Dave's Depression

A Short Story

BY E. S. GOLDMAN

THE DEPRESSION THAT BEGAN FOR EVERYBODY ELSE with the crash of the stock market came three years earlier to Dave Perleman’s family. An honorable mistake—natural for a man who trusted the arithmetic of waiters and called their attention to items omitted from his restaurant checks—opened the door to disaster. His wife, Edith, thought it was a mistake at the time, and soon it was beyond redress.

Edith had the quicker head for figures. When they met, she was on her first job out of business school, and had already been made the manager over two other girls, in the office of Maison Bernard, an importer of pigeon nests, floral arrangements, and other fashionably ornate millinery. Dave described her to his friends as a girl who was “big as a minute and all brains and style,” with a spirit of banter that matched his own. He approved her style with particular conviction, as he had been educated to it: he was the fireman with the duty watch at the Alvin Theatre in Pittsburgh, where society passed under his appreciative eye.

The courtship was unpromising: a size-four New York fashion plate and a stalwart fireman from Pittsburgh in Manhattan for a few days’ leave between hitches, with an introduction from a family friend. His ambition was to rise to the next civil-service rank; she was an energetic, goodlooking girl who had been taken to dinner by buyers and lawyers and could barely imagine living in Pittsburgh as a fireman’s wife.

She was very much in love with the man. Pittsburgh was possible, but not if Dave slept over the horses in the enginehouse every night except now and then. Edith observed that Dave was a grand master of friendship; surely something more middle class could be developed from such a talent. Even in New York men came to their restaurant table to say hello to Dave, and she could not walk a city block in Pittsburgh with him without being introduced to a half dozen “very good friends of mine.” He could sell insurance. He could sell merchandise for a famous house. He could be a merchant—

Yes, a merchant like the patrons of the wholesale firm of Maison Bernard. He could go to his merchant and traveler friends for advice and even backing; friends would become customers. He would be a success. He would come home for dinner. They would live a normal life. She would have children, and cook, and sew for the hospital, and they would spend their evenings with friends who liked theater and movies and dancing and bridge. They would join the temple and send respectable checks.

At anniversaries that went to silver, golden, and beyond, they told each other how well that unpromising marriage had worked out, although occasionally, in the Depression years, Dave reflected that he would have been chief by now, and Edith, who had to find another house and again another, because even this rent could no longer be afforded, had long—very long—thoughts.

For the first few years, before children arrived, he ran a small clothing store and Edith kept the books. Her job was to make something out of transactions that began with Dave’s coming toward the office with a coat over his arm and a sales slip in his hand. “We have to open an account for this friend of mine, Big Doggy.”

“I can’t open an account for a man with a name like that. What is his name?”

“His name is Big Doggy. Nobody calls him anything else.”

“Ask him his name. Anybody who expects credit knows you have to give a name and address.”

“I can’t ask a man I’ve known all my life what his name is.”

“Dave, you have to ask him his name. You have to get a reference. I have to have it for the accountant.”

“Tell the accountant he’s Little Doggy’s brother.”

Poor boys with street names from the Hill were becoming the city’s merchants, dentists, lawyers, councilmen, bookmakers, bootleggers, physicians, traveling men, theater owners. (Certain roads were not taken. The way to iron and steel was through the scrapyards, where one learned to arbitrage the numbers between telephones at both ears; an extra generation or two was needed to go that roundabout way. The university filled its tenured places with Presbyterians until the GI Bill overwhelmed it with bodies, and faculty to meet the demand had to be recruited from exotic cultures.) Moving ahead in available ways, Dave’s peers dispersed to greener neighborhoods in Squirrel Hill and the tributary streets of Schenley and Highland Park. They went to Dave Upstairs, seven years into his second ten-year lease, for a real buy on a suit of clothes.

