The Complete Stories (43 page)
Read The Complete Stories Online
Authors: Bernard Malamud
In late November Schwartz froze on the balcony in the fog and cold, and especially on rainy days he woke with stiff joints and could barely move his wings. Already he felt twinges of rheumatism. He would have liked to spend more time in the warm house, particularly when Maurie was in school and Cohen at work. But though Edie was goodhearted and might have sneaked him in in the morning, just to thaw out, he was afraid to ask her. In the meantime Cohen, who had been reading articles about the migration of birds, came out on the balcony one night after work when Edie was in the kitchen preparing pot roast and, peeking into the birdhouse, warned Schwartz to be on his way soon if he knew what was good for him. “Time to hit the flyways.”
“Mr. Cohen, why do you hate me so much?” asked the bird. “What did I do to you?”
“Because you’re an A-number-one troublemaker, that’s why. What’s more, whoever heard of a Jewbird? Now scat or it’s open war.”
But Schwartz stubbornly refused to depart so Cohen embarked on a campaign of harassing him, meanwhile hiding it from Edie and Maurie. Maurie hated violence and Cohen didn’t want to leave a bad impression. He thought maybe if he played dirty tricks on the bird he would fly off without being physically kicked out. The vacation was over, let him make his easy living off the fat of somebody else’s land. Cohen worried about the effect of the bird’s departure on Maurie’s schooling but decided to take the chance, first, because the boy now seemed to have the knack of studying—give the black bird-bastard credit—and second, because Schwartz was driving him bats by being there always, even in his dreams.
The frozen-foods salesman began his campaign against the bird by mixing watery cat food with the herring slices in Schwartz’s dish. He also blew up and popped numerous paper bags outside the birdhouse as the bird slept, and when he had got Schwartz good and nervous, though not enough to leave, he brought a full-grown cat into the house, supposedly a gift for little Maurie, who had always wanted a pussy. The cat never stopped springing up at Schwartz whenever he saw him, one day managing to claw out several of his tail feathers. And even at lesson time, when the cat was usually excluded from Maurie’s room, though somehow or other he quickly found his way in at the end of the lesson, Schwartz was desperately fearful of his life and flew from pinnacle to pinnacle—light fixture to clothestree to door top—in order to elude the beast’s wet jaws.
Once when the bird complained to Edie how hazardous his existence was, she said, “Be patient, Mr. Schwartz. When the cat gets to know you better he won’t try to catch you anymore.”
“When he stops trying we will both be in Paradise,” Schwartz answered. “Do me a favor and get rid of him. He makes my whole life worry. I’m losing feathers like a tree loses leaves.”
“I’m awfully sorry but Maurie likes the pussy and sleeps with it.”
What could Schwartz do? He worried but came to no decision, being afraid to leave. So he ate the herring garnished with cat food, tried hard not to hear the paper bags bursting like firecrackers outside the birdhouse at night, and lived terror-stricken, closer to the ceiling than the floor, as the cat, his tail flicking, endlessly watched him.
Weeks went by. Then on the day after Cohen’s mother had died in her flat in the Bronx, when Maurie came home with a zero on an arithmetic test, Cohen, enraged, waited until Edie had taken the boy to his violin lesson, then openly attacked the bird. He chased him with a broom on the balcony and Schwartz frantically flew back and forth, finally escaping into his birdhouse. Cohen triumphantly reached in and, grabbing both skinny legs, dragged the bird out, cawing loudly, his wings wildly beating. He whirled the bird around and around his head. But Schwartz, as he moved in circles, managed to swoop down and catch Cohen’s nose in his beak, and hung on for dear life. Cohen cried out in great pain, punched at the bird with his fist, and, tugging at its legs with all his might, pulled his nose free. Again he swung the yawking Schwartz around until the bird grew dizzy, then, with a furious heave, flung him into the night. Schwartz sank like a stone into the street. Cohen then tossed the birdhouse and feeder after him, listening at the ledge until they crashed on the sidewalk below. For a full hour, broom in hand, his heart palpitating and nose throbbing with pain, Cohen waited for Schwartz to return, but the brokenhearted bird didn’t.
That’s the end of that dirty bastard, the salesman thought and went in. Edie and Maurie had come home.
