Melov's Legacy

by Sam Ross

  Yah-yah, he sing-songed.

  She concluded that he had a girl.

  He wouldn’t admit that he had a girl, not even to himself.

  Soon he’d be coming to her, she knew, to say he wanted her to meet his sweetheart.

  He didn’t have a girl, he growled.

  Who was she? What was she like?

  She was like nothing. He didn’t have nothing.

  Then why was he so impatient about long pants and growing tall? Why did he glare at the clock and the calendar and curse them? Why did he brush his teeth and wash himself and comb his hair without being told?

  Because. That’s why.

  Pisher, sissy, monkey-face, she ridiculed him. So young and he had girls on his mind already. How time flew. Yesterday he was in diapers. Yesterday he had stood up and had taken a step and had fallen on his face. Yesterday he was a sick baby on a ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Now look at him. Look at him bristle. Look at him worry. Look at him die with impatience. Look at him. Look at him. How time flew.

  She crunched his face in her hands and kissed him on the lips. He broke away from her, bewildered by her emotion. Then she got sad. Her face blurred in the shadows of Time. Yussel was gone: forever. Rachel was gone. Soon Hershy would be going away. Oh, she knew. A girl came and the boy went. A girl came and a child suddenly became his own boss. Soon everybody would be gone. Soon, though she was going to give birth to a new baby, she’d be left alone with only his father. Soon, soon. Yesterday’s dream, today’s past. How time flew.…

  Time.

  For his mother it flew. For his father there was no time; there wasn’t a second of the day that didn’t consume him; time was a hungry mouth; it ate him up alive. For Hershy, time stood still. It was a funny world.

  Time left him in a state of suspense, too. Was Emily going to be in school the next day? What was she going to look like? What was she going to wear? Would she turn around and glance at him? Would she talk to him? Would he walk her home? Could he think up a stunt to get him away from the guys so that he could walk her home? Then what would they talk about? What would they do? Couldn’t he think up any games both of them could play? … Time left him with a sense of entering unknown vistas of experience; it left his cluttered heart and mind on the brink of bottomless chasms. He wanted to give but didn’t know how. He wanted to take but didn’t know what. Time brought him to a dictionary; it solved a problem.

  “Hey, you’re so smart, tell me what this means. Quagga.”

  “What, smarty?”

  “It’s a horse, see; like a zebra, see; with stripes, see.”

  “Where’d you learn that, from a dictionary?”

  “No,” he lied. “Think I read the dictionary like you? I seen a quagga in the zoo.”

  “You mean, you saw a quagga.”

  “All right. Saw.”

  “And I don’t read the dictionary, smarty.”

  “You do too.”

  “How do you know? Have you ever seen me?”

  “Saw, not seen. See?”

  “Seen is right, the way I used it.”

  “Saw-seen, what’s the diff? I know you read the dictionary.”

  “You’re a dirty, nasty, supercilious, unconscious, for saying that.”

  “Yah? Then how do you get them dollar words, from your own head?”

  “Yes, see? At night, when I’m asleep, they come right into my mind. Sometimes I make up a whole poem from my own mind when I’m sleeping and it has the most beautiful words in the world. See?”

  “Ah, baloney.”

  “If you talk to me like that, I won’t let you talk to me any more.”

  “Okay, don’t talk to me then. Who can understand you anyway?”

  Silence.

  “Then don’t talk to me.”

  Silence.

  “Ah, for Cry Yike.”

  Silence. Then:

  “You going to use that word, quagga, tomorrow?”

  “No.”

  But when teacher began weighing the value of words, Emily gave the class the word he had presented to her, and his heart turned over.

  Once he gave her a real present, at a priceless cost.

