The threat of her leaving gave Muni a touch of vertigo, made him realize how, for all his restlessness, he clung to the Pinch as to a raft in rough waters. “Uncle Pinchas says,” he injected, “that in Palestine the Arabs are butchering Jews …” Jenny eyed him as if wondering if he could only speak in non sequiturs, but Muni felt compelled to remind her that things could be barbarous out there where history was happening. He continued enumerating events he’d mostly ignored when his uncle rehearsed them over the breakfast table. “… and they got on trial in the state of Georgia the Jew Leo Frank for a murder nobody believes he did it.”
Jenny frowned as if to show herself proof against such distractions. “The other girls,” she said, “they don’t think about nothing but who will dance with them at the next Menorah Institute mixer. Me, I need,” she rummaged her brain for the word, “experience.”
Muni tried to remember if he’d ever felt a similar call to adventure. “I had in my life enough experience,” he told her, but he had to admit that the longing became Jenny Bashrig.
On subsequent walks, often at dusk since each had their duties during the day, the girl was forthcoming about her past. Much of what she revealed, though, Muni was already familiar with from the Pins’ account of her history: he knew, for instance, that she was an orphan, and was pleased to inform her that they shared that singular distinction. He knew also that, while the Rosens had taken her in, she had been throughout her childhood fundamentally the ward of the street, the entire community contributing to her upkeep. That he too was beholden to a community that had helped fund his flight to freedom was a topic he was not so anxious to discuss. While he had no thought of absconding, he still didn’t like to recall a debt that bound him in obedience to the Pinch, though no one else seemed to acknowledge the liability. In the ghetto tsedakah, or charity, was regarded a sacred duty that entailed no obligation on the part of the recipient. And in time, as Muni grew easier with Jenny, he became less oppressed by what he felt he owed North Main Street.
Although she was full of curious facts about the neighborhood and the city at large, Jenny’s education had not advanced beyond grade school. “Me and my teachers, we didn’t ever see eye to eye,” she confessed, almost proud of her virtual illiteracy. She boasted of her recalcitrance, her refusal to submit to the tyranny of Miss Christine Reudelhuber, the severely coiffed, talcum-reeking principal of the local school. Declared incorrigible, she’d begun her haphazard waitressing career at Rosen’s while openly developing her acrobatic skills. Having found her body something of an impediment at street level, she set out to discover how it might function more nimbly aloft, for such was her reasoning. Following instructions in a mail-order pamphlet on the science of equilibrism, she hung a slack rope near to the ground in the Rosen’s backyard; eventually she graduated from the rope to a woven cable purchased from a ship chandler’s down at the river wharf. That was the wire with which she’d replaced the clothesline strung across the alley between the Rosens and the Pins. She’d made no secret of her ultimate ambition to join a circus and travel the world. Never once, however, did she allude to the fact that her injury had grounded her, perhaps permanently, and Muni tactfully avoided the subject altogether.
“Now you,” Jenny said to him, demure again after one of her lengthy disclosures. They’d been sauntering along Main Street proper, past Court Square with its burbling fountain, peering into the dressed windows of the department stores owned by German Jews. These were the Jews who’d come to America with money and culture, and so bypassed the unventilated tenements of the Pinch.
“Me what?” wondered Muni, stalling, because he knew perfectly well what she meant: it was his turn to impart a detail or two of his own past. It was a past that had obviously intrigued the girl since his arrival, had even given him something of a heroic cachet in her eyes. So why was he so reluctant to revisit his history? It wasn’t that he was ashamed — why should he be ashamed? Hadn’t he survived the unspeakable against all odds? But his memories had been lost and found and lost again so often that he was no longer sure of the veracity of those that remained. Sometimes it even seemed to him that his past didn’t count; his own life had not yet started. Or rather, it had started once, been aborted, and was only just beginning again.
“Sure, the boy was fetched from out of the bulrushes,” Muni’s aunt Katie had informed the girl, mocking her nephew’s diffidence. “He fell from the moon.”
She was relentless in regaling Jenny with spurious facts about Muni’s origins, whenever their neighbor, who needed no invitation, dropped by at dinnertime. Jenny brought with her cold cuts and blintzes for which Pinchas was especially grateful, such a welcome change from Katie’s spuds. Lately Katie had tended to sling their suppers at her men with a growing irascibility, her humor prickly to the point of making her unapproachable. Moreover, she was unresponsive to any questions from her husband concerning her mood. At a loss, Pinchas fluctuated between hurt and solicitude, worried about the physical toll Katie’s temper was taking — the scooped cheeks and broken capillaries, the plum bruises beneath her eyes. But when Jenny was around, Katie perked up: she became garrulous, dispensing apocryphal versions of her nephew’s biography as confounding to her husband as to Muni himself. Jenny, however, was amused by Mrs. Pin’s fancies, and Katie would giggle as well, the two females retreating into a corner to conspire in whispers. Though he had no idea what transpired between them, Pinchas was glad to see his spouse animated again, though as soon as Jenny left, Katie reverted to her sour aspect.
Their outings took Jenny and Muni ever farther afield; the city had its points of interest. There was Beale Street with its barrelhouses cheek by jowl with funeral parlors, where the casketed dead were showcased in windows as examples of the mortician’s art. (On Beale they also saw the colored men rounded up by gaitered police for the offense of fraternizing in public.) There were the Italianate mansions along Adams Avenue, and the tree-lined Parkway, where you had to dodge cantering horses bearing smart equestrian ladies in riding pants. It was on the bridle path in the Parkway’s median that they sighted the first purple crocuses nudging their heads through the leaf-moldy loam. But for Muni, nowhere else in the city had the liveliness of North Main Street itself, at least as it was interpreted through Jenny’s back-fence tales. She told him how Mr. Crow, the locksmith, would have his wife committed to the county sanitarium by day, only to return at night to plead for her release; how the local hero Eddie Kid Wolf got his glass jaw routinely shattered in the Phoenix Arena over at Winchester and Front. Tantalized by her loshen horeh, her gossip, Muni sometimes felt that the shops and apartments above them, the narrow frame houses along the side streets, existed solely by the grace of the girl. Still he was slow to connect his increased affection for the picturesque ordinariness of the street with his feelings for his talky companion. It made him uneasy that he and Jenny Bashrig were already considered an item by their neighbors, since there was nothing in their association thus far that signified a romantic attachment.
After all, they had yet to even hold hands. Meanwhile everyone smiled benevolently upon the young couple. The fiddler Asbestos, whose blessing they also seemed to have secured, encouraged their intimacy with a purling adagio whenever they passed. They passed him often, as there were days when he seemed to occupy every street corner at once. As aggravated by the blind man’s familiarity with the girl as he was arrested by his music, Muni paused once to address him: “Don’t you got someplace else you need to be?”