Ultimate Terror

The shelf on which cookies were displayed was too high for a five-year-old to reach. Marvin had to use the shelves below it as a ladder. His small hands gripped the edge of the shelf two levels below the cookies, and he raised one foot to the shelf just above the floor. Drawing himself upward, he placed his other foot alongside the first.

Scaling a vertical ladder is precarious business. The slightest lean backward, and gravity will undo you. Marvin pressed his thin chest tightly against the grocery rack as he cautiously raised one hand to the next higher shelf. When he had it firmly gripped, he raised his other hand, then groped upward for the next foothold.

The second shelf from the floor contained quart bottles of vinegar. Marvin’s toe touched a bottle. Unable to look down, he moved his foot sidewise until he found a small gap between bottles. It wasn’t quite large enough for his foot, but tentative pressure widened it a little. Encouraged, he forced his toe into the space.

The pressure was transferred from bottle to bottle along the shelf. Three feet away, at the end of the row, a vinegar bottle was squeezed outward until it toppled to the floor and shattered with a crash that resounded through the empty grocery store.

Marvin was still clinging to the display rack in panic when his father rushed from the meat cooler to investigate the crash.

Jonas Swartz jerked the boy from his improvised ladder by the scruff of the neck. Swinging him around, he shook him by the shoulders until Marvin’s teeth rattled. Then he pointed a forefinger the size of a hotdog at Marvin’s nose.

“Cookies you want to steal, eh? We are raising our son to be a thief? You can’t ask your father, ‘Please, may I have a cookie?’ You don’t get enough to eat at the table, eh? We starve you.”

Marvin stared at his father wordlessly.

Basically Jonas Swartz was a kindly man. He had the same sort of rough love for his son as he had for his fat wife Martha. Though a stern disciplinarian, he was just, and seldom moved by anger. The only corporal punishment he ever administered, aside from frequent shakings, was a rare and not very hard slap across the buttocks with a razor strop.

He would have been amazed and hurt to know the only emotion his son felt for him was fear.

From Marvin’s diminutive viewpoint his father was a huge, blustering, red-faced ogre who ruled his restricted world. At moments such as the present he was stricken dumb with terror.

“Can’t you speak?” the grocer inquired, giving Marvin another shake. “Answer, you hear!”

A doorway at the rear of the shop gave onto the stairway to the second-floor living quarters. From this doorway a woman’s sharp voice said, “Marvin, what you do to make your father angry?”

Though her words were addressed to the boy, Martha Swartz’s gaze was fixed accusingly on her husband. She made a point of never interfering with her husband’s discipline, but she also made a point of automatically and silently disapproving of it.

Releasing his grip on the boy’s shoulder, the grocer frowned at his fat wife. Marvin instantly scooted to the protection of his mother’s arms and began to howl loudly.

Jonas yelled above the din, “He was stealing cookies again. And a bottle of vinegar he broke. Shut up, boy!”

Marvin’s howls immediately subsided to a frightened whimper.

“See?” Martha said with grim satisfaction. “You got him scared of you. A fine thing, a son should be scared of his own father.”

Jonas’ face reddened. “He’s so scared, why don’t he mind? A dozen times I say, ‘Don’t steal the cookies. You want a cookie, ask your father.’ So he pays attention? He’s so scared he shakes in his boots and never steals again?” He snorted, then added sarcastically, “Or maybe he’s too scared to ask even.”

Jonas’ face reddened. He’s he’d put his finger on the exact reason Marvin didn’t ask. The urge to avoid his father was so great, he preferred to risk being caught stealing rather than ask Jonas for anything.

Giving her son’s shoulder a comforting pat, Martha said, “Next time you ask, Marvin. You hear? Run play now.”

Marvin moved toward the rear stairs, anxious to get out of his father’s sight.

Jonas called, “Marvin!”

The boy stopped in the doorway and looked back fearfully.

“This time I’m through talking,” Jonas said. “This time you’re gonna learn once and for all to mind. Tonight we’ll have a little lesson.”

Marvin paled to the roots of his hair. “A little lesson” meant the razor strop. Even Marvin’s mother would have been astonished to know the depths of fear Jonas’ words caused in the boy. Though she automatically disapproved of the strop, she was never very concerned when Jonas used it. When Jonas punished the boy, he required Marvin to grasp his ankles, then methodically laid two light but stinging slaps across the buttocks with the strop, neither hard enough to leave more than momentary redness. The punishment was more psychological than corporal.

