The class applauded as she sat down. The bell rang, and school was over for the night.
Laban caught up with Miss Moscowitz in the hall and walked downstairs with her. “The bell rang too soon before I could reciprocate the way you felt about me,” he said.
“Oh, thank you,” said Miss Moscowitz, her face lighting with happiness. “That makes it mutual.”
“Without doubt,” said Laban, as they were continuing downstairs. He felt very good.
The students poured out into the street and began to disperse in many directions, but Laban did not feel like going home. The glow of triumph was warm within him, and he felt that he wanted to talk. He tipped his hat and said, “Miss Moscowitz, I realize I am a middle-aged man and you are a young woman, but I am young in my mind so I would like to continue our conversation. Would you care to accompany me to the cafeteria, we should have some coffee?”
“Gladly,” said Miss Moscowitz, “and I am not such a young woman. Besides, I get along better with a more mature man.”
Very much pleased, he took her arm and led her up the block to the cafeteria on the corner. Miss Moscowitz arranged the silverware and the paper napkins on the table while he went for the coffee and cake.
As they sipped their coffee, Laban felt twenty years younger, and a sense of gladness filled his heart. It seemed to him that his past was like a soiled garment which he had cast off. Now his vision was sharp and he saw things clearly. When he looked at Miss Moscowitz, he was surprised and pleased to see how pretty she was. Within him, a great torrent of words was fighting for release.
“You know, Miss Moscowitz—” he began.
“Please call me Ruth,” she said.
“Ah, Ruth, ever faithful in the Bible,” Laban mused. “My name is Laban.”
“Laban, that’s a distinguished name.”
“It’s also a biblical name. What I started out to say,” he went on, “was to tell you the background of my letter which they printed today.”
“Oh, please do, I am definitely interested.”
“Well, that letter is true and autobiographical,” he said impressively.
“Without meaning to be personal, how?” she asked.
“Well, I’ll tell you in a nutshell,” Laban said. “You are a woman
of intelligence and you will understand. What I meant,” he went on, acknowledging her smile with a nod, “what I meant was that I was the main character in the letter.” He sought carefully for his words. “Like Romeo and Juliet, I was influenced by passion when I was a young man, and the result was I married a woman who was incompatible with my mind.”
“I’m very sorry,” said Miss Moscowitz.
Laban grew moody. “She has no interest in the subjects I’m interested in. She don’t read much and she don’t know the elementary facts about psychology and the world.”
Miss Moscowitz was silent.
“If I had married someone with my own interests when I was young,” he mused, “—someone like you, why I can assure you that this day I would be a writer. I had great dreams for writing, and with my experience and understanding of life, I can assure you that I would write some very fine books.”
“I believe you,” she said. “I really do.”
He sighed and looked out of the window.
Miss Moscowitz glanced over his shoulder and saw a short, stout woman with a red, angry face bearing down upon them. She held a cup of coffee in her hand and was trying to keep it from spilling as she pushed her way toward Laban’s table. A young woman was trying to restrain her. Miss Moscowitz sized up the situation at once.
“Mr. Goldman,” she said in a tight voice, “your wife is coming.”
He was startled and half rose, but Emma was already upon them.
“So this is night school!” she cried angrily, banging the half-spilled cup of coffee on the table. “This is education every night?”
“Momma, please,” begged Sylvia, “everyone is looking.”
“He is a married man, you housebreaker!” Emma shouted at Miss Moscowitz.
Miss Moscowitz rose. Her face had grown pale, and the pockmarks were quite visible.
“I can assure you that the only relationship that I have had with Mr. Goldman is purely platonic. He is a member of my English class,” she said with dignity.
“Big words,” sneered Emma.
“Be still,” Laban cried. He turned to Miss Moscowitz. “I apologize to you, Miss Moscowitz. This is my cross I bear,” he said bitterly.
“Poppa, please,” begged Sylvia.
Miss Moscowitz picked up her books.
“Wait,” called Laban, “I will pay your check.”
“Over my dead body,” cried Emma.
“That will not be necessary,” said Miss Moscowitz. “Good night.”
She paid her check and went out through the revolving door.
“You ignoramus, you,” shouted Laban, “look what you did!”
