Last Respects (8 page)

Then, in the middle of my sixth year, the laws of her new country penetrated to my mother’s consciousness. I don’t know how. Perhaps a neighbor warned her that by keeping me in the house she was doing something that would bring down on her the retaliation of authority. This seems to me a reasonable guess. My mother’s whole life, as I look back on it, was directed by a ceaseless effort to avoid tangling with the law. Anyway, she took me around the corner to P.S. 188 and registered me in kindergarten class. The English language exploded all around me.

The immediate result was to force on me a double life. It lasted for six years, and I loved every minute of it. Every minute of my double life, I mean. For those six years it was Yiddish on the fourth floor of 390 East Fourth Street; English in P.S. 188 and on the surrounding pavements. I’m pretty sure my mother was aware of my double life. But she pretended she knew nothing about it. Which leads me to conclude that she was afraid of my life in P.S. 188 and on the surrounding pavements, because I learned as I grew older that her way of treating anything terrifying was to turn her back on it. What didn’t exist could not hurt her. Or so she thought. All I thought about was the fun I was having.

Then one day I was summoned from my 6-B class to the office of Mr. McLaughlin, the principal.

“A great honor has been conferred upon you,” he said. Mr. McLaughlin looked like a British officer in one of those steel engravings that illustrated
Vanity Fair.
Perhaps he was aware of this and tried, when he spoke, to underscore the image. The word honor, when he pronounced it, came out as un-oar. “You are going to be transferred from P.S. 188 to a rapid advance class in Junior High School 64 on Ninth Street,” he said. “This is being done because of your brilliant scholastic achievements.”

I did not understand what Mr. McLaughlin was talking about, and no wonder. The truth probably was P.S. 188 was becoming unmanageable because of overcrowding. To solve the problem Mr. McLaughlin had undoubtedly solicited the help of friendly principals in nearby junior highs. Their help enabled Mr. McLaughlin to transfer a number of students out of P.S. 188 to less congested schools. I think I was one of the few boys from P.S. 188 who landed in J.H.S. 64 on Ninth Street.

At first I was apprehensive about the transfer. Ninth Street was five blocks uptown from the block where I had thus far spent all of my life. It doesn’t sound like much. What’s five blocks? Well, in my day, which was half a century ago, it could be half a world. To a boy, anyway. At that time the Lower East Side was not so much a crisscrossed network of streets and blocks, as it was a cluster of different villages with totally different populations.

Ninth Street was almost exclusively Italian. I remember the feeling, on that first morning when I walked up to J.H.S. 64, that I had entered a strange country. It was. I had never known any Italians. Naturally, I was worried. My concern was short-lived. Aside from the fact that they bought strange foods displayed in store windows that did not look like Mr. Deutsch’s grocery on our block or Mr. Shumansky’s chicken store on the Avenue C corner, the Italians of Ninth Street seemed after a few days no different from the Hungarians and Austrians of my block. In relation to me, that is. They didn’t seem to know I was alive. This suited me fine. I didn’t want anybody staring at me during the settling-in process. This process ended the day my teacher announced that Mr. O’Hare, the scoutmaster of a newly formed scout troop, was looking for recruits, and any boy interested in joining could meet Mr. O’Hare for a talk after school in the gym of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House around the corner on Avenue B.

I had, of course, belonged to Troop 224 for about two years in the Hamilton Fish Park Branch of the New York Public Library until the scoutmaster died and the troop disintegrated. I missed it. I welcomed this opportunity to become involved again with knot-tying and Morse Code. Once more my mother pretended she was unaware of my involvement in the scout movement. She was dedicated to this pretense with a fierceness that still impresses me. Look at the things she had to pretend she did not see. The signaling flags I brought into the house. The flint-and-steel sets. The knot-tying equipment. The merit badge pamphlets and other technical literature that began to appear after supper on our kitchen table along with my schoolbooks when I was supposed to be doing my homework. My mother never saw any of it. She was determined not to see any of it. She laundered that uniform for me every Friday. She pressed it. She removed grease spots from the breeches with Carbona. She sewed my insignia and, as I earned them, my merit badges on the shirt. She did all that, but she never acknowledged the fact that her son disappeared every Saturday night at six o’clock wearing a khaki uniform and did not come home until almost midnight.

