The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  Rachel touched my arm in a gesture meant to signify our shared sympathy regarding this issue: she’d come on board. I looked at the arm she’d touched and then at her soft aquiline profile, her jet-black hair in its stylized liberation, and felt a twinge of conscience, because I hadn’t paid much attention to the headlines of late. Later on, when the concert was over and she took me aside to report some new findings in her research—did I know that Elvis Presley had been the Dubrovner family’s shabbos goy?—I refrained from offering any information in return. Her dark eyes had gone somewhat lynx-like in their expectation, and I wanted in my soul to take her with me; I wanted to show her the ladies flicking chickens in the back of Makowsky’s butcher shop or Hekkie Grussom’s wife braiding flax into rope in the yard behind his hardware store. I wanted to watch her peek through the curtain of the women’s gallery at the strange fire ablaze on the altar of the Market Square shul. But instead, in the face of her undisguised disappointment, I said good night and promptly turned away, intending to beat it back into Muni’s book, though I lay awake until dawn without reading a page.

  Of course I wasn’t entirely unaware of what was going on. How could I be when the situation was all the talk at Beatnik Manor? Things were heating up, the strikers marching every day for their self-respect, though I wondered if there was enough of that article to go around. Strike leaders had been arrested for jaywalking, union officials jailed for contempt of court. A mock funeral was held outside city hall to mourn the death of freedom, and at night the horizon over South Memphis was coral-red from the trash fires the strike supporters lit. Moreover, it was rumored that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself was coming to the city to speak on behalf of the sanitation workers. The issue seemed to have become a cause célèbre. But when I wasn’t obsessing over my missed connection with Rachel, I was literally absorbed in The Pinch, though I still managed only a page or two a night—because the effort involved in reading that particular volume could be as exacting as the effort of living on earth.

  At first I might have discounted the experience as the aftereffects of hallucinogens, which I wasn’t unfamiliar with. Such phenomena were common enough, especially when you’d stopped using the stuff as abruptly as I had: it left fluorescent echoes in the brain. But lately the echoes had more volume and substance than their original source. To read about the entertainments at the Idle Hour Theater, where every night was Talent Night, was to find myself in the audience among spell-struck neighbors. Onstage the citizens tried to outdo one another in performing wonders, though the miraculous had become relatively prosaic in those parts. Everybody was a magician. Harold Dlugach made a solemn show of lighting his brother Morton’s poots, from which fabulous salamanders materialized in the resulting blue flames; the Shpinker Hasids extracted the souls of local suicides from mirrors and ladies’ reticules, then released them like carrier pigeons with messages to God. (Muni wrote that, sequestered for so long, ben Yahya’s Hasids were now ubiquitous, whereas their rebbe seldom entered society anymore and looked peaky whenever he did.)

  Sometimes I confused what I read with what I imagined I’d read, or passed through, as when wide awake I dreamed that I sloshed into Pinchas Pin’s General Merchandise: I climbed the stairs and padded down the short hallway to peer into the little cupboard of a room, where a gaunt man with pouched eyes sat on a bed in his skivvies inscribing the deeds of the neighborhood. What would happen, I wondered, if I nudged aside his shoulder, displacing his writing hand to make room for mine, instead of simply retreating back to my own half of the century?

  8

  Beale Street

  When Jenny entered his room, stepping from her stilts through the window holding aloft a covered dish, Muni could scarcely bring himself to look up from his labor. She peered over his shoulder and he made automatically to conceal the writing with his hand. He needn’t have: the cursive was nearly illegible, a combination of Hebrew-laced Yiddish and the English he was trying to domesticate with the help of a broken-spined dictionary. Besides, Jenny was virtually unlettered.

  “It’s a secret what you’re scribbling?” asked the girl.

  “Not altogether,” said Muni, still abstracted, “but it’s not yet ready for the public consumption.”

  “Neither are you,” she teased, mussing his already unkempt hair. He had lost weight and his unwashed undershirt had a vinegar smell. She set down the plate of kugel, removed the half-eaten plate of buckwheat groats she’d left there before; then leaning over him, she pulled his face to her breast and brushed the crown of his head with her lips.

  “You’re crazy as a bedbug,” was her whispered diagnosis.

