CHAPTER TEN
The incident came at a time of crucial change in Hershy’s life, when the child was beginning to mingle with the adolescent that had taken root in him; it left him floundering, wishing to rush back over his early years into a corner of safety. But there was no escape, for the kids on the street were a part of his change.
Overnight, it seemed, the sight of a girl stirred something strange in them, as if they had seen a bud pop out on a tree or a worm crawl out of a cocoon or a butterfly flutter out of a caterpillar. Something seemed to reach inside them, shaking them violently, and suddenly a huge blob broke up into a hundred fragments and distinct forms began to take shape and they began to parade before the girls with a peculiar self-consciousness growing over them. Where before they were like shadow-boxers, involved wholly within themselves, now they felt that they were in a ring, surrounded by a whole new audience; now they found themselves reaching out, seeking a new kind of cheer and adulation; now, coming out of themselves, they found that they had to pause a moment to catch up with their new sensations of being, and they felt a need to talk about it. Society was taking its toll, especially at twilight, after a long day at school and at play. They’d sit or lie down on the slanting roof of a stable or garage, with the sky above and the alley below.
Hey, what makes the sky change all the time?
Look at all the colors, guys. Look at all the goddam colors.
The stars, guys. They’re popping, guys.
How come the moon don’t come up the same time every night?
All the things a guy don’t know. All the things.
(A cat screeched, breaking their flight through the mysteries of interstellar space, flinging them hard against the one thing they tried to avoid but which was uppermost in their minds.)
I hear it hurts when a cat does it.
Yow, it must hurt.
How about when a man does it?
I don’t know. Sometimes I hear funny noises from upstairs. Crazy laughing, screaming, moaning.
From next door I heard it. Holy mackerel, like a horse running.
You ever see it?
Once. A girl in the playground was riding on a swing. Yoppo, the wind picked up her dress. Yowie, the free show.
What’d it look like? What’d it look like?
You know.
Yah?
Holy mackerel.
Once I was in the yard. I looked up. Right on top of me, right on the second-floor porch, there was old lady Cohen. She didn’t have no bloomers on.
Yah? Yah?
Holy Jesus, guys. Holy, holy, holy.
They sat or lay on the roofs with their hands folded behind their heads or around their knees, watching the night close in on them, listening to the cats and the rats and the dogs and themselves, feeling a strange bubble work through them. Wandering through the dark star-blistered night, they found themselves ganging closer together, forming a kind of protective society; but in reality they were preparing themselves for a day when one of them would spurt out and become a part of the world of women and then come swaggering back to the collective world of men to say: I know what it’s all about now.
But Hershy, through all of this, felt as though split in two: one part of him involved; the other, violated and destroyed, cast out. He had a great need to purge himself of what he had seen and a still greater need to be told that it was nothing, it was normal, it was nature, it was a bad dream; but he had no one to talk to, not even his father, for, sensing the humiliation, shame, and heaviness his father felt about Rachel, he avoided mentioning her to the only one who shared his secret. He could hardly look at her without fantastic pictures rising in his mind. And, watching the growth of his mother, he began to look for Rachel’s body to change and to shame him completely. Nothing, however, seemed to happen to her, except that she hardly ever talked. Even Joey, it seemed, had stopped seeing her, had stopped blowing his horn outside the window at night. Still, his sight and memory persisted, kept his lips sealed. But in his silence his ears were probed, his heart agitated, his hands and knees made to quiver. In his silence, locked with the grotesque images of his mind, a hard core of loneliness shut him out from everything. Spring released everyone but flung him into a dungeon of silence and fear: a kind of violence began to rage through him.
One Saturday, Cyclops began to tell a story. It seemed so much like what Hershy had seen in the park that he stiffened with fright.
“I seen it. A guy and a girl. I seen it happen.”
“Who? Where? How? What’d they do? What’d they do?”
A fire in Hershey began to curl his hands and burn his eyes.
“I seen them. A guy and a girl. They was big, too.”
“Yah? Yah?”
“They was on the grass. Laying on the grass.”
“Holy. Yah? And then?”
“The guy kissed her.”
“Yah? Yah? And then?”
“He kissed her.”
“All right, all right, he kissed her. Then what?”
“He was on top of her, too?”
“Man, man. And then?”
“I couldn’t see no more.”
“Ah, you one-eyed punk. That all?”
“Then they got up and went away.”
The fire in Hershy crackled and raged up beyond control. He lunged out and hit Cyclops, the wide arc of his blow crashing against Cyclops’ ear. Cyclops fell down and looked up at him with his mouth open and his face white, rubbing his ear. A crazy desire came over him to kick Cyclops right in the mouth, but before he could do it he was tackled and pinned to the ground by the rest of the guys, and then the fire in him welled out of his eyes and scalded his face. When he was released, finally, he got up silently and walked away.
That evening, while eating the left-over chicken and soup from the night before, the sight of Rachel began to feed the smoldering fire that was still in him. There was a peculiar pull in his stomach and it brought thick nauseous saliva to his mouth. Glaring at Rachel, he spit at her and yelled: “I hope you die,” then rushed to the bathroom, but got sick on the way, and then retched for a time. His father held his forehead and his mother trembled over him and Rachel kept saying: “What’s the matter with him anyway?” But he thought he was going to die and somehow he didn’t care; he just wanted to lie down and catch his breath and then die.
Afterward, his mother undressed him and helped him to his daybed, trying both to soothe him and to find out what the matter was, but, getting no answer, she went to the kichen to prepare some tea for him, while Rachel went out to buy a lemon. His father sat beside him and stroked his hair. Hershy finally took a shuddering deep breath.
“What’s the matter, Hershele?”
“You know what’s the matter?”
“Why did you spit on Rachel and then get sick?”
“You know why. It’s what she did. She made you cry and broke your heart.”
“But I’m not crying any more and my heart isn’t broken any more.”
“She made me scared and I hit a kid and almost killed him and now he’ll be mad on me and all the guys’ll be mad on me and I can’t do nothing what all the guys are doing any more.”
His father stared at him, his head wavering.
“See?”
“I see,” his father said.
“So I hate her.”
His father shook his head slowly.
“Don’t you hate her?”
“No.”
“But look what she did.”
“I know. And I wish you could forget it. But you can’t hate something you love. Sometimes you do horrible things to me and Mama, but do we ever hate you for it?”
“No,” he admitted.
“You disturb us and irritate us and make us angry, yes; that’s part of loving someone; but we never hate you. Anything you’re responsible for you can’t hate. I’m responsible for you. If you killed someone, the blame would be part mine, the fault would be part mine, but I’d never hate you for it, I’d cry for you, I’d cry for myself.”
A lump formed in Hershy’s throat; his father’s voice seemed to quiver through him.
“I’m responsible for Rachel, too. If she did wrong, perhaps the fault is mine.”
It ain’t, Hershy wanted to say. It ain’t, Pa.
“But if you love somebody enough, they can’t do wrong. They may not always do the right thing, but they can’t do wrong. Someday, perhaps, you will understand. But Rachel is your flesh and blood, and if she became weak it’s up to us to protect her, to make her strong again, and you can’t do that with hate. Anybody can respect the strong. But it takes a strong person to respect the weak. Let’s be strong, Hershel, you and me, and be good to Rachel. Let’s forget the muscles and bones and flesh, and let’s live like giants in the heart and soul. Rachel needs us now more than ever. She is ashamed and has suffered. Let’s not make her suffer any more.”