  Many times, after delivering his father’s supper and trying to help out at the laundry and after eating his own supper, he sneaked out of the neighborhood through the alley, so that he could avoid meeting his pals, and went to where Emily lived. On the park side of the street, opposite her yellow house with the squirming bay windows, there was a large clearing of soft earth and grass, which, as the sun sank, became shadowed and cooled by the tall trees surrounding it. There, he’d do handstands and cartwheels and somersaults, hoping she’d see him through the windows. Sometimes she came out and passed by with a girl friend and, watching him begin to perform twice as hard, she said: “Who is that strange little boy over there? What queer things he does!” Sometimes, though, she came over alone. “You get away from in front of my house, you conceit, you show-off, you braggart, you acrobat.” But he knew that she liked his stunts, because after a little fight she’d sit down on the grass and she’d scream with delight as he wore himself out with more stunts; then tired, he’d sit down beside her and feel himself drawn very close to her, beyond their desperate awkwardness and agonizing silences.

  But one evening she didn’t appear at all, neither in her window nor outside. He wore himself out, performing and watching for her, wondering what had happened to her; but when the lights went on in her house and came out on the street, he knew that she was home and had ignored him and that she wasn’t going to come out. He dived into the grass on his hands and stretched out exhausted. Presently, through the swelling sound of the crickets and the soughing of the trees overhead, he felt the whole earth move against him, lifting him high high, until it became a huge ball with himself dangling over a curved edge of endless space. Then, looped in the incessant swirl of the cricket’s sound, he rolled up to his knees, rolled up to his feet, and, feeling as small as the cricket, began to walk home.

  On his way, he heard the sound of a mandolin. It seemed to reach out to him and, as though grasping him by the hand, it led him to Old Man Parker’s basement flat. Mr. Parker was the only real American that lived on the street. Nobody knew what he did and how he lived, but Hershy’s mother once said: “What does he have to do? He’s a genuine American. Isn’t that enough?” Outside of his mandolin playing he was always reading books and sometimes he recited poems. When he talked his words sounded more foreign than anybody Hershy knew.

  Hershy looked through the window and saw the old man sitting in candlelight, plunking his mandolin, his shadow huge on the wall and his gray beard and hair and clothes yellowed by the light. Mr. Parker saw him suddenly and stopped playing. He rose slowly and seemed to creak himself as he opened the creaking door.

  “Come in, son. O enter, son.”

  Hershy walked in timidly. The place was dusty, as unkempt as Mr. Parker, and smelled of old age, loneliness, and mothballs.

  “Sit down. O please sit down.”

  Hershy sat down stiffly on a soiled wooden chair and leaned against an old coat that was draped around it. A cloud of dust rose and the springs began to screech as Mr. Parker eased himself into a rocking chair. His eyes seemed to run and his tongue was a fiery red in his yellow-gray beard when he spoke.

  “Anything wrong, son? What makes you so pensive and silent?”

  Hershy felt that an ant was crawling down his back. He glanced at a spider web across a shelf of books and wriggled his shoulders. He said: “Nothing.”

  “Have you lost your best friend? Your dearest sweetheart?”

  The phrase frightened him, in the way it was said. He felt himself wanting to leap up and run, in the way Mr. Parker’s head wobbled as he leaned forward.

  “Do not worry, son. I am an old man dried by a century. I am a lonely old man with an ancient past. Do not see sadness in my weak eyes. If there are tears, see gratitude in them.”

  Hershy gulped and tried to relax.
Mr. Parker always talked funny, like he was remembering something and reciting it, his voice dry and froggy, the words matted by the shaggy hair that covered his whole face. Hershy could almost feel Mr. Parker’s voice boom in his belly. He could almost feel the heavy-veined, wrinkled, shaggy hands upon him, as they quivered. He felt himself recoil. But the old man was a real American. Maybe he’d know Emily better if he could know a real American.

  “Why don’t you play some more, Mr. Parker?”

  “Do not be frightened, son. I am an old man in a dusty basement. But you are youth. O youth. The lovers, the creators, the vital ones. I will write you a song.”

