Last Respects (7 page)

Somewhere around nine-thirty there would be a sharp knock on the door. No matter what we were doing—laying out the itinerary for a Sunday hike, burning gauze pads to make tinder for our flint-and-steel sets—we would stop doing it. Mr. O’Hare, our scoutmaster, would go to the door, open it, and admit Norton Krakowitz. It was like admitting a Japanese trade delegation to a postwar parley. There were a lot of parleys in 1927.

Much smiling. A joke or two. Hearty laughter, mostly, as I recall, from Mr. Krakowitz. Then the speech. Thirty seconds to a minute and a half on Scouting as the Road to a Better and More Prosperous America. Then the song. It was always “Me And My Shadow.” Norton Krakowitz sang it the way my father ate noodle soup: as though he would never again get a crack at another helping. End of song. Applause. Followed by the senior patrol leader (me) jumping to his feet and yelling, “How about three cheers and a tiger for Mr. Krakowitz?” No dissent. The troop came through with a “Rah Rah Rah, Siss Boom Bah, Mr. Krakowitz! Mr. Krakowitz! Mr. Krakowitz!” The recipient of this noisy adoration smiled, bowed, raised his hand, and announced: “One final word.” It was never one, but it sure as hell—no, sorry, sure as heck—was final. Like: “Vanity of vanities, sayeth the preacher, all is vanity.” Or: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.” Another wave of the hand, and Norton Krakowitz was off to the Clarke House on Rivington Street for a repeat performance. On East Fourth Street the Clarke House was pronounced the “Clock House.” There was a huge clock over the wide gray stone entrance.

“This bastard could ruin us,” said George Weitz. We had turned up Ninth Street toward Avenue B. “Where the hell does the Manhattan Council get off appointing a crap artist like that to be one of the referees?”

Crap artists are, of course, familiar decorations of all civilizations. Look at Caligula. Look at Hitler. On the other hand, they are not all so vicious. Look, as long as we’re looking, at Jimmy Walker. I think Norton Krakowitz was closer to Jimmy than to Caligula. I think that’s why I understood but was not terrified by the thoughts of George Weitz.

Similar thoughts had been running through my mind during the past few days. The referees of the eliminations contests performed a variety of functions, depending on the events they supervised. The main duty of the One-Flag Morse supervisor was to compose the messages that the competing teams would be wigwagging to each other. My thoughts had clustered around a central uneasy question: What kind of message could you expect to be cooked up by a referee who even before a hat was dropped broke into “Me and My Shadow”?

“Don’t worry about it,” I said to George. “Whatever this slob cooks up, you and I can send it. Good evening, Mr. O’Hare.”

The scoutmaster stopped and turned. He was two steps ahead of us on the way up the white marble stoop that led to the front doors of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House.

“Ah, good evening, young men,” said Mr. O’Hare.

Mr. O’Hare was very fond of all the members of Troop 244. At any rate, he certainly acted that way. But Mr. O’Hare had a very poor memory. He could not remember our names. So he called us all young men. I must say, in view of what I was called all the rest of the week, especially by friends like George Weitz, I enjoyed being addressed as “young man.” It was like coming up out of a sewer and finding yourself in the middle of a Frank Merriwell novel.

“Bright and early, I see,” said Mr. O’Hare.

That was another thing I liked. The way Mr. O’Hare talked. It was as though he had learned English not from Miss Hallock at J.H.S. 64 but by committing
David Copperfield
to memory.

“We were sort of worried about what Mr. Krakowitz is going to cook up for the One-Flag Morse message,” George said as we trotted up the marble steps together. I ran on ahead to pull open the heavy door for Mr. O’Hare. Thus I was facing him and George when George said, “We thought, you know, he might come up with, you know, something out of Shakespeare or something.”

George made it sound as though coming up out of Shakespeare was not unlike surfacing from a septic tank.

“I shouldn’t worry about that if I were you,” Mr. O’Hare said. “It doesn’t really matter if it’s out of Shakespeare or the New York
Daily News,
does it? Words are words. They’re composed of letters. All you have to do is wigwag the letters one at a time and the words will take care of themselves, won’t they?”

“Yes, sir,” George said. Softly, as he followed Mr. O’Hare into the lobby, he added, “You stupid jerk.”

