Jew Store (34 page)

And it was at this particular time, at this blissful time, that it happened. On a day when my father felt confident—why should he doubt it?—that business would proceed in a routinely perfect way, the black hole that had, unbeknownst to him, been out there all the time opened up and all but swallowed him.

On that day my father had picked up the paper before he went off to the store, feeling that the usual cursory glance at the morning's news would be sufficient. What could the paper tell him except that there was nothing to worry about, that people had faith in business, that stocks were rising? Did he need the paper to tell him what he knew from his own little Jew store?

He therefore paid scant attention to the headline before him as he sat with the paper on this particular Wednesday morning. But something caught at him. So before proceeding elsewhere in
the paper, he stopped, went back to the headline, and read it again. When he did, when he could finally focus fully, what the headline was telling him was that the stock market had crashed.

It almost sent him from his chair. If the headline had said that a meteor was heading for earth, it would have been no more of a blow. His senses reeled, and when they at last slowed down, the questions came. How much exactly did it have to do with him? He tried on a couple of things. As one who never played the market, was it possible he was immune to a market failure? Or maybe a countrywide catastrophe would take a long time to reach a little town like Concordia?

Both fantasies had brief lives. In what seemed just weeks the factory men showed up with promissory notes in their hands. They said the shoe factory had run out of money.

All night every night my father's eyes stayed open—his eyelids seemed to be held fast by thumbtacks—while he worried about what would be. (The only sure thing he had in his head was that my mother must not know the scope of the trouble.) It stayed with him all day as well. When he couldn't stand it any longer, he would suddenly bolt out of the store, to go see what the other stores were doing, to just walk up and down First Street, to talk to somebody. He decided one day to go out and have a talk with Roscoe Pinder. My father had resisted having any real conversation with Pinder since the day my mother and I had gone out to the factory, but now that episode seemed very small potatoes indeed.

He found the factory owner at the desk in his little office. The dish used as an ashtray was overflowing with cigarette butts. Pinder had always been spare, but, as my father liked to say, on this day he had the look of a yardstick.

“Yeah, I want to talk, too,” Pinder said. “Maybe not to you in particular, Bronson.”

My father took no offense: The man was hurting. “We're all in this together,” my father said to him. “So talk, I'll listen.”

My father recalled Pinder opening up with, “Hellfire, Bronson, did you come all this way just to aggravate me? Are you telling me my factory and your little Jew store have the same stake in this?”

My father brought out an old saying: “Look, Mr. Pinder, if there's a fire at your neighbor's big house, ain't your little one also in danger?”

Pinder shrugged, as if it didn't really matter. The problem was, he finally said, that orders had just slacked off. “You'd think nobody was wearing shoes no more.” He must have known that his problem wasn't the competition from up North, but he seemed not to be able to resist saying to my father, “You and your goddamned Yankees.”

Being called a “Yankee,” with or without the prefatory “god-damned,” always made my father feel misunderstood. Who? Him? A Yankee? Who said so?

If my father had come out to give him sympathy, Pinder said, he should save it until he had heard it all: There was a matter of a forty-five-thousand-dollar note coming due in the next week.

My father was dumbfounded. “Forty-five thousand! My God! An old customer like you? They absolutely positively got to treat you right! They got to give you at least an extension!”

Pinder said to tell that to that “son of a bitch,” the president of the bank, Ernest Fetzer, who appeared to have another way of looking at the problem. “He says the whole economy is a piece of shit and he ain't runnin' a shithouse.” My father knew little about Ernest Fetzer. He had only noticed that nobody ever called him “Ernie.”

My father was puzzled. Even if what Pinder said was so, what good would it do Fetzer to foreclose? Why would anybody want to take over the building?

Pinder had a surprise answer: If Fetzer had to take back the building, it wouldn't “piss off that fox atall.” What he “suspicioned”
was that Fetzer had somebody eager to move in, somebody who hadn't felt the Depression and maybe never would.

