The Assistant

by Bernard Malamud

  Suffering, he thought, is like a piece of goods. I bet the Jews could make a suit of clothes out of it. The other funny thing is that there are more of them around than anybody knows about.

  In the cemetery it was spring. The snow had melted on all but a few graves, the air was warm, fragrant. The small group of mourners following the grocer’s coffin were hot in their overcoats. At the Society’s plot, crowded with tombstones, two gravediggers had dug a fresh pit in the earth and were standing back, holding their shovels. As the rabbi prayed over the empty grave—from up close his beard was thick with gray—Helen rested her head against the coffin held by the pallbearers.

  “Good-by, Papa.”

  Then the rabbi prayed aloud over the coffin as the gravediggers lowered it to the bottom of the grave.

  “Gently … gently.”

  Ida, supported by Sam Pearl and the secretary of the Society, sobbed uncontrollably. She bent forward, shouting into the grave, “Morris, take care of Helen, you hear me, Morris?”

  The rabbi, blessing it, tossed in the first shovelful of earth.

  “Gently.”

  Then the diggers began to push in the loose earth around the grave and as it fell on the coffin the mourners wept aloud.

  Helen tossed in a rose.

  Frank, standing close to the edge of the grave, leaned forward to see where the flower fell. He lost his balance, and though flailing his arms, landed feet first on the coffin.

  Helen turned her head away.

  Ida wailed.

  “Get the hell out of there,” Nat Pearl said.

  Frank scrambled out of the grave, helped by the diggers. I spoiled the funeral, he thought. He felt pity on the world for harboring him.

  At last the coffin was covered, the grave full, running over. The rabbi said a last short Kaddish. Nat took Helen by the arm and led her away.

  She gazed back once, with grief, then went with him.

  Louis Karp was waiting for them in the dark hallway when Ida and Helen returned from the cemetery.

  “Excuse me for bothering you on this sad occasion,” he said, holding his hat in his hand, “but I wanna tell you why my father couldn’t get to the funeral. He’s sick and has to lay flat on his back for the next six weeks or so. The other night when he passed out at the fire, we found out later he had a heart attack. He’s lucky he’s still alive.”

  “Vey is mir,” muttered Ida.

  “The doctor says he’s gonna have to retire from here on in,” Louis said, with a shrug, “so I don’t think he’ll wanna buy your house any more. Myself,” he added, “I got a job of salesman for a liquor concern.”

  He said good-by and left them.

  “Your father is better off dead,” said Ida.

  As they toiled up the stairs they heard the dull cling of the register in the store and knew the grocer was the one who had danced on the grocer’s coffin.

  Frank lived in the back, his clothes hung in a bought closet, sleeping under his overcoat on the couch. He had used their week of mourning, when mother and daughter were confined upstairs, to get the store going. Staying open kept it breathing, but beyond that things were rocky. If not for his thirty-five weekly dollars in the register he would have had to close up. Seeing he paid his little bills, the wholesalers extended credit. People stopped in to say they were sorry Morris was dead. One man said the grocer was the only storekeeper that had ever trusted him for anything. He paid Frank back eleven dollars that he owed Morris. Frank told anybody who asked that he was keeping the business going for the widow. They approved of that.

  He gave Ida twelve dollars a week rent and promised her more when times got better. He said when they did, he might buy the store from her, but it would have to be on small installments because he had no money for a down payment. She didn’t answer him. She was worried about the future and feared she might starve. She lived on the rent he paid her, plus Nick’s rent, and Helen’s salary. Ida now had a little job sewing epaulettes for military uniforms, a bag of which Abe Rubin, a landsman of Morris’s, delivered in his car every Monday morning. That brought in another twenty-eight to thirty a month. She rarely went down to the store. To speak to her, Frank had to go upstairs and knock on her door. Once, through Rubin, someone came to look at the grocery and Frank was worried, but the man soon left.

