“A buyer,” Morris grunted, “will come next Purim.”
“Don’t be so smart. Karp telephoned him.”
“Karp,” he said in disgust. “Where he telephoned—the cheapskate?”
“Here.”
“When?”
“Yesterday. You were sleeping.”
“What did he told him?”
“For sale a store—yours, cheap.”
“What do you mean cheap?”
“The key is worth now nothing. For the stock and the fixtures that they are worth also nothing, maybe three thousand, maybe less.”
“I paid four.”
“Twenty-one years ago,” she said irritably. “So don’t sell, go in auction.”
“He wants the house too?”
“Karp don’t know. Maybe.”
“Big mouth. Imagine a man that they held him up four times in the last three years and he still don’t take in a telephone. What he says ain’t worth a cent. He promised me he wouldn’t put in a grocery around the corner, but what did he put?—a grocery. Why does he bring me buyers? Why didn’t he keep out the German around the corner?”
She sighed. “He tries to help you now because he feels sorry for you.”
“Who needs his sorrow?” Morris said. “Who needs him?”
“So why you didn’t have the sense to make out of your grocery a wine and liquor store when came out the licenses?”
“Who had cash for stock?”
“So if you don’t have, don’t talk.”
“A business for drunken bums.”
“A business is a business. What Julius Karp takes in next door in a day we don’t take in in two weeks.”
But Ida saw he was annoyed and changed the subject.
“I told you to oil the floor.”
“I forgot.”
“I asked you special. By now would be dry.”
“I will do later.”
“Later the customers will walk in the oil and make everything dirty.”
“What customers?” he shouted. “Who customers? Who comes in here?”
“Go,” she said quietly. “Go upstairs and sleep. I will oil myself.”
But he got out the oil can and mop and oiled the floor until the wood shone darkly. No one had come in.
She had prepared his soup. “Helen left this morning without breakfast.”
“She wasn’t hungry.”
“Something worries her.”
He said with sarcasm, “What worries her?” Meaning: the store, his health, that most of her meager wages went to keep up payments on the house; that she had wanted a college education but had got instead a job she disliked. Her father’s daughter, no wonder she didn’t feel like eating.
“If she will only get married,” Ida murmured.
“She will get.”
“Soon.” She was on the verge of tears.
He grunted.
“I don’t understand why she don’t see Nat Pearl anymore. All summer they went together like lovers.”
“A showoff.”
“He’ll be someday a rich lawyer.”
“I don’t like him.”
“Louis Karp also likes her. I wish she will give him a chance.”
“A stupe,” Morris said, “like the father.”
“Everybody is a stupe but not Morris Bober.”
He was staring out at the back yards.
“Eat already and go to sleep,” she said impatiently.
He finished the soup and went upstairs. The going up was easier than coming down. In the bedroom, sighing, he drew down the black window shades. He was half asleep, so pleasant was the anticipation. Sleep was his one true refreshment; it excited him to go to sleep. Morris took off his apron, tie and trousers, and laid them on a chair. Sitting at the edge of the sagging wide bed, he unlaced his misshapen shoes and slid under the cold covers in shirt, long underwear and white socks. He nudged his eye into the pillow and waited to grow warm. He crawled toward sleep. But upstairs Tessie Fuso was running the vacuum cleaner, and though the grocer tried to blot the incident out of his mind, he remembered Nick’s visit to the German and on the verge of sleep felt bad.
He recalled the bad times he had lived through, but now times were worse than in the past; now they were impossible. His store was always a marginal one, up today, down tomorrow—as the wind blew. Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered—sometimes it seemed to take forever—went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down. When he had first bought the grocery it was all right for the neighborhood; it had got worse as the neighborhood had. Yet even a year ago, staying open seven days a week, sixteen hours a day, he could still eke out a living. What kind of living?—a living; you lived. Now, though he toiled the same hard hours, he was close to bankruptcy, his patience torn. In the past when bad times came he had somehow lived through them, and when good times returned, they more or less returned to him. But now, since the appearance of H. Schmitz across the street ten months ago, all times were bad.
Last year a broken tailor, a poor man with a sick wife, had locked up his shop and gone away, and from the minute of the store’s emptiness Morris had felt a gnawing anxiety. He went with hesitation to Karp, who owned the building, and asked him to please keep out another grocery. In this kind of neighborhood one was more than enough. If another squeezed in they would both starve. Karp answered that the neighborhood was better than Morris gave it credit (for schnapps, thought the grocer), but he promised he would look for another tailor or maybe a shoemaker, to rent to. He said so but the grocer didn’t believe him. Yet weeks went by and the store stayed empty. Though Ida pooh-poohed his worries, Morris could not overcome his underlying dread. Then one day, as he daily expected, there appeared a sign in the empty store window, announcing the coming of a new fancy delicatessen and grocery.
Morris ran to Karp. “What did you do to me?”
The liquor dealer said with a one-shouldered shrug, “You saw how long stayed empty the store. Who will pay my taxes? But don’t worry,” he added, “he’ll sell more delicatessen but you’ll sell more groceries. Wait, you’ll see he’ll bring you in customers.”
Morris groaned; he knew his fate.
