The Assistant

by Bernard Malamud

  Ida came down, puffy-eyed from poor sleep. She felt a hopeless rage against the world. What will become of Helen? she asked herself, and cracked her knuckles against her chest. But when Morris looked up to listen to her complaints, she was afraid to say anything. A half-hour later, aware that something had changed in the store, she thought of the clerk.

  “Where is he?” she asked.

  “He left,” Morris answered.

  “Where did he leave?” she said in astonishment.

  “He left for good.”

  She gazed at him. “Morris, what happened, tell me?”

  “Nothing,” he said, embarrassed. “I told him to leave.”

  “Why, all of a sudden?”

  “Didn’t you say you didn’t want him here no more?”

  “From the first day I saw him, but you always said no.”

  “Now I said yes.”

  “A stone falls off my heart.” But she was not satisfied. “Did he move out of the house yet?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I will go and ask the upstairske.”

  “Leave her alone. We will know when he moves.”

  “When did you tell him to leave?”

  “Last night.”

  “So why didn’t you tell me last night?” she said angrily. “Why you told me he went early to the movies?”

  “I was nervous.”

  “Morris,” she asked in fright. “Did something else happen? Did Helen—”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “Does she know he left?”

  “I didn’t tell her. Why she went so early to work this morning?”

  “She went early?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know,” Ida said uneasily.

  He produced the handbill. “This is why I feel bad.”

  She glanced at it, not comprehending.

  “The German,” he explained. “They bought him out, two Norwegians.”

  She gasped. “When?”

  “This week. Schmitz is sick. He lays now in the hospital.”

  “I told you,” Ida said.

  “You told me?”

  “Vey is mir. I told you after Christmas—when improved more the business. I told you the drivers said the German was losing customers. You said no, Frank improved the business. A goy brings in goyim, you said. How much strength I had to argue with you?”

  “Did you tell me he kept closed in the morning his store?”

  “Who said? I didn’t know this.”

  “Karp told me.”

  “Karp was here?”

  “He came on Thursday to tell me the good news.”

  “What good news?”

  “That Schmitz sold out.”

  “Is this good news?” she asked.

  “Maybe to him but not to me.”

  “You didn’t tell me he came.”

  “I tell you now,” he said irritably. “Schmitz sold out. Monday will open two Norwegians. Our business will go to hell again. We will starve here.”

  “Some helper you had,” she said with bitterness. “Why didn’t you listen to me when I said let him go?”

  “I listened,” he said wearily.

  She was silent, then asked, “So when Karp told you Schmitz sold his store you told Frank to leave?”

  “The next day.”

  “Thank God.”

  “See if you say next week ‘Thank God.’”

  “What is this got to do with Frank? Did he help us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know,” she said shrilly. “You just told me you said he should leave when you found out where came our business.”

  “I don’t know,” he said miserably, “I don’t know where it came.”

  “It didn’t come from him.”

  “Where it came I don’t worry any more. Where will it come next week I worry.” He read aloud the specials the Norwegians were offering.

  She squeezed her hands white. “Morris, we must sell the store.”

  “So sell.” Sighing, Morris removed his apron. “I will take my rest.”

  “It’s only half past eleven.”

  “I feel cold.” He looked depressed.

  “Eat something first—your soup.”

  “Who can eat?”

  “Drink a hot glass tea.”

  “No.”

  “Morris,” she said quietly, “don’t worry so much. Something will happen. We will always have to eat.”

  He made no reply, folded the handbill into a small square and took it upstairs with him.

  The rooms were cold. Ida always shut off the radiators when she went down and lit them again in the late afternoon about an hour before Helen returned. Now the house was too cold. Morris turned on the stopcock of the bedroom radiator, then found he had no match in his pocket. He got one in the kitchen.

  Under the covers he felt shivery. He lay under two blankets and a quilt yet shivered. He wondered if he was sick but soon fell asleep. He was glad when he felt sleep come over him, although it brought night too quickly. But if you slept it was night, that’s how things were. Looking, that same night, from the street into his store, he beheld Taast and Pederson—one with a small blond mustache, the other half-bald, a light shining on his head—standing behind his counter, poking into his cash register. The grocer rushed in but they were gabbing in German and paid no attention to his gibbering Yiddish. At that moment Frank came out of the back with Helen. Though the clerk spoke a musical Italian, Morris recognized a dirty word. He struck his assistant across the face and they wrestled furiously on the floor, Helen screaming mutely. Frank dumped him heavily on his back and sat on his poor chest. He thought his lungs would burst. He tried hard to cry out but his voice cracked his throat and no one would help. He considered the possibility of dying and would have liked to.

  Tessie Fuso dreamed of a tree hit by thunder and knocked over; she dreamed she heard someone groan terribly and awoke in fright, listened, then went back to sleep. Frank Alpine, at the dirty end of a long night, awoke groaning. He awoke with a shout—awake, he thought, forever. His impulse was to leap out of bed and rush down to the store; then he remembered that Morris had thrown him out. It was a gray, dreary winter morning. Nick had gone to work and Tessie, in her bathrobe, was sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee. She heard Frank cry out again but had just discovered that she was pregnant, so did nothing more than wonder at his nightmare.

