G
eorge Fisher was still lying awake, thinking of the accident which he had seen on 121st Street. A young man had been struck by an automobile, and they had carried him to the drugstore on Broadway. The druggist couldn’t do anything for him, so they waited for an ambulance. The man lay on the druggist’s table in the back of the store looking at the ceiling. He knew he was going to die.
George felt deeply sorry for the man, who seemed to be in his late twenties. The stoical way in which he took the accident convinced George that he was a person of fine character. He knew that the man was not afraid of death, and he wanted to speak to him and tell him that he too was not afraid to die; but the words never formed themselves on his thin lips. George went home, choked with unspoken words.
Lying in bed in his dark room, George heard his daughter, Florence, put the key in the lock. He heard her whisper to Paul, “Do you want to come in for a minute?”
“No,” said Paul after a while, “I’ve got a nine o’clock class tomorrow.”
“Then good night,” said Florence and she closed the door hard.
George thought, This is the first decent boy Florence has gone out with, and she can’t get anywhere with him. She’s like her mother. She doesn’t know how to handle decent people. He raised his head and looked at Beatie, half expecting her to wake up because his thoughts sounded so loud to him, but she didn’t move.
This was one of George’s sleepless nights. They came just after he had finished reading an interesting novel, and he lay awake imagining that all those things were happening to him. In his sleepless nights George thought of the things that had happened to him during the day, and he said those words that people saw on his lips, but which they never heard him speak. He said to the dying young man, “I’m not afraid to die either.” He said to the heroine in the novel, “You understand my loneliness. I can tell you these things.” He told his wife and daughter what he thought of them.
“Beatie,” he said, “you made me talk once, but it wasn’t you. It was the sea and the darkness and the sound of the water sucking the beams of the pier. Those poetical things I said about how lonely men are—I said them because you were pretty, with dark red hair, and I was afraid because I was a small man with thin lips, and I was afraid that I could not have you. You didn’t love me, but you said yes for Riverside Drive and your apartment and your two fur coats and the people who come here to play bridge and mah-jongg.”
He said to Florence, “What a disappointment you are. I loved you when you were a child, but now you’re selfish and small. I lost my last bit of feeling for you when you didn’t want to go to college. The best thing you ever did was to bring an educated boy like Paul into the house, but you’ll never keep him.”
George spoke these thoughts to himself until the first gray of the April dawn drifted into the bedroom and made the silhouette of Beatie in the other bed clearer. Then George turned over and slept for a while.
In the morning, at breakfast, he said to Florence, “Did you have a good time?”
“Oh, leave me alone,” answered Florence.
“Leave her alone,” said Beatie. “You know she’s cranky in the morning.”
“I’m not cranky,” said Florence, almost crying. “It’s Paul. He never takes me anyplace.”
“What did you do last night?” asked Beatie.
“What we always do,” answered Florence. “We went for a walk. I can’t even get him into a movie.”
“Does he have money?” asked Beatie. “Maybe he’s working his way through college.”
“No,” said Florence, “he’s got money. His father is a big buyer. Oh, what’s the use? I’ll never get him to take me out.”
“Be patient,” Beatie told her. “Next time, either I or your father will suggest it to him.”
“I won’t,” said George.
“No, you won’t,” answered Beatie, “but I will.”
George drank his coffee and left.
When he came home for dinner, there was a note for George saying that Beatie and Florence had eaten early because Beatie was going to Forest Hills to play bridge and Florence had a date to go to the movies with her girl friend. The maid served George, and later he went into the living room to read the papers and listen to the war news.
The bell rang. George rose, calling out to the maid, who was coming from her room, that he would answer the bell. It was Paul, wearing an old hat and a raincoat, wet on the shoulders.
George was glad that Florence and Beatie were not there.
“Come in, Paul. Is it raining?”
“It’s drizzling.”
Paul entered without taking off his raincoat. “Where’s Florence?” he asked.
“She went to the pictures with a friend of hers. Her mother is playing bridge or mah-jongg. somewhere. Did Florence know you were coming?”
“No, she didn’t know.”
Paul looked disappointed. He walked to the door.
