Short Stories: Five Decades (6 page)

The automobile. Nine hundred dollars. A nine-hundred-dollar check looked very austere and impressive, like a penal institution. He was going to go off in the automobile, find a place in the mountains, write a play. Only he could never get himself far enough ahead on Dusty Blades and Ronnie Cook and His Friends. Twenty thousand words a week, each week, recurring like Sunday on the calendar. How many words was
Hamlet?
Thirty, thirty-five thousand?

Twenty-three dollars to Best’s. That was Martha’s sweater for her birthday. “Either you say yes or no,” Martha said Saturday night. “I want to get married and I’ve waited long enough.” If you married you paid rent in two places, light, gas, telephone twice, and you bought stockings, dresses, toothpaste, medical attention, for your wife.

Flacker plays with something in his pocket. Dusty’s hand shoots out, grabs his wrist, pulls his hand out. Buddy’s little penknife, which Dusty had given him for a birthday present, is in Flacker’s hand. “Flacker, tell me where Buddy Jones is, or I’ll kill you with my bare hands.” A gong rings. Flacker has stepped on an alarm. Doors open and the room fills with his henchmen.

Twenty dollars to Macy’s for books. Parrington,
Main Currents in American Thought
. How does Dusty Blades fit into the
Main Currents of American Thought?

Ten dollars to Dr. Farber. “I don’t sleep at night. Can you help me?”

“Do you drink coffee?”

“I drink one cup of coffee in the morning. That’s all.”

Pills, to be taken before retiring. Ten dollars. We ransom our lives from doctors’ hands.

If you marry, you take an apartment downtown because it’s silly to live in Brooklyn this way; and you buy furniture, four rooms full of furniture, beds, chairs, dishrags, relatives. Martha’s family was poor and getting no younger and finally there would be three families, with rent and clothes and doctors and funerals.

Andrew got up and opened the closet door. In it, stacked in files, were the scripts he had written in the last four years. They stretched from one end of a wide closet across to another, bridge from one wall to another of a million words. Four years’ work.

Next script. The henchmen close in on Dusty. He hears the sounds of Buddy screaming in the next room …

How many years more?

The vacuum cleaner roared.

Martha was Jewish. That meant you’d have to lie your way into some hotels, if you went at all, and you never could escape from one particular meanness of the world around you; and when the bad time came there you’d be, adrift on that dangerous sea.

He sat down at his desk. One hundred dollars again to Spain. Barcelona had fallen and the long dusty lines were beating their way to the French border with the planes over them, and out of a sense of guilt at not being on a dusty road, yourself, bloody-footed and in fear of death, you gave a hundred dollars, feeling at the same time that it was too much and nothing you ever gave could be enough. Three-and-a-third The Adventures of Dusty Blades to the dead and dying of Spain.

The world loads you day by day with new burdens that increase on your shoulders. Lift a pound and you find you’re carrying a ton. “Marry me,” she says, “marry me.” Then what does Dusty do? What the hell can he do that he hasn’t done before? For five afternoons a week now, for a year, Dusty has been in Flacker’s hands, or the hands of somebody else who is Flacker but has another name, and each time he has escaped. How now?

The vacuum roared in the hallway outside his room.

“Mom!” he yelled. “Please turn that thing off!”

“What did you say?” his mother called.

“Nothing.”

He added up the bank balances. His figures showed that he was four hundred and twelve dollars overdrawn instead of one hundred and eleven dollars, as the bank said. He didn’t feel like adding the figures over. He put the vouchers and the bank’s sheet into an envelope for his income-tax returns.

“Hit it out, Charlie!” a boy called on the field. “Make it a fast one!”

