The Complete Stories

by Bernard Malamud

  1952-53

  Riding Pants

  After a supper of fried kidneys and brains—he was thoroughly sick of every kind of meat—Herm quickly cleared the table and piled the dirty dishes in with the oily pans in the metal sink. He planned to leave like the wind, but in the thinking of it hesitated just long enough for his father to get his tongue free.

  “Herm,” said the butcher in a tired but angry voice as he stroked the fat-to-bursting beef-livered cat that looked like him, “you better think of getting them fancy pants off and giving me a hand. I never heard of a boy of sixteen years wearing riding pants for all day when he should be thinking to start some steady work.”

  He was sitting, with the cat on his knees, in a rocker in the harshly lit kitchen behind the butcher shop where they always ate since the death of the butcher’s wife. He had on—it never seemed otherwise—his white store jacket with the bloody sleeves, and apron, also blood-smeared and tight around his bulging belly, and the stupid yellow pancake of a straw hat that he wore in storm, sleet, or dead of winter. His mustache was gray, his lips thin, and his eyes, once blue as ice, were dark with fatigue.

  “Not in a butcher store, Pa,” Herm answered.

  “What’s the matter with one?” said the butcher, sitting up and looking around with exaggerated movements of the head.

  Herm turned away. “Blood,” he said sideways, “and chicken feathers.”

  The butcher slumped back in the chair.

  “The Lord made certain creatures designed for man to satisfy his craving for food. Meat and fowl are full of proteins and vitamins. Somebody has to carve the animal and trim the meat clear of bone and gristle. There’s no shame attached to such work. I did it my whole life long and never stole a cent from no one.”

  Herm considered whether there was a concealed stab in his words but he could find none. He had not stolen anything since he was thirteen and the butcher was never one to carry a long grudge.

  “Meat might be good, but I don’t have to like it.”

  “What do you like, Herm?”

  Herm thought of his riding pants and the leather boots he was saving for. He knew, though, what his father meant—that he never stuck to a job. After he quit school he had a paper route, but the pay was chicken feed, so he left that and did lawn-mowing and cellar-cleaning, but that was not steady enough, so he quit that too, but not before he had enough to buy a pair of riding pants.

  Since he could think of nothing to say, he tried to walk out, but his father called him back.

  “Herm, I’m a mighty tired man since your momma died. I don’t get near enough rest and I need it. I can’t afford to pay a butcher’s clerk because my take is not good. As a matter of fact it’s bad. I’m every day losing customers for the reason that I can’t give them the service they’re entitled to. I know you’re favorable to delivering orders but I need more of your help. You didn’t like high school and asked me to sign you out. I did that, but you haven’t been doing anything worthwhile for the past two months, so I decided I could use you in here. What do you say?”

  “What am I supposed to say?”

  “Yes or no, damn it.”

  “Then no, damn it,” Herm said, his face flaring. “I hate butcher stores. I hate guts and chicken feathers, and I want to live my own kind of life and not yours.”

  And though the butcher called and called, he ran out of the store.

  That night, while Herm was asleep, the butcher took his riding pants and locked them in the closet of his bedroom, but Herm guessed where they were and the next day went to the hardware store down the block, bought a skeleton key for a dime, and sneaked his riding pants out of his father’s closet.

  When Herm had just learned to ride he liked to go often, though he didn’t always enjoy it. In the beginning he was too conscious of the horse’s body, the massive frame he had to straddle, each independent rippling muscle, and the danger that he might have his head kicked in if he fell under the thundering hooves. And the worst of it was that sometimes while riding he was conscious of the interior layout of the horse, where the different cuts of round, rump, and flank were, as if the horse were stripped and labeled on a chart, posted, as a steer was, on the wall in the back of the store. He kept thinking of this the night he was out on Girlie, the roan they told him he wasn’t ready for, and she had got the reins from him and turned and ran the way she wanted, shaking him away when he tried to hold her back, till she came to the stable with him on her like a sack of beans and everybody laughing. After that he had made up his mind to quit horses, and did, but one spring night he went back and took out Girlie, who, though lively, was docile to his touch and went with him everywhere and did everything he wanted; and the next morning he took his last twenty-five dollars out of the savings account and bought the riding pants, and that same night dreamed he was on a horse that dissolved under him as he rode but there he was with his riding pants on galloping away on thin air.