  With his nose tucked in the voile crease between her tsitskehs, he inhaled her essence of lilac and cold cuts, and wondered why he did not rise from the cot to take her in his arms. Desire aside, Muni didn’t want to disappoint her; she’d been tolerant thus far of his elusiveness, never blaming him for running away. He was keenly aware of their deferred intimacy and wondered if his reluctance to hold her involved a portion of guilt; though whether or not their sins were permissible in this unorthodox climate was frankly immaterial to him now: his ache was acute and the moment opportune. So why was he still incapable of leaving off his employment for the sake of the girl? The answer was as inescapable as fate.

  “Yenny,” he said to her whisper-soft breasts, which muffled his words, “I am by Norf Main Freet iss instrumum.” Lifting his head. “When it speaks—and it don’t never stop talking—I must listen and take down every word.”

  Jenny shoved him to arm’s length, disburdened herself of a weighty sigh. “You poor deluded putz,” she said, not without a tinge of genuine rancor, and barged out of the room to check on Katie Pin.

  Attending to Pinchas’s wife and helping the Rosens in their effort to feed a community that lived essentially on air was keeping her busy. She saw to the needs of the failing Katie, spoon-fed and sitz-bathed her, emptied her slops and read her articles on society scandals from back issues of Harper’s Weekly. She kept the shades drawn to keep out the insult of the neighborhood’s radiance and shooed her husband from the bedroom, though he protested, “Katie, I hate you already, God forbid! Now will you let me in?” Because he thought—this was his logic—that if she believed he no longer loved her, she wouldn’t mind so much his watching over her decline. But Katie only screamed at him as Jenny explained before closing the door, “She don’t like you should see her dilapidate.” He watched anyway, peeking in while she was sleeping to ensure that there was still some indication of her breathing. Her once robust form was turning practically diaphanous in its degeneration, the only body in the Pinch that was visibly aging, and it seemed to her frantic husband that his wife suffered the martyrdom of age for all the others who’d been given a pass.

  Eventually Jenny stopped invading the Pins’ apartment through Muni’s window. How many times could she be expected to endure the same rude reception? His absorption in his febrile occupation had become a completely hermetic activity; it was an exercise made further exasperating by the ambivalent face he showed her whenever she managed to get his attention, though on her final few visits she’d failed to arouse even that tepid response. Muni had barely bothered to look up from his hen-scratching. Unshaven, unlaundered, and increasingly thin, he looked much as he had on the day he’d arrived on North Main Street from overseas. Back when he was a sleepwalker and she a ropewalker—avocations that who would have thought so compatible? Now he was a delirious insomniac like so many of their neighbors, some of whom repeated after Rabbi ben Yahya that “sleep is the unripe fruit of death.” The Shpinker rebbe’s bromides were frequently on their lips of late.

  Jenny wondered if Muni ever left his smelly cell anymore, strewn now with his uncle’s books—whose formal devices he appropriated as needed—and the drift of pages scored with his fitful scrawl. For books Jenny had little use, and as for the writing itself, who did Muni Pinsker think he was? Were the angels dictating to him a new testame
nt that the work should preclude all other concerns? It wasn’t lost on her how the very environment that inspired his labor had also made him a shut-in—was he even aware of the irony? But her anger was mixed (she couldn’t help it) with anxious concern. She worried about his well-being and even reserved some small part of her nature in which to admire his obsessive industry: how it displaced all else in his purview, including his regard for her. It was a passion that duplicated the charged atmosphere of the Pinch itself, which spilled beyond the boundaries of any given day to overflow the rest of existence.

  “It’s this stupid street that’s drove you nuts,” Jenny concluded on her last pass through his room, never asking why she herself remained proof against the neighborhood’s questionable influence. And still receiving no response from her sometime hartseniu, her lover, she gave way to a livid “You’re not a person anymore!”

  He showed no sign of having heard her, though when she was gone he paused to shake a cramp out of his wrist. He gazed at his scrawl and marveled at how the words functioned like a prism, refracting the black ink and white page into an iridescence. “I’m a person and a bit,” Muni reflected, thrilled at his own audacity.