“Look,” said Cohen, pointing to his bloody nose swollen three times its size, “what that sonofabitchy bird did. It’s a permanent scar.”
“Where is he now?” Edie asked, frightened.
“I threw him out and he flew away. Good riddance.”
Nobody said no, though Edie touched a handkerchief to her eyes and Maurie rapidly tried the nine-times table and found he knew approximately half.
In the spring when the winter’s snow had melted, the boy, moved by a memory, wandered in the neighborhood, looking for Schwartz. He found a dead black bird in a small lot by the river, his two wings broken, neck twisted, and both bird-eyes plucked clean.
“Who did it to you, Mr. Schwartz?” Maurie wept.
“Anti-Semeets,” Edie said later.
1963
C
harity Quietness sits in the toilet eating her two hard-boiled eggs while I’m having my ham sandwich and coffee in the kitchen. That’s how it goes, only don’t get the idea of ghettos. If there’s a ghetto I’m the one that’s in it. She’s my cleaning woman from Father Divine and comes in once a week to my small three-room apartment on my day off from the liquor store. “Peace,” she says to me. “Father reached on down and took me right up in Heaven.” She’s a small person with a flat body, frizzy hair, and a quiet face that the light shines out of, and Mama had such eyes before she died. The first time Charity Quietness came in to clean, a little more than a year and a half, I made the mistake to ask her to sit down at the kitchen table with me and eat her lunch. I was still feeling not so hot after Ornita left, but I’m the kind of a man—Nat Lime, forty-four, a bachelor with a daily growing bald spot on the back of my head, and I could lose frankly fifteen pounds—who enjoys company so long as he has it. So she cooked up her two hard-boiled eggs and sat down and took a small bite out of one of them. But after a minute she stopped chewing and she got up and carried the eggs in a cup to the bathroom, and since then she eats there. I said to her more than once, “Okay, Charity Quietness, so have it your way, eat the eggs in the kitchen by yourself and I’ll eat when you’re done,” but she smiles absentminded, and eats in the toilet. It’s my fate with colored people.
harity Quietness sits in the toilet eating her two hard-boiled eggs while I’m having my ham sandwich and coffee in the kitchen. That’s how it goes, only don’t get the idea of ghettos. If there’s a ghetto I’m the one that’s in it. She’s my cleaning woman from Father Divine and comes in once a week to my small three-room apartment on my day off from the liquor store. “Peace,” she says to me. “Father reached on down and took me right up in Heaven.” She’s a small person with a flat body, frizzy hair, and a quiet face that the light shines out of, and Mama had such eyes before she died. The first time Charity Quietness came in to clean, a little more than a year and a half, I made the mistake to ask her to sit down at the kitchen table with me and eat her lunch. I was still feeling not so hot after Ornita left, but I’m the kind of a man—Nat Lime, forty-four, a bachelor with a daily growing bald spot on the back of my head, and I could lose frankly fifteen pounds—who enjoys company so long as he has it. So she cooked up her two hard-boiled eggs and sat down and took a small bite out of one of them. But after a minute she stopped chewing and she got up and carried the eggs in a cup to the bathroom, and since then she eats there. I said to her more than once, “Okay, Charity Quietness, so have it your way, eat the eggs in the kitchen by yourself and I’ll eat when you’re done,” but she smiles absentminded, and eats in the toilet. It’s my fate with colored people.
Although black is still my favorite color you wouldn’t know it from my luck except in short quantities, even though I do all right
in the liquor store business in Harlem, on Eighth Avenue between 110th and 111th. I speak with respect. A large part of my life I’ve had dealings with Negro people, most on a business basis but sometimes for friendly reasons with genuine feeling on both sides. I’m drawn to them. At this time of my life I should have one or two good colored friends, but the fault isn’t necessarily mine. If they knew what was in my heart toward them, but how can you tell that to anybody nowadays? I’ve tried more than once but the language of the heart either is a dead language or else nobody understands it the way you speak it. Very few. What I’m saying is, personally for me there’s only one human color and that’s the color of blood. I like a black person if not because he’s black, then because I’m white. It comes to the same thing. If I wasn’t white my first choice would be black. I’m satisfied to be white because I have no other choice. Anyway, I got an eye for color. I appreciate. Who wants everybody to be the same? Maybe it’s like some kind of a talent. Nat Lime might be a liquor dealer in Harlem, but once in the jungle in New Guinea in the Second World War, I got the idea, when I shot at a running Jap and missed him, that I had some kind of a talent, though maybe it’s the kind where you have a good idea now and then, but in the end what do they come to? After all, it’s a strange world.
