First and Sierra

Aaron Lichtenstein walked down to the corner of First and Sierra on a hot July morning to look at the building that was going to bury him, and found that he could not hate it, which annoyed him more than if he could have.

Gray Reid’s had opened its new store there that week, two floors and a full basement of it, a clean modern block of a building put up in the worst years anyone could remember, when half the storefronts on Virginia had gone dark and stayed dark. The big store had been thirty-five years on North Virginia in a rented building and its lease had run out and rather than sign another it had built its own, down here by the river, and the whole town had come to walk through it. Aaron went at nine, when it was quiet, and let a girl in a smock show him up to the second floor where the ladies’ ready-to-wear was, racks and racks of it, dresses finished and hung and marked at prices that were fair, and he stood among it with his hat in his hands and understood exactly what he was looking at. He was looking at the end of a way of doing business that his father had brought over from Prussia by way of a wholesale house in San Francisco and set up on Sierra Street in the eighteen nineties, and that Aaron had kept alive through one war and a bank panic and now most of a depression, and that his daughter would not be able to keep alive much past him.

Lichtenstein and Sons stood one block west and it was everything this building was not. It was narrow and deep and dim, with a pressed-tin ceiling gone the color of weak tea, and bolts of cloth stacked to the top of the walls, and a rolling ladder on a rail to reach them, and a wire strung the length of the room with a little brass canister that ran the cash up to a cage in the back and the change back down. His father Jakob had put in the wire when it was the newest thing in the world. It was not the newest thing in the world anymore. Nothing in the store was. Aaron sold cloth by the yard to women who still made their own, and there were fewer of those women every year, because now a woman could walk into a building like this one and buy the dress already made for less than the cloth would cost her, and Aaron did not blame her for it. He would have done the same. That was the part that annoyed him. He kept looking for the villain in it and there was no villain in it, only the century, moving. He had watched it move before. He had watched the automobile put the livery stable out, and the electric light put the lamp man out, and the ready-made collar end a dozen small trades a man used to be able to feed a family on. Cloth by the yard was only the latest of them to be told, politely, by nobody in particular, that its time was finishing.

He came out of the big store into the sun. Across First Street the Elks had their home, connected to the new store by a tunnel underneath the street, they said, so a member could go from the club to the necktie counter without touching the weather, and Aaron thought that this was either the most civilized thing he had ever heard or the most decadent, and that in a town that had legalized both the roulette wheel and the six-week divorce inside the same year, it hardly stood out. The arch was up over Virginia two blocks east with its lights that promised the biggest little city in the world. The Riverside Hotel sat white and tall by the water where the divorce women stayed. It was a good town for a certain kind of speed. Aaron had never been a fast man. His whole trade was slowness, the yard measured twice, the account carried for a family through a bad year and squared in a good one, the knowing of a customer’s mother.

Ruth was at the store when he got back, doing the books at the counter with the light coming in through the plate windows across the oiled floor. She was twenty-eight and sharp in a way he had never been, and she looked up at him and read his face the way she read everything, fast and without comment, and said, “You went to see it.”

“I went to see it.”

“And?”

“And they build a good store,” Aaron said. He hung up his hat. “We are not going to become that. I want you to stop thinking about how we become that. We are never going to be that and we should not try, because a man who tries to be the thing that is beating him only loses faster and with less dignity.” He sat down heavily on the stool behind the counter. “So.”

“So what do we do.”

“We do the thing they cannot do.” He gestured at the dim length of the store, the cloth, the ladder, the wire overhead. “They have four hundred dresses and not one of them was cut for anybody. You come in there, you are a size. Here you are a person. Mrs. Pardini has been buying broadcloth off that counter since before you were born and she will not go there because there is nobody there who knows her. That is what we sell. Not cloth.” He was quiet a moment. “Your grandfather did not open this store to sell cloth either. He opened it so that there would be a Lichtenstein on this street. There has been one for forty years. I would like there to go on being one.”

Ruth did not say anything to that. She was not a sentimental girl and he had not raised her to be one. But she closed the ledger and came around the counter and stood next to her father in the long dim room they had both given their lives to, and after a while she said, “The window is bad. The window has been bad for two years and you will not let me touch it.” She was looking at the plate glass, the tired display, the sun-faded card of buttons that had sat in it since spring. “If we cannot build a building we can at least dress the window. They dress theirs. Let me dress ours.”

Aaron looked at the window his father had been so proud of. Then he looked at his daughter, who was going to be doing this after he was gone, in a town that was going to keep changing whether the Lichtensteins approved or not, and he found he was not too old to be surprised by wanting to say yes.

“Dress it,” he said. “Show me what you would do.”

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