  He lived in the future, to be forgiven. On the stairs one morning he said to Helen, “Things are changed. I am not the same guy I was.”

  “Always,” she answered, “you remind me of everything I want to forget.”

  “Those books you once gave me to read,” he said, “did you understand them yourself?”

  Helen waked from a bad dream. In the dream she had got up to leave the house in the middle of the night to escape Frank waiting on the stairs; but there he stood under the yellow lamp, fondling his lascivious cap. As she approached, his lips formed, “I love you.”

  “I’ll scream if you say it.”

  She screamed and woke.

  At a quarter to seven she forced herself out of bed, shut off the alarm before it rang and drew off her nightgown. The sight of her body mortified her. What a waste, she thought. She wanted to be a virgin again and at the same time a mother.

  Ida was still asleep in the half-empty bed that had for a lifetime served two. Helen brushed her hair, washed, and put on coffee. Standing at the kitchen window, she gazed out at the back yards in flower, feeling sorrow for her father lying in his immovable grave. What had she ever given him, ever done to make his poor life better? She wept for Morris, thinking of his compromises and surrenders. She felt she must do something for herself, accomplish some worthwhile thing or suffer his fate. Only by growing in value as a person could she make Morris’s life meaningful, in the sense that she was of him. She must, she thought, in some way eventually earn her degree. It would take years—but was the only way.

  Frank stopped waiting for her in the hall. She had cried out one morning, “Why do you force yourself on me?” and it had struck him that his penitence was a hammer, so he withdrew. But he watched her when he could, through an opening in the tissue paper backing of the store window. He watched as if he were seeing for the first time her slender figure, high small breasts, the slim roundness of her hips and the exciting quality of her slightly bowed legs. She always looked lonely. He tried to think what he could ever do for her and all he could think of was to give her something she had no use for, that would end up in the garbage.

  The idea of doing something for her seemed as futile as his other thoughts till one day, the tissue paper held a little aside as he watched her impassively entering the house, he had a thought so extraordinary it made the hair on the back of his neck stiffen. He figured the best thing he could do was help her get the college education she had always wanted. There was nothing she wanted more. But where, if she agreed to let him—he doubted it every minute it was in his mind—could he get the money unless he stole it? The more he pondered this plan, the more it excited him until he couldn’t stand the possibility it might be impossible.

  He carried in his wallet the note Helen had once written him, that she would come up to his room if Nick and Tessie went to the movies, and he read it often.

  One day he got another idea. He pasted a sign in the window: “Hot Sandwiches And Hot Soups To Go.” He figured he could use his short-order cooking experience to advantage in the grocery. He had some handbills printed, advertising these new things and paid a kid half a buck to deliver them to places where there were working men. He followed the boy for a couple of blocks to see that he didn’t dump the papers into a sewer. Before the end of the week a few new people were coming in at lunch and suppertime. They said this was the first time you could get any hot food to take out in the neighborhood. Frank also tried his hand at ravioli and lasagna once a week, making them from recipes he got out of a cookbook in the library. He experimented with baking small pizzas in the gas stove, which he sold for two bits apiece. The pasta and pizzas sold better than the hot sandw
iches. People came in for them. He considered putting a table or two in the grocery but there was no room, so all the food had to go.

  He got another little break. The milkman told him the two Norwegians had taken to yelling at each other in front of their customers. He said they were making less than they had expected. The store was fine for one man but not for two, so they each wanted to buy the other out. Pederson’s nerves couldn’t stand the fighting, and Taast bought him out at the end of May and had the place all to himself. But he found that the long hours alone were killing his feet. His wife came in to help out around suppertime; however Taast couldn’t stand being away from his family every night, when everyone else was free and at home, so he decided to close at seven-thirty and stop fighting Frank until almost ten. These couple of hours all to himself at night helped Frank. He got back some of the customers who came home from work late, and also the housewives who at the last minute needed something for breakfast. And Frank noticed, from peering into Taast’s window after he was closed, that he was no longer so generous with the specials.

