Sitting with some big guys on the bus to Camp Eagle Wing was Paul Frankenthal. Now, there was a surprise. Mr. Winston hadn’t let on, and at school, since our move to Longfellow Avenue, Frankenthal had been ignoring me. On the bus he still ignored me. As I halted in the aisle and waved, he just went right on holding forth about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, with all his old masterful Aldus Street air, maintaining his running lie that his father knew them both.
One of Paul’s listeners, a good-looking boy with thick curly dark hair, was measuring Paul with an incredulous narrow-eyed look, his upper lip curled in a sneer. He sat by the open window, hands loosely clasped, dressed in long pants, bright plaid socks, and a dandyish jacket and tie. I saw this boy raise his clasped hands to his face, then blow smoke out of the window. Wow! Frankenthal sneaked smokes in our schoolyard. But to do it on the bus under the noses of the counsellors! Who could this tough guy be? I moved on up the aisle, and that was my first glimpse of the celebrated novelist of the American Jewish experience.
The bus arrived at the camp about noon, and we were all marched in our city clothes to the “mess hall.” I remember well my first meal in that big clattering raw wood structure: stringy brown roast beef, with mashed potatoes and green peas; and what I remember most is—surprise—the sight of jugs of milk and plates of butter on the table. Hoping that this epic will be read by a vast public of non-Jews, I will explain why I was surprised. We religious Jews never eat dairy products with meat. Never. The prohibition is found in the Bible, and the Talmud elaborates it. My mother has dishes and cutlery for milk meals, and other sets for meat. So does my wife. So, for that matter, does my sister Lee. She slakes her passion for shellfish outside her home, but in her kitchen milk dishes and meat dishes are separated. Okay? And there sat the Eagle Wing campers and counsellors, thickly buttering their bread, and washing down roast beef with hearty gulps of milk.
At this distance in time, it’s hard to say what my reaction was. I move in the Christian world. I don’t eat meat and dairy products together, but I’m used to seeing others do so, Jews as well as gentiles. It’s a secular age. A lot of our people have lost touch with our traditions, especially the rich ones who need tax lawyers. When a client named Goldberg, let’s say, at lunch in a restaurant casually orders pork chops and a glass of milk, I don’t make an issue of it. I have no directive from on high to change the world as I find it, though I may cool off a bit toward brother Goldberg, and even fob him off on another lawyer. I have no directive to give all comers my services, either.
Well, to my best recollection, I felt no moral dismay at that first Eagle Wing lunch. Mr. Winston had assured Mom that the camp was Jewish. The milk and butter must be there for those who weren’t religious and wanted them. I would make no holy noises about that. Live and let live. As for the meat itself, Douglas Fairbanks couldn’t have lied about such a serious thing, could he? It had to be kosher. So spoke my hunger to my conscience, and I fell to with gusto on the roast beef. I didn’t eat the ice-cream dessert, and I ended up feeling well fed and virtuous. Still, it was a major surprise. Where had Mama sent me?
***
Next surprise. Blaring bugle notes shock me out of sleep. I am under a coarse blanket on a low cot, breathing sharp cold air in a wooden hut amid strange boys. Sleepy kids in pajamas and bathrobes, Yisroelke among them, pour out of a row of such huts and line up, shivering in chilly mist. A burly scoutmaster—all right, counsellor, though I put in three hard years of law school to earn that title, but okay, counsellor—a counsellor in bathing trunks and a sweatshirt bellows an exercise chant through a megaphone: “One-two-three-four! Bend, stretch, touch those toes! One-two-three-four!” Fifteen minutes of this distasteful harrying, then a megaphone bawl, “All juniors, morning dip!” We are juniors. So back to the hut, change from pajamas to bathing trunks, throw on a bathrobe, grab a towel, and march to the swimming dock.