in the liquor store business in Harlem, on Eighth Avenue between 110th and 111th. I speak with respect. A large part of my life I’ve had dealings with Negro people, most on a business basis but sometimes for friendly reasons with genuine feeling on both sides. I’m drawn to them. At this time of my life I should have one or two good colored friends, but the fault isn’t necessarily mine. If they knew what was in my heart toward them, but how can you tell that to anybody nowadays? I’ve tried more than once but the language of the heart either is a dead language or else nobody understands it the way you speak it. Very few. What I’m saying is, personally for me there’s only one human color and that’s the color of blood. I like a black person if not because he’s black, then because I’m white. It comes to the same thing. If I wasn’t white my first choice would be black. I’m satisfied to be white because I have no other choice. Anyway, I got an eye for color. I appreciate. Who wants everybody to be the same? Maybe it’s like some kind of a talent. Nat Lime might be a liquor dealer in Harlem, but once in the jungle in New Guinea in the Second World War, I got the idea, when I shot at a running Jap and missed him, that I had some kind of a talent, though maybe it’s the kind where you have a good idea now and then, but in the end what do they come to? After all, it’s a strange world.
Where Charity Quietness eats her eggs makes me think about Buster Wilson when we were both boys in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. There was this long block of run-down dirty frame houses in the middle of a not-so-hot white neighborhood full of pushcarts. The Negro houses looked to me like they had been born and died there, dead not long after the beginning of the world. I lived on the next street. My father was a cutter with arthritis in both hands, big red knuckles and fingers so swollen he didn’t cut, and my mother was the one who went to work. She sold paper bags from a secondhand pushcart on Ellery Street. We didn’t starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick, or the chicken was. This was my first acquaintance with a lot of black people and I used to poke around on their poor block. I think I thought, Brother, if there can be like this, what can’t there be? I mean I caught an early idea what life was about. Anyway, I met Buster Wilson there. He used to play marbles by himself. I sat on the curb across the street, watching him shoot one marble lefty and the other one righty. The hand that won picked up the marbles. It wasn’t so much of a game but he didn’t ask me to come over. My idea was to be friendly, only he never encouraged, he discouraged. Why did I pick him out for a friend? Maybe because I
had no others then, we were new in the neighborhood, from Manhattan. Also I liked his type. Buster did everything alone. He was a skinny kid and his brothers’ clothes hung on him like worn-out potato sacks. He was a beanpole boy, about twelve, and I was then ten. His arms and legs were burnt-out matchsticks. He always wore a brown wool sweater, one arm half unraveled, the other went down to the wrist. His long and narrow head had a white part cut straight in the short woolly hair, maybe with a ruler there, by his father, a barber but too drunk to stay a barber. In those days though I had little myself I was old enough to know who was better off, and the whole block of colored houses made me feel bad in the daylight. But I went there as much as I could because the street was full of life. In the night it looked different, it’s hard to tell a cripple in the dark. Sometimes I was afraid to walk by the houses when they were dark and quiet. I was afraid there were people looking at me that I couldn’t see. I liked it better when they had parties at night and everybody had a good time. The musicians played their banjos and saxophones and the houses shook with the music and laughing. The young girls, with their pretty dresses and ribbons in their hair, caught me in my throat when I saw them through the windows.
had no others then, we were new in the neighborhood, from Manhattan. Also I liked his type. Buster did everything alone. He was a skinny kid and his brothers’ clothes hung on him like worn-out potato sacks. He was a beanpole boy, about twelve, and I was then ten. His arms and legs were burnt-out matchsticks. He always wore a brown wool sweater, one arm half unraveled, the other went down to the wrist. His long and narrow head had a white part cut straight in the short woolly hair, maybe with a ruler there, by his father, a barber but too drunk to stay a barber. In those days though I had little myself I was old enough to know who was better off, and the whole block of colored houses made me feel bad in the daylight. But I went there as much as I could because the street was full of life. In the night it looked different, it’s hard to tell a cripple in the dark. Sometimes I was afraid to walk by the houses when they were dark and quiet. I was afraid there were people looking at me that I couldn’t see. I liked it better when they had parties at night and everybody had a good time. The musicians played their banjos and saxophones and the houses shook with the music and laughing. The young girls, with their pretty dresses and ribbons in their hair, caught me in my throat when I saw them through the windows.
