The Button by Scott Nadelson

If my grandfather hadn’t died of heart failure—heartbreak, my grandmother insists—a year before the towers fell, he would have been buried under a hundred floors of steel and concrete and shattered glass. His last shop was in the lobby of 10 World Trade Center, and even if people told him to evacuate because the buildings above him were on fire and about to collapse, he would have kept cutting or stitching. Work was the only thing he lived for after the last of his brothers died and he had no one to go bowling with on weekends. He couldn’t have bowled by then anyway, because his fingers were too arthritic to hold a twelve-pound ball, much less stuff them into narrow holes. But that didn’t keep him from threading needles and sliding shears through linen and tweed.

He’d never been a gifted tailor, or even a particularly skilled one, but he was sought after because he was fast and because he always second-guessed himself after setting prices, inevitably knocking a few dollars off the bill when a client came to pick up an order. He was especially generous to those he thought were coming to interview for a job in one of the towers, the young men whose sleeves or trouser cuffs needed letting out, whose hair looked too long to get them hired in high finance. People who worked in the neighborhood learned to come to him before getting a haircut if they wanted a deal. 

Once, on a visit to my family’s house in the suburbs when I was a teenager, he spotted a Led Zeppelin poster on my wall, pointed to Jimmy Page sweating over his Les Paul, and swore he’d once mended a blazer for that boy. “Nice English kid,” he said. “Down on his luck. He tried to pay me with a handful of ones, but I told him to keep it. Gave him the address of my barber.” That was in the mid-seventies, his shop around the corner from Madison Square Garden, where Zep was scheduled to play the next night.

He was already past retirement age when he moved downtown, but he was determined to leave my grandmother enough to live on after he was gone. She was a decade younger, and it was the least he could do after she’d made his meals for forty years. My grandmother spent her days playing canasta with neighbors in her Forest Hills apartment building and didn’t really want him hanging around the place anyway. Neither had much to say to each other by then, and even if they’d never spoken of it out loud, they both knew he would work his way to the grave. Still, the way it played out came as a surprise, at least to my grandmother. I can only speculate about my grandfather’s perspective, if he was even aware enough to process what was happening.

This was the late summer of 2000. The new millennium didn’t mean much to my grandfather, who was still plying the trade as he’d learned it from his own grandfather, born in a Polish village long erased from any map. He didn’t have a credit card reader, only accepted cash or checks, which he deposited before heading to the subway each evening. He’d been robbed a number of times over the years, so he usually kept a small roll of bills in his front pocket to hand over rather than risk being shot or stabbed; the rest he stuffed into a pouch sewn in the back of his trousers and hidden beneath his jacket. For the kids who ripped him off, he also felt sorry—their clothes and hair were ragged, so what chance did they have to get a decent job? Despite the hold-ups, he’d managed to squirrel away a good chunk of what he earned, spread across three savings accounts and a number of bonds. But despite making suits for brokers and analysts, he refused to put a dime into the stock market, which he expected to crash at any moment. My grandmother only shrugged when he told her he’d work a few more years and then she’d be set with whatever she needed when he was in the ground.

On this particular summer morning, business was slow when a young man entered, asking if my grandfather could sew a button back onto his shirt. He had an interview in the South Tower, he said, up on the eighty-eighth floor, and he couldn’t go in there with a bit of his chest showing. Of course, he’d be happy to help, my grandfather replied. He always wanted people to look their best. The young man—who was already employed in the South Tower and had taken the advice of an office mate not to shave before visiting the old tailor—began to unbutton his shirt, but my grandfather said, “No, no, keep it on. I’ve been doing this for fifty-five years. I can sew a button blind.”

According to the young man—who later called the ambulance when my grandfather collapsed—before the old guy even threaded his needle, he said there’d be no charge. It was just a button, after all, and he wanted the young man to succeed in his interview. His greatest joy in life was to use his meager talents to help those who needed them get ahead in the world. The sincerity with which he spoke spurred a surge of pity in the young man, along with a measure of guilt for taking advantage of the tailor, whose drooping gray face and sad gray eyes lingered on him a moment before bending toward the button. How many dozens of people in the finance sector had done this to him over the years, people who could have bought and sold his business with a day’s earnings. The young man determined he would pay my grandfather no matter how much he protested, and pay him well at that: he had several hundred dollars in his wallet, and by handing over even a small portion, he’d do the tailor a good turn and make himself feel better in the process.

