In the morning, a steady stream of roofers, general contractors, handymen, painters and plumbers kept Morty busy straight through until eleven o’clock. Then a shabbily dressed Hispanic woman carrying a broken pane of glass trudged into the store and spoke with Abe in her native tongue. Her gaunt face smeared with a maze of wrinkles, the gnarled old woman could have been sixty or a hundred and sixty. “Cut Mrs. Lopes a replacement for her kitchen window and give her a lift back to Wickendon Street.” Abe handed him a plastic tub of glazing compound and a putty knife. “And while you’re there, you might as well install the new glass.”
Morty’s mouth fell open. “I know the family from the Literacy Center,” his uncle explained. “Husband died of lung cancer last year. She lives with a granddaughter. They can just barely afford the glass much less paying someone to fix it.”
“I wanted to talk to you about the legal problem.”
Abe waved a hand impatiently over his head. “When you get back. Go fix the window.”
Morty grabbed some additional tools and went out to the car with Mrs. Lopez bringing up the rear. He arranged the new glass in the bed of the trunk. “How did you get here?”
“Boat,” Mrs. Lopez replied.
“No, I don’t mean the country. How did you get to the hardware store this morning?”
They were cruising down Thayer Street in the direction of the East Side. “Walk.”
“You walked a mile and a half carrying a broken pane of glass?”
There was a long pause. The woman peered out the window with a relaxed, self-absorbed expression. “Senõr Lefkowitz mucho honest. I walk.”
The woman lived on the third floor of a wooden tenement that smelled of black beans and cilantro.. A half-eaten taco—homemade not the Taco Bell variety—sat on a plate by the sink.. Pulling on a pair of rawhide gloves, Morty cleaned the broken shards of glass from the window frame. Twenty minutes into fixing the window, a pudgy, round-faced woman came into the apartment. The granddaughter, who was carrying a Spanish paperback, said something to Mrs. Lopez who answered her in their native tongue then left the room with a load of laundry.
“You’re from the hardware store?” Her English was impeccable with barely the hint of an accent. Morty nodded. “Everybody knows Mr. Lefkowitz.” The girl, who looked to be in her early thirties, sat down at the kitchen table.
Now that Morty had all the broken glass dug from the window, he chipped away at the last few remnants of brittle putty then grabbed a small propane torch. The woman stared at him in disbelief. “It’s to soften the putty.” He ran the flame over the window frame briskly several times then scraped the last few remnants of debris away.
“What are those little shiny things?”
Morty held up a tiny, wedge-shaped piece of metal. “They’re called glaziers’ points.” With the flat blade of a screwdriver, he pushed one down into the wood snug against the new glass. “The stays hold the glass in place, while the putty is setting up.” He gestured at the book. “Lituma en los Andes. Is that Death in the Andes?”
The woman’s forehead furrowed. “You’ve read it?”
“Only in English translation.” Morty replied. “Llosa is a brilliant writer, but, unfortunately, the book’s a flawed masterpiece.” Now that the window frame was cleaned up, he repositioned the glass, securing the new pane in place with more of the metal glaziers’ points, which he pressed into the soft wood. “Unfortunately, the author tried to stretch what should have been a novella with a thin plot into two hundred pages.”
The young woman smiled engagingly and crossed her arms over her breasts. “Well, I’ve only finished the first chapter so I couldn’t argue the point even if I disagreed.” With her fleshy shoulders and thick torso, she was far more Rubenesque than the sort of woman someone might expect to find gracing the centerfold of a Victoria Secret lingerie catalog. But she had a modestly pretty face with a flat nose and limpid brown eyes.
Morty opened the can of glazing compound and rolled a pencil-thin snake between the palms of his hands. Jamming the putty into the upper corner of the window, he ran a triangular bead at a sharp angle the entire length, trimming the excess away with the opposite end of the tool. “You speak good English.”
“I came here from Guatemala as a little girl so English was never a problem.” She stared at him with an amused expression. “Do you usually install the glass?”
Morty finished shaping the bead around the top of the window and was working on the opposite side. “No, not as a rule.”
