Shapers of Worlds Volume II, page 39
She lunged for me, her hands twisted into claws. It was a good thing she didn’t know how to use any of the stuff in my trench coat pockets—she could have done some real damage. As it was, she actually got her hands around my throat and started squeezing before she began to unravel. I stood up from my chair and watched her new body disintegrate into its component parts and then into slurry. The eyes went last. I popped one of them under my heel.
Then I took a deep breath of free air into my stolen lungs and set out to enjoy an unchained world.
The Little Tailor and the Elves
By Barbara Hambly
For as long as anybody could remember, Levitsky’s Tailor Shop had been in business in the basement of 113 West 34th Street. Solly Levitsky had opened the place in 1941, building it up from pressing pants and doing alterations; by the time his son, Irv, took over in the late sixties, it had expanded into the main floor of the building and included a dry-cleaning establishment as well. Irv’s work was excellent, and everyone in the neighbourhood thought very well of him.
Unlike his father, who was big for a Polish Jew—six feet one and built like a refrigerator—Irv, stocky and powerful, barely topped five three, though he wore builtup shoes and invariably claimed five five. Maybe his size had something to do with his temper, and his determination to be twice the tailor his father had been, no easy feat, considering his father’s expertise. “It’s great, it’s great,” the Italian businessmen would say, who’d been coming into the shop for years to have their suits made, standing in front of the big three-way mirrors under the fluorescent lighting that made even the dim back rooms of the basement as clear and flawless as day. And, in Irv’s opinion, it was great: the perfect hang of the iron-gray wool, forty dollars a yard with a hand to it like silk, the precise shaping of the shoulders over just sufficient padding to smooth away the annoying little variations to which mortal flesh is heir—it was a suit you couldn’t buy off the rack no matter how much you spent.
But always, as Irv was tucking the final payment cheque into the drawer of the electronic till that had replaced that old cast-iron clunker his father had kept in the shop till the day he retired, he’d overhear them as they went out the front door and up the half-dozen chipped cement steps to where their limos were doubleparked in traffic: “You think this is good, Vinnie? You should have seen the one his old man made me back in ’58. Now, that was a suit that sang.”
And Irv would go upstairs in a bitter temper and slap his wife.
“She’s a perfectly lovely girl, Irving.” Iris Levitsky put her head down on the kitchen table again, trying to will away the familiar clammy sensation she got in the pit of her stomach at the sound of her mother-in-law’s voice. “But would you just tell her what I said about newspapers being best for cleaning windows? Newspapers and ammonia, and never mind all this fancy-schmancy stuff they peddle over the TV. Newspapers and ammonia and good old-fashioned elbow grease.” In the front hall, the coat-cupboard door creaked; above the brimming kitchen sink, the tangerine and avocado cotton curtains shifted with the night wind and the sounds of M*A*S*H on the neighbours’ TV set.
Iris closed her eyes with wretchedness, knowing what was coming next.
“Iris . . . !” She flinched at the singsong whine of anger in her husband’s voice.
She raised her head. He was standing in the kitchen doorway in his shirtsleeves with his tie loosened, hands on his hips. People always said he was a short little man, but Iris was tinier yet—her head just cleared the top of his shoulder—and the angry bunch of those heavy black eyebrows filled her with panic.
“I got to tell you, Iris, you embarrassed the hell out of me tonight in front of my folks! What the hell you do around here all day, sit around eating bonbons?” He gestured furiously towards the avocado-green plates that couldn’t fit into the sink, lined up like a Manet painting on the harvest-gold Formica of the counter. “I mean, it’s eight-thirty, for Chrissake, and them dishes are still dirty! It’s not like you gotta go out and work or anything!”
Iris heartily wished she could go out and work or something. She’d been far happier when she’d only been the store’s accountant instead of the owner’s wife. But she could only whisper, “I’m sorry, honey.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry, too!” His voice rose, and Iris shrank further back against the table. The first time he’d struck her—the week after they’d come back from their honeymoon—he’d been miserably repentant for days, and it had been nearly six months before he’d slapped her again. Lately, he’d quit going through the formality of saying, “I don’t know what got into me.” Whatever it was, it had got into him fairly often in the seven years of their marriage so far.
