The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  This was not the world in which Muni and Jenny had initiated their romance. Witnessing such pandemonium on the heels of an unconsecrated union left them both feeling woefully unbalanced—which was doubly disturbing in the case of the equilibrist Jenny Bashrig.

  “It looks like curtains for the Pinch,” she concluded, and when her companion didn’t catch the expression, offered a sad “Kaput.”

  For reasons he couldn’t identify, Muni resented her assessment. “So this is by you wishful thinking?” he wondered.

  Jenny narrowed her eyes like gun ports but did not answer. Then they agreed that it was anyway time they should try to check on their people.

  They made their way toward the river bluff, whose higher ground they’d been told the displaced population had retreated to, but along the way found themselves fighting a current of pedestrians headed in the opposite direction. The planet had not yet ceased its rumblings and already their neighbors were returning whence they’d fled. If they couldn’t reclaim their tenements, whose listing walls and fallen masonry the police had cordoned off, then they would at least reassemble within the ghetto’s Sabbath boundaries. Jenny and Muni about-faced with the crowd as it forded the torrent of North Main Street to regroup in the previously evacuated Market Square Park. Some, having salvaged oil lamps, groceries, and feather beds from their apartments, began claiming family-sized parcels of lawn. The favored spots were those closest to the crater from which sprouted the monstrous network of roots; because upright or topsy-turvy, the tree was still the focal point of the park that had so often served as a neighborhood dormitory. Where else should they take refuge on such a night?

  Under a flapping marquee an advance guard of uniformed foot soldiers from the Salvation Army was already ladling soup, but a dispute among the local rabbis as to whether the stuff was trayf discouraged their congregants from partaking. The issue was anyway moot, since the refugees much preferred the day-old bagels the Ridblatts had begun to distribute. The butcher Makowsky, still wearing his blood-stained apron, passed out slices of pickled beef tongue, while Mr. and Mrs. Rosen were uncommonly generous with their Danishes. Children gamboled among the scattered lanterns like so many Jack-Be-Nimbles hurtling fairy lights, their parents greeting one another like long-lost relations. Despite their sudden grievously reduced circumstances, the mood of those gathered in the park bordered on festive.

  With the exception of the Padauers’ doddering child, who’d sustained second-degree burns from the fountain of sludge, and Mrs. Gruber, who broke a hip after falling through the firemen’s net—other than them and the gentiles crushed at the boxing arena and the blacksmith Tarnopol, rumored to have been swallowed by quicksand at the bayou—all of North Main Street and its immediate environs looked to be present and accounted for. Miraculously there were no other casualties to report. Of course a few citizens had superficial injuries that needed attending to, but Doc Seligman and the starchy Miss Reudelhuber, his acting nurse, were sufficient to the task. (A Red Cross chapter would later arrive on the scene to find nothing to do.) Everyone was chatty and ebullient, which may have been merely a symptom of shock, though they seemed to have swapped their earlier dread for the hum of collective unconstraint. One and all behaved like passengers washed up on an island after a shipwreck, stunned but thankful to be still among the living.

  Sam Alabaster’s doting wife surrounded him with cushions like a pasha and elevated his gouty leg on an ottoman, while he assured her, “In heaven you will be my footstool.” Their kids, having sprinted up and down a wavy patch of turf until they were seasick, upchucked in concert over the edge of the crevasse. Mrs. Alabaster shepherded them away from the precipice, only to find her husband risen from his bivouac and hobbling forward in his dressing gown to peer into the pit as well. As his wife drew him back from the brink, he was replaced by Mr. Bluestein, who’d toddled up in his nightshirt holding a candle like a ghetto Diogenes. He squinted down the long shaft of the inverted oak, which disappeared in darkness, and remarked to the Widow Teitelbaum standing next to him, “Maybe is now rightside-up, the tree, and it’s we are heads over heels.” It was an uncharacteristic remark from such a sober-minded man, but the widow, embracing her rescued gramophone, nevertheless nodded reflectively in accord. So did Nutty Iskowitz and his property, the palooka Eddie Kid Wolf, saved by the catastrophe from having been KO’d by Sailor Merkle once again. He was still wearing his shot-silk trunks and flowing robe, whose hem some prankish kids carried like a train. Mr. Sebranig had also advanced to the lip of the chasm, where he toyed with his fleshly wife, the two of them executing a light-footed foxtrot toward and away from the magnetic hole. They were accompanied by the bleating of the deaf-aid shofar from the Hasidic camp. Tired of blowing it, Rabbi ben Yahya had ceded the task to a follower. The shofar was dolefully complemented by the strings of Asbestos’s fiddle, though the fiddler himself was nowhere to be seen.

