The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  For all that, the rebbe performed the ceremony with perfect solemnity and a minimum of rheumy suspiration. Then, postponing their honeymoon indefinitely, the retired wirewalker and the former scribe set up housekeeping together, and Muni became a merchant by default. While his uncle had died intestate (his remains consigned to thin air), no one thought to dispute the nephew’s right to proprietorship of the store. Besides, given Muni’s reluctance to adapt his inventory to the changing times, Pin’s General Merchandise never offered much in the way of competition. Not that anyone was getting rich. The economy at that time was a primitive affair, primarily dependent on a system of bartering, as the businesses had only just begun to replenish their coffers with coin of the realm. While most of the items exchanged on the street were fairly worthless, occasionally someone would bring in an object of value, something washed up in the receding floodwaters: a kiddish cup (found in Petrofsky’s cellar) that the prophet Jeremiah had hidden after the destruction of the Temple, a nutshell bearing a microscript attributed to an angelic hand … But there was of course nothing of equal market value to trade for such objects, which were seldom recognized as sacred in any event.

  The just-married Jenny Pinsker, if only to keep from looking back, threw herself into her labors upstairs and down, and in the tradition of the young Katie Pin before her, proved as able a business partner as a wife. It was she who kept the books and appeased the creditors; who prevailed upon her husband to either update his stock or else be relegated to some quaint relic of a notions emporium—advice that Muni, resistant to innovation, only acceded to in the face of threats. Jenny threatened at every setback to return to the circus, though in truth those years were becoming as unreal to her as Muni’s time as compulsive scribbler was to him. Moreover, her affection for her husband had seriously compromised her center of gravity, further impaired by the often unbearable arthritis that distressed her gimp leg. Old Doc Seligman, who was suspected in his hemorrhoidal dotage of abusing his own medicine chest, prescribed her various analgesic powders that she was given to chasing with a finger or two of peppermint schnapps. It was a habit she’d picked up in her travels. When Muni expressed concern, Jenny twitted him that “Der shikker is a goy,” and assured him it wasn’t in the nature of a Jewish daughter to become a drunk. Meanwhile she’d conceived a fascination for the insular little boy who occupied the former scriptorium and was after all an orphan like herself. She recited at his bedside the verses she recalled from the clown’s somber catalog until they’d faded from her memory, then fell back on trying to entertain him with tales of the big top. On occasion Muni might supplement her stories with his own account of walking to America from the Siberian wastes, an event you might have thought he’d completed only yesterday. More than the stuffed derma and brisket that the ever-solicitous Rosens incessantly plied the newlyweds with, it was the broken record of those stories on which they endeavored to nourish Tyrone.

  At least until Mrs. Rosen warned them, dripping sweat into the pot of soup she’d lugged up the stairs, “they going, the bubbeh mayses, to stunt the boy’s growth.”

  They deferred to her wisdom, though there was no telling how much of his guardians’ maunderings Tyrone had digested. His physical growth was normal at any rate, and while his emotional maturity may have lagged behind, growing up was not a priority in the Pinsker household. Moreover, Tyrone had found his way into his own cache of narrative, the one he’d been poring over since before he learned to read. It was almost as if his actual literacy had little to do with deciphering the ragged manuscript that Muni had abandoned in the former nursery.

  He attended to those pages with a sedulity not dissimilar from that with which the Shpinker Hasids read Torah—that is, when they weren’t out exhorting the street to read it as well. They circulated in the neighborhood like missionaries, admonishing all and sundry to forswear their getting and spending in favor of studying sacred texts; they should live in the Book rather than the fallen world. But the only book the merchants of North Main were interested in was the one that kept their accounts, which were more often than not in the red. The fanatics would have them meditating on the sacrifice of Isaac and the sack of Jerusalem, but the population of the Pinch was otherwise occupied with Mrs. Bluestein’s Mah-Jongg circle and the dance marathons Rabbi Lapidus had been pressured into hosting at the Menorah Institute. They were distracted by Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Flesh and the Devil at the Idle Hour Cinema and by Representative Eustace Butler’s attempt to introduce in the Tennessee House a bill outlawing gossip. They were troubled by the arrest of Tillie Alperin’s scandalous daughter, caught smuggling booze under her skirt into the Green Owl Café, and by the crash of the New York Stock Exchange. Though with respect to the headlines announcing that hard times had arrived, the North Main Streeters were likely to reply, “When wasn’t it hard times in the Pinch?” Then they might give one another a sidelong glance, as if subject to a phantom spasm of memory recalling a time no one would have characterized as exactly “hard.”

