The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine
|
|
John Angel
Robert Rodman
frrodman@aol.com
1942. The three-year old market is shaped to fit into the lot created by the convergence of Harvard and Washington at an acute angle, transected by a short street that leaves an empty space in front of the store. This little triangular area is grandly called Harvard Square, and the address of the market is 10 Harvard Square. Large windows from 10 Harvard Square face down a broad street lined with shops, called Brookline Village. The store is like a manor house, the most powerful commercial presence among a host of small businesses, many thriving. Looking up toward the market from The Village, the main entrance to 10 Harvard Square appears to the right, at the corner. Above the entrance is a large shield-shaped sign, neon-lit at night, in red, white, and blue. On it are emblazoned the words "The Food Center."
It is nearly a supermarket in the days before the term has been coined. The meat is still sold by men who stand behind cool white showcases from which customers make their choices. Eddie Hill, for one, reaches into the case, weighs the selection, wraps it up so that it does not leak through the white slick paper, closes it with paper tape and writes the price on the package with a red wax crayon. He lays the package on the counter. "Anything else today, Mrs. McGillicuddy?" He is a tall, barrel-shaped man with a bright red shining face. His wife's name is Belle.
"Not today, Eddie."
The customer moves to the produce section, picks what he or she wants, and it too is packaged, put in a brown bag by someone like bushy-haired Harold Gussman, gruffer and rougher than the meat salesman. The produce men, moving around sacks of onions and potatoes, arranging displays of carrots and beets, celery, and tomatoes, could be working in the fields at that very moment, whereas the meat salesmen are insulated by white coats and orderly demeanor from the slaughter that yields their goods.
Only in the grocery section, where the cans are displayed on shelves to be removed by customers who place them in a shopping cart, is there no need for a salesman. A young blonde man with a club foot wheels boxes of items out from the warehouse, removes the lids with a razor blade, stamps a price on one end of each can or package, and makes sure the displays are neat. The refrigerated cases that houses eggs and dairy products may also allow for direct removal by customers, and these are a portent of the future of the meat department. One day it too will consist of such open cases full of pre-packaged meats, and when that day comes the salesmen will appear awkward and exposed in front of the cases, and in a sense suddenly jobless, naked of purpose, for all they will have to do is arrange and rearrange, no longer choosing, trimming, weighing, packaging.
Customers pay at one of three check-out booths, still without conveyor belts. The big cast-iron pre-electronic cash registers jink and rumble as each item is punched in. And when everything has been bagged, a customer may notice the bakery cases just beyond, and be attended to by attractive young women who tie cake boxes with string, or purchase liquor from salesmen at another counter, in what would be known as a package store if it existed apart from a market, on its own. A package store, New England euphemism, the shame of liquor, of alcohol, in Boston, where a good percentage of the population are drunks. Right across the street there are two taverns. You can smell the heavy humid odor of beer as you pass them by.
The Food Center is a profitable store. The owner has found a way to get hold of large supplies of meat. It is rationed of course, just as butter is, and tires and gasoline. People bring in their coupon books, and they also bring in coffee tins full of solidified fat drippings, bacon grease, lard, the leftovers, for which they receive 3 cents a pound at the meat counter. The customers are older men and women, particularly women, with their children, and the occasional 4-F who isn't in uniform. It is a colorful store, well-maintained, efficient, and the large windows are covered with hand-painted signs announcing the weekend's buys. "Ten lbs. potatoes, 89 cents." "Top round steak, 59 cents/ lb." The full-time sign painter, Karl, has a little studio up an iron spiral staircase behind the meat department. Inside there are heavy rolls of paper, jarsful of brushes, cans of paint, a spray gun from which little clouds of aromatic-smelling pink and blue and yellow emanate when he is at work. He leans over his large plywood table with his brush poised, carefully producing the lettering. He smokes incessantly and is an alcoholic, good-natured, face scarred by acne. His work increases as the week heads toward Thursday, when the ad in the local newspaper, the Citizen, is placed, full back-page with all the items on sale. The paper comes out on Friday and on Thursday night his signs are pasted high up on the windows that face Harvard Square. The weekend business will be big, as usual. This is a good store to get whatever you need. It is a thriving store. The owner is getting rich. On a Saturday, or a Friday night, it is full of customers.
On Friday, business in the fish department is good. Friday is still fish day. The small ice-filled case is packed with defrosting fillet (the "t" is pronounced) of sole and cod, pieces of halibut, swordfish, and ranks of fresh haddock, with their dilated target eyes, rainbow-colored mackerel, tubs of scallops, and lobsters twisting and turning on their icy beds, from Maine, at 49 cents a pound. If a customer wants one halved, the fish man, Harry Chimitz, will take his cleaver and split him alive. He is a humorous man, short, with a graying mustache, smart, a man who never lived up to his intelligence. The fish smells are rich and good if you can stand them and even the guts he removes with crafted blade movements, are clean, cold, organic, into the bucket with the rest. He keeps things clean. Codfish cakes are another item on a Friday. Brown, breaded, cold, ready for the oven. And shiny smelts by the hundreds, fresh from the sea; yellow slabs of smoked finnan haddie, a strange name which could be Gaelic; stainless steel containers of pink curled shrimp. The Irish crowd Harry's counter to obey the Friday rule. The boss is getting rich. Ten or fifteen other people are waiting in front of the meat cases, five salesmen waiting on them, the swinging doors which lead into the meat-cutting area behind the wall in constant motion.
Back there, a man at a block, short, Sicilian Dominic Maiocca is preparing chickens. With swift movements of the cleaver, he cuts off the head and feet, pulls out the guts, deftly cuts the green gall bladder off the liver, removes the gizzard, slits it open to wash away the sandy particles, wraps it up with the liver and the heart in a piece of tissue paper and places it in the hole left by the removed guts. The chicken is cold, the work done quickly. They accumulate on the wooden table in front of his block.
Nearby is the old, smallish refrigerator, with rusting metal shelves, home to poultry, fish, and barrels of corned beef and pickles slowly aging in the ice-cold brine, hoisted out with a hook as needed.
Beyond Dominic and up a short ramp is the recently added-on large cutting room and refrigerator, where Pete DiGiorgio and his assistants break down sides of beef, cuts up whole lambs and pork loins, to produce excellent cuts for roasting, broiling, boiling, all sorts of chops and steaks and roasts for placement in the cold trays to go into the meat case. The refrigerator in the back is quite large and inside it is refreshingly cold, especially in those pre-air conditioning days, especially when, in the summer, a Biblically humid heat wave descends on Boston and vicinity. Everything is in order on the shelves and the unbutchered meat hangs on hooks in the right places. The surface of sides of beef is fat and dry with blue stencils which display its quality: prime, choice, good, utility, commercial. Whole lambs, headless, gutless, footless, left with a pair of kidneys still attached, are also dry. Even though the living animal can easily be imagined, they too are already meat, and still called what they have been, unlike beef and pork and veal. There is always a tray of ground beef, the highest quality, and once in a while someone reaches in and eats a raw clod of it. In the little office near the door through which new shipments of meat are unloaded there are first-aid materials for those cuts that are an inevitable part of wielding such sharp instruments. The blood runs, the white gauze and tape are applied, the wound heals, though it is also true that on a rare occasion someone cuts off a finger joint and this is not yet the age when they can be sewn back on. The floors are covered with sawdust.