The Pinch Read online

  Muni was stunned: of all the marvels he’d witnessed since coming to the Pinch, this one seemed the least credible.

  Jenny tried to swallow her laughter with an unladylike snort. She pulled a knit cap from her pocket and tugged it purposefully over her head, then let go of another mutinous guffaw. After which she wiped her nose on her sleeve. “You don’t got to be scared of me,” she said.

  He began automatically to deny the charge, then realized that it was true. “I’m sorry what happened to your leg,” he offered finally.

  “I can tell you’re sorry,” she replied, admitting a smile he feared might break into hilarity again, “because of how sorry you look.”

  He was aware that she was teasing him, and while it made him no less uncomfortable, her tone suggested she had forgiven him his part in her injury. He didn’t deserve to be forgiven, and for a moment Muni thought of handing her the bat, which still lay at his feet, that he might receive his just punishment. But nothing in the girl’s rosy demeanor suggested she was in a punishing mood. Muni wished he could respond to her banter with some lighthearted riposte of his own; the situation seemed to call for it, but frivolity was never his strong suit. He made a stab at it anyway, offering a random tidbit he recalled from some newspaper item that Pinchas had offhandedly related.

  “Did you know that they’re putting now in the Cracker Jack box a prize?” His blush at the sheer insipidness of the remark inflamed his ears.

  Jenny looked at him with a patient expression that bordered on pity, which made Muni squirm. “And this has what to do with the price of lox in Zhitomir?” she asked. But his nervousness seemed to have infected her as well, both of them struck dumb by the realization that, despite their familiarity, they were still perfect strangers. Jenny ultimately broke the silence: “I had to bribe Mr. Dlugach with a half dozen of Mrs. Rosen’s boolkies,” she volunteered, though her voice had lost its prior self-possession. “Clever, no?” Muni conceded that she was clever, after which he was speechless again. The bashfulness that had overtaken them both might have held them there till petrifaction set in, had not Jenny summoned the temerity to propose that they take a walk. Muni opened his mouth to make his apologies; he had work to do—but found that he was already following her.

  “Is painful for you, the walking?” he managed, but she assured him that movement was always beneficial; then she set a pace, bobbing in her rhythmic limp, that Muni found hard to keep up with. They crossed Front Street, both still taciturn, and strolled down the rutted drive that led out along the river bluff, at the foot of which was the packet boat landing. So far during his tenure in Memphis Muni had paid little attention to the fact that the meandering Father of Waters flowed just below the Pinch; but on that brisk afternoon he was roused by the sight of a pair of low-lying steamers, their smokestacks puffing salt-and-pepper clouds as they took on goods and passengers. Docked beside them a showboat like a two-tiered wedding cake, a paddle the size of a carnival wheel at its stern, was piping minstrel tunes on its calliope. Barrels, potato sacks, and produce crates were piled in pyramids all about the levee, its stones pocked—as Jenny pointed out somewhat formally—with minié ball holes from Yankee gunboats.

  “What kind holes?” inquired Muni, but the girl had already moved on.

  Colored roustabouts, perspiring despite the bitter wind, heaved bales of cotton end over end up the groaning gangplanks, filling the lower and upper decks until the boats themselves became giant floating cotton bales. Old lady vendors hawked fish from trick buckets warmed by live coals; huddled stevedores sucked whiskey from jugs bristling with straws. Tin lizzies, driven by cotton and hardwood factors in fur-collared ulsters, joggled and backfired over the cobbles on tours of inspection, spooking the horses pulling baggage drays. Across the narrow channel the lanterns were being lit in the squatters’ shanties tethered to the bank of Mud Island on pontoons—“So they can ride out the floods,” Jenny had Muni to know, still dispensing information by the stingy morsel. As if she sensed that her companion had a delicate constitution that could only tolerate spoon-feeding. Despite the paucity of her conversation, however, Muni, who’d scarcely uttered a word, had the impression that the girl was mistress of all she surveyed.