Looking back on it, the only thing that seems strange to me about the whole business is that I did not find it strange. Some instinct told me it was crucial to my mother’s existence for her not to acknowledge my participation in any life outside her own orbit. Out of this same instinct came my total acceptance of the structure she had created, as well as my skill at maintaining my role in it.

That is why I could not believe my eyes on the night when I wigwagged twenty-five words with a single red and white Morse flag across the gym of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House in two minutes and ten seconds flat.

“Come on!” Chink Alberg barked from somewhere down near my left knee. “All I got is u, n, t, o!” I didn’t answer. I was staring with astonished disbelief at my mother’s figure at the other side of the gym. “For Christ’s sake!” Chink yelled. “What the hellzamatter with you?”

“It’s my mother,” I said.

“To hell with your mother,” Chink snarled. “Start calling, for Christ’s sake. Them other bastids, they’re getting ahead of us!”

I was aware of this. I could see George Weitz at the other side of the gym. His flag was whipping left and right. I could see Hot Cakes Rabinowitz kneeling to the left of George, calling the letters from his clipboard. I could even see the four rival teams, two on each side of George and Hot Cakes, wigwagging away like crazy, wiping out the lead I had gained with my two minutes ten, and pulling ahead. But I saw them all only peripherally. Like the clouds around the edges of a portrait in a museum. Or the grass under the feet of the painted main subject. My eyes were nailed to the stranger in the center.

My mother had never been inside the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House. During the months of my involvement with Troop 244 she had never acknowledged its existence. I had every reason to believe she did not even know its location. It could have been in her native land. Which was where? Hungary? Far Cathay? The Mountains of the Moon? When you got right down to it, how did I know where she had come from? She could not possibly be here. Therefore she wasn’t. This creature who had erupted in the middle of my signaling triumph and was now destroying it, was somebody else. Not my mother. Who? Across the length of the gym I examined her.

A skinny little woman. With blond hair pulled back into a neat knot on top of her head. Her little head. Everything about her was little. Especially her face. A fierce little face. But out of that little face two big blue eyes shone like lights. The whole thing—I had the impression of a force, not a human being—sheathed in something black. Not dressed. Wrapped. What she was wearing could have been painted on her body. High neck. Long sleeves. Skirt sweeping the yellow boards of the gym floor. She—no, it!—reminded me of something. I could hear Chink snarling furiously at my feet. I knew I was losing for Troop 244 the right to participate in the All-Manhattan rally. I felt in my sinking gut the waves of contempt and rage I was earning from my fellow scouts. But my mind had room for nothing but the desperate question: Who in God’s name was this stranger?

The answer surfaced abruptly out of my life at school. More accurately, out of my American history textbook. Coming across the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House gym was Molly Pitcher, moving firmly to take over the gun in the middle of the Battle of Monmouth at which her husband had fallen from a heat stroke. The fact that she looked like my mother didn’t matter. Nobody was fooling me. This was Molly Pitcher.

“What the hellz she think she’s doing?” Chink Alberg screamed.

“How should I know?” I screamed back.

“She’s your mother, ain’t she?”

This regrettable fact now came crashing down on me like a toppling wall. Because at my mother’s side, moving along beside her across the gym, I saw Mr. O’Hare.

The scoutmaster was swung slightly to one side and bent over, so the words he was uttering as he moved dropped into my mother’s left ear. It was about two feet below his mouth. I could not, of course, hear Mr. O’Hare’s words, but I knew they were angry. I could tell from his gestures. Great chopping swirls at the air, like an untrained swimmer plunging ahead with a primitive breaststroke. And the color of his face. Like the skin of a tangerine. I knew something else. Mr. O’Hare’s words did not matter. Not to my mother, anyway. Mr. O’Hare was unaware of this. Why should he know that my mother did not understand English?

“You can’t do this,” Mr. O’Hare was saying as he and my mother reached me and Chink. This was not the first time I had been impressed by the lack of logic, if not intelligence, in the remarks uttered by grownups. It was no time, however, to make notes on mental scoreboards. The fact remains that my mother
had
done it, and what she had done I found incredible. She had just brought the whole 1927 All-Manhattan rally eliminations finals to a halt.

“You come with me,” she said to me.

“What is she saying?” Mr. O’Hare snapped.

“Listen, Ma,” I said desperately in Yiddish. “For Christ’s sake,” I added angrily in English. “What the heck are you doing?” I concluded hysterically in a combination of both.

“God damn that bitch,” Chink Alberg said from somewhere around my knees. “She’s messing us up!”