Yet as the days went by, the store still sitting empty—emptier, he found himself thinking maybe the new business would never materialize. Maybe the man had changed his mind. It was possible he had seen how poor the neighborhood was and would not attempt to open the new place. Morris wanted to ask Karp if he had guessed right but could not bear to humiliate himself further.
Often after he had locked his grocery at night, he would go secretly around the corner and cross the quiet street. The empty store, dark and deserted, was one door to the left of the corner drugstore; and if no one was looking the grocer would peer through its dusty window, trying to see through shadows whether the emptiness had changed. For two months it stayed the same, and every night he went away reprieved. Then one time—after he saw that Karp was, for once, avoiding him—he spied a web of shelves sprouting from the rear wall, and that shattered the hope he had climbed into.
In a few days the shelves stretched many arms along the other walls, and soon the whole tiered and layered place glowed with new paint. Morris told himself to stay away but he could not help coming nightly to inspect, appraise, then guess the damage, in dollars, to himself. Each night as he looked, in his mind he destroyed what had been built, tried to make of it nothing, but the growth was too quick. Every day the place flowered with new fixtures—streamlined counters, the latest refrigerator, fluorescent lights, a fruit stall, a chromium cash register; then from the wholesalers arrived a mountain of cartons and wooden boxes of all sizes, and one night there appeared in the white light a stranger, a gaunt German with a German pompadour, who spent the silent night hours, a dead cigar stuck in his teeth, packing out symmetrical rows of brightly labeled cans, jars, gleaming bottles. Though Morris hated the new store, in a curious way he loved it too, so that some
times as he entered his own old-fashioned place of business, he could not stand the sight of it; and now he understood why Nick Fuso had that morning run around the corner and crossed the street—to taste the newness of the place and be waited on by Heinrich Schmitz, an energetic German dressed like a doctor, in a white duck jacket. And that was where many of his other customers had gone, and stayed, so that his own poor living was cut in impossible half.
Morris tried hard to sleep but couldn’t and grew restless in bed. After another quarter of an hour he decided to dress and go downstairs, but there drifted into his mind, with ease and no sorrow, the form and image of his boy Ephraim, gone so long from him, and he fell deeply and calmly asleep.
Helen Bober squeezed into a subway seat between two women and was on the last page of a chapter when a man dissolved in front of her and another appeared; she knew without looking that Nat Pearl was standing there. She thought she would go on reading, but couldn’t, and shut her book.
“Hello, Helen.” Nat touched a gloved hand to a new hat. He was cordial but as usual held back something—his future. He carried a fat law book, so she was glad to be protected with a book of her own. But not enough protected, for her hat and coat felt suddenly shabby, a trick of the mind, because on her they would still do.
“Don Quixote”?
She nodded.
He seemed respectful, then said in an undertone, “I haven’t seen you a long time. Where’ve you been keeping yourself?”
She blushed under her clothes.
“Did I offend you in some way or other?”
Both of the women beside her seemed stolidly deaf. One held a rosary in her heavy hand.
“No.” The offense was hers against herself.
“So what’s the score?” Nat’s voice was low, his gray eyes annoyed.
“No score,” she murmured.
“How so?”
“You’re you, I’m me.”
This he considered a minute, then remarked, “I haven’t much of a head for oracles.”
But she felt she had said enough.
He tried another way. “Betty asks for you.”
“Give her my best.” She had not meant it but this sounded funny because they all lived on the same block, separated by one house.
Tight-jawed, he opened his book. She returned to hers, hiding her thoughts behind the antics of a madman until memory overthrew him and she found herself ensnared in scenes of summer that she would gladly undo, although she loved the season; but how could you undo what you had done again in the fall, unwillingly willing? Virginity she thought she had parted with without sorrow, yet was surprised by torments of conscience, or was it disappointment at being valued under her expectations? Nat Pearl, handsome, cleft-chinned, gifted, ambitious, had wanted without too much trouble a lay and she, half in love, had obliged and regretted. Not the loving, but that it had taken her so long to realize how little he wanted. Not her, Helen Bober.
Why should he?—magna cum laude, Columbia, now in his second year at law school, she only a high school graduate with a year’s evening college credit mostly in lit; he with first-rate prospects, also rich friends he had never bothered to introduce her to; she as poor as her name sounded, with little promise of a better future. She had more than once asked herself if she had meant by her favors to work up a claim on him. Always she denied it. She had wanted, admittedly, satisfaction, but more than that—respect for the giver of what she had to give, had hoped desire would become more than just that. She wanted, simply, a future in love. Enjoyment she had somehow had, felt very moving the freedom of fundamental intimacy with a man. Though she wished for more of the same, she wanted it without aftermath of conscience, or pride, or sense of waste. So she promised herself next time it would go the other way; first mutual love, then loving, harder maybe on the nerves, but easier in memory. Thus she had reasoned, until one night in September, when coming up to see his sister Betty, she had found herself alone in the house with Nat and had done again what she had promised herself she wouldn’t. Afterward she fought self-hatred. Since then, to this day, without telling him why, she had avoided Nat Pearl.
