The Complete Stories

by Bernard Malamud

  One afternoon about a week and a half after Eleonora had come to them, when George arrived home from the FAO office where he worked, during the long lunch break, Grace said the maid was in her room crying.

  “What for?” George said, worried.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t you ask her?”

  “Sure I did, but all I could gather was that she’s had a sad life. You’re the linguist around here, why don’t you ask her?”

  “What are you so annoyed about?”

  “Because I feel like a fool, frankly, not knowing what it’s all about.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “She came out of the hall crying, about an hour ago,” Grace said. “I had sent her up to the roof with a bundle of wash to do in one of the tubs up there instead of our bathtub, so she doesn’t have to lug the heavy wet stuff up to the lines on the roof but can hang it out right away. Anyway, she wasn’t gone five minutes before she was back crying, and that was when she answered me about her sad life. I wanted to tell her I have a sad life too. We’ve been in Rome close to two months and I haven’t even been able to see St. Peter’s. When will I ever see anything?”

  “Let’s talk about her,” George said. “Do you know what happened in the hall?”

  “I told you I didn’t. After she came back, I went down to the ground floor to talk to the portinaia—she has some smattering of English—and she told me that Eleonora had been married but had lost her husband. He died or something when she was eighteen. Then she had a baby by another guy who didn’t stay around long enough to see if he recognized it, and that, I suppose, is why she finds life so sad.”

  “Did the portinaia say whether the kid is still alive?” George asked.

  “Yes. She keeps it in a convent school.”

  “Maybe that’s what got her down,” he suggested. “She thinks of her kid being away from her and then feels bad.”

  “So she starts to cry in the hall?”

  “Why not in the hall? Why not anywhere so long as you feel like crying? Maybe I ought to talk to her.”

  Grace nodded. Her face was flushed, and George knew she was troubled.

  He went into the corridor and knocked on the door of the maid’s room. “Permesso,” George said.

  “Prego.” Eleonora had been lying on the bed but was respectfully on her feet when George entered. He could see she had been crying. Her eyes were red and her face pale. She looked scared, and George’s throat went dry.

  “Eleonora, I am sorry to see you like this,” he said in Italian. “Is there something either my wife or I can do to help you?”

  “No, Signore,” she said quietly.

  “What happened to you out in the hall?”

  Her eyes glistened but she held back the tears. “Nothing. One feels like crying, so she cries. Do these things have a reason?”

  “Are you satisfied with conditions here?” George asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “If there is something we can do for you, I want you to tell us.”

  “Please don’t trouble yourself about me.” She lifted the bottom of her skirt, at the same time bending her head to dry her eyes on it. Her bare legs were hairy but shapely.

  “No trouble at all,” George said. He closed the door softly.

  “Let her rest,” he said to Grace.

  “Damn! Just when I have to go out.”

  But in a few minutes Eleonora came out and went on with her work in the kitchen. They said nothing more and neither did she. Then at three George left for the office, and Grace put on her hat and went off to her Italian class and then to St. Peter’s.

  That night when George got home from work, Grace called him into their bedroom and said she now knew what had created all the commotion that afternoon. First the signora, after returning from an appointment with her doctor, had bounded in from across the hall, and Grace had gathered from the hot stew the old woman was in that she was complaining about their maid. The portinaia then happened to come up with the six o’clock mail, and the signora laced into her for bringing an inferior type of maid into the house. Finally, when the signora had left, the portinaia told Grace that the old lady had been the one who had made Eleonora cry. She had apparently forbidden the girl to use the elevator. She would listen behind the door, and as soon as she heard someone putting the key into the elevator lock, she would fling open her door, and if it was Eleonora, as she had suspected, she would cry out, “The key is not for you. The key is not for you.” She would stand in front of the elevator, waving her arms to prevent her from entering. “Use the stairs,” she cried, “the stairs are for walking. There is no need to fly, or God would have given you wings.”

  “Anyway,” Grace went on, “Eleonora must have been outwitting her or something, because what she would do, according to the portinaia, was go upstairs to the next floor and call the elevator from there. But today the signora got suspicious and followed Eleonora up the stairs. She gave her a bad time up there. When she blew in here before, Eleonora got so scared that she ran to her room and locked the door. The signora said she would have to ask us not to give our girl the key anymore. She shook her keys at me.”

  “What did you say after that?” George asked.

  “Nothing. I wasn’t going to pick a fight with her even if I could speak the language. A month of hunting apartments was enough for me.

  “We have a lease,” said George.

  “Leases have been broken.”

  “She wouldn’t do it—she needs the money.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it,” said Grace.

  “It burns me up,” George said. “Why shouldn’t the girl use the elevator to lug the clothes up to the roof? Five floors is a long haul.”

  “Apparently none of the other girls does,” Grace said. “I saw one of them carrying a basket of wash up the stairs on her head.”

  “They ought to join the acrobats’ union.”

  “We have to stick to their customs.”

