How is one to explain a change of fortune? Why is it that sometimes one encounters a whole series of reversals and obstacles in life, and at other times life runs like a river as we partake of some strong tide and everything goes our way? Such phenomena give rise to astrology. Then again, in another age, it is explained as fate or fortune.
I have no idea why it was that Menzo’s fortunes seemed to take a better turn with the new day. I love best the ancient Greek explanation that Menzo’s god must have been away on vacation. In the same way that Poseidon had to go to visit the Ethiopians before Odysseus could continue his journey home, so perhaps it was something like this. The lesser god that looked after Menzo’s fate had been away attending a feast in a distant land. That morning his god returned and the first thing that he noticed as the rosy fingered dawn came was the dismal sight of the boots that had been tossed into the old cow dung in the corner of the barn. And Menzo’s god sighed a heavy sigh and said, “What a mess you are getting yourself into Menzo, we had better lend you a hand.” Something of the sort came to pass for him, that is how I like to think of it. For, after all, do not all events have a reason? Is there not a grand scheme to things? And are we not naively and simplemindedly inquiring into it? So let this archaic explanation stand. But before we see what the day holds for our friend, we have to concern ourselves with another even more obscure figure, a certain Anya Potlatch.
As Menzo had been dreaming about the hotel, Mrs. Potlatch was getting up to go to work. It was four in the morning. She was a woman of extremely regular work habits who had a tailor shop about a block from where Menzo had his vegetable stand. The shop was quite a standard affair. There was a central door set in from the sidewalk offset by two large plate glass windows which looked out onto the sidewalk and the street. To the right of the door sat Mrs. Potlatch’s sewing machine, and next to that a cupboard. To the left sat a large work table.
Besides tailoring work Mrs. Potlatch took in dry-cleaning and washing, but these tasks were not done by her but were sent out daily. A truck stopped at her shop in the evening to pick up the work.
There was also a steam press in the room. The back of the room was made up entirely of clothing racks filled with tagged clothing waiting to be picked up. Mrs. Potlatch sometimes bought and sold old clothes. She had one rack on which hung fairly new clothing that she had purchased outright from people who had brought it in. Occasionally she added to this stock of clothing for sale from washing and dry-cleaning items that had not been picked up for a long period of time.
Menzo passed this woman’s store every single morning and he almost never got to work before she did. Each morning he rounded the corner of Liberty and Washington Streets while it was still dark and see in the distance her light lighting up the patch of sidewalk in front of her establishment.
This morning it was late when he arrived at his corner but he did not set up his stand. He left it at the curb and walked back down the block and entered Mrs. Potlatch’s shop.
Mrs. Potlatch was a short plump woman of sixty-five whose hair was completely white and curled. As she worked, she bent over her sewing machine and the white skin of her arms trembled with the vibrations of the machine. When Menzo entered she did not look up from her work and she never stopped her work for a customer but always completed the stitch, or the cut, or the measurement before looking up. At the moment Menzo came in she had just started a hemming stitch and it was a full minute before she was able to turn her attention to him. But Menzo did not mind, and he was not impatient. He thought that the longer he had to wait the more likely it was she would help him.
Mrs. Potlatch looked up but Menzo said nothing. Then she said, “Can I help you, Menzo?” Mrs. Potlatch knew absolutely everyone by name.
“I’ve brought you some shoes ma’am.”
“I don’t buy shoes.”
“Not to buy but to fix for me.”
“Menzo, I’m not a shoemaker.”
“Please, Mrs. Potlatch, just look at them for me. It’s a tear — something that needs sewing up.”
“Let’s see, Menzo.”
He withdrew the boots from a bag that he had and set them on the edge of the sewing table. Mrs. Potlatch picked up the damaged boot, put on her glasses that hung around her neck by a cord, and took a careful look.
“Menzo, these boots are from Mr. Arnold’s store.”
“Yes, that’s right. I purchased them from there yesterday.”
As he said this Mrs. Potlatch put down the boot, took off her glasses and fixed him with an angry judgmental stare. She was about to begin scolding him and her left eye screwed up and the flesh under her chin trembled as she was about to begin. But he looked so daunted that she sighed and said nothing. She looked at the boot again and said, “Are you still a child now or something?”