And who might that be?

Well, there was talk of the government looking for a place. For a chemical plant. For making chemicals for war. “But don't get your hopes up, Bronson,” Pinder said. “Chemical plants don't hire big. All you get from them is a big smell.”

But would that bother Ernest Fetzer? Not according to Pinder. “Fetzer wouldn't care a monkey's patootie if the town turned into one big stink,” he said to my father. He gave it a thought. “No sir, he'll be downright pleased if I can't meet the note.”

My father said that at this point Pinder cupped his hand to his ear and said, “You hear that, Bronson? That sound is from a piece of machinery that
I
had specially made at the tooling plant, that
I
stood a man behind and taught how to use, that
I
kept tiptop.” How did my father think it felt to know he was about to lose all that?

And the men. They had learned a trade; they took pride in being skilled workers. “What about
them?
Lord knows I got good men here. The men had apparently said they would tough it out. But,” Pinder said, “they're depending on me to make things right. . . . Lord, the whole town's depending on me.”

My father felt deeply for the man. That such a thing could happen, that what a man had built up for so many years should come to nothing. What was needed was some hope. My father recognized the moment as one in which a plan must be devised, and he set himself to devising one. And then, ah, he had it.

Pinder, however, not only didn't want to listen, he didn't even want my father to
be
there. And who could blame him? My father didn't want to be there either. What he wanted was for something to pick him up and deposit him in the middle of the store on an ordinary day, everybody busy with customers or, if it was a slack time, everybody joking. His eyes suddenly filled
with tears.
Oy
, he said, when the heart is full, the eyes overflow. Another saying in a day made for sayings. “Mr. Pinder,” he said, and now he said it firmly, “I want you should listen to me.”

Pinder, my father used to say, was like a man who had been running for miles and could just barely manage to stay alive. “Okay, I'm listening,” he said finally.

My father's idea was for a meeting.

“I've had meetings,” Pinder answered him.

Yes, he no doubt had had many meetings, but none like the one my father had in mind. My father had in mind a
town
meeting. “We'll invite everybody. The whole town,” he said, and waited for a reaction.

None was forthcoming. My father began to sell, hard. “It'll work, Mr. Pinder. We'll turn them out like family at a reunion.”

Pinder finally reacted: He gave a grunt. And then he said, “Or like family gathering for the viewing. Or more likely out of pure morbid curiosity, to see how I'm bearing up under the passing.”

He asked my father if he had a miracle up his sleeve. “You think you're Abraham? You fixing to talk to God?”

My father certainly wasn't thinking of talking to God. Could he guarantee Pinder the money? Of course not. But what he
could
guarantee was that he could sell the town on the idea that if they wanted the factory to stay open, they had to at least come to a meeting.

Pinder continued to resist. How could a town meeting help? He needed money, and he needed it fast.

To which my father said, “Well, I always brag about being a born sal-es-man, Mr. Pinder, and this is one time where I got to put
tokhes ahfen tish
.”

My father said Pinder's eyebrows went up, so he explained, “It means I got to put my rear end on the table.”

And when Pinder's eyebrows stayed up, he said, “I got to put up or shut up.”

W
hen my father came home from his talk with Pinder, it was at last time to fill my mother in. “So what do you think, Reba?” he asked her.

My mother went wide-eyed. The factory was in trouble?
Oy
, and
oyoyoy
. “So tell me what you're telling me,” she said to my father.

It was no time for dissembling. “Trouble, trouble, trouble in spades,” my father answered her. Trouble in spades was an old pinochle term meaning that when spades are trump, all gains or losses are doubled.

“No need to get excited,” my father told my mother, while his own heart bumped away in his chest. He tried to infuse his words with reassurance: The factory was not going to close, if they did the right thing, which, he said—albeit with only a little conviction—was to have a town meeting.

My mother wanted to know if Roscoe Pinder had agreed to it, and my father had to say, “Not ‘agreed' exactly. Just didn't say no.”

