Authors: Richard Russo
“My little brother,” she said. “He died of leukemia. I draw him all the time. We’ve got lots of photos, so I draw those. When I try to draw him from memory, it never looks like him.”
“I’m an only child,” I told her, feeling inadequate for having nothing to say about the dead boy.
“Me, too,” she said. “Now, I mean. It’s just my dad and me.”
“What about your—”
“They’re separated. After Rudy died, she didn’t want to live here anymore. I live with her summers. My dad teaches at the high school.”
“Mr. Berg,” I said, making the connection. Even in junior high, we’d all heard about Mr. Berg. Everybody tried to stay out of his English classes. “I hear he’s strict,” I said, hoping to imply that this was why kids didn’t like him, not that he had bad breath or body odor. I waited, expecting Sarah Berg to confirm or deny her father’s strictness, since she was in a position to know. When she didn’t, I noticed that her drawing of her little brother had taken second prize, not first. Nan Beverly’s watercolor of a spaniel puppy had won first, but I noted an odd thing about the three checks in her margin. Two were identical, in black ink, whereas the third looked different, in blue ink, as if someone had added it after the fact. Had Sarah noticed this? Though I decided not to ask, that third check mark reminded me of Karen Cirillo’s unshakable conviction that our teachers had everything worked out in advance, the Borough kids catching all the breaks. Looking Sarah Berg over more closely, I was surprised to discover she was pretty, something I hadn’t noticed before. Also, that she had eyes like the boy in the drawing, one slightly larger and lower than the other. After leading me across the room, she’d dropped my hand, but I could still feel the warmth of hers and wished there was someplace else for her to lead me.
“You should’ve gotten first,” I told her. “Yours is a lot better.” I said this last quietly, even though we were alone in the room. It was the sort of statement that, if overheard, could lead to a fight in the school yard.
“Nan’s is good, too,” she said, and I could tell she liked having a reason to say her name, as if that might make them friends. Which made me like Sarah Berg even more.
I was still holding my drawing of Ikey’s, and this gave me an idea. “Maybe
you
could draw Ikey’s someday,” I suggested, immediately feeling foolish. Why would she want to draw that? “You could show me which parts should be white.” Dumber and dumber.
But she smiled, as if the only thing holding her back was just such an invitation, and when our eyes met I half expected Sarah’s to shift to some point off in the middle distance, like Karen Cirillo’s always did. But they didn’t. They stayed right on mine.
Which must mean, I concluded, that I was still there.
T
HE VERY NEXT DAY
Sarah Berg appeared with her sketch pad. I’d been working in the back room, and when I came out, there she was, sitting Indian style on the terrace across the street. “You’ll never guess what that girl’s doing,” my father said, staring out at her in wonder.
“Drawing the store?” I said.
“She’s drawing the store,” he said, apparently not having heard me. “You should see her go with that pen.”
I’d only been in the back room for about twenty minutes, but evidently that was long enough for Sarah to begin half a dozen drawings, now scattered on the grass next to her. Some had just a few lines, while others looked half done, and I couldn’t tell what it was about any of them that had caused her to stop and start over. Even the ones she’d abandoned after a few lines looked more promising than the drawing I’d worked on for a week. The one she was working on currently was the best. She’d done the outline of the whole store, dividing it into quadrants, and now appeared to be working from the center out, though for some reason, every now and then, she’d quit the section she was working on, as if an idea had occurred to her, and she’d squint at Ikey’s, then at her sketch pad, and draw a few lines in an adjacent quadrant before going back to where she’d been. “Your dad’s nice,” she said without looking at me. “All the way down. Most nice people are nice just partway.”
