“The mailman brought you this after you left for school a second time.”
“After lunch?” Ira reached out for the letter.
“May it augur well,” said Mom.
And Pop in jolly mood: “One of your grandmothers awoke for your sake.”
Ira extracted the letter from the already opened envelope: “Gee, I got a job! Park and Tilford! After school! Yea!”
“Tockin yea,” said Pop. “Such a goyish, fancy store to admit a Yiddle. Something unheard of.”
“Did they ask you?” said Mom.
“No. But I wrote on the application where it asked religion: Jewish.”
“Wunderbar!”
“It must have been Mr. Sullivan then,” Ira said. “He told me where to apply. He’s a bookkeeper after school.”
“Aha,” said Mom. “You see: the goy. They say he’s this, he’s that. A mensh is a mensh, goy or Jew. He took pity on you.”
Which made it all the more likely, Ira meditated, that he had gotten the job in his thirteenth year, while still in eighth grade where Mr. Sullivan was impressed with Ira’s aptitude in English; for had it been the following year when he was in Mr. Sullivan’s bookkeeping class, that crippled and cantankerous worthy, humane though he was, might very well have had his doubts about recommending so dense a scholar as Ira for any kind of job (and he did so again later).
He was to report for work Monday to the Park & Tilford store on 126th Street and Lenox Avenue. Weekdays, his regular hours of employment were from three-thirty in the afternoon until 6:00 P.M. Saturdays, all day, from 8:30 A.M. to closing time at 6:00 P.M. His pay would be five dollars per week.
Oh, it was long, long, long ago. . Mom cautioned him as he dressed with nervous haste in the morning before school, to show respect to everyone, do as he was told with cheerful mien — and try not to get his blue serge suit soiled before reporting for work that afternoon, to all of which he made irritable acknowledgment. And in his best shirt and tie, with an extra nickel for lunch, and with Mom’s blessings, off to Madison Avenue, explaining to schoolmates he met along the route past Mt. Morris Park the reason he was “all dressed up.” And to Mr. Conway, his homeroom teacher as well, just in case the class was kept for misbehavior. They weren’t. And as soon as school was dismissed for the day, away Ira went.
And away he went toward Lenox Avenue, trying to restrain his gait, not break into a trot — and break into a sweat that would mar his holiday nattiness, spoil the impression he was about to make as someone suitable for the cloudy negotiations he would soon be engaged in, as the manager’s right-hand man, or assigned to other financial duties requiring charm and tact and deference. He waited for a minute outside the richly arranged store windows for his excited panting to subside, took a fresh grip of his strap of books, and with the letter in the other hand, he entered the richly aromatic, richly subdued mahogany demesne. The elderly, dignified gentleman in wing-collar and white boutonniere in his lapel, who was stationed behind the tobacco and mineral-water counter, directed Ira to the manager’s desk.
It was in the center of the store, and Ira approached in a haze of anxiety and deference. On a podium, before a rolltop desk surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, sat Mr. Stiles, like a monarch reigning over a dozen clerks in tan jackets busily writing on yellow pads on a long dark counter, in front of which well-dressed patrons were seated on high revolving stools. They were ordering all manner of select comestibles, judging from the glistening array of glass jars on the counter, or the bags of aromatic coffee the clerks were busily removing from under the two showy red and gold electric grinders behind them.
Saturnine and thin, Mr. Stiles looked up from his desk. He had straight, mousy hair, combed back and parted on the side. His tongue nudged the quid of tobacco behind his cheek as Ira proffered the letter.
“So you’re Ira Stigman?” he returned the letter.
“Yes, sir.”
“Ever work for Park and Tilford before?”
“No, sir.”
Mr. Stiles leaned over the side of his armchair, drooled a trickle of tobacco juice into the brass cuspidor just below, and stood up. “All right, Ira, come with me.”
“Yes, sir.” Ira felt as if his eagerness to please would burst through his skin.
He followed Mr. Stiles down a flight of stairs into the brightly lit cellar. Rows and rows of shelves filled with all manner of tins and glass jars stretched away toward the rear. In front, at the bottom of the stairs, two men in tan jackets were removing grocery items — canned goods, small fancy packages and string-tied paper bags — from the expanse of a wide zinc-sheathed table dominated by two tremendous spools of string. The two clerks fit the items neatly into a huge wicker hamper. Mr. Stiles introduced Ira to a short, sturdy, brisk man with curly brown hair, standing assertively on legs, not bowed but oddly concave, and speaking — with an unmistakable Jewish accent. He was Mr. Klein. He was the shipping clerk. He held a sheaf of small invoices in his hand. In the buttonhole on his jacket lapel, he wore the small bronze star that Ira had come to recognize as the badge of the World War veteran.
“Where’s Harvey?” Mr. Stiles asked.
“Down here somewhere. Harvey!” Mr. Klein called.
“Rightchere.”
“He’s over at the sink.”
Mr. Stiles crooked his finger at Ira to follow. Midway of the cellar, at one side, the sleek, muscular porter was churning soapy water in the deep, enameled utility sink, churning the water with a mop. “Right here, Mr. Stiles.” He held the mop handle between powerful hands. His palm was pale against the mop-handle, his face gravely alert; on his tan jacket he too wore the same emblem as Mr. Klein.
“Harvey, that elevator sump is getting pretty bad, don’t you think?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Stiles.”
“Will you show this young fellow — Ira?”
Ira bobbed with alacrity.
“Show him how to clean it out, would you?”
“Yes, sir!”
“When he finishes that, send him over to Mr. Klein. He’ll tell you what to do next,” Mr. Stiles instructed.
“Yes, sir.”
At Harvey’s suggestion, Ira hung up his jacket in the toilet next to the sink. Harvey wrung out the mop between the rollers of the big pail, emptied it into the sink, got a wide, flat shovel out of the sink closet, gave it to Ira, and carrying the pail himself, led Ira over to the elevator used to lift or lower freight to and from the sidewalk. The elevator platform had been raised out of the way to street level. Down below, a couple of feet lower than the cellar floor, the massive spindle around which the elevator cable was wound stretched like a bridge above the surface of a square pond of inky, malodorous water. “You just stand on that axle,” said Harvey. “I’ll hand you the bucket an’ shovel.”
That was his stint: to clean out the sump by scooping up the muck with the shovel and emptying it into the bucket. When he had filled the bucket as nearly full as he dared, because he had to hoist it to floor level while balancing himself on the motor housing, he clambered up, lugged the bucket to the utility sink and dumped it. So this was the nice job he had dressed up so neatly for, Ira thought sullenly. Lousy bastard manager, why didn’t he let the porter do it? That’s what the porter was for. Still — the presentiment kept recurring as he crouched to scoop up the foul sludge — maybe he was being tested. They were testing him, he bet. If only he weren’t wearing his good Bar Mitzvah suit, his only good suit for weddings and special occasions, why did they have to do it just then? But that wasn’t their fault; that was his fault for harboring such nutty illusions, for being so anxious to please. For all the care he took to keep clear of spatters, he already had a dozen spots on his knee-pants. And look at his knees — smudges from the sump walls climbing out. Well, he couldn’t help it. Whatever Mom said, he was earning money, five dollars per week.