  Were Jenny and Muni happy? It wasn’t a question they would have bothered to ask, so absorbed were they in the specifics of their new life together. Had they stopped to take account of their situation, they might in fact have been surprised by the unqualified nature of their attachment. It was an affinity that depended on neither chemistry nor looks—Jenny was losing hers, and Muni, while trimmed and shaven in his commercial aspect, was never a beauty. Even touch was not essential to their alliance, though the occasional clip or pinch leading to a conjugal tumble remained a staple of their days. But at the heart of their union was a dogged devotion—enhanced by an unwritten contract to reduce the past to make-believe—that seemed to grow even as their energies flagged.

  Muni’s in particular were increasingly limited, his lungs having never been entirely defrosted of arctic rime. No amount of eruptive coughing could rid him of it, though he brought up a good deal of glutinous matter in his expectorations. Dr. Fruchter, whom the doddering Seligman’s patients had begun to consult, diagnosed consumption: “The Jewish disease,” he remarked somewhat smugly, a self-satisfied, musk-scented man; “a fine old tradition amongst our people.” (Muni allowed that he was not that keen on tradition.) Priding himself abreast of the latest treatments, Fruchter assured the couple that nothing short of a stint in an Adirondack “cure cottage” could delay Muni’s inevitable decline. There was naturally no question of the Pinskers amassing the funds for such a retreat; and besides, the climate and prescribed exposure to the elements sounded too much like the katorga to the onetime fugitive. Jenny nursed him on his bad days as best she could, despite being run off her feet with waiting on customers and attending to domestic chores. Owing to her schnapps and morphine cordials, however, she sometimes performed her duties in a sleepwalker’s fog: La Funambula become La Somnambula, as Mose Dlugach’s wisenheim sons observed. Like everyone in the Pinch, Jenny and Muni had made plans: they would salt away enough cash to buy a place—a house with a yard and a tree—in one of the better neighborhoods farther east, where the business would ultimately follow. But like everyone else they could never quite get a leg up. In time they relinquished their pipe dreams along with their neighbors, who pinned their hopes on their children and resigned themselves to dying in harness in the Pinch.

  Suspended awhile in the neighborhood, the process of aging was accelerated now as if to make up for its time in abeyance, and after a lengthy moratorium death had begun to visit North Main Street like a minor pestilence. Even the optimism of President Roosevelt’s inauguration speech did little to curb the incidence of mortality; people were passing away at a rate that seemed like retribution for having lived so long. Sparber the undertaker had become the most well-to-do man in the Pinch and arguably the most popular, since the funerals he arranged gave the community its best outlet for recreation. The bereaved would pile into the few available local vehicles and follow Sparber’s freshly waxed Phaeton hearse out to the Jewish cemeteries on the city’s periphery. Busine
sses would close for the day (as what business was there to lose?), and the burials would be followed by picnics under the elms. For the impoverished and unaffiliated, there were processions on foot to the nearby potter’s field. Since it was generally acknowledged that nobody among that immigrant generation left the Pinch other than in a pine box, a fond bon voyage was bade to those who managed to depart it in any fashion. There were even some so envious that, during the penitential prayer on the Day of Atonement (“Who by fire and who by water / Who by sword and who by wild beast …”), were heard to utter under their breath, “How about me?”

