Melov's Legacy

by Sam Ross

  “Because she stinks.”

  “If you’re going to carry my books you’ll have to stop using that vile language.”

  “Why, what’d I say?”

  “You’re an uncouth young man.”

  “Ah, what are you talking?”

  “I guess I’ll have to teach you some manners.”

  “Ah, bushwa.”

  “See what I mean?”

  He tried to see. She used too many big words, though. He looked at her instead. She looked like an expensive doll he had once seen in a store, with pink cheeks and soft curls. She glanced at him and he turned away quickly, embarrassed, moving in awkward silence.

  “You’re the one who had a fight with Polack once and beat him up, aren’t you?”

  He nodded, thrilled by the recognition, feeling his muscles bulge.

  “You must like me, huh?”

  The question stunned him, made him retreat: it had never occurred to him.

  “Do you like me?”

  He couldn’t answer.

  “Then why do you want to carry my books?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. He wished they had something to fight about; it was better.

  “Cat got your tongue?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, if you won’t tell me, then give my books to me.”

  He stepped to one side as she reached for the books and he thrust them away from her.

  “Then say nothing, tongue-tied.”

  She pouted and walked on silently. Then, flinging her head back, with her hair rushing along her middy collar, she said: “Do I look like Mary Pickford?”

  He stared at her, said huskily: “Yah.”

  The haughtiness of her face broke down.

  “Do I, Hershy? Do I, really?”

  “Yah. I think so.”

  “Oh, you …”

  “No. No kidding.”

  For a second there, she almost looked like Rachel. The similarity, and what he had really felt about Rachel before she turned bad and went away, astonished him.

  “Well, here we are.” She pointed to a yellow brick house. The bay windows, bordered with stained glass and thick flowery drapes inside them, seemed to squirm in the sun. They hurt his eyes. He faced the park across the street and let only the sun pinch his eyes.

  “I’m glad you stole my books, Robin Hood,” she said.

  “Yah.”

  “Will you do it again sometime?”

  “Sometime.”

  She jumped up the broad white stone stairs. He called after her: “That was some trick, huh?”

  She turned about, letting her chin rest coyly on her shoulder and shook her head, then she disappeared. Slowly, letting his arms dangle, looking at the glitter of the cement walk, he walked home wondering what had happened to him.

  3.

  His mother pounced on him and shattered the vague, oozy, spacious, dreamy feeling he had had.

  All right, so he was late.

  She’d give him an all right so he was late. Did he have no sense of duty, no responsibility? His father was working himself to the bone for him, but did he care?

  Ah, he wasn’t working himself to the bone for him. He was working himself to the bone for her. She was the one who had driven him into the business. She and Rachel.

  She shook him. What was he talking about?

  He knew what he was talking about.

  What had Rachel to do with it?

  He knew what Rachel had to do with it.

  What?

  He wasn’t saying. He and his Pa knew but he wasn’t saying.

  She shook him again. What?

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  She could kill him, she said. He was turning out to be a fiend.

  Exhausted, she released him. Her huge belly heaved for breath.

  All right, he was turning out to be a fiend. What did she want, never leaving him alone?

  She began to feel sorry for herself. She looked at her bulging figure. Give a child your blood, she said. Bring it into the world and let it almost kill you and what do you get? A demon.

  All right, he was already at the laundry. So he was a few minutes late. It wouldn’t kill his father.

  She’d tear his tongue out if he ever used that expression kill again. Who was he talking about, some bum on the street?

  Strange fears worked through his mother, but Hershy didn’t know what they were, didn’t know why she lashed out at him. With the business a reality at last, her aggressive forces suddenly became dammed up. Doubt and a sense of guilt crept through her. Fear also rose, as she watched a change come over Hershy’s father and as the business began to drain him; and with the fear mingled a hope that he wouldn’t be broken. The business had not only taken the seventy-five hundred dollar investment but also another fifteen hundred to get it going. That was something they hadn’t counted on, but once in it there was nothing to do about it. Then, a few days after going into it, Hershy’s father looked up from a newspaper and said: “The carpenters won the strike. A dollar an hour, a forty-four hour week.” He looked bleak, denied a victory, with a sense of lonely defeat, as he said it. The business had to be a success. She could never ask: and if it failed …? There could be no room for doubt; yet, in some tiny crevice, it crept in.