Mrs. Potlatch was extraordinarily perceptive about all matters pertaining to clothing. From that angle alone she was able to see right through people and understand their situations.
Nothing made Mrs. Potlatch angrier than people attempting to modify their own garments and then bringing the damaged things to her to be made right. They might be bringing her work but nevertheless she became indignant at the sight of crooked cuffs hemmed improperly, or a collar turned over and sewn in so that the whole line of the shirt was ruined. She would go right into a rage over it shaking the garment in her hand and saying, “Ruined, I’m telling you.” But it was just a form of bragging and bravado because there was nothing that she could not fix “to perfection” as she always said. And the customer always waited abashed and ashamed until she had finished speaking, knowing that she would take the work and her pride and pleasure when it was returned to its “rightful condition” was just as intense as her aggravation had been when it had arrived.
There was absolutely nothing that she could not do, and Menzo knew this. He would have been glad to hear her rant and rave because that meant that she would take the job. Now he expected to be refused because it was boots and she didn’t do boots. Then he thought of something. He began speaking. “I liked these boots but they are too tight for me. I would have brought them back but you see they are too narrow. I thought that if I removed the strap that ran across it, it would stretch out but you see in doing it I cut the boot. They need to be let out and this is something that only you can do ma’am, only you.”
When Menzo said, “only you,” he laid stress on those words and repeated them, knowing that his hope lay in that phrase and that flattery. It was not true that he took off the strap to give the boot more room, but it was true that only she could fix them.
When he had finished speaking, he stood beside her silently while she took up the boot again and, opening it up looked at it carefully. Menzo, wanting not to disturb her, walked to the back of the store with his hands behind his back, and began looking at the clothing for sale there. He had looked through this clothing frequently of late, hoping to find a suit. The suits that Mrs. Potlatch had for sale seldom changed. There were only a few sizes and it took a long time to sell them. He knew every suit on the rack, but nevertheless he looked through them all again. Most of them were out of the question, but two he had considered and rejected. He stopped again at the first of these two suits, took the coat off the hanger, and put it on. It was, as he already knew, too small in the shoulders.
He took off the jacket and hung it up and was about to take another from the rack, when he heard Mrs. Potlatch clear her throat, and move her chair.
He returned to her side. She did not say that she would fix the boots, but instead she asked him to put them on, which he did. She had him place his foot on the chair that stood next to her sewing machine. She meticulously examined the way the foot pressed against the shoe. She pressed the leather in with her fingers, occasionally putting marks on the leather with her tailor’s chalk. She did this to both boots. All the while she sat there, hunched over his foot, looking herself like a large bundle of clean scented laundry, he could not help feeling how terribly vulnerable and strange she looked. He thought how like a doctor she was in that she was indifferent to him while she was touching his foot. He recalled another time when he had asked her to look for a pair of pants for him and she had measured the inseam of his trousers to find his size. Another time she had had him stand with his arm outstretched as she measured his waist and hips. She did all this in an accurate, but somehow emotionally detached way. He kept thinking about her scalp, which showed so pinkly through her thin white hair. He thought that she was like some strange saintly personage, more than human in some way.
When she finished with his foot she told him to come back in the evening for the boots. She did not bother to tell him what she planned to do to them and he had no desire to ask.
As he left he said, “Perhaps you could keep an eye out for me for a suit you know. I’m a little big in here,” he said, referring to his chest and shoulders. But she had already returned to the work she had been doing and only nodded her head up and down in response.
Mrs. Potlatch had noticed for some time that Menzo had been looking for a suit. She had been thinking all along about what suit he was likely to get. The suit he would buy was that day hanging in the store amongst the other clothes in a paper wrapper. It had been in the store for some time but she had not put it up for sale.
The clothes that found their way to the sale rack came from three sources. Her customers sometimes brought her clothes and she bought them outright if she liked them. She never took things on consignment, as she didn’t want to be bothered by customers returning every day to see if their shirt or pants had been sold yet. The clothes that she purchased were of good quality because she only took fairly new clothes. Most often she refused things because she knew that if she didn’t, her small store, already so crowded, would become impossibly cramped.
