Now Dorothy wasn’t blind. All butchers were flirts. The female customers seemed to expect it and were flattered by it. (It was good for business, even.) Mrs. Bliss had a theory that she’d mentioned to Ted.
“I think butchers flirt because they’re always working with meat.”
Her husband blushed.
“That’s why, isn’t it? Ted? No, I’m serious.”
“Sure,” said Mr. Bliss. “You hit the nail on the head. Some go for the pot roasts, the rest for the chickens.”
She would have mentioned the incident with Junior, too, but she was afraid of what might happen. Ted was a gentle man, but it wasn’t unknown for partners to use their carving knives in a fit of temper. It wasn’t Junior’s life she feared for but her husband’s. Since he’d touched her she imagined Junior capable of any outrage. If it happened again, though…
And that’s why she was so bothered by those telephone calls at all hours. Dorothy was frightened Ted might be taking up with Junior again. The gonif had stolen from them once (tricks with the books), and though Herbie Yellin, Junior’s father, had made good their losses (or Dorothy might have taken up a carving knife herself and cut him where it would do the most good), she knew he could rob them again. It was in his nature to be a thief, and not just a thief but someone who deliberately went out of his way to betray the people who were closest to him. Look how he treated his wife, or, fallen down drunk, how he must have appeared to his beautiful children. Look what he’d done to Ted, and how he ran to his daddy whenever he got too far behind in his gambling debts. Was it any wonder Mrs. Bliss didn’t want him back in their lives?
But whenever she tried to bring up the subject of the calls with Ted her husband just shrugged and denied that there was anything going on and changed the subject. Sometimes he smiled and winked, conveying that if he really was up to something it wasn’t anything she needed to worry about.
Then he sprang the farm on her!
Then he told her — it was in the old, ruined farmhouse that first night after the children had fallen asleep — that the thing of it was that it was a black-market operation. He knew he could trust her, he said. It was no big deal, he said. It was 1942, probably already the middle of the war, and time to strike while the iron was still hot. It was the first time they’d really ever had any opportunity to cash in big. Fortunes were to be made in meat. And did Dorothy remember what it was like during the Depression, how no one had the money for the better cuts of meat and the only way they’d managed to get by was by eating up half their inventory? And every independent butcher he knew was into it directly or indirectly. Some were taking under the table for monkey business with the ration books. And some were charging whatever the traffic would bear no matter how hard the OPA tried to hold prices down. And some sons of bitches had given up the butcher profession completely and had become full-time ration-stamp counterfeiters. Now that was really a dirty thing to do, and hurt the war effort, and Ted wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. What he was trying to accomplish with his little operation was just to go to the source, become the source and set up his own little business. Why let big shots like Swift and Armour and Mr. Hormel Ham soak up all the profits and leave nothing over for the little guy? It was supply and demand, he said. Didn’t Dorothy know anything about supply and demand? It was how business did business, he said, and if Dorothy didn’t understand that even the war effort worked by that principle, then all he could say was that he was offering her a very valuable lesson. “Well,” Ted said, “what do you think?”
“Does Junior Yellin have anything to do with this?”
“Junior’s out of it. He found the place. Then all he did was put me in touch with the guy who owned it.”
“And took a cut, I suppose.”
“He took his commission. He’s entitled to his little commission. Even Junior Yellin has a right to live, Dorothy.”
This last was not something Dorothy entirely agreed with — the philandering, the gambling, the drunkenness, the lovely wife and beautiful kids, the funny business with Ted’s books, the funny business when he tried to try something with her — and although she knew her husband hated anyone speaking ill of his old partner (despite the fact that the no-good had cheated him), she understood that if she found out that Junior still maintained the slightest connection with this new operation, she would say something, she would have to, even if it meant spilling the beans about what had happened to her in back of the case in which the meat was displayed. (Though she understood her husband’s loyalty to Junior. She really did. It was the loyalty of family and, in a way, she shared it. The old loyalty of battle stations and circling wagons — all the closed ranks of blood. The world was humiliating enough. You couldn’t afford to live in a double-dealing world where you thought you were subject to being humiliated by partners, too. Of course old man Yellin had bailed out his boy by making restitution. Of course Ted had not broken up their partnership; of course it had been Herbie Yellin who had insisted that his son, so ruthlessly charged, so mercilessly done in by a partner who actually took the word of the accountant, an outsider, against the needs of a son who if he futzed the books did so out of necessity — those mounting gambling debts and the high price of his high nature with the floozies and bimbos he kept on the side. You came, you sprang to the defense of family. Dorothy understood this and even admired old Yellin for paying them back, then telling them off, and then insisting that it was Junior who had dissolved the partnership. Your dear ones were dear, no matter. Whatever was yours was.
(And if she’d gone to Ted that time and warned him about Junior and that what he pulled on the housewives and customers he had no compunction about pulling on Dorothy, too, then what? Would Ted have had it out with him, or would he have given her his old song and dance about how Junior was an artist, the best man in Chicago with boning knives, paring, carving knives, hacksaws and cleavers, an artist who could trim every last ounce of fat from a steak so that even the T-bones and porterhouses in their display cases, even the stringy briskets, looked like filet mignons, and you couldn’t say to an artist what you could say to an ordinary butcher? He loved her, she knew that, but she wasn’t so anxious to see push come to shove, never mind what she had told herself about carving knives and the temperaments of outraged butchers.)
It wasn’t even the discomfort of their life in the country she objected to, and certainly it wasn’t the problematic criminality of Ted’s being a black marketeer. She was innocent, and naive, and a woman of valor, but she was a wife, too, after all, and a mother with mouths to feed and babes to protect. What, she should be less than the simplest creatures, a lioness with her cubs, say, or a bear with its? So if she wished for the conclusion to the interval of their life on the farm, it was as much for the benefit of her three children as it was for her husband or for herself. Chicago represented an ideal of progress and comfort. It represented the future. Indeed, life in Michigan seemed so like life in Russia to Dorothy (though she could barely recall her girlhood in Russia) that the idea of Ted’s dumping the farm and moving the family back to Illinois seemed as much an ordeal and adventure as contemplating the journey from Russia to the New World must have seemed to her own parents. After only a few months away from the city, Chicago, raised to almost mythic stature, began to take on an atmosphere of enchantment and fable. Mrs. Bliss regaled her children with stories of how water had poured freely from every faucet in their apartment. All you had to do to fill a pitcher for lemonade was turn a tap. A pitcher for lemonade? To run a bath. To run a bath? To flush the toilet! She was a keeper of the flame, Mrs. Ted Bliss. She told them that in Chicago all the streets were paved, and the only paths you ever came across were the trails in Jackson Park or the Forest Preserves. Mail, she reported, was delivered by the postman directly to a letter box in the hall. The radio crackled with static only during thunderstorms. You could get all your programs clear as a bell.