Last Respects (17 page)

The following morning, as soon as my father went off to work, my mother tore the card to bits and flushed them down the toilet. Now, three days later, she was telling him he was crazy.

“But, Chanah,” my father said. “I read the postal. It said the meeting is tomorrow.”

“You’re crazy,” my mother said. Like many people of much vigor but little imagination, she believed firmly in the persuasive powers of repetition. “Hurry up and get out of here,” she said. “Do you want to be late?”

It was like asking Napoleon if he wanted to come straggling in for his coronation. What else did the poor bastard have to live for?

“You want more?” my mother said when my father was out of the house, on his way to a meeting that was scheduled to take place the following night.

“No,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”

I was also not very fond of my mother’s
kreplach.
She made them, as she made everything else she put on our table, grudgingly. As though she felt her time could have been better employed in some more useful pursuit. Years later, when I thought of my mother in the kitchen, I would get a picture in my mind of Madame Curie. Not only because they looked somewhat alike, but because I could imagine how the discoverer of radium might have felt at a moment when she was dragged away from her cauldrons of pitchblende to darn one of Pierre’s socks.

“It doesn’t matter,” my mother said. “There will be a lot of good things to eat at the Shumansky wedding.”

“We’re not guests,” I said.

“We’re better than guests,” my mother said. “Without us they wouldn’t have a wedding. If you’re late I’ll save you some
kishke.”
She looked at the alarm clock on the icebox. “Better get dressed. It’s under the mattress.”

I went out to the combination storage closet and bedroom at the far end of the flat in which I slept. My freshly laundered scout uniform was laid out neatly under my mattress for its final press. I put it on with a certain amount of uneasiness. I had not worn my uniform since the night my mother dragged me out of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House gym during the One-Flag Morse contest. When I came back into the kitchen she said, “You look nice.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Better go now,” my mother said. “There’s a lot to do.”

Pulling on my sweater, I said, “Walter knows?”

“Of course he knows,” my mother said irritably. “What do you think?”

Think? I had forgotten what the word meant. All I did was worry. I had not seen the tall man with the southern accent and the turtleneck sweater since the night on the dock when my mother and I had surprised him unloading sacks of booze from the
Jefferson Davis II.
But I knew my mother had seen him because her whole plan for the Shumansky wedding had been built around Walter’s cooperation. My father may not have known what was going on, but I did. Anyway, I thought I did. I had heard my mother tell Walter that first night on the barge that she would split her profits with him. They had obviously agreed, after I left the barge, on how to do it. I decided then, as I have decided many times in subsequent years, that the smartest thing to do was not to think. Worry, yes. What could you do about that? But think? Who needed it?

“All right,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”

“Don’t talk to anybody,” my mother said.

This proved to be surprisingly easy. What was working for me was the time of day. It was a few minutes before six. The starers were indoors. It was the hour when most families on the block were having their evening meal. I got all the way up Fourth, along Avenue D, and into Ninth Street without seeing anybody I knew.

Near the Avenue B corner, as I was approaching J.H.S. 64, I saw my old R.A.I teacher coming out of the building. It was pretty late for a teacher to be leaving the school, but Miss Hallock had a reputation as a nut who never went home until she had finished correcting every paper the members of her class had turned in that day. I slowed down until she crossed Avenue B and disappeared into Tompkins Square Park on her way to the Astor Place subway station. Then I put on a burst of speed. I made it around the corner and into the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House without anybody seeing me. Anyway, without my seeing anybody who might have been interested in seeing me.

I was swept by a feeling of pride. Since that night on the dock, when she had put her hand on my shoulder and it had occurred to me for the first time that I liked her, I had wanted my mother to think well of me. Crossing the white marble lobby, and trotting down the stairs to the troop meeting room, I couldn’t help thinking my mother had put her faith in someone worthy of her.

This opinion changed abruptly the moment I opened the door. Mr. O’Hare was sitting at the table in front of the room. He looked up in surprise from his black looseleaf program book. He had apparently been making notes in it with his gold Eversharp.

“Well, I do declare,” the scoutmaster said. “It seems to be our long-lost Benjamin.”