“But what if she gets fat and makes a shame on all of us?”
“She won’t get fat and she won’t shame us.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“Nobody’ll find out?”
“Nobody.”
“It’s a secret then?”
“Between you and me.”
“Not even Ma knows?”
“Nobody knows. Only you and me.”
His mother and Rachel came in with a glass of tea. He looked away from Rachel, but when she leaned over and kissed the top of his head, a nerve in him quivered; he whirled about and flung his arms around her, and, through the trembling touch of her lips and her warm breasts he felt the throb of her blood flow through him; it was good to be good on everybody.
Nevertheless, he still couldn’t trust Rachel fully; she might yet shame him and his family and cast them out completely from everybody’s lives. He still felt shaken, and cringed before the images that kept flooding his head of Joey’s huge hairy body and snarling face and Rachel’s full naked body. He still became tight as a fist when anybody looked at Rachel, and he shrank before the eyes of every big guy that looked at him. He still ran every time he saw Joey; tired afterward, everything he had idolized in him felt mangled, left him rocky and unable to stand up. He still felt something hold him back from the guys, though he cried inwardly to become one with them. But he had lost his violent rage. He wanted to be good on everybody, but something held him in check. He strained for some kind of release through Cyclops.
“I didn’t mean it, Cy.” He put his arm around him but Cyclops shrugged it off. “Don’t be mad, Cy.”
He didn’t know how to make Cyclops good on him. He didn’t know what else to say. He fumbled through his pockets and found a wooden whistle his father had made and given him.
“Here, Cy. Take it, but don’t be mad. Take it, huh?”
Cyclops looked away from him.
He didn’t know what else to do. He scrambled through his mind for some stunt that might make him laugh, for some thing he owned which Cyclops really wanted. Feeling condemned, a sudden fear of losing Cyclops and all the guys came over him.
Out of sheer desperation he tackled him and began wrestling with him, and, as they rolled over and strained against each other, Cyclops got limp and stared upward as Hershy straddled him.
“You’re not mad no more, Cy?”
“Ah, you’re full of crap.”
“But you’re not mad no more?”
“Ah, let me alone, will you?”
“Sure, sure, but you’re not mad no more?”
“No, for Christ sake.”
“Here.” He shoved the whistle in Cyclops’ pocket, and, looking up for full acceptance at the guys crowded about, got off him. He helped Cyclops to his feet and put his arm around his shoulders. Then the guys began to yell and slap them on the back; the gang was still intact.
He was released to them almost completely the day Rachel came home so excited she could hardly talk or sit still. She had made good before a theatrical booking agent, whom Joey had introduced her to some time ago, and he had set up a long series of bookings for her. She was going all over the country. She was going to be gone a long time. She was going to dance on a stage all over the country. She was so happy she began to cry.
The day after she left Hershy skipped out on the springboard street ready to fall in love. He lay down with his pals on the slanting roofs, with the great sky above and the alley below, and let himself go.
Boy, if I only had a girl.
What if you did? What would you do?
Yah. What if I did? What would I do?
They would know everything, they felt, the very secret of life itself, if they only knew a girl.
She suddenly appeared, like the word mirage which she was defining. The regular classroom work was finished, and whenever a few minutes remained until the bell rang, teacher played a game of giving value to words. Mirage was a fifteen-cent word.
“Mirage,” she was saying, “is something which you think is there, way off in the distance, but it isn’t. Like, a man is dying of thirst in the desert. All of a sudden, because he’s been thinking of water so much, he sees a lake; but it isn’t there, really. Mirage is an illusion.”
“That’s fine, Emily,” teacher said. “You might call it an optical illusion.”
Gee, Hershy thought. All the things one word can mean.
“Ah,” said Cyclops, who turned about on the seat in front of Hershy. “I bet I can get it wholesale, for ten cents.”
“Ah, you and your wholesale. Shut up. Don’t bother me.”
He wanted to look at Emily undisturbed.
There she had sat, without form, all that year. There she had sat: teacher’s pet, a show-ee-off, an irritation. But now he thought: all the words she knew, dollar ones, too. Man, was she rich. Silver and gold, she had in her head.
There she had sat: a lump, blank, nothing. Now she had straw-colored hair that hung down in soft fluffy curls to the white collar of her middy blouse. There was a nice roundness to her features: nothing bumpy or broken or too long or too hooked: everything was in place, nice, with shiny dark eyes, like his bull’s-eye knick, and a creamy kind of skin.
Emily Foster.
He wrote it on a piece of paper, but it didn’t look right. He printed it. It looked just right. He let the sound of her name go through his mind. Some name, he thought. He wondered how somebody got a name like that. It sounded so right.
Hershel Melov.
He crossed out Hershel and printed Hershy.
Hershy Melov.
The printed name came to him forcefully, as something new, something to contend with. He balanced it against Emily Foster.
Hershy Melov.
He listened carefully to the sound of it.
“Hey,” he whispered to Cyclops. “Say, Hershy Melov.”
“You crazy or something?”
“Say it.”
“All right. Hershy Melov.”
He listened carefully.
“Say it again.”
“Hershy Melov.”
Yah, he decided, somewhat awed. That was a name. A good name. A peachy name. Boy, was he glad his father changed his name. Melovitz. Yach. Melov. Boy, that was some name.
He printed it beside Emily Foster. They looked very good to him. He printed: Tinkers to Evers to Chance. That was a good combination, too. Collins to Weaver to Schalk. That was okay, too. Foster to Melov. Wow!
He wondered where she lived and how he could get to know her. He wondered if he should ask to carry her books home. No, all the guys would see. Should he just follow her? No, all the guys would ask him where he was going. Besides, he might look like a dog. Besides, maybe she lived far. He had to be right home after school and take his father’s supper to the laundry. His ma’d get mad if he didn’t come right home. His pa’d get hungry and wouldn’t be able to work. Suddenly, he got angry at her. Why didn’t she live on his street, right next door? Why did she have to live so far away? But maybe she didn’t live so far away and he could get to know her without being late. But what if it took a long time to get to know her?
The bell rang in the midst of his confusion. He was in back of the line and she was up forward as they marched out of the room. At the first landing he looked at the statue of an Indian, with his head thrown back and his humble arms stretched out, sitting on a horse. Help me, he pleaded. Oh, Indian, with the sad face, help me. Then an idea came to him just as the class reached the last landing. He broke out of the building yelling as loud as he could, jumping and skipping and scattering everybody about him. He was going mad. He was mad.
Look out, he was an auto-racer. Look out, look out for that machine gun: tatatatatata. Make room, he was running the hurdles. Whango, the pole vault. Look out, the fly. Watch it, watch the ball. He can’t see. The sun’s in his eyes. He’s blinded. Look out, look out, a beaner. Klunk. Run for home. You’re making it. Slide, Hershy. Sliiiiiiiiiide …
He slid right in front of Emily, who flung her head to one side and stepped over him as he looked up eagerly for recognition, perhaps a sign of applause, and all the guys laughed. He jumped up and tore her books out of her hands and began running away from her, looking about to see that she followed, and the guys roared. She followed him, yelling and screaming and crying, as he trotted along. He teased her into thinking she could catch him until they were out of sight of their classmates, then he slowed down to a walk.
