Last Respects (11 page)

My mother was a rotten cook. As a result, what we didn’t finish at our evening meal had to be thrown out. There were never any tasty leftovers to put in my lunch bag the next day. Furthermore, my mother never seemed to get the hang of making a sandwich. I don’t mean fancy three-deckers, or the tricky four-color inventions that now separate the short stories from the sanitary-napkin ads in our national magazines. I mean any old sandwich. Occasionally, when I offered to show my mother how the mothers of the other boys in my class made their sons’ sandwiches, she told me to hold my excessively overgrown mouth. I translate literally. In Hungarian the admonition doesn’t sound so awkward. Merely nasty.

Nobody ate sandwiches in Hungary, my mother said, and she had not come to this country to learn stupid tricks. Anything she did not know how to do was stupid. As a result my lunch usually consisted of a big
toochiss
roll cut down the middle and smeared liberally with butter or chicken fat, a couple of pieces of fruit, and a pale green empty Saratoga #2 bottle refilled with milk. My father always kept a case of Saratoga #2 mineral water under his bed. He drank a pint bottle every second morning of his life. My father worried constantly about his
moogin,
Yiddish for bowels.

My worry on that morning after the All-American semifinals remained just as constant. What was I going to tell George about what had happened the night before? As he headed toward me, I saw George was munching a cabbage leaf. He had just chiseled it from Chink Alberg. Chink’s mother used cabbage in his sandwiches the way, I learned years later, uptown women use lettuce. It was obvious that if I wanted to hold George off, I would have to do better than cabbage leaves. I examined my lunch bag. I had finished my roll and milk, but I still had a banana and an orange. I pulled them from the paper bag.

“Here,” I said, holding out the fruit. “You can have these.”

“And you can have this, you little louse,” George said.

A few stunned moments had gone by, and I could actually see George walking away from me, back across the yard toward Chink Alberg, before I realized that my banana had joined George’s fist in delivering the belt in the kisser.

I don’t feel I should go into my character as of today. Anyway, I don’t want to. The years take their toll. But in those days I was not a coward. Until that day in the J.H.S. 64 schoolyard, nobody had ever laid a hand on me without getting paid back. George was the exception. I stood up and went across the yard to the toilet, turned on the tap, and washed the squashed banana from my face. I did it without resentment. The night before, George had been within sight of a medal. I had kicked it away from his outstretched hand. I had earned my humiliation.

Earned it, yes. But liked it, no. Before the bell rang summoning me back upstairs to class, I had taken care of my face by washing it, and I had pulled together the cracks in my ego by adding George Weitz’s name to what my mother called her
verbissennah
list. Some day, I didn’t know when or how, I would pay him back for that shot in the mouth.

Until that day came, however, I had to cope with my mother. What was I going to do with this stranger who had come out of the woodwork in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House gym to lose me a medal, lead me into a crazy conference with a couple of Italians behind a window that said
Meister’s Matzoh Bakery, Inc.,
and earn me a belt in the kisser from George Weitz? Answer: stall.

This seemed easy enough. Several clearly defined opportunities presented themselves. My weekdays were broken up into neatly defined units.

Morning to three
P.M.
belonged to J.H.S. 64. From four to six I was in the hands of Rabbi Goldfarb in his
cheder
on Columbia Street. Six-thirty to about seven-thirty was what my mother called “sopper” time. After that, until ten-thirty, I worked in Mr. Lebenbaum’s candy store around the corner on Avenue C. The rest was not exactly silence, but close enough: on East Fourth Street you learned very early how to sleep surrounded, like the seed in an avocado, by a fatty layer of outside noises.

As an opportunity for stalling my mother, I saw at once that supper didn’t count. My father would be there, at the kitchen table, as he always was. It would be simple enough to avoid my mother merely by concentrating on him. Well, maybe not simple. My father was silent most of the time. The rest of the time, when he came edging timidly into the silence with a remark, what he said was not exactly stop-press news. But he got through his evening meal, as he got through the rest of his life, without creating any tensions around him. No, stalling my mother at that time would not be too difficult.

There was, then, only one danger spot. The hour between my departure from J.H.S. 64 on Ninth Street and my arrival in Rabbi Goldfarb’s
cheder
on Columbia Street.

