by Paul Hond
“Son.” Mickey felt like he’d been waiting all his life for this simple exchange of monosyllables. He thought to open his arms in an embrace, but was distracted by the sight, glimpsed over Ben’s shoulder, of a stunning tidiness that was almost harsh on the eyes. “What in the world happened in here?” A computer—Ben’s computer—sat flush on a miraculously paperless desk. “What the hell did you do?”
“Just organized things,” said Ben. He seemed eager to ask questions, but retreated instead into what seemed to Mickey a kind of shy respect, not unlike that with which he had greeted his mother when she’d return home after a similar length of time. He went to the desk and pressed a key on the computer. “Look,” he said.
Mickey felt a tweak of anger, though maybe it was hurt pride as much as anything—the idea that his mess had been cleaned up by someone else. He positioned himself behind the desk chair and looked over Ben’s shoulder at the list of options on the screen. How was he supposed to make sense of all this narrischkeit, as his father would say, all this hocus-pocus?
“Everything’s here,” Ben said.
Mickey sighed. What would Dulac say about computers?
Ben moved the mouse, and in a series of intelligent clicks, brought up all sorts of charts and figures. As he explained what it all meant, and how he’d done this, that and the other thing to cut waste and save money, Mickey’s head began to swim. The colorful graphics gave Ben’s arguments indisputable weight, and Mickey found himself trusting the kid’s decisions based on the mere fact of technology. The glow of the screen became a hearth, around which they had both gathered for warmth; Mickey tried to listen as Ben described, with eloquent logic, how each change led to profit, but under the screen’s glow Mickey fell instead to admiring his son’s profile (“He looks just like you!” Shirley Finkle had often told him) and the sound of his voice, in which Mickey could hear his own tone and inflections.
Mickey wondered how to spring the news of the arrests. Gravely? Joyfully? It wasn’t exactly what he’d call “good” news, and yet somehow it was. He said, plainly, “You know, Benjie, the police caught those two kids,” wondering if it had already broken in the papers.
Ben said nothing, and Mickey knew he was thinking the same thing that Morris had thought: that this was the reason he’d come back; that otherwise he might never have returned. But of course it wasn’t true; he’d missed his son, had been desperate to come home to him.
“What have you been doing all this time?” Ben said.
“Did you hear what I said? They caught the killers.”
“I heard you.”
Mickey felt the kid was on to him somehow, and didn’t want to give the impression that he was avoiding the subject. Though why should he feel defensive? He’d gone away for the good of all of them. Couldn’t Ben see that? Mickey felt a chill. This wouldn’t be easy, he thought. And yet it moved him that Ben seemed to have felt so deeply the blow of his absence.
“I met a very interesting man in Paris,” Mickey said, and the next thing he knew, he was preaching like Dulac himself, singing the praises of wood-fired ovens and organically grown wheat, thinking that as much as these new ideas might upset Ben’s ledgers, they were in any case vital seeds that would eventually take hold in his imagination and lead him, one way or another, to the serenity that Mickey had found while baking overseas. “We can do better here,” he said. “We can turn out a better product. I want to try to communicate something, try to—” He stopped; he couldn’t tell it like Dulac. And there was so much he wanted to express! “A single loaf,” he said, pulling at the air with his hands, grasping for the words, the inspiration that would enable him to convey the meaning of a single speck of grain—“is a living thing.”
Ben kept his eyes on the screen. “What are you talking about?” he said.
Mickey sighed. “I’m saying we need to maybe change the way we make things.”
Ben turned his head and looked up at him. “Change? What do you mean?”
“I just told you. The very philosophy behind—”
“But what about all I’ve—everything is—how can you want to change it? I’ve—”
“Benjie.”
“You always said that the idea is to produce the highest volume in the shortest amount of time for the cheapest cost. I’ve done that.”
Mickey was taken aback. The kid was vehement, on a mission of his own.
“This is a business,” Ben said. There was a severity in his tone which seemed to carry this verdict beyond the bakery and into the realm of the personal. “That’s all you ever meant it to be, a business. You can’t change it now.”