“Give me those books,” she said.
He folded his arm tightly about the books.
“You give them to me or I’ll report you.”
He smiled at her.
“Are you going to hand those books over?”
His smile broadened.
“That was some trick, huh?” he said.
“You hand those books right over to me now.”
“Boy, it came to me like lightning, that trick.” He doubled over, hugging himself, and laughed out loud.
She stared at him. A sneer came over her face. “Look at him laugh,” she said. “Horse. Horseteeth. Laughing hyena horseteeth.”
The description shocked him, choking his laughter.
“Yah?” he said. He shut his mouth. His teeth suddenly began to feel huge, bulging his mouth way out. He turned his face away.
“Yah,” she said, knowing she had hurt him, wanting to hurt him more. “You greenie, you.”
“I ain’t not a greenie. I’m an American. My father’s a citizen and my uncle was killed in the war.”
“Ho, ho. My great-great-grandfather was in the Civil War. He was a friend of Abraham Lincoln. And my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was in the Revolution. He was a friend of George Washington. You call yourself an American?”
“Yah? What’s so American about them? Didn’t they come over on a boat from the old country? If you want to know, the only real Americans is the Indians.”
“Yah, but you’re still a horseteeth hyena. You’re still a greenie. Don’t you ever wash your teeth?”
“Sure,” he lied. “Every day.”
“Some washer, you are.”
“Yah? If you’re so great, is your father in business?”
“Certainly, he is. What do you think?”
“Well, so’s my father. He’s got a big business. That makes your father and my father the same.”
“That’s what you think. If my father was your father, he’d kill you.”
“Yah?”
“Because you’re a nasty …”
“Yah?”
“You’re an obnoxious …”
The word stumped him. Still, he said: “Yah?”
“You’re impossible.” She stamped her foot on the ground.
“Why? Because I was doing a trick?”
“Some trick.”
“I wanted to carry your books home, but I didn’t know how, and I didn’t want all the guys and girls to know so they should talk. See?”
“Oh?”
Suddenly she changed. Her eyes relaxed and she turned away from him and began walking. She held her head high and proud, and she seemed to bounce, like her curly hair, as she stepped along.
“All right,” she said. “You may carry my books.”
Hershy stepped beside her and walked along silently. Now that they had nothing to fight about, he didn’t know what to say. He wished she’d start up again.
“What is your name?”
“Hershy Melov.”
She began to titter.
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s a funny name.”
“Yah? It’s as good as yours. It’s as good as Emily Foster any day.”
“Is it?”
“Yah.”
“Then why is it teacher sometimes calls you Herbert.”
“Because she stinks.”
“If you’re going to carry my books you’ll have to stop using that vile language.”
“Why, what’d I say?”
“You’re an uncouth young man.”
“Ah, what are you talking?”
“I guess I’ll have to teach you some manners.”
“Ah, bushwa.”
“See what I mean?”
He tried to see. She used too many big words, though. He looked at her instead. She looked like an expensive doll he had once seen in a store, with pink cheeks and soft curls. She glanced at him and he turned away quickly, embarrassed, moving in awkward silence.
“You’re the one who had a fight with Polack once and beat him up, aren’t you?”
He nodded, thrilled by the recognition, feeling his muscles bulge.
“You must like me, huh?”
The question stunned him, made him retreat: it had never occurred to him.
“Do you like me?”
He couldn’t answer.
“Then why do you want to carry my books?”
He shrugged his shoulders. He wished they had something to fight about; it was better.
“Cat got your tongue?”
He shook his head.
“Well, if you won’t tell me, then give my books to me.”
He stepped to one side as she reached for the books and he thrust them away from her.
“Then say nothing, tongue-tied.”
She pouted and walked on silently. Then, flinging her head back, with her hair rushing along her middy collar, she said: “Do I look like Mary Pickford?”
He stared at her, said huskily: “Yah.”
The haughtiness of her face broke down.
“Do I, Hershy? Do I, really?”
“Yah. I think so.”
“Oh, you …”
“No. No kidding.”
For a second there, she almost looked like Rachel. The similarity, and what he had really felt about Rachel before she turned bad and went away, astonished him.
“Well, here we are.” She pointed to a yellow brick house. The bay windows, bordered with stained glass and thick flowery drapes inside them, seemed to squirm in the sun. They hurt his eyes. He faced the park across the street and let only the sun pinch his eyes.
“I’m glad you stole my books, Robin Hood,” she said.
“Yah.”
“Will you do it again sometime?”
“Sometime.”
She jumped up the broad white stone stairs. He called after her: “That was some trick, huh?”
She turned about, letting her chin rest coyly on her shoulder and shook her head, then she disappeared. Slowly, letting his arms dangle, looking at the glitter of the cement walk, he walked home wondering what had happened to him.
His mother pounced on him and shattered the vague, oozy, spacious, dreamy feeling he had had.
All right, so he was late.
She’d give him an all right so he was late. Did he have no sense of duty, no responsibility? His father was working himself to the bone for him, but did he care?
Ah, he wasn’t working himself to the bone for him. He was working himself to the bone for her. She was the one who had driven him into the business. She and Rachel.
She shook him. What was he talking about?
He knew what he was talking about.
What had Rachel to do with it?
He knew what Rachel had to do with it.
What?
He wasn’t saying. He and his Pa knew but he wasn’t saying.
She shook him again. What?
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
She could kill him, she said. He was turning out to be a fiend.
Exhausted, she released him. Her huge belly heaved for breath.
All right, he was turning out to be a fiend. What did she want, never leaving him alone?
She began to feel sorry for herself. She looked at her bulging figure. Give a child your blood, she said. Bring it into the world and let it almost kill you and what do you get? A demon.
All right, he was already at the laundry. So he was a few minutes late. It wouldn’t kill his father.
She’d tear his tongue out if he ever used that expression kill again. Who was he talking about, some bum on the street?
Strange fears worked through his mother, but Hershy didn’t know what they were, didn’t know why she lashed out at him. With the business a reality at last, her aggressive forces suddenly became dammed up. Doubt and a sense of guilt crept through her. Fear also rose, as she watched a change come over Hershy’s father and as the business began to drain him; and with the fear mingled a hope that he wouldn’t be broken. The business had not only taken the seventy-five hundred dollar investment but also another fifteen hundred to get it going. That was something they hadn’t counted on, but once in it there was nothing to do about it. Then, a few days after going into it, Hershy’s father looked up from a newspaper and said: “The carpenters won the strike. A dollar an hour, a forty-four hour week.” He looked bleak, denied a victory, with a sense of lonely defeat, as he said it. The business had to be a success. She could never ask: and if it failed …? There could be no room for doubt; yet, in some tiny crevice, it crept in.
All Hershy knew was that since his father had gone into the business she yelled more and more at him, talked more and more about duty and responsibility, blamed him more and more for anything that went wrong, and that she grew more and more nervous. Was it because she was getting bigger, finding it harder to breathe and move and stand on her swelling legs? Was the thing in her an evil spirit, changing her, taking over her whole being? Or was she scared? Because once he heard her say to his father:
“I hope it comes easy.”
