Free The Pinch by Steve Stern Page B

how he’d succumbed to the plague of yellow jack upon his arrival in the city and, but for the intercession of a poor Irish lass, was given up for dead. Their marriage had condemned Katie to the lot of an outcast rejected by her own dissolute clan; it would have caused a scandal in Pinchas’s community as well, had there been any community to speak of. But Pinchas Pin was the first Hebrew to set up shop in the Pinch. By the time others of his persuasion had begun to straggle into that rough-and-ready neighborhood, his business had become an institution, as had his marriage to the pretty colleen. It had not been a perfect union; their childlessness was a constant source of regret, but Katie’s native exuberance had remained largely unflagging throughout. So it was with alarm that her husband observed how his wife had turned a corner into her climacteric, and was lately given to bouts of crankiness.
    Once in Pinchas’s presence Muni ventured to speculate that his coming to stay was perhaps responsible for putting undue stress on his uncle’s wife. He was surprised by the vehemence of the merchant’s response.
    “You?” Pinchas fairly shouted. “Shtik goy! Ain’t nobody else can make my Katie unhappy but me myself.”
    Muni never broached the subject again, though he couldn’t shake his remorse over his aunt’s disapproval of his apparent lack of concern for the fallen acrobat.
    Still he continued to lie low after Jenny’s return. The girl, for her part, never tried to seek him out but neither did she attempt to avoid him, and it was inevitable that their paths would cross again. For the time being, however, Muni ducked into doorways or retreated to the rear of the store if he saw her coming, swinging her weight along on crutches with the agility of a monkey ranging through trees. Some noted that Jenny seemed to negotiate the crutches better than she had her own two left feet before she’d fractured her leg.
    Meanwhile life on North Main Street proceeded apace. Construction was under way for the Idle Hour Theater, which would serve as a venue for touring theatricals as well as the projection of the photoplays that were making the arc-lit nickelodeons obsolete. The theater was viewed with civic pride by the Reform congregation of Temple Israel, though the less secular-minded Market Square Synagogue was opposed to the impious project. They were as dismayed by the Idle Hour as by rumors that sons of the Pinch were seen frequenting a floating casino moored under the bluff at the Happy Hollow fishing camp. Further fueling a communal sense of opprobrium was the news that Mrs. Gruber had once more refused to pay tribute to the agents of Boss Crump’s machine, and so was collared again for making moonshine. Bemoaning her disgrace, the street nevertheless turned out in a body for her trial, which was on a Friday afternoon in November. Called to the witness stand, Mrs. Gruber’s colleague Lazar der Royte remarked through a window that the sun, whose color rivaled the red of his beard, had begun to set. Ignoring the prosecutor’s questions, Lazar wrapped himself in his tallis and began to chant his Sabbath prayers.
    The neighborhood was less cacophonous since the gramophone in the Widow Teitelbaum’s window was no longer in competition with Asbestos’s fiddle. Instead, when she played such popular ditties as “Peg o’ My Heart” or “Yaddie Kaddie Kiddie Kaddie Koo,” the blind musician executed variations upon them, turning the sprightliest tunes into dolorous threnodies. In Pin’s General Merchandise it was business as usual, and business, Got tsu danken, was generally good. There was a run on rubber collars and oxblood Shinola was flying off the shelves, nor could novelty items like bagpipe balloons be kept in stock. Mr. Bluestein bought twelve yards of calico, and Mrs. Padauer—while her husband, a drummer in ladies’ foundation garments, was away on a business trip—came in to buy her geriatric child a