Emile by Philip Cesario
In 1961, young Michael hangs out with Emile Khalid, owner of the small New York book store his father works at.
Emile Khalid once had a fedora, a broken window, a red cat, and a black foot. Although not at the same time.
French and Syrian at the root, with an intellect honed at the Ecole des Beaux-Artes in Paris, he was an enthusiastic émigré to America, erstwhile artist, alleged Communist, unabashed perambulator, bibliophile, bookshop owner, and born teacher. He was also fifty-five years my senior, and my best friend.
I turned six years old in 1961, and Emile turned sixty-one, the math of his age always easy for me to calculate even as a young boy, he thoughtful enough to enter this world at the double ought.
Emile lived alone, except for a red tabby with unkempt fur named Chester; the cat owned a narrow, intelligent face and he had free roam of Emile's apartment on the west side of Manhattan in an area known as Hell's Kitchen. There, Emile and Chester lived among Emile's many books, hundreds of spines lined on two rows of wall shelving that circled the entire living room where a cracked leather chair sat under an arcing lamp, and in which confines Emile would read for hours into the night, Chester curled contentedly in his lap.
There were other books, too, stacked neatly on Emile's bedside table, the edifice towering above the dozen or so books piled high on the hardwood floor below. The apartment's kitchenette, comprised of little more than an undersized refrigerator and a shrunken stove, wasn't spared as a copy of Witness, by Whittaker Chambers, lay open, seemingly forever, on the modest pine counter next to the burners.
"Michael, ask your father if he would step behind the register for an hour," Emile called to me, glancing through the window of his shop, Emile's, into lower Manhattan. "Why don't you and I take a walk." What he usually intended to be an hour's break often turned into two or three, the longer the more enjoyable for me.
"You're six now. No need to hold my hand," he'd say with affection. "But you walk with your head up. Alert, aware." He patted my shoulder, my tee-shirt askew in the summer heat. "Michael, you walk like a man, especially when you walk alone."
Emile arrived at Ellis Island by ship, sometime in the 1920s, the exact year was never clear, and he was moved (he told my father, Matthew O'Donnell, his most trusted employee) by an "immediate and overwhelming sense of belonging" when he first stepped onto the streets of New York City.
No matter how well-intentioned, he explained, he never cared for that "monstrously sized gift of the French hovering over the harbor." Rather, it was the concrete and steel columns of Manhattan that conjured his most intense feelings for his newly adopted country.
"Michael," he would lean over to me and say quietly on our long walks together, pointing to the spired, cubed, and water-tower-spiked skyline, "the beauty, the ferocity, the arrogance - the spit-in-your-eye attitude if you don't like it, that's what I love about this place."
Emile had a serious face - dark eyes and a bald head with gray stubble at the temples - except when he found something amusing, and then he'd allow his features to turn almost elfin, and he'd let his torso jump with each burst of laughter.
Years later, my father told me Emile had been a talented sculptor, yet he had difficulty finding work, never mind flourishing as an artist. "I became an apprentice to a fine photographer, and he was kind and generous with me," I overheard him tell my father one Saturday afternoon when the shop was slow. "Then the crash came in twenty-nine, and I was out of work, pretty much destitute. I took whatever came along until I landed here."
It seems Emile struck up a friendship with Mr. Mantowicz, the previous owner of the small bookshop, mainly because of his many visits, if not regular purchases. Poorly lit, with the exception of a bright picture window where the bestsellers were piled in a helix, or carefully opened and placed smartly on end, the shop was a haven for the struggling Emile who was a perfect fit with the creak-prone floors and narrow aisles, and the tall stacks whose upper shelves could only be reached by a rolling ladder that only Mr. Mantowicz was allowed to climb, for fear of injury and ensuing lawsuits.
By the fall of 1938 the aging owner had grown desperately worried for his relatives in Poland, an elderly aunt and two younger cousins who had refused to leave. "I am astonished by their courage, but I fear for their lives," he told Emile the week before he set sail for Gdansk, having sold the store's inventory and assigned the lease to Emile.