  Beyond the island a burnt-orange sun was beginning to set, as the pilot lights came on along the Arkansas shore. Such were the sights that lay at the doorstep of the Pinch, and while Muni had viewed them before on solitary walks, he thought he’d never seen them till he glimpsed them today through Jenny’s wide-awake eyes; though she wasn’t necessarily thrilled by what she saw.

  “Did you know there’s a curse on this city?” she said, tying tight the strings of her cap under her chin.

  “In curses I don’t believe,” said Muni, adding a “kaynehoreh” against the evil eye.

  Jenny sniffed. “Asbestos told me,” she said, as if that settled all arguments, and Muni could have sworn he heard strains of the Negro’s strident fiddle in the air.

  The girl began speaking more freely, either from a release of nervous energy or an increasing comfort in the greenhorn’s company. She recounted something of the city’s history, breezily compressing centuries into the space of a paragraph: a Spanish conquistador had once passed through on a quest for gold, butchering Red Indians along the way, and later settlers had bilked the selfsame Indians out of their land. In departing their hallowed bluffs the Indians had flung a curse on the heads of the white men who’d displaced them. There was debate over the nature of that curse, and some said the yellow fever epidemics of the last century were retribution enough—“but I think,” pronounced Jenny with blithe confidence (she was again the mischievous maidl who’d engineered their encounter), “the worst is yet to come.”

  Then pensively pointing north with her index finger: “It’s six hours by train to St. Louis,” and south—beyond the railroad bridge recently broadened to accommodate motorcars—with her thumb: “Eight hours to New Orleans. In between is nowhere at all. I would like,” stated Jenny, with that vestige of Yiddish syntax that still sometimes invaded her speech, “to kick from my heels the dust of this town.” Then she voiced her intention to join the circus.

  The threat of her leaving gave Muni a touch of vertigo, made him realize how, for all his restlessness, he clung to the Pinch as to a raft in rough waters. “Uncle Pinchas says,” he injected, “that in Palestine the Arabs are butchering Jews …” Jenny eyed him as if wondering if he could only speak in non sequiturs, but Muni felt compelled to remind her that things could be barbarous out there where history was happening. He continued enumerating events he’d mostly ignored when his uncle rehearsed them over the breakfast table. “… and they got on trial in the state of Georgia the Jew Leo Frank for a murder nobody believes he did it.”

  Jenny frowned as if to show herself proof against such distractions. “The other girls,” she said, “they don’t think about nothing but who will dance with them at the next Menorah Institute mixer. Me, I need,” she rummaged her brain for the word, “experience.”

  Muni tried to remember if he’d ever felt a similar call to adventure. “I had in my life enough experience,” he told her, but he had to admit that the longing became Jenny Bashrig.

  On subsequent walks, often at dusk since each had their duties during the day, the girl was forthcoming about her past. Much of what she revealed, though, Muni was already familiar with from the Pins’ account of her history: he knew, for instance, that she was an orphan, and was pleased to inform her that they shared that singular distinction. He knew also that, while the Rosens had taken her in, she had been throughout her childhood fundamentally the ward of the street, the entire community contributing to her upkeep. That he too was beholden to a community that had helped fund his flight to freedom was a topic he was not so anxious to discuss. While he had no thought of absconding, he still didn’t like to recall a debt that bound him in obedience to the Pinch, though no one else seemed to acknowledge the liability. In the ghetto tsedakah, or charity, was regar
ded a sacred duty that entailed no obligation on the part of the recipient. And in time, as Muni grew easier with Jenny, he became less oppressed by what he felt he owed North Main Street.

  Although she was full of curious facts about the neighborhood and the city at large, Jenny’s education had not advanced beyond grade school. “Me and my teachers, we didn’t ever see eye to eye,” she confessed, almost proud of her virtual illiteracy. She boasted of her recalcitrance, her refusal to submit to the tyranny of Miss Christine Reudelhuber, the severely coiffed, talcum-reeking principal of the local school. Declared incorrigible, she’d begun her haphazard waitressing career at Rosen’s while openly developing her acrobatic skills. Having found her body something of an impediment at street level, she set out to discover how it might function more nimbly aloft, for such was her reasoning. Following instructions in a mail-order pamphlet on the science of equilibrism, she hung a slack rope near to the ground in the Rosen’s backyard; eventually she graduated from the rope to a woven cable purchased from a ship chandler’s down at the river wharf. That was the wire with which she’d replaced the clothesline strung across the alley between the Rosens and the Pins. She’d made no secret of her ultimate ambition to join a circus and travel the world. Never once, however, did she allude to the fact that her injury had grounded her, perhaps permanently, and Muni tactfully avoided the subject altogether.

