The Vanishing Expert

by David Movsesian

  “You looking for work, sailor?” he asked Ben without looking away from his task.

  “Maybe,” Ben replied.

  As Zapata broke off another block of ice, this one weighing roughly one hundred pounds, he turned and looked at Ben in his uniform, sizing him up. “You look strong enough,” the ice man said to him. “I’m pretty sure they’re hiring if you like.”

  Before Ben had time to respond, Zapata had swaddled the hundred-pound block of ice in the leather sling and turned and placed the thick pad on Ben’s shoulder. “Go ahead,” Zapata instructed. “Give it a try.”

  Ben smiled, realizing what Zapata was up to, but he leaned in and quickly heaved the slab onto his shoulder as he’d seen the ice man do earlier. He followed the ice man to the second floor of the apartment building and lowered the block of ice to the floor with a loud thump. Using the ice pick, Zapata scratched a line in the large slab of ice showing Ben where to carve, and then handed mallet and chisel to Ben. When the twenty-five pound block fell away, the ice man handed Ben his tongs and instructed him to carry the block inside, where Zapata showed him to the ice box. The block he’d carved fit perfectly into the ice compartment.

  “This one pays cash,” Zapata told him. As they stood wet and dripping in the kitchen, the woman of the house, a thin Polish woman in a loose-fitting housedress, appeared and handed Zapata three dimes.

  Outside, Zapata pointed to the ice cards in the windows of the other two apartments, one displaying “25” and the other “50”, indicating the size of the ice block each needed that day. Zapata again etched a line in the slab of ice and Ben carved off a block, which he carried into the next apartment. He then delivered the last block, the fifty-pounder, to the final apartment on the floor.

  On the way back to the wagon, Zapata pointed to the windows of the three apartments on the first floor. Only two of them displayed their ice cards in the window.

  “How do you know how much the third one needs?” Ben inquired.

  Zapata shook his head. “If they don’t put out their card, they don’t get no ice today,” the ice man told him. “Some people, they forget, and I know who they are so I knock on their door anyway, just to make sure.” He pointed to the window of the apartment that was conspicuously absent of a numbered card. “These people here just got themselves an electric ice box, so no ice for them.” Zapata grunted his contempt, presumably for the contraption itself, not for the family who no longer needed his services.

  Even then, just a year after the war had ended and soldiers were still returning home, there was a feeling in the air that a new prosperity was about to take hold. Americans had proven to themselves that they could do anything. They’d crawled out of the depths of the Depression, equipped assembly lines that helped to arm the most powerful military force in the world, and they’d won a war that appeared at the outset might be unwinnable. In 1946, Americans felt their destinies were finally in their own hands once again.

  At twenty-three years old, Ben Jordan certainly believed that.

  Had he not stumbled upon the ice man on that hot summer day on Union Street in 1946, he might have followed many other veterans to college, but he’d long ago dismissed the idea of more classroom learning. He only briefly considered calling upon the Casco Bay Ice Company that employed his new friend to inquire about a job. It seemed like honest, if uninteresting, work and he knew he was physically up to the task. But it was the notion that occurred to him as he considered the empty window of that first floor apartment — the one that would no longer need Zapata’s services— that led him elsewhere.

  That small decision changed the course of his life.

  Gus Deluca’s store on Pearl Street in Portland, Maine was named Deluca’s Appliances, but the locals all referred to it as Gus’s. Gus was a short, round man with a thick head of black curly hair and a booming voice that was as coarse as gravel from years of smoking. Those who only encountered him in the store rarely saw him actually puffing on his trademark cigar; they saw only the unlit and soggy stump that seemed forever cradled in the corner of his mouth. He rarely removed it, and there were those who believed it remained there even when he ate and slept.

