The man in the gray suit knelt on the carpet of the funeral home with the old wooden shoeshine box in front of him, and for a moment I thought he was going to pray. Instead he opened the lid. Inside lay the brushes, the cans of polish, the soft rags, all in the order I remembered from childhood visits to the PATH station, where my great uncle Sal sat on his stool and called every stranger young man. The man was about fifty five, silver at the temples. His hands trembled on the box. “My name is Richard Hale,” he said. “I am the chairman of a bank on Wall Street. And I am here to shine the shoes of Sal one last time.”
A hush fell over the packed room, over the commuters in their work clothes, the traders, the federal judge in the third row. My father, beside me, stiffened. All week he had said that Sal was a simple man who sat in a train station. “In 1991,” Richard said, “I was a twenty year old kid from Jersey City with a borrowed suit and no tie. I had an interview at a firm in the tower, my first. I was early, and I was shaking. I sat down on his stool and I said, I cannot afford this. Sal looked at my shoes, which were cracked, and he said, Son, a man goes into a room with the shoes under him. Sit.”
“He shined them for twenty minutes. He said nothing about the money. When he was done he looked at me and said, What are you afraid of? I told him I was afraid I did not belong. He said, I have shined the shoes of eleven thousand men on this stool. Some of them were senators. Some were thieves. They all sat the same. A pair of shoes does not know who is wearing it. Go in there and walk like you belong, and you will find out that you do.” Richard wiped his eyes. “I got the job.”
A wooden shoeshine box was opened at a casket by a man in a gray suit and gave one niece the morning to bring her father back to the station stool.
“I came back the next morning to pay him. He refused. He said, Pay me when you can afford it, and not before. So every morning for twenty nine years I stopped at his stool on the way to the train, and every morning I got a shine and a handshake. I never once paid. He would not take it. On my fifteenth anniversary I left a hundred dollar bill in his tip jar. He found me on the platform, and he gave it back, and said, Richard, that is too much of an insult.” The room laughed through its tears.
I put my hand over my mouth. I was thirty eight years old, an elementary school teacher in Hoboken, and I had loved my great uncle with the kind of love you give a person you rarely have to explain. Sal had come to my First Communion in his Sunday suit, smelling of polish and cigars. My father, his nephew, a quiet man in insurance, had always spoken of that stool the way a person speaks of a bad knee. None of us knew the shape of what Sal had been doing, every day, in that station, for forty six years.
Richard opened the box wider. In the bottom, under a rag, lay a thick black ledger. “He kept a book,” he said. “Every man he ever shined for free, he wrote the name and the date in pencil. He asked for nothing. He only asked, Someday, hold a door for somebody.” He turned the pages with a thumb. “There are four thousand and sixty names. I know a hundred and twelve of them. A mayor. Two surgeons. A man who teaches at Princeton.” He looked up. “The judge in the third row is on page nineteen.”
The judge, a gray haired woman in a charcoal dress, rose with her hand on her heart. “I was a law clerk in 1998,” she said. “I had lost a case. I sat on his stool and cried. He gave me a shine and a peppermint and told me to call my mother.” There was a wave of soft laughter. One after another, in the packed room, hands went up. A nurse. A sanitation worker. A deacon. All of them, strangers to each other, had sat on that same stool, and each one had walked off the platform a little taller. The line of people waiting to speak ran out the door.
My father stood last. He is a stooped, careful man who does not like to be looked at. He walked to the shoeshine box, and Richard stepped aside, and my father put his big hand on the lid. “Uncle Sal,” he said, “I told people you sat in a train station. I thought it was a small life.” He swallowed. “I was wrong. It was the biggest station in the world, and you were its heart.” Then he did something none of us expected. He took off his own shoes, black loafers, scuffed at the toe, and set them on the footrest of the open box.
Richard Hale picked up the brush. He shined the shoes of my father there on the carpet, slowly, with long even strokes, the way a man repays a debt that cannot be repaid. The room was silent except for the whisper of the cloth. When he was done, he tapped the toe of each shoe twice and said, in a perfect imitation of an old Italian rasp, Go in there and walk like you belong. My father put them on. He stood. He looked ten years younger, and he did not stop smiling for an hour.
In June, the transit authority set a small bronze plaque at the place where Sal sat, a block of rough granite with a brass footrest, and under it the words, Sal. He shined everyone. The bank funded a scholarship in his name for the children of PATH workers. And every morning, a boy of seventeen with a wooden box sits on that spot, with the old ledger open on his knee. On the first page he has written one line in pencil. Pay it forward. Under it is the name of my father, because on his way to work he stops there every day.
