The Pinch (22 page)

I thought their reaction unworthy of them. Where was the sympathy for their benefactor? Certainly Lamar had his idiosyncrasies, not the least of which was his sartorial pride in his antebellum heritage and penchant for adolescent flesh, but his largess toward the band and their outlandish projects had been princely. How could they be so unmoved? Of course, if I were honest I’d have had to admit to being almost as heartless: I was more worried about the threat to my livelihood and tenancy than I was about my landlord’s incarceration. What did I really care about drug traffickers or maverick musicians, or for that matter garbagemen and foreign wars—when what I wanted most at that moment (peace, Rachel) was to get back to the book I’d left in my apartment, which I figured was still too risky to return to that night?

Knackered from the long evening, I went nosing about that funhouse looking for a place to crash. In most rooms, including the hallways, the sleeping bags wriggled from the bodies twining inside them like chrysalises about to hatch. Stepping over them, I eventually discovered at the dark end of the house a small conservatory, its walls and ceiling composed of weather-scored quartz glass panes. On one of the panes was a large orange thumbprint that I assumed was the moon. I settled into a canvas deck chair amid a jungle of unlawful plants and luxuriant ferns, squinting through them toward the vanished civilization I was homesick for.

In the morning I took a bus back downtown. The shop reeked of geriatric must, Avrom breathing like an accordion, hacking up unsightly matter into his Luzianne coffee tin. His color was the yellow of the skim on hollandaise. When I suggested he call Doc Fruchter, a Pinch alumnus who still made house calls, he told me, “A calamity in your navel.” His curses often more riddle than sting. Still he ran me ragged with fetching the nostrums that the old quack had prescribed him and shelving the termite-bored library of a recently deceased entomologist. So it wasn’t until my lunch break that I managed to get to a phone booth. I called the office of Lamar’s attorney, Bernie “the Mouthpiece” Rappaport, and asked how things stood with my landlord. I braced myself to hear I didn’t know what: he’d been tortured, electrodes applied to his genitals until he named names. For all I knew I was a marked man.

“He won’t let me put up his bail,” said Bernie, sounding insulted. I’d met the lawyer once at the 348, a baggy little man with a threadbare comb-over dressed in discordant plaids. His only concession to the unconventional lifestyle of the clients he tended to represent was a pair of rufous muttonchops.

“What’s that?”

“He advised me against posting his bond.” I thought I could smell his cheap aftershave through the phone. “He wants to stay in stir.”

“Why, forgodsakes?”

“Let’s just say there are people on the outside who pose more of a threat to him than the courts.”

I knew that Lamar’s finances were in disarray, that he purchased his stuff from nefarious sources, but he’d made such a haven of 348 North Main Street, to say nothing of his lavish suite at the Peabody, that I thought of him as untouchable. Besides, there was his thoroughbred family who for all I knew still held slaves. Couldn’t their influence be brought to bear?

“You didn’t hear they already disowned him, their disgraced scion? They’re the type of family that got scions.”

I wondered where his imminent trial and conviction would leave me.

Late that afternoon I returned to the scene of the previous night’s flight. It was a somber slate-gray homecoming, North Main Street more deserted than usual, barren of its lately invasive long ago. The bar was padlocked, a hand-scrawled placard in the window reading
Closed Til Further Notice By Order of the Oinks
; the neon numbers above the door were extinguished, perhaps forever. What’s more, there was a barge-sized aqua sedan parked across the street in front of my building, containing no doubt a plainclothes cop waiting to apprehend me. Then I remembered that the vehicle was Rachel’s own rust-trimmed Buick Brontosaur, and the face in the driver’s-side window, once she’d unrolled it, was the girl herself. Disheveled and dog-weary from sleeplessness, I nevertheless felt my whole countenance distorted by an imbecile grin. As I approached the car she got out and smiled as well, though inscrutably.

“I’ve been asking some of my informants about Tyrone,” she began without preamble, infuriatingly matter-of-fact. “Seems there were a couple of years after the war when he was—what did they call him?—the shtot meshuggener, a kind of village idiot. He was everybody’s pet, harmless until he began trying to harm himself.” That’s when the street intervened to have him committed to Bolivar. But now the old Pinch survivors, themselves living in a luxury often subsidized by their comfortable children (it seemed they hadn’t all died “over there”), were in a position to help improve the artist’s situation. With Rachel’s prompting they might be willing to bring his plight to the attention of their respective synagogues: contributions could be made and funds raised to transfer him to the relative serenity of the B’nai B’rith Home, a well-endowed facility under the hawthorns across from Overton Park.

