CHAPTER EIGHT
That night, in his sleep, Hershy saw the silver bike roll up from nowhere, its gleaming frame and spokes so bright it hurt his eyes. In mounting it, a strange thing happened. His hair changed to orange tufts; his lips began to bulge and his nose, sticking way out of his face, got thick and red; and two black lines down his cheeks made his eyes droop. A crowd collected and began to laugh. He started to ride the bike. Though he pumped madly, the wheels spinning so fast that the spokes turned to silver disks, he hardly moved. The crowd laughed harder. Slowly, he rode up a pole, high, high, high. A silver wire stretched to another pole, a silver ping of sound shimmered up when he began to ride on it, high, lonely and far away, like the steady night whistle of a popcorn stand. Then the crowd burst into bellyaching laughter: for he began spinning like the wheels, as though they had taken control of him, with the red of his nose and the orange of his hair and the black of his cheeks and the pink of his flesh splashing through the silvery gleams of sound and motion. Suddenly with terrific force he was hurled outward, whirling, whirling, whirling, and, as the spinning slowed, he began to fall. He tried to clutch a spoke of the wheel but his hands closed upon a black void. He reached for the shimmery wave of pinging silver; it burst into fragments of black silence. He fell and fell and then leaped up in terrified fright just as he was about to hit bottom.
He stood at the doorway of his parents’ bedroom, staring through the dark at their sleeping forms. They were on their sides, facing each other, with their mouths open. He wanted to get in with them and feel the warmth of their bodies, but he was afraid to wake them. A chill crept through him and he walked back to his bed. Under the covers, he heard the clock in the kitchen tick. He heard the wind in the passageway and the squeak of the swaying lamppost light. He heard the snoring of the Pole upstairs and somebody muttering in the next-door flat. From far away the bell of a streetcar clanged. A burnt coal from the stove dropped through the grate. But the stove had no light in it. There was light only from the lamppost outside; it made great shadows swing through the street.
But the following night he slept soundly. For earlier, his father came home from work and laid a bankbook on the kitchen table, just as he laid his weekly pay envelope on it victoriously every Saturday night.
“A man has to be smart,” his father said. “Now, not only is our money secure, but it’s also making money.”
“Yes?” said his mother innocently. “And how is that?”
“The bank pays me for the pleasure of being able to look at that insurance check. Interest, they call it. Three hundred dollars a year they’ll pay, just so I’ll let them hold the money. Go know a thing like that. But if you live, how can you help but learn? You see, money is a responsibility. You have to learn what to do with it and then you have to learn how to live with it, otherwise you will get headaches, stomach trouble, ulcers, even a cancer, God forbid.”
Hershy saw his mother smile.
“One can live like a king with three hundred extra dollars a year,” his father continued. “So let’s eat. Afterwards, we’ll celebrate. We’ll go to a nickel show. A treat from the bank.”
His mother’s smile broadened. It was a smile of victory.
The news spread fast.
“Who, the Melovs?” people said. “Millionaires.”
Neighbors stopped Hershy on the street. What was his father going to do with all that money? Hershy didn’t know. Why, didn’t he listen to his father’s plans? Sure, he listened, but he didn’t know. Ah, he was ignorant, too involved with himself, a child. But how did he feel, being the son of a rich man? He shrugged his shoulders: all right, he guessed.
Some people expressed a hollow joy over the Melovs’ good fortune, but nobody really meant it; in fact, they resented it. Imagine, a dummy like David, having had a brother smart enough to insure himself and not knowing what to do with money. But what could you expect from a common worker? Oh, if they had had David’s luck. Oh, what they wouldn’t do. Oh, how they would make the world turn handsprings. Oh, if they only had an insured brother lying deep under the earth.
Only Uncle Hymie was sincere in his congratulations, for David was still no threat to his being the richest and most respected member of the whole family; besides, though Hershy’s father had never asked him for a dime, he was now eliminated as a prospective borrower or job-seeker; Uncle Hymie could afford to be generous in his good wishes.
People were funny, Hershy’s father decided. Suffer with them and you’re all right. But if there’s a chance that you will leave them, even if it’s for a new kind of suffering, then suddenly you’re a grafter, a conniver, a no-goodnik. Aye, people.
The talk, however, scared Hershy.
“Jesus, Hersh, you could be kidnapped.”
“Ah, what are you talking?”
“Yah. They could hold you for ten thousand dollars ransom.”
“Ah, they only kidnap rich kids.”
“Well, ain’t you rich?”
“Ah …”
“And then they kill you.”
“Ah, shut up already.”
The nights became full of shadows. In each passageway lurked a kidnapper. When alone, phantoms made him run through the streets at night, brought him heart-pounding and pale into the house, made him close the windows before going to sleep. He wished he were poor again.
He wished it harder when his mother said: “After Pesach, in the spring, we’re going to move.”
“Why?” his father asked.
“We’ll move to the other side of the park where my sister Reva and Hymie live,” she stated.
“But why?”
“Should I make you pictures? It’s a better neighborhood, isn’t it?”
“Sure, but better neighborhoods cost money.”
“So?”
“So! Rent costs more. In the fancier stores food costs a fortune. You’ll want to dress different, be like the high-tone neighbors. On my wages we can’t afford it.”
“We have to afford it.”
“Why do we have to?”
“For our children. We have to give them a better life.”
“Why? Do I hear them complain?”
“Oy,” she groaned. “Do I want to move for myself?”
“For who, then?”
“For Hershel. He should be meeting nicer friends. He should know children like my sister’s Manny—polite, refined, gentlemen, not the wild ruffians he knows.”
