The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  A few readers, when they discovered that both the Book Asylum and its young proprietor were extant, sought them out. At first Lenny had welcomed the pilgrims; the book’s notoriety (and the capital it generated) had helped to assuage his lingering guilt, and he was willing now to bask a bit in its reflected glory. But for their part the visitors were unable to hide their disappointment on meeting the book dealer in person: an unprepossessing, thickly bespectacled guy growing a paunch and bookish in the extreme, with no hint of the restless miscreant from the text. Ultimately Lenny would have them to know that the letdown was mutual.

  Another consequence of the book’s growing popularity was a renewed interest in the geographic Pinch (which few Memphians had ever even heard of) as a historical site. The curious began to visit it, looking for traces of the old ghetto community from Muni’s tales. Most, finding mainly ruins, passed on, but a handful of young artists, imbued with nostalgia for a place they’d known only in print, took advantage of the cheap real estate; they purchased loft space to convert into studios in an old coffee factory that had so far been spared the wrecking ball. Soon after, a coterie of utopian-minded friends, for whom The Pinch had become a kind of holy book, pooled their resources to make a down payment on one of the few remaining tenements on North Main. They lived there as a collective, renovating the apartments upstairs and opening a crafts shop on the ground floor. In the shop, along with feather earrings, macraméé bracelets, and scented candles, they sold—in a nod toward an “oriental” theme—homemade hamantashen and chocolate Hanukkah gelt. Thanks to a growing host of Pinch-inspired tourists, the shop prospered, its success spurring another young entrepreneur to open a tavern in a face-lifted building across the way. In deference to the spirit of place he served draft beer from a samovar.

  This vest-pocket commercial revival lured more foot traffic into the area, people milling about the sidewalks as if waiting impatiently for the further transformation of the street. Their presence attracted the notice of a group of progressive local investors, who became interested in redeveloping the district on an enterprising scale. They formed a consortium and submitted an ambitious plan to the city for construction of a number of edifices along both sides of North Main. Included in the plan was a self-imposed provision that the design of the new buildings—which would house an assortment of businesses and apartments—conform to the architecture of the original structures, thus preserving the flavor of the turn-of-the-century neighborhood. Newspapers and city fathers applauded the North Main Street Renaissance, as the development was called, and businesses jockeyed for a spot in what they now perceived as a prime location. When the ribbon was cut at the quarter’s inauguration, the public, like runners at the start of a race, bolted into a street lined with retail attractions. Alongside the boutiques and period cafés (one called unavoidably Catfish Bayou) there were traditional artisans’ shops, where visitors could observe cobblers, cigar rollers, pretzel bakers, and bespoke tailors at work on antique sewing machines. There was even a quality delicatessen with the gilt inscription in the window, though there was of course no kosher fare on the menu.

  Residents of the luxury apartments above the shops enjoyed a relaxed urban lifestyle in an appealing if somewhat artificial environment, a secure community of like-minded affluent types; this at a time when the rest of the city, as viewed from the rarefied vantage of the Pinch, still wallowed in a swamp of ignorance and rising crime. It’s true that the street’s advance-guard pioneers—the loft dwellers and tchotchke-mongers—were eventually priced out of the gentrified neighborhood; but there remained enough of a bohemian-inflected atmosphere to ensure North Main’s continuance as a fashionable destination for citizens and tourists alike. Nor did the new Pinch forget its debt to the Old World milieu that had fostered its revitalization in the first place. The vestibules of several condominiums were decorated with murals displaying large-scale reproductions of the paintings of Tyrone Pin. (These included mildly sentimentalized versions of the inverted oak, lit like a menorah and hung with fiends and earlocked children in beanies riding rafts like giant afikomens.) The paintings themselves, enhanced by the legend of the mad artist, now fetched princely sums. The proceeds from their sales were placed in a trust established by Leonard Sklarew through the connivance of his attorney, Philly Sacharin. As executive officer of the Tyrone Pin Trust (“Pin money,” its recipients called it), Mr. Sklarew, flush from the thirteenth printing of The Pinch, could allocate the funds as he saw fit. Needless to say, he made certain that the artist, himself unaware of his success and protected from curiosity seekers by the staff at his facility, would be well looked after until his death. Then there were donations to pet charities and causes, plus an endowment (supplemented by a memorial concert) that allowed the B’nai B’rith Home for the Aged to break ground for a lavish new Elder Lincoln Wing.