Oh, she was a pretty girl. She was wearing a short patchwork skirt and her perennial leather boots, a Navajo poncho with the hood thrown back. Her hair was woven in plaits like military braids. Every time I saw her she seemed to have graduated to some new stage of bohemianism. Could this be my influence?

“How long have you been waiting for me?” I asked, wishing for:
All my life.

“I just arrived,” she replied, looking confused by my obvious disappointment.

Then pretending it was only natural to do so, I invited her upstairs, and she followed as if custom dictated. My heart sank when I found the door to my apartment ajar, then remembered that I never bothered to lock it; I likewise balked at discovering that the place had been ransacked until I recalled that trashed was its normal condition. Once we’d entered I was acutely aware that Rachel Ostrofsky stood again in my drafty flat with its rancid odor for no other reason than I had asked her to. She seemed as awkward with this knowledge as I was, and for an immeasurable moment we could neither of us think of anything to say. I offered her the single chair, a rickety rattan job I’d scavenged from an abandoned toolshed strangled by creepers. Cautiously sitting, she crossed her shapely legs, which enflamed me all the more for the unshaven fuzz on her shins. Did I love her? I confess that she oscillated in my brain between the unassailable idea of her and the warm and fallible thing herself; though this evening she seemed emphatically three-dimensional, her presence a lodestar toward which a rudderless shlemiel might claw his way back from lost worlds.

Can I touch your aura? Jump your bones?
“Would you like a beer?” I asked her. Not waiting for a reply, I went into the galley kitchen and opened the little fridge which was bare of beers, just a puckered apple and a deviled ham sandwich gone chartreuse with mold. When I returned to her empty-handed, Rachel seemed not even to notice but instead said to me diffidently, “Lenny, I’ve been thinking I’d like to do”—
all the most degrading things we can think of
—“LSD.”

I won’t pretend to understand the feelings her request evoked in me. Certainly there was lust, an ache and a throb; there was the memory of the botched consummation we’d yet to repair. But there was something else as well—a gratitude that nearly choked me, sadness like a hymn. It was as if she’d asked to meet my imaginary friend. I reached down to pry her fingers from the arm of the chair and pulled her to her feet, ignoring her bewildered expression, which intensified when she felt how I was trembling. I led her over to the fetid mattress where I knelt and bade her do the same. I willed her to trust me, summoning an unfledged authority, praying she wouldn’t suddenly come to her senses and cut and run. Then I took up the book that lay facedown on the rumpled sheets, its splayed covers like a rooftop in a flood, and began to read aloud from its pages.

Once upon a bone-dry July afternoon, a solitary pack peddler by the name of Pinchas Pinsker came down the road. Pushing a wooden handcart, which he leaned against at an angle almost parallel to the ground, he turned into an avenue of oaks that led toward a colonnaded plantation house. His cart was a low, two-wheeled affair that had recently belonged to a greengrocer in Crab Orchard, Kentucky, and for it Pinchas had swapped a quantity of sateen ticking that the man’s wife had admired. He pushed the contraption by a pair of spindled handstaffs that he hoped one day to hitch to a horse’s flanks. The cart contained the tarp-covered contents of a small racket store: razors, carpet slippers, snuffboxes, and tobacco; there were spectacles, kitchen utensils, candles, oilcloth, dress patterns, and yard goods; dolls for the children, kickshaws for the ladies. Though he wasn’t born to this profession, when he removed the tarp from his merchandise, Pinchas—a short, bespectacled man with a nap of sandy hair under his bowler hat—felt like a conjuror revealing treasures.

As he neared the broad-porticoed house, he anticipated the servants and children coming out to greet him. That’s what he was accustomed to. The occupants of sharecroppers’ shacks and planters’ mansions alike would trickle forth from their habitations to welcome the Jew peddler and sample his wares. It was why he’d been drawn to the South in the first place, having heard that the population viewed the Hebrew with reverence as a person of the Book. Never mind that in the years since his bar mitzvah, rather than holy writ, the book Pinchas had most cherished was a Yiddish translation of the first volume of
Das Kapital
, a copy of which was secreted in his cart.