Unfortunately Marvin had imagination. Probably if his father had administered his infrequent strappings on the spot when he misbehaved, they wouldn’t have upset him any more than they upset his mother. But his father’s habit of pronouncing sentence, then making the boy wait until bedtime, gave him hours of miserable anticipation. Waiting was such pure torture, the actual strapping was almost anticlimactical. Marvin fled up the stairs.

Martha frowned at her husband, but she didn’t object. Instead she showed her displeasure by standing by and watching Jonas sweep up the glass and mop up the spilled vinegar from Marvin’s misadventure. Ordinarily she not only would have performed this chore herself, she wouldn’t even have let her husband help.

Upstairs Marvin flung himself on his bed and cried. He was still lying there, but no longer crying, when his mother came up to fix lunch a half hour later. At her urging he sullenly got up and pecked at a sandwich. But he had no appetite to eat more than a quarter of it. His mind was too full of the terrible thing that was going to happen to him at bedtime.

Luncheon procedure in the Swartz home was for Mrs. Swartz and Marvin to eat together, then Martha fixed her husband’s lunch and left it on the table for him while she went downstairs to tend the store. They couldn’t eat as a family without leaving the store unattended.

Marvin followed his mother downstairs and sidled to the front of the store to avoid his father. Jonas clumped upstairs to lunch.

A smattering of customers came and went during the half hour Jonas was upstairs, keeping Martha too busy to pay much attention to Marvin. He stood in the front window, broodingly looking at the street outside, his mind blank of everything but one thought: the bedtime strapping.

He paid no attention to what either his mother or the customers were saying until Mrs. Murtog, who lived around the corner, stopped in the doorway on the way out and called back, “Give your mama my best, Mrs. Swartz. And watch that New York traffic. You don’t want to end up in the hospital with her.”

When Mrs. Murtog went out, Marvin ran back to the meat counter and asked, “What’d she mean, mama, about the hospital?”

“Your grandma is in a hospital in New York City, dear. She had another asthma attack.”

Marvin’s eyes grew enormous. “She going to die?”

“Of course not,” Martha said, smiling at him. “She’ll be laid up a couple of days is all. I just got to go up to mind your grandpa until she’s better. He’s got too feeble to mind himself.”

“You mean you’re going away?” Marvin asked incredulously.

“On the five-thirty train. Just over the weekend, dear. I’ll be back Monday.”

Marvin looked forward in horror to bedtime that night. He couldn’t face the thought of taking his strapping without his mother there to lend moral support, and afterward to comfort him.

“Don’t go, mama,” he said in a low voice.

She frowned at him. “I got to take care of your grandpa, Marvin. He’s got so old, he forgets to eat unless you tell him. You want I should let him starve?”

“Don’t go,” he said more loudly. “Don’t leave me alone with him!”

Martha looked shocked. “You’re scared to stay with your own father? Shame on you.”

“Please, mama,” he begged tearfully.

“Stop such nonsense!” she ordered in a crisp tone. “You’re too big to be a mama’s boy. Your father will feed you and put you to bed just like when I’m here. You mind him nice. You hear?”

The clatter of Jonas’ feet on the stairs cut short any further pleading. As his father appeared, Marvin faded to the front of the store again. The moment Jonas became busy with a customer, Marvin circled around to the rear of the stairs and scooted up to his room.

The rest of the afternoon Marvin stayed upstairs suffering from an acute case of misery. About three thirty he heard his mother come up, and from the sounds she made in the other room he knew she was packing a suitcase. Flopping on his bed, he turned his face to the wall.

A long time later his mother came into the room and said softly, “Marvin, you sleeping?”

He kept his face to the wall and made no answer.

Gently she shook his shoulder. “Marvin, I want you should go tell your father to phone the taxi. It’s almost five.”

He pretended to be asleep.

“Marvin!” she said more sharply, shaking harder.

It was no use to pretend further. Rolling over he said sullenly. “What?”

“Go tell your father to phone the taxi. I don’t want to miss my train.”

Silently he rolled off the bed and shuffled out of the room. He was going down the stairs one lagging step at a time when his mother called shrilly, “Hurry, slowpoke! You want I should miss the train?”

