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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: The Assistant
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Helen removed her hat as she entered the grocery. “Me,” she called, as she had from childhood. It meant that whoever was sitting in the back should sit and not suddenly think he was going to get rich.
 
 
Morris awoke, soured by the long afternoon sleep. He dressed, combed his hair with a broken comb and trudged downstairs, a heavy-bodied man with sloping shoulders and bushy gray hair in need of a haircut. He came down with his apron on. Although he felt chilly he poured out a cup of cold coffee, and backed against the radiator, slowly sipped it. Ida sat at the table, reading.
“Why you let me sleep so long?” the grocer complained.
She didn't answer.
“Yesterday or today's paper?”
“Yesterday.”
He rinsed the cup and set it on the top of the gas range. In the store he rang up “no sale” and took a nickel out of the drawer. Morris lifted the lid of the cash register, struck a match on the underside of the counter, and holding the flame cupped in his palm, peered at the figure of his earnings. Ida had taken in three dollars. Who could afford a paper?
Nevertheless he went for one, doubting the small pleasure he would get from it. What was so worth reading about the world? Through Karp's window, as he passed, he saw Louis waiting on a customer while four others crowded the counter. Der oilem iz a goilem. Morris took the
Forward
from the newsstand and dropped a nickel into the cigar box. Sam Pearl, working over a green racing sheet, gave him a wave of his hammy hand. They never bothered to talk. What
did he know about race horses? What did the other know of the tragic quality of life? Wisdom flew over his hard head.
The grocer returned to the rear of his store and sat on the couch, letting the diminishing light in the yard fall upon the paper. He read nearsightedly, with eyes stretched wide, but his thoughts would not let him read long. He put down the newspaper.
“So where is your buyer?” he asked Ida.
Looking absently into the store she did not reply.
“You should sell long ago the store,” she remarked after a minute.
“When the store was good, who wanted to sell? After came bad times, who wanted to buy?”
“Everything we did too late. The store we didn't sell in time. I said, ‘Morris, sell now the store.' You said, ‘Wait.' What for? The house we bought too late, so we have still a big mortgage that it's hard to pay every month. ‘Don't buy,' I said, ‘times are bad.' ‘Buy,' you said, ‘will get better. We will save rent.'”
He answered nothing. If you had failed to do the right thing, talk was useless.
When Helen entered, she asked if the buyer had come. She had forgotten about him but remembered when she saw her mother's dress.
Opening her purse, she took out her pay check and handed it to her father. The grocer, without a word, slipped it under his apron into his pants pocket.
“Not yet,” Ida answered, also embarrassed. “Maybe later.”
“Nobody goes in the night to buy a store,” Morris said. “The time to go is in the day to see how many customers. If this man comes here he will see with one eye the store is dead, then he will run home.”
“Did you eat lunch?” Ida asked Helen.
“Yes.”
“What did you eat?”
“I don't save menus, Mama.”
“Your supper is ready.” Ida lit the flame under the pot on the gas range.
“What makes you think he'll come today?” Helen asked her.
“Karp told me yesterday. He knows a refugee that he looks to buy a grocery. He works in the Bronx, so he will be here late.”
Morris shook his head.
“He's a young man,” Ida went on, “maybe thirty—thirty—two. Karp says he saved a little cash. He can make alterations, buy new goods, fix up modern, advertise a little and make here a nice business.”
“Karp should live so long,” the grocer said.
“Let's eat.” Helen sat at the table.
Ida said she would eat later.
“What about you, Papa?”
“I am not hungry.” He picked up his paper.
She ate alone. It would be wonderful to sell out and move but the possibility struck her as remote. If you had lived so long in one place, all but two years of your life, you didn't move out overnight.
Afterward she got up to help with the dishes but Ida wouldn't let her. “Go rest,” she said.
Helen took her things and went upstairs.
She hated the drab five-room flat; a gray kitchen she used for breakfast so she could quickly get out to work in the morning. The living room was colorless and cramped; for all its overstuffed furniture of twenty years ago it seemed bar ren because it was lived in so little, her parents being seven days out of seven in the store; even their rare visitors, when invited upstairs, preferred to remain in the back. Sometimes Helen asked a friend up, but she went to other people's houses if she had a choice. Her bedroom was another impossibility, tiny, dark, despite the two by three foot opening in the wall, through which she could see the living room windows; and at night Morris and Ida had to pass
through her room to get to theirs, and from their bedroom back to the bathroom. They had several times talked of giving her the big room, the only comfortable one in the house, but there was no place else that would hold their double bed. The fifth room was a small icebox off the second floor stairs, in which Ida stored a few odds and ends of clothes and furniture. Such was home. Helen had once in anger remarked that the place was awful to live in, and it had made her feel bad that her father had felt so bad.
She heard Morris's slow footsteps on the stairs. He came aimlessly into the living room and tried to relax in a stiff armchair. He sat with sad eyes, saying nothing, which was how he began when he wanted to say something.
When she and her brother were kids, at least on Jewish holidays Morris would close the store and venture forth to Second Avenue to see a Yiddish play, or take the family visiting; but after Ephraim died he rarely went beyond the corner. Thinking about his life always left her with a sense of the waste of her own.
She looks like a little bird, Morris thought. Why should she be lonely? Look how pretty she looks. Whoever saw such blue eyes?
He reached into his pants pocket and took out a five-dollar bill.
“Take,” he said, rising and embarrassedly handing her the money. “You will need for shoes.”
“You just gave me five dollars downstairs.”
“Here is five more.”
“Wednesday was the first of the month, Pa.”
“I can't take away from you all your pay.”
“You're not taking, I'm giving.”
She made him put the five away. He did, with renewed shame. “What did I ever give you? Even your college education I took away.”
“It was my own decision not to go, yet maybe I will yet You can never tell.”
“How can you go? You are twenty-three years old.”
“Aren't you always saying a person's never too old to go to school?”
“My child,” he sighed, “for myself I don't care, for you I want the best but what did I give you?”
“I'll give myself,” she smiled. “There's hope.”
With this he had to be satisfied. He still conceded her a future.
But before he went down, he said gently, “What's the matter you stay home so much lately? You had a fight with Nat?”
“No.” Blushing, she answered, “I don't think we see things in the same way.”
He hadn't the heart to ask more.
Going down, he met Ida on the stairs and knew she would cover the same ground.
 
