Short Stories: Five Decades Read online

He laughed a little. “I want to, Mom, I want to.”

  He patted her shoulder and went down toward the baseball field, leaving her standing there puzzled at the top of the steps.

  The sun and the breeze felt good on the baseball field, and he forgot for an hour, but he moved slowly. His arm hurt at the shoulder when he threw, and the boy playing second base called him Mister, which he wouldn’t have done even last year, when Andrew was twenty-four.

  Second Mortgage

  The bell rang and I went to the window to see who it was.

  “Don’t answer it,” my father called. “It may be a summons.”

  “They can’t serve summonses on Sunday,” I said, parting the curtains cautiously.

  “Don’t answer it, anyway.” My father came into the living room. He didn’t know how to handle bill-collectors. They bullied him and he made wild promises, very seriously, to pay, and never did and they’d come and hound him terribly. When he was home alone he never answered the doorbell. He never even went to see who it was. He just sat in the kitchen reading the paper while the bell clanged over his head. Even the postman couldn’t get the front door opened when my father was home alone.

  The bell rang again. “What the hell,” I said, “it’s only a little old lady. She’s probably selling something. We can open the door.”

  “What for?” my father asked. “We can’t buy anything.”

  I opened the door anyway. The little old lady jumped when the door swung back. Her hands fluttered. They were plump little hands, swollen, without gloves. “I’m Mrs. Shapiro,” she said, waiting.

  I waited. She tried a smile. I waited sternly. Strangers are never friends at the doors of the poor. I was only seventeen but I had learned that anyone who rang our doorbell might turn out to be the Edison Electric Company or the Brooklyn Borough Gas Company, intent on shutting off the electricity or the gas.

  Mrs. Shapiro hunched inside her shapeless little coat. “I own the second mortgage,” she said.

  Still I waited, sternly. Another enemy.

  Her hand came out, cold, plump, and pleading. “I want to speak to your father, maybe,” she said.

  My father had retreated to the kitchen and the Sunday Times, hoping that nothing would happen at the front door that would require his tearing himself out of that peaceful welter of journalism.

  “Pop!” I called. I heard him sigh and the rustle of the Sunday Times as he put down the editorial page. Mrs. Shapiro came in and I closed the door. My father came in, wiping his glasses, longing for the kitchen.

  “This is Mrs. Shapiro, Pop,” I said. “She owns the second mortgage …”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Shapiro was eager and bright and apologetic for a moment. She moved into the middle of the room. There were runs in her fat little stockings and her shoes were shapeless. “I came because …”

  “Yes,” my father said, with his imitation of a businesslike attitude, that he always tried on bill-collectors and which he lost as soon as they started to bully him. “Yes. Of course. Just wait a moment … My wife … my wife knows more about this than … Oh … Helen! Helen!”

  My mother came down from upstairs, fixing her hair.

  “Mrs. Shapiro,” my father said. “The second mortgage …”

  “It’s this way,” Mrs. Shapiro said, moving toward my mother. “In 1929, I …”

  “Won’t you sit down?” My mother pointed to a chair. She glanced at my father, tightening her mouth. My mother was always contemptuous of my father at those times when my father proved unequal to the task of beating off the representatives of our poverty.

  Mrs. Shapiro sat on the very edge of the chair, leaning forward, her knees together. “The second mortgage is eight hundred dollars,” Mrs. Shapiro said. We all sat silent. Mrs. Shapiro was disheartened by the silence, but she went on, her fat gray cheeks moving anxiously over her words. “Eight hundred dollars is a lot of money,” she said.

  We didn’t contradict her.

  “In 1929,” Mrs. Shapiro said, “I had eight thousand dollars.” She looked to our faces for pity, envy, anything. We sat there expressionless, with the faces of people who have become used to owing money. “Eight thousand dollars. I worked all my life for it. I had a vegetable store. It’s hard to make money in vegetables nowadays. Vegetables are expensive and they spoil and there is always somebody else who sells them cheaper than you can …”

  “Yes,” my mother said, “vegetables are very expensive. I paid twenty cents for a head of cauliflower yesterday …”

  “It wasn’t any good, either,” my father said. “I don’t like cauliflower. It reminds me of cabbage, somehow.”