"Here is the note. You sign here," he said, pointing to the bottom of the page. "It says you pay me monthly. And here is where you send the checks," he said, putting a star next to the P.O. Box number in the payment clause.
Astonished by his good fortune, Emile did exactly as they agreed, the payments coming from the operating profits from the store, but the seller never cashed a single check, and a dozen checks remained outstanding when, a year later, a woman arrived at the shop just as Emile was unlocking the front door.
"You knew my father, Herman Mantowicz. He sold you this shop."
"Yes, of course. He hasn't..."
"I am his daughter, Helene. He will not be returning," she said, her gaze averting Emile's. "Please make the payments to me."
"She did not need to say more," said Emile, his eyes darting as he spoke with my father, as if replaying the scene before him. "Those were terrible years," he said, running a hand over the old wooden counter, the many names indented in the wood too numerous to count, "they would have killed me, too."
"We'll head uptown today. I want to see the competition," Emile said, in the usual way he would initiate our walk. "Remember, New York is for walking, no one who is sane drives a car in this city if they don't have to. And you just miss too much taking the subway."
He'd ask before too many blocks had passed: "Michael, what style is that building, the one on the corner over there?"
"I don't know," I said. Then I saw his disappointment. "Or maybe, I forgot."
"Well, I'm not going to tell you. But where can you find the answer?"
I interrupted him. "In aisle seven, where all the books about the buildings are."
"Yes," he said happily. "That's right. See, you do know."
We'd walk all the way up to mid-town, to The Concord Bookstore on Forty-Second Street. We'd go in through a big revolving glass door, and then Emile would slowly move through the aisles. He'd sniff at the books, sometimes at the customers, too, then he'd stop and check the prices of some of the hardcover fiction books.
"Do you know what fiction is, Michael?"
I shook my head.
"It's writing about something that is not real, except that sometimes it is more real than what is actually real."
"I don't understand."
He laughed that laugh he had, big and big-hearted, a laugh that invited comment. "Someday you will," he said. Then he'd point to the book's price, usually written in pencil on the flyleaf. "Now, I hope this is a fiction."
Of course, our trip uptown was only a ruse, for he knew how much I was amazed by, of all places, the Horn & Hardart Automat where I would stare in astonishment at the countless gleaming little square windows where anyone could extract, for the price of a quarter, edible delicacies of whatever kind, and in particular, Lemon Merengue pie. It was in the Automat, where strangers hurried through the aisles of the immense dining room to move in and out of common-seating tables, where the city seemed to be in its biggest rush, where Emile and I would sit quietly devouring our treats.
And once finished with our desserts, Emile would look furtively around the room eyeing the other diners, then he'd slide some coins over to me before rapping his fist on the table and yelling, "Encore," at which point I would be off, dashing to the windows to fetch another two slices of pie.
"A man has to have some vices," he'd mumble between bites, a smile on both our faces.
On our return downtown, Emile began to stop more often to rest his legs. Sometimes he would halt and take off a shoe to rub his foot. I thought it odd when he would find a narrow alley or a closed storefront, anywhere with a little privacy, and remove a shoe to stand on one foot and massage his toes.
All this while Emile was immaculately dressed in a coat and tie and fedora hat, usually a dark one that he wore rakishly pulled down and slightly to one side. "Got to keep the circulation going, Michael," he'd say, tying his shoe, before he rose with an exaggerated spring in his step.
The following year, I spent almost the entire summer in the bookshop. Each morning my mother fixed a lunch for my father and I and we'd take an early bus into New York from our home in New Jersey. We'd arrive by seven and Emile would be waiting for us, his coffee and buttered roll set out on waxed paper on the counter, his hat in its usual place atop the coat rack near the window.
Lately, though, there was an addition, a cherry wood cane that now hung beneath his fedora, one that he began to use that June. "My legs just won't let me walk as much, Michael," he explained when I'd ask about taking our usual trip to mid-town.
