Short Stories: Five Decades by Irwin Shaw Read Free Book Online Page B

bell rang and I went to the window to see who it was.
    “Don’t answer it,” my father called. “It may be a summons.”
    “They can’t serve summonses on Sunday,” I said, parting the curtains cautiously.
    “Don’t answer it, anyway.” My father came into the living room. He didn’t know how to handle bill-collectors. They bullied him and he made wild promises, very seriously, to pay, and never did and they’d come and hound him terribly. When he was home alone he never answered the doorbell. He never even went to see who it was. He just sat in the kitchen reading the paper while the bell clanged over his head. Even the postman couldn’t get the front door opened when my father was home alone.
    The bell rang again. “What the hell,” I said, “it’s only a little old lady. She’s probably selling something. We can open the door.”
    “What for?” my father asked. “We can’t buy anything.”
    I opened the door anyway. The little old lady jumped when the door swung back. Her hands fluttered. They were plump little hands, swollen, without gloves. “I’m Mrs. Shapiro,” she said, waiting.
    I waited. She tried a smile. I waited sternly. Strangers are never friends at the doors of the poor. I was only seventeen but I had learned that anyone who rang our doorbell might turn out to be the Edison Electric Company or the Brooklyn Borough Gas Company, intent on shutting off the electricity or the gas.
    Mrs. Shapiro hunched inside her shapeless little coat. “I own the second mortgage,” she said.
    Still I waited, sternly. Another enemy.
    Her hand came out, cold, plump, and pleading. “I want to speak to your father, maybe,” she said.
    My father had retreated to the kitchen and the Sunday Times , hoping that nothing would happen at the front door that would require his tearing himself out of that peaceful welter of journalism.
    “Pop!” I called. I heard him sigh and the rustle of the Sunday Times as he put down the editorial page. Mrs. Shapiro came in and I closed the door. My father came in, wiping his glasses, longing for the kitchen.
    “This is Mrs. Shapiro, Pop,” I said. “She owns the second mortgage …”
    “Yes.” Mrs. Shapiro was eager and bright and apologetic for a moment. She moved into the middle of the room. There were runs in her fat little stockings and her shoes were shapeless. “I came because …”
    “Yes,” my father said, with his imitation of a businesslike attitude, that he always tried on bill-collectors and which he lost as soon as they started to bully him. “Yes. Of course. Just wait a moment … My wife … my wife knows more about this than … Oh … Helen! Helen!”
    My mother came down from upstairs, fixing her hair.
    “Mrs. Shapiro,” my father said. “The second mortgage …”
    “It’s this way,” Mrs. Shapiro said, moving toward my mother. “In 1929, I …”
    “Won’t you sit down?” My mother pointed to a chair. She glanced at my father, tightening her mouth. My mother was always contemptuous of my father at those times when my father proved unequal to the task of beating off the representatives of our poverty.
    Mrs. Shapiro sat on the very edge of the chair, leaning forward, her knees together. “The second mortgage is eight hundred dollars,” Mrs. Shapiro said. We all sat silent. Mrs. Shapiro was disheartened by the silence, but she went on, her fat gray cheeks moving anxiously over her words. “Eight hundred dollars is a lot of money,” she said.
    We didn’t contradict her.
    “In 1929,” Mrs. Shapiro said, “I had eight thousand dollars.” She looked to our faces for pity, envy, anything. We sat there expressionless, with the faces of people who have become used to owing money. “Eight thousand dollars. I worked all my life for it. I had a vegetable store. It’s hard to make money in vegetables nowadays. Vegetables are expensive and they spoil and there is always somebody else who sells them cheaper than you can …”
    “Yes,”