  He lay in bed with the blankets pulled over his head, trying to smother his thoughts but they escaped and stank. The more he smothered them the more they stank. He smelled garbage in the bed and couldn’t move out of it. He couldn’t because he was it—the stink in his own broken nose. What you did was how bad you smelled. Unable to stand it he flung the covers aside and struggled to dress but couldn’t make it. The sight of his bare feet utterly disgusted him. He thirsted for a cigarette but couldn’t light one for fear of seeing his hand. He shut his eyes and lit a match. The match burned his nose. He stepped on the lit match with his bare feet and danced in pain.

  Oh my God, why did I do it? Why did I ever do it? Why did I do it?

  His thoughts were killing him. He couldn’t stand them. He sat on the edge of the twisted bed, his thoughtful head ready to bust in his hands. He wanted to run. Part of him was already in flight, he didn’t know where. He just wanted to run. But while he was running, he wanted to be back. He wanted to be back with Helen, to be forgiven. It wasn’t asking too much. People forgave people—who else? He could explain if she would listen. Explaining was a way of getting close to somebody you had hurt; as if in hurting them you were giving them a reason to love you. He had come, he would say, to the park to wait for her, to hear what she had to tell him. He felt he knew she would say she loved him; it meant they would soon sleep together. This stayed in his mind and he sat there waiting to hear her say it, at the same time in an agony that she never would, that he would lose her the minute she found out why her father had kicked him out of the grocer
y. What could he tell her about that? He sat for hours trying to think what to say, at last growing famished. At midnight he left to get a pizza but stopped instead in a bar. Then when he saw his face in the mirror he felt a nose-thumbing revulsion. Where have you ever been, he asked the one in the glass, except on the inside of a circle? What have you ever done but always the wrong thing? When he returned to the park, there was Ward Minogue hurting her. He just about killed Ward. Then when he had Helen in his arms, crying, saying at last that she loved him, he had this hopeless feeling it was the end and now he would never see her again. He thought he must love her before she was lost to him. She said no, not to, but he couldn’t believe it the same minute she was saying she loved him. He thought, Once I start she will come along with me. So then he did it. He loved her with his love. She should have known that. She should not have gone wild, beat his face with her fists, called him dirty names, run from him, his apologies, pleadings, sorrow.

  Oh Jesus, what did I do?

  He moaned; had got instead of a happy ending, a bad smell. If he could root out what he had done, smash and destroy it; but it was done, beyond him to undo. It was where he could never lay hands on it any more—in his stinking mind. His thoughts would forever suffocate him. He had failed once too often. He should somewhere have stopped and changed the way he was going, his luck, himself, stopped hating the world, got a decent education, a job, a nice girl. He had lived without will, betrayed every good intention. Had he ever confessed the holdup to Morris? Hadn’t he stolen from the cash register till the minute he was canned? In a single terrible act in the park hadn’t he murdered the last of his good hopes, the love he had so long waited for—his chance at a future? His goddamned life had pushed him wherever it went; he had led it nowhere. He was blown around in any breath that blew, owned nothing, not even experience to show for the years he had lived. If you had experience you knew at least when to start and where to quit; all he knew was how to mangle himself more. The self he had secretly considered valuable was, for all he could make of it, a dead rat. He stank.

  This time his shout frightened Tessie. Frank got up on the run but he had run everywhere. There was no place left to escape to. The room shrank. The bed was flying up at him. He felt trapped—sick, wanted to cry but couldn’t. He planned to kill himself, at the same minute had a terrifying insight: that all the while he was acting like he wasn’t, he was really a man of stern morality.

  Ida had awakened in the night and heard her daughter crying. Nat did something to her, she thought wildly, but was ashamed to go to Helen and beg her to say what. She guessed he had acted like a lout—it was no wonder Helen had stopped seeing him. All night she blamed herself for having urged her to go out with the law student. She fell into an unhappy sleep.

  It was growing light when Morris left the flat. Helen dragged herself out of bed and sat with reddened eyes in the bathroom, sewing on her coat collar. Once near the office she would give it to a tailor to fix so the tear couldn’t be seen. With her new dress she could do nothing. Rolling it into a hopeless ball, she hid it under some things in her bottom bureau drawer. Monday she would buy one exactly like it and hang it in her closet. Undressing for a shower—her third in hours—she burst into tears at the sight of her body. Every man she drew to her dirtied her. How could she have encouraged him? She felt a violent self-hatred for trusting him, when from the very beginning she had sensed he was un-trustable. How could she have allowed herself to fall in love with anybody like him? She was filled with loathing at the fantasy she had created, of making him into what he couldn’t be—educable, promising, kind and good, when he was no more than a bum. Where were her wits, her sense of elemental self-preservation?

  Under the shower she soaped herself heavily, crying as she washed. At seven, before her mother awakened, she dressed and left the house, too sickened to eat. She would gladly have forgotten her life, in sleep, but dared not stay home, dared not be questioned. When she returned from her half-day of work, if he was still there, she would order him to leave or would scream him out of the house.

