The Pinch (17 page)

“Jenny,” said Muni who needed her compliance, “we’re having fun, no?”

“You,” replied Jenny with feigned irritation, all the while manning her stilts like a natural extension of her legs, minus the limp, “you wouldn’t know fun if it bit your hiney. Anyhow, after a flood doesn’t usually come cholera and dysentery? So how is it we got instead a seagoing jamboree?”

Indeed, some of the neighbors navigating the channel could be heard shouting to one another in half-baked nautical terms. They cursed like sailors as they slung more bags atop the pillowcase parapet, behaving in their newfound swagger as prodigally as their offspring, whose summer vacation from school was now indefinitely extended. Some of the children, having captured the rebbe’s headless golem, were using its hollow corpus as a flotation device, though it continued to show signs of a twitching animation. Others gawked at the play of their reflections in the shop windows, which had acquired irregular features such as halos and donkey heads. In his exuberance Muni took the liberty of nibbling Jenny’s ear, prompting laughter that resulted in a dangerous wobbling. Self-conscious, he looked about to see who might have observed them, though a couple canoodling on stilts above standing water scarcely constituted a special attraction on such a morning.

They had taken a turn around the lagoon and arrived back at the entrance to Pin’s General Merchandise. There Muni slid down the twin poles onto the rampart, picked the splinters from his palms, and waded into the broth that engulfed the store. Above him Jenny abandoned the stilts to step through an upstairs window. Inside, Uncle Pinchas, pants rolled to the knees, was bailing water with a brass cuspidor. He seemed to be making headway, since the previously boggy depth was diminished to a shallow sludge.

“Nu, Uncle,” said Muni, but Pinchas scarcely acknowledged him. He tried again with a jovial Old Country greeting, “Uncle Pinchas, how fares a Yid?”

Pinchas paused in his activity to give his nephew a look through moisture-beaded spectacles. Apparently satisfied that the young man was as addled as the rest of his community, he said with a grim defiance, “How do you think?”

Muni took in the bowed walls and blistered counters already smutted with fungus, the warped glove cases and scrap albums fat with scalloped pages the proprietor was trying to flatten with C-clamps. Few commodities remained unspoiled: the dry goods were drenched, sacks of spuds sending runner-like eyes through their burlap—though (Muni found himself thinking) wasn’t a ravaged business finally incidental in the scheme of things? Why did his uncle seem so resistant to the general levity? Pinchas had exchanged the cuspidor for a box of lumpy corn starch, which he began sprinkling over his dripping inventory as a de-humidifyi ng agent. Muni gently grasped the arm that shook the box. “So, Uncle,” he said, “explain me again what happened.” For hadn’t he always relied on Pinchas to make sense of this singular neighborhood? And perhaps in explaining, his uncle would snap out of his mood.

“What can I tell you?” he said. “The Pinch is the place where things that don’t happen, happen. So maybe what happened, it ain’t exactly takink place.”

Which hardly qualified as an answer. When Muni continued to gaze at him expectantly, Pinchas sighed and said, “Come upstairs.”

Over weak tea at the kitchen table Pinchas gave his nephew a further account of the pernicious kibitzing of Rabbi ben Yahya and his zealots. “The Shpinkers, they don’t know from ruination and revelation the difference. They starve themselves and make their mikvah in ice water; flog themselves bloody and twist like pretzels their joints when they worship. They dress up in French underwear the holy scrolls and pray like demons in heat until what’s above spins out from its axis and collides with below.” He bumped his chafed knuckles together in illustration. “Then comes the cataclyzz: the earth opens and out pours the creatures from superstition, and time don’t flow anymore but sits still like a stagnant sump. This they call mashiach tseyt, Messiah time, which it will herald Messiah himself. Everything is prepared for his coming. That’s what they believe, the meshuggeners.”

“But what do
you
believe, Uncle?” asked Muni.

Pinchas removed his spectacles, squeezed the hump at the bridge of his nose. “I believe my Katie is ill.”

It was then that Jenny entered from the bedroom damp-eyed and distraught.

“I called in Doc Seligman,” continued Pinchas. “He didn’t even need to look at her; he knows already she’s sick. I’m crying hospital, but the doc says, ‘
You
tell her; to me she don’t listen.’ Anyway, he says, she’s better off now at home. What she’s got, a hospital can’t cure it.”