  The weather turned hot in July. People cooked less, lived more on delicatessen, canned goods, bottled drinks. He sold a lot of beer. His pastas and pizzas went very well. He heard that Taast had tried making pizzas but they were too doughy. Also, instead of using canned soups, Frank made a minestrone of his own that everybody praised; it took time to cook up, but the profit was better. And the new things he was selling pushed other goods along. He now paid Ida ninety a month for rent and the use of her store. She was earning more money on her epaulettes, and did not think so often that she would starve.

  “Why do you give me so much?” she asked him when he raised the money to ninety.

  “Maybe Helen could keep some of her wages?” he suggested.

  “Helen isn’t interested any more in you,” she said sternly.

  He didn’t answer her.

  But that night after supper—he had treated himself to ham and eggs and now smoked a cigar—Frank cleared the table and sat down to figure out how much it would cost to support Helen in college if she would quit her job and give all her time to education. When he had figured out the tuition from the college catalogues he had collected, he saw he couldn’t do it. His heart was heavy. Later he thought maybe he could work it if she went to a free college. He could give her enough for her daily expenses and also to make up whatever money she now gave her mother. He figured that to do it would be a rocky load on his head, but he had to do it, it was his only hope; he could think of no other. All he asked for himself was the privilege of giving her something she couldn’t give back.

  The big thing, exciting yet frightening, was to talk to her, say what he hoped to do. He always had it in mind to say but found it very hard. To speak to her, after all that had happened to them, seemed impossible—opening on peril, disgrace, physical pain. What was the magic word to begin with? He despaired he could ever convince her. She was remote, sinned against, unfeeling, or if she felt, it was disgust of him. He cursed himself for having conceived this mess he couldn’t now bring himself to speak of.

  One August night after he had seen her come home from work in the company of Nat Pearl, sick of the misery of un-motion, Frank made himself move. He was standing behind the counter piling bottles of beer into a woman’s market bag when he caught sight of Helen going by with some books on her arm. She was wearing a new summer dress, red trimmed with black, and the sight of her struck him with renewed hunger. All summer she had wandered at night alone in the neighborhood, trying to outwalk her loneliness. He had been tempted to close up and follow her, but until he had his new idea he could not think what he dared say that she wouldn’t run from. Hurrying the customer out of the store, Frank washed, slicked back his hair and quickly changed into a fresh sport shirt. He locked the store and hurried in the direction Helen had gone. The day had been hot but was cooling now and still. The sky was golden green, though below the light was dark. After running a block he remembered something and trudged back to the store. He sat in the back listening to his heart hammering in his ears. In ten minutes he lit a lamp in the store window. The globe drew a ragged moth. Knowing how long she lingered among books, he shaved. Then locking the front door again, he went toward the library. He figured he would wait across the street till she came out. He would cross over and catch up with her on her way home. Before she could even see him, he would speak his piece and be done with it. Yes or no, she could say, and if no, he would shut the joint tomorrow and skiddoo.

  He was nearing the library when he glanced up and saw her. She was about half a block away and walking toward him. He stood there not knowing which way to go, dreading to be met by her as lovely as she looked, standing like a crippled dog as she passed him. He thought of running back the way he had come, but she saw him, turned and went in haste the other way; so, reviving an old habit, he was after her, and before she could deny him, had touched her arm. They shivered. Giving her no time to focus her contempt, he blurted out what he had so long saved to say but could not now stand to hear himself speak.

  When Helen realized what he was offering her, her heart moved violently. She had known he would follow and speak, but she could never in a thousand years have guessed he would say this. Considering the conditions of his existence, she was startled by his continuing ability to surprise her, make God-knows-what-next-move. His staying power mystified and frightened her, because she felt in herself, since the death of Ward Minogue, a waning of outrage. Although she detested the memory of her experience in the park, lately it had come back to her how she had desired that night to give herself to Frank, and might have if Ward hadn’t touched her. She had wanted him. If there had been no Ward Minogue, there would have been no assault. If he had made his starved leap in bed she would have returned passion. She had hated him, she thought, to divert hatred from herself.