“Why not listen to what I’m saying,” said Mickey, “instead of flying off the handle?”
“I’ve done too much,” said Ben. “You can’t just barge in here and take over.”
“Barge in?” said Mickey. He laughed. “This happens to be my bakery.”
“If it’s so important to you, then why did you go away for so long?”
“That doesn’t mean it isn’t mine.”
“It means,” said Ben, “that you don’t really care about it.”
Mickey was staggered. “Of course I care about it,” he said, his voice straining to impart deeper meanings. “Why do you think I want to improve it?”
Ben looked crestfallen—he was speechless, his mouth agape—and Mickey immediately saw his own error. To suggest improvements was to degrade all that the kid had done.
“Listen.” Mickey walked around to the front of the desk and sat down in the chair. Funny: before he’d left, it was Benjie in that chair and him behind the desk. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “You’ve done a lot. I don’t mean to turn everything upside down.”
Ben gazed at the monitor.
“So what about everything else?” said Mickey, his voice bright with the insistence that all was well between them. “Any problems? The staff? Everyone okay?”
Ben was motionless for a moment, then sighed and typed something on the keyboard, the way an athlete might walk off pain. “Three people are gone,” he said, still typing.
“What?”
Ben read over what he’d typed, then went on to explain that two of the bakers had left for greener pastures, and that Lazarus—old, owl-eyed Lazarus of the night—had been installed in their place.
“Lazarus?” Mickey said. “Baking?”
“And supervising,” Ben said. “Kind of kills two birds with one stone. Three birds, since there’s one less baker now.”
“And he doesn’t mind?”
Ben shrugged. “He likes it.”
“Well,” said Mickey. It was, when he looked at it, a pretty smart move—it saved money and made for a leaner, more efficient staff—but Mickey was concerned that maybe the kid had been too ambitious, that this little shake-up was only the tip of the iceberg. He braced himself for more. “Anything else?” he said.
“No,” said Ben. “I mean, I canceled the store consignments, which weren’t the least bit profitable—that’s how I could afford to lose a baker, cutting the volume like that—but of course you could start them back up if you wanted, which I wouldn’t advise you to, since it’s not worth it, which I can prove to you on the computer, if you want. And Nelson quit. Here, look, I’ll show you the consignment figures. Say we make seventy-five percent off each item—”
“Just a second,” said Mickey. It was crazy, but the news of Ben’s brazen business decisions (which in any case were probably sound; Mickey had to admit that the kid was on the ball) did not pique him half as much as the item about Nelson that he’d tried to slip in there unnoticed. “You said Nelson quit?”
“It was his decision,” said Ben, with an odd emphasis. “Anyway, I covered the deliveries.”
More money saved, Mickey thought. “He get a better offer?”
“I didn’t ask,” said Ben. “Maybe he just wanted to do something else. Maybe he was tired of deliveries.”
Mickey scratched his head. He seemed to recall hopi
ng, in the back of his mind, that Ben’s new position might, among other things, hasten the demise of that ill-boding friendship, but now all he could feel—it hit him suddenly—was an immediate threat to his contact with Donna Childs. He knew this was a selfish thought—Ben had probably taken Nelson’s departure hard, God knew it wasn’t easy to be both a boss and a friend, not every boss could be loved, or even liked, hell, most of them were probably even hated.
“Well,” Mickey said, more for Ben’s sake, “I’m sorry he had to go.”
The phone rang. Ben picked it up.
“Lerner Bakery,” he said.
Mickey watched his son with a growing pride. The computer, the desk, the professional, confident manner on the phone—
“Uh-huh,” Ben said. He turned his head slightly. “Uh-huh. Right. No.” There was a long pause. “Uh-huh. Yes. Okay.” His hand dropped: the receiver slammed down.
“Careful with the phone,” Mickey said. “Who was it?”
“Nobody,” said Ben. “Just some customer asking stupid questions.” He rubbed his head.
Mickey laughed—he knew the feeling. “You okay?” he said. The kid looked a little pale.