Two stations before their stop, Helen shut her book, got up in silence and left the train. On the platform, as the train moved away, she caught a glimpse of Nat standing before her empty seat, calmly reading. She walked on, lacking, wanting, not wanting, not happy.
Coming up the subway steps, she went into the park by a side entrance, and despite the sharp wind and her threadbare coat, took the long way home. The leafless trees left her with unearned sadness. She mourned the long age before spring and feared loneliness in winter. Wishing she hadn’t come, she left the park, searching the faces of strangers although she couldn’t stand their stares. She went quickly along the Parkway, glancing with envy into the lighted depths of private houses that were, for no reason she could give, except experience, not for her. She promised herself she would save every cent possible and register next fall for a full program at NYU, night.
When she reached her block, a row of faded yellow brick houses, two stories squatting on ancient stores, Sam Pearl, stifling a yawn, was reaching into his corner candy store window to put on the lamp. He snapped the string and the dull glow from the fly-specked globe fell upon her. Helen quickened her step. Sam, always sociable, a former cabbie, bulky, wearing bifocals and chewing gum, beamed at her but she pretended no see. Most of the day he sat hunched over dope sheets spread out on the soda fountain counter, smoking as he chewed gum, making smeary marks with a pencil stub under horses’ names. He neglected the store; his wife Goldie was the broad-backed one, yet she did not much complain, because Sam’s luck with the nags was exceptional and he had nicely supported Nat in college until the scholarships started rolling in.
Around the corner, through the many-bottled window that blinked in neon “KARP wines and liquors,” she glimpsed paunchy Julius Karp, with bushy eyebrows and an ambitious mouth, blowing imaginary dust off a bottle as he slipped a deft fifth of something into a paper bag, while Louis, slightly popeyed son and heir, looking up from clipping to the quick his poor fingernails, smiled amiably upon a sale. The Karps, Pearls and Bobers, representing attached houses and stores, but otherwise detachment, made up the small Jewish segment of this gentile community. They had somehow, her father first, then Karp, later Pearl, drifted together here where no other Jews dwelt, except on the far fringes of the neighborhood. None of them did well and were too poor to move elsewhere until Karp, who with a shoe store that barely made him a living, got the brilliant idea after Prohibition gurgled down the drain and liquor licenses were offered to the public, to borrow cash from a white-bearded rich uncle and put in for one. To everybody’s surprise he got the license, though Karp, when asked how, winked a heavy-lidded eye and answered nothing. Within a short time after cheap shoes had become expensive bottles, in spite of the poor neighborhood—or maybe because of it, Helen supposed—he became astonishingly successful and retired his overweight wife from the meager railroad flat above the store to a big house on the Parkway—from which she hardly ever stepped forth—the house complete with two-car garage and Mercury; and at the same time as Karp changed his luck—to hear her father tell it—he became wise without brains.
The grocer, on the other hand, had never altered his fortune, unless degrees of poverty meant alteration, for luck and he were, if not natural enemies, not good friends. He labored long hours, was the soul of honesty—he could not escape his honesty, it was bedrock; to cheat would cause an explosion in him, yet he trusted cheaters—coveted nobody’s nothing and always got poorer. The harder he worked—his toil was a form of time devouring time—the less he seemed to have. He was Morris Bober and could be nobody more fortunate. With that name you had no sure sense of property, as if it were in your blood and history not to possess, or if by some miracle to own something, to do so on the verge of loss. At the end you were sixty and had less than at thirty. It was, she thought, surely a talent.
Helen remove
d her hat as she entered the grocery. “Me,” she called, as she had from childhood. It meant that whoever was sitting in the back should sit and not suddenly think he was going to get rich.
Morris awoke, soured by the long afternoon sleep. He dressed, combed his hair with a broken comb and trudged downstairs, a heavy-bodied man with sloping shoulders and bushy gray hair in need of a haircut. He came down with his apron on. Although he felt chilly he poured out a cup of cold coffee, and backed against the radiator, slowly sipped it. Ida sat at the table, reading.
“Why you let me sleep so long?” the grocer complained.
She didn’t answer.
“Yesterday or today’s paper?”
“Yesterday.”
He rinsed the cup and set it on the top of the gas range. In the store he rang up “no sale” and took a nickel out of the drawer. Morris lifted the lid of the cash register, struck a match on the underside of the counter, and holding the flame cupped in his palm, peered at the figure of his earnings. Ida had taken in three dollars. Who could afford a paper?
Nevertheless he went for one, doubting the small pleasure he would get from it. What was so worth reading about the world? Through Karp’s window, as he passed, he saw Louis waiting on a customer while four others crowded the counter. Der oilem iz a goilem. Morris took the Forward from the newsstand and dropped a nickel into the cigar box. Sam Pearl, working over a green racing sheet, gave him a wave of his hammy hand. They never bothered to talk. What did he know about race horses? What did the other know of the tragic quality of life? Wisdom flew over his hard head.
The grocer returned to the rear of his store and sat on the couch, letting the diminishing light in the yard fall upon the paper. He read nearsightedly, with eyes stretched wide, but his thoughts would not let him read long. He put down the newspaper.
The Assistant Page 2