Nagel's Bagels by Barry Rachin (books on motivation txt) 📕

Fifteen year-old Curtis Stedman slouched over a table in the far corner of Nagel's Bakery sobbing mawkishly. His slender body flopped about like a marionette where some practical jokester was jerking the strings causing the limbs to lurch about spastically in an utterly grotesque parody of genuine despair. Just two weeks earlier, the blond haired boy had been hired to work Saturdays plus two afternoons a week.

Lugging a tray of gourmet cream cheeses from the bakery proper out to the selling floor, Becky Borelli eased back through the swinging door, gestured to her mother and muttered, “New kid’s gone totally mental.”

Mrs. Borelli approached Curtis and asked what was wrong, but the lanky, fair-skinned boy only wailed all the louder, his bony elbows flailing about aimlessly. A metallic blue Camaro eased into a parking space in front of the store, and a platinum blonde, her hair done up in a tight bun with an ebony comb, eased out of the driver’s seat. “Marone!” Mrs. Borelli grabbed Curtis under the armpit, wrestling him to his feet, and navigated the distraught youth into rear of the bakery.

“Can I help you?” Becky smiled stiffly.

“A dozen hermit cookies.”

“Sold out an hour ago. Sorry.” A mournful howl erupted from behind the swinging doors followed by a series of muffled sobs. Becky could hear her mother whispering furtively to Curtis Stedman.

The blonde scrunched up her face, shifting a Vera Bradley handbag to the opposite shoulder. “Forget it.” She hurried out the door.

Becky waited on a steady flow of customers. One elderly Italian lady, whose breath reeked of garlic, placed an order for a birthday cake. Her mother usually handled special orders, but it was nothing fancy, just a flat cake with white frosting and “Happy Birthday, Angelique!’

A half hour later, Becky’s mother drifted back to the counter. “The Stedman boy… he’s gone, thank God!”

“Gone?”

Mrs. Borelli waved her hand, a peremptory gesture barring any further discussion of Curtis Stedman’s employment status. “Your father is whipping up a tray of cannolis and apricot squares. What else we need?”

“The hermit cookies are gone. So are the Asiago and cinnamon raisin bagels.”

*****

The new dishwasher at Nagel’s Bagels lasted not even two week. By Becky’s reckoning, Curtis Stedman flung the crumpled apron on the counter next to the pepperoni spinach pies and was out the door—adios, sayonara, bye-bye, aufwiedersehen, shalom—by one-thirty Saturday afternoon. Stranger still, there had been no indication that anything was wrong. Curtis arrived promptly at the designated time. He washed out the doughy mixing bowls and muffin pans that Becky’s father stacked in a precarious heap on the stainless steel sink. Then he swept the tiled floor, bussed tables and polished all five glass display cases with a bottle of Windex.

“I need a new clarinet reed,” Curtis said. He had just finished cleaning a refrigerated display full of cheese Danish and apple squares.

“You play clarinet?”

“Marching band and high school wind ensemble.” Curtis pushed his gold, wire-framed glasses up on the bridge of his nose.

“There’s the music store across the street,” Becky offered.

Curtis peered nearsightedly out the window. Diagonally across Turner Boulevard was a shabby building with a hand-carved sign over the doorway. Music Depot - most of the maroon paint had peeled away and the final letter ’T’ was missing. A young girl carrying a guitar case that was almost as long as she was tall exited the music store into the bright sunlight. “Rico number two.”

“What's that?”

“Rico number two. That’s the reed I play.” He picked up the Windex, ran an arc of spray across the glass and began polishing the display. “Maybe I’ll run over on my lunch break.”

*****

Becky slipped out the front door and crossed Turner Boulevard. All lights were off in the music store, the front door bolted tight. “Aw, crap!” She hurried back across the street.

“So why’d he quit?”

Mrs. Borelli slid a tray of hermit cookies into the oven and closed the lid. “None of your business.” Stocky with a swarthy complexion and auburn hair, Becky’s mother was attractive in a matronly sort of way.

“I got an idea what happened.”

“Good!” The woman flung the word in her face like a wet dishrag. “So there’s nothing more to discuss.”

Becky locked eyes with her mother. A high-pitched tinkling announced someone entering the store. “Go wait on the customer and, while you’re at it, put the ’Help Wanted’ sign back in the window.


Later that afternoon while she was cleaning up, Becky noticed a well-thumbed paperback on the floor near the rest room. Candide by Voltaire - the pages on the left were printed in French, mirroring the English translation on the facing page.

In a peculiar sort of way, the debacle was Becky's fault. Not that she meant to intentionally hurt Curtis Stedman – a part-time dishwasher prone to emotional excesses, who read French literature, played clarinet in both the marching band and wind ensemble. Becky was born and grew up on Federal Hill. The place resembled a parallel universe where conventional rules of social etiquette didn’t necessarily apply. One wrong turn could lead you down a loathsome cul-de-sac into a nether world of sordid vice. She knew her way around – not just the physical streets but the gritty, dysfunctional mindset. There were unsavory things you took for granted, shrugged off. That’s just the way it was.

