Seventh Avenue (8 page)

“A mistake,” Dobrinski replied, snatching the paper from Blackman.

“She’s pregnant?” Celia asked rhetorically.

“Who the hell started all this?” Jay said.

“I swear I didn’t say a word,” Rhoda cried. “I wanted to go away and have it on my own.”

“Then who told them?”

“Myrna.”

“Myrna! None of her goddamned business.”

“No swearing in this house,” Gold said. He shook Dobrinski’s lapel. “We have a man of God here.”

“In the year 1906 in the case of Esther Meltzer and Hymie Tenser - the very same situation - it was decided that the man was responsible and under the Latvian Convention of 1840, he had to marry the aforesaid Esther. Here” - he handed Jay some tattered onionskins – “read for yourself what it says. And even more recent, the case of Selma Horowitz and Jacob Petzel, the very same thing.”

“You’re welcome to him,” Morris said to Rhoda.” I never had nothing but trouble from him. Maybe you’ll make a mensch outa him.”

“And in the Bible, not to mention the Torah, it says . . .”

“But he’s mine baby,” Celia cried.

“Such a son-in-law. God’s punishing me.”

“I wish him good luck and good-bye,” Blackman said.

“. . . that a man of the Levy Tribe who did the same thing and upon refusing to marry was stoned to death in Mesopotamia . . .”

Jay realized that the situation was hopeless, and he was condemned to marry Rhoda. Sneeringly he asked her: “What do you want?”

“I just want us to be happy.”

“Will you be happy if we get married?”

“Only if you want to.”

There was a sudden hush; even Dobrinski stopped.

“All right,” Jay said, and he felt lifted high in the air, dizzy, frightened, and somehow delivered.

“We’re good for each other,” she said.

“Better you than me,” Morris said. “Have him with mine compliments.”

Dobrinski, prepared for any eventuality, now began a sermon dealing with the nature of marriage, what was expected of the partners, how the children should be raised. When he had finished he handed them about twenty address cards of firms that would give them special discounts if they mentioned his name, and for whom he acted as unofficial agent. He said a prayer for them and for the child and urged them to call on him if it was a boy, as he was licensed to perform circumcisions and he would undercut everyone else’s prices because of the unusual circumstances of their meeting.

“You see, I told you, let me worry,” he said to Gold as he counted the money he had been handed. “God smiles on such marriages.”

Jay knew with a certainty as deep and unchanging as a geometric axiom of Euclid that his love for Rhoda - if indeed it had ever existed and he wondered about this - was stillborn. Neither money nor social position, neither time nor place, neither blood ties nor the prospect of paradise, would alter this. If he had ever felt anything towards her, apart from a rampant urge to sleep with her, he could not remember it, and he thought this peculiar because he possessed, to an uncanny degree the power of memory, of minute mental reconstruction of face, feeling, situation, place, moment, time. He could not only remember how he had come to get a scrape on his knee when he was four years old, but he could also recall the exact street of the occurrence, the time of day, who his companions had been, the color of the brick on the wall, the smell of burning wood fires and the arc of the smoke trailing up in the air like a bird without a body, something felt, elusive, evanescent. His first sexual encounter he could reconstruct down to the last detail of shape, position, emotion, and movement, both his own and those of his thirteen-year-old accomplice, an indentured Slovak domestic with hair like a flaxen wheat sheaf, long muscular legs, yellowish eyes tinted with gamboge, fists as raw as a hambone, and a body odor like something that had been hung in a smokehouse for a decade. He could still see how she wiped the almost endless spume that continued to shoot forth from him on her striped blue apron. But of his dealings with Rhoda he could remember virtually nothing, except that she was for him an abstract principle in a determinist universe, which, by force of circumstance, final and immutable, had deprived him of his freedom and altered the course of his destiny.

At her suggestion, he retired from the ranks of food peddlers. Her value to her employer, the chief of Modes Dress Shoppe, was similar to that of a Prime Minister’s to his Sovereign. In fact, Rhoda
was
Modes Dress Shoppe; she sold dresses, bought them, hired staff, and did all the fittings. Her chief, a Mr. Finkelstein, who had spent nearly thirty years as a wholesaler in burlap sacks, did not even trust himself with the bookkeeping, a duty which, with a sigh of relief, he had delegated to Rhoda after her second week in the store. What precisely Mr. Finkelstein did in the shop would be almost impossible to say, for it would involve a form of scientific speculation better left to physicists. He occupied a place in the store adjacent to the cash register and perched on a three-foot-high stool, nodded to whoever came in. He was incapable of composing a coherent sentence, and so had developed a type of truncated verbal shorthand that was comprehensible - so complete was their communion - only to Rhoda, who translated these signals into action. So total was Mr. Finkelstein’s reliance on Rhoda that he would even have let her shave him if she had been willing; for with the exception of gray wiry hair which seemed to be fitted to his skull by some kind of cilia-producing machine, and trousers that were all creases, bearing the impression of every chair he had ever sat in, the only distinguishing characteristic Mr. Finkelstein possessed was a face permanently bleeding from razor wounds. Like decorations for valor, he wore four or five toilet paper plasters every morning. On the particular morning that Rhoda brought Jay to the store to meet him, Mr, Finkelstein had stumbled in, ashen-faced and bleeding - so truculent had the combat been that he had nearly slashed his throat - resembling a volunteer at a barber’s college, run by madmen, and specializing in a new and sinister type of assassination.

