The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction (18 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

Tags: #Fiction, #Jewish, #Short Stories (Single Author)

BOOK: The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction
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1953
WITH THE DOING of the deed embedded in his mind like a child’s grave in the earth, Farr shut the door and walked heavyhearted down the stairs. At the third-floor landing he stopped to look out the small dirty window, across the harbor. The late-winter day was sullen, but Farr could see the ocean in the distance. Although he was carrying the weapon, a stone sash weight in a brown paper bag, heedless of the danger he set it down on the window ledge and stared at the water. It seemed to Farr that he had never loved the sea as he did now. Although he had not crossed it—he thought he would during the war but didn’t—and had never gone any of the different ways it led, he felt he someday ought to. As he gazed, the water seemed to come alive in sunlight, flowing with slanted white sails. Moved to grief at the lovely sight he remained at the window with unseeing eyes until he remembered to go.
He went down the creaking stairs to the black, airless cellar. Farr pulled the rasping chain above the electric bulb and, when the dim light fell on him, searched around for a hiding place. As his hand uncoiled he realized with horror that he had forgotten the sash weight. He bounded up three flights of stairs, coming to a halt as he saw through the banister that an old woman was standing at the window, resting her bundle on the ledge—on the sash weight itself! Agitated, Farr watched to see whether she would discover the bloody thing, but she too was looking at the water and made
no move to go. When she finally left, Farr, who had been lurking on the landing below, ran up, seized the package, and fled down to the cellar.
There he was tempted to draw the weapon out of the paper to inspect it but did not dare. He hunted for a place to bury it but felt secure nowhere. At last he tore open the asbestos covering of an insulated water pipe overhead and shoved the sash weight into the wool. As he was smoothing the asbestos he heard footsteps above and broke into a chilling sweat at the fear he was being followed. Stealthily he put out the light, sneaked close to the wall, and crouched in the pitch dark behind a dusty dresser abandoned there. He waited with indrawn breath for whoever he was to come limping down. Farr planned to yell into his face, escape up the stairs.
No one came down. Farr was afraid to abandon the hiding place, stricken at the thought that it was not a stranger but his father, miraculously recovered from his wound, who sought him there, as he had in the past, shouting in drunken rage against his son, stalking him in the dark, threatening to beat his head off with his belt buckle if he did not reveal himself. The memory of this so deeply affected Farr that he groaned aloud. It did not console him that his father had at last paid a terrible price for all the misery he had inflicted on him.
Farr trudged up the steps out of the cellar. In the street he felt unspeakable relief to be out of the grimy tenement house. He brushed the cobwebs off his brown hat and spanked a whitewash smear off the back of his long overcoat. Then he went down the block to where the houses ended and stood at the water’s edge. The wind, whipping whitecaps along the surface of the harbor water, struck him with force. He held tightly to his hat. A flight of sparrows sprang across the sky, flying over the ships at anchor and disappearing in the distance. The aroma of roasting coffee filled Farr’s hungry nostrils, but just then he saw some eggshells bobbing in the water and a dead rat floating. Surfeited, he turned away.
A skinny man in a green suit was standing at his elbow. “Sure looks like snow.” The man wore no overcoat and his soiled shirt
was open at the collar. His face and hands were tinged blue. Farr cupped a match to his cigarette, puffing quickly. He would have walked away but was afraid of being followed, so he stayed.
“Just a whiff of a butt makes me hungry to the bottom of my belly,” said the man.
Farr listened, looking away.
After a minute the man, staring absently at the water, said, “The chill bites deep when there’s no food between it and the marrow.”
Suspecting him of planning to trick him, Farr warned himself to confess nothing. They’d have to ram a crowbar through his teeth to pry his jaws open.
“You wouldn’t know it from the look of me,” said the man, “but I’m a gentleman at heart.” He wore a strained smile and held forth a trembling hand. Farr reached into his pants pocket, where he had five crumpled dollars plus a large assortment of coins. He pulled out a fistful of change, selected a nickel and five pennies, and dropped them into the man’s outstretched hand.
Without thanking Farr, he drew back his arm and pitched the money into the water. Farr’s suspicions awoke. He hurried up the block, glancing back from time to time to see if he was being followed, but the man had dropped out of sight.
He turned on the half run up the treeless avenue, angered with the bum for spoiling his view of the harbor. Yet though Farr was now passing the pawnshops, which reminded him of things he did not like to remember, his spirits rose. He accounted for this strange and unexpected change in him by his having done the deed. For an age he had been tormented by the desire to do it, had grown silent, lonely, sullen, until the decision came that the doing was the only way out. Much too long the plan had festered in his mind, waiting for an action, but now that it was done he at last felt free of the rank desire, the suppressed rage and fear that had embittered and thwarted his existence. It was done; he was content. As he walked, the vista of the narrow avenue, a street he had lived his life along, broadened, and he could see miles ahead, down to the suspension bridge in the distance, and was aware of people walking along as separate beings, not part of the mass he remembered
avoiding so often as he’d trudged along here at various times of day and night.
 
 
One of the pawnshop windows caught his eye. Farr reluctantly stopped, yet he scanned it eagerly. There among the wedding bands, watches, knives, crucifixes, and the rest, among the stringed musical instruments and brasses hanging on pegs on the wall, he found what his eye sought—his mandolin—and felt a throb of pity for it. But Farr had not been working for more than a year—had left the place one rainy day in the fall—and the only way, thereafter, that he could keep himself in cigarette, newspaper, and movie money was to part, one by one, with the things he had bought for himself in a better time: a portable typewriter, used perhaps now and then to peck out a letter ordering a magazine; a pair of ice skates worn twice; a fine wristwatch he had bought on his birthday; and lately, with everything else gone, he had sold this little mandolin he’d liked so well, which he had taught himself to strum as he sang, and it was this bit of self-made music that he missed most. He considered redeeming it with the same five one-dollar bills he had got for it a month ago, but didn’t relish the thought of strumming alone in his room; so sighing, Farr tore himself away from the window.
 