“Oh, he’s cursing me,” Emma wailed, bursting into tears.
“Oh, Poppa, this is so mortifying,” said Sylvia. “Everyone is staring at us.”
“Let them look,” he said. “Let them see what a man of sensitivity and understanding has to suffer because of incompatible ignorance.” He snatched up his briefcase, thrust his hat on his head, and strode over to the door. He tossed a coin on the counter and pushed through the revolving door into the street. Emma was still sobbing at the table, and Sylvia was trying to comfort her.
Laban turned at the corner and walked down the avenue in the direction away from his home. The good feeling was gone and a mood of depression settled upon him as he thought about the scene in the cafeteria. To his surprise he saw things clearly, more clearly than he ever had before. He thought about his life with quiet objectivity and he enjoyed the calmness that came to him as he did so. The events of the day flowed into his thoughts, and Laban remembered his triumph in the classroom. The feeling of depression lifted.
“Ah,” he sighed, as he walked along, “with my experience, what a book I could really write!”
1943
W
inter had fled the city streets but Sam Tomashevsky’s face, when he stumbled into the back room of his grocery store, was a blizzard. Sura, sitting at the round table eating bread and a salted tomato, looked up in fright, and the tomato turned a deeper red. She gulped the bite she had bitten and with pudgy fist socked her chest to make it go down. The gesture already was one of mourning, for she knew from the wordless sight of him there was trouble.
“My God,” Sam croaked.
She screamed, making him shudder, and he fell wearily into a chair. Sura was standing, enraged and frightened.
“Speak, for God’s sake.”
“Next door,” Sam muttered.
“What happened next door?”—upping her voice.
“Comes a store!”
“What kind of a store?” The cry was piercing.
He waved his arms in rage. “A grocery comes next door.”
“Oi.” She bit her knuckle and sank down moaning. It could not have been worse.
They had, all winter, been haunted by the empty store. An Italian shoemaker had owned it for years, and then a streamlined shoe-repair shop had opened up next block where they had two men in red smocks hammering away in the window and everyone stopped to look. Pellegrino’s business had slackened off as if someone was shutting a faucet, and one day he had looked at his workbench, and when
everything stopped jumping, it loomed up ugly and empty. All morning he had sat motionless, but in the afternoon he put down the hammer he had been clutching and got his jacket and an old darkened Panama hat a customer had never called for when he used to do hat cleaning and blocking; then he went into the neighborhood, asking among his former customers for work they might want done. He collected two pairs of shoes, a man’s brown-and-white ones for summertime and a pair of lady’s dancing slippers. At the same time, Sam found his own soles and heels had been worn paper thin for being so many hours on his feet—he could feel the cold floorboards under him as he walked—and that made three pairs altogether, which was what Mr. Pellegrino had that week—and another pair the week after. When the time came for him to pay next month’s rent he sold everything to a junkman and bought candy to peddle with in the streets, but after a while no one saw the shoemaker anymore, a stocky man with round eyeglasses and a bristling mustache, wearing a summer hat in wintertime.
When they tore up the counters and other fixtures and moved them out, when the store was empty except for the sink glowing in the rear, Sam would occasionally stand there at night, everyone on the block but him closed, peering into the window exuding darkness. Often while gazing through the dusty plate glass, which gave him back the image of a grocer gazing out, he felt as he had when he was a boy in Kamenets-Podolski and going—the three of them—to the river; they would, as they passed, swoop a frightened glance into a tall wooden house, eerily narrow, topped by a strange double-steepled roof, where there had once been a ghastly murder and now the place was haunted. Returning late, at times in early moonlight, they walked a distance away, speechless, listening to the ravenous silence of the house, room after room fallen into deeper stillness, and in the midmost a pit of churning quiet from which, if you thought about it, evil erupted. And so it seemed in the dark recesses of the empty store, where so many shoes had been leathered and hammered into life, and so many people had left something of themselves in the coming and going, that even in emptiness the store contained some memory of their presences, unspoken echoes in declining tiers, and that in a sense was what was so frightening. Afterwards when Sam went by the store, even in daylight he was afraid to look, and quickly walked past, as they had the haunted house when he was a boy.
