The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  Though the store had by then gone mostly to wrack and ruin, Jenny made an effort to hold things together for the sake of the boy; she wanted, if superfluously, to protect him even beyond the self-imposed fortress of his own solitary withdrawal. But the damage to herself was irreversible. Mourning for Jenny took the form of outrage: now that Muni was gone, the sanctioned intimacy they’d shared as man and wife had dwindled in her mind to small change; it was bupkes when compared to the cataclysm of forbidden love they’d known before the quake. All the tenderness of their domestic life seemed to her to have been a charade. It was an evil thought, perhaps owing to the toxins that were ravaging her body and brain. Their effects had created a gulf between the widow and the current North Main Street, the one on which she dwelled in the hermitage of a dingy apartment with a largely oblivious kid. To his credit Tyrone was not so remote as to be wholly insensible to Jenny’s deterioration. He might sometimes coax her to take a sip of Mrs. Rosen’s fortified borscht, then wipe away the pink mustache it left on her upper lip, and once he placed in her lap the fat scrapbook bulging with her yellowing press releases. But instead of contemplating the photos and encomiums as she had in the past, Jenny tossed them onto the glacier of pages in Muni’s genizah.

  The unburdening of memories must have left her the more vulnerable to instinct; because one dim day, far from the Pinch in her thoughts, Jenny mounted the slant wire again and began her drunken ascent into the glaring spotlight. Uncharacteristically temperamental, she cursed the riggers for shining the spot in her eyes so that she had to climb the cable blind—though her naked toes had thankfully a foresight of their own. It was the steadfast Mrs. Rosen, bringing over a tray of vinegar meats to feed the orphans, who found her prostrate on the stairs beneath the hanging bulb.

  For Tyrone, who had little occasion to leave his room, the absence of his guardians was a vacancy, not a vacuum. Since they had always seemed to him more vital in the book than in the flesh, he scarcely missed them. He never wept when Jenny was buried beside her husband, in a funeral slightly grander than Muni’s since the Rosens had provided refreshments. Nor did he register the news some months later that the potter’s field was being plowed under to make room for a new subdivision. (The disinterred caskets, slated for transferral to other cemeteries, were subsequently lost in a welter of bureaucratic cross-purposes.) Such information appeared to make no more of an impression on Tyrone’s consciousness than, say, the wreck of the Hindenburg or the refusal of the US government to permit the refugees of the steamship St. Louis to disembark on its shores. Cousin Muni and his wife were anyway well enough preserved in the stories where nobody ever seemed to be gone for good.

  After the bank foreclosed on Pin’s General Merchandise, Tyrone, whose high school career had degenerated to the merest pretense, became a charity case in a community that could no longer afford to be charitable. A space was made available for him in the Rosens’ basement for which, now that he was of age, he was expected to pony up a nominal rent. The money came from various odd jobs, which he performed so ineffectually that his employers—Zipper’s Fine Wines & Spirits, Hekkie’s Hardware & Feed—complained they had hired a saboteur. Still, since he scarcely ate unless reminded, families passed him around at mealtimes in a version of the Old Country’s eating days. It was not a sustainable situation, and when Tyrone was called up in the years following the attack on Pearl Harbor, there was a guilty sense of relief on the street. No one, however, was deceived: all knew that the young misfit was ill equipped to go to war.

  The displacement of Tyrone Pin’s sensibility that began with his separation from Muni’s draggled pages was advanced in the hedgerows of Normandy and the snowfields of the Ardennes, and completed at the gates of Dachau. He survived in body primarily because others, amused by his recitations from a storybook nobody recognized, looked after him as they might have a child consigned to their care; they treated him more like a mascot or a lucky charm than a fellow GI. Such a previously taciturn kid, he’d been concussed into a kind of chattering competition with the noise of the Big Berthas and the ack-ack guns; he was jarred into loquacity by the hail of body debris raining down upon their pup tents from yet another artillery barrage. His chatter took the form of the stories he murmured like a constant prayer, a chant that kept time to their footslogging progress across the wasteland of northern Europe. But the foolish music of his tales was finally unsuited to the nether region they stumbled into on the eve of the armistice. There the stories that had once diverted the soldiers seemed an obscenity in a place where the little sense the stories made was lost.

