The Pinch (50 page)

There never appeared to be any special method to Tyrone’s reading: wherever he dipped into the narrative, that was a beginning and wherever he stopped was a terminus, since the events contained in Muni’s “book” seemed to be happening all at once. They were events that, for the boy, took precedence over anything that occurred beyond the Pinch—be it the kidnap of the Lindbergh baby or the institution of the Nuremberg Laws. When not immersed irretrievably in the book, Tyrone could be a more or less functioning foster son, though his obedience was a variable affair. Conscripted on occasion to help out in the store, he performed his assigned tasks—folding winter-weight underwear, stacking odorless galvanized iron commodes—with a benign inattention, scarcely noticing the comings and goings of customers. You’d have thought he viewed the store and the down-at-heel street, when he bothered to look, from a vantage outside time.

Muni and Jenny were of course aware of Tyrone’s rapt attachment to that mishmash of untitled pages—the results of a bout of derangement the merchant had no desire to revisit—and it gave them cause for concern. For Muni there was a particular guilt, feeling as he did that his own former shut-in existence might be his legacy to the boy, who was on his way to becoming a reclusive young man. But neither husband nor wife had the heart to try and separate him from his ruling passion. Still it pained them that, except for school (where his attendance, they would learn, was sporadic) and the odd errand on which he was dispatched, Tyrone stuck so close to home. In fact, the older he got the less was he inclined to leave his tiny room, where he was occasionally seen doodling with Muni’s discarded pen on the backs of the unnumbered pages.

“It ain’t healthy,” fretted the merchant to his wife, “that the kid’s all the time in the genizah,” which he’d taken to calling the nursery—a genizah being a place for the disposal of obsolete books and papers.

Replied Jenny, “I think he took a look at being a grown-up, then decided to turn back.”

Surely the boy must have been alert to the troubles that were rife in the household. But so what if his guardians suffered from their respective maladies, exacerbated by overwork; in the stories he read—and sometimes confused with the ones they’d told him—Muni and Jenny remained hale and blooming. If Muni suffered a massive hemorrhage that Dr. Fruchter was pleased to identify as “Rasmussen’s aneurysm,” Tyrone could still imagine his foster papa as a dirty-faced tyke, riding Getzel the belfer’s shoulders through the slushy streets of Blod on the way to Reb Death’s Head’s cheder. And if Jenny, due to the virulent effects of her paregoric cocktails, succumbed to a self-lacerating fit of itching, the boy could still see her swaying to her off-key lullabies; if she woke up screaming from a recurring nightmare in which she was strapped to the wheel of a paddleboat, he pictured her clogging on the back of a five-gaited black stallion.

Muni remained bedridden with an unhopeful prognosis after his return from the hospital, and Jenny attended him despite her own chronic nightsweats and shallow breathing. (So sensitive had her skin become that she could bruise from the sound of the whistle at the coffee factory.) But even then Tyrone was not disturbed: the mutually diminished condition of the merchant and his wife had little to do with a past that held dominion over the here and now. Then, on a dove-gray morning in February, drowning in a deluge of bronchial bleeding, Muni Pinsker expired with a rosy bubble on his lips. “Moykhl” was the word his wife thought she heard when the bubble burst, meaning Sorry.

“I can tell you’re sorry,” chided Jenny, who for an instant was back in the yard of Dlugach’s Secondhand having just rolled out of a carpet. Then she drained her teacup of the narcotic cordial that tasted of hemlock from the admixture of her tears.

In their single-minded pursuit of commerce, husband and wife had neglected to pay dues to what remained of the local landsmanschaft; neither had they purchased burial insurance from the peg-legged little man who peddled policies in their shoddily reconstructed neighborhood. And while the community had always taken pride in caring for its own, lately their fiscal austerity made the citizens reluctant to absorb any extra expense. So Muni was interred in the municipal boneyard just beyond the culvert that had once been Catfish Bayou. It wasn’t an exclusively goyishe parcel, however, since a portion of hallowed ground had already received Yoyzef Zlotkin, the Widow Teitelbaum, and the honorable Eliakum ben Yahya (whose disciples made a saturnalian show of mourning, which they discharged themselves of in a day). The city provided transport for the casket that included a county official, a well-meaning functionary who took it upon himself to conduct a token memorial service. Told that the deceased was an immigrant, he went beyond the dictates of his office in extolling the loved one’s patriotic devotion to his adopted homeland. A marker was promised though none had yet to appear.

Only a small cluster of neighbors showed up for the funeral. Among them were an aged but nicely turned-out Mama Rose and Morris Padauer, who’d lately moved into a house on Alabama Street. (The house was a gift from their undying son, Benjy, who ran a lucrative loan-sharking operation out of an office above the Green Owl Café.) Also in attendance was Hershel Tarnopol, displaying the chins and dignified paunch of his position as district ward heeler, his fur lapel still torn in tribute to the recent demise of his father. Supported at either arm by the Rosens, Jenny looked as if disfigured by grief, her abdomen so distended from noxious fluids that some wondered if, despite her years, she was big with child. Dismissing the poor turnout, the widow assured the assembled, “It don’t matter where they put his bones,” since his soul was tucked safely away like a pressed posy among the pages in his young charge’s possession. And no one would try to wrest those pages from Tyrone.

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 seemed 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.