When Jenny entered his room, stepping from her stilts through the window holding aloft a covered dish, Muni could scarcely bring himself to look up from his labor. She peered over his shoulder and he made automatically to conceal the writing with his hand. He needn’t have: the cursive was nearly illegible, a combination of Hebrew-laced Yiddish and the English he was trying to domesticate with the help of a broken-spined dictionary. Besides, Jenny was virtually unlettered.
“It’s a secret what you’re scribbling?” asked the girl.
“Not altogether,” said Muni, still abstracted, “but it’s not yet ready for the public consumption.”
“Neither are you,” she teased, mussing his already unkempt hair. He had lost weight and his unwashed undershirt had a vinegar smell. She set down the plate of kugel, removed the half-eaten plate of buckwheat groats she’d left there before; then leaning over him, she pulled his face to her breast and brushed the crown of his head with her lips.
“You’re crazy as a bedbug,” was her whispered diagnosis.
With his nose tucked in the voile crease between her tsitskehs, he inhaled her essence of lilac and cold cuts, and wondered why he did not rise from the cot to take her in his arms. Desire aside, Muni didn’t want to disappoint her; she’d been tolerant thus far of his elusiveness, never blaming him for running away. He was keenly aware of their deferred intimacy and wondered if his reluctance to hold her involved a portion of guilt; though whether or not their sins were permissible in this unorthodox climate was frankly immaterial to him now: his ache was acute and the moment opportune. So why was he still incapable of leaving off his employment for the sake of the girl? The answer was as inescapable as fate.
“Yenny,” he said to her whisper-soft breasts, which muffled his words, “I am by Norf Main Freet iss instrumum.” Lifting his head. “When it speaks—and it don’t never stop talking—I must listen and take down every word.”
Jenny shoved him to arm’s length, disburdened herself of a weighty sigh. “You poor deluded putz,” she said, not without a tinge of genuine rancor, and barged out of the room to check on Katie Pin.
Attending to Pinchas’s wife and helping the Rosens in their effort to feed a community that lived essentially on air was keeping her busy. She saw to the needs of the failing Katie, spoon-fed and sitz-bathed her, emptied her slops and read her articles on society scandals from back issues of Harper’s Weekly. She kept the shades drawn to keep out the insult of the neighborhood’s radiance and shooed her husband from the bedroom, though he protested, “Katie, I hate you already, God forbid! Now will you let me in?” Because he thought—this was his logic—that if she believed he no longer loved her, she wouldn’t mind so much his watching over her decline. But Katie only screamed at him as Jenny explained before closing the door, “She don’t like you should see her dilapidate.” He watched anyway, peeking in while she was sleeping to ensure that there was still some indication of her breathing. Her once robust form was turning practically diaphanous in its degeneration, the only body in the Pinch that was visibly aging, and it seemed to her frantic husband that his wife suffered the martyrdom of age for all the others who’d been given a pass.
Eventually Jenny stopped invading the Pins’ apartment through Muni’s window. How many times could she be expected to endure the same rude reception? His absorption in his febrile occupation had become a completely hermetic activity; it was an exercise made further exasperating by the ambivalent face he showed her whenever she managed to get his attention, though on her final few visits she’d failed to arouse even that tepid response. Muni had barely bothered to look up from his hen-scratching. Unshaven, unlaundered, and increasingly thin, he looked much as he had on the day he’d arrived on North Main Street from overseas. Back when he was a sleepwalker and she a ropewalker—avocations that who would have thought so compatible? Now he was a delirious insomniac like so many of their neighbors, some of whom repeated after Rabbi ben Yahya that “sleep is the unripe fruit of death.” The Shpinker rebbe’s bromides were frequently on their lips of late.
Jenny wondered if Muni ever left his smelly cell anymore, strewn now with his uncle’s books—whose formal devices he appropriated as needed—and the drift of pages scored with his fitful scrawl. For books Jenny had little use, and as for the writing itself, who did Muni Pinsker think he was? Were the angels dictating to him a new testament that the work should preclude all other concerns? It wasn’t lost on her how the very environment that inspired his labor had also made him a shut-in—was he even aware of the irony? But her anger was mixed (she couldn’t help it) with anxious concern. She worried about his well-being and even reserved some small part of her nature in which to admire his obsessive industry: how it displaced all else in his purview, including his regard for her. It was a passion that duplicated the charged atmosphere of the Pinch itself, which spilled beyond the boundaries of any given day to overflow the rest of existence.
