Melov's Legacy

by Sam Ross

  “Papa left without his hat and coat,” she said. “He’ll catch cold.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1.

  That night, in his sleep, Hershy saw the silver bike roll up from nowhere, its gleaming frame and spokes so bright it hurt his eyes. In mounting it, a strange thing happened. His hair changed to orange tufts; his lips began to bulge and his nose, sticking way out of his face, got thick and red; and two black lines down his cheeks made his eyes droop. A crowd collected and began to laugh. He started to ride the bike. Though he pumped madly, the wheels spinning so fast that the spokes turned to silver disks, he hardly moved. The crowd laughed harder. Slowly, he rode up a pole, high, high, high. A silver wire stretched to another pole, a silver ping of sound shimmered up when he began to ride on it, high, lonely and far away, like the steady night whistle of a popcorn stand. Then the crowd burst into bellyaching laughter: for he began spinning like the wheels, as though they had taken control of him, with the red of his nose and the orange of his hair and the black of his cheeks and the pink of his flesh splashing through the silvery gleams of sound and motion. Suddenly with terrific force he was hurled outward, whirling, whirling, whirling, and, as the spinning slowed, he began to fall. He tried to clutch a spoke of the wheel but his hands closed upon a black void. He reached for the shimmery wave of pinging silver; it burst into fragments of black silence. He fell and fell and then leaped up in terrified fright just as he was about to hit bottom.

  He stood at the doorway of his parents’ bedroom, staring through the dark at their sleeping forms. They were on their sides, facing each other, with their mouths open. He wanted to get in with them and feel the warmth of their bodies, but he was afraid to wake them. A chill crept through him and he walked back to his bed. Under the covers, he heard the clock in the kitchen tick. He heard the wind in the passageway and the squeak of the swaying lamppost light. He heard the snoring of the Pole upstairs and somebody muttering in the next-door flat. From far away the bell of a streetcar clanged. A burnt coal from the stove dropped through the grate. But the stove had no light in it. There was light only from the lamppost outside; it made great shadows swing through the street.

  But the following night he slept soundly. For earlier, his father came home from work and laid a bankbook on the kitchen table, just as he laid his weekly pay envelope on it victoriously every Saturday night.

  “A man has to be smart,” his father said. “Now, not only is our money secure, but it’s also making money.”

  “Yes?” said his mother innocently. “And how is that?”

  “The bank pays me for the pleasure of being able to look at that insurance check. Interest, they call it. Three hundred dollars a year they’ll pay, just so I’ll let them hold the money. Go know a thing like that. But if you live, how can you help but learn? You see, money is a responsibility. You have to learn what to do with it and then you have to learn how to live with it, otherwise you will get headaches, stomach trouble, ulcers, even a cancer, God forbid.”

  Hershy saw his mother smile.

  “One can live like a king with three hundred extra dollars a year,” his father continued. “So let’s eat. Afterwards, we’ll celebrate. We’ll go to a nickel show. A treat from the bank.”

  His mother’s smile broadened. It was a smile of victory.

  2.

  The news spread fast.

  “Who, the Melovs?” people said. “Millionaires.”

  Neighbors stopped Hershy on the street. What was his father going to do with all that money? Hershy didn’t know. Why, didn’t he listen to his father’s plans? Sure, he listened, but he didn’t know. Ah, he was ignorant, too involved with himself, a child. But how did he feel, being the son of a rich man? He shrugged his shoulders: all right, he guessed.

  Some people expressed a hollow joy over the Melovs’ good fortune, but nobody really meant it; in fact, they resented it. Imagine, a dummy like David, having had a brother smart enough to insure himself and not knowing what to do with money. But what could you expect from a common worker? Oh, if they had had David’s luck. Oh, what they wouldn’t do. Oh, how they would make the world turn handsprings. Oh, if they only had an insured brother lying deep under the earth.

  Only Uncle Hymie was sincere in his congratulations, for David was still no threat to his being the richest and most respected member of the whole family; besides, though Hershy’s father had never asked him for a dime, he was now eliminated as a prospective borrower or job-seeker; Uncle Hymie could afford to be generous in his good wishes.

