Macy’s

Macy’s is both a working department store and an unlikely piece of infrastructure in Harry Goldfarb’s drug business. Its toy department, especially the train display, provides a public meeting point for a briefcase exchange; later, the same store becomes the setting for Harry and Marion Silver to buy a television for his mother. The contrast makes Macy’s more than a backdrop: ordinary consumer routines offer cover for illicit business, while Harry’s difficulty navigating an ordinary purchase reveals how little control his practiced confidence can secure.

A Public Store as a Meeting Place

Harry’s choice of Macy’s answers a practical problem. The route he considers involving an international airport seems exposed: there are too many officials, too little room to escape, and even the journey through city traffic feels hazardous. Macy’s, by contrast, seems so commonplace that he doubts anyone would suspect it as a place to meet. The toy department offers a particular landmark: the trains. He imagines a room of his own furnished with model trains, houses, bridges, rivers, trees, cars, trucks, and lights. The fantasy of a miniature, orderly world accompanies the selection of a real location for business.

When Harry arrives for the exchange, he is early. He stops in the lingerie department to look at something Marion might like, but buys nothing; he tells himself that business comes first and that success depends on concentration. He then goes upstairs to the toy department and watches the train display. At the appointed time, he sets his case beside his right foot. Another man arrives, and the two switch cases as they had before. Harry leaves the store and takes a deliberately indirect route by cab and on foot before reaching the cutting room where Tyrone C. Love is waiting.

The meeting’s apparent simplicity conceals what follows. Harry and Tyrone carefully cut the last pound of pure heroin and bag it for distribution through their people. They divide the work of delivery, with Tyrone taking most of the supply and Harry the remainder. Macy’s has thus served as one link in a larger operation: the public store is not where the drugs are prepared or sold to users, but where a discreet handoff helps move the business forward.

A Return for a Different Purpose

Harry later brings Marion to Macy’s after they take a taste of heroin before going shopping. When she asks where he wants to go, he chooses the same store and jokes about the toy department and its trains. The choice is familiar to him but perplexing to Marion, who goes along with his plan for the cab ride. Their return turns the location into a shared scene, though Harry’s private associations with the store continue to shape their route.

At Macy’s, Harry insists that the cab take them to the Seventh Avenue entrance, even though Marion thinks they could get out sooner. He then insists that they visit the toy department before the television department, where Marion had wanted to go directly. She follows his lead and looks at the trains with him. The repeated detour suggests how thoroughly the store’s earlier business has become part of Harry’s habits: the route is no longer merely a means of reaching a meeting, but a routine he imposes even on an outing with Marion.

In the television department, Harry asks for the largest television set. He rejects a salesman’s attempt to sell him a more elaborate home-entertainment system and settles on a large console television. He pays with hundred-dollar bills, waits calmly for his change, and leaves with Marion. As he sits through the transaction, he imagines himself handling business like a capable, self-possessed adult. The purchase is intended for his mother, and he has previously delayed visiting stores because dealing with salespeople feels like a burden. Macy’s gives him a temporary stage on which to perform competence.

The Store and Harry’s Divided Self

That performance does not hold. Later, Harry remembers the purchase differently: in his recollection, he stammers, cannot answer the salesman’s questions, and feels embarrassed and guilty as the salesman promotes the more expensive set. He imagines being persuaded that his mother deserves the elaborate system, even if it would not fit in her apartment, then shakes off the thought. The scene’s reversal makes the store a measure of the distance between Harry’s composed public manner and his anxious, unstable experience of himself.

The two visits also expose a sharp contradiction in his intentions toward his mother. Harry wants to buy her a new television, but he has repeatedly used her existing set to obtain money for drugs. He rationalizes taking heroin before shopping as a way to make the task manageable, connecting the drug to a real act of care while also deepening his dependence on it. Macy’s holds these impulses together: an intended gift, an illicit exchange, and the consumer transaction through which Harry tries to see himself as capable of looking after someone.

For Harry, the store’s ordinary arrangement of departments becomes a private map. The lingerie floor, train display, television department, entrances, and cab routes acquire meaning through his business and routines. Yet the setting does not make him master of the world around him. At the train display, a brief exchange of cases allows the operation to proceed; at the sales desk, the same practiced confidence is vulnerable to the anxiety and guilt that return afterward. Macy’s therefore joins the novel’s criminal and domestic strands without erasing their difference: the store can conceal a transaction, but it cannot make Harry’s self-deceptions disappear.