The People

by Bernard Malamud

Farr blinked but didn’t reply.

  “Married?” Gus winked.

  “No,” Farr said, embarrassed. He stole a glance at the door. It was still there.

  Gus clucked. “How well I remember standing on the curbstone watching you play. Flippo with his left hand and the ball spins up. Biffo with his right, a tremendous sock lifting it far over the heads of all the fielders. How old were you then, Eddie?”

  Farr made no attempt to think. “Fifteen, I guess.”

  An expression of sorrow lit Gus’s eyes. “It comes back to me now. You were the same age as my Marty.”

  Farr’s tongue tightened. It was beyond him to speak of the dead.

  Himself again after a while, Gus sighed, “Ah yes, Eddie, you missed your true calling.”

  “One beer,” Farr said, digging into his pocket for the change.

  Gus drew a beer, shaved it, and set it before him.

  “Put your pennies away. Any old friend of my Marty’s needn’t be thirsty here.”

  Farr gulped through the froth. A cold beer went with how good he now felt. He thought he might even break into a jig step or two.

  Gus was still watching him. Farr, finding he couldn’t drink, set the glass down.

  After a pause Gus asked, “Do you still ever sing, Eddie?”

  “Not so much anymore.”

  “Do me a favor and sing some old-time tune.”

  Farr looked around, but they were alone. Pretending to be strumming his mandolin, he sang, “In the good old summertime, in the good old summertime.”

  “Your voice has changed, Eddie,” said Gus, “but it’s still pleasing to the ear.”

  Farr then sang, “Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found you.”

  Gus’s eyes went wet and he blew his nose. “A fine little singer was lost to the world somewhere along the line.”

  Farr hung his head.

  “What are your plans now, Eddie?”

  The question scared him. Luckily, two customers came in and stood at the bar. Gus went to them, and Farr did not have to answer.

  He picked up the beer and pointed with one finger to a booth in the rear.

  Gus nodded. “Only don’t leave without saying goodbye.”

  Farr promised.

  He sat in the booth, thinking of Marty. Farr often thought and dreamed about him, but though he knew him best as a boy he dreamed of him as a man, mostly as he was during the days and nights they stood on street corners, waiting to be called into the army. There didn’t seem anything to do then but wait till they were called in, so they spent most of their time smoking, throwing the bull, and making wisecracks at the girls who passed by. Marty, strangely inactive for the wild kid he had been—never knowing what wild thing to do next—was a blond fellow whose good looks the girls liked, but he never stopped wisecracking at them, whether he knew them or not. One day he said something dirty to this Jewish girl who passed by and she burst into tears. Gus, who had happened to be watching out of the upstairs window, heard what Marty said, ran down in his slippers, and smacked him hard across the teeth. Marty spat blood. Farr went sick to the pit of his stomach at the sound of the sock. He later threw up. And that was the last any of them had ever seen of Marty, because he enlisted in the army and never came out again. Gus got a telegram one day saying that he was killed in action, and he never really got over it.

  Farr was whispering to himself about Marty when he gazed up and saw this dark-haired woman standing by his table, looking as if she had slyly watched his startled eyes find her. Half rising, he remembered to remove his hat.

  “Remember me, Ed? Helen Melisatos—Gus told me to say hello.”

  He knew she was this Greek girl—only she’d been very pretty then—who had once lived in the same tenement house with him. One summer night they had gone together up to the roof.

  “Sure,” said Farr. “Sure I remember you.”

  Her body had broadened but her face and hair were not bad, and her dark brown eyes seemed still to be expecting something that she would never get.

  She sat down, telling him to sit.

  He did, placing his hat next to him on the seat.

  She lit a cigarette and smoked for a long time. A man called her from the bar but she shook her head. He left without her.

  Her lips moved hungrily. Although he could at first hear no voice, she seemed, against his will, to be telling him a story he didn’t want to hear. It was about this boy and a girl, a slim dark girl with soft eyes, seventeen then, wearing this nice white dress on a hot summer night. They’d been kissing. Then she had slipped off her undergarment and lain back, uncovered, on the tar-papered roof. With heart thudding he watched her, and when she said to kneel he kneeled, and then she said it was hot and why didn’t he take off his pants. He wanted to love her with their clothes on. When he got his pants off he stopped and couldn’t go on. What do you think of a guy who would do a thing like that to a girl? He wasn’t much of a lover, was he? She was smiling broadly now, and she spoke in an older, disillusioned voice, “You’re different, Ed.” And she said, “You used to talk a lot.”

  He listened intently but said nothing.

  “But you still ain’t a bad-looking guy. How old are you, anyway?”

  “Twenty-eight, going on twenty-nine.”

  “Married?”

  “Not yet,” he said quickly. “How about you?”

  “I had enough,” Helen said.

  He cagily asked her another question to keep her talking about herself. “How’s your brother George?”

  “He lives in Athens now. He went back with my mother after the war. My father died here.”

  Farr put on his hat.

  “Going someplace, Ed?”

  “No.” He whispered to himself that he must say nothing about his own father.

  She shrugged.

  “Drink?” he asked.

  She lifted her half-full whiskey glass. “Order yourself.”