But whenever he shut his eyes the empty store was stuck in his mind, a long black hole eternally revolving so that while he slept he
was not asleep but within, revolving: what if it should happen to me? What if after twenty-seven years of toil (he should years ago have got out), what if after all of that, your own store, a place of business … after all the years, the years, the thousands of cans he had wiped off and packed away, the milk cases dragged in like rocks from the street before dawn in freeze or heat; insults, petty thievery, doling of credit to the impoverished by the poor; the peeling ceiling, fly-specked shelves, puffed cans, dirt, swollen veins, the back-breaking sixteen-hour day like a heavy hand slapping, upon awaking, the skull, pushing the head down to bend the body’s bones; the hours; the work, the years, my God, and where is my life now? Who will save me now, and where will I go, where? Often he had thought these thoughts, subdued after months; and the garish FOR RENT sign had yellowed and fallen in the window so how could anyone know the place was to let? But they did. Today when he had all but laid the ghost of fear, a streamer in red cracked him across the eyes: National Grocery Will Open Another Of Its Bargain Price Stores On These Premises, and the woe went into him and his heart bled.
At last Sam raised his head and told her, “I will go to the landlord next door.”
Sura looked at him through puffy eyelids. “So what will you say?”
“I will talk to him.”
Ordinarily she would have said, “Sam, don’t be a fool,” but she let him go.
Averting his head from the glare of the new red sign in the window, he entered the hall next door. As he labored up the steps the bleak light of the skylight fell on him and grew heavier as he ascended. He went unwillingly, not knowing what he would say to the landlord. Reaching the top floor, he paused before the door at the jabbering in Italian of a woman bewailing her fate. Sam already had one foot on the top stair, ready to descend, when he heard the coffee advertisement and realized it had been a radio play. Now the radio was off, the hallway oppressively silent. He listened and at first heard no voices inside, so he knocked without allowing himself to think anymore. He was a little frightened and lived in suspense until the slow heavy steps of the landlord, who was also the barber across the street, reached the door, and it was—after some impatient fumbling with the lock—opened.
When the barber saw Sam in the hall he was disturbed, and Sam at once knew why he had not been in the grocery store even
once in the past two weeks. However, the barber, becoming cordial, invited Sam to step into the kitchen, where his wife and a stranger were seated at the table eating from piled-high plates of spaghetti.
“Thanks,” said Sam shyly. “I just ate.”
The barber came out into the hall, shutting the door behind him. He glanced vaguely down the stairway and turned to Sam. His movements were unresolved. Since the death of his son in the war he had become absentminded; and sometimes when he walked one had the impression he was dragging something.
“Is it true?” Sam asked in embarrassment. “What it says downstairs on the sign?”
“Sam,” the barber began heavily. He stopped to wipe his mouth with a paper napkin he held in his hand and said, “Sam, you know this store I had no rent for it for seven months?”
“I know.”
“I can’t afford. I was waiting for maybe a liquor store or a hardware, but I don’t have no offers from them. Last month this chain store make me an offer and then I wait five weeks for something else. I had to take it, I couldn’t help myself.”
Shadows thickened in the darkness. In a sense Pellegrino was present, standing with them at the top of the stairs.
“When will they move in?” Sam sighed.
“Not till May.”
The grocer was too faint to say anything. They stared at each other, not knowing what to suggest. But the barber forced a laugh and said the chain store wouldn’t hurt Sam’s business.
“Why not?”
“Because you carry different brands of goods and when the customers want those brands they go to you.”
“Why should they go to me if my prices are higher?”
“A chain store brings more customers and they might like things that you got.”
Sam felt ashamed. He did not doubt the barber’s sincerity, but his stock was meager and he could not imagine chain store customers interested in what he had to sell.
Holding Sam by the arm, the barber told him in confidential tones of a friend who had a meat store next to an A&P supermarket and was making out very well.
Sam tried hard to believe he would make out well but couldn’t.
“So did you sign with them the lease yet?” he asked.
“Friday,” said the barber.
“Friday?” Sam had a wild hope. “Maybe,” he said, trying to hold it down, “maybe I could find you, before Friday, a new tenant?”
“What kind of a tenant?”
“A tenant,” Sam said.
“What kind of store is he interested?”
Sam tried to think. “A shoe store,” he said.
