that she clapped her hands over Benjy’s ears but couldn’t help sharing a furtive smile with her husband.

  The antic pair concluded their routine with a brief skit involving a change of gender by Mr. Bones, who adopted for the part a princess petticoat and a sheitl wig. (He’s a lady in a café who lets fly a fart then tries to deceive the other p
atrons by scolding the waiter: “Stop dat!” The waiter: “Absolutely, madam, which way were it headed?”) Then the minstrels struck up a raucous choral rendition of “When Mose with His Nose Leads the Band,” to which Tambo and Bones commenced to dance.

  Their capers began as a combination of cakewalk and (as the Padauers perceived) a mother-in-law dance of the type seen at Jewish weddings, but soon progressed to acrobatics bordering on the hyperkinetic. They were joined by other band members juggling their instruments and spinning dreidls that disappeared in multihued whirlwinds. Bedlam reigned onstage until a Lilliputian trumpeter blew some shrill notes on a spiraling ram’s horn, and the interlocutor reappeared with his winsome face scrubbed clean of burnt cork.

  “Ladies and mentschen,” announced the squeaky-voiced trumpeter, “we now present for your delectification the kindshaft phenomenum Master Splendido, hypnotist and animal magnet extry-ordinaire.”

  The minstrels performed another roistering walkaround, playing a march tempo version of “Nokh a gletzl vayn” while circumambulating their featured entertainer, before exiting through the sequined curtain. That left the audience to admire the comely boy who stood before them, having swapped the interlocutor’s tatterdemalion for a silk-lapeled coat whose tails swept the floor.

  As Mama Rose removed her hands from his ears, Benjy fidgeted in the face of all he beheld. Suffering their hijinks, he couldn’t help but gloat over the situation of his former brethren, who’d cast him out of their underground kingdom only to be cast out themselves by the aftermath of the quake. He could picture with relish the collapsed catacombs that sent them scrambling up into the province of mortals, where they were met with a flood that dispersed them even farther afield. Seeking a more hospitable environment, they had apparently forsaken their habitual meddling in the lives of the Jews to assume this ludicrous imposture on higher ground. But while he might take some satisfaction in their reversal of fortune, Benjy harbored no lasting resentment: they’d merely done to him what they’d done to generations of antiquated ogres; countless like him had been switched for rosier human types and left to soldier on as best they could in the upper atmosphere. But you could bet your second sight that few had found accommodations as favorable for a haimish ever after as were his with the Padauers. Even now, when forced to acknowledge his alien origin, they continued to treat him as their cosseted ward, and he regretted that the skimpy gifts he was able to give them were so unequal to the attentions he received in return.

  Now, however, he was in a position to give them the supremest gift imaginable: he could reintroduce them to their stolen child. It would be the greatest sacrifice a fake kid could make for his adoptive family. But the shretelekh were an essentially selfish breed, not known for a generosity of spirit, and the substitute Benjy, who couldn’t even recall his original name, had never supposed himself to be better than the rest.

  Meanwhile the callow headliner, Master Splendido, had invited volunteers from the audience to step onto the stage. Charmed by his cherubic face and piping voice, a goodly number accepted his invitation, the gents helping the ladies onto the platform where all took the chairs vacated by the minstrels. The volunteers were a largely youthful contingent in dinner jackets and cotton voile frocks, slightly lit and eager to participate in whatever frolic was requested of them. Master Splendido wasted no time in exploiting their receptiveness. He addressed the house, reeling off his credentials without a trace of the former mock dialect: “Ladies and gentlemen, I am Splendido, who was initiated into the mysteries by the stupefying sorcerers of Sfat …” The audience was as transfixed as they were amused, if only by the distinction between the child’s reedy voice and the inflated claims he made. The performer removed from a coat pocket the small tin figure of a grass-skirted African dancer and turned the key in her back. Then he held the shimmying doll at their eye level as he paced back and forth in front of the row of volunteers.

  “From this moment everything I say, no matter how stupid, will become your reality. But first, go to sleep …”

  At their table Rose and Morris Padauer were as spellbound as the volunteers, for they’d recognized the windup doll as the very twin of the one they’d replaced for the unshapely replacement of their kidnapped baby boy. Surely a coincidence, since it was as absurd to believe they could have begotten a Master Splendido as it was to think they’d spawned the little bogey seated between them. The boy onstage was nothing like the infant they’d lost—except for his fair hair and beryl blue eyes, the snub nose, the poppy petal mouth … Between them their surrogate child saw his guardians in the process of making a stupendous connection, dismissing it, then tentatively beginning to entertain it again. Benjy sucked his vestigial tooth: a reckoning, he understood, was at hand. The Padauers had perhaps only to declare themselves for a joyous reconciliation to unfold before the assembled, leaving the cast-off “peanut” hung out to dry.

