Chapter 1, Menzo Ruins his New Shoes

Mr. Menz, or Menzo as he was often called, had a large cart in the form of a small house on wheels that he pulled up to the same downtown corner every morning. From this cart he sold fruit and vegetables of all kinds, candy, and some newspapers and magazines. His wares fluctuated through the year and with the seasons. Menzo was about forty and had been at the same corner about ten years. The stand was located just past the main entrance of the big hotel, and many of his customers were guests of the hotel. For ten years he had made a living, though I would not say a good living, selling to passers-by. The hotel guests were especially good customers who seemed to him to always be longing to spend money for no apparent reason. Although this was profitable for him, it nevertheless aggravated him. It was as if being away from home meant those men were compelled to buy things whether they needed them or not.
The hotel near Menzo’s stand was a big affair with several entrances and exits and was, and still is, one of the largest structures in our city. To the left and right of the main entrance of the hotel were staircases that led from the sidewalk down to its subterranean level. These staircases looked like the entrances to the subway in a large metropolis, having iron rails running around them. But, as you know, there is no subway to be found in our city. The basement area of the hotel was open to the public and featured rest rooms, a barber shop, and shoeshine stands.
Menzo often closed his stand at about two-thirty in the afternoon. After locking it up he walked to the hotel, descended to the basement level and used the rest room located there. He was therefore acquainted with all the other regulars of the hotel basement floor but his work did not allow him to become too familiar with them. His acquaintance with them was restricted to a greeting, and sometimes a smile or gesture.
At the foot of the steps leading to the basement of the hotel there were two large glass and mahogany doors, and through those doors one entered a large high-ceilinged hallway. Entering the hallway he passed the large chairs on the left where three middle-aged black men stationed themselves waiting for their shoeshine customers. When the customers arrived they mounted the chairs, which looked like thrones of a crude construction. There they sat, splayed out, looking always intent, and sensations from the brush entered into their feet and they would be filled with a longing for something unknown. They longed for something so elemental and so unknown that sex would have been an inadequate substitute.
Often after having their shoes shined, a middle-aged businessman wandered out onto the street. Walking down the street he would come across Menzo’s van and purchase a peach. Then forgetting his change, he ate it standing rooted to the spot, staring off into space abstractedly.
Menzo did not realize the connection between these purchases made by the hotel guests and the shoeshine men. Even if he did, he still would not have had any use for the shoeshine men because he simply did not like them. These three men were relatively new to the hotel basement, having been set up there by the hotel management for the convenience of the guests. When first Menzo passed by them he did not greet them, both because they were black and because he simply was unacquainted with them. But as time went by and he passed them every day it became difficult for him to continually ignore them. Sometimes it seemed to Menzo as though the shoeshine men went out of their way to catch his eye but he was not sure.
Menzo disliked the occupation of these men which seemed to him to be little more than begging, and he also disliked the rhythmic slapping sound of the brush and rag which ascended sometimes to almost a rustic blues. Rather than arouse in him some ridiculous and impractical longing, it gave him an angry, one might almost say bigoted feeling. All of his feelings about the shoeshine men he summed up by saying to himself, “they can’t just do the job, but they have to sort of dance and twitch around. Do I tap dance when I give the people their tomatoes?” For Menzo it was a question of dignity. He was aware of the authority that comes with having stiff joints, even though he was not old. He never moved abruptly. It was as though some thought had to precede each movement.
Day by day as Menzo passed these men on his way to the hotel men’s room, a kind of courtship evolved. He thought at first that the men were nodding to him, and finally he became convinced they were indeed nodding to him as he passed. Fortunately they were not actually saying anything to him. The three men always stationed themselves at the same chairs. At two-thirty in the afternoon there was seldom anyone around and they entertained themselves with several running arguments. Often as Menzo passed he heard snatches of conversation which he only barely understood.
He was gradually reaching a point where he was deciding to say something to them, but once he made the decision to greet them, he put it off. As he passed them he averted his gaze and looked to the right. To the right in the hallway there was a long mirror in a mahogany frame running horizontally and taking up the entire section of wall across from the shoeshine stands. One day he was finally about to speak to them but then something unfortunate happened.
As he was passing them that one afternoon with his glance averted into the mirror, the shoeshine men were engrossed in conversation and did not notice him passing. One of them happened to say to another, “Look at them shoes, they no better than dead man’s shoes.” This comment was not intended for Menzo, but referred to the fact that one of the shoeshine men’s shoes were torn in such a way as to reveal some of his toes. Menzo, looking down at his own shoes in passing, thought that the comment was directed at him, and took offense.
