The Complete Stories (11 page)
Read The Complete Stories Online
Authors: Bernard Malamud
During the week, by placing here and there a deft question, he managed to get from Miriam some information about Max. It surprised him to learn that the boy was not studying to be either a doctor or lawyer
but was taking a business course leading to a degree in accountancy. Feld was a little disappointed because he thought of accountants as bookkeepers and would have preferred “a higher profession.” However, it was not long before he had investigated the subject and discovered that Certified Public Accountants were highly respected people, so he was thoroughly content as Saturday approached. But because Saturday was a busy day, he was much in the store and therefore did not see Max when he came to call for Miriam. From his wife he learned there had been nothing especially revealing about their greeting. Max had rung the bell and Miriam had got her coat and left with him—nothing more. Feld did not probe, for his wife was not particularly observant. Instead, he waited up for Miriam with a newspaper on his lap, which he scarcely looked at, so lost was he in thinking of the future. He awoke to find her in the room with him, tiredly removing her hat. Greeting her, he was suddenly inexplicably afraid to ask anything about the evening. But since she volunteered nothing he was at last forced to inquire how she had enjoyed herself. Miriam began something noncommittal, but apparently changed her mind, for she said after a minute, “I was bored.”
but was taking a business course leading to a degree in accountancy. Feld was a little disappointed because he thought of accountants as bookkeepers and would have preferred “a higher profession.” However, it was not long before he had investigated the subject and discovered that Certified Public Accountants were highly respected people, so he was thoroughly content as Saturday approached. But because Saturday was a busy day, he was much in the store and therefore did not see Max when he came to call for Miriam. From his wife he learned there had been nothing especially revealing about their greeting. Max had rung the bell and Miriam had got her coat and left with him—nothing more. Feld did not probe, for his wife was not particularly observant. Instead, he waited up for Miriam with a newspaper on his lap, which he scarcely looked at, so lost was he in thinking of the future. He awoke to find her in the room with him, tiredly removing her hat. Greeting her, he was suddenly inexplicably afraid to ask anything about the evening. But since she volunteered nothing he was at last forced to inquire how she had enjoyed herself. Miriam began something noncommittal, but apparently changed her mind, for she said after a minute, “I was bored.”
When Feld had sufficiently recovered from his anguished disappointment to ask why, she answered without hesitation, “Because he’s nothing more than a materialist.”
“What means this word?”
“He has no soul. He’s only interested in things.”
He considered her statement for a long time, then asked, “Will you see him again?”
“He didn’t ask.”
“Suppose he will ask you?”
“I won’t see him.”
He did not argue; however, as the days went by he hoped increasingly she would change her mind. He wished the boy would telephone, because he was sure there was more to him than Miriam, with her inexperienced eye, could discern. But Max didn’t call. As a matter of fact he took a different route to school, no longer passing the shoemaker’s store, and Feld was deeply hurt.
Then one afternoon Max came in and asked for his shoes. The shoemaker took them down from the shelf where he had placed them, apart from the other pairs. He had done the work himself and the soles and heels were well built and firm. The shoes had been highly polished and somehow looked better than new. Max’s Adam’s apple went up once when he saw them, and his eyes had little lights in them.
“How much?” he asked, without directly looking at the shoemaker.
“Like I told you before,” Feld answered sadly. “One dollar fifty cents.”
Max handed him two crumpled bills and received in return a newly minted silver half dollar.
He left. Miriam had not been mentioned. That night the shoemaker discovered that his new assistant had been all the while stealing from him, and he suffered a heart attack.
Though the attack was very mild, he lay in bed for three weeks. Miriam spoke of going for Sobel, but sick as he was Feld rose in wrath against the idea. Yet in his heart he knew there was no other way, and the first weary day back in the shop thoroughly convinced him, so that night after supper he dragged himself to Sobel’s rooming house.