At other times people brought in things to be cleaned or washed and simply never return. Since her store was in the same block as the hotel, she found that hotel guests sometimes left a suit behind. Sometimes her regular customers also never got around to picking things up. When this happened Mrs. Potlatch did not simply put the clothes up for sale. More than once people had returned after many months and asked for an article of clothing, as if it was only a few weeks since it had been dropped off.
The third source of clothing produced the best clothing but also problematic clothing. Sometimes people brought clothes to her for washing or dry-cleaning, and then while the work was in the shop they happened to die. Over the years some fine articles of clothing became the property of Mrs. Potlatch in this way. Once a long woman’s fur coat was not claimed. Another time several men’s suits that had been brought in for alterations that still had price tags on them, and they remained in the shop after the owner’s name appeared in the obituary column.
Mrs. Potlatch was scrupulously honest, and at first the problem of what to do with these garments presented a strange dilemma for her. Obviously she could have just returned the articles to the family of the person who had died, that would have presented no difficulty. But if she did that, it raised a spiritual question for her. Why had this clothing been brought to her for cleaning if the owner was destined to die before it was cleaned? What purpose did this serve in God’s plan for the people who she knew. And in order to understand Mrs. Potlatch it is necessary to understand that she firmly believed that everything that happened was ordained by Providence. Everything that happened, happened for a reason, and a good, easily understandable reason.
She read the Bible faithfully and could quote Scripture, often with precise relevance to the occasion. Jesus says in the Bible, “Every hair on your head is numbered by thy father.” And if every hair on the head is numbered, what about Mr. Abrams’ three piece suit? Was that not also numbered by the father? Did not Mr. Abrams’ suit come into her possession for a reason, and a good reason?
Mr. Abrams’ had died a few weeks ago. He had been the president of the County Savings Bank. Menzo was going to buy his three piece, dark gray, well-tailored suit. Mrs. Potlatch had already measured it. It didn’t need any alterations.
Meanwhile, Menzo started work for the day. He returned to his stand, opened its doors which rotated on hinges upward, meeting above and forming a triangle like the roof of a house. As he was late, he was unable to sell any newspapers. It was Saturday and there were a lot of people about. Saturday was a busy day for him but it usually started late because people came down to town later in the day. He often went to work late on Saturday, and on Sunday he didn’t go in at all.
Menzo believed that he could have a real market because for the last several years he had developed many real customers who came to him regularly to buy. He made special purchases for his customers, and they relied on him for certain things. At first he sold things because people came across him by accident. But now he could depend upon a predictable income from his work, and he provided produce for many families in the area. The magazines, gum, and candy he sold went almost entirely to the hotel guests. He also sold certain magazines that he kept out of sight and which had to be requested by name.
Saturday turned out to be a slow, uneventful day for him. He waited impatiently for evening to come so that he could retrieve his boots from Mrs. Potlatch. At lunchtime she passed by his stand on her way to the hotel luncheonette, and a few minutes later she returned carrying a bag with a sandwich in it, but he only greeted her as usual. Even when she came up to his stand and purchased some apples he said nothing about the boots although it was difficult for him to restrain himself. He stayed late at his stand, until five, but he had no fear that Mrs. Potlatch would not be open because she never went home before eleven or twelve at night
He waited patiently until five o’clock and then he closed up his stand and walked down the block and entered the tailor shop. As he entered he saw that there were two other people there. One was the boy who wrote the clothes down in a ledger book, a thirteen year old who worked for Mrs. Potlatch every afternoon. He was at the table to the left of the door doing his job which consisted of opening bags of people’s laundry and taking out the items. He wrote the person’s name and the articles of clothing in a notebook in pencil, and then attached a clip tag with a number to the garment. The boy did not look up at Menzo when he entered the shop but, like Mrs. Potlatch, he continued with what he was doing.
Menzo could see only the ankles and feet of the other person who was there. At the rear of the shop amongst the clothing racks, was a makeshift changing room made up from pipes from which hung pieces of cloth which formed an enclosure. Behind this cloth people waited who were having their garments worked on. Mrs. Potlatch often repaired zippers and buttons, or mended a tear right on the spot while the customer waited in the back of the store. When Menzo entered the shop, a man was sitting behind the curtain, his naked lower legs were visible, as were his sock-covered feet. His shoes sat to one side. Mrs. Potlatch was, as usual, bent over her work and, as usual, did not look up or say anything to him when he arrived.
