A Man Without Shoes

by John Sanford

  “You’re about to tell me you’re ordinary again. You’re touched on that subject.”

  “I admit it,” he said. “It touches me.”

  “It isn’t right to be running yourself down all the time. I don’t want you to do it any more.”

  “As long as I don’t run you down, why not?”

  “But you do run me down,” she said. “You act as if marrying you was bad taste on my part, a low and vulgar desire. What’ve you ever done that you’re so ashamed of?”

  “It’s what I haven’t done,” he said. “I haven’t done anything to be proud of.”

  “I happen to like you the way you are, Dan, but if you don’t like yourself, and if you never will till you’ve done something to be proud of, then for God’s sake, why don’t you go out and do it?”

  He let a cigarette fall, and caught in the air-flow made by the train, it struck the ballast hundreds of ties back-track. “I’ve been dreading your saying that,” he said. “It makes this a quarrel.”

  “I don’t think it does,” she said. “I’ve never asked you to prove to me that you’re great, because I don’t care whether you’re great or small. You’re the one who wants proof, and since you never seem to find it in what I say, I’m afraid you’ll have to look for it in what you do, in the great deed you once warned me about. So far, though, instead of the great deed, all I’ve seen is self-pity, and it makes me wonder whether you’re only out to feel proud, not to do the deed.”

  “Suppose we just look at the scenery,” he said.

  “You look at it: I’m not finished talking. You may’ve forgotten what happened three years ago this week, but I haven’t. In case you need reminding, we decided to get married, and after a while we did get married, and I don’t regret it yet, and I never will. But one by one, little things pile up in three years, and finally the time comes when they start to crowd the big ones. At first, I didn’t mind your saying you were ordinary. In fact, I liked it, not because I ever thought you were anything else, but because it was good to know a person who knew the truth about himself; it was a change from ordinary people who were all swole up like toads. What I liked still better was the fact that you weren’t satisfied with being ordinary, and the more you talked about it, the surer I was that one fine day you’d climb the mountain you dreamed of. If you can stand the truth, that was why I kept my job after we were married: I didn’t want to hold you back when you felt like setting out for the top of the mountain. But for all your talk, the mountain is still up there, and you’re still down here. Do or die, it was going to be, but you haven’t done, and you haven’t died: you’ve only felt sorry for yourself. I want that to stop, Dan. Do you hear? I want it to stop!”

  “Put up or shut up,” he said. “Is that it?”

  “Can you think of anything else to do?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I could leave you”

  She studied him before saying, “It’s a quarrel now,” and then she turned away and entered the car.

  He remained where he was for the rest of the journey to Jersey City, and a paper that he had bought while awaiting the ferry was still unread, still unopened, when he disembarked in Manhattan. Nothing was said during the long walk to the subway, the ride uptown, or the short walk to the house, nor was anything said on the stairway, or at the door, or in the momentary nocturne of the flat. He stood at the window, staring at images in the transparent room overhanging the street, and he listened in vain for a voice, either his own or another’s, but both rooms vanished in silence, and only then did he realize that he was still holding the still-folded newspaper.

  “I’m sorry, Mary,” he said. “I shouldn’t’ve spoken the way I did.”

  “You’re very right about that,” she said.

  He went to the bedside and looked down into the darkness. “Are you going to count it against me?” he said.

  “Yes, Dan, and for a very long time.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t, Mary.”

  “It’ll have to wear off.”

  “I didn’t think you were so hard.”

  “How would you feel if I said I was going to leave you?”

  “As if I were watching a funeral,” he said. “My own.”

  “That’s well put, Dan. I couldn’t do better.”

  DAN JOHNSON, MR. PETERSON UP

  The bar was deep, narrow, and dark. In a booth facing a fly-spotted frieze of racing-photographs, Dan sat across a table from his employer, and turning a beer-glass in its coaster of foam, he read a legend from one of the pictures on the wall: FRIAR ROCK, M. GARNER UP, WINNING THE 1916 SUBURBAN.

  Peterson took a pale blue envelope from his pocket and flicked it over the table toward Dan, saying, “What did you do to Miss Emma James—try to take her temperature?”

  Dan glanced at the envelope without touching it. “Complaint?” he said.