“I’m just tired,” Ben said.
“You’ve been working hard, huh?”
“Yeah.”
Mickey nodded. “How about we close up early and go home. Have an early dinner.”
Ben looked at him. “Close up early?”
“We can do that, you know,” Mickey said.
After having seen what had been done at the bakery, it came as little surprise to Mickey that the house should be in tip-top condition. Plants watered, floors clean, kitchen sink empty of dishes. Ben had even made two neat stacks of mail on the table by the phone: a small stack for Emi (junk mail, mostly) and a big stack of bills for him. Mickey examined Emi’s stack—don’t get rid of your mother’s mail, he’d said, there might be something important—and found himself unable to throw any of it out. It was strange: before he’d left, he’d had no trouble tossing out her mail; now, perhaps because the flow would be slowing, each piece had the weight of a rare collectible.
In the kitchen he put a pot of water on to boil. There were a couple of boxes of pasta in the cupboard, and also some olive oil, a jar of capers and a container of sun-dried tomatoes. In the refrigerator he found some old garlic and a jar of olives. Tomorrow, maybe, he’d go food shopping.
“Dad?”
Mickey turned. Ben was standing in the doorway, wearing only a pair of boxers. Mickey’s first impulse was to turn away in modesty, but he then realized that Ben’s appearance was perfectly normal. He looked at his son, trying hard not to betray his discomfort with the raw body, the plain physical fact of his own child. Nipples like twin birthmarks, hair shooting up like flames on the bony chest, a light fuzz creeping below the coin slot of a navel; Mickey hadn’t seen the kid’s bare hide since the day after Emi’s death, when he went into his room to break the news, but even then he hadn’t noticed the hair, the marks of an approaching manhood that now seemed to pit them against each other.
“Did you like it?” Ben said. “France?”
“Sure,” said Mickey. He smiled. “But I’m glad to be home.”
Ben scratched at the hairs below his navel. “I think we should move there,” he said.
“You want to move there, huh?”
“Or somewhere.” A thumb found the elastic band of his shorts. “I bet we could move to another state or even another country and start up a business.”
Mickey laughed. “We’ll think about it,” he said. He might have been fielding a small child’s request for a horse.
“I’m serious, Dad.”
It was the “Dad” that grabbed him. Mickey took a harder look at this young man, this lean bundle of ideas. What was inside him? Why this urge to move, to get away?
Mickey saw the danger—saw the kid spreading his wings and flying the coop. He was eighteen, almost nineteen. An adult. Mickey stiffened: would he lose Benjie too?
“Take a couple of weeks off,” said Mickey. “You’ve worked hard, and you’ve done a bang-up job.”
The water had come to a boil. Mickey opened a box of spaghetti and emptied a loose bundle of stiff golden spindles into his hand.
He said, “I just want you to know that I’m very proud of you, son.” He turned, and was startled to find that Ben wasn’t there.
After a moment he heard the footfalls on the stairs, and the slam of a bedroom door.
Mickey ate alone: Ben had shut himself up in his room, saying he wasn’t hungry, that he had a headache. Mickey figured he was angry at him for something, or maybe he was just uncomfortable with the situation; they hadn’t had a meal together in a long time, and neither of them, Mickey supposed, would quite know how to act.
After dinner, Mickey sorted through his mail. Bills, bills and more bills, a few late cards of condolence from customers, a dozen mail-order catalogs and sweepstakes offers, a dozen more bank and stock statements. The waste of paper that went on in his name impressed him greatly. And Emi—she was obviously still alive to her creditors. Mickey searched her pile, thinking he might alight on something personal—a letter, a postcard, something to revive her name in a small burst of controversy, that he might recall her, just for a moment, with the immediacy and intensity which only jealousy can fuel—but there was nothing. Mildly disappointed, he went up to bed.
Ben’s light was out. Mickey stared at the phone, tempted to pick it up and call Donna, but in a failure of nerve told himself that it would be better to try her during the day, at work, where at least Nelson wouldn’t be a factor.
