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New Scott Nadelson story, “Willowbrook,” in Gulf Stream Lit Mag

15 Dec 2014|

Excerpt from “Willowbrook,” by Scott Nadelson for Gulf Stream Lit Mag


At a quarter past eight on a steamy July morning that already had him sweating in his suit, Joseph Mandel, weekday manager of Florsheim’s, raised his bald head and listened. The noise came from the stock room. Boxes shifting, tissue paper crinkling. Nothing to be alarmed about, though he was aware of a mild queasiness rising from abdomen to chest as he left the register, which he’d nearly finished refilling with fives and ones. A rat, he thought, though more likely it was only a mouse. With the bars still pulled down over the windows, a rat let loose from the adjacent pet store might mistake the shop for its cage. That’s how he’d describe the place to old friends, those few who still spoke to him, who weren’t swayed by popular opinion—crotchety, disgruntled old men like himself, whose company he didn’t much care for. A cage, and he the rat behind the bars.

Mandel was a few years past retirement age, a small stooped man with big ears and hairless arms and legs, who always sported tartan golf hats outside, to protect his head from sun and rain. In the shop he broke company policy by wearing the old oxfords he’d bought on a trip to Chicago in the spring of 1961, polishing them himself every evening before going to bed. They’d lasted twenty-five years without a scuff, the soles replaced twice, the leather as soft as a young girl’s skin. He joked with himself, far too often, that if he ever lost this job, too, if he sank any lower in the world, he could always open a shoe-shine stand to supplement his Social Security check. As a boy he’d shined weekends in the Morristown train station, and even then he’d had affection for quality leather, the way it gleamed when you rubbed it right, the supple wrinkles where it creased at the toe.

He’d opened his own store in Denville just after he was married—late in life for that time, at thirty-one—specializing in children’s shoes because there was no other competition. He dealt with plenty of criers and pushy parents, but mostly he’d enjoyed saddling up little feet, the smile he’d get when he let a pretty girl in pigtails wear her new penny loafers out to the street. Though he didn’t have any children of his own, he knew how to keep them entertained, with a shelf of old wooden toys he collected at garage sales and an antique Mutoscope he’d picked up at a junk shop and had refurbished, loading it on alternate weeks with scenes of a ballroom dance and a barroom shootout. When they saw him walking around town, kids would run up and hug him, and parents trusted him enough that they’d occasionally leave their eight- or nine-year-olds with him while they did their shopping at the Grand Union. For thirty years he cornered the market and made himself a living his father, a house framer, couldn’t have imagined.

Then there was the business with the photographs, the accusations, the talk of criminal charges, the newspaper articles. His marriage, a mistake from the beginning, lingering at the edge of a cliff for a decade, finally plunged. His store sat empty three months, nothing but a customer or two from out of town. All the locals gave him a wide berth, pulling their kids away when they saw him on the sidewalk. He waited until his savings were drained before shutting down and retreating behind these bars on the second floor of the Willowbrook Mall, where he peddled shoes he wouldn’t put near his own feet to the tacky, overweight middle managers of North Jersey.

To read the entire story, go to Gulf Stream Lit Mag.