The day Ida reopened the grocery the stranger disappeared but he returned to the candy store the next morning, and seating himself at the fountain, asked for coffee. He looked bleary, unhappy, his beard hard, dark, contrasting with the pallor of his face; his nostrils were inflamed and his voice was husky. He looks half in his grave, Sam thought. God knows what hole he slept in last night.
As Frank Alpine was stirring his coffee, with his free hand he opened a magazine lying on the counter, and his eye was caught by a picture in color of a monk. He lifted the coffee cup to drink but had to put it down, and he stared at the picture for five minutes.
Sam, out of curiosity, went behind him with a broom, to see what he was looking at. The picture was of a thin-faced, dark-bearded monk in a coarse brown garment, standing barefooted on a sunny country road. His skinny, hairy arms were raised to a flock of birds that dipped over his head. In the background was a grove of leafy trees; and in the far distance a church in sunlight.
“He looks like some kind of a priest,” Sam said cautiously.
“No, it’s St. Francis of Assisi. You can tell from that brown robe he’s wearing and all those birds in the air. That’s the time he was preaching to them. When I was a kid, an old priest used to come to the orphans’ home where I was raised, and every time he came he read us a different story about St. Francis. They are clear in my mind to this day.”
“Stories are stories,” Sam said.
“Don’t ask me why I never forgot them.”
Sam took a closer squint at the picture. “Talking to the birds? What was he—crazy? I don’t say this out of any harm.”
The stranger smiled at the Jew. “He was a great man. The way I look at it, it takes a certain kind of a nerve to preach to birds.”
“That makes him great, because he talked to birds?”
“Also for other things. For instance, he gave everything away that he owned, every cent, all his clothes off his back. He enjoyed to be poor. He said poverty was a queen and he loved her like she was a beautiful woman.”
Sam shook his head. “It ain’t beautiful, kiddo. To be poor is dirty work.”
“He took a fresh view of things.”
The candy store owner glanced again at St. Francis, then poked his broom into a dirty corner. Frank, as he drank his coffee, continued to study the picture. He said to Sam, “Every time I read about somebody like him I get a feeling inside of me I have to fight to keep from crying. He was born good, which is a talent if you have it.”
He spoke with embarrassment, embarrassing Sam.
Frank drained his cup and left.
That night as he was wandering past Morris’s store he glanced through the door and saw Helen inside, relieving her mother. She looked up and noticed him staring at her through the plate glass. His appearance startled her; his eyes were haunted, hungry, sad; she got the impression he would come in and ask for a handout and had made up her mind to give him a dime, but instead he disappeared.
On Friday Morris weakly descended the stairs at six A.M., and Ida, nagging, came after him. She had been opening at eight o’clock and had begged him to stay in bed until then, but he had refused, saying he had to give the Poilisheh her roll.
“Why does three cents for a lousy roll mean more to you than another hour sleep?” Ida complained.
“Who can sleep?”
“You need rest, the doctor said.”
“Rest I will take in my grave.”
She shuddered. Morris said, “For fifteen years she gets here her roll, so let her get.”
“All right, but let me open up. I will give her and you go back to bed.”
“I stayed in bed too long. Makes me feel weak.”
But the woman wasn’t there and Morris feared he had lost her to the German. Ida insisted on dragging in the milk boxes, threatening to shout if he made a move for them. She packed the bottles into the refrigerator. After Nick Fuso they waited hours for another customer. Morris sat at the table, reading the paper, occasionally raising his hand gently to feel the bandage around his head. When he shut his eyes he still experienced moments of weakness. By noon he was glad to go upstairs and crawl into bed and he didn’t get up until Helen came home.
The next morning he insisted on opening alone. The Poilisheh was there. He did not know her name. She worked somewhere in a laundry and had a little dog called Polaschaya. When she came home at night she took the little Polish dog for a walk around the block. He liked to run loose in the coal yard. She lived in one of the stucco houses nearby. Ida called her die antisemitke, but that part of her didn’t bother Morris. She had come with it from the old country, a different kind of anti-Semitism from in America. Sometimes he suspected she needled him a little by asking for a “Jewish roll,” and once or twice, with an odd smile, she wanted a “Jewish pickle.” Generally she said nothing at all. This morning Morris handed her her roll and she said nothing. She didn’t ask him about his bandaged head though her quick beady eyes stared at it, nor why he had not been there for a week; but she put six pennies on the counter instead of three. He figured she had taken a roll from the bag one of the days the store hadn’t opened on time. He rang up the six-cent sale.
Morris went outside to pull in the two milk cases. He gripped the boxes but they were like rocks, so he let one go and tugged at the other. A storm cloud formed in his head and blew up to the size of a house. Morris reeled and almost fell into the gutter, but he was caught by Frank Alpine, in his long coat, steadied and led back into the store. Frank then hauled in the milk cases and refrigerated the bottles. He quickly swept up behind the counter and went into the back. Morris, recovered, warmly thanked him.