She herself seemed nice “all the way down,” and I searched for the courage to say so, but it took too long and I gave up. I was glad to see her, though, glad that she hadn’t forgotten her promise to draw Ikey’s, glad she’d come by the very next day, glad she still seemed as at ease and comfortable as the day before. After the art show we’d gone for a Coke at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, and in the middle of the afternoon we had the place to ourselves. Accustomed to Karen Cirillo, I expected to pay, but Sarah said no, it had to be Dutch treat. Even before our Cokes arrived, she’d launched into a personal history. Her family was Jewish, she said. They didn’t practice the religion but instead something her father called humanism, which was more of a belief system. They didn’t go to church, just put their faith in what her dad called the fundamental nobility of man. They ate pork chops like we did, Sarah gave me to understand, and also celebrated Christmas, at least as a season of fellowship, even if they didn’t, as humanists, subscribe to the notion of Jesus being God or anything like that. That he was
good
was full and sufficient. People who believed that good wasn’t good enough, that Jesus had to be
God,
were the ones who gave us the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust. All of these confidences came out in a rush that inspired me to offer intimate revelations of my own. We were Catholics, I told her, though she seemed already to have guessed that much. Nor did she seem that surprised that I’d gone to St. Francis until junior high, which meant we believed that Jesus
was
God, though we probably agreed that the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition—which I looked up later—and the Holocaust were bad things. If I understood Mr. Berg’s humanism, I suspected we were listing in that direction ourselves. Ikey’s was open on Sunday, a point Father Gluck had raised with my mother and was told, for his trouble, to mind his own business, after which we hadn’t gone to Mass for a month and now ate meat on Fridays, ecumenical behavior that put us on a par with the Bergs eating pork chops, at least so far as I could see.
The Bergs had moved to Thomaston from Long Island when she was in second grade, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear even to Sarah. Her father had been a high school teacher there as well, and from what she said, or didn’t say, I got the impression that he’d gotten into some kind of trouble that required him to look for a new job. He hated Thomaston, Sarah confided, because our town sorely tested his belief in the fundamental nobility of man, and because you simply couldn’t get a decent bagel, with or without the lox to put on it.
Also, this. It had been her father who insisted she accept young Gabriel Mock’s invitation to the fateful movie. As a rule he didn’t let his daughter go out on dates, but here was a chance to make a statement. In Mr. Berg’s opinion, Thomaston’s Negroes had been ghettoized by people who, when it came to bigotry and ignorance, rivaled the citizenry of Birmingham and Selma. And why not? Did we not descend, at least symbolically, from Sir Thomas Whitcombe, like Thomas Jefferson a slave owner? No doubt both believed that all men were created equal, if by men you meant white landowners. All American patriots, in Mr. Berg’s view, were hypocrites by definition.
“My father has a lot of opinions.” Sarah had sighed, sucking the last of her soda noisily through her straw, and I had to agree with her. When I said, hoping to impress her, that I might take a class with him anyway, she warned me that he wouldn’t like me. “You like it here in Thomaston, so he’ll think you’re a fool. Besides, he only likes angry people.”
“You’re not angry,” I’d pointed out.
“I don’t count,” she’d shrugged, and at first I assumed she meant that of course he loved her anyway, since she was his daughter. But something about her tone suggested another possibility—that her father really didn’t think of her as someone who counted.
Back when her little brother was alive and Sarah’s mother still lived with them, the Bergs had rented a house on Seventh Avenue, near the Borough. But now that it was just the two of them, they rented a smaller, less expensive house a couple of blocks from Division Street, technically in the East End, but close to the gin mills and the YMCA. Until recently, her best friend had been a girl named Sally Doyle, who lived next door, and they’d always gone to the dances and Saturday matinees together. But after young Gabriel Mock showed up at the door to take Sarah to the matinee, the other girl’s mother didn’t want them to be friends anymore, which seemed to please Mr. Berg, who saw the whole experience as a teaching opportunity. His daughter would have lots of friends, good ones, he told her, once she got to college. They’d be different, by which he meant better. (Though I didn’t say so, I was reminded of my grandparents, who’d had a similar ambition for my mother.) Sarah would then go to Columbia University, it had been decided, where Mr. Berg had himself spent two years before transferring to the state teachers college, where he’d met Sarah’s mother. His reason for leaving Columbia, he maintained, was that his family had suffered a financial reversal, though Sarah’s mother claimed he’d been asked to leave to avoid the indignity of flunking out.