His father tried to reassure her. “This time it will.”
“I hope it doesn’t tear me to pieces.”
“Don’t think about it.”
“What else have I got to think about? Look, like something wild, it grows and grows. It’s all of me.”
“Try not to think about it.”
“Hershel almost killed me.”
Had he? Could he, a little baby, with no muscles, nothing, without knowing it, almost have killed her? How?
“He tried to come out feet first, the little devil. He tried to kick me into a grave. Oh, how he hurt. Then he turned around and came out right. Oh, how he hurt.”
“That was in the old country. It couldn’t happen here.”
“You see what comes from love: pain, suffering, sometimes death.”
“But here they have everything to make it easy.”
“You can talk. You’re safe, sound. You can enjoy your pleasure and go right to sleep. But for my moment of pleasure I’m doomed to agony. The devil must have a hand in this. In this, the devil must dominate God.”
… Or was she like this because his father was hardly ever home now? He came home so late and so tired that he could hardly take off his clothes and lie down to sleep. He woke up so early that every nerve and bone in his body rebelled. It filled her with pity and complaint. He (Hershy) overheard her talking to the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Bromberg. It filled him with disgust.
“Business is no good for love.”
“No?”
“It takes the life out of a man.”
“So?”
“It tears the heart out of a woman. It makes you lonely.”
“But you have plenty of company. Look at your belly.”
“Yes, but without a man by your side the new company makes you feel lonelier. The bed sometimes gets so cold.”
“It’s a hard life.”
“After all, what do we want out of life? Just a little warmth, that’s all. Just a little warmth.”
“True, true.”
… It was all very bewildering. Love had the power to kill; without it, one could die. A baby, without a muscle in its body, could tear a mother to pieces; without it, there was no life. A baby was supposed to be a gift from God; but the devil, too, took his toll. His mother wanted his father to work like a beast, yet when he drove himself too hard she became frightened and lonely and cold. His father, meantime, tried to pacify her; it made him happier, it seemed, to see things in the abstract. For every feeling of joy, he said, there must be one of pain; otherwise one could never know what joy was. Things never came easy; they came with sweat and blood; only then could one realize the exaltation of a thing coming into being. You can’t just want; you have to do something about it; and in the doing is the pleasure and the pain.
“Puff,” his mother answered. “Puff up more clouds. A man philosophizes, a woman suffers: the man has it so easy.”
But Hershy could testify that a man didn’t have it easy. He knew. He had seen his father at work.
A terrifying world of heat, sound, and smell hit him the first time he came into the laundry off the cool shady street of a spring afternoon. The heat made him gasp and glued his nostrils together and burned his throat; for a moment he thought he was on the benches of a Russian steam room. Soon, dripping with sweat, he was a part of the consuming dampness: the steam, the sweating walls, the sloshing water, the wet clothes. Soon, within a building that had been an old stable, he began to vibrate as the whole plant shook with the working machinery. The gears clanked like the sound of freight cars moving on rails. The belts that whirled the washers screeched. The washers swish-sushed back and forth, with the soapy water gushing out of the pocket holes and splattering onto the cement floors and streaming into the foamy gutters. Off to one side two ringers began revolving with a hum, and then, as they hit a whirring speed, they went into a high whine. The sound was so great it was almost impossible to hear a voice. Separated from the plant itself was the boiler room; there, at the source of the plant’s fierce energy and confusion, it seemed quiet and orderly, with only the hot fire sizzling in the furnace and the long flapping belt loping around two wheels and the well-oiled eccentric rods camming silently and the flyballs whirling on top of the engine.
Uncle Irving brought the bundles in with a horse and wagon. His father helped him unload, then both of them weighed and sorted them. Then his father dragged them to the washers, heaved them up, and dumped them into the pockets. His father mixed the soaps and bleach solutions and carried them in buckets and spilled them into the pockets. All the while he turned valves to get water into the washers and turned valves to drain them. Then he pulled the clothes out of the pockets and lugged them to the ringers to extract the water, then carried them to the bins where Uncle Irving was to pick them up for delivery.
His father wore big rubber boots, looked drowned in them as he sloshed up and down the wet pavement. He tended one machine after another, ending an operation and beginning it again. Up and down, over and over, carrying bundles and buckets, mixing solutions, turning valves and pulling levers, his wet hair plastered to his forehead, his damp face growing hollower, his lean body sometimes looking as wilted as the wrung-out clothes.
On Monday and Tuesday his father started the day at five in the morning and didn’t come home until ten-eleven at night. Work slacked down on Wednesday, until there were only a few bundles to wash on Saturday. But then the machinery needed tending and fixing; the bins had to be rebuilt; business details had to be taken care of; there were a thousand things that had to be done to keep the whole plant going. Even on Sundays, he found it necessary to spend a few hours at the plant, to prepare it for the heavy Mondays and Tuesdays.
Hershy knew all this. So did his mother. What more testimony did she need of how hard his father worked than the way he came home at night? Even she, at times, seeing the way the flesh was tightening on his face and body, gasped and became overwhelmed with pity and warned him to slow down before he killed himself. To which his father answered: “The machine is a peculiar thing. It dominates a man. The tool—” he shook his head, remembering sadly, of something loved and forever lost “—is something a man dominates. But a machine—there is only one thing you can be to it: a slave.”
Yes, Hershy could testify. A man did not have it easy. He knew. His mother knew, too. Maybe that’s why she was so scared. But he really knew. He had seen his father at work. He knew another thing, too. He didn’t like the laundry. He hated going there, but he wanted to help. Now, with something else on his mind, aside from the fact that it took him away from his friends and their games, he hated it more. But maybe, he thought, if his father was a success he’d make lots of money and he’d be able to get out of the inside of the laundry and become an office man like Uncle Hymie. Maybe Emily would like him better if his father had lots of money. All girls liked guys with money. He had to help out. It would be nice if he could show off a house nicer and bigger than Emily’s. Ah, he’d say, my father’s richer than your father. She wouldn’t be able to argue back. A fact was a fact. He had to help out.
Boarding a streetcar to go out of the neighborhood always brought a sense of adventure and fear to Hershy. His fear lay in the peculiar sensation of leaving home, that something unknown might happen which would keep him from ever returning; it lay in the hostile faces and bodies towering over him, in being a stranger among strangers, in feeling that nobody cared for him and that nobody would help him if he needed it; it lay in a sense that he might get lost suddenly, forever and hopelessly lost. To prevent this he began to memorize every detail on the way to his father’s laundry, each one marked with a sign for his safe return. Leaving his own neighborhood with its familiar landmarks—Joey Gans’s restaurant and poolroom, the two movie houses across the street from each other, the photo shop filled with familiar faces he could identify, the butter and egg store, the fish market, the butcher store, the barber shop and its revolving candy-stick pole, the baseball scores chalked on the sides of buildings, and the rusty corrugated tin fronts of buildings—a change didn’t occur for a half mile.
