One day he looked up from lining up four ashcans for the sanitation truck to remove and saw Mr. and Mrs. Panessa staring at him from the store. They were staring up through the glass front door and when he looked at them at first his eyes blurred, and they appeared to be two scrawny, loose-feathered birds.
He went down the block to get a wrench from another janitor, and when he got back they then reminded him of two skinny leafless bushes sprouting up through the wooden floor. He could see through the bushes to the empty shelves.
In the spring, when the grass shoots were sticking up in the cracks in the sidewalk, he told Etta, “I’m only waiting till I can pay it all.”
“How, Willy?”
“We can save up.”
“How?”
“How much do we save a month?”
“Nothing.”
“How much have you got hid away?”
“Nothing anymore.”
“I’ll pay them bit by bit. I will, by Jesus.”
The trouble was there was no place they could get the money. Sometimes when he was trying to think of the different ways there were to get money his thoughts ran ahead and he saw what it would be like when he paid. He would wrap the wad of bills with a thick rubber band and then go up the stairs and cross the street and go down the five steps into the store. He would say to Panessa, “Here it is, little old man, and I bet you didn’t think I would do it, and I don’t suppose nobody else did and sometimes me myself, but here it is in bucks all held together by a fat rubber band.” After hefting the wad a little, he placed it, like making a move on a checkerboard, squarely in the center of the counter, and the diminutive man and his wife both unpeeled it, squeaking and squealing over each blackened buck, and marveling that so many ones had been put together into such a small pack.
Such was the dream Willy dreamed, but he could never make it come true.
He worked hard to. He got up early and scrubbed the stairs from cellar to roof with soap and a hard brush, then went over that with a wet mop. He cleaned the woodwork too and oiled the banister till it shone the whole zigzag way down, and rubbed the mailboxes in the vestibule with metal polish and a soft rag until you could see your face in them. He saw his own heavy face with a surprising yellow mustache he had recently grown and the tan felt cap he wore that a tenant had left behind in a closetful of junk when he had moved. Etta helped him and they cleaned the whole cellar and the dark courtyard under the crisscrossed clotheslines, and they were quick to respond to any kind of request, even from tenants they didn’t like, for sink or toilet repairs. Both worked themselves to exhaustion every day, but as they knew from the beginning, no extra money came in.
One morning when Willy was shining up the mailboxes, he found in his own a letter for him. Removing his cap, he opened the envelope and held the paper to the light as he read the trembling writing. It was from Mrs. Panessa, who wrote her husband was sick across the street, and she had no money in the house so could he pay her just ten dollars and the rest could wait for later.
He tore the letter to bits and hid all day in the cellar. That night, Etta, who had been searching for him in the streets, found him behind the furnace amid the pipes, and she asked him what he was doing there.
He explained about the letter.
“Hiding won’t do you any good at all,” she said hopelessly.
“What should I do then?”
“Go to sleep, I guess.”
He went to sleep but the next morning burst out of his covers, pulled on his overalls, and ran out of the house with an overcoat flung over his shoulders. Around the corner he found a pawnshop, where he got ten dollars for the coat and was gleeful.
But when he ran back, there was a hearse or something across the street and two men in black were carrying this small and narrow pine box out of the house.
“Who’s dead, a child?” he asked one of the tenants.
“No, a man named Mr. Panessa.”
Willy couldn’t speak. His throat had turned to bone.
After the pine box was squeezed through the vestibule doors, Mrs. Panessa, grieved all over, tottered out alone. Willy turned his head away although he thought she wouldn’t recognize him because of his new mustache and tan cap.
“What’d he die of?” he whispered to the tenant.
“I really couldn’t say.”
But Mrs. Panessa, walking behind the box, had heard.
“Old age,” she shrilly called back.
He tried to say some sweet thing but his tongue hung in his mouth like dead fruit on a tree, and his heart was a black-painted window.
Mrs. Panessa moved away to live first with one stone-faced daughter, then with the other. And the bill was never paid.
