Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

by Stanley Elkin

  He looked at the strange thick letters in the prayer book. “Go ahead,” the rabbi said, “think of Harold and tell God.”

  He tried then to think of his son, but he could recall him only as he was when he was a baby standing in his crib. It was unreal, like a photograph. The others knew what he was thinking and frowned. “Go ahead,” the rabbi said.

  Then he saw him as a boy on a bicycle, as once he had seen him at dusk as he looked out from his apartment, riding the gray sidewalks, slapping his buttocks as though he were on a horse. The others were not satisfied.

  He tried to imagine him older but nothing came of it. The rabbi said, “Please, Greenspahn, the sun is almost down. You’re wasting time. Faster. Faster.”

  All right, Greenspahn thought. All right. Only let me think. The others stopped their chanting.

  Desperately he thought of the store. He thought of the woman with the coffee, incredibly old, older than the old men who prayed with him, her wig fatuously red, the head beneath it shaking crazily as though even the weight and painted fire of the thick, bright hair were not enough to warm it.

  The rabbi grinned.

  He thought of the schvartze, imagining him on an old cot, on a damp and sheetless mattress, twisting in a fearful dream. He saw him bent under the huge side of red, raw meat he carried to Arnold.

  The others were still grinning, but the rabbi was beginning to look a little bored. He thought of Arnold, seeming to watch him through the schvartze’s own red, mad eyes, as Arnold chopped at the fresh flesh with his butcher’s axe.

  He saw the men in the restaurant. The criers, ignorant of hope, the kibitzers, ignorant of despair. Each with his pitiful piece broken from the whole of life, confidently extending only half of what there was to give.

  He saw the cheats with their ten dollars and their stolen nickels and their luncheon lusts and their torn breads.

  All right, Greenspahn thought. He saw Shirley naked but for her brassiere. It was evening and the store was closed. She lay with Arnold on the butcher’s block.

  “The boy,” the rabbi said impatiently, “the boy.”

  He concentrated for a long moment while all of them stood by silently. Gradually, with difficulty, he began to make something out. It was Harold’s face in the coffin, his expression at the very moment of death itself, before the undertakers had had time to tamper with it. He saw it clearly. It was soft, puffy with grief; a sneer curled the lips. It was Harold, twenty-three years old, wifeless, jobless, sacrificing nothing even in the act of death, leaving the world with his life not started.

  The rabbi smiled at Greenspahn and turned away as though he now had other business.

  “No,” Greenspahn called, “wait. Wait.”

  The rabbi turned and with the others looked at him.

  He saw it now. They all saw it. The helpless face, the sly wink, the embarrassed, slow smug smile of guilt that must, volitionless as the palpitation of a nerve, have crossed Harold’s face when he had turned, his hand in the register, to see Frank watching him.

  I LOOK OUT FOR ED WOLFE

  He was an orphan, and, to himself, he seemed like one, looked like one. His orphan’s features were as true of himself as are their pale, pinched faces to the blind. At twenty-seven he was a neat, thin young man in white shirts and light suits with lintless pockets. Something about him suggested the ruthless isolation, the hard self-sufficiency of the orphaned, the peculiar dignity of men seen eating alone in restaurants on national holidays. Yet it was this perhaps which shamed him chiefly, for there was a suggestion, too, that his impregnability was a myth, a smell not of the furnished room which he did not inhabit, but of the three-room apartment on a good street which he did. The very excellence of his taste, conditioned by need and lack, lent to him the odd, maidenly primness of the lonely.

  He saved the photographs of strangers and imprisoned them behind clear plastic windows in his wallet. In the sound of his own voice he detected the accent of the night school and the correspondence course, and nothing of the fat, sunny ring of the word’s casually afternooned. He strove against himself, a supererogatory enemy, and sought by a kind of helpless abrasion, as one rubs wood, the gleaming self beneath. An orphan’s thinness, he thought, was no accident.