  Perhaps the crowning element of the North Main Street Renaissance was the construction of a streetcar line, which stretched from the Pinch along Main Street proper as far as the refurbished Central Station on South Main. The new trolley had an old-fashioned character, featuring heritage-style wooden cars with reversible mahogany seats and brass handles. Along its route once-vacant commercial premises began to reopen, their tenants including famous-name chain stores, gourmet markets, chic bistros, and wine bars. The mercantile fervor that had infected North Main and its contiguous district also reawakened the dust of Beale Street, which began again, Lazarus-like, to show signs of life. In time its vintage restoration became the hub of the city’s musical nightlife, and downtown Memphis, risen from its longtime repose, flourished like never before.

  17

  Envoi

  I woke up in the hospital under a morass of memories I thought had been lost forever. Wishful thinking, I guess. They must have been dislodged from whatever wrinkle in the brain they were stuck in when I was hit on the head, then—after I was launched full-throttle into a solid brick wall—released altogether. Memories of wanting and misspent time, they weighed on me; disappointments crushed my ribs, pinched my left leg, stung me like hornets in every joint, to say nothing of the pain in my aching head. They left me defenseless to the clinical invasions of the hospital staff, defenseless as well when, from behind the privacy curtain surrounding my bed, the female person I recalled as my sometime girlfriend, Rachel Ostrofsky, stepped forth.

  She was wearing her black boots and blue raincoat, a Spanish-fan barrette like an unfolding wing pinning back one side of her shimmery hair. Her expression was full of a solicitude I expected to dissolve along with her physicality. But morphine pump notwithstanding, it seemed she was no hallucination. Her glow was so palpable I wanted never to traffic in hallucination again.

  “You’re a memory come alive,” I heard myself mutter.

  “Kafka?” came a voice from in back of Rachel. “The quote is from Kafka, am I right?”

  The voice belonged, after he’d edged to her side—natty in his navy blazer and the woodpecker’s crest of his strawberry hair—to the diminutive party who’d decked me an age ago in the 348. I remembered (what didn’t I remember?) that he was a law student and could be an even smarter aleck than me. I remembered also that Rachel had once referred to him as her fiancé, though who even used that word anymore?

  “We thought we’d find you hounded by reporters,” she said, with the breezy air of somebody trying to put a good face on a strained situation. Nor did her “we” escape my attention.

  They stood over my bed, Rachel and her companion (Dennis, wasn’t it?), observing me like they might have a child they thought cute despite (or because of) its deformity. In one hand Rachel held a bouquet of purple flowers, in the other a newspaper. The paper was folded to a page displaying a grainy black-and-white photo, which she waved under my nose like smelling salts. “I started phoning hospitals the minute I saw it,” she said, pooching a lip in token of how much the image had disturbed her. I extended a hand to still her wrist and felt her blench at my touch. It was an alternative pape
r, a hippie rag, and the photograph was of poor quality and a bit out of focus. But you could make out clearly enough, amid the chaos of the panicked crowd and the club-swinging cops, a frizzy-haired white guy collapsed in the gutter near a fallen Negro with a bloody head. It took me a studious second to recognize the victims of what the paper called “needless brutality.”

  I shut my eyes until the awful pressure in my chest was a little relieved. When I opened them Rachel was calling to a passing nurse to please bring her a vase for the flowers. The sharp-featured nurse fairly snarled as if to imply that her job description did not include responding to imperious requests.

