The People

by Bernard Malamud

  Farr pointed.

  The detective brushed aside some cobwebs and felt along the pipe with his fingers. He found the loose asbestos and from the wool inside plucked forth the sash weight.

  Farr audibly sucked in his breath.

  In the yellow glow of the hall lamp upstairs the detective took the sash weight out of the bag and examined it. Farr shut his eyes.

  “What floor do you live on?”

  “Fourth.”

  Wolff looked up uneasily. They trudged up the stairs, Farr leading.

  “Not so fast,” said Wolff.

  Farr slowed down. As they passed the third-floor window he looked out to sea, but all was dark. On the next floor he stopped before a warped door with a top panel of frosted glass.

  “In here,” Farr said at last.

  “Have you got the key?”

  Farr turned the knob and the door fell open, bumping loudly against the wall. The corridor to the kitchen was black. The detective’s light pierced it, lighting up a wooden table and two wooden chairs.

  “Go on in.”

  “I’m afraid,” whispered Farr.

  “Go on, I said.”

  He stepped reluctantly forward.

  “Where is he?” said the detective.

  “In the bedroom.” He spoke hoarsely.

  “Show me.”

  Farr led him through a small windowless room containing a cot and some books and magazines on the floor. Wolff’s light shone on him.

  “In there.” Farr pointed to the door.

  “Open it.”

  “No.”

  “Open, I said.”

  “For godsake, don’t make me.”

  “Open.”

  Farr thought quickly: in the dark there he would upset the detective and make a hasty escape into the street.

  “For the last time I said open.”

  Farr pushed the door and it squeaked open on its hinges. The long narrow bedroom was heavy with darkness. Wolff’s light hit the metal headboard of an old double bed, sunken in the middle.

  A groan rose from the bed. Farr groaned too, his hair on end.

  “Murder,” said the groan, “terrible, terrible.”

  A white bloodless face rose into the light, old and staring.

  “Who’s there?” cried Wolff.

  “Oh, my dreams, my dreams,” wept the old man, “I dreamed I was bein murdered.”

  Flinging aside the worn quilt, he slid out of bed and hopped in bare feet on the cold floor, skinny in his long underwear. He groped toward them.

  Farr whispered wild things to himself.

  The detective found the light chain and pulled it.

  The old man saw the stranger in the room. “And who are you, might I ask?”

  “Theodore Wolff, detective from the Sixty-second Precinct.” He flashed his shield.

  Herman Farr blinked in surprise and shame. He hastily got into the pants that had been draped across a chair and, stepping into misshapen slippers, raised suspenders over his shoulders.

  “I must’ve overslept my nap. I usually have supper cookin at six and we eat half past six, him and I.” He suddenly asked, “What are you doin here if you’re a detective?”

  “I came here with your son.”

  “He didn’t do anything wrong?” asked the old man, frightened.

  “I don’t know. That’s what I came to find out.”

  “Come into the kitchen,” said Herman Farr. “The light’s better.”

  They went into the kitchen. Herman Farr got a third chair from the bedroom and they sat around the wooden table, Farr waxen and fatigued, his father gaunt and bony-faced, with loose skin sprouting gray stubble, and on the long side of the table, the heavyset Wolff, wearing his black hat.

  “Where are my glasses?” complained Herman Farr. He got up and found them on a shelf above the gas stove. The lenses were thick and magnified his watery eyes.

  “Until now I couldn’t tell the nature of your face,” he said to the detective.

  Wolff grunted.

  “Now what’s the trouble here?” said Herman Farr, staring at his son.

  Farr sneered at him.

  The detective removed the sash weight from the paper bag and laid it on the table. Farr gazed at it as if it were a snake uncoiling.

  “Ever see this before?”

  Herman Farr stared stupidly at the sash weight, one hand clawing the back of the other.

  “Where’d you get it?” he cried in a quavering voice.

  “Answer my question first.”

