Seventh Avenue

by Norman Bogner

  “My fiancé, Jay Blackman, Mr. Finkelstein.”

  Jay held out his hand, which Finkelstein held for some minutes and forgot to return. Finally, Jay had to yank his hand away.

  “I’ve hired him,” Rhoda said. “He’ll be a big help to me, specially when I go buying. I won’t have to carry those heavy bags on the subway.”

  “And leaving . . . ?” Finkelstein, with some confusion, asked.

  “Oh, he’ll work the same hours as me,” Rhoda translated for Jay.

  “Paper forms . . . ?”

  “Yes, I’ll get him to fill out a tax form, and we’ll start him at twelve dollars a week.”

  Jay waited with some apprehension for Finkelstein to reply. He had closed his eyes, supporting his chin in a manner at once pensive and profound.

  “Well, what’s happening?” Jay said with a hint of irritation.

  “He’s asleep.”

  “Asleep? Just like that?”

  “It’s all right, you’re hired,” Rhoda said.

  “How do you know it’s all right by him?”

  “If it wasn’t he would have stamped his feet.”

  “Oh, great. Stamped his feet.”

  “The only time he stamps his feet is when a woman wants to return or exchange a dress, or if she wants a refund.”

  “What are you getting me into?”

  “Jay, honey, in a few months, you’ll know the whole business inside out, and we’ll open our shop, and we’ll also manage to save some money.”

  “Then we can shit on old Finkelstein.”

  “Don’t talk that way.”

  “Why not, it’s a goddamned good idea. It’s better to learn a decent business than wheeling a pushcart. I’m glad I listened to you.”

  “Come into the back with me. First thing you’ve got to learn is where the stock’s kept.”

  In the back room he saw a jungle of hanging dresses, which without women to fill them reminded him of unripe fruit. He waited for Rhoda to give him his instructions. It all looked simple enough: a woman would pick out a dress and he’d get it from the back - you didn’t have to be a genius to tell a 38 black from a kelly green 34. He noticed two little rooms off to the side with dusky maroon velveteen drapes where the doors should have been.

  “What are they for?”

  “Changing rooms.”

  “The women change dresses in there?” he asked with interest.

  “Well, they don’t go on the street.”

  The job suddenly fired his imagination: better than freezing his ass off on a street corner. Decidedly.

  “And I . . . ?”

  “Once you know the stock, you can approach a customer.”

  “Not before?”

  “No! You see the whole point is to sell. If a woman comes in for a 36 beige wool dress and we haven’t got the size or color, you switch her to something that we do have. If you don’t, she walks. Or if you’re having trouble getting her to switch, you T.O. her. Turn her over to me or one of the other girls. Mr. F. hates they should walk.”

  “How can he stop them?”

  “You got to make sure that they don’t walk because you haven’t tried. Whoever comes in, buys. That’s the sort of thinking that makes a shop successful.”

  Jay agreed.

  He spent the next few days studying styles, color, sizes, the types of approach that women liked, and those that failed. He proved to have an intuitive knowledge of how to persuade women to like something, and also the added authority of being a man in a vanity business, for women would accept his opinion more readily than a shopgirl’s. What particularly attracted his attention was the accounting procedure that Rhoda employed every evening and which was called checking off. She would tear out the paper roll of the register at the last sale each day and check it against the tickets on the spike, and the two had to tally. She would then count the receipts and enter the figure in a ledger that showed the previous year’s sales for the day. At the end of the week and month, they would know how much they were up or down over the former year.