But with the parties came drinking and fights. Sundays were bad days after the Saturday-night parties. I remember once that Buster’s father, also long and loose, always wearing a dirty gray Homburg hat, chased another black man in the street with a half-inch chisel. The other one, maybe five feet high, lost his shoe and when they wrestled on the ground he was already bleeding through his suit, a thick red blood smearing the sidewalk. I was frightened by the blood and wanted to pour it back in the man who was bleeding from the chisel. On another time Buster’s father was playing in a crap game with two big bouncy red dice, in the back of an alley between two middle houses. Then about six men started fistfighting there, and they ran out of the alley and hit each other in the street. The neighbors, including children, came out and watched, everybody afraid but nobody moving to do anything. I saw the same thing near my store in Harlem, years later, a big crowd watching two men in the street, their breaths hanging in the air on a winter night, murdering each other with switchblade knives, but nobody moved to call a cop. I didn’t either. Anyway, I was just a young kid but I still remember how the cops drove up in a police paddy wagon and broke up the fight by hitting everybody they could hit with big nightsticks. This was in the days before La Guardia. Most of the fighters were knocked out cold,
only one or two got away. Buster’s father started to run back in his house but a cop ran after him and cracked him on his Homburg hat with a club, right on the front porch. Then the Negro men were lifted up by the cops, one at the arms and the other at the feet, and they heaved them in the paddy wagon. Buster’s father hit the back of the wagon and fell, with his nose spouting very red blood, on top of three other men. I personally couldn’t stand it, I was scared of the human race so I ran home, but I remember Buster watching without any expression in his eyes. I stole an extra fifteen cents from my mother’s pocketbook and I ran back and asked Buster if he wanted to go to the movies, I would pay. He said yes. This was the first time he talked to me.
only one or two got away. Buster’s father started to run back in his house but a cop ran after him and cracked him on his Homburg hat with a club, right on the front porch. Then the Negro men were lifted up by the cops, one at the arms and the other at the feet, and they heaved them in the paddy wagon. Buster’s father hit the back of the wagon and fell, with his nose spouting very red blood, on top of three other men. I personally couldn’t stand it, I was scared of the human race so I ran home, but I remember Buster watching without any expression in his eyes. I stole an extra fifteen cents from my mother’s pocketbook and I ran back and asked Buster if he wanted to go to the movies, I would pay. He said yes. This was the first time he talked to me.
So we went more than once to the movies. But we never got to be friends. Maybe because it was a one-way proposition—from me to him. Which includes my invitations to go with me, my (poor mother’s) movie money, Hershey chocolate bars, watermelon slices, even my best Nick Carter and Merriwell books that I spent hours picking up in the junk shops, and that he never gave me back. Once, he let me go in his house to get a match so we could smoke some butts we found, but it smelled so heavy, so impossible, I died till I got out of there. What I saw in the way of furniture I won’t mention—the best was falling apart in pieces. Maybe we went to the movies altogether five or six matinees that spring and in the summertime, but when the shows were over he usually walked home by himself.
“Why don’t you wait for me, Buster?” I said. “We’re both going in the same direction.”
But he was walking ahead and didn’t hear me. Anyway he didn’t answer.
One day when I wasn’t expecting it he hit me in the teeth. I felt like crying but not because of the pain. I spit blood and said, “What did you hit me for? What did I do to you?”
“Because you a Jew bastard. Take your Jew movies and your Jew candy and shove them up your Jew ass.”
And he ran away.
I thought to myself how was I to know he didn’t like the movies. When I was a man I thought, You can’t force it.