  Coming home from the garage, Nick smelled gas in the hall. He inspected the radiators in his flat, saw they were both lit, then knocked on Frank’s door.

  After a minute the door opened a crack.

  “Do you smell anything?” Nick said, staring at the eye in the crack.

  “Mind your goddamned business.”

  “Are you nuts? I smell gas in the house, it’s dangerous.”

  “Gas?” Frank flung open the door. He was in pajamas, haggard.

  “What’s the matter, you sick?”

  “Where do you smell the gas?”

  “Don’t tell me you can’t smell it.”

  “I got a bad cold,” Frank said hoarsely.

  “Maybe it’s comin’ from the cellar,” said Nick.

  They ran down a flight and then the odor hit Frank, an acrid stench thick enough to wade through.

  “It’s coming from this floor,” Nick said.

  Frank pounded on the door. “Helen, there’s gas here, let me in. Helen,” he cried.

  “Shove it,” said Nick.

  Frank pushed his shoulder against the door. It was unlocked and he fell in. Nick quickly opened the kitchen window while Frank, in his bare feet, roamed through the house. Helen was not there but he found Morris in bed.

  The clerk, coughing, dragged the grocer out of bed and carrying him to the living room, laid him on the floor. Nick closed the stopcock of the bedroom radiator and threw open every window. Frank got down on his knees, bent over Morris, clamped his hands to his sides and pumped.

  Tessie ran in in fright, and Nick shouted to her to call Ida.

  Ida came stumbling up the stairs, moaning, “Oh, my God, oh, my God.”

  Seeing Morris lying on the floor, his underwear soaked, his face the color of a cooked beet, flecks of foam in the corners of his mouth, she let out a piercing shriek.

  Helen, coming dully into the hall, heard her mother’s cry. She smelled the gas and ran in terror up the stairs, expecting death.

  When she saw Frank in his pajamas bent over her father’s back, her throat thickened in disgust. She screamed in fear and hatred.

  Frank couldn’t look at her, frightened to.

  “His eyes just moved,” Nick said.

  Morris awoke with a massive ache in his chest. His head felt like corroded metal, his mouth horribly dry, his stomach crawling with pain. He was ashamed to find himself stretched out in his long underwear on the floor.

  “Morris,” cried Ida.

  Frank got up, embarrassed at his bare feet and pajamas.

  “Papa, Papa.” Helen was on her knees.

  “Why did you do it for?” Ida yelled in the grocer’s ear.

  “What happened?” he gasped.

  “Why did you do it for?” she wept.

  “Are you crazy?” he muttered. “I forgot to light the gas. A mistake.”

  Helen broke into sobbing, her lips twisted. Frank had to turn his head.

  “The only thing that saved him was he got some air,” Nick said. “You’re lucky this flat ain’t windproof, Morris.”

  Tessie shivered. “It’s cold. Cover him, he’s sweating.”

  “Put him in bed,” Ida said.

  Frank and Nick lifted the grocer and carried him in to his bed. Ida and Helen covered him with blankets and quilt.

  “Thanks,” Morris said to them. He stared at Frank. Frank looked at the floor.

  “Shut the windows,” Tessie said. “The smell is gone.”

  “Wait a little longer,” said Frank. He glanced at Helen but her back was to him. She was still crying.

  “Why did he do it?” Ida moaned.

  Morris gazed long at her, then shut his eyes.

  “Leave him rest,” Nick advised.

  “Don’t light any matches for another hour,’ Frank told Ida.

  Tessie closed all but one window and they left. Ida and Helen remained with Morris in the bedroom.

&n
bsp; Frank lingered in Helen’s room but nothing welcomed him there.

  Later he dressed and went down to the store. Business was brisk. Ida came down, and though he begged her not to, shut the store.

  That afternoon Morris developed a fever and the doctor said he had to go to the hospital. An ambulance came and took the grocer away, his wife and daughter riding with him.

  From his window upstairs, Frank watched them go.

  Sunday morning the store was still shut tight. Though he feared to, Frank considered knocking on Ida’s door and asking for the key. But Helen might open the door, and since he would not know what to say to her over the doorsill, he went instead down the cellar, and mounting the dumb-waiter, wriggled through the little window in the air shaft, into the store toilet. Once in the back, the clerk shaved and had his coffee. He thought he would stay in the store till somebody told him to scram; and even if they did, he would try in some way to stay longer. That was his only hope left, if there was any. Turning the front door lock, he carried in the milk and rolls and was ready for business. The register was empty, so he borrowed five dollars in change from Sam Pearl, saying he would pay it back from what he took in. Sam wanted to know how Morris was and Frank said he didn’t know.

  Shortly after half past eight, the clerk was standing at the front window when Ida and her daughter left the house. Helen looked like last year’s flower. Observing her, he felt a pang of loss, shame, regret. He felt an unbearable deprivation —that yesterday he had almost had some wonderful thing but today it was gone, all but the misery of remembering it was. Whenever he thought of what he had almost had it made him frantic. He felt like rushing outside, drawing her into a doorway, and declaring the stupendous value of his love for her. But he did nothing. He didn’t exactly hide but he didn’t show himself, and they soon went away to the subway.