  As a consequence, Tillie Alperin’s departure from scrofula, Sam Alabaster’s from a fatty heart, and Mr. and Mrs. Elster’s from exposure to fumes after cleaning their carpet with carbon tetrachloride, were regarded by many as blessings in disguise. “It’s for the best,” some said when Milton Chafetz died of a stroke after reading his own obituary—a printing error—in the Hebrew Watchman; they said the same when Cantor Bielski perished from complications resulting from holding his bladder throughout a reading of the Megillah, and when Oyzer Tarnopol reputedly succumbed from spontaneous combustion. “He’s well out of it.” Thus was the street’s population eroded. Where there were no widowed spouses or sons and daughters to carry on the business, shops were repossessed by the bank and thereafter left vacant, so that the complexion of North Main took an even more derelict turn. The joke was that the earthly Pinch itself was done for and had ascended to a better place, where a heavenly version of the neighborhood rejoiced in a seller’s market.

  While the bond between husband and wife in their apartment above the general merchandise was strengthened by a shared affection for their charge, tasks and frequent ill health kept them often preoccupied. So the boy was left, as he had been much of his life, to his own amusements. Though they reminded themselves that he was a product of his peculiar origins, Tyrone remained a conundrum to his adoptive family. Not a bad-looking kid—his green eyes when wide open were beacons—he seemed to them as backward in comprehension as he was periodically possessed of a quick (if eccentric) intelligence. Though his limbs were well enough formed, he was stingy of movement and had small interest in playing outdoors with others. Which was a moot point in any case, since there were really no kids his own age to play with; and while the older ones refrained from bullying Tyrone, they tended to keep their distance, though whether from wariness or disdain who could say. He was an indifferent scholar at the Christine School (named for the late Miss Christine Reudelhuber), where nothing in the standard curriculum seemed to rouse his curiosity. Regarded as a queer fish by students and teachers alike, he was nevertheless tolerated for his inoffensive nature. He seemed for the most part imperturbable, even during the onset of adolescence, when his interest in the opposite sex was never seen to extend beyond a dispassionate appreciation of their limbs in motion. Though capable of expressing a measure of gratitude toward his guardians, it was only the perusal of Muni’s untended manuscript in the former nursery that truly engaged him.

  It should have been a forbidding proposition, construing those pages, even as the boy’s reading skills advanced in proficiency. Not only was the writing crabbed, the pages water damaged, smeared with food, and stained in their latter portion with gouts of blood, but the language itself often strayed from a pidgin English into Yiddish and back again. Latin characters were occasionally replaced by the hooks and hangers of Hebrew script. But for Tyrone, reared in a Pinch that everyone else seemed to have forgotten, the language was somehow no deterrent to his concentration. To watch him at his reading—his free hand waving as if in time to music, the fingers as if squeezing flesh—was to believe he had only to cast his eye over the text to feel he was present at the events it described: such as the moment the butcher Makowsky cracked a walnut with his teeth and released a nitzot, a spark of the divine, which set fire to his beard without consuming his face. You could imagine his acute identification with the bitterness of Pinchas Pin, who was unable to give his wife a child, and the joy when a child was born to the merchant’s Katie posthumously and precircumcised.

  There never appeared to be any special method to Tyrone’s reading: wherever he dipped into the narrative, that was a beginning and wherever he stopped was a terminus, since the events contained in Muni’s “book” seemed to be happening all at once. They were events that, for the boy, took precedence over anything that occurred beyond the Pinch—be it the kidnap of the Lindbergh baby or the institution of the Nuremberg Laws. When not immersed irretrievably in the book, Tyrone could be a more or less functioning foster son, though his obedience was a variable affair. Conscripted on occasion to help out in the store, he performed his assigned tasks—folding winter-weight underwear, stacking odorless galvanized iron commodes—with a benign inattention, scarcely noticing the comings and goings of customers. You’d have thought he viewed the store and the down-at-heel street, when he bothered to look, from a vantage outside time.

  Muni and Jenny were of course aware of Tyrone’s rapt attachment to that mishmash of untitled pages—the results of a bout of derangement the merchant had no desire to revisit—and it gave them cause for concern. For Muni there was a particular guilt, feeling as he did that his own former shut-in existence might be his legacy to the boy, who was on his way to becoming a reclusive young man. But neither husband nor wife had the heart to try and separate him from his ruling passion. Still it pained them that, except for school (where his attendance, they would learn, was sporadic) and the odd errand on which he was dispatched, Tyrone stuck so close to home. In fact, the older he got the less was he inclined to leave his tiny room, where he was occasionally seen doodling with Muni’s discarded pen on the backs of the unnumbered pages.

