Schloyme’s Liquor Store

“Nice little girl, Stevens,” Schloyme said, leaning against the edge of the door into his liquor shop.

My father held a case of wine. “How much’ll you give me for her, Schloyme?” he called over his shoulder, then glanced into the front seat of the car to see if I was paying attention.

Indeed I was paying the kind of close attention a five-year-old does when her father might sell her to the tall, dark-haired man with grayish circles around his eyes, a man whose store smelled of sweet booze like her parents’ left-over cocktail glasses. He was kidding. I sat up straighter and watched.

“I’ll give you five dollars,” Schloyme said, sliding a toothpick across his full lips. Purplish lips, ugh! Inside, Schloyme’s wife, Zelda, sat on a stool behind the cash register. When I went inside with my father she smiled and offered me a candy, just like the witch in Hansel and Gretel and I knew how that story ended.

“Naw, she’s worth more than that,” my father said, sliding the wine into the back seat. He closed the door and peered down at me, lanky, dark-eyed Daddy. He grinned and turned back to Schloyme.

“Make it fifty and she’s all yours,” he said.

Only a joke. Not very funny. At all! Why had I ever wanted to come with him on this errand? I was so glad to see him when he drove into the yard after work that I leaped into his arms and begged to go.

“Okay, okay, kiddo.” His pet name for me. Well, sometimes for other people but I ignored that. Wasn’t that often. He unlatched my arms and legs. “Let me get into some clothes.” By that he meant, out of the suit and tie and into khakis and sneakers.

Friday afternoons he was free to be around for the whole weekend except in winter when he might have to stoke the coal furnace at the mill where he manufactured a fancy kind of dust. Golden dust. That’s what I saw when I went to the mill with him or with my mother when she took her car for gas. There was golden dust inside the mill and all over the turnaround. The small manufacturing business my parents owned ground up feldspar, mixed it with mysterious ingredients and sold it as a floor cleaner to supermarkets.

Worth-Spar, Inc., owned the old brick mill, a relic of an earlier Connecticut economy, and a hundred-acre mine site a few miles south of Cobalt. The mill itself was only two miles north of Cobalt, home to Mickey’s Cobalt Market and Schloyme’s Cobalt Liquor Store beside it. Shared the same concrete foundation, steps and roof. Surely they were not just the only Jewish merchants for miles, they were family kin as well. Yes, memory prompts that they were brothers-in-law. Close enough that Schloyme could send his son to Sadie to change a hundred dollar bill or borrow something from her cash register. Business partners, too, then.

Mining the surface feldspar demanded a loader and a truck which needed gas so the mill had a gas tank and an old red and white pump with a round gauge on top. When Mom pulled up beside it, one of the Italian workmen, Morris or Andy, would come out, wiping his oily hands on a towel and throw the pump lever up as he unscrewed the gas cap. An ancient engine ground into life in the throat of the pump. Morris and Andy who had worked for my father for thirty years, as had all of the men, were handsome, dark-skinned guys with big white teeth. And they treated us as if were royalty.

“So Italian. Always very charming,” my mother would say, dreamily. I loved the sound of the gas whizzing and gurgling into the tank and I liked the smell of the fumes.

Mom always put her cigarette out before we even got there. She didn’t have to pay anything, of course, it was just one big holding tank all the vehicles used. Company car, gas, etc., perks of being on the Board of Directors.

If that makes you think of a large, successful family corporation, shrink that thought to a one-man with one secretary/accountant and six or eight Italian stone blasters, loader operators, truck drivers and crushing and milling machine mechanics. Which altogether produced the golden dust. My father supervised the mill and sold bags of his Worth-Spar product from Boston to Washington, D.C.. Was he a tycoon? The last year of his life, 1960, my father told me, more than once, that he had finally broken five figures. Meaning he made over $10,000. Then he died at fifty-seven.

My father took me deer hunting on that quarry land two or three times. We’d put a candy bar in a jacket pocket, find the mittens which were somewhere in a distant drawer, it being only November and not yet cold enough. Then Dad would take out his .22 rifle which smelled deliciously of nitrate—almost salty—and gun oil. He checked the chamber to be sure it was empty, reset the safety button, watching all the time to be sure I was paying attention which indeed I was, then wrapped it in a flannel shirt and laid it carefully across the back seat of the car.

It would be a typical Connecticut fall day, not clear, not cloudy, just hazy enough to take the color out of the blue sky. An enervating sky, really. But the sky I lived with and there was my handsome father, limber as a Pinocchio, telling me how to stalk a deer. How to look for, yet never find, fresh deer droppings. If we saw some little green pellets, we called to each other like scientists on a dig. Were they fresh, Dad would ask me. They had no fresh gleam, I saw. Ah, very perceptive. Now we could go on our hunt confident we would not encounter our prey any time soon.

It could have been rabbit poop, he wasn’t sure and I wasn’t sure he could pull the trigger on either one. Yet we thrashed on through the skinny swamp oak and swamp maple trees, eyes down like Indian trackers, my father carrying the gun in the crook of his right arm, muzzle down, of course, ready to lift, sight and squeeeeze the trigger. Which would blow a bullet right into the deer. Or the bunny. I never thought of that.

Golden oak leaves crackled underfoot as we traipsed to a high point or what my father promised would be a high point but was only a rise of feldspar outcropping with a close view of more skimpy trees, some low dark laurel bushes we’d come back for at Christmas and not a sign of any living thing. I don’t believe one bird flew anywhere near central Connecticut that afternoon.

Secretly we each blamed each other. That is, I blamed him for not finding a deer and he probably blamed me for making him even think about shooting a deer for he was a very soft-hearted guy. I never considered the consequences of killing or, worse, injuring an animal on purpose. Just for the meat? Why not go to Mickey’s?

Gee, the deer hunting happened later than the Me auction. Let’s go back.

“Fifty, eh?” Schloyme turned his head to speak into the black interior of his shop. “Zelda, got fifty in the box?”

An indistinguishable sound from inside, not necessarily encouraging. Schloyme nodded as if it were, still moving the toothpick over his horrible lips. He wore grayish-pink eyeglasses. His belly hung over his belt, a little.

“Now let me see,” my father said, grinning widely now. He looked in on me. By then I was bolt upright and ready to escape. Run home right now! How could my very own father—

“I don’t know, Schloyme, let me think about it.”

He slid in beside me and held in his beautiful right hand the key to my salvation. He turned and said, “Don’t you worry, kiddo. I wouldn’t trade you for all the tea in China.”

I exhaled with relief. He wasn’t going to sell me. This time.