the point of making her unapproachable. Moreover, she was unresponsive to any questions from her husband concerning her mood. At a loss, Pinchas fluctuated between hurt and solicitude, worried about the physical toll Katie’s temper was taking—the scooped cheeks and broken capillaries, the plum bruises beneath her eyes. But when Jenny was around, Katie perked up: she became garrulous, dispensing apocryphal versions of her nephew’s biography as confounding to her husband as to Muni himself. Jenny, however, was amused by Mrs. Pin’s fancies, and Katie would giggle as well, the two females retreating into a corner to conspire in whispers. Though he had no idea what transpired between them, Pinchas was glad to see his spouse animated again, though as soon as Jenny left, Katie reverted to her sour aspect.
Their outings took Jenny and Muni ever farther afield; the city had its points of interest. There was Beale Street with its barrelhouses cheek by jowl with funeral parlors, where the casketed dead were showcased in windows as examples of the mortician’s art. (On Beale they also saw the colored men rounded up by gaitered police for the offense of fraternizing in public.) There were the Italianate mansions along Adams Avenue, and the tree-lined Parkway, where you had to dodge cantering horses bearing smart equestrian ladies in riding pants. It was on the bridle path in the Parkway’s median that they sighted the first purple crocuses nudging their heads through the leaf-moldy loam. But for Muni, nowhere else in the city had the liveliness of North Main Street itself, at least as it was interpreted through Jenny’s back-fence tales. She told him how Mr. Crow, the locksmith, would have his wife committed to the county sanitarium by day, only to return at night to plead for her release; how the local hero Eddie Kid Wolf got his glass jaw routinely shattered in the Phoenix Arena over at Winchester and Front. Tantalized by her loshen horeh, her gossip, Muni sometimes felt that the shops and apartments above them, the narrow frame houses along the side streets, existed solely by the grace of the girl. Still he was slow to connect his increased affection for the picturesque ordinariness of the street with his feelings for his talky companion. It made him uneasy that he and Jenny Bashrig were already considered an item by their neighbors, since there was nothing in their association thus far that signified a romantic attachment.
After all, they had yet to even hold hands. Meanwhile everyone smiled benevolently upon the young couple. The fiddler Asbestos, whose blessing they also seemed to have secured, encouraged their intimacy with a purling adagio whenever they passed. They passed him often, as there were days when he seemed to occupy every street corner at once. As aggravated by the blind man’s familiarity with the girl as he was arrested by his music, Muni paused once to address him: “Don’t you got someplace else you need to be?”
“I am someplace else,” replied the Negro with his yellow-toothed grin. Then he added mysteriously, “I ain’t what you think I am.”
“Frankly I don’t know what I think you are,” said Muni, thus terminating their exchange.
Was Jenny pretty? Her nose was slightly crooked, her stripling figure wiry to a nearly unfeminine degree, but her eyes—those lamp-black puddles—had their own gravitational pull. Looking into them, Muni felt a tidal response in his kishkes, as if his very insides were being drawn toward the girl. At some point Jenny had discarded her cane, and while she still limped, might limp forever, her jerky movements had become so adapted to her gait that Muni hardly noticed. He was selfishly thankful that her handicap kept her anchored to terra firma, that she didn’t attempt to mount her rope or tinker with the reels that held it taut. Also, she’d stopped talking so much about leaving town, though when she mentioned it Muni fought an urge to hold her back
Their outings took Jenny and Muni ever farther afield; the city had its points of interest. There was Beale Street with its barrelhouses cheek by jowl with funeral parlors, where the casketed dead were showcased in windows as examples of the mortician’s art. (On Beale they also saw the colored men rounded up by gaitered police for the offense of fraternizing in public.) There were the Italianate mansions along Adams Avenue, and the tree-lined Parkway, where you had to dodge cantering horses bearing smart equestrian ladies in riding pants. It was on the bridle path in the Parkway’s median that they sighted the first purple crocuses nudging their heads through the leaf-moldy loam. But for Muni, nowhere else in the city had the liveliness of North Main Street itself, at least as it was interpreted through Jenny’s back-fence tales. She told him how Mr. Crow, the locksmith, would have his wife committed to the county sanitarium by day, only to return at night to plead for her release; how the local hero Eddie Kid Wolf got his glass jaw routinely shattered in the Phoenix Arena over at Winchester and Front. Tantalized by her loshen horeh, her gossip, Muni sometimes felt that the shops and apartments above them, the narrow frame houses along the side streets, existed solely by the grace of the girl. Still he was slow to connect his increased affection for the picturesque ordinariness of the street with his feelings for his talky companion. It made him uneasy that he and Jenny Bashrig were already considered an item by their neighbors, since there was nothing in their association thus far that signified a romantic attachment.
After all, they had yet to even hold hands. Meanwhile everyone smiled benevolently upon the young couple. The fiddler Asbestos, whose blessing they also seemed to have secured, encouraged their intimacy with a purling adagio whenever they passed. They passed him often, as there were days when he seemed to occupy every street corner at once. As aggravated by the blind man’s familiarity with the girl as he was arrested by his music, Muni paused once to address him: “Don’t you got someplace else you need to be?”
“I am someplace else,” replied the Negro with his yellow-toothed grin. Then he added mysteriously, “I ain’t what you think I am.”
“Frankly I don’t know what I think you are,” said Muni, thus terminating their exchange.
Was Jenny pretty? Her nose was slightly crooked, her stripling figure wiry to a nearly unfeminine degree, but her eyes—those lamp-black puddles—had their own gravitational pull. Looking into them, Muni felt a tidal response in his kishkes, as if his very insides were being drawn toward the girl. At some point Jenny had discarded her cane, and while she still limped, might limp forever, her jerky movements had become so adapted to her gait that Muni hardly noticed. He was selfishly thankful that her handicap kept her anchored to terra firma, that she didn’t attempt to mount her rope or tinker with the reels that held it taut. Also, she’d stopped talking so much about leaving town, though when she mentioned it Muni fought an urge to hold her back
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