“It’s this stupid street that’s drove you nuts,” Jenny concluded on her last pass through his room, never asking why she herself remained proof against the neighborhood’s questionable influence. And still receiving no response from her sometime hartseniu, her lover, she gave way to a livid “You’re not a person anymore!”
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.
After Asbestos had asked her for the umpteenth time if she maybe had second thoughts, they turned the corner onto Beale Street and proceeded under dangling pawnshop globes. A black man in a turned-around collar tipped his homburg to the fiddler and spoke his name, while Jenny wondered: Who tips his hat to a blind man? Farther along, a street-corner band—washboard, bull fiddle, and jug—left off the spirited number they were playing to strike up what sounded to the girl like one of the fiddler’s own funereal scores. Pausing, Asbestos flashed a rare grin, took his instrument from its sack, and sawed a few collaborative chords. So it seemed that the schnorrer of North Main Street, upon whom Jenny had condescended to bestow her benevolence, was a dignitary here on Beale. Why was she not surprised? They pressed on through a fine mist of frying pigs’ snouts from a vendor’s oil drum grill. The pavement was crowded with peddlers hawking stink killers and hair straighteners, vials of Oil of Gladness and packets of Come-To-Me Powder. A couple of undertakers quarreled over a corpse being stretchered from a barroom into a horse-drawn ambulance. Through their open doors Jenny could see the yellow-skinned ladies gyrating to barrelhouse pianos, their buttocks rolling like juggled melons beneath the fringe of their hobble skirts.
Despite the many looks askance, Jenny didn’t feel the fear take hold until Asbestos asked if they’d come yet as far as the Monarch Club. “See mens roll they bones in Pappy Haddum’s horn,” he advised. “Sign say, No Dozen Here.” She peered through a smoky door toward a bar on top of which men were tossing dice into a large leather funnel, saw the sign above the bar, and confirmed that they had arrived. The fiddler directed her into an alley and up a steep flight of stairs on the outside of the building, where their knock at a paint-blistered door was answered in due course.
“Howdo, Mizriz Barbee,” Asbestos greeted the imposing woman, who cordially invited them in. Her moon face was buffed cordovan, a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from a meaty lip, a knit fascinator tied toothache-fashion round her bulbous head. Her breasts inside the gingham housedress might have helped to fortify the North Main Street seawall—which was the last antic thought Jenny would entertain that night. Suddenly struck by the enormity of what she was about to do, she was reduced to the condition of a tongue-tied little girl.
“Chile, don’t be skeered,” said the midwife in a voice like warm butterscotch. She waved a hand as if to introduce her patient to the reassuring tidiness of her apartment—the antimacassared armchair, the pot boiling on a wood-burning cookstove. But when she shambled forward on her thick ankles to pull back the curtain on the alcove she called her “surg’ry,” acrophile that she was, Jenny grew queasy and fought against falling into a swoon.
There was a table with an oilcloth and, in the corner, one half of an upright packing crate, painted red, which could serve as a modesty screen. A portrait of a bronze-skinned Jesus adorned a wall whose floral paper was unfurling from the plaster to reveal the thin laths beneath. On a stool beside the table was an orderly array of items—crotchet needles, curling irons, a catheter—in an emulation of clinical instruments, though their pitilessness was salient. The midwife was wiping her hands in her apron in what the girl assumed was a sanitary motion, but when she held out a pink palm Jenny realized she’d misread the gesture.
“I take y’all’s donation now,” showing ivory teeth interspersed with gold, the cigarette remaining somehow glued to her lower lip.
Jenny fished in the pocket of her middy skirt and surrendered the agreed-upon sum, a wad of cash comprising a year’s worth of tips. Mizriz Barbee fanned herself with the bills—as if the breeze whispered their amount—before stuffing them into her prodigious bosom. Obedient to his instincts Asbestos chose that moment to make a discreet exit from the apartment, while Jenny silently mouthed the word coward. A fly buzzed, a mouse skittered, the piano from the honky-tonk below played a syncopated rag. The girl was handed a clammy sheet with a hole in it to slip her head through and invited to undress behind the screen. Disrobed, Jenny glimpsed her tight belly, which had not yet begun to “show,” unkneaded dough that would never rise.