Then a big car barn came into view with a hundred shiny tracks that curved into it. The stores began to fritter out. A quiet boulevard. A cigar-store Indian. The photo shop was the same but the faces of the people in the pictures had changed. The same chalk drawings and scoreboards on the sides of buildings, the same barber shops, the same flats on top of the street-level stores. The butcher shops changed, were filled with rabbits and pigs. No butter and egg stores. The same poolrooms, but the guys around them looking different: bigger, tougher. The people on the streets different: lighter hair, bluer eyes, blunter and broader faced, taller, heavier. Factories here and there with water tanks on top of them. A gas tank, a great big round gas tank. Empty lots, rubbled, the same. A drinking trough for horses and an iron post with a horse’s head. The smell changed, heavier, like lard. The sky was more speckled, from smoke. A store with a head painted on the window, split apart with many colors, and gypsies sitting outside in a hundred dirty colors. Two big movie houses with vaudeville attractions. The YMCA. Three carlines crossing. One store like a triangle. Big stores. In the jungled depths of Polack-town. Next stop his.
Excitement also lurked everywhere: in the shiny rails that stretched endlessly; in the lurching motion of the streetcar, which sometimes transported him aboard a ship in a faraway ocean going to a faraway land; in the sense of rushing through space; in the signposts—like the cigar-store Indian and the water trough for horses which made the street open up to the vast expanse of the Wild West, like the gypsies outside their store who could make magic and read minds, like the vaudeville attractions in the big movie houses where he might one day see Rachel, like the YMCA where there were a million games to play; in the wonder, too, of what was going on all about him.
On this day, however, a new sensation worked through him on the way to his father’s laundry. In passing the neighborhood movie house he saw a picture of Mary Pickford. Somehow, it began to blend into an image of Emily Foster and he felt a funny pull in his stomach; he wished he knew what had caused it. He looked up at the motorman, who had just spit a stream of tobacco juice over his head through the open window and was wiping a brown trickle off his chin, wondering whether he could tell him about Emily Foster.
Was it possible, he wondered, that this man with the beefy freckled hands and the bulky shoulders and thick belly, could have been a kid once with a girl like Emily Foster? Behind him stood a hunched-up man with vacant eyes and an open whistle-breathing mouth and deep creases in his cheeks. Ah, thought Hershy, he wouldn’t know. Would anybody else know? He looked through the car: at the empty eyes, the distressed faces, the tense crouches, the uncomfortable slouches. Were all of them kids once with a feeling like he was having? Would they know what was happening to him? Well, maybe his father’d know. He didn’t look like them. At least, he wasn’t a stranger. But how could he talk about it with his father? The guys? Could he ask them? No, they’d kid him, they’d laugh at him. He wished he had a big brother. You could talk to a big brother; he’d know everything; he wouldn’t kid.
The motorman began to dang-dang his bell. A horse and wagon rode the rails in front of the car. The motorman began to yell. The horse and wagon swerved off. Hershy stopped thinking about Emily. The man on the wagon, huddled up with his elbows resting on his knees and with the reins dangling in his hands, looked like Uncle Ben. In passing, he saw that it wasn’t Uncle Ben, but his whole body froze: the motorman stuck his head out of the window and hurled a wad of brown spit at the peddler and yelled: “Hey, you kike bastard, next time I’ll run you down.” The peddler rode on indifferently. The motorman slammed his foot down on the bell a few more times, and, with the car away, looked down at Hershy.
“Boy, these kike bastards,” he said, “clogging up the streets, making money money money, I could kill every one of them. Kid, when you grow up, be a man, don’t let them walk on the same side of the street with you.”
Hershy felt himself shrink from under the motorman’s bloodshot eyes and reddish face.
“You going to be a man, kid? You going to do it?”
“Yah. Yah.”
“Keep the country from going to the dogs. Me, I fought in the war. What did I get for it? A stool I never sit on, an iron fence behind me, a dirty window in front, a bell to dingle, a bunch of autos farting in my face, a Jew on a horse and wagon to slow me up and make me late and put me in dutch with the company, a bunch of fatheads who want me to roll out the carpets every time they get off. A guy goes away, gets himself shot at, and what does he come back to? A beefing wife, a couple of kids who don’t know him from Adam, the same old varicose-vein job, and a bunch of Jews running free on the streets.”
His throat dry, his knees quivering, Hershy backed away from the motorman, slunk behind him, and stepped to the door.
“Let me out, Mister. I got to get out here.”
The motorman whirled his crank and slammed the door open. Hershy ran to the curb and swore defiantly at the motorman, but the door was already shut and the car had trundled past. Then, suddenly realizing that he was in a foreign neighborhood, he began to run. Maybe somebody on the street had heard him swear. He had got off the car three blocks before his stop and he ran hard over the distance. When he got to where he was to turn off to his father’s laundry, he paused to catch his breath; he still had two dangerous blocks of foreign territory to pass before he’d be really safe.
He wedged the package of food under his armpit, pulled his broken-peaked cap down to one side so that he might look tougher, took a deep breath, and then began to walk. The trees between the sidewalk and the curb were the same as on his block. The houses, some of them flush against the walk and some set back from it, were almost the same; they were only a little older and dirtier. A group of three kids were sitting on a porch. He tightened up and began to spit through the side of his mouth.
“Hey.”
He looked straight ahead, his heart hammering and throbbing in his throat, his legs strained like a taut bowstring ready to whing him away.
“Next time we’ll find out who the punk is.”
Safe. He tried to relax but couldn’t. A block and a half to go. A black iron fence began to flicker past. Set back from it was a church. In the garden was the statue of a saint in a long robe, with bowed head and a cross in his hand. A statue of Jesus Christ nailed to a cross, with a kind of diaper around his mid-section, loomed up. He stiffened and spit three times to keep his evil spirit away. (Once, a year ago, he had wandered out of his neighborhood and was attacked by five kids. Because he didn’t know the catechism they knocked him down, pulled his pants off, and found out he was a Jew. Then they dragged him into a church yard to baptize him. They almost broke his arm, as they applied an upward pressure to it behind his back, to get him on his knees. Then, refusing to beg for mercy, feeling that if he did his own God would strike him dead, his mouth filled with blood as a knee rammed his chin. A clot of earth was forced into his mouth, and, when he saw a worm wriggle out in his sputtering, he vomited. He keeled to his side; then, pinned to the ground in the form of a cross, each one drew up a blob of phlegm, and, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, they spit on him and baptized him and ran away at the approach of a priest. Only when the priest, in helping him clean up, assured him over and over that he had not been baptized and that he had not betrayed his father and his mother and his God and that the kids who had tortured him would be doomed to everlasting hell, did he begin to feel alive again.)
At the corner he saw four kids his size playing mumbly-peg. Then he couldn’t help himself. He broke into a dead run and rushed into the laundry out of breath with his face white and his blood still racing madly onward. He had made it again. Once there, he calmed down quickly and the heat of the place helped bring back the blood to his face.
He walked over the wooden floor, parts of which were rotted and splintered from the dampness, through a wooden gate his father had made which led to the office. His father, who had watched the office girl sweat and squirm at work, had built a wooden partition separating the plant from the office. He had also built her two wooden desks. Uncle Irving had been opposed to it: what was he, still a carpenter? But his father said: “For a few dollars and a little labor let a person be a human being, let her be able to go home without having to wring her clothes out and without a broken back and splinters in her arms. God knows, we pay her little enough for her labor.” To which Uncle Irving answered: “All right, break your back and spend our money, but don’t come to me with complaints. Some businessman I’ve got for a partner.”