  “Yes. It belongs to me, though I wish to Christ I had never seen it.”

  “It’s yours?” said Wolff.

  “That’s right. I had it hid in my trunk.”

  “What’s this stain on it here?”

  Farr gazed in fascination where the detective pointed.

  Herman Farr said he didn’t know.

  “It’s a bloodstain,” Wolff said.

  “Ah, so it is,” sighed Herman Farr, his mouth trembling. “I’ll tell you the truth. My wife—may God rest her soul—once tried to hit me with it.”

  Farr laughed out loud.

  “Is this your blood?” asked Wolff.

  “No, by the livin mercy. It’s hers.”

  They were all astonished.

  “Are you telling the truth?” said Wolff. sternly.

  “I’d give my soul if I only wasn’t.”

  “Did you hit her with it?”

  Herman Farr lifted his glasses and with a clotted yellow handkerchief wiped the tears from his flowing eyes.

  “A sin is never lost. Once in a drunken fit, enraged as I was by my long-lastin poverty, I swung it at her and opened a wound on her head. The blood is hers. I could never blame her for wantin to kill me with it. She tried it one night when I was at my supper, but the thing fell out of her hand and smashed the plate. I nearly jumped out of my shoes. Seein it fall I realized the extent of my wickedness and kept the sash weight hid away at the bottom of my trunk as a memory of my sins.”

  Wolff scratched a match under the table, paused, and shook it out. Farr smoked the last cigarette in his crushed pack. The old man wept into his dirty handkerchief.

  “I have deserved a violent endin of my life if anybody ever did. In my younger days I was a beast—cruel, and a weaklin. I treated them both very badly.” He nodded to Farr. “As he more than once said it, I killed her a little every day. Many times—may the livin God keep torturin me for it—I beat her black and blue, once bloodyin her nose on a frosty morning when she complained of the cold, and another time pushin her down a flight of stairs. As for him, I more than once skinned his back with my belt buckle.”

  Farr crushed his cigarette and snapped it into the sink.

  Wolff then lit a cigar and puffed slowly.

  The old man wept openly. “This young man is the livin witness of my terrible deeds, but he don’t know half the depths of my sufferin since that poor soul left this world, or the terrible nature of my nightly dreams.”

  “When did she die?” the detective asked.

  “Sixteen years ago, and he has never forgiven me, carryin his hatred like a fire in his heart, although she, good soul, forgave me in his presence at the time of her last illness. ‘Herman,’ she said, ‘I’m goin to a place where I would be ill at ease if I didn’t forgive you,’ and with that she went to her peace. But my son has hated me throughout the years, and I can’t look at him without seein it in his eyes. ‘Tis true, he has sometimes been kind to a helpless old man, and when my arthritis was so bad that I couldn’t move, he more than once brought a plate of soup to my bed and fed me with a spoon, but in the depths of his soul my change has made no difference to him and he hates me now as he did then, though I’ve repented on sore knees a thousand times. I have often said to him, ‘What’s done is done, and judge me for what I have since become’—for he is an intelligent man and reads books you and I never heard of—but on this thing he won’t yield or be reasoned with.”

  “Did
he ever try to hurt you?”

  “No more than to nag or snarl at me. No, for all he does nowadays is to sit alone in his room and read and reflect, although his learnin doesn’t in the least unbend his mind to me. Of course I don’t approve him givin up his job, because with these puffed and crippled hands I am lucky when I can work half time, but there are all sorts in the world and some have greater need for reflection than others. He has been inclined in that direction since he was a lad, although I did not notice his quiet and solitary ways until after he had returned from the army.”

  “What did he do then?” said Wolff.

  “He worked for a year at his old job, then gave it up and became a hospital orderly. But he couldn’t stand it long and he quit and stayed home.”

  Farr looked out the dark fire-escape window and saw himself walking along the dreary edge of a desolate beach, the wind wailing at his feet, driftwood taking on frightening shapes, and his footsteps fading behind, to appear on the ground before him as he walked along the vast, silent shore …

  Wolff rubbed the cigar out against the sole of his shoe. “You want to know why I’m here?” he said to Herman Farr.