“I don’t want to move,” Hershy said. “You think I want to live with sissies?”
“You see,” she pointed out to his father. “Everybody who isn’t a bum is a sissy. Is that a way to bring up a child?”
“Yah, but I won’t know anybody there,” Hershy argued. “I’ll be all alone.”
“Shut up.” She glared at him, and, as he backed away, she continued: “We should move for Rachel’s benefit, too.”
“How is that?”
“She’s getting old enough to get married. Can she bring a suitor in this house without shame?”
“Why not? We live in it, don’t we? If it’s good enough for us, why shouldn’t it be good enough for a suitor? I don’t believe in pretending. Let a suitor know who we really are—that we’re plain, honest people.”
“Fool, why do you think Rachel never brings a boy friend home?”
“Why?”
“Why do you think she wanders around nights, God only knows where and with whom?”
“Why?”
“Because she’s ashamed of us, the house.”
“It’s hard to believe.”
“Oh, blind one! How you love to stay blind! But a woman knows. Even a woman without a brain in her head knows so many things that a man can never hope to learn.”
Hershy watched his father stare at his mother.
“In a better neighborhood,” his mother argued, “she’ll meet better people. Two thousand dollars you want to give her for a dowry. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, you’d like her to meet and marry. Where can she meet them: on her job, here? Only in a better neighborhood. Here, she can only meet a bum like Joey Gans. And even he’s too proud, so he thinks, to come into our house.”
“All right,” his father said. “In the spring, we’ll see.”
“All right.” So far as his mother was concerned, it was settled.
But for Hershy it was not all right. He didn’t want to move. He didn’t want to leave all the guys. He didn’t want to go to a new school with sissies. He bet they didn’t even know how to play ball. They were too sissy for football. He wasn’t afraid of the fights he might get into. He could murder them one hand lefty. But it wouldn’t be any fun fighting a bawling sissy. He would be the loneliest guy in the world. His mother was going to ruin his life. And his father, who wasn’t a fighter, was going to help her. Don’t let her, Pa. Be strong, put up a fight, don’t let her, Pa. But he knew his mother’d win, especially now, for as she got bigger with the baby it seemed to give her more power. Gee, but he wished he was poor again.
The only thing good about being rich was a certain magic that surrounded him when he ran an errand, or decided to treat himself, at the grocer’s. His mother had developed a habit of saying: “Tell the groceryman he should give it to you without money.” She herself said to the grocer: “I’ll buy it without money.”
“For the Melovs,” the grocer said, “anything.”
So whenever he felt like it he went in and bought candy, fig newtons, chocolate cookies, or halvah, “without money.”
At the end of the week, though, his father yelled bloody murder. He’d add up the butcher and grocer bills. He was sure that they were tacking on the debts of other people to his account.
“Cash,” he’d say. “From now on, buy with cash. I don’t ever want to owe anybody a penny, you hear. And you, Hershel, if you don’t stop eating so much sweets you’ll get diabetes.”
“What’s diabetes?”
“Never mind what it is. It shouldn’t happen to one’s worst enemy, that’s all.” Then, turning to Hershy’s mother: “You see how money suddenly commands respects, the lowlifes. But you see, also, how people suddenly want to bleed you to death, the leeches.”
But then Hershy got to hate going to the grocer’s, even though he could buy things without money there. The grocer was a bowlegged little man with sharp eyes and a jerky way of moving, so that he looked like he was always ready to chase him out. His wife, who was short and fat, with thick legs and fleshy arms and the most amazing bulge of breasts he had ever seen, used to ignore him completely. But now the grocer began to swarm all over him, tousling his hair and pinching his cheeks and slapping his face tenderly, and his wife sometimes laid her heavy hand on him to draw him to her huge belly and breasts.
“Is it true your sister Rachel is going to get two thousand dollars for a dowry?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s what your mama said.”
“If she said it she said it.”
“Your papa’s an angel. A man, a man.”
“Yah, I guess so.”
“And he wants Rachel should marry a lawyer, doesn’t he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Our Benny is studying to be a lawyer.”
Benny was a four-eyed guy, with kinky hair and a greasy face full of pimples. His studying to be a lawyer was supposed to mean something.
“So what?” he asked.
But Hershy’s mother, he found out, couldn’t escape them. She invited Benny over after supper one night.
“But, Ma, how could you without Rachel saying okay?” he said.
“Shut up. It’s not your business.”
“But she’s got a guy, Joey Gans.”
“Who knows about him? Do I ever see him? All he is to me is an automobile horn that makes Rachel run.”
Rachel went wild when she learned of Benny’s coming to meet her. “Why didn’t you tell me first?”
“Because I knew you’d say no.”
“If you knew I’d say no, why’d you say yes?”
“Because it’s not easy to get a leech off one’s back.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“It won’t hurt you anyhow. Maybe you’ll like him.”
“But I got a date tonight.”
“You’ll have it another night then.”
“Oh, Ma. Go to the grocery and tell them I’m busy. Tell them to peddle their kid someplace else.”
“No.”
“Tell them I got no dowry. It was only talk from Papa anyway. And if it wasn’t only talk, then here and now I give it up. Imagine, me paying off a guy to marry me; me, a girl with style. A guy wants me, he’s got to have it. What am I, a fathead, a broken-down bum?”
“You tell him.”
“All right, I’ll tell him.”
But Rachel didn’t tell him. It seemed that Benny had just come over and had sat down in the front room, with Hershy’s mother trying to get Hershy to stay in the kitchen with her and his father, when the horn began to blow. Rachel got up and said: “I’m sorry, kid, but I got a date. My mother got her signals mixed. Some other time, huh, kid?”