IN THE COURSE OF ACQUIRING PRIME DOWNTOWN LOCAtions for its shops, the Federal Cigar Store chain bought the corner of Fifth Avenue and Wood Street in Pittsburgh and sent its agent in to tell Dave that the rent for his clothing store on the second floor would be doubled. The agent blew cigar smoke at Dave and jabbed at his lapel for emphasis.

Regarding the agent as a poor specimen, Dave said he had three more years on his lease to think about it and would talk to the man then.

“No, you won’t. We’ll rewrite it today or I’ll have somebody else in here when you want to renew. This is a valuable salesroom. I have people standing in line for it.”

“This room was a storage loft when I got it. I’ll talk to you at the right time.”

“There won’t be another time.”

Considerable power remained in the sloping shoulders of the merchant who had played left guard for Fort Hamilton a quarter century before and had gone on to spend five years as a ladderman in Company C. His impulse was to hold the agent’s head still with one hand, poke two fingers into his nostrils, and lead him out like a cow. Instead, he told him where he could stick his lease.

His exact words surprised his children when they heard them recollected on the Memory Project tape. They had never heard Dave say anything stronger than hell and damn. If they had depended on their father, they would have had no vocabulary for the conduct of ordinary business.

He brought the cigar company’s rejected proposition home, so that Edith could share his disdain. She heard him out, her angular face drawing in around observant black eyes. The image of embattled wagons circled at a dire time came readily to mind as Edith contemplated Dave embarked on error. Later her arms and body stoutened and her feet overflowed her pumps, but her mind never lost precision. When she realized that Dave’s last word had been no, she said, “Why don’t you see if you can work something out? The business and the location are perfect for each other.”

“I’m not going to do business with a man like that.”

“You might have to, Dave. They have the upper hand.”

“Maybe, but I’m not going to do business with him. I should have thrown him out.”

Sixty years later the ancient man wished the Memory Project to understand that he had not forgiven the miserable agent and his miserable employer, that he regretted the lost opportunity to assault the sorry excuse for a human being who touched his lapel aggressively and blew smoke in his face. The dismissing hand falling back to bone was still handsomely carved and muscular.

“Eventually I had to go in to see him, because I had to get the lease renewed. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, and it didn’t accomplish a thing. He kept his word. They had another tenant. They brought in a credit outfit to take advantage of the trade I had built up for the location. They went broke. The cigar store failed too. They all had to get out. They cost a lot of people a lot of money. I never cost anybody a dollar.”

The bond between Dave’s business and its location, correctly discerned by Edith, could not easily be replicated. He searched until no time remained, and leased a floor for which the best that could be said was that it had possibilities. Real possibilities, he said, with a salesman’s indestructible enthusiasm. If the adjoining showroom could be added. But despite conversational understandings, it could not be, and Dave Upstairs moved into an alley of a room for which narrow tables had to be custom-made and anchored to the floor so that they would not tip over. If the first-floor entrance could he made more prominent and the stairway less steep. But the landlord priced these accommodations high, and Dave’s savings were running out. He convinced himself that less costly alternatives, with paint and carpentry, were available.

Once more he had to grind his face in the dirt and ask the cigar-store agent for a brief extension of his occupancy while he completed the alterations he would not have had to make if he had stayed put.

The agent looked at him with the disdain with which he had himself been regarded.

“I’ll let you know.”

Dave had to call, and call again, sweating, before the reprieve was allowed, at a premium above the exalted monthly rate he had refused to pay.

The new arrangement would have worked out all right if customers had come in the same numbers as before, but the address was a block out of the way from the center, the steepness of the stairway could not be wished away, the showroom was uncomfortably tight. After his early success Dave felt he had to apologize for this store to Edith, to his customers, to manufacturers who had bet on what looked like a winner in Pittsburgh and now were on the phone. “Dave, we’ve been expecting your check.”

The real Depression arrived in 1929 and supplied a generic explanation for being broke. Every man blamed the man above. The customer lived off his savings if he had them and swore at dunning merchants. Merchants knew their manufacturers had a cushion and didn’t have to squeeze that hard. Manufacturers lashed out at mills and banks that didn’t seem to care how profitable a customer had been. Those higher in the chain directed downward their regret at necessity, their contempt for imprudence, their suspicion of false pleading, their determination to survive and even prosper.