  “Yes.”

  “He came to the station house around suppertime and made a statement that he had murdered you with this sash weight.”

  The old man groaned. “Not that I don’t deserve the fate.”

  “He thought he actually did it,” Wolff said.

  “It’s his overactive imagination on account of not gettin any exercise to speak of. I’ve told him that many times but he don’t listen to what I say. I can’t describe to you the things he talks about in his sleep. Many a night they keep me awake.”

  “Do you see this sash weight?” Wolff asked Farr.

  “I do,” he said, with eyes shut.

  “Do you still maintain that you hit or attempted to hit your father with it?”

  Farr stared rigidly at the wall. He thought, If I answer I’ll go crazy. I mustn’t. I mustn’t.

  “He thinks he did,” Wolff said. “You can see he’s insane.”

  Herman Farr cried out as though he had been stabbed in the throat.

  Farr shouted, “What about that boy I killed? You showed me his picture.”

  “That boy was my son,” Wolff said. “He died ten years ago of terrible sickness.”

  Farr rose and thrust forth his wrists.

  The detective shook his head. “No cuffs. We’ll just call the ambulance.”

  Farr wildly swung his fist, catching the detective on the jaw. Wolff’s chair toppled and he fell heavily to the floor. Amid the confusion and shouting by Herman Farr that he was the one who deserved hanging, Farr fled down the ill-lighted stairs with murder in his heart. In the street he flung his coins into the sky.

  1953

  The Elevator

  ELEONORA WAS an Umbrian girl whom the portiere’s wife had brought up to the Agostinis’ first-floor apartment after their two unhappy experiences with Italian maids, not long after they had arrived in Rome from Chicago. She was about twenty-three, thin, and with bent bony shoulders which she embarrassedly characterized as gobbo—hunchbacked. But she was not unattractive and had an interesting profile, George Agostini thought. Her full face was not so interesting; like the portinaia’s, also an Umbrian, it was too broad and round, and her left brown eye was slightly wider than her right. It also looked sadder than her right eye.

  She was an active girl, always moving in her noisy slippers at a half trot across the marble floors of the furnished two-bedroom apartment, getting things done without having to be told, and handling the two children very well. After the second girl was let go, George had wished they didn’t have to be bothered with a full-time live-in maid. He had suggested that maybe Grace ought to go back to sharing the signora’s maid—their landlady across the hall—for three hours a day, paying her on an hourly basis, as they had when they first moved in after a rough month of apartment hunting. But when George mentioned this, Grace made a gesture of tearing her red hair, so he said nothing more. It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to have the girl—she certainly needed one with all the time it took to shop in six or seven stores instead of one supermarket, and she was even without a washing machine, with all the kids’ things to do; but George felt he wasn’t comfortable with a maid always around. He didn’t like people waiting on him, or watching him eat. George was heavy, and sensitive about it. He also didn’t like her standing back to let him enter a room first. He didn’t want her saying “Comanda” the minute he spoke her name. Furthermore he wasn’t happy about the tiny maid’s room the girl lived in, or her sinkless bathroom, with its cramped sitzbath and no water heater. Grace, whose people had always been much better off than his, said everybody in Italy had maids and he would get used to it. George hadn’t got used to the first two girls, but he did find that Eleonora bothered him less. He liked her more as a person and felt sorry for her. She looked as though she had more on her back than her bent shoulders.

  One afternoon about a week and a half after Eleonora had come to them, when George arrived home from the FAO office where he worked, during the long lunch break, Grace said the maid was in her room crying.

  “What for?” George said, worried.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t you ask her?”

  “Sure I did, but all I could gather was that she’s had a sad life. You’re the linguist around here, why don’t you ask her?”

  “What are you so annoyed about?”

