The Assistant

by Bernard Malamud

  Later he thought he would also go and see Morris in the hospital, as soon as he knew which one he was in—after they got home; but they didn’t return till midnight. The store was closed and he saw them from his room, two dark figures getting out of a cab. Monday, the day the Norwegians opened their store, Ida came down at seven A.M. to paste a piece of paper on the door saying Morris Bober was sick and the grocery would be closed till Tuesday or Wednesday. To her amazement, Frank Alpine was standing, in his apron, behind the counter. She entered in anger.

  Frank was miserably nervous that Morris or Helen, either or both, had told her all the wrong he had done them, because if they had, he was finished.

  “How did you get in here?” Ida asked wrathfully.

  He said through the air shaft window. “Thinking of your trouble, I didn’t want to bother you about the key, Mrs.”

  She vigorously forbade him ever to come in that way again. Her face was deeply lined, her eyes weary, mouth bitter, but he could tell that for some miraculous reason she didn’t know what he had done.

  Frank pulled a handful of dollar bills out of his pants pocket and a little bag of change, laying it all on the counter. “I took in forty-one bucks yesterday.”

  “You were here yesterday?”

  “I got in how I explained you. There was a nice rush around four till about six. We are all out of potato salad.”

  Her eyes grew tears. He asked how Morris felt.

  She touched her wet lids with a handkerchief. “Morris has pneumonia.”

  “Ah, too bad. Give him my sorrow if you can. How’s he coming along out of it?”

  “He’s a very sick man, he has weak lungs.”

  “I think I’ll go to see him in the hospital.”

  “Not now,” Ida said.

  “When he’s better. How long do you think he’ll be there?”

  “I don’t know. The doctor will telephone today.”

  “Look, Mrs,” Frank said. “Why don’t you stop worrying about the store while Morris is sick and let me take care of it? You know I make no demands.”

  “My husband told you to go out from the store.”

  He furtively studied her face but there was no sign of accusation.

  “I won’t stay very long,” he answered. “You don’t have to worry about that. I’ll stay here till Morris gets better. You’ll need every cent for the hospital bills. I don’t ask a thing for myself.”

  “Did Morris tell you why you must leave?”

  His heart galloped. Did she or didn’t she know? If yes, he would say it was a mistake—deny he had touched a red cent in the register. Wasn’t the proof of that in the pile of dough that lay right in front of her eyes on the counter? But he answered, “Sure, he didn’t want me to hang around Helen any more.”

  “Yes, she is a Jewish girl. You should look for somebody else. But he also found out that Schmitz was sick since December and kept closed his store in the mornings, also earlier in the night. This was what improved our income, not you.”

  She then told Frank that the German had sold out and two Norwegians were opening up today.

  Frank flushed. “I knew that Schmitz was sick and kept his store closed sometimes, but that isn’t what made your business get better. What did that was how hard I worked building up the trade. And I bet I can keep this place in the same shape it is, even with two Norwegians around the corner or three Greeks. What’s more, I bet I can raise the take-in higher.”

  Though she was half-inclined to believe him, she couldn’t

  “Wait, you’ll see how smart you are.”

  “Then let me have a chance to show you. Don’t pay me anything, the room and meals are enough.”

  “What,” she asked in desperation, “do you want from us?”

  “Just to help out. I have my debt to Morris.”

  “You have no debt. He has a debt to you that you saved him from the gas.”

  “Nick smelled it first. Anyway I feel I have a debt to him for all the things he has done for me. That’s my nature, when I’m thankful, I’m thankful.”

  “Please don’t bother Helen. She is not for you.”

  “I won’t.”

  She let him stay. If you were so poor where was your choice?

  Taast and Pederson opened up with a horseshoe of spring flowers in their window. Their pink handbills brought them steady business and Frank had plenty of time on his hands. During the day only a few of the regulars came into the grocery. At night, after the Norwegians had closed, the grocery had a spurt of activity, but when Frank pulled the strings of the window lights around eleven, he had only fifteen dollars in the register. He didn’t worry too much. Monday was a slow day anyway, and besides, people were entitled to grab off a few specials while they could get them. He figured nobody could tell what difference the Norwegians would make to the business until a couple of weeks had gone by, when the neighborhood was used to them and things settled back to normal. Nobody was going to give specials away that cheap every day. A store wasn’t a charity, and when they stopped giving something for nothing, he would match them in service and also prices and get his customers back.

  Tuesday was slow, also as usual. Wednesday picked up a little, but Thursday was slow again. Friday was better. Saturday was the best day of the week, although not so good as Saturdays lately. At the end of the week the grocery was close to a hundred short of its recent weekly average. Expecting something like this, Frank had closed up for a half hour on Thursday and taken the trolley to the bank. He withdrew twenty-five dollars from his savings account and put the money into the register, five on Thursday, ten on Friday and ten on Saturday, so that when Ida wrote the figures down in her book each night she wouldn’t feel too bad. Seventy-five less for the week wasn’t as bad as a hundred.