  “Now you,” Jenny said to him, demure again after one of her lengthy disclosures. They’d been sauntering along Main Street proper, past Court Square with its burbling fountain, peering into the dressed windows of the department stores owned by German Jews. These were the Jews who’d come to America with money and culture, and so bypassed the unventilated tenements of the Pinch.

  “Me what?” wondered Muni, stalling, because he knew perfectly well what she meant: it was his turn to impart a detail or two of his own past. It was a past that had obviously intrigued the girl since his arrival, had even given him something of a heroic cachet in her eyes. So why was he so reluctant to revisit his history? It wasn’t that he was ashamed—why should he be ashamed? Hadn’t he survived the unspeakable against all odds? But his memories had been lost and found and lost again so often that he was no longer sure of the veracity of those that remained. Sometimes it even seemed to him that his past didn’t count; his own life had not yet started. Or rather, it had started once, been aborted, and was only just beginning again.

  “Sure, the boy was fetched from out of the bulrushes,” Muni’s aunt Katie had informed the girl, mocking her nephew’s diffidence. “He fell from the moon.”

  She was relentless in regaling Jenny with spurious facts about Muni’s origins, whenever their neighbor, who needed no invitation, dropped by at dinnertime. Jenny brought with her cold cuts and blintzes for which Pinchas was especially grateful, such a welcome change from Katie’s spuds. Lately Katie had tended to sling their suppers at her men with a growing irascibility, her humor prickly to the point of making her unapproachable. Moreover, she was unresponsive to any questions from her husband concerning her mood. At a loss, Pinchas fluctuated between hurt and solicitude, worried about the physical toll Katie’s temper was taking—the scooped cheeks and broken capillaries, the plum bruises beneath her eyes. But when Jenny was around, Katie perked up: she became garrulous, dispensing apocryphal versions of her nephew’s biography as confounding to her husband as to Muni himself. Jenny, however, was amused by Mrs. Pin’s fancies, and Katie would giggle as well, the two females retreating into a corner to conspire in whispers. Though he had no idea what transpired between them, Pinchas was glad to see his spouse animated again, though as soon as Jenny left, Katie reverted to her sour aspect.

  Their outings took Jenny and Muni ever farther afield; the city had its points of interest. There was Beale Street with its barrelhouses cheek by jowl with funeral parlors, where the casketed dead were showcased in windows as examples of the mortician’s art. (On Beale they also saw the colored men rounded up by gaitered police for the offense of fraternizing in public.) There were the Italianate mansions along Adams Avenue, and the tree-lined Parkway, where you had to dodge cantering horses bearing smart equestrian ladies in riding pants. It was on the bridle path in the Parkway’s median that they sighted the first purple crocuses nudging their heads through the leaf-moldy loam. But for Muni, nowhere else in the city had the liveliness of North Main Street itself, at least as it was interpreted through Jenny’s back-fence tales. She told him how Mr. Crow, the locksmith, would have his wife committed to the county sanitarium by day, only to return at night to plead for her release; how the local hero Eddie Kid Wolf got his glass jaw routinely shattered in the Phoenix Arena over at Winchester and Front. Tantalized by her loshen horeh, her gossip, Muni sometimes felt that the shops and apartments above them, the narrow frame houses along the side streets, existed solely by the grace of the girl. Still he was slow to connect his increased affection for the picturesque ordinariness of the street with his feelings for his talky companion. It made him uneasy that he and Jenny Bashrig were already considered an item by their neighbors, since there was nothing in their association thus far that signified a romantic attachment.