1957
The Loan
The sweet, the heady smell of Lieb’s white bread drew customers in droves long before the loaves were baked. Alert behind the counter, Bessie, Lieb’s second wife, discerned a stranger among them, a frail, gnarled man with a hard hat who hung, disjoined, at the edge of the crowd. Though the stranger looked harmless enough among the aggressive purchasers of baked goods, she was at once concerned. Her glance questioned him but he signaled with a deprecatory nod of his hatted head that he would wait—glad to (forever)—though his face glittered with misery. If suffering had marked him, he no longer sought to conceal the sign; the shining was his own—him—now. So he frightened Bessie.
She made quick hash of the customers, and when they, after her annihilating service, were gone, she returned him her stare.
He tipped his hat. “Pardon me—Kobotsky. Is Lieb the baker here?”
“Who Kobotsky?”
“An old friend”—frightening her further.
“From where?”
“From long ago.”
“What do you want to see him?”
The question insulted, so Kobotsky was reluctant to say.
As if drawn into the shop by the magic of a voice the baker, shirtless, appeared from the rear. His pink fleshy arms had been deep in dough. For a hat he wore jauntily a flour-covered brown paper sack. His peering glasses were dusty with flour, and the inquisitive face white with it, so that he resembled a paunchy ghost; but the ghost, through the glasses, was Kobotsky, not he.
“Kobotsky,” the baker cried almost with a sob, for it was so many years gone Kobotsky reminded him of, when they were both at least young, and circumstances were—ah, different. Unable, for sentimental reasons, to refrain from smarting tears, he jabbed them away with a thrust of the hand.
Kobotsky removed his hat—he had grown all but bald where Lieb was gray—and patted his flushed forehead with an immaculate handkerchief.
Lieb sprang forward with a stool. “Sit, Kobotsky.”
“Not here,” Bessie murmured.
“Customers,” she explained to Kobotsky. “Soon comes the supper rush.”
“Better in the back,” nodded Kobotsky.
So that was where they went, happier for the privacy. But it happened that no customers came so Bessie went in to hear.
Kobotsky sat enthroned on a tall stool in a corner of the room, stoop-shouldered, his black coat and hat on, the stiff, gray-veined hands drooping over thin thighs. Lieb, peering through full moons, eased his bones on a flour sack. Bessie lent an attentive ear, but the visitor was dumb. Embarrassed, Lieb did the talking: ah, of old times. The world was new. We were, Kobotsky, young. Do you remember how both together, immigrants out of steerage, we registered in night school?
“Haben, hatte, gehabt.” He cackled at the sound of it.
No word from the gaunt one on the stool. Bessie fluttered around an impatient duster. She shot a glance into the shop: empty.
Lieb, acting the life of the party, recited, to cheer his friend: “‘Come,’ said the wind to the trees one day, ‘Come over the meadow with me and play.’ Remember, Kobotsky?”
Bessie sniffed aloud. “Lieb, the bread!”
The baker bounced up, strode over to the gas oven, and pulled one of the t
iered doors down. Just in time he yanked out the trays of brown breads in hot pans, and set them on the tin-top worktable.
Bessie clucked at the narrow escape.
Lieb peered into the shop. “Customers,” he said triumphantly. Flushed, she went in. Kobotsky, with wetted lips, watched her go. Lieb set to work molding the risen dough in a huge bowl into two trays of pans. Soon the bread was baking, but Bessie was back.
The honey odor of the new loaves distracted Kobotsky. He breathed the fragrance as if this were the first air he was tasting, and even beat his fist against his chest at the delicious smell.
“Oh, my God,” he all but wept. “Wonderful.”
“With tears,” Lieb said humbly, pointing to the large bowl of dough.
Kobotsky nodded.
For thirty years, the baker explained, he was never with a penny to his name. One day, out of misery, he had wept into the dough. Thereafter his bread was such it brought customers in from everywhere.
“My cakes they don’t like so much, but my bread and rolls they run miles to buy.”
Kobotsky blew his nose, then peeked into the shop: three customers.
“Lieb”—a whisper.
Despite himself the baker stiffened.
The visitor’s eyes swept back to Bessie out front, then, under raised brows, questioned the baker.
Lieb, however, remained mute.
Kobotsky coughed to clear his throat. “Lieb, I need two hundred dollars.” His voice broke.
