The Assistant

by Bernard Malamud

  Thus he settled it in his mind only to find himself remorseful. He groaned, scratching the backs of his hands with his thick nails. Sometimes he felt short of breath and sweated profusely. He talked aloud to himself when he was alone, usually when he was shaving or in the toilet, exhorted himself to be honest. Yet he felt a curious pleasure in his misery, as he had at times in the past when he was doing something he knew he oughtn’t to, so he kept on dropping quarters into his pants pocket.

  One night he felt very bad about all the wrong he was doing and vowed to set himself straight. If I could do one right thing, he thought, maybe that would start me off; then he thought if he could get the gun and get rid of it he would at least feel better. He left the grocery after supper and wandered restlessly in the foggy streets, feeling cramped in the chest from his long days in the store and because his life hadn’t changed much since he had come here. As he passed by the cemetery, he tried to keep out of his mind the memory of the holdup but it kept coming back in. He saw himself sitting with Ward Minogue in the parked car, waiting for Karp to come out of the grocery, but when he did his store lights went out and he hid in the back among the bottles. Ward said to drive quick around the block so they would flush the Jew out, and he would slug him on the sidewalk and take his fat wallet away; but when they got back, Karp’s car was gone with him in it, and Ward cursed him into an early grave. Frank said Karp had beat it, so they ought to scram, but Ward sat there with heartburn, watching, with his small eyes, the grocery store, the one lit place on the block besides the candy store on the corner.

  “No,” Frank urged, “it’s just a little joint, I got my doubts if they took in thirty bucks today.”

  “Thirty is thirty,” Ward said. “I don’t care if it’s Karp or Bober, a Jew is a Jew.”

  “Why not the candy store?”

  Ward made a face. “I can’t stand penny candy.”

  “How do you know his name?” asked Frank.

  “Who?”

  “The Jew grocer.”

  “I used to go to school with his daughter. She has a nice ass.”

  “Then if that’s so, he will recognize you.”

  “Not with a rag around my snoot, and I will rough up my voice. He ain’t seen me for eight or nine years. I was a skinny kid then.”

  “Have it your way. I will keep the car running.”

  “Come in with me,” Ward said. “The block is dead. Nobody will expect a stickup in this dump.”

  But Frank hesitated. “I thought you said Karp was the one you were out after?”

  “I will take Karp some other time. Come on.”

  Frank put on his cap and crossed the car tracks with Ward Minogue. “It’s your funeral,” he said, but it was really his own.

  He remembered thinking as they went into the store, a Jew is a Jew, what difference does it make? Now he thought, I held him up because he was a Jew. What the hell are they to me so that I gave them credit for it?

  But he didn’t know the answer and walked faster, from time to time glancing through the spiked iron fence at the shrouded gravestones. Once he felt he was being followed and his heart picked up a hard beat. He hurried past the cemetery and turned right on the first street after it, hugging the stoops of the stone houses as he went quickly down the dark street. When he reached the poolroom he felt relieved.

  Pop’s poolroom was a dreary four-table joint, owned by a glum old Italian with a blue-veined bald head and droopy hands, who sat close to his cash register.

  “Seen Ward yet?” Frank said.

  Pop pointed to the rear where Ward Minogue, in his fuzzy black hat and a bulky overcoat, was practicing shots alone at a table. Frank watched him place a black ball at a corner pocket and aim a white at it. Ward leaned tensely forward, his face strained, a dead butt hanging from his sick mouth. He shot but missed. He banged his cue on the floor.

  Frank had drifted past the players at the other tables. When Ward looked up and saw him, his eyes lit with fear. The fear drained after he recognized who it was. But his pimply face was covered with sweat.

  He spat his butt to the floor. “What have you got on your feet, you bastard, gumshoes?”

  “I didn’t want to spoil your shot.”

  “Anyway you did.”

  “I’ve been looking for you about a week.”

  “I was on my vacation.” Ward smiled in the corner of his mouth.

  “On a drunk?”