It also seemed to be curtains for my mother’s plan. My part in what she and Walter Sinclair had cooked up depended on my getting in and out of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House without being stopped or even noticed. That’s why I was wearing my scout uniform. A boy in khaki breeches with a royal-blue bandanna held in place around his gullet by a neckerchief slide woven from gold braid was as conspicuous in the corridors of a settlement house as an onion in a goulash. Except to his scoutmaster, of course, and who would have expected Mr. O’Hare to be in the meeting room on an ordinary weekday evening? Not the senior patrol leader of Troop 244. To my knowledge, the fat man never even set foot in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House except on Saturday nights.

“Hello,” I said. Somehow that didn’t seem to be enough, so I added, “It’s nice to see you, sir.”

“If I may return the compliment,” Mr. O’Hare said, “it’s nice to see you, too, Benjamin. In fact, you could not have come at a more appropriate moment.” He tapped the notebook with the gold Eversharp. “I came down here tonight to complete the plans for our participation in the All-Manhattan rally. As you may have heard, in spite of certain disruptive circumstances, the troop did rather well at the eliminations.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Oh, then you did hear, did you?” Mr. O’Hare said.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Hot Cakes told me we took three firsts.”

“Indeed we did,” Mr. O’Hare said. “Knot-tying, flint-and-steel, and bandages with arterial pressure points. Did you say Hot Cakes?”

“Hot Cakes Rabinowitz,” I said. “He’s in the Raven Patrol.”

“Oh, yes,” Mr. O’Hare said. “I believe he is more appropriately known as Ira, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Ira may also have told you that we took a second in bridge-building, another in basket-weaving, and a perfectly respectable third in camp hygiene, did he not?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

If I have to say it once more, I thought, there could be trouble. My gut was grinding.

“All in all, we did quite well, I think,” Mr. O’Hare said. “Of course, we would be in a better position if my expectations in connection with One-Flag Morse had been realized, but then, one can’t have everything, can one?”

“No, sir,” I said.

That helped a little, but not much. “No, sir” sounds a lot like “Yes, sir.” Especially to a jumpy gut.

“I had hoped after what happened on that ill-fated night,” Mr. O’Hare said, “I had hoped my senior patrol leader would have had the courtesy of a true scout to come and explain to me the nature of the disruption. The cause, so to speak, of what was surely one of the most startling experiences to which the troop had ever been subjected, won’t you agree?”

Not with a “Yes, sir.” I couldn’t.

“It was my aunt, sir,” I said. “She got very sick all of a sudden. In fact, she was dying, and they sent for my mother, but my mother doesn’t speak English, so she had to come and get me because she needed someone to do like, you know, to do the translation for her.”

I said a lot more, droning on and on without thinking about what I was saying, snatching at remembered bits and pieces I had used on Chink Alberg and George Weitz the day after the disaster, because whatever thinking there was room for in my head was circling around the question: How was I going to get rid of this fatso and do what my mother and Walter Sinclair had sent me here to do?

“I quite understand,” Mr. O’Hare said. “And indeed I am most sympathetic, in spite of what your mother’s interruption cost the troop on that ill-fated night. But what I cannot understand, and what I find it most difficult to feel sympathetic about, is your subsequent conduct, Benjamin, as I’m sure you can understand, can’t you?”

I was not too sure about the word subsequent, but I had a very clear understanding of the word conduct. It appeared every month on my school report card.

I hesitated, caught between “Yes, sir,” of which I’d had a bellyful, and “No, sir,” which did not seem appropriate. Finally I settled for a hesitant “Well,” accompanied by an embarrassed foot shuffle.

“I don’t mean to be harsh,” Mr. O’Hare said, and he shifted his weight in the chair as though the layers of fat in which he was sitting had suddenly become too much for him. “But eleven—no, twelve—days have passed since the unfortunate incident took place, and I have not heard from you, Benjamin. You did not come to our last meeting, and nobody to whom I spoke, George Weitz and Ira and Morris, none of them seemed to know what your plans were, or if you ever intended to come back to the troop. I mean they didn’t know, Benjamin, if I make myself clear?”

