No call had come through from Dillon, and my father was getting fidgety. He had thought the wait would be but a day or two, but then it was a week, and then it was a second one. All that time he could only sit on the back porch and reread the local weekly, the Sentinel, until it softened in his hands.
My mother was more anxious than my father. “Oy, what a stubborn man,” she said to him after one long day of waiting. “He ain’t no different than Szymanski.”
My father floundered. Who was this guy Szymanski? And how did he come into it?
He came into it because he was my mother’s first boss, the one who had fired her when he caught her eating matzos.
Joey, if he didn’t share my parents’ anxiety, has remembered sharing my mother’s hostility to Dillon. Dillon, he had concluded back then, was meaner than the man in the black hat and black beard who was forever trying to outwit Tom Mix. “That Mr. Dillon’s so mean,” he said to my father, “he ought to live in a hollow log and drink muddy water.”
To which my father said, “Oy, that poor man Dillon’s got the curse of the Bronsons on him. I sure wouldn’t take no chances if I was him.”
Finally my father had read the newspaper until his eyes glazed over. How could he stand one more reading of the story of the Baileys’ new baby and Louise Caldwell’s wedding shower? Was Mrs. Sterling Yancey’s tea for her church circle, at which the Mmes. Josiah Jones and Billy Upton staffed the table and poured (“at both ends,” the paper reported), so riveting that he should read about it again and again? All right, he was somewhat interested that the north road out of town had been reoiled, but he had taken in, digested, and expelled every word about it several times. Enough was enough. He repeated to himself one of his favorite sayings—that roast chickens don’t fly into your mouth— then put down the paper, rose from the chair, went into the house to get his hat and coat, and headed for First Street.
First Street was, as my father now knew, the three-block, cobblestoned street where all the stores were. Some of the stores sold things, and some provided services. The important ones were on the second block, most notably—at least from my father’s point of view—the palatial Dalrymple-Eaton’s Department Store. Also on this block were the First National Bank and the furniture store. The first block had, besides Tom Dillon’s store, other establishments, like the barber shop, where I got my hair cut, and the Cinderella Beauty Parlor, where Miriam had her hair variously marcelled, bobbed, or shingled, depending on the fashion of the moment. The third block wound down to the picture show and the train depot. Beyond the railroad crossing was the blacksmith shop and New Bethel Baptist Church, but you couldn’t see them very well from First Street.
First Street divided white Concordia on the west from black Concordia on the east, which was called, as in Savannah, “Niggertown.” As far as I knew, that was its name. All the town’s Negroes lived there, in the shacks, and there was a bootlegger’s hut at the edge of it. The streets were dark brown dirt because, unlike the west side of town, where the dirt streets were occasionally treated to a scattering of gravel, which lightened them, Niggertown streets were never treated to anything. Niggertown did, however, have one thing the west side didn’t have, and that was a “sugar ditch,” where raw sewage ran.
On First Street my father walked past the bank and the drugstore and traversed the cobblestones. Between Suggs’s Feed and Lovett’s Hardware, he came upon a little window fronting an insurance and real estate office. He went in.
In the office he talked to Herman Tucker.
The man was built to the pattern of Tom Dillon—large, beefy, with rolls of midtorso flesh. If Dillon was combative, Tucker was all amiability. When he smiled, which was all the time, his dentures protruded so far my father figured that if the man coughed, his teeth would fly out and make a landing on him. The man was a fake, my father decided at once, all fake.
In the small, dark office, Tucker sat behind a desk. He occasionally let his smile go into eclipse while he swigged at a Coca-Cola bottle. In between being swigged at, the bottle sat on the dust and grit of the desktop. Tucker didn’t seem surprised to see my father, and my father guessed that Tucker and Tom Dillon had had a little conversation about his arrival in town.
Tucker said he had a couple of “real nice places,” and though my father said a wry “uh-huh” under his breath, aloud he said he was all ears. He spotted a wooden folding chair against a wall, pulled it open, sat down across the desk, and told Tucker, “You got my attention complete.”
It was no surprise to my father that Tucker’s first suggestion was an abandoned blacksmith shop, which Tucker described as needing only a floor to turn into a palace.