Another surprise! The sand beach isn’t there. Yet I saw the photograph with my own eyes, and Mr. Winston said himself—remember?—“We have a great sand beach. The best.” No sign of it. Thick thorny bracken grows to the water’s edge, and a rickety dock extends over the brush into muddy shallows. Megaphone: “Last one in is a rotten egg!” Megaphone man dives, and comes up snorting. “It’s great! Great! Everybody in!” The dock is jammed with hesitant contenders for rotten egg. One by one we leap or dive. Among the last, I hold my nose and stiffly jump.
Next surprise. As I knife down feet first into icy water, my ankles sink in cold slime, and tangle in water plants, or snakes. I struggle free and splutter to the surface, amid many boys gasping and thrashing in the brown water, which smells like rotting leaves. We all flounder to the mossy ladder, slip and slide up, and dart for our towels. Uncle Phil, my counsellor, stands there in his bathrobe with the other counsellors, dry. They are not juniors. We frantically towel ourselves and fling on robes. Last out of the water, Megaphone springs about the unstable dock with dull booms. “Great! Great! Nothing like it! Makes a new man of you!”
That was the morning dip. It went on all summer. Camp Eagle Wing, for my money, was one long morning dip. Great! Nothing like it! Makes a new man of you! A cold dismal baptism, but I learned like the other kids to slap my chest and yell, “Great! Great! Nothing like it!” Children are simians, and they will mirror the doings of their elders. But the imitation may have no more heart in it than a monkey’s wave back at you, from behind the bars of his cage.
As we straggle back to the huts, I spy Mr. Winston on the lawn in shorts and a T-shirt, very hairy-legged, a whistle on a thong around his neck. I dart to him. “Mr. Winston, I thought you said we had a sand beach.”
“I said the girls’ camp had a sand beach,” he replies over his shoulder, hurrying away.
Talk about surprises! To be lied to in this barefaced way, by a grown-up, and a teacher at that! And by Douglas Fairbanks! This second lie—that he had said Camp Nokomis had a sand beach—was worse than the first one. This time Mr. Winston knew that I knew he was lying, and he didn’t care. I was trapped for the summer. If I didn’t like it I could lump it. He had lied to me, that night on Longfellow Avenue, because as Bobbeh said, he wanted money. Now he had the money. Wise Bobbeh.
It crossed my mind, as I trudged back to my hut, that Winston was the counsellor of Bunk Eight. Paul Frankenthal and the tough guy who had smoked on the bus were in that bunk. How could Winston have told Mom he would take me in there? The camp was divided by age. I was a junior. Bunk Eight was for intermediates. Another Winston lie!
Well, then, what could I believe? Was the camp even Jewish?
In the days that followed, the doubt nagged. The camp owner, a Mr. Seidman, was a small round shiny personage, with a shiny bald head, shiny face, and persisting shiny smile. I thought Mr. Seidman might be Jewish. He had a large wife, reputedly an opera singer, with a big jaw, a huge bosom, a rear to balance, and a stiff corseted walk. I wasn’t so sure about her. Frankenthal was a Jew. In my bunk one kid was named Levy, another Goldenheim, and Uncle Phil’s name was Kahn. Yet—what about the butter, the milk? I had nobody to consult or to turn to; certainly not Mr. Winston. There was no rabbi in the camp. There was no minister or priest, either. Nobody said grace at meals. As for Hebrew lessons, not a trace. No prayer books. No Hebrew Bibles. Nothing!
Mind you, this perplexity didn’t keep me awake nights. I was swamped in novelty, hustled from one activity to another: morning dips, ball games, dramatic tryouts, glimpses of the girls at canteen time, when we could line up and buy candy, my best moment of the day. Such things, much more than religion, were my concerns. There was just this low-grade nag: where was I? I figured the Friday night services ought to tell the story. Or had Winston lied about them, too?
Well, on Friday night, sure enough, all the campers marched in uniform to “the chapel,” a one-story wooden building full of rough benches. The nature counsellor, a soft white bespectacled rather maggoty man, passed out brown booklets containing Indian prayers to the Great Spirit. As he led us in reading these, the campers yawned, blinked, and dozed. Things livened up when he went to the piano, and Mrs. Seidman stood up to sing a hymn, hands clasped against her stomach. Nobody could have dozed through that. She wailed that hymn like a fire alarm, rounding her mouth so you couldn’t understand a word. I listened hard for Hebrew, but heard nothing like it.
After that Mr. Seidman spoke, and you couldn’t understand him, either. Mr. Seidman had the sort of voice that turns off your mind; no sense formed from his singsong oily noise, certainly no discernible Bible message. Mrs. Seidman then caterwauled “America the Beautiful,” and we marched off to the bunks. That was Friday night worship at Eagle Wing. I did not pursue Mr. Winston’s notion that, in view of my rabbinic background, I assist at services. I didn’t want to seem pushy. Had I been a full-blooded Iroquois, descended from an orthodox medicine man, I might have given it more thought.
Now, all during those services, a dark-haired pretty girl about my size had kept glancing at me from the Nokomis side. Next day at canteen time I spied her off by herself, throwing a stick for a little black dog, and I went up to her.
“Say, what kind of dog is that?”
“Scottie.” A pert look sized me up. “I’m Betty Seidman.”
Betty Seidman! So a princess of the blood had an eye for the Minsker Godol! This was more like it. “Hi. I’m David Goodkind.” Bashful pause. “Does your camp have a sand beach?”
“Sure. Like to see it?”
“I’m not allowed on the girls’ grounds.”
“Oh, pooh.” She called the dog. “Come, Laddie.”
We slipped into the wild woods between the camps and walked down a narrow path, the dog gambolling after us. “There’s the beach,” said Betty Seidman, as we came out on a big gray rock above the water. There it was below, sure enough, the long sweep of sand I had seen in Winston’s brochure. We sat down on the cold stone. Puffy white clouds, low sun, still lake, pretty girl. Groping for conversation, I said, “Look at that cloud. It’s like an elephant.”
“Look at that one.” She picked it right up, pointing and laughing. “It’s a monkey.”
“Ha, ha!” I pointed. “I see a whale.”
“And I see a horse.”
“I see George Washington,” I said, rather stretching it.
“I see Jesus Christ,” giggled Betty Seidman, startling me almost out of my skin.
Jesus Christ?
Jesus Christ had not been a name bandied about on Aldus Street. Only once had we ever talked much about Jesus Christ. The newspapers at the time had been making a to-do about an evangelist who predicted the world was about to end. The evening before the announced Judgment Day, we kids sat around a fire in the lots, discussing Jesus Christ in low worried tones. We agreed that Jesus Christ had not really been such a bad guy, that he had only been trying to help people. We were all hedging against the risk that, if the world ended, there might be something to this Krisht business, after all.
Now what about Betty Seidman? Could she possibly be a Krisht?
Laddie followed us back to the boys’ camp, on a shortcut through thick brush that Betty showed me. “Nobody sees you when you come this way. Remember that.” She squeezed my hand and vanished.
As the summer wore on I found out that Eagle Wing had started as a Christian Science camp, but times were tough, and so Seidman had gone after the Jewish trade, too, with Winston as Bronx recruiter. Hence Friday night services, and the absence of ham or pork. On the other hand, many of the campers were Christian, or Christian Scientists, or nothing; hence butter and milk with the meat. It never was clear what the Seidmans were, but Camp Eagle Wing was American as apple pie: heterogeneous, easygoing, noncommittally spiritual once a week. I was the maverick, to be worrying about it.
***
One morning I was lying alone on my bunk with a Baseball Joe book when in walked the tough intermediate who had smoked on the bus. Jimmy Levy’s brother in Bunk Eight had told us all about him: a wise guy named Peter Quat from a Manhattan private school, hated by all his bunkmates. Quat broke rules and got the other fellows in trouble. He claimed he was trying to get kicked out of camp. The gossip was that his father, a rich doctor, had given Winston a big tip to put up with him.
“I hear you have a copy of Les Misérables, kid,” he said, with that same narrowed-eye sneering look. It’s still Peter’s trademark, visible on all his book-jacket pictures. “What the hell for? To show off?”
“To read.”
“Let’s see it.”
I got it out of my trunk. My public library card, I should explain, was the joy of my life. I had long since read through all the fairy tales and boys’ books, and lately had been taking out the fattest books I could find—I guess, to impress the librarians. In that way I had come on The Three Musketeers and The Swiss Family Robinson; so fat books seemed a good bet, and Les Misérables was the fattest in the building. The lady librarian had blinked down at me in heartwarming amazement, checking it out on summer loan. Les Misérables was a slow starter, but then I got all in a sweat to find out what happened to Jean Valjean, and I finished it by flashlight under my covers after taps, snivelling over Valjean’s death.
“Lend it to me,” said Quat.
“Got anything I can read?”
“Come to my bunk and we’ll see.”
The campground was deserted. Rowdy baseball noises echoed from the far playing fields. I had never been in Bunk Eight before, wanting to steer clear of Frankenthal. Quat picked a book off an unmade bed—all the others were army-neat—and said, “How about this, as long as you’ve read Les Misérables?”
It was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by one James Joyce. The first page seemed to be gibberish, so I declined it.
“Tell you what,” said Quat, “try this, but don’t let your counsellor see it, and let me have it back tomorrow.”
With that he pulled a magazine from under his rumpled blanket. Le Sourire was the name. I remember the cover well, a drawing in twenties’ style of a pretty girl in frilly lingerie, with perky breasts plainly showing through, pink nipples and all.
“I can’t read French,” I said. I was intrigued and faintly scandalized.
“You don’t have to read French,” said Quat with an evil grin. “You’ll enjoy this magazine. At least I think you will.”
At this moment Laddie came bounding into the bunk. “Hey, Laddie! Lunch time, hey?” Quat pulled a salami from his trunk and hacked off pieces with a scout knife. Keeping food in the bunks was against the rules. So was feeding the Seidman dog. Laddie had once almost choked to death on a chicken bone, hence the edict. But the dog leaped and caught Quat’s salami morsels in a practiced way. Quat knelt and hugged the animal. “I love this dog,” he said. “There’s nothing else in this camp worth shitting on. Well, maybe I’d shit on Mr. Seidman, if he asked me in a real polite way. I sure wouldn’t shit on Bill Winston. I don’t believe in pampering counsellors.”
I left with Le Sourire all rolled up. I didn’t know much, but I knew it was contraband. Back on my cot in Bunk Four, I leafed through Le Sourire with mingled feelings of guilt, delight, and ever-rising warm disturbance, all shot through with visions of Betty Seidman, Rosalind Katz, and my old neighbor Bare-behind. A new world of sensation was opening to me, and Quat was quite right, a knowledge of French was not essential.
Now mind you, Le Sourire was pitiably tame compared to what’s around nowadays, all these glossy magazines with pictures of girls showing their hairy crotches under klieg lights, interspersed with short stories by Nobel Prize authors, and interviews with eminent politicians. We live in peculiar times, or at least they strike me as peculiar. I don’t fight the trend, in fact I helped bring it about by winning the obscenity cases; but I will have my senile headshake at such goings-on. Le Sourire had, I now realize, a sort of quaint art deco charm. All illustrations, no photographs; and for my money those colored pen-and-ink sketches of naughty mamselles, in various stages of peek-a-boo undress, had it all over the stark genito-urinary closeups which today’s adolescents get off on, as I believe they put it.
Anyway, Uncle Phil came bounding into the bunk very much like Laddie, with much the same gaping jaws and hanging red tongue, and he frightened me by roaring, “Where the hell did you get that?” To Uncle Phil, Le Sourire was of course the hottest of hot stuff.
Unnerved, I spoke the simple truth. “I got it from Peter Beater.”
“From WHO?”
Shakily I repeated, “Peter Beater. Peter Quat. In Bunk Eight.” Jimmy Levy’s brother always referred to the rebellious oddball as Peter Beater. To me it was just an innocuous nickname.
Uncle Phil took the magazine from me, sat down on my cot, and shifted to a clergyman voice. “Davey, do you know what that means?”
“What what means?”
“What you’ve just said.”
A Talmudic mind can put two and two together. My disquieting sensations over Le Sourire, Frankenthal’s tales of the big guys in the lots, and some other things I had heard at camp fell into one squalid picture. Naturally, I said I hadn’t the slightest idea. Uncle Phil left, thumbing through the magazine, and he stumbled in the doorway and fell down the steps. He picked himself up and made off toward Bunk Eight.
All kinds of a crisis ensued. Le Sourire was confiscated. A solemn meeting took place in Bunk Eight, chaired by Bill Winston, ranging from sex matters to the need for harmony in the bunk. Quat offered to give a wienie roast and make his bed thereafter, and the other guys agreed to stop calling him Peter Beater. Bill Winston was delighted. They had the wienie roast next night after taps, and Frankenthal got hoggish and demanded a fifth or sixth frankfurter, and Quat told him to go to hell, and Frankenthal said, “Okay for you, Peter Beater,” and Quat laid his head open with a mustard jar. That chilled the new era of good feeling. The story got out all over camp that Quat had put Paul Frankenthal, the star athlete, in the infirmary with many stitches in his scalp. Quat still didn’t make his bed, and they still called him Peter Beater, only now they did it in front of Winston. Le Sourire passed from one counsellor’s hand to another, until Mr. Seidman himself collared and kept it. Remembering Mrs. Seidman, I’d say Le Sourire ended up where it did the most good.
***
Meanwhile, my romance with Betty Seidman flourished. We would slip off at canteen time to the gray rock above the lake, and hold hands and talk, and maybe I’d beg a kiss or two. Nothing more. After-images of Le Sourire were haunting me, and I would daydream of trying every lascivious devilry with Betty Seidman. But when she was right there in the flesh, in big thick green bloomers and a white middy blouse, with those dark eyes sparkling at me, I fell apart. All my indecent intentions dried up. The fact is, I’ve never changed much. Women awe me. I have to nerve myself after nearly thirty years, if you’ll believe it, for every pass I make at Jan, my own wife. Some say women prefer rough tough guys who yank down their panty hose without a by-your-leave, but I’ll never know. I’m not saying I’ve done badly in the long run with my reverential approach—I’m not complaining, shall we say—but it got me exactly nowhere with Betty Seidman.
I was returning to my bunk from one of these tender meetings, via the short cut through the woods, when I noticed a peculiar black thing swinging in the air. I literally didn’t believe my eyes, and for a second or two stood dumbfounded. Laddie was dangling from a heavy clothesline thrown over a high branch of a tall tree, with the other end knotted around a white birch. I snapped out of the daze and reached for him, but he hung too high. With shaking fingers, I tried to untie the hard knots at the other end. The dog was alive, whining and gagging, his head bent to one side, his jaws open, blood trickling from his thrust-out tongue. He looked straight down at me, beseeching help, then the glazed eyes drooped shut.
Peter Quat came crashing through the brush with a scout knife, his clothes torn, his face all bloody and swollen. “Okay, you catch him!” He hacked through the thick line and the dog fell into my arms, the rope coiling around him. He opened dim eyes as I laid him on the ground. Peter cut the noose around his neck, and he feebly wagged his tail. But his head fell to one side, the life went out of his eyes, and he lay still. Peter felt for the dog’s heart and called, “Laddie, Laddie, come back, Laddie! Don’t die!” His bloodstained face was streaming tears.
If you ever wonder, now and then in the rest of my story, why I put up with Peter Quat, remember this, it’s all true. He is now what he was at Camp Eagle Wing, an enfant terrible with a very nasty streak, but there is forlorn bottled-up love in him somewhere, if he seems to have none for his parents or his people. He lay embracing the dog, and howling, “Laddie! Laddie! Don’t die!” He turned his blood-streaked face up at me. “That moronic criminal son of a bitch did it! Just because I love the dog! I caught him at it!” The inert dog uttered a strangled cough and barely moved his head. “Christ, he’s alive!” Peter stood up and glared at me, tears and blood running down his dirty face, and lifted the dog in his arms. “I’ll handle this. You don’t know anything, do you hear? Don’t say a word to anyone, ever. Beat it!”
Next day, Frankenthal left the camp. The last time I ever saw Paul Frankenthal he was crossing the lawn in his city clothes, a real big guy, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. A few days later, Quat also departed. Betty Seidman avoided me after that. I did not know for a while whether Laddie had survived, until I sneaked up to the Seidman house and saw him moping in a small pen of tough chicken wire. All sorts of rumors flew for a few days, and then the fuss died down.
A week or so after this, my parents drove over from Feder’s farm to visit me, bringing along that no-good Harold; also my sister Lee, who with rare good sense had fought off being sent to Camp Nokomis. Poor stumblebum Minsker Godol, in goyish exile! I didn’t want to admit how miserable I was. I bluffed it out. I showed Lee and Harold the canteen, the social hall, the lake, the tennis courts, the playing fields. I told Harold about campfires and overnight hikes. I boasted to Lee that the camp owner’s daughter was in love with me. Mr. Seidman and Bill Winston raved to Mom and Pop about their brilliant son. In that whole orgy of phoniness, there was one moment of truth. I was showing Mom and Pop the mess hall, where the waiters were setting up for supper. I pointed out the milk and butter on the table. “We always have meat for supper,” I said. “And see what they serve, every night.”
My father looked at Mom, without a word.
My mother was dressed to kill in a silk frock and a big picture hat. She had lapped up the praises of Seidman and Winston, smiling, bridling, behaving like an intermediate girl at canteen time; while Pop, who appeared gray-faced and thin, had listened impassively. But when Pop gave Mom that look in the mess hall—just a roll of his wise brown eyes—I realized that he had not for a moment been taken in by Camp Eagle Wing; that he held her accountable for sending me there; but that he would not put her down in front of me. Mom shrugged at his look and dropped her eyes.
“Don’t eat the butter or drink the milk, Yisroelke,” Pop said.
“I don’t,” I said.
He put an arm around my shoulders and we left the mess hall. So I served out my sentence in Camp Eagle Wing, and I went on eating the meat.
***
When I read this part to Jan, she said, “Do you realize how awful your mother is coming out?”
Poor Mama!
Look, remember how young she was, an immigrant in a strange new world, and remember those sauerkraut crocks, will you? Is it really so awful that Mama was bemused by a handsome young fraud of a teacher who flattered her and flirted with her because—as old Bobbeh knew at once—he wanted money? Camp Eagle Wing in those brochures, with Bill Winston flashing his manly smile and his pearly spats at Mama, looked so much like the ploika that she hadn’t the heart to press Douglas Fairbanks with the old Jewish nag: “But is it kosher?” Too redolent of sauerkraut, eh, Mom, that dull old-country query?
Green Cousin, poor Green Cousin, not so awful, and there is nothing to forgive. Eagle Wing was my first stop on the way to April House, and it had to happen. The thing I will remember is the nickel-plated flashlight. The camping list called for a flashlight, so before I left for Eagle Wing we went to a hardware store. The black flashlight cost a fraction of the nickel-plated one. They both gave the same light. Frugality was your middle name. But you saw Yisroelke yearning over that classy nickel-plated flashlight, and that was the one you bought. Okay, Mom.