That was exactly what Marvin wanted. He had decided on a last desperate effort to keep his mother home by simply not relaying her message. But her shout undid him. His father heard it.

When Marvin appeared in the lower doorway, Jonas said, “What’s your mother yelling? She wants me to call the taxi already?”

Reluctantly Marvin nodded his head.

“At a quarter to five, and only fifteen minutes to the station? Yah, women!”

He went to the phone and called for a taxi.

As the boy turned to go upstairs again, his father called, “Marvin!”

Marvin looked over his shoulder.

“Stay here,” Jonas ordered. “Watch by the window for the taxi, so you can tell your mama.”

Slowly Marvin shuffled over to the front window and took up his vigil. Time dragged by minute by minute. Martha appeared from upstairs, a flowered hat perched on her round head and a medium-sized suitcase in her hand. Jonas took the suitcase from her, carried it front and set it down by the door just as the taxi pulled up outside.

“Here it is,” Jonas announced.

Martha hurriedly grabbed up the suitcase, as though she feared the taxi wouldn’t wait unless she ran out immediately, gave her husband a peck of a kiss and stooped to kiss Marvin lightly on the cheek.

“Be a good boy,” she said breathlessly. “Mind your father nice. You hear?”

“Don’t worry about us,” Jonas said, giving his son an affable pat on the shoulder. “We’ll make out fine.”

The cheerfulness of his father’s tone flooded Marvin with hope. Perhaps he had forgotten the promised “little lesson.”

His mother dashed the hope. In stunned outrage he listened to her say, “Mind you don’t use the strop too hard, Jonas. He’s only a child.”

“Did I ever?” Jonas protested. “Do I make him bleed?”

Then Jonas was holding open the door and Martha was bustling through it to the cab. The grocer stood in the doorway waving after it, and Martha returned his waves through the rear window until it was out of sight. Marvin didn’t wave. He stood stone-still, staring after the cab through tear-dimmed eyes until he couldn’t see it anymore.

Jonas closed the door, glanced at the wall clock and said, “Ach, closing time.”

He threw the inner bolt and Marvin was all alone with him.

The boy stood in miserable silence as his father covered the vegetable rack, straightened shelves and replaced stock which had moved with items from the storeroom. He still had not moved when Jonas began transferring meat from the meat-display counter to the meat cooler.

“Marvin!” Jonas called.

Moving woodenly, Marvin went toward his father and behind the meat counter. Jonas was dropping four thick pork chops into a paper bag.

“Our dinner,” the grocer said, handing the bag to Marvin. “You want to carry up?”

Silently Marvin accepted the bag.

Jonas made two more trips to the cooler. Each time when he emerged, he moved his heavy shoulders in a peculiar gesture, as though shrugging off the coldness of the cooler’s interior. As he started to make a third trip, carrying a tray of hamburger, a sudden breathtaking thought hit Marvin.

Before he could stop to analyze the thought, and perhaps lose the courage to carry through, the boy set the bag of pork chops on the cutting block and ran to the cooler. His father was just setting the hamburger tray on a shelf at the rear when Marvin slammed the heavy door.

With both small hands he grasped the thick bolt and shot it home.

Then he stood still with his heart pounding and terror gripping his stomach at the enormity of what he had done. The “little lesson” would be mild compared to what his father would do to him for this.

From the other side of the door there came a faint pounding, barely audible because of the heavy insulation. When it went on and on with monotonous rhythm, Marvin moved back until he could no longer hear it.

He considered what to do. The choice wasn’t too complicated even for a five-year-old mind. He could open the door again, or leave it shut.

The former action would bring drastic, and probably immediate punishment, he knew. He decided the matter required more thought.

He went up the stairs, forgetting the pork chops, and wandered around the house aimlessly for some time. Eventually, when he grew hungry, he made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and ate it. There was milk in the refrigerator, but he decided on the luxury of a glass of water instead.

As he ate, his thoughts about his father downstairs grew more and more desultory. The longer he left him there, he knew, the greater would be the eventual punishment. But also the longer he left him there, the farther off was the punishment.

He didn’t have the stomach to face his father without his mother there to lend moral support. He decided to wait for her. It was Friday now, and she’d be home by Monday.

He stayed up until midnight, and went to bed without taking a bath.