  Returning from lunch, he entered the office building where he worked. It was an old building, squat and gargoyled, brightly patched where sandblasters had once worked and then, for some reason, quit before they had finished. He entered the lobby, which smelled always of disinfectant, and walked past the wide, dirty glass of the cigarette-and-candy counter to the single elevator, as thickly barred as a cell.

  The building was an outlaw. Low rents and a downtown address and the landlord’s indifference had brought together from the peripheries of business and professionalism a strange band of entrepreneurs and visionaries, men desperately but imaginatively failing: an eye doctor who corrected vision by massage; a radio evangelist; a black-belt judo champion; a self-help organization for crippled veterans; dealers in pornographic books, in paper flowers, in fireworks, in plastic jewelry, in the artificial, in the artfully made, in the imitated, in the copied, in the stolen, the unreal, the perversion, the plastic, the schlak.

  On the third floor the elevator opened and the young man, Ed Wolfe, stepped out.

  He passed the Association for the Indians, passed Plasti-Pens, passed Coffin & Tombstone, passed Soldier Toys, passed Prayer-a-Day. He walked by the open door of C. Morris Brut, Chiropractor, and saw him, alone, standing at a mad attention, framed in the arching golden nimbus of his inverted name on the window, squeezing handballs.

  He looked quickly away, but Dr. Brut saw him and came toward him, putting the handballs in his shirt pocket, where they bulged awkwardly. He held him by the elbow. Ed Wolfe looked down at the yellowing tile, infinitely diamonded, chipped, the floor of a public toilet, and saw Dr. Brut’s dusty shoes. He stared sadly at the jagged, broken glass of the mail chute.

  “Ed Wolfe, take care of yourself,” Dr. Brut said.

  “Right. ”

  “Regard your position in life. A tall man like yourself looks terrible when he slumps. Don’t be a schlump. It’s not good for the organs.”

  “I’ll watch it.”

  “When the organs get out of line the man begins to die.”

  “I know.”

  “You say so. How many guys make promises. Brains in the brainpan. Balls in the strap. The bastards downtown.” Dr. Brut meant doctors in hospitals, in clinics, on boards, non-orphans with M.D. degrees and special license plates and respectable patients who had Blue Cross, charts, died in clean hospital rooms. They were the bastards downtown, his personal New Deal, his neighborhood Wall Street banker. A disease cartel. “They won’t tell you. The white bread kills you. The cigarettes. The whiskey. The sneakers. The high heels. They won’t tell you. Me, I’ll tell you.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Wise guy. Punk. I’m a friend. I give a father’s advice.”

  “I’m an orphan.”

  “I’ll adopt you.”

  “I’m late to work.”

  “We’ll open a clinic. ‘C. Morris Brut and Adopted Son.’ ”

  “It’s something to think about.”

  “Poetry,” Dr. Brut said and walked back to his office, his posture stiff, awkward, a man in a million who knew how to hold himself.

  Ed Wolfe went on to his own office. The sad-faced telephone girl was saying, “Cornucopia Finance Corporation.” She pulled the wire out of the board and slipped her headset around her neck, where it hung like a delicate horse collar. “Mr. La Meck wants to see you. But don’t go in yet. He’s talking to somebody.”

  He went toward his desk at one end of the big main office. Standing, fists on the desk, he turned to the girl, “What happened to my call cards?”

  “Mr. La Meck took them,” she said.

  “Give me the carbons,” Ed Wolfe said. “I’ve got to make some calls.”

  The girl looked embarrassed. Her face
went through a weird change, the sadness taking on an impossible burden of shame, so that she seemed massively tragic, like a hit-and-run driver. “I’ll get them,” she said, moving out of the chair heavily. Ed Wolfe thought of Dr. Brut.

  He took the carbons and fanned them out on the desk, then picked one in an intense, random gesture like someone drawing a number on a public stage. He dialed rapidly.

  As the phone buzzed brokenly in his ear he felt the old excitement. Someone at the other end greeted him sleepily.

  “Mr. Flay? This is Ed Wolfe at Cornucopia Finance.” (Can you cope, can you cope? he hummed to himself.)