  Jay’s master plan did not take shape until he had been in the shop for a month. He had made astonishing progress and could sell a woman just about anything he had in stock. Even Finkelstein, who was not given to anything as energetic as enthusiasm, purred when he watched Jay. Dresses that had been packed away in camphor two years previously as unsalable were sold at almost twice the price they had originally been marked at. He had never seen anything like it in his life. Women waited in line to be served by Mr. Jay, his new appellation. If he didn’t have the right size, he sold them a larger dress and had it altered. Modes Dress Shoppe had never had such a season; they were almost always out of stock. On the fourth payday, Finkelstein handed Jay a little note scribbled on the back of his newspaper which said “up two dollars.” This represented for Jay a new beginning, for he had never before had a rise in salary, but despite this additional remuneration, he felt restive and dissatisfied. He was beginning to love the business with a passion that choked him when he spoke about it, but he hated making profits for Finkelstein. In his fifth week, he overcharged a woman fifty cents on a dress and pocketed the difference. This, over the week, netted him an extra eight dollars, but he knew that this policy would work only a short time. What he needed was something that would enable him to create capital, and for this he had to have Rhoda’s complete cooperation. The first month also confirmed that he could never be satisfied with Rhoda, and he had two affairs with women he had picked up in the shop.

  On his third buying visit to Manhattan with Rhoda, he decided to put to her the proposition that had been forming in his mind. They were on their way to see the dress jobber they did most of their business with and had first stopped for coffee in a luncheonette on 38th Street.

  “We’re up three hundred dollars over last month and five hundred over last year,” Rhoda said proudly.

  “Yeah, and it’s in that putz pocket.”

  “It’s his business, isn’t it? We only work there.”

  “Why do you think we’re making more money?” Jay demanded.

  “Because of you. Isn’t that what you want to hear?”

  “I want to know if it’s true.”

  “Of course it’s true. The women love you. They can’t say no to you.”

  “The point is we’re getting nowhere fast, and the nebishe is on the gravy train.”

  “The point is we’re still not married.”

  “The point is we’re getting married on October 10th and that gives us six weeks to make money so that we can get an apartment.”

  “Okay,” she mused, “what do you want us to do?”

  “Go into partnership.”

  “With who? The bank?”

  “Finkelstein!”

  “What? He’d never allow it, so don’t bother to ask.”

  “Who the hell wants to ask him. He mustn’t know a thing about it.”

  “I’m not going to start stealing from him, if that’s what you’re hinting at.”

  Jay finished his coffee slowly, gazed at Rhoda patronizingly, and realized at that moment that she could no longer teach him anything about business.

  “Rhoda, you’re wonderful in a shop, but a head for business you haven’t got.”

  “Why? ‘Cause I won’t become a thief?”

  “Do you think I’m such a fool as to suggest beating the till?”

  “Then what?”

  “We average a hundred and fifty dresses a week. There’s no reason why we can’t sell two hundred.”

  “None.”

  “But the other fifty dresses should be our dresses.”

  He waited several minutes for this to register, but she gave him a blank look.

  “You pay cash for everything, right?” She nodded and felt for the two hundred dollars in her bag. “Well, most retailers do business on credit and settle in thirty days. So we buy dresses on credit from a jobber that’s looking for business and settle with him when the bill falls due. We sell Fink
elstein’s stuff and also our own, and give him a bit of ours so that his sales are going up.”

  “But what about ringing up and making change?”

  “You do all that in any case. We do our business in cash. It’s so simple it’s disgusting. What do you do with the register paper after you’ve checked it against the tickets?”

  “Enter it in the ledger.”

  “But with the paper?”

  “I throw it away.”

  “Does he see it?”

  “No, he doesn’t understand how it works. He just looks in the ledger and compares the receipts.”

  “Fine. Then every time we sell one of our own, you ring up a nickel or a dime and he gets it, and that way everything looks all right to the customer ‘cause she can’t see what you’re ringing up. His profits increase and we make money without overhead.”

  “What if we can’t get rid of our stuff?”

  “But we will.”

  “What if we can’t and then there’s a bill to settle?”

  “I go to jail. They don’t put pregnant women away.”

  “Oh, Jay, I’m scared. It’s a terrible chance to take.”

