The Complete Stories

by Bernard Malamud

  “Someday I will be dead,” the sexton remarked, “and you’ll be better off with a profession.”

  Both of them knew he was reminding her she might be an old maid. She seemed not to worry, but later he heard her, through the door, crying in her room.

  Once on a hot summer’s day they went together on the subway to Manhattan Beach for a dip in the ocean. Glasser, perspiring, wore his summer caftan and a black felt hat of twenty years. He had on white cotton socks, worn bulbous black shoes, and a white shirt open at the collar. Part of his beard was faintly brown and his complexion was flushed. On the train Lucille wore tight bell-bottom ducks and a lacy blue blouse whose long sleeves could be seen through up to her armpits; she wore clogs and had braided her dark hair to about six inches of ponytail, which she tied off with a green ribbon. Her father was uncomfortable at an inch of bare midriff, her heavy breasts, and the tightness of her pants, but said nothing. One of her troubles was that, however she dressed, she had little to say, and he hoped the college courses would help her. Lucille had gold-flecked grayish eyes, and in a bathing suit showed a plumpish but not bad figure. A Yeshiva bocher, dressed much like her father, stared at her from across the aisle of the train, and though Glasser sensed she was interested, her face self-consciously stiffened. He felt for her an affectionate contempt.

  In September Lucille delayed, then would not go to reregister for night college. She had spent the summer mostly alone. The sexton argued kindly and furiously but she could not be moved. After he had shouted for an hour she locked herself in the bathroom and would not come out though he swore he had to urinate. The next day she returned very late from work and he had to boil an egg for supper. It ended the argument; she did not return to her night classes. As though to balance that, the telephone in her room began to ring more often, and she called herself Luci when she picked up the receiver. Luci bought herself new clothes—dresses, miniskirts, leotards, new sandals and shoes, and wore them in combinations and bright colors he had never seen on her before. So let her go, Glasser thought. He watched television and was usually asleep when she got home late from a date.

  “So how was your evening?” he asked in the morning.

  “That’s my own business,” Luci said.

  When he dreamed of her, as he often did, he was upbraiding her for her short dresses; when she bent over he could see her behind. And for the disgusting costume she called hot pants. And the eyeliner and violet eye shadow she now used regularly. And for the way she looked at him when he complained about her.

  One day when the sexton was praying in the shul on Canal Street Luci moved out of the house on Second Avenue. She had left a greenink note on lined paper on the kitchen table, saying she wanted to live her own life but would phone him once in a while. He telephoned the linoleum office the next day and a man there said she had quit her job. Though shaken that she had left the house in this fashion, the sexton felt it might come to some good. If she was living with someone, all he asked was that it be an honest Jew.

  Awful dreams invaded his sleep. He woke enraged at her. Sometimes he woke in fright. The old rabbi, the one who had gone to live with his son in Detroit, in one dream shook his fist at him.

  On Fourteenth Street, one night on his way home from Helen’s house, he passed a prostitute standing in the street. She was a heavily made-up woman of thirty or so, and at the sight of her he became, without cause, nauseated. The sexton felt a weight of sickness on his heart and was moved to cry out to God but could not. For five minutes, resting his swaying weight on his cane, he was unable to walk. The prostitute had taken a quick look at his face and had run off. If not for a stranger who had held him against a telephone pole until he had flagged down a police car that drove the sexton home, he would have collapsed in the street.

  In the house he pounded clasped hands against the wall of Lucille’s room, bare except for her bed and a chair. He wept, wailing. Glasser telephoned his eldest daughter and cried out his terrible fear.

  “How can you be so positive about that?”

  “I know in my heart. I wish I didn’t know but I know it.”

  “So in that case she’s true to her nature,” Helen said. “She can’t be otherwise than she is, I never trusted her.”

  He hung up on her and called Fay.

  “All I can say,” said Fay, “is I saw it coming, but what can you do about such things? Who could I tell it to?”

  “What should I do?”

  “Ask for God’s help, what else can you do?”