“I’m sorry I’m the one who’s gotta be at the store six days a week until seven o’clock at night making sure them schwartze girls upstairs ain’t robbing the place blind and leaving spots on the customers’ clothes, making enough money to have a nice house, a good car, a decent living for you and Melissa, and that I gotta come home after all that and find the dishes ain’t done, the house is a pigsty, my daughter’s running around with dirt on her face like some wop brat and you sittin’ on your can reading a goddamn newspaper!”
He turned furiously away and got a beer from the refrigerator. “I’m gonna be watching TV. And for God’s sake, take some time out from whatever the hell you do all day and wash the goddamn windows! I can see the dirt from here!”
His words weren’t necessary. Iris had already resolved to turn over a new leaf and wash the windows tomorrow—surely she’d have time between picking Melissa up from school and taking her to her dance lessons . . .
But as she plunged her arms into the froth of suds, Iris recalled that she’d promised to take old Mrs. Callahan to the clinic tomorrow.
For a moment, she wondered whether she ought to call the old lady and cancel, but Jessie Callahan was over eighty, still living alone in her own little house with her four dogs, and the bus ride to the clinic would be hard on her. A guilty glance at the clock showed Iris that it was nearly nine, and Melissa still to bathe and be told her story . . .
Tears of frustration crept down her cheeks as she piled the silverware into the rack to dry. It would leave spots, but those could be wiped off before she put them away, if she had time. Mama Levitsky had also commented on the dirty grout in the bathroom tiles.
Well, maybe tomorrow there’d be time to wash a few windows before picking Melissa up . . .
She dashed a handful of cold water over her eyes, so that Melissa wouldn’t see she’d been crying, as she went to get her daughter a bath.
At the clinic the next day, Jessie Callahan shook her head over Iris’s shaky-voiced account of her own failings and her husband’s justified anger. “I know I should be better,” Iris admitted, looking straight ahead at the harassed Medicare staffers because she knew if she looked at her friend, she’d burst into tears again. “I mean, Irv’s mother keeps their house spotless, and she’s more than forty years older than I am. But with Melissa, and doing the accounts for the store, I just . . . I just can’t!”
A small black child, who’d been there with her parents when Jessie and Iris had arrived nearly an hour and a half ago and still hadn’t been seen, pelted noisily by. Iris fished in her purse for the package of butterscotch Lifesavers she always carried for Melissa and gave the child one, guessing that the little girl hadn’t had any lunch.
“Now, honey,” said Jessie Callahan in her soft voice, “there are worse things in the world than a little dirt, and turning your brain into a mushroom and your soul into mould by spending the whole day cleaning property is one of them. Don’t worry about it. These things all work out.”
Queerly enough, when Iris got home—far later than she’d thought she would, for the clinic had been jammed, and Jessie had had to wait nearly three hours to be seen—she found that she must have dried the silverware after all. The silverware basket and dish drainer were not only empty but hung neatly on their hooks on the inside of the broom-closet door; the dishes were stacked, gleaming, in the cupboard; the silverware grinned brightly at her when she opened the drawer. Behind the tangerine-and-avocado-pattern curtains—and surely the curtains looked cleaner and crisper than Iris remembered them yesterday—the windows sparkled, too.
I must have been tireder than I thought, Iris reflected, if I don’t even remember putting the silverware and dishes away. She had easily enough time to do the very small amount of laundry which needed doing, and iron Irv’s shirts and the fresh tablecloth and napkins Irv always insisted upon, before it was time to put dinner on.
That was the first time it happened and the last time Irv had genuine cause for complaint about her housekeeping.
It didn’t happen with tremendous frequency after that, at first. But it happened often enough. After the fourth or fifth time that Iris found some particularly daunting piece of housework done—the kitchen floor stripped and rewaxed just before another of Mama Levitsky’s unscheduled drop-in visits—Iris started keeping track. It troubled her; she began to wonder if she was developing multiple personalities or having housework blackouts, and she took to running time-and-motion studies on herself until it occurred to her that even if she were doing the housework unconscious, that was far preferable to being aware of each mind-numbing chore.
