The Complete Stories (18 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: The Complete Stories
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The meeting was arranged for a Monday evening at the branch public library near where she worked—her bookish preference; himself, he would have chosen the freedom of a street corner. She would, she said, be wearing a sort of reddish babushka. Now Mitka found himself actively wondering what she looked like. Her letters showed her sensible, modest, honest, but what of the human body? Though he liked his women, among other things, to be lookers, he guessed she wasn’t. Partly from hints dropped by her, partly his intuition. He pictured her as comely yet hefty. But what of it as long as she was womanly,
intelligent, brave? A man like him nowadays had need of something special.
The March evening was zippy outside but cupped in it the breath of spring. Mitka opened both windows and allowed the free air to blow on him. About to go—there came a quick knock on the door. “Telephone,” a girl’s voice sang out. Probably the advertising Beatrice. He waited till she was gone, then unlocked the door and stepped into the hall for his first phone call of the year. As he picked up the receiver a crack of light showed in the corner. He stared and the door shut tight. The landlady’s fault, she built him up among the roomers as a sort of freak. “My writer upstairs.”
“Mitka?” It was Madeleine.
“Speaking.”
“Mitka, do you know why I’m calling?”
“How should I know?”
“I’m half drunk on wine.”
“Save it till later.”
“Because I am afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“I do so love your letters and would hate to lose them. Do we have to meet?”
“Yes,” he hissed.
“Suppose I am not what you expect?”
“Leave that to me.”
She sighed. “All right then—”
“You’ll be there?”
No sound from her.
“For godsake, don’t frustrate me now.”
“Yes, Mitka.” She hung up.
 
 
Sensitive kid. He plucked his very last buck out of the drawer and quickly left the room, to hurry to the library before she could change her mind and leave. But Mrs. Lutz, in flannel bathrobe, caught him at the bottom of the stairs. Her gray hair wild, her voice broken. “Mitka, why have you shunned me so long? I have waited months for a single word. How can you be so cruel?”
“Please.” He shoved her aside and ran out of the house. Nutty dame. The balmy current in the air swept away the unpleasantness, carried a sob to his throat. He walked briskly, more alive than for many a season.
The library was an old stone structure. He searched in circulation
amid rows of books on sagging floors but found only the yawning librarian. The children’s room was dark. In reference, a lone middle-aged female sat at a long table, reading; on the table stood her bulky market bag. Mitka searched the room and was turning to look elsewhere when a monstrous insight tore at his scalp:
this was she
. He stared unbelievingly, his heart a dishrag. Rage possessed him. Hefty she was but yes, eyeglassed, and marvelously plain; Christ, didn’t know color even—the babushka a sickly running orange. Ah, colossal trickery—was ever man so cruelly defrauded? His impulse was to escape into breathable air but she held him there by serenely reading the printed page—(sly one, she knew the tiger in the room). Had she for a split second gazed up with wavering lids he’d have bolted sure; instead she buttoned her eyes to the book and let him duck if he so willed. This infuriated him further. Who wanted charity from the old girl? Mitka strode (in misery) toward her table.
“Madeleine?” He mocked the name. (Writer maims bird in flight. Enough not enough.)
She looked up with a shy and stricken smile. “Mitka?”
“The same—” He cynically bowed.
“Madeleine is my daughter’s name, which I borrowed for my story. Mine is Olga really.”
A pox on her lies—yet he hopefully asked, “Did she send you?”
She smiled sadly. “No, I am the one. Sit, Mitka.”
He sat sullenly, harboring murderous thoughts: to hack her to pieces and incinerate the remains in Mrs. Lutz’s barrel.
“They’ll be closing soon,” she said. “Where shall we go?”
He was motionless, stunned.
“I know a beer place around the corner where we can refresh ourselves,” Olga suggested.
She buttoned a drab coat over a gray sweater. At length he rose. She got up too and followed him, hauling her market bag down the stone steps.
In the street he took the bag—it felt full of rocks—and trailed her around the corner into the beer joint.
Along the wall opposite the beat-up bar ran a row of dark booths. Olga sought one in the rear.
