Jew Store (11 page)

It didn't make any difference. “Quit wasting my time,” the man told him.

Another
momzer
, my father thought. Were there nothing but
momzers
in this town? The conversation going nowhere, in fact at a dead stop, my father turned and retraced his steps. The tinkling bell tinkled.

Once outside, he felt all at once something of a drop-off in spirits. Where were the people whose hearts beat faster at the thought of a Jew store coming to town? Where were the drums and the trumpets? Well, he didn't expect pounding hearts and drums exactly, but where was at least somebody agreeable to taking his money?

In fewer minutes than he would have liked, he had re-crossed the street to the real estate office.

Inside he again faced Tucker. The minute he looked at him, he knew nothing good would be coming from that smile. It was a smile of which my father had grown very weary indeed. Tucker said again that all he had was the blacksmith shop and the “nigger” church.

To try to project a calm that he certainly wasn't feeling, my father walked to the calendar on the wall and pretended to scrutinize
the girl on it—a puffy-cheeked girl, preternaturally pink and white, smiling brilliantly over the slogan
FOR SERVICE WITH A SMILE, CALL CRUICKSHANK'S PLUMBING
. “You can't be doing much business with such few listings,” he said to the wall.

Tucker wanted to help “like the very dickens” and said he would give it another think. My father turned from the calendar and took a look as Tucker embarked on his “think.” As the man leaned back in his chair, his head fell back, his eyes closed, his mouth sprang open, and his tongue ran under his upper dentures, as if, my father said, searching out diamonds hidden in molars. Suddenly the eyelids lifted, and there came the revelation that Tom Dillon had the store my father was looking for.

This was news? Of course it wasn't, but what could my father do? He retreated to the little wooden chair, positioned just as he had left it yesterday, and asked Tucker if he thought Dillon was ready to talk business.

Tucker answered that he never spoke for Tom Dillon.

My father gave his almost silent “uh-huh” and sat on.

Tucker suggested that my father try some other town, that there were a lot of little towns that might be in the market for a Jew store. “So why not just go on and look further?” he asked my father.

My father was suddenly undone, his confidence seriously compromised. This guy Tucker was peeing on his back and calling it rain. The man knew the shoe factory was the attraction and here he was smiling his kulak smile and telling him to go someplace else. Did he have it wrong? Had Tom Dillon
ever
taken him seriously? After all, with the shoe factory coming in, lots of merchants could be wanting a store.

My father struggled for something light—
frailech
was his word—to make the man loosen up, come around. He had some jokes, but when he ran them through his head, he realized they were about Jews, so they were out. Jewish jokes were only for other Jews' ears.

Traveling salesman jokes were out as well. My father was not a goody-goody, but he was also not a traveling salesman and didn't want to sound like one. Traveling salesmen's reputations were not of the finest.

He set himself to come up with something funny about the ride from Nashville but soon realized there was nothing funny about that ride. And if he described what had really happened, told the incidents for the horror stories they were, would this man care? Of course not. Did a boil hurt under the other fellow's armpit? This man especially would feel no hurt.

Maybe something funny about Miss Brookie? My father started talking, sure that a good story would come to him. “Say, you must know Miss Brookie Simmons,” he began.

“Everybody knows Brookie Simmons.” Tucker looked up, eyes brightening. He began to heave about, pleasurably, my father would always say, like an elephant wallowing in mud.

Tucker had a proposal, a bet, though it was one my father never described in much detail. My guess was that the bet had a sexual aspect and that Miss Brookie was the target.

This was not the lighthearted something my father had in mind. He told Tucker that he wasn't much of a betting man, and the wallowing stopped.

My father knew he was now supposed to get up and go. But this was proving difficult since he seemed stuck to the chair.

As he sat, feelings washed over him, all of them bad. He began to face facts: the accent that he now knew he had, his lack of an education, his size. No matter what my mother thought, he was not tall. No, he was an undersized Jew pitted against Gentile giants.