It was his political sympathies that had compelled him to leave his family and the Russian Pale of Settlement one step ahead of the czar’s police. But despite arriving in the New World with his ideals intact, Pinchas had since conceived a healthy tolerance for free enterprise. His pulse was quickened by the babel of the hagglers and shmeikelers along the jostling thoroughfares of the Lower East Side of New York. No stranger to labor himself, having served apprenticeships as a draper and grain broker back in Blod, Pinchas began peddling flour sifters and mousetraps from a stall on Ludlow Street. Restless with how his ignorance of the native language confined him to the ghetto, however, he took to straying into outlying quarters. He wandered among the arrant residents of the Five Points and the complacent burghers of Kleindeutschland above Fourteenth Street, picking up snatches of the American tongue along the way. Here was a mobility he’d been denied in the Old Country, and while he remained disapproving of their acquisitive values, Pinchas was nonetheless infected by the yeasty energies of these Yankee citizens. Addicted now to the habit of movement, he secured a small loan from Yarmolovsky’s Bank on Canal Street; he purchased forty dollars’ worth of goods from a nearby supply house and set off to broaden his orbit, taking a train as far as Cincinnati, whence he proceeded on foot along the sun-baked highways into Kentucky and farther south.

As he neared the big house, he wondered why no one had yet to appear. The hedges were neatly trimmed in elaborate topiary shapes, the kitchen garden weeded and pruned, but the house and grounds seemed otherwise abandoned. A gaunt hound with a panting pink tongue approached him, nuzzling his leg and whimpering pitifully; a lowing cow dragged her swollen udders through the tea roses. The air around the mansion, already oppressive in the afternoon heat, had a forbidding odor, miasmic like rotting silage. Pinchas marveled that he should have goosebumps despite his streaming perspiration. The whole day had in fact had a portentous quality about it, all the traffic along the rutted highway headed away from the city of Memphis toward which he was bound. The passengers in their traps and wagons piled with trunks and household furnishings looked distressed, some with sponges tied clownishly over their noses.

Curiosity overcoming his trepidation, he climbed the front steps and pressed his nose against the pane of a tall, rippled-glass window. The gallery overhead shaded the porch and shielded the glass from glare so that Pinchas was able to spy the sumptuous parlor inside. Empty of occupants, the parlor was appointed with a marble hearth, brass firedogs, and a portrait of a saber-wielding officer in Confederate butternut above the mantelpiece. The porch planks creaked under his hobnails as Pinchas slunk around the corner of the house and peered through the window of another room. It took his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the dim interior of what turned out to be a high-ceilinged bedroom containing a nightmare tableau; for beneath the canopy of a disordered bed lay a man and woman, their silk-robed bodies snarled in an unnatural configuration—their eyes stark-staring, faces frozen in the rigor of their final agony, as if their souls had wrenched themselves free of their gawking mouths. On the floor below the bed was another pair of lifeless bodies, similarly entangled: two ring-letted little girls in their alice-blue nighties. The twin daughters along with their parents were wreathed in flies and blanketed in what appeared to be a lava of black caviar, some of which was also sprayed across the wainscoting’d walls.

Pinchas’s first thought was irrational: the serfs had murdered their masters and children and fled the estate. Then he remembered that the serfs—the slaves? had there really been slaves?—were freed more than a decade before. “Vey iz mir,” he gasped aloud, lurching headlong back toward his cart. He took up the handles and steered it blindly through a cloud of mosquitoes so thick it left a peddler-shaped hole where he’d passed through, and without looking back turned again into the open road.

Now he was alert to the signs that told him he had stumbled into the Valley of the Shadow. Shacks along the way featured men with shotguns sitting sentinel in their yards, flinty wives standing fiercely behind them in their Sunday bonnets. The current of traffic moving always in the opposite direction grew denser, occasional passengers calling out to him from their carriages what might have been warnings. But if Pinchas didn’t exactly ignore them, neither did he take their words to heart—one of which (“yellow jack”) was repeated with some frequency. He imagined Yellow Jack as a Goliath terrorizing the city whose outskirts he had entered, a giant with whom he was destined to contend. At the same time he understood that this was nonsense. What Jew heads deliberately upstream during an exodus? But Pinchas had been so often discouraged from crossing borders and thresholds due to this interdiction or that imperial ukase that he proceeded on the strength of sheer dogged forward momentum.