“For peace and privacy.”
He laid the bag on the table. “The place smells.”
They sat facing each other. He grew increasingly depressed at the thought of spending the evening with her. The irony of it—immured
for months in a rat hole, to come forth for this. He’d go back now and entomb himself forever.
 
 
She removed her coat. “You’d have liked me when I was young, Mitka. I had a sylphlike figure and glorious hair. I was much sought after by men. I was not what you would call sexy but they knew I had it.”
Mitka looked away.
“I had verve and a quality of wholeness. I loved life. In many ways I was too rich for my husband. He couldn’t understand my nature and this caused him to leave me—mind you, with two small children.”
She saw he wasn’t listening. Olga sighed and burst into tears.
The waiter came.
“One beer. Bring the lady whiskey.”
She used two handkerchiefs, one to blow her nose in, the other to dry her eyes.
“You see, Mitka, I told you so.”
Her humility touched him. “I see.” Why hadn’t he, fool, not listened?
She gazed at him with sadly smiling eyes. Without glasses she looked better.
“You’re exactly the way I pictured you, except for your thinness, which surprises me.”
Olga reached into her market bag and brought out several packages. She unwrapped bread, sausage, herring, Italian cheese, soft salami, pickles, and a large turkey drumstick.
“Sometimes I favor myself with these little treats. Eat, Mitka.”
Another landlady. Set Mitka adrift and he enticed somebody’s mama. But he ate, grateful she had provided an occupation.
The waiter brought the drinks. “What’s going on here, a picnic?”
“We’re writers,” Olga explained.
“The boss will be pleased.”
“Never mind him, eat, Mitka.”
He ate listlessly. A man had to live. Or did he? When had he felt this low? Probably never.
Olga sipped her whiskey. “Eat, it’s self-expression.”
He expressed himself by finishing off the salami, also half the loaf of bread, cheese, and herring. His appetite grew. Searching within the bag Olga brought out a package of sliced corned beef and a ripe pear. He made a sandwich of the meat. On top of that the cold beer was tasty.
“How is the writing going now, Mitka?”
He lowered the glass but changed his mind and gulped the rest.
“Don’t speak of it.”
“Be uphearted, not down. Work every day.”
He gnawed the turkey drumstick.
“That’s what I do. I’ve been writing for over twenty years and sometimes—for one reason or another—it gets so bad that I don’t feel like going on. But what I do then is relax for a short while and then change to another story. After my juices are flowing again I go back to the other and usually that starts off once more. Or sometimes I discover that it isn’t worth bothering over. After you’ve been writing so long as I you’ll learn a system to keep yourself going. It depends on your view of life. If you’re mature you’ll find out how to work.”
“My writing is a mess,” he sighed, “a fog, a blot.”
“You’ll invent your way out,” said Olga, “if you only keep trying.”
 
 
They sat awhile longer. Olga told him of her childhood and when she was a girl. She would have talked longer but Mitka was restless. He was wondering, what after this? Where would he drag that dead cat, his soul?
Olga put what was left of the food into the market bag.
In the street he asked where to.
“The bus, I guess. I live on the other side of the river with my son, his vinegary wife, and their little daughter.”
He took her bag—a lightened load—and walked with it in one hand, a cigarette in the other, toward the bus terminal.
“I wish you’d known my daughter, Mitka.”
“So why not?” he asked hopefully, surprised he hadn’t brought up this before, because she was all the time in the back of his mind.
“She had flowing hair and a sweet hourglass figure. Her nature was beyond compare. You’d have loved her.”
“What’s the matter, is she married?”
“She died at twenty—at the fount of life. All my stories are actually about her. Someday I’ll collect the best and see if I can get them published.”
He all but crumpled, then walked unsteadily on. For Madeleine he had this night come out of his burrow, to hold her against his lonely heart, but she had burst into fragments, a meteor in reverse, scattered in the far-flung sky, as he stood below, a man mourning.
They came at last to the terminal and Mitka put Olga on the bus.
“Will we meet again, Mitka?”
“Better no,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It makes me sad.”
