outgoing personality was the antidote to Ruben’s retiring nature, and their clientele responded favorably to his enthusiasm just as they did to the ads and jingles he cooked up, the numerous inventory sales he engineered. He also led the initiative in opening a discount annex that turned out to be nearly as lucrative as the flagship store. At first Julius had looked forward to working alongside his father, anxious to prove his mettle, but Ruben, while commending his son for his go-ahead attitude, remained the same benign but distant presence he’d been throughout the boy’s life. Often the son felt ashamed of his father’s subservience, of how passively he suffered a customer’s unjust complaints, and wondered if his conduct might have less to do with decorum than faintness of heart. That assessment was further confounded by an incident that occurred during the lawless days following the murder of the man that the colored people regarded as a kind of black Moses, when there was rioting and looting all over town. Most of the mayhem was confined to the ghetto neighborhoods, but some of the looters ventured farther afield, if only to prove that nowhere was safe. This was the case on an afternoon when a car skidded into the lot of Karp’s Appliance, its doors slamming shut, and Julius saw his ordinarily neutral father become strangely alert. Then, without explanation, the father hustled his son behind a checkout counter and bade him hunker down beside him, as two men burst into the otherwise empty store.
“Ain’t nobody home,” exclaimed one, and the other, “‘Spose we got to wait on ourself.” There was the sound of metal smashing merchandise, and Julius, who couldn’t remember ever being in such close proximity to his father, sniffed a bad odor he associated with fear. Presently a flat-nosed man holding a mini-fridge on top of which lay a crowbar, a plastic pick stuck in his woolly hair, peered over the counter. “What we got here?” The other, in dark glasses and cradling a shotgun, came round to see: “Look like a pair of fascist insect.” He stretched the pointy toe of his boot to prod a petrified Julius in the ribs, which was all it took to trigger an action that figured in no order of experience the youth had ever known. For his father was instantly upon the intruder, ignoring his weapon as he pummeled him to the ground, the rifle clattering across the floor as he fell. Then no sooner had he knocked down one than he lit into the other, who was pinned to the spot by the appliance he’d dropped on his foot. Having so savagely dispatched both vandals, Ruben Karp seemed not to know what to do with his leftover rage, and stood over them baying like a berserker, curling and uncurling his fingers as if strangling air, while the men dragged themselves bloodied and groaning from the store. After that the proprietor straightened the creases in his business suit and withdrew into a meekness that exceeded even his former demeanor. Julius, waiting to feel gratitude or awe, felt neither, but regarded his father from that moment with an increased wariness.
For all that, they were good years for Julius Karp, on the strength of which he married and started a family. Whey-faced and lethargic, his Yetta was perhaps not the most disarming girl, but aware that he was no prize himself (though his looks had improved since infancy from unpleasant to only slightly insipid), Julius was content to have found a bride who seemed to think that he would do as well as another. He was also pleased with his well-heeled in-laws, who had thrown in a suburban house to sweeten the deal. After the wedding there followed a prolonged honeymoon period during which husband and wife viewed history unfolding over their parallel TV trays. Together they witnessed a president resign in disgrace, though not before he had deputized the King (that is, Elvis) as an honorary member of the Secret Service. They watched the end of a war and the return home and subsequent death of Elvis Presley, prompting Julius to observe reverentially, “Our city is a place where Kings come to die.” The event made him feel, as he had in his youth, that Memphis was the center of the world. It was around that time that his Grandma Yokey also expired, though Julius was nearly too preoccupied to notice. The old lady had been mostly an embarrassment anyway,