The Complete Stories (44 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: The Complete Stories
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“I’m sorry it happened,” she said.
“Don’t talk like it’s your fault.”
When I got out of the hospital my mother was dead. She was a wonderful person. My father died when I was thirteen and all by herself she kept the family alive and together. I sat shiva for a week and remembered how she sold paper bags on her pushcart. I remembered her life and what she tried to teach me. Nathan, she said, if you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you. Mama, I said, rest in peace on this subject. But if I do something you don’t like, remember, on earth
it’s harder than where you are. Then when my week of mourning was finished, one night I said, “Ornita, let’s get married. We’re both honest people and if you love me like I love you it won’t be such a bad time. If you don’t like New York I’ll sell out here and we’ll move someplace else. Maybe to San Francisco, where nobody knows us. I was there for a week in the Second War and I saw white and colored living together.”
“Nat,” she answered me, “I like you but I’d be afraid. My husband woulda killed me.”
“Your husband is dead.”
“Not in my memory.”
“In that case I’ll wait.”
“Do you know what it’d be like—I mean the life we could expect?”
“Ornita,” I said, “I’m the kind of a man, if he picks his own way of life he’s satisfied.”
“What about children? Were you looking forward to half-Jewish polka dots?”
“I was looking forward to children.”
“I can’t,” she said.
Can’t is can’t. I saw she was afraid and the best thing was not to push. Sometimes when we met she was so nervous that whatever we did she couldn’t enjoy it. At the same time I still thought I had a chance. We were together more and more. I got rid of my furnished room and she came to my apartment—I gave away Mama’s bed and bought a new one. She stayed with me all day on Sundays. When she wasn’t so nervous she was affectionate, and if I know what love is, I had it. We went out a couple of times a week, the same way—usually I met her in Times Square and sent her home in a taxi, but I talked more about marriage and she talked less against it. One night she told me she was still trying to convince herself but she was almost convinced. I took an inventory of my liquor stock so I could put the store up for sale.
Ornita knew what I was doing. One day she quit her job, the next she took it back. She also went away a week to visit her sister in Philadelphia for a little rest. She came back tired but said maybe. Maybe is maybe so I’ll wait. The way she said it, it was closer to yes. That was the winter two years ago. When she was in Philadelphia I called up a friend of mine from the army, now a CPA, and told him I would appreciate an invitation for an evening. He knew why. His wife said yes right away. When Ornita came back we went there. The wife made a fine dinner. It wasn’t a bad time and they told us to come again. Ornita had a few drinks. She looked relaxed, wonderful. Later, because of a twenty-four-hour
taxi strike I had to take her home on the subway. When we got to the 116th Street station she told me to go back on the train, and she would walk the couple of blocks to her house. I didn’t like a woman walking alone on the streets at that time of the night. She said she never had any trouble but I insisted nothing doing. I said I would walk to her stoop with her and when she went upstairs I would go to the subway.
On the way there, on 115th in the middle of the block before Lenox, we were stopped by three men—maybe they were boys. One had a black hat with a half-inch brim, one a green cloth hat, and the third wore a black leather cap. The green hat was wearing a short coat and the other two had long ones. It was under a streetlight but the leather cap snapped a six-inch switchblade open in the light.
“What you doin with this white son of a bitch?” he said to Ornita.
“I’m minding my own business,” she answered him, “and I wish you would too.”
“Boys,” I said, “we’re all brothers. I’m a reliable merchant in the neighborhood. This young lady is my dear friend. We don’t want any trouble. Please let us pass.”
“You talk like a Jew landlord,” said the green hat. “Fifty a week for a single room.”
“No charge fo the rats,” said the half-inch brim.
“Believe me, I’m no landlord. My store is Nathan’s Liquors between Hundred Tenth and Eleventh. I also have two colored clerks, Mason and Jimmy, and they will tell you I pay good wages as well as I give discounts to certain customers.”
“Shut your mouth, Jewboy,” said the leather cap, and he moved the knife back and forth in front of my coat button. “No more black pussy for you.”
“Speak with respect about this lady, please.”
I got slapped on my mouth.
“That ain’t no lady,” said the long face in the half-inch brim, “that’s black pussy. She deserve to have evvy bit of her hair shave off. How you like to have evvy bit of your hair shave off, black pussy?”
“Please leave me and this gentleman alone or I’m gonna scream long and loud. That’s my house three doors down.”
They slapped her. I never heard such a scream. Like her husband was falling fifteen stories.