  “Because I feel like a fool, frankly, not knowing what it’s all about.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “She came out of the hall crying, about an hour ago,” Grace said. “I had sent her up to the roof with a bundle of wash to do in one of the tubs up there instead of our bathtub, so she doesn’t have to lug the heavy wet stuff up to the lines on the roof but can hang it out right away. Anyway, she wasn’t gone five minutes before she was back crying, and that was when she answered me about her sad life. I wanted to tell her I have a sad life too. We’ve been in Rome close to two months and I haven’t even been able to see St. Peter’s. When will I ever see anything?”

  “Let’s talk about her,” George said. “Do you know what happened in the hall?”

  “I told you I didn’t. After she came back, I went down to the ground floor to talk to the portinaia—she has some smattering of English—and she told me that Eleonora had been married but had lost her husband. He died or something when she was eighteen. Then she had a baby by another guy who didn’t stay around long enough to see if he recognized it, and that, I suppose, is why she finds life so sad.”

  “Did the portinaia say whether the kid is still alive?” George asked.

  “Yes. She keeps it in a convent school.”

  “Maybe that’s what got her down,” he suggested. “She thinks of her kid being away from her and then feels bad.”

  “So she starts to cry in the hall?”

  “Why not in the hall? Why not anywhere so long as you feel like crying? Maybe I ought to talk to her.”

  Grace nodded. Her face was flushed, and George knew she was troubled.

  He went into the corridor and knocked on the door of the maid’s room. “Permesso,” George said.

  “Prego.” Eleonora had been lying on the bed but was respectfully on her feet when George entered. He could see she had been crying. Her eyes were red and her face pale. She looked scared, and George’s throat went dry.

  “Eleonora, I am sorry to see you like this,” he said in Italian. “Is there something either my wife or I can do to help you?”

  “No, Signore,” she said quietly.

  “What happened to you out in the hall?”

  Her eyes glistened but she held back the tears. “Nothing. One feels like crying, so she cries. Do these things have a reason?”

  “Are you satisfied with conditions here?” George asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “If there is something we can
do for you, I want you to tell us.”

  “Please don’t trouble yourself about me.” She lifted the bottom of her skirt, at the same time bending her head to dry her eyes on it. Her bare legs were hairy but shapely.

  “No trouble at all,” George said. He closed the door softly.

  “Let her rest,” he said to Grace.

  “Damn! Just when I have to go out.”

  But in a few minutes Eleonora came out and went on with her work in the kitchen. They said nothing more and neither did she. Then at three George left for the office, and Grace put on her hat and went off to her Italian class and then to St. Peter’s.

  That night when George got home from work, Grace called him into their bedroom and said she now knew what had created all the commotion that afternoon. First the signora, after returning from an appointment with her doctor, had bounded in from across the hall, and Grace had gathered from the hot stew the old woman was in that she was complaining about their maid. The portinaia then happened to come up with the six o’clock mail, and the signora laced into her for bringing an inferior type of maid into the house. Finally, when the signora had left, the portinaia told Grace that the old lady had been the one who had made Eleonora cry. She had apparently forbidden the girl to use the elevator. She would listen behind the door, and as soon as she heard someone putting the key into the elevator lock, she would fling open her door, and if it was Eleonora, as she had suspected, she would cry out, “The key is not for you. The key is not for you.” She would stand in front of the elevator, waving her arms to prevent her from entering. “Use the stairs,” she cried, “the stairs are for walking. There is no need to fly, or God would have given you wings.”

  “Anyway,” Grace went on, “Eleonora must have been outwitting her or something, because what she would do, according to the portinaia, was go upstairs to the next floor and call the elevator from there. But today the signora got suspicious and followed Eleonora up the stairs. She gave her a bad time up there. When she blew in here before, Eleonora got so scared that she ran to her room and locked the door. The signora said she would have to ask us not to give our girl the key anymore. She shook her keys at me.”

  “What did you say after that?” George asked.