Andrew felt like going out and playing with them. He changed his clothes and put on a pair of old spikes that were lying in the back of the closet. His old pants were tight on him. Fat. If he ever let go, if anything happened and he couldn’t exercise, he’d blow up like a house, if he got sick and had to lie in bed and convalesce … Maybe Dusty has a knife in a holster up his sleeve … How to plant that? The rent, the food, the piano teacher, the people at Saks who sold his sister dresses, the nimble girls who painted the tin gadgets in his father’s shop, the teeth in his father’s mouth, the doctors, the doctors, all living on the words that would have to come out of his head. See here, Flacker, I know what you’re up to. Business: Sound of a shot. A groan. Hurry, before the train gets to the crossing! Look! He’s gaining on us! Hurry! will he make it? Will Dusty Blades head off the desperate gang of counterfeiters and murderers in the race for the yacht? Will I be able to keep it up? The years, the years ahead … You grow fat and the lines become permanent under your eyes and you drink too much and you pay more to the doctors because death is nearer and there is no stop, no vacation from life, in no year can you say, “I want to sit this one out, kindly excuse me.”

His mother opened the door. “Martha’s on the phone.”

Andrew clattered out in his spiked shoes, holding the old, torn fielder’s glove. He closed the door to the dining room to show his mother this was going to be a private conversation.

“Hello,” he said. “Yes.” He listened gravely. “No,” he said. “I guess not. Good-bye. Good luck, Martha.”

He stood looking at the phone. His mother came in and he raised his head and started down the steps.

“Andrew,” she said, “I want to ask you something.”

“What?”

“Could you spare fifty dollars, Andrew?”

“Oh, God!”

“It’s important. You know I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important. It’s for Dorothy.”

“What does she need it for?”

“She’s going to a party, a very important party, a lot of very big people’re going to be there and she’s sure they’ll ask her to play.…”

“Do the invitations cost fifty dollars apiece?” Andrew kicked the top step and a little piece of dried mud fell off the spiked shoes.

“No, Andrew.” His mother was talking in her asking-for-money voice. “It’s for a dress. She can’t go without a new dress, she says. There’s a man there she’s after.”

“She won’t get him, dress or no dress,” Andrew said. “Your daughter’s a very plain girl.”

“I know,” his mother’s hands waved a little, helpless and sad. “But it’s better if she at least does the best she can. I feel sorry for her, Andrew …”

“Everybody comes to me!” Andrew yelled, his voice suddenly high. “Nobody leaves me alone! Not for a minute!”

He was crying now and he turned to hide it from his mother. She looked at him, surprised, shaking her head. She put her arms around him. “Just do what you want to, Andrew, that’s all. Don’t do anything you don’t want to do.”

“Yeah,” Andrew said. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I’ll give you the money. I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

“Don’t give it to me if you don’t want to, Andrew.” His mother was saying this honestly, believing it.

He laughed a little. “I want to, Mom, I want to.”

He patted her shoulder and went down toward the baseball field, leaving her standing there puzzled at the top of the steps.

The sun and the breeze felt good on the baseball field, and he forgot for an hour, but he moved slowly. His arm hurt at the shoulder when he threw, and the boy playing second base called him Mister, which he wouldn’t have done even last year, when Andrew was twenty-four.

Second Mortgage

T
he bell rang and I went to the window to see who it was.

“Don’t answer it,” my father called. “It may be a summons.”

“They can’t serve summonses on Sunday,” I said, parting the curtains cautiously.

“Don’t answer it, anyway.” My father came into the living room. He didn’t know how to handle bill-collectors. They bullied him and he made wild promises, very seriously, to pay, and never did and they’d come and hound him terribly. When he was home alone he never answered the doorbell. He never even went to see who it was. He just sat in the kitchen reading the paper while the bell clanged over his head. Even the postman couldn’t get the front door opened when my father was home alone.

The bell rang again. “What the hell,” I said, “it’s only a little old lady. She’s probably selling something. We can open the door.”

“What for?” my father asked. “We can’t buy anything.”

I opened the door anyway. The little old lady jumped when the door swung back. Her hands fluttered. They were plump little hands, swollen, without gloves. “I’m Mrs. Shapiro,” she said, waiting.

I waited. She tried a smile. I waited sternly. Strangers are never friends at the doors of the poor. I was only seventeen but I had learned that anyone who rang our doorbell might turn out to be the Edison Electric Company or the Brooklyn Borough Gas Company, intent on shutting off the electricity or the gas.

Mrs. Shapiro hunched inside her shapeless little coat. “I own the second mortgage,” she said.