  Ward put his hand to his chest and brought up a belch. “I wish to hell it was. Somebody tipped my old man I was around here, so I hid out for a while. I had a rough time. My heartburn is acting up.” He hung up his cue, then wiped his face with a dirty handkerchief.

  “Why don’t you go to a doctor?” Frank said.

  “The hell with them.”

  “Some medicine might help you.”

  “What will help me is if my goddam father drops dead.”

  “I want to talk to you, Ward,” Frank said in a low voice.

  “So talk.”

  Frank nodded toward the players at the next table.

  “Come out in the yard,” Ward said. “I got something I want to say to you.”

  Frank followed him out the rear door into a small enclosed back yard with a wooden bench against the building. A weak bulb shone down on them from the top of the doorjamb.

  Ward sat down on the bench and lit a cigarette. Frank did the same, from his own pack. He puffed but got no pleasure from the butt, so he threw it away.

  “Sit down,” said Ward.

  Frank sat on the bench. Even in the fog he stinks, he thought.

  “What do you want me for?” Ward asked, his small eyes restless.

  “I want my gun, Ward. Where is it?”

  “What for?”

  “I want to throw it in the ocean.”

  Ward snickered. “Cat got your nuts?”

  “I don’t want some dick coming around and asking me do I own it.”

  “I thought you said you bought the rod off a fence.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then nobody’s got a record of it, so what are you scared of?”

  “If you lost it,” Frank said, “they trace them even without a record.”

  “I won’t lose it,” Ward said. After a minute he ground his cigarette into the dirt. “I will give it back to you after we do this job I have on my mind.”

  Frank looked at him. “What kind of a job?”

  “Karp. I want to stick him up.”

  “Why Karp?—there are bigger liquor stores.”

  “I hate that Jew son of a bitch and his popeyed Louis. When I was a kid all I had to do was go near banjo eyes and they would complain to my old man and get me beat up.”

  “They would recognize you if you go in there.”

  “Bober didn’t. I will use a handkerchief and wear some / different clothes. Tomorrow I will go out and pick up a car. All you got to do is drive and I will make the heist.”

  “You better stay away from that block,” Frank warned. “Somebody might recognize you.”

  Ward moodily rubbed his chest. “All right, you sold me. We will go somewheres else.”

  “Not with me,” Frank said.

  “Think it over.”

  “I’ve had all I want.”

  Ward showed his disgust. “The minute I saw you I knew you would puke all over.”

  Frank didn’t answer.

  “Don’t act so innocent,” Ward said angrily. “You’re hot, the same as me.”

  “I know,” Frank said.

  “I slugged him because he was lying where he hid the rest of the dough,” Ward argued.

  “He didn’t hide it. It’s a poor, lousy store.”

  “I guess you know all about that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can the crud. I know you been working there.”

  Frank drew a breath. “You following me again, Ward?” Ward smiled. “I followed you one night after you left the poolroom. I found out you were working f
or a Jew and living on bird crap.”

  Frank slowly got up. “I felt sorry for him after you slugged him, so I went back to give him a hand while he was in a weak condition. But I won’t be staying there long.”

  “That was real sweet of you. I suppose you gave him back the lousy seven and a half bucks that was your part of the take?”

  “I put it back in the cash register. I told the Mrs the business was getting better.”

  “I never thought I would meet up with a goddam Salvation Army soldier.”

  “I did it to quiet my conscience,” Frank said.

  Ward rose. “That ain’t your conscience you are worried about.”

  “No?”

  “It’s something else. I hear those Jew girls make nice ripe lays.”

  Frank went back without his gun.

  Helen was with her mother as Ida counted the cash. Frank stood behind the counter, cleaning his fingernails with his jackknife blade, waiting for them to leave so he could close up.

  “I think I’ll take a hot shower before I go to bed,” Helen said to her mother. “I’ve felt chilled all night.”

  “Good night,” Ida said to Frank. “I left five dollars change for the morning.”

  “Good night,” said Frank.

