I am happy to bring this story out of the dark. It is, in fact, the sequel to Gold’s famous “Trouble with Water,” which appeared in Wandering Stars. If you remember Greenberg the concessionaire who was cursed by a water gnome, you’ll also remember the terrible (yet terribly logical) consequences that followed. Now, meet Kaplan the tailor, who is a bit too high-handed with an Eastern holyman….
KAPLAN TRIED TO MAKE a gesture of impatience. It was impossible because his arms were piled high with clothing. He followed his wife’s pointing finger and succeeded in shrugging contemptuously.
Clad in pathetic rags, the hairiest, dirtiest tramp in the world stood outside the plate-glass window of Kaplan’s dry-cleaning store and eagerly watched the stubby, garment-laden figure as it waddled toward the bandbox cleaning vat.
“Him?” Kaplan echoed sarcastically. “A bum like him is going to drive us out of business? Do you mind if I am asking you what with, Mrs. Genius?”
“Like my mother told me,” Mrs. Kaplan retorted angrily, “a book you can’t tell by its covers. So, rags he’s wearing and he’s dirty, that means he can’t have money? You don’t read in the papers, I suppose. Blind beggars don’t own apartment houses and chauffeurs, I suppose, and people on relief don’t ride cars down to get their checks. Besides, such a feeling I get when I look at him—like when a mouse looks at a cat.”
“Pah!” Kaplan broke in good-humoredly. “Some foolishness.”
“All right, Mr. Einstein, he’s standing out there with a pencil and paper because somewhere else he ain’t got to go.”
“You think maybe you’re wrong?” Kaplan almost snapped testily. “No. He’s going to the Ritz for supper and he stopped in while he should have his dress suit pressed! Molly, a whole year you been annoying me with this lazy, no-good loafer. Ain’t I got enough on my head as it is?”
Molly pursed her lips and went back to sewing buttons on a dress that hung from a hook. With his arms still loaded, Kaplan clambered up on the window platform, where the bandbox vat stood. How he ever had the strength of character to refrain from fondling his beautiful machine, Kaplan never understood. It really was a lovely thing: red, black and chromium, a masterpiece of a dry-cleaning machine that attracted school children and summer residents.
In spite of his confident attitude, Kaplan felt less certain of himself now. The moment he had stepped on the platform, the tramp darted to the middle of the window.
Defiantly, Kaplan opened the door to the vat and tried to stuff in the garments without regard for scientific placement. They stuck, of course. Kaplan raised his head and glowered at the tramp, who craned and pressed his ugly, stubbled face against the polished glass, trying to peer into the open tank.
“Aha!” Kaplan muttered, when he saw his enemy’s anxiety. “Now I got you!”
“Did you say something?” Molly asked ironically.
“No, no!” he said hastily. “So fat I’m getting—”
It was uncomfortable working in that position, but Kaplan shoved his slightly gross body between the opening and his audience. Straining from above and getting in his own way, he put the clothes in properly around the tumbler. Then he shut the door quickly and turned on the switch. The garments twirled slowly in the cleansing fluid.
Kaplan descended the stairs with an air of triumph.
That had happened every workday for a year, yet neither the little tailor nor his degraded foe had lost the original zest of the silent, bitter struggle. Once more Kaplan had defeated him! On his victory march back to the pressing machine, Kaplan allowed himself a final leer at the fallen.
But this time it was his face, not the tramp’s, that slipped into anxiety. He stood trembling and watching his enemy’s contented face, and fear lashed him.
The tramp was holding a large piece of brown grocery bag against the hitherto clean window with one hand. With the other he held a stump of pencil, which he used for checking unseen marks against whatever parts of the machine he could note from outside.
But what frightened Kaplan was his complacent satisfaction with his work. Usually he shook his head bewilderedly and wandered off, to reappear as eagerly at four thirty the next afternoon.
This time he didn’t shake his head. He folded the dirty square of paper, stowed it away carefully in some hole in the lining of his miserable jacket, and strode—yes, strode!—away, nodding and grinning smugly.
Kaplan turned and looked unhappily at Molly. Luckily she was biting off a thread and had not noticed. If she hadn’t been there, he knew he would have been useless. Now he had to put on a show of unconcern.
But his hands shook so violently that he banged down the iron almost hard enough to smash the machine, shot a vicious jet of steam through the suit, and the vacuum pedal, which dried the buck and garment, bent under the jab of his unsteady foot. He raised the iron and blindly walloped a crease in the pants.
Half an hour later, when Molly was arranging the garments for delivery, she let out a shriek:
“Ira! What are you doing—trying to ruin us by botch jobs?”
Kaplan groaned. He had started, properly enough, at the pleat near the waist; but a neat spiral crease ended at the side seam. If Molly had not caught the error, Mr. McElvoy, Cedarmere’s dapper high-school principal, would have come raging into the store next day, wearing a pair of corkscrew pants.
“From morning to night,” Kaplan moaned, “nothing but trouble! You and your foolishness—why can’t I be rich and send you to Florida?”
“Oh, you want to get rid of me?” she shrilled. “Like a dog I work so we can save money, but you ain’t satisfied! What more do you want—I should drive the truck?”
“It ain’t a bad idea,” he said wistfully. “How I hate to drive—”
He was almost quick enough to dodge the hanger. It was the first time he had ever regretted the imposing height of his bald, domelike head.
Bleary-eyed, Kaplan drove up to the store twenty-five minutes early. Sometime, late at night, Molly had fallen into an exhausted sleep. But his weary ear and intense worry had kept him awake until dawn. Then he got out of bed and dazedly made breakfast.
He remembered the last thing she had shrieked at him:
“Five bankruptcies we’ve had, and not a penny we made on any of them! So once in your life you get an idea, we should borrow money and buy a bandbox, we should move to a little town where there ain’t competition. So what do you do? Bums you practically give your business to!”
There wasn’t much literal truth in her accusation, yet Kaplan recognized its hyperbolic justice. By accepting the tramp as a tramp, merely because he wore dirty rags, Kaplan was encouraging some mysterious, unscrupulous conniving. just what it might be, he couldn’t guess. But what if the tramp actually had money and was copying the bandbox machine so he could find out where to buy one—
“A fat lot people care, good work, bad work, as long as it’s cheap,” Kaplan mumbled unhappily. “Don’t Mr. Goodwin, the cheap piker, ride fifteen miles to that faker, Aaron Gottlieb, because it’s a quarter cheaper?”
Kaplan opened the door of the Ford delivery truck and stepped out. “The loafer,” he mumbled, “he could buy a bandbox, open a store, and drive me right out of business. Family he ain’t got, a nice house be don’t need—he could clean and press for next to—”
Kaplan had been fishing in his pocket for the key. When he looked up, his muttering rose to a high wail of fright.
“You! What do you want here?”
Early as it was, the tramp squatted cross-legged on the chill sidewalk as if he had been waiting patiently for hours. Now he raised himself to his feet and bowed his head with flattering respect.