Potash & Perlmutter: Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures — John Shaqi
Potash & Perlmutter: Their Copartnership Ventures and AdventuresGlass, Montague
General
Potash & Perlmutter: Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures
Glass, Montague
Clothing trade -- New York (State) -- New York -- Fiction; Jewish fiction; Jews -- New York (State) -- New York -- Fiction
Once more Abe proffered his hand to his new model, and a moment later
the door slammed behind them.
"So, that's the party, is it?" said Morris, emerging from his
hiding-place. "What's she looking for a job by us for, Abe? She could
make it twice as much by a circus sideshow or a dime museum."
"Philip Hahn will be here in a couple of hours, Mawruss," Abe replied,
avoiding the thrust. "I guess he's going to buy a big bill of goods,
Mawruss."
"I hope so, Abe, because it needs quite a few big bills to offset the
damage a model like this here Miss Kreitmann can do. In fact, Abe," he
concluded, "I'd be just as well satisfied if Miss Kreitmann could give
us the orders, and we could get Philip Hahn to come to work by us as a
model. I ain't never seen him, Abe, but I think he's got a better shape
for the line."
A singular devotion to duty marked every action of Emanuel Gubin,
shipping clerk in the wholesale cloak and suit establishment of Potash &
Perlmutter. That is to say, it had marked every action until the
commencement of Miss Kreitmann's incumbency. In the very hour that
Emanuel first observed the luster of her fine black eyes his heart gave
one bound and never more regained its normal gait.
As for Miss Kreitmann, she saw only a shipping clerk, collarless,
coatless and with all the grime of his calling upon him. Two weeks
elapsed, however, and one evening, on Lenox Avenue, she encountered
Emanuel, freed from the chrysalis of his employment, a natty,
lavender-trousered butterfly of fashion. Thereafter she called him
Mannie, and during business hours she flashed upon him those same black
eyes with results disastrous to the shipping end of Potash &
Perlmutter's business.
Packages intended for the afternoon delivery of a local express company
arrived in Florida two weeks later, while the irate buyer of a Jersey
City store, who impatiently awaited an emergency shipment of ten heavy
winter garments, received instead half a hundred gossamer wraps designed
for the sub-tropical weather of Palm Beach.
"I don't know what's come over that fellow, Mawruss," Abe said at last.
"Formerly he was a crackerjack--never made no mistakes nor nothing; and
now I dassen't trust him at all, Mawruss. Everything we ship I got to
look after it myself, Mawruss. We might as well have no shipping clerk
at all."
"You're right, Abe," Morris replied. "He gets carelesser every day. And
why, Abe? Because of that Miss Kreitmann. She breaks us all up, Abe. I
bet yer if that feller Gubin has took her to the theayter once, Abe, he
took her fifty times already. He spends every cent he makes on her, and
the first thing you know, Abe, we'll be missing a couple of pieces of
silk from the cutting-room. Ain't it?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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