  People were funny, Hershy’s father decided. Suffer with them and you’re all right. But if there’s a chance that you will leave them, even if it’s for a new kind of suffering, then suddenly you’re a grafter, a conniver, a no-goodnik. Aye, people.

  The talk, however, scared Hershy.

  “Jesus, Hersh, you could be kidnapped.”

  “Ah, what are you talking?”

  “Yah. They could hold you for ten thousand dollars ransom.”

  “Ah, they only kidnap rich kids.”

  “Well, ain’t you rich?”

  “Ah …”

  “And then they kill you.”

  “Ah, shut up already.”

  The nights became full of shadows. In each passageway lurked a kidnapper. When alone, phantoms made him run through the streets at night, brought him heart-pounding and pale into the house, made him close the windows before going to sleep. He wished he were poor again.

  He wished it harder when his mother said: “After Pesach, in the spring, we’re going to move.”

  “Why?” his father asked.

  “We’ll move to the other side of the park where my sister Reva and Hymie live,” she stated.

  “But why?”

  “Should I make you pictures? It’s a better neighborhood, isn’t it?”

  “Sure, but better neighborhoods cost money.”

  “So?”

  “So! Rent costs more. In the fancier stores food costs a fortune. You’ll want to dress different, be like the high-tone neighbors. On my wages we can’t afford it.”

  “We have to afford it.”

  “Why do we have to?”

  “For our children. We have to give them a better life.”

  “Why? Do I hear them complain?”

  “Oy,” she groaned. “Do I want to move for myself?”

  “For who, then?”

  “For Hershel. He should be meeting nicer friends. He should know children like my sister’s Manny—polite, refined, gentlemen, not the wild ruffians he knows.”

  “I don’t want to move,” Hershy said. “You think I want to live with sissies?”

  “You see,” she pointed out to his father. “Everybody who isn’t a bum is a sissy. Is that a way to bring up a child?”

  “Yah, but I won’t know anybody there,” Hershy argued. “I’ll be all alone.”

  “Shut up.” She glared at him, and, as he backed away, she continued: “We should move for Rachel’s benefit, too.”

  “How is that?”

  “She’s getting old enough to get married. Can she bring a suitor in this house without shame?”

  “Why not? We live in it, don’t we? If it’s good enough for us, why shouldn’t it be good enough for a suitor? I don’t believe in pretending. Let a suitor know who we really are—that we’re plain, honest people.”

  “Fool, why do you think Rachel never brings a boy friend home?”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think she wanders around nights, God only knows where and with whom?”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s ashamed of us, the house.”

  “It’s hard to believe.”

  “Oh, blind one! How you love to stay blind! But a woman knows. Even a woman without a brain in her head knows so many things that a man can never hope to learn.”

  Hershy watched his father stare at his mother.

  “In a better neighborhood,” his mother argued, “she’ll meet better p
eople. Two thousand dollars you want to give her for a dowry. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, you’d like her to meet and marry. Where can she meet them: on her job, here? Only in a better neighborhood. Here, she can only meet a bum like Joey Gans. And even he’s too proud, so he thinks, to come into our house.”

  “All right,” his father said. “In the spring, we’ll see.”

  “All right.” So far as his mother was concerned, it was settled.

  But for Hershy it was not all right. He didn’t want to move. He didn’t want to leave all the guys. He didn’t want to go to a new school with sissies. He bet they didn’t even know how to play ball. They were too sissy for football. He wasn’t afraid of the fights he might get into. He could murder them one hand lefty. But it wouldn’t be any fun fighting a bawling sissy. He would be the loneliest guy in the world. His mother was going to ruin his life. And his father, who wasn’t a fighter, was going to help her. Don’t let her, Pa. Be strong, put up a fight, don’t let her, Pa. But he knew his mother’d win, especially now, for as she got bigger with the baby it seemed to give her more power. Gee, but he wished he was poor again.