Still I waited, sternly. Another enemy.

Her hand came out, cold, plump, and pleading. “I want to speak to your father, maybe,” she said.

My father had retreated to the kitchen and the Sunday
Times
, hoping that nothing would happen at the front door that would require his tearing himself out of that peaceful welter of journalism.

“Pop!” I called. I heard him sigh and the rustle of the Sunday
Times
as he put down the editorial page. Mrs. Shapiro came in and I closed the door. My father came in, wiping his glasses, longing for the kitchen.

“This is Mrs. Shapiro, Pop,” I said. “She owns the second mortgage …”

“Yes.” Mrs. Shapiro was eager and bright and apologetic for a moment. She moved into the middle of the room. There were runs in her fat little stockings and her shoes were shapeless. “I came because …”

“Yes,” my father said, with his imitation of a businesslike attitude, that he always tried on bill-collectors and which he lost as soon as they started to bully him. “Yes. Of course. Just wait a moment … My wife … my wife knows more about this than … Oh … Helen! Helen!”

My mother came down from upstairs, fixing her hair.

“Mrs. Shapiro,” my father said. “The second mortgage …”

“It’s this way,” Mrs. Shapiro said, moving toward my mother. “In 1929, I …”

“Won’t you sit down?” My mother pointed to a chair. She glanced at my father, tightening her mouth. My mother was always contemptuous of my father at those times when my father proved unequal to the task of beating off the representatives of our poverty.

Mrs. Shapiro sat on the very edge of the chair, leaning forward, her knees together. “The second mortgage is eight hundred dollars,” Mrs. Shapiro said. We all sat silent. Mrs. Shapiro was disheartened by the silence, but she went on, her fat gray cheeks moving anxiously over her words. “Eight hundred dollars is a lot of money,” she said.

We didn’t contradict her.

“In 1929,” Mrs. Shapiro said, “I had eight thousand dollars.” She looked to our faces for pity, envy, anything. We sat there expressionless, with the faces of people who have become used to owing money. “Eight thousand dollars. I worked all my life for it. I had a vegetable store. It’s hard to make money in vegetables nowadays. Vegetables are expensive and they spoil and there is always somebody else who sells them cheaper than you can …”

“Yes,” my mother said, “vegetables are very expensive. I paid twenty cents for a head of cauliflower yesterday …”

“It wasn’t any good, either,” my father said. “I don’t like cauliflower. It reminds me of cabbage, somehow.”

“When Mr. Shapiro died of cancer, it took him two years to die,” Mrs. Shapiro went on, trying to please us. “I had eight thousand dollars. I had rheumatism and high blood pressure and I couldn’t take care of the store any more.” Once more she begged our faces for that crumb of pity. “I took the eight thousand dollars out of the bank and I went to Mr. Mayer and I said, ‘Mr. Mayer, you’re a big man, you have a fine reputation, I am giving you a widow’s life’s savings, invest it for me so that I have enough to live on. I don’t need much, Mr. Mayer,’ I told him, ‘just a few dollars a week until I die, that’s all,’ I said, ‘just a few dollars.’”

“I know Mayer,” my father said. “He’s not doing so well now. The Trust Company’s in receivership now.”

“Mr. Mayer,” Mrs. Shapiro said with passion, her fists quivering on her little thighs, “is a crook! He took my money and he put it out in second mortgages. Eight thousand dollars’ worth of second mortgages!”

She stopped. For the moment she could not say another word.

“Today,” my father said, “even first mortgages are no good. Nothing’s any good any more.”

“In the last two years,” Mrs. Shapiro said, her eyes filling with tears, “I haven’t got a penny out of them … out of eight thousand dollars’ worth of second mortgages, not a penny …” A little rag of a handkerchief came out and wiped at her eyes. “I used to go to Mr. Mayer and he’d tell me I’d have to wait. How long can I wait? I don’t have with what to eat now, as it is! Can I wait longer than that?” Triumphantly she wept. “Now Mr. Mayer won’t see me any more. They tell me he’s out when I go there. It doesn’t do any good to go there.” She stopped, wiping her eyes. We sat, uncomfortable and still.