Lieb slowly sank onto the sack. He knew—had known. From the minute of Kobotsky’s appearance he had weighed in his thoughts the possibility of this against the remembrance of the lost and bitter hundred, fifteen years ago. Kobotsky swore he had repaid it, Lieb said no. Afterwards a broken friendship. It took years to blot out of the system the memoried outrage.
Kobotsky bowed his head.
At least admit you were wrong, Lieb thought, waiting a cruelly long time.
Kobotsky stared at his crippled hands. Once a cutter of furs, driven by arthritis out of the business.
Lieb gazed too. The bottom of a truss bit into his belly. Both eyes were cloudy with cataracts. Though the doctor swore he would see after the operation, he feared otherwise.
He sighed. The wrong was in the past. Forgiven: forgiven at the dim sight of him.
“For myself, positively, but she”—Lieb nodded toward the shop —“is a second wife. Everything is in her name.” He held up empty hands.
Kobotsky’s eyes were shut.
“But I will ask her—” Lieb looked doubtful.
“My wife needs—”
The baker raised a palm. “Don’t speak.”
“Tell her—”
“Leave it to me.”
He seized the broom and circled the room, raising clouds of white dust.
When Bessie, breathless, got back she threw one look at them, and with tightened lips waited adamant.
Lieb hastily scoured the pots in the iron sink, stored the bread pans under the table, and stacked the fragrant loaves. He put one eye to the slot of the oven: baking, all baking.
Facing Bessie, he broke into a sweat so hot it momentarily stunned him.
Kobotsky squirmed atop the stool.
“Bessie,” said the baker at last, “this is my old friend.”
She nodded gravely.
Kobotsky lifted his hat.
“His mother—God bless her—gave me many times a plate hot soup. Also when I came to this country, for years I ate at his table. His wife is a very fine person—Dora—you will someday meet her—”
Kobotsky softly groaned.
“So why I didn’t meet her yet?” Bessie said, after a dozen years still jealous of the first wife’s prerogatives.
“You will.”
“Why didn’t I?”
“Lieb—” pleaded Kobotsky.
“Because I didn’t see her myself fifteen years,” Lieb admitted.
“Why not?” she pounced.
Lieb paused. “A mistake.”
Kobotsky turned away.
“My fault,” said Lieb.
“Because you never go anyplace,” Bessie spat out. “Because you live always in the shop. Because it means nothing to you to have friends.”
Lieb solemnly agreed.
“Now she is sick,” he announced. “The doctor must operate. This will cost two hundred dollars. I promised Kobotsky—”
Bessie screamed.
Hat in hand, Kobotsky got off the stool.
Pressing a palm to her bosom, Bessie lifted her arm to her eyes. She tottered. They both ran forward to steady her but she did not fall. Kobotsky retreated quickly to the stool and Lieb returned to the sink.
Bessie, her face like the inside of a loaf, quietly addressed the visitor. “I have pity for your wife but we can’t help you. I am sorry, Mr. Kobotsky, we are poor people, we don’t have the money.”
“A mistake,” Lieb cried, enraged.
Bessie strode over to the shelf and tore out a bill box. She dumped its contents on the table, the papers flying everywhere.
“Bills,” she shouted.
Kobotsky hunched his shoulders.
“Bessie, we have in the bank—”
“No—”
“I saw the bankbook.”
“So what if you saved a few dollars, so have you got life insurance?”
He made no answer.
“Can you get?” she taunted.
The front door banged. It banged often. The shop was crowded with customers clamoring for bread. Bessie stomped out to wait on them.
In the rear the wounded stirred. Kobotsky, with bony fingers, buttoned his overcoat.
“Sit,” sighed the baker.
“Lieb, I am sorry—”
Kobotsky sat, his face lit with sadness.
When Bessie finally was rid of the rush, Lieb went into the shop. He spoke to her quietly, almost in a whisper, and she answered as quietly, but it took only a minute to start them quarreling.
Kobotsky slipped off the stool. He went to the sink, wet half his handkerchief, and held it to his dry eyes. Folding the damp handkerchief, he thrust it into his overcoat pocket, then took out a small penknife and quickly pared his fingernails.