Sure, my father thought, put a floor in a blacksmith shop and it turns into a palace; and put wheels on me and I turn into a wagon. “A blacksmith shop?” he said aloud.
Tucker trained his dentures on my father and offered that “you people”—meaning Jews—were so “enterprising,” they could “pure” work miracles.
In his throat my father gave another “uh-huh.”
The other place used to be a “nigger” church that had been foreclosed on but already had an upstairs and only needed to have the benches taken out to make my father “mighty proud.” Tucker said to him, “As I say, you Jews are so . . .”
Yes, yes, my father knew all about how Jews were so this and so that: so smart, so energetic, so whatever. This man’s choice had been “enterprising.” My father had finally gotten it into his head that when people said these things what they meant was that Jews were different, and he had no doubt that among themselves there was an understanding that Jews were “not like you and me.” That people thought he was different didn’t bother him so much. People were all different in one way or another, and if some didn’t like in what way he was different, well, what could he do about it?
But for dealing with this man Tucker, he plucked an old Jewish saying from his bag of old Jewish sayings—one having to do with not spitting in the well you might have to drink from later—and kept these thoughts to himself. Out loud he wondered if those two listings were all Tucker had.
From the way Tucker shifted around, my father knew a game plan was already operating, one in which this son of a bitch with the teeth was being coached by the momzer with the sweaty face. For how could a man call himself a realtor (which my father pronounced “relator” like everybody else in town) and have only these preposterous listings? No, something was going on here.
My father figured it was time to counter. He told Tucker he’d think it over, that he’d come in in a few days to have another talk.
Two days later he once more meandered up and down First Street. The day was hot, without hint of breeze. Under his woollen coat, my father’s armpits pooled with sweat, and wet patches showed dark along his hatband. He went into Redfearn’s Drugstore and Soda Fountain and, under a ceiling fan “trying its best to quit altogether,” as my father described it, bought some Camels and attempted to engage the clerk in conversation.
The clerk stood behind boxes of cough medicines stacked chest high on the counter. Above him, on a horizontal piece of bare wood resting on rickety posts, were some red rubber hot-water bottles. The clerk bent his head and, through the narrowed opening, squinted up at my father. “What’s that you say?”
My father repeated that there wouldn’t be many calls for hot-water bottles at that time of year. There being no rejoinder, my father said uncomfortably to the clerk, “You know . . . it being so hot, uh, and all that.”
The clerk was uninterested. Summer, winter, didn’t mean “diddly” to him, and, anyway, he didn’t go in for doing something different “every time the weatherman farts.” (Whenever a memory called for words my father judged unsuitable, he added an automatic, “Excuse me, children,” and decades later he was still adding it.) The drugstore clerk, having delivered himself of this sentiment, went back to washing glasses at the fountain.
My father went out. To waste some more time, he crossed the street and put himself on view in front of Spivey’s Furniture Store, where he feigned a fascination with the window display. There was in fact no display, only haphazard heaps of furniture called “Grand Rapids,” a generic term for the kind of cheap, mass-produced stuff pioneered in that Michigan city. A jungle, my father thought. It was obvious that the guy had to get rid of some trees or find a new clearing. Was it possible he had in mind a new location?
Before he knew it, he had opened the door. A bell tinkled. Then he was squeezing past overstuffed chairs to a path leading to a desk. Behind the rolltop sat a man with gold-rimmed spectacles on a nose “only a bone,” as my father said.
My father held out his hand and gave his name. The man responded with neither hand nor name but with a look that my father always described as like ice forming.
My father said to the man, “I was wondering . . .” The man answered, “Ain’t nothing for you to wonder about in here.” The man said further that he knew why my father was in town, had known ever since he got there. (Were spies hanging from Miss Brookie’s crape myrtle?) And, the man wanted to know, wasn’t it true that Tom Dillon had my father under lock and key?
My father said nobody had him under lock and key.
It didn’t make any difference. “Quit wasting my time,” the man told him.
Another momzer, my father thought. Were there nothing but momzers in this town? The conversation going nowhere, in fact at a dead stop, my father turned and retraced his steps. The tinkling bell tinkled.