He toiled up the stairs, though he knew it was bad for him, and at the top knocked at the door. Sobel opened it and the shoemaker entered. The room was a small, poor one, with a single window facing the street. It contained a narrow cot, a low table, and several stacks of books piled haphazardly around on the floor along the wall, which made him think how queer Sobel was, to be uneducated and read so much. He had once asked him, Sobel, why you read so much? and the assistant could not answer him. Did you ever study in a college someplace? he had asked, but Sobel shook his head. He read, he said, to know. But to know what, the shoemaker demanded, and to know, why? Sobel never explained, which proved he read so much because he was queer.
Feld sat down to recover his breath. The assistant was resting on his bed with his heavy back to the wall. His shirt and trousers were clean, and his stubby fingers, away from the shoemaker’s bench, were strangely pallid. His face was thin and pale, as if he had been shut in this room since the day he had bolted from the store.
“So when you will come back to work?” Feld asked him.
To his surprise, Sobel burst out, “Never.”
Jumping up, he strode over to the window that looked out upon the miserable street. “Why should I come back?” he cried.
“I will raise your wages.”
“Who cares for your wages!”
The shoemaker, knowing he didn’t care, was at a loss what else to say.
“What do you want from me, Sobel?”
“Nothing.”
“I always treated you like you was my son.”
Sobel vehemently denied it. “So why you look for strange boys in the street they should go out with Miriam? Why you don’t think of me?”
The shoemaker’s hands and feet turned freezing cold. His voice became so hoarse he couldn’t speak. At last he cleared his throat and croaked, “So what has my daughter got to do with a shoemaker thirty-five years old who works for me?”
“Why do you think I worked so long for you?” Sobel cried out. “For the stingy wages I sacrificed five years of my life so you could have to eat and drink and where to sleep?”
“Then for what?” shouted the shoemaker.
“For Miriam,” he blurted—“for her.”
The shoemaker, after a time, managed to say, “I pay wages in cash, Sobel,” and lapsed into silence. Though he was seething with excitement, his mind was coldly clear, and he had to admit to himself he had sensed all along that Sobel felt this way. He had never so much as thought it consciously, but he had felt it and was afraid.
“Miriam knows?” he muttered hoarsely.
“She knows.”
“You told her?”
“No.”
“Then how does she know?”
“How does she know?” Sobel said. “Because she knows. She knows who I am and what is in my heart.”
Feld had a sudden insight. In some devious way, with his books and commentary, Sobel had given Miriam to understand that he loved her. The shoemaker felt a terrible anger at him for his deceit.
“Sobel, you are crazy,” he said bitterly. “She will never marry a man so old and ugly like you.”
Sobel turned black with rage. He cursed the shoemaker, but then, though he trembled to hold it in, his eyes filled with tears and he broke into deep sobs. With his back to Feld, he stood at the window, fists clenched, and his shoulders shook with his choked sobbing.
Watching him, the shoemaker’s anger diminished. His teeth were on edge with pity for the man, and his eyes grew moist. How strange and sad that a refugee, a grown man, bald and old with his miseries, who had by the skin of his teeth escaped Hitler’s incinerators, should fall in love, when he had got to America, with a girl less than half his age. Day after day, for five years he had sat at his bench, cutting and
hammering away, waiting for the girl to become a woman, unable to ease his heart with speech, knowing no protest but desperation.
hammering away, waiting for the girl to become a woman, unable to ease his heart with speech, knowing no protest but desperation.
“Ugly I didn’t mean,” he said half aloud.
Then he realized that what he had called ugly was not Sobel but Miriam’s life if she married him. He felt for his daughter a strange and gripping sorrow, as if she were already Sobel’s bride, the wife, after all, of a shoemaker, and had in her life no more than her mother had had. And all his dreams for her—why he had slaved and destroyed his heart with anxiety and labor—all these dreams of a better life were dead.
The room was quiet. Sobel was standing by the window reading, and it was curious that when he read he looked young.
“She is only nineteen,” Feld said brokenly. “This is too young yet to get married. Don’t ask her for two years more, till she is twenty-one, then you can talk to her.”