  Following his bittersweet parting from Jenny, Muni located his aunt and uncle, who were also among those standing at the rim of the abyss. After a warm reunion, at least on the part of his uncle—his aunt Katie only listlessly participating—Pinchas wasted no time in informing his nephew that, appearances aside, this was not a natural disaster.

  “They did it,” he declared, pointing in the direction of the clustered Hasids. “The knucklehead Shpinkers, they finally did it.”

  “Did what, Uncle?”

  “They engineered from heaven and earth the nuptials.”

  “Nupshuls?” Muni understood the word if not its context. How did that old Talmudic adage go? “The world is a wedding.” Funny that the word wedding should have had so little resonance for him till now.

  “From heaven and earth,” repeated Pinchas, lifting and inclining his chin toward each destination. “Or if not heaven, then sitra achra, what they call the Other Side. Now we got with the aftermath to contend.” But although he didn’t sound thrilled by this monumental turn of events, neither did Pinchas, for all his disquiet, seem unduly alarmed. While for his part Muni was relieved to hear that his responsibility for what had happened was shared by others.

  It was already getting on toward morning, and the North Main Streeters, wilting from a surfeit of excitement, had settled down on their respective plots of ground to catch some winks. The sky was already beginning to brighten from indigo to salmon-pink, like the interior of an abalone shell, but the park was still relatively cool. People were strewn about on pallets as if they’d been haphazardly deposited there by the recent upheaval, though the prevailing attitude remained that of survivors rather than victims. Having shrugged his suspenders from his shoulders, Muni too lay back in the soft grass. He cradled his head in his intertwined fingers, giving ear to the earth’s increasingly infrequent eructations, like belches after a hearty meal. Like his neighbors Muni felt a certain satisfaction at having endured such a major tumult, though for him the experience had broader implications than tonight’s big event. He realized that, during all his time in America, he’d neglected to celebrate the staggering fact that he was still alive: not even his ardor for Jenny had roused him to that.

  Jenny. She was bedded down somewhere nearby, he assumed, and while the very idea of her stirred in his belly a maelstrom of emotions, he reminded himself that she was not an idea but a girl. He thought he could smell the lilac-and-kosher-dill scent of her on the breeze, which lulled him; the park had become an inviolable zone of tranquility. Then even as he entertained the notion that he must have been spared for a reason, Muni imagined how Jenny would tease him for the thought. “Where’d you get such a big head?” he wondered, chuckling aloud as he tucked himself comfortably under a patchwork of dreams.

  He awoke minutes (or was it hours?) later to muggy sunshine, refreshed but somewhat disconcerted upon finding that his pocket watch had stopped. It was a recent purchase, a coin-silver hunting watch that Novak the pawnbroker claimed had a sixteen-jewel movement and would last till Messiah arrived. Muni had thought it might last until he could a
fford a better one. Then he observed that the walleyed Mr. Shapiro, ensconced on a crazy quilt a few yards away, was looking befuddled as he presented the open face of his watch to his equally puzzled wife. And Sam Alabaster was shaking the gunmetal case of his own moon calendar watch as if time could be bullied back into motion.

  “Maybe they don’t remember to wind them up,” ventured Pinchas from his dew-drenched blanket; and winding the stem of his turnip with a show of confidence, he then began thumping it with his knuckles when the hands refused to move. Comparing watches, nephew and uncle noted that both had stopped at 7:36, which was approximately the time the temblors had begun the night before.