As there was nothing to do, he looked all over the room, the contents of which took only a moment to survey, and instantly a new suit on the clothes for sale rack jumped out at him as if it had been connected to his eye by a big spring. He looked at the suit and the rest of the room darkened into obscurity. He took a step in the direction of the suit, but Mrs. Potlatch, observing him out of the corner of her eye, gestured for him to stand still by extending her arm and pointing to the floor where he had been standing. Menzo took a step back and tried to relax. The room was silent except for the rumble of the sewing machine as Mrs. Potlatch set a zipper in place.
Soon the pants were finished and she handed them over the curtain. Shortly thereafter the man emerged tucking in his shirt and prepared to pay for the work. Menzo took the opportunity to slip past and approach the clothes rack, but he did not believe that it could be a suit that would fit him and he did not want to be disappointed too quickly. He began looking at the suits all over again beginning with the first one on the rack. Since the new suit was the last in the rack he was able to suspend his anticipation and drag out the feeling that perhaps the new garment might fit him. The customer left and Mrs. Potlatch summoned Menzo to her table.
She did not produce the boots at once, which were in a box under her table. She began instead with a few words of admonishment. “Now Menzo, never buy clothing that doesn’t fit you, regardless how it looks, never mind how cheap or a bargain. The job you gave me, impossible. I did the best I could with them, the lining, the stitching, everything.” But as he stood there saying nothing she became quiet, and reaching under her sewing table, she took out a box and set it on the sewing machine table in his direction.
Inside the box Menzo found a completely reconstructed pair of boots. Where the cut had been was a seam where two parts of the leather met. It looked exactly as if this seam was a part of the original boot. This new seam wrapped around the boot and managed to end in a little decorative piece of leather which hid the place where the metal rings had been. The technical part of the job, the stitching and cutting, was nothing compared to the design idea which transformed the boot from an ordinary dress boot into an item that looked like a gentleman’s riding boot. But then Mrs. Potlatch was a tailor who could make a woman’s full length dress coat from scratch. In all matters, her design sense was impeccable and perfect, so much so that she did not consider that she had a sense of design at all. For her there was only one way to do things, “the right way and to perfection.”
While he looked over the boots Mrs. Potlatch of course rattled on about the difficulties of the job. The thickness of the leather, it’s inflexibility, the difficulty of finding a leather to match where she had to piece it in. Did he see how the leather that ran underneath the seam and the leather that formed the decorative squares was a slightly different nap and thickness. Menzo sat down in the chair next to Mrs. Potlatch’s sewing machine and began taking off his old boots and trying on the new ones, all the while nodding and agreeing with Mrs. Potlatch that yes he did understand that the leather is hard to stitch, and almost inflexible. And yes he did know that materials are hard to find.
Mrs. Potlatch was slightly distracted while she talked to Menzo because of the sound in her shop of a pencil eraser being used. Tony, the boy who worked for her, had all this while been at the work table marking in the clothes and had apparently made a mistake in the log book and was erasing it out.
Mrs. Potlatch said nothing but stopped in her speech and inclined her head in Tony’s direction for a moment. Then she resumed talking to Menzo who was at that moment realizing that his boots fit perfectly. He was about to exclaim about it, raising up both hands to do so, but Mrs. Potlatch cut him off before he could begin by saying, “To perfection, they fit to perfection. It was just a matter of a little dart here and some stretching. And now to perfection they fit you. But never again bring to me shoes and boots. Look what you’ve done to my fingers.” She said this holding up her hands to show him how the work had reddened her hands, which were a uniform pink color.
Their conversation was again interrupted by the sound of Tony erasing something in the ledger book. This second time Mrs. Potlatch could not restrain herself from inquiring about it. Tony had made two misspellings in the book, she found out, and had erased the names and corrected the misspellings.
