Authors: Steve Stern
For his part the obsolescent little imp, who came to be known like his predecessor as Benjy, had had enough of geriatric abuse at the hands of his own kind. And Mama Rose and Morris were indulgent parents, sensitive to his delicate condition, indignant at the kaynehorehs, the “no evil eyes,” that some spat in his direction when they wheeled him by in his stroller. Despite their slender means the Padauers appareled their creature in sailor suits and flannel drawers; they made sacrifices to ensure him a protein-rich diet full of boiled brisket and herring with smetana—a welcome change from the blue mold and lichen that were the regular fare of the shretelekh. They powdered and diapered him after the spells of incontinence his diet sometimes induced, bought him a windup Kabongo African dancer and a wooden pelican on wheels. Although he remained misshapen, Benjy thrived in the Padauers’ charge and even regained the ability to walk, albeit at an unsteady bowlegged waddle. If he occasionally balked at playing the part of his adoptive parents’ little manikin (he was after all several centuries old), he understood that infantilization was a small price to pay for the pampered existence he enjoyed.
So he persisted in the imposture and considered himself fortunate. As for the Padauers, why disabuse them of their fond delusion? The guardianship of their special child gave them a unique status in the community as universal objects of pity, and besides, they seemed genuinely devoted to the counterfeit boy. For all this Benjy was grateful after his fashion, and even sought to reward his foster family’s generosity. Though what conjuring powers he’d once laid claim to were mostly depleted, he could still provide them with certain luxuries that would otherwise have been beyond their reach. Morris Padauer, returning with his paltry profit from the road, liked to refresh his spirits with a drop of brandy, and Benjy was able to ensure that his de facto papa’s flask remained bottomless. He assisted Mama Rose’s unending efforts at rendering goose fat by making certain that the schmaltz never ceased to overflow its jar. While he couldn’t produce the pot of shekels that his species had been rumored to possess in more storied times, he could see to it that the pennies in Rose’s piggy bank were inexhaustible. The Padauers never knew the source of these small blessings but came to accept them as gifts complementary to the abiding gift of Benjy himself.
Meanwhile the Shpinker Hasidim, a ragtag quorum of celibate bachelors, performed their penitential rites with a wanton zeal in their shtibl above the hardware and feed store. Under the auspices of their venerable rebbe Eliakum ben Yahya they initiated liturgical practices regarded as heretical if not downright obscene by lay observers, practices that ultimately resulted in a neighborhood apocalypse. The earth shook, the waters rose, and the ground opened beneath the great oak in Market Square Park. The tree toppled crown-foremost into a yawning chasm, so that its muddy roots were upended, and the creatures inhabiting those roots were thrust suddenly into the galvanic air. Thus exposed, they scurried from their perches and scattered abroad into the shadows. A few hung on around the flooded North Main Street to further nettle the already arsy-varsy lives of its citizens, but most, with an aversion to water, abandoned the Pinch. They went in search of places where no one would recognize them for what they were.
The outcast Benjy Padauer caught sight of them from his elevation atop the geyser that had erupted beneath him in the backyard of Dlugach’s Secondhand, where his mama had been hanging out clothes. Riding the crest of that fountain, he suffered a pang of anxiety that the shretelekh might be coming back for him. Then the pang was superseded by the pain generated from the hot waterspout that was scalding his keister through his knickerbocker pants.
When the spout subsided and the temblors ceased, a dazed Rose and Morris Padauer carried Benjy to Doc Seligman to be treated for his burns. The good doctor had set up an impromptu clinic behind a standing hospital screen in Market Square Park, to which the majority of the neighborhood had retreated after the quake. Despite the trauma of having lost their homes and livelihoods, the survivors seemed for the most part in an unaccountably convivial mood. Families with salvaged tea urns and featherbeds occupied their outdoor dormitory like castaways on a charm-bound island.
Physical injuries among the local population had been thankfully slight, but even the superficially wounded insisted on battlefield dressings, which they wore like badges of honor. Thus was the doctor, though capably assisted by a humorless Miss Reudelhuber, exhausted from his labors. His cotton-wool hair was matted, his varicose cheeks puffing like gills, when the Padauers presented their aged child, the seat of whose pants was still smoldering. Rallying somewhat, Doc Seligman welcomed them as he folded the privacy curtain around them and asked Miss Reudelhuber to please fetch a basin of cool water. He yanked down Benjy’s trousers against the “peanut’s” (his mama’s term of endearment) croaking protests, and sat him in the basin, which sizzled from the immersion of his scarlet tush. The peanut emitted a sigh like a rattle; then the doc raised him up and rubbed an aromatic ointment on his blistered nates, while the Padauers looked away, respectful of their child’s modesty. The doctor, applying a gauze plaster with a frown, was not so tactful.
“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.
Tonight Muni munched a stale rugelach from the dish he’d taken to the kitchen to offer Pinchas, who was absent, but Muni never missed him since he followed his uncle’s every movement in the history he was busy composing. Or was it the reverse? His uncle did whatever Muni wrote that he did. Along with ongoing events the nephew recorded others that came before and after, which also somehow happened concurrently: such as General Bedford Forrest’s cavalry charge through the doors of the Gayoso House Hotel, and a monthlong camp meeting on the bluff, where the bull pen was filled with straw so that attendees who got the holy shakes would not be injured—all of which took place even as the butcher Makowsky and Bluestein the mohel merrily prepared to circumcise young Nathan Halprin’s heart.
These things Muni cited while remaining holed up in his cell for an indefinite time, time itself having become as still as standing water. The length of his tangled hair and beard attested to the fact that time still flowed, however, and the music from the fiddle outside his window was both doleful and demoniac.
At the news of Katie’s untimely passing imparted to him by Jenny Bashrig, who abandoned the Pinch soon after, Pinchas Pin never budged. He stayed fixed to the kitchen chair he’d sat vigil in for weeks. Banished from the bedroom by a wife who didn’t want him to witness her suffering, he had wondered if his obedience were due to consideration or cowardice. Still he’d trusted her to the care of Doc Seligman and the watchful Jenny; told himself that when the crisis passed, as it must, she would welcome him back into her presence, where he would find her hale and lovely again, and less cruel. But that outcome had not ensued, and so Pinchas was determined to remain obstinately unmoving until such time as Katie’s fate was reversed. After all, there had never been a satisfactory diagnosis, and an affliction without a name was no affliction at all, and therefore had no power to vanquish its victim. So, mulish, he sat and waited beyond the time when garments should have been rent, mirrors turned to the wall, the burial society called in to wash the corpse. Never mind: tradition no longer figured in Pinchas’s frame of reference, just as illness and death had no place in the present-day Pinch. His neighbors, with their chronic complaints of shingles, piles, furuncles, goiters, and fatty hearts, were not complaining anymore. They had surrendered to an epidemic of unbridled felicity that supplanted illness and death; dying they would now have regarded as bad form.