Idiots First Page 12

  When the barber saw Sam in the hall he was disturbed, and Sam at once knew why he had not been in the store even once in the past two weeks. However, the barber became cordial and 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 then turned to Sam. His movements were unresolved. Since the death of his son in the war he had become absent-minded; 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 the 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 growing 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 didn’t 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 progressed 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 back 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 shining blade and became in tiers the shelves rising 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 flourescent 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 a gleaming enameled refrigerator containing three windows, for cooking, medium, and best butter; and a case for frozen foods, creamy white, the latest thing. As he was admiring it all, he thought 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. That it might be kept him back 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 see 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 for me, but then the alarm banged in his ear and he had to get up and drag in the milk cases. At eight 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 wild bird that wanted to fly away.

  When the chain store opened in the middle of May, with a horseshoe wreath of roses in the window, Sura counted up that night and proclaimed they were ten dollars short; which wasn’t so bad, Sam said, till she reminded him ten times six was sixty. She openly wept, sobbing they must do something, driving Sam to a thorough wiping of the shelves with wet cloths she handed him, oiling the floor, and washing, inside and out, the front window, which she redecorated with white tissue paper from the five-and-ten. Then she told h
im to call the wholesaler, who read off this week’s specials; and when they were delivered, Sam packed three cases of cans in a towering pyramid in the window. Only no one seemed to buy. They were fifty dollars short the next week and Sam thought if it stays like this we can exist, and he cut the price of beer, lettering with black crayon on wrapping paper a sign for the window that beer was reduced in price, selling fully five cases more that day, though Sura nagged what was the good of it if they made no profit—lost on paper bags—and the customers who came in for beer went next door for bread and canned goods? Yet Sam still hoped, but the next week they were seventy-two behind, and in two weeks a clean hundred. The chain store, with a manager and two clerks, was busy all day but with Sam there was never, any more, anything resembling a rush. Then he discovered that they carried, next door, every brand he had and many he hadn’t, and he felt for the barber a furious anger.

  That summer, usually better for his business, was bad, and the fall was worse. The store was so silent it got to be a piercing pleasure when someone opened the door. They sat long hours under the unshaded bulb in the rear, reading and rereading the newspaper and looking up hopefully when anyone passed by in the street, though trying not to look when they could tell he was going next door. Sam now kept open an hour longer, till midnight, although that wearied him greatly, but he was able, during the extra hour, to pick up a dollar or two among the housewives who had run out of milk or needed a last minute loaf of bread for school sandwiches. To cut expenses he put out one of the two lights in the window and a lamp in the store. He had the phone removed, bought his paper bags from peddlers, shaved every second day and, although he would not admit it, ate less. Then in an unexpected burst of optimism he ordered eighteen cases of goods from the jobber and filled the empty sections of his shelves with low-priced items clearly marked, but as Sura said, who saw them if nobody came in? People he had seen every day for ten, fifteen, even twenty years, disappeared as if they had moved or died. Sometimes when he was delivering a small order somewhere, he saw a former customer who either quickly crossed the street, or ducked the other way and walked around the block. The barber, too, avoided him and he avoided the barber. Sam schemed to give short weight on loose items but couldn’t bring himself to. He considered canvassing the neighborhood from house to house for orders he would personally deliver but then remembered Mr. Pellegrino and gave up the idea. Sura, who had all their married life, nagged him, now sat silent in the back. When Sam counted the receipts of the first week in December he knew he could no longer hope. The wind blew outside and the store was cold. He offered it for sale but no one would take it.

  One morning Sura got up and slowly ripped her cheeks with her fingernails. Sam went across the street for a haircut. He had formerly had his hair cut once a month but now it had grown ten weeks and was thickly pelted at the back of the neck. The barber cut it with his eyes shut. Then Sam called an auctioneer who moved in with two lively assistants and a red auction flag that flapped and furled in the icy breeze as though it were a holiday. The money they got was not a quarter of the sum needed to pay the creditors. Sam and Sura closed the store and moved away. So long as he lived he would not return to the old neighborhood, afraid his store was standing empty, and he dreaded to look through the window.

  THE MAID’S SHOES

  The maid had left her name with the porter’s wife. She said she was looking for steady work and would take anything but preferred not to work for an old woman. Still if she had to she would. She was forty-five and looked older. Her face was worn but her hair was black, and her eyes and lips were pretty. She had few good teeth. When she laughed she was embarrassed around the mouth. Although it was cold in early October, that year in Rome, and the chestnut vendors were already bent over their pans of glowing charcoals, the maid wore only a threadbare black cotton dress which had a split down the left side, where about two inches of seam had opened on the hip, exposing her underwear. She had sewn the seam several times but this was one of the times it was open again. Her heavy but well-formed legs were bare and she wore house slippers as she talked to the portinaia; she had done a single day’s washing for a signora down the street and carried her shoes in a paper bag. There were three comparatively new apartment houses on the hilly street and she left her name in each of them.

  The portinaia, a dumpy woman wearing a brown tweed skirt she had got from an English family that had once lived in the building, said she would remember the maid but then she forgot; she forgot until an American professor moved into a furnished apartment on the fifth floor and asked her to help him find a maid. The portinaia brought him a girl from the neighborhood, a girl of sixteen, recently from Umbria, who came with her aunt. But the professor, Orlando Krantz, did not like the way the aunt played up certain qualities of the girl, so he sent her away. He told the portinaia he was looking for an older woman, someone he wouldn’t have to worry about. Then the portinaia thought of the maid who had left her name and address, and she went to her house on the via Appia Antica near the catacombs and told her an American was looking for a maid, mezzo servizio; she would give him her name if the maid agreed to make it worth her while. The maid, whose name was Rosa, shrugged her shoulders and looked stiffly down the street. She said she had nothing to offer the portinaia.