  All Hershy knew was that since his father had gone into the business she yelled more and more at him, talked more and more about duty and responsibility, blamed him more and more for anything that went wrong, and that she grew more and more nervous. Was it because she was getting bigger, finding it harder to breathe and move and stand on her swelling legs? Was the thing in her an evil spirit, changing her, taking over her whole being? Or was she scared? Because once he heard her say to his father:

  “I hope it comes easy.”

  His father tried to reassure her. “This time it will.”

  “I hope it doesn’t tear me to pieces.”

  “Don’t think about it.”

  “What else have I got to think about? Look, like something wild, it grows and grows. It’s all of me.”

  “Try not to think about it.”

  “Hershel almost killed me.”

  Had he? Could he, a little baby, with no muscles, nothing, without knowing it, almost have killed her? How?

  “He tried to come out feet first, the little devil. He tried to kick me into a grave. Oh, how he hurt. Then he turned around and came out right. Oh, how he hurt.”

  “That was in the old country. It couldn’t happen here.”

  “You see what comes from love: pain, suffering, sometimes death.”

  “But here they have everything to make it easy.”

  “You can talk. You’re safe, sound. You can enjoy your pleasure and go right to sleep. But for my moment of pleasure I’m doomed to agony. The devil must have a hand in this. In this, the devil must dominate God.”

  … Or was she like this because his father was hardly ever home now? He came home so late and so tired that he could hardly take off his clothes and lie down to sleep. He woke up so early that every nerve and bone in his body rebelled. It filled her with pity and complaint. He (Hershy) overheard her talking to the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Bromberg. It filled him with disgust.

  “Business is no good for love.”

  “No?”

  “It takes the life out of a man.”

  “So?”

  “It tears the heart out of a woman. It makes you lonely.”

  “But you have plenty of company. Look at your belly.”

  “Yes, but without a man by your side the new company makes you feel lonelier. The bed sometimes gets so cold.”

  “It’s a hard life.”

  “After all, what do we want out of life? Just a little warmth, that’s all. Just a little warmth.”

  “True, true.”

  … It was all very bewildering. Love had the power to kill; without it, one could die. A baby, without a muscle in its body, could tear a mother to pieces; without it, there was no life. A baby
was supposed to be a gift from God; but the devil, too, took his toll. His mother wanted his father to work like a beast, yet when he drove himself too hard she became frightened and lonely and cold. His father, meantime, tried to pacify her; it made him happier, it seemed, to see things in the abstract. For every feeling of joy, he said, there must be one of pain; otherwise one could never know what joy was. Things never came easy; they came with sweat and blood; only then could one realize the exaltation of a thing coming into being. You can’t just want; you have to do something about it; and in the doing is the pleasure and the pain.

  “Puff,” his mother answered. “Puff up more clouds. A man philosophizes, a woman suffers: the man has it so easy.”

  But Hershy could testify that a man didn’t have it easy. He knew. He had seen his father at work.

  A terrifying world of heat, sound, and smell hit him the first time he came into the laundry off the cool shady street of a spring afternoon. The heat made him gasp and glued his nostrils together and burned his throat; for a moment he thought he was on the benches of a Russian steam room. Soon, dripping with sweat, he was a part of the consuming dampness: the steam, the sweating walls, the sloshing water, the wet clothes. Soon, within a building that had been an old stable, he began to vibrate as the whole plant shook with the working machinery. The gears clanked like the sound of freight cars moving on rails. The belts that whirled the washers screeched. The washers swish-sushed back and forth, with the soapy water gushing out of the pocket holes and splattering onto the cement floors and streaming into the foamy gutters. Off to one side two ringers began revolving with a hum, and then, as they hit a whirring speed, they went into a high whine. The sound was so great it was almost impossible to hear a voice. Separated from the plant itself was the boiler room; there, at the source of the plant’s fierce energy and confusion, it seemed quiet and orderly, with only the hot fire sizzling in the furnace and the long flapping belt loping around two wheels and the well-oiled eccentric rods camming silently and the flyballs whirling on top of the engine.