Dave had personal problems as well. He lost Aubey, his oldest son, in a gymnasium accident the year the store closed. Aubey, a boy of unlimited promise, with an appointment to West Point from a congressman Dave had grown up with on the Hill, swung on a pull-up stanchion, rocked to lift its feet from the floor, rocked higher, daring them to lift higher, until the pendulum went beyond the point of return and laid an iron bar across his throat as he fell to the floor. His larynx smashed, Aubey died strangling red, then purple, kicking out, without voice.

Lloyd, Dave’s second son, had a tubercular hip and would never go to West Point. He was indolent and at twelve, the age at which Dave had been taken out of school to be a wage-earner for his family—got around all right but didn’t have the will to hold a regular Saturday job. Maxine, his daughter, needed braces on her teeth, needed clothes. At the same time, she was a tomboy and used up shoes. His youngest son had been born with a brain injury after a difficult delivery. Answering the call bell, the head of obstetrics had been seen walking fast toward the delivery room. These were the years before the age of Blue Cross, before doctors one knew well were sued.

The bills tilled the cubbyholes in the delicate Louis XVI desk that Edith had bought in their first prosperity. They owed grocers, druggists, doctors, dentists, department stores. They moved in order to owe the landlord less. When he had been poor, Dave had never owed. Edith’s family had never owed.

He went to New York to see if the maker of a line he had done well with would back him in another store. He developed an argument so persuasive that he would have bought it in a minute if he were William P. He went over and over it in the sleeper on the way to New York.

“I made a mistake, William, but I showed that I could do business in the right location. I want to pay what I owe you one hundred cents on the dollar, but I can’t pay if I don’t have a store. With your credit behind me in a good location I can have a well-stocked store. My customers will follow me wherever I go.”

William said, “I have alw ays thought well of you, Dave, but I don’t handle those things myself anymore. Talk to my credit man. Sam will know what to do.”

The credit man, a famous collector who went around to the embattled New York stores every Friday and took what was owed his firm right out of the till, knew who would make it and who would be good money after bad.

“Damn it, Dave,”he said, “I can’t do business with a man who has his hat in his hand.”

Dav e went away listening to the sound of his own voice asking for help. He looked in the mirror to see what desperation looked like. He did better on his next call. He said with confidence what he had omitted from the first interviews, thinking William and Sam might find it presumptuous.

“Without me, you have nobody to do business with in Pittsburgh. If you’re ready to move fast, we can be in business in two months and have the finest store in the city.”

NO LONGER DAVE UPSTAIRS, HE OPENED AN IMPRESsive street-level establishment where a lesser merchant had failed and left amenities in place at ten cents on the dollar. The store was stylish in a way that Edith had had in mind from the beginning. The aisles were broad, the carpeting dense, the display cases waxed oak. Banks anchored the street to past and future centuries. The three best jewelers in town could be seen from the door, as well as a tobacconist with a British lion on his window, and office buildings held in the strong hands of Mellon cousins. The old J. MacNail men’s store, with a Duquesne Club clientele, was in the next block. The weather forecast was clear—the 1923 recession had blown over in a year, had been followed by good times, and Dave expected more of the same.

However, it was only 1931. Careful men had been able to scramble to an upper floor with their families and goods when the first wave of business failures flooded out the usual poor and improvident, but the waters of economic disaster kept rising. They now ran on the better streets and into the lobbies of the better buildings. The best people said the flood waters would abate. But they rose beyond anyone’s imagination, collapsing the foundations of well-built houses. The best men clung to roofs, which floated away. Dave hadn’t had any money to lose in the stock market, but his partners, trying to recoup on Wall Street their earlier losses, were carried away, had to let go; the new store was unmoored.