  “Three pages, and written in letters of fire.”

  “That isn’t fire. It’s leftover blood from her last servant.”

  “One or the other, you cost us a client.”

  “You could’ve bawled me out in the office and saved yourself a beer.”

  “Sick of the job, kid?” Peterson said.

  “The job and you, both,” Dan said.

  “Why don’t you quit, then?”

  “I’m waiting to be bounced.”

  “I wouldn’t bounce you if you spit in my eye, kicked my ass, and then insulted me. I find you fascinating.”

  “And I you. I come to work mornings like a dog to its vomit.”

  “You don’t have to be a dog. You can get down on your knees and be a human being.”

  “I wish to God you’d give me my walking-papers.”

  “If you want to be able to look yourself in the eye, grow some nerve and quit, but don’t expect me to make it easy for you. This is Capitalism, kid, and I like it, and if you think I’m going to help you break it up by stiffening your back, you’re crazier than any communist I ever heard of. Go start your revolution, but get your nerve some place else.”

  “You don’t think much of me, do you?”

  “No, and it used to be I didn’t think much of your ideas. I see now there’s nothing the matter with any idea; the matter is always with people. You communists are superb in a pamphlet; in the flesh, you don’t have enough guts to need feeding.”

  “I don’t happen to be a communist.”

  “Fellow-traveler, then, or whatever you call it.”

  “I don’t happen to be that, either.”

  “Will you for Chrisake tell me what you do happen to be?”

  “I’m a servant of the ruling-class,” Dan said, and he laughed, but very quickly the laugh began to set up and harden, and reaching for his beer-glass, he flushed his throat. “I’m a stale glass of beer, that’s what I am. I had a head on me once, and I was full of fizz, but all I’ve got left is the color.” He finished the drink and wiped his mouth. “What do you say we get out of here?”

  “Sure,” Peterson said.

  BAILEY & BERNSTEIN

  “Last name?” Dan said.

  “Bernstein,” the man said.

  “First name?”

  “Solly.”

  “For Saul?”

  “For Solomon.”

  [“I said, ‘Joe, you tell me to come up here right away, and right away I come, and you don’t say nothing only I’m a nice guy, a real pal. For that I have to schlep myself to your house in the middle of the night?’ He said, ‘Solly, I’ll going to tell you something. We come from the same block, the same house, almost, and it’s thirty years we know each other, and if you was my own brother, I couldn’t have no better respeck for you, maybe less. But this is peculiar times we’re having, very peculiar, and me feeling like a brother ain’t the same as you being a actual brother. Y’ understand, Solly? Y’know what I mean?’ I said, ‘Not yet, Joe.’ He said, ‘Well, for instance, we play Tchicago. Tchicago is big-time. It’s got all kinds of people—business-people, working-people, society-people, Je
ws, Christians, schwartzers (is that how you say it?), everybody. We jump out there in front of all them people for twelve minutes, and what do we do? We open together, and then we give ’em a number by ourself, and then we give ’em a shot of comedy, and we close—and we go over big like always. Right? But Tchicago ain’t the whole country, Solly. Y’know what I mean?’ I said, ‘I know what you mean by Tchicago ain’t the whole country, but that ain’t what you mean.’ He said, ‘Take a town like New Orlens, or Detroit, even. We don’t go over there so good no more, and it ain’t account of we played them places to death. Y’know?’ I said, ‘I know, Joe.’ He said, ‘Now, there’s a thing I ain’t wanted to talk to you about, Solly, being as you’re sensitive on the point, and I was afraid maybe you’d take it personal. But lately I come to the conclusion we’re too good friends to hold anything back, so I made up my mind I’d mention the subjeck if you gave me your word you wouldn’t take offense. Y’know what I mean?’ I said, ‘What’s so hard? You’re going to be offensive, and I’m not suppose to take offense.’ He said, ‘Exackly, and seeing as how you’re reasonable, Solly, this is what I got on my mind. This Hitler is stirring up a lot of trouble amongst the Christians and the Jews. There ain’t no sense to it, and God knows the Jews had enough trouble already, but all the same, Solly, we got to face the facks, and the facks show that a lot of Christians that didn’t know a Jew from a white man in the old days, all of a sudden they’re making cracks. I wouldn’t even bother to tell you I’m not that kind ofa Christian, Solly, because you know it. But being a Christian, I naturally hear Christians talking, and putting two and two together, also that we ain’t going over only in the biggest cities where there’s lots of Jews to go for your half of the routine, I figure maybe for the good of our reputation, we ought to break up to a couple of singles till this Hitler-business blows over. After that, we can double up again and get some new material, and in no time we’ll be right back where we was before. Y’know?’”]

