“Until the first of the year.”
“Maybe in that time I can do something for you. The situation may ease up a bit. I’ll keep you in mind. Almost anything, you say?”
“Is it really that bad, Bob?”
“I got them in the office. I got them on the phone. People hunting homes.”
“But what happened? There are all those flew apartment houses and the big developments. They had signs out front, advertised for rent or sale all summer.”
“I don’t know,” he said, and he sounded frantic. “I wouldn’t even try to answer. I just can’t understand it. I could sell a thousand homes. I could rent any number of apartments. But I haven’t got a one. I’m sitting here, going stony broke, because I have no listings. They all ran down to zero a good ten days ago. I have people pleading with me. They offer bribes to me. They think I’m holding out. I have more customers than I ever had before and there’s no way I can do business with them.”
“New people coming into town?”
“God, I don’t think so, Parker. Not this many of them.”
“New couples starting out?”
“I tell you, honest, half of the folks waiting for me are older people who sold their homes because the families had grown up and they didn’t need a big house any more. And a lot of the others are people who sold their places because their families were increasing and they needed room.”
“And now,” I said, “there is no room at all.”
“That’s the size of it,” he said. There was nothing more to say. I said it.
“Thanks, Bob.”
“I’ll keep watch for you,” he said. He didn’t sound too hopeful.
I hung up and sat there and wondered what was going on. There was something going on—I was sure of that. This was not just a situation brought about by an abnormal demand. Here was something that defied all rules of economics. There was a story somewhere; I could almost smell it. Franklin’s had been sold and Ed had lost his lease and Old George had sold this building and people were storming realty offices in a mad attempt to find a place to live.
I got up and put on my hat and coat. I tried not to notice the semicircle out of the carpeting when I went out the door.
I had a terrible hunch—a terrifying hunch.
The apartment building stood on the edge of a neighborhood shopping area, one that had developed years before, long before anyone had thought of sticking shopping centers helter-skelter way out in the sticks.
If my hunch was right, the answer might lie in the shopping area—in any shopping area.
I set out, hunting for that answer.
Ninety minutes later I had my answer and I was scared stone cold.
Most of the business houses in the area had lost their leases or were about to lose them. Several with long leases had sold their businesses. Most of the buildings apparently had changed hands within the last few weeks.
I talked with men who were desperate and others who had become resigned. And a few who were angry and another few who admitted they were licked.
“I tell you,” one druggist said, “maybe it is just as well. With the tax structure as it stands and all the regulations and the governmental interference, I sometimes wonder just how smart it is to remain in business. Sure, I looked for another location. But that was pure reflex. Habit dies hard in almost any man. But there’s no location. There’s nowhere for me to go. So I’ll just sell out my stock as best I can and get this monkey off my back, then wait and see what happens.”
“Any plans?” I asked.
“Well, the wife and I have been talking for some time about a long vacation. But we never took it. Never got around to taking it. This business tied me down and it’s hard to get good help.”
And there was the barber who had waved his scissors and snipped them angrily.
“Christ,” he said, “a man can’t make a living any longer. They won’t let you.”
I wanted to ask him who they were, but he didn’t give me a chance to get in a single word.
“God knows I make a poor enough living as it is,” he said. “Barbering isn’t what it used to be. Haircuts are all you get. Now and then a shampoo, but that is all. We used to shave them and give them facials and all of them wanted stickum on their hair. But now all we get is haircuts. And now they won’t even let me keep the little that I have.”
I managed to ask who they were, and he Couldn’t tell me. He was angry that I asked. He thought I was smarting off.
Two old family establishments (among Others), each of which owned its building, had held out against the offers which had been made them, each more attractive than the last.
“You know, Mr. Graves,” said an old gentleman at one of the hold-out business houses, “there might have been a time when I would have taken one of the offers. I suppose that I am foolish that I didn’t. But I’m too old a man. Me and this store have become so entangled we’re a part of one another. To sell out the business would be like selling out myself. I don’t suppose that you can understand that.”
“I think I do,” I said.
He put up a pale old hand, with the startling blue of veins standing out against the porcelain of his skin, and smoothed the thin white thatch of hair that clung plastered to his skull.
“There’s such a thing as pride,” he told me. “Pride in a way of doing business. No one else, I can assure you, would carry on this business in the same manner that I do. There are no manners in the world today, young man. There isn’t any kindness. And no consideration. There’s no such thing as thinking the best of one’s fellowmen. The business world has become a bookkeeping operation, performed by machines and by men who are very like machines in that they have no soul. There is no honor and no trust and the ethics have become the ethics of a wolf pack.”
He reached out the porcelain hand and laid it on my arm so lightly I couldn’t feel its touch.
“You say all my neighbors have lost their leases or sold out?”
“The most of them.”
“Jake up the street—he hasn’t? The one in the furniture business. He’s a thieving old scoundrel, but he thinks the same as I.”
I told him he was right. Jake wasn’t selling out, one of the half dozen or so who hadn’t.
“He’s the same as me,” the old man said. “We look on business as a trust and privilege. These others only see it as a way of making money. Jake has his sons he can leave the business to, and that may make a difference. Maybe that’s another reason he is hanging on. It is different with me. I have no family. There is just my sister. Just the two of us. When we are gone, the business will go with us. But so long as we live, we stay here, serving the public as honorably as we can. For I tell you, sir, that business is more than just a counting of the profits. It is a chance for service, a chance to make a contribution. It is the glue that keeps our civilization stuck together, and there can be no prouder profession for any man to follow.”
It sounded like a muted trumpet call from some other era, and that, perhaps, was exactly what it was. For a moment I sensed the thrill of proud-bright banners waving in the blue and I felt the newness and the clearness that was gone forever now.
And the old man may have seen the same thing that I had seen, for he said: “It is all tarnished now. Only here and there, in a few secluded corners, can we keep it shining bright.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. “You’ve done me a lot of good.”
As we shook hands in parting, I wondered why I should have told him that. Wondering why, I knew it was the truth—that somehow he’d done something, or said something, to put back some faith in me. Faith in what? I wondered, and I wasn’t sure. Faith in Man, perhaps. Faith in the world. Perhaps, even, some faith in myself.
I went out of the store and stood on the sidewalk and shivered, cold in the last warmness of the day.
For now it was not just happenstance, whatever it might be that was going on. It wasn’t only Franklin’s or the apartment in which I lived. It wasn’t only Ed who had lost his lease. It wasn’t only people who could find no place to live.