Evergreen (22 page)

Solly would gladly pay interest, if that’s what Joseph wanted.

No, that wasn’t what he wanted; he certainly didn’t want to make money out of someone he knew and loved as much as Solly. It was just that he couldn’t afford to endanger his own family. He hoped Solly could understand that. He really wished so much that he could come to his rescue. Was Solly sure he had tried everything: the banks, the professional money lenders? … Joseph’s voice trailed weakly.

Yes, Solly had tried everything and Joseph was his last hope. Was this really his final word?

Yes it was, and he was so sorry. Solly would never know how sorry.

That was the last time they spoke together. By five o’clock that afternoon Solly was dead.

On the way home from the office Tim happened to pass through the street where Solly lived and found it blocked by police cars and crowds. He leaned out and asked a bystander what was wrong.

“A man jumped out of the window,” she reported, and Joseph knew, he simply knew, that it was Solly.

When he got home he went to the telephone. A strange voice answered at Solly’s house, a neighbor perhaps.

“Has anything—is everything all right?” he asked, the question not seeming odd at all.

“No,” the woman said, muffled and crying. “Oh, my God, Solly has killed himself! …”

He put the receiver softly back, and sat for a while alone, and summoned Anna. For the next few days they were occupied with Ruth. She was so calm it was as if she had died too. People kept coming in, hesitating, with shock in their faces. What should they say to her? They didn’t
know what to say. So they put their arms around her, pressing their cheeks to her face, and then went into the dining room where neighbors had put out a coffee urn and platters of food, fruit and cold cuts and cakes, because the living must go on eating and living.

Every few minutes someone said, “I don’t think she even realizes it yet,” and another answered, “Next week, next month, she will really know what’s happened.”

In the meantime Ruth sat in the living room on Solly’s chair. The fat white mourning candle burned in its holder on the piano which was newly draped with the Spanish shawl that Joseph and Anna had brought from Europe only a few weeks before. It was black silk with flowers and fringe, a gaudy thing that Ruth had wanted so badly. Now she stretched out her hand, thin and transparent against the candle flame.

“Empty, empty,” she said, and was silent.

He kept starting awake. He knew he had been dreaming but in the instant of waking the dream fled, and he could only remember that he had been standing or climbing or kneeling on the fourteenth floor and down, straight down, were the tops of cars, crawling like beetles. There was a wind in his face. No, it was not his face, it was Solly’s. Was it Solly or Joseph hanging there and in the ultimate instant, frantic with terror, pulling back? Too late, too late, all hold was loosed. Was it Solly or Joseph? The street rushed up, tilting, screaming—Who, Solly or Joseph? Then a hand on his shoulder, Anna’s hand.

“Hush, hush. You were dreaming. Joseph, Joseph, it’s all right.”

And he worried about Malone. The man was whipped. He sat in his office with his telephone turned off. He must have lost twenty-five pounds of jolly fat; the skin hung on his neck in folds.

Once Joseph came in and found him staring out of the window. When he turned, Joseph saw that he had been crying, and would have left the room, but Malone said,
“Why didn’t I know that what goes up has to come down? Tell me, why didn’t I know?”

“You’ve plenty of company,” was all Joseph could think of to say.

He worried about the building that was near completion, but Malone was in no condition to talk about it. So he called his lawyer and learned that their bank might not be able to make the final payment on the construction loan. Three large banks had already failed and the way people were lining up to withdraw their deposits, even a bank in sound shape could be made to fail. What if this one failed; how would they finish the job?

He decided to have a talk with his man at the bank tomorrow morning. Do it in person, not on the telephone, and handle it carefully; you didn’t just walk in and tell people there were rumors they might be going under.

When he arrived at the bank at ten o’clock the next day there was a crowd on the sidewalk. Old women, men in business suits, men in overalls were shuffling and bustling at the doors. The doors were shut.

What was to be done? Nine stories and penthouse on the stylish upper East Side, a gem of a little job, half of it rented. A hundred thousand dollars would finish it. There was nothing else to do but to use his own funds. After all, it was only lending it to himself, he reasoned. But in doing so he had almost depleted his capital.

He came home, somber and thoughtful, to hear another tale of woe.

“It’s Ruth,” Anna said. “We thought she had Solly’s insurance, at least. But it seems she signed some papers, signed it over when he borrowed money for the stocks. And now they tell her it isn’t hers! And Joseph, she hasn’t a cent, she’s over in that apartment without a cent!”

He thought, he thought with pounding head, “I wish people would leave me alone!”—and remembered Solly teaching him to play ball, and Ruth coming to Anna when their children had been born and there had been no one
else to help, and the summer just past when Iris had stayed with them and been so warmly cared for.

“Find out what she needs,” he said. “They were good to us, Anna. I don’t forget.”

That winter there were heavy snows. The city advertised for men to shovel and long lines formed before morning light. Some of the men who came were middle-aged; they wore hand-tailored suits and velvet-collared overcoats. All over the city there were lines: bread lines, soup lines. Joseph passed them while riding in his car; once he saw the face of a man he knew and looked quickly away so that the man would not know he had been seen.

The speed with which disaster had spread was unbelievable. Sitting in his good, solid car behind Tim, on his way home to where it was still warm and there was plenty of food, he could reassure himself that he was not like those poor devils in the lines. And yet, and still, speaking of devils, the small devil fear was there all right, perched inside his head and waiting. Waiting for what?

The new building, the little gem, was not renting. The penthouse had finally been leased for half what they had expected to get. The chain store which had taken a ninety-nine-year lease on Madison Avenue had gone bankrupt. The lofts in the fur district were partly vacant; the swinging racks heavy with furs were gone. The two prime apartment houses on Central Park West were emptying out, but the interest and taxes and maintenance went on. He had been using up his personal funds to keep them going. Malone had nothing to contribute. How long could this last, this slump or whatever it was? How long could he go on?

