Still I spritzed my face and armpits in the sink, locked the shop, and caught a bus down Poplar Avenue as far as Overton Park, whose lion-crowned gates were the end of the streetcar line back in the day. I got off the bus at Tucker Street and walked up a short semicircular drive, where I was met by Rachel standing in front of the B’nai B’rith Home for the Aged. It was a low, bunker-like building bordered by acacias, its entrance flanked by potted nasturtiums beside which, looking equally vegetable, were parked a pair of seniors in wheelchairs. There was a hint of chloroform on the breeze, a setting designed to accent Rachel’s vivacity. In the brief time since I’d seen her she’d trimmed her bangs, which made her look like Cleopatra or Grace Slick; she wore a short suede jacket over a corduroy smock and, despite the balmy morning, her leather boots.
I flung my arms about her.
“He’s not here,” she stated flatly, patting my back as if to encourage a burp.
“Marry me,” I heard myself saying, squeezing harder, but when she failed to return the pressure I relaxed my embrace. “Who’s not here?”
“Tyrone.”
Concealing my disappointment at her lack of enthusiasm, I took a breath: “Let me guess,” I said, my thoughts leaping ahead of themselves. “You got him transferred from the state asylum and now he’s run away …” Phrases like “dragnet” and “all-points bulletin” came to mind.
Released from my hold, Rachel gave me a look. “Earth to Lenny,” she said patiently. “He goes to the park to paint.”
You might have thought that after so long a confinement he’d be in dread of the out-of-doors, but there, across the way, sat the artist in a folding chair behind an easel in the shade of the bronze doughboy statue. An attendant stood at his shoulder, a stout woman with a plum-colored face wearing scrubs, the flesh hanging like wineskins from her folded arms. Scattered in the grass about the easel was a murmuration of flower children seated in lotus positions, playing penny whistles and weaving clover chains. The month of March, having run the scales of the seasons, had settled this morning on picture perfect: yellow daffodils and forsythia, pink dogwoods, azalea, crab apple, redbud, and tulip trees, all seemed to have burst into blossom only moments ago. Despite the warmth, however, Tyrone was bundled into a duffle coat, a watchcap pulled nearly to the hooded lids of his soft shamrock eyes. His attendant, who seemed to recognize Rachel — this was evidently not her first visit — announced somewhat skeptically, “The chirren have ’dopted him.”
I looked over his shoulder at the painting in progress, its bold primaries having little in common with the pastel hues of the surrounding meadow. The composition repeated the moonstruck themes I’d grown accustomed to from Muni’s book: a street of unlikely juxtapositions and historic anachronisms, merchants and members of long-extinct races mingling in front of flyblown facades. But where that brazen Pinchscape might ordinarily have enthralled me, today it only gave me the willies with its mad departure from the morning’s serenity.
Bending close to the artist, Rachel asked him (a little patronizingly, I thought), “Are you happy here, Tyrone?”
Previously so slow to respond, he replied now without hesitation in a voice that, cracking like an adolescent’s, sounded almost sane. “Isn’t everybody?”
Given the source, I found his answer rather chilling, but Rachel allowed herself a sigh of satisfaction. I supposed she’d earned it. After all she’d been instrumental in bringing about the artist’s improved situation, in making sure he had available the choicest materials: a stretched cotton canvas on a lyre easel (she had me to know), a watercolor palette and squirrel hair brushes. She had indeed been a busy girl. She’d conducted her interviews and written a grant that would enable her to conduct even more, and was composing a monograph based on her research. The monograph, a projected oral history of North Main Street, was the initial stage of what she hoped would result in a book — a book that might be viewed as a kind of practical companion to the one Muni Pinsker had written. That one she’d invited me to donate to the Folklore Center’s archive.
Regarding Tyrone with an almost proprietary benevolence, she whispered to me that it might be possible to put together a show of his paintings at the center. “The naive art thing is really catching on.”
I couldn’t help admiring her even as I suspected that her interest in Tyrone’s work was not entirely selfless. Meanwhile Tyrone, uncorked, had become almost conversational.
“There’s thirty-nine occupations that if you do them on Shabbos you’re punished with death,” he submitted without looking up from his painting, “and Fannie Dubrovner was guilty of the worst”—the hippies appeared to be communally holding their breath—“which is to spin the wool while it’s still on the goat.” I recognized the reference from Muni’s text, but the rest was unfamiliar. “She sweated lice, Fanny, that sizzled in the oven where God put her without a kitsl or a kiss …”
I saw Rachel shudder and thought, good, maybe she’s beginning to understand that Tyrone isn’t Mr. Dick. The painter went on offering unsolicited information: “Sanford Nussbaum carved the Lord’s name on a donkey’s hoof / and laughed to see it jump over the synagogue roof …,” while one of the hippies took scrupulous notes. Another, a girl with a pendulous bosom swinging freely beneath her gossamer shift, rose to drape a clover necklace over Tyrone’s head. He looked up to give her an appraising glance, his eyes ticktocking back and forth with the sway of her breasts, and thoughtfully remarked to his audience or himself, “Moses and Aaron.”
“He means a nice rack,” I interpreted for Rachel, who simpered as if to say that the phrase needed no translation. The attendant rolled her eyes as if to imply that her job might be more than she’d bargained for.
We walked to Rachel’s car, which was waiting at the curb in front of an old hotel with awninged windows overlooking the park.
“So what do you think?” she asked as she unlocked the door.
I was thinking that, appearances notwithstanding, there was no place that Tyrone Pin would ever really belong, and his vulnerability made me a little sick to my stomach. But as Rachel’s question had no special reference, it merited only a general response. “I think you would have to be out of your mind not to be crazy in this world,” I said.
She awarded me a tight-lipped grin. “Or vice versa,” she replied.
I tried to return the smile, wanting so much to parlay the moment into an intimate exchange: we were bonding again over a lunatic who was the living connection to the vanished Pinch. But a perverse impulse refused to let me take advantage of her ebullient mood. “Do you imagine that you brought him back to the Garden?” I said. Her grin reversed itself. “He’s damaged goods, Rachel. When all’s said and done, he’s just a poor defective shell-shocked ex-GI.”
She looked puzzled: “Thus spake Lenny Sklarew.” But rather than object, she narrowed her eyes to examine me through the bore of her inquisitive squint. “Since when did you become such a scold?” she asked, not without a note of respect; then gently lowering her voice, “What’s eating you, Lenny?”
What wasn’t eating me? I’d lost my apartment, my employers, and even, it seemed, my relation to the book that had all but eclipsed my own past — though that last was perhaps a blessing. But shouldn’t the book’s loosened hold on me allow for a tightening of Rachel’s?