Mama Levitsky still picked holes, of course, and Irv still shouted and threatened, but it seemed to Iris that they had to look harder for faults to find. She continued to drive Jessie to the local Senior Center and the Adult Literacy Resource Center where they both did volunteer teaching, and, weirdly enough, the housework continued to get done.
It was only when Melissa spoke about seeing “little men” that Iris became truly worried and spoke to Jessie about it.
“Ah, I thought that’s what might be happening.” The old lady smiled. “It’s the elves.”
“What?” Iris stared at her. She’d gone over to cook Jessie some lunch and play cards with her—since Jessie’s stroke in the spring of ’77, the old lady could barely get around—and they were sitting together in Jessie’s neat white kitchen.
Jessie raised her snowy brows. “The elves,” she said. “They’ve been around me as long as I can remember. They did things for Mother, too—Mother cleaned houses out here in Long Island, and there were eleven of us back home, and only me to raise and look after the little ones. But Mother was never too tired to help out her friends or take care of those in the neighbourhood who couldn’t take care of themselves. She’d always say that chores like this had a way of getting done. I first saw the elves when I wasn’t much older than Melissa . . .”
She nodded toward the little girl, happily tossing a Wiffle ball for the dogs to chase across the neat handkerchief of lawn outside.
“Only glimpses of them I’d get, out the corners of my eyes, usually in the winter, when it got so early dark. It seemed to me then they were three or four little brownfaced men dressed in cobwebs, with long ears like dogs, but that might have been something I made up later or something I read in a book.”
She sighed, and shook her head, and reached tremblingly for a spoon to eat the scrambled eggs Iris had made her, but seemed to find it too much effort and put it down again. Iris worried that as she grew feebler, Jessie would be unable to keep the house at all, but so far, it hadn’t happened, and she dreaded the day when the old lady would be taken to some kind of state institution because she could no longer look after herself, as much for Jessie’s sake as for how badly she’d miss the old lady’s company.
“Mother used to say they weren’t good folk,” Jessie murmured, her arthritic fingers stirring at the spoon—a tiny coffee spoon, with a decorative cartouche at the top saying PERTH—WESTERN AUSTRALIA on it. “Neither good nor evil, she said, but rather like children that never had no mother: queer and selfish and cunning. But leave them out food, in the shop or in the house, and don’t put no cold iron above the doors, and they’ll be your friends. And that’s what I used to do.”
“Leave them food?” asked Iris, seeing Jessie’s mind begin to drift. “Like some kids leave cookies for Santa on Christmas Eve?”
“Of course, for what’s Santa Claus but the memory of some other helping spirit? But these . . . They aren’t good folk, having no souls, but they see good in humans and are drawn to it, like cold children to a flame. As they were drawn to Mother.” All that complicated erosion-map of facial lines crumpled and changed with her smile.
“And do you know,” she went on, “somehow all the dishes did get done at our house, and the food did get cooked, and none of my brothers and sisters ever went dirty, and Mother managed to keep those rich folks’ houses spotless, too, be there ever so many of them. I never was afraid of the elves, and I’d bake cookies to leave out for them, but Mother never did let any of us alone in the dark if she could help it. I still leave them cookies, time to time. There’s not much to do around this place, now I’m too old to mess it up much. I’m glad they’ve found somebody else to help. They don’t like to be idle.”
Iris wasn’t sure just what to say to that. Jessie was very old, and her mind wandered, but the fact remained that things got done that Iris didn’t remember doing, and Mama Levitsky had less and less cause to complain. That didn’t stop her from complaining, of course. In fact, she seemed to complain more. Even after Solly and his wife retired to Miami in 1978, Iris’s husband continued to find fault with everything his wife did or didn’t do.