I hit the one that slapped her and the next I knew I was laying in the gutter with a pain in my head. I thought, Goodbye, Nat, they’ll stab me for sure, but all they did was take my wallet and run in three directions.
Ornita walked back with me to the subway and she wouldn’t let me go home with her again.
“Just get home safely.”
She looked terrible. Her face was gray and I still remembered her scream. It was a terrible winter night, very cold February, and it took me an hour and ten minutes to get home. I felt bad for leaving her but what could I do?
We had a date downtown the next night but she didn’t show up, the first time.
In the morning I called her in her place of business.
“For God’s sake, Ornita, if we got married and moved away we wouldn’t have the kind of trouble that we had. We wouldn’t come in that neighborhood anymore.”
“Yes, we would. I have family there and don’t want to move anyplace else. The truth of it is I can’t marry you, Nat. I got troubles enough of my own.”
“I coulda sworn you love me.”
“Maybe I do but I can’t marry you.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“I got enough trouble of my own.”
I went that night in a cab to her brother’s house to see her. He was a quiet man with a thin mustache. “She gone,” he said, “left for a long visit to some close relatives in the South. She said to tell you she appreciate your intentions but didn’t think it will work out.”
“Thank you kindly,” I said.
Don’t ask me how I got home.
Once, on Eighth Avenue, a couple of blocks from my store, I saw a blind man with a white cane tapping on the sidewalk. I figured we were going in the same direction so I took his arm.
“I can tell you’re white,” he said.
A heavy colored woman with a full shopping bag rushed after us.
“Never mind,” she said, “I know where he live.”
She pushed me with her shoulder and I hurt my leg on the fire hydrant.
That’s how it is. I give my heart and they kick me in my teeth.
“Charity Quietness—you hear me?—come out of that goddamn toilet!”
1963
F
idelman listlessly doodled all over a sheet of yellow paper. Odd indecipherable designs, ink-spotted blotched words, esoteric ideographs, tormented figures in a steaming sulfurous lake, including a stylish nude rising newborn from the water. Not bad at all, though more mannequin than Knidean Aphrodite. Scarpio, sharp-nosed on the former art student’s gaunt left, looking up from his cards inspected her with his good eye.
“Not bad, who is she?”
“Nobody I really know.”
“You must be hard up.”
“It happens in art.”
“Quiet,” rumbled Angelo, the padrone, on Fidelman’s fat right, his two-chinned face molded in lard. He flipped the top card.
Scarpio then turned up a deuce, making eight and a half and out. He cursed his Sainted Mother, Angelo wheezing. Fidelman showed four and his last hundred lire. He picked a cautious ace and sighed. Angelo, with seven showing, chose that passionate moment to get up and relieve himself.
“Wait for me,” he ordered. “Watch the money, Scarpio.”
“Who’s that hanging?” Scarpio pointed to a long-coated figure loosely dangling from a gallows rope amid Fidelman’s other drawings.
Who but Susskind, surely, a figure out of the far-off past.
“Just a friend.”
“Which one?”
“Nobody you know.”
“It better not be.”
Scarpio picked up the yellow paper for a closer squint.
“But whose head?” he asked with interest. A long-nosed severed head bounced down the steps of the guillotine platform.
A man’s head or his sex? Fidelman wondered. In either case a terrible wound.
“Looks a little like mine,” he confessed. “At least the long jaw.”
Scarpio pointed to a street scene. In front of American Express here’s this starving white Negro pursued by a hooting mob of cowboys on horses.
Embarrassed by the recent past Fidelman blushed.
It was long after midnight. They sat motionless in Angelo’s stuffy office, a small lit bulb hanging down over a square wooden table on which lay a pack of puffy cards, Fidelman’s naked hundred-lire note, and a green bottle of Munich beer that the padrone of the Hotel du Ville, Milano, swilled from, between hands or games. Scarpio, his majordomo and secretary-lover, sipped an espresso, and Fidelman only watched, being without privileges. Each night they played sette e mezzo, jeenrummy, or baccarat and Fidelman lost the day’s earnings, the few meager tips he had garnered from the whores for little services rendered. Angelo said nothing and took all.