Frank said huskily, his eyes on his scarred and heavy hands, that he was new to the neighborhood but living here now with a married sister. He had lately come from the West and was looking for a better job.
The grocer offered him a cup of coffee, which he at once accepted. As he sat down Frank placed his hat on the floor at his feet, and he drank the coffee with three heaping spoonfuls of sugar, to get warm quick, he said. When Morris offered him a seeded hard roll, he bit into it hungrily. “Jesus, this is good bread.” After he had finished he wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, then swept the crumbs off the table with one hand into the other, and though Morris protested, he rinsed the cup and saucer at the sink, dried them and set them on top of the gas range, where the grocer had got them.
“Much obliged for everything.” He had picked up his hat but made no move to leave.
“Once in San Francisco I worked in a grocery for a couple of months,” he remarked after a minute, “only it was one of those supermarket chain store deals.”
“The chain store kills the small man.”
“Personally I like a small store myself. I might someday have one.”
“A store is a prison. Look for something better.”
“At least you’re your own boss.”
“To be a boss of nothing is nothing.”
“Still and all, the idea of it appeals to me. The only thing is I would need experience on what goods to order. I mean about brand names, and et cetera. I guess I ought to look for a job in a store and get more experience.”
“Try the A&P,” advised the grocer.
“I might.”
Morris dropped the subject. The man put on his hat.
“What’s the matter,” he said, staring at the grocer’s bandage, “did you have some kind of an accident to your head?”
Morris nodded. He didn’t care to talk about it, so the stranger, somehow disappointed, left.
He happened to be in the street very early on Monday when Morris was again struggling with the milk cases. The stranger tipped his hat and said he was off to the city to find a job but he had time to help him pull in the milk. This he did and quickly left. However, the grocer thought he saw him pass by in the other direction about an hour later. That afternoon when he went for his Forward he noticed him sitting at the fountain with Sam Pearl. The next morn
ing, just after six, Frank was there to help him haul in the milk bottles and he willingly accepted when Morris, who knew a poor man when he saw one, invited him for coffee.
“How is going now the job?” Morris asked as they were eating.
“So-so,” said Frank, his glance shifting. He seemed preoccupied, nervous. Every few minutes he would set down his cup and uneasily look around. His lips parted as if to speak, his eyes took on a tormented expression, but then he shut his jaw as if he had decided it was better never to say what he intended. He seemed to need to talk, broke into sweat—his brow gleamed with it—his pupils widening as he struggled. He looked to Morris like someone who had to retch—no matter where; but after a brutal interval his eyes grew dull. He sighed heavily and gulped down the last of his coffee. After, he brought up a belch. This for a moment satisfied him.
Whatever he wants to say, Morris thought, let him say it to somebody else. I am only a grocer. He shifted in his chair, fearing to catch some illness.
Again the tall man leaned forward, drew a breath and once more was at the point of speaking, but now a shudder passed through him, followed by a fit of shivering.
The grocer hastened to the stove and poured out a cup of steaming coffee. Frank swallowed it in two terrible gulps. He soon stopped shaking, but looked defeated, humiliated, like somebody, the grocer felt, who had lost out on something he had wanted badly.
“You caught a cold?” he asked sympathetically.
The stranger nodded, scratched up a match on the sole of his cracked shoe, lit a cigarette and sat there, listless.
“I had a rough life,” he muttered, and lapsed into silence.
Neither of them spoke. Then the grocer, to ease the other’s mood, casually inquired, “Where in the neighborhood lives your sister? Maybe I know her.”
Frank answered in a monotone. “I forget the exact address. Near the park somewheres.”
“What is her name?”
“Mrs. Garibaldi.”
“What kind name is this?”
“What do you mean?” Frank stared at him.
“I mean the nationality?”
“Italian. I am of Italian extraction. My name is Frank Alpine—Alpino in Italian.”
The smell of Frank Alpine’s cigarette compelled Morris to light his butt. He thought he could control his cough and tried but couldn’t. He coughed till he feared his head would pop off. Frank watched with interest. Ida banged on the floor upstairs, and the grocer ashamedly pinched his cigarette and dropped it into the garbage pail.
“She don’t like me to smoke,” he explained between coughs. “My lungs ain’t so healthy.”
“Who don’t?”
“My wife. It’s a catarrh some kind. My mother had it all her life and lived till eighty-four. But they took a picture of my chest last year and found two dried spots. This frightened my wife.”