  The soldiers were no longer listening anyway, occupied as they were with inspecting boxcars full of corpses and vomiting over the sight of walking broomsticks with skin as sere as the wings of bats. It was a nation of dry bones with claws, unable to digest powdered eggs but still capable of tearing a camp guard thrown into their midst limb from limb. The soldiers had no time to attend to Tyrone, though his vaporing did catch the attention of at least one coat-upon-a-stick, and that one, having nobody of his own left to care for, conceived—though he couldn’t yet feed himself—a desire to look after the pixilated GI. The survivor—formerly Avrom of Slutsk when he remembered his name and later the languages, including English, that he’d once been conversant in—Avrom, who must have been as starved for illusion as for nourishment, went so far as to follow the narisher mensch across an ocean to America.

  There he found him, no longer so talkative, painting pictures in a basement storeroom, on butcher paper, plywood panels, plaster walls, and whatever else came to hand. As a kid Tyrone had evinced only the slightest interest in drawing or coloring; words were his pictures even before he could read. Now it seemed he’d returned to a childhood that he’d never left far behind in order to revive a latent instinct. Or was it an original instinct that he’d only just developed? Because his designs—devoid of drunken soldiers wearing masks as they shoveled mounds of putrefaction in striped pajamas—expressed a dazzled, perhaps willful innocence. He’d begun with a box of thick wax crayons, drawing crude images out of the stories he no longer seemed able to relate. Seeing that these compositions were his single enthusiasm, no other concern having seized him since his return, the Rosens encouraged his efforts. From their own spare pockets they provided him with supplies: brushes and an easel, watercolors, egg temperas, and oils. Ignorant of all method and technique, he daubed, slashed, and stippled his illuminations on coarse and hostile surfaces until they began to achieve startling effects. By the time Mrs. Rosen ushered his first and only visitor down a creaky flight of stairs, Tyrone had converted their basement into a garish Lascaux.

  Having found at the end of his odyssey only a paint-splattered shmegegi instead of the bruited miracle street, the survivor couldn’t conceal his disappointment. “Dos iz efsher der Pinch?” he asked, incredulous. Where was the book that Tyrone had quoted from chapter and verse, the one he’d cited as history, atlas, and gazetteer, which had assumed a Grail-like aura for Avrom? He pressed the artist for clues to its whereabouts and was met with abstracted unconcern. Led so far by figments and sick fancy, the survivor experienced a mounting anger, directed as much at himself as Tyrone; he became possessed of a determination to retrieve some tangible keepsake for his trouble. At length he proceeded to bully the redheaded mooncalf into an instant of clarity, which vanished as quickly as it arrived, but not before Avrom had been enlightened. Alone by starlight he dug a hole beside a neglected sapling that showed little promise of ever growing taller. The sapling stood in an otherwise treeless plot of ground that had once been a park, where Tyrone had buried Muni’s manuscript like an outworn Torah scroll before leaving for the war.

  Around that time the Rosens’ deli went belly-up, as had so many other North Main Street businesses. Families that owned their run-down buildings survived by renting rooms to the transient poor; they became landlords and hoped the sacrifices they’d made on behalf of their children hadn’t been futile, while their children seeme
d to be waiting for the excuse of another war to leave the Pinch. (Impatient, they made trial excursions as far as the Pig-N-Whistle to sample pork barbecue, the Dreamland Gardens to drink Purple Jesuses.) Tenants rather than proprietors, the Rosens were evicted from their premises and reduced to living on a picayune pension in two rooms above Futterman’s Bail Bonds on Monroe. Bereft of their hospitality and judged non compos mentis by his neighbors, Tyrone Pin was deemed a neighborhood liability: an agency was contacted and papers signed, committing him to the state asylum at Bolivar. Having pursued the artist from an inferno to his fool’s paradise (and having cleared no end of bureaucratic hurdles along the way), the refugee Avrom Slutsky lacked any compelling reason to stick around. Neither did he have a reason to move on. A scholar and dreamer during the time that had preceded the great interruption, he leased a commercial space with an option to purchase on a shoestring loan from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. There he began the unprofitable operation of buying and selling used books.

