As a consequence, Tillie Alperin’s departure from scrofula, Sam Alabaster’s from a fatty heart, and Mr. and Mrs. Elster’s from exposure to fumes after cleaning their carpet with carbon tetrachloride, were regarded by many as blessings in disguise. “It’s for the best,” some said when Milton Chafetz died of a stroke after reading his own obituary — a printing error — in the Hebrew Watchman; they said the same when Cantor Bielski perished from complications resulting from holding his bladder throughout a reading of the Megillah, and when Oyzer Tarnopol reputedly succumbed from spontaneous combustion. “He’s well out of it.” Thus was the street’s population eroded. Where there were no widowed spouses or sons and daughters to carry on the business, shops were repossessed by the bank and thereafter left vacant, so that the complexion of North Main took an even more derelict turn. The joke was that the earthly Pinch itself was done for and had ascended to a better place, where a heavenly version of the neighborhood rejoiced in a seller’s market.
While the bond between husband and wife in their apartment above the general merchandise was strengthened by a shared affection for their charge, tasks and frequent ill health kept them often preoccupied. So the boy was left, as he had been much of his life, to his own amusements. Though they reminded themselves that he was a product of his peculiar origins, Tyrone remained a conundrum to his adoptive family. Not a bad-looking kid — his green eyes when wide open were beacons — he seemed to them as backward in comprehension as he was periodically possessed of a quick (if eccentric) intelligence. Though his limbs were well enough formed, he was stingy of movement and had small interest in playing outdoors with others. Which was a moot point in any case, since there were really no kids his own age to play with; and while the older ones refrained from bullying Tyrone, they tended to keep their distance, though whether from wariness or disdain who could say. He was an indifferent scholar at the Christine School (named for the late Miss Christine Reudelhuber), where nothing in the standard curriculum seemed to rouse his curiosity. Regarded as a queer fish by students and teachers alike, he was nevertheless tolerated for his inoffensive nature. He seemed for the most part imperturbable, even during the onset of adolescence, when his interest in the opposite sex was never seen to extend beyond a dispassionate appreciation of their limbs in motion. Though capable of expressing a measure of gratitude toward his guardians, it was only the perusal of Muni’s untended manuscript in the former nursery that truly engaged him.
It should have been a forbidding proposition, construing those pages, even as the boy’s reading skills advanced in proficiency. Not only was the writing crabbed, the pages water damaged, smeared with food, and stained in their latter portion with gouts of blood, but the language itself often strayed from a pidgin English into Yiddish and back again. Latin characters were occasionally replaced by the hooks and hangers of Hebrew script. But for Tyrone, reared in a Pinch that everyone else seemed to have forgotten, the language was somehow no deterrent to his concentration. To watch him at his reading — his free hand waving as if in time to music, the fingers as if squeezing flesh — was to believe he had only to cast his eye over the text to feel he was present at the events it described: such as the moment the butcher Makowsky cracked a walnut with his teeth and released a nitzot, a spark of the divine, which set fire to his beard without consuming his face. You could imagine his acute identification with the bitterness of Pinchas Pin, who was unable to give his wife a child, and the joy when a child was born to the merchant’s Katie posthumously and precircumcised.
There never appeared to be any special method to Tyrone’s reading: wherever he dipped into the narrative, that was a beginning and wherever he stopped was a terminus, since the events contained in Muni’s “book” seemed to be happening all at once. They were events that, for the boy, took precedence over anything that occurred beyond the Pinch — be it the kidnap of the Lindbergh baby or the institution of the Nuremberg Laws. When not immersed irretrievably in the book, Tyrone could be a more or less functioning foster son, though his obedience was a variable affair. Conscripted on occasion to help out in the store, he performed his assigned tasks — folding winter-weight underwear, stacking odorless galvanized iron commodes — with a benign inattention, scarcely noticing the comings and goings of customers. You’d have thought he viewed the store and the down-at-heel street, when he bothered to look, from a vantage outside time.
Muni and Jenny were of course aware of Tyrone’s rapt attachment to that mishmash of untitled pages — the results of a bout of derangement the merchant had no desire to revisit — and it gave them cause for concern. For Muni there was a particular guilt, feeling as he did that his own former shut-in existence might be his legacy to the boy, who was on his way to becoming a reclusive young man. But neither husband nor wife had the heart to try and separate him from his ruling passion. Still it pained them that, except for school (where his attendance, they would learn, was sporadic) and the odd errand on which he was dispatched, Tyrone stuck so close to home. In fact, the older he got the less was he inclined to leave his tiny room, where he was occasionally seen doodling with Muni’s discarded pen on the backs of the unnumbered pages.
“It ain’t healthy,” fretted the merchant to his wife, “that the kid’s all the time in the genizah,” which he’d taken to calling the nursery — a genizah being a place for the disposal of obsolete books and papers.
Replied Jenny, “I think he took a look at being a grown-up, then decided to turn back.”
Surely the boy must have been alert to the troubles that were rife in the household. But so what if his guardians suffered from their respective maladies, exacerbated by overwork; in the stories he read — and sometimes confused with the ones they’d told him — Muni and Jenny remained hale and blooming. If Muni suffered a massive hemorrhage that Dr. Fruchter was pleased to identify as “Rasmussen’s aneurysm,” Tyrone could still imagine his foster papa as a dirty-faced tyke, riding Getzel the belfer’s shoulders through the slushy streets of Blod on the way to Reb Death’s Head’s cheder. And if Jenny, due to the virulent effects of her paregoric cocktails, succumbed to a self-lacerating fit of itching, the boy could still see her swaying to her off-key lullabies; if she woke up screaming from a recurring nightmare in which she was strapped to the wheel of a paddleboat, he pictured her clogging on the back of a five-gaited black stallion.
Muni remained bedridden with an unhopeful prognosis after his return from the hospital, and Jenny attended him despite her own chronic nightsweats and shallow breathing. (So sensitive had her skin become that she could bruise from the sound of the whistle at the coffee factory.) But even then Tyrone was not disturbed: the mutually diminished condition of the merchant and his wife had little to do with a past that held dominion over the here and now. Then, on a dove-gray morning in February, drowning in a deluge of bronchial bleeding, Muni Pinsker expired with a rosy bubble on his lips. “Moykhl” was the word his wife thought she heard when the bubble burst, meaning Sorry.
“I can tell you’re sorry,” chided Jenny, who for an instant was back in the yard of Dlugach’s Secondhand having just rolled out of a carpet. Then she drained her teacup of the narcotic cordial that tasted of hemlock from the admixture of her tears.