The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  She hesitated despite herself, succumbing to a sudden professional reflex. “There were German Jews in Memphis in the 1840s,” she grudgingly replied. “Goldsmith’s Department Store was founded just after the Civil War.”

  “I’m talking about the first Jew in the Pinch.”

  “I know about the Pinch,” she stated as if I’d challenged her. “I’ve already conducted some oral history interviews with people who lived there.”

  “You mean here. So how did you learn about the Pinch?”

  “You told me.” The admission must have cost her something, as her fidgeting seemed to imply. “After you mentioned it I did some homework,” she continued. “The Pinch was an Irish neighborhood until the Russian Jews started trickling in during the eighteen eighties and nineties. The Irish eventually moved on, and the district was Jewish till after the war.”

  “Did anybody tell you about the earthquake?”

  “What earthquake? People talk about the synagogues, the shops—the Pinch was like every other ethnic urban ghetto. Nobody mentions anything about an earthquake.”

  “It happened; it practically swallowed the neighborhood. The epicenter was in Market Square Park, just over there. I can show you.”

  “You’re batshit.”

  “It’s just a block or two away.”

  She cleared her throat somewhat nervously. “I’d have to get my coat.”

  I was afraid that if she returned to her friends she might never come back. Remarking that she was indeed shivering from the cold, I took off my own overcoat, a worn-to-threads rag with no lining, and draped it over her shoulders. I hoped she would be impressed by the gallantry of the gesture.

  She eyed me with grave suspicion. “This better be quick.”

  On the way I congratulated myself for having once again exploited Rachel’s gullibility; her resistance was not nearly as intractable as she liked to project. The truth was that in all the months I’d spent on North Main Street I’d scarcely noticed the park myself. It was there opposite the old Ellis Auditorium: an acre of unattended crabgrass bordered by a Catholic church, a low-rise housing project, and some empty lots from which the structures had been recently razed: the kind of poky city vacuum that nature can’t abide. As we entered it Rachel asked me, incidentally, what was my name, and I told her Captain Blood, a.k.a. Lenny Sklarew. Hers was Rachel Ostrofsky. Such a doughy Slavic mouthful for such a svelte American girl.

  Of course I knew there would be no sign of the great tree that Muni Pinsker had described, the one that capsized into a hole during the quake. It was clear from the first that the author of The Pinch, however much he drew from actual events, could not be considered a reliable narrator. Still, his version of the past seemed so much truer than the present tenantless decay.

  “You can see how the ground gives way in the middle of the park,” I said, playing at cicerone.

  “I don’t even see a park,” said Rachel, looking a little like a refugee—which became her—in my fluttering overcoat.

  The patch of land that was all that remained of the original park resembled so many other orphaned tracts fallen victim to so-called urban renewal, tracts designated for face-lifts that never happened.

  “But look, Rachel,” I said, aware of calling her by her given name for the very first time. “See the way it dips …”

  There did in fact seem to be a slight depression in the sparse grass, a concavity I marched into in my effort to make the point. In so doing I slammed into a solid object snout-first. Stunned, I fell backward onto the hard ground with a throbbing head, my nose oozing blood. Opening my eyes I expected to see—what? Maybe a swag-bellied cop or Rachel’s battling fiancé? But there was nothing there.

  The girl was standing over me, this time not bothering to kneel. “What are you on?” she asked.

  “Methamphetamine, Tuinal, alcohol, caffeine, but that’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “Do you think these kinds of theatrics are endearing?” she wondered, since my lying prostrate and bleeding was where we’d begun. Regardless, there was enough moonlight for her to perceive that my nose was indeed hemorrhaging, and just how did she account for that? How did I?

  “Rachel,” I said, trying to sound prophetic despite being flat on my back, head tilted to reverse the flow of blood, “there are more things in heaven and earth than you dreamed of in your folklore classes.”

  “No doubt,” she replied without conviction.

  “Rachel,” I confided in a voice that trilled a bit from the fluid draining into my throat, “I walked into a tree.”

  “Uh-huh,” she breathed, hovering impatiently above me, the wind waving the showy black standard of her hair. “Listen, Lenny, my friends will be wondering what became of me.” Whereupon she removed my overcoat and spread it over me with the care she might have bestowed upon an invalid or a corpse, then set off in the direction of the bar.