  Mr. Parker rose and went to a cluttered roll-top desk. He fumbled about for some paper, opened a book, and with a trembling hand began to write. Hershy watched, both frightened and fascinated, rooted to his chair. Mr. Parker folded the paper, then got up and put it in Hershy’s shirt pocket. And then Hershy almost leaped with terror as he felt the trembling old hand on his head and heard a new note, almost of frenzy, come into Mr. Parker’s voice:

  “O camerado close! O you and me at last, and us two only.

  O a word to clear one’s path ahead endlessly!

  O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!

  O now I triumph—and you shall also;

  (Mr. Parker fumbled for Hershy’s hand)

  O hand in hand—O wholesome pleasure—O one more desirer and lover!

  O to haste firm holding—to haste, haste on with me.”

  Hershy flung Mr. Parker’s hand off his head and rushed out of the door. He ran wildly down the block and finally stopped. He didn’t know what had happened, except that he had had a feeling of being engulfed, that he couldn’t breathe, like suddenly he was drowning in a sea of wriggling veins and yellow-gray moss. It was when he began to scratch his head, puzzled and wondering why he had got so scared, that he missed his skull cap. He walked back stealthily to the basement flat. Mr. Parker was hunched over his desk, his head on his arms, his back shuddering, and great sobs tore out of his throat. The terror Hershy had felt had run out in his flight; in its stead a deep sense of pity welled up. He tiptoed in through the open door and took his cap off the floor and stepped out without making a sound.

  The following day he couldn’t help but dramatize the evening before to himself. And when he presented Emily with the poem that was written for him he thought he had risked his very life for it.

  “Here,” he said. “A poem I wrote for you. I almost died to do it.”

  She pecked his cheek and ran away and left him standing in a bewildered straitjacket of joy. But the next day, without warning, she stepped up to him in the park, just as he was getting to his feet from a somersault, and slapped his face.

  “You’re a dirty, nasty, filthy-minded person, you, and you ought to get your mouth washed with soap and water until the day you die, you you you filthy.”

  “Why, what’d I do?”

  “My mother told me what you wrote. You’re a foul, evil-minded, dirty little boy, she said, and I must never see you again.”

  She handed back the poem; it was what Mr. Parker had recited to him the night before, and below it was written—by Walt Whitman, who was also so misunderstood.

  “Besides, my mother said I have no business playing with a dirty little Jew. See?”

  The words shocked him: he had never considered whether she was Jewish or not.

  “Yah?” he said, his breath coming hard.

  “Yes. I’m never to see you again. Now beat it, you dirty little Jew.”

  His fists tightened and he glared at her and for a moment he couldn’t move; but when she turned her back on him and walked away and he saw her curls bounce haughtily on her shoulders, something inside him seemed to tear loose. He ran over and kicked her with all his might. He looked down at her as she screamed and cried on the ground, then his heart seemed to drop out of his hands as they uncurled, and he walked home with a great emptiness. He met some of his pals sitting on the curbstone under the light of the lamppost outside his house. Listening to them talk and yearn, he declared solemnly: “Ah, they all stink out loud.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1.

  Every other year, as the school term drew to a close, Hershy felt like a wild bridled horse, bucking and straining against rein and saddle and bit. And, when released finally—the rein loosened, the bit snapped, the saddle flung off—he burst out in a frenzy of joy: school was over: he had passed: it was summer summer summer … A time for liberation and belonging: all outdoors was his.

  But this year, after the initial outburst of joy, he learned for the first time in his life that summer was also a time for oppression; in its vivid and luxuriant growth, corrupt bodies entered with seeds of despair and decay. For it was evident by then that the laundry, as well as his father, was slowly disintegrating.

  “The devil,” his mother said, mopping her wet face and groaning with the burden of her added weight, “has come to spend his holiday with us.”

  Hershy noticed that she long ago had stopped welcoming his father eagerly each time he came home.

  “How was business today?”

  “So-so.”

  “Was it good?”

  “So-so.”

  “How many bundles did you wash today?”