  “When Mr. Shapiro died of cancer, it took him two years to die,” Mrs. Shapiro went on, trying to please us. “I had eight thousand dollars. I had rheumatism and high blood pressure and I couldn’t take care of the store any more.” Once more she begged our faces for that crumb of pity. “I took the eight thousand dollars out of the bank and I went to Mr. Mayer and I said, ‘Mr. Mayer, you’re a big man, you have a fine reputation, I am giving you a widow’s life’s savings, invest it for me so that I have enough to live on. I don’t need much, Mr. Mayer,’ I told him, ‘just a few dollars a week until I die, that’s all,’ I said, ‘just a few dollars.’”

  “I know Mayer,” my father said. “He’s not doing so well now. The Trust Company’s in receivership now.”

  “Mr. Mayer,” Mrs. Shapiro said with passion, her fists quivering on her little thighs, “is a crook! He took my money and he put it out in second mortgages. Eight thousand dollars’ worth of second mortgages!”

  She stopped. For the moment she could not say another word.

  “Today,” my father said, “even first mortgages are no good. Nothing’s any good any more.”

  “In the last two years,” Mrs. Shapiro said, her eyes filling with tears, “I haven’t got a penny out of them … out of eight thousand dollars’ worth of second mortgages, not a penny …” A little rag of a handkerchief came out and wiped at her eyes. “I used to go to Mr. Mayer and he’d tell me I’d have to wait. How long can I wait? I don’t have with what to eat now, as it is! Can I wait longer than that?” Triumphantly she wept. “Now Mr. Mayer won’t see me any more. They tell me he’s out when I go there. It doesn’t do any good to go there.” She stopped, wiping her eyes. We sat, uncomfortable and still.

  “I’m going to the houses where I have the second mortgages,” Mrs. Shapiro said. “Nice houses, they are … like this. With rugs and curtains and steam heat and something cooking on the stove that you can smell inside. I have the second mortgage on houses like that, and I don’t have enough to eat …” Her tears soaked through the rag of a handkerchief. “Please,” she cried, “please … give me something. I don’t want the eight hundred dollars, but something. It’s my money … I have nobody. I have rheumatism and there’s no heat in my room and there’re holes in my shoes. I walk on my bare feet … Please … please …”

  We tried to stop her but she kept on, crying, “Please … please … just a little bit. A hundred dollars. Fifty. My money …”

  “All right, Mrs. Shapiro,” my father said. “Come back next Sunday. I’ll have it for you then …”

  The tears stopped. “Oh, God bless you,” Mrs. Shapiro said. Before we knew what she was about she flung herself across the room and was on her hands and knees in front of my father and was kissing his hand wildly. “God bless you, God bless you,” she cried over and over again. My father sat through it nervously, trying to pick her up with his free hand, looking pleadingly at my mother.

  Finally my mother could bear it no longer. “Mrs. Shapiro,” she said, breaking in over the “God bless you”s, “listen to me! Stop that! Please stop it! We can’t give you anything! Next Sunday or any Sunday! We haven’t got a cent.”

  Mrs. Shapiro dropped my father’s hand. She stayed on her knees in front of him, though, looking strange there in the middle of our living room. “But Mr. Ross said …”

  “Mr. Ross is
talking nonsense!” my mother said. “We have no money and we’re not going to have any! We expect to be thrown out of this house any day now! We can’t give you a penny, Mrs. Shapiro.”

  “But next Sunday …” Mrs. Shapiro tried to make my mother understand that she didn’t expect it now, not for another week …

  “We won’t have any more next Sunday than we have today. And we have eighty-five cents in the house right now, Mrs. Shapiro!” My mother stood up, went over to Mrs. Shapiro, where she was kneeling on the floor. Before my mother could touch her, Mrs. Shapiro keeled over onto the floor, hitting it heavily, like a packed handbag that’s been dropped.

  It took us ten minutes to pull her out of her faint. My mother gave her tea, which she drank silently. She didn’t seem to recognize us as she drank her tea and made ready to go off. She told us that this was the fifth time in two months that she had fainted like that. She seemed ashamed of herself, somehow. My mother gave her the address of a doctor who would wait for his money and Mrs. Shapiro went out, her fat, shabby stockings shaking as she went down the steps. My mother and I watched her as she shambled down the street and disappeared around the corner, but my father went into the kitchen and the New York Times.