He fell asleep, then woke up at dawn: for a moment he thought he was in Paris, that it was time to get up and kindle the hearth. He felt a small regret when he realized he was home.
Restless, he shaved and dressed and walked over to the bakery to see what was what. The bakers, including a whistling Lazarus, who wore a white apron over his black suit, were hard at work, mixing and cutting and shaping. Mickey stood unnoticed by the office door, watching; as ever, he was amazed at the industry that went on in his name, even when he wasn’t there.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” he said.
The bakers looked up, and like a string of firecrackers their faces lit one after the next with recognition. They stopped what they were doing and came toward him, some of them still holding their cutters. Mickey stepped back, and was then surprised—though why should he have been surprised?—when the men surrounded him with big peasant smiles and slapped his shoulders.
“I want to hear all about it,” said Shirley Finkle as Mickey moved some trays around in the display case. It was a few minutes before opening, and Shirley, who had been knocking at the glass—who had damn near fainted like a starstruck bobby-soxer at the sight of Mickey coming out of his office to the front—had just now informed him that, as she’d been lending a hand behind the counter (“I tell ya, I’ve been in here so many times I could have done it with my eyes closed!”) and checking in on Ben daily (“He knew better than to stay out all hours, not with eagle-eye Shirley right next door!”)—that, seeing as how things would have been so topsy-turvy without her, she, more than anyone else, deserved the first full account of his adventures.
“Very nice trip,” said Mickey. “Very interesting.” He wondered if the DA would phone today. Hadn’t Flemke said he would?
“Nice? Interesting?” said Shirley. “You can do better than that. Let’s have some details!”
“Details,” said Mickey.
“Did you parley-voo Fran-say? Did you climb up the Eiffel Tower?”
“Not this time,” said Mickey. “I’m afraid I wasn’t much of a tourist.” He was aware of the effect that his new worldliness was having on his neighbor, and tried hard to appear like the simple man who had spent forty years behind the counter. “How’s Gilbert?” he said.
Shirley didn’t seem to hear him. “Didn’t you take any pictures?”
“Pictures?” sa
id Mickey.
Shirley shook her head in wonder, as though forgoing picture-taking was a foolish, bullheaded and devastatingly masculine act. “You are something else, Mickey Lerner. Some-thing else.”
Mickey rubbed his nose. “Next time,” he said, “I’ll take a camera.”
“The hell with the camera,” Shirley cried. “Take me!” And she began to laugh in that giddy, whiskey-sour way of hers.
Mickey laughed with her.
“So,” she said, “What’s going to happen with Benjie, now that you’re back?”
“Benjie?”
“Is he staying here to work?”
Mickey shrugged. “Whatever he wants.”
“He’s not going back to making deliveries, is he?”
“No,” said Mickey, reminding himself that he now had to hire a delivery man. “He’d be helping me run the show, just like he’s been doing.”
Shirley shook her head. “The way he handled himself, I tell ya, I was amazed. Little Benjie Lerner.”
“Yup.” Mickey watched through the window as a bus pulled up at the stop.
“Is he coming in today?” said Shirley.
Mickey looked at her. “No. I figured I’d give him a break, some time off to rest.” Mickey had no sooner completed the sentence and begun to wonder again what he’d do about deliveries when he saw through the window a figure stepping off the bus whom he thought might be Nelson: a young black man in a bulky hooded coat, the kind Nelson wore.
Was Nelson dropping by to visit, to chat about his new job? Ask for his old job back?
Mickey almost hoped it was the latter, but when the man failed to enter the bakery, Mickey figured that it wasn’t Nelson after all.
24
As he approached the bakery, Nelson was shocked to see, standing behind the counter, not the lanky figure of Ben Lerner, but rather—he could hardly believe his eyes—Mickey Lerner, Bread, in the flesh, there, as though he’d never even been gone. Nelson quickly moved out of sight of the window; he had planned to ask Crumb to do him a big favor, but the sight of the elder Lerner, home safe and sound from distant lands, filled him with unexpected emotions.