  The sexton hurried to the synagogue and prayed for God’s intervention. When he returned to his flat he felt unrelieved, outraged, miserable. He beat his chest with his fists, blamed himself for not having been stricter with her. He was angered with her for being the kind she was and sought ways to punish her. Really, he wanted to beg her to return home, to be a good daughter, to ease the pain in his heart.

  The next morning he woke in the dark and determined to find her. But where do you look for a daughter who has become a whore? He waited a few days for her to call, and when she didn’t, on Helen’s advice he dialed information and asked if there was a new telephone number in the name of Luci Glasser.

  “Not for Luci Glasser but for Luci Glass,” said the operator.

  “Give me this number.”

  The operator, at his impassioned insistence, gave him an address as well, a place on midtown Ninth Avenue. Though it was still September and not cold, the sexton put on his winter coat and took his rubbertipped heavy cane. He rode, whispering to himself, on the subway to West Fiftieth Street, and walked to Ninth, to a large new orange-brick apartment house.

  All day, though it rained intermittently, he waited across the street from the apartment house until his daughter appeared late at night; then he followed her. She walked quickly, lightly, as though without a worry, down the avenue. As he hurried after her she hailed a cab. Glasser shouted at it but no one looked back.

  In the morning he telephoned her and she did not answer, as though she knew her father was calling. That evening Glasser went once more to the apartment house and waited across the street. He had considered going in and asking the doorman for her apartment number but was ashamed to.

  “Please, give me the number of my daughter, Luci Glasser, the prostitute.”

  At eleven that night Luci came out. From the way she was dressed and made up he was positive he had not been mistaken.

  She turned on Forty-eighth Street and walked to Eighth Avenue. Luci sauntered calmly along the avenue. The sidewalks were crowded with silent men and showily dressed young women. Traffic was heavy and there were strong lights everywhere, yet the long street looked dark and evil. Some of the stores, in their spotlit windows, showed pictures of men and women in sexual embrace. The sexton groaned. Luci wore a purple silk sweater with red sequins, almost no skirt, and long black net stockings. She paused for a while on a street corner, apart from a group of girls farther up the block. She would speak to the men passing by, and one or two would stop to speak to her, then she waited again. One man spoke quietly for a while as she listened intently. Then Luci went into a drugstore to make a telephone call, and when she came out, her father, half dead, was waiting for her at the door. She walked past him.

  Incensed, he called her name and she turned in frightened surprise. Under the makeup, false eyelashes, gaudy mouth, her face had turned ashen, eyes anguished.

  “Papa, go home,” she cried in fright.

  “What did I do to you that you do this to me?”

  “It’s not as bad as people think,” Luci said.

  “It’s worse, it’s filthy.”

  “Not if you don’t think so. I meet lots of people—some are Jewish.”

  “A black year on their heads.”

  “You live your life, let me live mine.”

  “God will curse you, He will rot your flesh.”

  “You’re not God,” Luci cried in sudden rage.

  “Cocksucker,” the sexton shouted, wavin
g his cane.

  A policeman approached. Luci ran off. The sexton, to the man’s questions, was inarticulate.

  When he sought her again Luci had disappeared. He went to the orange apartment house and the doorman said Miss Glass had moved out; he could not say where. Though Glasser returned several times the doorman always said the same thing. When he telephoned her number he got a tape recording of the operator saying the number had been disconnected.

  The sexton walked the streets looking for her, though Fay and Helen begged him not to. He said he must. They asked him why. He wept aloud. He sought her among the streetwalkers on Eighth and Ninth Avenues and on Broadway. Sometimes he went into a small cockroachy hotel and uttered her name, but nobody knew her.

  Late one October night he saw her on Third Avenue near Twenty-third Street. Luci was standing in mid-block near the curb, and though it was a cold night she was not wearing a coat. She had on a heavy white sweater and a mirrored leather miniskirt. A round two-inch mirror in a metal holder was sewn onto the back of the skirt, above her plump thighs, and it bounced on her buttocks as she walked.

  Glasser crossed the street and waited in silence through her alarm of recognition.