Once outside, he felt all at once something of a drop-off in spirits. Where were the people whose hearts beat faster at the thought of a Jew store coming to town? Where were the drums and the trumpets? Well, he didn’t expect pounding hearts and drums exactly, but where was at least somebody agreeable to taking his money?
In fewer minutes than he would have liked, he had re-crossed the street to the real estate office.
Inside he again faced Tucker. The minute he looked at him, he knew nothing good would be coming from that smile. It was a smile of which my father had grown very weary indeed. Tucker said again that all he had was the blacksmith shop and the “nigger” church.
To try to project a calm that he certainly wasn’t feeling, my father walked to the calendar on the wall and pretended to scrutinize the girl on it—a puffy-cheeked girl, preternaturally pink and white, smiling brilliantly over the slogan FOR SERVICE WITH A SMILE, CALL CRUICKSHANK’S PLUMBING. “You can’t be doing much business with such few listings,” he said to the wall.
Tucker wanted to help “like the very dickens” and said he would give it another think. My father turned from the calendar and took a look as Tucker embarked on his “think.” As the man leaned back in his chair, his head fell back, his eyes closed, his mouth sprang open, and his tongue ran under his upper dentures, as if, my father said, searching out diamonds hidden in molars. Suddenly the eyelids lifted, and there came the revelation that Tom Dillon had the store my father was looking for.
This was news? Of course it wasn’t, but what could my father do? He retreated to the little wooden chair, positioned just as he had left it yesterday, and asked Tucker if he thought Dillon was ready to talk business.
Tucker answered that he never spoke for Tom Dillon.
My father gave his almost silent “uh-huh” and sat on.
Tucker suggested that my father try some other town, that there were a lot of little towns that might be in the market for a Jew store. “So why not just go on and look further?” he asked my father.
My father was suddenly undone, his confidence seriously compromised. This guy Tucker was peeing on his back and calling it rain. The man knew the shoe factory was the attraction and here he was smiling his kulak smile and telling him to go someplace else. Did he have it wrong? Had Tom Dillon evertaken him seriously? After all, with the shoe factory coming in, lots of merchants could be wanting a store.
My father struggled for something light—frailech was his word—to make the man loosen up, come around. He had some jokes, but when he ran them through his head, he realized they were about Jews, so they were out. Jewish jokes were only for other Jews’ ears.
Traveling salesman jokes were out as well. My father was not a goody-goody, but he was also not a traveling salesman and didn’t want to sound like one. Traveling salesmen’s reputations were not of the finest.
He set himself to come up with something funny about the ride from Nashville but soon realized there was nothing funny about that ride. And if he described what had really happened, told the incidents for the horror stories they were, would this man care? Of course not. Did a boil hurt under the other fellow’s armpit? This man especially would feel no hurt.
Maybe something funny about Miss Brookie? My father started talking, sure that a good story would come to him. “Say, you must know Miss Brookie Simmons,” he began.
“Everybody knows Brookie Simmons.” Tucker looked up, eyes brightening. He began to heave about, pleasurably, my father would always say, like an elephant wallowing in mud.
Tucker had a proposal, a bet, though it was one my father never described in much detail. My guess was that the bet had a sexual aspect and that Miss Brookie was the target.
This was not the lighthearted something my father had in mind. He told Tucker that he wasn’t much of a betting man, and the wallowing stopped.
My father knew he was now supposed to get up and go. But this was proving difficult since he seemed stuck to the chair.
As he sat, feelings washed over him, all of them bad. He began to face facts: the accent that he now knew he had, his lack of an education, his size. No matter what my mother thought, he was not tall. No, he was an undersized Jew pitted against Gentile giants.
He could only think that everything was a failure, and it was his fault: He had been done in by his chutzpah, his arrogance. What had made him think that his born sal-es-man-ship would open doors? And why had he believed those Nashville big shots who were so confident that he was on well-greased wheels to success? They didn’t know everything; they didn’t even know there were towns that wanted no part of Jews. And now here he sat, his good luck nowhere to be seen, his hustle out of commission, unable even to get him out of the chair.
And so what if he did get up? What then? He had no place to go except to my mother, who would surely say that now they would go back to New York. And if they had to go back, he would have to wire my grandfather for the money.