On that day my mother recalled a saying, too: “He's maybe like a drowning man grabbing even for the point of a sword,” she said to my father, and felt a chill as she said it.

My father was full of assurances and guarantees, too full. When he was like this, my mother knew, it usually meant he was only hoping for the best. So she cried, “Wait! Wait!”

“Tem-po-rary” had gotten off the ropes and was staging a comeback. It all at once seemed very logical to my mother: If there was a perfect time to leave Concordia, it was now. There was still money in the bank, and, though she didn't mention this to my father, we could go before Miriam and T got anything really serious into their heads. “Look at it this way,” she said, “we came in with a letter and a wagon and we could go out comfortable. Ain't that something to think about?”

“No,” was my father's prompt answer. No, we had to help out. “We can't just go and make believe we was never here.”

“But if we stay and there ain't no living?”

My father answered that we would cross that bridge when we came to it.

He was already making plans. We would announce the meeting by knocking on doors, going out in the fields to the farmers, getting the preachers to announce it in church, put it in the
Sentinel
. “And then they'll come,” my father said to my mother.

“Yes, maybe.” And, my mother wanted to know, if and when everybody came to the meeting, so what then?

“What then?” my father answered her. “After everybody gets to the meeting, I'll think of something, that's what then.”

A
s my father had predicted, everybody came to the meeting. It was held in the school auditorium; and even that capacious space, balcony and all, was barely up to it.

Miriam was in many ways responsible for the turnout. She had rallied her friends, and they had knocked on doors and yelled, “Town meetin', seven P.M., Saturday night, high school auditorium! Don't y'all dare not come, hear?”

Now, with the other girls, she slipped into the row behind my mother and me, toward the back. My mother and I had an empty seat between us for my father.

Though the auditorium lights were on, their effect was negligible. The room remained gray, as if lightly veiled. Only the stage, because it had its own lights, was bright. On each side of the stage the long purple velveteen curtains hung in heavy folds, the dust on them showing up under the lights as a silvery patina. Above center stage, at the top of the proscenium, was the chipped plaster shield representing a coat of arms. Carrying out the school colors, gold letters on a purple background spelled out
LUX FACIT VERITATEM,
which I took to mean, “Always wash with soap.” Well, I would think, sometimes I did, but not
always
.

Chairs had been set out on the stage. When I asked who they were for, my mother said, “For the big shots.”

There was surprisingly little laughter among the crowd. Greetings were exchanges of solemn stares and head shakes. The children were lively at first and kept the auditorium churning by hopping from row to row, but their parents soon issued a warning. “Ardell,”one mother called out, “this ain't no church social. You quit cutting the fool and sit down and offer up a prayer.”

I resisted joining the row hoppers, although I watched them with some envy. I felt somehow that I must stay with the family. We were deeply involved, I knew that: We had talked about nothing but the meeting for days, and my father had remained serious the whole time.

At last onto the stage, from the wings, moving in a loose body toward the table, came Roscoe Pinder, the Reverend Charles Boomer Jones—Brother Jones—and Mayor Canaday and Ernest Fetzer.

That was when my father came to sit in the vacant seat.

Wasn't my father a “big shot”? Shouldn't he be up there on the stage? I checked with him. “Ain't you a big shot, Papa?”

“To be a big shot you got to make a big noise,” my father explained. “I'm getting my ammunition together.”

The place was growing quiet. Soon it was hushed enough that the swishing sound of the auditorium door could be heard, and when I looked around, there was Miss Brookie coming through, pushing into the last row, squeezing into a seat.

And then a truly heavy silence fell upon us. As the mayor walked to the lectern, there was the clear squeak of floorboards rubbing together.

The mayor thanked us for coming, saying we all knew why we were there, and that we had some business to discuss. But first the preacher would lead us in prayer. “Brother Jones,” the mayor said, making way for him.