by Sam Ross
“Okay. Kiddies love it and ladies scream,” he said. “Watch it, sport.”
He removed the oilcloth and a machine something like a cash register came into view.
“Watch it carefully, sport.”
Then he did the most amazing thing. He inserted a dollar through a slot, punched a few knobs, and the machine began working and buzzing like a gum slot machine. Then a bell rang, and from the bottom popped a ten-dollar bill.
“How do you like that, sport?” the man said.
“What is it?” asked Hershy’s father.
“What is it!” the man laughed. “Money, hey?”
“Yes, yes, I know,” said Hershy’s father.
“What’s the matter, ain’t you never seen a ten-dollar bill?” said the man. “Here, touch it, feel it. Nice, hey? Real nice, hey?”
Hershy’s father stared at the bill.
“Here, let me have a tenner,” the man said. “I want you to match it. I want you to see it ain’t fake. I want you to see it’s the McCoy.”
Hershy’s father fumbled in his pocket and took out a ten-dollar bill. He looked at both of them carefully. They were exactly the same.
“From the one dollar came the ten?” he asked.
“Exactly, sport.” The man slapped him on the back.
“It’s really real?”
“Strictly McCoy, sport.”
“David,” said Hershy’s mother, her eyes bulging. “Do you realize …”
“Man, oh man,” said Hershy. “Some magic, huh?”
“I told you, sport, kiddies love it and women scream. Yep, missus. Yep, sport. Five thousand gets you fifty thousand. One dollar gets you ten, every time.”
“How, what do you mean?” said Hershy’s father.
“How? What do I mean? The machine, sport. The machine. What’d I do, give you a demonstration for nothing? The machine talks, I don’t have to. You seen with your own eyes, didn’t you? Okay, I’ll show you again. Give me a dollar. I’m going to show you with your own dollar.”
Hershy’s father handed him a dollar. The man inserted it through the slot, and bang, out popped another ten-dollar bill.
“Now here’s the pitch, sport. I understand you got ten thousand dollars. All right, I got two of these machines, but I got no money. Now this machine eats money, but before it produces ten for one you got to feed it one. So, in order to make this machine work for me, too, I need some ready cash. So I’m willing to part with this gold mine for five thousand. That leaves you five thousand. Right? And five times ten gets you fifty. Right? So both of us stand to make fifty thousand on this little invention a great scientist dreamed up and all our problems are over. See? Here, give me another dollar bill.”
Hershy’s father handed him another dollar and watched the machine with his mouth open. The man continued talking, spieling like a barker at a circus, his face twitching, his hands working, his body getting tighter and tighter. Suddenly, Hershy saw his father’s mouth close and his eyes flare.
“Get out,” he said.
“What do you mean, get out?” the man said. “What, are you nuts or something, giving me the shag, me, who’s willing to let you in on the hottest thing man ever invented?”
“Get out, I said.”
“What, have you got holes in your head or something?”
“Get out, you hear!”
Hershy’s father picked up the machine and the oilcloth, thrust them into the man’s hands, and pushed him out of the house.
“You, too!”
Mr. Finkel, the neighbor, lifted his eyebrows, his face looking more than ever like he had been gypped, and walked out.
Alone, Hershy’s mother said: “But David, you saw with your own eyes.”
“Yah, Pa,” said Hershy. “It worked. Like magic, it worked.”
“Shut up,” his father said. “Do you want me to spend the rest of my days in jail?”
“No,” said Hershy’s mother. “But if it was real, who would know?”
His father dismissed her with a wave of his hand. He slumped into a chair. He said: “Do I look like an idiot, a complete idiot? Tell me, do I?”
“No,” said Hershy’s mother.
“Then why do people come to me with their wild, greedy schemes?”
Hershy didn’t know. His mother didn’t answer.
“The two connivers. Imagine what they must think of me. Talk to him fast, Mr. Finkel must have told this man. The less sense you make the better it will be, Mr. Finkel must have told him. It hurts that I should be taken for a complete fool. It hurts hard.”