Frank slowly put out his cigarette. “What I started out to say before about my life,” he said heavily, “is that I have had a funny one, only I don’t mean funny. I mean I’ve been through a lot. I’ve been close to some wonderful things—jobs, for instance, education, women, but close is as far as I go.” His hands were tightly clasped between his knees. “Don’t ask me why, but sooner or later everything I think is worth having gets away from me in some way or other. I work like a mule for what I want, and just when it looks like I am going to get it I make some kind of a stupid move, and everything that is just about nailed down tight blows up in my face.”
“Don’t throw away your chance for education,” Morris advised. “It’s the best thing for a young man.”
“I could’ve been a college graduate by now, but when the time came to start going, I missed out because something else turned up that I took instead. With me one wrong thing leads to another and it ends in a trap. I want the moon so all I get is cheese.”
“You are young yet.”
“Twenty-five,” he said bitterly.
“You look older.”
“I feel old—damn old.”
Morris shook his head.
“Sometimes I think your life keeps going the way it starts out on you,” Frank went on. “The week after I was born my mother was dead and buried. I never saw her face, not even a picture. When I was five years old, one day my old man leaves this furnished room where we were staying, to get a pack of butts. He takes off and that was the last I ever saw of him. They traced him years later but by then he was dead. I was raised in an orphans’ home and when I was eight they farmed me out to a tough family. I ran away ten times, also from the next people I lived with. I think about my life a lot. I say to myself, ‘What do you expect to happen after all of that?’ Of course, every now and again, you understand, I hit some nice good spots in between, but they are few and far, and usually I end up like I started out, with nothing.”
The grocer was moved. Poor boy.
“I’ve often tried to change the way things work out for me but I don’t know how, even when I think I do. I have it in my heart to do more than I can remember.” He paused, cleared his throat and said, “That makes me sound stupid but it’s not as easy as that. What I mean to say is that when I need it most something is missing in me, in me or on account of me. I always have this dream where I want to tell somebody something on the telephone so bad it hurts, but then when I am in the booth, instead of a phone being there, a bunch of bananas is hanging on a hook.”
He gazed at the grocer then at the floor. “All my life I wanted to accomplish something worthwhile—a thing people will say took a little doing, but I don’t. I am too restless—six months in any one place is too much for me. Also I grab at everything too quick—too impatient. I don’t do what I have to—that’s what I mean. The result is I move into a place with nothing, and I move out with nothing. You understand me?”
“Yes,” said Morris.
Frank fell into silence. After a while he said, “I don’t understand myself. I don’t really know what I’m saying to you or why I am saying it.”
“Rest yourself,” said Morris.
“What kind of a life is that for a man my age?”
He waited for the grocer to reply—to tell him how to live his life, but Morris was thinking, I am sixty and he talks like me.
“Take some more coffee,” he said.
“No, thanks.” Frank lit another cigarette and smoked it to the tip. He seemed eased yet not eased, as though he had accomplished something (What? wondered the grocer) yet had not. His face was relaxed, almost sleepy, but he cracked the knuckles of both hands and silently sighed.
Why don’t he go home? the grocer thought. I am a working man.
“I’m going.” Frank got up but stayed.
“What happened to your head?” he asked again.
Morris felt the bandage. “This Friday before last I had here a holdup.”
“You mean they slugged you?”
The grocer nodded.
“Bastards like that ought to die.” Frank spoke vehemently.
Morris stared at him.
Frank brushed his sleeve. “You people are Jews, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” said the grocer, still watching him.
“I always liked Jews.” His eyes were downcast.
Morris did not speak.
“I suppose you have some kids?” Frank asked.
“Me?”
“Excuse me for being curious.”
“A girl.” Morris sighed. “I had once a wonderful boy but he died from an ear sickness that they had in those days.”
“Too bad.” Frank blew his nose.
A gentleman, Morris thought with a watery eye.
“Is the girl the one that was here behind the counter a couple of nights last week?”
“Yes,” the grocer replied, a little uneasily.
“Well, thanks for all the coffee.”
“Let me make you a sandwich. Maybe you’ll be hungry later.”
“No thanks.”
The Jew insisted, but Frank felt he had
all he wanted from him at the moment.
Left alone, Morris began to worry about his health. He felt dizzy at times, often headachy. Murderers, he thought. Standing before the cracked and faded mirror at the sink he unwound the bandage from his head. He wanted to leave it off but the scar was still ugly, not nice for the customers, so he tied a fresh bandage around his skull. As he did this he thought of that night with bitterness, recalling the buyer who hadn’t come, nor had since then, nor ever would. Since his recovery, Morris had not spoken to Karp. Against words the liquor dealer had other words, but silence silenced him.
Afterward the grocer looked up from his paper and was startled to see somebody out front washing his window with a brush on a stick. He ran out with a roar to drive the intruder away, for there were nervy window cleaners who did the job without asking permission, then held out their palms to collect. But when Morris came out of the store he saw the window washer was Frank Alpine.
The Assistant Page 4
