table, and out of this collection picked up and opened a coin purse, where he found only a few copper coins and a hairpin. He whistled between his teeth, then took the bag again and clenched the bottom of it. He grunted, turned the bag inside out, and tore at the silk lining of it with his teeth, which nearly made Young cry, as if he were watching his father take his teeth to his mother’s very flesh. But then Big was proved to be right, for paper cash came out of the slit in the silk like a caesarian birth, more than one hundred dollars, and Big set them on the table as if they had been holy cards and he a convert or a grandmother. He looked at them with affection, too, Young saw, and then he dug deep into his own pockets, where he always kept every piece of money he had. He planted these right next to Mrs. Emerson’s newborn cash, and sat down and appeared to think.
“I don’t know how she done this,” he said finally, “but it’s a good thing all around she was smart.” He looked up at Young, and said with pride and something proprietary that later Young would know emanated from love and desire, both as alive as they must have been the day he first saw her and the afternoon they had wed.
“It’s the reason I married her. She was pretty, but the pretty girls flocked round me like bees in them days. She was the smart one.”
Young had also not said a word to his father since he was seven years old, letting his yes’s and no’s to his mother stand in for all the conversation he could muster with either of them, but now he said, “Oh,” and his father nodded as if they’d been speaking to and understanding each other all along, as if Big the man and Young the boy were bound by an honorable understanding of self that was perfect, and that this made everything all right, which Young felt that it did.
Big picked up two gold dollars and several pieces of the paper, along with a few pennies and the hairpin.
“I’m going to leave you with all this,” he said, pointing to what remained on the table. “Tomorrow, take the streetcar down to the bank, and have the banker change one of these”—he picked up one of the bills—“into coins and change. When you run out, go back down and do the same thing. Don’t spend the gold coins until you have to. When you run out all the way, it’ll be time to get a job. Nobody from the police or the schools will come looking for you here. Don’t drink at home, and don’t ever bring a girl here. Thomas over on Pratt will help you get the right things to eat, and Barry down the road won’t let you get too drunk. When you’re seventeen, tell Pauline I sent you.”
He then thrust his hand out, and Young took it, and he said, “Goodbye. I’ll see you again, God willing.”
And then he was gone, and Young knew that he was going to be happier than he had ever been in his life.
Shabbat Shalom
Young Mr. Emerson discovered that he enjoyed cleaning and washing up for himself, and when he had asked, Thomas, who owned the little dry-grocer’s in the next block, called his wife out to the counter, and she told him how to order milk from the milk wagon, and ice, and how to haggle for vegetables when the colored men came around leading their mule-drawn wagons. She told him which dry goods he should keep on hand, and which it was better to come up to their place for every once in a while, and she told him what to use in the event, heaven forbid, he should find himself connected to a dirty girl. Thomas told him not to smoke at home, but would sell him a cigarillo that he could smoke by parts at the tavern.
He hadn’t gone out to the tavern right away, mostly because he was worried how drinking would deplete his money. He found, though, that one of those changed bills would get him through an entire week or two of spending his money on damned well anything he could think of to spend it on, and that he could drink quite a bit on one coin, and soon he was at the tavern three and four nights out of the week. No one mentioned his youth, no one seemed to notice, or if they did, perhaps they thought this was the best way for an orphan who was nearly a grown man to settle his affairs. If he needed a new collar or shoelaces or tooth powder from Woolworth’s, he’d take a bill, and they would change it for him just as if he’d gone to the bank, and that would save him a trolley ride downtown. He’d seen Pauline, and he thought he’d like to turn seventeen just as soon as the opportunity presented itself.
It had one day, and he had promptly fallen in love and asked to marry her despite the difference in their ages. When she’d laughed at him he hadn’t minded, but pulled her over to him again and said, “No hard feelings?” and that was possibly the first time in his life he’d made a joke to someone else at his own expense. He did run out of money eventually, but kept all of the gold coins in a cigar box as a memento of his mother, who now had you asked him was the embodiment of the glories of the saints Elizabeth and Ann and even the Blessed Mother. He found a job that might turn into something, running errands first for the Western Union, and then selling papers for the News American, where he found luck covering funerals and writing obituaries, eventually famed on the floor for the particular elegance and lack of sentimentality in his elegiac style. He had been too young for the first war, and was too old for the second. He had been happy, and productive, and had courted not a few very nice women, at least four of whom would have been very glad to marry him, but he never put the question to them.
And then, on what would become the last day of the second Great War, he had woken up, tried to get out of bed, and found he could not. He had been reading the reports that were coming in from Europe and Asia, and what he read there he identified with in some curiously personal way, although he despised Jews and colored people and had never previously had any reason to change his mind about them, never having come in their way other than to buy things off the nigger carts or have his shoes shined or his hair oiled in the men’s room. When he had come across one photograph of a little boy in Berlin, with a yellow star on his knitted vest sweater and a large bandage on his forehead, Young felt a deep sense of injustice in his heart and soul, more real than anything he had felt since he was small and had stopped talking, and was sick nearly to the point of expelling his dinner onto the archives room floor.
He stayed in bed all that day, despite hunger and needing the toilet. He slept, woke, daydreamed about who knew what, slept again. It wasn’t until he knew that he had to get a drink and that there was none in the house that he forced himself to roll off the bed. From there, he crawled to the dresser and extracted some socks, and stood, staggered to the bathroom, used the toilet, and spit blood into the basin. He looked at himself, as if from a great distance, he thought, as if the entire world had gone quiet and blank. It was novel, and he realized in some part of himself that he enjoyed the feeling.
This had been a Saturday, and normally he worked a half-day Saturdays. On Sunday he felt fine, got up, left the house, and decided he’d just go on “a nice long walk.” He walked down Lombard Street for blocks, enjoying himself hugely, but still bothered with the sense that his physical body was far away from the rest of the corporeal universe, and then he was downtown, near the water, and still he kept walking. “Maybe I’ll walk all the way to the East Side,” he thought, “and get something to eat or something.”
Not a Desecration
He reached Lloyd Street, saw a man in a frock hat and long hair coming towards him on Lombard, and realized he wished to speak to him—he didn’t know the man, he simply he wanted to talk to someone, he had kept silent too long all day. But the man, deep in thought, didn’t notice Young, and turned up Lloyd, crossing the street to Young’s side as he did. Without thinking, Young followed him, a slight, rather short man with harsh features that in some way reminded Young of Big Emerson. They reached a square building that looked like a church and yet did not, and the man began to ascend the stairs. Young waited for him to open the door, but it appeared that the man had only wanted to reassure himself the door was locked. He turned, and saw Young standing there.
“What do you wish, please?” the man said in a heavily accented voice. He seemed nervous, as if perhaps he worried Young wished ill for him or even intended to rob or strike him.
“Oh. I thought I might like to go inside, you know, to pray.” Young hadn’t said a sincere prayer in twenty years.
“But it’s Sunday.”
“I know.” What was the matter with that? “But, you know, waking and sleeping, on the doors