  Morris, better after ten days in the hospital, was brought home in a cab by Ida and Helen and laid to bed to convalesce. Frank, gripping his courage, thought of going up to see him and this time starting out right, right off. He thought of bringing him some fresh baked goods to eat, maybe a piece of cheese cake that he knew the grocer liked, or some apple strudel; but the clerk was afraid it was still too soon and Morris might ask him where he had got the money to buy the cake. He might yell, “You thief, you, the only reason you stay here still is because I am sick upstairs.” Yet if Morris felt this way he would already have told Ida what Frank had done. The clerk now was sure he hadn’t mentioned it, because she wouldn’t have waited this long to pitch him out on his ear. He thought a lot about the way Morris kept things to himself. It was a way a person had if he figured he could be wrong about how he sized up a situation. It could be that he might take a different view of Frank in time. The clerk tried to invent reasons why it might be worth the grocer’s while, after he got on his feet again, to keep him on in the grocery. Frank felt he would promise anything to stay there. “Don’t worry that I ever will steal from you or anybody else any more, Morris. If I do, I hope I drop dead on the spot.” He hoped that this promise, and the favor he was doing him by keeping the store open, would convince Morris of his sincerity. Yet he thought he would wait a while longer before going up to see him.

  Helen hadn’t said anything to anybody about him either and it wasn’t hard to understand why. The wrong he had done her was never out of his mind. He hadn’t intended wrong but he had done it; now he intended right. He would do anything she wanted, and if she wanted nothing he would do something, what he should do; and he would do it all on his own will, nobody pushing him but himself. He would do it with discipline and with love.

  All this time he had snatched only glimpses of her, though his heart was heavy with all he hoped to say. He saw her through the plate glass window—she on the undersea side. Through the green glass she looked drowned, yet never, God help him, lovelier. He felt a tender pity for her, mixed with shame for having made her pitiable. Once, as she came home from work, her eyes happened to look into his and showed disgust. Now I am finished, he thought, she will come in here a
nd tell me to go die some place; but when she looked away she was never there. He was agonized to be so completely apart from her, left apologizing to her shadow, to the floral fragrance she left in the air. To himself he confessed his deed, but not to her. That was the curse of it, to have it to make but who would listen? At times he felt like crying but it made him feel too much like a kid to cry. He didn’t like to, did it badly.

  Once he met her in the hall. She was gone before he could move his lips. He felt for her a rush of love. He felt, after she had left, that hopelessness was his punishment. He had expected that punishment to be drastic, swift; instead it came slowly—it never came, yet was there.

  There was no approach to her. What had happened had put her in another world, no way in.

  Early one morning, he stood in the hall till she came down the stairs.

  “Helen,” he said, snatching off the cloth cap he now wore in the store, “my heart is sorrowful. I want to apologize.”

  Her lips quivered. “Don’t speak to me,” she said, in a voice choked with contempt. “I don’t want your apologies. I don’t want to see you, and I don’t want to know you. As soon as my father is better, please leave. You’ve helped him and my mother and I thank you for that, but you’re no help to me. You make me sick.”

  The door banged behind her.

  That night he dreamed he was standing in the snow outside her window. His feet were bare yet not cold. He had waited a long time in the falling snow, and some of it lay on his head and had all but frozen his face; but he waited longer until, moved by pity, she opened the window and flung something out. It floated down; he thought it was a piece of paper with writing on it but saw that it was a white flower, surprising to see in wintertime. Frank caught it in his hand. As she had tossed the flower out through the partly opened window he had glimpsed her fingers only, yet he saw the light of her room and even felt the warmth of it. Then when he looked again the window was shut tight, sealed with ice. Even as he dreamed, he knew it had never been open. There was no such window. He gazed down at his hand for the flower and before he could see it wasn’t there, felt himself wake.

  The next day he waited for her at the foot of the stairs, bareheaded in the light that fell on his head from the lamp.

  She came down, her frozen face averted.

  “Helen, nothing can kill the love I feel for you.”

  “In your mouth it’s a dirty word.”

  “If a guy did wrong, must he suffer forever?”

  “I personally don’t care what happens to you.”

  Whenever he waited at the stairs, she passed without a word, as if he didn’t exist. He didn’t.

  If the store blows away some dark night I might as well be dead, Frank thought. He tried every way to hang on. Business was terrible. He wasn’t sure how long the grocery could last or how long the grocer and his wife would let him try to keep it alive. If the store collapsed everything would be gone. But if he kept it going there was always the chance that something might change, and if it did, maybe something else might. If he kept the grocery on its feet till Morris came down, at least he would have a couple of weeks to change how things were. Weeks were nothing but it might as well be nothing because to do what he had to do he needed years.

  Taast and Pederson had the specials going week after week. They thought of one come-on after another to keep the customers buying. Frank’s customers were disappearing. Some of them now passed him in the street without saying hello. One or two crossed the trolley tracks and walked on the other side of the street, not to have to see his stricken face at the window. He withdrew all he had left in the bank and each week padded the income a little, but Ida saw how bad things were. She was despondent and talked of giving the place over to the auctioneer. This made him frantic. He felt he had to try harder.