In the evening there was a flurry of business. Morris's mood quickened and he exchanged pleasantries with the customers. Carl Johnsen, the Swedish painter, whom he hadn't seen in weeks, came in with a wet smile and bought two dollars' worth of beer, cold cuts and sliced Swiss cheese. The grocer was at first worried he would ask to charge—he had never paid what he owed on the books before Morris had stopped giving trust—but the painter had the cash. Mrs. Anderson, an old loyal customer, bought for a dollar. A stranger then came in and left eighty-eight cents. After him two more customers appeared. Morris felt a little surge of hope. Maybe things were picking up. But after half-past eight his hands grew heavy with nothing to do. For years he had been the only one for miles around who stayed open at night and had just about made a living from it, but now Schmitz matched him hour for hour. Morris sneaked a little smoke, then began to cough. Ida pounded on the floor upstairs, so he clipped the butt and put it away. He felt restless and stood at the front window, watching the street. He watched a trolley go by. Mr. Lawler, formerly a customer, good for at least a fiver on Friday nights, passed the store.
Morris hadn't seen him for months but knew where he was going. Mr. Lawler averted his gaze and hurried along. Morris watched him disappear around the corner. He lit a match and again checked the register—nine and a half dollars, not even expenses.
Julius Karp opened the front door and poked his foolish head in.
“Podolsky came?”
“Who Podolsky?”
“The refugee.”
Morris said in annoyance, “What refugee?”
With a grunt Karp shut the door behind him. He was short, pompous, a natty dresser in his advanced age. In the past, like Morris, he had toiled long hours in his shoe store, now he stayed all day in silk pajamas until it came time to relieve Louis before supper. Though the little man was insensitive and a blunderer, Morris had got along fairly well with him, but since Karp had rented the tailor shop to another grocer, sometimes they did not speak. Years ago Karp had spent much time in the back of the grocery, complaining of his poverty as if it were a new invention and he its first victim. Since his success with wines and liquors he came in less often, but he still visited Morris more than his welcome entitled him to, usually to run down the grocery and spout unwanted advice. His ticket of admission was his luck, which he gathered wherever he reached, at a loss, Morris thought, to somebody else. Once a drunk had heaved a rock at Karp's window, but it had shattered his. Another time, Sam Pearl gave the liquor dealer a tip on a horse, then forgot to place a bet himself. Karp collected five hundred for his ten-dollar bill. For years the grocer had escaped resenting the man's good luck, but lately he had caught himself wishing on him some small misfortune.
“Podolsky is the one I called up to take a look at your gesheft,” Karp answered.
“Who is this refugee, tell me, an enemy yours?”
Karp stared at him unpleasantly.
“Does a man,” Morris insisted, “send a friend he should
buy such a store that you yourself took away from it the best business?”
“Podolsky ain't you,” the liquor dealer replied. “I told him about this place. I said, ‘The neighborhood is improving. You can buy cheap and build up this store. It's run down for years, nobody changed anything there for twenty years.'”
“You should live so long how much I changed—” Morris began but he didn't finish, for Karp was at the window, peering nervously into the dark street.
“You saw that gray car that just passed,” the liquor dealer said. “This is the third time I saw it in the last twenty minutes.” His eyes were restless.
Morris knew what worried him. “Put in a telephone in your store,” he advised, “so you will feel better.”
Karp watched the street for another minute and worriedly replied, “Not for a liquor store in this neighborhood. If I had a telephone, every drunken bum would call me to make deliveries, and when you go there they don't have a cent.”
He opened the door but shut it in afterthought. “Listen, Morris,” he said, lowering his voice, “if they come back again, I will lock my front door and put out my lights. Then I will call you from the back window so you can telephone the police.”
“This will cost you five cents,” Morris said grimly.
“My credit is class A.”
Karp left the grocery, disturbed.
God bless Julius Karp, the grocer thought. Without him I would have my life too easy. God made Karp so a poor grocery man will not forget his life is hard. For Karp, he thought, it was miraculously not so hard, but what was there to envy? He would allow the liquor dealer his bottles and gelt just not to be him. Life was bad enough.
At nine-thirty a stranger came in for a box of matches. Fifteen minutes later Morris put out the lights in his window. The street was deserted except for an automobile parked in front of the laundry across the car tracks. Morris
peered at it sharply but could see nobody in it. He considered locking up and going to bed, then decided to stay open the last few minutes. Sometimes a person came in at a minute to ten. A dime was a dime.

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