“Misspellings, why misspell the name Tony, just put it in correctly the first time, why is there a need to spell it wrong?” This kind of logic which Tony heard, applied to all things by Mrs. Potlatch always made him smile to himself. He was fond of Mrs. Potlatch and sometimes imitated her language and logic. But Tony had not misspelled the entries in the ledger book. Tony had written in the clothes for Mr. Edwards, and for Mr. Culton all under the name Johnson. Johnson had preceded Edwards and Culton in the ledger book, but he had neglected to put in the new names. He was writing in all the clothes under the name Johnson. It was only because the list of clothes under Johnson had become unusually long that he noticed his error, backtracked and put in the missing names.
Tony was distracted from his work and with good reason. Tony was imagining that he was shooting Menzo to death there in Mrs. Potlatch’s shop. In Tony’s imagination he saw himself draw a pistol from his pants. He turned around and aimed it at Menzo’s back high enough for the bullet to go through his heart and also high enough so that when it came out of Menzo it would miss Mrs. Potlatch and lodge in the wall above her head.
His imagination did not form an altogether realistic image of the shooting of Menzo. The gun, for example, went off with a loud bang but there was no kickback and his arm did not fly up. What he imagined was more along the lines of the sound of a loud cap pistol.
The bullet that hit Menzo did not cause him to be thrown over onto Mrs. Potlatch which would have happened if he had actually been shot. Tony had seen some movies of gangsters and from those he created his imaginary picture. People who were shot should stagger around for a moment and then slump to the floor. Menzo stood there talking while Tony shot him six times. Each shot formed a round burn hole in his coat. The most that this shooting produced for Menzo was a desire to reach around and scratch the back of his neck which he did. As the shooting did not succeed in killing Menzo, Tony was preparing to draw a knife from his belt, but Menzo had finished talking to Mrs. Potlatch and was moving off toward the back of the store to look at the suits again.
Although Tony had never in his life hurt anyone and would never have actually shot or stabbed anyone, the images he formed in his mind regarding Mr. Menzo were not entirely innocent ones. Tony was by nature a kind boy but he hated Menzo like Death. Menzo had no idea who Tony was but Tony knew Menzo, his stand, his house, and his path back and forth between them. He was one of the boys who in the previous year had pelted Menzo's van with stones.
Mrs. Potlatch resumed her work as Menzo went to the back of the store to finish looking at the suits for sale. She seemed to be ignoring him and unaware that he was still in the store. She could hear the sounds of the hanger’s being moved and she knew it was just a moment before Menzo discovered that the new suit in the back would fit him. It did not, as yet, have a price tag on it.
There was the sound of Menzo’s shirt sleeves sliding into a suit jacket, and then silence. Then Mrs. Potlatch heard him moving this way and that in order to look at himself in the mirror.
Finally he came up to Mrs. Potlatch’s sewing machine and stood close to her without saying anything. She turned to him, took hold of the lower part of the lapel of his coat and held it out from his body as tailors often do.
It was a tender moment for Menzo and for Mrs. Potlatch also. It was special for Mrs. Potlatch because it was yet another situation in which she had reinvented God for herself and fitted herself into His plan like a sleeve being stitched into a coat. It was special for Menzo because he had coat, pants and shoes, and so now perhaps a new life could begin for him.
Tony was not indifferent to this either. He was occupied writing in four shirts for Mrs. Walters and as he did so he also imagined that he was drawing a chair up behind Mr. Menzo, standing on it and bringing a big heavy stone down upon his skull. It will be necessary to inquire more deeply into this perverse train of thought that kept recurring in Tony’s imagination. It is necessary to consider some of Menzo’s inner thoughts also.
Mrs. Potlatch sent him to the changing booth. There, behind the curtain, he began taking off his old clothes and putting on his new clothing and inwardly he was moved by many strange thoughts which crowded into his head all at once.
Although Menzo was forty years old he had never in his life been with a woman. He had never even been intimate with anyone. It was not only that he had never had a sexual experience, more than that, he had never been emotionally close to a woman. He had never succeeded in getting involved in a personal conversation with a woman. Sometimes when a woman came up to his stand to buy something he attempted to drag out the transaction by asking a question intended to prolong the moment slightly. These attempts always ended in failure and embarrassment. There were many married and older woman who stood chatting with him for half an hour. Mrs. Potlatch treated him like a dear friend, but young single women he attempted to talk to always answered him in barely understandable monosyllables and left abruptly. It was as if it was not sufficient that they had no interest in him personally. They needed to let him know that he was, “out of the question.” It was as if their actions betrayed the notion, “don’t even begin to think of me standing here and talking to you. I would have to be crazy.”