  “What did you tell him?” Dan said.

  “What did I tell him?” the man said. “I didn’t tell him nothing. I put on my hat and went out.”

  “You should’ve let him know what you thought of him.”

  “You work with a feller thirty years, you don’t have to say what you’re thinking: he knows.”

  “I’d’ve made sure.”

  “A feller sells you down the river, it ain’t no accident. A lowlife is a lowlife, so what’s the use talking?”

  Dan took up the man’s card. “It’s going to be hard to find a job for you, Mr. Bernstein,” he said. “I’ll try my best, but you insist on something in the singing line, and you may as well know in advance that we get very few calls for entertainers of any kind.”

  “Did you put down I could sing at weddings?”

  “Yes, I have that down,” Dan said.

  “I know all the Jewish songs, and I accompany myself with the piana, and I got my own dress-suit. You got that down, about the dress-suit?”

  “That’s down too, Mr. Bernstein.”

  “And the address—you got the address?”

  “The address and the cigar-store phone-number.”

  “Well, I guess that’s about all,” the man said, and he rose and went to the door. There he paused to punch his hat out and re-crease it, and while he did so, he said, “You ever maybe get a application from a feller name Bailey? Joe Bailey?”

  “Bailey?” Dan said. “Not that I recall.”

  “My partner,” the man said, and now he looked at Dan. “Joe Bailey. Bailey & Bernstein.”

  “Is he out of work now?”

  “Since about a year after me,” the man said. “If he ever comes in here, I wonder could I ask you a favor.”

  “Certainly,” Dan said. “What is it?”

  “Don’t tell him I’m willing to sing at weddings.”

  SEA-SHELLS, SEA-SHELLS, BY THE SEA-SHORE

  It was Saturday evening of the Labor Day week-end, and in the slow-moving throng on the Asbury Park boardwalk were Dan and Mary. They halted, like many others, to watch a sand-sculptor below them on the beach, and like many others, they listened for a while to rug-auctioneers and concessionaires, and when they reached the martial orbit of a brass band, they went more erectly and corrected step, and like so many of the rest, they tried in vain to hit something with a ball, or ring something with a hoop, or break something with a popgun cork in order to win something like a stuffed dog, or a beribboned cane, or a glass pistol filled with pastilles, and as all did at one time or another, they heard above the music and the talk and the heel-pound the plunge of breakers and the surge of surf on the black strand.

  “If we go out to the end of the pier,” Mary said, “we can watch them cast.”

  They left the crowds and the lights behind them and walked planks over rising and falling water. At the end rail, a few men stood trolling: from time to time, they leaned backward, bowing their rods, and then they dropped forward to make and take up slack; when line began to come in wet through the agates, it was reeled in all the way and recast.

  “Going out!” one of the men said, and he whipped his tackle overhead in a long arc at the night. The reel unwound and whined, and after a moment the sinker struck and sank, and the man resumed his trolling.

  “Remember this time three years ago, Dan?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I remember.”

  “What do you remember about it?”

  “That you had your way about the church.”

  “Is that all you remember?”

  “No. There were other things.”

  “What other things, Dan?”

  “The way you looked.”

  “Do you really remember that?”

  “You didn’t think I’d forget, did you?”

  “I don’t know. People forget things sometimes. Things like that.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Did I look good that day?”

  “The same as you always look. You don’t change.”

  “You used to say I did. I used to be very plain one minute and very beautiful the next.”

  “You’re not like that now. Whenever I look at you, I see the same thing.”

  “That’s not very good, is it? to see the same thing all the time.”

  “It depends on what you see.”

  “Don’t I ever get beautiful any more, Dan? Not even for that one minute a day?”

  He turned to look at her before answering. “I think you’re not very happy, either,” he said. “Or else you’d know that you never get plain.”

