Authors: Steve Stern
The lights that streamed through the kitchen window from the jubilee beyond made auroras of the waving chintz curtains, while Pinchas continued to sit in dull denial. Grief at this stage was its own anesthesia: he felt nothing. Oh, maybe some bitterness, as when he suspected that his wife’s malady was his punishment for failing to lie with her as her husband these past several years. But if so, hadn’t he been punished enough? “Katie, come back already!” he shouted, then had a laugh at the sheer idiocy of his outburst; then forced himself finally to his feet and went to see if she might have obeyed his summons.
He was met at her door by a sickly-sweet odor that filtered into his nostrils and penetrated his guts where feeling began to return. The resulting pain was exquisite, as when (wrote Muni) frozen limbs begin to thaw. Stumbling into the bedroom, he found a blue marble woman—her ice-gray hair threaded with rust—laid out in her nainsook chemise as on a tomb. But before Pinchas could fall upon her as his pain dictated, a thing happened that would have violated the limits of his freethinking consciousness, had that consciousness not been already so savaged: for Katie’s spirit—he assumed it was her spirit though it wasn’t in the least diaphanous and looked instead uncommonly alive—had begun to detach itself from her dormant body and, once free, rushed directly out of the room. Pinchas watched her departure, wondering if he were the catalyst, that even in the tranquility that had succeeded her suffering, his wife preferred to elude his regard. But so urgent and quick did her risen shade appear that it rendered all but superfluous her supine form; it was in every way the animated likeness of the original, which confused Pinchas as to whether you could even say that the ghost was deceased. And as
dead
was still not a concept he was able to attach to his wife, Pinchas managed to overcome a disabling anguish and lumber after her out the door and down the hall.
“Katie, my dove,” he called to her, “this is foolishness, no?”
He had some vague intention of overtaking the apparition, because the more distance her spirit put between itself and his wife’s remains, the more permanent did that separation become. He realized as well that this logic, unique to the moment, was at the same time entirely groundless, though it must have some basis in reason—mustn’t it?—since Pinchas was a reasonable man.
“Och, Katie,” he cried, “I’m loving you beyond logic!” and would follow her, dead or alive, wherever she led. Or so he believed.
Once outside, Pinchas sloshed into the canal that the neighbors declared had its source in Eden, whose surface the shade walked briskly across. For their part his neighbors, if not playing at being shopkeepers and artisans, could be seen prospecting with strainers for the nacreous dream residue that bobbed like manna atop the shimmering stream. The jeweler Gottlob led his goose of a daughter through seasons that changed from one block to the next, bundling and unbundling her in her peacoat accordingly; the pharmacist Blen waved a butterfly net from his wherry to try and snatch a monkey-faced ziz bird out of the air. The North Main Street Improvement Committee was convened in the back of Makovsky’s to propose names for emotions that no one had previously experienced. So preoccupied were the citizens of the Pinch with their manifold phenomena that they scarcely noticed the bespectacled merchant in pursuit of his wife’s fugitive ghost.
On the crest of the little hill that was formed by the great oak’s uprooting, Katie paused a moment as a breeze stirred her auburn hair and pasted her chemise against her well-knit bones. Above her in the violet sky a cloud hung from a crescent moon like a rag from a scimitar; an owl hooted and the merchant’s phantom wife ducked without a backward glance below the surface of the earth. She sank among the inverted limbs that extended into the fissure as if she were descending a staircase. Having mounted the hillock behind her and peered over the brink into darkness, Pinchas balked in his pursuit; he’d come (it seemed) as near to the abyss as his tether would stretch. Weak from days without eating and further debilitated by a fathomless sorrow, he was snapped back to a plausible sanity: Katie’s ghost was not Katie; the wraith swallowed up by the earth’s open maw had nothing to do with his beloved wife. Hysteria had given way to a soberer rationale: he was a retail merchant again, and rather than follow a shade into the sunless unknown, Pinchas elected to turn around and retrace his steps back home.