Hershy tapped the office girl on the head. She looked up from her adding machine and smiled at him. Her wide face seemed to crunch together when she smiled.
“How’s my little sweetheart today?” she asked.
“All right,” he said, warmed by her welcome smile.
He liked her. She always had a big smile for him. Sometimes she let him brush against her, and, when she didn’t move away, he got very excited. Once, when she was showing him how the adding machine worked, he leaned against her shoulder and accidentally put his arm around her and touched her breast. She looked up and shivered, then smiled and wagged her finger at him and said: “Naughty, naughty.” Another time, after he had pecked his name on the typewriter, she pulled him to her. “Why, that’s wonderful, wonderful.” Then she released him and said: “My, my, but you’re getting to be a big boy.” He couldn’t understand why, but when he was close to her he felt tense, dry-mouthed, heart-pounding. Was it that she held the secret that he and all the guys on the street were aching to learn?
He wondered if he could ask her about Emily: was it right that you should get a funny pull in your belly when a picture of a girl got in your head; and what did you talk about, without fighting, when you were with a girl; and how could you know if a girl was your girl? But the engineer stepped in, his white teeth flashing from his grimy face, his light hair coated with coal dust. The office girl looked away and slapped the engineer’s hand down when he tickled her chin and said: “What’s doing, cookie?”
Hershy wondered if she was the engineer’s girl, if … but he was a married man; besides, in his overalls, he looked like a coal bag. Still, he liked the engineer, too. He had swum against the Duke Kahanamoku, the greatest swimmer in the world, and had pitched in the Three-Eye League, and had run the hundred yards in ten flat, and had been a crack fullback, and had done more things than it took the ordinary man a hundred years to do. Hershy, when he sat at his desk in the boiler room, didn’t believe him, because he had a weak chest and his collarbones stuck out and his legs were bowed and his neck was scrawny and his gray eyes looked washed out; but he seemed to know so much about everybody and everything that it was nice listening to him. And when it came to machinery he knew everything.
“Someday,” he warned him, “you’re going to step in your father’s shoes, so you better learn what makes this place tick.” Then he’d mystify Hershy completely as he compared the plant to the human body. “See that engine.” There wasn’t much to see, only the pumping rods and the flyballs. “That’s the heart. Instead of blood it pumps power to all the machines in the plant; it makes all the belts flap and all the wheels go round. See the coal. That’s food, that’s meat and potatoes and bread. You feed it into that big ugly mouth, see. That’s the fire box. See down below. I push and pull the shaker, the waste goes down the grate, and the system is cleaned out, just like when you go on the toilet. Now, that hot fire heats up the water in the boiler on top, and when water boils up what do you get? Steam. That’s right, sonny. Now that steam is like your blood, see. It’s what makes everything tick. It pops off against the engine; then, like the heart, the engine begins pumping, real hard, and it makes all the machinery move. See?”
Hershy’d say, yah, he saw, but he really saw nothing. Everything was hidden. He couldn’t see the water in the boilers, nor the steam in the engine, nor the intricate connections between the engine and the machinery in the plant. All he knew was: it worked. His body worked, too; he didn’t know why. He knew also that the engineer was important to his father and that he made more money than his father. That was another hard thing to understand: a boss making less money than a man who worked for him. His mother cursed the engineer for the salary he made, but his father stood in awe of him: without him, a man of science, the laundry was nothing; in fact, it gave him pleasure, he claimed, to watch a man go about his work with a sure skill and knowledge; the engineer was the master of the machine, just as he had been the master of the tool. As a result, with his father completely mystified by the machine and dependent upon the engineer’s control of the machine’s might, Hershy also stood in awe of him. He wondered, with all the engineer knew, whether he should ask him about girls. But then he might start talking about the heart and the blood and all the things inside that a guy can never see, and he’d get all mixed up, more than before. Maybe he’d ask him some other time.
“What do you say, champ?” The engineer pulled Hershy’s cap down over his eyes. “Hit any Texas leaguers lately?”
Hershy pulled his cap up. “No,” he said.
“Got to keep the balls hot, kid.” The engineer winked at the office girl, who turned away red in the face. “Got to keep up that old batting average, champ. Remind me to tell you sometime what them Texas leaguers did to my batting average in the Three-Eye League.”
No, thought Hershy, he couldn’t talk about it with the engineer. He might say: Remind me to tell you about a little girl I had when I was four; by the time I was going on twelve, like you, I was an old old hand already.
He walked on to the wet floor of the plant. His father was walking down the aisle, pulling levers and twisting valves, amid the sliding belts and revolving wheels and washing machines. His boots were shiny and his bare arms were strained and his eyes looked buried between his forehead and cheekbones and his straight black hair was plastered to his scalp.
“How’s it, Pa?”
“Oh, hello, Hershel. Look out, you’ll get wet.”
Hershy jumped back as a flooded washer, in its backward turn, gushed over. His father pulled a lever and let some of the soapy water splash into the gutter below.
“What’s the good word, Pa?”
“Nothing. Nothing.”
“Need some help?”
“No.”
“Can’t I do anything?”
“Later. Later.”
His father stopped a machine and dragged the bundles to a ringer. He raised a lever. The high spin of the ringer began to slow down as his father walked away to the washing machines. The tight ball of clothes began to scatter, until, like a tightly woven rope had splintered to shreds, the clothes lay full and limp in the aluminum shell. Hershy wondered how, without hands, the clothes were wound up and wrung out and unraveled. His father came back, took out the water-extracted clothes, and dumped the wet wash into the ringer. Hershy pulled the lever down and started the spinning; he had helped out. His father patted his back.
“It’s easy, Pa. Anybody can do it.”
“That’s right. Anybody.”
“When you going to eat?”
“Later. Later.”
“How come you don’t go out to eat?”
“I don’t have the time. Who’ll tend the machines?”
“I will.”
“When you get older. There’ll be plenty of time for you to work when you get older.”
“You mean you don’t want me around?”
“No. You can go home and play. Play while you have a chance.”
He lingered, feeling guilty; he really wanted to help. He also wanted to get back home, too. Maybe after supper he’d go over to the park and see Emily outside her house.
The engineer walked by. Hershy’s father asked him if he’d watch the machines while he grabbed a bite to eat.
“Sure, sure,” said the engineer.
Hershy followed his father with the package of food through the boiler room out into the alley. His father sat down on a wooden crate, and, closing his eyes for a moment, leaned heavily against the building. Hershy watched the sweat begin to dry on his skull-like face.
“You’ll catch a cold, Pa.”
His father shook himself and took a deep breath, as though coming out of a deep sleep. He opened the package and began to eat a salmon sandwich. He fumbled about the paper and brought up a pint bottle of milk. Opening it, he drained half the bottle before he set it down.
“Pa, we going to be rich someday?”
“I hope so.”
“When?”
“Someday.”
“Do all girls like rich guys?”
“I suppose so.”
“Then we got to be rich.”
“Why? Do you have a girl?”
“Who? Me?”
“Then don’t worry about it.”
“But we ain’t rich now, are we?”
“No. We’re poorer than we ever were.”
“Why? Because the engineer makes all the money?”
“No.”
“Because you used up all our money?”
“Yes.”
“But when we get rich we’ll have a big house, huh?”
“Yes.”
“And a car and everything, huh?”