Hershy burst out laughing. Benny was left sitting alone, digging at the skin around his fingernails and looking at his shoes. The laughter suddenly burst into tingling stars from the slap Benny had given him.
“The bitch,” Benny said, and walked out.
He opened the window and yelled after him: “Wait’ll I tell Joey Gans on you. He’ll kill you for that.”
Benny walked on with sloping shoulders and bobbing head. Looking at him, like an empty sack, Hershy began to feel sorry for him. In the kitchen his mother cursed Rachel, but his father said it was her own fault, she shouldn’t be a matchmaker, a meddler, even if the grocer and his wife had plagued her to death; this should teach her a lesson. Afterward, Hershy was glad of the incident. He was able to walk into the grocer’s without being bothered.
The insurance man who had sold Hershy’s father his first and only policy and who came around twice a year to collect the premium, was overjoyed at the news, but it was hard to believe his sincerity. He had a tight thin mouth set in a long dry face. When he tried to laugh or express good cheer, his high stiff collar seemed to choke him, his mouth jerked to one side, and his whole face seemed to crack from the force of the emotion. Besides that, Hershy and his father associated insurance with death; it made them feel solemn in his presence. And though the insurance man insisted that he dealt primarily with life, Hershy’s father didn’t believe it; a man had to be solemn in the presence of one who dealt with the bereaved and the dead. But now the insurance man was armed with a big selling point. He was not going to be done out of it. He pressed home his arguments with pinched, believe-you-me eyes, a piston-like arm, and a pointing finger. He wanted Hershy’s father to take out more insurance at once, not only for himself but for the whole family.
“You see what insurance can do for you,” he said.
Hershy’s father saw, solemnly. He could see where insurance was important for him. His family was dependent on him and if, God forbid, something should happen, well …
Nothing was going to happen to him, the insurance man was confident. Why he was sure that Mr. Melov would live to be at least a hundred, a strong hard-working man like him, and he’d collect on his policy, every cent, plus interest, plus dividends, plus the money he had put in. That was the way to look at things. That was the bright way.
No, Hershy’s father couldn’t see it. He would feel funny if he took out insurance for Rachel and Hershy and his wife. He would feel like he was dependent on them. It was not a good way for a man to feel. He didn’t like to think that their lives were being valued in dollars and cents.
But, the insurance man argued, a man didn’t take out insurance against death. He took it out for life. He could save through insurance. That’s why it was called life insurance.
What was wrong with saving in a bank?
Well, a bank, the insurance man was contemptuous. Money there was like money in your pocket. It was too easy to take out, too tempting. But insurance was something you paid for, something you kept, no matter what. It forced you to save money.
Hershy’s mother interrupted. She had a superstition about insurance; it could put evil into one’s head. If David wanted, he could take out another policy, but she wouldn’t hear of having policies taken out for her or Hershy or Rachel.
Nothing else the insurance man was able to say could convince them. Hershy’s father said he’d let him know later about another policy for himself. To pay money with the thought of death involved gave him the shudders.
“Did you ever see a leech like that?” said Hershy’s mother after the insurance man left.
“You see,” said his father, “how money doesn’t let you alone.”
“Holy man,” said Hershy, glad to be released from the presence of death. “Everybody’s got an angle. Everybody.”
Peddlers, with I-should-drop-dead-if-this-isn’t-an-honest-to-god-genuine-bargain, had angles, too; only Hershy felt sorry for them because his Uncle Ben was a peddler. And Hershy’s mother began to wonder where all the bearded Jewish beggars had come from, asking for one donation or another; it seemed to her that they had gathered from every part of the city to her door.
And one night a neighbor, Mr. Finkel, whose wife was a friend of Hershy’s mother, came over with a man to talk to Hershy’s father. Hershy knew Mr. Finkel as a man who played cards in Joey Gans’s place; he had sad slanting eyes, looking like he was always being gypped. The man he brought over had a tight suit on. There was a scar on his chin and a tic twitched one side of his face. He was carrying something under an oilcloth and he placed it on the kitchen table.
“Sport,” he called Hershy’s father, making him wince. “Call me Joe.”
He wanted to talk alone to Hershy’s father. What he had to say was very important, very hush-hush, strictly personal; he was going to let Hershy’s father in on something he had never dreamed of. Hershy didn’t want to leave the room; he was fascinated by the man’s twitch and the thing under the oilcloth. Hershy’s mother wouldn’t leave, either: whatever the man had to discuss was for her ears also. The man shrugged his shoulders.
“Okay. Kiddies love it and ladies scream,” he said. “Watch it, sport.”
He removed the oilcloth and a machine something like a cash register came into view.
“Watch it carefully, sport.”
Then he did the most amazing thing. He inserted a dollar through a slot, punched a few knobs, and the machine began working and buzzing like a gum slot machine. Then a bell rang, and from the bottom popped a ten-dollar bill.
“How do you like that, sport?” the man said.
“What is it?” asked Hershy’s father.
“What is it!” the man laughed. “Money, hey?”
“Yes, yes, I know,” said Hershy’s father.
“What’s the matter, ain’t you never seen a ten-dollar bill?” said the man. “Here, touch it, feel it. Nice, hey? Real nice, hey?”
Hershy’s father stared at the bill.
“Here, let me have a tenner,” the man said. “I want you to match it. I want you to see it ain’t fake. I want you to see it’s the McCoy.”
Hershy’s father fumbled in his pocket and took out a ten-dollar bill. He looked at both of them carefully. They were exactly the same.
“From the one dollar came the ten?” he asked.