  He sat at a desk in the midst of his cluttered shop, where his moodiness tended to discourage the occasional browser, and commenced a task even more thankless than his chosen trade. He began to translate the crossbred language of Muni’s exhumed manuscript—worm-eaten despite the gunny sack it was buried in—into a negotiable English, his own becoming less rusty in the process. It took him five years. Then willing a functional dexterity into his shaky hand, he made a fair copy of the yet untitled book, which he called (what else?) The Pinch. He gave it the albeit tongue-in-cheek subtitle A History and oversaw its printing at his own expense at a local press. It was also Avrom’s idea, frankly an afterthought, to include as illustrations reproductions of the pictures the unhinged GI had painted with a holy vengeance on his return from overseas.

  The general belief was that the bookseller had been scrupulously faithful in his redaction of The Pinch, but there were those who later suggested he took liberties with the original text. They argued that, frustrated with an inability to wring from Muni’s manuscript his fascination on first hearing its contents in the lager, he invented bits for his own amusement. He tampered and perhaps even perversely inserted himself and his assistant as characters. Avrom would of course have vehemently denied the allegation: it was shtuterai, patently ridiculous. The passages foretelling his own arrival in Memphis—along with so many other prophecies—had after all come as no surprise to him, who had lost the capacity to be surprised: “For me,” he might have said, “the future came already and went.” And as for the intrusion into those pages of the feckless kid who came to work in his shop: that one, he would have had you to know, existed in the book’s printed edition long before he’d turned up in the flesh at the Book Asylum. Regarding that issue the bookseller had responded with typical insouciance even to the inquiries of the employee himself: “It’s the gilgul, stupid.”

  “The gilgul?”

  Then Avrom had wearily explained the mystical process of the transmigration of souls, a concept he naturally had no truck with; on the other hand, he allowed for the necessity of some spiritual recycling in this day and age, when the availability of Yiddishe souls was severely depleted.

  The employee, one Lenny Sklarew, had sighed in bewilderment, then gone back to alphabetizing the shelves.

  When he’d delivered The Pinch to Shendeldecker the printer, who ran off the job on his greasy old six-cylinder rotary press, Avrom was glad to wash his hands of the thing. The labor of preparing the book for print had left him exhausted—a klippah, a husk. Why, he wondered, had he taken on the project in the first place? Why, for that matter, had he come to this Bluff City, America? If he experienced any gratification in having rendered Muni’s folly accessible to the common reader, he never located it in any part of his being. He made no effort to publicize the undertaking for all its pains, or even to acknowledge its existence, and had a customer decided on some stray impulse to buy the thing, he would have sold it for a song. When the volume was in fact discovered in a random stack by his employee, he disclaimed any personal connection to it, the completion of his self-assigned task having absolved Avrom of his commitment to The Pinch for good and all. Though his employee, confounded by his own appearance in its pages, thought he detected otherwise.

  Lenny believed that his boss took a measure of pride in his possession of the book, just as he did in his ownership of the shop and all it contained. It was a proprietariness that extended as well to his sometime assistant, over whose fly-by-night progress Avrom maintained a paternal (if cranky) interest. An interest that went beyond his curiosity, no doubt already satisfied, concerning the character of the kid in the book—the one who swallowed the pills that made his brain swell like a hypertrophied heart and fell out of moving vehicles.

  He came around on a ward in St. Joseph’s Hospital at about the time that Avrom, his organs failing, throat percolating blood on another ward in the same facility, passed out of this world. Lenny himself had sustained an impressive array of injuries—cracked ribs and skull, shattered knee, internal bleeding, et cetera—that kept him confined in bed tethered to tubes, ropes, and pulleys and moored to a catheter for better than a week. The injuries would have lingering aftereffects that served to get him declared 4-F by the local draft board. It was a deferral that the late Elder Lincoln would have advised him was undeserved: an arbitrary decision on the part of a committee that had an ample pool of black youth to draw from for its steady supply of cannon fodder. But Elder was no longer around to stoke Lenny’s guilt. Nor, as it turned out, was Avrom, whom Lenny—garbed in an open-backed hospital gown and escorted by a portable pole with its dangling saline drip, surrounded by an aluminum walker—had gone looking for as soon as he was able. But on the wing where he’d previously visited him, the former employee was informed that his choleric old boss was already departed, carted away and buried in an East Memphis memorial park at taxpayers’ expense. Lenny would plan, then postpone, pilgrimages to his gravesite ever after.