He went into the men’s room and entered one of the stalls and shut the wooden door. After sitting on the toilet he looked at the walls on either side of him which were dark yellow marble. There were things written in pencil on the walls which he read. He always used the same stall, if it was unoccupied, and in that stall were some scratch carvings of male and female organs. He looked, for the thousandth time, at these carvings and after that looked gloomily down at his boots which looked out at him from under his heavy woolen trousers.
Finally he unlaced his boots and took off the left one, holding it up to look at in profile. He was looking to see if he had “dead man’s shoes.”
We do not know if Menzo was Italian but he had grown up in the Italian section of the city. Since he had grown up there he knew of the Italian superstition that if a person’s shoes begin to point upward then they soon will ascend upward. If one’s shoes point to heaven one will soon pass away.
That superstition about dead men’s shoes probably comes from the fact that old shoes begin to bend upward. When a person dies they often leave behind a closet full of shoes that point upward. There is something poignant about the shoes of someone who has died. To look upon the clothing of someone who has died, that is one thing. But the shoes are even more imbued with the humanness of a person. The superstition of the condition of a person’s shoes relating to their life somehow strikes a truthful chord. The black community at that time had a similar superstition. They used to say it was bad luck to have shoes in which the toes were exposed.
Menzo was looking to see if the toes of his shoes pointed up, which in fact they did. He felt that the observation about his shoes was somehow malicious and insidious.
Thomas, one of the shoeshine men, had observed Menzo after he passed by. Something about the way Menzo walked told Thomas that Menzo had taken the remark personally. When Menzo returned down the hallway, Thomas observed him carefully. He looked at him in the long mirror, rather than face to face, to see if perhaps he was correct in his assumption. Menzo walked angrily past with his eyes averted in the mirror and so it happened that their eyes met in the mirror. It was easy for Thomas to see the correctness of his assumption. He could see the characteristic look of the face of a man who feels that he has been insulted. But Menzo, looking at Thomas in the mirror, saw a look of such good-natured sympathy and friendliness that his emotional state was momentarily upset. For a second he even came close to realizing his mistake, but some chemical reaction was going on in him which is a part of being angry, and Thomas’s friendly look only resulted in his becoming even more angry. If Menzo wasn’t by nature a quiet and reserved man, there perhaps would have been an altercation in the hallway of the hotel that afternoon.
When he left the hotel basement he did not, as usual, go back to his van and head for home. Instead he headed east on Lafayette Street. He went two blocks and came to a stop in front of a fashionable men’s clothing and shoe store. He stood there and looked into the window at the display of shoes and suits. He had never purchased shoes from this store before because it catered to businessmen and featured exclusively shoes which were not suited to his vocation, which required sturdy boots. In the window at that time was a men’s dress boot. In design it was almost the same as the chunky black boots that he wore every day but it had thin soles and a high polish. He entered the store and asked to try on the boots.
Menzo had actually been considering the purchase of these boots for some time. As a matter of fact, he had thought of purchasing them the moment he first saw them, but he had delayed because he realized that his present boots were far from worn out. The purchase was part of a desire on his part to change his whole way of life. He had a vision of himself as the owner of a small market. He had saved up a sum of money but he imagined that he would have to borrow about an equal amount in order to start his enterprise. He understood that it was impossible to borrow money wearing his old work clothes but he could not bring himself to buy an entire outfit just to go to the bank. The problem of what clothes to wear to the bank had been plaguing him for some time, ever since he had seen a storefront for rent that was suitable to his plans. He had decided to solve the problem in a practical way. He would shop for clothes that were respectable enough to approach a bank in, but that could be easily converted later into work clothes. The first purchase in this direction were the new boots which he found himself buying for a totally unrelated reason, because of the “dead man’s shoes” comment.
Menzo asked the salesman to bring him a size ten. Size ten was brought out but these turned out to be too small. As so often happens the size eleven was no better. It was long enough but it chafed the center part of his foot. The salesman then measured Menzo’s feet and explained to him that the boots came in only a C width and Menzo’s feet were larger than an E width. Menzo asked if it was possible to order the boots in the E width and was told that was not possible.
He took off the boot he had tried on and set it on the floor and stared at it with a kind of rigid determination. While he was staring at the boots, the salesman explained that the store had a regular work boot, which was not displayed in the window, that came in even a triple E size. He said, “They are very similar to the worn out pair that you are wearing.” Then, after a pause he added, “Would you like me to get a pair for you to try on?” Menzo was in such a reverie as he stared down at the new boots that he didn’t actually hear a word the man said.
