Collected Stories

pray together for Morris. So once more he was on his knees, under rows and rows of musty marbled-cardboard files, by the glass lamp by the edge of the desk, the shade with flounced edges, like the candy dish. Mrs. Skoglund, in her Scandinavian accent—an emotional contralto—raising her voice to Jesus-uh Christ-uh, as the wind lashed the trees, kicked the side of the house, and drove the snow seething on the windowpanes, to send light-uh, give guidance-uh, put a new heart-uh in Pop’s bosom. Woody asked God only to make Pop put the dish back. He kept Mrs. Skoglund on her knees as long as possible. Then he thanked her, shining with candor (as much as he knew how), for her Christian generosity and he said, “I know that Hjordis has a cousin who works at the Evanston YMCA. Could she please phone him and try to get us a room tonight so that we don’t have to fight the blizzard all the way back? We’re almost as close to the Y as to the car line. Maybe the cars have even stopped running.”

Suspicious Hjordis, coming when Mrs. Skoglund called to her, was burning now. First they barged in, made themselves at home, asked for money, had to have coffee, probably left gonorrhea on the toilet seat. Hjordis, Woody remembered, was a woman who wiped the doorknobs with rubbing alcohol after guests had left. Nevertheless, she telephoned the Y and got them a room with two cots for six bits.

Pop had plenty of time, therefore, to reopen the etagere, lined with reflecting glass or German silver (something exquisitely delicate and tricky), and as soon as the two Selbsts had said thank you and good-bye and were in midstreet again up to the knees in snow, Woody said, “Well, I covered for you. Is that thing back?”

“Of course it is,” said Pop.

They fought their way to the small Y building, shut up in wire grille and resembling a police station—about the same dimensions. It was locked, but they made a racket on the grille, and a small black man let them in and shuffled them upstairs to a cement corridor with low doors. It was like the small-mammal house in Lincoln Park. He said there was nothing to eat, so they took off their wet pants, wrapped themselves tightly in the khaki army blankets, and passed out on their cots.

First thing in the morning, they went to the Evanston National Bank and got the fifty dollars. Not without difficulties. The teller went to call Mrs. Skoglund and was absent a long time from the wicket. “Where the hell has he gone?” said Pop.

But when the fellow came back, he said, “How do you want it?”

Pop said, “Singles.” He told Woody, “Bujak stashes it in one-dollar bills.”

But by now Woody no longer believed Halina had stolen the old man’s money.

Then they went into the street, where the snow-removal crews were at work. The sun shone broad, broad, out of the morning blue, and all Chicago would be releasing itself from the temporary beauty of those vast drifts.

“You shouldn’t have jumped me last night, Sonny.”

“I know, Pop, but you promised you wouldn’t get me in Dutch.”

“Well, it’s okay. We can forget it, seeing you stood by me.”

Only, Pop had taken the silver dish. Of course he had, and in a few days Mrs. Skoglund and Hjordis knew it, and later in the week they were all waiting for Woody in Kovner’s office at the settlement house. The group included the Reverend Doctor Crabbie, head of the seminary, and Woody, who had been flying along, level and smooth, was shot down in flames. He told them he was innocent. Even as he was falling, he warned that they were wronging him. He denied that he or Pop had touched Mrs. Skoglund’s property. The missing object—he didn’t even know what it was—had probably been misplaced, and they would be very sorry on the day it turned up. After the others were done with him, Dr. Crabbie said that until he was able to tell the truth he would be suspended from the seminary, where his work had been unsatisfactory anyway. Aunt Rebecca took him aside and said to him, “You are a little crook, like your father. The door is closed to you here.”

To this Pop’s comment was “So what, kid?”

“Pop, you shouldn’t have done it.”

“No? Well, I don’t give a care, if you want to know. You can have the dish if you want to go back and square yourself with all those hypocrites.”

“I didn’t like doing Mrs. Skoglund in the eye, she was so kind to us.”

“Kind?”

“Kind.”

“Kind has a price tag.”

Well, there was no winning such arguments with Pop. But they debated it in various moods and from various elevations and perspectives for forty years and more, as their intimacy changed, developed, matured.

“Why did you do it, Pop? For the money? What did you do with the fifty bucks?” Woody, decades later, asked him that.

“I settled with the bookie, and the rest I put in the business.”

“You tried a few more horses.”

“I maybe did. But it was a double, Woody. I didn’t hurt myself, and at the same time did you a favor.”

“It was for me?”

“It was too strange of a life. That life wasn’t you, Woody. All those women… Kovner was no man, he was an in-between. Suppose they made you a minister? Some Christian minister! First of all, you wouldn’t have been able to stand it, and second, they would have thrown you out sooner or later.”

“Maybe so.”

“And you wouldn’t have converted the Jews, which was the main thing they wanted.”

“And what a time to bother the Jews,” Woody said. “At least I didn’t bug them.”

Pop had carried him back to his side of the line, blood of his blood, the same thick body walls, the same coarse grain. Not cut out for a spiritual life. Simply not up to it.

Pop was no worse than Woody, and Woody was no better than Pop. Pop wanted no relation to theory, and yet he was always pointing Woody toward a position—a jolly, hearty, natural, likable, unprincipled position. If Woody had a weakness, it was to be unselfish. This worked to Pop’s advantage, but he criticized Woody for it, nevertheless. “You take too much on yourself,” Pop was always saying. And it’s true that Woody gave Pop his heart because Pop was so selfish. It’s usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart.

Remembering the pawn ticket for the silver dish, Woody startled himself with a laugh so sudden that it made him cough. Pop said to him after his expulsion from the seminary and banishment from the settlement house, “You want in again? Here’s the ticket. I hocked that thing. It wasn’t so valuable as I thought.”

“What did they give?”

“Twelve-fifty was all I could get. But if you want it you’ll have to raise the dough yourself, because I haven’t got it anymore.”

‘You must have been sweating in the bank when the teller went to call Mrs. Skoglund about the check.”

I was a little nervous,” said Pop. “But I didn’t think they could miss the thing so soon.”

That theft was part of Pop’s war with Mother. With Mother, and Aunt Rebecca, and the Reverend Doctor. Pop took his stand on realism. Mother represented the forces of religion and hypochondria. In four decades, the fighting never stopped. In the course of time, Mother and the girls turned into welfare personalities and lost their individual outlines. Ah, the poor things, they became dependents and cranks. In the meantime, Woody, the sinful man, was their dutiful and loving son and brother. He maintained the bungalow—this took in roofing, pointing, wiring, insulation, air-conditioning—and he paid for heat and light and food, and dressed them all out of Sears, Roebuck and Wieboldt’s, and bought them a TV, which they watched as devoutly as they prayed. Paula took courses to learn skills like macrame-making and needlepoint, and sometimes got a little job as recreational worker in a nursing home. But she wasn’t steady enough to keep it. Wicked Pop spent most of his life removing stains from people’s clothing. He and Halina in the last years ran a Cleanomat in West Rogers Park—a so-so business resembling a Laundromat—which gave him leisure for billiards, the horses, rummy and pinochle. Every morning he went behind the partition to check out the filters of the cleaning equipment. He found amusing things that had been thrown into the vats with the clothing—sometimes, when he got lucky, a locket chain or a brooch. And when he had fortified the cleaning fluid, pouring all that blue and pink stuff in from plastic jugs, he read the Forward over a second cup of coffee, and went out, leaving Halina in charge. When they needed help with the rent, Woody gave it.

After the new Disney World was opened in Florida, Woody treated all his dependents to a holiday. He sent them down in separate batches, of course. Halina enjoyed this more than anybody else. She couldn’t stop talking