“What could you do with it?” a boy asked.
“Color an elephant and sell it,” his father said. “Put up a flag. Tell a lie. Ah, kid, you know too much. You’ve seen the truth. It’s the color of excuse and burden. I’ve got a nerve. You’re too young. Why should I saddle you with white? But have you got a big brother maybe? Nah, nah, it’s a grownup’s color. Buy better brown. Go green, green’s grand. You want green? Here—” He stuck his hand into his pocket and without looking pulled out a green crayon. The boy gasped and moved back. “No? Still thinking about the white? Naughty kid, you grow up too fast today. White-hot for white, are you? All right, you win, I said white for sale and I meant white for sale. White sale here. All right, who wants it?”
A boy offered three cents, another four. A child said a nickel. He sold it to a girl for six.
“Done,” he said, and took the money and reached back into his pocket. His eyes were closed. “Purple,” he said.
They lived on what his father earned from the sales. Maybe fifteen dollars came into the house in a week, and although it was the Depression his son felt poor. Perhaps he would have felt poor no matter what his father earned, for all he needed to remind him of their strange penury was one sight of his father at his card table in what would normally be the parlor. (A card table and chairs in the American Home; they had brought the Diaspora into the front room.) It was the counting house of a madman. On the table, on the chairs, on the floor — there were only the card table and two chairs for furniture — were the queer, changed products and by-products, the neo-junk his father dealt in. There were stamped lead soldiers, reheated on the kitchen stove and bent into positions of agony, decapitated, arms torn from the lead sides, the torsos and heads and limbs in mass cigar-box graves. His father would sell these as “a limited edition, a special series from the losing side” (“An educational toy,” he explained to the children. “What, you think it’s all victories and parades and boys home on furlough? This is why they give medals. A head is two cents, an arm a penny. It’s supply and demand”). There were four identical decks of Bicycle cards into which his father had inserted extra aces, kings, queens. These he carried in an inside pocket of his coat and took with him into the pool hall for soft interviews with the high school boys (“Everybody needs a head start in life. You, fool, how would you keep up otherwise?”). There were single sheets torn from calendars (“April,” he called in February, “just out. Get your April here”). There were collections of pressed flowers, leaves (“The kids need this stuff for school”). There was a shapeless heap of dull rags, a great disreputable mound of the permanently soiled and scarred, of slips that might have been pulled from corpses in auto wrecks, of shorts that could have come from dying men, sheets ripped from fatal childbeds, straps pulled from brassieres — the mutilated and abused and dishonored. Shards from things of the self, the rags of rage they seemed. Or as if they grew there, in the room, use’s crop. “Stuff, stuff,” his father said, climbing the rags, wading into them as one might wade into a mound of autumn’s felled debris. “Someday you’ll wear a suit from this.” There were old magazines, chapters from books, broken pencils, bladders from ruined pens, eraser ends in small piles, cork scraped from the inside of bottle caps, ballistical shapes of tinfoil, the worn straps from watches, wires, strings, ropes, broken glass — things’ nubbins.
“Splinters,” his father said, “there’s a fortune in splinters.” “Where’s the fortune in splinters already?” his father said. Looking at the collection, the card table, the two chairs, the room which for all its clutter seemed barren. “Look alive there. Your father, the merchant prince, is talking. What, you think I’ll live forever? We’re in a crisis situation, I tell you. I have brought the Diaspora this far and no further. Though I’ll tell you the truth, even now things fly outward, my arms and my heart, pulling to scatter. I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go. There are horses inside me and they are stampeding. Run, run for the doctor. Get cowboys with ropes. Talk to me. Talk!”
“What do you want me to say?” his son asked.
“Yielder, head bower, say what you mean.”
The boy didn’t know what he meant.
“It’s not moving, it’s not moving,” his father moaned. “Business is terrible. Are you hungry?”
“No.”
“Are you cold?”
“No.”
“Nevertheless, business is terrible. It stinks, business.” He brushed a pile of canceled stamps from the table. “Everything is vendible. It must be. That’s religion. Your father is a deeply religious man. He believes in vendibility. To date, however, he has failed to move the unsalable thing. The bottom has dropped out of his market look out below.”
They lived like this for three years.
For three years he was on the verge of fleeing his father. What prevented him now was not love (love goes, he thought) so much as an illusion that the Diaspora had brought him to an end of the earth, an edge of the world. For all that there were telephone poles about him, newspapers, machines, cars, neon in the windows of the taverns, he seemed to live in a world that might have been charted on an old map, the spiky spines of serpents rising like waves from wine-dark seas, personified zephyrs mump-cheeked and fierce — a distant Praetorianed land, unamiable and harsh. There might have been monkeys in its trees, burning bushes in its summers. He lived in a constant fear of miracles that could go against him. The wide waters of the Ohio and the Mississippi that he had seen meld from a bluff just below Cairo, Illinois, would have turned red in an instant had he entered them, split once and drowned him had he taken flight. There was the turtle death beyond, he vaguely felt, and so, like one who has come safely through danger to a given clearing, he feared to go on or to retrace his steps. He was content to stay still.
Content but embarrassed.
His father was famous now, and they seemed to live under the special dispensation of their neighbors. “I would make them eat the Jew,” he would confide defiantly.
Like anyone famous, however, they lived like captives. (He didn’t really mean “they” surprisingly, he was untouched — a captive’s captive.) It must have been a task even for his father to have always to come up to the mark of his madness. Once he bored them he was through. It was what had happened in Vermont, in Maine, elsewhere. Once he repeated himself — not the pattern; the pattern was immune, classic — it would be over. “There’s a fortune in eccentricity, a fortune. I’m alive,” his father said in honest wonder, weird pride. “It’s no joke, it costs to live. Consumers, we’re consumers. Hence our mortality. I consume, therefore I am.” He would smile. “I hate them,” he’d say. “They don’t buy enough. Read Shylock. What a wisdom! That was some Diaspora they had there in Venice.”
It was not hate, but something darker. Contempt. But not for him. For him there were, even at thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, pinches, hugs, squeezes. They slept together in the same bed (“It cuts coal costs. It develops the heart”). Awakened in the declining night with a rough kiss (“Come, chicken, cluck cluck cluck. If you cannot tell me, hold me”). Whispers, declarations, manifestoes in the just unhearing ear. Bedtime stories: “Your mother was a gentile and one of my best customers. I laid her in my first wagon by pots and by pans and you were born and she died. You think I hate you, you think so? You think I hate you, you took away my shicksa and a good customer? Nah, nah, treasure, I love you. She would have slowed down the Diaspora. We had a truck, and she couldn’t read the road maps. Wake up, I’ll tell you the meaning of life. Can you hear me? Are you listening? This is rich.” (At first he was terrified, but gradually he accommodated to madness, so that madness made no difference and words were like melodies, all speech as meaningless as tunes. He lied, even today. He said what he wanted, whatever occurred to him. Talk is cheap, talk is cheap.) “Get what there is and turn it over quick. Dump and dump, mark down and close out. Have specials, my dear. The thing in life is to sell, but if no one will buy, listen, listen, give it away! Flee the minion. Be naked. Travel light. Because there will come catastrophe. Every night expect the flood, the earthquake, the fire, and think of the stock. Be in a position to lose nothing by it when the bombs fall. But what oh what shall be done with the unsalable thing?”