Salesmen still traveled the country looking for merchants who could pay their bills. Dave wasn’t one of those, but the roadmen were old friends. One came to dinner and stayed with Dave at the table after Edith went into the kitchen to do the dishes.

“You could declare bankruptcy, Dave. Clear the deck. You wouldn’t be the only one.”

“I’m not interested in that.”

He began a long, sliding defense along the ropes with new partners and the credit of new manufacturers in still other stores, and finally he backed into a shabby salesroom to begin again as Dave Upstairs, this time alone except for a part-time tailor. In order to make a bank deposit to cover checks he had already written, he had to lock the door and put up a sign saying that he would be back in ten minutes.

He understood why poor men wanted sons. He had had three. One was dead. One had a game leg and couldn’t be made to understand that whatever cards you had you played for every trick in them. President Roosevelt had a game leg—the boy was lazy. His last son, on whom a fortune had been spent in special schools in New York and Philadelphia, was ten years old and couldn’t spell his name.

“They aren’t doing him any good,” Edith said. “I want to bring him home.”

“What are you going to do with him all day in this house? You would have to do everything for him. You would have to clean up after him.”

“They aren’t doing him any good. You can’t tell me he couldn’t learn to write his name and read the name of a street on a sign. You can’t afford to keep him in those expensive places, and they don’t do anything for him.”

“Don’t tell me what I can afford! If I have to steal, Don will have what he needs!”

“If you’re going to steal, steal enough to put bread on your table and buy your daughter a pair of shoes! I want my son where I can keep an eye on him.”

“If that’s what you want, I can get him in the Allegheny School, and you can see him every day.”

“My son isn’t going to a state institution.”

“What do you know about it? Ben Davis has a boy there. He says everything about the place is well run. Go out and take a look at it.”

“Donald is not going to a state institution.”

No real sons, and a wife who had become a nurse with a short temper.

EDITH MOVED THEM AGAIN AND DIDN’T BOTHER TO put down rugs. She set out to find something better or cheaper the day she moved in. To visit her family she went to New York on the sit-up Pennsylvania Railroad excursion for seven dollars. Dave took the same train after he closed the store Saturday, napped through the calls for Altoona. . . Harrisburg. . . Paoli . . . Manhattan Transfer . . . Newark, and was in New York at dawn, two hours before he could see anybody. He shopped the New York wholesale markets for enough merchandise to carry the store for a month. He wrestled suitcases and cartons of merchandise onto the return train Sunday night and off again Monday morning in time to open the store.

These were not the exertions and sacrifices of a young man on the way up. He was middle-aged, hanging on, losing ground, not certain he could pay next month’s rent. Then what? A salesman’s job in a department store that wanted his mailing list? Salesmen couldn’t pay off the bills of failed stores.

Old friends from the Hill went to jail for arson, and reasonable suspicion lay against others who weren’t caught. Puffy Rosener shot himself. Gum Haberman disappeared and was never found. Widows relied on insurance. Douglas Kampreiter stopped him on the street to tell him that he had lost his electric-lighting-fixture business and his daughter was in the hospital. He didn’t know where to turn and asked if Dave could help him out.

Dave was able to give him only the money in his pocket. The Kampreiters had lived two houses down Crawford Street from the Perlemans. Dave thought Douglas might kill himself. He wanted to talk about that with somebody, but he didn’t find anybody until his son Lloyd happened to be with him in the dark that night, standing on the cement pad in front of the garage. The obscurant night made possible conversation with a boy as though he were a man. On impulse Dave told Lloyd about Douglas Kampreiter.

“Do you know what Douglas said to me? He said that if a man got to a certain point he had a duty—he had a duty—to jump out of a window so his family would have the insurance. Do you think that’s so?”