Sobel didn’t answer. Feld rose and left. He went slowly down the stairs but once outside, though it was an icy night and the crisp falling snow whitened the street, he walked with a stronger stride.
But the next morning, when the shoemaker arrived, heavy-hearted, to open the store, he saw he needn’t have come, for his assistant was already seated at the last, pounding leather for his love.
1950
M
arcus was a tailor, long ago before the war, a buoyant man with a bushy head of graying hair, fine fragile brows, and benevolent hands, who comparatively late in life had become a clothier. Because he had prospered, so to say, into ill health, he had to employ an assistant tailor in the rear room, who made alterations on garments but could not, when the work piled high, handle the pressing, so that it became necessary to put on a presser; therefore though the store did well, it did not do too well.
arcus was a tailor, long ago before the war, a buoyant man with a bushy head of graying hair, fine fragile brows, and benevolent hands, who comparatively late in life had become a clothier. Because he had prospered, so to say, into ill health, he had to employ an assistant tailor in the rear room, who made alterations on garments but could not, when the work piled high, handle the pressing, so that it became necessary to put on a presser; therefore though the store did well, it did not do too well.
It might have done better but the presser, Josip Bruzak, a heavy, beery, perspiring Pole, who worked in undershirt and felt slippers, his pants loose on his beefy hips, the legs crumpling around his ankles, conceived a violent dislike for Emilio Vizo, the tailor—or it worked the other way, Marcus wasn’t sure—a thin, dry, pigeon-chested Sicilian, who bore or returned the Pole a steely malice. Because of their quarrels the business suffered.
Why they should fight as they did, fluttering and snarling like angry cocks, and using, in the bargain, terrible language, loud coarse words that affronted the customers and sometimes made the embarrassed Marcus feel dizzy to the point of fainting, mystified the clothier, who knew their troubles and felt they were, as people, much alike. Bruzak, who lived in a half-ruined rooming house near the East River, constantly guzzled beer at work and kept a dozen bottles in a rusty pan full of ice. When Marcus, in the beginning, objected, Josip, always respectful to the clothier, locked away the pan and disappeared
through the back door into the tavern down the block where he had his glass, in the process wasting so much precious time it paid Marcus to tell him to go back to the pan. Every day at lunch Josip pulled out of the drawer a small sharp knife and cut chunks of the hard garlic salami he ate with puffy lumps of white bread, washing it all down with beer and then black coffee brewed on the one-burner gas stove for the tailor’s iron. Sometimes he cooked up a soupy mess of cabbage which stank up the store, but on the whole neither the salami nor the cabbage interested him, and for days he seemed weary and uneasy until the mailman brought him, about every third week, a letter from the other side. When the letters came, he more than once tore them in half with his bumbling fingers; he forgot his work and, sitting on a backless chair, fished out of the same drawer where he kept his salami a pair of cracked eyeglasses which he attached to his ears by means of looped cords he had tied on in place of the broken sidepieces. Then he read the tissue sheets he held in his fist, a crabbed Polish writing in faded brown ink whose every word he uttered aloud so that Marcus, who understood the language but preferred not to hear, heard. Before the presser had dipped two sentences into the letter, his face dissolved and he cried, tears smearing his cheeks and chin so that it looked as though he had been sprayed with something to kill flies. At the end he fell into a roar of sobbing, a terrible thing to behold, which incapacitated him for hours and wasted the morning.