“Exactly, sport.” The man slapped him on the back.
“It’s really real?”
“Strictly McCoy, sport.”
“David,” said Hershy’s mother, her eyes bulging. “Do you realize …”
“Man, oh man,” said Hershy. “Some magic, huh?”
“I told you, sport, kiddies love it and women scream. Yep, missus. Yep, sport. Five thousand gets you fifty thousand. One dollar gets you ten, every time.”
“How, what do you mean?” said Hershy’s father.
“How? What do I mean? The machine, sport. The machine. What’d I do, give you a demonstration for nothing? The machine talks, I don’t have to. You seen with your own eyes, didn’t you? Okay, I’ll show you again. Give me a dollar. I’m going to show you with your own dollar.”
Hershy’s father handed him a dollar. The man inserted it through the slot, and bang, out popped another ten-dollar bill.
“Now here’s the pitch, sport. I understand you got ten thousand dollars. All right, I got two of these machines, but I got no money. Now this machine eats money, but before it produces ten for one you got to feed it one. So, in order to make this machine work for me, too, I need some ready cash. So I’m willing to part with this gold mine for five thousand. That leaves you five thousand. Right? And five times ten gets you fifty. Right? So both of us stand to make fifty thousand on this little invention a great scientist dreamed up and all our problems are over. See? Here, give me another dollar bill.”
Hershy’s father handed him another dollar and watched the machine with his mouth open. The man continued talking, spieling like a barker at a circus, his face twitching, his hands working, his body getting tighter and tighter. Suddenly, Hershy saw his father’s mouth close and his eyes flare.
“Get out,” he said.
“What do you mean, get out?” the man said. “What, are you nuts or something, giving me the shag, me, who’s willing to let you in on the hottest thing man ever invented?”
“Get out, I said.”
“What, have you got holes in your head or something?”
“Get out, you hear!”
Hershy’s father picked up the machine and the oilcloth, thrust them into the man’s hands, and pushed him out of the house.
“You, too!”
Mr. Finkel, the neighbor, lifted his eyebrows, his face looking more than ever like he had been gypped, and walked out.
Alone, Hershy’s mother said: “But David, you saw with your own eyes.”
“Yah, Pa,” said Hershy. “It worked. Like magic, it worked.”
“Shut up,” his father said. “Do you want me to spend the rest of my days in jail?”
“No,” said Hershy’s mother. “But if it was real, who would know?”
His father dismissed her with a wave of his hand. He slumped into a chair. He said: “Do I look like an idiot, a complete idiot? Tell me, do I?”
“No,” said Hershy’s mother.
“Then why do people come to me with their wild, greedy schemes?”
Hershy didn’t know. His mother didn’t answer.
“The two connivers. Imagine what they must think of me. Talk to him fast, Mr. Finkel must have told this man. The less sense you make the better it will be, Mr. Finkel must have told him. It hurts that I should be taken for a complete fool. It hurts hard.”
What hurt more was the night Uncle Ben, the fruit peddler, came over with his wife Bronya, the oldest sister of Hershy’s mother.
Uncle Ben had been a harness-maker, but when the automobile came he lost his job and couldn’t get another. One day, in a rage against the machine that had made him obsolete, he took a sledgehammer and broke up an automobile on the street; as a result, he spent thirty days in jail and came out a baffled man, with the wrinkles of his forehead seeming to form in curious question marks. Logic finally came back to him, the logic of a desperate man: since he knew about a horse’s equipment he should also know something about a horse, and since he came from a village that was surrounded by farms he should also know something about fruits, so he decided to get a horse and wagon and go into the fruit business. The horse, he found, became another mouth to feed and house and care for; and the wagon, he learned, became something that always needed fixing; and fruit, until he discovered the cheating ways of the men at the market, was something that turned rotten as soon as he touched it. The only pleasure he got out of the business was handling the harness, but even that got old and worn and its rough texture became an irritant. Recently, his horse had slipped on the ice and broken a leg. He had stood silent over the animal, looking into its blood-streaked eyes, pitying himself more than the horse, while somebody ran for a policeman. The horse was shot and dragged away and he had left the wagon to rot with the fruit. He was strictly a shlimazel; the fates were against him. Perhaps he was made to suffer, he reasoned, just so that his being might reassure those who made the world move that they were great. People said you could weep for Uncle Ben. And perhaps you could, looking at his sparse sandy hair and his tangled eyebrows and his runny gray eyes and the unkempt mustache that was wedged between the two long grooves of his cheeks; and the way he sat, as though a weight had settled on him, crushing the baffled wrinkles out of his forehead, made one squirm. His wife complemented him, her folded hands resigned in her lap, her long pale face shrouded in a shawl of tightly combed hair that was pulled into a thick biscuit, her head and shoulders rocking steadily as she sat; from time to time she sighed.
Hope, which had led Uncle Ben from one agony to another, was gnawing at him again. He knew of a newsstand he could buy; it brought in between thirty and thirty-five dollars a week.
“No!” said Hershy’s father. “You mean, from little penny sales a man can make all that in a week?”
“It’s the truth,” said Uncle Ben. “I saw it in black and white.”
“Imagine that.”
There was a long silence, filled with sighs, throat clearing, and the sullen sounds of their clothes rubbing against the chairs. Uncle Ben was working hard to gather his forces and Hershy could feel his mother and father begin to retreat. It seemed that his father had suddenly assumed for Uncle Ben the position of Uncle Hymie, the one you catered to, came to for advice or for a loan; mixed with all this was also a sense of envy and contempt. His father tried to relax, make Uncle Ben comfortable, but didn’t know what to do except look away from him.