He could only think that everything was a failure, and it was his fault: He had been done in by his chutzpah, his arrogance. What had made him think that his born sal-es-man-ship would open doors? And why had he believed those Nashville big shots who were so confident that he was on well-greased wheels to
success? They didn't know everything; they didn't even know there were towns that wanted no part of Jews. And now here he sat, his good luck nowhere to be seen, his hustle out of commission, unable even to get him out of the chair.

And so what if he did get up? What then? He had no place to go except to my mother, who would surely say that now they would go back to New York. And if they had to go back, he would have to wire my grandfather for the money.

It was perhaps this last galling thought that got him to his feet. And, incredible as it was even to him, he managed a smile and a thanks. Thanks for what? he asked himself. For
bupkis
, for goat shit (“Excuse me, children”), that's for what.

As he walked to the door, Tucker was yanking at desk drawers, rummaging through them, shutting them with a bang, letting my father know he had better things to do.

“You get anything, you let me know,” my father said to him.

“You bet,” Tucker mumbled, peering into a drawer.

I
n the next moment the man was on his feet, moving out from behind the desk and extending his hand. My father was thrown into severe disorientation. Could it be the
momzer
was offering a good-bye shake? He reached out to take the hand, and when he did, saw that Tucker was looking not at him but at someone just entering the office.

My father lowered his head and tried to maneuver past. He felt the newcomer's hand on his arm. The man wanted him, him, Aaron Bronson.

Tucker sat back down, his eyes deep into whatever was taking place.

The man introduced himself as Spivey, and my father recognized the man from the furniture store. A hand was out, limply hanging, and my father shook it. What was this? Had this disagreeable guy decided he could produce something resembling a friendly gesture after all? Though at this moment my father
didn't question it too closely, he later figured that because Waylon Spivey and Tom Dillon were foes of long standing, Spivey had mulled it over and decided to give himself the fun of reeling my father in before Dillon did.

They crossed the street. Inside his furniture store Spivey sat down behind the rolltop desk and motioned my father to the spindle-backed chair beside it. Behind the spectacles pale eyes stared at my father.

Did my father know what was what, what he was supposed to do? “No,” he always said, “all I could do was stare back.”

Spivey finally spoke, and the man's words poured over my father like rain on parched corn. What the man said was that the store was for rent.

Spivey got up, turned on the lights, and the store came alive. My father knew he had found his store. Not ritzy, but what need had he for ritzy? Two floors already, and—think of it—a Number One location.

Staying unexcited was the ticket. My father composed himself, rose, and started on a leisurely walk among the jumble. As he strolled, he envisioned. Here on the first floor would be the women's and shoe departments. He climbed the stairway and saw what the second floor could be—a place just for men. He closed his eyes and allowed “Perfect” to escape his lips.

Serenely he moved back down the stairs. Back at the desk, he put his hands in his pockets, pinched a quarter hard, and asked Spivey how come he was letting such a store go. If this was all a joke, now was when Spivey would produce the punch line.

There was no punch line. The store was available because Spivey was putting in a railroad spur at the edge of town and he wanted to be near it. “Folks don't mind riding out for furniture,” he said to my father.

It was okay. But not over. Now came the “how much.”

His property being “a danged sight better than them fool
things you been offered,” Spivey thought seventy-five was about right.

My father swallowed, hard.

There was to be more hard swallowing. That figure was while he was getting started; then it would go up “accordin',” as my father always said Spivey pronounced the word. Spivey was drawing things out, having himself a good time, telling my father not to try to Jew him down, that it wasn't going to work. And oh, yes, there was a five-year lease.

A lease like that could turn out to be a sentence, but my father told himself that the man had him right by the
beytsim
, or, as my father would translate it, “right by the silver dollars.” He tried to stall. He asked when he could get in, if he decided to . . . uh, if he decided to . . . take it?

Giving my father's silver dollars a squeeze, Spivey said there was no deciding about it, that my father had to take it, had no choice. And he could get in just in time to go to market for his back-to-school trade.