  The first time Gus Deluca laid eyes on Ben Jordan was on that hot July day shortly after Ben had parted company with the ice man on Union Street. He’d sweated through his uniform, and his right shoulder and sleeve were still soaked from the block of ice he’d labored with just a short time earlier, almost to the point of dripping on Gus’s wooden floor. Gus watched Ben as he paused in the doorway and peeled off his hat, clutching it nervously in his fingers.

  “What can I do for you, sailor?” Gus croaked.

  Ben approached him and thrust out his hand, introducing himself.

  “I was hoping for a job,” Ben said.

  “Wish I had one for you,” Gus said sincerely. “This is a small operation. Just me and my wife and my daughter, and a couple boys who do deliveries.”

  Ben didn’t appear dissuaded. He wasn’t the first young man to walk into Gus’s store looking for work; he wasn’t even the first to show up in uniform. But there was something about this young sailor that captured Gus’s attention. Years later, Gus would continue to assert that he knew there was something special about Ben Jordan from the moment he saw him standing in his doorway, hat in hand.

  “Hear me out,” Ben said, and he proceeded to explain his proposition. He described his experience just an hour earlier, delivering ice to the apartments a few miles away, and the one apartment which no longer required the ice man’s services. Ben proposed that he would work for Gus going door-to-door selling refrigerators to the families who lived in the old apartment buildings and the multi-family homes in the city. There was a new prosperity about to take hold in the city, he claimed, and he believed that these people would soon be eager to add some of the new conveniences, like refrigerators, to their lives. The ice cards displayed in the windows would indicate which homes to visit. He would simply walk the streets and knock on the door of each of those homes, and convince them to purchase a refrigerator from Deluca’s Appliances.

  When Gus informed him he couldn’t afford to pay him a salary, Ben dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “I’ll work on commission,” Ben told him. “You just pay me a cut of what I sell.”

  It took Ben only a few weeks to master his pitch, but by the end of the summer, he was selling more refrigerators in a week than Gus typically sold in a month. He rented a small apartment on Cumberland Avenue, about a mile west of the store. It was close enough to the water that a strong breeze often carried with it the scent of the sea, and more importantly, it was far enough from the railroad line that he wouldn’t be obliged to listen to the clatter and rumble of the trains that permeated so many of his memories of his wretched childhood.

  Perhaps it was because the railroad had been his father’s occupation. Perhaps it was because he suspected it had been a train that took his father away from them—in truth, long before he actually left them on that bleak autumn morning— but Ben never cared much for trains. He avoided them whenever he could. By the time he returned to Portland after the war, the streetcars were all but gone, but he suspected he would have avoided them as well had they still been in service. As it was, he rode the city buses when he needed to, but most of the time he simply walked. Everything he needed was within walking distance of his apartment; anything that wasn’t he simply decided he could live without. He could walk to Deluca’s Appliance store. He could walk to the restaurants and diners along the water. And he spent most of his days walking through the neighborhoods of Portland, knocking on doors and meeting with nearly every city dweller who displayed an ice card in their windows.

  Over the next several years, the ice cards would become less common, due in no small part to Ben’s tireless efforts. In some neighborhoods, they were downright scarce. Once a few homes on the street had purchased a refrigerator, it became easier to convince the others on the street to mak
e the investment. No one wanted to be the last on the street to own a refrigerator, but more importantly, ice deliveries were less reliable on those streets that had largely converted to what Zapata, the iceman, had once referred to as “those infernal contraptions”.

  So the harder Ben worked, it seemed, the easier his work became. By 1950, he purchased a modest home of his own on the edge of the city, and a 1947 Chevy Fleetline, which he drove mainly on Sundays, mostly for trips up the coast to Bath to visit his mother.

  More important than all of that was that he fell in love with Gus Deluca’s daughter, Rose, who worked in her father’s store. She kept the books and helped out around the store, keeping an eye on things whenever Gus had to leave, or when he had to “use the john,” as he liked to say, which always resulted in a lengthy absence shortly after lunch.

