The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan

by Callaghan, Morley; Atwood, Margaret;

  Then he crossed the road slowly, wondering why he should not have Mike Kon make him a suit. It would be a legitimate excuse to make a little gesture to a man who had been a friend of Scotty’s and see if he was willing to be friendly with him. The more he thought of it the more he liked it.

  In the days before the war, when some of the newspapermen had claimed Mike had a chance of winning the title, he used to watch him fight at the Forum and liked his style — a rough, mean, crowding type of fighter, with a broken nose and some scar tissue over his eyes. In those days Mike had been an illiterate young hoodlum very much respected by other young hoodlums in the east end. He had gone on and done a lot of fighting in the smaller New York clubs; then he had settled down to fight out of Philadelphia for a bad and powerful character named Sleepy Ferraro. After five years, washed up and with his eyes damaged, he came home. But something must have happened to his mind and heart, for around Dorfman’s they used to joke about Mike, wondering why he had changed his life and educated himself. He was always reading books. He used big words and talked slowly and deliberately. All his friends called him Mike the Scholar. They joked about him reading books aloud to his father who had had a paralytic stroke and who lived with him in the apartment over the store.

  But I really don’t know him well, Harry thought, inspecting the cloth in the window. In Dorfman’s, Mike had never been quite sure of himself, never quite certain he belonged, so they had always greeted each other good-naturedly and that was all. But suddenly he wanted to have Mike Kon, Scotty’s friend, put out his hand to him and greet him with pleasure and respect as he would have done in the old days.

  It was a smart shop done in limed oak with materials draped over pillars and he was agreeably impressed; then Mike, himself, came from his office, wearing a good worsted jacket.

  “Hello, Mike,” he said, and he put out his hand, smiling with his old distinguished air.

  “Why, hello, Harry,” Mike said, squinting with surprise; he refused to wear glasses.

  “Thought I’d drop in and try one of your suits, Mike. What about it?” Harry said casually, and turned to some of the bolts of cloth.

  “Why, sure,” Mike said, a little flustered. There was an awkward moment and neither one of them knew whether it was from embarrassment or because Mike was impressed that he was being asked to make a suit for a man whose clothes he used to admire. As Mike pulled out bolts of cloth and draped the ends over the table, they talked casually. Harry said he had been out of town. Nothing was said about Scotty Bowman. Mike seemed to be concerned only about the suit. When Harry picked out a lightweight tropical very light gray with a fine blue check Mike remonstrated; he said those tropicals didn’t keep a press no matter how you watched them. Harry couldn’t agree with him. Any suit needed a lot of pressing in the summer, he said, and he asked for a fashion book. While Mike listened respectfully he pointed at a conservative model with natural shoulders and made some suggestions. There were to be real buttonholes on the sleeves and hand-stitching on the lapels. “Fine, fine. I like all this. I do,” Mike said. “Now to measure you,” and he got a tape measure. Hesitating, he said, “Willie is the real expert, Harry,” and he called for his middle-aged English fitter who came from the office, a tape measure around his neck, and wearing the vest he always wore even in the hottest weather. Everything went well. The suit was to be finished in a week. They shook hands. Outside, Harry stood in the sun lighting a cigarette and smiling to himself for he hadn’t noticed in Mike that embarrassed vague resentment he used to feel in people who had known both him and Scotty; he hadn’t noticed it at all.

  He knew Mike Kon would tell everybody he was back but he took his time that week about appearing in the old places. He wanted the word to get around; for a while he wouldn’t go to the Ritz bar or the M.A.A. Club, he decided; it would be better to wait until old friends, who heard he was back, came looking for him. When that happened it would be time to start talking about a decent job.

  In the middle of the week when he went into Mike’s place for a fitting, only Willie was there. That night he went into Dorfman’s for the first time. Alfred Dorfman, of course, was glad to see him and bought him drinks and insisted he come out to the house some night and have dinner. When Ted Ogilvie and old Haggerty came in, Alfred called them over and bought drinks for them, too, and got them all drunk.

