Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

had in back, behind his garden, by the horseshoes court, or at some other man’s table, for instance the long one in the high-ceilinged room in Duncan Orrick’s house. Dozens of those stories would show up in Martin Orrick’s novels. He had also, in certain moods, darker stories—and a darker streak in his character—stories of atrocities he’d seen at first hand, half-crazy Americans who drove tanks in to finish off wounded boches or took shots at the drivers of the German Red Cross. Though late in life he would come to believe he’d made a sad mistake, he resolved to bring no children into a world so bleak and dangerous, a world in which even the best of men, if the cards were right, could revert in the twinkle of an eye to murderous gorilla.

After the war he’d bumped around for six months, then worked for a while in the family dry-cleaning establishment, the Sunshine Cleaners, a long, airless place sweet-smelling as a bakery, except the smell was of starch and warm cloth and soap and cleaning fluid—a small establishment just off an alley across from the furtive back entrance to a bank and next door to a farm-implement repair shop. The rooms behind the cheerful, plant-filled front lobby were as filled with steamy windows as a winter snowstorm has flakes of snow, the walls between the windows painted dead-man gray, all the rooms crowded with bagged and loose laundry with yellow or blue tickets, and antique machinery, workers without faces, and the noise of the equipment—the woof and hiss of the big steam presser, the clush of washers, the rattle of hangers as they slid along their long wooden bars.

Later, though he still kept an interest in the place, he took on various selling jobs—as a Watkins man serving the local farmers, small-townsmen, and villagers from Rochester to Buffalo and from the shore of Lake Ontario to the hill towns of Warsaw and Perry, then as an independent “grocer on wheels” serving, among others, the people of the Tonawanda Indian Reservation, with whom he learned to speak a little Seneca and whose virtues he would admire, and whose stories he would quote, in sombre imitation of the Seneca manner, for the rest of his life; still later as a furniture salesman in one small-town furniture store after another.

Everyone liked him and he was famous for his honesty, though that was not true of the people for whom he worked. He read books about salesmanship and personal magnetism, whatever came to hand, also books that might help him judge the character of his customers—books on phrenology, palmistry, and astrology—and if he made a mistake in attempting a sale he made a careful note of it in a ledger he had, and made an effort never to repeat it. (He had once chanced upon a book about calligraphy and wrote, even when he was seventy-two and could barely hold a pen, in an elegant, tasteful hand. He used the slanted, hyperlinear hand of a nineteenth-century professional scrivener.) He was not, for all that, a hard-sell salesman but a man who believed that business was an honorable and responsible profession and, indeed, in a democracy of ordinary men, as noble a profession as a man could turn his hand to. He wouldn’t sell shoddy goods to any man if he could find him something decent for a price he could afford, nor would he lie about the value of the goods he sold—wouldn’t even lie by keeping silent. To his bosses’ displeasure, he resisted selling what he knew in advance the customer would have trouble making payments on: he would talk with the man in his merry, joking way, trying to make the man see sense and perhaps, incidentally, selling him something else he had equal use for and could more easily afford and might someday be glad he’d gotten hold of. Not at all that he was a pious moralist who delighted in butting in on other people’s business. His judgments of the customer—however merrily he talked, ducking and weaving and feinting like a boxer, rubbing his hands like a man undecided about what to eat first at some splendid potluck—were complex and serious-minded, and he understood that, when a family buys furniture, practical considerations are not always of the first importance. Occasionally people have urgent need of what they cannot afford, and the salesman’s just business is to get the sale made in the way least likely to do damage. It was not from arrogance or the wish to play God that he drew that opinion. He saw business as a service, and even used the word. Though he did not believe and would not say—except jokingly, after he’d lost a sale—that “the customer is always right,” he saw the customer as his only true employer, himself as the customer’s agent and faithful servant. He believed that if he proved himself a trustworthy servant, the customer would return when he needed George Preston’s services again, and would mention the name, or pass on the card, to people they knew who had need of him.

As a general rule, the stores for which he worked didn’t share his philosophy—not surprisingly, of course: it was late in the day for an old-time Yankee peddler. The stores for which he worked were owned by people interested in making money quickly, people who knew about interest rates and inventory shift, but nothing about gluing or angled joints or fabrics. They were in “business,” not “furniture.” They were strangers who came to the hardware-store and tourist-court villages of western New York from the high-pressure clip joints of Syracuse, Rochester, or Buffalo, where volume was the not very carefully guarded secret and where the customer expected to be cheated and was. Personal relationships between salesman and customer were unheard of in such places, if only because the customer was forever on the move, chasing down leads on the American Dream in Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, leaving