"Michael, please get that book, the one by that Rovere fellow. It's over..."
"I know," I said, "it's in aisle six under politics, right?"
"Yes," he smiled, "that's correct. I told Mr. Haransky that I'd put it aside for him."
When I returned to the counter with the book, Emile explained how the reporter had once covered a rally some years ago. "I let them hold it right in front of this window. At first the crowd was small, then the supporters filled up the entire sidewalk. Eventually they filled the street."
Emile tapped on the big window with a single knuckle. "That's when the police came and broke up the rally, shooed everyone off, but there was no commotion. It was peaceful until that night. That's when the brick came through this window. What a mess I found the next morning. I also found the brick with a note taped to it."
"What did it say?"
"They wrote, Commie, that's what they wrote. That's what they wrote," he said again, repeating the phrase more quietly. Emile then paused, rubbing his knuckle gently against the window. "Remember, Michael, head up."
Once September came, I didn't see much of Emile. Although I rode the bus into the city with my father on a few Saturdays, I grew busy with football and the new friends that came with it, other boys with whom I could now talk to about the girl who sat two rows ahead of me in class and who wouldn't turn around, no matter how much commotion I made in the back of the classroom.
Still, Emile kept in touch, mostly by sending books to me with my father. More art, more architecture, American history, politics, too, though nothing more sophisticated than I could handle.
In the days leading up to Christmas, my father said the shop was a madhouse, that Emile couldn't hire enough people to service the customers properly. Emile's legs now bothered him all the time, he said, yet he refused to leave the sales counter. He only allowed my father to commandeer the stacks ladder, my father sliding, then climbing furiously to pluck another title from the top shelves for another sale.
The Sunday before Christmas, my father and I went to the shop early. Emile hadn't yet arrived, so my father used his key. When we pushed open the bulky front door and set our lunch bags on the counter, we heard a low moan.
Emile had been on the floor the entire night. He had taken off his shoes and socks to relieve the pain. Once on the floor, he found he could not stop the aching, nor could he stand up, his left foot almost completely black to the ankle.
"It was below the knee. Thank God," my father announced to us once he had hung up the phone. My mother and I waited for more, but Emile had said relatively little, only that the amputation was a success. They had saved most of his leg, and the doctors said they would fit him for a prosthesis - "an artificial leg, Michael" - in the coming weeks. In the meantime, Emile put my father in charge of the shop until he was well enough to return.
"When will they discharge you? We'll take you to our home," my father said while my mother and I nodded in agreement.
Then my father listened as Emile explained why not. "Alright, Emile."
When he hung up, he said Emile didn't want us to bother. Emile told him he had arranged for transport and then for someone to come to the apartment to help him with all the necessities. "He said he'll get by just fine."
My father began leaving the house at five in the morning, waiting on the wooden slat bus bench across the street for the first bus into the city, and not returning until after ten each night, having opened and closed the store himself, unwilling to let the others handle the responsibility.
When, after a few months of this routine, my mother worried about him exhausting himself, he simply said, "I made a promise, Margaret. And it needs to be kept." He looked at her directly, then turned to me and nodded, his usual exclamation point when he was finished with a subject.
That's about the time when we got word that Emile was doing better, his artificial leg fitted and already discarded to a bedroom closet by the patient. "Damn thing is too clumsy," was what he told my father when he stopped by for their regular Saturday meetings at the apartment.
"He wants to know if you want to visit him next Saturday."
"What do I have to do?"
"Michael, you don't have to do anything. Just visit. He'd like your company."
When the day arrived, my father, mother, and I all walked up the four flights to Emile's apartment.
"It's not locked. Come in."
Emile seemed happy to see us, sitting in that big brown chair, one pant leg reaching the floor, the other one clipped, his abbreviated leg capped with a clean white stocking, while Chester sat in his lap and purred.
The Saturdays to follow saw me being dropped off early in the morning to spend the entire day with Emile, my father coming back around six - he recently having been ordered by Emile to let the staff handle the shop closings, if not the openings - and afterward we would head to the bus station for the trip home.
