In a city in the deep South, where my father lived when a young man, he would sometimes telephone a number which he knew would not be answered. In those days a “Central” operator handled calls. After some ringing, Central would report, “There is no answer.” My father would say, “That’s funny. There ought to be someone home. Are you ringing the right number? Central would try again. Again she would report no answer. My father would comment on how odd it was, Central would make some reply, and my father would hang up. There was no call he wanted to make. But at least he had spoken to the telephone operator. My father was very lonely when he lived in the South as a young man with his father and mother.
My father was handsome, with dark gleaming hair, large brown eyes, and a slight stoop, as if he were not quite sure of his step. He wore collars two sizes larger than he needed; he claimed they were more comfortable. He loved good leather, had a beautiful handwriting, and ate very heavily.
A few years later, the family moved to New York, where my father and grandfather opened another shoe store, such as they had had in the South. One day a young woman came in who caught my father’s interest. She was tall, straight-backed, pretty, and wore a proud expression. My father noticed that she seemed to be known in the store.
When she left, he asked about her and learned that her people were in business up the street; my grandfather knew them slightly.
In a short time the young people had met officially, gone out, and seemed suited to one another. A marriage was arranged by the older folks, and the engagement was announced. My father was happy.
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One night, three weeks before the wedding was to take place, my father came to see his fiancée and there were tears welling in his eyes. For over six years he had been in effect his father’s partner, sharing all the work and responsibility of their businesses. Now that he was to be married, he had asked his father to make the partnership clear and official. He had been refused, rather coldly.
His fiancée had something to tell him that night, too, and she was too inexperienced to withhold it for another time. She had been thinking their engagement over very carefully. She was not sure she liked the solemn young man with the dark eyes and the hesitant walk. There was something about the way he looked at her, too. She wanted to break the engagement.
My father fell upon his knees. The tears he had been holding back out of pride now formed fully and broke. How could she do it? he asked. Was he nothing to her? If she didn’t want him now, he had nowhere to turn; there was no future for him. He looked up at her, his face stained like a child’s. Please, please, please. She couldn’t desert him, he cried.
The sight of the man weeping this way unsettled the young woman; she had not expected such a reaction. She agreed to go ahead with the marriage, the way it had been planned. She was very sorry for him.
They had a two-weeks honeymoon on a farm near Kingston. When they returned, his wife’s father put him in touch with a man who wanted a partner for a new shoe store, and lent him the money to start with. My father worked hard and effectively, preparing the new store. His wife was pregnant.
The night I was born it rained, and the store had been open only a few hours. There was a totally unexpected demand for overshoes. Within a short time the entire stock of rubbers and galoshes had been sold out. My father came upstairs over the store to see my mother and the baby, and there was a happy light in his eye. The new store was going to be a success.
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Everything went well. Business was good, the stock increased, the loan was paid off. But there was one difficulty. My father found he didn’t like his partner; the man now appeared gross and vulgar to him. My father complained about him more and more, then suddenly told my mother he wanted to sell out. She was horror-stricken. “Leave a good business for him to grow rich in? You’re crazy,” she said.
“You don’t understand my feelings,” my father said. “A man like that—he gets on my nerves. Every day is torture. I can’t stay with him. Don’t ask me to do it. I just can’t.” In the end, my mother agreed. After all, it was man’s business.
Now he had more capital, and he opened a new store of his own. It thrived from the first. Another child was born. Of course, my mother spent most of her time in the store, and after the child was weaned, she began to help with the trade in busy hours. She was bright and had a way with people; she handled customers with greater and greater authority. In the back of the store, she cooked, fed the family, and talked business with my father. He ate alone; the children seemed to bother him. Little by little he began to turn over any especially difficult customers to my mother.
The number of difficult customers seemed to increase as the store prospered, and my father began to talk about it. There was too much bargaining, too much suspiciousness, too much loud talk in the store. It was the Jewish trade, he said. Gentile customers were not like that. What was the use of making a living if you weren’t happy in it? He thought of closing up, holding an auction, re-opening in a Gentile neighborhood.
This time my mother put up a battle. In their room, night after night, into the small hours, they argued about it. My father would plead with my mother not to make him continue with something he detested. My mother told him he had no right to detest. He had strange ideas. He was not like other men. He had talked it into himself, this trouble.
One day my father had to go downtown to see a wholesaler, and we walked to the trolley car with him. As he boarded it and the car moved off, my mother said, “Look at him, how he carries his head down in front of the conductor. He’s afraid of the whole world.” She looked disgusted.
