He couldn’t say exactly why he hadn’t gone to see her in the hospital. Of course it didn’t help that, since the “accident,” he and Jenny had become the chief topic of gossip in the Pinch. And the more people talked about them, speculating on the nature of their relationship and shushing one another when he came into view, the less Muni felt disposed to communicate with the girl. The intimacy he’d experienced with Jenny that night on the wire was an anomalous event; it had occurred almost entirely outside his consciousness and therefore beyond his control. The thought of it frightened him, as did the intense desire he’d felt when he held her pliant form. Having only recently reclaimed a kind of impromptu identity for himself, Muni was not yet prepared to make that self susceptible to the devices of another. The sensations the girl evoked in him were disturbing, and if he weren’t careful they could shatter the fragile peace he’d fashioned for himself since coming to North Main.
“You’re a cruel lad,” judged his aunt Katie, who was not ordinarily meddlesome. The remark stung. He admired his aunt for her playful nature and comely looks, though he seemed to have arrived just as those looks had begun to fade. Before his eyes the blush of her high cheeks had turned from ripe to raw, and her dense auburn hair was recently knitted with silver. All her handsome features had entered their autumnal phase.
Muni was also aware of his uncle’s unease over her aging. Didn’t Pinchas protest overmuch in his running commentaries that his Katie was the same girl who’d rescued him decades before from a common grave? It was a tale he told at the least opportunity: how he’d succumbed to the plague of yellow jack upon his arrival in the city and, but for the intercession of a poor Irish lass, was given up for dead. Their marriage had condemned Katie to the lot of an outcast rejected by her own dissolute clan; it would have caused a scandal in Pinchas’s community as well, had there been any community to speak of. But Pinchas Pin was the first Hebrew to set up shop in the Pinch. By the time others of his persuasion had begun to straggle into that rough-and-ready neighborhood, his business had become an institution, as had his marriage to the pretty colleen. It had not been a perfect union; their childlessness was a constant source of regret, but Katie’s native exuberance had remained largely unflagging throughout. So it was with alarm that her husband observed how his wife had turned a corner into her climacteric, and was lately given to bouts of crankiness.
Once in Pinchas’s presence Muni ventured to speculate that his coming to stay was perhaps responsible for putting undue stress on his uncle’s wife. He was surprised by the vehemence of the merchant’s response.
“You?” Pinchas fairly shouted. “Shtik goy! Ain’t nobody else can make my Katie unhappy but me myself.”
Muni never broached the subject again, though he couldn’t shake his remorse over his aunt’s disapproval of his apparent lack of concern for the fallen acrobat.
Still he continued to lie low after Jenny’s return. The girl, for her part, never tried to seek him out but neither did she attempt to avoid him, and it was inevitable that their paths would cross again. For the time being, however, Muni ducked into doorways or retreated to the rear of the store if he saw her coming, swinging her weight along on crutches with the agility of a monkey ranging through trees. Some noted that Jenny seemed to negotiate the crutches better than she had her own two left feet before she’d fractured her leg.
Meanwhile life on North Main Street proceeded apace. Construction was under way for the Idle Hour Theater, which would serve as a venue for touring theatricals as well as the projection of the photoplays that were making the arc-lit nickelodeons obsolete. The theater was viewed with civic pride by the Reform congregation of Temple Israel, though the less secular-minded Market Square Synagogue was opposed to the impious project. They were as dismayed by the Idle Hour as by rumors that sons of the Pinch were seen frequenting a floating casino moored under the bluff at the Happy Hollow fishing camp. Further fueling a communal sense of opprobrium was the news that Mrs. Gruber had once more refused to pay tribute to the agents of Boss Crump’s machine, and so was collared again for making moonshine. Bemoaning her disgrace, the street nevertheless turned out in a body for her trial, which was on a Friday afternoon in November. Called to the witness stand, Mrs. Gruber’s colleague Lazar der Royte remarked through a window that the sun, whose color rivaled the red of his beard, had begun to set. Ignoring the prosecutor’s questions, Lazar wrapped himself in his tallis and began to chant his Sabbath prayers.
The neighborhood was less cacophonous since the gramophone in the Widow Teitelbaum’s window was no longer in competition with Asbestos’s fiddle. Instead, when she played such popular ditties as “Peg o’ My Heart” or “Yaddie Kaddie Kiddie Kaddie Koo,” the blind musician executed variations upon them, turning the sprightliest tunes into dolorous threnodies. In Pin’s General Merchandise it was business as usual, and business, Got tsu danken, was generally good. There was a run on rubber collars and oxblood Shinola was flying off the shelves, nor could novelty items like bagpipe balloons be kept in stock. Mr. Bluestein bought twelve yards of calico, and Mrs. Padauer — while her husband, a drummer in ladies’ foundation garments, was away on a business trip — came in to buy her geriatric child a winter coat. Pinchas was busy with a supplier, so it fell to Muni to take down the naval reefer that Mrs. Padauer had selected from an overhead rack. He helped the little manikin (whom she referred to as “my peanut”) on with the coat, which dwarfed his shriveled frame. While his mother was distracted in her inspection of a plaid mackinaw, the diminutive creature, Benjy by name, croaked in a voice like a belch, “I hope they don’t bury me in this shmatte.” When they’d left with their purchase, Pinchas, having observed the transaction out of the corner of an eye, answered the question on the tip of Muni’s tongue.
“I would say that he was born, the peanut, around the time of the destruction of the Second Temple.” He breathed on his spectacles and wiped them in his apron. “I got it also on the authority from Doc Seligman that he ain’t entirely a human person.”
Another subject of local interest was Hershel Tarnopol, who was on a spree. Ever since his father, Oyzer, had heaved his several pounds of sin into Catfish Bayou and gone thereafter into an inconsolable funk, Hershel had run amok in the neighborhood. Before, there had been a general tolerance for his escapades; after all, he’d stolen only essentials of the sort that the blacksmith, whose business was failing due to the tantrums that drove his customers away, neglected to provide their household. There had also been a certain admiration for the boy’s stealth, and the sense that Hershel in his baggy plus fours was a necessary evil. It was as if the merchants believed that, as long as the jug-eared scamp was allowed his petty thefts, the street might be immune to greater incursions. But lately he’d been given to pure mischief, stealing items he could have no real use for: single shoes from the show rack in front of Sebranig’s Custom Footwear, cattle dehorners from Hekkie’s Hardware & Feed, an ormolu clock, a taxidermied owl, canvas puttees. So far no one had actually caught him in the act, but Hershel always made his presence known before merchandise vanished, lest others be given credit for his crimes. What’s more, his pranks, which had thus far been relatively harmless — mixing colored gelatin in water closets, tossing a garfish into the ritual bath — had taken a more destructive turn. Cartridges exploded on the trolley tracks as the cars rolled over them, firing salvos that threatened the lives and limbs of passersby; and while no one had witnessed Hershel’s direct involvement, his conspicuous glee left little doubt as to who was responsible.