  “I’d still like to tell the old dame off.”

  “This is Rome, George, not Chicago. You came here of your own free will.”

  “Where’s Eleonora?” George asked.

  “In the kitchen.”

  George went into the kitchen. Eleonora was washing the children’s supper dishes in a pan of hot water. When George came in she looked up with fear, the fear in her left eye shining more brightly than in her right.

  “I’m sorry about the business in the hall,” George said with sympathy, “but why didn’t you tell me about it this afternoon?”

  “I don’t want to make trouble.”

  “Would you like me to talk to the signora?”

  “No, no.”

  “I want you to ride in the elevator if you want to.”

  “Thank you, but it doesn’t matter.”

  “Then why are you crying?”

  “I’m always crying, Signore. Don’t bother to notice it.”

  “Have it your own way,” George said.

  He thought that ended it, but a week later as he came into the building at lunchtime he saw Eleonora getting into the elevator with a laundry bundle. The portinaia had just opened the door for her with her key, but when she saw George she quickly ducked down the stairs to the basement. George got on the elevator with Eleonora. Her face was crimson.

  “I see you don’t mind using the elevator,” he said.

  “Ah, Signore”—she shrugged—“we must all try to improve ourselves.”

  “Are you no longer afraid of the signora?”

  “Her girl told me the signora is sick,” Eleonora said happily.

  Eleonora’s luck held, George learned, because the signora stayed too sick to be watching the elevator, and one day after the maid rode up in it to the roof, she met a plumber’s helper working on the washtubs, Fabrizio Occhiogrosso, who asked her to go out with him on her next afternoon off. Eleonora, who had been doing little on her Thursday and Sunday afternoons off, mostly spending her time
with the portinaia, readily accepted. Fabrizio, a short man with pointed shoes, a thick trunk, hairy arms, and the swarthy face of a Spaniard, came for her on his motorbike and away they would go together, she sitting on the seat behind him, holding both arms around his belly. She sat astride the seat, and when Fabrizio, after impatiently revving the Vespa, roared up the narrow street, the wind fluttered her skirt and her bare legs were exposed above the knees.

  “Where do they go?” George once asked Grace.

  “She says he has a room on the Via della Purificazione.”

  “Do they always go to his room?”

  “She says they sometimes ride to the Borghese Gardens or go to the movies.”

  One night in early December, after the maid had mentioned that Fabrizio was her fiance now, George and Grace stood at their living-room window looking down into the street as Eleonora got on the motorbike and it raced off out of sight.

  “I hope she knows what she’s doing,” he muttered in a worried tone. “I don’t much take to Fabrizio.”

  “So long as she doesn’t get pregnant too soon. I’d hate to lose her.”

  George was silent for a time, then remarked, “How responsible do you suppose we are for her morals?”

  “Her morals?” laughed Grace. “Are you batty?”

  “I never had a maid before,” George said.

  “This is our third.”

  “I mean in principle.”

  “Stop mothering the world,” said Grace.

  Then one Sunday after midnight Eleonora came home on the verge of fainting. What George had thought might happen had. Fabrizio had taken off into the night on his motorbike. When they had arrived at his room early that evening, a girl from Perugia was sitting on his bed. The portiere had let her in after she had showed him an engagement ring and a snapshot of her and Fabrizio in a rowboat. When Eleonora demanded to know who this one was, the plumber’s helper did not bother to explain but ran down the stairs, mounted his Vespa, and drove away. The girl disappeared. Eleonora wandered the streets for hours, then returned to Fabrizio’s room. The portiere told her that he had been back, packed his valise, and left for Perugia, the young lady riding on the back seat.

  Eleonora dragged herself home. When she got up the next morning to make breakfast she was a skeleton of herself and the gobbo looked like a hill. She said nothing and they asked nothing. What Grace wanted to know she later got from the portinaia. Eleonora no longer ran through her chores but did everything wearily, each movement like flowing stone. Afraid she would collapse, George advised her to take a week off and go home. He would pay her salary and give her something extra for the bus.

  “No, Signore,” she said dully, “it is better for me to work.” She said, “I have been through so much, more is not noticeable.”

  But then she had to notice it. One afternoon she absentmindedly picked up Grace’s keys and got on the elevator with a bag of clothes to be washed. The signora, having recovered her health, was waiting for her. She flung open the door, grabbed Eleonora by the arm as she was about to close the elevator door, and dragged her out.

  “Whore,” she cried, “don’t steal the privileges of your betters. Use the stairs.”

  Grace opened the apartment door to see what the shouting was about, and Eleonora, with a yowl, rushed past her. She locked herself in her room and sat there all afternoon without moving. She wept copiously. Grace, on the verge of exhaustion, could do nothing with her. When George came home from work that evening he tried to coax her out, but she shouted at him to leave her alone.

  George was thoroughly fed up. “I’ve had enough,” he said. He thought out how he would handle the signora, then told Grace he was going across the hall.