Finally he took up the boots and forced them onto his feet again. He stood up and walked over to a mirror, admired the boots, and walked back and sat down. He took the boot off and asked the salesman again if the boot could be ordered in a wider size. “As I said before,” the salesman said, emphasizing each word, “I am sorry but they can’t.” He did not bring up the subject of the other boots again.
Menzo would have already purchased the boots, regardless of the tight fit, and would have already left the store if it weren’t for one small annoying detail. The work boots that he wore everyday were entirely plain. The only thing slightly decorative about them was the stitch running across the toe at the front. The new boots had a somewhat flimsy strap running across the ankle which was attached to the left and right sides with little circles of steel. The straps gave the boots an almost feminine touch. At a glance one would have thought it was a woman’s boot. It was this detail that was interfering with his decision to make the purchase and not the problem of size. He could have just cut the straps off, but the metal circles that attached the straps to the boot were attached in such a way that if they were removed they would leave four noticeable holes. If it had not been for the imagined derisive comment about his boots, Menzo would probably not have purchased the boots that afternoon. He made the purchase knowing in his heart it was a mistake, but reassuring himself that it could be made right. Once the straps were removed and the boots stretched out they would be perfectly adequate.
He returned to his place of business and hoisted the pull bar of his van onto his shoulders and began the long walk home which he performed each day with the motions of a dray horse. He seldom looked to either side as he plodded along. It was this slow walk home that was the source of aggravation to him because it hurt his pride to have to perform a horse’s task. Above all he did not like people to see him. When he came to work it was early in the morning and at that time it was usually still dark. The few people who were around did not seem to notice him or anything else. But in the afternoon the people who were about were idle and seemed to have nothing better to do than to stare fixedly at him while he plodded past, as if he were some kind of sideshow put on for their entertainment.
He was not the only poor man plodding along with some apparatus in tow. There were many people who made a living in a way that involved acting the part of horse and a scavenger. There were rag pickers, buyers of old clothes, men who went door to door buying gold and silver, and itinerant repairmen. These men returned again and again to the same neighborhoods and were always greeted by everyone with a certain condescending familiarity. Many had nicknames, many accepted gratuities of food or clothing with enthusiasm, and many of them were far from poor. Menzo chaffed under the burden of his cart and his role in life. There were many reasons, but they could be summed up by saying that he wished he had been born for some other occupation. Either through a trick of fate or an inexplicable obstinacy on the part of Providence he found himself caught in a situation he couldn’t seem to transcend. This had gone on now for many years.
The most aggravating thing about his journey home were the young boys who sometimes taunted him and pelted his van with stones, whose impact would ring out as they struck his painted metal signs. He finally had to adjust his route home, going out of his way down to Broad Street. Broad Street was a long straight stretch of factories and warehouses, and by using that street he was able to avoid the roaming groups of young boys just out of school at that time of day. Broad Street had no houses on it and was actually exceptionally broad and treeless, so there was no place for him to be ambushed. Since he had shifted to this route he had not suffered any attacks from children. He was trudging along about the third block out from the center of town. He still had about two miles to go before reaching a turn at the far outskirts of the city leading to his home.
At that point he stopped for a moment, set down his load, turned around and looked back along the distance he had just traversed. He was looking for a puddle in the road because it occurred to him that he must have absentmindedly stepped into some water. But the dry and dusty street had no signs of moisture, and dirt, dust, and particles of paper occasionally blew swiftly by in the warm dry air. He imagined that he must have stepped in a puddle because his left foot was wet. It often happened to him that as he trudged along, not always looking where he was going, that he trod in some water without realizing it. Seeing no water and puzzling about the sensation in his foot, he pulled his cart over to the side of the road. He sat down upon a short fat post which was one of a series of posts set in along the side of the road. What these posts were for and who put them there no one knew but they made a convenient seat to sit upon. He sat down, heaved a heavy sigh, and looked down at his feet. He had on his new boots which already had on them a light coating of dust.
