“But—” I began, then stopped, realizing that no matter what I said, it would only make things worse.
ONE DAY, returning from Whitcombe Park, I found my parents engaged in what even they would have been hard pressed to call a discussion. In fact, they were so involved in it that they seemed not to notice, or care, that I’d entered the room.
“Well then, you’re just going to have to return them unsigned,” my mother was saying. There was a thick sheaf of documents on the table between them. “I’m not risking this house, nor will I risk Lou’s college.”
For his part, my father looked like he had the morning when we returned Bobby Marconi to his father with his wrist broken. “So what do you want me to do, Tessa? If I don’t do this, what am I supposed to do?”
That slowed my mother down, but it didn’t stop her. “For a year I’ve been telling you this day was coming,” she said. “Over a year.”
“That ain’t what I’m saying,” he told her, even more hangdog now. “What I’m saying is, what’s a man like me supposed to do? It’s us I’m doing it for.”
This slowed her even more, though of course she wouldn’t give in. “But don’t you see, Lou? You keep saying it’s for us, and maybe you even believe that, but it’s not true. This is about you and your pride. It’s about being able to brag down at the diner, like you used to brag to Mr. Marconi, like you brag to everybody. What are you thinking, Lou? That you’re the first man to lose a job? You’ll find another. Losing a job doesn’t mean you go out and risk everything we’ve got left on a doomed corner market that’s really nothing more than a bookie joint.”
“I ain’t gonna make book over there, Tessa. You know I wouldn’t do that.”
My mother let out a gasp of pure exasperation, then let her head fall forward onto the kitchen table so hard that the salt and pepper shakers jumped. She let it rest there for several beats before finally raising it to look at him again. “Yes, Lou, I know you aren’t going to make book over there. I know that. But the fact is that the book’s the only part of Ikey’s business that’s worth anything. What do you think’s kept him in business this long?”
“You know how sick he’s been—”
“No, I don’t,” my mother interrupted. “Just because somebody says something doesn’t make it true, Lou. Don’t you know that? He’s been telling you he’s sick because he wants you to buy the store. He doesn’t want you to know the truth, which is that he’s not making a go of it because it can’t be done. Tommy Flynn’s been trying to sell his store for two years, and he’s got twice Ikey’s business. There used to be two dozen corner stores in Thomaston. More, probably. Now there’s six. What happened to them? The supermarkets. Can’t you see, Lou? Corner stores are going the way of milk in bottles.”
Even I would’ve known better than to say what my father said next. Worse still was the silence that stretched between them, until he finally said, “Milk’s better in bottles.”
Then, to my surprise, it was my mother who was crying. “Oh, Lou, Lou,” she sobbed. “Can’t you see it doesn’t matter what you think? People have decided. They want supermarkets. They want milk in cartons. Who cares which is better? When people want the wrong thing, they still want it. Usually they want the wrong thing more than the right thing. You’ve been outvoted.”
It was only then, when she put her head on her forearms and continued to cry, that my father finally acknowledged I was standing there. “I bought Ikey Lubin’s,” he explained, unnecessarily. I must’ve looked frightened, because he added, “I don’t want you to worry about it neither. I don’t want you to worry about nothing.”
LOOKING BACK, I think my father’s purchase of Ikey Lubin’s was a greater seismic event for our family than moving from Berman Court to the East End. Here again my mother and I remember things differently. As she recalls it, Ikey Lubin’s was just one more thing she had to resign herself to, one more circumstance over which she had neither control nor choice. My own recollection is that my father’s announcement set in motion a struggle that played itself out over many months, during which my mother was far from resigned. Right from the start she refused to enter the store, ever. What was done might be done, but she made it clear that Ikey’s was my father’s folly, not hers, and she wouldn’t dream of giving up her bookkeeping accounts. I was allowed to help out after school if I wanted to, on either Saturday or Sunday but not both. Yes, she’d do the books, but only if my father brought home the cash register receipts, vendors’ bills and other documents she’d need. Otherwise, he was on his own. That he should’ve taken such a step without consulting her was…she didn’t even know the word for it.