When she reappeared, the midwife pressed a tin cup into her hands, saying, “Swallah this yere medicine.” The words had a sacerdotal authority, and utterly passive now Jenny did as she was told. She breathed fire and began to cough from the scorching bite of the red-eye, while the midwife slapped her back and guffawed. Reclaiming the cup, she allowed the butt to drop from her lip into the liquid with a sizzle then swilled the rest of the contents herself. She enfolded the girl in her hammy arms and lifted her with an affable grunt onto the table. Still reeling from the whiskey, which had somewhat cut the fear, Jenny squirmed from the feel of the cold oilcloth on her bare buttocks. But if the dram did anything to diminish the pain of the midwife’s procedure, you couldn’t have proved it by the girl. The pain was its own voluminous province, with zones and latitudes and turbulent moods; her cries sounded like some far-off opera to her own ears. When she’d finally come through it, Jenny recognized the room and the woman with bloody hands, the fiddler returned to poke his head around the packing crate—which is not to say that she wasn’t still lost and a long way from home.
She had sufficient focus to take note, once she was helped to sit up, of the pail at the foot of the table and the mess it contained, which caused her to retch down her front. On the streetcar rattling north toward the Pinch, white passengers in rush seats craned their necks to glower menacingly at the girl. It wasn’t bad enough that she was seated beside a Negro in the Colored section, her head tilted onto his shoulder, but the scent of her sick was pervading the car.
And so Jenny joined the handful of citizens who remained impervious to the enticements of North Main Street’s unending fling. The discontent she’d expressed over the years had been mostly for the sake of conversation; she understood that now, understood what it really meant not to belong. Her desperate action, she felt, had disqualified her from participating in the everyday life of the old neighborhood, not that much of the everyday had survived the quake. When she’d recovered her strength, Jenny was stony in her resolution. She took in the clothes that hung on the line suspended between the delicatessen and the general store, then clamped shut the lock securing the pulley and, barefoot in her muslin chemise, mounted the rope. It was neither entirely static nor loose enough to qualify as slack. The tightrope was for the classic equilibrist, the slack for the clown, but the unevenness of her legs since her accident had left her—the girl discovered—peculiarly suited to both types of performance. Once her joints were again lubricated by movement, it seemed to her that none of her gifts had been lost in retirement. She was versatile, could enact her routines with or without a weighted pole; she could balance on a chair, prance (notwithstanding her limp) like a ballerina. With gymnastic maneuverings she could swing in giant circles, executing twists and airborne releases. The transports she enjoyed upon experiencing once again her body’s death-defiance of gravity rivaled, she’d have wagered, the loftiest spiritual acrobatics of ben Yahya’s disciples. It went without saying that she didn’t deserve to feel such exhilaration.
Of course nobody paid attention to her efforts, least of all the sedulous Muni Pinsker outside whose window she performed. Ineffable occurrences having become so commonplace in the Pinch, what interest had her neighbors in the perfectly natural phenomenon of a girl on a wire?
It was Asbestos, traveling back and forth at his leisure between the great world and North Main, who alerted Jenny to the fact that the circus had come to town. The news came as no surprise to the ropewalker, who’d seen the gaudy posters on hoardings during her journey to Beale. Hadn’t they helped spur her motivation to take up her art again? This particular circus, Forepaugh & Broadway’s Floating Carnival of Fun, had sailed downriver from north of St. Paul and was docked at the foot of the levee. Its quarters were composed of a steamboat that doubled as a menagerie, which towed an ornate wooden “palace.” The palace sat astride a huge flat-bottomed barge and housed an extravaganza of several rings. If they knew of its arrival, the North Main Streeters, enjoying a floating carnival of their own, were not the least bit curious about such a flea-bitten exhibition. Though the piping of its steam organ could be heard in the Pinch, it was nearly drowned out by the music of the Shpinkers’ improvised niggunim, their chants tweaked in turn by the blind man’s soulful cadenzas. But for Jenny Bashrig, so out of place in the old neighborhood, the circus calliope was a siren song she had no choice but to follow to its source.
