The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick by Elizabeth Hardwick

the public by the Olympia and Russell’s efforts on behalf of his goods were of commensurate casualness. “I think it is quite old,” or “not many of them around anymore,” he would say. He did not know the first thing about “antiques,” but for the sake of appearance he added a listlessness about the matter and a general wariness concerning unworthy exertions.
    Somehow the preoccupied, confused Mr. Soferis kept his shop going. The Charles Street place was one of four shops the man owned and Russell supposed the end of the year magically indicated a businesslike profit for the enterprises. After all, it was amazing what people would pay twenty-five dollars for. The pale, heavy, vague Mr. Soferis was repetitive and theoretical. His thoughts and time were taken up in the mere fact of his four Olympias; he loved the shops individually and as a group, as if they had been his four sons. The shops were his for better or for worse; he had never ceased to marvel that he, a poor Greek boy, had acquired them. Soferis allowed his business the peculiar indulgences due to the miraculous and his soul warmed to the idea of ownership as much as to its benefits, which were at best small.
    For Russell, the “position,” as he called it, had come to him without effort, having been more or less handed down by his uncle, Walt Simmons, who had presided for a time over the Olympia with the same smoky languor his nephew now brought to the post. The place was only one narrow room with a windowless pantry on the right side where there was a worktable for wrapping packages, polishing pewter, rubbing silver, patching wood, and gluing bits of broken china back to cups and saucers. He was no hand at patching and for a long time had been astonished to know how hard it was to clean silver.
    Mr. Soferis, double-parking out in front in his old, cluttered station wagon, came and went, loading and unloading, muttering, counting, musing. “The stuff moves faster when it is all clean and shining,” he frequently advised. Russell puffed away on his cigarette as an answer. Soferis was a natural junk man. He loved things, odds and ends, bits of junk bought by the lot. The care and display and marketing of these innumerable castoffs and leftovers was nearly as confusing to him as to Russell. Russell was honest, just as his uncle, Walt Simmons, had been honest. Mr. Soferis, having been tricked out of a few dollars here and there in his commercial life, valued the absence of theft more than the presence of energy and purpose. There were beautiful shops, inspired shops, and tricky shops along Charles Street and other parts of the Beacon Hill section of Boston, but these vivid establishments did not arouse the envy or the emulation of the owner of the four Oympias. He had his own; he trucked back and forth, breathing hard, adding and subtracting in his junk-muddled mind.
    Russell did not like the work, but he liked being where he was and did not want to make a change. “Not just yet,” he would think to himself, idly. He was penniless and unskilled; he had just finished his military service, put in a year as a filling-station attendant, before this opportunity to be the “manager” of the Olympia came to him from Uncle Walt.
    It was the beginning of winter, in November, when Marianne Gibbs first came into the shop. “I’m just looking around, please,” she said.
    “It’s all yours, honey,” Russell said boldly. He knew which girls to hope for. This was one, he decided.
    Marianne was very short, a dwarf of a girl, with a large, well-shaped head and a vaguely reproving expression. Her chin was pointed, her features were pretty at first glance, but the whole effect of her face was somewhat faded and overcast. She was well-dressed, neat, and even stylish. “She makes a good appearance,” Russell said to himself, in the language of employment applications. Her black pumps were polished, her black cloth coat was brushed, her light-blue scarf as clean as