For many weeks my mother seemed to vacillate between depression and dark, inarticulate rage. In the grip of the first, it was as if she could see into the future and knew that what was marching inexorably toward us in the end couldn’t be prevented, or that she and my father would have to see things the same way and share the same fears, something they’d never done. Other times her grim, mute fatalism turned into fury, and she would fire angry questions at him, one after another. “What possessed you? What is wrong with you? Is it so difficult to just look at things, Lou, and see them for what they are? Why do you always have to…? Why must you be so…?”
Here words would fail her, and when they did, the rage would slowly leak away. My father never argued back, just stood there waiting—silent, patient, hangdog, shrugging his shoulders, as if all this was as mysterious to him as it was to her. Eventually it became clear to my mother that he didn’t intend to speak, ever again, if necessary. When I happened to be present, she’d study me, too, but if she expected me to take up my father’s argument, to give voice to whatever he couldn’t find words for, she was sorely mistaken. Then her eyes would fill and she’d look through the blinds at the darkening street outside, at Ikey Lubin’s across the intersection, as if the only way she could control her emotions was to pretend that we were no longer in the room with her.
I was always glad when her rage morphed into grief, because I couldn’t bear those despairing, unfinished questions. “Lou, Lou, why do you always have to…? Why must you be so…?” Try as I might, I couldn’t help feeling they were addressed as much to me as to my father. Didn’t we share the same name? Didn’t I always see things with the same optimism? Was I not, as Gabriel Mock Junior had pointed out, his spitting image? If something was wrong with him, wasn’t I equally to blame? Worse, I couldn’t banish the fear that someday she’d finish one of those why-do-you-always-have-to questions she was forever trying to articulate and that when she did it would mean the end of our family. It was as if she knew, too, knew full well, that what she was about to say had the power to atomize us, and getting halfway there was terrifying enough.
Buying Ikey Lubin’s had just as profound an effect on my father, whose life changed utterly as a result. Suddenly, for the first time in his adult life, he was no longer a route man. Accustomed to going out into the world armed with clear, simple duties, and with his own good nature as the primary tool of their implementation, he now had to stand still in one spot and trust that the world would come to him and also that, when it did, he’d have what was required. In the store he was like a man recently jailed without explanation and brutally interrogated on a subject of which he hadn’t the slightest knowledge. Trapped behind Ikey’s monster cash register, he bounced from one foot to the other, waiting for the next thing, whatever that might be. When a customer came in asking for something, he bolted from behind the counter like an escapee, sometimes doing two or three laps around the store before locating the item requested, then grimly returning to the register to ring up the sale and await his next fleeting liberation. Gone, he now realized, were the days he could stroll downtown for coffee and a doughnut at the Cayoga Diner or some joke swapping at the barbershop. He couldn’t even leave his post long enough to stroll down the block and offer advice to roofers or painters or plumbers when they showed up unexpectedly at the Spinnarkles’ next doo
r or at the Gunthers’. He had no choice but to wait for those men to come to him on their lunch hour—that is, assuming they didn’t buy their soda from Tommy Flynn’s cooler down the street. Many of Ikey’s regulars had, as expected, fallen away when they couldn’t bet their number or daily double, and that first month or so my father sometimes waited an hour or more between customers. Uncle Dec came in just once, looked around, met my father’s eye, shook his head and left without a word.
