still in bed, benefitting from an early holiday vacation that the school allowed the lower grades, I sat alone at the breakfast table in the rear of the apartment, eating the fruit and cereal my mother had left for me. Also on the table, packed in a brown paper bag, was my lunch—a soggy ham-and-egg sandwich made with Italian bread that my father had gotten the night before from our waiter at The Venice.
After hastily tossing the sandwich into my schoolbag, and grabbing my hat and coat, I skipped down the side staircase onto the sidewalk and waited at the bus stop almost ten minutes before the arrival of Mr. Fitzgerald. Shivering, I stood against a granite wall of the bank watching the activity along the avenue: shopkeepers unlocking their front doors, truckers unloading merchandise, sanitation men sweeping the streets. On the sidewalk of every block, chained to lampposts, were large wire baskets filled with corded bundles of cardboard and newspapers that people had deposited during the weekend to be collected later in the day by volunteer workers affiliated with a wartime recycling agency; and in the windows of shops were signs reminding citizens to conserve on household fats, to turn in old toothpaste tubes as new ones were purchased, and also to remit all tin cans, flattened, to grocery stores.
Ever since a tanker had been torpedoed a year before by a German submarine ten miles down the coast from Ocean City, the resort had been smitten by patriotic fervor. Middle-aged men and women, like my father, volunteered as air-raid wardens and auxiliary beach patrollers; and most draft-age men who had been found physically unfit for the military took jobs in Philadelphia defense plants, or at the bayside boat factory on the south end of the island, where barges and towboats were being constructed for the War Department.
With so many people in military work or the army, there was an acute shortage of help on the island—which was why I was expected to assist inthe store after school, and why my parents were burdened by inept or unreliable personnel whom in better days they would have replaced. My mother’s salesladies were either garrulous or absentminded older women who preferred exchanging gossip with the customers to ringing up sales, or aggressive younger women who were impatient with the customers and even rude to those who did not buy; and most of the saleswomen also chain-smoked and occasionally burned holes in the merchandise.
My father’s dry-cleaning trucks were driven by high school seniors whose inexperience and recklessness led to frequent accidents and countless traffic violations; my father’s assistant in the cutting room was a seventy-seven-year-old retired tailor from Philadelphia, who, because of failing eyesight and frayed nerves, was not renowned for his flawless measuring and cutting of cloth. But even more of a problem for my father were his pressing machines and the men who operated them.
These machines were jawlike monstrosities with elongated padded white lips that voraciously compressed clothes in boisterous heads of steam—and then, with a sudden malfunctioning of one of their many recondite and irreplaceable parts, they would choke, sizzle, and stall to a halt, breaking down most often on those afternoons when the back-room tables were stacked highest with wrinkled suits and overcoats that had been promised for delivery to customers before nightfall.
These antiquated machines that my father had purchased during the late 1920s were not only confounding to fix but enfeebling to use; the workers were forced to stretch and strain as they pulled down on the levers of the long iron padded flatbeds that pressed the clothes against the lower flatbeds; and since the imperfectly repaired boilers of the machines leaked excessive amounts of steam, the men at work quickly became drowsy and debilitated, like weightlifters in a sauna.
Even on the coldest day of winter, when all the overhead fans were
After hastily tossing the sandwich into my schoolbag, and grabbing my hat and coat, I skipped down the side staircase onto the sidewalk and waited at the bus stop almost ten minutes before the arrival of Mr. Fitzgerald. Shivering, I stood against a granite wall of the bank watching the activity along the avenue: shopkeepers unlocking their front doors, truckers unloading merchandise, sanitation men sweeping the streets. On the sidewalk of every block, chained to lampposts, were large wire baskets filled with corded bundles of cardboard and newspapers that people had deposited during the weekend to be collected later in the day by volunteer workers affiliated with a wartime recycling agency; and in the windows of shops were signs reminding citizens to conserve on household fats, to turn in old toothpaste tubes as new ones were purchased, and also to remit all tin cans, flattened, to grocery stores.
Ever since a tanker had been torpedoed a year before by a German submarine ten miles down the coast from Ocean City, the resort had been smitten by patriotic fervor. Middle-aged men and women, like my father, volunteered as air-raid wardens and auxiliary beach patrollers; and most draft-age men who had been found physically unfit for the military took jobs in Philadelphia defense plants, or at the bayside boat factory on the south end of the island, where barges and towboats were being constructed for the War Department.
With so many people in military work or the army, there was an acute shortage of help on the island—which was why I was expected to assist inthe store after school, and why my parents were burdened by inept or unreliable personnel whom in better days they would have replaced. My mother’s salesladies were either garrulous or absentminded older women who preferred exchanging gossip with the customers to ringing up sales, or aggressive younger women who were impatient with the customers and even rude to those who did not buy; and most of the saleswomen also chain-smoked and occasionally burned holes in the merchandise.
My father’s dry-cleaning trucks were driven by high school seniors whose inexperience and recklessness led to frequent accidents and countless traffic violations; my father’s assistant in the cutting room was a seventy-seven-year-old retired tailor from Philadelphia, who, because of failing eyesight and frayed nerves, was not renowned for his flawless measuring and cutting of cloth. But even more of a problem for my father were his pressing machines and the men who operated them.
These machines were jawlike monstrosities with elongated padded white lips that voraciously compressed clothes in boisterous heads of steam—and then, with a sudden malfunctioning of one of their many recondite and irreplaceable parts, they would choke, sizzle, and stall to a halt, breaking down most often on those afternoons when the back-room tables were stacked highest with wrinkled suits and overcoats that had been promised for delivery to customers before nightfall.
These antiquated machines that my father had purchased during the late 1920s were not only confounding to fix but enfeebling to use; the workers were forced to stretch and strain as they pulled down on the levers of the long iron padded flatbeds that pressed the clothes against the lower flatbeds; and since the imperfectly repaired boilers of the machines leaked excessive amounts of steam, the men at work quickly became drowsy and debilitated, like weightlifters in a sauna.
Even on the coldest day of winter, when all the overhead fans were
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