“Good as new,” he pronounced, resisting an urge to give the little oddity’s bandaged bottom a patsch before helping him lift his pants. Then, perhaps realizing the irony of his pronouncement, he added sympathetically, “You folks ain’t yet too old. Why you don’t try for a human child?” Upon which the doc, clearly regretting what he’d said, began to busy himself with his instruments.
He hadn’t meant to let the cat out of the bag, though it wasn’t as if the bag hadn’t already been poked full of holes. This wasn’t his first examination of the Padauers’ stunted entity; the parents had brought him to the doctor early on with the question of why he didn’t seem to grow. An old-school physician cautious in his diagnoses, Seligman had allowed for the rare possibility of a premature aging syndrome for which there was no known cure. He’d suggested they seek confirmation from specialists, whose fees the beleaguered couple could never have paid. Besides, Seligman’s judgment, speculative though it was, was good enough for them. But that night in the park, his weariness infected by the uncommon lucidity of the post-seismic environment, the doctor let slip a truth the whole community took for granted: that the Padauers’ prodigy did not belong to the race of men.
Husband and wife exchanged evasive glances, each trying to hide from the other what they had failed to hide entirely from themselves. Attempting to conceal his stubbly beard behind an upturned piqué collar, Benjy mumbled apologetically in his froggy voice, “Nobody’s perfect.”
The senseless jubilation that had overtaken the Pinch in the aftermath of its earthshaking event served only to salt the Padauers’ wounds. Morris, in his chinless despondency, and Mama Rose, heavy-laden with the freight of her saddlebag hips, seemed in that moment to have lost their knack for comforting each other. At one point Morris even put the question in plain words to their peanut, “Benjy, what kind of thing are you?”
His response was a half-hearted bleat: “I’m a red-blooded American boy?”
It was perhaps the electric atmosphere itself that renewed the Padauers’ motivation to find a solution to the mystery of their charge. Having given up on gleaning enlightenment from the medical community, however, they thought they might consult with clergy. They ruled out the stuffy Rabbi Lapidus of the Baron de Hirsch Synagogue as too insensible to preternatural affairs and chose instead to seek the crackpot wisdom of Rabbi ben Yahya. Like the rest of the neighborhood they’d shared a skepticism bordering on animosity toward the Shpinker fanatics. But as all parties now agreed that the Hasids’ ritual antics were responsible for shifting the planet’s tectonic structure, the Padauers had revised their attitude; they wondered if the Shpinker rebbe might have some special knowledge concerning the origin of their ill-made little shaver.
They gave the Dlugach boys a few coins to row them as far as Commerce Avenue, where they disembarked at Hekkie’s Hardware & Feed. At the top of an exterior staircase they were admitted into the loft above the store by an idiotically grinning young Hasid. Behind him a chorus line of his fellows had linked arms in a frantic kazatsky, chanting psalms and balancing bottles and books atop their heads as they danced. In a corner a solitary disciple waltzed with a Torah scroll wrapped in a corset cover trimmed in Valenciennes lace. (Mr. Padauer recognized the style of the garment as the Esnah Ingenue from the catalog of a company he represented.) The room itself, with its floor like a deck listing to starboard, was strewn with penitential paraphernalia — trays of tacks for rolling in, a cat-o’-nine-tails — that had apparently fallen into disuse. There was a long table piled with books at the head of which sat Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya, instigator of the providential new order. His eyelids were swollen and heavy, his complexion chlorotic, his beard spilling like cinders from a scuttle over his vest. The cushions that held him wedged in his throne-like chair looked to be all that kept him from pitching into the revelry.
Nervously the Padauers approached the rabbi, each holding on to one of Benjy’s nipper-like hands.
“Rebbe,” said Morris, not wishing to disturb him, though how could he not be disturbed by his disciples’ buffoonish behavior? “Rebbe, this is our son.”
The rabbi’s thick eyelids wavered as his fingers groped for the snuffbox on the table before him. Taking a pinch, he stuffed it up a hairy nostril, sneezed, and wiped his nose with his beard. Then, slightly revived, he reached for Benjy, whom he lifted with a wheeze onto his lap. The Padauers’ little curiosity went stiff, wincing at the old man’s sour breath and piss-pot odor as the tzaddik proceeded to bounce him on his knee. Unforbearingly, Benjy submitted to the inspection of his turtle-shaped head and pointy ears, but when the old man stuck a fat finger in his mouth, he clamped down reflexively with one of his few remaining teeth. Seemingly unfazed, the rabbi pried himself loose and returned their bogus child to the custody of his parents.
“These type shretelekh,” he uttered, “they ain’t known to have a poisonous bite.” He nonetheless offered the offended finger for a disciple to kiss.
Morris and Mama Rose looked at one another dispiritedly, but Rabbi ben Yahya wasn’t finished. In a phlegm-filled voice from deep in his throat, he began to list all the things Benjy was not: he was not from sitra achra, the provenance of demons; he was neither lantekh nor kapelyushnikl, who hailed from horeh khoyshdekh, the mountains of darkness, and were no damn good. Theirs was a member of a relatively harmless race of underground folk—“and this one, the pitsvinik, he got left in him no mischief at all.”
It was Rose who first attempted to state the obvious: “Then the peanut is not”—which Morris undertook to complete—“our son?”
“Cholileh,” said the rebbe. “God forbid.”
The noise in the room had reached a pitch that precluded conversation, the dervish dancing of the enraptured disciples causing the building to tremble as from another aftershock. In the midst of it the Padauers raised their voices to ask the rebbe if he knew what might have happened to their original offspring, him of the flaxen curls.
Eliakum ben Yahya cupped a hand to his tufted ear so that they had to repeat the question, but again he was unable to hear. After failing a third time, Morris, in his frustration, shouted, “What should we do now with him?” indicating the creature.
“Him?” said Rabbi ben Yahya, sinking back into his former torpor. In fact, he appeared to be quite unwell. “Why not show to him a good time?” he breathed. “Is playing now they tell me on the Hotel Peabody rooftop the New Pygmy Minstrels, that it’s fun for the whole family I’m led to believe.”
Then he closed his eyes and the downcast Padauers, taking hold of little Benjy again, had to agree they could use a night out, which they hadn’t enjoyed since their courtship days.
Even as his uncle chased after his wife’s ghost as far as Market Square Park, Muni Pinsker sat on his cot in his odorous underwear chronicling the event. He didn’t need to be in the park to observe the episode. If he left his narrow room at all, it was only to fetch another inkwell or nib or more stationery; he visited the watercloset when necessary, shared with Pinchas the food that Mrs. Rosen sent across on a tray suspended from the pulleyed clothesline, then hurried back to his room. In the scribe’s ranging mind, experience and narrative occurred with a simultaneity that made it impossible to know whether the act prompted the story or the story the act.