  At the end of the week, at noontime, he got the suit and took it home and tried it on. It looked like one of his own suits, a good-looking piece of cloth, well cut and worth the money Mike had charged him for it.

  That night he went to Alfred Dorfman’s home and had dinner with the family. They welcomed him warmly but Alfred would have seen to this, he knew. Alfred would have welcomed him affectionately if he had just come out of the penitentiary. He was also very encouraging. “I’m telling some important people you’re back, Harry, and I see them all,” he said. Never at any time since the trial in the winter had Alfred mentioned Scotty Bowman, and he didn’t now.

  ✧ XII ✧

  Next day in the afternoon sunlight Harry walked over to Annie Laurie’s place, wondering if she had finished with the painting.

  The door was open and she called, “Come in,” and he found her in her living room, kneeling in the corner painting the last of the woodwork white. “I’ll be right with you in just a minute,” she said. “Just this little corner to do.”

  “You could paint a three-story house,” he said, admiringly. “How are you on the high ladders?”

  “Harry, look out,” she called, for he had come around her, close to the window trim shining white; he had brushed against the paint. “Oh, Lord,” she cried. “I should have told you it was wet. I just painted it this morning. Your new suit.”

  On his shoulder and sleeve there was a smear of paint a foot long, and as he cursed she rushed into the kitchen and came back with a rag soaked in some cleaning fluid and she rubbed at the smear fiercely. The paint came off but there was a faint stain discoloring the cloth right down the arm. His wondering expression as he stared at it made her feel stricken. “Oh, don’t take it so seriously,” he said, smiling. “All I have to do is take it to the cleaners before it really dries. There’s one right down on St. Catherine there. They can clean that coat in an hour.”

  “Yes, maybe if you take it at once before it dries,” she said, and he gave her a kiss and went out, carrying his coat.

  In the cleaning establishment the young fellow, a Greek with long sideburns, looked at the coat and shrugged and said it would clean up without a blemish and to come back in an hour. He went out, bought Time and The New Yorker from a newsstand, then entered a restaurant and had some coffee and read. In an hour and a half he went back to the cleaners.

  When the young Greek saw him coming in he glanced at him nervously, hesitated, then went back to the office, and returned to the counter with an older man, bald, in a white shirt with a black bow tie, who was carrying the coat. “My friend,” said the older man, shaking his head solemnly. “This you won’t like,” and he opened the coat and spread it out on the counter. The lining seemed to have light crisscrossing veins running through it, but these veins were really thin fine tears. “See, I do this,” the young one with the sideburns said, and he nicked one of the cuts with his finger and it fell open. “You see?” he asked.

  “Good God,” Harry said, staring at the lining blankly. “What are you going to do? I bring the coat in to you and you tear it to pieces. It’s that rotten stuff you use.”

  “Wait. Now wait. Look at the cloth, the rest of the coat. Is it all right?” the older man said, spreading it out on the counter. Getting excited, both cleaners grabbed at the coats on hangers that had been cleaned that morning. They showed him the linings. “That’s a faulty piece of material you got there, mister,” they said. “Look, every part of the lining. Now look at the cloth. If it was the cleaning fluid it would have hurt the cloth. No? Take it back. Where did you get it? — Mike Kon. It’s a gyp. Make him put a new lining in i
t. Tell him to come to us,” and they both pounded the counter belligerently as they gesticulated to each other, and grabbed at other coats, showing him how these linings couldn’t be torn. They convinced him and he put on the coat and went out slowly, looking troubled.

  ✧ XIII ✧

  After he had had his lunch next day, Mike Kon came loafing along the street in the sunlight, saying hello to any shopkeeper standing at a door and waving to clerks at the windows. He liked greeting these businessmen at noontime. He liked to think that in a few years’ time he might be asked to be president of the neighborhood business association, and then be asked to run for alderman. These hopes helped him to feel secure and established and confident that in a year’s time his business would be a success and the loan he had got from Scotty Bowman’s bank would be paid off. He liked selling suits to young fellows of the sporting fraternity, but he also dreamed of being accepted as a tailor by people who wanted fine suits and wouldn’t care whether or not he was an old fighter. He still wasn’t quite sure whether he was accepted as a solid businessman.