Since Menzo stood in the middle of downtown every day, he observed couples passing by and he made comparisons between himself and other men, sometimes saying to himself, “I’m ugly perhaps but not as ugly as this rat in a trench coat passing by.” These comparisons made him depressed and gave him a feeling of hopelessness and isolation. Even the sight of dogs copulating in the street started him thinking about the inevitable relationships among people having to do with appearances. Dogs, he could see, had no comprehension of looks. They did not regard the line of the nose or size of the chin as relevant when making decisions about each other. Scent and coincidence seemed to be much more important.
Why did people consider one face more beautiful than another? He wondered to himself what was the basis of the idea of physical beauty. Why, for example, could not his face be considered beautiful and a face commonly thought of as beautiful be considered ugly? These thoughts aggravated and upset him. Furthermore, despite his appearance, he had a highly refined conception of physical beauty.
Menzo had a collection of pictures of beautiful women. This collection of pictures was a mixed pleasure for him. He looked at them and felt a certain longing, but it also made him angry that the face of some woman would be looking out to him invitingly, when he knew that in real life they would never even look at him at all. The pictures made him feel lied to and tricked. Gradually he found that the pictures annoyed him so much that he threw them all out. There was one picture that he kept, however, and that one was not from a “girlie” magazine. It was an advertisement for perfume which showed a woman leaning forward and touching her partially exposed chest with her fingers. She was wearing a black V-neck dress and leaning in such a way as to expose some but not all of her breasts, which disappeared into shadow. Her hair covered a part of one eye and she was not smiling. Her head was turned slightly away and she had a troubled look on her narrow well-chiseled features.
For Menzo, this picture represented the perfect, beautiful woman. He kept this picture in a special place folded into four. He wished that he had never originally folded it into four but that could not be undone. He had even attempted to find another copy of the magazine later so he could have an undamaged copy but was unable to find one. Often he took out the picture, unfolded it, and studied it as if it contained the answer to some riddle.
He finished changing into his new suit and prepared to pull the curtain back and appear to the world as a new person. He had to admit to himself that he not only desired to open a store, he not only desired to get a loan, he realized that he also desired to get settled, that is, he wanted to get married and have a “normal life” like everyone else. Whom it was he planned to marry he had no idea, and in this area Mrs. Potlatch would be of no use to him. He was especially eager to get “settled” because in the past year he had found himself filled with desires and ideas that caused him guilt and confusion. At first it seemed that nothing was interesting to him at all, but then he might find himself looking with a kind of unnatural curiosity at a horse or a tree branch. He would see in these shapes the forms of a woman’s body and these thoughts seemed perverse to him. When he thought these thoughts and other more complicated ones, he said to himself, “Menzo you are getting off the track,” just as he had said in the barn about the boots.
As he came out of the changing booth and into the shop, Mrs. Potlatch was just preparing to close up to go out and have her dinner. After dinner she would return and work until close to midnight. Tony was finished with his tasks and was cleaning up. Tony’s elder sister had stopped by and was waiting for him as they planned to walk home together. It was already getting dark outside.
Menzo paid Mrs. Potlatch, and the sum she charged him for both the suit and the boots was so small that at first he thought that it was for the boots only. Mrs. Potlatch, seeing quickly his confusion, reassured him saying, “For both, for both, the suit is nothing, just an old suit, how much can I get for it Menzo? A dead man’s suit.” Mrs. Potlatch instantly regretted that expression as she saw how Menzo’s face clouded over but she knew exactly how to retrieve the situation and she said, “You know it’s good luck to wear a dead person’s clothes, not like people think. The dead person’s spirit looks after the person who wears their clothes and helps him how he can.”
“And whose suit was this?” Menzo asked.
“Why it belonged to Mr. Abrams, the bank president,” she said.
This seemed to Menzo just the good omen that he had hoped for, and he was filled with admiration and gratitude for the old tailor woman and in a burst of feeling he reached out his hand to touch and squeeze her shoulder, but he drew his hand back at the last instant before touching her, and she, beginning to stand up, pretended not to notice.
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