  She began to enter the apartment by the kitchen window, wearing a serving tray on a strap around her neck so it wouldn’t interfere with her stilt-walking facility. From the tray she removed the dishes she brought for Pinchas and Katie. (Pinchas only picked an occasional noodle from the broth, which left a generous helping of table scraps for Muni, though the boniness of both men advertised their want of nourishment.) Jenny and Pinchas would exchange solemn nods before the girl went into the sickroom to nurse Pinchas’s wife in her extremity. When she first experienced the morning queasiness with its accompanying dry heaves, Jenny wondered if Katie’s infirmity was contagious, then dismissed her discomfort as a symptom of fatigue. She was working too hard in order to steer clear of disappointment. The missed monthly, however, was more difficult to ignore, though did any women have regular cycles since the clocks had stopped? But with the nausea came bloat and nipples as swollen as plums, and despite an abiding naïveté about such things, Jenny could no longer deny the truth of her situation.

  Against all reason the girl felt joyful. Her first impulse was to share her news with the father-to-be, imagining how it might snap him out of his fervid single-mindedness. “We’re going to have a happy event,” she’d announce, and he would leave off his graphomania to lift her into the air as in a dance; though she knew he would more likely reply, “We had already the event,” if he replied at all. Because what occurrence could possibly surpass his waking dream? Then Jenny didn’t know whether she was more aggrieved over their imagined conversation or the one she knew they would never have. Why had the dumkopf never proposed to her? Didn’t he understand that theirs would be a special child, the first to be born into the postdiluvian Pinch?

  There was an evening when she peered into Muni’s room, lit by a single yahrzeit candle, and saw the reams of pages that threatened to inundate or bury him alive. It came to her what an unwelcome intrusion the birth of a flesh-and-blood child would be in a world composed exclusively of words. After that Jenny began actively to resent the common dream that had inebriated the street.

  She had an urge to confide in Katie but worried that her news might be the last thing that, in her contemplation of last things, the childless woman would want to hear. Then once at sundown, from the tar-beach rooftop of the Rosens’ building, Jenny surveyed the brazen surface of the canal with its lamplit fleet. Rabbi ben Yahya had said that the water was derived from the perspiration of heavenly hosts singing the praises of the highest, and these days the rebbe’s word was taken as gospel. The star-speckled evening stretched south toward antiquity, north toward the end of days. That it was no longer confined by its former diurnal horizons could also be attributed to the Shpinker rebbe, whose Hasids had prayed a hole in the membrane separating the fallen world from its opposite number. The Hasids themselves maintained, paradoxically, that they had repaired the rift between Olam Ha-ba and Olam Ha-zeh, above and below, thus allowing free passage between the two spheres. This meant that an angel might, if it wished, cohabit with a mortal and a mortal become likewise a citizen of Paradise. A boat could do duty as both a floating barbershop and a shivah shel-maalah, a celestial academy. Children plunged into the canal and surfaced with novelties: amphoras wreathed in blue algae, electronic gadgets that had yet to be invented, a rusalka (a mermaid) that they were made to throw back again. In the park some householders were turning on a spit a flayed red ox, which (though only partially visible) was as big as a mastodon.

  From her vantage Jenny, heart-stricken, took in the broad expanse of that freakish street and rejected wholesale its garish goings-on. What kind of a normal childhood could be had in the midst of such humbug? The Pinch was finally no place to raise a kid.

  She considered consulting the Widow Teitelbaum, who did a backstairs business as kishef macher, a medicine lady. She kept a cabinet of herbal teas and patent medicines like Hardy’s Woman’s Friend that she sold over the counter, and was known to administer mercury and hellebore enemas to good effect. The Jews had no special problem with abortion—some proclaiming like the joker Asher Sebranig that “it ain’t human, the fetus, till it gets its law degree.” Circumstances sometimes warranted desperate measures. But the word itself left a nasty taste on Jenny’s tongue. Besides, she knew there would be gossip; North Main Street was all about choosing life these days, and terminating a pregnancy would not have been consistent with the general air of festivity. So she decided to turn to the Negro Asbestos with whom she had a peculiar relationship, though he was lately hard to find. He came and went at a time when it seldom occurred to anyone else to leave the boundaries of the Pinch. Some even thought it impossible, so much had the district come to define their world. In this attitude (remarked Rabbi ben Yahya), they were like the population of the mythical city of Luz, the city of immortals, whose residents went outside the walls only to die.