When he wasn't directing me to locate and pull some title from his shelves, or we weren't listening to the ball game, Emile and I usually played Skee-ball, rolling a small plastic ball into a pan with recessed half-spheres with numbers painted on them.
Emile seemed to find all this ball rolling and my fetching amusing; his upper body still able to jump with laughter each time Chester trapped my ball then swatted it away just before I scored some winning points.
A Saturday in late May was the last time we listened to a Yankees game on Emile's big radio, or read together, or pleaded with Chester to please leave us alone, if only for five minutes. Three days after I left the apartment that evening with a new horde of books tucked under my arm, the woman who came in each day to care for Emile found him unconscious, still in bed where she had left him.
My father called my mother from the bookshop and the three of us rushed to the hospital - he quickly tossing the keys to the first employee he saw - "You, take care of the store" - and sprinting out to the street to hail the first cab. My mother and I drove into the city and the heavy morning traffic of upper Manhattan. After finally finding an open garage near the hospital, we sprinted through the lobby and then through the hospital's sea-green hallways to the cardiac ward on the twelfth floor.
When we reached Emile's room, my father's flat, outstretched palm halted us at the door. I watched as he stood over Emile at his bedside, his boss now quiet and still. He ran a hand over Emile's bald head, then he grabbed a limp hand, squeezing it in a gentle goodbye.
When my father came to the door, he said, "he's gone, we're too late." Then he looked at my mother. "Michael shouldn't be here."
I ducked under my father's arm blocking the doorway and I ran to Emile's side. He didn't look different to me, just quieter, with an almost undetectable upturn to his lips. My father and mother came to me quickly.
My mother softly placed her hands on my shoulders. "Michael," she said, "are you okay?"
I picked up my head. "I am," I said.
 |
| Image generated with OpenAI |
French and Syrian at the root, with an intellect honed at the Ecole des Beaux-Artes in Paris, he was an enthusiastic émigré to America, erstwhile artist, alleged Communist, unabashed perambulator, bibliophile, bookshop owner, and born teacher. He was also fifty-five years my senior, and my best friend.
I turned six years old in 1961, and Emile turned sixty-one, the math of his age always easy for me to calculate even as a young boy, he thoughtful enough to enter this world at the double ought.
Emile lived alone, except for a red tabby with unkempt fur named Chester; the cat owned a narrow, intelligent face and he had free roam of Emile's apartment on the west side of Manhattan in an area known as Hell's Kitchen. There, Emile and Chester lived among Emile's many books, hundreds of spines lined on two rows of wall shelving that circled the entire living room where a cracked leather chair sat under an arcing lamp, and in which confines Emile would read for hours into the night, Chester curled contentedly in his lap.
There were other books, too, stacked neatly on Emile's bedside table, the edifice towering above the dozen or so books piled high on the hardwood floor below. The apartment's kitchenette, comprised of little more than an undersized refrigerator and a shrunken stove, wasn't spared as a copy of Witness, by Whittaker Chambers, lay open, seemingly forever, on the modest pine counter next to the burners.
"Michael, ask your father if he would step behind the register for an hour," Emile called to me, glancing through the window of his shop, Emile's, into lower Manhattan. "Why don't you and I take a walk." What he usually intended to be an hour's break often turned into two or three, the longer the more enjoyable for me.
"You're six now. No need to hold my hand," he'd say with affection. "But you walk with your head up. Alert, aware." He patted my shoulder, my tee-shirt askew in the summer heat. "Michael, you walk like a man, especially when you walk alone."
Emile arrived at Ellis Island by ship, sometime in the 1920s, the exact year was never clear, and he was moved (he told my father, Matthew O'Donnell, his most trusted employee) by an "immediate and overwhelming sense of belonging" when he first stepped onto the streets of New York City.