  “I got my beer.” But when he took up the glass it was empty.

  “Still absentminded?” She smiled.

  “My mind’s okay,” Farr said.

  “I bet you’re still a virgin?”

  “I bet you’re not.” Farr grinned and drained a drop from the glass.

  “Remember that night on the roof?”

  He harshly said he didn’t want to hear about it.

  “I couldn’t believe in myself for a long time after that,” Helen said.

  “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  She sat silent, not looking at him. She sat silent so long his confidence finally ebbed back.

  “Remember,” he said, “when you had that sweet-sixteen party in your house, your mother gave us that Greek coffee that had jelly in the bottom of the little cup?”

  She said she remembered.

  “Let me buy you a drink.” Farr reached into his pocket. He was smoking and squinted as he counted the coins.

  He caught Gus’s eye and ordered whiskey for her, but Gus wouldn’t take anything for it. Farr then slid a coin into the jukebox.

  “Dance?” he said, fighting a panicky feeling.

  “No.”

  Vastly relieved, he went to the bar and ordered another beer. This time Gus let him pay. Farr cashed one of his dollar bills.

  “Nothing like old friends, eh, Eddie?”

  “Yeah,” said Farr happily. He lit a cigarette and steered the beer over to the table. Helen had another whiskey and Farr another beer. He got used to the way her eyes looked at him over her glass.

  After a time Helen asked him if he had had supper.

  A violent hunger seized him as he remembered his last meal had been breakfast.

  He said no.

  “Come on up to my place. I’ll fix you something good.”

  Farr whispered to himself that he ought to go. He ought to, and later talk her into going up to the roof with him. If he did it to her now, maybe he would feel better and then things that had gone wrong would go right. You could never tell. />
  Her face was flushed, and all the time she was grinning at him in a dirty way.

  Farr whispered something and she strained to catch it but couldn’t. “What the hell are you saying?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on up with me, kid,” she urged. “After, I’ll show you how to make a man out of yourself.”

  His head fell with a bang against the tabletop. His eyes were shut, and he wouldn’t move.

  “Imagine a guy your age who never made love,” Helen taunted.

  He answered nothing and she began cursing him, her face lit in livid anger. Finally she got up, a little unsteady on her feet. “Why don’t you go and drop dead?”

  He said he would.

  Farr walked again in the darkened streets. He stopped at the heavy wooden doors of the Catholic church. Pulling one open, he glanced hastily inside and saw the holy-water basin. He wondered what would happen if he went in and gargled a mouthful. A girl in a brown coat and purple bandanna came out of the church and Farr asked her when was confession.

  She looked up at him in fright and quickly said, “Saturday.”

  He thanked her and walked away. It was Monday.

  She ran after him and said she could arrange for him to see the priest if he wanted to.

  He said no, that he was not a Catholic.

  Though his coat reached to his ankles, his legs were cold. So were the soles of his feet. He walked as if he were dragging a burden. The burden was the way he felt. The good feeling had gone and this old one was heavier now than anything he remembered. He would not mind the cold so much if he could only get rid of this dismal heaviness. His brain felt like a rock. Still it grew heavier. That was the unaccountable thing. He wondered how heavy it could get. If it got any heavier, he would keel over in the street and nobody’d be able to lift him. They would all give up and leave him lying with his head sunk in asphalt.

  On the next street shone two green lamps on both sides of some stone steps leading into a dark and dirty building. It was a police station. Farr stood across the street from it, but nobody went in or came out. Finally it grew freezing cold. He blew into his fists, looked around to see if he was being followed, and then went in.

  He was grateful for the warmth. The sergeant sat at the desk writing. He was a bald-headed man with a bulbous nose, which he frequently scratched with his little finger. His second and third fingers had ink stains on them from a leaky fountain pen. The sergeant glanced up in surprise, and Farr did not care for his face.

  “What’s yours?” he said.

  Farr’s tongue was like a sash weight. Unable to speak, he hung his head.

  “Remove your hat.”

  Farr took it off.

  “Come to the point,” said the sergeant, scratching his nose. Farr at last confessed to a crime.

  “Such as what?” said the sergeant.

  Farr’s lips twitched and assumed odd shapes. “I killed somebody.”

  “Who, for instance?”

  “My father.”

  The sergeant’s incredulous look vanished. “Ah, that’s too bad.”

  He wrote Farr’s name down in a large ledger, blotted it, and told him to wait on a bench by the wall.

  “I got to locate a detective to talk to you, but as it happens nobody’s around just now. You picked suppertime to come in.”

  Farr sat on the bench with his hat on. After a while a heavyset man came through the door, carrying a paper bag and a pint container of coffee.

  “Say, Wolff,” called the sergeant.

  Wolff slowly turned around. He had broad, bent shoulders and a thick mustache. His large black hat was broad-brimmed.

  The sergeant pointed his pen at Farr. “A confession of murder.”

  Wolff’s eyebrows went up slightly. “Where’s Burns or Newman?”

  “Supper. You’re the only one that’s around right now.”

  The detective glanced uneasily at Farr. “Come on,” he said.