Advertisements were appearing, offering a five-year lease on an apartment for one year’s rent in advance, offering free decoration, free remodeling, anything. Only come in and sign up.

And no new work in sight.

At night he lay awake and held a dialogue with himself.

Air
, he said indignantly. They say it was all bubbles
and air. But I go past the houses, fifteen stories high, with the doormen in maroon uniforms standing under the awnings, and I know the insides of those houses the way a doctor knows a body. I know the miles of brass pipe, the hardwood floors, the imported tile in the lobby. And you tell me that’s all air?

Built on promises, that’s what they mean.

Promises? Oh, you mean mortgages, promises to pay. But these buildings cost millions; what man, or group of men, would be able to construct them without borrowing?

That’s true.

We always pay back, don’t we? And have enough left to live very well, besides.

You pay back as long as somebody else pays you.

The rents, you mean?

Of course.

Of course.

But what when people no longer pay the rent?

They’ll pay the rent. They can’t find better places to live.

But when they lose their jobs, what will they do?

I don’t know. You think it will be that bad?

It is that bad already.

Silence.

There are ten million unemployed. Silence.

You’ll have to dispossess a lot of them.

You mean, put them and their furniture out on the street?

That’s what it means to dispossess.

I can’t do that. I wouldn’t sleep if I had to do that to people.

Well, then, you’ll lose your properties, you’ll lose everything.

And if I put them out, what then? You’ll lose everything anyway.

Yet he didn’t panic. Month after month he trimmed and cut back and managed. Malone and he moved from their
lavish office and gave up most of the staff. He sold the car, but kept Tim on as an office boy in spite of not needing one, for Tim had two babies to bring up. The maids were dismissed and Iris changed to public school. She hadn’t been very happy anyway with that bunch of snobs, Joseph told himself, knowing it for a rationalization. And he pawned Anna’s diamond ring to meet a mortgage payment on a building which he later lost. It was one of the bitterest moments of his life when she drew it from her finger and handed it to him. She urged him to sell it but he fiercely refused. He would get that ring back for her one day if he had to burst his heart to do it.

In the end he saved one building, a small apartment house on Washington Heights, where they had begun, and it was that which fed them during the famine years.

“A man called on the telephone for you today,” Iris informed Anna at the supper table. “I forgot to tell you.”

“Well, who was he?”

“He didn’t leave his name. I thought it was the dry cleaner, you said you expected him to call about Papa’s suit. But it wasn’t.”

“Iris!” Anna said. “Do please get to the point.”

“I am! It was Mr. Werner and he said he was calling about the picture he’d sent.”

“I thought you said he didn’t leave his name,” Maury scoffed.

“That was the first time he called. The second time he told who he was!”

“Cheer up, folks! This kid will learn how to take a message one of these years,” Maury said.

Anna laid down her fork, then picked it up again and took a mouthful of carrots.

“Werner? Picture?” Joseph repeated.

“Yes, he said he’d sent Mama a picture and he hadn’t heard from her, so he wondered whether it had got lost or something.”

“Oh,” Anna said, “I meant to answer. I just haven’t got around to it. He did send a picture when his father died. He wrote that they broke up the apartment, and he—Paul Werner—and his sister were going over the things and he—they—came upon this picture and they thought it
looked like me, but it doesn’t at all, it’s a silly-looking thing, but they—he—sent it and I really forgot all about it, that’s why I didn’t even think to mention it—” She got up and began clearing the plates away. “Coffee or tea tonight, Joseph?”

“Let’s see the picture, Ma,” Maury called into the kitchen.

“Yes, let’s see it, Anna,” Joseph said when she came back.

“You really want to? I’ve stuck it somewhere, I’ll have to go rummaging all around—”

“I’d like to see it,” Joseph repeated.

She is acting very queer about it, Iris thought.

Anna propped the picture on a table in the living room. It was a crayon drawing of a woman. There was a small gold label on the carved gold frame. Iris bent to read it.
Woman with Red Hair
, it said, with the name of the artist below it.

The woman was seated. Her body was a sweeping curve: the bent head with its washerwoman’s knot of dusky red hair, the long, slender neck, the naked shoulders, the suggestion of breast, the arm lying on the lap, the hand fading into shadow. Iris bent closer. There was a piece of knitting on the lap; the ball of yarn had fallen to the floor.

It gave Iris a fine, pleased feeling. She looked back at the artist’s name. “Mallard. I’ve seen his work. It was in the museum when our class went with the art teacher. He must be famous!”

“Don’t get excited,” Anna said coldly. “It’s only a crayon sketch. Not worth any fortune, you can be sure.”

What a crass thing for Mama to say! Not like her at all. And that sharp tone!

Joseph tilted his head to the side. He looked doubtful. “It must be valuable. They wouldn’t put such an expensive frame on it otherwise, would they?”

Anna’s mouth twitched. Iris saw it.

“I’m trying to see the resemblance,” Joseph said. “It certainly isn’t at all like the one we had done of you in Paris.”

“It certainly isn’t. This one is art,” Maury said.

That annoyed Joseph. “Ahhh—what do you know about art?”

Iris was amused. She put her arm around her father’s shoulder. “Papa dear, it’s you who don’t know about art.”

“Maybe not,” Joseph grumbled, “but I know what I like. This doesn’t look like your mother. I can’t see how those people can think it does.”

“A picture isn’t a photograph,” Iris explained earnestly. “A good picture suggests. That’s what the art teacher said. It shows character, makes you
feel
the person.”