“The man,” said Uncle Ben finally, “is making a sacrifice. He’s a sick man. He can’t stand the cold. So he has to go away to a warmer climate. He is making a real sacrifice.” Uncle Ben paused, trying to focus his eyes on somebody, but getting no contact (not even from Hershy, who kept identifying him with the crippled horse that was shot) he stared at his stubby calloused hands. “The man wants twelve hundred dollars.”
“That’s not bad,” Hershy’s father admitted.
“I could make that in less than a year. I figured it out in black and white. Even if it’s only thirty dollars a week I could make fifteen hundred and sixty dollars, three hundred and sixty more than I’d pay in, and then the stand would be mine, all mine, all my life.”
“You mean you’d pay the twelve hundred dollars back in a year and live on only three hundred and sixty?”
Uncle Ben studied the question; it seemed to bewilder him. “No,” he said. “I mean …” He got all mixed up in his calculations, then cast them away with an incestuous curse in Russian. “But I could pay it all back, in one year or five years: what’s the difference?”
There was a pause again, with everybody straining as if they were standing on their toes. Hershy had some marbles in his pocket. He picked one and flicked it against the pile. He said silently: give it to him, Pa; aw, give it to him. Then his father cleared his throat, as though there were a bone in it.
“Couldn’t you get it for a thousand?” he said.
Uncle Ben seemed to leap up: “Maybe I could. The man is desperate. He is making a sacrifice. Maybe I could, maybe I could.”
“A thousand dollars is a lot of money, you know.”
“The man will take it. He’s desperate.”
“In fact, I put aside a little more than a thousand for Hershy’s education.”
“You have to think of the children, I know.”
“Rachel has to have some money for the day she gets married. She’s a big girl now. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow she’ll come home with a boy and say: Pa, meet my future husband.”
“I hope so, I hope so.”
“Things here aren’t like in the old country. It costs money to get married. Everything costs a fortune.”
Uncle Ben nodded his head. Slowly, he was losing the enthusiasm he had worked up. Hershy could feel his spirit droop. His father, without realizing it, because he wanted to be kind and because he couldn’t be abrupt and say no, had a need to explain his situation further.
“The new baby also needs money. If it’s a boy I’ll have to put some aside for his education. If it’s a girl she’ll need money to grow up and then more for her marriage.”
“I know,” said Uncle Ben dryly. “The children are very important. All we live for is the children.”
“And then there will be hospital bills and doctor bills for Sonya and the new baby. What’s left?”
Uncle Ben shrugged his shoulders.
“Have you asked anybody else?”
Uncle Ben nodded. “But you know what everybody thinks of me. Like in the poem by Abraham ibn Ezra:
“If I sold shrouds,
No one would die.
If I sold lamps,
Then, in the sky
The sun, for spite,
Would shine by night.”
Aunt Bronya stopped her weary rocking and sighing a moment to say: “True, true. Once a shlimazel always a shlimazel.”
“Words, everybody is willing to give me,” said Uncle Ben. “Even my silent horse, who didn’t have any words, told me what he thought of me. Once, when I was washing him he spread his legs and peed on me. Another time he lifted up his tail and farted right in my face. At least, he was honest.”
“Did you ask Hymie?”
“You know Hymie. He’s so stuffed with money, his guts should only turn green with it, that he can’t even get his finger in to pull any of it out.”
“Then what can I do? You know I’m not a rich man. All right, I have a few extra dollars now to protect me and my family, should anything happen. But all I am, really, is a hard worker who lives only on his wages.”
“But I’ll pay you back, David.”
“Yes, but how? To put so much money, twelve hundred dollars, into a business and get so little in return seems scandalous. Money goes, nobody knows where. And if you don’t pay me, can I become a tyrant and demand it, can I take it out of your mouth and the mouths of your children? What if I should need the money before you can pay it up? Can I ask you to sell the stand? Can I force you to do a thing like that? And if I could, would I be able to? Would I be able to see you and your children go hungry? It’s such a hard thing you ask of me.”
“But what can happen? You’re working. You and your family, may God protect you from any evil, you’re strong and healthy. What can happen that you might want to need the money suddenly?”
“Who knows? But I remember the days when I wasn’t working, when we almost starved from hunger and couldn’t pay the rent, when I walked the streets trying to make a penny while swallowing my own bitter gall. Look what’s happening in the world: revolutions, strikes, maybe a depression, the papers say, even the cost of a piece of bread makes it almost a luxury. And what if something happens to me? Will you work and earn a living for me and my family?”
“Then you won’t give me the money?”
“If I were a rich man, I’d say all right. But what have I got, a little security, through the heavenly grace of my poor brother? Even I, with a little money, am I thinking of business? What is it with this business-business? Can’t a man be happy without a business?”
The contempt finally came out of Uncle Ben: “Don’t talk about you and me. We’re two different people.”
“Oh, how you confuse me.”
“I should be so confused.”
“Look, Ben.” Hershy’s father leaned across the table and put his hand on Uncle Ben’s shoulder. “Buy another horse and become a fruit peddler again. It made you a living before and it’s something you know about.”
Uncle Ben shrugged the placating hand away. “No. Never again.”
“I could give you the money for a horse, even for a wagon and your first load of fruit. But twelve hundred dollars, that’s a fortune.”
“Don’t do me any favors. I don’t want the rest of my life harnessed to a dumb animal.”
“Don’t dream so big, Ben. You got along before with a horse, why not again?”
“Don’t tell me how to dream. Because you have some money, it doesn’t make you a boss over me. Remember, you’re still David Melov, a common worker.”