  Farr got up and followed him. The detective walked heavily up the wooden stairs. Halfway up he stopped, sighed inaudibly, and went up more slowly.

  “Hold this,” he said at the top of the stairs.

  Farr held the bag of food and the coffee. The hot container warmed his cold hand. Wolff. unlocked a door with a key, then took his supper from Farr, and they went inside. The church bell in the neighborhood bonged seven times.

  Wolff routinely frisked Farr. He sat down heavily at his desk, tore open the paper bag, and unwrapped his food. He had three meat-and-cheese sandwiches and a paper dish of cabbage salad which he ate with a small plastic fork that annoyed him. As he was eating he remembered the coffee and twisted the top off the container. His hand shook a little as he poured the steaming coffee into a white cup without a handle.

  He ate with his hat on. Farr held his in his lap. He enjoyed the warmth of the room and the peaceful sight of someone eating.

  “My first square today,” said Wolff. “Busy from morning.”

  Farr nodded.

  “One thing after another.”

  “I know.”

  Wolff, as he ate, kept his eyes fastened on Farr. “Take your coat off. It’s hot here.”

  “No, thanks.” He was now sorry he had come.

  The detective finished up quickly. He rolled the papers on his desk and what remained of the food into a ball and dumped it into the wastebasket. Then he got up and washed his hands in a closet sink. At his desk he lit a cigar, puffed with pleasure two or three times, put it to the side in an ashtray, and said, “What’s this confession?”

  Although Farr struggled with himself to speak, he couldn’t.

  Wolff. grew restless. “Murder, did somebody say?”

  Farr sighed deeply.

  “Your mother?” Wolff. asked sympathetically.

  “No, my father.”

  “Oh ho,” said Wolff.

  Farr gazed at the floor.

  The detective opened a black pocket notebook and found a pencil stub.

  “Name?” he said.

  “You mean mine?” asked Farr.

  “Yours—who else?”

  “My father’s.”

  “First yours.”

  “Farr, Edward.”

  “His?”

  “Herman J. Farr.”

  “Age of victim?”

  Farr tried to think. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know your own father’s age?”

  “No.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-nine, going on thirty.”

  “That you know?”

  Farr didn’t answer.

  Wolff wrote down something in the book.

  “What was his occupation?”

  “Upholsterer.”

  “And yours?”

  “None,” Farr said, in embarrassment.

  “Unemployed?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your regular work?”

  “I have none in particular.”

  “A jack of all trades.” Wolff broke the ash off in the tray and took another puff of the cigar. “Address?”

  “80 South Second.”

  “Your father too?”

  “Yes.”

  “That where the body is?”

  Farr nodded absently.

  The detective then slipped the notebook into his pocket.

  “What did you use to kill him with?”

  Farr paused, wet his dry lips, and said, “A blunt instrument.”

  “You don’t say? What kind of a blunt instrument?”

  “A window sash weight.”

  “What’d you do with it?”

  “I hid it.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “In the cellar where we live.”

  Wolff carefully tapped his cigar out in the ashtray and leaned forward. “So tell me,” he said, “why does a man kill his father?”

  Alarmed, Farr half rose from his chair.

  “Sit down,” said the detective.

  Fa
rr sat down.

  “I asked you why did you kill him?”

  Farr gnawed on his lip till it bled.

  “Come on, come on,” said Wolff, “we have to have the motive.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who then should know—I?”

  Farr tried frantically to think why. Because he had had nothing in his life and what he had done was a way of having something?

  “What did you do it for, I said,” Wolff asked sternly.

  “I had to—” Farr had risen.

  “What do you mean ‘had to’?”

  “I had no love for him. He ruined my life.”

  “Is that a reason to kill your father?”

  “Yes,” Farr shouted. “For that and everything else.”

  “What else?”

  “Leave me alone. Can’t you see I’m an unhappy man?”

  Wolff sat back in his chair. “You don’t say?”

  “Sarcasm won’t get you anyplace,” Farr cried angrily. “Be humble with suffering people.”

  “I don’t need any advice on how to run my profession.”

  “Try to remember a man is not a beast.” Trembling, Farr resumed his seat.

  “Are you a man?” Wolff asked slyly.

  “No, I have failed.”

  “Then you are a beast?”

  “Insofar as I am not a man.”

  They stared at each other. Wolff flattened his mustache with his fingertips. Suddenly he opened his drawer and took out a picture.

  “Do you recognize this woman?”

  Farr stared at the wrinkled face of an old crone. “No.”

  “She was raped and murdered on the top floor of an apartment house in your neighborhood.”

  Farr covered his ears with his hands.

  The detective laid the picture back in the drawer. He fished out another.

  “Here’s a boy aged about six or seven. He was brutally stabbed to death in an empty lot on South Eighth. Did you ever see him before?”

  He thrust the picture close to Farr’s face.

  When Farr looked into the boy’s innocent eyes he burst into tears.

  Wolff put the picture away. He pulled on the dead cigar, then examined it and threw it away.

  “Come on,” he said, tiredly rising.

  The cellar was full of violent presences. Farr went fearfully down the steps.

  Wolff flashed his light on the crisscrossed pipes overhead. “Which one?”