“Well, I’m sorry,” said George, hoping that the boy would stay.
Paul turned at the door. “Mr. Fisher.”
“Yes?” said George.
“Are you busy now?”
“No, I’m not.”
“How about going for a walk with me?”
“Didn’t you say it was raining?”
“It’s only spring rain,” said Paul. “Put on your raincoat and an old hat.”
“Yes,” said George, “a walk will do me good.” He went into his room for a pair of rubbers. As he was putting them on, he could feel a sensation of excitement, but he didn’t think of it. He put on his black raincoat and last year’s hat.
As soon as they came into the street and the cold mist fell on his face, George could feel the excitement flow through his body. They crossed the street, passed Grant’s Tomb, and walked toward the George Washington Bridge.
The sky was filled with a floating white mist which clung to the street lamps. A wet wind blew across the dark Hudson from New Jersey and carried within it the smell of spring. Sometimes the wind
blew the cold mist into George’s eyes, and it shocked him as if it were electricity. He took long steps to keep up with Paul, and he secretly rejoiced in what they were doing. He felt a little like crying, but he did not let Paul guess.
Paul was talking. He told stories about his professors in Columbia at which George laughed. Then Paul surprised George by telling him that he was studying architecture. He pointed out the various details of the houses they were passing and told him what they were derived from. George was very much interested. He always liked to know where things came from.
They slowed down, waited for traffic to stop, crossed Riverside Drive again, and walked over to Broadway to a tavern. Paul ordered a sandwich and a bottle of beer, and George did the same. They talked about the war; then George ordered two more bottles of beer for Paul and him, and they began to talk about people. George told the boy the story of the young man who had died in the drugstore. He felt a strange happiness to see how the story affected Paul.
Somebody put a nickel into the electric phonograph, and it played a tango. The tango added to George’s pleasure, and he sat there thinking how fluently he had talked.
Paul had grown quiet. He drank some beer, then he began to speak about Florence. George was uneasy and a little bit frightened. He was afraid that the boy was going to tell him something that he did not want to know and that his good time would be over.
“Florence is beautiful with that red hair,” said Paul, as if he were talking to himself.
George said nothing.
“Mr. Fisher,” said Paul, lowering his glass and looking up, “there’s something I want you to know.”
“Me?”
“Mr. Fisher,” Paul told him earnestly, “Florence is in love with me. She told me that. I want to love her because I’m lonely, but I don’t know—I can’t love her. I can’t reach her. She’s not like you. We go for a walk along the Drive, and I can’t reach her. Then she says I’m moody, and she wants to go to the movies.”
George could feel his heart beating strongly. He felt that he was listening to secrets, yet they were not secrets because he had known them all his life. He wanted to talk—to tell Paul that he was like him. He wanted to tell him how lonely he had been all his life and how he lay awake at night, dreaming and thinking until the gray morning drifted into the room. But he didn’t.
“I know what you mean, Paul,” he said.
They walked home in the rain, which was coming down hard now.
When he got in, George saw that both Beatie and Florence had gone to bed. He removed his rubbers and hung his wet hat and raincoat in the bathroom. He stepped into his slippers, but he decided not to undress because he did not feel like sleeping. He was aware of a fullness of emotion within him.
George went over to the radio and turned on some jazz softly. He lit a cigar and put out the lamps. For a while he stood in the dark, listening to the soft music. Then he went to the window and drew aside the curtain.
The spring rain was falling everywhere. On the dark mass of the Jersey shore. On the flowing river. Across the street the rain was droning on the leaves of the tall maples, wet in the lamplight, and swaying in the wind. The wind blew the rain hard and sharp across the window, and George felt tears on his cheeks.
A great hunger for words rose in him. He wanted to talk. He wanted to say things that he had never said before. He wanted to tell them that he had discovered himself and that never again would he be lost and silent. Once more he possessed the world and loved it. He loved Paul, and he loved Florence, and he loved the young man who had died.
I must tell her, he thought. He opened the door of Florence’s room. She was sleeping. He could hear her quiet breathing.
“Florence,” he called softly, “Florence.”