“Shut up,” I whispered, then fell in beside Mr. O’Hare. I did not like what George was doing. Even then I grasped the wisdom of keeping one’s eye on the ball. The ball was the One-Flag Morse signaling medal. “What George means, Mr. O’Hare, he means maybe Mr. Krakowitz, you know how he is, he could hit us with a surprise.”

“Oh, now, really, young men, I doubt that,” Mr. O’Hare said.

It seemed to me Mr. O’Hare’s voice lacked conviction. Moving along between him and George Weitz down the marble lobby of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House, I sneaked a look at our scoutmaster. I did it quite often. Not because Mr. O’Hare was a man so fat that he didn’t seem to walk so much as shake himself forward, like the jelly quivering around a piece of gefüllte fish when my mother brought the plate in from the kitchen. Or even because his face looked like that of the man in the Admiration cigar ads. What fascinated me about Mr. O’Hare was his total lack of reality. He could have been a specimen in a museum or an animal in the zoo. I always expected to find, somewhere over his head, a small sign identifying his species and native habitat. Mr. O’Hare was a creature from another world: uptown. A goy in a double-breasted blue serge suit, just like the Rogers Peet man, who came down to the Lower East Side three times a week after work. Why? To conduct Jewish boys like me and George Weitz with painstaking care through the absorbing intricacies of the Scout Handbook? Hmmm.

Years later, whenever he crossed my mind, Mr. O’Hare always left great big fat muddy footprints. They all oozed question marks. Had the fat man been a male Jane Addams? A henpecked husband of limited income driven not to the card table or the bottle but to a virtuous dedication that got him out of the house at night for no greater expense than the carfare down to Avenue B? A closet fairy, maybe, who liked to hang around boys? Or just a plain, ordinary, garden variety uptown dumbbell?

I don’t know. The question marks remain. So does the shining memory of the man who had said in front of all the members of Troop 244 that he had never seen anybody handle a Morse flag the way I did. I liked Mr. O’Hare, jerk or no jerk.

“Okay,” I said. “Whatever Mr. Krakowitz gives us to send, sir, we’ll send it.”

Humble. Resigned. Accepting the inevitable without protest. Even with a touch of grace. After all, was not a scout, in addition to trustworthy, loyal and so on, also courteous? It worked. There are things you can do with your voice when you are fourteen that Demosthenes could never have achieved with a mouthful of pebbles at sixty. Mr. O’Hare’s round, unbaked apple-pie face creased in a troubled frown. He wanted to win even more than George Weitz and I did.

“Why don’t you young men just pop on to the gym,” Mr. O’Hare said. “Mr. Krakowitz is well aware of his duties as a referee. I am absolutely certain nothing of a surprising nature is in store for you.”

I was unaware then that Mr. O’Hare had uttered one of the more foolish statements the human animal is capable of making.

The message Mr. Krakowitz wrote for me to signal was:
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.
Twenty-five words from the Book of Common Prayer.

I did not know this at the time. In fact, at the time I didn’t even know there was such a thing as the Book of Common Prayer. All I knew, when the starting gun went off and my reader-receiver tore open the sealed envelope, was that if Troop 244 was going to make it into the All-Manhattan finals, we would have to break our collective rear ends. The four teams we were competing against were hot. They had a reputation that had preceded them all the way uptown to Avenue B.

This did not worry me. I had assumed they would be hot. If they weren’t, how had they come up as far as this phase of the eliminations? The reason their reputations did not worry me was that I had a feeling about Morse Code. A sort of green thumb, you might say, for sending and receiving dots and dashes. I don’t know where I got it. When Mr. O’Hare had told the troop I handled a Morse flag better than any scout he had ever known, I accepted the compliment without any of that digging-my-toe-into-the-hot-sand nonsense. So far as the denizens of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House were concerned, false modesty had not yet been invented. Mr. O’Hare’s compliment seemed to me no more than just.

I was pretty good at knot-tying. I could whip up a spiral reverse bandage as well as most members of the troop. I could without too much effort get a spark and then a bit of fire out of a piece of flint, a slab of broken steel file, and a wad of singed surgical gauze. But it was my skill with the Morse flag that had bumped me up to senior patrol leader of Troop 244, and it was this skill that made me feel that night we were going to win, no matter how fancy Mr. Krakowitz got.