  There followed an awkward silence during which I wondered what Rachel had told Dennis about me. Whatever it was, his smug expression suggested he’d made his peace with it; I could only guess at the terms of the treaty. The nurse returned to hand Rachel, uncordially, a small water-filled Mason jar. Rachel placed the flowers in the jar, which was too shallow for their long stems and tipped over as soon as she set it on the nightstand.

  “You shouldn’t have,” I said.

  When she went to fetch a towel, Dennis scooted closer to the bed to ask, “Are you in pain?” the way a torturer inquires of his victim on the rack. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of answering in the affirmative, but I suppose he could tell from my squinched brow that I was hurting, because he grinned; though he resumed his masquerade of compassion on Rachel’s return. Squatting beside the bed to wipe up the spill, she made small talk, talk so trivial, in fact, that it was hardly worth replying to: she hoped I’d recover soon from my injuries, praised me for taking part in the march …

  “I was only sightseeing,” I assured her, suspecting that she continued to wipe the floor in order to avoid having to get to her feet and face me. “I had no business there.”

  Finally standing again, Rachel countered, “I disagree,” though she might have mustered a little more conviction. She added for good measure that my participation in the march was plainly heroic. “Quixotic,” inserted Dennis, his tone suggesting that the cause was lost all along: case closed.

  It was then I felt the tears beginning to well up from some sulfurous source deep in my bowels. They’d always been my special brand of incontinence, the tears, and I bit my lip to try and hold them back, but the words that escaped my mouth gave me away.

  “Rachel, what about us?”

  She looked downright horror-struck before the pity set in. But rather than succumb to it, she straightened her spine and chose that moment to drop her bombshell. Ignoring the question that still hung in the astringent air, she stated with a forced informality, “Dennis and I have set a date.” It was to be a midsummer wedding, a small interfaith affair with a rabbi and a priest, for which they’d already chosen an ideal location on the river bluff. “We’d be pleased if you came,” she said disingenuously, while next to her Dennis bared his barracuda grin.

  I was restrained by traction, catheter, and IV tube from inflicting further injury to my person. Murder and betrayal are the whole of the law, I concluded as I lay there bereft of speech. The monitor tangled in cords beside my bed blinked and whirred as if some jackpot had been struck: it was the signal for another pair of visitors to make their unannounced appearance from behind the curtain. This is your life, I thought.

  Rachel and Dennis donned tepid smiles to greet them: the middle-aged man and woman shaking their heads in unison at the foot of the bed. “Oh, Lenny,” lamented the gentleman, and heaved a ten-pound sigh. His eyes behind his library-frame glasses were puffy, his nose porous and pickle-shaped like my own; the receding tide of his crinkly hair left behind it a littoral of wrinkled pink brow. Foursquare in a madras sport coat, he was holding, like the tail of a fish past its prime, the same hippie paper (the Glass Onion) Rachel had brought with her. “Lennylenny.” His sigh was seconded by the woman beside him, her attitude of condolence as subverted by her tangerine pantsuit as was his by the plaid sport coat. So far they’d refrained from advancing any closer, for which I was thankful, since the distance aided me in my effort not to recognize them.

  “So Lenny,” the man ventured at length, “how do you feel?”

  Rachel had thoughtfully worked some mechanism that caused the bedstead to raise me nearer to a sitting position. “Never better,” I managed, which was apparently the wrong answer, because the man practically barked, “Just what did you think you were doing down there?”

  “Myron,” cautioned his companion with a hand to his sleeve, but no sooner did she quiet him down than she too started in on me. “Aren’t you even a little ashamed?” A neon vein pulsing at her throat.

  From the bottom of my heart I admitted, “I’m a lot ashamed,” but their still-nettled demeanor implied that they didn’t believe me.

  At that point Dennis cleared his throat and took a step in their direction, offering his glad hand by way of cutting the tension, and making conspicuous my failure to provide introductions. “I’m Dennis Kavanaugh,” he said, confident of the good impression he made on his elders. “And this is Rachel,” placing an arm around her waist, “my fiancée.” Whereupon the newcomers reflexively adopted a civil manner. The sport coat introduced himself as Myron Sklarew, the patient’s father, and cranked Dennis’s hand heartily in return. “I’m Mrs. Sklarew,” submitted his pantsuited spouse, “Lenny’s mom,” smiling sweetly as she pinched the tips of Dennis’s fingers.