through the back door into the tavern down the block where he had his glass, in the process wasting so much precious time it paid Marcus to tell him to go back to the pan. Every day at lunch Josip pulled out of the drawer a small sharp knife and cut chunks of the hard garlic salami he ate with puffy lumps of white bread, washing it all down with beer and then black coffee brewed on the one-burner gas stove for the tailor’s iron. Sometimes he cooked up a soupy mess of cabbage which stank up the store, but on the whole neither the salami nor the cabbage interested him, and for days he seemed weary and uneasy until the mailman brought him, about every third week, a letter from the other side. When the letters came, he more than once tore them in half with his bumbling fingers; he forgot his work and, sitting on a backless chair, fished out of the same drawer where he kept his salami a pair of cracked eyeglasses which he attached to his ears by means of looped cords he had tied on in place of the broken sidepieces. Then he read the tissue sheets he held in his fist, a crabbed Polish writing in faded brown ink whose every word he uttered aloud so that Marcus, who understood the language but preferred not to hear, heard. Before the presser had dipped two sentences into the letter, his face dissolved and he cried, tears smearing his cheeks and chin so that it looked as though he had been sprayed with something to kill flies. At the end he fell into a roar of sobbing, a terrible thing to behold, which incapacitated him for hours and wasted the morning.
Marcus had often thought of telling him to read his letters at home, but the news in them wrung his heart and he could not bring himself to scold Josip, who was, by the way, a master presser. Once he began on a pile of suits, the steaming machine hissed without letup, and every garment came out neat, without puff or excessive crease, and the arms, legs, and pleats were as sharp as knives. As for the news in the letters, it was always the same, concerning the sad experiences of his tubercular wife and unfortunate fourteen-year-old son, whom Josip, except in pictures, had never seen, a boy who lived, literally, in the mud with the pigs, and was also sick, so that even if his father saved up money for his passage to America, and the boy could obtain a visa, he would never get past the immigration doctors. Marcus more than once gave the presser a suit of clothes to send to his son, and occasionally some cash, but he wondered if these things ever got to him. He had the uncomfortable thought that Josip, in the last fourteen years, might have brought the boy over had he wanted, his wife too, before she had contracted tuberculosis, but for some reason he preferred to weep over them where they were.
Emilio, the tailor, was another lone wolf. Every day he had a forty-cent lunch in the diner about three blocks away but returned early to read his
Corriere
. His strangeness was that he was always whispering to himself. No one could understand what he said, but it was sibilant and insistent, and wherever he stood, one could hear his hissing voice urging something, or moaning softly, though he never wept. He whispered when he sewed a button on, or shortened a sleeve, or when he used the iron. Whispering when he hung up his coat in the morning, he was still whispering when he put on his black hat, wriggled his sparse shoulders into his coat, and left, in loneliness, the store at night. Only once did he hint what the whispering was about; when the clothier, noticing his pallor one morning, brought him a cup of coffee, in gratitude the tailor confided that his wife, who had returned last week, had left him again this, and he held up the outstretched fingers of one bony hand to show she had five times run out on him. Marcus offered the man his sympathy, and thereafter, when he heard the tailor whispering in the rear of the store, could always picture the wife coming back to him from wherever she had been, saying she was this time—she swore—going to stay for good, but at night when they were in bed and he was whispering about her in the dark, she would think to herself she was sick of this and in the morning was gone. And so the man’s ceaseless whisper irritated Marcus; he had to leave the store to hear silence, yet he kept Emilio on because he was a fine tailor, a demon with a needle, who could sew up a perfect cuff in less time than it takes an ordinary workman to take measurements, the kind of tailor who, when you were looking for one, was very rare.
Corriere
. His strangeness was that he was always whispering to himself. No one could understand what he said, but it was sibilant and insistent, and wherever he stood, one could hear his hissing voice urging something, or moaning softly, though he never wept. He whispered when he sewed a button on, or shortened a sleeve, or when he used the iron. Whispering when he hung up his coat in the morning, he was still whispering when he put on his black hat, wriggled his sparse shoulders into his coat, and left, in loneliness, the store at night. Only once did he hint what the whispering was about; when the clothier, noticing his pallor one morning, brought him a cup of coffee, in gratitude the tailor confided that his wife, who had returned last week, had left him again this, and he held up the outstretched fingers of one bony hand to show she had five times run out on him. Marcus offered the man his sympathy, and thereafter, when he heard the tailor whispering in the rear of the store, could always picture the wife coming back to him from wherever she had been, saying she was this time—she swore—going to stay for good, but at night when they were in bed and he was whispering about her in the dark, she would think to herself she was sick of this and in the morning was gone. And so the man’s ceaseless whisper irritated Marcus; he had to leave the store to hear silence, yet he kept Emilio on because he was a fine tailor, a demon with a needle, who could sew up a perfect cuff in less time than it takes an ordinary workman to take measurements, the kind of tailor who, when you were looking for one, was very rare.