Years later, in the prime of my life, I met Mrs. Ornita Harris. She was standing by herself under an open umbrella at the bus stop, crosstown 110th, and I picked up her green glove that she had dropped on the wet sidewalk. It was in the end of November. Before I could ask her was it hers, she grabbed the glove out of my hand, closed her umbrella,
and stepped in the bus. I got on right after her. I was annoyed so I said, “If you’ll pardon me, miss, there’s no law that you have to say thanks, but at least don’t make a criminal out of me.”
and stepped in the bus. I got on right after her. I was annoyed so I said, “If you’ll pardon me, miss, there’s no law that you have to say thanks, but at least don’t make a criminal out of me.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said, “but I don’t like white men trying to do me favors.”
I tipped my hat and that was that. In ten minutes I got off the bus but she was already gone.
Who expected to see her again, but I did. She came into my store about a week later for a bottle of Scotch.
“I would offer you a discount,” I told her, “but I know you don’t like a certain kind of a favor and I’m not looking for a slap in the face.”
Then she recognized me and got a little embarrassed.
“I’m sorry I misunderstood you that day.”
“So mistakes happen.”
The result was she took the discount. I gave her a dollar off.
She used to come in every two weeks for a fifth of Haig & Haig. Sometimes I waited on her, sometimes my helpers, Jimmy or Mason, also colored, but I said to give the discount. They both looked at me but I had nothing to be ashamed. In the spring when she came in we used to talk once in a while. She was a slim woman, dark, but not the most dark, about thirty years I would say, also well built, with a combination nice legs and a good-size bosom that I like. Her face was pretty, with big eyes and high cheekbones, but lips a little thick and nose a little broad. Sometimes she didn’t feel like talking, she paid for the bottle, less discount, and walked out. Her eyes were tired and she didn’t look to me like a happy woman.
I found out her husband was once a window cleaner on the big buildings, but one day his safety belt broke and he fell fifteen stories. After the funeral she got a job as a manicurist in a Times Square barbershop. I told her I was a bachelor and lived with my mother in a small three-room apartment on West Eighty-third near Broadway. My mother had cancer, and Ornita said she was very sorry.
One night in July we went out together. How that happened I’m still not so sure. I guess I asked her and she didn’t say no. Where do you go out with a Negro woman? We went to the Village. We had a good dinner and walked in Washington Square Park. It was a hot night. Nobody was surprised when they saw us, nobody looked at us like we were against the law. If they looked maybe they saw my new lightweight suit that I bought yesterday and my shiny bald spot when we walked under a lamp, also how pretty she was for a man my type. We went in a movie on West Eighth Street. I didn’t want to go in but she said she had heard
about the picture. We went in like strangers and we came out like strangers. I wondered what was in her mind and I thought to myself, Whatever is in there it’s not a certain white man that I know. All night long we went together like we were chained. After the movie she wouldn’t let me take her back to Harlem. When I put her in a taxi she asked me, “Why did we bother?”
about the picture. We went in like strangers and we came out like strangers. I wondered what was in her mind and I thought to myself, Whatever is in there it’s not a certain white man that I know. All night long we went together like we were chained. After the movie she wouldn’t let me take her back to Harlem. When I put her in a taxi she asked me, “Why did we bother?”
For the steak, I thought of saying. Instead I said, “You’re worth the bother.”
“Thanks anyway.”
Kiddo, I thought to myself after the taxi left, you just found out what’s what, now the best thing is forget her.
It’s easy to say. In August we went out the second time. That was the night she wore a purple dress and I thought to myself, My God, what colors. Who paints that picture paints a masterpiece. Everybody looked at us but I had pleasure. That night when she took off her dress it was in a furnished room I had the sense to rent a few days before. With my sick mother, I couldn’t ask her to come to my apartment, and she didn’t want me to go home with her where she lived with her brother’s family on West 115th near Lenox Avenue. Under her purple dress she wore a black slip, and when she took that off she had white underwear. When she took off the white underwear she was black again. But I know where the next white was, if you want to call it white. And that was the night I think I fell in love with her, the first time in my life, though I have liked one or two nice girls I used to go with when I was a boy. It was a serious proposition. I’m the kind of a man when I think of love I’m thinking of marriage. I guess that’s why I am a bachelor.
That same week I had a holdup in my place, two big men—both black—with revolvers. One got excited when I rang open the cash register so he could take the money, and he hit me over the ear with his gun. I stayed in the hospital a couple of weeks. Otherwise I was insured. Ornita came to see me. She sat on a chair without talking much. Finally I saw she was uncomfortable so I suggested she ought to go home.
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