  “Of course it is, but we’ve got to take it. It’s a cinch, and Finkelstein’s not losing on the deal. The other important thing is that we establish credit, so that when we open up our own shop, people will know us already. And we’ve got to settle our bills earlier than the limit so that we get a reputation for being good business people and then everyone’ll have confidence in us. You’ve got to get the jobbers and manufacturers to think you’re respectable, then everything’s possible.”

  When they got up from the table, Jay picked up Rhoda’s bag.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “I want to hold onto the money so that I can flash it when we make our order.”

  “We can’t use it.” Her voice was panicky.

  “I just want to inspire confidence.”

  New York was in the midst of a prolonged Indian summer that had set back most of the dress people a month in selling their merchandise. Only Modes had gone against the trend and was doing business in fall dresses. They had made the same mistake as all the other retail stores, but because of Jay’s dynamism, they were selling dresses that women could not wear for at least two months.

  “Should we place the order with Benny?” Rhoda asked.

  “No, absolutely not. He’d be suspicious if suddenly you wanted credit. We’ve got to find our own guy and then educate him.”

  Rhoda considered Jay’s suggestion.

  “Hey, wait a minute. About two months ago, I met a new jobber, a small one, that was looking for customers.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Marty . . . ?”

  “Think, will you!”

  “He’s on Thirty-Ninth Street just off Seventh Avenue. Cass, that’s it.”

  After considerable difficulty, and with the assistance of three people who worked in the district, they found Marty Cass’s showroom, which was the top loft in what had formerly been the headquarters of a camphor supplier. They took the service elevator to the eighth floor, and Rhoda watched with interest as Jay tested various expressions of bonhomie on a face that seemed designed by nature for nothing less than total motility: puckers, grimaces, scowls, derisive extensions, condescension, certainty - in short the mise-en-scène of his every emotion, which in a curious way revealed that he was almost incapable of any strong emotion. In the showroom, Jay decided on a flagrantly bored expression with the hint of a smile. Marty Cass was a man in his middle twenties, with a long cigar protruding at a rakish angle from his mouth, a Leo Carillo mustache - which Jay admired, and made a mental note to copy - soft gray eyes, and wavy black hair done up in a style similar to the whipped cream pompadours used by soda jerks to decorate a banana split. He wore a powder blue suit and a hand-painted tie of a horse - also painted blue - and Jay immediately realized that the man, a few years his senior, was destined for success.

  “Hello . . . hello . . . hello, children. I’m Marty Cass. Now what can I do for you?”

  “Mr. Cass, you may not remember, but we met once a few months ago at Benny Herbert’s showroom.”

  “Remember, of course, I remember. You’re Saks Fifth Avenue’s dress buyer.” He handed Jay a cigar.

  “What is it, a blackjack?” Jay asked. “They can book you on a Sullivan charge for smoking one of these.”

  “Glad to see you’ve got a sense of humor.”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have one!”

  “I’m not from Saks Fifth Avenue,” Rhoda protested.

  “I know, my child, just openers. You’ve probably been sent by my father-in-law to see if I’m doing any stealing.”

  Jay lit the cigar.

  “It’s a miracle if you don’t get a lip hernia from these.”

  “Just stub it out. I’ll rewrap it and sell it as a second,” Marty said. “Seriously though, I do remember meeting you. The question is, was I standing at the time? I mean in an upright position? I didn’t promise to pay you ten thousand dollars for your body?”

  “No, nothing like that, and in any case I’m spoken for” - she gave Jay’s sleeve a little yank – “and we’re here to do some buying.”

  “Where’s the showroom?” Jay asked.

  “You’re in it. Actually, it’s not exactly a showroom . . . sort of a closet that made good. But don’t let that bother you. I’ve got goods . . . goods, the likes of which you’ve never seen. Now I’ll show you what no human eyes have ever before beheld.” He wheeled out a rack of dresses, removed a dust sheet.

  “These look like they’ve given birth to hundreds.”

  “The latest Paris knock-offs.”