As he entered the shop, Lieb was pleading with Bessie, reciting the embittered hours of his toil, the enduring drudgery. And now that he had a penny to his name, what was there to live for if he could not share it with a dear friend? But Bessie had her back to him.
“Please,” Kobotsky said, “don’t fight. I will go away now.”
Lieb gazed at him in exasperation. Bessie stayed with head averted.
“Yes,” Kobotsky sighed, “the money I wanted for Dora, but she is not sick, Lieb, she is dead.”
“Ai,” Lieb cried, wringing his hands.
Bessie faced the visitor, pallid.
“Not now,” he spoke kindly, “five years ago.”
Lieb groaned.
“The money I need for a stone on her grave. She never had a stone. Next Sunday is five years that she is dead and every year I promise her, ‘Dora, this year I will give you your stone,’ and every year I gave her nothing.”
The grave, to his everlasting shame, lay uncovered before all eyes. He had long ago paid a fifty-dollar deposit for a headstone with her name on it in clearly chiseled letters, but had never got the rest of the money. If there wasn’t one thing to do with it there was always another: first an operation; the second year he couldn’t work, imprisoned again by arthritis; the third a widowed sister lost her only son and the little Kobotsky earned had to help support her; the fourth incapacitated by boils that made him ashamed to walk out into the street. This year he was at least working, but only for just enough to eat and sleep, so Dora still lay without a stone, and for aught he knew he would someday return to the cemetery and find her grave gone.
Tears sprang into the baker’s eyes. One gaze at Bessie’s face—and the odd looseness of her neck and shoulders—told him that she too was moved. Ah,
he had won out. She would now say yes, give the money, and they would then all sit down at the table and eat together.
But Bessie, though weeping, shook her head, and before they could guess what, had blurted out the story of her afflictions: how the Bolsheviki came when she was a little girl and dragged her beloved father into the snowy fields without his shoes; the shots scattered the blackbirds in the trees and the snow oozed blood; how, when she was married a year, her husband, a sweet and gentle man, an educated accountant—rare in those days and that place—died of typhus in Warsaw; and how she, abandoned in her grief, years later found sanctuary in the home of an older brother in Germany, who sacrificed his own chances to send her, before the war, to America, and himself ended, with wife and daughter, in one of Hitler’s incinerators.
“So I came to America and met here a poor baker, a poor man—who was always in his life poor—without a cent and without enjoyment, and I married him, God knows why, and with my both hands, working day and night, I fixed up for him his piece of business and we make now, after twelve years, a little living. But Lieb is not a healthy man, also with eyes that he needs an operation, and this is not yet everything. Suppose, God forbid, that he died, what will I do alone by myself? Where will I go, where, and who will take care of me if I have nothing?”
The baker, who had often heard this tale, munched, as he listened, chunks of bread.
When she had finished he tossed the shell of a loaf away. Kobotsky, at the end of the story, held his hands over his ears.
Tears streaming from her eyes, Bessie raised her head and suspiciously sniffed the air. Screeching suddenly, she ran into the rear and with a cry wrenched open the oven door. A cloud of smoke billowed out at her. The loaves in the trays were blackened bricks—charred corpses.
Kobotsky and the baker embraced and sighed over their lost youth. They pressed mouths together and parted forever.
1952
A Confession of Murder
With the doing of the deed embedded in his mind like a child’s grave in the earth, Farr shut the door and walked heavy-hearted down the stairs. At the third-floor landing he stopped to look out the small dirty window, across the harbor. The late-winter day was sullen, but Farr could see the ocean in the distance. Although he was carrying the weapon, a stone sash weight in a brown paper bag, heedless of the danger he set it down on the window ledge and stared at the water. It seemed to Farr that he had never loved the sea as he did now. Although he had not crossed it—he thought he would during the war but didn’t—and had never gone any of the different ways it led, he felt he someday ought to. As he gazed, the water seemed to come alive in sunlight, flowing with slanted white sails. Moved to grief at the lovely sight he remained at the window with unseeing eyes until he remembered to go.
The Complete Stories Page 12