  “It ain’t healthy,” fretted the merchant to his wife, “that the kid’s all the time in the genizah,” which he’d taken to calling the nursery—a genizah being a place for the disposal of obsolete books and papers.

  Replied Jenny, “I think he took a look at being a grown-up, then decided to turn back.”

  Surely the boy must have been alert to the troubles that were rife in the household. But so what if his guardians suffered from their respective maladies, exacerbated by overwork; in the stories he read—and sometimes confused with the ones they’d told him—Muni and Jenny remained hale and blooming. If Muni suffered a massive hemorrhage that Dr. Fruchter was pleased to identify as “Rasmussen’s aneurysm,” Tyrone could still imagine his foster papa as a dirty-faced tyke, riding Getzel the belfer’s shoulders through the slushy streets of Blod on the way to Reb Death’s Head’s cheder. And if Jenny, due to the virulent effects of her paregoric cocktails, succumbed to a self-lacerating fit of itching, the boy could still see her swaying to her off-key lullabies; if she woke up screaming from a recurring nightmare in which she was strapped to the wheel of a paddleboat, he pictured her clogging on the back of a five-gaited black stallion.

  Muni remained bedridden with an unhopeful prognosis after his return from the hospital, and Jenny attended him despite her own chronic nightsweats and shallow breathing. (So sensitive had her skin become that she could bruise from the sound of the whistle at the coffee factory.) But even then Tyrone was not disturbed: the mutually diminished condition of the merchant and his wife had little to do with a past that held dominion over the here and now. Then, on a dove-gray morning in February, drowning in a deluge of bronchial bleeding, Muni Pinsker expired with a rosy bubble on his lips. “Moykhl” was the word his wife thought she heard when the bubble burst, meaning Sorry.

  “I can tell you’re sorry,” chided Jenny, who for an instant was back in the yard of Dlugach’s Secondhand having just rolled out of a carpet. Then she drained her teacup of the narcotic cordial that tasted of hemlock from the admixture of her tears.

  In their single-minded pursuit of commerce, husband and wife had neglected to pay dues to what remained of the local landsmanschaft; neither had they purchased burial insurance from the peg-legged little man who p
eddled policies in their shoddily reconstructed neighborhood. And while the community had always taken pride in caring for its own, lately their fiscal austerity made the citizens reluctant to absorb any extra expense. So Muni was interred in the municipal boneyard just beyond the culvert that had once been Catfish Bayou. It wasn’t an exclusively goyishe parcel, however, since a portion of hallowed ground had already received Yoyzef Zlotkin, the Widow Teitelbaum, and the honorable Eliakum ben Yahya (whose disciples made a saturnalian show of mourning, which they discharged themselves of in a day). The city provided transport for the casket that included a county official, a well-meaning functionary who took it upon himself to conduct a token memorial service. Told that the deceased was an immigrant, he went beyond the dictates of his office in extolling the loved one’s patriotic devotion to his adopted homeland. A marker was promised though none had yet to appear.

  Only a small cluster of neighbors showed up for the funeral. Among them were an aged but nicely turned-out Mama Rose and Morris Padauer, who’d lately moved into a house on Alabama Street. (The house was a gift from their undying son, Benjy, who ran a lucrative loan-sharking operation out of an office above the Green Owl Café.) Also in attendance was Hershel Tarnopol, displaying the chins and dignified paunch of his position as district ward heeler, his fur lapel still torn in tribute to the recent demise of his father. Supported at either arm by the Rosens, Jenny looked as if disfigured by grief, her abdomen so distended from noxious fluids that some wondered if, despite her years, she was big with child. Dismissing the poor turnout, the widow assured the assembled, “It don’t matter where they put his bones,” since his soul was tucked safely away like a pressed posy among the pages in his young charge’s possession. And no one would try to wrest those pages from Tyrone.