  Just to the right of the entrance to his shop was the door and the stairs that led to the upstairs apartment, and after lunch, before going into the store, he always climbed these stairs to see his father and spend a few minutes with him and the nurse, Mrs. McManus. The remodeling of the old apartment, which he had paid for himself, had been costly; he had wall-to-wall broadloom on the floors; there was a smart modern living room and three bedrooms, one for himself, and one for his father, and one for the nurse. He could not be sure that his father, now that he had had a stroke, appreciated how different this place was from the old one, and it always saddened him. His father was in the living room in his wheelchair, the light glistening on his bald head, his big nose shining too. On the right arm of the chair they had rigged up a board about a foot wide, and on this board there was a pad and a pencil on a string. Old Mr. Kon had been paralyzed on the left side; he couldn’t speak, but sometimes two fingers on his right hand seemed to have a little life in them. Every morning Mrs. McManus, would stick the pencil between these two fingers and urge him to scratch on the pad. Often there were lines scratched on the pad but whether they were made by a nerve twitching in the finger or by the old man trying to write they didn’t know. “Hello, papa,” Mike said, cheerfully, as if he believed his father heard and understood every word he said. Every day he tried to have a little more faith in this, and he talked to him sometimes for an hour about everything going on the city. “How are you doing today, papa?” he asked. The one good eye, the right one, glittered at him fiercely till he pressed the hand gently. It was always hard for him to do this. He could not bear the touch of the inert, watery and swollen hand.

  “Mrs. McManus,” he called. “Is that you, Mr. Kon?” she said, coming from the kitchen in her white smock. She was a gray-haired jolly Scotswoman who seemed to have some affection for the helpless old man. “He seems to be pretty much himself today,” she said, looking at the old man reflectively. “Don’t you think so?”

  “Look at those scratches on the pad,” Mike said. “I think they’re getting firmer all the time.” He sat down, smiling at his father, as he always did, and began to talk to him about what was happening in the world, then about a book he had read last night as if he believed his father understood and had unspoken opinions of his own and showed it with that one lively blinking gray eye.

  Years ago he couldn’t have sat beside his father as he did now, feeling at ease and with speech unnecessary between them. In those early days he had had no understanding at all of his father. As a boy he had been ashamed that the old man had sold newspapers and had a bad accent and wore illfitting clothes, and that in the winter, at his corner newsstand, his red nose had been always running. His father used to wear a cap and earmuffs and had called out hoarsely the names of his papers while he danced around to keep his feet warm; this middle-aged newsboy used to come home and waste his time trying to read high-school poems aloud in a heavy accent. In those days just being near his father had offended him.

  “Michael,” his father had said, looking up, his finger on a sentence on the page. “This I don’t get. Make it clear, please.”

  “Why don’t you call me Mike like everybody else does?”

  “Because with you and me it is not like it is with everybody else,” he said mildly.

  “Aw, hell, why don’t you lay off those kids’ books. Just be what you are. Everybody knows what we are anyway.”

  “What is it you say we are, Michael?” he asked gravely, as he closed the book, his finger between the pages, and looking down over his glasses.

  “We don’t rate. Why does a newsboy want to use big words? Who the hell cares?”

  Closing the book, his father let it rest on his knee, and stared at the cover, and then he stood up and turned on the gas to heat the kettle and make himself a cup of tea. It was his only dissipation, the only one he could afford, the drinking of too many cups of tea. Mike had waited, hating the silence, his own uneasiness, and his father’s familiar movements as he bent over the stove. “To insult your father, Michael, is not good,” he said finally. “I’m a poor man, okay . . . The way it is with me there are no big jobs for me. But you are very wrong. Nobody knows what we are in this place but you and me. Maybe nobody but you knows what I would want to be . . . what we should be. The books — yes. Money — no. A poor man can have some dignity. If I’m rich, can I buy it? No, it has to be here,” and he tapped his head, “and here,” and he tapped his heart. “Someday, see this . . . then you are my son.”