“Won’t you write either? You’ll never know what your letters meant to me. I was like a young girl waiting for the mailman.”
“Who knows?” He got off the bus.
She called him to the window. “Don’t worry about your work, and get more fresh air. Build up your body. Good health will help your writing.”
His face showed nothing but he pitied her, her daughter, the world. Who not?
“Character is what counts in the pinches, of course properly mixed with talent. When you saw me in the library and stayed I thought, There is a man of character.”
“Good night,” Mitka said.
“Good night, my dear. Write soon.”
She sat back in her seat and the bus roared out of the depot. As it turned the corner she waved from the window.
Mitka walked the other way. He was momentarily uneasy, until he realized he felt no pangs of hunger. On what he had eaten tonight he could live for a week. Mitka, the camel.
 
 
Spring. It gripped and held him. Though he fought the intimacy he was the night’s prisoner as he moved toward Mrs. Lutz’s.
He thought of the old girl. He’d go home now and drape her from head to foot in flowing white. They would jounce together up the stairs, then (strictly a one-marriage man) he would swing her across the threshold, holding her where the fat overflowed her corset as they waltzed around his writing chamber.
1953
N
ot long ago there lived in uptown New York, in a small, almost meager room, though crowded with books, Leo Finkle, a rabbinical student at the Yeshiva University. Finkle, after six years of study, was to be ordained in June and had been advised by an acquaintance that he might find it easier to win himself a congregation if he were married. Since he had no present prospects of marriage, after two tormented days of turning it over in his mind, he called in Pinye Salzman, a marriage broker whose two-line advertisement he had read in the
Forward.
The matchmaker appeared one night out of the dark fourth-floor hallway of the graystone rooming house where Finkle lived, grasping a black, strapped portfolio that had been worn thin with use. Salzman, who had been long in the business, was of slight but dignified build, wearing an old hat, and an overcoat too short and tight for him. He smelled frankly of fish, which he loved to eat, and although he was missing a few teeth, his presence was not displeasing, because of an amiable manner curiously contrasted with mournful eyes. His voice, his lips, his wisp of beard, his bony fingers were animated, but give him a moment of repose and his mild blue eyes revealed a depth of sadness, a characteristic that put Leo a little at ease although the situation, for him, was inherently tense.
He at once informed Salzman why he had asked him to come, explaining that but for his parents, who had married comparatively late in life, he was alone in the world. He had for six years devoted
himself almost entirely to his studies, as a result of which, understandably, he had found himself without time for social life and the company of young women. Therefore he thought it the better part of trial and error—of embarrassing fumbling—to call in an experienced person to advise him on these matters. He remarked in passing that the function of the marriage broker was ancient and honorable, highly approved in the Jewish community, because it made practical the necessary without hindering joy. Moreover, his own parents had been brought together by a matchmaker. They had made, if not a financially profitable marriage—since neither had possessed any worldly goods to speak of—at least a successful one in the sense of their everlasting devotion to each other. Salzman listened in embarrassed surprise, sensing a sort of apology. Later, however, he experienced a glow of pride in his work, an emotion that had left him years ago, and he heartily approved of Finkle.
The two went to their business. Leo had led Salzman to the only clear place in the room, a table near a window that overlooked the lamp-lit city. He seated himself at the matchmaker’s side but facing him, attempting by an act of will to suppress the unpleasant tickle in his throat. Salzman eagerly unstrapped his portfolio and removed a loose rubber band from a thin packet of much-handled cards. As he flipped through them, a gesture and sound that physically hurt Leo, the student pretended not to see and gazed steadfastly out the window. Although it was still February, winter was on its last legs, signs of which he had for the first time in years begun to notice. He now observed the round white moon, moving high in the sky through a cloud menagerie, and watched with half-open mouth as it penetrated a huge hen, and dropped out of her like an egg laying itself. Salzman, though pretending through eyeglasses he had just slipped on to be engaged in scanning the writing on the cards, stole occasional glances at the young man’s distinguished face, noting with pleasure the long, severe scholar’s nose, brown eyes heavy with learning, sensitive yet ascetic lips, and a certain almost hollow quality of the dark cheeks. He gazed around at shelves upon shelves of books and let out a soft, contented sigh.
