The Assistant Read Free

urged. He boiled up some tea and served it in a thick glass, with a slice of lemon. The peddler eased himself into a chair, derby hat and coat on, and gulped the hot tea, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
    â€œSo how goes now?” asked the grocer.
    â€œSlow,” shrugged Breitbart.
    Morris sighed. “How is your boy?”
    Breitbart nodded absently, then picked up the Jewish paper and read. After ten minutes he got up, scratched all over, lifted across his thin shoulders the two large cartons tied together with clothesline and left.

    Morris watched him go.
    The world suffers. He felt every schmerz.
    At lunchtime Ida came down. She had cleaned the whole house.
    Morris was standing before the faded couch, looking out of the rear window at the back yards. He had been thinking of Ephraim.
    His wife saw his wet eyes.
    â€œSo stop sometime, please.” Her own grew wet.
    He went to the sink, caught cold water in his cupped palms and dipped his face into it.
    â€œThe Italyener,” he said, drying himself, “bought this morning across the street.”
    She was irritated. “Give him for twenty-nine dollars five rooms so he should spit in your face.”
    â€œA cold water flat,” he reminded her.
    â€œYou put in gas radiators.”
    â€œWho says he spits? This I didn’t say.”
    â€œYou said something to him not nice?”
    â€œMe?”
    â€œThen why he went across the street?”
    â€œWhy? Go ask him,” he said angrily.
    â€œHow much you took in till now?”
    â€œDirt.”
    She turned away.
    He absent-mindedly scratched a match and lit a cigarette.
    â€œStop with the smoking,” she nagged.
    He took a quick drag, clipped the butt with his thumb nail and quickly thrust it under his apron into his pants pocket. The smoke made him cough. He coughed harshly, his face lit like a tomato. Ida held her hands over her ears. Finally he brought up a gob of phlegm and wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, then his eyes.
    â€œCigarettes,” she said bitterly. “Why don’t you listen what the doctor tells you?”
    â€œDoctors,” he remarked.

    Afterward he noticed the dress she was wearing. “What is the picnic?”
    Ida said, embarrassed, “I thought to myself maybe will come today the buyer.”
    She was fifty-one, nine years younger than he, her thick hair still almost all black. But her face was lined, and her legs hurt when she stood too long on them, although she now wore shoes with arch supports. She had waked that morning resenting the grocer for having dragged her, so many years ago, out of a Jewish neighborhood into this. She missed to this day their old friends and landsleit—lost for parnusseh unrealized. That was bad enough, but on top of their isolation, the endless worry about money embittered her. She shared unwillingly the grocer’s fate though she did not show it and her dissatisfaction went no farther than nagging—her guilt that she had talked him into a grocery store when he was in the first year of evening high school, preparing, he had said, for pharmacy. He was, through the years, a hard man to move. In the past she could sometimes resist him, but the weight of his endurance was too much for her now.
    â€œA buyer,” Morris grunted, “will come next Purim.”
    â€œDon’t be so smart. Karp telephoned him.”
    â€œKarp,” he said in disgust. “Where he telephoned—the cheapskate?”
    â€œHere.”
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œYesterday. You were sleeping.”
    â€œWhat did he told him?”
    â€œFor sale a store—yours, cheap.”
    â€œWhat do you mean cheap?”
    â€œThe key is worth now nothing. For the stock and the fixtures that they are worth also nothing, maybe three thousand, maybe less.”
    â€œI paid four.”
    â€œTwenty-one years ago,” she said irritably. “So don’t sell, go in auction.”
    â€œHe wants the