  Rose resembled her mother, slim and pretty with dark wavy hair and a shy smile. She had the good fortune of looking nothing at all like her father, which even Gus perceived as a blessing. While Gus’s corpulent shape and bulldog face gave him character, his features would have been absolutely tragic on his only daughter.

  Rose was nineteen when Ben first met her in 1946. Since he spent most days walking the streets of Portland, he rarely saw Rose, and on those occasions when he did visit the store, he might not have had the opportunity to speak with her unless he happened to arrive at the store when Gus was indisposed. In time, as he began to learn Gus’s gastronomic schedule, he was able to time his visits to spend more time speaking— and flirting— with Gus’s lovely daughter.

  Nearly a year passed before Ben summoned the courage to ask Gus for his permission to date Rose. To his surprise, Gus was enthusiastic about the idea. Though Gus was protective of his only daughter, he saw in Ben an upstanding young man and a diligent worker who would one day be a good provider for his family. Gus could imagine no better suitor for Rose than Ben.

  Ben was smitten with Rose almost from the beginning, and the two of them became inseparable whenever they weren’t working. Ben finally had a companion for his Sunday drives up the coast, and the two of them often drove as far as Camden where they enjoyed a nice meal at a local restaurant and then walked along the water before driving home.

  Rose was equally taken with Ben, who was always kind and courteous, though a bit clumsy at times, something that Rose found endearing. The truth was that Ben had never been involved in a serious relationship with a girl before Rose. In high school, he was usually more interested in getting back to the farm to help his uncle with the chores. He never made the time for much more than a date or two, and before long, most of the girls who might have had some interest in him simply moved on to other more available boys. Then came the war, where he spent three years upon a ship full of men. He had little contact with women during his years in the Navy, with the exception of the young girls he met whenever they were in port, a good many of whom were prostitutes. It was, in fact, the young Filipino whore with the raging case of gonorrhea who finally relieved Ben Jordan of his virginity. Though he was grateful to have finally parted company with it, what she gave him in exchange was far worse so that it seemed an unfair trade— not at the time, but later.

  After that unfortunate encounter, Ben was in no great rush for another. He swore off prostitutes, though he’d only been with one, and he focused his energies on getting through the war and returning home where he hoped to meet a nice girl and start a family. He was certain he’d found just such a girl in Rose Deluca.

  In the autumn of 1950, shortly after Ben moved into his new home, he approached Gus one more time, to ask Gus’s permission to marry Rose. Gus was almost giddy, wrapping his thick arms around Ben in a powerful bear hug and slapping him on the back with such force that all the air rushed out of Ben’s lungs.

  When Gus suggested they celebrate the occasion with cigars, Ben accepted with some reservations; since he rarely witnessed Gus puffing on a cigar, he wondered if Gus kept a box of the soggy stumps in the back room. But Gus produced a pair of Cubans and the two of them puffed away outside on the sidewalk, a wide, silly smile plastered across Gus’s pug face. Ben wondered if it was the cigar or the news of his daughter’s upcoming marriage that put it there.

  Ben Jordan and Rose Deluca were married the following June in a small ceremony at the Church of the Sacred Heart on Sherman Street, not far from Ben’s first apartment. For their honeymoon, Gus rented them a cottage on Cape Cod, after which Rose moved into Ben’s modest home to start their life together.

  Ben continued to thrive in his career, and the windows bearing ice cards in the neighborhoods he visited became increasingly scarce. in 1954, out of gratitude, Gus made Ben a partner in the business.

  “It all gonna be yours someday anyway,” Gus told him. “You might as well have part of it now.”

  As Ben continued to prosper, he decided to purchase a large parcel of land just north of the city in Falmouth. He had such fond memories of his adolescence on his uncle’s farm; he hoped his own children might one day have the opportunity to grow up on more than the tiny patch of ground they currently owned at the edge of the city. He wasn’t planning a return to farming, but the idea of owning a vast piece of property certainly appealed to him. He showed the land to Rose and she fell in love with the idea. With her blessing— the only thing he really needed— he purchased the land with the hope that they would one day build their dream house upon it.

