I arrived at Townsend Harris Monday morning in a state of advanced dread.
On the trolley Abby Cohen had not referred to the Bronx Home News. For once his echoes of his father’s views—of the Talmud as a futile waste of time, of kosher butchers as a guild of irreligious fakers and thieves, and of God as a Stone Age bogeyman—were music to my ears, so long as he said nothing about my bar mitzva. He didn’t know it had taken place, because I hadn’t told him. You may find this hard to believe, but I kept my Townsend Harris life and my Bronx life rigidly compartmented, and Abby belonged in the Harris compartment. I had invited nobody from the school, not even Monroe Biberman, though he had a fair Jewish background. I had been moving between two planets, the Inside and the Outside. The horror of the Bronx Home News story was that it leaped the interplanetary void; and “my David,” the synagogue paragon, was proclaimed in public print as the mental and physical giant of Townsend Harris Hall. That was what I had to live down, unless by a miracle it escaped notice.
I passed through the morning periods, through the chess-playing in the crowded lunchroom, and through the afternoon classes, and heard not a whisper of the Bronx Home News. Was the miracle happening? Was God—in whom, unlike Dr. Cohen, I unreservedly believed—overlooking my small thieveries and the serious matter of gartered thighs, and giving me this incredible break as his bar-mitzva present? Even Seymour Dreyer, as we met going down into the subway at the end of the day, cordially waved and smiled. Not what I would expect from Dreyer if he had anything on me; and Dreyer, remember, was from the Bronx.
***
Now let me fill you in on Dreyer. Early in our first term, he and I had been partners in petty crime. Once when I was going down into the subway, he approached me and proposed that we crowd through a turnstile together. I had no compunction about gypping the subway system, and we did this regularly, each time saving a nickel. (Doesn’t that put the patina of a lost golden age on my youth? Five cents to ride anywhere in New York!) Dreyer next sought to improve our acquaintance by inviting me to see how easy it was to steal books from the library. I was curious enough to go with him to his neighborhood branch. Sure enough, he checked out two books and left with a third under his coat, beaming in triumph. When we reached the street, he offered me the pilfered book, but I wouldn’t accept it. I was capable of mulcting the transit system of a nickel a day, but there was something rotten to me in stealing a book from a library. I took a distaste to Dreyer, and backed off from our subway arrangement.
Once he joined the Stadium staff and got into Arista, Seymour Dreyer had no time for me. Dreyer was a born side-glancer, winker, and snickerer behind his hand. Every now and then I’d see him with some Stadium fellow, the back of his hand to his mouth, glancing toward me sideways with those half-closed Dreyer eyes. At the time, in my naive obliviousness to the whole Arista thing, I wasn’t bothered. Chances are he was proving how superior he was to his Bronx origins, by making jokes about the Bronx butt in the purple suit. You know such people, we all do, and that was Seymour Dreyer, the long and short of him.
***
Well, nothing is as stale as yesterday’s newspaper, and I awoke Tuesday with my spirits reviving. I had another uneventful day at the school. Ye gods, I thought, was I going to make it?
No.
When I got home, a letter awaited me from Seymour Dreyer. He congratulated me on my bar mitzva and my five gold medals. He expressed his wonder at the journalism award, since he wasn’t aware that I had joined the Stadium staff or even tried out for it. About my physical perfection and boxing prowess, he said that he’d have to be more careful around me hereafter; he hadn’t realized that such a powerful body lurked beneath my purple suit. I was bound to get into Arista now, he concluded, since there weren’t many boy geniuses around, and the honor society was always eager to raise the level of its membership.
Next day I approached Monroe Biberman and said I was with-drawing my Arista candidacy. He was dumbfounded. “Why?” he asked. “What’s bothering you?”
How could I tell him? I said the first lame thing I could think of: I had heard there was talk against me in the Stadium office. Biberman pooh-poohed the notion, said I shouldn’t get cold feet now, my election looked all set. Only, he casually suggested that I wear a different suit to the meeting. He didn’t criticize the purple suit; that was all he said. I densely let that go by, even after the Dreyer dig. And so, an ox to the knife, in the gray bar-mitzva suit in which I had marched to glory under the arch of crossed flags, I came to the Arista meeting on Friday afternoon. When I entered the classroom where they held it, about twenty members were lounging in the chairs. Several of them were smoking, and a few had on their laps copies of the Bronx Home News.