 
At the next corner stood Gus’s Tavern. Farr, who had not gone in in an age, after a struggle entered, gazing around as if in a cathedral. Gus, older, with a folded apron around his paunch and an open vest over his white shirt, was standing behind the bar polishing beer glasses. When he saw Farr he put down the glass he was shining and observed him in astonishment.
“Well, throw me for a jackass if ’tisn’t the old Punch-Ball King of South Second!”
Farr grunted awkwardly at the old appellation. “Surprised, Gus?”
“That’s the least of it. Where in the name of mud have you been these many months—or is it years?”
“In the house mostly,” Farr answered huskily.
Gus continued to regard him closely, to Farr’s discomfort. “You’ve changed a lot, Eddie, haven’t you now? I ask everybody whatever has become of the old Punch-Ball King and nobody says they ever see you. You used to haunt the streets when you were a kid.”
Farr blinked but didn’t reply.
“Married?” Gus winked.
“No,” Farr said, embarrassed. He stole a glance at the door. It was still there.
Gus clucked. “How well I remember standing on the curbstone watching you play.
Flippo
with his left hand and the ball spins up.
Biffo
with his right, a tremendous sock lifting it far over the heads of all the fielders. How old were you then, Eddie?”
Farr made no attempt to think. “Fifteen, I guess.”
An expression of sorrow lit Gus’s eyes. “It comes back to me now. You were the same age as my Marty.”
Farr’s tongue tightened. It was beyond him to speak of the dead.
Himself again after a while, Gus sighed, “Ah yes, Eddie, you missed your true calling.”
“One beer,” Farr said, digging into his pocket for the change.
Gus drew a beer, shaved it, and set it before him.
“Put your pennies away. Any old friend of my Marty’s needn’t be thirsty here.”
Farr gulped through the froth. A cold beer went with how good he now felt. He thought he might even break into a jig step or two.
Gus was still watching him. Farr, finding he couldn’t drink, set the glass down.
After a pause Gus asked, “Do you still ever sing, Eddie?”
“Not so much anymore.”
“Do me a favor and sing some old-time tune.”
Farr looked around, but they were alone. Pretending to be strumming his mandolin, he sang, “In the good old summertime, in the good old summertime.”
“Your voice has changed, Eddie,” said Gus, “but it’s still pleasing to the ear.”
Farr then sang, “Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found you.”
Gus’s eyes went wet and he blew his nose. “A fine little singer was lost to the world somewhere along the line.”
Farr hung his head.
“What are your plans now, Eddie?”
The question scared him. Luckily, two customers came in and stood at the bar. Gus went to them, and Farr did not have to answer.
He picked up the beer and pointed with one finger to a booth in the rear.
Gus nodded. “Only don’t leave without saying goodbye.”
Farr promised.
 
 
He sat in the booth, thinking of Marty. Farr often thought and dreamed about him, but though he knew him best as a boy he dreamed of him as a man, mostly as he was during the days and nights they stood on street corners, waiting to be called into the army. There didn’t seem anything to do then but wait till they were called in, so they spent most of their time smoking, throwing the bull, and making wisecracks at the girls who passed by. Marty, strangely inactive for the wild kid he had been—never knowing what wild thing to do next—was a blond fellow whose good looks the girls liked, but he never stopped wisecracking at them, whether he knew them or not. One day he said something dirty to this Jewish girl who passed by and she burst into tears. Gus, who had happened to be watching out of the upstairs window, heard what Marty said, ran down in his slippers, and smacked him hard across the teeth. Marty spat blood. Farr went sick to the pit of his stomach at the sound of the sock. He later threw up. And that was the last any of them had ever seen of Marty, because he enlisted in the army and never came out again. Gus got a telegram one day saying that he was killed in action, and he never really got over it.
 
 
Farr was whispering to himself about Marty when he gazed up and saw this dark-haired woman standing by his table, looking as if she had slyly watched his startled eyes find her. Half rising, he remembered to remove his hat.
“Remember me, Ed? Helen Melisatos—Gus told me to say hello.”
He knew she was this Greek girl—only she’d been very pretty then—who had once lived in the same tenement house with him. One summer night they had gone together up to the roof.
“Sure,” said Farr. “Sure I remember you.”
Her body had broadened but her face and hair were not bad, and her dark brown eyes seemed still to be expecting something that she would never get.
She sat down, telling him to sit.
He did, placing his hat next to him on the seat.
She lit a cigarette and smoked for a long time. A man called her from the bar but she shook her head. He left without her.
Her lips moved hungrily. Although he could at first hear no voice, she seemed, against his will, to be telling him a story he didn’t want to hear. It was about this boy and a girl, a slim dark girl with soft eyes, seventeen then, wearing this nice white dress on a hot summer night. They’d been kissing. Then she had slipped off her undergarment and lain back, uncovered, on the tar-papered roof. With heart thudding he watched her, and when she said to kneel he kneeled, and then she said it was hot and why didn’t he take off his pants. He wanted to love her with their clothes on. When he got his pants off he stopped and couldn’t go on. What do you think of a guy who would do a thing like that to a girl? He wasn’t much of a lover, was he? She was smiling broadly now, and she spoke in an older, disillusioned voice, “You’re different, Ed.” And she said, “You used to talk a lot.”
He listened intently but said nothing.
“But you still ain’t a bad-looking guy. How old are you, anyway?”

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