When Leo’s eyes fell upon the cards, he counted six spread out in Salzman’s hand.
“So few?” he asked in disappointment.
“You wouldn’t believe me how much cards I got in my office,” Salzman replied. “The drawers are already filled to the top, so I keep them now in a barrel, but is every girl good for a new rabbi?”
Leo blushed at this, regretting all he had revealed of himself in a curriculum vitae he had sent to Salzman. He had thought it best to acquaint him with his strict standards and specifications but, in having done so, felt he had told the marriage broker more than was absolutely necessary.
He hesitantly inquired, “Do you keep photographs of your clients on file?”
“First comes family, amount of dowry, also what kind promises,” Salzman replied, unbuttoning his tight coat and settling himself in the chair. “After comes pictures, rabbi.”
“Call me Mr. Finkle. I’m not yet a rabbi.”
Salzman said he would, but instead called him doctor, which he changed to rabbi when Leo was not listening too attentively.
Salzman adjusted his horn-rimmed spectacles, gently cleared his throat, and read in an eager voice the contents of the top card:
“Sophie P. Twenty-four years. Widow one year. No children. Educated high school and two years college. Father promises eight thousand dollars. Has wonderful wholesale business. Also real estate. On the mother’s side comes teachers, also one actor. Well known on Second Avenue.”
Leo gazed up in surprise. “Did you say a widow?”
“A widow don’t mean spoiled, rabbi. She lived with her husband maybe four months. He was a sick boy she made a mistake to marry him.”
“Marrying a widow has never entered my mind.”
“This is because you have no experience. A widow, especially if she is young and healthy like this girl, is a wonderful person to marry. She will be thankful to you the rest of her life. Believe me, if I was looking now for a bride, I would marry a widow.”
Leo reflected, then shook his head.
Salzman hunched his shoulders in an almost imperceptible gesture of disappointment. He placed the card down on the wooden table and began to read another:
“Lily H. High school teacher. Regular. Not a substitute. Has savings and new Dodge car. Lived in Paris one year. Father is successful dentist thirty-five years. Interested in professional man. Well-Americanized family. Wonderful opportunity.
“I know her personally,” said Salzman. “I wish you could see this girl. She is a doll. Also very intelligent. All day you could talk to her about books and theayter and whatnot. She also knows current events.”
“I don’t believe you mentioned her age?”
“Her age?” Salzman said, raising his brows. “Her age is thirty-two years.”
Leo said after a while, “I’m afraid that seems a little too old.”
Salzman let out a laugh. “So how old are you, rabbi?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“So what is the difference, tell me, between twenty-seven and thirty-two? My own wife is seven years older than me. So what did I suffer?—Nothing. If Rothschild’s a daughter wants to marry you, would you say on account her age, no?”
“Yes,” Leo said dryly.
Salzman shook off the no in the yes. “Five years don’t mean a thing. I give you my word that when you will live with her for one week you will forget her age. What does it mean five years—that she lived more and knows more than somebody who is younger? On this girl, God bless her, years are not wasted. Each one that it comes makes better the bargain.”
“What subject does she teach in high school?”
“Languages. If you heard the way she speaks French, you will think it is music. I am in the business twenty-five years, and I recommend her with my whole heart. Believe me, I know what I’m talking, rabbi.”
“What’s on the next card?” Leo said abruptly.
Salzman reluctantly turned up the third card:
“Ruth K. Nineteen years. Honor student. Father offers thirteen thousand cash to the right bridegroom. He is a medical doctor. Stomach specialist with marvelous practice. Brother-in-law owns own garment business. Particular people.”
Salzman looked as if he had read his trump card.
“Did you say nineteen?” Leo asked with interest.
“On the dot.”
“Is she attractive?” He blushed. “Pretty?”
Salzman kissed his fingertips. “A little doll. On this I give you my word. Let me call the father tonight and you will see what means pretty.”
But Leo was troubled. “You’re sure she’s that young?”
