Shop Talk Page 30

  “I once thought I would make you my beneficiary. You are young, you could carry on the business, but no! You rush too much! I leave the whole shooting match to the Universal Committee on Conversation!”

  “Conservation!” Adam corrected her.

  It was her favorite threat, to cut him out of her will. Adam wondered if she even had a will. It was a five o’clock threat, when she wanted him to sit and drink rum with her, and listen to her curse Commercialism, Collectors, Waste, Progress and the City. Her mood could just as easily swing, in a matter of minutes. Then she would offer Adam the autograph album which had belonged to Goethe’s son, or she would announce to Adam that she was planning to adopt him legally as her son and heir, or she would inform him that it was the U.C.C. she was cutting from her will, because they were doing nothing about topsoil research. She was magniloquent in both moods, either offering Adam the world, or offering to pull it out from under him. There was no in-between, such as an offer of an extra five-dollar raise. Adam was still making the measly seventy-five dollars a week he had been earning for the past two years.

  “Everything to the Universal Committee on Conservation!” she babbled on. “They want to preserve, Adam! You don’t want to preserve! What do you care if some unprincipled saprophyte walks in to buy ‘The Lucy Baker Album?’ You would sell it in a blink of the eye!”

  Adam sighed and walked across to his desk, starting to clear away the day’s work. He said, “You know nothing about the man who wanted to buy that album.”

  “Where he is? Not here. Ah? He wants to buy, but he has no time to wait! I would sell it to him under no circumstances!”

  “You’re stubborn,” said Adam. “Just stubborn!”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Yah, nothing! I heard you under your breath! You and the City! Same birds!” She took another swallow of rum. “ ‘Remember well and bear in mind, that a true friend is hard to find.’ ”

  It was a verse from “The Lucy Baker Album.”

  “So is a good living hard to find,” said Adam.

  “Quit the whole shooting match if you don’t like it! Anyway, you’re fired! I fired you a hundred times, and you don’t get it through your head!”

  “All we sell any more,” Adam said, “is autographs. We haven’t sold an autograph album in seven months!”

  “Sell all the autographs you want to,” said Mrs. Auerbach, holding the rum bottle to the light to see its level. “Who cares for an old slip of paper with Button Gwinnett scrawled on it? Ah? Yah, worth money, but who cares for it? And all the other signers of your Declaration to Independence! Some independence when the City comes to wreck your home!”

  “ ‘The Lucy Baker Album’ could have paid for a whole remodeling job here,” Adam grumbled.

  Mrs. Auerbach chuckled. “I hate to sell the albums, Adam. The autograph books—there’s where my heart is. The Stammbuchs, with all their sweet sentiments! There’s the heart in this business, and you would sell it! Sell Button Gwinnett’s schlimm signature, but leave me my heart!”

  “Never mind,” said Adam. “Sunday I’ll look in the Times for something. Some other work!”

  Mrs. Auerbach did not raise her eyes from the rum bottle. She had heard that before. She knew how Adam loved The Mart. For Adam too, the autograph books were the most interesting part of the business. He loved to study the handwriting of the people who wrote in them; handwriting analysis had become his hobby. He enjoyed imagining the friendships, love affairs, and family relationships, and more than often he could pick out the most sinister dips and loops written in some of the saccharine and homely verses; as well as the contrary in some of the most dull and proper entries. Adam had never had a knack for making friends; love was a word which still sounded clumsy and joyless on his tongue. He had been raised in the Cayuga County Orphans’ Home, in upstate New York, and the closest he had ever come to having a family was his hero-worship of a very wealthy man in the city. But this same man had a son of his own with whom Adam had never succeeded in getting along; the son, in fact, had been the blight of Adam’s young years, always teasing him and showing him up. Adam had come away from upstate New York with a fierce embarrassment at having been an orphan. Often, with strangers, he invented a family; more than often he pretended to be the son of that rich man, using this masquerade only in the very unimportant moments—riding on a train or a bus, or having a drink beside someone in a bar. It was a little peculiarity of Adam’s, and he did it without thinking, as though it were a perfectly normal thing to do. Usually he kept his own name, but there had been times when he went the limit, and said his name was Billy Bollin.

  Mrs. Auerbach was the only person with whom he had ever discussed his past in detail, and honestly. She was old and warm and sentimental, in her better moments, and, he supposed, slightly daffy as well, but Adam could talk to her. When he had first come to New York and taken this job with her at The Mart, they had spent many long hours talking together. Mrs. Auerbach could carry on forever over a rum bottle, but never once had she told Adam anything about her past.

