Bernard Malamud
THE MAID'S SHOES
The maid had left her name with the porter's wife. She
said she was looking for steady work and would take anything but
preferred not to work for an old woman. Still, if she had to, she
would. She was about forty-five and looked older. Her face was worn
but her hair was all black and her eyes and lips were pretty. She
had few good teeth. When she laughed she was embarrassed around
the mouth. Although it was cold early in October, that year in
Rome, and the chestnut vendors were already hunched over their
pans of glowing charcoals, the maid wore only a threadbare black
cotton dress which had a rent down the left side, where about two
inches of seam had opened on the hip, showing her underwear. She
had sewn the seam several times but this was one of the times it was
open again. Her heavy but well-formed legs were bare and she wore
house slippers as she talked to the portinaia; she had done a single
day's washing for a signora down the street and carried her shoes
in a paper bag. There were three comparatively new apartment
houses on the hilly street, and she had left her name in all of them.
The portinaia, a dumpy woman wearing a brown tweed skirt
she had got from an English family that had once lived in the build–
ing, said she would remember the maid, but then she forgot; she
forgot until an American professor moved into a furnished apart–
ment on the fifth floor and asked her to help him find a maid. The
portinaia brought
him
a
girl
from the neighborhood, a girl of six–
teen, recently from Umbria, who came with her aunt. But the pro–
fessor, Dr. O. E. Krantz, did not like the way the aunt played up
certain qualities of the
girl,
so he sent her away. He told the por–
tinaia he was looking for an older woman, someone he wouldn't have
to worry about. Then the portinaia thought of the maid who had