Market! The St. Louis market! Back-to-school!
My father felt a jolt, as if he had been dozing and a wagon wheel had rolled over a deep hole. Look here, wasn't he the one with the Jewish head, the guy with the head for dry goods? And this goy was telling him his business? In the next moment he heard himself saying that there were a couple of other things he wanted to look at but that Spivey had made him a very interesting proposition. My father saw his hustle as back on track.

He blanked his face. He understood, he told Spivey, that Oliphant could use a store like he had in mind and that he had heard that some properties there could be on the market.

“Oliphant!” Spivey spit the word out. Didn't my father know that Oliphant had already had a store like he had in mind? And that one day it just gave a loud fart and disappeared? Had my father heard that, too?

“I heard,” my father answered him, remembering the store
that had dyed Miss Brookie's hands blue. He started moving doorward, promising to let Spivey know in a couple of days.

And then all at once Tom Dillon was there, in the store, soft-faced, smiling, walking toward my father with his hand out. “Good thing I found you, Bronson,” he was saying.

In telling of this moment, my father would always say, “Children, when a
momzer
like this one gives you a big kiss, count your fillings.” He took Dillon's hand and said, “That so, Mr. Dillon?”

Dillon said he had been thinking about their little talk and had about concluded it was his civic duty to assist a newcomer. “We oughtn't to turn strangers from our gates, no sir,” he said, and laughed. Dillon had a laugh that went so abruptly on and off, it might have been operated by a hand-held button. “You haven't forgotten, have you?”

It seemed Dillon had decided that he could fix up the upstairs after all so that my father could have his two separate departments. “We can't have the men in the ladies' bloomers, now can we?” A huge sound suddenly roared out of his throat, the beefy body bounced, and the sweat ran. He was at the boil, my father thought, like a pot of wash in a Southern backyard.

Spivey was now a collection of paroxysms, darting to and fro around Dillon, snatching at him, elbowing him. He ordered him from the store. “Just get on out, you no-account. You dassent come in here talking business to somebody I'm already talking business to. You just move along.”

Dillon moved not, only said matter-of-factly that Spivey was a goddamn thieving son of a bitch.

Spivey's turn. Dillon stank worse than a nigger outhouse. Hadn't Spivey heard Dillon had been arrested for violating the smell laws?

Spivey took hold of my father and pulled him to one side. He suddenly had another deal. The deal was that he would come down twenty-five with a three-year lease if my father signed now. “This gol-derned pussyfooting around got to stop,” he said.

As my father said later, this was not his idea of “pussyfooting around”; it was his idea of full-scale combat. He told Spivey to write the lease up and he'd sign.

Dillon wasn't finished. As Spivey was walking back to his desk to fill in the particulars, Dillon was spinning my father around and yelling “Sign? Sign?” into his face. What was my father going on about? Had he forgotten their understanding?

It meant little to Dillon that they had no understanding, that there was nothing to understand
about
. He wasn't even listening when my father told him that he would never do such a foolish thing as to take a store before he knew the particulars.

Having dealings with a “sawed-off little Jew” was something he should have never done, Dillon now informed my father. Could you have honest dealings with a Jew? “No,” he said, in answer to his own question. “Not the Lord himself could do it. Don't we all know that?”

In the doorway he turned and, handkerchief gripped tight, shook his fist while he wished to hell that the Bronsons had never come to Concordia in the first place. Finally, he charged out, sideswiping pieces of furniture as he went.

My father walked slowly back to the spindle chair. How to explain, he thought then as he thought always, why such an important man, a man with such a big reputation, should carry around so much hate? It was a moment before he could take the paper Spivey was holding out to him.

As to the signing of the lease, though I was certainly not on the scene at Spivey's, I have since that day witnessed so many such rites that I feel I can describe this one with complete confidence. First there would have been the slow reading, with my father whispering the words and occasionally looking up to consider, and then the clearing of a space on the desk to ensure that his elbows and hand, when it finally came time to affix his signature, would have enough space to dock a boat if the need arose. At last he would have unscrewed his Waterman fountain
pen and scrawled out a lengthy
Aaron Bronson
, and, as this was an important document, he would have imposed an inked dot between the names and streamed a paraph under both (to thwart forgery), and then he would have sat back and read the document again.