He pulled the left boot off and saw, to his amazement, that his sock was soaked with blood. For a moment he felt terrified as it seemed that he must have cut himself badly. He looked at the bottom of the boot, but the sole was smooth, new and undamaged. He pulled the laces out and stretched open the boot but could see nothing in particular except that the new cloth lining was more or less uniformly wet with a thin coating of blood. He looked carefully at his sock and found that there was a spot near the ankle that was especially red. Finally he took off his sock and found that he had an inch long cut in his foot. Taking up his boot from the ground where he had set it he felt around inside. At first he didn’t find anything, but then suddenly he cut open the tip of his finger on something that felt like an extremely small razorblade. Pulling the boot far apart and looking carefully he discovered that the metal ring that secured the decorative strap to the boot had its end inside the boot. The end of the ring, where it had been finished off, had a burr on it which stuck slightly into the boot. The burr could not be seen because it was obscured by the lining of the inside the boot. The boots were extremely tight and showed no inclination to stretch out. The metal burr had sliced into his foot and then with each step the burr had kept the cut open so that it could not stop bleeding. Although it was not a serious cut, it had let a lot of blood.
He pulled off the other boot and put them both into a compartment in the cart. Then he put his old boots back on. As he resumed his journey he realized that he had been ignoring not only the blood, but the fact that both his feet had been in agony from the chafing of the boots. Rather than think about the pain in his feet he had been thinking about the trip to the bank that he was planning in his new clothes. He had never attempted to borrow money from a bank before, and he had no idea what to expect, and he had lately been continually thinking about it.
Broad Street stretched away from him lined entirely with factories and warehouses, and in between these buildings were neglected areas of ground covered with shrubs, grass and sumac trees. The sumac foliage had turned a brilliant orange because it was late September. These areas between the factories had always been used to throw trash into, and featured an assortment of household odds and ends interspersed with large rusting pieces of machinery thrown out from the local industry. He often stopped along Broad Street to inspect the piles of trash and debris because he sometimes found valuable objects in the area, or at least useful ones. Construction firms sometimes dumped off small quantities of building materials which were too much bother to return. Sometimes he found half-full bags of cement, or a pile of roofing shingles. Usually things were damaged or broken, but he was selective and anything of value he brushed off, loaded into his cart, and brought home. His eye had become accustomed to the street, and without really looking he perceived that there was some new material to look over or pick through. He was not entirely positive he wasn’t stealing. Even when an item was obviously discarded and lying by the side of the road, he preferred not to take it unless there was no one around.
One day some workmen had stopped a truck along the side of the road and were piling lumber into one of the lots. Menzo stopped and asked if it was trash, and was told that it had all been miscut and was to be discarded. Why the men didn’t take the lumber to the dump he didn’t know, but he imagined that it was just that much further to go. He would have taken all the lumber but it was too big for his cart and when he returned later with some rope to tie it on with it was all gone.
An area of farmland began at the end of Broad Street, which was set in low hills intersected by unnamed dirt roads. At the end of one of these dirt roads Menzo came to a stop. He was a tenant on the property of an unoccupied farm. His home consisted of one room, sort of a large shed, that had been built in the space between two barns. The barns were not at right angles to each other which gave to Menzo’s shed a curious shape. One corner was oddly too wide, and the other was extremely acute so that the far corner ended in obscure, gloomy shadow. Set into the exterior wall was a door and two windows. The doors and both windows had been taken from other structures and did not match each other. One pane of glass had a broken corner and where the glass was missing a little light entered the large vacant room. Almost no other light entered the room because over the years the windows, having never been washed, were covered with a layer of dark green moss. In direct light the glass lit up a little and look like old Coke bottle glass. The door, once painted white, was now uniformly gray and had almost no paint on it at all.
The big room he lived in had a cement floor. Although it was nearly empty it had a spartan, rather than poverty-stricken feeling. There was almost nothing in the room except for an iron bed like a World War I hospital bed, which in fact it was, and a pot-bellied stove. There was also a pine table and one chair. Next to the table there was a wooden box, set up for someone to sit upon, but no one had ever sat upon it. Stacked next to the box were a pile of almost-current newspapers and magazines. He owned one book, A Tale of Two Cities, that he had purchased two years before. He had not given up reading it, but his bookmark was only on page one hundred.
Menzo entered his room, leaving the door open for a little light, and sat down heavily on the bed. He sat there staring straight out into the yard for about twenty minutes, hardly moving. He did this almost every day. His surroundings had the appearance of belonging to a poor and probably slow person, and although he was poor he was far from slow. The reasons for his near destitution, his aloneness, and the marginal nature of his existence were many, not the least of which was his physical appearance.