  “A hundred.”

  “But Irving said you can handle two hundred a day.”

  “What one says, what one dreams about, and what is really true, are three different things.”

  “Still, a hundred bundles isn’t bad. At a dollar a bundle, it’s a hundred dollars. You made a hundred dollars today.”

  “If only it were so simple.”

  “If you washed them you made it.”

  “All right, then I made it.”

  “So where is it?”

  “In a piece of coal, a barrel of soap, in a fixed machine, in the landlord’s pocket, on the engineer’s table; in a thousand things a business consumes. So tell me, where is it?”

  “Don’t worry. You just started. Wait, business will get better. You’ll expand. You’ll hire more workers. You’ll have it easy then. You’ll just sit in the office. You’ll see.”

  “I hope so, I hope so, I hope so.”

  But when he began staring at her as she talked, falling asleep at the table while waiting for his supper, becoming more and more silent, her eagerness died away. In its stead rose a sense of guilt. A dim hope, vague and aching, mingled with fear, took over. She became concerned more with survival than with success.

  2.

  Hershy was at the laundry the day a city inspector came to look the plant over. He showed his badge and Hershy noticed his father become nervous as the man walked about and noted things down in a black notebook.

  “What is it?” his father asked. “What’s the matter?”

  The man didn’t answer. He observed and made notes in his book; he mopped his thick red face and the leather band of his straw hat. Finally, having obtained the fear and respect he wanted, he cleared his throat and said:

  “Mr. Melov, you’re in a jam.”

  “How? Why?”

  “You’re not operating according to regulations.”

  “How is that? What do you mean?”

  “I could close you down tomorrow, like that.” The inspector snapped his fingers.

  Hershy watched his father’s body twinge, as though he had been cracked with a whip.

  “Yep.” The inspector snapped his fingers again. “Like that. Tomorrow.”

  “But this place has been in business for years. Why suddenly, now, is it operating against the law?”

  “Well, for years we didn’t know about this place, see? But people have started to complain about the smoke from your stack. It’s too low, not according to regulations. If they hadn’t complained, nobody’d have known the difference. But now that they have and I’ve come to look things over, I see you not only need a higher stack but you also need a brick wall instead of wood to separate the boiler
room from the plant. That’s a safety regulation.”

  “But who has to worry about safety? I’m the only one in the plant. I don’t have any workers here. If anybody is unsafe, it’s me, the owner, the boss, nobody else.”

  “It makes no difference, Mr. Melov. You got to operate according to regulations. That’s the law.”

  “Who complained?”

  “Why? You think you can do anything about it?” He looked his father over, with a slight chuckle and a sneer, his bulky body towering over him. “The neighbors around here are big fighting Polacks.”

  His father shook his head weakly and wiped the sweat from his eyes.

  “Well, what are you going to do about it?” said the man.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do I put in an order to close you up?”

  “No. No.”

  “What are your plans then?”

  “Where will I get the money?”

  “That’s your worry.”

  “Can’t you help me? You see, I just started the business. Give me a chance to get on my feet. I’ll do everything right. God knows, I want to do everything right. Just give me a little time, I beg you.”

  The man stuck his thick lips out, thinking.

  “Well,” he said, “I don’t have to turn in my report right away.”

  “No. Please give me a little time.”

  “I don’t like to see a guy trying to get along put in a jam.”

  His father’s eyes began to look grateful.

  “I figure,” the man said, “it’ll cost you a good five hundred for the job, maybe closer to seven-fifty before you’re through, what with labor costs and all that going up. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Would it be worth two hundred bucks to you if I don’t turn in my report?”

  His father’s eyes seemed to spin, then grow wide and rigid.

  “For two hundred bucks,” the man said, “I’ll tear up this report and I’ll turn in another one saying the plant is in perfect order, operating according to the law. How’s that, Mr. Melov?”

  His father’s mouth began to quiver and the man, mistaking it for heartfelt gratitude, said: