I mentioned to Mr. Winston that my mother was coming to the school to re-register us with our new address. Flashing that Douglas Fairbanks smile, he said he would very much like to meet her; and he did, the very next day after the sauerkraut cataclysm.
And now, to describe the next great turn in my life, I’m compelled to disclose the affair of Mama and Mr. Winston. That is a most bizarre passage. I haven’t bothered to ask Mom about it, her hearing aid would simply go out of commission for a few days. Mysteriously, my sister Lee doesn’t treasure this oddity of Mom’s early years, and I’m not about to remind her of it. Lee would only improvise a scurrilous fantasy about poor Mom and Mr. Winston, and go on embellishing it for years. In time Mr. Winston might even eclipse the clambake. So let’s have none of that.
You understand, of course, that throughout Mama remained pure as the driven snow. Surely I don’t have to tell you that about the big yoxenta. It was just foolishness, foolishness on a grand scale, on a Mama scale. Mama seldom did things by halves.
***
“Send him to a camp? What for?”
We were at supper. Papa looked more pale and abstracted than usual. It was before he gave up smoking, and he had smoked cigarette after cigarette and eaten nothing. A crucial meeting he was about to have that evening with the gentile money man, Mr. Kornfelder, and a new personage, a Mr. Worthington, was much on his mind. I had heard worried talk about this meeting for weeks.
Mama: “Why, he’ll grow strong and healthy at a camp. He’ll learn all kinds of things.”
Pop (not belligerent but baffled): “What sort of things, Sarah?”
“Oh, everything. Canoeing, diving, horseback riding, weaving baskets. Everything.”
“Weaving baskets? What for?”
“Why shouldn’t he learn to weave baskets?”
“When is this teacher coming?”
“Half past eight.”
“Sarah, that’s when I meet Kornfelder and Worthington.”
“So I’ll talk to Mr. Winston myself.”
“But what’s wrong with Feder’s farm?”
“Feder’s, again? So he can run wild all summer with that no-good Harold?”
“No-good” Cousin Harold and I, with Mom and Aunt Sophie, had been spending summer vacations for years at Feder’s farm in the mountains; a heavenly place enlivened by several frisky Feder daughters. Last summer there had been a shadowy incident involving Harold and one of those daughters. Cousin Harold got a horrendous licking, and now he was “that no-good Harold.” The daughter in question had a receding chin and pinkish eyes, and Harold was always throwing windfall apples at her and calling her “Andy Gump,” after a chinless comic-strip character, now extinct. Harold was then only a little over nine like me; too old for the doctor game, and hardly up to anything spicier. As I recall, “Andy Gump” got a licking, too, so maybe she did entice Harold into some precocious foolery. In any case, a prime argument for Mr. Winston’s summer camp was that I would not be with that no-good Harold. There was no way Mama could foresee, of course, that I would be getting to know Peter Beater Quat.
Papa left. I rushed through my homework, all excited because Douglas Fairbanks was coming to our house, though about summer camp I was dubious. I did not feel suited to the outdoors life. That no-good Harold, now, was a real outdoorsman, a Boy Scout. He had tried taking me along with his scout troop on hikes in the wooded Palisades. It had not worked out. The first time, I stumbled and rolled down the Palisades through brush and brambles, fetching up against a rock with my head. The scoutmaster had to drive me to a hospital in Hackensack to have my head stitched. He was ungracious about this. The next time, using Cousin Harold’s scout knife to cut a steak I cooked over a wood fire, I laid my thumb open, and pulsed a lot of blood into my handkerchief, trying to hide the gash, not wanting to annoy the scoutmaster. Still, I trailed blood all over the ground. He noticed it and got very upset, until he found out that the blood was mine; then he cheered up a lot, I guess because I was a visitor, and not in his troop. Or possibly he wanted me to die.
The third time did me in. A can of baked beans, when heated in a fire, needs a hole punched in it to let out the steam. Nobody mentioned this to me. Outdoorsmen know it. We were gathered around a big fire, toasting frankfurters on peeled sticks, and the cans were all heating up in the flames, when my can went off like a grenade. It was an amazing explosion, and it aborted that outing. We were all bespattered head to foot, the scoutmaster’s ear got cut by flying tin, and he shed much blood himself; and I do believe people were picking beans off themselves in Hackensack. I was not invited again. Harold said the scoutmaster told him not to invite me any more, said I was too clumsy. In fact he referred to me as “your clumsy little fairy of a cousin,” which I think was inappropriate language. I don’t remember what he looked like, but he did not have the equable temperament for a scoutmaster.
So, all this talk of Camp Eagle Wing made me apprehensive. I liked Feder’s farm, and asked nothing better than to while away my summer days there. But the doorbell rang when I was finishing my arithmetic, and here came Mr. Winston.
As I scribbled off the last problems, I could hear him and Mama talking. That in itself was strange, Mr. Winston’s voice within our walls. Stranger yet, when I came into the parlor, was the way Mama looked. I had last seen her at supper in an apron and an old house dress. I found her transformed: remarkably thinner in the purple dress reserved for weddings and bar mitzvas, her hair all done up as on Friday night, the long gold-and-pearl earrings from Russia dangling in her ears. And her eyes sparkled, and her cheeks were flushed, and she and Mr. Winston were laughing merrily. Her lips looked bloodshot, or something. I had never seen them so red. A beautiful scent diffused from her, almost like the smell of Feder’s apple orchard: sweet, fresh, powerful. Mom sometimes wore perfume, but this was a new fragrance. Had she bought it so as to make a special impression on my teacher? Why? She knew I was in pretty solid with Mr. Winston.
“Speak of the devil!” giggled Mama. “Here he comes! Were your ears burning, Davey? Somebody has been saying some very nice things about you.”
“Hello, there, David.” Douglas Fairbanks grinned and ran a thumb across his mustache, exactly as he did in the movies. He crossed his legs, in dark trousers pressed razor-sharp, and I saw buttoned gray cloth casings on his shoes. Spats! A pure film touch. I had never seen anything so dashing on a live man. He and Mama sat together on the sofa. On the low table before them photographs, booklets, and papers were spread out.
“Come and see,” said Mama. “It’s so exciting!”
I obeyed. Camp Eagle Wing in the pictures looked all too out-doorsy: kids swimming off a dock, or marching in a line through woods, or playing ball games, or eating at long tables, or gathered around campfires toasting frankfurters (!), or canoeing in a squadron, or weaving baskets. Scoutmaster types hovered everywhere.
“Girls’ camp, too?” I asked, because there were a couple of all-girl pictures.
“Oh, yes,” said Mama eagerly. “Camp Nokomis. That’s where Lee will go.”
“Nokomis? Is that Hebrew?”
Mr. Winston smiled. “It’s Indian, David. ‘Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.’ You’ll be reading Longfellow next year. That’s who your street is named after, Longfellow.”
“The camps are Jewish, of course?” asked Mama, a shade thoughtfully.
“Mrs. Goodkind, I’m Jewish,” said Mr. Winston with a jocund grin and a thumbstroke at his mustache.
“You are?” Mama’s eyes opened wide and brilliant. “Who’d ever know it?”
This was a surprise to me, too. I assumed all teachers were gentiles, certainly including this charmer; nor in those days was I far wrong.
“Why, my grandfather was a rabbi.”
“You don’t say! Where?”
With a vague gesture toward, I guess, the Atlantic Ocean, Mr. Winston said, “Oh, Europe.”
I don’t think he was pretending. In those days they used to say that movie stars like Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Ramon Novarro were actually Jews named Cohen or Horowitz or Goldstein. In that sense I’d guess Mr. Winston was Jewish. As for his rabbinic grandfather, you meet few American Jews whose grandfathers weren’t rabbis in the old country. By this is meant an elderly gent in a skullcap and a beard, scowling from a dim old photograph.
Anyway, Mama turned yoxenta in an eyeblink. “My father is a rabbi from the Volozhin Yeshiva, that was the greatest yeshiva in Lithuania. And my grandfather was a chief rabbi in Minsk.”
“Now we know where David gets his brains from,” said Mr. Winston, “and his mother, too.”
They both laughed and laughed, looking playfully at each other. I began to feel oddly in the way.
“Maybe David can help us conduct Friday night services at Eagle Wing,” said Mr. Winston.
“Gosh, a sand beach,” I said, thumbing the pictures.
“We have a great sand beach,” said Mr. Winston. “The best.”
“What do you think, Davey?” said Mama. “Doesn’t it look wonderful?”
“I won’t know anybody there.”
“We’ll put you in my bunk,” said Mr. Winston. “You’ll get to know everybody.”
“Oh, my David is a good mixer,” said Mom. “He’ll make friends.”
Over Mama’s perfume, I smelled liniment, Bobbeh was usually asleep by now; but she was an inquisitive old thing, and the strange male voice probably stirred her up. She came hobbling into the parlor in a shapeless brown sack, her wig plopped on her head any old way, so that all the white hair showed. She halted and stared at Mr. Winston, who stared back at this apparition.
“What does the gentile want?” Bobbeh asked Mom in Yiddish.
Mom darted an embarrassed look at Mr. Winston, but he was smiling obliviously. Bobbeh might as well have spoken Swahili as Yiddish.
“Nothing, Bobbeh, nothing,” murmured Mom, jumping to her feet. “The man is just visiting us. There’s some tea in the kitchen, and…”
“What does he want? Is he from the police?”
“Bobbeh, you should be healthy,” hissed Mama. Yiddish has these inside-out imprecations. “He’s not from the police, and he’s not a gentile, he’s a Jew. Go have some tea.”
“A Jew? With those things on his feet? He looks like a priest.”
I can’t imagine why Bobbeh said that, but I suppose she took any outlandish garb as a vestment. Peering at Mr. Winston, not taking her eyes off him, she hobbled to an armchair and sat down.
Silence. Thick awkward liniment-laden silence.
“This is my mother-in-law,” said Mama.
“How do you do?” said Mr. Winston.
“He probably wants money,” said Bobbeh. “Give him money and he’ll go away. You’ll see. That’s all any of them want. I have some money, if you need it.”
“Bobbeh, he’s Davey’s teacher!” snapped Mama. “I know him, and he’s a fine man.”
“A teacher from Hebrew school? With those things on his feet?”
Mama asked Mr. Winston through gritted teeth whether he wouldn’t like some tea. He said he would. She disappeared off to the kitchen, where we could hear her clanking and slamming around, while I explained to Bobbeh that Mr. Winston was my teacher in “English” school. That she understood. Her suspicious expression relaxed, and Mr. Winston noted with admiration my mastery of Yiddish. “Boy, you really sling that lingo around, don’t you?” was the way he put it. “Tell your grandmother that I think you do very nice work in school.”
I translated.
“Ask him what those things are on his feet,” said Bobbeh.
This seemed slightly personal on short acquaintance, so I hesitated.
“What does she say?” asked Mr. Winston.
“She says she’s proud of me.”
“She’s such a fine-looking old lady,” he observed.
“What did he say?” asked Bobbeh.
“He says they keep his feet warm,” I said.
“Cold feet, hah?” Bobbeh asked. “Like by a frog.”
I broke into whoops of laughter. I was still doubled over in my chair when Mama came in with a clattering tray. Bobbeh and Mr. Winston were regarding me with puzzlement as I howled and writhed, picturing Mr. Winston’s frog feet inside the spats.
“So? What’s so funny?” Mama inquired, setting the tray down so hard that cups, saucers, spoons, sugarbowl, and cookies all jumped.
I couldn’t reply, in my mad fit of the giggles. The amount of subtle disdain Bobbeh managed to cram into that one word, jabba, “frog”! She just didn’t take to Mr. Winston.
Mom didn’t enjoy the stump of that evening. Bobbeh’s intrusion had clouded the delight of Mr. Winston’s visit. Mama was quenched, her gaiety gone, her high color faded, her eyes dulled. She seemed much too dressed up in contrast to Bobbeh’s homey brown sack, and her red lips were like a clown’s. Her peculiar playfulness with my teacher was all over. Mr. Winston too sobered, under Bobbeh’s questioning gaze, into his severe classroom self. He drank a cup of tea, bolted a cookie, and took himself off, leaving all the Eagle Wing stuff. Mama saw him to the door, and I guess went downstairs with him, because she was a while getting back. Bobbeh drank tea while I flipped through the camp pictures.
Tying on her old apron as she marched into the parlor, Mama began slinging the tea things back on the tray with jerky gestures.
“He wants money,” said Bobbeh. “You’ll see. Otherwise what was he doing here, that English teacher? He wants money. Maybe to give Yisroelke good marks. Don’t pay him a penny. Yisroelke can get good marks by himself, he has a Jewish head.”
“Bobbeh, you should be healthy,” snarled Mama, “YOU SHOULD LIVE TO BE A HUNDRED TWENTY YEARS.”
I couldn’t sleep. Much later I heard my father come home, and I jumped out of bed and went to the parlor. I wanted to hear how Pop had made out with the money men, and I had only to look at him to know. His pale face shone, his dark-shadowed eyes gleamed, and the tired smile he gave me lifted my heart.
“Yisroelke,” he said, glancing at his wristwatch, “why aren’t you asleep?”
“Papa, did you lick Kornfelder and Worthington?”
He and Mama guffawed. Mama wore her old pink bathrobe, her lips were their usual color, and her hair was combed out for bed. On the low table, amid the scattered Camp Eagle Wing pictures and papers, stood a whiskey bottle and two glasses. Amazement! My parents drank strong spirits once in a blue moon, and then only for a toast or a good-luck wish.
“Mr. Kornfelder and Mr. Worthington are fine gentlemen, Yisroelke,” said Papa, trying hard to be solemn, “and we had a nice meeting. So go to bed.”
“You bet Papa licked them,” said Mama, adding in devilish Yankee slang, “Papa licked the pants off them.”
Again they both laughed with joy.
“Oh, boy! I knew it!” I hugged Papa, and I could smell the whiskey. “So we’ll build a great big place, just like the Splendid Laundry, won’t we?”
“We’ll see. We’ll see.” Papa patted my shoulder. “Go back to bed.”
“And I’ve got wonderful news for you, Davey,” said Mama. “You’re going to Camp Eagle Wing.”
***
You have to know what happened at Pop’s meeting, since all our futures hung on it.
I’ve mentioned the boiler that burst at Pop’s place. Such break-downs were all too usual. The Fairy Laundry had started with no capital, and bled by two dead-weight partners, it was still gasping along without capital. Pop had had to buy old machinery on credit from the General Laundry Machinery Corporation, for the move into the vacated Woolworth store. Meantime, a rival Bronx firm, the Splendid Laundry, had expanded into a grand concrete structure with all-new machinery. The boss of the Splendid, Sam Solomon, had moved down to West End Avenue in Manhattan, among the rich gentiles. Sam Solomon had no partners. Mom was keen for Pop to build a big concrete plant so that we too could move to West End Avenue. Wasn’t he every bit as good a laundryman as Sam Solomon?
Mr. John Worthington thought so. Mr. Worthington, the boss of the machinery corporation, had been urging Pop for years to ditch Brodofsky and Gross and start a new steam laundry. As you know, Pop wouldn’t do that. He did ask Mr. Worthington whether he would back a concrete plant for the Fairy Laundry, and the man was all for it. Kornfelder, too, was favorably inclined.
So most of the talk at supper for weeks had been about an impasse with the two money men, Kornfelder and Worthington. They wanted Brodofsky and Gross dropped with lump-sum settlements; otherwise, no financing for a concrete plant. Papa was equally stubborn. Brodofsky and Gross might accept the settlements, he told Mama, but they would never cease thinking they were partners. Once they ran through their lump sums, he would wind up supporting them, as he did Uncle Yehuda. Surprisingly, considering how she despised the partners, Mom was backing up Pop this time. “Listen, you’ve come all the way with those two fools,” she said as he left that evening for the showdown meeting. “Now the goyim want you to throw them out. Nothing doing. They’ll finance the new plant, anyway, you’ll see.”
As you know, Pop won the showdown, and so the big plant was on, partners and all. That victory was probably Pop’s death warrant, but who foresees such things? Immediately, because he went to that meeting, I went to Camp Eagle Wing. On the matter of Mr. Winston, I’ll bet Pop would have sided with Bobbeh.
***
Anyway, that was it. I never saw the Feder farm again. I can’t imagine that it still exists. I don’t remember where it was. I know we took a coal-burning train to get there, and I never hear the chuffing of an old-style locomotive or the wail of its whistle but I remember that gritty sooty ride to golden summer days; to an apple orchard where the wormy windfall fruit lay sun-warmed on the grass, sweetening the air; to a wool hammock where I swung under the apple trees, reading Penrod and Tarzan books; to green meadows where big monarch butterflies went flitting through the milkweed and the goldenrod; to a dung-smelling barn buzzing with flies, and to the taste of warm raw milk right out of a stamping cow’s rubbery teats; and to rose-spotted little lizards scuttling on the rocks by some unnamed river. The Feder farm, like the Aldus Street that was, lives only in my memory; and now perhaps in these meager words, if they ever see the light. I went to Camp Eagle Wing that summer, and to other camps for years and years, until I freed myself from camps by starting to work for Harry Goldhandler, the gag czar.
And right here my story starts moving on the main line, with a faint last whiff of smoke from an old coal-burner, and the fading echo of its whistle, as it disappears down a branch track I travelled no more.