Chapter 10

The third week of training again tested the boots’ brains as they learned the chain of command and courtesies accorded each rank. It meant as little to these working class men as knowing which utensil to use at a formal dinner, but at any hour a superior could quiz them and mete out punishment if they didn’t bark out the correct answer. Tomasio complained that his head ached from trying to keep the five grades of admiral straight. Meanwhile, Ryan searched in the middle of the book for the lieutenant rankings. Shmuel told him to turn back to the beginning. “It’s right after ensign, which is what we’ll be when we graduate. See if you can find Mikovski’s ranking.”

“Damn. He’s just a notch above us.” Ryan slammed his book shut.

“So why should we be afraid of him?” Tomasio asked Ryan.

“Because he has the power to decide whether we pass or flunk out,” someone answered.

“And either way he can make our lives miserable while we’re here,” said another.

They looked at Shmuel. “Lieutenant Junior Grade doesn’t scare me,” he bluffed. But he knew that being one rank up from the bottom made you mean. The Navy was like the Lower East Side that way. Immigrants who’d been there a year felt superior to greenhorns. Catholics beat out Jews because they had Jesus in common with Protestants, and German Jews assumed they were better than those from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, especially poor Galicians like his family.

Day and night, the tired men also took turns at watchstanding, recording sunrise and sunset and keeping a log of drills, inspections, salutes, and flag displays. Entries had to be made in pen, not pencil, and errors crossed out but not erased, in case the log was used as evidence in legal proceedings. The uneducated boots cursed in frustration at their indelible mistakes, and offered to pay Shmuel in cigarettes if he forged their entries. He shook his head, but not because he didn’t smoke. Despite the lies he’d told to get into the Navy, and the identity he kept secret from them, Shmuel knew that the men had to trust his honesty if he wanted to keep their respect.

His self-respect at risk too, Shmuel told himself he was done with lying and betraying his faith from this point on. He kept his resolve all week, until he was assigned Saturday watch duty. Keeping the log book meant writing on the Sabbath. Having already hauled ropes on Shabbas, not to mention eating trayf, it seemed hypocritical to worry about violating another stricture. Yet it troubled him. Last year, he’d joined Saturday afternoon sessions at shul where two men could argue three interpretations of Torah, but were forbidden from writing down their ideas, often embellished, until the following day. Unlike Jews, the Navy did not permit ambiguity or revision. Recording had to be exact and contemporaneous, a word Dev would have loved.

Ryan volunteered to cover for him. “Bandage your hand and tell Mikovski you got a bad rope burn and can’t write.” Shmuel was sceptical but it was better than admitting the real reason.

“What’s the matter, Lord?” Mikovski squeezed Shmuel’s bandage hand. “Ain’t you got calluses by now?” He grinned. “Unless you’re one of those Jew boys who won’t write on Saturday? Had me one of them, once. Pissed himself learning to fire a gun and slunk home to his mama.”

“No, sir. I just have a sore hand from sliding down a busted rope.”

“But it’ll be all better by Saturday, right?” Mikovski pulled off the bandage.

“Yes, sir!” Shmuel saluted. Navy regulations, and Mikovski, had overruled God.

***

Finally, at the end of week four, the boots had their first break from training. They were given a month’s pay and a free day to walk around East Boston. They moved awkwardly on land, braced for the ocean swells that were miles from the city’s broad streets and narrow alleyways.

Shmuel went with Ryan and Tomasio to the gedunk stand, the sailors’ name for the base commissary. They stood in front of the candy counter. After a month of mess trays with food in controlled portions, choice bewildered them. Ryan said he thought sailors were supposed to buy life savers. Tomasio took a bag of Amalkaka, chocolate-covered animal crackers. Ryan grabbed a package too. Shmuel hesitated, afraid they were made with lard. It was silly to care after eating pork, but for some reason, the idea of lard nauseated him. Also, “kaka” was Yiddish slang for shit, something he wouldn’t tell his friends for fear of spoiling their pleasure too. In the end, he bought Mary Jane’s, whose taste reminded him of Rivka’s honey-nut cake, and joked that it was a good workout for his jaws, the only part of him that the Navy wasn’t exercising.

“As long as you keep your mouth shut in front of Mikovski,” Tomasio said, and he and Ryan bought a bar of the taffy candy too. They savoured it slowly after gobbling the cookies.

“You ready for some companionship, boot boy?” Tomasio nudged Shmuel in the ribs.

Shmuel blushed and imagined his strawberry mark reddening too. Tomasio turned to Ryan.