What I got, when I whipped out the last letter of the last word in my message, was a tap of approval on my tail from Chink Alberg. His real name was Morris, but on East Fourth Street, Morris Alberg was known as Chink because he had slant eyes. He was squatted down on the shiny yellow wood of the gym floor, about three feet to the left of my widespread legs. This kept him clear of my wigwagging flag which was mounted on an eight-foot bamboo pole, and yet close enough so I would have no trouble hearing him call out the letters of the message from the sheet that had been handed to him in a sealed envelope by Mr. Krakowitz just before the starting whistle blew.

“Two minutes ten!” Chink said from somewhere down around my knees. I could hear the excitement in his voice. It made my heart jump. Two minutes ten for twenty-five words, averaging out to six letters each, was better than I had done even in my best practice sessions. “We’re ahead!” Chink said. “Jesus, we must be! Two minutes ten is—!”

“Shut up!” I said without moving my head or shifting my glance. At the other end of the gym George Weitz had set his flag in motion. I could see Hot Cakes Rabinowitz, squatting at George’s feet, moving his lips as he called the letters from the sheet of paper fastened to the clipboard in his lap.

“Start writing!” I hissed at Chink. Inside my head the wigwags of George’s flag recorded dot, dot, dash. “U,” I yelled. Dash, dot went the flag. “N,” I yelled. George’s flag dropped to the left in a single dash. “T,” I yelled. Three flips to the left. “O,” I yelled, and even though Mr. O’Hare had cautioned us over and over again that a receiver must never worry about the words but merely call the letters, I could not stop myself from putting these first four together and yelling, “Unto!”

Thus I knew that for the second half of the Troop 244 segment of the flagged Morse eliminations contest for the 1927 All-Manhattan rally, Mr. Krakowitz had chosen something from either the Bible or Shakespeare. At that time these were the only two areas of printed material in which I had encountered the word “unto.”

Later, at Mr. O’Hare’s post-mortem analysis of our performance, I learned that the message George Weitz had started to wigwag to me was from Matthew XXV:29:
Unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.
At the time, however, I knew as much about Matthew as I knew about the Book of Common Prayer, which was nothing.

I did, however, know two things: Chink’s excited analysis was probably correct, we were ahead; and I was receiving George Weitz so clearly and easily that the odds were good we would finish ahead.

After all these years I am still uncertain about how many words of Matthew XXV: 29, George Weitz managed to wigwag at me across the gym, but I am absolutely certain about my performance at the receiving end. I never got beyond that first word “unto.”

A split second after I yelled the letter “O” down to Chink at my feet, I saw my mother.

There are those who may not consider this startling. Or even interesting. After all, sons and daughters have been seeing their mothers since Cain and Abel began to notice that the Garden of Eden was becoming a bit cramped. And while it is true that Cain and Abel would undoubtedly have raised an eyebrow if they had caught sight of
my
mother, the reason for their surprise would have been considerably different from mine. In a manner of speaking, until that moment in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House, I had never before seen my mother.

Let me clarify that.

The first five years of my life had been lived in our tenement flat about two hundred feet from the docks that jutted out into the East River to accommodate the coal and lumber barges. More accurately, those first five years had been spent in that railroad flat and in the shadow of my mother’s slender and almost tiny figure: she put on only a little flesh in her middle years; she weighed a hundred and five pounds the day I was born, and she was still almost exactly that the day she died.

When I say I lived in that flat, I do not mean what most people mean when they say they live in a certain place, a geographical point from which they leave daily, let us say, to go to work, and to which they return nightly to be fed, have some entertainment, and then go to sleep. When I say I lived in that flat on East Fourth Street for the first five years of my life, I mean it the way Edmund Dantes would mean it if he were describing his residence in the Chateau d’If.

I never went down into the street without my mother. I never met a human except in her presence. I don’t recall that I wanted to. It never occurred to me to question my way of life. I hope Dr. Spock is not listening, but I have a strong feeling that very few five-year-olds do. I just jogged along from day to day, doing what I was told, trying to stay out of trouble, and listening quite a lot. What I heard was not very exciting. The adults who lived on our block were almost all, like my mother, immigrants from Hungary or, like my father, immigrants from Austria. They spoke what my parents spoke: Yiddish and Hungarian. So did I.