Lloyd didn’t understand that his father was saying he had been imagining the look of the street below from a high window in the William Penn Hotel. At sixteen, Lloyd had an aptitude for abstract discussion. The question to him was of the order of Will the Pirates win the pennant? What is ethics? Resolved: Monarchy Is a Better Form of Government Than Democracy. Eventually he would make a substantial living out of that kind of activity—Lloyd Perleman discussing whether, contrary to Rahv, writer A was of the genus Cowboy rather than Indian, would be a hard-to-get ticket at Yale and Chicago—but he could offer nothing for the moment. He said, “I don’t think so.”

“How can a man be better dead than alive?” Dave said, brooding. “Don’t say anything to your mother about this. It would only disturb her.”

The next morning he selected a freshly laundered white-on-white shirt whose collar Edith had turned, moved the Spanish-American War veteran’s pin from the lapel of the gray sharkskin to the lapel of the blue brushedworsted, closed his briefcase on last night’s paperwork and the wax-papered meatloaf sandwich Edith had prepared for his lunch, and took the streetcar to town. At eight-thirty he mounted Mickey’s throne in front of the bank to get a dime-and-a-dime shoeshine, the only extravagance remaining since he had given up barber shaves and lunch at Kramer’s.

One reason Douglas Kampreiter had the idea to ask him for help was that Dave always looked like a man who still had resources. Sitting on Mickey’s throne, brushes flying and cloth snapping jazz around his ankles, greeting Al and Hunk and Sidney and Aaron walking by on the way to their own stores and offices, Dave appeared to be one of those who had been saved. In the Army he had learned the importance of shined shoes; ever after, at whatever the going rate, he thought that was the best way to spend that amount of money. His thinning gray hair, gone on top but still showing a shadow of color over the ear, seemed always to have been trimmed that morning. The hand that waved the morning Post in greeting was strong, lightly haired, the fingers well formed; the nails were thick as buttons, lustrous as a surgeon’s. Fortunately—perhaps the instinct of a man who had been poor and thought of the lasting quality of possessions—his taste had always been for conservative apparel that would survive the seasons, and the slight stitch line hardly showed under the arms where his jacket had been let out to its limit. He couldn’t afford a new suit even if one of his manufacturers had made it up for the cost of the cloth.

Kampreiter had been lucky to find that his handsome old buddy (one of Edith’s friends said he looked like an Irish judge—adding, when Edith looked doubtful of the compliment, “of a higher court”), rolling down the street toward him, favoring the foot broken playing football at Fort Hamilton, had two dollars in his pocket. Dave got to his store with a dime to get him home that night.

ONE OF THE TRIALS OF DAVE UPSTAIRS WAS THE ELEvator operator, who was used to taking patients up to a doctor on the third floor but hadn’t before had traffic for the second. Oscar thought the increase in his work load should have been matched by an increment in his pay envelope. Because the landlord was inaccessible, he took his grievance out on the new tenant. If he had a patient for the doctor and a customer for the clothing store he made the delivery on the doctor’s floor first and complained on the way down that Dave’s customer ought to have walked anyhow.

“A big, strong man like you could manage one flight of stairs,”Oscar said to Big Doggy.

Big Doggy told Dave what the elevator operator had said, and then walked around the floor, pulling out sleeves. “You don’t seem to have much stock, Dave. I’ll be back.” He rang for the elevator but tired of waiting and finally walked down.

Dave thought he had been put on earth to induce men like Big Doggy to stop thinking they could visualize what a suit looked like by looking at a sleeve. Salesmen who allowed customers to walk around pulling out sleeves were nothing but sleeve salesmen!—a grade below Bolshevik, unfit to call themselves clothing salesmen.

The beginning of all knowledge was to slip on a jacket for size. We’ll find the color and pattern all right, once we get you into something that feels comfortable. In the mirror the customer—an inch sucked off his waist and added to his chest—saw reflected the movie star or captain of industry or other image he had in mind, while Dave pinched the shoulder up a half inch to show the final miracle his tailor would perform.

“When only the color and pattern are wrong,”Dave had told his salesmen, when he could afford salesmen, “you’ve made the sale. Take your customer to the sample box. Show him fabrics that can be made up in exactly the model he has just told you he likes, and get his deposit. He will be the most satisfied customer in the world.”