  “Who?”

  “Ed Wolfe. I’ve got an unpleasant duty,” he began pleasantly. “You’ve skipped two payments.”

  “I didn’t skip nothing. I called the girl. She said it was okay.”

  “That was three months ago. She meant it was all right to miss a few days. Listen, Mr. Flay, we’ve got that call recorded, too. Nothing gets by.”

  I’m a little short.”

  “Grow.”

  “I couldn’t help it,” the man said. Ed Wolfe didn’t like the cringing tone. Petulance and anger he could meet with his own petulance, his own anger. But guilt would have to be met with his own guilt, and that, here, was irrelevant.

  “Don’t con me, Flay. You’re a troublemaker. What are you, Flay, a Polish person? Flay isn’t a Polish name, but your address…”

  “What’s that?”

  “What are you? Are you Polish?”

  “What’s that to you? What difference does it make?” That’s more like it, Ed Wolfe thought warmly.

  “That’s what you are, Flay. You’re a Pole. It’s guys like you who give your race a bad name. Half our bugouts are Polish persons.”

  “Listen. You can’t…”

  He began to shout. “You listen. You wanted the car. The refrigerator. The chintzy furniture. The sectional you saw in the funny papers. And we paid for it, right?”

  “Listen. The money I owe is one thing, the way…”

  “We paid for it, right?”

  “That doesn’t…”

  “Right? Right?”

  “Yes, you…”

  “Okay. You’re in trouble, Warsaw. You’re in terrible trouble. It means a lien. A judgment. We’ve got lawyers. You’ve got nothing. We’ll pull the furniture the hell out of there. The car. Everything. ”

  “Wait,” he said. “Listen, my brother-in-law….”

  Ed Wolfe broke in sharply. “He’s got money?”

  “I don’t know. A little. I don’t know.”

  “Get it. If you’re short, grow. This is America.”

  “I don’t know if he’ll let me have it.”

  “Steal it. This is America. Good-by.”

  “Wait a minute. Please.”

  “That’s it. There are other Polish persons on my list. This time it was just a friendly warning. Cornucopia wants its money. Cornucopia. Can you cope? Can you cope? Just a friendly warning, Polish-American. Next time we come with the lawyers and the machine guns. Am I making myself clear?”

  “I’ll try to get it to you.”

  Ed Wolfe hung up. He pulled a handkerchief from his drawer and wiped his face. His chest was heaving. He took another call card. The girl came by and stood beside his desk. “Mr. La Meck can see you now,” she mourned.

  “Later. I’m calling.” The number was already ringing.

  “Please, Mr. Wolfe.”

  “Later, I said. In a minute.” The girl went away. “Hello. Let me speak with your husband, madam. I am Ed Wolfe of Cornucopia Finance. He can’t cope. Your husband can’t cope.”

  The woman made an excuse. “Put him on, goddamn it. We know he’s out of work. Nothing gets by. Nothing.”

  There was a hand on the receiver beside his own, the wide male fingers pink and vaguely perfumed, the nails manicured. For a moment he struggled with it fitfully, as though the hand itself were all he had to contend with. Then he recognized La Meck and let go. La Meck pulled the phone quickly toward his mouth and spoke softly into it, words of apology, some ingenious excuse Ed Wolfe couldn’t hear. He put the receiver down beside the phone itself and Ed Wolfe picked it up and returned it to its cradle.

  “Ed,” La Meck said, “come into the office with me.”

  Ed Wolfe followed La Meck, his eyes on La Meck’s behind.

  La Meck stopped at his office door. Looking around, he shook his head sadly, and Ed Wolfe nodded in agreement. La Meck let him enter first. While La Meck stood, Ed Wolfe could discern a kind of sadness in his slouch, but once the man was seated behind his desk he seemed restored, once again certain of the world’s soundness. “All right,” La Meck began, “I won’t lie to you. ”

  Lie to me. Lie to me, Ed Wolfe prayed silently.