Scarpio, snickering, understood the street scene. Fidelman, adrift penniless in the stony gray Milanese streets, had picked his first pocket, of an American tourist staring into a store window. The Texan, feeling the tug, and missing his wallet, had bellowed murder. A carabiniere looked wildly at Fidelman, who broke into a run, another well-dressed carabiniere on a horse clattering after him down the street, waving his sword. Angelo, cleaning his fingernails with his penknife in front of his hotel, saw Fidelman coming and ducked him around a corner, through a cellar door, into the Hotel du Ville, a joint for prostitutes who split their fees with the padrone for the use of a room. Angelo registered the former art student, gave him a tiny dark room, and, pointing a gun, relieved him of his passport, recently renewed, and the contents of the Texan’s wallet. He warned him that if he so much as peeped to anybody, he would at once report him to the questura, where his brother presided, as a dangerous alien thief. The former art student, desperate to escape, needed money to travel, so he sneaked into Angelo’s room one morning and, from the strapped suitcase under the bed, extracted fistfuls of lire, stuffing all his pockets. Scarpio, happening in, caught him at it and held a pointed dagger to
Fidelman’s ribs—who fruitlessly pleaded they could both make a living from the suitcase—until the padrone appeared.
“A hunchback is straight only in the grave.” Angelo slapped Fidelman’s face first with one fat hand, then with the other, till it turned red and the tears freely flowed. He chained him to the bed in his room for a week. When Fidelman promised to behave he was released and appointed “mastro delle latrine,” having to clean thirty toilets every day with a stiff brush, for room and board. He also assisted Teresa, the asthmatic, hairy-legged chambermaid, and ran errands for the whores. The former art student hoped to escape but the portiere or his assistant was at the door twenty-four hours a day. And thanks to the card games and his impassioned gambling Fidelman was without sufficient funds to go anywhere, if there was anywhere to go. And without a passport, so he stayed put.
Scarpio secretly felt Fidelman’s thigh.
“Let go or I’ll tell the padrone.”
Angelo returned and flipped up a card. Queen. Seven and a half on the button. He pocketed Fidelman’s last hundred lire.
“Go to bed,” Angelo commanded. “It’s a long day tomorrow.”
Fidelman climbed up to his room on the fifth floor and stared out the window into the dark street to see how far down was death. Too far, so he undressed for bed. He looked every night and sometimes during the day. Teresa, screaming, had once held on to both his legs as Fidelman dangled half out of the window until one of the girls’ naked customers, a barrel-chested man, rushed into the room and dragged him back in. Sometimes Fidelman wept in his sleep.
 
 
He awoke, cringing. Angelo and Scarpio had entered his room but nobody hit him.
“Search anywhere,” he offered, “you won’t find anything except maybe half a stale pastry.”
“Shut up,” said Angelo. “We came to make a proposition.”
Fidelman slowly sat up. Scarpio produced the yellow sheet he had doodled on. “We notice you draw.” He pointed a dirty fingernail at the nude figure.
“After a fashion,” Fidelman said modestly. “I doodle and see what happens.”
“Could you copy a painting?”
“What sort of painting?”
“A nude. Tiziano’s ‘Venus of Urbino.’ The one after Giorgione.”
“That one,” said Fidelman, thinking. “I doubt that I could.”
“Any fool can.”
“Shut up, Scarpio,” Angelo said. He sat his bulk at the foot of Fidelman’s narrow bed. Scarpio, with his good eye, moodily inspected the cheerless view from the window.
“On Isola Bella in Lago Maggiore, about an hour from here,” said Angelo, “there’s a small castello full of lousy paintings, except for one which is a genuine Tiziano, authenticated by three art experts, including a brother-in-law of mine. It’s worth half a million dollars but the owner is richer than Olivetti and won’t sell though an American museum is breaking its head to get it.”
“Very interesting,” Fidelman said.
“Exactly,” said Angelo. “Anyway, it’s insured for at least $400,000. Of course if anyone stole it it would be impossible to sell.”
“Then why bother?”
“Bother what?”
“Whatever it is,” Fidelman said lamely.
“You’ll learn more by listening,” Angelo said. “Suppose it was stolen and held for ransom. What do you think of that?”
“Ransom?” said Fidelman.
“Ransom,” Scarpio said from the window.
“At least $300,000,” said Angelo. “It would be a bargain for the insurance company. They’d save a hundred thousand on the deal.”