He left the park and again confronted the spectacle of a neighborhood he perceived as a perverse impersonation of itself. But no sooner had he arrived at the bank of the canal than he realized that he’d succumbed to a stunning failure of nerve. Katie’s specter had more vitality than the corpse growing stiff back in the apartment to which he knew he couldn’t bring himself to return; the ghost had the greater claim to his allegiance, and Pinchas hated himself for having turned around. Isolated from his preposterous community by grief, he belonged to neither this world nor any other. Deeply ashamed, he stepped into an empty coracle moored to a hitching post in front of Poupko’s Hosiery and began paddling toward the place where all the lunacy had begun.
Mr. and Mrs. Padauer were leaving as Pinchas arrived. As they passed him on the landing above Hekkie’s Hardware, they were debating whether it was actually possible to travel beyond the borders of the Pinch.
“Mama,” Mr. Padauer was saying, “it’s like there’s around the neighborhood a Shabbos boundary, and can’t nobody come in or go out.”
“But we got special an exempt from the rebbe,” she countered, to which her husband concurred, though he had no recollection of having received such a thing.
Pinchas stepped undeterred into the dusty shtibl, where the Hasids were behaving as if it were Yom Kippur eve. They were performing the kaporeh ritual, twirling roosters by the spurred ankles above their heads. So rapidly were they twirling the chickens that the birds had begun to function as propellers, lifting the chanting fanatics into the air while feathers fell all around them like snow. Pinchas had to duck beneath the elevated disciples’ kicking feet as he approached the slumbering rebbe, with whom he had never before stood on ceremony. Still, he was a little daunted by the old man’s waxy countenance and stertorous breathing. But in his desperate need for answers, he gave the holy man’s shoulder a vigorous shake, until his lids began to open like jimmied clamshells.
“My Katie died and her ghost went in the hole in the park,” he stated defiantly.
“So you say,” replied the rebbe with a yawn, automatically reaching for his snuffbox.
Taking his response for indifference, Pinchas felt himself becoming incensed; he was on the verge of blaming the old kocker for his broken heart and demanding to know what he was going to do about it, when he remembered that Eliakum ben Yahya was not responsible. He and his band of zealots might be blamed for turning the Pinch into a sort of supernatural funfair, but he’d played no apparent part in Katie’s demise. No one was culpable, he reminded himself in an effort to calm his outrage, though he still couldn’t manage to rule out his own guilt. Then Pinchas became aware that the rebbe was posing a question.
“So why you didn’t follow her?”
“What?” said Pinchas, who’d heard him perfectly well.
The rebbe emitted a restive grunt. “Why you didn’t go after her?” he repeated.
“To what end?”
“Tahke, to bring her back.”
Again Pinchas was near to erupting with rage, until he realized, again, that the real target of his anger was himself. Hadn’t he gone to the park with that very purpose in mind before the madness of his resolve stopped him cold? Nevertheless he felt obliged to restate the irrefutable. “She’s dead!”
“So go where go the dead and bring her back.”
This was too much; he was being mocked. He’d compromised his integrity by seeking an audience with the old charlatan only to be humiliated for his trouble. “It’s what I deserve,” he supposed. But on the other hand, why had he come here if not for confirmation that the laws governing the conventions of the ordinary were in abeyance. And where wouldn’t he go to fetch back his Katie?
“You ’fraid?” Pinchas was dimly conscious of the rebbe inquiring.
“You damn for sure right I’m afraid!” he barked.
“But you been there before,” reasoned Rabbi Eliakum. “You should know from the way back already.”
Pinchas peered at him in perplexity before grasping the old man’s reference; everyone knew the story: how the young pack peddler had been rescued from his entombment during the Fever. He’d told it so often, leaving open the issue of whether he’d been actually dead and resurrected, that he’d practically leached the tale of any truth, but now the memory recurred in all its stark veracity: Katie had saved him then and had given him now an opportunity to return the favor. Wasn’t that what the rebbe implied? But it had been so long—not since leaving his country of origin—that Pinchas Pin had been called upon to take himself into the unknown.
Seeing how he was torn, Rabbi Eliakum, with a heavy “Oy,” endeavored to raise himself to his feet. Some of his Hasids, spent from the aerial exertion of twirling their chickens, had dropped from the ceiling to lie in a blissful heap among the cross-eyed birds. The rebbe made an exasperated gesture with his bearded chin as if to say they were beyond his influence now. “I’ll go with you,” he asserted. Then taking up his walking stick and a small siddur, which he slipped into the pocket of his caftan, he began to scoot haltingly toward the door. Even through his own forebodings Pinchas could see that the old man was in no shape to play his guide.