  At twenty-four, Adam Blessing was a little under six feet, with strong muscles he had worked hard to develop, a pleasant manner, and a good appearance—which had also involved work. As a youngster he had been very fat, and far from neat; he had been slow in school, and the dolt of his classmates. The course he had run since leaving Auburn, New York had not been an easy one; it had been all uphill. He had enrolled in numerous adult education classes given in high schools around the city. He had taken speech and shorthand, a semester of German, art appreciation, music appreciation, ballroom dancing, economics, a course in business management and one in personality. He was not as shy as he used to be, and he was meticulous about combing his white-blond hair and parting it in a somewhat old-fashioned way on the far left side. He kept himself scrubbed clean, nails clipped, clothes pressed and immaculate. His face was not overly-endowed by Nature with perfect features, but he had a good nose and excellent teeth, which compensated for lips that were on the small side, and eyes that were a dull, yellowish brown, Adam could easily be taken for a school teacher, a seminary student, a teller in a bank; or for exactly what he was—Mrs. Auerbach’s clerk.

  This outward appearance of mild-mannered introversion was misleading. Adam Blessing was ambitious. His ambitions kept him awake nights, sent him on long walks through dawn-deserted city streets, and kept him writing letter after letter after letter to manufacturers, corporations, agencies and any number of private enterprises. He was a world of ideas without an axis on which to revolve. When his letters received any replies at all, they were simply polite acknowledgments; more frequently they were ignored. Adam imagined that they were probably laughed at, and often, just after he mailed one of his letters, his cheeks would smart with frustration and humiliation as he imagined the letter arriving, and being ridiculed. His ideas for a way to improve paper clips, for children’s games, for advertising copy, for packaging pickles and olives in lighter containers, for promoting books and for publishing more readable newspapers—all of Adam’s ideas were unrealized. He needed money; even ideas for making money cost money. That fact was his dead end.

  Waking and sleeping, he dreamed of having money, but in those moments of stark reality when he was face to face with the glaring light of truth, he became resigned and somewhat bitter. He was Adam Blessing, no matter if he could see his reflection only hazily in the mirror behind the bar, no matter if the stranger beside him did put his beer down, shake his hand and say: “Glad to know you, Mr. Bollin.”

  After he had piled his correspondence neatly and rolled down the top of his desk, he glanced across at Mrs. Auerbach. She was humming a waltz. Some of the rum had dribbled down the front of her red sweater from the sides of her mouth, and her legs were spread in a careless fashion, so that Adam could see up to the long pink silk bloomers she wore; could see the jelly-fat-flabby thighs. He had seen her that way too many times to figure, but each time he was
reminded of the only glimpse of his own mother which his memory retained. He was not even certain of how old he was, but he must have been very young, for it was some time before he had been taken to the Home. He was in a kitchen with her. She had been washing clothes at the sink on a hot day, and she had plopped herself down on a straight-backed wooden chair, in the same posture as Mrs. Auerbach’s now. He had not been too young to feel a certain shame at being able to see up her skirt. She was not fat like Mrs. Auerbach. Adam could not remember her face. But he did remember something she said to him. Her tone was sarcastic. Adam liked to think that it was a sarcasm striped with a certain disappointment about something Adam had nothing to do with, but he could not be positive of that. He only knew for sure that she had looked at him and said, “And a lot you care!”

  That was the only memory Adam had of a parent.

  Mrs. Auerbach’s mood had swung now. She was telling Adam that she was leaving him everything when she passed on. Adam was convinced she would leave it to dogs and cats, the Committee on Conservation, or perhaps some imaginary committee of her own, to fight the city of New York. He sometimes wondered what happened to an old woman’s money when she had no beneficiary; but whatever did happen, and whoever did take over the business, Adam was sure he would be asked to stay on. In addition, he was sure his position would be a more important one. He knew as much about the stock at The Mart as Mrs. Auerbach did, and he had hundreds of ideas for making the place a success. Mrs. Auerbach was simply not interested in the business any more, despite her occasional harangues to the contrary. Whoever took over the business—and even in Adam’s dreams he discounted himself, for he knew the old woman and her crazy ways—the new owner would need Adam. It would be a matter of time. Adam would be given more responsibility and more money, and while he would probably not get rich, he would have enough, he was sure …

  Drunk or sober, Mrs. Auerbach embraced strangeness with the unreasoning enthusiasm of the certifiable eccentric. Adam knew that she often picked through city litter baskets for strange souvenirs—an old box, a hat band—once, the wheel of a baby carriage. It had been reported to Adam, by other shopkeepers along Fifty-seventh Street, that she kept thousands of dollars in used sardine tins in her icebox; and Adam was very used to seeing the jar of pepper she carried at all times, to ward off thieves.

  About Mr. Auerbach—whoever he was, and if he ever had been—Adam knew nothing. Mrs. Auerbach mentioned no relatives, except to say she had lived a lovely life and it was done with some years ago; that now she and Adam were both orphans.