  Jenny came upon Asbestos as he was crawling from under a rust-cankered manhole cover on Winchester Street. When she accosted him, the fiddler explained that it was easier for a blind man to negotiate the underground city than to walk abroad on its surface. Wringing out a saturated pant leg, he alluded to a system of tunnels beneath downtown Memphis that predated the Civil War. “Folk’d use them to conduck your slave to Beulah Land.” Jenny had heard it all before; had already gleaned from her dealings with Asbestos, who as the object of her charity had come to trust her, that such clandestine operations persisted to this day. Armies of indigent black men were daily arrested on trumped-up charges and indentured to forced labor in mines and lumber camps, and certain intrepid types conspired for their deliverance. Give him a little schnapps and the fiddler might allow that he himself, sightlessness notwithstanding, had a finger in such operations during his subterranean rambles. Ordinarily Jenny humored him—“Old man, you won’t never die in bed”—but today all that business, if it really occurred, unfolded in a universe no longer even parallel to the Pinch.

  Impatiently she interrupted Asbestos’s discourse and appealed to him for help. As he listened, his prune face collapsed behind its smoked lenses and he cautioned the girl in his emery voice, “You ain’t want to do that, honey.” He was right, she didn’t. Nevertheless she threatened to pursue independent means that included certain cunning medieval devices if he refused her. In the end the Negro downheartedly relented and agreed to arrange everything. A few nights later they set out for Beale Street by an overland route, since—thanks to the pillowslip ramparts—it was now possible to travel along buckling sidewalks all the way to Main Street proper.

  Asbestos led the way with his tapping cane, and Jenny fatalistically followed the blind man. Despite his bias against aboveground travel, he seemed to know every lamppost and crosswalk on the way to Beale. Straggling together past the department stores and specialty shops, they raised eyebrows; a blind nig and a gimpy jew gi
rl, they may even have invited some vulgar remarks. But Jenny, for all her trepidation, felt a slight sense of relief to be back in an ordinary precinct where everything was more or less finite. People window-shopped, trolley lines clacked, wires sang; the air smelled of horse manure and roasted peanuts. The weather was appropriately autumnal; there were newspapers with headlines announcing the opening of a canal in Central America and the imminence of a war in Europe. Everything proceeded according to rational categories without the least intimation of eternity.

  After Asbestos had asked her for the umpteenth time if she maybe had second thoughts, they turned the corner onto Beale Street and proceeded under dangling pawnshop globes. A black man in a turned-around collar tipped his homburg to the fiddler and spoke his name, while Jenny wondered: Who tips his hat to a blind man? Farther along, a street-corner band—washboard, bull fiddle, and jug—left off the spirited number they were playing to strike up what sounded to the girl like one of the fiddler’s own funereal scores. Pausing, Asbestos flashed a rare grin, took his instrument from its sack, and sawed a few collaborative chords. So it seemed that the schnorrer of North Main Street, upon whom Jenny had condescended to bestow her benevolence, was a dignitary here on Beale. Why was she not surprised? They pressed on through a fine mist of frying pigs’ snouts from a vendor’s oil drum grill. The pavement was crowded with peddlers hawking stink killers and hair straighteners, vials of Oil of Gladness and packets of Come-To-Me Powder. A couple of undertakers quarreled over a corpse being stretchered from a barroom into a horse-drawn ambulance. Through their open doors Jenny could see the yellow-skinned ladies gyrating to barrelhouse pianos, their buttocks rolling like juggled melons beneath the fringe of their hobble skirts.

  Despite the many looks askance, Jenny didn’t feel the fear take hold until Asbestos asked if they’d come yet as far as the Monarch Club. “See mens roll they bones in Pappy Haddum’s horn,” he advised. “Sign say, No Dozen Here.” She peered through a smoky door toward a bar on top of which men were tossing dice into a large leather funnel, saw the sign above the bar, and confirmed that they had arrived. The fiddler directed her into an alley and up a steep flight of stairs on the outside of the building, where their knock at a paint-blistered door was answered in due course.