  Rose loved that Ben was a dreamer. She enjoyed listening to him describe his vision of a grand home filled with children, and spontaneous adventures in London and Paris and Rome, but the truth was she never really needed any of those things. What she loved most about Ben’s dreams was that Ben dreamed them. She loved to watch his face as he imagined the abundant life that was always just a wish away. He always seemed happiest when he was weaving some fantasy of what their lives together would be, and that made her happy, too.

  More importantly, Ben proved to be the loving and devoted husband Rose had always hoped for. There were even those who believed he doted on her a little too much, a notion that Ben dismissed as impossible. A woman like Rose, he knew, could never have too much.

  During those early years of their marriage, they tried desperately to conceive a child, but for some reason, it seemed as if it was simply not meant to be. In time, Rose began to fear she was infertile, and each month when she had her period— right on schedule— she despaired that she’d be unable to bear the children they both so desperately wanted. Ben wondered to himself if the problem was more likely the long-term damage of the unwelcome gift bestowed upon him years earlier by the Filipino prostitute. The ship’s doctor had explained to him at the time that he’d waited so long to seek treatment for the infection that it may have done irreparable harm, including, potentially leaving him sterile. At the time, he cared only that the infection, and the accompanying burning sensation, was resolved. The notion that he might be unable to father a child seemed both remote and irrelevant to him. It wasn’t until years later, when he and Rose tried time and again to conceive a child, always without success, that he put any stock in the doctor’s warning.

  He desperately hoped he would never have to tell Rose about his adventure in Pearl Harbor and the accompanying case of the clap. While it might provide her with some small consolation that she wasn’t to blame for their inability to conceive, he wondered what the information might do to their relationship. He feared that she might be so repulsed by his adventure— even if he omitted the fact that the woman had been a prostitute, which he planned to do— that it would affect their lovemaking. So he decided to keep the story to himself for as long as he could.

  As it turned out, Ben would never need to explain to his wife about his experience with the young whore or the devastating case of Gonorrhea that had left him sterile. Soon, his beloved Rose would be taken from him, not once, but twice.

  In the summer of 1955, Rose found herself trying to stay cool during a debilitating July heat wave. She
contemplated driving to the beach, knowing that wading in the frigid Maine surf would bring her relief, but chose instead to take in a matinee at one of the air-conditioned movie theaters in Portland. She didn’t care what movie was playing. The appeal of sipping ice-cold lemonade in a cool theater was too strong to resist.

  To her surprise she enjoyed the film, and as she stepped out of the theater, she was so distracted by the sudden blast of heavy, humid air, that she failed to notice the tall man who followed her to her car. She unlocked her car door, but as she was about to climb in, she noticed the ice cream parlor less than a half-block down the road. She left the car, and strolled down the road and enjoyed a small dish of strawberry ice cream.

  Feeling refreshed, she drove home, never noticing that the man who’d followed her from the movie theater was curled up on the floor just behind her seat.

  When Ben returned home from work that evening, he arrived, as he often did, with a fistful of flowers. Rose’s car was in the driveway, so he was forced to park in the street. The left rear door of her car was open. As he passed it, he peered in to see if Rose was unloading packages or groceries. Finding nothing, he closed the door, and went inside, calling Rose’s name. There was no reply.

  He found her on the floor of the bedroom beneath a sheet, her knees drawn to her chest. She laid still, her brown eyes open and fixed in a catatonic gaze. Ben cried out her name and rushed to her. For a moment he thought she was dead. He placed his hand upon her arm, and found her skin strangely cold to his touch, but she was breathing, and she appeared unharmed, except for an odd bruise on her throat.

  “Rose!” he shouted. “Talk to me! Are you hurt?”

  She didn’t respond. She didn’t move. It was as if he were shouting at a statue of Rose.