It was perhaps this last galling thought that got him to his feet. And, incredible as it was even to him, he managed a smile and a thanks. Thanks for what? he asked himself. For bupkis, for goat shit (“Excuse me, children”), that’s for what.
As he walked to the door, Tucker was yanking at desk drawers, rummaging through them, shutting them with a bang, letting my father know he had better things to do.
“You get anything, you let me know,” my father said to him.
“You bet,” Tucker mumbled, peering into a drawer.
In the next moment the man was on his feet, moving out from behind the desk and extending his hand. My father was thrown into severe disorientation. Could it be the momzer was offering a good-bye shake? He reached out to take the hand, and when he did, saw that Tucker was looking not at him but at someone just entering the office.
My father lowered his head and tried to maneuver past. He felt the newcomer’s hand on his arm. The man wanted him, him, Aaron Bronson.
Tucker sat back down, his eyes deep into whatever was taking place.
The man introduced himself as Spivey, and my father recognized the man from the furniture store. A hand was out, limply hanging, and my father shook it. What was this? Had this disagreeable guy decided he could produce something resembling a friendly gesture after all? Though at this moment my father didn’t question it too closely, he later figured that because Waylon Spivey and Tom Dillon were foes of long standing, Spivey had mulled it over and decided to give himself the fun of reeling my father in before Dillon did.
They crossed the street. Inside his furniture store Spivey sat down behind the rolltop desk and motioned my father to the spindle-backed chair beside it. Behind the spectacles pale eyes stared at my father.
Did my father know what was what, what he was supposed to do? “No,” he always said, “all I could do was stare back.”
Spivey finally spoke, and the man’s words poured over my father like rain on parched corn. What the man said was that the store was for rent.
Spivey got up, turned on the lights, and the store came alive. My father knew he had found his store. Not ritzy, but what need had he for ritzy? Two floors already, and—think of it—a Number One location.
Staying unexcited was the ticket. My father composed himself, rose, and started on a leisurely walk among the jumble. As he strolled, he envisioned. Here on the first floor would be the women’s and shoe departments. He climbed the stairway and saw what the second floor could be—a place just for men. He closed his eyes and allowed “Perfect” to escape his lips.
Serenely he moved back down the stairs. Back at the desk, he put his hands in his pockets, pinched a quarter hard, and asked Spivey how come he was letting such a store go. If this was all a joke, now was when Spivey would produce the punch line.
There was no punch line. The store was available because Spivey was putting in a railroad spur at the edge of town and he wanted to be near it. “Folks don’t mind riding out for furniture,” he said to my father.
It was okay. But not over. Now came the “how much.”
His property being “a danged sight better than them fool things you been offered,” Spivey thought seventy-five was about right.
My father swallowed, hard.
There was to be more hard swallowing. That figure was while he was getting started; then it would go up “accordin’,” as my father always said Spivey pronounced the word. Spivey was drawing things out, having himself a good time, telling my father not to try to Jew him down, that it wasn’t going to work. And oh, yes, there was a five-year lease.
A lease like that could turn out to be a sentence, but my father told himself that the man had him right by the beytsim, or, as my father would translate it, “right by the silver dollars.” He tried to stall. He asked when he could get in, if he decided to . . . uh, if he decided to . . . take it?
Giving my father’s silver dollars a squeeze, Spivey said there was no deciding about it, that my father had to take it, had no choice. And he could get in just in time to go to market for his back-to-school trade.
Market! The St. Louis market! Back-to-school! My father felt a jolt, as if he had been dozing and a wagon wheel had rolled over a deep hole. Look here, wasn’t he the one with the Jewish head, the guy with the head for dry goods? And this goy was telling him his business? In the next moment he heard himself saying that there were a couple of other things he wanted to look at but that Spivey had made him a very interesting proposition. My father saw his hustle as back on track.
He blanked his face. He understood, he told Spivey, that Oliphant could use a store like he had in mind and that he had heard that some properties there could be on the market.
“Oliphant!” Spivey spit the word out. Didn’t my father know that Oliphant had already had a store like he had in mind? And that one day it just gave a loud fart and disappeared? Had my father heard that, too?