  He walked across and sat down at the card table with Mrs. Auerbach, waving away her offer of the rum bottle. It was now twenty minutes past five. Adam’s date was with an airline reservations telephone clerk he had met in his personality class.

  “Mrs. Auerbach, I have to go soon. Really.”

  She was paging through the familiar autograph book, her favorite.

  “This is the great poet Goethe’s son’s autograph book, Adam.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I know that by now.”

  “Yes, ma’am, you know, don’t you? It’s yours, but you think I should put it back in the safe. You don’t believe it’s yours, no?” She cackled and drank more rum. “My apartment was mine. Thirty years, Adam, yah? I believed it was mine, but no! The City’s it was—all these years. Did the City pay the rent once? No, but the City’s it is!”

  “I’m sorry about that Mrs. Auerbach, I really am.” “But you’re a hurry. Rush and rush, Adam, is that you? Like the City, rush and rush to get me out.” “I have a date, Mrs. Auerbach.”

  “Yes, but wait, Adam.” She placed her hand on Adam’s wrist. “The law is, this is yours. Take it.” She put the worn autograph book in his hands. “It was Goethe’s son’s book, Adam. Oh, money it could bring you, and not a little. But more, Adam. Sentiment. Roots. Let it be your Stammbuch, Adam. Roots, I can’t give you, but this is the next best thing. Yah, Adam?”

  “Thank you,” said Adam. “I’ll put it back in the safe.”

  She slapped her hand down on the book in his hand. “Nein! This time, take it with you! It is yours, Adam!”

  Adam said, “Yes, and thank you again. I’ll keep it here in the safe.”

  “Nein!”

  Adam held the book in his hand, uncertain of his next step. In all his years of receiving this “gift” from Mrs. Auerbach, she had never stopped him from putting it back in the safe; neither of them, Adam always thought, had ever taken her gesture with any seriousness. The book was worth thousands; it was one of The Mart’s most valuable pieces of stock.

  “ ‘Hand to the patron the book, and hand it to friend and companion,’ “ Mrs. Auerbach recited. “I hope you will over and over read that, Adam. In Goethe’s own handwriting.”

  Adam said, “This book is worth—”

  “Money! Is that all you care for? Put it in your pocket and shut up your squealing and squeaking! I need some peace! You are like a collector with your money all the time! Put it in your pocket!”

  Adam did as he was told.

  “Go on, rush!” she said. “Shoo!”

  “I could—help you home, Mrs. Auerbach.”

  Momentarily she regarded him coolly, letting his presumption hang in the silence. Adam had thought of walking her the few blocks to her apartment, then slipping back with the valuable book and locking it safely in The Mart. It was no good. “Since when did I need help home, Herr Blessing?”

  He knew she was very angry.

  “The law about ‘The Lucy Baker Album stands!’ “ she announced, with a bang of the rum bottle on the table top for punctuation. “To that man who comes here for it, it is not for sale.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And there is filing piled up on your desk too!” “I realize that, Mrs. Auerbach.”

  “Do you have correspondence on the Poe manuscript?” “Yes, Mrs. Auerbach. I have it started.” “Go on! Next thing you’ll want this overtime employees want, yah?” “No,” Adam said.

  He kept the palm of his hand on his pocket where the album was. He knew he would keep it there all night, and that he would sleep with it under his pillow; not draw a free breath until it was back in The Mart on Monday. He could not even return it tomorrow, though he had a key. At 6:00 P.M. on Saturdays, Mrs. Auerbach’s burglar alarm was wired to the keyhole, and centralized with the Palmer Protective Association. It was clocked that way until eight Monday morning.

  “What are you waiting for, ah?” She sat erect now, with her plump legs crossed, the one dangling over the other, swinging—exposing her garter, her silk stockings, and her bright yellow ankle socks. As always, Adam could see his face in the shine on her shoes. He dismissed a crazy, sudden impulse to bend down and plant a kiss on that wild mop of orange hair.

  As he turned, after saying good night, he heard her voice behind him snap: “Get in on time Monday morning, Herr Blessing!”

  Outside, he climbed the winding stairs to Fifty-seventh Street. He sneaked a look at her, the naked electric light bulb dangling on a cord directly above her head, the bottle of rum tipped to her mouth, and her feet tapping energetically to what Adam guessed was probably another waltz.

  Read more of Touched

  Tyrus Books, a division of F+W Media, publishes crime and dark literary fiction—offering books from exciting new voices and established, well-loved authors. Centering on deeply provocative and universal human experiences, Tyrus Books is a leader in its genre.

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  This edition published by

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  an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.

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  Copyright © 1998 by Lizzie Hart

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, use
d fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-3901-4

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3901-5