Crackpot, page 17
Danile tried to caution his daughter against showing the disrespect which she clearly felt for her English school teacher. Rahel would not have liked it, even though the child were in the right. He must try to turn Hoda’s complaints around, somehow, so that she would learn something, even from them.
“When you see that your teacher is ignorant, doesn’t that make you realize what a terrible thing ignorance is?”
“Of course.”
“And don’t you feel, then, that you want to help the ignorant so they should be less ignorant? Don’t you want to teach them to know better in the future? Great rabbis have been known to sit listening, humbly. Even a teacher can be taught, without realizing, sometimes, how much she owes to her students.”
Hoda had tried that already, and it didn’t work. They didn’t want to know anything, any of them.
Had she been patient? Had she tried again? A teacher must try to make her pupils want to learn. If you were ahead of others, it was your duty to try to help them catch up. A teacher must never give up. Look at Mr. Polonick, her old parochial school teacher, who had come unbidden to make a special offer in order to coax a promising student back to her books.
But Hoda, though she liked Mr. Polonick, responded nevertheless with a surprising tirade. Mr. Polonick didn’t have any right to try to interfere in her life; she’d be friends with anyone she liked, and she didn’t care what he thought about it! So what if he had seen her talking on the street; she wasn’t doing anything to be ashamed of; he didn’t see her do a thing, and anyway, what business was it of his if she hung around with her friends in the evenings?
The uncomfortable knowledge that she was not being strictly honest with her father made Hoda yell a little, to show she was in the right. Old Polonick didn’t have to come hinting around to her daddy. All his visit did in the end was upset Daddy, who wanted her to be a teacher or something when she grew up, and force her to further lies in her efforts to soothe him and divert him from dangerous ground.
“Sure Daddy, I’ll bet I could be a teacher. I could teach what I’ve learned so far. All kinds of kids have trouble, like my friend Morgan, for instance. He’s the dumbest boy in the school, but I’ve taught him plenty already. I don’t even have to go back to school to be able to teach what I know. I could stay home and give private lessons maybe.” She left it at that for the time being, hopefully, not daring to go on, not quite sure of what she was going to go on to. In a way she had told him, hadn’t she? when she had said that about “going back” to school? You couldn’t go back unless you’d been away. And then if you said you didn’t have to go back and Daddy didn’t say anything, he was kind of agreeing with you, wasn’t he? It was almost like getting permission. It was almost like telling him. It was getting him ready to know. What was the use of worrying him with any more all at once? And besides, she probably could be a teacher and give private lessons, a far better teacher than old biddy Bottomsuck. And maybe she would, too, someday.
But meanwhile, as long as Daddy seemed satisfied, and she was having some fun, she tried not to think about worrisome things. Leaves fell. Indian summer came and lingered. Intermittently, in between cleaning jobs for bossy ladies and her troubles with the basket business and other money matters, Hoda tasted freedom. For long days she wandered about, pacing the flat platform of earth under pouring blue sky, smiling into the air, her mind so filled with pleasant snatches of thought and feeling that she hardly knew she was alone. Wherever she turned the horizon was low, just at the bottom of the street, and she fancied herself walking off into the air, heavy Hoda, lighter than air. But she didn’t have to walk off. Most of her was in the sky already. Only the soles of her feet kept contact with earthly things. While they plodded dutifully along wooden pavements, mud walks, gravel ways, and sometimes even got so far as the newly paved streets of the rich, with their clean, hard cement sidewalks and asphalt roads, the rest of her swam through oceans of friendly sky, crisp and autumnal smelling, and faintly cloudy with her breath. When she felt like it she peddled baskets; when she felt like it she kicked stones; she felt good or bad, when she felt like it. She was free to dream her day through. No one could tell her what to do. There was no one she had to try, fruitlessly, to please, no one to criticize her constantly, no one to squelch her or laugh at her, no trap to be caught in where she would be forced to stay even if they made her feel bad all the time. Freedom was fun.
