The law student launched without preamble into chatty conversation. Assuming common cause, he employed his best forensic vocabulary in describing the inconvenient position the garbage strike had placed the city in. Rachel, to her credit, kept mum, perhaps remorseful at having savaged my last article of faith with her announcement. Then, as it looked like Dennis and my putative father might be on the verge of bonding over their mutual contempt for the poor, she gently touched the arm of her intended; she reminded him they’d been about to depart. “We have a prior engagement?” Dennis looked at her as if this was news to him but acquiesced to her resolute features.
She turned to me before leaving to mention something about how the B’nai B’rith Home had assumed power of attorney over the estate of Tyrone Pin, some of whose paintings now sold for upwards of …, but I was no longer listening. Then she reached across the nightstand to give my hand a squeeze. Maybe it was a tender squeeze, fraught with the pathos of unrealized desire, but to me it felt perfunctory, the way an arthritic squeezes a rubber bulb.
I wanted to tell her I’d never wash my hand again but couldn’t even summon that much spleen.
As soon as they were gone the alleged Myron Sklarew, somewhat placated, informed me, “I phoned Kenny Kurtz down at the Commercial—he owes me, Kenny — and asked him to call off his dogs. Otherwise you’d have been swarmed by journalists wanting the scoop on the only white face in that mob of schwartzes.”
I thanked him.
“He told me nobody had yet identified you and we agreed it should stay that way.”
Then his wife chimed in. “It’s bad enough our own rabbi has to get involved with those”—she choked down the ill-bred language on the tip of her tongue—“but you Lenny, what did that mess have to do with you?”
“Nothing,” I conceded.
There was a silence during which they put on their concerned faces once again and I thought I knew what was coming. They were about to relent and invite me to come back home, all was forgiven, and for a weak moment I thought I might cave in to their appeal. After all, they hadn’t been such bad parents, just clueless like everyone else: add denying them to the list of things I was ashamed of. But instead of flinging wide his arms, Myron gave a nod to his wife who copied the nod with righteous chins and withdrew a letter from her purse. Her husband took the letter from her hand and stepped forward to give it to me. The return address on the envelope — County Draft Board 480, Shelby County Federal Building, Suite 369—said it all. Seeing that I made no move to open it, he leaned over and tore it open for me, bending my fingers until they pincered the page bearing its official stamp:
GREETINGS FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
It seemed I was being ordered to report for conscription into the Armed Forces of the United States of America. I was given a specific time to appear for a physical examination that would precede my immediate induction into the military.
“We spoke to the doctor,” said Myron. What doctor? I’d been visited so far only by interns, who glanced at my chart, then at me, as if to verify they made a match before briskly walking away. “He says you should be shipshape in a matter of weeks. Plenty of time to heal before,” glancing at the letter, “your call-up date.”
Then he took a paternal tone, which my presumptive mother complemented with an expression that risked creasing her cosmetic mask. “Do the right thing, son,” placing a hand on my scarified arm, “and we’ll be proud of you.” Don’t, he didn’t have to tell me, and you’re nothing to us.
Gazing up at them from my procrustean bed, I replied, “Who did you say you were?”
I waited for the next round of visitors to appear from behind the curtain and bring me some fresh mortification: the living had had their turn, so how about the dead? Where was the ghost of Elder Lincoln come to demand I wreak vengeance on his killers? Where was Avrom — though I didn’t yet know he was gone, his casket conveyed by pallbearers dispatched from the Shelby County Penal Farm — where was he, my old boss, come forward to dump a steaming burden of fate in my lap? But nobody else arrived, the world was scoured of ghosts, and the tears that once flowed so easily were as dried up as Rachel’s flowers dying of thirst on the nightstand.
I was released from the hospital a couple of days after the slaying of Dr. Martin Luther King, feeling as fragile as Humpty Dumpty. Hobbling on crutches into the April morning, I was assailed by bright sunshine like a hail of thumbtacks, my eyes acutely sensitive since the blow to my head. Pink azaleas and yellow buttercups trumpeted their shrill colors from a nearby park, and I winced from the mordant scent of lilacs. The natural world, it seemed, was in the process of reclaiming the man-made, which looked to me to be in retreat, the city strangely quiet, the traffic sparse to nonexistent; and I, with my pallor and plaster cast, stitches like railroad crossties over the shaved patch on my skull, was a suitably walking wounded survivor of the uninhabited landscape.
My armpits and ribs ached from the pressure of the aluminum crutches as I made my way to the nearest bus stop. I engineered the precarious business of boarding the bus and rode downtown, where I dismounted on Main Street with equivalent difficulty. Negotiating the last few meters from the corner to the Book Asylum, I unlocked the door and swung across the threshold into the semidark. I inhaled the shop’s attar of arcane philosophies, forgotten histories, and baroque tales, and was at once relieved. The tall shelves were ramparts from behind which I could look out onto the armed camp of downtown Memphis, where fatigue-clad Guardsmen with fixed bayonets patrolled the street on foot and in jeeps. I was under siege, which suited my mood, holed up as I was in Avrom’s sanctum while the nation burned. Leaning the crutches against the wall, I lowered myself into my former boss’s chair, then lifted the dead weight of my rigid leg until it rested on top of the desk. Also atop the desk, where I’d left it, was Muni Pinsker’s “history” of the Pinch.
I hadn’t the least temptation to pick it up, or so I told myself, though I poked it like the curious artifact it was. I blew the dust from its cover, then I picked it up, opened it, and pitched headlong into its splashy contents. It was evening in the book, an evening partaking of the properties of dawn, and a wedding was in progress on a flatboat anchored to no particular season in the North Main Street canal. The vessel was “floodlit” by the moon’s reflection on a scattering of seraphic fingernail parings floating on the surface of the water. The canopy, sagging like a pelican’s pouch from the load of children peeking out of its sling, was held aloft by a flock of hoopoes with the heads of sages. Gottlob the jeweler, late as usual, was paddling furiously out to the boat in his leaky tub to deliver the ring. Its stone was cut from a sacred jacinth by means of the Shamir, the worm that had hewn the blocks for the Temple in keeping with the commandment that no iron be used in constructing the altar of God. On board the boat the staid Rabbi Lapidus, a rooster tucked under his arm as a sign of fertility, charged the lovelorn to “be always heartbroken, mein kinder, for only then can you keep evil away.”
A balmy, schnecken-scented breeze emanated from the oven of Ridblatt’s Bakery, under whose awning shuffled a Hasid with his nose in a volume of Talmud. He stepped off the curb and ambled several strides over the water before he realized where he was and promptly sank. A few doors down, Pin’s General Merchandise was dark, a sign on the door announcing CLOSED FOR FENCY YENTZING. Upstairs Pinchas and Katie Pin were in flagrante, while down the hall their nephew, Muni, gleeful in his unwashed underwear, was busy scribbling on the pages in his lap. Behind him stood a silent, ginger-haired child peering over his shoulder in an effort to see what he was writing, and beside the child hovered a scruffy old party in red suspenders, also rubbernecking. To the knobby blades of the old guy’s wilted shoulders were appended a paltry pair of wings, no bigger than a chicken’s, their pinfeathers as spotty as the fuzz on his ill-shaped head. I too was seized by a desire to kibitz and tried to sidle between the little boy and Avrom Slutsky, for the transfigured old gaffer was none other than he. But while the kid stepped aside the old man gave me a sharp elbow to the kidneys, turning to shout, “Gay avek! Get outta here!” The shout, which was familiar as his standard glottal screech, had at the same time the sonorous authority of a bat kol, a voice from on high.