But none of that could be made to happen while the customer walked around flipping sleeves. Dave had shown his salesmen how to slow the customer down, interrupt him, make him stand still to have the set of his shoulders studied—A touch high on the right? Not unusual— and the middle button tugged: That ought to be eased. Open the button and walk around the customer, slide the jacket off his shoulders without a by-your-leave. No more sleeve flipping. The customer accepted the service of a man who knew his business. The sale had begun.

But he hadn’t been able to slow down even an old customer like Big Doggy, whose size and model he already knew, and lead him to the sample box.

“Department stores didn’t like to sell special orders from swatches. They wanted to sell their inventory. I couldn’t afford to hang more than a hundred suits, so the sample box was my store. A salesman has to work with what he has. I sold the idea that no matter how big a store is, you can’t find more than one or two suits you like that fit you, but in my store you could find a hun-dred. My problem was I couldn’t afford advertising and I wasn’t getting enough traffic. If they came in, I sold more than my share. ”

Dave’s view was that Big Doggy had come in to buy a suit of clothes. Edith and her friends could spend an afternoon shopping with no intention of buying anything, but if a man went to the trouble of seeking you out, he wanted to do business with you. Of course the customer had to be in a reasonable frame of mind, could not begin with a chip put on his shoulder by an elevator man.

He had a row with the elevator man—the first time in years he had been in such a row—and as he got deeper into it, he began to feel that he was bullying the man. He walked away, leaving his anger in the air. He thought about taking it up with the landlord in a calm way, but the landlord would have changed the subject, would have asked about the rent’s being paid late.

IN THE SCALE OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION, THE TRIAL of the elevator was insignificant, a minor diversion for a warrior beset by the dragons of the times—but it put the name of Andrew MacNail into his head.

Long before Dave Perleman opened his first store, and during his years of feast and famine, there was another men’s store in Pittsburgh, a fiscally impregnable institution that in its second generation of management had become a sort of comic-opera enterprise. The founder of the J. MacNail store was a product of the Scotch Presbyterian community that ruled Pittsburgh’s business and society. On Wood Street, a half block from the royal court in the Duquesne Club, MacNail’s store catered to the apparel interest of his peers, and when it came into the hands of the son, Andrew, it became more a club than a store.

Supported by inherited wealth, MacNail’s rendered an occupation for the inheritor and a living for several elderly employees, and it did not lose enough money to concern the estate. A sense of useful function was imparted by an occasional order from a steel baron for a half-dozen custommeasure shirts or a pink coat to wear at Dick Mellon’s Rolling Rock Hunt. (Dick—it was a sign of fraternity to raise one’s voice slightly to be overheard speaking of Dick. Only newspapers and outsiders spoke of him as Richard.) A sluggish trade went on in dinner jackets, tails, ascots, Irish poplin ties, Swiss linen handkerchiefs, and clocked silk socks. Passing MacNail’s on his way to the bank, Dave would glance in the window and marvel at the merchandising. Pink coats! What kind of market existed in Pittsburgh for pink riding coats? He was especially impressed to see the same black pin-striped suit in the window three seasons in a row. “Not the same style, the same suit. It had a loose thread in the lapel buttonhole.”

Dave had met MacNail in earlier times. He had looked into MacNail’s store to get the sense of it, and MacNail had come in to see what was going on when Dave, backed by the New York manufacturer, had taken over the failed store farther up Wood Street. They saw each other infrequently on the street and said each other’s names, although Dave was not sure MacNail knew who he was outside the identifying environment of a store.

More than once Dave had had a fantasy of the wonders he could achieve with access to MacNail’s constituency. On this day, on which he felt himself stretched on a rack, he decided to talk to Andrew before going home.

He would have to get going fast—MacNail’s closed in a half hour. He hadn’t made a sale all day, and at least he might bring home some kind of new hope to tell Edith about. Speaking of a better prospect put off for a day or two the need to find one.