“Listen to reason, please, Ben.”
“Go to hell with your reason.”
Hershy’s father began to show anger. “Do me a favor and go to hell yourself if you won’t listen to reason. Do what millions of other men have to do to live: go get a job.”
“Don’t tell me what to do. Don’t forget, I’m not used to taking orders any more. The horse taught me how to give orders. Remember?”
“How can I talk to a man like you?”
“Then don’t talk to me. I don’t care if we never talk again. But if you should want to talk to me, talk to me with money. Come, Bronya.” Uncle Ben rose, took Aunt Bronya by the hand and pulled her to her feet. “And may your insides, too, turn green with the money you’re stuffed with.”
Hershy watched his mother and father stare at each other after Uncle Ben and Aunt Bronya left.
“Gee,” he said, feeling he had to say something, “I’ll bet if we ever go to their house, their kids’ll never play with me. They’ll be mad on me.”
“Don’t worry,” his mother said. “You have plenty of other bums to play with.”
His father paid no attention to him. “Sonya,” he said. “Did I do wrong?”
“No.”
“But maybe I should have given him the money. He’ll pay me back.”
“That shlimazel? Never.”
“But it’s for your sister, too.”
“I don’t care. We have to think of ourselves first.”
“The money feels like a bone in my throat.”
“If you had agreed to give him the money, I’d have killed you.”
Hershy’s father looked up at the ceiling: a habit, Hershy noticed, he was getting into lately.
“Ay, Yussel, Yussel,” he said. “You meant good, but look what it’s doing to us.”
Hershy’s mother couldn’t let the matter about Uncle Ben rest. She was afraid that Uncle Ben and her sister Bronya might gossip to all the landsmen, that they might create the impression that she and David had hearts of stone. She was certain that she and David had treated Uncle Ben right, but she needed assurance; she needed people to stand up for her good name. She took Hershy along to the West Side to visit her sister Mascha and Uncle Irving, who lived on the same street as Uncle Ben. Hershy’s cousins, Louie and Charley, were at a movie, and he moved about restlessly as his mother explained her plight.
Uncle Irving said: “Poison, I’d have given him.”
Hershy watched his mother agree eagerly.
“What right does a man have to ask for all that money?” Uncle Irving said. “What does Ben think—you owe him a living, you have nothing to do but squander your money on him? He’s crazy.”
Hershy’s mother patted Uncle Irving’s hand. “Irving,” she said. “You’re a man with sense. I knew you’d understand.”
Uncle Irving went on. “What if you should want to go into business yourself? Then what would you do?”
“Yes,” said Hershy’s mother. “What would I do?”
“Is David thinking of going into business?”
Hershy’s mother shrugged her shoulders.
“He should take his time,” said Uncle Irving firmly. “He should know what he’s doing. He should be careful.”
“Sometimes a man can take too much time.”
“Now,” said Uncle Irving, rubbing his hands, his eyes lighting up. “If a man should come to David with a proposition where he could make a lot of money, then he’d really have something to offer, hah?”
Hershy’s mother placed her hands on her belly, as though protecting the baby within her.
“If a man, say, like myself,” Uncle Irving continued, “were to come to David and say: ‘David, I have a proposition that will make you a fortune—’ that would really be something, wouldn’t it?”
Hershy saw that though his mother nodded she wasn’t convinced. Uncle Irving smiled and patted her knee.
“Don’t worry about Ben,” he said. “I know your heart is bleeding for him. He had no right to ask you for all that money. He had no right to torture you. He should go to work.”
Hershy was glad when Uncle Irving’s kids, Louie and Charley, came home from the movie. He went outside with them and played run-sheep-run with a gang of other guys.
After the game, since his mother hadn’t called him yet, he went over to one of the lampposts with Louie and Charley to watch the crap game.
“Jiggers,” said Louie. “There’s Itzik.”
Itzik was Uncle Ben’s oldest son, who was a couple years older than Hershy. He had a soft down of hair on his face and pimples were beginning to break out. He had lost a dime in the game. He was broke but still he watched the game anxiously.
“So what?” said Hershy.
“He’ll cockalize you.”
“Yah, for what?”
Itzik saw him. “What are you doing around here, punk?”
“Nothing. My ma’s by Aunt Mascha.”
“Beat it, you cheap sonofabitch.”
“I won’t.”
“Then give me a nickel.”
“I ain’t got it.”
“Yah? You and your cheap kike of an old man.”
Itzik hit him and knocked him down. Hershy got up and rushed at him. Itzik hit him again and knocked him down. Hershy got up, bursting with rage, but Louie and Charley and a few other kids held him back. They dragged him away from the crap game. When his mother saw him she yelled: “I told you not to go outside.”
He didn’t answer her.
“Why’d he hit you?”
“You know why.”
“I’ll kill him, that bum.”
On the way to the streetcar they approached the crap game. Hershy’s mother walked over to Itzik and slapped him full across the face. Itzik felt his cheek in amazement, then laughter broke out from under the lamppost, and, as Hershy and his mother hurried away, Itzik broke out into a volley of curses. But Hershy didn’t feel any better over his mother striking Itzik. He still wished he was poor again.
It was important, of course, also to get Uncle Hymie’s reactions, solace, and advice. Uncle Hymie rose to the occasion.
“To a bank you should have told him to go, that shlimazel,” he said.