“This I am positive. The father will show you the birth certificate.”
“Are you positive there isn’t something wrong with her?” Leo insisted.
“Who says there is wrong?”
“I don’t understand why an American girl her age should go to a marriage broker.”
A smile spread over Salzman’s face.
“So for the same reason you went, she comes.”
Leo flushed. “I am pressed for time.”
Salzman, realizing he had been tactless, quickly explained. “The father came, not her. He wants she should have the best, so he looks around himself. When we will locate the right boy he will introduce him and encourage. This makes a better marriage than if a young girl without experience takes for herself. I don’t have to tell you this.”
“But don’t you think this young girl believes in love?” Leo spoke uneasily.
Salzman was about to guffaw but caught himself and said soberly, “Love comes with the right person, not before.”
Leo parted dry lips but did not speak. Noticing that Salzman had snatched a glance at the next card, he cleverly asked, “How is her health?”
“Perfect,” Salzman said, breathing with difficulty. “Of course, she is a little lame on her right foot from an auto accident that it happened to her when she was twelve years, but nobody notices on account she is so brilliant and also beautiful.”
Leo got up heavily and went to the window. He felt curiously bitter and upbraided himself for having called in the marriage broker. Finally, he shook his head.
“Why not?” Salzman persisted, the pitch of his voice rising.
“Because I detest stomach specialists.”
“So what do you care what is his business? After you marry her do you need him? Who says he must come every Friday night in your house?”
Ashamed of the way the talk was going, Leo dismissed Salzman, who went home with heavy, melancholy eyes.
Though he had felt only relief at the marriage broker’s departure, Leo was in low spirits the next day. He explained it as arising from Salzman’s failure to produce a suitable bride for him. He did not care for his type of clientele. But when Leo found himself hesitating whether to seek out another matchmaker, one more polished than Pinye, he wondered if it could be—his protestations to the contrary, and although he honored his father and mother—that he did not, in essence, care for the matchmaking institution? This thought he quickly put out of mind yet found himself still upset. All day he ran around in the woods—missed an important appointment, forgot to give out his laundry, walked out of
a Broadway cafeteria without paying and had to run back with the ticket in his hand; had even not recognized his landlady in the street when she passed with a friend and courteously called out, “A good evening to you, Dr. Finkle.” By nightfall, however, he had regained sufficient calm to sink his nose into a book and there found peace from his thoughts.
Almost at once there came a knock on the door. Before Leo could say enter, Salzman, commercial Cupid, was standing in the room. His face was gray and meager, his expression hungry, and he looked as if he would expire on his feet. Yet the marriage broker managed, by some trick of the muscles, to display a broad smile.
“So good evening. I am invited?”
Leo nodded, disturbed to see him again, yet unwilling to ask the man to leave.
Beaming still, Salzman laid his portfolio on the table. “Rabbi, I got for you tonight good news.”
“I’ve asked you not to call me rabbi. I’m still a student.”
“Your worries are finished. I have for you a first-class bride.”
“Leave me in peace concerning this subject.” Leo pretended lack of interest.
“The world will dance at your wedding.”
“Please, Mr. Salzman, no more.”
“But first must come back my strength,” Salzman said weakly. He fumbled with the portfolio straps and took out of the leather case an oily paper bag, from which he extracted a hard, seeded roll and a small smoked whitefish. With a quick motion of his hand he stripped the fish out of its skin and began ravenously to chew. “All day in a rush,” he muttered.
Leo watched him eat.
“A sliced tomato you have maybe?” Salzman hesitantly inquired.
“No.”
The marriage broker shut his eyes and ate. When he had finished he carefully cleaned up the crumbs and rolled up the remains of the fish, in the paper bag. His spectacled eyes roamed the room until he discovered, amid some piles of books, a one-burner gas stove. Lifting his hat he humbly asked, “A glass tea you got, rabbi?”
Conscience-stricken, Leo rose and brewed the tea. He served it with a chunk of lemon and two cubes of lump sugar, delighting Salzman.
After he had drunk his tea, Salzman’s strength and good spirits were restored.

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