What hurt more was the night Uncle Ben, the fruit peddler, came over with his wife Bronya, the oldest sister of Hershy’s mother.
Uncle Ben had been a harness-maker, but when the automobile came he lost his job and couldn’t get another. One day, in a rage against the machine that had made him obsolete, he took a sledgehammer and broke up an automobile on the street; as a result, he spent thirty days in jail and came out a baffled man, with the wrinkles of his forehead seeming to form in curious question marks. Logic finally came back to him, the logic of a desperate man: since he knew about a horse’s equipment he should also know something about a horse, and since he came from a village that was surrounded by farms he should also know something about fruits, so he decided to get a horse and wagon and go into the fruit business. The horse, he found, became another mouth to feed and house and care for; and the wagon, he learned, became something that always needed fixing; and fruit, until he discovered the cheating ways of the men at the market, was something that turned rotten as soon as he touched it. The only pleasure he got out of the business was handling the harness, but even that got old and worn and its rough texture became an irritant. Recently, his horse had slipped on the ice and broken a leg. He had stood silent over the animal, looking into its blood-streaked eyes, pitying himself more than the horse, while somebody ran for a policeman. The horse was shot and dragged away and he had left the wagon to rot with the fruit. He was strictly a shlimazel; the fates were against him. Perhaps he was made to suffer, he reasoned, just so that his being might reassure those who made the world move that they were great. People said you could weep for Uncle Ben. And perhaps you could, looking at his sparse sandy hair and his tangled eyebrows and his runny gray eyes and the unkempt mustache that was wedged between the two long grooves of his cheeks; and the way he sat, as though a weight had settled on him, crushing the baffled wrinkles out of his forehead, made one squirm. His wife complemented him, her folded hands resigned in her lap, her long pale face shrouded in a shawl of tightly combed hair that was pulled into a thick biscuit, her head and shoulders rocking steadily as she sat; from time to time she sighed.
Hope, which had led Uncle Ben from one agony to another, was gnawing at him again. He knew of a newsstand he could buy; it brought in between thirty and thirty-five dollars a week.
“No!” said Hershy’s father. “You mean, from little penny sales a man can make all that in a week?”
“It’s the truth,” said Uncle Ben. “I saw it in black and white.”
“Imagine that.”
There was a long silence, filled with sighs, throat clearing, and the sullen sounds of their clothes rubbing against the chairs. Uncle Ben was working hard to gather his forces and Hershy could feel his mother and father begin to retreat. It seemed that his father had suddenly assumed for Uncle Ben the position of Uncle Hymie, the one you catered to, came to for advice or for a loan; mixed with all this was also a sense of envy and contempt. His father tried to relax, make Uncle Ben comfortable, but didn’t know what to do except look away from him.
“The man,” said Uncle Ben finally, “is making a sacrifice. He’s a sick man. He can’t stand the cold. So he has to go away to a warmer climate. He is making a real sacrifice.” Uncle Ben paused, trying to focus his eyes on somebody, but getting no contact (not even from Hershy, who kept identifying him with the crippled horse that was shot) he stared at his stubby calloused hands. “The man wants
twelve hundred dollars.”
“That’s not bad,” Hershy’s father admitted.
“I could make that in less than a year. I figured it out in black and white. Even if it’s only thirty dollars a week I could make fifteen hundred and sixty dollars, three hundred and sixty more than I’d pay in, and then the stand would be mine, all mine, all my life.”
“You mean you’d pay the twelve hundred dollars back in a year and live on only three hundred and sixty?”
Uncle Ben studied the question; it seemed to bewilder him. “No,” he said. “I mean …” He got all mixed up in his calculations, then cast them away with an incestuous curse in Russian. “But I could pay it all back, in one year or five years: what’s the difference?”