If you had passed by Menzo’s house late that afternoon and peered through the broken glass of the window, you would have seen, sitting on the bed, a short, broad-shouldered man, whose face, from a lifetime of being outside in the sun, had darkened to a tobacco color. The entire lower portion of his face and neck was scarred with the evidence of smallpox, and his short fleshy nose, underneath which sat an oversized mouth and chin gave to him the appearance of a pug dog. It was a curious fact that Menzo did not realize that most people thought he was a negro. He did not know his origins but he thought most likely he was Italian.
Ugliness is not a vice, and beauty is not a virtue, that is easy to say. It is one of those statements that should be true, but if we are objective, we would have to say that ugliness may as well be a vice, and beauty may as well be a virtue.
Anyone can think of some beloved person who is ugly and some beautiful person whom everyone hates. The effect of ugliness on one’s fate is hard to determine. For Menzo, the fact that he was ugly in a slightly menacing way aroused in other people a feeling of ill ease. This created for him an almost insurmountable barrier to simple, everyday interaction with people.
Anyone can grow to love a pug dog, and anyone can overcome a momentary aversion, but there were other unfortunate facts of Menzo’s nature and history that further contributed to his isolation. He had a business, people bought his goods, he had a reliable life and would probably one day be a store owner. All of these facts indicated that he had a formidable supply of willpower. He had a dogged determination to have a normal life. For him to earn a living in the world took many times as much energy and effort as for you or I. He was a Prometheus who was making a small business out of his labors. He intended to make a success out of it. The efforts he had expended to earn and save five-hundred dollars could have made another man a millionaire. Another man, that is, who had the advantages of finely chiseled features and intelligent parents. He had neither.
But to return to Menzo whom we left sitting on his bed staring out the door into the yard. Next to him on the bed he had placed his new boots, and when he had finished his meditation, for that is what one might have called it, he turned his attention to them.
The boots presented a perplexing problem. He realized without any doubt that he should not have bought them. He realized further that he had bought them for the wrong reasons. The thought that this was a mistake was an injury to him. He said to himself, “I’ve purchased some boots and here it’s a mistake, for they don’t fit me. But is going to the bank a mistake then? Is renting the store going to be a mistake? And if those things are mistakes what then? But then perhaps this can easily be set right.”
Over the years he had become somewhat superstitious and he thought that if the first step toward getting a loan was a mistake then that constituted some kind of bad omen which needed to be set right. He took up the boots and went out to the barn, the door of which stood always ajar. He set the boots down upon a work bench that stood just inside the barn door. On the wall above the bench was an assortment of old, rusting tools. Some had been there since the barn had been built, some had been found in his journeys down Broad Street, and had been added to the collection.
He took up a pair of heavy sheet metal shears and attempted to cut one of the metal rings off one of the boots. The cutter proved to be too dull, or the ring too thick because he was barely able to put a dent into the surface of the metal. Even as he had sat in the shoe store, he had pictured himself out here in the barn with the clippers. He had already pictured to himself how he would attempt to cut the rings, and how it would not be possible. He also had imagined what he would do next, which was to take down a hacksaw and remove the blade from its holder. He began to try and carefully cut through the ring with the hacksaw blade. He cut carefully and slowly so as not to scratch the leather. However, the blade kept skidding on the slick surface of the metal. No sooner did he think he had the blade set in a grove than he saw that it had slipped to another spot. Again and again he patiently tried to cut the ring, holding the blade in his left hand, and grasping the ring tightly in his right, but as soon as he thought he was getting somewhere the ring would slip out from under his fingers. Finally, in desperation, he set the boot down upon the bench, thrust his hands in his pockets and walked from one end of the barn to the other often stopping and looking around. He was “trusting to luck.” This was an expression of his that meant that he was hoping to find something in the barn that would be of use in cutting the rings.
He soon found among some old tools a pair of needle-nose pliers and with these he was able to get a firm grip on the ring. The pliers made it possible to bear down on the blade, and flecks of metal began to pile up on the leather, and the blade began to drag, which meant that he was getting into the center of the steel. He soon had the first ring cut through, stopping frequently.
Each ring had to be cut twice in order to remove it from the shoe, and the entire process took a few hours. The bench had to be moved closer to the barn door so that he could see what he was doing as the light faded. For almost the entire time he was patient and only occasionally pressed harder on the blade. Once in a while he gave the ring a good three or four heavy aggressive strokes, and then resume a steady pace. About three quarters of the way through the first cut of the last ring, as he was giving the saw a few heavy rapid strokes, the saw popped out of the ring and cut a broad gash all the way across the toe of the shoe. The cut was not a surface scratch, but went all the way through the leather and into the lining.