I told Sarah that my mother was adamant that I attend college, too, though we hadn’t decided where, as well as my father’s doubts that we could afford it, an opinion he was not allowed to voice openly, which made Sarah smile. And, so she wouldn’t feel so bad, I told her I’d also lost my best friend. I described how Bobby Marconi and I had surfed my father’s milk truck on Saturday mornings, and I must have done a pretty good job describing Bobby, his courage and his refusal to cry even though his broken wrist hurt so bad he’d thrown up, and when I finished she said it was too bad she’d never have the opportunity to meet him, and I admitted I sometimes still missed him, though of course that wasn’t nearly as bad as having your little brother die or your mother move away, so I supposed I was pretty lucky. I’d meant this observation to be sympathetic, but knew it was stupid when Sarah’s eyes filled with tears. I’d walked her home, then, trying to make the conversation easy and fun again, but it was like her dead brother and departed mother were there with us, and walking back to Ikey’s I kicked myself for saying the wrong thing. Now she wouldn’t ever want to draw Ikey’s or go out Dutch treat at Woolworth’s again.
But here she was, scratching away with her special pen, a gift, I would later learn, from her mother, who was herself some kind of artist. Her good spirits had returned, and Ikey’s was coming to life on the page. She was just about done when my mother came out of the house with two stainless-steel tubs of macaroni and potato salad for the store. I met her on the sidewalk and took one of the bowls, then helped her fit them into the far end of the meat case next to the ground beef. Sarah was tearing the completed drawing out of the sketch pad when my mother and I arrived back at the curb.
“This is my friend Sarah,” I told her, glad that I could say this without fear of contradiction. I wouldn’t have dared say such a thing about Karen Cirillo, who probably would’ve said,
We’re friends, Lou? When did that happen?
“She won second prize in the art show,” I continued.
“I
see,
” my mother said, amazed, like anybody would be, at how good the drawing was. Ikey’s looked like a place even my mother would be proud to own, the kind of store that wouldn’t make a pauper of you the first moment your attention slipped.
“You can have it,” Sarah said, “if you want.”
“But you worked so hard on it,” my mother objected.
“It’s your store,” Sarah said.
My mother must’ve seen that Sarah was proud of the drawing and also that she wanted us to have it. “How about we put it in a frame and hang it up by the register where everybody can see it? That way, when you visit, you can see it, too.”
The store got busy then, so it was later that afternoon, long after Sarah was gone, that I finally had a chance to inspect the finished product and see that she’d added people to the drawing. A female figure, clearly my mother, could be seen bending over to slip a salad bowl into the meat case, the door to which was held open by Uncle Dec, recognizable by his shiny black hair. The man behind the register, by the bearlike slope of his big shoulders, was obviously my father. Also, she’d given Ikey’s some business, an idea she probably got from me. The day before, sitting at the Woolworth’s counter, I’d confessed our continuing anxieties that Ikey’s might fail, so she’d given us three customers. The nearest, his back to the viewer, was about to enter the store, and his opening the door gave us that privileged glimpse inside. The two people at the register, a boy and a girl, seemed to be completing a purchase. Only when I looked closer did I realize they were Sarah and me. I was identified with a few tiny strokes expertly representing the plaid shirt I was wearing that day, whereas Sarah, half a head shorter, was identifiable by her dark, curly hair. On closer inspection, I saw that we were holding hands.
She had drawn us together. Which was how I learned that we were.
T
HAT DRAWING STILL EXISTS.
As promised, my mother got it framed, though my father insisted that mine be framed as well, so people could compare. He thought mine was every bit as worthy, a minority view. Both renderings hung above the register at Ikey Lubin’s for years, and Sarah and I have marveled more than once at how she captured in an hour or two our world as it then existed. After the fact, of course, it seemed not just a drawing but a prophecy. In her innocent depiction, Ikey’s seemed prosperous, and for a while it was. For most of the next four years, it appeared our store would succeed, an illusion fostered in part by the failure of so many other neighborhood markets, among them Tommy Flynn’s, whereas we had found our niche. I always maintain that Ikey’s never failed, not really. It was our luck that did, and that only for a time.