Hershy’s father had dealt with Uncle Ben exactly right. After all, he (Uncle Hymie) was a man who dealt with banks. He dealt with a loan association and countless insurance companies and manufacturers of all sorts; he had a hundred people working for him; in short, he was a man who ought to know about such matters. Even the way he lived was proof that he ought to know. Look at the way he dressed. A sport, everybody called him. Look at the way his wife dressed. A society lady, everybody called her. And the children, Manny and Shirley; did one have to ask about them? Off the fat of the land they lived. And look at the house he lived in. It was his own. But would he have risen to where he was today if he had let himself cry over every shlimiel and shlimazel who had come to him with a greedy hand and a tale of woe? “You bet your life, no,” he said.
Uncle Hymie paced the floor. A discussion of finance always brought him to his feet and made him move; it charged his wiry body and reddened his blunt face and intensified the nervous blink of his eyes.
“Hymie,” Aunt Reva said. “You’ll wear out the rug.”
“Shut up. A man is talking.”
“Don’t aggravate yourself, please, Hymie. You’ll go to sleep with a bellyache tonight. The doctor said you have to be careful with the ulcer.”
“Shut up already.”
Aunt Reva retreated to a corner of the couch. Uncle Hymie breathed deeply, unfettered at last, and continued.
When he needed money, where did he go: to David, Ben, Irving? He went to a bank. (Of course, he didn’t say that his partner, whom he was planning to get rid of now, had a capital investment in the laundry and that he was able to borrow money on the strength of it; that was ancient history.) And he had to pay back every penny with a heavy six per-cent interest right on time.
What was money: something you found on the streets, something you tore up into confietti to make hula-hula on a holiday? People sailed around the world and discovered new lands in search for it; that was how America was born. People lived like beasts and suffered untold hardships to dig it out of the earth, so that they could become free men and do anything they wanted. People even killed for money, even themselves. It was a curse, sure. It was evil, too. It could even make a slave of you, all right. But a man without money was always a slave. With it, he had a chance for freedom.
But there was a secret to money. The secret gave it life: power. Without knowledge of the secret, money was useless. What was the secret? Very simple. Something the banks, the merchants, the manufacturers, and the landowners had learned long ago. The secret was so simple that he was afraid everybody was going to laugh. Here is what it was: money had to be used; its only value was in making more money; like a magnet, it had to draw everything to itself or it was nothing. The secret was that simple.
“You hear, David?” said Hershy’s mother.
“I hear.”
“Listen to a man who knows.”
Uncle Hymie smiled, pleased. Aunt Reva, looking worried, was about to open her mouth. Uncle Hymie knifed her with his eyes and said: “Shut up.”
Uncle Hymie was really wound up. He continued. “Can a hungry man go to a bank and say: ‘Lend me a dollar so that I might fill up my belly?’ The bank says: ‘What is your security?’ And if the man says: ‘Me; if my belly is filled, I’ll be able to work, and then I’ll be able to pay you back …’ do you think the bank is interested in the man’s belly? No. Because what’s a belly? The man might go and poison himself with food, who knows? So where will the bank get its dollar back with six cents interest, from the stones in the pauper’s grave? But if you ask a bank for money to build a factory or a building, or if you need a loan to buy machinery, then, if the bank knows that if you can’t pay up it will profit more by your misfortune, then you’re a good man, you’re a gem, you’re a regular allrightnik. Bellies, nobody is interested in. But a building, a business, securities, a piece of machinery, everybody is interested in. That’s the world. A piece of iron is more important than a man. Go change it.”
“All right, my allrightnik,” said Aunt Reva. “Stop talking before you wear out both your belly and the rug.”
On the way home, Hershy’s father said: “It’s a funny thing about a man in business—he thinks he knows everything.”
“Doesn’t he?” said Hershy’s mother.
“I don’t know. Sometimes when I look at him now I can hardly recognize him. He used to be a socialist. Now look at him. The sweat has dried out of him and he appears like the iron that has become more important to him than a man. Money, he says, gives you freedom. But I see him as a man who is in a deep dungeon, chained to a dollar.”
“I should only be chained like he is.”
“What do you think, Hershel?” his father asked.
“I think Uncle Hymie stinks,” said Hershy. “He never lets me drive his car. He only lets me sit in it and turn the wheel. He’s full of hot air.”
The conversation didn’t end there. It continued after Hershy got into bed. Their talk came to him from the kitchen. He listened intently, afraid to fall asleep. He was afraid that if he fell asleep he’d wake up in a strange world where everything had changed. Even now, nothing seemed the same any more. He lay hard against the bed. And yet, though he felt the whole surface of his body against the mattress, he felt himself dangling.
Uncle Hymie was right, his mother said. Money had to be used. Money could make you free. It could release you from the drudgery of the kitchen; it could free you from being a slave to a landlord and a boss and a piece of bread; it could open up your life and fling you into a world you never dreamed of; it could make a waltz of life. She’d be the happiest person in the world if she knew that she wouldn’t be on her hands and knees scrubbing the floors a few days after the baby was born, if she was sure that she was going to have some help, if she knew that she was living in a larger flat with steam or furnace heat, if she knew that she wouldn’t have to kill herself hunting and fighting for bargains. What was a person without money? He was a nothing. In the old country, if a man could read or write and had a trade, he was respected, he was an important man of the community, he was a somebody. Here, you could be a philosopher, but if you didn’t have money you were a nobody.
“Talk, talk, talk,” Hershy muttered.
Here, said his father, a woman got into a man’s pants and never left him alone. What was it with the air here that made a woman go crazy with the desire to become a man?
Here, said his mother, a woman got into a man’s pants to put a fire in him. Here, a whole new world had opened. A woman grasped the importance. A man, however, could continue to stumble blindly from his job to his bed.