Lacking the price of admission, she avoided the matinee and evening hours and made her way down the bluff to the riverfront on a breezy October (was it?) morning. The wind was whipping up whitecaps on the surface of the mile-wide river, compared to which the grand canal of North Main Street—thought Jenny—was a ditch. The broad floodplain on the Arkansas side flashed light and dark beneath the scudding shadows of clouds like wandering atolls; and the girl felt her perspective beginning to shift, her own drama starting to shrink to a shameful inconsequence in the presence of the wider world. The sideshow tents erected at the foot of the levee flew banners displaying crude images of Siamese triplets and the monster rats of Sumatra. The trunk of an elephant and the neck of a camel protruded through the open portholes of the wallowing steamboat, its promenade deck perched upon by grooming chimpanzees. A lion shuddered the planks of the pier with its deep bass roar, and Jenny, brightening, couldn’t help but think “Noah’s Ark,” though she rejected the thought as the kind of association her neighbors might make.
As the ticket booth was empty, she ascended the creaking gangplank onto the deck of the barge unobserved. She entered the so-called palace via a draperied companionway that led between tiers of bleachers into a tawdry, tabernacle-sized amphitheater. An animal pungency stung her nostrils. Painted tapestries, gilt mirrors, and carved woodwork ornamented the interior in a faded pastiche of Gilded Age splendor; raffish sunlight, invaded by flitting barn swallows, slanted through the high windows to illumine three sawdust rings. In the nearest a stocky equestrienne in a tatty leotard stood erect astride the back of a cantering steed. The spotted horse circled a midget with a whip, his stance duplicating the bareback rider’s as he balanced upon a pig in full harness. The middle ring was vacant, but in the farthest from Jenny a pair of men in matching dressing gowns were inspecting a heavy net that lay folded in the sawdust and sand. Jenny’d seen the trawlers of Happy Hollow examining their seines with a similar diligence, but it thrilled her to think of the bigger fish this net was designed to catch. The rigging above them was hung with the properties of various aerial acts like a playground for weightless children; a rope ladder extended upward to a platform from which a taut cable was stretched.
Members of the ring crew were lugging in, anaconda-fashion, a large rolled tarp through the wide-open carriage doors. In the stands a bald man with a handlebar mustache was playing cards with a giantess in a pinchbeck tiara whose tights appeared to be stuffed with cannonballs. Could that be Professor Hotspur of Hotspur’s Pantomimic Pachyderms, and the woman Madame Hortense the Female Hercules, as advertised on the panels outside? Jenny wondered even as she shed her peacoat, kicked off her shoes, and toddled over to the farthest ring. There she mounted the wooden curb, grabbed hold of the narrow rope ladder, and began to clamber up its jittery length.
Nobody noticed when she stepped from the lofty platform onto the polished steel cable, until a roustabout happened to look up and inquire, “Why ain’t that gal wearin’ her mechanic?” Another, shading bloodshot eyes, offered the stunned reply, “That’n ain’t even with the show.” Then the laborers shared a collective groan: they’d seen this kind of thing before—circus-crazed civilians sneaking in after hours to enter a tiger’s cage or dangle from a trapeze. The bad ends they came to invariably spelled trouble for the whole company. Dropping their burden, the crew scrambled into the ring to begin frantically hoisting the safety net to catch the harebrained girl when she fell. The two men who’d been contemplating repairs to the net took their time in moving out of their way. Standing at the side of the ring, they began blithely discussing the girl’s technique, commenting on the relation of her center of mass to her base of support. “Not too wide in her lateral acceleration,” judged the taller, his arms shoved into the silk sleeves of his robe like a Chinaman. “Nor too narrow in her sagittal direction,” remarked his partner, arching a brow over a drowsy eye.
“But that business of gripping the wire between her great and second toe …”
“Definitely out. We’ll have to buy her a nice pair of buffalo hide slippers …”
“… and slather the soles with molasses to limit the torque.”
When the circus cast off from the Memphis levee to make for more southerly ports, almost no one in the Pinch was aware that La Funambula had gone with it. For them, anyone who strayed beyond the neighborhood was instantly lost to memory. Of course the Rosens knew she was gone, Mr. Rosen attempting to comfort his wife as she shed a torrent of tears over the nearly illiterate scrawl of Jenny’s note. (The note, with its clumsy profession of gratitude, was so damp from the combined tears of Mrs. Rosen and her foster daughter that it was later pinned pennant-wise to the highwire clothesline to dry.) Pinchas Pin was also aware of her departure, since it was Jenny who’d informed him—cradling his inconsolable head in her lap before saying good-bye—that his Katie’s suffering was finally at an end. But Muni Pinsker, in the fever dream of his chronicling, remained unmindful of her absence while dedicating every word he wrote to his precious girl.