  After all, they had yet to even hold hands. Meanwhile everyone smiled benevolently upon the young couple. The fiddler Asbestos, whose blessing they also seemed to have secured, encouraged their intimacy with a purling adagio whenever they passed. They passed him often, as there were days when he seemed to occupy every street corner at once. As aggravated by the blind man’s familiarity with the girl as he was arrested by his music, Muni paused once to address him: “Don’t you got someplace else you need to be?”

  “I am someplace else,” replied the Negro with his yellow-toothed grin. Then he added mysteriously, “I ain’t what you think I am.”

  “Frankly I don’t know what I think you are,” said Muni, thus terminating their exchange.

  Was Jenny pretty? Her nose was slightly crooked, her stripling figure wiry to a nearly unfeminine degree, but her eyes—those lamp-black puddles—had their own gravitational pull. Looking into them, Muni felt a tidal response in his kishkes, as if his very insides were being drawn toward the girl. At some point Jenny had discarded her cane, and while she still limped, might limp forever, her jerky movements had become so adapted to her gait that Muni hardly noticed. He was selfishly thankful that her handicap kept her anchored to terra firma, that she didn’t attempt to mount her rope or tinker with the reels that held it taut. Also, she’d stopped talking so much about leaving town, though when she mentioned it Muni fought an urge to hold her back physically. He wanted to hold her. Once he went so far as to remark that her coat was too thin for the climate, imagining she might then nestle against him for warmth. Would he have the courage to enfold her with a cautious arm? He remembered the shameless flirtations of the Labor Bund girls back in Minsk: how he would stammer in embarrassment, his belly a furnace, until deportation put an end to desire. But the weather had turned and a new season was afoot: japonica, forsythia, and sweet jasmine grew out of the cracks in the sidewalk; creepers climbed the alley walls. The perfume of growing things vied with the fulsome odors from Sacharin’s fish market and the nearby river, and energies Muni was unaware he possessed were quickened by his proximity to the girl.

  But even while the whole street seemed solicitous of the match, Muni refrained from any conduct that might be perceived as courtship. At the same time he knew that mere friendship would never entirely content him, though he sometimes felt he and Jenny were still separated by mountains and frozen wastes. Then one mild April evening, during the agitated days just after the sinking of the Titanic, they took a walk through Market Square Park. A number of other strollers were also abroad in that ill-lighted public space, its gas lamps not yet replaced by electric lights. Leaving the path Jenny had bolted ahead of him out across the patchy lawn, lurching in her uneven stride toward the towering oak that was the park’s centerpiece. This was the tree under whose broad boughs in summer, when
the tenements became ovens, the population of the Pinch would bring hampers, picnic on blankets spread over the grass, then bed down for the night.

  Despite the faint glow of her eggshell frock Muni lost sight of the girl in the shadows; she was a ghost and then she was gone. Having followed her beneath the branches, he stood there stymied among the sinuous roots peering this way and that, when a pair of strong hands grasped him under the arms and hoisted him into the air. Kicking and twisting, he struggled to regain his equilibrium, even as he was set astride a nodding bough—from which, looking up, he saw Jenny hanging by her knees. Moonlight filtering through the new leaves revealed her braid dangling like a bell-pull from under the skirt draped over her head, leaving her umbrella-style drawers fully exposed. Then, skinning the cat, she dropped neatly onto the limb that supported Muni, and leaned forward to plant a wet kiss on his lips.

  The contact, brief as it was, left Muni so light-headed he thought he might swoon; he might have slid from the branch and broken his head had not Jenny held on to keep him from tumbling. The canopy of leaves cast harlequin shadows over her expectant face, and he felt compelled out of gratitude (if not challenged) to return her favor in kind. But while he still lacked the nerve to give back the kiss, there was something he thought she might even prefer. A piece of his past was the least of what he owed her for her attentions, though reaching into that grab bag could be like thrusting a hand into embers.

  “When I was brodyag,” he submitted, “that it means a fugitive fleeing the katorga, the labor camp, I came one time in the wilderness to what I think—I’m that weary—is from a wrecked sailing ship its hull. But close up I can see that it’s instead the rib bones and tusks from a old-timey monster.”