Table Talk

THE SUMMER I sold bibles door-to-door was my first experience of a suburb. I was fourteen. I don’t remember which suburb, but it was close enough to Philadelphia for the guy I now think of as The Collector to drive his sales crew out there in the morning hours and then collect us late afternoon. I was expected to work summers, and jobs usually came my way through relatives. I had an uncle who moonlighted as a successful bible merchant, and it was he, a matinee-idol lookalike with a Dean Martin voice, who trained me. I spent a Saturday with him as he made rounds in one of my own South Philadelphia neighborhoods. I wondered how it might all turn out. I was not confident.

It seemed easy, at least as he went about the work. Ring bell, don’t open screen door, speak quietly, maintain eye contact, don’t show merchandise until you’re invited in, don’t sound too religious. The merchandise was the Catholic Douay-Rheims version, glamorously packaged in a glittery, tooled-leather cover, transported in a hard cardboard valise that acted as a cover for the cover and could be opened just like the stout serious book mounted inside. You couldn’t quite flip it sexily open, as Joel McCrea does with his winged documents case in Foreign Correspondent, but it had its own theatricality. Don’t open it until you’ve asked permission, pause in your spiel for a moment when you open it, let the customer savor the gilt-edged pages, the blooming ornate capitals, the illustrations that in their rotogravure colors looked cadged from Life, let them ogle the magisterial heft and furniture value of the thing. It was not heavier than it looked.

The Collector picked us up early, drove to the target area, and dropped us in separate districts. The other salesmen,