I didn’t know, either. But the direction the conversation had taken, especially the tone of Mr. O’Hare’s voice, seemed to indicate an opening in the gummy mass of dipped-in-chicken-fat syllables the scoutmaster was pouring over me as though I was a blintz on a plate and he was a pitcher of sour cream. I jumped through the opening like Rin-Tin-Tin streaking through the crack in the door left open by the careless rustler.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I would never leave the troop, Mr. O’Hare. That’s why I came here tonight.”

Since I didn’t know where I was going, I thought I’d better go in his direction. So I matched my voice to his. I mean I tried to copy the throb Mr. O’Hare had got into his last remarks. It wasn’t easy. His hot air was coming up out of the barrel of fat in which he lived. All that flabby suet made a marvelous sounding board. But me, I was just a skinny kid with a concave chest and a voice that was trying to make up its mind about changing. All I had to rely on was my talent for invention. I gave it the works. The works worked.

“You mean you came here tonight to explain?” Mr. O’Hare said. “To apologize?”

“Well,” I said. Now I shifted from the foot shuffle to the toe stare. I cleared my throat. For a wild moment, in the grip of reckless inspiration, I gave a fevered thought to a tear or two. I was pretty sure I could do it. Crying on order had got me through several jams in school. But here, in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House, the Scout Law stood in the way. A scout is brave, it said between thrifty and clean. I had a feeling it was the sort of thing Mr. O’Hare would remember. “Yes, sir,” I said. “I came to—to—”

My voice broke. Not a crash. Just a sort of crumble. Heartbreaking but manly. It made even me feel sad.

“Benjamin,” Mr. O’Hare said. “Benjamin, I don’t know how to tell you the extent to which your words have moved me. What you have just said—” He paused. It had apparently occurred to him to give a moment of thought to what I had just said. “But how did you know I would be here?” Mr. O’Hare said. “I did not know myself until an hour ago that I would be coming down tonight. I forgot my program book when I went home after Saturday’s meeting. I planned to work on it tonight. When I learned I didn’t have my book, I—I—” Mr. O’Hare paused again. “Benjamin,” he said, “I am puzzled.”

He was also in my way, and time was running out.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know you’d be here tonight, Mr. O’Hare.”

“Then how could you come here to apologize?”

“I didn’t come to apologize in words,” I said. “I came to—to—I came to do something that would show how I felt about the troop,” I said. “I came to borrow the hike wagon.”

There is this to be said for a fat face: you can’t beat it as a ball park on which to register consternation. It’s like dropping a stone into a lake. There is plenty of room for the ripples to spread out. I could understand their spreading out on Mr. O’Hare’s face. The hike wagon was a cart the members of Troop 244 had constructed from the scoutmaster’s design.

It consisted of a Kirkman’s Soap Flakes wooden box mounted on two baby-carriage wheels nailed at one end to an umbrella-shaft axle. At the other end a length of broomstick, running horizontally, had been nailed to form a handle. A top for the box had been fixed on hinges, so that, when the wagon sat flat on the ground, it could be opened for loading and unloading. In the wagon, when we went on Sunday hikes, we carried the heavy equipment that would not fit into our knapsacks: the iron grill that went over the campfire; the two big aluminum pots in which we cooked stews and soups; the two baseball bats, the balls, the catcher’s mitt, and the pitcher’s glove with which we took our whack at the national pastime when we found a level campsite; the folding cot on which Mr. O’Hare took his nap after lunch; the first-aid kit; and the Morse Code flags.

The whole thing was painted a ripe almost golden khaki, and on the cover, in purple and red, appeared a twelve-inch reproduction of the scout badge. Above it, in six-inch type, was lettered:
Troop 244, Manhattan Council, B.S.A.
Below the badge appeared the scout motto:
Be Prepared.

Because of the way the wagon was constructed, it could be moved easily, like an up-ended baby carriage, along sidewalks leading to the Astor Place subway station, down the subway steps and into trains, onto the Dyckman Street ferry, and when we were across the river, along the hiking paths at the foot of the Palisades. Because of its gaudy coloring, the wagon attracted a lot of attention. There was a good deal of rivalry among the members of the troop for the opportunity to push or lug the wagon in public. Because of its markings, it would never occur to a cop or any other law enforcement officer to suspect that the hike wagon contained anything illegal. Especially if it was being pulled or shoved by a boy in uniform. Anyway, that’s what my mother and Walter Sinclair were counting on.