He showed no sign of having heard her, though when she was gone he paused to shake a cramp out of his wrist. He gazed at his scrawl and marveled at how the words functioned like a prism, refracting the black ink and white page into an iridescence. “I’m a person and a bit,” Muni reflected, thrilled at his own audacity.
She began to enter the apartment by the kitchen window, wearing a serving tray on a strap around her neck so it wouldn’t interfere with her stilt-walking facility. From the tray she removed the dishes she brought for Pinchas and Katie. (Pinchas only picked an occasional noodle from the broth, which left a generous helping of table scraps for Muni, though the boniness of both men advertised their want of nourishment.) Jenny and Pinchas would exchange solemn nods before the girl went into the sickroom to nurse Pinchas’s wife in her extremity. When she first experienced the morning queasiness with its accompanying dry heaves, Jenny wondered if Katie’s infirmity was contagious, then dismissed her discomfort as a symptom of fatigue. She was working too hard in order to steer clear of disappointment. The missed monthly, however, was more difficult to ignore, though did any women have regular cycles since the clocks had stopped? But with the nausea came bloat and nipples as swollen as plums, and despite an abiding naïveté about such things, Jenny could no longer deny the truth of her situation.
Against all reason the girl felt joyful. Her first impulse was to share her news with the father-to-be, imagining how it might snap him out of his fervid single-mindedness. “We’re going to have a happy event,” she’d announce, and he would leave off his graphomania to lift her into the air as in a dance; though she knew he would more likely reply, “We had already the event,” if he replied at all. Because what occurrence could possibly surpass his waking dream? Then Jenny didn’t know whether she was more aggrieved over their imagined conversation or the one she knew they would never have. Why had the dumkopf never proposed to her? Didn’t he understand that theirs would be a special child, the first to be born into the postdiluvian Pinch?
There was an evening when she peered into Muni’s room, lit by a single yahrzeit candle, and saw the reams of pages that threatened to inundate or bury him alive. It came to her what an unwelcome intrusion the birth of a flesh-and-blood child would be in a world composed exclusively of words. After that Jenny began actively to resent the common dream that had inebriated the street.
She had an urge to confide in Katie but worried that her news might be the last thing that, in her contemplation of last things, the childless woman would want to hear. Then once at sundown, from the tar-beach rooftop of the Rosens’ building, Jenny surveyed the brazen surface of the canal with its lamplit fleet. Rabbi ben Yahya had said that the water was derived from the perspiration of heavenly hosts singing the praises of the highest, and these days the rebbe’s word was taken as gospel. The star-speckled evening stretched south toward antiquity, north toward the end of days. That it was no longer confined by its former diurnal horizons could also be attributed to the Shpinker rebbe, whose Hasids had prayed a hole in the membrane separating the fallen world from its opposite number. The Hasids themselves maintained, paradoxically, that they had repaired the rift between Olam Ha-ba and Olam Ha-zeh, above and below, thus allowing free passage between the two spheres. This meant that an angel might, if it wished, cohabit with a mortal and a mortal become likewise a citizen of Paradise. A boat could do duty as both a floating barbershop and a shivah shel-maalah, a celestial academy. Children plunged into the canal and surfaced with novelties: amphoras wreathed in blue algae, electronic gadgets that had yet to be invented, a rusalka (a mermaid) that they were made to throw back again. In the park some householders were turning on a spit a flayed red ox, which (though only partially visible) was as big as a mastodon.
From her vantage Jenny, heart-stricken, took in the broad expanse of that freakish street and rejected wholesale its garish goings-on. What kind of a normal childhood could be had in the midst of such humbug? The Pinch was finally no place to raise a kid.
She considered consulting the Widow Teitelbaum, who did a backstairs business as kishef macher, a medicine lady. She kept a cabinet of herbal teas and patent medicines like Hardy’s Woman’s Friend that she sold over the counter, and was known to administer mercury and hellebore enemas to good effect. The Jews had no special problem with abortion — some proclaiming like the joker Asher Sebranig that “it ain’t human, the fetus, till it gets its law degree.” Circumstances sometimes warranted desperate measures. But the word itself left a nasty taste on Jenny’s tongue. Besides, she knew there would be gossip; North Main Street was all about choosing life these days, and terminating a pregnancy would not have been consistent with the general air of festivity. So she decided to turn to the Negro Asbestos with whom she had a peculiar relationship, though he was lately hard to find. He came and went at a time when it seldom occurred to anyone else to leave the boundaries of the Pinch. Some even thought it impossible, so much had the district come to define their world. In this attitude (remarked Rabbi ben Yahya), they were like the population of the mythical city of Luz, the city of immortals, whose residents went outside the walls only to die.
Jenny came upon Asbestos as he was crawling from under a rust-cankered manhole cover on Winchester Street. When she accosted him, the fiddler explained that it was easier for a blind man to negotiate the underground city than to walk abroad on its surface. Wringing out a saturated pant leg, he alluded to a system of tunnels beneath downtown Memphis that predated the Civil War. “Folk’d use them to conduck your slave to Beulah Land.” Jenny had heard it all before; had already gleaned from her dealings with Asbestos, who as the object of her charity had come to trust her, that such clandestine operations persisted to this day. Armies of indigent black men were daily arrested on trumped-up charges and indentured to forced labor in mines and lumber camps, and certain intrepid types conspired for their deliverance. Give him a little schnapps and the fiddler might allow that he himself, sightlessness notwithstanding, had a finger in such operations during his subterranean rambles. Ordinarily Jenny humored him—“Old man, you won’t never die in bed”—but today all that business, if it really occurred, unfolded in a universe no longer even parallel to the Pinch.
Impatiently she interrupted Asbestos’s discourse and appealed to him for help. As he listened, his prune face collapsed behind its smoked lenses and he cautioned the girl in his emery voice, “You ain’t want to do that, honey.” He was right, she didn’t. Nevertheless she threatened to pursue independent means that included certain cunning medieval devices if he refused her. In the end the Negro downheartedly relented and agreed to arrange everything. A few nights later they set out for Beale Street by an overland route, since — thanks to the pillowslip ramparts — it was now possible to travel along buckling sidewalks all the way to Main Street proper.
Asbestos led the way with his tapping cane, and Jenny fatalistically followed the blind man. Despite his bias against aboveground travel, he seemed to know every lamppost and crosswalk on the way to Beale. Straggling together past the department stores and specialty shops, they raised eyebrows; a blind nig and a gimpy jew girl, they may even have invited some vulgar remarks. But Jenny, for all her trepidation, felt a slight sense of relief to be back in an ordinary precinct where everything was more or less finite. People window-shopped, trolley lines clacked, wires sang; the air smelled of horse manure and roasted peanuts. The weather was appropriately autumnal; there were newspapers with headlines announcing the opening of a canal in Central America and the imminence of a war in Europe. Everything proceeded according to rational categories without the least intimation of eternity.