For more than a year, despite the fact that they both made noises in the rear room, neither the presser nor the tailor seemed to notice one another; then one day, as though an invisible wall between them had fallen, they were at each other’s throat. Marcus, it appeared, walked in at the very birth of their venom, when, leaving a customer in the store one afternoon, he went back to get a piece of marking chalk and came on a sight that froze him. There they were in the afternoon sunlight that flooded the rear of the shop, momentarily blinding the clothier so that he had time to think he couldn’t possibly be seeing what he saw—the two at opposite corners staring stilly at one another—a live, almost hairy staring of intense hatred. The sneering Pole in one trembling hand squeezed a heavy wooden pressing block, while the livid tailor, his back like a cat’s against the wall, held aloft in his rigid fingers a pair of cutter’s shears.
“What is it?” Marcus shouted when he had recovered his voice, but neither of them would break the stone silence and remained as when he had discovered them, glaring across the shop at the other, the tailor’s lips moving and the presser breathing like a dog in heat, an eeriness about them that Marcus had never suspected.
“My God,” he cried, his body drenched in cold creeping wetness, “tell me what happened here.” But neither uttered a sound, so he shrieked through the constriction in his throat, which made the words grate awfully, “Go back to work—” hardly believing they would obey; and when they did, Bruzak turning like a lump back to the machine and the tailor stiffly to his hot iron, Marcus was softened by their compliance and, speaking as if to children, said with tears in his eyes, “Boys, remember, don’t fight.”
Afterwards the clothier stood alone in the shade of the store, staring through the glass of the front door at nothing at all; lost, in thinking of them at his very back, in a horrid world of gray grass and mottled sunlight, of moaning and blood-smell. They had made him dizzy. He lowered himself into the leather chair, praying no customer would enter until he had sufficiently recovered from his nausea. So, sighing, he shut his eyes and felt his skull liven with new terror to see them both engaged in round pursuit in his mind. One ran hot after the other, lumbering but in flight, who had stolen his box of broken buttons. Skirting the lit and smoking sands, they scrambled high up a craggy cliff, locked in two-handed struggle, teetering on the ledge, till one slipped in slime and pulled the other with him. Reaching forth empty hands, they clutched nothing in stiffened fingers, as Marcus, the watcher, shrieked without sound at their evanescence.
He sat dizzily until these thoughts had left him.
When he was again himself, remembrance made it a kind of dream. He denied any untoward incident had happened; yet, knowing it had, called it a triviality—hadn’t he, in the factory he had worked in on coming to America, often seen such fights among the men?—trivial things they all forgot, no matter how momentarily fierce.
However, on the very next day, and thereafter without skipping a day, the two in the back broke out of their hatred into thunderous quarreling that did damage to the business; in ugly voices they called each other dirty names, embarrassing the clothier so that he threw the measuring tape he wore like a garment on his shoulders once around his neck. Customer and clothier glanced nervously at each other, and Marcus quickly ran through the measurements; the customer, who as a rule liked to linger in talk of his new clothes, left hurriedly after paying
cash, to escape the drone of disgusting names hurled about in the back yet clearly heard in front so that no one had privacy.
cash, to escape the drone of disgusting names hurled about in the back yet clearly heard in front so that no one had privacy.
Not only would they curse and heap destruction on each other but they muttered in their respective tongues other dreadful things. The clothier understood Josip shouting he would tear off someone’s genitals and rub the bloody mess in salt; so he guessed Emilio was shrieking the same things, and was saddened and maddened at once.