  She was back the next Sunday and two Sundays after that, ringing the bell, but we didn’t open the door. She rang for almost a half-hour each time, but we all sat quietly in the kitchen, waiting for her to go away.

  Sailor off the Bremen

  They sat in the small white kitchen, Ernest and Charley and Preminger and Dr. Stryker, all bunched around the porcelain-topped table, so that the kitchen seemed to be overflowing with men. Sally stood at the stove turning griddle-cakes over thoughtfully, listening intently to what Preminger was saying.

  “So,” Preminger said, carefully working his knife and fork, “everything was excellent. The comrades arrived, dressed like ladies and gentlemen at the opera, in evening gowns and what do you call them?”

  “Tuxedoes,” Charley said. “Black ties.”

  “Tuxedoes,” Preminger nodded, speaking with his precise educated German accent. “Very handsome people, mixing with all the other handsome people who came to say good-bye to their friends on the boat; everybody very gay, everybody with a little whisky on the breath; nobody would suspect they were Party members, they were so clean and upper class.” He laughed lightly at his own joke. He looked like a young boy from a nice Middle Western college, with crew-cut hair and a straight nose and blue eyes and an easy laugh. His laugh was a little high and short, and he talked fast, as though he wanted to get a great many words out to beat a certain deadline, but otherwise, being a Communist in Germany and a deck officer on the Bremen hadn’t made any obvious changes in him. “It is a wonderful thing,” he said, “how many pretty girls there are in the Party in the United States. Wonderful!”

  They all laughed, even Ernest, who put his hand up to cover the empty spaces in the front row of his teeth every time he smiled. His hand covered his mouth and the fingers cupped around the neat black patch over his eye, and he smiled secretly and swiftly behind that concealment, getting his merriment over with swiftly, so he could take his hand down and compose his face into its usual unmoved, distant expression, cultivated from the time he got out of the hospital. Sally watched him from the stove, knowing each step: the grudging smile, the hand, the consciousness and memory of deformity, the wrench to composure, the lie of peace when he took his hand down.

  She shook her head, dumped three brown cakes onto a plate.

  “Here,” she said, putting them before Preminger. “Better than Childs restaurant.”

  “Wonderful,” Preminger said, dousing them with syrup. “Each time I come to America I feast on these. There is nothing like it in the whole continent of Europe.”

  “All right,” Charley said, leaning out across the kitchen table, practically covering it, because he was so big, “finish the story.”

  “So I gave the signal,” Preminger said, waving his fork. “When everything was nice and ready, everybody having a good time, stewards running this way, that way, with champagne, a nice little signal and we had a very nice little demonstration. Nice signs, good loud yelling, the Nazi flag cut down, one, two, three, from the pole. The girls standing together singing like angels, everybody running there from all parts of the ship, everybody getting the idea very, very clear—a very nice little demonstration.” He smeared butter methodically on the top cake. “So then, the rough business. Expected. Naturally. After all, we all know it is no cocktail party for Lady Astor.” He pursed his lips and squinted at his plate, looking like a small boy making believe he’s the head of a family. “A little pushing, expected, maybe a little crack over the head here and there, expected. Justice comes with a headache these days, we all know that. But my people, the Germans. You must always expect the worst from them. They organize like lightning. Method. How to treat a riot on a ship. Every steward, every oiler, every sailor, was there in a minute and a half. Two men would hold a comrade, the other would beat him. Nothing left to accident.”

  “The hell with it,” Ernest said. “What’s the sense in going through the whole thing again? It’s all over.”

  “Shut up,” Charley said.

  “Two stewards got hold of Ernest,” Preminger said softly. “And another one did the beating. Stewards are worse than sailors. All day long they take orders, they hate the world. Ernest was unlucky. All the others did their jobs, but they were human beings. The steward is a member of the Nazi party. He is an Austrian; he is not a normal man.”

  “Sally,” Ernest said, “give Mr. Preminger some more milk.”

