Mr. Birnbaum

Harry Birnbaum didn't live in my neighborhood, but he was as well-known as Joe the Cop or Mueller the Butcher. The only thing anybody ever called him was Mr. Birnbaum, and he worked for an insurance company. He went from house to house, apartment to apartment—wherever he had a client—to collect fifty cents for each policy. A policy might be enough for burial or a means of assuring the children of a thousand dollars when they reached twenty-one years of age.

Mr. Birnbaum was tall, stoop-shouldered, and bald. He always wore a gray suit, a white shirt with a dark blue tie, black shoes with thick gum soles. In the wintertime, he wore a heavy black overcoat with a black muffler and a gray fedora hat. On wet or snowy days, he wore rubbers or galoshes—the black canvas kind with metal clasps—with his trouser cuffs tucked inside. He didn't drive a car but came to the neighborhood by bus at about eight o'clock in the morning, carrying a newspaper and his account book, around which was wrapped a thick rubber band. His clothes always looked too big for him. That and his quiet, soft-spoken manner made him seem to be timid and unhealthy. But I don't ever remember when Mr. Birnbaum didn't show up at our house with absolute regularity on Thursdays between three and four o'clock in the afternoon to collect $2.50 from my mother. Mr. Birnbaum would take the money and mark the payment in little squares in his book. My dad's was for burial. Each of us four kids would get a thousand dollars when we reached twenty-one. In times of stress, my mother would say with the sigh of a martyr, "Well—you'll at least be able to bury me."

There were times when my mother didn't have the two-fifty. Mr. Birnbaum would just nod and say, "Next week, then, Mrs. Brady."

Sometimes I would have to go to the door and tell Mr. Birnbaum that my mother wasn't home, and he would say, "Next week, then, William," in that soft voice, and I could never tell if he thought I was telling a lie. There were times when that would happen a couple of weeks in a row. But I never recall Mr. Birnbaum getting upset or demanding payment or threatening to cancel the policies, a prospect that terrified my mother. He always seemed glad to see me and would ask me about school and wish me well before leaving.

Mr. Birnbaum never came inside. He would wait outside in the hall when we lived in the apartment and on the stoop when we moved into the house we rented after my father got a raise. No matter how many times my mother would tell him to come in out of the cold or the heat or whatever, Mr. Birnbaum would apologize and say he didn't want to track up the floor, as if we lived in a mansion instead of an ordinary seven-room frame house on a street with about twenty other houses that—except maybe for a tree or a hedge or a flagpole or some other decoration—looked exactly like ours.

As I said, Mr. Birnbaum was as regular as the days of the week. The milkman was Tuesday. The iceman was usually Friday, and Mr. Birnbaum was Thursday. The only time he ever missed a Thursday was when he was on vacation for two weeks every year. He never told anyone where he spent his vacations. Not that anybody asked him—at least when I was around. But I used to wonder. He would always