  The law student launched without preamble into chatty conversation. Assuming common cause, he employed his best forensic vocabulary in describing the inconvenient position the garbage strike had placed the city in. Rachel, to her credit, kept mum, perhaps remorseful at having savaged my last article of faith with her announcement. Then, as it looked like Dennis and my putative father might be on the verge of bonding over their mutual contempt for the poor, she gently touched the arm of her intended; she reminded him they’d been about to depart. “We have a prior engagement?” Dennis looked at her as if this was news to him but acquiesced to her resolute features.

  She turned to me before leaving to mention something about how the B’nai B’rith Home had assumed power of attorney over the estate of Tyrone Pin, some of whose paintings now sold for upwards of …, but I was no longer listening. Then she reached across the nightstand to give my hand a squeeze. Maybe it was a tender squeeze, fraught with the pathos of unrealized desire, but to me it felt perfunctory, the way an arthritic squeezes a rubber bulb.

  I wanted to tell her I’d never wash my hand again but couldn’t even summon that much spleen.

  As soon as they were gone the alleged Myron Sklarew, somewhat placated, informed me, “I phoned Kenny Kurtz down at the Commercial—he owes me, Kenny—and asked him to call off his dogs. Otherwise you’d have been swarmed by journalists wanting the scoop on the only white face in that mob of schwartzes.”

  I thanked him.

  “He told me nobody had yet identified you and we agreed it should stay that way.”

  Then his wife chimed in. “It’s bad enough our own rabbi has to get involved with those”—she choked down the ill-bred language on the tip of her tongue—“but you Lenny, what did that mess have to do with you?”

  “Nothing,” I conceded.

  There was a silence during which they put on their concerned faces once again and I thought I knew what was coming. They were about to relent and invite me to come back home, all was forgiven, and for a weak moment I thought I might cave in to their appeal. After all, they hadn’t been such bad parents, just clueless like everyone else: add denying them to the list of things I was ashamed of. But instead of flinging wide his arms, Myron gave a nod to his wife who copied the nod with righteous chins and withdrew a letter from her purse. Her husband took the letter from her hand and stepped forward to give it to me. The return address on the envelope—County Draft Board 480, Shelby County Federal Building, Suite 369—said it all. Seeing that I made no move to open it, he leaned over and tore it open for me, bending my fingers until they pincered the p
age bearing its official stamp:

  GREETINGS FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

  It seemed I was being ordered to report for conscription into the Armed Forces of the United States of America. I was given a specific time to appear for a physical examination that would precede my immediate induction into the military.

  “We spoke to the doctor,” said Myron. What doctor? I’d been visited so far only by interns, who glanced at my chart, then at me, as if to verify they made a match before briskly walking away. “He says you should be shipshape in a matter of weeks. Plenty of time to heal before,” glancing at the letter, “your call-up date.”

  Then he took a paternal tone, which my presumptive mother complemented with an expression that risked creasing her cosmetic mask. “Do the right thing, son,” placing a hand on my scarified arm, “and we’ll be proud of you.” Don’t, he didn’t have to tell me, and you’re nothing to us.

  Gazing up at them from my procrustean bed, I replied, “Who did you say you were?”

  I waited for the next round of visitors to appear from behind the curtain and bring me some fresh mortification: the living had had their turn, so how about the dead? Where was the ghost of Elder Lincoln come to demand I wreak vengeance on his killers? Where was Avrom—though I didn’t yet know he was gone, his casket conveyed by pallbearers dispatched from the Shelby County Penal Farm—where was he, my old boss, come forward to dump a steaming burden of fate in my lap? But nobody else arrived, the world was scoured of ghosts, and the tears that once flowed so easily were as dried up as Rachel’s flowers dying of thirst on the nightstand.