“Mr. Goodkind,” said the president of Arista, a dark, mature, and not disagreeable lordling named Jerry Bock, who was the editor of the Stadium, and who by general school whisper actually knew and frequented a whore, “will you please tell us why you think you should be elected to Arista?”
He sat at the teacher’s desk, a copy of the Bronx Home News open before him to the society page. Seymour Dreyer had gone to a lot of trouble, all right. He might have just passed one clipping around, but no, he was driving this nail to the board, establishing once for all his credentials as a Bronxite who despised Bronxites. Dreyer sat in the front row with a hand over his mouth, leaning toward the ear of Monroe Biberman, in the seat beside him, and on his face behind the hand was the beam of triumph with which he had stolen the library book.
—I wish I could break in here to tell you that Seymour Dreyer came to a bad end, but the fact is I’ve never heard of him since I left Townsend Harris. Dreyer was buried deeper in my subconcious than even Frankenthal was; but as soon as I began writing about my bar mitzva, the Bronx Home News came bursting through the six feet of mental cement with which I’ve overlaid it for forty years and more, and so this inconsequent snickering sneak has moved center stage.
But how much of this ordeal do you really want me to describe? It all happens in Lilliput, and who cares that I am back there, one of the tiny people, in a desperate situation? Well, okay. I stand with my back to the blackboard, my sweaty hands behind me clutching at the shelf where the chalk and the erasers lie, confronting those Arista kids and actually attempting to say why I should be elected. That was my mistake. I should have found a few dignified words and walked out as soon as I saw the newspapers, because I was sunk. I could see that in the smirks all over the room. Only Biberman and Bock seemed to be somewhat embarrassed. I hadn’t gotten far when one grinning face interrupted and asked me please to describe my journalistic achievements. Even as I drew breath to try to account for that accursed write-up, another grinning face declared he was more interested in my boxing record. Was I a welterweight or a bantamweight? Giggles. A third grinning face observed that a perfect physique was a rarity; would I consider stripping to the waist, so that the Arista members could all admire my award-winning body?
Raucous laughter, and the pillorying was on. Such questions and crude jokes shot at me from all sides. Adolescents aren’t kind, they put each other to the test all the time, and they’ll peck a downed one to death. It was my second Halloween. I faced it in silence, and let them joke and laugh themselves out. I didn’t say anything. I just stood there and took it. My knees were shaking, but I’m glad to say, even across this gulf of years, that my face remained calm and my eyes dry.
The noise died down.
“Mr. Goodkind, is your first name really Isaac?” Jerry Bock asked in a sober, almost apologetic way, as though trying to get the meeting back on the track.
“No.”
“Ignatz?” said someone. That someone was Monroe Biberman. He piped up “Ignatz” in a funny voice, and set them all laughing again.
And then, as the hee-haws subsided, Seymour Dreyer said, in the crude Jew singsong of vaudeville, “Tell us, Iggy, where’s your purple suit?”
That did not get a laugh. I found my voice and said to Jerry Bock, “My first name is Israel. Any other questions?”
He didn’t answer. He looked out at the Arista members. So did I. No one said anything. Biberman wouldn’t meet my eye, and his face was turning red. Perhaps he was regretting “Ignatz,” now that the thing was done. For a laugh, one laugh, he had finished me off. The other faces were blank, except for Dreyer’s, whose eyes were almost shut in the happy book-stealing look. His kike imitation had over-shot the mark and ended the fun, but he didn’t realize it.
“Thank you, Mr. Goodkind,” said Jerry Bock.
I walked out. Though I had a jug sentence to serve, I went to my locker, got my books, and hurried the few blocks to the trolley, so as to arrive home in time for the first Sabbath after my bar mitzva. That night I intended to go to the synagogue with my father.
For the rest of my time in Townsend Harris, which is truly a blur, I was Iggy. The name caught and stuck. I don’t remember being bothered by that. The school just ceased to matter to me. Biberman and I scarcely talked again, and we didn’t win the short-story prize, by the way. As a matter of fact, Abby Cohen did. It didn’t help Abby on the Stadium, though. He worked like a dog till the end, yet got no higher than associate editor. But then, rather to my surprise, Dreyer didn’t even achieve that. Seymour Dreyer never did quite make it across the bridge.