Evergreen

  The father was ashamed too of the dirt. He hated it. From him Joseph knew he had inherited his extreme love of cleanliness and order. For a man to love those things in a place where there was little cleanliness and no order!

  They used to go to the baths together once a week, Pa and Joseph. In a way the child dreaded it, the smell of the steam and the press of naked men. How ugly old bodies were! And yet, in another way, it was the only time they ever talked together, really talked, there in the steam and later on the five blocks’ walk home.

  Sometimes he was subjected to homilies: “Do right, Joseph. Every man knows what right is and he knows too when he has done something dishonest or unjust. He may tell others and himself that he doesn’t know, but he does know. Do right and life will reward you.”

  “But sometimes wicked people are rewarded too, aren’t they, Pa?”

  “Not really. It may seem so on the surface, but not really.”

  “What about the Czar? How cruel he is, and yet he lives in a palace!”

  “Ah, but he hasn’t lived his life out yet!”

  Joseph considered that doubtfully. His father said with firmness, “When you do wrong, you pay. Maybe not right away, but you always pay.” And then he said, “Would you like a banana? I’ve a penny here, and you can buy two at the corner. One for your mother.”

  “What about you, Pa?”

  “I don’t like bananas,” his father lied.

  When Joseph was ten Pa’s sight went bad. First he had to hold the paper very far away. Then after a while he wasn’t able to read it at all. Joseph’s mother had never learned to read. In the Old Country it wasn’t essential for a girl to learn, although some did, of course. So Joseph had to read the paper in the evening, because his father wanted to know what was going on in the world. But it was difficult; Joseph didn’t read Yiddish very well and he knew his father wasn’t satisfied.

  For a while Pa had struggled on in the tailoring shop, hunching lower and lower in the yellow flame from the gaslight, for even at noon the daylight was shut out by the fire escapes outside the window. When it was evident that he could work no more they had closed the shop and his mother became the unacknowledged breadwinner.

  The store was the square “front room,” with the counter running across the back and the large brown icebox standing at one side. In the two rear rooms separated by a dark green cloth curtain, they lived, their arrangements the same as they had been in the tailor shop two blocks away. The kitchen table was covered with oilcloth once blue, now a spoiled gray. Here they ate and here his mother made the potato salad and the coleslaw that went into the brown refrigerator in the store along with the soda bottles and the milk. Bread was stacked on the counter; coffee, sugar and spices stood on the shelves; crackers and candy were in boxes and barrels on the floor, along with the pickles floating in their scummy brine. A bell jangled when the door was opened. In the summer you didn’t hear the bell because the screen door’s spring was broken. His father never knew how to fix anything, so the door hung open. Curving bands of yellow flypaper hung from the ceiling fixture, and huge black flies collected on it, disgusting flies, black and wet when they were squashed, bred in the horsedroppings on the street.… Strange that his father, who was so fastidious, didn’t seem to mind them, Joseph thought, until he realized that the old man didn’t see them.

  From six o’clock in the morning until ten at night his mother stood behind the counter. Not that they were so busy; it was just that one never knew when someone might come in to buy. Sometimes the jangling bell would ring past ten at night.

  “Oh, Mrs. Friedman, I saw the light, I hope it’s not too late. We’re out of coffee.”

  For the neighborhood it was a convenience, a place where one could go at odd hours to pick up something one had forgotten, after the markets had closed and the pushcarts were covered with tarpaulins and guarded for the night. A small convenience. A small living.

  “Max Friedman,” read the sign above the door. It should have read, “Katie Friedman.” Even at the age of ten Joseph was able to understand the tragedy in that.

  He had a snapshot of himself sitting in front of the store, the first picture taken of him since his infant portrait when he lay naked on the photographer’s fur rug. He was twelve years old, in knickers and cap, high shoes and long black stockings.

  “How solemn you were!” Anna said when she saw it. “You look as though you had the weight of the world on your shoulders.”

  Not the weight of the world, but a great one, nevertheless. For that was the year when he went from childhood to adult knowledge in one night. Well, make it two or three nights, at the most.