“Sorry, I’m a do-it-at-night man.” The young Irishman looked as uncomfortable as Shmuel felt. It was mid-day and they had to be back on the ship at 1600 hours, long before dark.

Tomasio cajoled them, saying any obliging whore would turn out the lights and drape a scarf over the window, but when Shmuel and Ryan fussed with their candy wrappers, he didn’t push it. He said he was off to find something sweeter and would meet them back at the gedunk stand at 1545. Too embarrassed to look at each other, Ryan and Shmuel walked downtown in search of a dark movie theatre, where, for the next two hours, they and a theatre full of recruits watched Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton shorts. Happy to blot out the indignities of camp and avoid thoughts of what lay ahead, they laughed more loudly than the movies’ antics deserved.

Then, with over an hour of leave remaining, Shmuel suggested visiting the stalls along the wharf that catered to sailors. They still had most of their pay left, and while many men sent their unspent wages home, Shmuel didn’t know what to do with his. Both men bought socks, and Ryan bought stationery to write his girlfriend. Shmuel pretended to believe Ryan had one. Then Shmuel picked up a snow globe with an ivory carving of a twin-masted ship. It would have made a nice Chanukah present for Dev, a paperweight to hold down her word lists. But when he turned it upside down, the masts became the legs of a naked woman, while the prow and stern became huge breasts glistening under the swirling flakes.

“Should I buy this for Tomasio?” he asked Ryan uncertainly. “I think he’d appreciate it.”

“Liar!” Two stalls down, a group of sailors hounded a small greying man in a black jacket with frayed tzitzit hanging below the hem.

“Not German,” the frightened man insisted. “Sephardic.”

“Huh? Never heard of it.” A sailor, whose rolled-up sleeves revealed lurid tattoos from wrist to elbow, spit in the face of the cowering Jew.

“It means he’s from southern Europe, not the north where the enemy is from.” Shmuel walked towards the angry crowd without hesitation.

Ryan pulled Shmuel in the opposite direction. “It’s not our fight. Save it for the real war.”

Shmuel shook him off. “Sephardic Jews came to America in 1492, same as Columbus. Been here longer than most of our families.” He rolled up his sleeves too and clenched his fists. Without tattoos, his sunburned muscles shone as brightly as the ivory breasts in the snow globe.

“You sure about that?” a sceptical sailor asked.

Shmuel, relieved he hadn’t been recognized as a Jew, searched his mind to say something believable. “Our neighbours in Brooklyn were from Spain. Sephardim are very loyal to America.”

“What about them other kind of Jews?”

“Ashkenazy. They’re loyal too.” Shmuel wished he could point to himself as living proof.

The tattooed sailor pumped Shmuel’s hand. “As my Irish grandmother says, ‘I’m glad I didn’t die yesterday or I wouldn’t have known that.’” He eyed the snow globe, adding “You’re okay, Mick.” In Ryan’s company, Shmuel had passed as a fellow Irishman. Others were creating an identity for him. Was this any better than his father deciding who and what he should be?

***

Back at the gedunk stand, Tomasio guffawed at the bawdy trinket, before muttering his thanks. It wasn’t the lewdness, Shmuel realized, but the gesture of friendship that made him uneasy. To cover his embarrassment, Tomasio bragged about taking on two at once at the whorehouse.

“Shmuel took on a whole crowd,” Ryan said, “and with his mouth, not his fists.”

Shmuel let Ryan tell Tomasio the story, not out of modesty but because he was too tired to talk any more. Freedom was messy; he craved the orderliness of the ship. The other men seemed relieved to be back on board too. The Calvin Austin had become their home, albeit a temporary one. In four weeks, they’d be leaving home for the second time in two months.

Emptying his pockets that night, Shmuel discovered that he still had nearly twenty-five dollars left. He stashed the bills in his sea bag. One month ago, he would have saved the money to pay tuition at the seminary, fulfilling Avram’s wishes. What did he want for himself now? He thought about how naturally he’d fallen into the role of teacher at boot camp, and how earlier today, he’d turned around an ugly incident by explaining geography and history to an immigrant as raw as those he’d grown up with. An idea began to take shape. Suppose he attended yeshiva after all, but with the goal of opening his own cheder, a school for curious young boys, instead of training to be a rabbi. Having discovered the power of his voice, he could use that same pedagogy to help Jewish boys learn not only Talmud, but also how to live like Americans in a world more complex than the shtetl where their parents had grown up.

Pedagogy, another word Dev would relish. If they were having one of their bedtime conversations, he could teach it to her. But his sister was on her own now. And so was he.