A number of things happened in 1978. A big, glossy tailoring and alterations establishment opened on West 35th Street, utilizing, Irv swore nightly in gusts of bourbon, cheap Vietnamese labour who’d work for fifty cents an hour up in the attics. Moreover, fewer businessmen were buying bespoke suits, preferring instead to frequent the high-end designer stores like Neiman-Marcus and I. Magnin. He found himself doing more alterations work and less tailoring as such, and most of the money came in from the dry-cleaning establishment upstairs.
That was the year Iris went back to work. In addition to doing the books—which she’d always done, having been hired for the purpose just out of high school—Irv put her in charge of the dry-cleaning side of the operation. “That way, I can fire those stupid girls who can’t do a decent job anyway,” he groused, pacing around the kitchen, beer can in hand, while Iris and Melissa stood silent beside the sink where they’d been washing dishes when he’d come in. “Filthy broads, anyway, always off in the back combing their hair or drinking Cokes—Cokes! I caught one of them actually leaving a wet ring on the counter, where customers’ clothes go!”
“Did they get Coke on a garment?” asked Iris, shocked. She’d been in the store and knew the girls were pretty conscientious about wiping up crumbs and spills from lunch. Surely, they couldn’t have deteriorated that much in a few weeks.
“That ain’t the point, stupid!” yelled Irv, losing his temper, and at the sound of his voice, Melissa edged a little closer to Iris’s leg. Iris had told Melissa she’d gotten her current black eye from running into a door; she didn’t know whether the little girl believed her or not. She always kept a close eye on Melissa and didn’t think Irv had ever done more than yell at his daughter, but since business had been steadily worsening, Irv had taken to drinking more beers in front of the TV set evenings and weekends. He’d taken to coming home later in the evenings, too, and by the smell of his breath, the hour or so in between he was spending in the Seventh Avenue Grill.
“The point is them stupid nafkas is careless around the customers’ clothes! They eat their goddamn greasy hamburgers there, probably on the folding table if I know anything about schwartzes! No wonder the place got roaches!”
Iris knew better than to point out that any establishment in Manhattan had roaches, particularly one situated between a Mexican restaurant and a grocery store.
“I shoulda figured you wouldn’t know the difference if the store was clean or dirty! God knows what’s gonna happen to my reputation—to Dad’s reputation—with you in charge there!”
“Melissa,” said Iris gently, recognizing the signs of a full-fledged storm brewing, “why don’t you go upstairs and run your bath? I’ll finish up here.”
“The hell she will!” bellowed Irv in a gusty blast of Miller High Life. “You’re teaching her to be just as crummy as you, running off and leaving her job halfdone so you can go fix sandwiches and sit around and bullshit with that senile old Mick! My mother was right about you! Well, I’m not gonna have no lazy slob for a daughter, even though I got one for a wife! And if I see so much as one spot, one hair, one pin out of place, I’ll teach you to be clean myself, God damn it! And that goes for you, too,” he added, turning savagely to his silent daughter, “when your mother’s away at work, you hear?”
Nevertheless, Melissa slipped away quietly halfway through Irv’s ensuing tirade. Iris remained, taking the shouts and blows in head-bowed silence, reflecting that he did have a point. She was spending a good deal of time with Jessie, now that the old lady was practically helpless. Later she went up to Melissa’s room, not turning on the light because she could feel her lip puffing up—she’d have to put ice on it before going into the shop tomorrow—and found the little girl sitting up in bed in the dark.
“Don’t worry about Daddy, Mommy,” said Melissa softly. “The little men will help me keep house, and then he won’t be mad.”
Iris hugged her but reflected that it would take more than the elves’ housekeeping to prevent Irv from working himself into the furies that seemed to be the only outlet for his frustration with the generally poor condition of the world, his business, and his life.
She wasn’t sure at what point she came to accept the elves as a reality and rely on them for their help as matter-of-factly as Melissa did. Perhaps it was during the year which followed, when it became obvious to her that someone was helping Melissa with the housework—a seven-year-old girl couldn’t possibly keep everything from the bathroom faucets to the outsides of the upstairs windows gleaming like that. And thankfully, Irv never complained about Melissa or bawled her out for leaving sandwich crumbs on the counter or imagined tasks undone.