  Wolf Harris came into the store one day where Joseph was helping after school. He was some very remote relative of Solly’s on the other side of Solly’s family. He was eighteen and aptly named. His nose was thin; his large mouth was always drawn back in a scornful smile.

  “Want to make some money, kid? Mr. Doyle wants a kid to run messages for him.”

  “Doyle?” Pa had come from his chair next to the stove. “Why should Mr. Doyle need my son?”

  “Because. He needs a boy he can trust to deliver stuff on time, not to lose things. He’ll give him a dollar and a half a week to come in after school every day.”

  A dollar and a half! But Doyle was rich, Doyle was from Tammany Hall. He was Power, Government, Authority. Nobody knew exactly what he did, but they did know you could go to him for anything. He had no prejudice. Astonishing America, where the government didn’t care whether you were Chinese, Hungarian or Jewish! If you needed money for a funeral or a ton of coal or somebody in the family was in trouble, you could ask Doyle and he would take care of it. All you had to do in return was to mark the square he told you to mark on election day.

  Pa went inside and Joseph heard his parents talking for a minute or two. Then Pa came back.

  “Tell Mr. Doyle,” he said to Wolf, “that my son will be happy to work for him and we thank him, his mother and I.”

  Doyle had a dignified office near Tammany Hall on Fourteenth Street. Every day after school Joseph went over through the front room where a row of girls sat at their typing machines and down the corridor to the back where he knocked and was admitted. Doyle was bald and ruddy. He had a stickpin in his tie and a ring on his finger which Wolf said was a real sapphire, “worth a fortune.” He liked to joke. He would offer Joseph a cigar or pretend to hand him a coin: “Go down to Tooey’s Bar and get yourself a beer.” And then he would always give a treat, an apple or a chocolate bar, before sending him on his errands.

  Doyle owned a lot of property. He owned two houses on the street where Joseph lived, as a matter of fact. Sometimes Joseph had to deliver papers to plumbers or tinsmiths and others having to do with Doyle’s houses. Sometimes he had to take envelopes to saloons, or pick up papers there that felt thick, as though there might be money inside. He learned to go right in at the front door and ask for the proprietor, who was usually behind the bar, behind the bar with the glittering bottles and the painting of a naked lady. The first time he saw a painting like that his eyes almost popped out. The men at the bar saw what he was looking at and thought it was very funny. They told jokes that he didn’t understand, and he felt uncomfortable. But it was worth it. A dollar and a half! Just for walking around the city carrying envelopes!

  One day Mr. Doyle asked to see his handwriting. He got a sheet of paper and said, “Now, write something, anything, I don’t care what.”

  When Joseph had written very neatly, Joseph Friedman, Ludlow Street, New York, United States of America, Western Hemisphere, World, Universe, Doyle took the paper away and said, “Very nice, very nice … how are you on arithmetic?”

  “It’s my best subject.”

  “Is it, now! Well, what do you know! How would you like to do a bit of writing and arithmetic for me? Would you like that, you think?”

  And as Joseph looked puzzled, he said, “Here, I’ll show you. See these two ledgers? Brand new,
nothing written in them? I’ll show you what I want. I want you to copy down in these from the lists that I’ll give you. See here, a list like this, with names and doll—numbers, never mind what it’s for, you don’t need to go into all that.… Just copy all the names in this ledger with these numbers, see? And then put the same names in the other ledger with these other numbers, see? Think you can do it?”

  “Oh, sure, sir, I can do it. That’s easy.”

  “It’s important to be accurate, you understand. Take your time. I don’t want any mistakes.”

  “Oh, no, sir, I won’t make any mistakes.”

  “Good. So that’s what you’ll be doing from now on. You’ll work at the desk all by yourself in that little room next to mine, and nobody’ll brother you. When you’re finished you’ll hand the ledgers back to me. And Joseph, one other thing. You’re a good religious boy, aren’t you? I mean, you go to synagogue regularly, don’t tell lies?”

  “No, sir, I mean yes, sir, and I don’t tell lies.”