“Yes.”
“When’ll we be that rich? By the summer? By next year?”
“It takes time.”
“Then maybe we’ll move in a big house by the park on Sacramento Street, huh?”
“Maybe.”
His father bit into another sandwich. Somehow, he wasn’t interested in talking. He looked more like he wanted to sleep. Lately, he never seemed interested in talking. He didn’t seem to care what was happening. He wiped his milky mouth with his hairy forearm.
“Pa, do I have a grandfather?”
“No. They’re both dead.”
“But I had a grandfather, didn’t I?”
“Certainly.”
“Did I have a great-grandfather, too?”
“Certainly. That was my grandfather.”
“How about a great-great-great-great-grandfather?”
“You had them, too.”
“Who was they?”
“I don’t know.”
“How come other people know who theirs was?”
“Why are you so interested suddenly?”
“Somebody said they had a great-great-great-great-grandfather in the American Revolution.”
“Oh.”
“What did mine do?”
“Yours? Your grandfather was the greatest of them all”
“Yah? Who was he?”
“Adam, the first man in the world.”
“No kidding, Pa.”
“It’s true. All Jews are descended from Adam. Even the goyishe bible says so. So next time somebody boasts about their ancestors you tell them you’re a descendant of Adam’s. Hear?”
“Yah. How come you know so much, Pa?”
A weak smile appeared on his father’s face.
“If I could only know so much as you, Pa.”
“You will, Hershel. Much more. Much much more.”
“I’d win every argument.”
His father stood up and took a last deep breath of air and walked back into the laundry.
“You can go home now, Hershel.”
“Okay. But any time you want some help let me know.”
He still lingered on, feeling guilty in not helping. But his father paid no attention to him; the machines began to absorb him again. He wished his father was like he used to be, stronger-looking, and giving all his attention to him whenever he wanted it. Now he seemed to be inside himself all the time.
“Pa, do you wish you was a carpenter again?”
His father didn’t answer him. A hundred spouts of dirty soapy water spilled out of the holes of a washer and splattered Hershy’s shoes and stockings. Hershy decided, finally, to leave.
Hershy began to train his hair with water and vaseline, and finally managed to get a clean unbroken part on the side. He brushed his teeth twice a day and no longer rebelled when his mother insisted upon his changing into clean clothes. He longed for long pants but was told he wouldn’t get them until he got into high school. He studied the big guys, especially when they were with girls: the way they walked and talked and looked, wondering what they talked about and what was happening to them as they walked or sat or stood still. The image of Rachel and Joey began to blur: as something without meaning which he could no longer relate to himself; as something, almost, that had not happened, though sometimes it disturbed him in his sleep. In fact, with her gone, he began to miss her, as his mother and father did, for it felt strange and lonely about the house without her.
From time to time, when she sent a picture postcard from some different part of the country, he could almost see her getting dolled up and eating supper with him, and he could almost hear her singing voice and smell her nice powdery skin. And he could almost hear himself say to her, after a breathless trip through all the wonders she had seen and done: Rachel, what’s a girl really like, what do they want, how do they like a guy to be, what do you talk about with them, how are you supposed to feel? Maybe she’d tell him. He wished she was home again, as much as his mother and father did.
He also wished, as he observed himself in the mirror and began to estimate himself, that he had dark curly hair and that his ears didn’t stick out and that his teeth wouldn’t make his mouth bulge and that his nose wasn’t so bony and that his eyes were wide and dark insead of light and sunken. He wished he was six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a big chest and narrow hips and strong legs, with muscles busting out all over. For, when he looked at his bony knees and the thin fuzz on his shapeless legs, at his tight white skin with only his ribs and two nipples designating his chest, at his flat waist and bony pelvic region, and at his narrow arms and shoulders, he saw himself as something not yet formed. He became helpless at the sight of himself; he’d never become a man. Time, to him, became a stationary thing; it never moved. It seemed to him that he had lasted a century and that nothing had changed about him. Growing up was endless.
His mother, noticing his change (though he thought she was too absorbed with worry about the business and his father and the growth within her), clasped her hands and screamed with delight: my, how he was growing.
Yah-yah, he sing-songed.
She concluded that he had a girl.
He wouldn’t admit that he had a girl, not even to himself.
Soon he’d be coming to her, she knew, to say he wanted her to meet his sweetheart.
He didn’t have a girl, he growled.
Who was she? What was she like?
She was like nothing. He didn’t have nothing.
Then why was he so impatient about long pants and growing tall? Why did he glare at the clock and the calendar and curse them? Why did he brush his teeth and wash himself and comb his hair without being told?
Because. That’s why.
Pisher, sissy, monkey-face, she ridiculed him. So young and he had girls on his mind already. How time flew. Yesterday he was in diapers. Yesterday he had stood up and had taken a step and had fallen on his face. Yesterday he was a sick baby on a ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Now look at him. Look at him bristle. Look at him worry. Look at him die with impatience. Look at him. Look at him. How time flew.
She crunched his face in her hands and kissed him on the lips. He broke away from her, bewildered by her emotion. Then she got sad. Her face blurred in the shadows of Time. Yussel was gone: forever. Rachel was gone. Soon Hershy would be going away. Oh, she knew. A girl came and the boy went. A girl came and a child suddenly became his own boss. Soon everybody would be gone. Soon, though she was going to give birth to a new baby, she’d be left alone with only his father. Soon, soon. Yesterday’s dream, today’s past. How time flew.…
Time.
For his mother it flew. For his father there was no time; there wasn’t a second of the day that didn’t consume him; time was a hungry mouth; it ate him up alive. For Hershy, time stood still. It was a funny world.
Time left him in a state of suspense, too. Was Emily going to be in school the next day? What was she going to look like? What was she going to wear? Would she turn around and glance at him? Would she talk to him? Would he walk her home? Could he think up a stunt to get him away from the guys so that he could walk her home? Then what would they talk about? What would they do? Couldn’t he think up any games both of them could play? … Time left him with a sense of entering unknown vistas of experience; it left his cluttered heart and mind on the brink of bottomless chasms. He wanted to give but didn’t know how. He wanted to take but didn’t know what. Time brought him to a dictionary; it solved a problem.
“Hey, you’re so smart, tell me what this means. Quagga.”
“What, smarty?”
“It’s a horse, see; like a zebra, see; with stripes, see.”
“Where’d you learn that, from a dictionary?”
“No,” he lied. “Think I read the dictionary like you? I seen a quagga in the zoo.”
“You mean, you saw a quagga.”
“All right. Saw.”
“And I don’t read the dictionary, smarty.”
“You do too.”
“How do you know? Have you ever seen me?”
“Saw, not seen. See?”
“Seen is right, the way I used it.”
“Saw-seen, what’s the diff? I know you read the dictionary.”
“You’re a dirty, nasty, supercilious, unconscious, for saying that.”
“Yah? Then how do you get them dollar words, from your own head?”
“Yes, see? At night, when I’m asleep, they come right into my mind. Sometimes I make up a whole poem from my own mind when I’m sleeping and it has the most beautiful words in the world. See?”
“Ah, baloney.”
“If you talk to me like that, I won’t let you talk to me any more.”
“Okay, don’t talk to me then. Who can understand you anyway?”
Silence.
“Then don’t talk to me.”