Menzo was silent for a moment, taking it in, and then he said to himself, “Why am I doing this?” With a gesture of intense aggravation he picked up the boot and threw it into a dark corner of the barn. It landed in the soft dirt making almost no sound. Then he picked up the other boot and threw it in the same direction. Without bothering to replace the bench, which stood diagonally in the doorway, he left the barn and went back to his house.
As it was now late, he prepared to go to bed for the night. He was, off course, quite dejected about the outcome of the boot project, and he realized how stupid he had been both to buy the boots and then to ruin them. It sometimes happened that he got “off the track” as he expressed it to himself. Often when he was in one of these moods he would carry out some pointless project, all the time realizing it was pointless. Later, as a reaction, he was both depressed and overly careful and cautious, in an attempt to make up to himself for his momentary stupidity. It was an indication, when all is said and done, of Menzo’s intelligence, that he knew when he was being stupid.
But for now he lay down upon his bed and prepared to go to sleep, thinking that with a new day he would forget about his boots, but for a long time he could not get to sleep, and could not even seem to close his eyes.
He began to think about the shoeshine men. Their voices sounded softly in his ears as if they were in the room. Even though he was in bed looking at the ceiling, in his imagination he saw the wide hall of the hotel basement with the shoeshine men sitting there and people walking back and forth.
It seemed to him that he was walking down the hallway on his way to the elevators when in fact he had fallen asleep. He was dreaming that he was on the way to the office of the director of the hotel and it was one of those dreams which somehow seem more real than life because the events of the dream are full of some obvious but unclear significance. He entered the elevator, asking the elevator boy to take him to the top floor. Although he had never had occasion to go up into the hotel he knew for certain that the hotel owners had a large suite of offices that looked out over the city from huge arched windows. The elevator doors opened and he entered a large reception area where many people were standing and sitting. He could see that it was necessary to stand in line to speak to the receptionist before taking a seat. The receptionist, who was returning to her desk from another room, beckoned to him to step forward. As he did so she said, “What is your business?” But he was unable to proceed because his approach to the desk was blocked by another man who turned around to face him.
This man said to him, “Surely not in these clothes,” gesturing to Menzo to look at his clothing. Menzo ignored the man, brushing past him, and continued to approach the receptionist who was in a hurry to hear what he had to say.
Menzo finally reached the woman and said, “I must speak to someone about the manners of some people down in the basement of the hotel.”
It was unnecessary to continue speaking because the woman, giving him a look of complete agreement, said, “We will take care of this. I will go in and make the arrangements.”
With that the receptionist went into the office and closed the door part way. Through the partly opened door Menzo could see a man at a large desk. In front of him was a group of men all seemingly talking, and gesturing at once.
Menzo sat down to wait his turn, and looking up noticed his reflection in a mirror. He could see with satisfaction his new suit and tie and he reassured himself that now that he had his market around the corner from the hotel, the owners of the hotel would be anxious to listen to his observations about the hotel basement. He thought about his market that he had just left, confident that his affairs were in good hands. He had recently hired a girl who was remarkably good with the customers.
Looking up at the door of the office again he was pleased to see that the men were preparing to leave. The receptionist, returning to her desk, gave him another reassuring look so he was now convinced he would succeed with his complaint, and that it would even be appreciated.
But then he became aware of a warm sensation in his shoe. Looking down he saw that the toe of his boot was torn open and that the edges of the cut were glistening with blood. Reaching down he pulled off his boot only to find that his foot had a terrible gash. He began to feel faint from the loss of blood, and as he bent down over his foot, he slid slowly off the chair and passed out onto the floor. When he came to the men who had been in the office were standing over him and he was amazed to see that it was none other than the three black men from the basement of the hotel. One bent down to help him with his foot, producing from somewhere a pan of warm water. The other two were discussing what to do. Finally the two other black men picked him up and carried him out of the office. He began to struggle with them and woke up.
The black men that he had been so angry with during the day, were so concerned for his well being in the dream that when he awoke a feeling of goodwill and friendliness came over him. During that half-awake state in the middle of the night, when his mind was not sure of anything, for a long while he gave himself up to a certain security and calm that the dream produced. Only later was he able to reconstruct his angry mood of the day before.
He managed to fall asleep again, and the rest of the night he continued to dream but the images were vague and inconsistent so they formed no coherent scenes or stories. Overall arose the impression that nothing could be accomplished. He must start over, and in starting over everything was mistakes, delays and accidents. When morning came he slept late and it had already been light a few hours when he awoke.