No matter how well-intentioned, he explained, he never cared for that "monstrously sized gift of the French hovering over the harbor." Rather, it was the concrete and steel columns of Manhattan that conjured his most intense feelings for his newly adopted country.
"Michael," he would lean over to me and say quietly on our long walks together, pointing to the spired, cubed, and water-tower-spiked skyline, "the beauty, the ferocity, the arrogance - the spit-in-your-eye attitude if you don't like it, that's what I love about this place."
Emile had a serious face - dark eyes and a bald head with gray stubble at the temples - except when he found something amusing, and then he'd allow his features to turn almost elfin, and he'd let his torso jump with each burst of laughter.
Years later, my father told me Emile had been a talented sculptor, yet he had difficulty finding work, never mind flourishing as an artist. "I became an apprentice to a fine photographer, and he was kind and generous with me," I overheard him tell my father one Saturday afternoon when the shop was slow. "Then the crash came in twenty-nine, and I was out of work, pretty much destitute. I took whatever came along until I landed here."
It seems Emile struck up a friendship with Mr. Mantowicz, the previous owner of the small bookshop, mainly because of his many visits, if not regular purchases. Poorly lit, with the exception of a bright picture window where the bestsellers were piled in a helix, or carefully opened and placed smartly on end, the shop was a haven for the struggling Emile who was a perfect fit with the creak-prone floors and narrow aisles, and the tall stacks whose upper shelves could only be reached by a rolling ladder that only Mr. Mantowicz was allowed to climb, for fear of injury and ensuing lawsuits.
By the fall of 1938 the aging owner had grown desperately worried for his relatives in Poland, an elderly aunt and two younger cousins who had refused to leave. "I am astonished by their courage, but I fear for their lives," he told Emile the week before he set sail for Gdansk, having sold the store's inventory and assigned the lease to Emile.
"Here is the note. You sign here," he said, pointing to the bottom of the page. "It says you pay me monthly. And here is where you send the checks," he said, putting a star next to the P.O. Box number in the payment clause.
Astonished by his good fortune, Emile did exactly as they agreed, the payments coming from the operating profits from the store, but the seller never cashed a single check, and a dozen checks remained outstanding when, a year later, a woman arrived at the shop just as Emile was unlocking the front door.
"You knew my father, Herman Mantowicz. He sold you this shop."
"Yes, of course. He hasn't..."
"I am his daughter, Helene. He will not be returning," she said, her gaze averting Emile's. "Please make the payments to me."
"She did not need to say more," said Emile, his eyes darting as he spoke with my father, as if replaying the scene before him. "Those were terrible years," he said, running a hand over the old wooden counter, the many names indented in the wood too numerous to count, "they would have killed me, too."
"We'll head uptown today. I want to see the competition," Emile said, in the usual way he would initiate our walk. "Remember, New York is for walking, no one who is sane drives a car in this city if they don't have to. And you just miss too much taking the subway."
He'd ask before too many blocks had passed: "Michael, what style is that building, the one on the corner over there?"
"I don't know," I said. Then I saw his disappointment. "Or maybe, I forgot."
"Well, I'm not going to tell you. But where can you find the answer?"
I interrupted him. "In aisle seven, where all the books about the buildings are."
"Yes," he said happily. "That's right. See, you do know."
We'd walk all the way up to mid-town, to The Concord Bookstore on Forty-Second Street. We'd go in through a big revolving glass door, and then Emile would slowly move through the aisles. He'd sniff at the books, sometimes at the customers, too, then he'd stop and check the prices of some of the hardcover fiction books.
"Do you know what fiction is, Michael?"
I shook my head.
"It's writing about something that is not real, except that sometimes it is more real than what is actually real."
"I don't understand."
He laughed that laugh he had, big and big-hearted, a laugh that invited comment. "Someday you will," he said. Then he'd point to the book's price, usually written in pencil on the flyleaf. "Now, I hope this is a fiction."