  The next day on the way to the Book Asylum I barged into a rack of vintage kangaroo-calf bicycle shoes, pleased at my ability to identify them even though they weren’t there. The rack clattered noisily nonetheless as it toppled in front of me. Of course I was an old hand at confusing what was there with what was not. An intrepid psychic traveler, I’d crossed thresholds into unexplored regions encountering dragons and bugbears of every stripe and paisley (keeping the Thorazine handy in case I couldn’t vanquish the dragon on my own). So what was the big deal about occasionally crossing over from what passed for real life into the pages of a bogus historical chronicle? Never mind that I approached the book with an ostrich-egg lump in my throat, since, in reading The Pinch, I was conscious of also approaching a rendezvous with myself.

  Apprehension aside, the past put the present in the shade. The world from my North Main Street window was a toilet: the government was sliding toward fascism, the planet dying from neglect, and my lottery number put me in line to be shipped off on short notice to Vietnam. There, if I escaped the rockets and jungle rot, I would doubtless stumble into a man-trap and be impaled on envenomed stakes. Moreover—to offset the mind-fucking effects of The Pinch—I’d begun to read the newspapers, which reported that negotiations were at an impasse and no end in sight for the garbage strike. Undiscouraged by police harassment and the mayor’s inflexible stance, however, the sanitation workers persisted in marching every day. Their ranks had been joined by students, clergymen, and ordinary citizens, a few of them white.

  In that atmosphere Avrom’s Asylum was as good as its name. The crowded shelves provided insulation from the unrest beyond its door, and there were times, I confess, when I thought I might like to hunker down in that dimly lit shop till the hard rain that was coming passed over. Then I reminded myself that I belonged to a reckless tribe, who ran out to greet the winds of change with open arms; I remembered that I was, albeit at my own speed, in pursuit of a beautiful girl.

  “Avrom,” I said, as he gummed his fried egg sandwich (mine was pimento cheese), “I keep sort of stumbling into the past.”

  I wasn’t really expecting an answer, though Avrom, his mouth crusted with yellow yolk dribbling into his beard, offered an offhand response: “Rabbi bar Hana that he once bumped into a frog as big as Mount Tabor, and like the eyelids of the morning were its eyes.”

  As usual I wondered why I even bothered to confide in the old kocker, as he sometimes called himself. But for all his double-talk I suppose I invested in him a degree of authority, if only by virtue of the blue tattoo on his wrist. Surely someone who’d been where he’d been must’ve returned with some kind of momentous insight to impart. Though I admit I was reluctant to ask him about that particular journey, or what he might have lost along the way. I had after all my own concerns, and besides the old man never gave me a straight reply. “Better you should be your own shamus,” he would advise me, like he had the answers but thought it would be more educational if I found them myself. The thing was, before discovering Muni’s book I hadn’t really thought of what the questions might be.

 
; Today’s was “Who’s Tyrone Pin?” That was the incongruous name to which the illustrations were attributed on the title page of The Pinch. Slouched in the understuffed armchair catty-cornered from Avrom’s desk, I braced myself to hear the obvious: “He made like it says the pictures—” Imagine my surprise when, instead of the usual runaround, Avrom said simply, “Why you don’t ask him?” It was a particularly unsettling reply given his previous assurance that all persons connected with the book were “gone with the wind.” That was Avrom’s phrase, which he seemed to think was original with him.

  “And where would I find this Tyrone person?” I inquired, again expecting to be handed a riddle. By now it was apparent that Avrom was better acquainted with the book than he was willing to let on; like I said, he enjoyed making mystery. But since the answer was disturbing enough in its own right, the old man seemed to relish divulging it.

  “He’s since the war an inmate by the Western State Mental Hospital at Bolivar.”

  The information shook me to my socks. That the illustrator was living gave the book a kind of manifest presence in the world, made it more than just some indefinable artifact. But Avrom wasn’t finished. “He grew up in the Pinch, Tyrone—Katie and Pinchas Pin’s boy, a delicate kid, so I’m told.”

