Then suddenly reawakening to the cursed place they were in, Jenny cried, “Get me out of here!” As Muni began to escort her from the park, she took one last look behind her at the upstanding roots which creaked from the gentle swaying of the hanged man, a breeze teasing an Aeolian murmur from his fractured instrument. An armed Klansman was stationed in the shadows beneath him to discourage anyone who might want to cut down their ill omen too soon. As she turned back toward Muni, a quote from the drowned clown’s store of favorites escaped Jenny’s lips: “An oasis of horror,” she breathed, “in a desert of boredom.”
Heartened by her utterance, which was at least in the realm of communication, Muni dredged up a platitude of his own. “They say,” he ventured, “that if so wish the righteous, they can make a world. Likewise the putz, if he don’t pay attention, can lose one. A world, that is.”
Jenny allowed herself one more sniffle, then no more. “A philosopher yet,” she said bitterly.
Near the entrance to the park she paused to collect the carpetbag she’d stashed under a bench. When she stood up again, she pointed to the fey child that was still holding Muni’s hand and inquired, “What’s this?”
Muni explained that Tyrone was the boy that Katie and Pinchas Pin had had late in life before their dual demise.
Smiling wanly, Jenny licked a finger, thrust it into the blaze of the boy’s ginger hair, and made a sizzling sound. The kid didn’t return her smile but nevertheless raised his limpid eyes in acknowledgment.
“When I left,” said Jenny, with delicacy, “Katie was dead already. Since when do dead ladies have babies?”
In response little Tyrone admitted, “I don’t think I’m a hundred percent human boy.”
Jenny harrumphed. “Life swarms with innocent monsters,” she remarked, for despite all she was proud of the education she’d received during her voyaging.
“I have to pish,” said Tyrone, as if to prove he had also the needs of an ordinary child, though looking at him neither Muni nor Jenny was fooled.
The North Main Street they encountered as they trudged back from the lynching was a detritus-clogged artery, its commercial establishments in a shocking state of disrepair. The proprietors of the shops and residents of the lodgings above them stood brooding over their broken surroundings, as if the death of the Negro had recalled them to the unimpassioned rhythm of their days. Where had they been for what amounted (when they were able to gauge the interlude according to a standard calendar) to years? The earth itself looked to have aged in their absence, its surface shelf-worn and unsparingly lived upon, though their neighbors appeared much the same. (Some even looked, despite their joylessness, to have improved in their general appearance.) All were aware as never before that a vital and prospering city was spread out around them, which the Pinch had failed to keep pace with. Why, wondered some, had they not decamped before it was too late?
“A shmutsik dump” was the judgment heard frequently as the merchants went through the motions of reclaiming their sidetracked livelihoods. “We’re poor!” the families complained, having apparently never noticed before.
Muni’s courtship of Jenny Bashrig, whom Mr. and Mrs. Rosen had welcomed back into their household with open arms, was a brief and diffident affair. Neither pretended that the second chance they’d been afforded was a continuance of the passion they’d known in the days before the quake; their renewed sympathy for one another had little in common with the infatuation that had shaken them beyond sanity at the top of the tree in Market Square Park. That jarring romance belonged to a prelapsarian period that neither Muni nor Jenny could clearly recollect, a variety of forgetfulness they had in common with the rest of North Main Street. What they shared now was a mutual sorrow, both believing they’d shelved their own particular sadness to mourn what the other had lost, then discovered in that unpretty process that much of what they’d lost was the same. In the event, they soon made a tentative peace with one another and found in their reacquaintance that something of the original fondness had endured. For a couple without fountain pen or balance pole to cling to, it was enough.
When Muni said, “Marry me already?” Jenny replied, “Why not?” then squashed the reasons that tried to give voice. They were wed, after registering with the proper authorities, in a private ceremony in Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya’s chambers above the feedstore, with only Tyrone, the Rosens, and the rebbe’s handful of disciples as witnesses.
Their choice of the old holy man was largely a practical decision, since his rogue offices could be had cut-rate as compared to the inflated services of the established synagogues. (Some of which, in their lordliness, alleged that nuptials officiated by ben Yahya were not authentically sanctified.) Also, the couple felt frankly sorry for the old man, whose bluff good health had begun to deteriorate rapidly since his return to the Pinch. The salubrious benefits of his underworld furlough were short-lived, and it appeared to anyone who noticed his corky flesh and the troughs beneath his lusterless eyes that he’d come back from the afterlife to die. In the meantime he was being neglected by his disillusioned followers; so maybe, thought Muni and Jenny — united in their good intentions — a wedding would lift his spirits.
The occasion, however, was a little soured by the stiff-necked presence of the Hasids, who had become ever more doctrinaire since their rebbe’s return: they withheld their “Mazel tovs” at the crushing of the goblet, as there could be no real mazel until the Messiah came; frowned at the lopsided halo that the old man, with his waning powers, made to appear above the bride and groom’s heads. While music was in any case absent in the ghetto since the death of the fiddler and the pawning of the Widow Teitelbaum’s gramophone, they no longer deemed it kosher to chant or dance. Since the end of that murky period that they regarded as the failed result of their mystical experimentation, they had become increasingly rigid in their adherence to the letter of the law. Attempting to impose their intolerance on one and all, they policed the neighborhood (though the shopkeepers shooed them away like flies); they routinely accused individuals of having committed sins punishable by HaShem with chancres and bloody flux, and even tried to organize a rabbinic court to excommunicate Ivan Salky for having donned the phylactery of the arm before that of the forehead.
For all that, the rebbe performed the ceremony with perfect solemnity and a minimum of rheumy suspiration. Then, postponing their honeymoon indefinitely, the retired wirewalker and the former scribe set up housekeeping together, and Muni became a merchant by default. While his uncle had died intestate (his remains consigned to thin air), no one thought to dispute the nephew’s right to proprietorship of the store. Besides, given Muni’s reluctance to adapt his inventory to the changing times, Pin’s General Merchandise never offered much in the way of competition. Not that anyone was getting rich. The economy at that time was a primitive affair, primarily dependent on a system of bartering, as the businesses had only just begun to replenish their coffers with coin of the realm. While most of the items exchanged on the street were fairly worthless, occasionally someone would bring in an object of value, something washed up in the receding floodwaters: a kiddish cup (found in Petrofsky’s cellar) that the prophet Jeremiah had hidden after the destruction of the Temple, a nutshell bearing a microscript attributed to an angelic hand … But there was of course nothing of equal market value to trade for such objects, which were seldom recognized as sacred in any event.