  Herm woke to hear the sound of a cleaver on the wooden block down in the store. As it was still night he jumped out of bed frightened and searched for his riding pants. They were not in the bottom drawer where he had hidden them under a pile of his mother’s clothes, so he ran to his father’s closet and saw it was open and the butcher not in bed. In his pajamas Herm raced downstairs and tried to get into the butcher shop, but he was locked out and stood by the door crying as his father chopped the tightly rolled pants as if they were a bologna, with the slices falling off at each sock of the cleaver onto the floor, where the cat sniffed the uncurled remains.

  He woke with the moon on his bed, rose and went on bare toes into his father’s room, which looked so different now that it was no longer his mother’s, and tried to find the butcher’s trousers. They were hanging on a chair but without the store keys in the pockets, or the billfold, he realized blushing. Some loose change clinked and the butcher stirred in the creaking bed. Herm stood desperately still but, when his father had quieted, hung the pants and tiptoed back to his room. He pushed up the window softly, deciding he would slide down the telephone wires to the back yard and get in that way. Once within the store he would find a knife, catch the cat, and dismember it, leaving the pieces for his father to find in the morning; but not his son.

  Testing the waterspout, he found it too shaky, but the wires held his weight, so he slid slowly down to the ground. Then he climbed up the sill and tried to push on the window. The butcher had latched it, not knowing Herm had loosened the screws of the latch; it gave and he was able to climb in. As his foot touched the floor, he thought he heard something scamper away but wasn’t sure. Afraid to pull the light on because the Holmes police usually passed along the block this time of night, he said softly in the dark, “Here, kitty, here, kitty kitty,” and felt around on the pile of burlap bags, but the cat was not where she usually slept.

  He felt his way into the store and looked in the windows and they too were empty except for the pulpy blood droppings from the chickens that had hung on the hooks. He tried the paper-bag slots behind the counter and the cat was not there either, so he called again, “Here, kitty kitty kitty,” but could not find it. Then he noticed the icebox door had been left ajar, which surprised him, because the butcher always yelled whenever anyone kept it open too long. He went in thinking of course the damn cat was there, poking its greedy head into the bowl of slightly sour chicken livers the butcher conveniently kept on the bottom shelf.

  “Here, kitty,” he whispered as he stepped into the box, and was completely unprepared when the door slammed shut behind him. He thought at first, so what, it could be opened from the inside, but then it flashed on him that the butcher had vaguely mentioned he was having trouble with the door handle and the locksmith was taking it away till tomorrow. He thought then, Oh, my God, I’m trapped here and will freeze to death, and his skull all but cracked with terror. Fumbling his way to the door, he worked frantically on the lock with his numbed fingers, wishing he had at least switched on the light from outside
where the switch was, and he could feel the hole where the handle had been but was unable to get his comb or house key in to turn it. He thought if he had a screwdriver that might do it, or he could unscrew the metal plate and pick the lock apart, and for a second his heart leaped in expectation that he had taken a knife with him, but he hadn’t.

  Holding his head back to escape the impaling hooks, he reached his hand along the shelves on the side of the icebox and then the top shelf, cautiously feeling if the butcher had maybe left some tool around. His hand moved forward and stopped; it took him a minute to comprehend it was not going farther, because his fingers had entered a moist bony cavern; he felt suddenly shocked, as if he were touching the inside of an electric socket, but the hole was in a pig’s head where an eye had been. Stepping back, he tripped over something he thought was the cat, but when he touched it, it was a bag of damp squirmy guts. As he flung it away he lost his balance and his face brushed against the clammy open side of a bleeding lamb. He sat down in the sawdust on the floor and bit his knuckles.