When the job was done, he packed up the tools.
“I’m finishing my degree in journalism at Brown,” the girl said.
“Well, then we have something in common. I studied comparative literature there.”
“But you work in a hardware store?”
He shrugged. “Things don’t always turn out the way we plan.” He washed his hands in the kitchen sink. “I didn’t catch your name.”
“Maria. Maria Escobar.”
“Morty Goldfarb.”
Mrs. Lopez, who had come back into the room a few minutes earlier, placed a twenty dollar bill on the table next to the tools. Morty took the bill and placed it back in the old woman’s hand. “No pay today. Free installation.”
“You nice people. Muchos gracias!”
Maria Escobar accompanied Morty down to the car. “That was very sweet of you.”
A group of college students sauntered by on their way to class. Morty watched the students until they were almost gone from sight. “Does the name Louisa Morales mean anything to you?” Maria shook her head. “My uncle got himself into a legal bind and I don’t know what to do.” He told her about the lawsuit and his disastrous visit to Garret, Myers and Morales.”
“What a shame!” She made a face. “Sexual harassment is the hot button issues on campus lately.”
“Every premenstrual, bra-burning feminist,” Morty noted, “with a chip on her shoulder will want Abe Lefkowitz’ head mounted on a stake.” He blew out his cheeks in frustration. “Even with a good lawyer, I don’t see how my uncle can get a fair deal.”
It didn’t matter if Abraham Lefkowitz was a leading advocate of woman’s rights, a philanthropist, lover of small children, bunny rabbits and baby ducks. Fling enough shit at a guileless individual and something foul was bound to stick. Afterwards, the person could spend the better part of a lifetime trying to undo the damage. “I shouldn’t be burdening you with our problems.” Morty turned the engine over and drove off.
When Morty got back, his uncle asked, “Did you fix Mrs. Lopez’ window?”
“Good as new.”
“She try to pay you?”
“Twenty dollars. I gave her back the money.”
“Good boy.” Abe Lefkowitz seldom charged any of the cash strapped customers full price on anything. When Morty challenged him on his pricing philosophy, he said, “I charge them what I think they can afford.”
“Then you should inflate the price when some grosser macher buys stuff.”
“That would be dishonest, and anyway, Mrs. Lopez is devoutly religious. A regular saint.”
“That so?” Morty scratched an earlobe thoughtfully. “How would you, an orthodox Jew, know about Mrs. Lopez’ religious habits?”
Abe slit open a cardboard box containing small containers of pumice and rottenstone. “I drive past Our Lady of Guadalupe Church every day on the way to work, and more often than not that woman is coming or going from the building.”
“Is that a fact?” Morty rubbed his chin. “How many Spanish speaking people do you figure you taught English since you started with the literacy program?”
“Hard to say. A couple hundred or so.”
“What other church do they attend?”
“There is no other church that caters to the Hispanics. They all go to Our Lady of Guadalupe.”
“What about the middle class.”
His uncle waved his hand impatiently. “The Mass is in their native tongue. They all g
o there.” He resumed sorting the polishing agents.
Morty couldn’t get the phantasmagoric image of Louisa Morales out of his brain. The voluptuous, dark-skinned goddess utterly lacking in the milk of human kindness. “We can’t put this off any longer. We have got to talk about the legal papers.”
“And I agree.” Abe Lefkowitz draped a hairy forearm around his favorite nephew’s shoulder and steered him into the cluttered office. Pushing him down in a chair, the older man rested his buttocks on the edge of the desk. Lifting the phone off the hook, he covered the receiver with a greasy towel. “I’m gonna talk and you’re gonna listen.”
The previous afternoon, while Morty was trying to match wits with Louisa Morales, Abe Lefkowitz went to the synagogue to pray over his latest misfortune. “I was reciting the Shma Yisrael Adoinoi Eluhainu, Adonoi achod, when suddenly my whole body went numb and I heard this voice.”
“What sort of voice?” Morty gawked at his uncle uncomprehendingly.