  All about them the North Main Streeters were rising from their improvised bedding to greet the new day. They swiveled their heads like periscopes as if to get their bearings, orienting themselves by the compass points of familiar faces. Over there, as lean as the lamppost beneath which he swayed, was the pious bootlegger Lazar der Royte at his morning prayers. The pursy Mrs. Padauer shared a park bench with her weak-chinned husband in his felt crusher hat; sandwiched between them was their aged tyke, knee pants bulging from the diaper-thick bandages that swaddled his scalded tush. There was the merchant Pinchas Pin and his vinegary wife, and a headless figure molded from clay, with stumps in place of arms and legs, that came trundling precipitously along the gravel path. It tumbled over railings and flailed in its attempt to pick itself up, only to plunge thereafter, to the delight of all who saw, straight into a bench or shrub.

  Muni turned to his uncle, the answer man: “Vos iz?” And Pinchas, rolling his eyes: “It’s the golem that he didn’t finish making it, the rebbe.”

  The laughter of their neighbors pervading the air seemed to clear it of the early morning haze. Many rubbed their eyes with the heels of their hands, trying to square the world they were looking at with the one they had woke to the day before. The difference wasn’t so much that North Main Street was under water, the flood having submerged their businesses and made tributaries of the side streets. That much they could observe from the park, which was still above sea level. But the real difference was the way the devastated district had everything and nothing in common with the Pinch. The atmosphere was somehow tonic despite the heat, every object sharply defined but with a michutz, a little something extra. The roots of the upended tree writhed like tentacles; they waved like the batons of a hundred concert conductors; the fire plug in front of the stucco synagogue spun like a bobbin. The blackbirds that perched on the telegraph wires were notes in a musical staff whose melody even the most tone-deaf could read.

  Watching his neighbors in the act of evaluating their situation, Pinchas offered this studied aside to his nephew: “I think we don’t see things as they are so much as we see them as we are.” Muni tried to digest the statement, whatever it meant, though it clearly did nothing to alleviate Katie’s sour mood, and it frankly failed to rise to the level of the general intoxication to which Muni himself had succumbed.

  People were performing their ablutions in the granite fountain, empty for years but filled now with a hot ground water that spurted up in sporadic jets through a crack. Children were using the fountain for a sailboat basin, their fleet of twigs rehearsing in miniature the flotilla their parents were beginning to launch for the purpose of reaching their front doors. For no sooner had they freshened themselves after their open-air nap, itself invigorating, than the North Main Streeters set out to reclaim their abodes. In this, they flew in the face of the injunctions the civic authorities had put in place overnight. There were sawhorse barriers, fire and police ordinances plastered to every doorpost declaring their habitations unsafe. The papers promised disaster relief: a distribution center would be established and necessities dispensed, arrangements made for temporary housing until reconstruction could render the tenements habitable again. But so far no such services had materialized. The city of Memphis made all the appropriate noises: the authorities intended to behave responsibly toward their citizens of Hebrew extraction. But other than the couple of independent organizations that had already come and gone, noise was what the city delivered; emergency measures seemed to have evaporated with the dew. And while the community didn’t like to appear ungrateful, they nevertheless dismissed the municipal response.

  They dismissed the prohibitions that would have kept them from their homes, and set out to take up residence again above their flooded shops. No one interfered with them; having fulfilled their duty toward the ghetto, at least in print, the municipality under the auspices of Mayor Crump (called, for his ruddy complexion, the Red Snapper) washed its hands of North Main Street. After all, the city proper was perfectly intact; the banks, theaters, and retail stores that composed the heart of downtown Memphis were unharmed by the misfortune that had visited the Pinch. That district had always been a flyblown excrescence anyway. Moreover, there seemed a common reluctance on the part of outsiders to enter the self-styled Pale north of Poplar Avenue. It was as if, since yesterday, an invisible wall had been erected; and after giving short shrift to the disturbance and boasting of the city’s unstinting aid efforts, the local press for the most part forgot about the quake.