  “Lucille,” he begged her, “come home with your father. We won’t tell anybody. Your room is waiting.”

  She laughed angrily. She had gained weight. When he attempted to follow her she called him dirty names. He hobbled across the street and waited in an unlit doorway.

  Luci walked along the block and when a man approached she spoke to him. Sometimes the man stopped to speak to her. Then they would go together to a run-down, dark, squat hotel on a side street nearby, and a half hour later she returned to Third Avenue, standing between Twenty-third and -second, or higher up the avenue, near Twenty-sixth.

  The sexton follows her and waits on the other side of the street by a bare-branched tree. She knows he is there. He waits. He counts the number of her performances. He punishes by his presence. He calls down God’s wrath on the prostitute and her blind father.

  1972

  Talking Horse

  Q Am I a man in a horse or a horse that talks like a man? Suppose they took an X-ray, what would they see?—a man’s luminous skeleton prostrate inside a horse, or just a horse with a complicated voice box? If the first, then Jonah had it better in the whale—more room all around; also he knew who he was and how he had got there. About myself I have to make guesses. Anyway, after three days and nights the big fish stopped at Nineveh and Jonah took his valise and got off. But not Abramowitz, still on board, or at hand, after years; he’s no prophet. On the contrary, he works in a sideshow full of freaks—though recently advanced, on Goldberg’s insistence, to the center ring inside the big tent in an act with his deaf-mute master—Goldberg himself, may the Almighty forgive him. All I know is I’ve been here for years and still don’t understand the nature of my fate; in short if I’m Abramowitz, a horse; or a horse including Abramowitz. Why is anybody’s guess. Understanding goes so far and no further, especially if Goldberg blocks the way. It might be because of something I said, or thought, or did, or didn’t do in my life. It’s easy to make mistakes and easy not to know who made them. I have my theories, glimmers, guesses, but can’t prove a thing.

  When Abramowitz stands in his stall, his hooves nervously booming on the battered wooden boards as he chews in his bag of hard yellow oats, sometimes he has thoughts, far-off remembrances they seem to be, of young horses racing, playing, nipping at each other’s flanks in green fields; and other disquieting images that might be memories; so who’s to say what’s really the truth?

  I’ve tried asking Goldberg, but save yourself the trouble. He goes black-and-blue in the face at questions, really uptight. I can understand—he’s a deaf-mute from way back; he doesn’t like interference with his thoughts or plans, or the way he lives, and no surprises except those he invents. In other words questions disturb him. Ask him a question and he’s off his track. He talks to me only when he feels like it, which isn’t so often—his little patience wears thin. Lately his mood is awful, he reaches too often for his bamboo cane—whoosh across the rump! There’s usually plenty of oats and straw and water, and once in a while even a joke to relax me when I’m tensed up, but otherwise it’s one threat or another, followed by a flash of pain if I don’t get something or other right, or something I say hits him on his nerves. It’s not only that cane that slashes like a whip; his threats have the same effect—like a zing-zong of lightning through the flesh; in fact the blow hurts less than the threat—the blow’s momentary, the threat you worry about. But the true pain, at least to me, is when you don’t know what you have to know.

  Which doesn’t mean we don’t communicate to each other. Goldberg taps out Morse code messages on my head with his big knuckle—crack crack crack; I feel the vibrations run through my bones to the tip of my tail—when he orders me what to do next or he threatens how many lashes for the last offense. His first message, I remember, was NO QUESTIONS. UNDERSTOOD? I shook my head yes and a little bell jingled on a strap under the forelock. That was the first I knew it was there.

  TALK, he rapped on my head after he told me about the act. “You’re a talking horse.”

  “Yes, master.” What else can you say?

  My voice surprised me when it came out high through the tunnel of a horse’s neck. I can’t exactly remember the occasion—go remember beginnings. My memory I have to fight to get an early remembrance out of. Don’t ask me why unless I happened to fall and hurt my head, or was otherwise stunted. Goldberg is my deaf-mute owner; he reads my lips. Once when he was drunk and looking for company he tapped me that I used to carry goods on my back to fairs and markets in the old days before we joined the circus.