*****


“He’s intellectually gifted.” Later that night, Mrs. Borelli tossed the words out in an offhand manner not bothering to raise her head from her sewing.

“What’s that?”

“I know Curtis’ mother from Saint Gregory’s. The family doesn’t like to make a big deal about his uniqueness, but it just slipped out when we were commiserating one day after Mass.” Mrs. Borelli, who was letting her husband's pants out, held the waistband at arm's length before resuming her stitching. “According to Mrs. Stedman, there are five levels of gifted intelligence ranging from bright to profoundly gifted. Her son falls in the ‘exceptional’ category.”

“Exactly how exceptional?”

“One in every thirty thousand people is exceptional, which places him in the ninety-nine-point-ninth percentile.”

"What's his specialty?"
Mrs. Borelli removed her thimble momentarily so she could snip the thread. "History… ancient history predating the Christian era."

"Okay." Becky felt a slight giddiness welling up in her brain and went upstairs to lie down.

So the boy sweeping confectioner’s sugar and King Arthur flour from the bakery floor was an underage Einstein! But how could she have thought any different? From the first day he arrived at the bakery, Curtis seemed fogbound, loopy, eccentric, spaced-out - just a tad out to lunch. It took the ‘gifted child’ half an hour to figure out how to manage a mop and pail where he wasn’t sloshing sudsy water haphazardly the length the display room floor. Asynchronicity. That was the loopy, twenty-five cent word Mrs. Stedman used when explaining to Becky’s mother why her teenage son sometimes seemed ham-fisted or dull-witted, undertaking simple chores. Gifted children developed unevenly, their hypersensitive craniums far outstripping everything else in their genetic makeup. But then, it went with the territory—supposedly all these ‘gifted’ types were like that. Becky remembered her physics teacher commenting that Einstein didn’t speak until he was two.

*****

Earlier in the week on Tuesday, Becky found Curtis sprawled on the bakery floor. “There’s a wrinkle in my sock,” he groused, waving a sneaker fitfully in the air. The boy ran a probing finger over his instep then slipped the sneaker back on but immediately removed it a second time.

Becky glanced at his foot. “I don’t see a wrinkle.”

“Well, I can feel it and the damn thing’s driving me nuts.”

Becky shrugged and went off to wait on a customer. A half hour later, she spied Curtis near the industrial mixer with the same shoe off and turning the offending sock inside out.

On another occasion, she found Curtis at the front of the store fidgeting and glancing over his shoulder at the far wall.

“What’s wrong?”

“That moronic clock’s ridiculously loud.”

Becky gawked at the clock, the same one that had hung over the frosted tarallo and coconut macaroons for the past ten years back to when the orthodox Jew, Morris Nagel, still owned the bakery and her father was head baker. In all that time she never found the clock a distraction. Even now, the second hand bumped along inconspicuously accompanied by a whisper-soft ticking. Being in the ninety-nine-point ninth percentile definitely had its drawbacks.

*******

“Is Curtis home?” It took Becky twenty minutes to ride her five-speed bike cross town to Providence's, East Side.

“And you are?” The woman’s voice betrayed a lilting, earthy resonance.”

“I got a book that belongs to him,” Becky side stepped the question.

When Curtis appeared in the doorway, she said, “Candide… you forgot your book.” He led the way into a claustrophobically tiny back yard with a scraggily peach tree and rock garden. “I know what happened.”

“Your mother promised not to tell anyone.”

“Didn’t have to. I went across the street. The Music Depot was closed. They’re normally open until five on a Saturday. I put one and one together and came up with two and a half.”

Curtis stared Becky full in the face. “You knew what they did over there?” His tone was mildly accusatory.

“Everybody on Federal Hill knows what they do over at the Music Depot,” Becky replied soberly. “It’s Federal Hill, for Christ sakes!”

On any given day of the week, a steady stream of youngsters and an occasional diehard grown up could be seen lugging their instruments to lessons. The Music Depot provided rentals – trumpets, saxophones, flutes and even an occasional student model oboe or French horn - sold sheet music and instructional manuals. They carried a decent selection of trumpet mouthpieces from the standard Bach 7C to the extra-wide symphonic models. But the owner didn’t make his living off instrument rentals and half-hour lessons. The store was a front, a betting parlor that catered to a motley crowd of compulsive gamblers—horses, dogs, college and professional football, whatever.

A loan shark who weighed three hundred pounds, Bernie Antonelli, advanced patrons short-term loans at the perfectly reasonable rate of thirty percent interest. If you missed a payment, interest was compounded along with a late-fee penalty using an accounting method that only Bernie properly understood. It wasn’t usury, per se. Unfortunately, if you missed more than one payment, Bernie would call you up and politely request a meeting at the store so that a arrangement benefiting both parties could be consummated.

“I was outside admiring this Selmer clarinet in the storefront window.” Curtis fussed with his slender hands as he spoke. “Not some cheap student model but a rosewood beauty with gold-plated keys and custom engraving on the lacquered bell. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I see this muscle-bound goon with biceps out to here, smack some old geezer in the side of the head.” Curtis spoke slowly, measuring each word. "The goon slugged him here,” he pointed to the soft spot just above his right ear, “with a set of brass knuckles. Then,