“Shoemaker?”
“No, a shoe store where they sell shoes.”
The barber pondered it. At last he said if Sam could get a tenant he wouldn’t sign the lease with the chain store.
As Sam descended the stairs the light from the top-floor bulb diminished on his shoulders but not the heaviness, for he had no one in mind to take the store.
However, before Friday he thought of two people. One was the red-haired salesman for a wholesale grocery jobber, who had lately been recounting his investments in new stores; but when Sam spoke to him on the phone he said he was only interested in high-income grocery stores, which was no solution to the problem. The other man he hesitated to call, because he didn’t like him. That was I. Kaufman, a former dry-goods merchant, with a wart under his left eyebrow. Kaufman had made some fortunate real estate deals and had become quite wealthy. Years ago he and Sam had stores next to one another on Marcy Avenue in Williamsburg. Sam took him for a lout and was not above saying so, for which Sura often ridiculed him, seeing how Kaufman had prospered, and where Sam was. Yet they stayed on comparatively good terms, perhaps because the grocer never asked for favors. When Kaufman happened to be around in the Buick, he usually dropped in, which Sam increasingly disliked, for Kaufman gave advice without stint and Sura sandpapered it in when he had left.
Despite qualms he telephoned him. Kaufman was pontifically surprised and said yes he would see what he could do. On Friday morning the barber took the red sign out of the window so as not to prejudice a possible deal. When Kaufman marched in with his cane that forenoon, Sam, who for once, at Sura’s request, had dispensed with his apron, explained to him they had thought of the empty store next door as perfect for a shoe store because the neighborhood had none and the rent was reasonable. And since Kaufman was always investing in one project or another they thought he might be interested in this. The barber came over from across the street and unlocked the door. Kaufman clomped into the empty store, appraised the structure of the place, tested the floor, peered through the barred
window into the back yard, and, squinting, totaled with moving lips how much shelving was necessary and at what cost. Then he asked the barber how much rent and the barber named a modest figure.
Kaufman nodded sagely and said nothing to either of them there, but in the grocery store he vehemently berated Sam for wasting his time.
“I didn’t want to make you ashamed in front of the goy,” he said in anger, even his wart red, “but who do you think, if he is in his right mind, will open a shoe store in this stinky neighborhood?”
Before departing, he gave good advice the way a tube bloops toothpaste, and ended by saying to Sam, “If a chain store grocery comes in you’re finished. Get out of here before the birds pick the meat out of your bones.”
Then he drove off in his Buick. Sura was about to begin a commentary, but Sam pounded his fist on the table and that ended it. That evening the barber pasted the red sign back on the window, for he had signed the lease.
Lying awake nights, Sam knew what was going on inside the store, though he never went near it. He could see carpenters sawing the sweet-smelling pine that willingly yielded to the sharp blade and became in tiers the shelves rising almost to the ceiling. The painters arrived, a long man and a short one he was positive he knew, their faces covered with paint drops. They thickly calcimined the ceiling and painted everything in bright colors, impractical for a grocery but pleasing to the eye. Electricians appeared with fluorescent lamps which obliterated the yellow darkness of globed bulbs; and then the fixture men hauled down from their vans the long marble-top counters and gleaming enameled three-windowed refrigerator, for cooking, medium, and best butter; and a case for frozen foods, creamy white, the latest thing. As he was admiring it all, he turned to see if anyone was watching him, and when he had reassured himself, and turned again to look through the window, it had been whitened so he could see nothing more. He had to get up then to smoke a cigarette and was tempted to put on his pants and go in slippers quietly down the stairs to see if the window was really soaped up. That it might be kept him there, so he returned to bed, and being still unable to sleep he worked until he had polished, with a bit of rag, a small hole in the center of the white window, and enlarged that till he could make out everything clearly. The store was assembled now, spic-and-span, roomy, ready to receive the goods; it was a pleasure to come in. He whispered to himself this would be good if it was mine, but then the
alarm banged in his ear and he had to get up and drag in the milk cases. At 8 a.m. three enormous trucks rolled down the block and six young men in white duck jackets jumped off and packed the store in seven hours. All day Sam’s heart beat so hard he sometimes fondled it with his hand as though trying to calm a bird that wanted to fly off.