  He tried out all sorts of schemes. He got specials on credit and sold half the stuff, but then the Norwegians began to sell it cheaper, and the rest remained on his shelves. He stayed open all night for a couple of nights but did not take in enough to pay for the light. Having nothing much to do, he thought he would fix up the store. With all but the last five dollars from the bank account, he bought a few gallons of cheap paint. Then removing the goods from one section of the shelves, he scraped away the mildewed paper on the walls and painted them a nice light yellow. When one section was painted he went to work on the next. After he had finished the walls he borrowed a tall ladder, scraped the ceiling bit by bit and painted it white. He also replaced a few shelves and. neatly finished them in dime store varnish. In the end he had to admit that all his work hadn’t brought back a single customer.

  Though it seemed impossible the store got worse.

  “What are you telling Morris about the business?” Frank asked Ida.

  “He don’t ask me so I don’t tell him,” she said dully.

  “How is he now?”

  “Weak yet. The doctor says his lungs are like paper. He reads or he sleeps. Sometimes he listens to the radio.”

  “Let him rest. It’s good for him.”

  She said again, “Why do you work so hard for nothing? What do you stay here for?”

  For love, he wanted to say, but hadn’t the nerve. “For Morris.”

  But he didn’t fool her. She would even then have told him to pack and go, although he kept them for the moment off the street, had she not known for a fact that Helen no longer bothered with him. He had probably through some stupidity fallen out of her good graces. Possibly her father’s illness had made her more considerate of them. She had been a fool to worry. Yet she now worried because Helen, at her age, showed so little interest in men. Nat had called but she wouldn’t go near the phone.

  Frank scraped down on expenses. With Ida’s permission he had the telephone removed. He hated to do it because he thought Helen might sometime come down to answer it. He also reduced the gas bill by lighting only one of the two radiators downstairs. He kept the one in the front lit so the customers wouldn’t feel the cold, but he no longer used the one in the kitchen. He wore a heavy sweater, a vest and a flannel shirt under his apron, and his cap on his head. But Ida, even with her coat on, when she could no longer stand the emptiness of the front, or the freezing back, escaped upstairs. One day she came into the kitchen, and seeing him salting up a soup plate of boiled potatoes for lunch, began to cry.

  He thought always of Helen. How could she know what was going on in him? If she ever looked at him again she would see the same guy on the outside. He could see out but nobody could see in.

  When Betty Pearl got married Helen didn’t go to the wedding. The day before she apologized embarrassedly, said she wasn’t feeling too well—blamed her father’s illness. Betty said she understood, thinking it had something to do with her brother. “Next time,” she remarked with a little laugh, but Helen, seeing she was hurt, felt bad. She reconsidered facing the ceremony, rigmarole, relatives, Nat or no Nat—maybe she could still go; but couldn’t bring herself to. She was no fixture for a wedding. They might say to her, “With such a face, go better to a funeral.” Though she had many a night wept herself out, her memories kept a hard hold in her mind. Crazy woman, how could she have brought herself to love such a man? How could she have considered marrying someone not Jewish? A total, worthless stranger. Only God had saved her from a disastrous mistake. With such thoughts she lost all feeling for weddings.

  Her sleep suffered. Every day she dreaded every night. From bedtime to dawn she eked out only a few wearisome unconscious hours. She dreamed she would soon awake and soon awoke. Awake, she felt sorry for herself, and sorrow, no soporific, induced sorrow. Her mind stamped out endless worries: her father’s health, for instance; he showed little interest in recovery. The store, as ever. Ida wept in whispers in the kitchen. “Don’t tell Papa.” But they would sometime soon have to. She cursed all grocery stores. And worried at seeing nobody, planning no future. Each morning she crossed off the calendar the sleepless day to be. God forbid such days.

 
; Though Helen turned over all but four dollars of her check to her mother and it went into the register, they were always hard up for cash to meet expenses. One day Frank got an idea about how he might lay hold of some dough. He thought he would collect an old bill from Carl, the Swedish painter. He knew the painter owed Morris over seventy bucks. He looked for the housepainter every day but Carl did not come in.

  One morning Frank was standing at the window when he saw him leave Karp’s with a wrapped bottle in his pocket.

  Frank ran out and reminded Carl of his old bill. He asked him to pay something on the account.

  “This is all fixed up with me and Morris,” the painter answered. “Don’t stick your dirty nose in.”

  “Morris is sick, he needs the dough,” Frank said.

  Carl shoved the clerk aside and went on his way.

  Frank was sore. “I’ll collect from that drunk bastard.”

  Ida was in the store, so Frank said he would be back soon. He hung up his apron, got his overcoat and followed Carl to his house. After getting the address, he returned to the grocery. He was still angered at the painter for the way he had acted when he had asked him to pay his bill.

  That evening he returned to the shabby four-story tenement and climbed the creaking staircase to the top floor. A thin, dark-haired woman came wearily to the door. She was old until his eyes got used to her face, then he realized she was young but looked old.

  “Are you Carl the painter’s wife?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Could I talk to him?”

  “On a job?” she said hopefully.

  “No. Something different.”