But then, who knows, maybe the arthritis flared up, or maybe my grandfather was distracted by thoughts of his five older brothers, all dead now, who’d made him go bowling every Saturday night since they were in their early twenties because my grandfather was the worst bowler they knew, and they could always make a few bucks from him when they competed for cash. Whatever the reason, he couldn’t get the needle to do what he wanted. Every time he tried to stitch the button on, his finger slipped and jabbed the young man in the chest. This happened three or four times, and each time the tailor apologized profusely, the young man told my grandmother afterward; he came to the memorial service and tried to hand her the hundred bucks he’d intended to give my grandfather, which she waved off, having no purse to put it in and feeling it was inappropriate under the circumstances to tuck it into her bra. 

For the sake of the old guy’s dignity, at first the young man held back any comments, just let himself be pricked and swallowed the pain. But then the needle went in far enough that he could feel it hit hard against his breastbone, and he couldn’t keep himself from crying out. “No job is worth this!” he shouted, and slapped my grandfather’s hand away.

Of all the things he could have said, my grandmother was sure this was the only one guaranteed to kill my grandfather outright. Because for him, a job was the only thing that mattered, the only thing you could count on. His whole career he’d wanted only to help people find good jobs, and now he’d made this young man give up hope, the absolute worst thing imaginable. His skill, such as it was, had turned against him, and he was dead before the ambulance arrived.

I might have believed this version of the story, too, if the young stock analyst—who didn’t really look young at all to me; he was probably in his late thirties—didn’t approach me after the service. I’d come home from college for the funeral, and I’m sure I stood out from the rest of the graveside mourners, which included a number of my grandfather’s former clients, as well as his brothers’ children and grandchildren. I had hair down to my shoulders, and my suit, bought off the rack in a thrift store, was too small across the chest, too baggy under the arms. Why the analyst chose to talk to me, I’m not sure. Maybe someone pointed me out as the grandson, but I certainly didn’t identify myself.

It was true that the old tailor apologized, the analyst said as we stood to the side of my family’s plot in the Long Island cemetery, but to be honest, he added, the apologies didn’t sound sincere at all. In fact, the tailor seemed to take a certain pleasure in causing the young man pain, and he seemed determined to go on until he’d drawn blood. “He was getting back at us,” the analyst went on, “for all the years we’d laughed at him and abused his generosity. He knew I wasn’t looking for a job. He could see it right away, and he must have realized how few of us had really needed his help. I don’t know for sure, because it all happened so fast, but I think he swore at me, too. Cursed me, I mean, though not in a language I understood.”  

As soon as the tailor had taken his revenge, he smiled, drew in a huge last breath, and fell forward onto his needle, as if onto a sword. The analyst seemed shaken as he told me this, his eyes crinkled with uncertainty beneath the oiled hair that didn’t move even in a stiff breeze blowing off Jamaica Bay. He wasn’t sure what to think of it all, only that he needed to make amends for what he and others had done. Then he lowered his voice, touched his chest, and whispered, “The wound. It still hasn’t healed. I’ve been putting Neosporin on it every few hours, and it’s as fresh as when he first stuck me.” 

He handed me a folded-up bill and told me to let the old guy know he’d paid up. His voice had a pleading note in it, and his fingers trembled as he held out the money. When I took it, relief eased across his buffed pink jaw. I expected him to tell me the same thing my grandfather had said the last time I’d seen him: that it was time to clean myself up now that I had only a year of school left, that there was no point in searching for work looking like a bum. But he only thanked me and shook my hand, and then turned away from the fresh dirt of my grandfather’s grave and hurried down the cemetery’s long central aisle, pressing a hand against his chest the whole way.

I wish I could say I invested the analyst’s hundred bucks, used it to buy a suit that fit and get myself a good job, one that would have made my grandfather proud. But the truth is, I spent it on a bag of pot and a couple CDs. By the time I graduated, my hair touched the top of my shoulder blades, and the manager of a screen-printing shop hired me to clean squeegees. 

I want to believe, too, that the analyst quit his job and moved far away from the World Trade Center, that he left high finance for some career dedicated to helping people and making the world a better place, but I know it’s not likely.

My grandmother, meanwhile, was set up regardless of how much my grandfather had saved for her. For the last ten years of her marriage, she’d been carrying on an affair with one of her canasta partners, widowed and retired from a company that sold fiber glass insulation. He had a pension, and he’d invested wisely, and by the time my grandfather died, he’d already built up enough of a nest egg to keep my grandmother happy for the rest of her days. Within a few months of the funeral, they married, and together the following summer they watched news footage showing planes slamming into towers, burying all memory of my grandfather’s cloth and thread and needles, which had never done much good for anyone who really needed them.

Scott Nadelson is the author of nine books, including the novel Trust Me and the story collection While It Lasts. His work has recently appeared in Ploughshares, Five Points, STORY, and The Best American Short Stories 2020.

8 November 2024