  After a time, his fright prevented any further disgust. He tried to reason out what to do, but there was nothing he could think of, so he tried to think what time it was and could he live till his father came down to open the store. He had heard of people staying alive by beating their arms together and walking back and forth till help came, but when he tried that it tired him more, so that he began to feel very sleepy, and though he knew he oughtn’t, he sat down again. He might have cried, but the tears were frozen in, and he began to wonder from afar if there was some quicker way to die. By now the icebox had filled with white mist, and from the distance, through the haze, a winged black horse moved toward him. This is it, he thought, and got up to mount it, but his foot slipped from the stirrup and he fell forward, his head bonging against the door, which opened, and he fell out on the floor.

  He woke in the morning with a cutting headache and would have stayed in bed but was too hungry, so he dressed and went downstairs. He had six dollars in his pocket, all he owned in the world; he intended to have breakfast and after that pretend to go for a newspaper and never come back again.

  The butcher was sitting in the rocker, sleepily stroking the cat. Neither he nor Herm spoke. There were some slices of uncooked bacon on a plate on the table and two eggs in a cardboard carton, but he could not look at them. He poured himself a cup of black coffee and drank it with an unbuttered roll.

  A customer came into the store and the butcher rose with a sigh to serve her. The cat jumped off his lap and followed him. They looked like brothers. Herm turned away. This was the last he would see of either of them.

  He heard a woman’s resounding voice ordering some porterhouse steak and a chunk of calf’s liver, nice and juicy for the dogs, and recognized her as Mrs. Gibbs, the doctor’s wife, whom all the storekeepers treated like the Empress of Japan, all but kissing her rear end, especially his father, and this was what he wanted his own son to do. Then he heard the butcher go into the icebox and he shivered. The butcher came out and hacked at something with the cleaver and Herm shivered again. Finally the lady, who had talked loud and steadily, the butcher always assenting, was served. The door closed behind her corpulent bulk and the store was quiet. The butcher returned and sat in his chair, fanning his red face with his straw hat, his bald head glistening with sweat. It took him a half hour to recover every time he waited on her.

  When the door opened again a few minutes later, it almost seemed as if he would not be able to get up, but Mrs. Gibbs’s bellow brought him immediately to his feet. “Coming,” he called with a sudden frog in his throat and hurried inside. Then Herm heard her yelling about something, but her voice was so powerful the sound blurred. He got up and stood at the door.

  It was her, all right, a tub of a woman with a large hat, a meaty face, and a thick rump covered in mink.

  “You stupid dope,” she shouted at the butcher, “you don’t even know how to wrap a package. You let the liver blood run all over my fur. My coat is ruined.”

  The anguished butcher attempted to apologize, but her voice beat him down. He tried to apologize with his hands and his rolling eyes and with his yellow straw hat, but she would have none of it. When he went forth with a clean rag and tried to wipe the mink, she drove him back with an angry yelp. The door shut with a bang. On the counter stood her dripping bag. Herm could see his father had tried to save paper.

  He went back to the table. About a half hour later the butcher came in. His face was deathly white and he looked like a white scarecrow with a yellow straw hat. He sat in the rocker without rocking. The cat tried to jump into his lap but he wouldn’t let it and sat there looking into the back yard and far away.

  Herm too was looking into the back yard. He was thinking of all the places he could go where there were horses. He wanted to be where there were many and he could ride them all.

  But then he got up and reached for the blood-smeared apron hanging on a hook. He looped the loop over his head and tied the strings around him. They covered where the riding pants had been, but he felt as though he still had them on.

  1953

  The Girl of My Dreams

  After Mitka had burned the manuscript of his heartbroken novel in the blackened bottom of Mrs. Lutz’s rusty trash can in her back yard, although the emotional landlady tried all sorts of bait and schemes to lure him forth, and he could tell as he lay abed, from the new sounds on the floor and her penetrating perfume, that there was an unattached female loose on the premises (wondrous possibility of yore), he resisted all and with a twist of the key had locked himself a prisoner in his room, only venturing out after midnight for crackers and tea and an occasional can of fruit; and this went on for too many weeks to count.