Silence.
“Ah, for Cry Yike.”
Silence. Then:
“You going to use that word, quagga, tomorrow?”
“No.”
But when teacher began weighing the value of words, Emily gave the class the word he had presented to her, and his heart turned over.
Once he gave her a real present, at a priceless cost.
Many times, after delivering his father’s supper and trying to help out at the laundry and after eating his own supper, he sneaked out of the neighborhood through the alley, so that he could avoid meeting his pals, and went to where Emily lived. On the park side of the street, opposite her yellow house with the squirming bay windows, there was a large clearing of soft earth and grass, which, as the sun sank, became shadowed and cooled by the tall trees surrounding it. There, he’d do handstands and cartwheels and somersaults, hoping she’d see him through the windows. Sometimes she came out and passed by with a girl friend and, watching him begin to perform twice as hard, she said: “Who is that strange little boy over there? What queer things he does!” Sometimes, though, she came over alone. “You get away from in front of my house, you conceit, you show-off, you braggart, you acrobat.” But he knew that she liked his stunts, because after a little fight she’d sit down on the grass and she’d scream with delight as he wore himself out with more stunts; then tired, he’d sit down beside her and feel himself drawn very close to her, beyond their desperate awkwardness and agonizing silences.
But one evening she didn’t appear at all, neither in her window nor outside. He wore himself out, performing and watching for her, wondering what had happened to her; but when the lights went on in her house and came out on the street, he knew that she was home and had ignored him and that she wasn’t going to come out. He dived into the grass on his hands and stretched out exhausted. Presently, through the swelling sound of the crickets and the soughing of the trees overhead, he felt the whole earth move against him, lifting him high high, until it became a huge ball with himself dangling over a curved edge of endless space. Then, looped in the incessant swirl of the cricket’s sound, he rolled up to his knees, rolled up to his feet, and, feeling as small as the cricket, began to walk home.
On his way, he heard the sound of a mandolin. It seemed to reach out to him and, as though grasping him by the hand, it led him to Old Man Parker’s basement flat. Mr. Parker was the only real American that lived on the street. Nobody knew what he did and how he lived, but Hershy’s mother once said: “What does he have to do? He’s a genuine American. Isn’t that enough?” Outside of his mandolin playing he was always reading books and sometimes he recited poems. When he talked his words sounded more foreign than anybody Hershy knew.
Hershy looked through the window and saw the old man sitting in candlelight, plunking his mandolin, his shadow huge on the wall and his gray beard and hair and clothes yellowed by the light. Mr. Parker saw him suddenly and stopped playing. He rose slowly and seemed to creak himself as he opened the creaking door.
“Come in, son. O enter, son.”
Hershy walked in timidly. The place was dusty, as unkempt as Mr. Parker, and smelled of old age, loneliness, and mothballs.
“Sit down. O please sit down.”
Hershy sat down stiffly on a soiled wooden chair and leaned against an old coat that was draped around it. A cloud of dust rose and the springs began to screech as Mr. Parker eased himself into a rocking chair. His eyes seemed to run and his tongue was a fiery red in his yellow-gray beard when he spoke.
“Anything wrong, son? What makes you so pensive and silent?”
Hershy felt that an ant was crawling down his back. He glanced at a spider web across a shelf of books and wriggled his shoulders. He said: “Nothing.”
“Have you lost your best friend? Your dearest sweetheart?”
The phrase frightened him, in the way it was said. He felt himself wanting to leap up and run, in the way Mr. Parker’s head wobbled as he leaned forward.
“Do not worry, son. I am an old man dried by a century. I am a lonely old man with an ancient past. Do not see sadness in my weak eyes. If there are tears, see gratitude in them.”
Hershy gulped and tried to relax. Mr. Parker always talked funny, like he was remembering something and reciting it, his voice dry and froggy, the words matted by the shaggy hair that covered his whole face. Hershy could almost feel Mr. Parker’s voice boom in his belly. He could almost feel the heavy-veined, wrinkled, shaggy hands upon him, as they quivered. He felt himself recoil. But the old man was a real American. Maybe he’d know Emily better if he could know a real American.
“Why don’t you play some more, Mr. Parker?”
“Do not be frightened, son. I am an old man in a dusty basement. But you are youth. O youth. The lovers, the creators, the vital ones. I will write you a song.”
Mr. Parker rose and went to a cluttered roll-top desk. He fumbled about for some paper, opened a book, and with a trembling hand began to write. Hershy watched, both frightened and fascinated, rooted to his chair. Mr. Parker folded the paper, then got up and put it in Hershy’s shirt pocket. And then Hershy almost leaped with terror as he felt the trembling old hand on his head and heard a new note, almost of frenzy, come into Mr. Parker’s voice:
“O camerado close! O you and me at last, and us two only.
O a word to clear one’s path ahead endlessly!
O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!
O now I triumph—and you shall also;
(Mr. Parker fumbled for Hershy’s hand)
O hand in hand—O wholesome pleasure—O one more desirer and lover!
O to haste firm holding—to haste, haste on with me.”
Hershy flung Mr. Parker’s hand off his head and rushed out of the door. He ran wildly down the block and finally stopped. He didn’t know what had happened, except that he had had a feeling of being engulfed, that he couldn’t breathe, like suddenly he was drowning in a sea of wriggling veins and yellow-gray moss. It was when he began to scratch his head, puzzled and wondering why he had got so scared, that he missed his skull cap. He walked back stealthily to the basement flat. Mr. Parker was hunched over his desk, his head on his arms, his back shuddering, and great sobs tore out of his throat. The terror Hershy had felt had run out in his flight; in its stead a deep sense of pity welled up. He tiptoed in through the open door and took his cap off the floor and stepped out without making a sound.
The following day he couldn’t help but dramatize the evening before to himself. And when he presented Emily with the poem that was written for him he thought he had risked his very life for it.
“Here,” he said. “A poem I wrote for you. I almost died to do it.”
She pecked his cheek and ran away and left him standing in a bewildered straitjacket of joy. But the next day, without warning, she stepped up to him in the park, just as he was getting to his feet from a somersault, and slapped his face.
“You’re a dirty, nasty, filthy-minded person, you, and you ought to get your mouth washed with soap and water until the day you die, you you you filthy.”
“Why, what’d I do?”
“My mother told me what you wrote. You’re a foul, evil-minded, dirty little boy, she said, and I must never see you again.”
She handed back the poem; it was what Mr. Parker had recited to him the night before, and below it was written—by Walt Whitman, who was also so misunderstood.
“Besides, my mother said I have no business playing with a dirty little Jew. See?”
The words shocked him: he had never considered whether she was Jewish or not.
“Yah?” he said, his breath coming hard.
“Yes. I’m never to see you again. Now beat it, you dirty little Jew.”
His fists tightened and he glared at her and for a moment he couldn’t move; but when she turned her back on him and walked away and he saw her curls bounce haughtily on her shoulders, something inside him seemed to tear loose. He ran over and kicked her with all his might. He looked down at her as she screamed and cried on the ground, then his heart seemed to drop out of his hands as they uncurled, and he walked home with a great emptiness. He met some of his pals sitting on the curbstone under the light of the lamppost outside his house. Listening to them talk and yearn, he declared solemnly: “Ah, they all stink out loud.”