  “Don’t do it,” she shouted, but he was already on his way.

  George knocked on the signora’s door. She was a woman of past sixty-five, a widow, always dressed in black. Her face was long and gray, but her eyes were bright black. Her husband had left her these two apartments across the hall from each other that he had owned outright. She lived in the smaller and rented the other, furnished, at a good rent. George knew that this was her only source of income. She had once been a schoolteacher.

  “Scusi, Signora,” said George, “I have come with a request.”

  “Prego.” She asked him to sit.

  George took a chair near the terrace window. “I would really appreciate it, Signora, if you will let our girl go into the elevator with the laundry when my wife sends her up to the tubs. She is not a fortunate person and we would like to make her life a little easier for her.”

  “I am sorry,” answered the signora with dignity, “but I can’t permit her to enter the elevator.”

  “She’s a good girl and you have upset her very much.”

  “Good,” said the signora, “I am glad. She must remember her place, even if you don’t. This is Italy, not America. You must understand that we have to live with these people long after you, who come to stay for a year or two, return to your own country.”

  “Signora, she does no harm in the elevator. We are not asking you to ride with her. After all, the elevators are a convenience for all who live in this house and therefore ought to be open for those who work for us here.”

  “No,” said the signora.

  “Why not think it over and let me know your answer tomorrow? I assure you I wouldn’t ask this if I didn’t think it was important.”

  “I have thought it over,” she said stiffly, “and I have given you the same answer I will give tomorrow.”

  George got up. “In that case,” he said, “if you won’t listen to reason, I consider my lease with you ended. You have had your last month’s rent. We will move on the first of February.”

  The signora looked as if she had just swallowed a fork.

  “The lease is a sacred contract,” she said, trembling. “It is against the law to break it.”

  “I consider that you have already broken it,” George said quietly, “by creating conditions that make it very hard for my family to function in this apartment. I am simply acknowledging a situation that already exists.”

  “If you move out, I will take a lawyer and make you pay for the whole year.”

  “A lawyer will cost you half the rent he might collect,” George answered. “And if my lawyer is better than yours, you will get nothing and owe your lawyer besides.”

  “Oh, you Americans,” said the signora bitterly. “How well I understand you. Your money is your dirty foot with which you kick the world. Who wants you here,” she cried, “with your soaps and toothpastes and your dirty gangster movies!”

  “I would like to remind you that my origin is Italian,” George said.

  “You have long ago forgotten your origin,” she shouted.

  George left the apartment and went back to his own.

  “I’ll bet you did it,” Grace greeted him. Her face was ashen.

  “I did,” said George.

  “I’ll bet you fixed us good. Oh, you ought to be proud. How will we ever find another apartment in the dead of winter with two kids?”

  She left George and locked herself in the children’s bedroom. They were both awake and got out of bed to be with her.

  George sat in the living room in the dark. I did it, he was thinking.

  After a while the doorbell rang. He got up and put on the light. It was the signora and she looked unwell. She entered the living room at George’s invitation and sat there with great dignity.

  “I am sorry I raised my voice to a guest in my house,” she said. Her mouth was loose and her eyes glistened.

  “I am sorry I offended you,” George said.

  She did not speak for a while, then said, “Let the girl use the elevator.” The signora broke into tears.

  When she had dried her eyes, she said, “You have no idea how bad things have become since the war. The girls are disrespectful. Their demands are endless, it is impossible to keep up with them. They talk back, they take every advantage.
They crown themselves with privileges. It is a struggle to keep them in their place. After all, what have we left when we lose our self-respect?” The signora wept heartbrokenly.

  After she had gone, George stood at the window. Across the street a beggar played a flute.

  I didn’t do it well, George thought. He felt depressed.

  On her afternoon off Eleonora rode up and down on the elevator.

  1957

  An Apology

  Early one morning, during a wearying hot spell in the city, a police car that happened to be cruising along Canal Street drew over to the curb and one of the two policemen in the car leaned out of the window and fingered a come-here to an old man wearing a black derby hat, who carried a large carton on his back, held by clothesline rope to his shoulder, and dragged a smaller carton with his other hand.

  “Hey, Mac.”

  But the peddler, either not hearing or paying no attention, went on. At that, the policeman, the younger of the two, pushed open the door and sprang out. He strode over to the peddler and, shoving the large carton on his back, swung him around as if he were straw. The peddler stared at him in frightened astonishment. He was a gaunt, shriveled man with very large eyes which at the moment gave the effect of turning lights, so that the policeman was a little surprised, though not for long.

  “Are you deaf?” he said.

  The peddler’s lips moved in a way that suggested he might be, but at last he cried out, “Why do you push me?” and again surprised the policeman with the amount of wail that rang in his voice.

  “Why didn’t you stop when I called you?”

  “So who knows you called me? Did you say my name?”

  “What is your name?”

  The peddler clamped his sparse yellow teeth rigidly together.