“My fiancé, Jay Blackman, Mr. Finkelstein.”

Jay held out his hand, which Finkelstein held for some minutes and forgot to return. Finally, Jay had to yank his hand away.

“I’ve hired him,” Rhoda said. “He’ll be a big help to me, specially when I go buying. I won’t have to carry those heavy bags on the subway.”

“And leaving . . . ?” Finkelstein, with some confusion, asked.

“Oh, he’ll work the same hours as me,” Rhoda translated for Jay.

“Paper forms . . . ?”

“Yes, I’ll get him to fill out a tax form, and we’ll start him at twelve dollars a week.”

Jay waited with some apprehension for Finkelstein to reply. He had closed his eyes, supporting his chin in a manner at once pensive and profound.

“Well, what’s happening?” Jay said with a hint of irritation.

“He’s asleep.”

“Asleep? Just like that?”

“It’s all right, you’re hired,” Rhoda said.

“How do you know it’s all right by him?”

“If it wasn’t he would have stamped his feet.”

“Oh, great. Stamped his feet.”

“The only time he stamps his feet is when a woman wants to return or exchange a dress, or if she wants a refund.”

“What are you getting me into?”

“Jay, honey, in a few months, you’ll know the whole business inside out, and we’ll open our shop, and we’ll also manage to save some money.”

“Then we can shit on old Finkelstein.”

“Don’t talk that way.”

“Why not, it’s a goddamned good idea. It’s better to learn a decent business than wheeling a pushcart. I’m glad I listened to you.”

“Come into the back with me. First thing you’ve got to learn is where the stock’s kept.”

In the back room he saw a jungle of hanging dresses, which without women to fill them reminded him of unripe fruit. He waited for Rhoda to give him his instructions. It all looked simple enough: a woman would pick out a dress and he’d get it from the back - you didn’t have to be a genius to tell a 38 black from a kelly green 34. He noticed two little rooms off to the side with dusky maroon velveteen drapes where the doors should have been.

“What are they for?”

“Changing rooms.”

“The women change dresses in there?” he asked with interest.

“Well, they don’t go on the street.”

The job suddenly fired his imagination: better than freezing his ass off on a street corner. Decidedly.

“And I . . . ?”

“Once you know the stock, you can approach a customer.”

“Not before?”

“No! You see the whole point is to sell. If a woman comes in for a 36 beige wool dress and we haven’t got the size or color, you switch her to something that we do have. If you don’t, she walks. Or if you’re having trouble getting her to switch, you T.O. her. Turn her over to me or one of the other girls. Mr. F. hates they should walk.”

“How can he stop them?”

“You got to make sure that they don’t walk because you haven’t tried. Whoever comes in, buys. That’s the sort of thinking that makes a shop successful.”

Jay agreed.

He spent the next few days studying styles, color, sizes, the types of approach that women liked, and those that failed. He proved to have an intuitive knowledge of how to persuade women to like something, and also the added authority of being a man in a vanity business, for women would accept his opinion more readily than a shopgirl’s. What particularly attracted his attention was the accounting procedure that Rhoda employed every evening and which was called checking off. She would tear out the paper roll of the register at the last sale each day and check it against the tickets on the spike, and the two had to tally. She would then count the receipts and enter the figure in a ledger that showed the previous year’s sales for the day. At the end of the week and month, they would know how much they were up or down over the former year.