  But thunderstruck as they were, Mama Rose and Morris remained seated lest they disrupt the proceedings—they were that cowed by their circumstances. It’s true that Mrs. Padauer had started up without thinking from her chair, but Morris, himself drained of color, restrained her with a hand to the wrist, saying, “Mama, we cooled already our heels this long …” Her full bosom aquiver, his wife resumed her seat; their reuniting could wait (could it not?) till after the show, though in the meantime both she and her husband might plotz from anticipation.

  Charged by the hypnotist to sleep the sleep of the guiltless, the row of volunteers had instantly slumped against one another like weary travelers in a station waiting room. Sauntering to the front of the stage, Splendido assured his rapt audience that the subjects were now entirely under his control. “I can change them any way I want,” he boasted. His voice, no longer merely beguiling, had acquired a touch of the petulance consistent with his age; it was a little chilling given the powers he laid claim to, and the cabaret patrons laid down their utensils, their dinners growing cold on their plates.

  “You, sir,” said the hypnotist, tapping the shoulder of a natty gentleman sleeper, who was jerked awake at the touch. “You were created by the echo of a voice from the black heaven and are now infested with demons.”

  Straightaway the young man tumbled from his chair, his lacquered hair losing its wave as he began to roll around the stage. Thrashing and flailing as if attempting to escape his own skin, he was heard to utter words in languages that (the hypnotist submitted) were conceived before the creation of Adam.

  Leaving the possessed gentleman to his loquacious seizure, Splendido began tapping the other volunteers. “You and you and you,” until all the rest were awakened, “are swine.”

  The lot of them lurched from their chairs and, negligent of their evening finery, began scrambling about the stage on all fours, grunting, snuffling, and rooting about as if for truffles. Readdressing the possessed man, the hypnotist proclaimed, “By the secrets I stole from a nest in the cosmic tree, I command the demons to flee through your left big toe.” The man was propelled into the air as if yanked by the foot in question before falling limply onto the boards. Then via some invisible transit, his demons seemed to have taken up residence in the swine, who emitted bloodcurdling squeals as they spilled from the stage and circulated among the tables. The audience snatched up dishes and bunched their skirts, craning their necks to watch the bewitched volunteers racing toward the surrounding parapets. They clambered onto the low walls, where they reared up on their hind legs, teetering perilously above the streets, until Master Splendido called out to them, “Be as you were!” At his direction they stepped backward from the walls as one and, uttering residual oinks, returned to the stage, where they resumed their chairs and again fell immediately asleep.

  Shaken by what they’d witnessed, the spectators dabbed their faces with napkins and murmured among themselves in a susurrus of hushed conversation. Onstage the hypnotist, having reawakened and dismissed his volunteers, doffed his high hat to take a bow. The applause was irresolute. “Mama,” whi
spered Morris a bit uncertainly, “it’s a rare little pisher we made,” but Mama Rose could barely nod her head to concur.

  Released from their trance, the volunteers, apparently amnesiac, looked perfectly composed as they took their places again at the candlelit tables. Their fellow patrons, however, regarded them suspiciously. Then Master Splendido began to move among them, menacing now despite his pink cheeks and dewy curls. In fact, most of the audience avoided making eye contact as he toddled past them, asking, “Who would like next to be transmogrificated?” Nor did he seem especially discouraged that no one was willing. When he’d strolled to the farthest tables, he paused beside the Padauers and smiled at them like, they felt, the breaking dawn. “Would you care to join me on the stage?” he asked warmly, and Rose and Morris squeezed hands under the table. Between them the pretend Benjy was acutely aware of their contact, and he cringed in his knowledge of what he believed they were thinking: they were thinking that the wonderful boy had recognized them as well, and was summoning them to a surprise reunion where all would be revealed; the audience would stand and cheer the happy occasion. Benjy’s heart (or whatever crabbed organ still pumped the green ichor through his calcified arteries) sank as he watched the half-pint sorcerer help his family to their feet—she in her frumpy tub frock and he in his shabby gabardine suit.

  Diffident but full of expectation and exchanging secret grins, Mr. and Mrs. Padauer trailed behind Master Splendido back onto the stage. There they stood looking tenderly at the Tom Thumb mesmerist, who had already removed the grass-skirted figurine from his pocket and turned the key. Despite his poor eyesight and distance from the stage, Benjy was nevertheless able to lip-read the word the volunteers were mouthing in unison: “Zuninkeh.” Darling son. But the doll had already begun to wiggle her hips and Splendido, an unkind expression distorting his pretty features, to utter his trance-inducing suggestions. Then, still sharing their inane grin, the Padauers sank into the chairs—all but two of which had been removed by pygmy assistants—and were sound asleep.