Muni asked if his uncle had sought a “second opinion,” a phrase he’d heard bandied about.

“I got already from Seligman a second opinion, and a third.”

It made a kind of cloudy sense that the hospital had been ruled out, now that the Pinch had become an essentially isolated province, but why had Pinchas so readily accepted Katie’s condition? “But Uncle,” his nephew protested, though before he could press the issue further, he was distracted by Jenny, who, standing at his shoulder, had begun softly to sob. Muni turned to her, perplexed, since this drama surrounding his aunt seemed so fundamentally out of tone with the character of a burnished new world.

Still he made a point of visiting his bedridden aunt. Her hair, bleached of its carroty essence, was the gray of rain-washed shingles, her pallid flesh interlaced with blue veins like marble. Her eyes, with their gas-green flame virtually extinguished, were a milky opalescence. Seeming embarrassed by the depredations of her accelerated aging and the cloying odor she exuded, Katie nevertheless rallied the strength to tease him with the neighborhood gossip.

“Nephew and Jenny sitting in a tree,” she intoned, “k-i-s-s …,” the letters dissipating in a throaty aspiration.

Unpleasant as it was, Muni was grateful that she gave him an audience, since almost all others, Pinchas included, were forbidden to enter the sickroom.

“Seligman says Katie is with me a shlecht vayb, a shrew, so that I won’t miss her when she’s gone,” confided Pinchas from the kitchen chair that had become the seat of his distress. “But I know better.”

“What do you know, Uncle?” asked Muni, who could barely stand to linger indoors while outside the people carried on like skylarkers in Eden. He was hardly paying attention when Pinchas replied, “I know that she punishes me.”

This gave his nephew pause. “Beg pardon,” he respectfully submitted, uneasy to find himself gainsaying his uncle, “but isn’t it Aunt Katie that’s the victim?”

“She punishes me,” continued Pinchas, oblivious of Muni’s challenge, “because I’m not anymore with her a man.” It wasn’t a confession that Muni would have invited, but his uncle wasn’t done. “What’s the point if we can’t make together a baby?”

That the couple were well past their childbearing years seemed the least of what was wrong with Pinchas’s argument. “I don’t think that from spite nobody dies,” Muni offered with a great lump in his throat.

“You tell that to my Katie,” called Pinchas, for his nephew, who’d heard all he could bear to, was already halfway down the stairs.

Dr. Seligman came and went with his syringes and gentian blue vials, and Jenny was also much in attendance. She brought herbal infusions from the Widow Teitelbaum and soups from Mrs. Rosen, which the patient seldom touched. (The deli was operating out of the Rosens’ upstairs kitchen, Mrs. Rosen lowering baskets of borscht and sandwiches into the passing boats from her fire escape.) When Pinchas poked his head into the bedroom, however, Katie spat a string of Irish curses until he withdrew, though he hung on in the doorway suffering her abuse like a warm spring shower.

But despite his aunt’s progressive emaciation Muni still couldn’t find it in himself to feel sorry for her. This, he knew, was unconscionable: she was after all the wife of the man who’d rescued him from affliction, and didn’t he venerate her gentle person as well? Hadn’t they both been in his eyes—that is, until his uncle disabused him—the very model of domestic harmony? But the giddy climate of North Main Street was unfavorable to your common-variety pity; it was an atmosphere that argued against even the remorse you might feel for not feeling pity. And anyway Muni thought his aunt was beautiful in her languishing: wasting away became her like a cameo on an ageless sepulcher.

That’s how things stood in the old neighborhood: nobody and nothing was so base or inessential that they lacked some aspect of the sublime. Every gesture, from scrounging for foodstuffs to caulking rust buckets and emptying water closets with a sieve, seemed to take its place in the grand narrative. Viewing the scuttled street from an upstairs window, Muni would recall the concept of neshomah yeterah, the bonus soul the faithful are granted on Friday nights. He remembered how, back in his childhood cheder in Blod, even their sadistic old melammed would wax rhapsodic when speaking of Shabbos: how the Sabbath was a palace in time whose architecture contained both the immemorial past and the promised future. Now the Pinch seemed to occupy a perpetual Sabbath that encompassed a past as distant as Muni’s childhood and then some. Every action echoed a chiddush nifla (Muni remembered the phrase), some wondrous event.

