The Pinch (25 page)

But that wasn’t the only reason Pinchas was reluctant to reveal the full extent of his recovery. He luxuriated in Katie’s attentions, even when the measures she took to restore him verged on the heroic: for she administered regular doses of castor oil and calomel to reactivate kidney function and loosen the bowels, the effects of which Pinchas suffered in grateful humiliation. Reborn, he was content there should be a period during which he was reduced to the condition of a virtual babe in arms. When his body began to regain its previous vigor, his clearing brain acknowledged certain stirrings that had been—though unrecognized till now—a fundamental motivation all along. Because, beyond his need to escape the cloistered life of the shtetl and the incarceration his treasonous sympathies promised, Pinchas had yielded as well to a call to adventure. And adventure included an unspoken quest for romance. True, such a desire was not wholly compatible with his commitment to dialectical materialism, or to the cruder materialism he’d lately practiced. In fact, he was as vexed by this desire as he was by his inexperience. He derided his growing fondness for the girl even as he regarded her as the agent of his salvation, a notion her father affirmed in his cups.

“It’s a mockery of our Lord’s own resurrection you’ve made with this Jew man,” Cashel was heard to mutter.

And Katie: “Put a cake in it, Da!”

The brothers, less vocal, satisfied themselves with pissing discreetly in the peddler’s porridge and thumping him in places where the bruises wouldn’t show. Pinchas was stoic in suffering their abuse, having endured worse at the hands of the girl herself, whom he was coming to adore.

He knew it was an impossible infatuation, not the least because he was a Hebrew and she the daughter of a popish clan who viewed him as essentially vermin. But such obstacles the peddler, perhaps delusional in his re-invigorated state, believed he could overcome. Added to these deterrents, however, was the further inconvenience of a fiancé. For it seemed that Katie Keough had been pledged to one Phelim Mulrooney, a barkeep who operated a dram shop over in Catfish Alley. It happened that the Keough men, averse to their own rotgut (whose side effects rivaled the symptoms of the plague itself), had run up an exorbitant tab at Squire Mulrooney’s tavern. In point of fact, they were in default of a bill they could never hope to settle. The barkeep, though, had magnanimously agreed to waive their debt, and even to extend them a line of credit, in exchange for the hand of the fair but undowered Katie. The maid herself had not objected to the betrothal; its imminence was the trump card she held over her father and brothers, and played whenever the occasion called for it. To break off the engagement would have meant severing their lifeline, and by periodically threatening to do just that, Katie would have her way in most matters. Besides, the girl had been approached by worse suitors, and despite a face so infested with blackheads that he looked to have been peppered by buckshot, Phelim Mulrooney was a man of parts. The proprietor of a thriving business, he made a more or less honest, if disreputable, living. The Pinch had offered her no better prospects.

Pinchas had ascertained all this during the tavern keeper’s visits. The man would appear on the gentile Sabbath, doff his stiff bowler, and greet them—often with wilting flowers for Katie—with a “God save all in this house.” The Keoughs would respond with false enthusiasm, because it was clear none were overly fond of their benefactor. He would pay his shamefast respects to his intended, embarrassed by his own transparent carnality, and even inquire after the welfare of her patient, whom he regarded as the girl’s innocent pastime. Then he would sit down with the men and, casting the occasional cow’s eyes in Katie’s direction, discuss items concerning the wedding. Impatient though he was, however, Phelim agreed there was nothing for it but to postpone the affair until the ongoing crisis had abated. For death still held dominion over the district.

“A feller can’t unstopper a keg or raise a bucket from a well without he turns up a corpse,” the suitor would repine. “They’re after saying there ain’t enough living to bury the dead and it’s the niggers are having to do it.”

Of course there was always the question, never expressed, of their own survival. Phelim himself wore as a charm against misfortune a moonstone amulet sold to him by a fishwife who was later stoned for a witch. “The world’s gone plain medieval and no kicker.” Eavesdropping from where he lay on his pallet, Pinchas silently maintained there was no impediment so great that he couldn’t surmount it, as long as the girl felt about him as he did about her. But so far there was little evidence in support of that.