  “You’re in here for me to fire you. You’re not being laid off. I’m not going to tell you that I think you’d be happier some place else, that the collection business isn’t your game, that profits don’t justify our keeping you around. Profits are terrific, and if collection isn’t your game it’s because you haven’t got a game. As far as your being happier some place else, that’s bullshit. You’re not supposed to be happy. It isn’t in the cards for you. You’re a fall-guy type, God bless you, and though I like you personally I’ve got no use for you in my office.”

  I’d like to get you on the other end of a telephone some day, Ed Wolfe thought miserably.

  “Don’t ask me for a reference,” La Meck said. “I couldn’t give you one.”

  “No, no,” Ed Wolfe said. “I wouldn’t ask you for a reference.” A helpless civility was all he was capable of. If you’re going to suffer, suffer, he told himself.

  “Look,” La Meck said, his tone changing, shifting from brutality to compassion as though there were no difference between the two, “you’ve got a kind of quality, a real feeling for collection. I’m frank to tell you, when you first came to work for us I figured you wouldn’t last. I put you on the phones because I wanted you to see the toughest part first. A lot of people can’t do it. You take a guy who’s already down and bury him deeper. It’s heart-wringing work. But you, you were amazing. An artist. You had a real thing for the deadbeat soul, I thought. But we started to get complaints, and I had to warn you. Didn’t I warn you? I should have suspected something when the delinquent accounts started to turn over again. It was like rancid butter turning sweet. So I don’t say this to knock your technique. Your technique’s terrific. With you around we could have laid off the lawyers. But Ed, you’re a gangster. A gangster.”

  That’s it, Ed Wolfe thought. I’m a gangster. Babyface Wolfe at nobody’s door.

  “Well,” La Meck said, “I guess we owe you some money.”

  “Two weeks’ pay,” Ed Wolfe said.

  “And two weeks in lieu of notice,” La Meck said grandly.

  “And a week’s pay for my vacation.”

  “You haven’t been here a year,” La Meck said.

  “It would have been a year in another month. I’ve earned the vacation.”

  “What the hell,” La Meck said. “A week’s pay for vacation.”

  La Meck figured on a pad, and tearing off a sheet, handed it to Ed Wolfe. “Does that check with your figures?” he asked.

  Ed Wolfe, who had no figures, was amazed to see that his check was so large. After the deductions he made $92.73 a week. Five $92.73’s was evidently $463.65. It was a lot of money. “That seems to be right,” he told La Meck.

  La Meck gave him a check and Ed Wolfe got up. Already it was as though he had never worked there. When La Meck handed him the check he almost couldn’t think what it was for. There should have been a photographer there to record the ceremony: ORPHAN AWARDED CHECK BY BUSINESSMAN.

  “Good-by, Mr. La Meck,” he said. “It has been an interesting association,” he added foolishly.

  “Good-by, Ed,” La Meck answered, putting his arm around Ed Wolfe’s shoulders and leading him to the door. “I’m sorry it had to end thi
s way.” He shook Ed Wolfe’s hand seriously and looked into his eyes. He had a hard grip.

  Quantity and quality, Ed Wolfe thought.

  “One thing, Ed. Watch yourself. Your mistake here was that you took the job too seriously. You hated the chiselers.”

  No, no, I loved them, he thought.

  “You’ve got to watch it. Don’t love. Don’t hate. That’s the secret. Detachment and caution. Look out for Ed Wolfe.”

  “I’ll watch out for him,” he said giddily, and in a moment he was out of La Meck’s office, and the main office, and the elevator, and the building itself, loose in the world, as cautious and as detached as La Meck could want him.

  He took the car from the parking lot, handing the attendant the two dollars. The man gave him back fifty cents. “That’s right,” Ed Wolfe said, “it’s only two o’clock.” He put the half-dollar in his pocket, and, on an impulse, took out his wallet. He had twelve dollars. He counted his change. Eighty-two cents. With his finger, on the dusty dashboard, he added $12.82 to $463.65. He had $476.47. Does that check with your figures? he asked himself and drove into the crowded traffic.