The nightly arguments went on, and finally my mother suggested he spend a few weeks in the country. She would handle the store alone. He agreed, but in three days he was back. It had gotten on his nerves. He had been very lonely, and there was no telephone in the store. My mother’s resistance broke, and she agreed to the move. The auction was held.
The new store in the Gentile neighborhood failed within six months. My father lost all his capital. After a time he borrowed money, secured some credit for stock, and located a new store, in the Jewish section again. It would not be as grand as the other one, but with luck it would build. The night before it opened, we walked with him on the main street of the Jewish shopping area. “Ah, look at the lights, the crowds in the street,” he said. “There was nothing like that in the Gentile neighborhood.” My mother walked silently.
There were many debts to face in the new store, and my father, once a bankrupt, found it hard to handle his creditors. He shrank from asking for more time; he felt himself to be a poor risk; so he tried to pay and keep the business going at the same time. Soon we moved to a cheaper apartment. My mother got a little job selling for a relative. It did not help. The store closed.
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Eventually, he got a job in another shoe store. It was the first time he had worked for anyone except his father. One night he came home with his jaws set, his expression fierce. The story came. At first he seemed angry at us as he told it.
The boss had treated him as though he were a boy, ordering him to go down to the cellar during a slack period and carry up stock. A man who had had his own business, a man like him! His lips worked; his eyes grew moist.
My mother said, “You dig your own grave. Why do you take it so hard? You don’t like the job, ask around about another. Be like other men. Be like a man altogether. Don’t cry, do something.”
My father got up from the table, holding his head low, and went into the bedroom. We heard him put a chair against the door, under the knob, locking himself in.
Then, while he was out of a job, my father got a wonderful idea. He had noticed that when the trolley cars were crowded, the conductor, busy collecting fares, never knew when the last person had cleared the boarding step and it was safe to go ahead. Accidents could happen. It took a lot of the conductor’s time and delayed the car. Why not—here was his invention—have a sort of plate on the car step with an electrical connection to a big lamp in the car? While someone was still standing on the plate, the lamp would be lit and the conductor would know not to give the motorman the signal to go ahead. He explained it to my mother, watching her face. Her eyes fell. She said it might be a good idea, but what he needed was a job. My father got very angry at her.
Just a few weeks later, the first one-man trolley cars appeared on the streets, without any conductor at all. People got on and off at the front, where the motorman could see them. My father spoke about it. “I have no luck,” he said. “I’m not dumb, I can figure things out. I just have no luck.”
Now when my mother told my father what was wrong with him, he no longer argued with her; he seemed to agree. One Sunday morning, my mother woke me quite early. “Get dressed,” she said in a whisper, as if there were someone listening, “I want you to do something for me.” When I was ready, she gave me a slip of paper on which was written a nearby address. “Go see if Papa is there. If he is, tell him I said to come home with you.”
It was a furnished room. My father was there. When I gave him my mother’s words, he stood for a while thinking; then he placed a key carefully on the bed and left with me.
On the way home a strange thing happened. My father tried to talk to me. I was eleven, but we had never talked much. He had always been either busy with my mother, or locked up in the bedroom alone. Now, with sidelong glances at me as we walked along, he asked if I was having a good time at school. It seemed weird to talk of a good time that morning. He seemed weird to me too. I tried to produce a nice answer, but I couldn’t. He turned away from me and fell silent, looking straight ahead as he plodded up the street.
We all went to the movies that night, and everyone seemed happier. My father promised my mother that the very next day he would apply for a laundry driver’s job that had been advertised. But when we rose to go to school and my mother to go to work, he was still in bed; my mother put her fingers to her lips, and we tiptoed out.
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My father woke a little later, and, I suppose, noticed the time with surprise. When he looked around for my mother, she was gone. There was no coffee made, and he would have to cook it himself; he filled the pot with water, but although he took down half the cans and boxes in the pantry, he couldn’t find the coffee. She would be gone all day long. He sat down on the bed and reached for his socks. At the heel of the left there was a large hole that showed above the shoe. He threw it down and opened several drawers but there were no other socks. On the dresser there was the page of help-wanted ads, with the one for the laundry driver checked off. He went into the kitchen and began to walk around and around on the linoleum.
Downstairs the neighbors heard my father walking in a regular pattern around and around on the floor. There would be no one coming home; the children ate at school. He walked around and around. Then he took a decision. He picked up the Sunday papers and went into the little old-fashioned bathroom we had. He spread the papers on the floor. He locked the door tight. Then my father opened the gas jet, lay down on the floor, and died.
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