  They left by the rear door and he heard them go up the stairs. Frank closed the store and went into the back. He thumbed through tomorrow’s News, then got restless.

  After a while he went into the store and listened at the side door; he unlatched the lock, snapped on the cellar light, closed the cellar door behind him so no light would leak out into the hall, then quietly descended the stairs.

  He found the air shaft where an old unused dumb-waiter stood, pushed the dusty box back and gazed up the vertical shaft. It was pitch-dark. Neither the Bobers’ bathroom window nor the Fusos’ showed any light.

  Frank struggled against himself but not for long. Shoving the dumb-waiter back as far as it would go, he squeezed into the shaft and then boosted himself up on top of the box. His heart shook him with its beating.

  When his eyes got used to the dark he saw that her bathroom window was only a couple of feet above his head. He felt along the wall as high as he could reach and touched a narrow ledge around the air shaft. He thought he could anchor himself on it and see into the bathroom.

  But if you do it, he told himself, you will suffer.

  Though his throat hurt and his clothes were drenched in sweat, the excitement of what he might see forced him to go up.

  Crossing himself, Frank grabbed both of the dumb-waiter ropes and slowly pulled himself up, praying the pulley at the skylight wouldn’t squeak too much.

  A light went on over his head.

  Holding his breath, he crouched motionless, clinging to the swaying ropes. Then the bathroom window was shut with a bang. For a while he couldn’t move, the strength gone out of him. He thought he might lose his grip and fall, and he thought of her opening the bathroom window and seeing him lying at the bottom of the shaft in a broken, filthy heap.

  It was a mistake to do it, he thought.

  But she might be in the shower before he could get a look at her, so, trembling, he began again to pull himself up. In a few minutes he was straddling the ledge, holding onto the ropes to steady himself yet keep his full weight off the wood.

  Leaning forward, though not too far, he could see through the uncurtained crossed sash window into the old-fashioned bathroom. Helen was there looking with sad eyes at herself in the mirror. He thought she would stand there forever, but at last she unzippered her housecoat, stepping out of it.

  He felt a throb of pain at her nakedness, an overwhelming desire to love her, at the same time an awareness of loss, of never having had what he had wanted most, and other such memories he didn’t care to recall.

  Her body was young, soft, lovely, the breasts like small birds in flight, her ass like a flower. Yet it was a lonely body in spite of its lovely form, lonelier. Bodies are lonely, he thought, but in bed she wouldn’t be. She seemed realer to him now than she had been, revealed without clothes, personal, possible. He felt greedy as he gazed, all eyes at a banquet, hungry so long as he must look. But in looking he was forcing her out of reach, making her into a thing only of his seeing, her eyes reflecting his sins, rotten past, spoiled ideals, his passion poisoned by his shame.

  Frank’s eyes grew moist and he wiped them with one hand. When he gazed up again she seemed, to his horror, to be staring at him through the window, a mocking smile on her lips, her eyes filled with scorn, pitiless. He thought wildly of jumping, bolting, broken-boned, out of the house; but she turned on the shower and stepped into the tub, drawing the flowered plastic curtain around her.

  The window was quickly covered with steam. For this he was relieved, grateful. He let himself down silently. In the cellar, instead of the grinding remorse he had expected to suffer, he felt a moving joy.