She was instantly awake. “What’s the matter?” she whispered.
The words rushed to his lips. “Paul, Paul was here.”
She rose on her elbow, her long hair falling over her shoulder. “Paul? What did he say?”
George tried to speak, but the words were suddenly immovable. He could never tell her what Paul had said. A feeling of sorrow for Florence stabbed him.
“He didn’t say anything,” he stammered. “We walked—went for a walk.”
Florence sighed and lay down again. The wind blew the spring rain against the windows and they listened to the sound it made falling in the street.
1942
T
hey sat in the kitchen in the rear of the grocery store, and Rosen, the salesman from G. and S., chewing a cigar stump in the corner of his mouth, quickly and monotonously read off the items from a mimeographed list that was clipped to the inside cover of his large pinksheeted order book. Ida Kaplan, her small, fleshy chin raised, was listening attentively as Rosen read this week’s specials and their prices. She looked up, annoyed at her husband, whose eyes showed that he wasn’t listening.
“Sam,” she called sharply, “listen please to Rosen.”
“I’m listening,” said Sam absently. He was a heavy man with thick, sloping shoulders and graying hair which looked grayer still in the glare of the large, unshaded electric bulb. The sharp light bothered his eyes, and water constantly trickled over his reddened eyelids. He was tired and he yawned ceaselessly.
Rosen stopped for a minute and smiled cynically at the grocer. The salesman shifted his large body into a more comfortable position on the backless chair and automatically continued to drone forth the list of grocery items: “G. and S. grape jam, $1.80 a dozen; G. and S. grape jelly, $1.60 a dozen; Gulden’s mustard, $2.76 a carton; G. and S. canned grapefruit juice Number 2, $1.00 a dozen; Heckers flour, 3½ lbs., $2.52 a half barrel—”
Rosen stopped abruptly, removed his cigar, and said, “Well, whaddayasay, Sam, you gonna order one item at least?”
“Read,” said Sam, stirring a bit, “I’m listening.”
“You listening, yes,” said Ida, “but you not thinking.”
Rosen gripped the wet cigar butt between his teeth and went on reading: “Kippered herrings, $2.40 a dozen; Jell-O, 65¢ a dozen; junket, $1.00 a dozen.”
Sam forced himself to listen for a moment, then his mind wandered. What was the use? True, the shelves were threadbare and the store needed goods, but how could he afford to place an order? Ever since the A&P supermarket had moved into the neighborhood, he had done less than half his original business. The store was down to $160 a week, just barely enough to pay for rent, gas, electricity, and a few other expenses. A dull feeling of misery gnawed at his heart. Eighteen hours a day, from 6 a.m. to midnight, sitting in the back of a grocery store waiting for a customer to come in for a bottle of milk and a loaf of bread and maybe—
maybe
a can of sardines. Nineteen impoverished years in the grocery business to this end. Nineteen years of standing on his feet for endless hours until the blue veins bulged out of his legs and grew hard and stiff so that every step he took was a step of pain. For what? For what, dear God? The feeling of misery crept to his stomach. Sam shivered. He felt sick.
“Sam,” cried Ida, “listen, for godsake.”
“I’m listening,” Sam said, in a loud, annoyed tone.
Rosen looked up in surprise. “I read the whole list,” he declared.
“I heard,” Sam said.
“So what did you decide to order?” asked Ida.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing!” she cried shrilly.
In disgust, Rosen snapped his order book shut. He put on his woolen muffler and began to button his overcoat.
“Jack Rosen takes the trouble to come out on a windy, snowy February night and he don’t even get an order for a lousy box of matches. That’s a nice how-d’ye-do,” he said sarcastically.
“Sam, we need goods,” said Ida.
“So how’ll we pay for the goods—with toothpicks?”
Ida grew angry. “Please,” she said haughtily, “please, to me you will speak with respect. I wasn’t brought up in my father’s house a grocer should—you’ll excuse me—a grocer should spit on me every time he talks.”
“She’s right,” said Rosen.
“Who asked you?” Sam said, looking up at the salesman.
“I’m talking for your own good,” said Rosen.