Perhaps the barkeep Mulrooney was right and he was nothing to her but an ephemeral pet. Living among louts in the absence of her mother, she was in need of a creature on which she could expend some tenderness, and in lieu of a broken-winged bird a sick Yid peddler would have to do. As soon as he was mended, she would set him free without a second thought. So he continued to call forth the odd fit of coughing and dissemble a frailty he no longer felt. Then he would try to count the freckles that sprinkled her cheeks like spilled nutmeg as she passed a saucer of rum vapors under his nose. He held his breath to glimpse the shady contours of her camisole as she knelt to give him a mustard footbath, and spied her emerald eye peeking at him from behind a helix of strawberry hair. Her hands, as she dried them in her apron, darted like sparrows in a bath; her slight breast lifted suspensefully before a sigh. Sometimes she caught him ogling her and they both blushed in mutual discomfiture, though he might think he detected the hint of a smile. Then he could believe that, along with the turbid light that filtered into her hovel from the hellscape outside, she had allowed herself to bask an instant in his adoration.

“Katie,” he had resolutely confided in her, “the man I was before you have saved me I am no more.” To which the girl inquired, “Are you then no more a man at all?” Ignoring her retort, he stood by his statement: because the previous Pinchas had had no tolerance for magical thinking; the credulity of the Russian Pale with its deathless prophets and hidden saints was a world he’d long since left behind. But how to argue with the fact that he’d been raised from his coffin by an angel? And now he felt his identity as erstwhile revolutionary and peregrine merchant was a casualty of that event. All that once defined him had been displaced by his overriding passion for the girl. “Katie, I am gornisht vi a vantz,” he avowed, “nothing but a insect without you.”

They tickled her, his singular confessions, which she occasionally countered with melodic Irish equivalents: “We say amadán, a fool.” She seemed to enjoy listening to his fractured syntax, often correcting his speech, as if in healing his body she must also knit his broken tongue. Sometimes, however, his relentless expressions of gratitude seemed to get under her skin. Was it that she’d simply had enough of his malarkey, or had she come to feel the burden of a responsibility for his very existence? In his most hopeful moments Pinchas suspected that she knew he was malingering and was complicit in prolonging his convalescence.

He offered her tortured versions of biblical verses recalled from his cheder days, whose meaning he felt he’d only begun to understand: “Your eyes are toyvn … pretty doves / your hair a flock of goats—”

“A flock of goats!”

“Your teeth are ewes that they sheared already the fleece—”

“For the love of Jaysus!”

“Your breasts—”

“Shut your gob!”

But she hid her amusement in her apron.

Once, when the men were out peddling their poteen and he was alone with the girl, Pinchas dared to venture, “Katie, you are, I think, mayn bashert.” He lay sprawled across the tattered quilt, his back against the bowed wall of the kip, eyes moist behind their small oval lenses.

“The cheek!” she exclaimed, though her potato masher remained poised in midflail; then in a whisper, “What does it mean, bashert?”

“It means a destined one.”

Lowering the masher into the bowl, the girl became thoughtful. “We say m’anamchara, soul mate, or macushla machree, pulse of my heart.” Her roseate complexion deepened as she returned to mauling her spuds, and Pinchas thought she glowed like a synagogue’s everlasting lamp.

He wondered how he could want so much to worship and possess her at the same time, and how either option seemed to him equally holy. But no sooner had Pinchas realized that she was fond of him as well than he began to anguish over her well-being. Enslaved to a family of ingrates who conspired to sell her into the servitude of a loveless marriage, she was in dire need of being rescued from her fate. And that was to say nothing of the threat of the plague itself, which she might contract any day in her comings and goings—that is, if her wayward father and brothers didn’t bring it back home to her from their knockings-about. Unable to contain his anxiety on her behalf, Pinchas found himself risen to his feet, taking hold of Katie’s free hand. She again ceased pummeling her boiled tubers to level at him a dubious gaze.

“You saved me my life,” he said. “Now you will please to let me”—he recalled the cardinal utterance of his profession—“settle the account.”

She snickered, rolled her eyes, but made no effort to withdraw her hand from his. “Give an ear to who’s talking salvation,” she quipped.

“Katie, I got for you shpilkes,” he admitted, “which it means I am afraid.”

“Faith and didn’t the Gypsy assure me I’ve nothing to fear from the distemper? It’s other ills the years have in store for me.”

But she could see he was far from appeased.

“Pinchas”—his name on her lips was pure music—“say after me: From tinker and pooka …”

“From tinker and pooka …,” he solemnly repeated.