There was a pause again, with everybody straining as if they were standing on their toes. Hershy had some marbles in his pocket. He picked one and flicked it against the pile. He said silently: give it to him, Pa; aw, give it to him. Then his father cleared his throat, as though there were a bone in it.
“Couldn’t you get it for a thousand?” he said.
Uncle Ben seemed to leap up: “Maybe I could. The man is desperate. He is making a sacrifice. Maybe I could, maybe I could.”
“A thousand dollars is a lot of money, you know.”
“The man will take it. He’s desperate.”
“In fact, I put aside a little more than a thousand for Hershy’s education.”
“You have to think of the children, I know.”
“Rachel has to have some money for the day she gets married. She’s a big girl now. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow she’ll come home with a boy and say: Pa, meet my future husband.”
“I hope so, I hope so.”
“Things here aren’t like in the old country. It costs money to get married. Everything costs a fortune.”
Uncle Ben nodded his head. Slowly, he was losing the enthusiasm he had worked up. Hershy could feel his spirit droop. His father, without realizing it, because he wanted to be kind and because he couldn’t be abrupt and say no, had a need to explain his situation further.
“The new baby also needs money. If it’s a boy I’ll have to put some aside for his education. If it’s a girl she’ll need money to grow up and then more for her marriage.”
“I know,” said Uncle Ben dryly. “The children are very important. All we live for is the children.”
“And then there will be hospital bills and doctor bills for Sonya and the new baby. What’s left?”
Uncle Ben shrugged his shoulders.
“Have you asked anybody else?”
Uncle Ben nodded. “But you know what everybody thinks of me. Like in the poem by Abraham ibn Ezra:
“If I sold shrouds,
No one would die.
If I sold lamps,
Then, in the sky
The sun, for spite,
Would shine by night.”
Aunt Bronya stopped her weary rocking and sighing a moment to say: “True, true. Once a shlimazel always a shlimazel.”
“Words, everybody is willing to give me,” said Uncle Ben. “Even my silent horse, who didn’t have any words, told me what he thought of me. Once, when I was washing him he spread his legs and peed on me. Another time he lifted up his tail and farted right in my face. At least, he was honest.”
“Did you ask Hymie?”
“You know Hymie. He’s so stuffed with money, his guts should only turn green with it, that he can’t even get his finger in to pull any of it out.”
“Then what can I do? You know I’m not a rich man. All right, I have a few extra dollars now to protect me and my family, should anything happen. But all I am, really, is a hard worker who lives only on his wages.”
“But I’ll pay you back, David.”
“Yes, but how? To put so much money, twelve hundred dollars, into a business and get so little in return seems scandalous. Money goes, nobody knows where. And if you don’t pay me, can I become a tyrant and demand it, can I take it out of your mouth and the mouths of your children? What if I should need the money before you can pay it up? Can I ask you to sell the stand? Can I force you to do a thing like that? And if I could, would I be able to? Would I be able to see you and your children go hungry? It’s such a hard thing you ask of me.”
“But what can happen? You’re working. You and your family, may God protect you from any evil, you’re strong and healthy. What can happen that you might want to need the money suddenly?”
“Who knows? But I remember the days when I wasn’t working, when we almost starved from hunger and couldn’t pay the rent, when I walked the streets trying to make a penny while swallowing my own bitter gall. Look what’s happening in the world: revolutions, strikes, maybe a depression, the papers say, even the cost of a piece of bread makes it almost a luxury. And what if something happens to me? Will you work and earn a living for me and my family?”
“Then you won’t give me the money?”
“If I were a rich man, I’d say all right. But what have I got, a little security, through the heavenly grace of my poor brother? Even I, with a little money, am I thinking of business? What is it with this business-business? Can’t a man be happy without a business?”
The contempt finally came out of Uncle Ben: “Don’t talk about you and me. We’re two different people.”
“Oh, how you confuse me.”
“I should be so confused.”