My parents had always argued over money, since no matter how hard they worked we came up short at the end of the month. My father wasn’t a spendthrift, but saving for a rainy day wasn’t in his nature. To his way of thinking, the sun was shining most of the time. My mother had inherited from her parents the exact opposite view. To her, a sunny day was a rarity. Tomorrow it would rain, and the only question was how hard. She didn’t think we’d need an ark necessarily, but she favored spending money only on what we really needed. She was willing to spend larger amounts if whatever it was would last, if she could be assured she wouldn’t have to buy it again next week. By contrast, my father had a great fondness for anything that sparkled, especially if it was cheap. If he went downtown with a pocket full of change, he’d spend a quarter here, a dime there and his last penny on a lemon drop, taking great pleasure in each tiny purchase. When it came to money, my mother maintained, he was like a tire with a slow leak; you couldn’t find it and wouldn’t even know it was there except that every third or fourth morning it was flat. Before Ikey Lubin’s their disagreements, however heated they were, always got resolved peacefully. Once they’d both calmed down, they convened at the kitchen table, a pad of paper and a sharp pencil between them, and she would show him the consequences of what he’d done or wanted to do. She was left-handed, my mother, and my father always sat to that side of her at the table, watching the numbers appear in columns on the pad. After a while, usually in the middle of some calculation, he’d take the pencil from her and set it on the table and put his hand on top of hers, where it would remain, sometimes for a whole minute, while they agreed to say nothing, until finally he’d grin, as if to say it didn’t really matter who was right, and give her back the pencil, which she always accepted with a sigh, as if to acknowledge that of course he was right, it didn’t matter at all. How many times did I witness this ritual during my boyhood? Even now I can feel the sweetness of those gestures, of my father first taking the pencil from her, then giving it back.
But Ikey’s was different. Sure, I knew my parents still loved each other, but what if they didn’t love each other enough? What if the store made my mother love my father less, and that “less” was no longer sufficient to hold us together? “Divorce,” an unheard-of word during much of my boyhood, was suddenly on everyone’s lips, as familiar as cancer. Families, it seemed, could be dissolved. The real reason the Mulroneys down the street were leaving Thomaston, it was whispered, wasn’t that he’d been offered a new job downstate but rather that he’d found a new woman in Amsterdam. My father’s purchase of Ikey Lubin’s brought home to me that my parents were now in a new conflict, that the stakes were higher, that the story of our family was being written without any guarantee of the happy ending I’d always taken for granted. My mother’s anger and fear might be as powerful as her affection for him and even for me. What was happening to other families might one day happen to ours.
Rather than contemplate any of this, I absented myself by spending as much time as possible at the store, where I knew my mother wouldn’t step foot. There I learned how to take deliveries, keep the storeroom organized and the dairy case rotated so the food in it wouldn’t spoil, stock shelves and operate the big cash register. With so little business at first, my father could have handled all these chores by himself, but he liked having me around. He seemed to know that right from the start I loved the store as much as he did—its dry, warm smell, its crowded, sloping shelves and the fact that it was ours, though we kept Ikey Lubin’s name to avoid having to spend money on a new sign. Strangely, with so much to worry about, I had fewer spells during this period, and never a single one when I was at Ikey’s.
When I wasn’t helping out at the store, I continued to explore on my bicycle, sometimes visiting Gabriel in Whitcombe Park, where I helped paint his fence and searched, without success, for the caves he insisted riddled the estate. That summer I also became a denizen of the Thomaston Free Library. Always a reader, I now borrowed six books every Saturday morning—the maximum allowable. At night I’d read until my mother made me turn out the light, then wake up early and read until it was time to bathe and eat breakfast and go to school. My father, who wasn’t a reader, regarded my voracious habit with wonder and pride. “You couldn’t hardly believe it,” he’d report to anybody who happened into the store and showed the slightest interest, “the books he read just last week. Not skinny ones neither.” If I happened to be there, he’d call me over and quiz me in front of his customers. “Tell ’em the books you read,” he’d say, and I’d proudly tick them off—books by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Sometimes the neighborhood men who congregated at Ikey’s would be suspicious and ask questions designed to trip me up, but I’d read the books and they hadn’t, so I had an unfair advantage. In the end they’d nod and agree that I’d done what I said, hard though it was to believe, and I’d bask in my achievement until the talk turned to baseball and stock-car racing.