  “And then I go peddle the papers too,” he said, contemptuously. But his father sat down again and picked up the book. The kettle began to boil. Waiting stiffly, Mike hoped his father would get up and pour the water in the teapot. The expression in the steady gray eyes began to bother him; he tried to outstare him, feeling big and belligerent. Then the very calm, innocent, steady eyes began to insult him, and he trembled. “Have a cup of tea with me, Michael,” his father said mildly.

  “I don’t drink tea. To hell with it,” he said, and he swaggered into the bedroom and got undressed quickly. Yet the sounds of his father making the tea, the cup going down on the table, then the silence, then the knowledge that he was sitting out there, patient and untroubled, reading the grammar, the high-school poems, became an even deeper insult. At the end of the week he had left home, left that little room and his father and the few books and the silly, lofty, biblical talk.

  After the years in the ring when he had hurt the optic nerve in his right eye and wondered what would become of him he found that he often thought of his father. On train trips and in cheap hotel rooms he began to read as if his father were beside him encouraging him to become an educated man. The more he read the more he was impressed by all the things his father had wanted. He had saved a little money and he came home and met his father, that is, he seemed to know him for the first time. Even now, when he thought of that day and how he had impressed his father, he would smile to himself. He had told Scotty Bowman all about it. At the time he had applied for the loan he had had to tell Scotty a great many things about himself.

  On his lunch hour now he said the things he might have said if the stroke hadn’t cheated them of the satisfaction of interesting conversation. It was a monologue, of course, but by this time he had learned to handle it naturally. Smoking his cigar, he would talk a little, look out the window reflectively, then turn feeling pleased when the one shining eye was on him, and sometimes sit for a long time saying nothing as he would have done with a man who could share the silence of his thoughts.

  A buzzer in the room was connected with the store and whenever anyone came in at this hour wanting to see him personally, Willie, his fitter, rang this buzzer. Today he had been only ten minutes with father when the buzzer rang. “Well, so long for now, papa,” he said amiably and he went down the stairs to the store.

  Harry Lane, his arms folded, leaning against the long oaken table, was wea
ring the new lightweight gray tropical with the fine blue check.

  “Hello, Harry,” he said

  “Hello, Mike,” Harry said, straightening up.

  “Anything I can do for you?”

  “Yes, there is,” Harry said coolly. “Something I thought I’d show you,” and taking off the coat he spread it out on the table and showed him the torn lining. “What do you make of that, Mike?” he asked crisply.

  “My God, what did you do to that coat already, Harry?” Mike said, and he looked indignant.

  “I took it to the cleaners. That’s all.”

  “But you just got it a few days ago.”

  “I got some paint on it.”

  “Paint.”

  “Yes, paint. What does it matter what I got on it?” he said impatiently. “I took it into the cleaners and they cleaned it at once. The Acme cleaners, about five blocks along the street. It came out like this.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “They said it was a rotten lining.”

  “Of all the nerve,” Mike said fiercely, but his face began to burn, for he could see that the cleaners had convinced Harry. He grew afraid that Harry, who had always patronized only the best tailors, was only too willing to look down on a piece of material from him; all his prestige seemed to be involved. “You know what did this lousy job?” he said quickly. “That stinking cleaning fluid they’re using. Why, it’s happening all the time with these cleaners. They’re always getting sued. Who are they trying to kid?”

  “Look here, Mike,” Harry began; then he wouldn’t go on; he was sure Mike was bluffing him; all he could think of then was that in the old days, before his disgrace, Mike wouldn’t have been arguing with him; he would have had too much respect, but now he felt he didn’t have to care. “If it had been the cleaning fluid,” he said, trying to hold his temper, “it would have damaged the cloth as well as the lining, and you know it.”