Saul Bennett
The Bitter Riches Of Chocolate
Chocolate bars, you surely will recall, were short for all
save soldiers, sailors, etc., and when they showed up in shops
disappeared quicker than The Shadow dissolved on the radio,
or more often never appeared, owners holding them off shelves,
back-rooming them instead at unpatriotic prices. A nickel Hershey's,
larger than today's 60c size, could command 12 or, even, outrageously,
15 cents, but all those civilians busy black-marketing similar exotica
were untroubled by such prices, as they were gouging back. If you could
turn up nylons, or penny-into-dime Fleer's Double Bubble,
your unborn grandchildren were a lock for college paid in full.
My father was a surgical glass salesman working hospitals and labs
from Manhattan up through Bridgeport and New Haven. Since you
couldn't eat or wear his items, you say, why is my father in this poem?
Because early on the job he was nephewed by a doting older customer
who also imported microscopes, some Swiss line, German-sounding,
and a surprising number of fathers seemed in need then of better
microscopes for sons, nephews, whomever, don't ask me why,
though having something to do with medical school when the War ended.
You expected to pay, even at wholesale, had one been available, a couple
thousand times more for a superb microscope than for a Baby Ruth
or Clark bar, so sniff the delicious possibilities: my father picks one up,
say, for a hundred, and turns it around for a deuce. But when he could
get the things, and talk of his touch went way past Sunnyside,
where we lived, out as far as Rego Park and Forest Hills, he was happy
to oblige at not even a bubble gum hunk more than his cost. I once
overheard a certain Mr. Ed Napp.,the no-chin candy wholesaler father
of my friend Freddy across the block, egging my father he was coconuts
to trade a dollar for only a hundred cents, but all my father could do
was shrug, a little embarrassed, maybe, he lacked sharks" teeth.
About 20 years later, less, maybe, in his young 30s, Freddy picked up
cancer and died. After, observing Mr. Napp, who'd made such a killing
off his bars he never worked again, you observed in all seasons
but winter a pot-belly-in-a-white-T-shirt-Beefeater, short a shave,
planted at a slumped attention in front of his apartment house; who might,
when hailed, nod, but never speak, ever. Superstitious always, I felt
my father had strung out my life by shooting straight in the War,
keeping me alive all these years, so far past the end of my own child, 24.