  “You know God punishes you when you do wrong.”

  “That’s what Pa says.”

  “Of course. Then I can depend on you to keep your word. Never to talk about what you write in the books. Never to mention the books to anybody at all. It’s just between you and me. Government business, you understand.”

  Doyle was very pleased with him. Wolf told him so. And one day when Doyle was in the neighborhood he came into the store and talked to his parents.

  “Your son’s a very smart boy. Dependable, too. A lot of kids, you can’t count on them. They say they’ll come to work, then they go play ball or loaf around and forget.”

  “Joseph’s a good boy,” Pa said.

  “What do you plan to do with him? What’s he going to be?”

  His father shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s young yet. He should stay in school, maybe go to college. But we have no money.”

  “He’d make a topnotch accountant. And there’s always money around for a smart boy like him. When the time comes, I’ll see that he gets a chance. He could go to N.Y.U. Just tell him to stick with me.”

  “Could be only nice talk,” his mother remarked that evening. “To make the parents feel good, telling them what a fine boy they have.”

  But Wolf said otherwise. “He thinks a lot of you, he means it. He wants you to study accounting. He can do it, too. He can get anything done, lay his hands on money whenever he needs it.”

  Joseph was curious about what Wolf did for Doyle. There were always so many people around Doyle, you could never figure out what they all did. Some were connected with the police and fire departments, others had to do with building inspections or the courts, with Doyle’s real estate or with elections, a maze of businesses and interests. Wolf lived with an older brother; he always wore good clothes and had cash in his pocket. But you would never ask Wolf about anything personal. There was a distance between him and you. It was hard to say why; there was just something that put you at a distance.

  Joseph had a best friend, Benjie Baumgarten. They walked to school together and back, went to the synagogue on the Sabbath and sat together and confided everything in one another. Benjie was curious about Wolf and Doyle.

  “What do you do for him?” he pressed.

  “Run errands. And write records.”

  “What sort of errands? And what do you write?”

  “It’s confidential. Business,” Joseph said importantly.

  “Oh, you dumb ass! Sure, private business with the Governor, I’ll bet. Or the President, maybe.”

  “No, really.” Benjie was envious, of course. Joseph could afford to be tolerant, lofty. “I’d tell you if I could, but I promised. You wouldn’t want me to break a promise to you, would you?”

  “No …”

  They were crouched on the cellar stairs in number eleven, an abandoned building down the street from Joseph’s house. The house had been condemned and the tenants had all moved out, except for some tramps, who, everybody knew, slept in the basement to get out of the cold.

  Benjie had brought a plug of chewing tobacco which they were trying for the first time. This was a good place to avoid being seen.

  “The sign says keep out—penalty of the law,” Benjie said. “What’ll happen if the owner catches us?”

  “Nothing. Mr. Doyle is the owner, if you want to know. Well, a part-owner anyway. He wouldn’t mind.” Joseph felt important.

  So they were hiding under the stairs, feeling faintly nauseated and neither one willing to admit it to the other, when the door in the yard creaked open and a wedge of late afternoon light appeared. Wolf Harris came in, carrying a can.

  They drew back, making no sound. The can was filled with some liquid, which Wolf poured out as he moved around among the empty boxes, piled newspapers and broken baby carriages. When he had emptied the can he went softly out and closed the door. The fumes of kerosene rose up the staircase.

  “Now why do you suppose he did that?” Benjie whispered. “I’m going out to ask him.”

  “You shut up!”

  “Why should I!”

  “Because. Wolf told me never to talk to him unless he talked to me first. Not to speak to him on the street, especially when he was with somebody else.”

  “That’s funny. I wonder why?”

  “I never asked him.”

  “You scared of him?”

  “Yeah, a little.”

  “He’s got a fierce temper, Wolf has. Once I saw him beat up a guy and break his nose. The blood came like water out of a pump.”

  “You never told me!”

  “Well, it happened!”

  “I believe you.”

  “Why do you Work for Doyle?”

  “What’s Doyle got to do with what were talking about?”

  “Nothing. I just wondered.”