  But her response to his offer was an instantaneous no. She said it almost savagely, to escape any possibility of being directly obligated to him, of another entrapment, nausea.

  “I couldn’t think of it.”

  He was astonished to have got this far, to be walking at her side—only it was a night in a different season, and her summer face was gentler than her winter one, her body more womanly; yet it all added up to loss, the more he wanted her the more he had lost.

  “In your father’s name,” he said. “If not for you, then for him.”

  “What has my father got to do with it?”

  “It’s his store. Let it support you to go to college like he wanted you to.”

  “It can’t without you. I don’t want your help.”

  “Morris did me a big favor. I can’t return it to him but I might to you. Also because I lost myself that night—”

  “For God’s sake, don’t say it.”

  He didn’t, was dumb. They walked dumbly on. To her horror they were coming to the park. Abruptly she went the other way.

  He caught up with her. “You could graduate in three years. You wouldn’t have any worry about expenses. You could study all you want.”

  “What would you expect to get from this—virtue?”

  “I already said why—I owe something to Morris.”

  “For what? Taking you into his stinking store and making a prisoner out of you?”

  What more could he say? To his misery, what he had done to her father rose in his mind. He had often imagined he would someday tell her, but not now. Yet the wish to say it overwhelmed him. He tried wildly to escape it. His throat hurt, his stomach heaved. He clamped his teeth tight but the words came up in blobs, in a repulsive stream.

  He spoke with pain. “I was the one that held him up that time. Minogue and me. Ward picked on him after Karp ran away, but it was my fault too on account of I went in with him.”

  She screamed and might have gone on screaming but strangers were staring.

  “Helen, I swear—”

  “You criminal. How could you hit such a gentle person? What harm did he ever
do you?”

  “I didn’t hit him, Ward did. I gave him a drink of water. He saw I didn’t want to hurt him. After, I came to work for him to square up what I did wrong. For Christ’s sake, Helen, try to understand me.”

  With contorted face she ran from him.

  “I confessed it to him,” he shouted after her.

  He had managed well in the summer and fall, but after Christmas business dragged, and though his night salary had been raised five bucks, he found it impossible to meet all his expenses. Every penny looked as big as the moon. Once he spent an hour searching for a two-bit piece he had dropped behind the counter. He tore up a loose floor board and was elated to recover more than three dollars in green and grimy coins that Morris had lost during the years.

  For himself he spent only for the barest necessities, though his clothes were falling apart. When he could no longer sew up the holes in his undershirts he threw them away and wore none. He soaked his laundry in the sink and hung it to dry in the kitchen. He was, as a rule, prompt in his payment of jobbers and wholesalers, but during the winter he kept them waiting. One man he held off his neck by threatening to go bankrupt. Another he promised tomorrow. He slipped a couple of bucks to his most important salesman, to calm them at the office. Thus he kept going. But he never missed a payment of rent to Ida. He valued his payments to her because Helen had returned to night college in the fall, and if he didn’t give the ninety to Ida, Helen wouldn’t have enough for her own needs.

  He was always tired. His spine ached as if it had been twisted like a cat’s tail. On his night off from the Coffee Pot he slept without moving, dreaming of sleep. In the dead hours at the Coffee Pot, he sat with his head on his arms at the counter, and during the day in the grocery he took catnaps whenever he could, trusting the buzzer to rouse him, although other noises did not. When he awoke, his eyes were hot and watery, his head like porous lead. He grew thin, his neck scrawny, face bones prominent, his broken nose sharp. He saw life from a continual wet-eyed yawn. He drank black coffee till his stomach turned sour. In the evening he did nothing—read a little. Or he sat in the back with the lights out, smoking, listening to the blues on the radio.