“Rabbi, you’re not well,” he cautioned.
“A nekhtiker tog,” pooh-poohed the old tzaddik. “Nonsense, a nice stroll will do for me good.”
Once on a visit to the Pink Palace Museum with Rachel, while standing in front of the case containing a pair of shrunken heads from Borneo, I tried pitching my voice.
“Oy,” I made one of the heads to say, and the other, also in an old man’s voice via Rachel, replied, “You’re telling me.”
An item now, you might have seen us together around town: at a poetry reading at the Bitter Lemon Coffeehouse or an Italian film about a plague of boredom at the Guild Art Theater. We made a road trip at Rachel’s suggestion into the Delta, a pilgrimage to the crossroads where bluesmen bartered their souls to the Devil, and to the grave of William Faulkner, where we shared a fried pie. We watched the sun set over the river, which left an indelible rose madder impression on my brain, even without the agency of LSD. Then we repaired to my apartment—never to hers; I’d yet to be invited to spend the night at her place—where we fooled around and I read to her aloud.
I guess you could say I was happy. Hadn’t I waited all my days for such a girl? Still, there were times I wished I could get even closer to her, to penetrate her heart’s core as they say. Though wasn’t it enough that, to put it crudely, I was getting laid? So what if Rachel never quite responded in kind to the zeal of my attentions; never mind that her caresses often seemed almost maternal, as if she was moved less by desire than compassion. Not proud, I would take what I could get. Besides, I had sufficient enthusiasm for the drum-tight hollow of her abdomen and the scent of her tar-black hair, the spicy compartments of her mind, to compensate for whatever was lacking in her participation. The fact of our lovemaking was enough for me to build a small universe upon.
The sap from my arrested adolescence surged like an aneurysm whenever she touched me. Meanwhile
The Pinch
had receded from primary experience to the dimensions of a regular book; its pages ceased to swallow me whole as they had before my association with Rachel, whose history I would sometimes investigate as eagerly as I had North Main Street itself.
“When,” I’d asked her somewhat hesitantly, “did you lose your virginity?”
“Well, there was the unicycle when I was thirteen, and again …”
“Again?”
“… at fifteen, a boy from the planet Mongo …”
“Never mind”—becoming mumpish—“I don’t want to know.”
“What’s the matter, Lenny? Can’t you take your own medicine?”
She was right of course, since even with her I tended to trade mostly in double-talk. Still I refused to let her off the hook: “Were you ever—and you should know I stand ready to avenge you if you were—abused?”
“No,” she said demurely, “but there was the guitar-playing cantor at Temple Sinai—I was his pet—who asked me once if I wouldn’t mind spanking him. I remember I was so flustered I told him I had a cold.”
What was her greatest disappointment? When, after having her tonsils out at age eight, she’d written to Neil Sedaka to come visit her in the hospital and he didn’t show. Once she caught her big sister in a primal embrace with the country club golf pro and wrecked their moment by laughing until she spat up. She was a daddy’s girl until he suggested a fix-up with an old friend’s son, the feckless heir to a radiator steam trap industry. She had a thing for animals: her favorite TV show was
Zoo Parade,
her favorite book
National Velvet,
which had surpassed even Anne Frank’s diary as a teenage passion. She traveled in Israel and Egypt the summer after high school graduation with a boyfriend who claimed not to have had a bowel movement during their entire month abroad. Despite her practical bent (she’d been treasurer of a Brandeis College political action committee and worn a gas mask to an uneventful demonstration), she thought she might like to die like Joan of Arc.
Then it would be my turn, though her interrogations tended to be less specific, as when she asked, “So Lenny, why are you such a—to put it mildly—such a case?”
“Blame it on my childhood.”
“Your childhood.”
“As you know I was snatched from my cradle by a buzzard that dropped me on the doorstep of a London blacking factory …”
At which point during that particular exchange she had stiffened and turned away from me. I sat up in bed to find her staring at the opaque glass of the window that gave back the reflection of her seal-sleek body. My eyes slid down her breast and clung to the nipple like Harold Lloyd hanging on to the face of a clock.