The Assistant Read Online Free PDF Page A

today?” Helen asked her.
    â€œKarp told me yesterday. He knows a refugee that he looks to buy a grocery. He works in the Bronx, so he will be here late.”
    Morris shook his head.
    â€œHe’s a young man,” Ida went on, “maybe thirty—thirty—two. Karp says he saved a little cash. He can make alterations, buy new goods, fix up modern, advertise a little and make here a nice business.”
    â€œKarp should live so long,” the grocer said.
    â€œLet’s eat.” Helen sat at the table.
    Ida said she would eat later.
    â€œWhat about you, Papa?”
    â€œI am not hungry.” He picked up his paper.
    She ate alone. It would be wonderful to sell out and move but the possibility struck her as remote. If you had lived so long in one place, all but two years of your life, you didn’t move out overnight.
    Afterward she got up to help with the dishes but Ida wouldn’t let her. “Go rest,” she said.
    Helen took her things and went upstairs.
    She hated the drab five-room flat; a gray kitchen she used for breakfast so she could quickly get out to work in the morning. The living room was colorless and cramped; for all its overstuffed furniture of twenty years ago it seemed bar ren because it was lived in so little, her parents being seven days out of seven in the store; even their rare visitors, when invited upstairs, preferred to remain in the back. Sometimes Helen asked a friend up, but she went to other people’s houses if she had a choice. Her bedroom was another impossibility, tiny, dark, despite the two by three foot opening in the wall, through which she could see the living room windows; and at night Morris and Ida had to pass
through her room to get to theirs, and from their bedroom back to the bathroom. They had several times talked of giving her the big room, the only comfortable one in the house, but there was no place else that would hold their double bed. The fifth room was a small icebox off the second floor stairs, in which Ida stored a few odds and ends of clothes and furniture. Such was home. Helen had once in anger remarked that the place was awful to live in, and it had made her feel bad that her father had felt so bad.
    She heard Morris’s slow footsteps on the stairs. He came aimlessly into the living room and tried to relax in a stiff armchair. He sat with sad eyes, saying nothing, which was how he began when he wanted to say something.
    When she and her brother were kids, at least on Jewish holidays Morris would close the store and venture forth to Second Avenue to see a Yiddish play, or take the family visiting; but after Ephraim died he rarely went beyond the corner. Thinking about his life always left her with a sense of the waste of her own.
    She looks like a little bird, Morris thought. Why should she be lonely? Look how pretty she looks. Whoever saw such blue eyes?
    He reached into his pants pocket and took out a five-dollar bill.
    â€œTake,” he said, rising and embarrassedly handing her the money. “You will need for shoes.”
    â€œYou just gave me five dollars downstairs.”
    â€œHere is five more.”
    â€œWednesday was the first of the month, Pa.”
    â€œI can’t take away from you all your pay.”
    â€œYou’re not taking, I’m giving.”
    She made him put the five away. He did, with renewed shame. “What did I ever give you? Even your college education I took away.”
    â€œIt was my own decision not to go, yet maybe I will yet You can never tell.”
    â€œHow can you go? You are twenty-three years old.”

    â€œAren’t you always saying a person’s never too old to go to school?”
    â€œMy child,” he sighed, “for myself I don’t care, for you I want the best but what did I give you?”
    â€œI’ll give myself,” she smiled. “There’s hope.”
    With this he had to be satisfied. He still conceded her a future.
    But