“God spoke to me. Here.” He pointed to his heart. “It was no different than Moses on Mount Sinai.”
“Moses got the Ten Commandments,” Morty wasn’t buying any of this nonsense. “What did you get?”
“God said not to worry. He would smite my persecutors, shame and humiliate them in the eyes of their own kind.”
Florence Catelli was suing them for ten thousand dollars plus legal expenses and Abraham Lefkowitz was hearing celestial voices from the cosmic beyond. “God intends to smite your persecutors?” Morty jumped up from the chair and began pacing the tiny office like a wild man. “What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
Morty rubbed his eyes with the spatulated tips of his fingers. There were times—floods, natural disasters, unavoidable human tragedy—when a soul required divine intervention, when nothing else but God’s personal solace could set things right in the universe. Other times you needed a hard nosed, take-no-prisoners lawyer. “Maybe,” Morty was clutching at straws, “you had a spiritual epiphany, an intimation of divine solace and -”
“He said no lawyers.”
“What?”
“The last thing God said was no lawyers. He would handle Florence Catelli on his own, divine terms.” The man’s features were suffuse with a radiant, ecstatic glow as Abraham Lefkowitz replaced the telephone on the hook and went back out to check on customers.
The rest of the afternoon flew by in an emotional blur. A friend from college stopped by the hardware store just before closing. “Did you here? Naomi Abraham’s getting married.”
“That so?” Morty was restocking the sandpaper bins. First an edict from God and now this! He felt dizzy, like he needed to barf his brains out or stumble off the curb in front of a fully loaded cement mixer.
“She went on a Club Med vacation and met this orthodontist. One month later the dentist, who is already set up with his own practice pops the question.”
Morty could feel his brain shutting down. “That’s nice.”
“Picture’s in the society section of today’s paper. I never seen her look so radiant!”
After his friend left, Morty hurried across the street and bought a copy of the Brandenberg Gazette. Yes, there she was. The future Naomi Skolnick. Lithe with curly brown hair, she was never particularly pretty, but the girl had a certain perkiness and haughty style that rendered her irresistible. Six weeks ago Morty Goldfarb and Naomi Abraham were living together. Now she was featured in the society section engaged to Myron Skolnick of Fort Pierce, Florida. Surprise! Surprise!
Naomi and Morty met in college. An elementary ed major from a wealthy family on Long Island, when she moved into his tidy apartment, the woman brought a truckload of designer clothes and shoes, a two thousand dollar Bose stereo system and flagrant disdain for everything middle class. “Time to replace these Stone Age relics,” Naomi pointed to the rabbit ears perched on top of the television.
“What did you have in mind?” Morty asked.
“I already put in a call to Direct TV. They’re installing a satellite dish a week from Tuesday.”
The sixty-dollar, TV antenna Naomi was consigning to the junk heap was a top-of-the-line Godar, the first rabbit ear antenna to incorporate a broadband 14-element inline log periodic. Morty had no idea what that meant, but the picture was always clear and he could pull stations all the way from Boston and even southern New Hampshire with little or no ghosting. But, of course, that wasn’t the issue. Naomi needed MTV, Bravo, CNN, and a dozen movie channels.
The following Tuesday, a white van sporting the Direct TV logo pulled up in front of the apartment building. An hour and a half later Morty was channel surfing through the various offerings, which didn’t look much different than what he originally had except now there was a monthly fee.
They were living together four months and Naomi said, “You earned a master’s degree in literature and could teach at the college level, but you waste your talent hawking masking tape and bug spray at a stupid hardware store. I don’t get it.”
Morty had worked for his uncle all through high school and college. When he graduated, with a degree in comparative literature, the family assumed the studious bookworm would apply for a teaching position. Instead, Morty meandered back to Lefkowitz Hardware.
Now they were being pummeled by the ‘big boxes’, the Home Depots, Lowes, Ace True Value, Benny’s plus a dozen-and-one other corporate chains that stayed open seven days a week, boasting fifty times the floor space plus every conceivable hardware gizmo known to man. “My uncle’s getting on in years. He can’t manage alone,” Morty replied evasively.