  “He kept hitting Ernest,” Preminger tapped absently on the porcelain top with his fork, “and he kept laughing and laughing.”

  “You know who he is?” Charley asked. “You’re sure you know who he is?”

  “I know who he is. He is twenty-five years old, very dark and good-looking, and he sleeps with at least two ladies a voyage.” Preminger slopped his milk around in the bottom of his glass. “His name is Lueger. He spies on the crew for the Nazis. He has sent two men already to concentration camps. He is a very serious character. He knew what he was doing,” Preminger said clearly, “when he kept hitting Ernest in the eye. I tried to get to him, but I was in the middle of a thousand people, screaming and running. If something happens to that Lueger that will be a very good thing.”

  “Have a cigar,” Ernest said, pulling two out of his pocket.

  “Something will happen to him,” Charley said, taking a deep breath, and leaning back from the table. “Something will damn sure happen to him.”

  “You’re a dumb kid,” Ernest said, in the weary tone he used now in all serious discussions. “What do you prove if you beat up one stupid sailor?”

  “I don’t prove anything,” Charley said. “I don’t prove a goddamn thing. I am just going to have a good time with the boy that knocked my brother’s eye out. That’s all.”

  “It is not a personal thing,” Ernest said, in the tired voice. “It is the movement of Fascism. You don’t stop Fascism with a personal crusade against one German. If I thought it would do some good, I’d say, sure, go ahead …”

  “My brother, the Communist,” Charley said bitterly. “He goes out and he gets ruined and still he talks dialectics. The Red Saint with the long view. The long view gives me a pain in the ass. I am taking a very short view of Mr. Lueger. I am going to kick the living guts out of his belly. Preminger, what do you say?”

  “Speaking as a Party member,” Preminger said, “I approve of your brother’s attitude, Charley.”

  “Nuts,” Charley said.

  “Speaking as a man, Charley,” Preminger went on, “please put Lueger on his back for at least six months. Where is that cigar, Ernest?”

  Dr. Stryker spoke up in his dry, polite, dentist’s voice. “As you know,” he said, “I am not the type for violence.” Dr. Stryker weighed a hundred and thirty-three pounds and it was almost possible to see through his
wrists, he was so frail. “But as Ernest’s friends, I think there would be a definite satisfaction for all of us, including Ernest, if this Lueger was taken care of. You may count on me for anything within my powers.” He was very scared, Dr. Stryker, and his voice was even drier than usual, but he spoke up after reasoning the whole thing out slowly and carefully, disregarding the fear, the worry, the possible great damage. “That is my opinion,” he said.

  “Sally,” Ernest said, “talk to these damn fools.”

  “I think,” Sally said slowly, looking steadily at her husband’s face, always stiffly composed now, like a corpse’s face, “I think they know what they’re talking about.”

  Ernest shrugged. “Emotionalism. A large useless gesture. You’re all tainted by Charley’s philosophy. He’s a football player. He has a football player’s philosophy. Somebody knocks you down, you knock him down, everything is fine.”

  “I want a glass of milk, too,” Charley said. “Please, Sally.”

  “Whom’re you playing this week?” Ernest said.

  “Georgetown.”

  “Won’t that be enough violence for one week?” Ernest asked.

  “Nope,” Charley said. “I’ll take care of Georgetown first, then Lueger.”

  “Anything I can do,” Dr. Stryker said. “Remember, anything I can do. I am at your service.”

  “The coach’ll be sore,” Ernest said, “if you get banged up, Charley.”

  “The hell with the coach. Please shut up, Ernest. I have got my stomachful of Communist tactics. No more. Get this in your head, Ernest.” Charley stood up and banged the table. “I am disregarding the class struggle, I am disregarding the education of the proletariat, I am disregarding the fact that you are a good Communist. I am acting strictly in the capacity of your brother. If you’d had any brains you would have stayed away from that lousy boat. You’re a painter, an artist, you make water colors, what the hell is it your business if lunatics’re running Germany? But all right. You’ve got no brains. You go and get your eye beat out. O.K. Now I step in. Purely personal. None of your business. Shut your trap. I will fix everything to my own satisfaction. Please go and lie down in the bedroom. We have arrangements to make here.”