“I heard,” my father answered him, remembering the store that had dyed Miss Brookie’s hands blue. He started moving doorward, promising to let Spivey know in a couple of days.
And then all at once Tom Dillon was there, in the store, soft-faced, smiling, walking toward my father with his hand out. “Good thing I found you, Bronson,” he was saying.
In telling of this moment, my father would always say, “Children, when a momzer like this one gives you a big kiss, count your fillings.” He took Dillon’s hand and said, “That so, Mr. Dillon?”
Dillon said he had been thinking about their little talk and had about concluded it was his civic duty to assist a newcomer. “We oughtn’t to turn strangers from our gates, no sir,” he said, and laughed. Dillon had a laugh that went so abruptly on and off, it might have been operated by a hand-held button. “You haven’t forgotten, have you?”
It seemed Dillon had decided that he could fix up the upstairs after all so that my father could have his two separate departments. “We can’t have the men in the ladies’ bloomers, now can we?” A huge sound suddenly roared out of his throat, the beefy body bounced, and the sweat ran. He was at the boil, my father thought, like a pot of wash in a Southern backyard.
Spivey was now a collection of paroxysms, darting to and fro around Dillon, snatching at him, elbowing him. He ordered him from the store. “Just get on out, you no-account. You dassent come in here talking business to somebody I’m already talking business to. You just move along.”
Dillon moved not, only said matter-of-factly that Spivey was a goddamn thieving son of a bitch.
Spivey’s turn. Dillon stank worse than a nigger outhouse. Hadn’t Spivey heard Dillon had been arrested for violating the smell laws?
Spivey took hold of my father and pulled him to one side. He suddenly had another deal. The deal was that he would come down twenty-five with a three-year lease if my father signed now. “This gol-derned pussyfooting around got to stop,” he said.
As my father said later, this was not his idea of “pussyfooting around”; it was his idea of full-scale combat. He told Spivey to write the lease up and he’d sign.
Dillon wasn’t finished. As Spivey was walking back to his desk to fill in the particulars, Dillon was spinning my father around and yelling “Sign? Sign?” into his face. What was my father going on about? Had he forgotten their understanding?
It meant little to Dillon that they had no understanding, that there was nothing to understand about. He wasn’t even listening when my father told him that he would never do such a foolish thing as to take a store before he knew the particulars.
Having dealings with a “sawed-off little Jew” was something he should have never done, Dillon now informed my father. Could you have honest dealings with a Jew? “No,” he said, in answer to his own question. “Not the Lord himself could do it. Don’t we all know that?”
In the doorway he turned and, handkerchief gripped tight, shook his fist while he wished to hell that the Bronsons had never come to Concordia in the first place. Finally, he charged out, sideswiping pieces of furniture as he went.
My father walked slowly back to the spindle chair. How to explain, he thought then as he thought always, why such an important man, a man with such a big reputation, should carry around so much hate? It was a moment before he could take the paper Spivey was holding out to him.
As to the signing of the lease, though I was certainly not on the scene at Spivey’s, I have since that day witnessed so many such rites that I feel I can describe this one with complete confidence. First there would have been the slow reading, with my father whispering the words and occasionally looking up to consider, and then the clearing of a space on the desk to ensure that his elbows and hand, when it finally came time to affix his signature, would have enough space to dock a boat if the need arose. At last he would have unscrewed his Waterman fountain pen and scrawled out a lengthy Aaron Bronson, and, as this was an important document, he would have imposed an inked dot between the names and streamed a paraph under both (to thwart forgery), and then he would have sat back and read the document again.
On this day the two men shook hands, and Spivey put the lease in his pocket. My father was to get his the next day, after it had been typed up. “There’s a lady at the bank uses a typewriter,” Spivey told him.
My father had a store, and of course it was time for giving himself congratulations. This he did, but it was not the congratulations he had envisioned, with a “Hoorah!” and a walk on the moon. No, he wasn’t moon walking. And why he wasn’t was no mystery. As my father said later, he knew that when Tom Dillon charged out the door, it wasn’t the end of Tom Dillon. And, of course, it wasn’t. My father had made an enemy, and he knew what to expect of enemies. Still, he and my mother never had to face Tom Dillon’s most hateful act against us, and that was because Miriam and I never told them of it.