  In the late fall, after a long year and a half of voyaging among more than twenty publishers, the novel had returned to stay and he had hurled it into a barrel burning autumn leaves, stirring the mess with a long length of pipe, to get the inner sheets afire. Overhead a few dead apples hung like forgotten Christmas ornaments upon the leafless tree. The sparks, as he stirred, flew to the apples, the withered fruit representing not only creation gone for nothing (three long years), but all his hopes, and the proud ideas he had given his book; and Mitka, although not a sentimentalist, felt as if he had burned (it took a thick two hours) an everlasting hollow in himself.

  Into the fire also went a sheaf of odd-size papers (why he had saved them he would never know): copies of letters to literary agents and their replies; mostly, however, printed rejection forms, with perhaps three typed notes from lady editors, saying they were returning the MS of his novel, among other reasons—but this prevailed—because of the symbolism, the fact that it was obscure. Only one of the ladies had written let’s hear from you again. Though he cursed them to damnation it did not cause the acceptance of his book. Yet for a year Mitka labored over a new one, up to the time of the return of the old manuscript, when, upon rereading that, then the new work, he discovered the same symbolism, more obscure than ever; so he shoved the second book aside. True, at odd moments he sneaked out of bed to try a new thought with his pen, but the words refused to budge; besides he had lost the belief that anything he said could make significant meaning, and if it perhaps did, that it could be conveyed in all its truth and drama to some publisher’s reader in his aseptic office high above Madison Avenue; so he wrote nothing for months —although Mrs. Lutz actively mourned—and vowed never to write again though he felt the vow was worthless, because he couldn’t write anyway whether he had vowed or no.

  So Mitka sat alone and still in his faded yellow-papered room, the badly colored Orozco reproduction he had picked up, showing Mexican peasants bent and suffering, thumbtacked above the peeling mantelpiece, and stared through sore eyes at the antics of pigeons on the roof across the street; or aimlessly followed traffic—not people—in the street; he slept for good or ill a great deal, had bad dreams, some horrific, and awaking, looked long at the ceiling, which never represented
the sky although he imagined it snowing; listened to music if it came from the distance, and occasionally attempted to read some historical or philosophical work but shut it with a bang if it lit the imagination and made him think of writing. At times he cautioned himself, Mitka, this will have to end or you will, but the warning did not change his ways. He grew wan and thin, and once when he beheld his meager thighs as he dressed, if he were a weeper he would have wept.

  Now Mrs. Lutz, herself a writer—a bad one but always interested in writers and had them in her house whenever she could fish one up (her introductory inquisition masterfully sniffed this fact among the first) even when she could ill afford it—Mrs. Lutz knew all this about Mitka and she daily attempted some unsuccessful ministration. She tried tempting him down to her kitchen with spry descriptions of lunch: steaming soup, Mitka, with soft white rolls, calf’s foot jelly, rice with tomato sauce, celery hearts, delicious breast of chicken—beef if he preferred—and his choice of satisfying sweets; also with fat notes slipped under his door in sealed envelopes, describing when she was a little girl, and the intimate details of her sad life since with Mr. Lutz, imploring a better fate on Mitka; or she left at the door all sorts of books fished out of her ancient library that he never looked at, magazines with stories marked, “You can do better,” and when it arrived, her own copy, for him to read first, of the Writer’s Journal. All these attempts having this day failed—his door shut (Mitka voiceless) though she had hid in the hall an hour to await its opening—Mrs. Lutz dropped to one horsy knee and with her keyhole eye peeked in: he lay outstretched in bed.

  “Mitka,” she wailed, “how thin you have grown—a skeleton—it frightens me. Come downstairs and eat.”