The just-married Jenny Pinsker, if only to keep from looking back, threw herself into her labors upstairs and down, and in the tradition of the young Katie Pin before her, proved as able a business partner as a wife. It was she who kept the books and appeased the creditors; who prevailed upon her husband to either update his stock or else be relegated to some quaint relic of a notions emporium — advice that Muni, resistant to innovation, only acceded to in the face of threats. Jenny threatened at every setback to return to the circus, though in truth those years were becoming as unreal to her as Muni’s time as compulsive scribbler was to him. Moreover, her affection for her husband had seriously compromised her center of gravity, further impaired by the often unbearable arthritis that distressed her gimp leg. Old Doc Seligman, who was suspected in his hemorrhoidal dotage of abusing his own medicine chest, prescribed her various analgesic powders that she was given to chasing with a finger or two of peppermint schnapps. It was a habit she’d picked up in her travels. When Muni expressed concern, Jenny twitted him that “Der shikker is a goy,” and assured him it wasn’t in the nature of a Jewish daughter to become a drunk. Meanwhile she’d conceived a fascination for the insular little boy who occupied the former scriptorium and was after all an orphan like herself. She recited at his bedside the verses she recalled from the clown’s somber catalog until they’d faded from her memory, then fell back on trying to entertain him with tales of the big top. On occasion Muni might supplement her stories with his own account of walking to America from the Siberian wastes, an event you might have thought he’d completed only yesterday. More than the stuffed derma and brisket that the ever-solicitous Rosens incessantly plied the newlyweds with, it was the broken record of those stories on which they endeavored to nourish Tyrone.
At least until Mrs. Rosen warned them, dripping sweat into the pot of soup she’d lugged up the stairs, “they going, the bubbeh mayses, to stunt the boy’s growth.”
They deferred to her wisdom, though there was no telling how much of his guardians’ maunderings Tyrone had digested. His physical growth was normal at any rate, and while his emotional maturity may have lagged behind, growing up was not a priority in the Pinsker household. Moreover, Tyrone had found his way into his own cache of narrative, the one he’d been poring over since before he learned to read. It was almost as if his actual literacy had little to do with deciphering the ragged manuscript that Muni had abandoned in the former nursery.
He attended to those pages with a sedulity not dissimilar from that with which the Shpinker Hasids read Torah — that is, when they weren’t out exhorting the street to read it as well. They circulated in the neighborhood like missionaries, admonishing all and sundry to forswear their getting and spending in favor of studying sacred texts; they should live in the Book rather than the fallen world. But the only book the merchants of North Main were interested in was the one that kept their accounts, which were more often than not in the red. The fanatics would have them meditating on the sacrifice of Isaac and the sack of Jerusalem, but the population of the Pinch was otherwise occupied with Mrs. Bluestein’s Mah-Jongg circle and the dance marathons Rabbi Lapidus had been pressured into hosting at the Menorah Institute. They were distracted by Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Flesh and the Devil at the Idle Hour Cinema and by Representative Eustace Butler’s attempt to introduce in the Tennessee House a bill outlawing gossip. They were troubled by the arrest of Tillie Alperin’s scandalous daughter, caught smuggling booze under her skirt into the Green Owl Café, and by the crash of the New York Stock Exchange. Though with respect to the headlines announcing that hard times had arrived, the North Main Streeters were likely to reply, “When wasn’t it hard times in the Pinch?” Then they might give one another a sidelong glance, as if subject to a phantom spasm of memory recalling a time no one would have characterized as exactly “hard.”
Were Jenny and Muni happy? It wasn’t a question they would have bothered to ask, so absorbed were they in the specifics of their new life together. Had they stopped to take account of their situation, they might in fact have been surprised by the unqualified nature of their attachment. It was an affinity that depended on neither chemistry nor looks — Jenny was losing hers, and Muni, while trimmed and shaven in his commercial aspect, was never a beauty. Even touch was not essential to their alliance, though the occasional clip or pinch leading to a conjugal tumble remained a staple of their days. But at the heart of their union was a dogged devotion — enhanced by an unwritten contract to reduce the past to make-believe — that seemed to grow even as their energies flagged.
Muni’s in particular were increasingly limited, his lungs having never been entirely defrosted of arctic rime. No amount of eruptive coughing could rid him of it, though he brought up a good deal of glutinous matter in his expectorations. Dr. Fruchter, whom the doddering Seligman’s patients had begun to consult, diagnosed consumption: “The Jewish disease,” he remarked somewhat smugly, a self-satisfied, musk-scented man; “a fine old tradition amongst our people.” (Muni allowed that he was not that keen on tradition.) Priding himself abreast of the latest treatments, Fruchter assured the couple that nothing short of a stint in an Adirondack “cure cottage” could delay Muni’s inevitable decline. There was naturally no question of the Pinskers amassing the funds for such a retreat; and besides, the climate and prescribed exposure to the elements sounded too much like the katorga to the onetime fugitive. Jenny nursed him on his bad days as best she could, despite being run off her feet with waiting on customers and attending to domestic chores. Owing to her schnapps and morphine cordials, however, she sometimes performed her duties in a sleepwalker’s fog: La Funambula become La Somnambula, as Mose Dlugach’s wisenheim sons observed. Like everyone in the Pinch, Jenny and Muni had made plans: they would salt away enough cash to buy a place — a house with a yard and a tree — in one of the better neighborhoods farther east, where the business would ultimately follow. But like everyone else they could never quite get a leg up. In time they relinquished their pipe dreams along with their neighbors, who pinned their hopes on their children and resigned themselves to dying in harness in the Pinch.
Suspended awhile in the neighborhood, the process of aging was accelerated now as if to make up for its time in abeyance, and after a lengthy moratorium death had begun to visit North Main Street like a minor pestilence. Even the optimism of President Roosevelt’s inauguration speech did little to curb the incidence of mortality; people were passing away at a rate that seemed like retribution for having lived so long. Sparber the undertaker had become the most well-to-do man in the Pinch and arguably the most popular, since the funerals he arranged gave the community its best outlet for recreation. The bereaved would pile into the few available local vehicles and follow Sparber’s freshly waxed Phaeton hearse out to the Jewish cemeteries on the city’s periphery. Businesses would close for the day (as what business was there to lose?), and the burials would be followed by picnics under the elms. For the impoverished and unaffiliated, there were processions on foot to the nearby potter’s field. Since it was generally acknowledged that nobody among that immigrant generation left the Pinch other than in a pine box, a fond bon voyage was bade to those who managed to depart it in any fashion. There were even some so envious that, during the penitential prayer on the Day of Atonement (“Who by fire and who by water / Who by sword and who by wild beast …”), were heard to utter under their breath, “How about me?”