  The water was not so deep that they couldn’t have waded, but Muni’s uncle, in order to spare his wife the immersion, ferried her along with their nephew back to North Main from the boat launch at Market Square Park. They held a course against the current toward Pin’s General Merchandise by means of a flat-bottomed pirogue hauled up for a price from the levee. Their neighbors employed similar conveyances, navigating skiffs, dories, a jury-rigged raft buoyed on oil drum pontoons, which they paddled with tea trays, dustpans, and the occasional oar. Most of the vessels had been bought for peanuts or procured in exchange for stopped pocket watches from the fisherfolk down at the Happy Hollow shantytown. They were hauled up the bluff to the park by energetic North Main Streeters who then shoved them off in a body, like an armada setting sail on a voyage of conquest.

  The Pins arrived at the sunken portals of their store to find that its front doors had made an ineffective floodgate. They disembarked into waist-deep water, Pinchas lifting his wife in his arms, though she complained all the while that she was capable of managing on her own. Their nephew yanked open one of the glass-paned double doors, admitting a surge that instantly increased the level of the water inside. A flotsam of wallowing fabrics, fly swatters, toy soldiers, hampers, and fans bobbed all about them. Rolling hogsheads spilled straw and china cruets onto the surface of the mercantile soup. Submersed to the navel in that sloppy element, Muni looked toward his uncle to gauge his reaction, and saw that Pinchas had gone ghostly pale. He wasn’t taking stock of the shambles of his business, however, but peering over the spectacles that had slipped to the tip of his nose, he was studying the tight features of his wife’s faded face. He was cursing himself for having previously failed to notice her frailty, realizing upon lifting her above the risen water that she now weighed little more than her bones.

  “Uncle?” said Muni, too distracted by the aquatic disorder to detect the particular nature of his uncle’s dismay. Unanswering, Pinchas was already sloshing through the swill toward the stairs at the rear of the shop, up which he carried his querulous bride.

  Muni forged his way back through the cracked-open door and once again took in the ruined Pinch. It was a tragedy, was it not? But for the life of him he couldn’t see it that way. From Muni’s saturated vantage the world floated inside and out, and whatever wasn’t waterlogged rode the surface of the flooded neighborhood like the buoyant sensations that floated free in his breast and skull.

  Over the gunwales of their ad hoc argosy the families were assessing their sunken shops and homes. Fathers briefly left their wives and children to wade into their businesses and inspect the losses, only to slosh back out—heads shaking—to the comparative serenity of the boats. The pharmacist Blen sat in a rocking dinghy beside his pie-faced wife, gazing at the wreckage of his drugstore. The window had given way, al
lowing the water to liberate the large glass show globes, which in turn had discolored the flood with their red and green dyes. Mr. and Mrs. Elster in their leaky cockleshell watched a parlor suite (swarming with cats) that had escaped their discount emporium drifting by. Mose Dlugach and his shiftless sons, Sam Alabaster and his brood in their half-submerged skiff, old Ephraim Schneour wearing his bowler at an unusually rakish angle—all appraised their damaged livelihoods and weighed their options. Muni could hear their voices carrying across the narrows.

  Sam Alabaster: “Commercial insurance we got, but only we paid for theft and fire, no?”

  Mendel Blen: “That way, God forbid, we could get from our parnosseh a little something back in hard times.”

  Sam: “Tahkeh, but who didn’t waive the clause that included coverage for floods?”

  Nobody didn’t. The Mississippi River, for all the deluges it had wrought north and south of the city, could never climb the bluff to their doorsteps—that was the conventional wisdom. And as for earthquakes, who ever heard of such a thing in this part of the world? Nearly everyone, as it turned out, except the residents of the Pinch, as the New Madrid fault line upon which the city of Memphis sat rivaled the most fretful on earth.

  Afloat in their knocking vessels, the neighbors frowned in fitting apprehension, but no one was fooled; the frowns were forced. The harbor they were anchored in was an eminently safe one. So what if their buildings were crippled, some with toppled walls exposing entire cross sections of interior—such as the one in which an unveiled Widow Teitelbaum could be seen seated in her bath, turning faucets from which no water flowed? There was no gas and the coal cellars were swamped, nor was there any unspoiled meat or produce to be had in the inundated groceries and butcher shops. But never mind, a new dispensation was afoot. The feeling was infectious: they were participants in a grand regatta, and while ordinary life might be turned on its noodle—“mit kop arop,” as the old folks said—the transformation of their neighborhood was an astronomically bracing sea change.