“… and black-hearted stranger …”

“…and black-hearted stranger …”

“God keep”—here she squeezed his hand—“God keep my treasure this day from danger.”

He completed the incantation and vowed to himself he would never leave her side.

It was a difficult vow to keep, given that his sham condition kept him from accompanying her into the perilous out-of-doors. He was torn, wanting at once to show himself as her protector and loath to reveal the extent of his fitness lest he be abruptly sent packing. Of course Katie would never turn him out, but the rest of her brood had become ever more voluble in expressing their discontent. Their neighbors were dying like flies, the virulence of the fever so great in their quarter that the remainder of the city claimed that it originated there. The Irish were a long-standing scapegoat, there being none lower on the social ladder but poor blacks, at least not until Pinchas had come along. But the Keough men had grown tired of the harmless persecutions—gluing his toes with molasses, painting his phiz with boot polish while he slept—they’d inflicted on the freeloader in Katie’s absence; they were weary of appearing repentant in the face of their sister’s wrath when she returned. They were ready to be rid of the Yid for good and all. His situation, Pinchas understood, was untenable and could not endure, but the love that steeled his resolve had also, he believed, made him cunning. It was time to devise a plan.

On an August evening—humidity so dense it curled the roof shingles—the brothers sat sharing a jar as they gutted a string of crappie. Fish innards slithered from the listing table, plopping onto the toes of their plow shoes and the floor. Across the room lay the peddler under a sodden sheet, pretending to sleep as he listened to their discussion of the topic that absorbed what little air was left in the room: for even her “gombeen siblings,” as Katie called them, had begun to recognize that their days might be numbered. Who knew but their da might return this very night bringing the infection from the tavern, or their sister from her foraging?

“They say,” reckoned Murtagh, his stubbled face flecked with bits of bloody intestine, “you can tell by his breath on a glass who’s a carrier. Put a microscope to the glass and it’s tiny bogeys you’ll see.”

His sheepdog eyes peering through a fringe of cornsilk hair, Tighe remarked, “Sure, and your carrier can make a gamecock go roupy by coughing upon it.”

“That, I think, is moonshine,” disparaged his older brother, “though your smaller bird will succumb.”

Sentimental when soused, they fell to brooding over their fellows who’d been recently taken by Mister Jack: Rory Kavanagh, Spanker O’Malone—the list went on. “Fine lads gone too soon to glory and it’s himself that survives,” said Murtagh, tilting his square head in the direction of the recumbent Pinchas. “There’s justice for you.”

“Bang on,” Tighe nodded in assent. “And there lies the Jew like a great-I-am in the place of old Finbar.” For he still nursed a bitterness that the swayback hound, whose treble yelps he’d so savored when lifting it by the ears, had been banished from its pallet to the out-of-doors. Still feigning sleep, Pinchas manufactured a raucous snore.

Then Murtagh, who was not above goading his little brother, suggested that he might perhaps introduce a red pepper to the dosser’s bony arse. Whereat Tighe, rising shakily to his feet, offered to go him one better and introduce the whole of the sheeny’s anatomy to the night.

“Whisht, boyo, our Katie would be having your guts for garters.”

“The biggety minx,” exclaimed Tighe in a burst of pot valor, “she can start with these,” plucking the entrails stuck to his trousers and flinging them at the wall. “The divil take Katie and her reasty rabbi!” Tottering forward, he leaned over the peddler and gave his shoulder a rough shake. “Here,” he shouted, “it’s time yer mushed along up the yard.” Then a cuff to the back of the counterfeit sleeper’s skull.

But Pinchas had provided for just such an eventuality. With the sheet pulled tightly over his head, he dredged with furtive fingers the reserve of ingredients he’d tucked into the deep pockets of Cashel’s nightshirt. From the right-hand compartment he scooped the saffron pollen he’d collected from the overripe irises that Phelim Mulrooney had bestowed on Katie during his visits. He rubbed the pollen rapidly over his face, then took from the other pocket the pulpy blackberries he’d filched from Katie’s larder and pressed them into his squinched-up eyes. He stuffed the fistful of tea leaves into his cheeks, so that before Tighe could tear the sheet from his head and haul him to his feet, Pinchas’s skin was turned a saffron yellow and purple tears leaked from his nostrils and eyes.