“Please,” said Sam, “you’ll be quiet. You are a salesman of groceries, not a counselor of human relations.”
“It happens that I am also a human being.”
“This is not the point,” Sam declared. “I’m doing business with Rosen, the salesman, not the human being, if any.”
Rosen quickly snatched his hat off the table. “What business?” he cried. “Who’s doing business? On a freezing February night in winter I leave my wife and child and my warm house and drive twelve miles through the snow and the ice to give you a chance to fill up your fly-specked shelves with some goods, and you act like you’re doing me a favor to say no. To hell with such business. It’s not for Jack Rosen.”
“Rosen,” said Sam, looking at him calmly, “in my eyes you are common.”
“Common?” spluttered the salesman. “I’m common?” he asked in astonishment. His manner changed. He slipped his book into the briefcase, snapped it shut, and gripped the handle with his gloved hand. “What’s the use,” he said philosophically. “Why should Jack Rosen waste his time talking to a two-bit grocer who don’t think enough of his place of business to wash the windows or to sweep the snow off the sidewalk so that a customer can come in? Such a person is a peasant in his heart. He belongs in czarist Russia. The advantages of the new world he don’t understand or appreciate.”
“A philosopher,” sneered Sam, “a G. and S. wholesale groceries’ philosopher.”
The salesman snatched up his bag and strode out of the store. He slammed the front door hard. Several cans in the window toppled and fell.
Ida looked at her husband with loathing. Her small, stout body trembled with indignation.
“His every word was like it come from God,” she said vehemently. “Who ever saw a man should sit in the back of the store all day long and never go inside, maybe to wipe off the shelves or clean out under the counter the boxes, or to think how to improve his store a customer should come in?”
Sam said nothing.
“Who ever heard there should be a grocer,” continued Ida, shaking her head scornfully, “who don’t think enough about his place of business and his wife, he should go outside and sweep off the snow from the sidewalk a customer should be able to come to the door. It’s a shame and a disgrace that a man with a place of business is so lazy he won’t get up from a chair. A shame and a disgrace.”
“Enough,” said Sam quietly.
“I deserve better,” she said, raising her voice.
“Enough,” he said again.
“Get up,” she cried. “Get up and clean the sidewalk.”
He turned to her angrily. “Please,” he cried, “don’t give me orders.”
Ida rose and stood near his chair. “Sam, clean off the sidewalk,” she shouted in her shrill voice.
“Shut up!” he shouted.
“Clean off the sidewalk!” Her voice was thick with rage.
“Shut up,” he roared, rising angrily. “Shut up, you bastard, you.”
Ida looked at him uncomprehendingly; then her lips twisted grotesquely, her cheeks bunched up like a gargoyle’s, and her body shook with sobs as the hot tears flowed. She sank down into her chair, lowered her head on her arms, and cried with a bitter squealing sound.
Sam groaned inwardly. The words had leaped from his tongue, and now she was crying again. The miserable feeling ground itself into his bones. He cursed the store and his profitless life.
“Where’s the shovel?” he asked, defeated.
She did not look up.
He searched for it in the store and found it in the hallway near the cellar door. Sam bounced the shovel against the floor to shake off the cobwebs and then went outside.
The icy February wind wrapped him in a tight, cold jacket, and the frozen snow on the ground gripped his feet like a steel vise. His apron flapped, and the wind blew his thin hair into his eyes. A wave of desperation rolled over him, but he fought against it. Sam bent over, scooped up a pile of snow, and heaved it into the gutter, where it fell and broke. His face was whipped into an icy ruddiness, and cold water ran from his eyes.
Mr. Fine, a retired policeman, one of Sam’s customers, trudged by, heavily bundled up.
“For godsake, Sam,” he boomed in his loud voice, “put on something warm.”
The tenants on the top floor, a young Italian couple, came out of the house on their way to the movies. “You’ll catch pneumonia, Mr. Kaplan,” said Mrs. Costa.
“That’s what I told him,” Mr. Fine called back.
“At least put a coat on, Sam,” advised Patsy Costa.
“I’m almost through,” Sam grunted.