  “Because we need the money, stupid!” He wasn’t going to mention anything about the accountancy course. Benjie might get the idea and horn in on it. Friend or no friend.

  “Wolf scares me,” Benjie said irrelevantly.

  “Oh, shut up, will you!”

  Joseph felt suddenly uneasy. The tobacco juice puckered his mouth. “I’m going home,” he said.

  The fire sirens woke him during the night, they and the noise of the crowd in the street. He and his parents got up and went outside. Number eleven down the block was blazing. Smoke, blown by the wind from the East River, stretched in ribbons across the sky. Flames exploded like rockets inside the tenement. Their light went surging from the first floor to the second, to the third. On the third floor faces appeared at the windows; arms moved in anguish.

  “Tramps!” Ma cried. “My God, the house is full of tramps and they can’t get out!”

  Of course. In the winter, most people puttied the windows shut to keep out the cold.

  “Oh, my God,” Pa said.

  The fire burned all night. Its flames warmed the night air all down the street. The water from the fire hoses froze on the sidewalks. The fire horses neighed at the flames and stamped their huge feet. Toward morning the fire burned out. The interior of the building had been hollowed; the blackened stone front was a jagged ruin. There were seven known dead. The crowds came silently to stare.

  Joseph was very quiet. All day at school he turned things over in his mind: to tell Pa first and then Mr. Doyle? Or to go straight to Doyle? He wanted to talk it over with Benjie but Benjie had not come to school that morning.

  On the way home at three o’clock Benjie hailed him. “I went over to see your boss this morning, Joseph.”

  “You went to see Mr. Doyle?”

  “I told him I knew who set the fire. I told him about Wolf and the kerosene.”

  “Did you tell him I was with you?” Joseph demanded.

  “Oh,” Benjie said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t. I guess I wanted to take all the credit myself.”

  Well, he had no one to blame but himself. Why hadn’t he thought of staying out of school today and running over to Mr. Doyle
’s? Then Wolf would be arrested and Joseph would have been the hero instead of Benjie. Slow, like Pa. Old-fashioned. Let everybody get ahead of me. I don’t think fast.

  “I can’t understand the whole thing,” Benjie puzzled. “I thought Wolf and Mr. Doyle were thick. So why would Wolf want to burn the man’s house down? Can you figure it out?”

  “Oh, hell,” Joseph said, brushing past Benjie.

  He was still puzzling things over at breakfast the next morning, sore and silent, angry at Benjie and most of all at himself, when Mrs. Baumgarten appeared at the curtain to their kitchen.

  “I’m sorry to brother you but I thought you might know where Benjie is? He didn’t come home last night.”

  “I saw him yesterday after school,” Joseph said.

  Mrs. Baumgarten began to cry. “What can have happened to him?”

  Joseph’s mother spoke comfort. “He’s probably staying with a friend, that’s all, and didn’t tell you.”

  “Where? What friend? Why would he do that?”

  “Don’t worry, nothing’s happened to him, I’m sure.”

  But something had happened. Benjie’s body was pulled out of the river on the following Saturday afternoon. The police came to the synagogue looking for someone to come and identify it. Joseph’s father shouted to him not to go but he pretended not to hear and went along with the crowd. Afterward he was sorry he had gone. They had killed Benjie with an ice pick and fish had eaten away part of his face.

  Joseph walked back home. People pulled at him with questions, whispering as people do. But he couldn’t talk, just walked on past the burnt-out tenement. It was said that the insurance had already been collected. All of a sudden the boy, just twelve years old that summer, saw and understood the whole thing. He went into his parents’ store, pushed open the curtain and sat down on the cot next to the stove. All of a sudden he was old; it seemed to him that he had just learned all there was to know about life. That people will do anything, that people will kill for money.

  He began to cry. His father and mother came over and sat one on each side of him. They put their arms around his shoulders and sat there with him, not speaking. They thought he was crying for his friend, and of course he was, but also he was crying for much more, for his father’s innocence and his own lost innocence, for everything that was dirtied and ruined in the world …