  The only thing good about being rich was a certain magic that surrounded him when he ran an errand, or decided to treat himself, at the grocer’s. His mother had developed a habit of saying: “Tell the groceryman he should give it to you without money.” She herself said to the grocer: “I’ll buy it without money.”

  “For the Melovs,” the grocer said, “anything.”

  So whenever he felt like it he went in and bought candy, fig newtons, chocolate cookies, or halvah, “without money.”

  At the end of the week, though, his father yelled bloody murder. He’d add up the butcher and grocer bills. He was sure that they were tacking on the debts of other people to his account.

  “Cash,” he’d say. “From now on, buy with cash. I don’t ever want to owe anybody a penny, you hear. And you, Hershel, if you don’t stop eating so much sweets you’ll get diabetes.”

  “What’s diabetes?”

  “Never mind what it is. It shouldn’t happen to one’s worst enemy, that’s all.” Then, turning to Hershy’s mother: “You see how money suddenly commands respects, the lowlifes. But you see, also, how people suddenly want to bleed you to death, the leeches.”

  But then Hershy got to hate going to the grocer’s, even though he could buy things without money there. The grocer was a bowlegged little man with sharp eyes and a jerky way of moving, so that he looked like he was always ready to chase him out. His wife, who was short and fat, with thick legs and fleshy arms and the most amazing bulge of breasts he had ever seen, used to ignore him completely. But now the grocer began to swarm all over him, tousling his hair and pinching his cheeks and slapping his face tenderly, and his wife sometimes laid her heavy hand on him to draw him to her huge belly and breasts.

  “Is it true your sister Rachel is going to get two thousand dollars for a dowry?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s what your mama said.”

  “If she said it she said it.”

  “Your papa’s an angel. A man, a man.”

  “Yah, I guess so.”

  “And he wants Rachel should marry a lawyer, doesn’t he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Our Benny is studying to be a lawyer.”

  Benny was a four-eyed guy, with kinky hair and a greasy face full of pimples. His studying to be a lawyer was supposed to mean something.

  “So what?” he asked.

  But Hershy’s mother, he found out, couldn’t escape them. She invited Benny over after supper one night.

  “But, Ma, how could you without Rachel saying okay?” he said.

  “Shut up. It’s not your business.”

  “But she’s got a guy, Joey Gans.”

  “Who knows about him? Do I ever see him? All he is to me is an automobile horn that makes Rachel run.”

  Rachel went wild when she learned of Benny’s coming to meet her. “Why didn’t you tell me first?”

  “Because I knew you’d say no.”

  “If you knew I’d say no, why’d you say yes?”

  “Because it’s not easy to get a leech off one’s back.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “It won’t hurt you anyhow. Maybe you’ll like him.”

  “But I got a date tonight.”

  “You’ll have it another night then.”

  “Oh, Ma. Go to the grocery and tell them I’m busy. Tell them to peddle their kid someplace else.”

  “No.”

  “Tell them I got no dowry. It was only talk from Papa anyway. And if it wasn’t only talk, then here and now I give it up. Imagine, me paying off a guy to marry me; me, a girl with style. A guy wants me, he’s got to have it. What am I, a fathead, a broken-down bum?”

  “You tell him.”

  “All right, I’ll tell him.”

  But Rachel didn’t tell him. It seemed that Benny had just come over and had sat down in the front room, with Hershy’s mother trying to get Hershy to stay in the kitchen with her and his father, when the horn began to blow. Rachel got up and said: “I’m sorry, kid, but I got a date. My mother got her signals mixed. Some other time, huh, kid?”

  Hershy burst out laughing. Benny was left sitting alone, digging at the skin around his fingernails and looking at his shoes. The laughter suddenly burst into tingling stars from the slap Benny had given him.

  “The bitch,” Benny said, and walked out.

  He opened the window and yelled after him: “Wait’ll I tell Joey Gans on you. He’ll kill you for that.”