MacNail’s store was a shoe-box stack of four highceilinged floors, only wide enough for a row of venerable display and stock cases on each side and an aisle down the middle. A short floor had been constructed at the rear between the first and second to accommodate an office with a large interior window, through which the proprietor could observe the traffic entering his store.

The atmosphere was of an institution that had been in place so long that all depreciation schedules had been used up. An acquirer would estimate how extensive the changes must be before the store was suitable for a contemporary business. The drop-globe lighting would have to go, and the cumbersome cases, and the elevator. . . .

The last time Dave had been in the store, he had gone up on what he thought must be the slowest elevator in America. On the trip a customer could forget what he had come for. The closet-sized elevator could accommodate two passengers in addition to the operator, but a third might well back out and say he would wait for the next trip. Dave asked for the office floor.

The operator took him to the second floor and said, “Take the steps down to the office.”

Dave boggled at the instruction. He looked closely at the operator, wondering whether he’d see a family resemblance to the elevator operator he had just left.

The man explained, “There’s no elevator door on the office floor.”

MacNail had one glass eye from a riding accident, and a skittish retina in the other. As a consequence, his face seemed set in permanent wariness. Dave had the impression that Andrew aimed the glass eye at him in an effort to figure out just who he was. He told Edith that night, “I think he sees a little better out of the glass eye.” Eventually MacNail said, “Hello, Dave,” and, a short time later, “Would you like to sit down?”

Dave accepted the offer and went to the point. “Andrew, I am going to have to give up my business. If you would make room for me here, I have a whole lot to offer you. I have a large personal trade that would follow me, and I know the markets. I don’t doubt that I can increase your suit business enormously.” He said it with an emphasis and a gesture appropriate to the word. “I am proposing that you let me come in as your clothing buyer. Let me do with the department what I see to do, with your agreement. I don’t want a big salary. I want a percentage of the profit. Can we talk about that?”

He said it with no expectation that MacNail would be interested. On his way across town he had foreseen that MacNail not only would reject his proposition but wouldn’t even make him a counter-offer to come in as a salesman on commission. In all his life Dave had not required much ethnic space—not in the Army, not in the fire department—and his friendships were so wide that Commissioner Magee, the county Republican leader, had once asked him to consider running for Council, but he knew the Duquesne Club had no Jewish members and that Jews were not employed by firms like the J. MacNail store.

He wouldn’t have come to MacNail at all had he taken more time to think about it. The need to do something had driven him emotionally; the closing hour had pushed him to act. He waited for Andrew to respond. He thought Andrew looked bewildered, unable to deal with what had been said to him. His working eye wandered and his other tried to home. He worked his lips, as if words resided there to be got out. This went on so long that Dave thought perhaps the interview was over. Dave was able to match silences with men disposed to such contests, but this silence was outside the rules. MacNail was getting on. Perhaps his head didn’t work right anymore or he had a speech affliction. Dave felt compelled to speak.

“I am only telling you what I see. I think your clothing operation can do much better. You will be able to see the difference in one season.”

MacNail needed another few seconds to get it out. “Dave, I can’t tell you how glad I am you came in. I’ve often thought of you as somebody who could do something with that department I’m not able to do. Let’s come to terms.”

H E TOLD THE MEMORY PROJECT, “WHAT MATTERED to me most at that time was that I had something to bring home to Edith. I didn’t know whether the Depression was over for me or not. As it turned out, that was the end of it. In five years Andrew MacNail died and I was able to buy the store from the estate. What I needed that day more than anything else was something to bring home to Edith. Anything. She had been through so much hardship and disappointment. Her hopes in me had not been realized. I wanted to bring her something that would keep her going one more day, and I hadn’t made even one sale.

“If I’d had a quarter in my pocket,I probably would have changed my mind whileI was on the street and bought her a bunch of flowers, and not even gone in to see Andrew. You wouldn’t think so, but even in a Depression you can have too much money.”