He must have emptied the bucket a dozen times. Slowly the tarry water-level lowered. And each time he made the round trip to the sink and back, he used the occasion to make covert reconnaissance of the cellar. There, beyond the sink, was a very large icebox with glass doors. One side was locked, the other unlocked. Behind the glass doors of the locked side, he could see fruit he had never dreamed of: orange-colored smooth shapes, small and large, others chocolate-colored, others purple, all luscious-seeming and all choice. There were other fruits still that he recognized but had never tasted: grapes green and long, grapes round and ruddy, apples of unmistakable ripeness and succulence: pears, plums, peaches, apricots, cherries, tangerines. What a store! If he ever got his hands on them.
Behind the glass of the unlocked icebox were homelier, but still-tempting foods: cheeses, whole wheels of them, whole pineapple-shapes of them, and small crocks of cheese too — at least, the labels said so: cheddar cheese in wine. Whoever heard of cheddar cheese? Who ever heard of cheese in wine? Probably it wasn’t kosher; that was why he had never heard of it. Packages of butter and cartons of eggs. Just wait, just wait till he knew his way around. And look at that aisle across the way: fancy cans of salmon. Cans of lobster and crab that weren’t kosher, and what was that small jar? Beluga what? Caviar. Sardines he knew. But what were anchovies? Tiny little tins, he’d have to ask somebody. And that next aisle that he skirted about shiftily with empty bucket when no one was paying attention: Woo! Kumquats in syrup, what the hell were kumquats, chestnut glacé, figs he knew, but gooseberries, loganberries — maybe Mr. Kilcoyne could tell him. He knew all about fruit and vegetables. And that! Strangest of alclass="underline" at the end of the cellar, double-padlocked, sealed, dusty, dirty, thick steel-bar lattice— Oh, he knew what that was, could see through to spider-webbed, dusty bottles: Inside was all that was against the law. Prohibition, that was why.
At length, after many pailfuls had been scooped up, miry patches of concrete began to show through the muck; then the damp floor of the sump itself, which he tried to scrape clean. He called Harvey for his verdict.
“You do it any better, you spoil it, kid.”
“What?”
“Just go on and wash that bucket and shovel.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s right. And the sink, who’ll clean that?”
“You want me to clean it?”
“Ain’t nobody else gonna do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then see what Mr. Klein wants.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mr. Klein wanted him to wash his face and hands first. And when Ira returned from the sink, “How’d he do?” Mr. Klein asked Harvey, on his way to the stairs with pointed ladder, pail and squeegee.
“Oh, comme çi, comme ça,” Harvey twirled the squeegee easily.
Mr. Klein winked at his assistant, who stole up behind Harvey as he mounted the first step, and with tweety, clucking chirp, goosed him.
Harvey’s whole frame convulsed: “Jesus, man, don’t do that!” Water splashed out of his pail. “Man!” His eyes opened into a glare. “Jesus, man, I’ve told you. I almost jumped off a box car when someone did that to me while I was coming north!” He sidled warily up the stairs.
“Ever see anybody so goosy, Walt?” Mr. Klein grinned at his returning assistant.
“Me? Never.” Walt, short and round, who also wore a veteran’s emblem in the lapel of his tan jacket, reached for an item on the zinc-sheathed table. “I’ve seen goosy colored guys, but he’s the goosiest. You know, Black Jack Pershing commanded a black regiment when he went after the greasers in Mexico. Can you imagine what those guys were like? All Pancho Villa woulda had to do was order his troops to goose ’em.”
“Yeah. Pershine wouldn’t hev no army left.”
“The Mexicans woulda had a field day, Klein.”
“Yeh.”
“Jesus, you didn’t git my gag. Did you?” he addressed Ira.
“I don’t know. A field day?”
“Listen, Ira is your name?” Mr. Klein asked. “You see these small brown bags and this sugar in the barrel — did you ever weigh anything?”
“Lay anything?” asked the clerk named Walt.
“All right. You can go upstairs to the counter,” said Mr. Klein. “I got a new assistant.”
“Anything you say.” And to Ira: “Look out for that guy. He’s a slave driver.”
“Okay, already.” Mr. Klein dismissed his assistant, who walked from behind the counter and proceeded to climb up the stairs. And addressing Ira, he pointed to a barreclass="underline" “You see this? You know what it is?”
Ira looked. The barrel was half full of familiar white crystals. “It’s sugar.”
“Det’s right.” Mr. Klein pointed an accusing finger at Ira. “Can your mother get sugar?”
“Gee, no. She has to go all over.”
“So now you understand. The sugar is scarce nowadays. We give only a half pound to a customer. We’re Hooverizing. Other things don’t make so much difference, but sugar I want you to weigh it out, not more and not less. But just!” The index finger of the threatening hand curled around to join the thumb in a threatening loop. “I’ll show you the first one. You’re Jewish?”
“Yeh.”
“All right. So you got a Jewish kupf. Now watch me. This is a half-pound weight.” He set the round half-pound counter on one of the white platforms of the scale, and rapidly at first and then more slowly, let the sugar dribble from the scoop in his hand into the paper bag, the weighted platform barely lifted. “Farshtest? Okay. Det’s all. Try to be fest, but it should be right.” He then showed Ira how to tie up the bag, yanking twine from a giant cone of it at the end of the table, whipping twine around the small paper package and forming a bight to snap the twine. “You’ll get the heng of it,” he watched Ira at his first awkward attempt, then went back to matching groceries to his invoices, stowing the items in one of the big hampers. Once in awhile, he would stop and consult a small red New York City street guide that he kept next to him on the zinc-sheathed table. “You know where 124th Street is?” he asked in peculiarly Jewish statement, when Ira had weighed out and tied about twenty or so bags.
“124th Street? That’s where I go to the library.”
Mr. Klein regarded Ira gravely a moment. “You go to the library. So, all right. Come with me.”
“Now?”
“Of course now. V’im lo akhsav, matai? Do you know any Hebrew?”
“No.” Ira followed him. “Yeah, maybe baruch atoo adonoi.”
“And you went to cheder.”
“Yeah. But I didn’t like it there.”
“What do you mean?”
“I liked it better on 9th Street.”
“That’s where you lived?”
“Yeah. 749 East 9th Street.”
“So why did you like it better there?”
Ira shrugged. “Everybody in the block went to cheder.”
“Aha. So okay.” Mr. Klein stopped before the locked glass door of the icebox, took the ring of keys off its clip on his belt. “You know what a steamer besket is?” He unlocked the glass door, stooped down, and as Ira was about to repeat wonderingly, “steamer basket,” brought out from the bottom shelf the most breathtaking basket Ira had ever seen, beautiful in its wicker weaving, its high, graceful handle, and piled high with most of the glorious fruit with which that part of the icebox was stocked, a mound of diverse fruits interspersed with bonbons, mints and jellies and jars of mixed shelled nuts. The contents were all bounded by a stiff, transparent canopy of celluloid, made fast to the basket rim by several windings of cord.