Every ladder was a type of Jacob’s Ladder; every mired but still spinning bicycle wheel—a rainbow in its spokes—was a version of the wheel Ezekiel saw. The flood was a reprise of the Flood. During sanguine sunsets the canal of North Main Street became the River Sambatyon, beyond which dwelled the lost tribes of Israel. When Tillie Alperin’s little Esther burned her tongue on a hot knish, Isaiah’s lips were seared again by the angel’s lump of coal. Jakie Belz proudly presented his soiled linen as evidence that he’d been visited in the night by the demoness Lilith. Every gas pipe, base burner, and bedpan contained a trapped soul demanding release. Ike Petrofsky complained (or was he boasting?) of having to wade through several past lives in the morning in order to get back to the here and now—“And tomorrow I can step if I want into today.”

Muni supposed he might also get around to recognizing a future that infiltrated the present at every turn, but there was no rush. For the time being he was captivated by current events that were themselves still encrusted with the past, his own and others’. Memories once too painful to revive—of prison and the katorga and the hopeful time before—seemed as if refined into luminous tintypes in the alchemical air. When he’d read them as a child in cheder, the stories of the Torah were converted before his eyes into tangible experience. Now, though he was blindsided by the prospect, Muni’s experience of the Pinch seemed to clamor for a translation back into text. He remembered how the tales from holy writ, conveyed through the medium of Hebrew characters, could filter the grayest shtetl light into a Joseph’s coat of colors; so how much brighter would words make a light that was already resplendent. The neighborhood was tohu v’bohu, a mishmash of stories that needed only some designated scribe to apprehend and record them for all time.

“Somebody ought to write it all down,” Muni told Jenny one evening, when they were huddled together among the Medusa’s hair roots of the inverted oak.

Her reply was a suggestion she would regret till her dying day: “So why don’t you already?”

They had picked up their affair of the heart more or less where they’d left off before the quake. Of course the entire community was now stricken with a kind of pandemic infatuation, a free-floating euphoria that perhaps lent spice to the lovers’ feelings; though a gleeful Muni preferred to think it was the other way around: his passion for Jenny had enlivened the whole neighborhood. But whereas his spirits were practically lighter than air, Jenny, whose medium had been thin air itself, seemed to keep at least one foot on the ground. She almost resented that their affair was nothing special in a place where
everything
was special, and she worried about Katie Pin. She even admitted to feeling some guilt over being happy while Katie lay at death’s door. “It isn’t nice to be romantic under her nose,” she cautioned, sensing that their amorousness may have served to aggravate Katie’s lamentable state. Muni couldn’t have disagreed more.

“Does her good, I think, to see young people in love,” he insisted, unable to understand Jenny’s reservations.

Then one night in the tree, in a burst of spontaneous sentiment, he’d confessed to a youthful folly.

He was gazing at her barefoot countenance, her slender form in an embroidered smock backlit by a red-orange dusk that caused the twisted roots to do a fair impression of a burning bush. Other couples occupied those wavering boughs as well, flirting with each other more boldly than they’d have dared on dry land, dry land having become a scarce commodity. Above them Muni also caught sight of an ill-shaped little entity in a brass hat, which, when he squinted to sharpen his focus, was gone. A grin wreathed his face as he wondered if all this immoderate gladness was merely a function of his desire for Jenny.

“You know,” he was suddenly moved to confide in her, “I used to make poems.” There was one he remembered—remembered for the first time in an age—about the prophet Samuel in a foul mood after being recalled from death by the Witch of Endor; there was another about the sheydim, the elementals, who wove elflocks into Samson’s beeswaxed hair …

“And now you make what?” mused the girl, tickling his middle with an uplifted toe. “Whoopee?”

But instead of divulging another memory, as her touch had routinely prompted, Muni swatted away her foot like a housefly. “Be for a moment serious,” he scolded, shocked at his own thin-skinned response. But he was not done mulling over his recollection of the poems, which were admittedly callow and immature though not without a certain … he searched for the word.

The girl had screwed up her face and crossed her eyes in a burlesque of seriousness, defusing Muni’s mood. “We are not by you amused,” he pronounced, his peevishness already dissolved into parody.

“Okey-doke,” said Jenny, still playing along, commencing as if to climb down. “Drop me a line when you get a chance.”