  “These were knocked off two years ago; I’ve been selling them for the last three weeks.”

  “You must be a genius.”

  “He is,” Rhoda agreed.

  “Now look, Mr. Cass . . .”

  “Marty.”

  “Fine, Marty, I’m Jay Blackman. Now listen, if we want to see ancient clothing that was worn by the Romans, they got museums for it. We want some hot numbers” - he fished in his pocket, took out a wad of notes, the outside one was a fifty and the others were singles – “not this old dreck.”

  Marty studied the roll of notes.

  “I got a better idea. Want to come in with me as a partner?” He wheeled another rack out and showed Jay his new line, “Here, my dear, the blood of my heart.”

  “That’s better,” Jay said. “The other crap’s good to use in a fire. The insurance company’d give you fifty percent on them.”

  “We’re from Modes Dress Shoppe,” Rhoda said.

  “Where?”

  “Modes! From Borough Park. Fourteenth Avenue.”

  “Sorry, we don’t ship goods overseas.”

  “Didn’t you ever meet my boss, Mr. Finkelstein?” Rhoda asked.

  Marty thought for a few minutes and tugged his mustache gently.

  “How long’ve you been with him?”

  “Seven years. I started with him after he’d been open a month.”

  “I’m just trying to remember. Let’s see . . . did he ever have a dog?”

  “That’s right, he did. But it died, oh, about a year ago,” Rhoda said.

  “Yeah, I do recall. This mashugunah came up to my father-in-law’s showroom with this dog. Yeah, that’s way before I got married. How could I forget? He let the dog pick out all the dresses. Whatever the dog smelled, he bought. Oh, my God. What a day that was. He was barred from the showroom after that. In the middle of placing the order, he asks to go to the bathroom and vanishes for the rest of the day. And this dog, big sonovabitch, collie or something like that with long hair, was racing all over the building looking for him. We had to call the A.S.P.C.A. to get rid of it. Then the next morning, the janitor found Finkelstein in the toilet. He’d locked himself in and couldn’t get out and said he didn’t want to make any noise because he was afraid it would disturb us. A
nd you work for him?”

  “We both do,” Jay said. “I’m about to start up my own business in a couple of months and we don’t want to leave him high and dry.”

  “I’m amazed that he’s still in business.”

  “Yeah, well, Rhoda’s running it for him.”

  “And you thought of me. Well, every new account’s like money in the bank. I try not to run my business on one-shot deals. Long-term thinking. And as this is our first transaction, it has to be a successful one so I won’t stick you with any garbage. All our future business is based on the first order. Now, would you like me to tell you what I think you ought to buy?”

  “Oh, c’mon Marty. We’re both cute. Rhoda and me didn’t bring our seeing-eye dog with us ‘cause we don’t need one. Save the buildups for the Finkelsteins. We’re gonna go into business in a . . .”

  “Little shop,” Rhoda interjected.

  “Big way. No half-assed operation.”

  “Big way . . . small shop? You lie, and she swears for you, that the arrangement? You got your signals crossed, children.”

  “Small at first, then as big as the biggest.”

  “Jay, my dear, you can’t tell me stories. I invented the game. How do you think I married my wife? How do you think I became an . . .”

  “Unsuccessful jobber? First you had to be an unsuccessful shipping clerk.”

  “Is he always a million laughs? My dear boy, I love you. I can’t help not loving you because I can see in your heart that you’re a crook of the first order. And because we’re both crooks, we’re gonna make it. Now first of all, put away the phony bankroll. What’ve you got under the fifty, toilet paper?”

  “No, singles.” Jay smiled, and for the first time felt genuinely at ease.

  “I’ll give you a hundred dollars’ credit, and you pay me promptly on the tenth or I put it out for collection, capisce?”

  “Make it two hundred,” Jay insisted.

  “Doesn’t this boy know when he’s on to a good thing, my dear?”

  “Leave Rhoda out of it. I’ll split the difference with you - a hundred and fifty.”