  The crisis of identity that had predated Lenny’s day in the streets was naturally compounded by physical trauma and the liberal doses of morphine and painkillers that were afterward prescribed. Having forgotten his prior loss of memory, you could say that the patient suffered from a double amnesia, not that the condition deeply concerned him in his fuddled state. At some point he was visited by a small delegation from the band known as the Psychopimps, who assured him he was not to blame for Elder’s death in a tone that suggested he might well have been. But if their tidings penetrated the convalescent’s cloudy mind at all, they registered only as a muffled tympanum in the brain. Likewise the news of Dr. King’s return to Memphis, his valedictory speech punctuated by thunder and lightning after which he was said to be giddy as a child, and his subsequent assassination—though the rumbling from that event would eventually reverberate in the patient’s gut until his lunch backed up and spewed into the bedpan. Later he became aware that there was rioting all over the map, and thought it odd that his city, source of the wound that infected the rest of the nation, should remain so eerily quiet. It was during that lull that Lenny, leaning on a metal cane, with raccoon eyes and zipper-like stitches over his brow, was delivered an exorbitant bill and discharged from the hospital. He returned to the Book Asylum on a Main Street nearly deserted but for the patrolling reserves in combat gear.

  He could have gone anywhere, become anyone, a notion that perhaps played a part in persuading him to take refuge in the bookstore. Whatever the case, reentering the shop was as close to a homecoming as any Lenny was likely to know. And if there remained some doubt as to Avrom’s final wishes with respect to his store, that doubt was put to rest by a phone call on the very afternoon of Lenny’s return. Still muzzy, he wondered before answering if the caller might be Rachel Ostrofsky, which was the first he’d thought of the girl since his hospital release.

  “Is this Leonard Sklarew?”

  The emphasis on the final syllable came across as fleering, but Lenny nevertheless confessed that he wa
s he. The unfamiliar voice introduced itself as Philly Sacharin, a nephew of the North Main Street alumnus Sol Sacharin of Sacharin’s Buffalo Fish, and also coincidentally a junior partner in the law firm headed by Bernie Rappaport. He seemed confident that the information would carry some weight with his addressee. Unlike the ordinarily harried Bernie, Philly gave the impression of a cooler customer; he informed Lenny with glib assurance that the book-dealer had been in touch with him before his final illness, and that his “gift”—the passing along in writing of a shop leased these several decades from Midsouth Select Properties Incorporated—amounted, should he accept it, to Lenny’s very own mausoleum.

  “You want to keep up the old man’s fixed-term?” piped the lawyer a little gleefully over the wire. “We’ll get your transfer certified with all due haste. All you gotta do is first sell your soul to Midsouth Select to the tune of a zillion shekels in improvements. They want the worn-out heat pump and swamp cooler—whatever that is—replaced, plus an upgrade of the drywall and insulation, and while you’re at it why not install a new septic system, which they stipulate. Then there’s your sidewalk maintenance …”

  He continued rattling off a bewildering variety of technical terms—“prescriptive covenant,” “peppercorn rent, which you can forget about it”—further demonstrating his command of contract law.

  “Ever hear of Jewish lightning? That’s when you torch a place for the insurance.”

  Lenny thanked him kindly, satisfied that, insofar as it had been Avrom’s to give, the shop was his. Astonishingly, he found that he welcomed the news with all its attendant headaches—which, now that the big headache of his concussion had begun to subside, failed to intimidate him. The Book Asylum was a bulwark against the ill winds that wafted over the planet, a shrine to Muni Pinsker’s chronicle, which lay before him on the desk where he’d left it and was Avrom’s real legacy. It was altogether fitting that an individual waking up from injury and shock might seek comfort in such a place; emerging from the wreckage of his heart and bones, he might, from within the confines of his very own business, begin to reconstruct himself. He could start by shifting into an underutilized pragmatic gear and hatching a plan; maybe devise a strategy that would allow him to be both alone and not alone, to invite a portion of the public into The Pinch and perhaps acquire some revenue along the way.