This time was always spent in hurrying from Ninth Street to Fourth, dumping my schoolbooks, downing the glass of milk and slice of honey cake or plate of
eierküchel
my mother had set out for me on the kitchen table, and then either hotfooting it or hitching a wagon ride to Columbia Street. This interlude should have been pleasant. My mother was a rotten cook, true, but at that time I didn’t quite appreciate the fact that good cooks were preferable to bad. Food was food. My mother’s
eierküchel
sopped up milk satisfactorily, and her honey cake, like anybody else’s honey cake, was sweet. Unfortunately, she acted about them the way a gold miner in a Jack London story watched the assayer test the ore the weary prospector had managed to bring back to civilization.

First bite. My mother: “It’s good?” Me: “Wait till I chew it.” I chew it. My mother: “Well?” Me: “Yeah.” My mother: “Yeah what?” Me: “Yeah, it’s good.” My mother: “That’s all you can say?” Me, in English: “No, but that’s all you’re going to hear.” My mother: “Speak so I can understand.” Me: “I said it’s the best honey cake you ever made.” My mother: “So why do you take such small bites?” I take a big bite. My mother: “Don’t eat so fast. You’ll get sick.”

I never had. But this just might be the day. It was a risk I decided not to run. When the three o’clock bell rang, I did not go home. Carrying my schoolbooks, I headed down Avenue C. I got as far as Second Street before an ice wagon came clopping along, heading my way. In those days ice wagons were the only vehicles in the neighborhood that had a nice low-slung wooden step on the back. I hopped on. The horses made good time. Too good. When I hopped off in front of Rabbi Goldfarb’s
cheder,
I was early. I could tell by the garbage cans on the sidewalk.

Today, of course, I own a wristwatch. If I forget to wind it, I can always, as I move around town, learn the time of day by looking up at the Paramount clock or at the jittery little device in front of the IBM Building on Madison. Even in those days the clock atop the Con Edison tower on Fourteenth Street was considered pretty accurate. But to see the Con Edison tower from the arena in which I spent my early years you had to go up to Avenue A for a clear view north, and that was going a bit far to learn it was suppertime. Aside from the J.H.S. 64 school bells, therefore, which were as inexorably accurate as the East River tides, the only reliable timepiece to which I had access were the two garbage cans in front of Rabbi Goldfarb’s
cheder.

The
cheder
was located on the top floor of a three-story faded red brick building. It looked a little peculiar, to me anyway, among the crumbling, crowded, leaning-against-each-other six-story dirty gray tenements of Columbia Street. The street floor was occupied by a stable. Here were housed the horses used by local distributors of ice and coal and by the many undertakers who did business in the area.

Above the stable, on the second floor, a heavily bearded scroll writer and his wispily bearded assistants worked on lettering the Torahs that were ordered for presentation to different synagogues on special occasions, and the prayer cloths, embossed prayer books, and phylacteries that were the traditional gifts from parents to sons at their bar mitzvah ceremonies. The top floor of the building was used as a synagogue on Saturdays and special holidays by a burial society composed of immigrants from a small town in the Ukraine, who were held in contempt by my mother. Russian Jews?
Pfeh!
She didn’t exactly spit. After all, she did all the cleaning around the house. But she made her point.

Years before I met him, Rabbi Goldfarb, who may or may not have come to America from this Ukrainian town, seemed to have grasped the fact that six days a week, not counting weeks containing special holidays, the burial society’s top-floor synagogue was not used. He made some sort of rent deal with the burial society, and established his afternoon school in their quarters. When my mother enrolled me, Rabbi Goldfarb had a reputation on East Fourth Street as one of the best
melameds
in the business.

This meant his teachings took hold. He could be counted on to turn a “nice Jewish boy”—a term employed by all parents for all sons even if the little bastards had already displayed the interests of Jack the Ripper and the proclivities of Boss Tweed—into a “good Jew,” a term that didn’t exactly defy definition but certainly resisted it. More accurately, nobody bothered to make the definition. Why bother? Who wasted time defining Mt. Everest? There it was. A great big fat mountain. There we all were. Good solid unimpeachable Jews.