  Uncle Irving brought the bundles in with a horse and wagon. His father helped him unload, then both of them weighed and sorted them. Then his father dragged them to the washers, heaved them up, and dumped them into the pockets. His father mixed the soaps and bleach solutions and carried them in buckets and spilled them into the pockets. All the while he turned valves to get water into the washers and turned valves to drain them. Then he pulled the clothes out of the pockets and lugged them to the ringers to extract the water, then carried them to the bins where Uncle Irving was to pick them up for delivery.

  His father wore big rubber boots, looked drowned in them as he sloshed up and down the wet pavement. He tended one machine after another, ending an operation and beginning it again. Up and down, over and over, carrying bundles and buckets, mixing solutions, turning valves and pulling levers, his wet hair plastered to his forehead, his damp face growing hollower, his lean body sometimes looking as wilted as the wrung-out clothes.

  On Monday and Tuesday his father started the day at five in the morning and didn’t come home until ten-eleven at night. Work slacked down on Wednesday, until there were only a few bundles to wash on Saturday. But then the machinery needed tending and fixing; the bins had to be rebuilt; business details had to be taken care of; there were a thousand things that had to be done to keep the whole plant going. Even on Sundays, he found it necessary to spend a few hours at the plant, to prepare it for the heavy Mondays and Tuesdays.

  Hershy knew all this. So did his mother. What more testimony did she need of how hard his father worked than the way he came home at night? Even she, at times, seeing the way the flesh was tightening on his face and body, gasped and became overwhelmed with pity and warned him to slow down before he killed himself. To which his father answered: “The machine is a peculiar thing. It dominates a man. The tool—” he shook his head, remembering sadly, of something loved and forever lost “—is something a man dominates. But a machine—there is only one thing you can be to it: a slave.”

  Yes, Hershy could testify. A man did not have it easy. He knew. His mother knew, too. Maybe that’s why she was so scared. But he really knew. He had seen his father at work. He knew another thing, too. He didn’t like the laundry. He hated going there, but he wanted to help. Now, with something else on his mind, aside from the fact that it took him away from his friends and their games, he hated it more. But maybe, he thought, if his father was a success he’d make lots of money and he’d be able to get out of the inside of the laundry and become an office man like Uncle Hymie. Maybe Emily would like him better if his father had lots of money. All girls liked guys with money. He had to help out. It would be nice if he could show off a house nicer and bigger than Emily’s. Ah, he’d say, my father’s richer than your father. She wouldn’t be able to argue back. A fact was a fact. He had to help out.

  4.

  Boarding a streetcar to go out of the neighborhood always brought a sense of adventure and fear to Hershy. His fear lay in the peculiar sensation of leaving home, that something unknown might happen which would keep him from ever returning; it lay in the hostile faces and bodies towering over him, in being a stranger among strangers, in feeling that nobody cared for him and that nobody would help him if he needed it; it lay in a sense that he might get lost suddenly, forever and hopelessly lost. To prevent this he began to memorize every detail on the way to his father’s laundry, each one marked with a sign for his safe return. Leaving his own neighborhood with its familiar landmarks—Joey Gans’s restaurant and poolroom, the two movie houses across the street from each other, the photo shop filled with familiar faces he could identify, the butter and egg store, the fish market, the butcher store, the barber shop and its revolving candy-stick pole, the baseball scores chalked on the sides of buildings, and the rusty corrugated tin fronts of buildings—a change didn’t occur for a half mile.