He went many times to the rear, pleading with them, and they listened to his every word with interest and tolerance, because the clothier, besides being a kind man—this showed in his eyes—was also eloquent, which they both enjoyed. Yet, whatever his words, they did no good, for the minute he had finished and turned his back on them they began again. Embittered, Marcus withdrew into the store and sat nursing his misery under the yellow-faced clock ticking away yellow minutes, till it was time to stop—it was amazing they got anything done—and go home.
His urge was to bounce them out on their behinds but he couldn’t conceive where to find two others who were such skilled and, in essence, proficient workers, without having to pay a fortune in gold. Therefore, with reform uppermost in his mind, he caught Emilio one noon as he was leaving for lunch, whispered him into a corner, and said, “Listen, Emilio, you’re the smart one, tell me why do you fight? Why do you hate him and why does he hate you, and why do you use such bad words?”
Though he enjoyed the whispering and was soft in the clothier’s palms, the tailor, who liked these little attentions, lowered his eyes and blushed darkly, but either would not or could not reply.
So Marcus sat under the clock all afternoon with his fingers in his ears. And he caught the presser on his way out that evening and said to him, “Please, Josip, tell me what he did to you. Josip, why do you fight, you have a sick wife and boy?” But Josip, who also felt an affection for the clothier—he was, despite Polish, no anti-Semite—merely caught him in his hammy arms and, though he had to clutch at his trousers, which were falling and impeding his movements, hugged Marcus in a ponderous polka, then with a cackle pushed him aside and, in his beer jag, danced away.
When they began the same dirty hullabaloo the next morning and drove a customer out at once, the clothier stormed into the rear and they turned from their cursing—both fatigued and green-gray to the gills—and listened to Marcus begging, shaming, weeping, but especially paid heed when he, who found screeching unsuited to him, dropped it and
gave advice and little preachments in a low, becoming tone. He was a tall man and, because of his illness, quite thin. What flesh remained had wasted further in these troublesome months, and his hair was white now so that, as he stood before them, expostulating, exhorting, he was in appearance like an old hermit, if not a saint, and the workers showed respect and keen interest as he spoke.
gave advice and little preachments in a low, becoming tone. He was a tall man and, because of his illness, quite thin. What flesh remained had wasted further in these troublesome months, and his hair was white now so that, as he stood before them, expostulating, exhorting, he was in appearance like an old hermit, if not a saint, and the workers showed respect and keen interest as he spoke.
It was a homily about his long-dead dear father, when they were all children living in a rutted village of small huts, a gaunt family of ten—nine boys and an undersized girl. Oh, they were marvelously poor: on occasion he had chewed bark and even grass, bloating his belly, and often the boys bit one another, including the sister, upon the arms and neck in rage at their hunger.
“So my poor father, who had a long beard down to here”—he stooped, reaching his hand to his knee, and at once tears sprang up in Josip’s eyes—“my father said, ’Children, we are poor people and strangers wherever we go, let us at least live in peace, or if not—’”
But the clothier was not able to finish because the presser, plumped down on the backless chair where he read his letters, swaying a little, had begun to whimper and then bawl, and the tailor, who was making odd clicking noises in his throat, had to turn away.
“Promise,” Marcus begged, “that you won’t fight anymore.”
Josip wept his promise, and Emilio, with wet eyes, gravely nodded.
This, the clothier exulted, was fellowship and, with a blessing on both their heads, departed, but even before he was altogether gone the air behind him was greased with their fury.
Twenty-four hours later he fenced them in. A carpenter came and built a thick partition, halving the presser’s and tailor’s work space, and for once there was astonished quiet between them. They were, in fact, absolutely silent for a full week. Marcus, had he had the energy, would have jumped in joy, and kicked his heels together. He noticed, of course, that the presser occasionally stopped pressing and came befuddled to the new door to see if the tailor was still there, and though the tailor did the same, it went no further than that. Thereafter Emilio Vizo no longer whispered to himself and Josip Bruzak touched no beer; and when the emaciated letters arrived from the other side, he took them home to read by the dirty window of his dark room; when night came, though there was electricity, he preferred to read by candlelight.
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