  On a Saturday morning in December, Morris, after a little more than two impatient weeks upstairs, came down with his head healed. The night before, Ida told Frank he would have to leave in the morning, but when Morris later learned this they had an argument. Although he hadn’t said so to Ida, the grocer, after his long layoff, was depressed at the prospect of having to take up his dreary existence in the store. He dreaded the deadweight of hours, mostly sad memories of his lost years of youth. That business was better gave him some comfort but not enough, for he was convinced from all Ida had told him that business was better only because of their assistant, whom he remembered as a stranger with hungry eyes, a man to be pitied. Yet the why of it was simple enough—the store had improved not because this cellar dweller was a magician, but because he was not Jewish. The goyim in the neighborhood were happier with one of their own. A Jew stuck in their throats. Yes, they had, on and off, patronized his store, called him by his first name and asked for credit as if he were obliged to give it, which he had, in the past, often foolishly done; but in their hearts they hated him. If it weren’t so, Frank’s presence could not have made such a quick difference in income. He was afraid that the extra forty-five dollars weekly would melt away overnight if the Italian left and he vehemently said so to Ida. She, though she feared he was right, still argued that Frank must be let go. How could they, she asked, keep him working seven days a week, twelve hours a day, for a miserable five dollars? It was unjust. The grocer agreed, but why push the boy into the street if he wanted to stay longer? The five dollars, he admitted, was nothing, but what of the bed and board, the free packs of cigarettes, the bottles of beer she said he guzzled in the store? If things went on well, he would offer him more, maybe even a small commission, very small—maybe on all they took in over a hundred and fifty a week, a sum they had not realized since Schmitz had opened up around the corner; meantime he would give him his Sundays off and otherwise reduce his hours. Since Morris was now able to open the store, Frank could stay in bed till nine. This proposition was no great bargain but the grocer insisted that the man have the chance to take or refuse it.

  Ida, a red flush spreading on her neck, said, “Are you crazy, Morris? Even with the forty more that comes in, which we give him away five dollars, our little profit, who can afford to keep him here? Look what he eats. It’s impossible.”

  “We can’t afford to keep him but we can’t afford to lose him, on account he might improve more the business if he stays,” Morris answered.

  “How can three people work in such a small store?” she cried.

  “Rest your sick feet,” he answered. “Sleep longer in the morning and stay more upstairs in the house. Who needs you should be so tired every night?”

  “Also,” Ida argued, “who wants him in the back all night so we can’t go inside after the store is closed when we forget something?”

  “This I thought about also. I think I will take off from Nick’s rent upstairs a couple dollars and tell him he should give Frank the little room to sleep in. They don’t use it for nothing, only storage. There, with plenty bla
nkets he will be comfortable, with a door which it goes right in the hall so he can come in and go out with his own key without bothering anybody. He can wash himself here in the store.”

  “A couple dollars less from the rent comes also from our poor pocket,” Ida replied, pressing her clasped hands to her bosom. “But the most important is I don’t want him here on account of Helen. I don’t like the way he looks on her.”

  Morris gazed at her. “So you like maybe how Nat looks on her, or Louis Karp? That’s the way they look, the boys. Tell me better, how does she look on him?”

  She shrugged stiffly.

  “This is what I thought. You know yourself Helen wouldn’t be interested in such a boy. A grocery clerk don’t interest her. Does she go out with the salesmen where she works, that they ask her? No. She wants better—so let her have better.”

  “Will be trouble,” she murmured.

  He belittled her fears, and when he came down on Saturday morning, spoke to Frank about staying on for a while. Frank had arisen before six and was sitting dejectedly on the couch when the grocer came in. He agreed at once to continue on in the store under the conditions Morris offered.

  More animated now, the clerk said he liked the idea of living upstairs near Nick and Tessie; and Morris that day arranged it, in spite of Ida’s misgivings, by promising three dollars off their rent. Tessie lugged out of the room a trunk, garment bags and a few odds and ends of furniture; after, she dusted and vacuumed. Between what she offered, and what Morris got out of his bin in the cellar, they supplied a bed with a fairly good mattress, a usable chest of drawers, chair, small table, electric heater and even an old radio Nick had around. Although the room was cold, because it had no radiator and was locked off from the Fusos’ gas-heated bedroom, Frank was satisfied. Tessie worried about what would happen if he had to go to the bathroom at night, and Nick talked the matter over with Frank, saying apologetically that she was ashamed to have him go through their bedroom, but Frank said he never woke up at night. Anyway, Nick had a key made to the front door patent lock. He said if Frank ever had to get up he could walk across the hall and let himself in through the front without waking them. And he could also use their bathtub, just so long as he told them when he would want it.