  Benny walked on with sloping shoulders and bobbing head. Looking at him, like an empty sack, Hershy began to feel sorry for him. In the kitchen his mother cursed Rachel, but his father said it was her own fault, she shouldn’t be a matchmaker, a meddler, even if the grocer and his wife had plagued her to death; this should teach her a lesson. Afterward, Hershy was glad of the incident. He was able to walk into the grocer’s without being bothered.

  The insurance man who had sold Hershy’s father his first and only policy and who came around twice a year to collect the premium, was overjoyed at the news, but it was hard to believe his sincerity. He had a tight thin mouth set in a long dry face. When he tried to laugh or express good cheer, his high stiff collar seemed to choke him, his mouth jerked to one side, and his whole face seemed to crack from the force of the emotion. Besides that, Hershy and his father associated insurance with death; it made them feel solemn in his presence. And though the insurance man insisted that he dealt primarily with life, Hershy’s father didn’t believe it; a man had to be solemn in the presence of one who dealt with the bereaved and the dead. But now the insurance man was armed with a big selling point. He was not going to be done out of it. He pressed home his arguments with pinched, believe-you-me eyes, a piston-like arm, and a pointing finger. He wanted Hershy’s father to take out more insurance at once, not only for himself but for the whole family.

  “You see what insurance can do for you,” he said.

  Hershy’s father saw, solemnly. He could see where insurance was important for him. His family was dependent on him and if, God forbid, something should happen, well …

  Nothing was going to happen to him, the insurance man was confident. Why he was sure that Mr. Melov would live to be at least a hundred, a strong hard-working man like him, and he’d collect on his policy, every cent, plus interest, plus dividends, plus the money he had put in. That was the way to look at things. That was the bright way.

  No, Hershy’s father couldn’t see it. He would feel funny if he took out insurance for Rachel and Hershy and his wife. He would feel like he was dependent on them. It was not a good way for a man to feel. He didn’t like to think that their lives were being valued in dollars and cents.

  But, the insurance man argued, a man didn’t take out insurance against death. He took it out for life. He could save through insurance. That’s why it was called life insurance. />
  What was wrong with saving in a bank?

  Well, a bank, the insurance man was contemptuous. Money there was like money in your pocket. It was too easy to take out, too tempting. But insurance was something you paid for, something you kept, no matter what. It forced you to save money.

  Hershy’s mother interrupted. She had a superstition about insurance; it could put evil into one’s head. If David wanted, he could take out another policy, but she wouldn’t hear of having policies taken out for her or Hershy or Rachel.

  Nothing else the insurance man was able to say could convince them. Hershy’s father said he’d let him know later about another policy for himself. To pay money with the thought of death involved gave him the shudders.

  “Did you ever see a leech like that?” said Hershy’s mother after the insurance man left.

  “You see,” said his father, “how money doesn’t let you alone.”

  “Holy man,” said Hershy, glad to be released from the presence of death. “Everybody’s got an angle. Everybody.”

  Peddlers, with I-should-drop-dead-if-this-isn’t-an-honest-to-god-genuine-bargain, had angles, too; only Hershy felt sorry for them because his Uncle Ben was a peddler. And Hershy’s mother began to wonder where all the bearded Jewish beggars had come from, asking for one donation or another; it seemed to her that they had gathered from every part of the city to her door.

  And one night a neighbor, Mr. Finkel, whose wife was a friend of Hershy’s mother, came over with a man to talk to Hershy’s father. Hershy knew Mr. Finkel as a man who played cards in Joey Gans’s place; he had sad slanting eyes, looking like he was always being gypped. The man he brought over had a tight suit on. There was a scar on his chin and a tic twitched one side of his face. He was carrying something under an oilcloth and he placed it on the kitchen table.

  “Sport,” he called Hershy’s father, making him wince. “Call me Joe.”

  He wanted to talk alone to Hershy’s father. What he had to say was very important, very hush-hush, strictly personal; he was going to let Hershy’s father in on something he had never dreamed of. Hershy didn’t want to leave the room; he was fascinated by the man’s twitch and the thing under the oilcloth. Hershy’s mother wouldn’t leave, either: whatever the man had to discuss was for her ears also. The man shrugged his shoulders.