Of course, our trip uptown was only a ruse, for he knew how much I was amazed by, of all places, the Horn & Hardart Automat where I would stare in astonishment at the countless gleaming little square windows where anyone could extract, for the price of a quarter, edible delicacies of whatever kind, and in particular, Lemon Merengue pie. It was in the Automat, where strangers hurried through the aisles of the immense dining room to move in and out of common-seating tables, where the city seemed to be in its biggest rush, where Emile and I would sit quietly devouring our treats.
And once finished with our desserts, Emile would look furtively around the room eyeing the other diners, then he'd slide some coins over to me before rapping his fist on the table and yelling, "Encore," at which point I would be off, dashing to the windows to fetch another two slices of pie.
"A man has to have some vices," he'd mumble between bites, a smile on both our faces.
On our return downtown, Emile began to stop more often to rest his legs. Sometimes he would halt and take off a shoe to rub his foot. I thought it odd when he would find a narrow alley or a closed storefront, anywhere with a little privacy, and remove a shoe to stand on one foot and massage his toes.
All this while Emile was immaculately dressed in a coat and tie and fedora hat, usually a dark one that he wore rakishly pulled down and slightly to one side. "Got to keep the circulation going, Michael," he'd say, tying his shoe, before he rose with an exaggerated spring in his step.
The following year, I spent almost the entire summer in the bookshop. Each morning my mother fixed a lunch for my father and I and we'd take an early bus into New York from our home in New Jersey. We'd arrive by seven and Emile would be waiting for us, his coffee and buttered roll set out on waxed paper on the counter, his hat in its usual place atop the coat rack near the window.
Lately, though, there was an addition, a cherry wood cane that now hung beneath his fedora, one that he began to use that June. "My legs just won't let me walk as much, Michael," he explained when I'd ask about taking our usual trip to mid-town.
"Michael, please get that book, the one by that Rovere fellow. It's over..."
"I know," I said, "it's in aisle six under politics, right?"
"Yes," he smiled, "that's correct. I told Mr. Haransky that I'd put it aside for him."
When I returned to the counter with the book, Emile explained how the reporter had once covered a rally some years ago. "I let them hold it right in front of this window. At first the crowd was small, then the supporters filled up the entire sidewalk. Eventually they filled the street."
Emile tapped on the big window with a single knuckle. "That's when the police came and broke up the rally, shooed everyone off, but there was no commotion. It was peaceful until that night. That's when the brick came through this window. What a mess I found the next morning. I also found the brick with a note taped to it."
"What did it say?"
"They wrote, Commie, that's what they wrote. That's what they wrote," he said again, repeating the phrase more quietly. Emile then paused, rubbing his knuckle gently against the window. "Remember, Michael, head up."
Once September came, I didn't see much of Emile. Although I rode the bus into the city with my father on a few Saturdays, I grew busy with football and the new friends that came with it, other boys with whom I could now talk to about the girl who sat two rows ahead of me in class and who wouldn't turn around, no matter how much commotion I made in the back of the classroom.
Still, Emile kept in touch, mostly by sending books to me with my father. More art, more architecture, American history, politics, too, though nothing more sophisticated than I could handle.
In the days leading up to Christmas, my father said the shop was a madhouse, that Emile couldn't hire enough people to service the customers properly. Emile's legs now bothered him all the time, he said, yet he refused to leave the sales counter. He only allowed my father to commandeer the stacks ladder, my father sliding, then climbing furiously to pluck another title from the top shelves for another sale.
The Sunday before Christmas, my father and I went to the shop early. Emile hadn't yet arrived, so my father used his key. When we pushed open the bulky front door and set our lunch bags on the counter, we heard a low moan.
Emile had been on the floor the entire night. He had taken off his shoes and socks to relieve the pain. Once on the floor, he found he could not stop the aching, nor could he stand up, his left foot almost completely black to the ankle.
"It was below the knee. Thank God," my father announced to us once he had hung up the phone. My mother and I waited for more, but Emile had said relatively little, only that the amputation was a success. They had saved most of his leg, and the doctors said they would fit him for a prosthesis - "an artificial leg, Michael" - in the coming weeks. In the meantime, Emile put my father in charge of the shop until he was well enough to return.