During the day, while I and the rest of his pupils were soaking up America’s gentile culture in schools like J.H.S. 64, Rabbi Goldfarb moved through the neighborhood, the way veins of fat marble a good steak, performing good works. He presided at funerals. He cemented friable marriage relationships. He advised troubled mothers. He read the riot act to troublesome sons. He helped arrange the bringing over of relatives from Europe. For all these services he received a fee, of course, but he was famous for leaving the size of his emoluments to the discretion of the people he served. Not so with his fees for teaching in his
cheder.
These were fixed as strictly as his rules about punctuality.

Rabbi Goldfarb always arrived at his
cheder
sometime between three-forty-five and four o’clock. His pupils were due at the same time. It was not essential that he get to class ahead of them. There was nothing to prepare. Whatever it took to transform a nice Jewish boy into a good Jew, Rabbi Goldfarb had it all in his head. The few minutes between his arrival and the time his big silver onion watch showed four o’clock, he spent in hanging up his coat, visiting a hall toilet that would have been spurned by the men and women imprisoned in the Black Hole of Calcutta, and polishing up his chair rung.

This piece of wood, about twenty inches long, was to Rabbi Goldfarb’s life as a pedant what Excalibur was to Arthur as a king. Rabbi Goldfarb twirled it as a badge of office. He used it as a pointer. He polished it as a tension reliever. And he employed it as an instrument of punishment.

The causes for punishment were two: stupidity and tardiness. A few moments before four sharp, Rabbi Goldfarb emerged from the toilet, buttoning his fly, and started the day’s lesson with whatever pupils were present. Whenever the door opened, after his watch showed four o’clock, Rabbi Goldfarb would dart forward, and without listening to the inevitable explanation or even giving the offender an identifying glance, begin to swing his chair rung. He always aimed for the ankles. He rarely missed. When he did, Rabbi Goldfarb took another cut at the offender. He never missed twice. It hurt like hell, but he made his point: nice Jewish boys who expect to grow up to be good Jews get to
cheder
on time.

I always did. After my first experience with Rabbi Goldfarb’s chair rung, anyway. In fact, after that I was always early. It was easy enough to tell just how early by a glance at the two garbage cans on the sidewalk near the entrance to the building.

It was a time when few people in that neighborhood used tinned foods. And most bottles were returnable for the deposit. Nobody threw them out. So that garbage cans usually contained mostly soft materials. Almost everybody, however, used coal for heating. So did the owner of the stable on the ground floor of this building. As a result, on top of most garbage cans there was usually a mound of ashes. East Side ashes in those days always contained pieces of black rock that had been dumped into the coal by the seller to fatten his profit and, naturally, had refused to burn for the customer. Every boy who arrived early for Rabbi Goldfarb’s
cheder
paused at the garbage cans to pick through the ashes for one or more of these black rocks before he went upstairs. These rocks were our only protection against the rats.

On the afternoon following the All-Manhattan rally eliminations, when I hopped off the ice wagon in front of Rabbi Goldfarb’s
cheder
on Columbia Street, the ashes on top of the garbage cans were two symmetrical mounds. The conical grayish-white masses had not yet been disturbed. So I knew I had arrived first, and knew it was not yet a quarter to four. I pawed through the ashes at the top of both garbage cans and selected four black rocks. They were the best I had ever found. The smallest was as big as a baseball.

I shoved three of them under the straps of my schoolbag the way a Cossack might have shoved bullets into his bandolier. Holding the fourth rock in my hand, I started up the stairs. I always felt, when I did this, as though I were a character in a novel by James Fenimore Cooper stalking Indians through the Primeval Forest instead of rats up a flight of Columbia Street stairs. The stairs were so decayed that the wood sank under my feet. I always hopped my way up fast, from step to step, afraid that if I remained in one spot too long, my weight would tear through the step below. This gave me the feeling I was climbing a rope ladder. I moved upward as though I were tunneling through a layer cake from the baking pan to the top layer of icing. Up through the ground-floor smell of manure. Up through the second-floor smell of unwashed Talmudic scholars. And finally out into the complicated stink of Rabbi Goldfarb’s domain. I tiptoed across the rotted wood of the landing and put my ear to the
cheder
door. Like Chingachgook with his ear to the ground, I could feel my heart respond with a leap of excitement. At the other side of the warped and cracked plywood slab I could hear the rustling sounds of my quarry. There was no doubt about it. I had arrived first.