Oh, what happened to a man here! said his father. He is pecked, pecked, pecked. Instead of being stronger with the security of money he had grown weaker, he was slowly being undermined. He had become like a wounded chicken.…
Hershy shut his eyes tight against the image that flashed through his mind. It was of himself, on his hands and knees, looking through a basement window, watching the shochet slaughter chickens. Zip, the throat was cut. Splash, the blood shot out. Whop, the chicken was flung away, regurgitating as it ran about, growing weaker and weaker and finally dropping in a pool of blood. Next. The shochet’s razor flashed. Blood spurted out of the chicken’s throat. Suddenly, the cackling and the flapping of wings became furious: a chicken tore free from its coop, pounced on the wounded chicken, immediately pecked it to death. The sight, when one of the wounded chicken’s eyes was punctured, made him turn away with nausea.
“Leave him alone,” he yelled inwardly. “Leave him alone.”
The image remained as the talk went on.
There, his father said, a woman had her place. She wore a skirt. A man raised his hand and there was silence. A man beat the woman and she whimpered with pleasure. Here, a man became nothing. A woman tried to take away the very thing that made a man a man. What was she trying to do to him?
She only wanted to make him a greater man; a man of importance; a man, who, with a glance, would command respect; a man who would give his children every chance to grow into powerful figures in the land.
So what did she want of him?
A man, she continued, who did not make a place in the world for his children would never be remembered.
All right, what did she want of him?
She wanted him to use the money.
He had already spent it.
How? In small dreams, in a future that belonged to nobody and that would amount to nothing?
He thought he had spent it wisely, unselfishly.
He had spent nothing, she said. He had only talked. There was no future in holding money in a bank. If he lost his job or got sick the money would be gone before they could look around.
What was the matter with her? his father wanted to know. Didn’t she sleep well at night any more?
No. She could feel the baby stirring in her. Feel, she said. Feel the baby in her belly.
A little life, he commented.
It will want a big life.
Everybody wants. Doesn’t anybody ever want to give?
Not in this world.
Yes, he admitted sadly.
“Aw, go to sleep already,” Hershy said, not loud enough to be heard. But his mother was far from getting ready for bed.
They had to start thinking about using the money, she said. God had taken away a life and had given them a gift. If life and death had meaning, if there was an order to God’s world, then it was up to them to find it. The meaning she had discovered was that God had taken away a life in order to make room for a new life. God, in his kindness, to make up for David’s grief, had made his seeds potent after all these years and had given her body the strength to make them grow. A new life was coming, growing bigger and bigger every day, making more and more demands. Soon it would burst into the world to make more demands, and she wanted to be able to give it more than a breast full of milk and a kind pat on the head. Not only that, God had suddenly given them the means to make a new life for everybody. It was up to them to fulfill God’s graciousness.
What else had she discovered in her sleepless nights?
How, she countered, does a man make a new life if suddenly he finds money in his hands?
He doesn’t spend it, that’s certain.
No, she agreed. He uses it. He uses it to make more money. He buys his freedom with it. He creates a bigger and richer world for himself and his family. He goes into business.
What kind of business?
Any kind, so long as it was good.
What was good?
A cabinet-making factory. After all, he was a cabinet-maker, wasn’t he?
He wanted her to talk sense. A business like that took heavy heavy thousands.
What about being a contractor? He was a carpenter. He was a builder. What more did it take to be a contractor?
Oh, but he wished she’d talk sense. What was he, a millionaire?
All right, a dry goods store. Did one have to know much to own a dry goods store? Goods was goods. Everybody knew about goods.
No, he knew nothing about goods.
Did he know anything?
Yes. He knew that he was getting sleepy.
“Yah,” Hershy said silently. “Go on to sleep already. Leave him alone already, will you, Ma? Will you leave him alone?”
Look, his mother said. What about a delicatessen store? What did one have to know to handle that?
Nothing, his father admitted. But he would not be chained day and night to a sawdust floor, with his children living out of a pop bottle.
A laundry.
No, he knew nothing about that.
Hershy saw his father become smaller and smaller, his mother larger and larger, himself crushed between them.
But look at Hymie, she said. He was an ignoramus. Like David, at one time he knew about nothing but a saw and a piece of wood. But when he lost a job in his trade he looked about him and said: No, if a man spends his life learning a trade only to find that he can’t work steady at it, then it wasn’t for him. It took a man to make a decision like that. So what did he do? He took a job as a laundry driver. He saw it was a new business. It was growing. It was being a maid for people who couldn’t afford to hire a human being to slave for them but who could afford a dollar for a bundle of wash. He saw all that. And then when the opportunity came he bought into a laundry and became a success. Did that take a great wisdom, a great brain?
No, his father admitted.
Did Hymie have more brains than he?
No.
Why, what he had in his little finger, Hymie could never hope to have in his whole head. So what did it take? Only a little courage. Only a little.
But Hymie didn’t have a heart.
She was convinced that even a man with a heart could become a success.
But what if he went into a business with a heart and then had it cut out of him? How would people be able to bear him? How would he be able to bear himself?
That was not a thing he had to concern himself with. His job was to look to the future. His job was to change his world.
But what if he should fail?
Why should he fail? Why should he even think of it?
But people had failed. People do fail.
Oh, his mother groaned. Why hadn’t she married a man with the heart of a lion.
Oh, his father answered, what a burden he was carrying. A beast was on his back.
Hershy felt the beast pounce on his father. It was a life and death struggle. He tried to help, but the beast flung him away. He had to stand on the side and watch. Kill him, Pa. Oh, kill him, Pa.
“Yussele, Yussele,” he heard his father say. “Help me.”