“Morris, we’ll have none of that language, if you please,” said Mr. O’Hare.

He had once explained to the troop that to call a fellow scout Chink was like calling the king of Italy a wop. I didn’t quite grasp the comparison. Everybody I knew called Victor Emmanuel a wop. Everybody who talked English, anyway. Mr. O’Hare, who talked nothing else, grabbed my arm and said, “If this lady is your mother, will you please ask her to listen to me for one moment?”

“Ma,” I said, “Mr. O’Hare wants to tell you something.”

“You tell this pudding-headed goy to get out of my way,” my mother said.

She grabbed my arm and started to hustle me across the gym floor, toward the doors behind George Weitz and Hot Cakes Rabinowitz. Mr. O’Hare loped along.

“My good woman,” he said.

“Get dead,” my mother said.

I swallowed my gum. She had said it in English. Not very good English. In fact, I wasn’t sure my mother had spoken English. I allowed her to drag me along. My mind seemed to follow like a reluctant dog on a leash. An astounding thought had erupted in my mind: Maybe I wasn’t the only one who had been leading a double life?

“I must say, madam,” Mr. O’Hare said. He didn’t say any more. We had swung around George Weitz and Hot Cakes Rabinowitz and reached the doors to the lobby. My mother put her free hand up to Mr. O’Hare’s bulging belly. One hundred and five pounds, remember. And she shoved. What she shoved, remember, was at least two hundred and twenty pounds of solid suet, maybe more. And Mr. O’Hare toppled back.

Not exactly into the arms of George Weitz. He couldn’t. There was that eight-foot bamboo pole between them. It was in a relaxed position because George had forgotten all about Matthew XXV:29, and was staring at my mother in astonishment. As a result, the red and white Morse flag at the top of the pole clearly marked for all observers in the gym of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House the precise spot where the bamboo pole and Mr. O’Hare made contact. William Tell, aiming for the apple on his son’s head, couldn’t have done better. Bull’s-eye. Mr. O’Hare screamed. My mother—still one hundred and five pounds, remember—punched open the swinging doors and dragged me through them into the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House lobby.

“Ma,” I said. “Do you know what you’ve just done?”

“Come on, come on, come on,” she said. “There’s no time.”

“Ma, they’re waiting for me,” I said. I was talking to her back. The dragging process had resumed. Across the marble floor of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House lobby. Through the great big double doors. Out into Avenue B. “It’s my team,” I said. “Ma, we were winning. I wigwagged twenty-five words in two minutes and ten seconds flat.”

“You can do it again,” my mother said, dragging me down Avenue B. “Some other time.”

“But there won’t be any other time,” I wailed. “This is the eliminations, the semifinals. You just got us eliminated, Ma.”

“What’s eliminated?”

The English word, imbedded in my hysterical Yiddish complaint, had captured her attention.

“It’s like, you could say, like lost,” I said. “It means we lost.”

“So if you lost, what are you complaining about going back? What’s there to go back for? You can’t be—What did you say—ellimated?”

“Eliminated.”

“You can’t be eliminated twice,” my mother said.

She led me around the corner of Tompkins Square Park into Seventh Street. Halfway up the block toward Avenue A she released my wrist. It was though she had decided the reluctant dog had been dragged so far and around so many turns from the place where he wanted to be, that there was no longer any chance of his escaping from her side. The poor pooch was no longer capable of finding his way back. My mother was almost right. Not in the sense that I couldn’t have found my way back to the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House. My mother was right because I wouldn’t have tried. I was too ashamed of what had just happened to face Mr. O’Hare and the members of my troop. I wondered if I would ever be able to face them. I also wondered if my mother had gone crazy. Not only because she had just told Mr. O’Hare to “get dead,” but because of where she was heading.

To my knowledge my mother had never been further west of the East River than Avenue C. Yet tonight she had come as far west as Avenue B to drag me out of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House gym, and now we were crossing Avenue A on our way to First Avenue. I had, of course, done a certain amount of roaming away from Fourth and Lewis streets during the six years of my double life, and when Mr. O’Hare took the troop out on a Sunday hike, we always met him at the subway station in front of Wanamaker’s on Astor Place. This was quite a distance from the corner of Fourth and Lewis streets. I was an explorer. But all my roaming had always been done in the company of other Magellans like George Weitz and Chink Alberg or another friend from the troop. Also, all of our roaming had been done during the day. Now it was night.