“Look, Ben.” Hershy’s father leaned across the table and put his hand on Uncle Ben’s shoulder. “Buy another horse and become a fruit peddler again. It made you a living before and it’s something you know about.”
Uncle Ben shrugged the placating hand away. “No. Never again.”
“I could give you the money for a horse, even for a wagon and your first load of fruit. But twelve hundred dollars, that’s a fortune.”
“Don’t do me any favors. I don’t want the rest of my life harnessed to a dumb animal.”
“Don’t dream so big, Ben. You got along before with a horse, why not again?”
“Don’t tell me how to dream. Because you have some money, it doesn’t make you a boss over me. Remember, you’re still David Melov, a common worker.”
“Listen to reason, please, Ben.”
“Go to hell with your reason.”
Hershy’s father began to show anger. “Do me a favor and go to hell yourself if you won’t listen to reason. Do what millions of other men have to do to live: go get a job.”
“Don’t tell me what to do. Don’t forget, I’m not used to taking orders any more. The horse taught me how to give orders. Remember?”
“How can I talk to a man like you?”
“Then don’t talk to me. I don’t care if we never talk again. But if you should want to talk to me, talk to me with money. Come, Bronya.” Uncle Ben rose, took Aunt Bronya by the hand and pulled her to her feet. “And may your insides, too, turn green with the money you’re stuffed with.”
Hershy watched his mother and father stare at each other after Uncle Ben and Aunt Bronya left.
“Gee,” he said, feeling he had to say something, “I’ll bet if we ever go to their house, their kids’ll never play with me. They’ll be mad on me.”
“Don’t worry,” his mother said. “You have plenty of other bums to play with.”
His father paid no attention to him. “Sonya,” he said. “Did I do wrong?”
“No.”
“But maybe I should have given him the money. He’ll pay me back.”
“That shlimazel? Never.”
“But it’s for your sister, too.”
“I don’t care. We have to think of ourselves first.”
“The money feels like a bone in my throat.”
“If you had agreed to give him the money, I’d have killed you.”
Hershy’s father looked up at the ceiling: a habit, Hershy noticed, he was getting into lately.
“Ay, Yussel, Yussel,” he said. “You meant good, but look what it’s doing to us.
”
3.
Hershy’s mother couldn’t let the matter about Uncle Ben rest. She was afraid that Uncle Ben and her sister Bronya might gossip to all the landsmen, that they might create the impression that she and David had hearts of stone. She was certain that she and David had treated Uncle Ben right, but she needed assurance; she needed people to stand up for her good name. She took Hershy along to the West Side to visit her sister Mascha and Uncle Irving, who lived on the same street as Uncle Ben. Hershy’s cousins, Louie and Charley, were at a movie, and he moved about restlessly as his mother explained her plight.
Uncle Irving said: “Poison, I’d have given him.”
Hershy watched his mother agree eagerly.
“What right does a man have to ask for all that money?” Uncle Irving said. “What does Ben think—you owe him a living, you have nothing to do but squander your money on him? He’s crazy.”
Hershy’s mother patted Uncle Irving’s hand. “Irving,” she said. “You’re a man with sense. I knew you’d understand.”
Uncle Irving went on. “What if you should want to go into business yourself? Then what would you do?”
“Yes,” said Hershy’s mother. “What would I do?”
“Is David thinking of going into business?”
Hershy’s mother shrugged her shoulders.
“He should take his time,” said Uncle Irving firmly. “He should know what he’s doing. He should be careful.”
“Sometimes a man can take too much time.”
“Now,” said Uncle Irving, rubbing his hands, his eyes lighting up. “If a man should come to David with a proposition where he could make a lot of money, then he’d really have something to offer, hah?”
Hershy’s mother placed her hands on her belly, as though protecting the baby within her.
“If a man, say, like myself,” Uncle Irving continued, “were to come to David and say: ‘David, I have a proposition that will make you a fortune—’ that would really be something, wouldn’t it?”