“And so,” said Olivia, laughing — no, not laughing, nibbling rather at the bait of a laugh—“you figured you weren’t going to pick up a lot of girls like that.”
“No, I wasn’t. That’s why I said to the boss — I always referred to my father as the boss in the store — I said, ‘Boss, I cannot do these garbage cans anymore. These girls from school are coming by, they stop in front of the store because of the bus, they see me cleaning garbage cans, and the next day I’m supposed to ask them to go out to a Saturday night movie with me? Boss, I can’t do it.’ And he said to me, ‘You’re ashamed? Why? What are you ashamed of? The only thing you have to be ashamed of is stealing. Nothing else. You clean the garbage cans.’ ”
“How terrific,” she said, and captivated me now with a different laugh entirely, a laugh that was laden with the love of life for all its unexpected charms. At that moment you would have thought the whole of Olivia lay in her laughter, when in fact it lay in her scar.
It was also “terrific” and amused her greatly when I told her about Big Mendelson, who worked for my father when I was a little kid. “Big Mendelson had a nasty mouth on him,” I said. “He really belonged in the back, in the refrigerator, and not in front waiting on customers. But I was seven or eight, and because he had this nasty kind of humor and because they called him Big Mendelson, I thought he was the funniest man on earth. Finally my father had to get rid of him.”
“What did Big Mendelson do that he had to get rid of him?”
“Well, on Thursday mornings,” I told her, “my father would come back from the chicken market and he would dump all the chickens in a pile and people would pick whatever chicken they wanted for the weekend. Dumped them on a table. Anyway, one woman, a Mrs. Sklon, she used to pick up a chicken and smell the mouth and then smell the rear end. Then she’d pick up another chicken, and again she’d smell the mouth and then smell the rear end. She did the same thing every week, and she did it so many times every week that Big Mendelson couldn’t contain himself, and one day he said, ‘Mrs. Sklon, can you pass that inspection?’ She got so mad at him, she picked up a knife from the counter and said, ‘If you ever talk to me that way again, I’ll stab you.’ ”
“And that’s why your father let him go?”
“Had to. By then he’d said lots of things like that. But about Mrs. Sklon Big Mendelson was right. Mrs. Sklon was no picnic even for me, and I was the nicest boy in the world.”
“I never doubted that,” Olivia said.
“Well, for good or bad, that’s what I was.”
“Am. Are.”
“Mrs. Sklon was the only one of the customers who didn’t want to fix me up with their daughters. I couldn’t trick Mrs. Sklon,” I said. “No one could. I would deliver to her. And every time I delivered she would take the order apart. And it was always a big order. And she would take it out of the bag and undo the wax paper and take everything out and weigh everything to make sure the weight was correct. I had to stand there and watch this show. I was always in a rush because I was always looking to deliver the orders as fast as I could and then get back to the schoolyard to play ball. So at a certain point I’d bring her order around to the back door, plop it down on the top step, knock on the door once, and run like hell. And she would catch me. Every time. ‘Messner! Marcus Messner! The butcher’s son! Come back here!’ I always felt, when I was with Mrs. Sklon, that I was at the heart of things. I felt that with Big Mendelson. I mean what I’m saying, Olivia. I felt that with people in the butcher shop. I got enjoyment out of that butcher shop.” But only before, I thought, before his thoughts made my father defenseless.
“And she had a scale in the kitchen, Mrs. Sklon — was that it?” Olivia asked me.
“In the kitchen, yes. But it was not an accurate scale. It was a baby scale. Besides, she never found that there was anything wrong. But she always weighed the meat, and she always caught me when I tried to run away. I could never escape this woman. She used to give me a quarter tip. A quarter was a good tip. Most were nickels and dimes.”
“You had humble origins. Like Abe Lincoln. Honest Marcus.”
“Insatiate Olivia.”
“What about the war, when meat was rationed? What about the black market? Was your father in the black market?”
“Did he bribe the owner of the slaughterhouse? He did. But his customers didn’t have ration stamps sometimes, and they were having company, they were having family over, and he wanted them to have meat, so he would give the slaughterhouse owner some cash each week, and he was able to get more meat. It wasn’t a big deal. It was as easy as that. But otherwise my father was a man who never broke the law. I think that was the only law he ever broke in his life, and in those days everyone broke that one, more or less. You know kosher meat has to be washed every three days. My father would take a whisk broom with a bucket of water and wash all the meat down. But sometimes you had a Jewish holiday, and though we ourselves weren’t strictly observant, we were Jews in a Jewish neighborhood, and what’s more, kosher butchers, and so the store was closed. And one Jewish holiday, my father told me, he forgot. Say the Passover Seder was going to be on a Monday and a Tuesday, and he washed the meat on the previous Friday. He would have to come back on Monday or Tuesday to do it again, and this one time he forgot. Well, nobody knew he’d forgotten, but he knew, and he would not sell that meat to anyone. He took it all and sold it at a loss to Mueller, who had a nonkosher butcher store on Bergen Street. Sid Mueller. But he would not sell it to his customers. He took the loss instead.”
“So you did learn to be honest from him in the store.”
“Probably. I certainly can’t say I ever learned anything bad from him. That would have been impossible.”
“Lucky Marcus.”
“You think so?”
“I know so,” Olivia said.
“Tell me about being a doctor’s daughter.”
All color passed out of her face when she replied, “There’s nothing to tell.”
“You—”
She let me get no further. “Practice tact,” she said coldly, and with that, as though a switch had been thrown or a plug pulled — as though gloom had swept through her like a storm — her face simply shut down. For the first time in my presence, so too did the beauty. Gone. The play and the luster suddenly gone, the fun of the butcher shop stories gone, and replaced by a terrible, sick-looking pallor the instant I wanted to know more about her.
I feigned indifference but I was shocked, so shocked that I blotted out the moment almost immediately. It was as if I’d been spun round and round till I was giddy and needed first to regain my balance, before I could reply, “Tact it is, then, and tact it shall be.” But I wasn’t happy, and earlier I’d been so happy, not just because of my raising Olivia’s laughter but because of my remembering my father as he’d once been — as he’d always been — back in those unimperiled, unchanging days when everybody felt safe and settled in his place. I’d been remembering my father as if that’s the way he still was and our lives had never taken this freakish turn. I’d been remembering him when he was anything but defenseless — when he was, without dispute, untyrannically, reassuringly, matter-of-factly boss, and I, his child and beneficiary, had felt so astonishingly free.
Why wouldn’t she answer me when I asked what it was like to be a doctor’s daughter? At first I blotted out that moment, but later it returned and wouldn’t go away. Was it the divorce she didn’t want to talk about? Or was it something worse? “Practice tact.” Why? What did that mean?