"When will they discharge you? We'll take you to our home," my father said while my mother and I nodded in agreement.
Then my father listened as Emile explained why not. "Alright, Emile."
When he hung up, he said Emile didn't want us to bother. Emile told him he had arranged for transport and then for someone to come to the apartment to help him with all the necessities. "He said he'll get by just fine."
My father began leaving the house at five in the morning, waiting on the wooden slat bus bench across the street for the first bus into the city, and not returning until after ten each night, having opened and closed the store himself, unwilling to let the others handle the responsibility.
When, after a few months of this routine, my mother worried about him exhausting himself, he simply said, "I made a promise, Margaret. And it needs to be kept." He looked at her directly, then turned to me and nodded, his usual exclamation point when he was finished with a subject.
That's about the time when we got word that Emile was doing better, his artificial leg fitted and already discarded to a bedroom closet by the patient. "Damn thing is too clumsy," was what he told my father when he stopped by for their regular Saturday meetings at the apartment.
"He wants to know if you want to visit him next Saturday."
"What do I have to do?"
"Michael, you don't have to do anything. Just visit. He'd like your company."
When the day arrived, my father, mother, and I all walked up the four flights to Emile's apartment.
"It's not locked. Come in."
Emile seemed happy to see us, sitting in that big brown chair, one pant leg reaching the floor, the other one clipped, his abbreviated leg capped with a clean white stocking, while Chester sat in his lap and purred.
The Saturdays to follow saw me being dropped off early in the morning to spend the entire day with Emile, my father coming back around six - he recently having been ordered by Emile to let the staff handle the shop closings, if not the openings - and afterward we would head to the bus station for the trip home.
When he wasn't directing me to locate and pull some title from his shelves, or we weren't listening to the ball game, Emile and I usually played Skee-ball, rolling a small plastic ball into a pan with recessed half-spheres with numbers painted on them.
Emile seemed to find all this ball rolling and my fetching amusing; his upper body still able to jump with laughter each time Chester trapped my ball then swatted it away just before I scored some winning points.
A Saturday in late May was the last time we listened to a Yankees game on Emile's big radio, or read together, or pleaded with Chester to please leave us alone, if only for five minutes. Three days after I left the apartment that evening with a new horde of books tucked under my arm, the woman who came in each day to care for Emile found him unconscious, still in bed where she had left him.
My father called my mother from the bookshop and the three of us rushed to the hospital - he quickly tossing the keys to the first employee he saw - "You, take care of the store" - and sprinting out to the street to hail the first cab. My mother and I drove into the city and the heavy morning traffic of upper Manhattan. After finally finding an open garage near the hospital, we sprinted through the lobby and then through the hospital's sea-green hallways to the cardiac ward on the twelfth floor.
When we reached Emile's room, my father's flat, outstretched palm halted us at the door. I watched as he stood over Emile at his bedside, his boss now quiet and still. He ran a hand over Emile's bald head, then he grabbed a limp hand, squeezing it in a gentle goodbye.
When my father came to the door, he said, "he's gone, we're too late." Then he looked at my mother. "Michael shouldn't be here."
I ducked under my father's arm blocking the doorway and I ran to Emile's side. He didn't look different to me, just quieter, with an almost undetectable upturn to his lips. My father and mother came to me quickly.
My mother softly placed her hands on my shoulders. "Michael," she said, "are you okay?"
I picked up my head. "I am," I said.
A short but impactful story about many things: ageing, the human condition, the immigrant experience, a love of books. It was life-affirming, too, despite Death rearing its head. I also liked how the MC accepted what had happened at the end, despite his father's misgivings about his inability to deal with death. Hopefully after Michael gets older he'll get a bookshop of his own. Or maybe he'll even take over Emile's. Well-done.
ReplyDeleteMuch appreciate the review. Kind words. Many thanks.
Delete