“It’s your health,” said Patsy. He and his wife pushed their way through the wind and the snow, going to the movies. Sam continued to shovel up the snow and heave it into the gutter.
When he finished cleaning the sidewalk, Sam was half frozen. His
nose was running and his eyes were bleary. He went inside quickly. The warmth of the store struck him so hard that the back of his head began to ache, and he knew at once that he had made a mistake in not putting on an overcoat and gloves. He reeled and suddenly felt weak, as if his bones had dissolved and were no longer holding up his body. Sam leaned against the counter to keep himself from falling. When the dizziness went away, he dragged the wet shovel across the floor and put it back in the hall.
Ida was no longer crying. Her eyes were red and she looked away from him as he came into the kitchen. Sam still felt cold. He moved his chair close to the stove and picked up the Jewish paper, but his eyes were so tired that he could not make out the words. He closed them and let the paper slip to the floor. The overpowering warmth of the stove thawed out his chilled body, and he grew sleepy. As he was dozing off, he heard the front door open. With a start, Sam opened his eyes to see if Ida had gone inside. No, she sat at the table in frigid silence. His eyelids shut and opened again. Sam rose with an effort and shuffled into the store. The customer wanted a loaf of bread and ten cents’ worth of store cheese. Sam waited on her and returned to his place by the stove. He closed his eyes again and sneezed violently. His nose was running. As he was searching for his handkerchief, the store door opened again.
“Go inside,” he said to Ida, “I must take a aspirin.”
She did not move.
“I have a cold,” he said.
She gave no sign that she had heard.
With a look of disgust, he walked into the store and waited on the customer. In the kitchen, he began to sneeze again. Sam shook two aspirins out of the bottle and lifted them to his mouth with his palm, then he drank some water. As he sat down by the stove, he felt the cold grip him inside and he shivered.
“I’m sick,” he said to his wife, but Ida paid no attention to him.
“I’m sick,” he repeated miserably. “I’m going upstairs to sleep. Maybe tomorrow I’ll feel a little better.”
“If you go upstairs now,” Ida said, with her back turned toward him, “I will not go in the store.”
“So don’t go,” he said angrily.
“I will not come downstairs tomorrow,” she threatened coldly.
“So don’t come down,” he said brokenly. “The way I feel, I hope the store drops dead. Nineteen years is enough. I can’t stand any more. My heart feels dried up. I suffered too much in my life.”
He went into the hall. She could hear his slow, heavy footsteps on the stairs and the door closing upstairs.
Ida looked at the clock. It was ten-thirty. For a moment she was tempted to close the store, but she decided not to. The A&P was closed. It was the only time they could hope to make a few cents. She thought about her life and grew despondent. After twenty-two years of married life, a cold flat and an impoverished grocery store. She looked out at the store, hating every inch of it, the dirty window, the empty shelves, showing old brown wallpaper where there were no cans, the old-fashioned wooden icebox, the soiled marble counters, the hard floor, the meagerness, the poverty, and the hard years of toil—for what?—to be insulted by a man without understanding or appreciation of her sacrifices, and to be left alone while he went upstairs to sleep. She could hear the wind blowing outside and she felt cold. The stove needed to be shaken and filled with coal, but she was too tired. Ida decided to close the store. It wasn’t worth keeping open. Better for her to go to sleep and come down as late as she chose tomorrow. Let him have to prepare his own breakfast and dinner. Let him wash the kitchen floor and scrub out the icebox. Let him do all the things she did, then he would learn how to speak to her. She locked the front door, put out the window lights, and pulled the cord of each ceiling lamp, extinguishing the light, as she made her way toward the hall door.
Suddenly she heard a sharp tapping against the store window. Ida looked out and saw the dark form of a man who was rapping a coin against the glass.
A bottle of milk, thought Ida.
“Tomorrow,” she called out. “The store is now closed.”
The man stopped for a second, and she thought with relief that he was going away, but once again he began to rap the coin sharply and insistently. He waved his hands and shouted at her. A woman joined him.
“Mrs. Kaplan!” she called, “Mrs. Kaplan!”
Ida recognized Mrs. Costa. A great fright tore at her heart, and she rushed over to the door.