  Then a big car barn came into view with a hundred shiny tracks that curved into it. The stores began to fritter out. A quiet boulevard. A cigar-store Indian. The photo shop was the same but the faces of the people in the pictures had changed. The same chalk drawings and scoreboards on the sides of buildings, the same barber shops, the same flats on top of the street-level stores. The butcher shops changed, were filled with rabbits and pigs. No butter and egg stores. The same poolrooms, but the guys around them looking different: bigger, tougher. The people on the streets different: lighter hair, bluer eyes, blunter and broader faced, taller, heavier. Factories here and there with water tanks on top of them. A gas tank, a great big round gas tank. Empty lots, rubbled, the same. A drinking trough for horses and an iron post with a horse’s head. The smell changed, heavier, like lard. The sky was more speckled, from smoke. A store with a head painted on the window, split apart with many colors, and gypsies sitting outside in a hundred dirty colors. Two big movie houses with vaudeville attractions. The YMCA. Three carlines crossing. One store like a triangle. Big stores. In the jungled depths of Polack-town. Next stop his.

  Excitement also lurked everywhere: in the shiny rails that stretched endlessly; in the lurching motion of the streetcar, which sometimes transported him aboard a ship in a faraway ocean going to a faraway land; in the sense of rushing through space; in the signposts—like the cigar-store Indian and the water trough for horses which made the street open up to the vast expanse of the Wild West, like the gypsies outside their store who could make magic and read minds, like the vaudeville attractions in the big movie houses where he might one day see Rachel, like the YMCA where there were a million games to play; in the wonder, too, of what was going on all about him.

  On this day, however, a new sensation worked through him on the way to his father’s laundry. In passing the neighborhood movie house he saw a picture of Mary Pickford. Somehow, it began to blend into an image of Emily Foster and he felt a funny pull in his stomach; he wished he knew what had caused it. He looked up at the motorman, who had just spit a stream of tobacco juice
over his head through the open window and was wiping a brown trickle off his chin, wondering whether he could tell him about Emily Foster.

  Was it possible, he wondered, that this man with the beefy freckled hands and the bulky shoulders and thick belly, could have been a kid once with a girl like Emily Foster? Behind him stood a hunched-up man with vacant eyes and an open whistle-breathing mouth and deep creases in his cheeks. Ah, thought Hershy, he wouldn’t know. Would anybody else know? He looked through the car: at the empty eyes, the distressed faces, the tense crouches, the uncomfortable slouches. Were all of them kids once with a feeling like he was having? Would they know what was happening to him? Well, maybe his father’d know. He didn’t look like them. At least, he wasn’t a stranger. But how could he talk about it with his father? The guys? Could he ask them? No, they’d kid him, they’d laugh at him. He wished he had a big brother. You could talk to a big brother; he’d know everything; he wouldn’t kid.

  The motorman began to dang-dang his bell. A horse and wagon rode the rails in front of the car. The motorman began to yell. The horse and wagon swerved off. Hershy stopped thinking about Emily. The man on the wagon, huddled up with his elbows resting on his knees and with the reins dangling in his hands, looked like Uncle Ben. In passing, he saw that it wasn’t Uncle Ben, but his whole body froze: the motorman stuck his head out of the window and hurled a wad of brown spit at the peddler and yelled: “Hey, you kike bastard, next time I’ll run you down.” The peddler rode on indifferently. The motorman slammed his foot down on the bell a few more times, and, with the car away, looked down at Hershy.

  “Boy, these kike bastards,” he said, “clogging up the streets, making money money money, I could kill every one of them. Kid, when you grow up, be a man, don’t let them walk on the same side of the street with you.”

  Hershy felt himself shrink from under the motorman’s bloodshot eyes and reddish face.

  “You going to be a man, kid? You going to do it?”

  “Yah. Yah.”

  “Keep the country from going to the dogs. Me, I fought in the war. What did I get for it? A stool I never sit on, an iron fence behind me, a dirty window in front, a bell to dingle, a bunch of autos farting in my face, a Jew on a horse and wagon to slow me up and make me late and put me in dutch with the company, a bunch of fatheads who want me to roll out the carpets every time they get off. A guy goes away, gets himself shot at, and what does he come back to? A beefing wife, a couple of kids who don’t know him from Adam, the same old varicose-vein job, and a bunch of Jews running free on the streets.”