  Hoping to further exploit his confidential mood, I pressed him. “Did you know them, the Pins?”

  “Me, I’m a Shlomo-come-lately, who do I know? By the time I get here everyone is—”

  “Gone with the wind—so you said.”

  Later on I’m wondering what would be the point of making a trip to some ghoulish institution—which was Western State’s reputation—to talk with a lunatic. Reading the book was a daunting enough experience in itself, especially now that I’d begun running into North Main Street’s long-extinct merchandise. I stepped on an unreal roller skate and coasted a few hair-raising moments before I went sprawling; I barked my shin on the phantom fender of a 1908 Packard motor carriage and even glimpsed some ectoplasm in a serge waistcoat, watch fob, and gartered sleeves. Such occasions, despite the panoply of bruises I was collecting, were tantamount to waking up in a dream. I might have written off the incidents as acid flashbacks, but since I’d become so absorbed in the book, I was less inclined to sample the psychoactive stuff in my pantry. I used to declare with Stephen Dedalus the wish to wake up from the nightmare of history, but nowadays I had to struggle just to rouse myself enough from The Pinch to take notice of current events. Not that I struggled very hard. I was thus straddling two worlds when Rachel Ostrofsky came back into the 348 all alone.

  4

  A Local Apocalypse

  Until the earthquake, when North Main Street rippled like a beaten carpet and rolled like a wave, things had been relatively quiet. Of course, owing to Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya and his followers’ infernal tampering with the cosmos, there had been instances of what might be deemed the miraculous. But such events had been minimal, a mere trickle compared to the flood that followed the quake—which events included, incidentally, a flood.

  But on the day that Jenny Bashrig was discharged from the St. Joseph Hospital, all that was yet to come. Muni had not visited her during her convalescence, and it was with shame that he watched her hobbling on crutches through the door of Rosen’s Delicatessen. When they’d tumbled together from the rope above the alley, the girl struck the ground first with Muni landing on top of her. He’d heard the bone snap and seen the leg’s unnatural angle as he rolled off, shaken but unharmed, onto the gravel, convinced she had deliberately broken his fall. While she lay moaning and convulsed in pain, Muni cried for help, alerting Mrs. Rosen, who hastened in her billowing nightclothes to fetch Dr. Seligman. The bathrobed doctor, after a swift inspection of her injury, phoned for an ambulance to come and haul her away. Attendants lifted her onto a stretcher and Muni averted his glance from her sloe-eyed stare and the bandy state of her splintered limb beneath the rumpled blue gown. He dodged Dr. Seligman’s questions as to how he happened to be abroad at that hour in a torn nightshirt, and avoided what he perceived as the accusatory gaze of the blind fiddler on his corner. To say nothing of the neighbors who’d begun to poke their heads from their second-story windows. That was the last he’d seen of Jenny until he glimpsed her a week later from behind the plate glass of Pin’s General Merchandise, as she was being helped by Old Man Rosen from the rear of the Argo Electric ambulance.

  He couldn’t say exactly why he hadn’t gone to see her in the hospital. Of course it didn’t help that, since the “accident,” he and Jenny had become the chief topic of gossip in the Pinch. And the more people talked about them, speculating on the nature of their relationship and shushing one another when he came into view, the less Muni felt disposed to communicate with the girl. The intimacy he’d experienced with Jenny that night on the wire was an anomalous event; it had occurred almost entirely outside his consciousness and therefore beyond his control. The thought of it frightened him, as did the intense desire he’d felt when he held her pliant form. Having only recently reclaimed a kind of impromptu identity for himself, Muni was not yet prepared to make that self susceptible to the devices of another. The sensations the girl evoked in him were disturbing, and if he weren’t careful they could shatter the fragile peace he’d fashioned for himself since coming to North Main.

  “You’re a cruel lad,” judged his aunt Katie, who was not ordinarily meddlesome. The remark stung. He admired his aunt for her playful nature and comely looks, though he seemed to have arrived just as those looks had begun to fade. Before his eyes the blush of her high cheeks had turned from ripe to raw, and her dense auburn hair was recently knitted with silver. All her handsome features had entered their autumnal phase.