Jay’s master plan did not take shape until he had been in the shop for a month. He had made astonishing progress and could sell a woman just about anything he had in stock. Even Finkelstein, who was not given to anything as energetic as enthusiasm, purred when he watched Jay. Dresses that had been packed away in camphor two years previously as unsalable were sold at almost twice the price they had originally been marked at. He had never seen anything like it in his life. Women waited in line to be served by Mr. Jay, his new appellation. If he didn’t have the right size, he sold them a larger dress and had it altered. Modes Dress Shoppe had never had such a season; they were almost always out of stock. On the fourth payday, Finkelstein handed Jay a little note scribbled on the back of his newspaper which said “up two dollars.” This represented for Jay a new beginning, for he had never before had a rise in salary, but despite this additional remuneration, he felt restive and dissatisfied. He was beginning to love the business with a passion that choked him when he spoke about it, but he hated making profits for Finkelstein. In his fifth week, he overcharged a woman fifty cents on a dress and pocketed the difference. This, over the week, netted him an extra eight dollars, but he knew that this policy would work only a short time. What he needed was something that would enable him to create capital, and for this he had to have Rhoda’s complete cooperation. The first month also confirmed that he could never be satisfied with Rhoda, and he had two affairs with women he had picked up in the shop.

On his third buying visit to Manhattan with Rhoda, he decided to put to her the proposition that had been forming in his mind. They were on their way to see the dress jobber they did most of their business with and had first stopped for coffee in a luncheonette on 38th Street.

“We’re up three hundred dollars over last month and five hundred over last year,” Rhoda said proudly.

“Yeah, and it’s in that
putz
pocket.”

“It’s his business, isn’t it? We only work there.”

“Why do you think we’re making more money?” Jay demanded.

“Because of you. Isn’t that what you want to hear?”

“I want to know if it’s true.”

“Of course it’s true. The women love you. They can’t say no to you.”

“The point is we’re getting nowhere fast, and the
nebishe
is on the gravy train.”

“The point is we’re still not married.”

“The point is we’re getting married on October 10th and that gives us six weeks to make money so that we can get an apartment.”

“Okay,” she mused, “what do you want us to do?”

“Go into partnership.”

“With who? The bank?”

“Finkelstein!”

“What? He’d never allow it, so don’t bother to ask.”

“Who the hell wants to ask him. He mustn’t know a thing about it.”

“I’m not going to start stealing from him, if that’s what you’re hinting at.”

Jay finished his coffee slowly, gazed at Rhoda patronizingly, and realized at that moment that she could no longer teach him anything about business.

“Rhoda, you’re wonderful in a shop, but a head for business you haven’t got.”

“Why? ‘Cause I won’t become a thief?”

“Do you think I’m such a fool as to suggest beating the till?”

“Then what?”

“We average a hundred and fifty dresses a week. There’s no reason why we can’t sell two hundred.”

“None.”

“But the other fifty dresses should be our dresses.”

He waited several minutes for this to register, but she gave him a blank look.

“You pay cash for everything, right?” She nodded and felt for the two hundred dollars in her bag. “Well, most retailers do business on credit and settle in thirty days. So we buy dresses on credit from a jobber that’s looking for business and settle with him when the bill falls due. We sell Finkelstein’s stuff and also our own, and give him a bit of ours so that his sales are going up.”

“But what about ringing up and making change?”

“You do all that in any case. We do our business in cash. It’s so simple it’s disgusting. What do you do with the register paper after you’ve checked it against the tickets?”

“Enter it in the ledger.”

“But with the paper?”

“I throw it away.”

“Does he see it?”

“No, he doesn’t understand how it works. He just looks in the ledger and compares the receipts.”

“Fine. Then every time we sell one of our own, you ring up a nickel or a dime and he gets it, and that way everything looks all right to the customer ‘cause she can’t see what you’re ringing up. His profits increase and we make money without overhead.”

“What if we can’t get rid of our stuff?”

“But we will.”

“What if we can’t and then there’s a bill to settle?”

“I go to jail. They don’t put pregnant women away.”

“Oh, Jay, I’m scared. It’s a terrible chance to take.”

“Of course it is, but we’ve got to take it. It’s a cinch, and Finkelstein’s not losing on the deal. The other important thing is that we establish credit, so that when we open up our own shop, people will know us already. And we’ve got to settle our bills earlier than the limit so that we get a reputation for being good business people and then everyone’ll have confidence in us. You’ve got to get the jobbers and manufacturers to
think
you’re respectable, then everything’s possible.”

When they got up from the table, Jay picked up Rhoda’s bag.

“What’re you doing?”

“I want to hold onto the money so that I can flash it when we make our order.”

“We can’t use it.” Her voice was panicky.

“I just want to inspire confidence.”

New York was in the midst of a prolonged Indian summer that had set back most of the dress people a month in selling their merchandise. Only Modes had gone against the trend and was doing business in fall dresses. They had made the same mistake as all the other retail stores, but because of Jay’s dynamism, they were selling dresses that women could not wear for at least two months.