The Complete Stories Page 8

  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.

  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 him 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, thus 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, anymore, 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 for 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.

  1949

  The Prison

  Though he tried not to think of it, at twenty-nine Tommy Castelli’s life was a screaming bore. It wasn’t just Rosa or the store they tended for profits counted in pennies, or the unendurably slow hours and endless drivel that went with selling candy, cigarettes, and soda water; it was this sick-in-the-stomach feeling of being trapped in old mistakes, even some he had made before Rosa changed Tony into Tommy. He had been as Tony a kid of many dreams and schemes, especially getting out of this tenement-crowded, kid-squawking neighborhood, with its lousy poverty, but everything had fouled up against him before he could. When he was sixteen he quit the vocational school where they were making him into a shoemaker, and began to hang out with the gray-hatted, thick-soled-shoe boys, who had the spare time and the mazuma and showed it in fat wonderful rolls down in the cellar clubs to all who would look, and everybody did, popeyed. They were the ones who had bought the silver caffè espresso urn and later the television, and they arranged the pizza parties and had the girls down; but it was getting in with them and their cars, leading to the holdup of a liquor store, that had started all the present trouble. Lucky for him the coal-and-ice man who was their landlord knew the leader in the district, and they arranged something so nobody bothered him after that. Then before he knew what was going on—he had been frightened sick by the whole mess—there was his father cooking up a deal with Rosa Agnello’s old man that Tony would marry her and the father-in-law would, out of his savings, open a candy store for him to make an honest living. He wouldn’t spit on a candy store, and Rosa was too plain and lank a chick for his personal taste, so he beat it off to Texas and bummed around in too much space, and when he came back everybody said it was for Rosa and the candy store, and it was all arranged again and he, without saying no, was in it.

  That was how he had landed on Prince Street in the Village, working from eight in the morning to almost midnight every day, except for an hour off each afternoon when he went upstairs to sleep, and on Tuesdays, when the store was closed and he slept some more and went at night alone to the movies. He was too tired always for schemes now, but once he tried to make a little cash on the side by secretly taking in punchboards some syndicate was distributing in the neighborhood, on which he collected a nice cut and in this way saved fifty-five bucks that Rosa didn’t know about; but then the syndicate was written up by a newspaper, and the punchboards
all disappeared. Another time, when Rosa was at her mother’s house, he took a chance and let them put in a slot machine that could guarantee a nice piece of change if he kept it long enough. He knew of course he couldn’t hide it from her, so when she came and screamed when she saw it, he was ready and patient, for once not yelling back when she yelled, and he explained it was not the same as gambling because anybody who played it got a roll of mints every time he put in a nickel. Also the machine would supply them a few extra dollars cash they could use to buy television so he could see the fights without going to a bar; but Rosa wouldn’t let up screaming, and later her father came in shouting that he was a criminal and chopped the machine apart with a plumber’s hammer. The next day the cops raided for slot machines and gave out summonses wherever they found them, and though Tommy’s place was practically the only candy store in the neighborhood that didn’t have one, he felt bad about the machine for a long time.

  Mornings had been his best time of day because Rosa stayed upstairs cleaning, and since few people came into the store till noon, he could sit around alone, a toothpick in his teeth, looking over the News and Mirror on the fountain counter, or maybe gab with one of the old cellar-club guys who had happened to come by for a pack of butts, about a horse that was running that day or how the numbers were paying lately; or just sit there, drinking coffee and thinking how far away he could get on the fifty-five he had stashed away in the cellar. Generally the mornings were this way, but after the slot machine, usually the whole day stank and he along with it. Time rotted in him, and all he could think of, the whole morning, was going to sleep in the afternoon, and he would wake up with the sour remembrance of the long night in the store ahead of him, while everybody else was doing as he damn pleased. He cursed the candy store and Rosa, and cursed, from its beginning, his unhappy life.