The cautious attitude with which the neighbors regarded the child was extended to his parents as well. It was true that the Pins had been the objects of jealousy and idle talk in the past, but back then Pinchas’s status in the community was unimpeachable, and his wife’s affability had always tended to stem the loshen horah, the gossip. Besides, Pin’s General Merchandise was the long-standing anchor of North Main Street. Now, however, all anchors had been weighed, and from their bobbing vessels and supernal vantages the population deemed the Pins a suspicious lot: their bliss was not the same as the street’s.
For Tyrone’s sake Katie and Pinchas tried to maintain a pretense of normality. They represented themselves as solid citizens in a neighborhood whose permeability to wonders mocked the very nature of solidity. Still, Pinchas reasserted the proprietorship of his business while Katie took charge of her kitchen, the nursery, and the care and maintenance of the obsessed nephew. She helped out in the store, where her husband tried to push his damaged commodities. They didn’t seem to notice how they were perceived as violating the very spirit of the neighborhood, taking the part of earnest merchants when others only played at business. Where Pinchas endeavored to flog his waterlogged flannels and yachting caps, Leon Shapiro might offer, along with a factory rebate, an imp encased in a soap bubble, and Mr. Abraham peddled the philosophers’ stones the kiddies played potsie with. The currency they exchanged was more likely to be secrets than hard cash. But there were other reasons their neighbors signaled against the evil eye whenever they saw the Pins, other reasons why the Pins embraced their standard inventory with such a will.
Because, despite her lickerish vitality, Katie had begun to show signs of decomposition, and out of sympathy her husband had also developed symptoms. Her fair complexion, once dusted in freckles like cinnamon in milk, had acquired a pastry-like flakiness, bits of which dropped into the lap of her apron dress. The dress itself hung from her brittle bones as from a hanger. Her formerly russet hair, discolored and dyed, began to fall out in hanks, revealing patches of scalp the texture of coconut shell. Her green eyes had faded to oyster gray and ran with a viscous humor. The more she appeared to be actively decaying, however, the friskier she became, as if that insatiable hunger might redeem her wasting flesh. But each coupling took a further toll on both her and Pinchas, who was likewise beginning to come apart. Still they yentzed with an ever more fevered determination, further decimating the selves their desire was meant to preserve.
“Katie,” Pinchas had at last to admit while facing a merciless mirror, “let us face it, we are starting to rot.”
To which Katie replied with a transparent optimism, “Bollocks, we’re only shedding skin.”
But with every orgiastic release she experienced, Katie also felt the efforts of her soul attempting to escape its moldering confines. She had glimpsed it seeping out of herself like a bubble from a pipe, an amorphous rose blob suggesting the outlines of a young Irish bride. Then it was Pinchas’s job, sharing as he did her perception, to stuff his wife’s herniated neshomah back into whatever fissure it emerged from. But it was a dim and elusive entity, Katie’s soul, and Pinchas, in the groggy afterglow of their prodigious coition, was often slow in attempting to retrieve it. As a result, the thing had managed on several occasions to detach itself from her person. And once it ventures forth from its mortal frame the incorporeal is selfish: it feels no warmth or responsibility toward its former substance or much attachment to anything else on earth, be it husband or son. It feels only the mindless instinct to wander in the direction whence it came, and Katie’s soul might have fled halfway back to yenne velt, the other world, had not Pinchas managed to recover it in time. But occasionally the husband questioned his own selfishness in not allowing his wife her spiritual freedom. Besides, that oft-repeated effort of retrieval had worn him pretty thin and unseated his own restless spirit, which had also begun to look for a way out of its disintegrating skin. The situation had made Muni think, as he related it in his ongoing chronicle, of the escape artist Harry Houdini, who strove to release himself from straitjackets and sausage casings.
So it was only a matter of time before the ghosts of Katie and Pinchas Pin gave up their ravaged bodies, which continued for a while to pummel one another into a glimmering dust.
Still, their nephew wondered if he could have written their end differently, if even now it might not be too late to change their destiny: they had been in such an agony over leaving behind their only child. But when he reentered his privy-sized room, shadowed by the odd little boy, and gazed again upon the heap of his manuscript, its pages appeared to him as so much spindrift from an already receding tide. Soon, he thought, they would completely evaporate. Also scattered about the floor were a few long-abandoned toys — a wooden caboose, a tin frog, an Indian headdress from which Muni, stooping, plucked a red feather. He returned to the bedroom with the boy at his heels and used the feather to sweep the luminous crumbs from the rumpled sheets into the open palm of his hand. The boy watched him with unblinking jade-green eyes. Muni made a fist around the crumbs in his left hand — where they hissed like the interior of a nautilus shell — and with his right reached for the boy’s, whose small fingers entwined Muni’s own.
“I remember when they had faces,” he said.
“I wish I did,” replied Muni, beyond consolation. He put on his estranged clothing and led little Tyrone down the stairs through the largely liquidated store, then out onto the raised sidewalk above the canal that no longer deserved its name.
Vacant now of vessels except a foundered few, the grand canal of North Main Street was mostly dried up, the once steely blue body of water having separated into standing pools. The dregs of the lagoon were exposed: spittoons and smashed hogsheads, the legs of a supine piano protruding like a belly-up beast from the shallow residue. The air was no longer as tonic as it had been in Muni’s written version, where the atmosphere partook of the bracing climate on the first day of creation. The street was not quite the street of his composition, which had renewed itself daily, so that every morning you had to reacquaint yourself with the drama of your surroundings: the melancholy of the Floradora girl in the ad painted on the wall of Grinspan’s Cigar Store, the grace adhering to the wrought iron volutes of tailor Bluestein’s sewing machine … The dilapidated storefronts had lost their look of scenery suspended from a rigging in heaven and appeared as if about to collapse. The sidewalks were barren of people, giving the impression that the never-ending festivities that had so absorbed Muni Pinsker in his role as chronicler were finally over.
But the festivities, as the boy and his unkempt cousin discovered, had merely moved west to Market Square Park, which was where Muni had been headed in the first place. It was his duty to his aunt and uncle and their surviving offspring to consign the dust of Katie and Pinchas Pin to the hole in the park, the one with no bottom in which the great oak was upended. That way their remains might follow where Muni assumed their spirits had led. He never questioned the sense of this conviction; in his logy and discomposed state it was the only logic the former scribe felt he had a hold of, though it also soothed him somewhat to hold on to the hand of the unquestioning little boy.