  I used to think I was born here.

  “On a rainy, snowy, crappy night,” Goldberg Morse-coded me on my bony skull.

  “What happened then?”

  He stopped talking altogether. I should know better but don’t.

  I try to remember what night we’re talking about and certain hazy thoughts flicker in my mind, which could be some sort of story I dream up when I have nothing to do but chew oats. It’s easier than remembering. The one that comes to me most is about two men, or horses, or men on horses, though which was me I can’t say. Anyway two strangers meet, somebody asks the other a question, and the next thing they’re locked in battle, either hacking at one another’s head with swords or braying wildly as they tear flesh with their teeth; or both at the same time. If riders, or horses, one is thin and poetic, the other a fat stranger wearing a huge black crown. They meet in a stone pit on a rainy, snowy, crappy night, one wearing his cracked metal crown that weighs a ton on his head and makes his movements slow though nonetheless accurate, and the other on his head wears a ragged colored cap. All night they wrestle by weird light in the slippery stone pit.

  Q. “What’s to be done?”

  A. “None of those accursed bloody questions.”

  The next morning one of us wakes with a terrible pain which feels like a wound in the neck but also a headache. He remembers a blow he can’t swear to and a strange dialogue where the answers come first and the questions follow:

  I descended a ladder.

  How did you get here?

  The up and the down.

  Which is which?

  Abramowitz, in his dream story, suspects Goldberg had walloped him over the head and stuffed him into a horse because he needed a talking one for his act and there was no such thing.

  I wish I knew for sure.

  DON’T DARE ASK.

  That’s his nature; he’s a lout though not without a little consideration when he’s depressed and tippling his bottle. That’s when he taps me out a teasing anecdote or two. He has no visible friends. Family neither of us talks about. When he laughs he cries.

  It must frustrate Goldberg that all he can say aloud is four-letter words like geee, gooo, gaaa, gaaw; and the circus manager who doubles as ringmaster, in for a s
nifter, looks embarrassed at the floor. At those who don’t know the Morse code Goldberg grimaces, glares, and grinds his teeth. He has his mysteries. He keeps a mildewed threeprong spear hanging on the wall over a stuffed pony’s head. Sometimes he goes down the cellar with an old candle and comes up with a new one lit though we have electric lights. Although he doesn’t complain about his life, he worries and cracks his knuckles. He doesn’t seem interested in women but sees to it that Abramowitz gets his chance at a mare in heat, if available. Abramowitz engages to satisfy his physical nature, a fact is a fact, otherwise it’s no big deal; the mare has no interest in a talking courtship. Furthermore, Goldberg applauds when Abramowitz mounts her, which is humiliating.

  And when they’re in their winter quarters the owner once a week or so dresses up and goes out on the town. When he puts on his broadcloth suit, diamond stickpin, and yellow gloves, he preens before the full-length mirror. He pretends to fence, jabs the bamboo cane at the figure in the glass, twirls it around one finger. Where he goes when he goes he never informs Abramowitz. But when he returns he’s usually melancholic, sometimes anguished, didn’t have much of a good time; and in this mood may mete out a few loving lashes with that bastard cane. Or worse—make threats. Nothing serious but who needs it? Usually he prefers to stay home and watch television. He is fascinated by astronomy, and when they have those programs on the educational channel he’s there night after night, staring at pictures of stars, quasars, infinite space. He also likes to read the Daily News, which he tears up when he’s done. Sometimes he reads this book he hides on a shelf in the closet under some old hats. If the book doesn’t make him laugh outright it makes him cry. When he gets excited over something he’s reading in his fat book, his eyes roll, his mouth gets wet, and he tries to talk through his thick tongue, though all Abramowitz hears is geee, gooo, gaaa, gaaw. Always these words, whatever they mean, and sometimes gool goon geek gonk, in various combinations, usually gool with gonk, which Abramowitz thinks means Goldberg. And in such states he has been known to kick Abramowitz in the belly with his heavy boot. Ooof.