Chapter 2, Mrs. Potlatch repairs Menzo's Shoes

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.

The Novel Menzo

Notes about the novel Menzo:

1. The main character of the novel is Menzo, who sells vegetables from a stand in downtown Utica in 1949. He is based upon an actual person who sold peanuts near the hotel in Utica New York in the late fifties.

2. A secondary character is a Mrs. Potlatch, referred to as Anya. Mrs Potlatch is patterned on a certain Mrs. Potash, who was an old Jewish tailor woman who had a shop around the corner from the Hotel Utica in the fifties.

3. The novel describes Menzo's attempt to deal with the fact that he can no longer keep his stand at its traditional location because of traffic changes.

4. From page one where we meet Menzo on his way to the bathroom in the hotel, until the climax of the story about a week later, the action moves with a metronome like cadence, and the reader never loses track of his location, his thoughts and his actions.

THE INFLUENCE OF OTHER WRITERS ON THE NOVEL "MENZO"

1. There is an obvious reference in both the tone, the actions, and the characters to "The Overcoat", by Nikolai Gogol. In The Overcoat", the relationship of an old man and his tailor is central to the story. The problems that bring the man to the tailor are the same ones that lead to the climax of the story line. In Menzo the structure is very similar, but the characters are not models extrapolated from Gogol but two individuals who actually existed, and were known to the writer.

2. Readers familiar with Dostoevsky will find many elements which have a clear reference to that great writer. This influence is not limited to tone and approach only, but sometimes specific details or descriptions have been employed. One example is the following, in the description of a room:

Sonia's room in "Crime and Punishment": Sonia's room looked like a barn; it was a very irregular quadrangle and this gave it a grotesque appearance. A wall with three windows looking out on to the canal ran aslant so that one corner formed a very acute angle, and it was difficult to see in it without very strong light. The other corner was disproportionately obtuse.

Menzo's room in "Menzo": His home consisted of one room, sort of a large shed, that had been built in the space between two barns. The barns were not at right angles to each other which gave to Menzo’s shed a curious shape. One corner was oddly too wide, and the other was extremely acute so that the far corner ended in obscure, gloomy shadow.

The wording is different, and the situation is also different, but the purpose of the detail is to connect the uncomfortable architecture of the rooms to the unsettled life of the resident.

"Menzo, Utica 1949" is available from Barnes and Noble as a Nook download. And from Amazon, as a download for Kindle.

Hard copies will be available in September.

More notes to follow...