My first encounter on the outside was Paul Frankenthal. He wasn’t very far outside. We lived in Apartment 5-D and the Frankenthals in 5-A, on the top floor of a tenement house on Aldus Street, in the Southeast Bronx.
How did Mama cope with the hazard of small children loose in a fifth-floor flat? Keeping the windows shut was no answer. Mama believed in fresh air, and anyway in the summertime we would all have choked. No, what Mama did when we moved in was to take Lee and then myself by the ankles, hold us one by one outside a window head-down, and let us scream and wriggle in terror for a good while at the sight of the drop to the concrete yard five stories below. That did it. I have no recollection of this strong medicine, I have only Mama’s word for it, but I believe her. To this day I can’t lean out of an open window without getting a queasy feeling which locates itself very insistently in my scrotum. Joyce writes of the “scrotum-tightening” sea. A high window has it all over the sea in my book for scrotum-tightening, but then I have this singular background.
At some point Mama took me to the nearest public school, where Lee already was in the second or third grade, and enrolled me in the kindergarten, lying about my age with the blandest good conscience. Mom had no patience with this goyish foolishness of waiting until the Minsker Godol was six before starting him in school. I could already sound out Hebrew sentences, and she figured public school would be my meat. In fact, I had a rapid ascent, which turned into a horror not unlike hanging out of a high window by the ankles. The principal scrotum-tightener in this matter was Paul Frankenthal, and that is his entrance cue.
***
I can’t remember not knowing Paul Frankenthal. I close my eyes and there we are sitting by a window in the Frankenthal flat, Paul, Lee, and I playing casino while a furious summer thunderstorm c-r-r-racks and crashes and rages outside on Aldus Street. Jagged blue-white lightning makes me wince, rain lashes the tenements opposite us, and on the sidewalk far below gray stars splash up in myriads. The bright colors of the cards, the flat-faced kings, queens, and knaves, the joker in his yellow and red hunting costume, fascinate me. No cards in our apartment! Mama in her latter days became a terror of the Miami Beach canasta set, but at that time she retained “a rabbi’s a daughter’s” objection to playing cards. Vulgar. The Frankenthals lived in the front. Our apartment looked out at the back yards, where tall bare poles supported five stories of clotheslines. You would wake in the morning to the squeak of clothesline pulleys. From the Frankenthals’ windows you could see cars and people going by, a more interesting view than wet sheets, shirts, and union suits multitudinously flapping.
I may be doing Paul an injustice by attributing to him the memorable first beating I got. Still, I don’t think it would have occurred to me on my own to go playing doctor with the girl in Apartment 5-C. I was four, and not that much interested in girls. Her mother caught me examining her bare behind as she lay prone on her bed, little skirt up, little pants down. A scandalized caterwauling broke out, a horde of adults came trampling into 5-C, and I was summarily removed to Apartment 5-D; where Mama then and there did her best, using my father’s razor strop, to whomp voyeurism out of her jewel.
Instead, she beat into me the perception that there is something both marvellous and forbidden about a girl’s bare behind. That is strictly true, to be sure; but she was rushing matters, pressing the point at my tender age. Now, I distinctly recall Paul Frankenthal among those invading adults. Question: what was he doing there? My guess is that he set me up and then sandbagged me, thus establishing the theme and tone of our long relationship. Possibly not. He did me enough damage later, and I will waive this count as not proved. To Mama’s credit, she never told the story to Pop; not to my knowledge. I watched his face closely for the next couple of days. I’d have known, if he found out.
***
In the silent-film serials of my childhood, the bad guy could be spotted straight off by his mustache. Take Mr. Deering, the bad guy who pursued Pearl White through fifteen episodes of Plunder, trying to get the map for the diamond mine away from her. What a monster! What a mustache! Paul Frankenthal’s father looked a lot like Mr. Deering, and he had exactly the same style of mustache: thick, slick, black, pointy. Later on, Paul too grew a Mr. Deering mustache, and in point of fact he landed in the pokey like his father, and for the same reason: kickbacks and whatnot in the construction game. Yet at the outset Paul was a sort of hero to me, and to most of the boys and girls in our neighborhood.
When Faile Street had a rock-throwing fight with Hoe Avenue, for instance, Paul was right up front, heaving and ducking stones, while I manned the far rear. Faile Street meant nothing to me, nor had I anything against Hoe Avenue. Our tenement was near Faile Street, and this accident of geography obliged us to show up on the field of honor, a vacant lot between Faile and Hoe, to show our manhood, or boyhood. The neighborhood girls flocked to watch, you see. The battle station I selected was fairly close to the girls. Any Hoe type who beaned me at that range would have had a throwing arm worth money in later life. I wasn’t a conspicuous coward, the Faile Street rear was crowded with cannon fodder of weak convictions, but I was no Paul Frankenthal, either. My sister Lee admired the hell out of Paul for his valor, and talked on and on about the rock fight afterward until I was sick of it.
To my best recollection nobody—I mean not one combatant—was injured in that fight. Nobody fell. Nobody even bled. Not in the large rear clump of the hesitant, not in the hardier midfield boys yelling, ducking, and scurrying about, not even up front among the few like Frankenthal. A huge hubbub, a lot of stones flung randomly—such was juvenile combat in those days of the Bronx’s lost innocence, before the ethnic gangs made a serious bloody business of it. A born street boy, Frankenthal perceived that a show of dash in rock fighting was a high-yield, low-risk activity. I wouldn’t have acted on this insight if it had occurred to me, and I take nothing away from Paul Frankenthal; but his subsequent swagger did not rest on a very broad base of exposure to death, and it riled me that this fact escaped my sister.
On the whole, I will call Paul the first of the villains in this epic. Like Iago, like Uriah Heep, like Richard the Third, like most of the heavies in literature, Paul Frankenthal was of a jealous and envious disposition, and therefore determined on villainy. He inherited the trait from his mother. Mrs. Frankenthal comes and goes in this story like Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, but this is her moment, and she can have her own short chapter.