  Muni was also aware of his uncle’s unease over her aging. Didn’t Pinchas protest overmuch in his running commentaries that his Katie was the same girl who’d rescued him decades before from a common grave? It was a tale he told at the least opportunity: how he’d succumbed to the plague of yellow jack upon his arrival in the city and, but for the intercession of a poor Irish lass, was given up for dead. Their marriage had condemned Katie to the lot of an outcast rejected by her own dissolute clan; it would have caused a scandal in Pinchas’s community as well, had there been any community to speak of. But Pinchas Pin was the first Hebrew to set up shop in the Pinch. By the time others of his persuasion had begun to straggle into that rough-and-ready neighborhood, his business had become an institution, as had his marriage to the pretty colleen. It had not been a perfect union; their childlessness was a constant source of regret, but Katie’s native exuberance had remained largely unflagging throughout. So it was with alarm that her husband observed how his wife had turned a corner into her climacteric, and was lately given to bouts of crankiness.

  Once in Pinchas’s presence Muni ventured to speculate that his coming to stay was perhaps responsible for putting undue stress on his uncle’s wife. He was surprised by the vehemence of the merchant’s response.

  “You?” Pinchas fairly shouted. “Shtik goy! Ain’t nobody else can make my Katie unhappy but me myself.”

  Muni never broached the subject again, though he couldn’t shake his remorse over his aunt’s disapproval of his apparent lack of concern for the fallen acrobat.

  Still he continued to lie low after Jenny’s return. The girl, for her part, never tried to seek him out but neither did she attempt to avoid him, and it was inevitable that their paths would cross again. For the time being, however, Muni ducked into doorways or retreated to the rear of the store if he saw her coming, swinging her weight along on crutches with the agility of a monkey ranging through trees. Some noted that Jenny seemed to negotiate the crutches better than she had her own two left feet before she’d fractured her leg.

  Meanwhile life on North Main Street proceeded apace. Construction was under way for the Idle Hour Theater, which would serve as a venue for touring theatricals as well as the projection of the photoplays that were making the arc-lit nickelodeons obsolete.
The theater was viewed with civic pride by the Reform congregation of Temple Israel, though the less secular-minded Market Square Synagogue was opposed to the impious project. They were as dismayed by the Idle Hour as by rumors that sons of the Pinch were seen frequenting a floating casino moored under the bluff at the Happy Hollow fishing camp. Further fueling a communal sense of opprobrium was the news that Mrs. Gruber had once more refused to pay tribute to the agents of Boss Crump’s machine, and so was collared again for making moonshine. Bemoaning her disgrace, the street nevertheless turned out in a body for her trial, which was on a Friday afternoon in November. Called to the witness stand, Mrs. Gruber’s colleague Lazar der Royte remarked through a window that the sun, whose color rivaled the red of his beard, had begun to set. Ignoring the prosecutor’s questions, Lazar wrapped himself in his tallis and began to chant his Sabbath prayers.

  The neighborhood was less cacophonous since the gramophone in the Widow Teitelbaum’s window was no longer in competition with Asbestos’s fiddle. Instead, when she played such popular ditties as “Peg o’ My Heart” or “Yaddie Kaddie Kiddie Kaddie Koo,” the blind musician executed variations upon them, turning the sprightliest tunes into dolorous threnodies. In Pin’s General Merchandise it was business as usual, and business, Got tsu danken, was generally good. There was a run on rubber collars and oxblood Shinola was flying off the shelves, nor could novelty items like bagpipe balloons be kept in stock. Mr. Bluestein bought twelve yards of calico, and Mrs. Padauer—while her husband, a drummer in ladies’ foundation garments, was away on a business trip—came in to buy her geriatric child a winter coat. Pinchas was busy with a supplier, so it fell to Muni to take down the naval reefer that Mrs. Padauer had selected from an overhead rack. He helped the little manikin (whom she referred to as “my peanut”) on with the coat, which dwarfed his shriveled frame. While his mother was distracted in her inspection of a plaid mackinaw, the diminutive creature, Benjy by name, croaked in a voice like a belch, “I hope they don’t bury me in this shmatte.” When they’d left with their purchase, Pinchas, having observed the transaction out of the corner of an eye, answered the question on the tip of Muni’s tongue.