  “Look at what I’m wearing,” she said. “Look at this junk pile, can you call it a house? I live here with my son and his bitch of a wife who counts every spoonful of soup in my mouth. They treat me like dirt and dirt is all I have to my name.”

  “In that case I can do nothing for you,” the portinaia said. “I have myself and my husband to think of.” But she returned from the bus stop and said she would recommend the maid to the American professor if she gave her five thousand lire the first time she was paid.

  “How much will he pay?” the maid asked the portinaia.

  “I would ask for eighteen thousand a month. Tell him you have to spend two hundred lire a day for carfare.”

  “That’s almost right,” Rosa said. “It will cost me forty one way and forty back. But if he pays me eighteen thousand I’ll give you five if you sign that’s all I owe you.”

  “I will sign,” said the portinaia, and she recommended the maid to the American professor.

  Orlando Krantz was a nervous man of sixty. He had mild gray eyes, a broad mouth, and a pointed clefted chin. His round head was bald and he had a bit of a belly, although the rest of him was quite thin. He was a somewhat odd-looking man but an authority in law, the portinaia told Rosa. The professor sat at a table in his study, writing all day, yet was up every half hour on some pretext or other to look nervously around. He worried how things were going and often came out of his study to see. He would watch Rosa working, then went in and wrote. In a half hour he would come out, ostensibly to wash his hands in the bathroom or drink a glass of water, but he was really passing by to see what she was doing. She was doing what she had to. Rosa worked quickly, especially when he was watching. She seemed, he thought, to be unhappy, but that was none of his business. Their lives, he knew, were full of troubles, often sordid; it was best to be detached.

  This was the professor’s second year in Italy; he had spent the first in Milan, and the second was in Rome. He had rented a large three-bedroom apartment, one of which he used as a study. His wife and daughter, who had returned for a visit to the States in August, would have the other bedrooms; they were due back before not too long. When the ladies returned, he had told Rosa, he would put her on full time. There was a maid’s room where she could sleep; indeed, which she already used as her own though she was in the apartment only from nine till four. Rosa agreed to a full time arrangement because it would mean all her meals in and no rent to pay her son and his dog-faced wife.

  While they were waiting for Mrs. Krantz and the daughter to arrive, Rosa did the marketing and cooking. She made the professor’s breakfast when she came in, and his lunch at one. She offered to stay later than four, to prepare his supper, which he ate at six,
but he preferred to take that meal out. After shopping she cleaned the house, thoroughly mopping the marble floors with a wet rag she pushed around with a stick though the floors did not look particularly dusty to him. She also washed and ironed his laundry. She was a good worker, her slippers clip-clopping as she hurried from one room to the next, and she frequently finished up about an hour or so before she was due to go home; so she retired to the maid’s room and there read Tempo or Epoca, or sometimes a love story in photographs, with the words printed in italics under each picture. Often she pulled her bed down and lay in it under blankets, to keep warm. The weather had turned rainy, and now the apartment was uncomfortably cold. The custom of the condominium in this apartment house was not to heat until the fifteenth of November, and if it was cold before then, as it was now, the people of the house had to do the best they could. The cold disturbed the professor, who wrote with his gloves and hat on, and increased his nervousness so that he was out to look at her more often. He wore a heavy blue bathrobe over his clothes; sometimes the bathrobe belt was wrapped around a hot water bottle he had placed against the lower part of his back, under the suit coat. Sometimes he sat on the hot water bag as he wrote, a sight that caused Rosa, when she once saw this, to smile behind her hand. If he left the hot water bag in the dining room after lunch, Rosa asked if she might use it. As a rule he allowed her to, and then she did her work with the rubber bag pressed against her stomach with her elbow. She said she had trouble with her liver. That was why the professor did not mind her going to the maid’s room to lie down before leaving, after she had finished her work.

  Once after Rosa had gone home, smelling tobacco smoke in the corridor near her room, the professor entered it to investigate. The room was not more than an elongated cubicle with a narrow bed that lifted sideways against the wall; there was also a small green cabinet, and an adjoining tiny bathroom containing a toilet and a sitzbath fed by a cold water tap. She often did the laundry on a washboard in the sitzbath, but never, so far as he knew, had bathed in it. The day before her daughter-in-law’s name day she had asked permission to take a hot bath in his tub in the big bathroom, and though he had hesitated a moment, the professor finally said yes. In her room, he opened a drawer at the bottom of the cabinet and found a hoard of cigarette butts in it, the butts he had left in ash trays. He noticed, too, that she had collected his old newspapers and magazines from the waste baskets. She also saved cord, paper bags and rubber bands; also pencil stubs he threw away. After he found that out, he occasionally gave her some meat left over from lunch, and cheese that had gone dry, to take with her. For this she brought him flowers. She also brought a dirty egg or two her daughter-in-law’s hen had laid, but he thanked her and said the yolks were too strong for his taste. He noticed that she needed a pair of shoes, for those she put on to go home in were split in several places, and she wore the same black dress with the tear in it every day, which embarrassed him when he had to speak to her; however, he thought he would refer these matters to his wife when she arrived.