Three chapters from what I can't bear losing

I never did find out whether Dave had a family, where he went to school, where his parents came from. For a long time I didn't know whether he was Jewish or Italian and only when he handed me his card and I realized that his name was David Cohen did I know I had a landsman in the house. He responded to my Yiddish but in a modest and dignified way, and didn't try to capitalize on it. He told me he had worked for Thermoguard for twenty-three years, but I didn't believe him. In his second conversation with Stan he tried to get out of calling on another customer about forty-five minutes away from me, but Stan apparently had no one else to send. My heart almost broke when Dave said to me, "You have a nice house here," a standard statement but, in his case, coming out of-not envy-but a kind of matter-of-fact humility. I had to give him detailed instructions on how to get to his next call-he didn't have a map of New Jersey-and I walked him out to his car to say good-bye. His dark blue something or other was sitting smack in front of my next-door neighbor's driveway, but I didn't say anything. Nor could I see through the windows of the car because of the blinding sunlight, but he explained that that was his wife sitting in the passenger's seat and I advised him at once where to go for lunch on his way up the river, my heart breaking at the domestic scene, Dave forever out of my life, the lost knowledge appalling.

I know I saw my father in Dave, or perhaps my own self in another life. It's an interesting question, how long salesmanship has been a separate occupation in the world of trade and commerce. I want to say that early traders, early merchants, knew whereof they carried, on camel-back or ship-back, and were themselves the "salesman," and in the bazaar, the marketplace or the flea market they knew their goods well, be they shoes or rugs or pottery, all of which were family-produced. But that may be too romantic an idea. Maybe the Phoenicians, the Arabs, the Mongols, had special emissaries whose job it was to "sell" products. My father and his friends liked to say that a good salesman could sell anything, it was a truism among them, and most of them loved the very act of selling. For him, my father, it was men's and boy's clothing, later women's, though he started off selling cigars. I can see him in his early twenties; he had a Model T and loaded his cigar boxes in the backseat. Probably a display case of sorts. Young, handsome, vigorous, ambitious, optimistic. He was strongly attached to his product and when he switched to men's clothing he loved feeling the goods and rubbing his fingers over the lapel in order to judge the quality. The customer was never a "mark"-he was always given a decent buy. Even at the end when he was in the going-out-of-business business, buying bankrupt or solvent stock, reopening the store with big signs in the window, often employing the old owner who as often as not was retiring, replenishing the stock (helas) with new merchandise, the principal source of income for one of the partners who was a manufacturer with a plant in North Carolina, he was always fair, fighting the partners in the name of honesty and good business practices.