He outlined a plan. They had photographed the Titian on both sides, from all angles and several distances, and had collected from art books the best color plates. They also had the exact measurements of the canvas and every figure on it. If Fidelman could make a decent copy they would duplicate the frame and on a dark night sneak the reproduction into the castello gallery and exit with the original. The guards were stupid, and the advantage of the plan—instead of just slitting the canvas out of its frame—was that nobody would recognize the substitution for days, possibly longer. In the meantime they would row the picture across the lake and truck it out of the country down to the French Riviera. The Italian police had fantastic luck in recovering stolen paintings; one had a better chance in France. Once the picture was securely hidden, Angelo back at the hotel, Scarpio would get in touch with the insurance company. Imagine the sensation! Recognizing the brilliance of the execution, the company would have to kick in with the ransom money.
“If you make a good copy, you’ll get yours,” said Angelo.
“Mine? What would that be?” Fidelman asked.
“Your passport,” Angelo said cagily. “Plus two hundred dollars in cash and a quick goodbye.”
“Five hundred dollars,” said Fidelman.
“Scarpio,” said the padrone patiently, “show him what you have in your pants.”
Scarpio unbuttoned his jacket and drew a long mean-looking dagger from a sheath under his belt. Fidelman, without trying, could feel the cold blade sinking into his ribs.
“Three fifty,” he said. “I’ll need plane fare.”
“Three fifty,” said Angelo. “Payable when you deliver the finished reproduction.”
“And you pay for all supplies?”
“I pay all expenses within reason. But if you try any monkey tricks—snitch or double cross—you’ll wake up with your head gone, or something worse.”
“Tell me,” Fidelman asked after a minute of contemplation, “what if I turn down the proposition? I mean in a friendly way?”
Angelo rose sternly from the creaking bed. “Then you’ll stay here for the rest of your life. When you leave you leave in a coffin, very cheap wood.”
“I see,” said Fidelman.
“What do you say?”
“What more can I say?”
“Then it’s settled,” said Angelo.
“Take the morning off,” said Scarpio.
“Thanks,” Fidelman said.
Angelo glared. “First finish the toilet bowls.”
 
 
Am I worthy? Fidelman thought. Can I do it? Do I dare? He had these and other doubts, felt melancholy, and wasted time.
Angelo one morning called him into his office. “Have a Munich beer.”
“No, thanks.”
“Cordial?”
“Nothing now.”
“What’s the matter with you? You look like you buried your mother.”
Fidelman set down his mop and pail with a sigh and said nothing.
“Why don’t you put those things away and get started?” the padrone asked. “I’ve had the portiere move six trunks and some broken furniture out of the storeroom where you have two big windows. Scarpio
wheeled in an easel and he’s bought you brushes, colors, and whatever else you need.”
“It’s west light, not very even.”
Angelo shrugged. “It’s the best I can do. This is our season and I can’t spare any rooms. If you’d rather work at night we can set up some lamps. It’s a waste of electricity but I’ll make that concession to your temperament if you work fast and produce the goods.”
“What’s more I don’t know the first thing about forging paintings,” Fidelman said. “All I might do is just about copy the picture.”
“That’s all we ask. Leave the technical business to us. First do a decent drawing. When you’re ready to paint I’ll get you a piece of sixteenth-century Belgian linen that’s been scraped clean of a former picture. You prime it with white lead and when it’s dry you sketch. Once you finish the nude, Scarpio and I will bake it, put in the cracks, and age them with soot. We’ll even stipple in fly spots before we varnish and glue. We’ll do what’s necessary. There are books on this subject and Scarpio reads like a demon. It isn’t as complicated as you think.”
“What about the truth of the colors?”
“I’ll mix them for you. I’ve made a life study of Tiziano’s work.”
“Really?”
“Of course.”
But Fidelman’s eyes still looked unhappy.
“What’s eating you now?” the padrone asked.
“It’s stealing another painter’s ideas and work.”
The padrone wheezed. “Tiziano will forgive you. Didn’t he steal the figure of the Urbino from Giorgione? Didn’t Rubens steal the Andrian nude from Tiziano? Art steals and so does everybody. You stole a wallet and tried to steal my lire. It’s the way of the world. We’re only human.”
“Isn’t it sort of a desecration?”
“Everybody desecrates. We live off the dead and they live off us. Take for instance religion.”
“I don’t think I can do it without seeing the original,” Fidelman said. “The color plates you gave me aren’t true.”
“Neither is the original anymore. You don’t think Rembrandt painted in those sfumato browns? As for painting the Venus, you’ll have to do the job here. If you copied it in the castello gallery one of those cretin guards might remember your face and the next thing you know you’d have trouble. So would we, probably, and we naturally wouldn’t want that.”
“I still ought to see it,” Fidelman said obstinately.

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