  AND LIE DOWN to PLEASANT DREAMS

  The room was still dark when Dan opened his eyes. How long he had slept—one hour, two hours, or merely minutes—he did not know, but he knew that he had come as wholly out of sleep as if sleep were a tunnel now behind him. Light from a street-lamp below passed through the basket-weave of the curtains and turned part of the ceiling into a gently-moving mesh. He lay watching it for many moments, and then, impelled by a sense of being watched himself, he said, “Do you always awaken when I do?”

  “When I’m asleep, and you’re not, I feel lonely. I don’t know why, unless it’s because sleep is like water, a lonely thing.”

  “A lonelier thing is people,” he said.

  “Are you lonely, Dan?”

  “Like a last man on earth,” he said. “This terrible quarrel, Mary—when’re we going to end it?”

  “But, Dan, we did end it—that night on the pier.”

  “Was that the end?”

  “Oh, Danny,” she said, and she turned her body to him and put her face near his. “What more did you think you had to say?”

  “I didn’t know,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

  “When we went home afterwards…,” she said, “… when we went home, and you… when you didn’t do anything, Dan… I thought you didn’t want….”

  And he turned to her, saying into her mouth, “Don’t let’s fight any more, Mary.”

  And she said, �
��Spain,” and only later did he remember the word and understand.

  HOW BEAUTIFUL ARE THY FEET WITH SHOES

  The waiter brought a second pot of coffee, and Dan filled Florencia’s cup and his own, saying, “I’m glad I ran into you.” “I am train to be polite,” Florencia said. “Therefore I will say thank you for the lunch. But I am train to be honest too. Therefore I will say this place is stinks. You will escuse me?”

  “You’re escused,” Dan said. “This place is also cheaps.”

  “Americans do not cook. Murder, yes; cook, no.”

  “And the Spanish?”

  Florencia removed her wedding-ring and spun it into a gold-piece on the marble table. “Genio makes wild when I do this,” she said, and the coin curtsied and became a ring again. “I am sicken of the eSpanish. They cook well; they murder badly.”

  “Are you a Catholic, Flo? I never asked you.”

  “I am been born in the Church. I am not been living in it since many years.”

  “What made you give it up?”

  “I do not say I have give it up. I say only that I do not live in it.”

  “Doesn’t that come to the same thing?”

  “Not often the people have give up the Church, but many times, all through history, the Church have give up the people.”

  “I always thought it never let go.”

  “As in eSpain?” the woman said. “Where the Church will follow you to the grave for one peseta of a mortgage? That is an act of the Church to give up the people, and if you have been read the books and the papers, you will know it is but one of the acts. Please do not disunderstand. The Catholic people love the Church—and with good reason, for it can be a beautiful thing, with much art in it, and much comfort, and much simple and human people who wish always for it to be a house of fine pride. But the Church do not love the people with the same equality. It will speak otherwise, it will say all are one in the sight of God, yet you will never find it at the shoulder of the poor and the weak, side by side, only with the rich and the strong. For them, it will fight always, and indeed its own self is rich and strong at the espenditure of the poor. A great sucking monster is the Catholic Church of eSpain, not the Jew that it forever try to blame for its wrongs. Never there was a Jew in all history of the world that take his pound of flesh like the Church of my country, and all the Jews now living own not so much land, nor ever were they so cruel to the people dwelling on that land in shameful hunger. The Jew you will find in the dark and dirty shop, yes. The Jew you will find with his crumbs and scraps, yes. But you will not find him in the big bank-houses, nor in the steamshipping companies, nor in the railroad lines. There you will find only the Church with its business and usury, for it is the Church, not the Jew, which is the money-changer of eSpain. That is an evil thing, to own the body of the people, but there are more evil things, and the most evil of all is to own the soul of the people for profit, and not only the soul of the old ones, but that of the little children, who are told from the beginning that they will burn forever if they do not learn to love misery. But is not the people that should love misery. Is the Church. Yet never in a thousand years have the Church speak its power for the poor, and that is why I say I do not live in it for a long time now. I confess these thinkings to the priest, and he tell me I am not good enough to pray. Not good enough, he say! What he mean is, not bad enough! The good do not pray in the Church of the rich and the strong and the cruel!”