It was then he was approached from both sides of the avenue by children or midgets: he couldn’t tell which as all were in nightshirts and uniformly short of stature, their faces hidden by red bandannas. About the bandannas Pinchas wasn’t so concerned, since half the population wore masks like ganefs; only these turned out to be ganefs indeed. For in a matter of seconds, before the spent peddler could even react, they had whipped the tarp from his merchandise and gathered up the entirety of his stock-in-trade from the cart. Spiriting away armloads piled as high as their heads with tinware, piece goods, garters, and pewter buttons, the thieves vanished as swiftly as they’d appeared; though one returned to snatch up the canvas tarpaulin and, as an afterthought, the volume of Marx.
Wanting despite his inertia to give chase, Pinchas was stymied by his inability to choose which of their several directions to pursue them in. “A plague befall you!” he called after them reflexively, chilled by his apprehension that the curse may already have been fulfilled. He patted himself to make sure that the roll of bills, his savings, was still pinned to the inside of his dank flannel drawers. Then, as he pondered his empty cart with a sigh like a stab, he was distracted by the sight of a young man choking sobs, lugging a body in a winding sheet down a flight of stone steps. Mechanically Pinchas wheeled his cart toward the curb, and without exchanging a word with the weeping man, took up one end of the body by the feet that protruded from the shroud. They were a woman’s bare, spatulate feet with callused toes. Together Pinchas and the man lifted the corpse onto the cart, and tipping the sweaty rim of his bowler hat, the heartsick peddler continued on his way.
He wandered gaslit sidestreets past tall Italianate houses with turrets and ornate iron gates. Most were completely dark, though in one or two lights flickered like foxfire behind the hooded windows. Some of the more modest abodes had signs at the gate advertising rooms, but their haunted aspect told the peddler that strangers need not apply. Once or twice he sought to inquire of a rare pedestrian, who only quickened his pace at the peddler’s approach. Even though evening had descended, there was no relief from the sticky heat, and Pinchas’s legs, despite their habitual forward motion, were close to giving out. He was staggering before a boxy two-story house that, unlike its neighbors, was brightly lit from within. Watermelon vines spiraled the porch columns and a magnolia stood in the yard, its fragrance cutting somewhat the pervasive stench. On the porch sat a porcine woman in a rocker fanning herself with what looked like a raptor’s wing. She was wearing a flounced silk wrapper and smoking a long-stemmed pipe, her platinum hair piled in a towering pompadour.
“You got maybe a room?” asked the peddler, before his knees buckled under him and he knelt on the broken board paving. He heard the woman bellow, “Dinah! Eulalie! A customer.”
Ladies in rustling skirts, their cologne so acrid it brought tears to his eyes, grabbed Pinchas under the arms. As they dragged him up the front steps and through the front door, he couldn’t tell whether he was being rescued or abducted. He was aware of passing through a furbelowed parlor, complete with pier glass, fainting couch, and the portrait of a naked female attended by putti. He was hauled up a steep, carpeted staircase and taken into a room off a narrow hallway. Unfolded across a brass bed, Pinchas felt cool hands caressing him even as they shoved a mercury thermometer between his lips and took his pulse. They unbuttoned his garments and toiveled his sunken chest with damp cloths. At length one of the ladies — Pinchas could tell she was only a girl despite the heavy rouge — pronounced authoritatively, “He ain’t fevered, just tuckered out.”
One of the girls had fetched a bowl of beef bouillon and begun to spoon-feed him, while another offered him a tot of brandy from a cupping glass. A third, arms folded across her blotchy décolletage, made a considered judgment: “I believe this here is a Jew feller.” At that the two others resumed their clinical attitudes. “How can you tell?” asked the girl with the broth, inclining her sausage-curled head for a closer inspection. “Well,” replied the one across the bed from her, setting aside the brandy, “he has got what you call the map a Jerusalem writ on his face.” But the standing girl with the dappled bosom asserted somewhat listlessly that that wasn’t sufficient proof. “Ain’t but one way to be sure,” she said, which sent the others into a fit of titters, upon which two pairs of hands made for the flies of Pinchas’s underwear.
His energies in some measure restored by their ministrations, the peddler’s first impulse was to protect his modesty and extricate himself from the room. The rabbis of his youth would have been scandalized. On the other hand, Pinchas had as good as abandoned his heritage, Isaiah and Jeremiah having been replaced in his hierarchy of prophets by Proudhon and Kropotkin. In his travels, once he’d neglected to keep the Sabbath, he never bothered to keep it again, nor did he make any effort to observe the dietary laws. Where women were concerned he had resisted temptation only because temptation had been scarce in his experience. And while these daughters of Lilith would be reckoned unclean by every category of the halakhic code, Pinchas realized with a wan smile that he wasn’t picky. He was after all a Narodnik, a freethinker, despite his late commercial proclivities, and the despotic faith of his forefathers could not reach him here.
For all that, he was ashamed of his thoughts, which he might attribute to his weakened condition, though how to explain the rebellious stirring in his loins? Meanwhile the ladies had opened his drawers and uncovered his upstanding organ, which they leered at, having never before beheld the sign of the Covenant. “Thang’s nekkider than nekkid,” observed the girl on the peddler’s left side, damask-cheeked and saucer-eyed. The one at his right, risen to her knees on the mattress, clapped her hands, which jiggled her curls like pendants on a chandelier. “I want a go,” she resolved. “I ain’t never rid one a these.” She was lifting her crinoline when the other girl shoved her roughly out of the way, then positioned herself astride Pinchas’s outstretched legs. A hilarious tussling ensued, during which the spectator girl, her maculate bodice glazed in sweat, began to slide down the wall in a swoon. The two on the bed ceased their frolic to stare at their fallen companion. The one straddling Pinchas looked in perplexity from her fellow on the floor to the peddler’s peeled member. “It ain’t all that peculiar,” she reckoned. Then the fallen girl began to convulse, projecting a stream of bile like molten coffee grounds across the valance below the bedstead.
Pinchas watched in horror as the two girls, with amazingly unruffled efficiency, left the bed to attend to their companion slumped against the wall. They pressed a lace hankie to her mouth and watched as a crimson stain slowly spread. Galvanized by the scene and the fetor that made the air in the room unbreathable, Pinchas tucked his wilted manhood back into his long johns and slid from the mattress. Trailing the sheet he’d wrapped carelessly about his person, he shuffled back into the hallway, where he encountered two more painted ladies, who parted to let him pass.
Turning about, the addled peddler asked them, “Where am I?”
“Annie Cook’s,” they said in unison over their shoulders, then commenced to contradict each other, one cheerfully alleging that the establishment was a “bawdy,” the other a “pest” house. Unenlightened, Pinchas proceeded down the corridor, passing closed doors behind which could be heard a medley of moans and shrieks; but whether from amorous exertions or the laments of the infirm, who could say? A door at the end of the hall, however, stood open, and through it Pinchas spied the ladies nursing a chap whose fallow flesh appeared to have been parboiled from the inside out. This house, he concluded, was a kind of sanctuary where the nafkehs doubled as sisters of mercy — and sometimes martyrs. Good on them, he thought, but an upright man such as he (in health if not virtue) had no business here. Woozy though he was, Pinchas had seen enough. He made his way down the back stairs and was in the street again before he realized that, still togaed in the bedsheet, he’d forgotten his clothes.