My mother, true to her word, never ventured into the store, though she worked part of every Sunday on the books, shaking her head and rubbing her temples at my father’s way of doing things. It was immediately clear that she’d been right about the nature of the business. What Ikey Lubin had been was a bookie, and the exodus of so many regular customers unnerved my father, who kept up a brave front for a while, shrugging his shoulders and saying, “Business is bound to pick up,” to which my mother would reply, without looking up from the ledger, “Really, Lou? Why’s that?” She knew perfectly well he couldn’t explain why, because he had no idea. He was hoping it would, just as he was hoping she’d soon relent and take up the pencil and show him what he was doing wrong and how to do it differently. He’d already done what he shouldn’t have done in buying Ikey Lubin’s, and he’d done it without consulting her, knowing full well that if he had, she’d have advised him not to, probably forbidden it. What she was doing now was showing him the consequences of his behavior. He wanted to do things his way? Fine. He could just go on ahead and let her know how it all worked out. It was like she enjoyed watching him suffer.
What I didn’t understand at the time was her strategy, too, was doomed to failure. She couldn’t teach him this particular lesson, not really, for the simple reason that if he failed, we all failed. Even his suffering—and he did suffer, waiting for her to share her solution with him—was not his alone. Anxious for it to be over, we all became depressed. What was she waiting for, a sign from God? From my father himself? It seemed so to me, which was why I resented her so. Just as he was clearly waiting for her to tell him how to fix things, she appeared to be waiting for him to say some magic word, like the one that made the fake bird come down on the Groucho Marx show. He would say it, eventually, but it troubled me that I’d never know what that word was, because there were no bells and whistles, no descending bird.
Whatever the magic word was, it got said one Sunday afternoon a good two months later. He and I were sitting on the front porch while my mother worked on the market’s books inside, receipts and invoices spread out all over the kitchen table. I was reading while he sat on the top step, staring morosely at the store, which was closed, this being the Sabbath. When my mother finally came out on the porch, she sat down beside him holding open the ledger, but he just looked away. “I guess people like Tommy Flynn more than me,” he said with a sweeping gesture that took in the whole street.
“Oh, Lou,” my mother said, her voice less harsh than it had been of late. “Why do you have to be so…?” Her voice trailed of
f, like it always did. After a while, she tried again. “Look, it’s bad, but not the way you think. Tommy Flynn’s a little ferret. People like you lots better than Tommy.”
“Then how come they shop down to his store and not mine?”
My mother rubbed her temples. “Lou,” she said. “Try to understand. Tommy Flynn’s not your problem. The new A&P’s your problem. It’s going to bury you and Tommy Flynn in the same unmarked grave unless we can prevent it. Can’t you see that?”
He couldn’t. I could tell that much just by looking at him, though I wasn’t sure what she was driving at either.
“How we gonna compete with superdoop prices?” he said, using his word for all supermarkets. “They buy in quantity. The vendors don’t give us the same breaks.”
“I know that. You aren’t going to beat the A&P at what they do well, Lou. You’re never going to be big like they are. You’re never going to have wide aisles, and you won’t be able to offer people lots of choices. Your only chance is to beat them at what you do well.”
Suddenly, I found myself sitting up straight. I had no idea what we might be good at over at Ikey’s, and I could tell my father didn’t either, but he was listening carefully to find out, and so was I.
“You’re small, Lou. You’ve got to find out how to make small a good thing.”
My father glanced over at me. This was making sense to him, and he wondered if it was making sense to me, too. “How do we do that?”
I closed my book, got up from my porch chair and joined them on the steps and listened to my mother talk for the next hour. As she spoke, I found my anger at her leaking away. It occurred to me that what she’d been doing all these weeks, probably since the moment my father had announced his purchase, was figuring out how this foolish thing that he’d done could be made to work. In her initial fear she’d let it be known that the folly was his and his alone, but of course she’d known all along it wasn’t, and so, perhaps without admitting it, even to herself, she’d devised a plan that she was now, finally, ready to share.