But that wasn’t the real reason. Academia, especially in the Ivy League, MFA programs, was a hot house for pontificating fools and scholastic snobs who penned highbrow literary criticism that even their own colleagues couldn’t penetrate. A lot of what passed for scholarship was little more than intellectual masturbation.
The previous day at Lefkowitz Hardware a young man cornered Morty over by the key machine. “I got to cut a hole in a piece of wood.”
A hole in a piece of wood—that was simple enough, right? Well, let’s see. The customer could use a spade drill bit or maybe he might prefer something a bit neater so he shells out a few extra bucks and purchase a Forstener, flat bottom with a self-centering spur. Or perhaps he opts for a set of hole saws with an interchangeable arbor. That will do the job and let the novice woodworker change diameters to suit the task. Or maybe all he really needed was a brad-tipped carbide model with a recessed shank? Of course, a jigsaw could do the job equally well.
Morty ultimately sold the man a one-inch spade bit. “What speed do you recommend on the drill press?”
“Step the belt down to around eight hundred rpm’s. Nothing over a thousand,” Morty counseled.
“And for these?” He pointed to a pair of standard, eighth-inch carbide bits.”
“Keep it up around three thousand; you’ll reduce drag and breakage.”
This was the real universe, the world of blue collar working stiffs. The university was too goddamn safe, too antiseptic and hygienic for Morty Goldfarb's gritty temperament. Truth be told, the six years at the university had been little more than an intellectual interlude, never an expedient means to an end.
One morning in late October, Naomi blocked the doorway as Morty was heading off to work. “I treasure you dearly but I also love this.” She pointed to a genuine alligator skin belt she had bought at the Chestnut Hill Mall. It wasn’t just the sixty-nine dollar belt. It was the Bose stereos, haute cuisine, Coach handbags - not the cheap knockoffs scruffy street venders hawked off 42nd street in New York City. It was a package deal. Naomi wanted the whole shebang and Morty Goldfarb, all around nice guy mensch, couldn’t deliver squat.
“I rented a place over by Federal Hill.” The girl kissed him on the side of the mouth. There was nothing angry or hurtful about the gesture. She had always been upfront about her material wants and needs. “I’ll be out of here by the we
ekend.”
Sensing his anguish, she wrapped her arms around him. “We had some fun together but it’s time to move on. Don’t hate me.” She pulled her head away from his chest and fixed him with the most angelic, if ever so slightly haughty, smile.
“Hate you?” Morty stumbled over the words. “I only wish ...” He couldn’t think of anything coherent to say and left the sentence dangling like another domestic loose end.
When all her belongings were gone, the apartment exuded a monkish austerity. Morty called the Direct TV company. “I’m canceling service. Come at your convenience and remove the dish.”
“Bill’s paid up through the end of next month,” the customer service representative explained. Why don’t you just enjoy the programming until then and we’ll shut it down?”
“Okay. That sounds reasonable.” As soon as he hung up, Morty rummaged about in the closet and located his Godar antenna with the broadband 14-element inline log periodic. He removed the satellite transmitter cable and connected the rabbit ears to the back of the television.
A week passed and then a month. Like a necrotic, suppurating wound, the pain in his heart was unbearable. Morty dropped by his parent’s house. “Naomi moved out. She left me.” He could have phrased it more delicately, finessed the break up into a matter of mutual consent, but why bother.
His mother burst into tears, dabbing her blotchy face with a soggy Kleenex. “From the day that darling girl came into your life I was hoping...”
“Yes, I know.”
His mother sighed and stared dully into space. “Abiker mama. Abiker knarr.,” she mumbled and put the water on for tea.
Eternal mother, eternal fool.
One Jewish mother can raise up ten sons,
but can ten sons lift even a single mother?
Mrs. Goldfarb hungered for grandchildren. Was it too much to ask? When Naomi Abraham came on the scene, it was tacitly understood that the enterprising, slightly pushy woman would straighten Morty out, get the ineffectual dreamer back on track. Morty wasn’t a bad sort. He just needed a firm shove in the right direction.