Between the public park and the Anglican graveyard, down towards the river, there was a quiet road with deep ditches beside it and high bushes and old trees. No one had bothered to clear away the autumn leaves here. Here the boys built a ditch fire one evening, out of twigs and leaves and some wood they’d pinched from the woodyard, and they roasted potatoes, and Hoda ate the charred black spuds, smelling them deeply, tossing them from hand to hand till they cooled off, smelling and licking her fingers afterwards. And then she lay on her back on a pile of leaves in the ditch with her dress rolled up, and the leaves crunching as she squirmed and sank deeper, as boy after boy rolled on her while his buddies raked the embers for the last few spuds, and in between boys she lay watching the early evening stars and smelling the smoking leaves and sucking the black burnt potato peel-leavings off her lower lip, and resting, and then she took the boys again and she couldn’t help it, she laughed and laughed. But nobody cared much about the noise here. The park was dark on one side of the lane, and the graveyard dark on the other, and her laughter rolled over both of them, and upward to the stars. Nor did she even think to ask for money that time, nor did they think to offer to pay. But afterwards she worried about it and warned herself not to do it too often that way. If she didn’t take payment, then it was as though she didn’t have to do it, and was doing it for her pleasure only, and she didn’t know if that was right, unless you were married and with your one-and-only. She was pretty sure that was the way it was supposed to work.
If only Indian summer would last forever, or at least till the really right things started to happen. But it didn’t, not that year anyway. As the air grew colder people seemed to be less and less interested in buying straw things. Soon there would be no point at all in peddling from door to door. But the stock of baskets and bags was growing alarmingly, and Daddy was so happy at his work that Hoda didn’t know how to tell him not to work so much. And soon it would be too frosty to fuck on the school landing under the arch, or in the ditches, or even in the damp shed. Then where would she get the money to rescue them from the constant need to which Uncle had doomed them when he had rushed out and gone tripping, spat over natty white spat, down the crooked verandah steps?
Persistently, she lobbied for more cleaning jobs, schooling herself to keep her mouth shut, because she knew that just because she stood up for her rights sometimes, those dames went around telling each other she was insolent. Who wouldn’t get fed up with the way they nagged, and some of them even yelled at you, as if you were their slave, when you knew you were just as good as they were and perfectly free to go out and breathe fresh air and hang around and be happy, if only you didn’t need the money for you and Daddy to live on.
She tried different places to get jobs, like the stores around the market, where she had got to know some of the people in the summer, but nobody seemed to need her, except to run a message or make a delivery sometimes, when the boy wasn’t handy, but they didn’t encourage her to hang around all day like she was willing to do, just in case they might need her. She wasn’t dumb; she caught on to how they felt about her, and after a while she got so embarrassed she had to force herself to keep asking, because it made her feel so badly to be sent away again, as if now the person who had turned her down had some kind of mean advantage over her, because he knew of her need, and still he didn’t want her around. So she tried to be flippant in advance, even in asking, so they shouldn’t think it was so important to her anyway.
Once, she even walked all the way downtown to the factory district behind the City Hall to see if she could become a factory girl, but when she came into the long, narrow, dim room with machines going noisily all over and long tables and people all with their heads down, inhaling nothing but the sharp, cloth-dye smell all day, it seemed even worse than being in school and having to do dumb things all together, so when the man called her into the little partitioned office and asked her questions, Hoda let herself get pretty smart with her answers. Not that she said anything bad or anything; she just joked around as though they were already friends. If he accepted her this way it might not be as awful as it looked here. Of course she made sure she let him know she wasn’t lazy. She wanted to work. Maybe it was because he reminded her a little of Hymie’s friend Limpy the Letz, who looked pretty jerky but was a lot of fun once you got to know him, that she gave him the chance to show his human side. Just so he didn’t think, as he seemed to, from the first few things he said to her, that he’d be doing her any big favour if he offered her a job in a noisy, smelly old place like this. He needn’t expect her to kiss his feet. She’d just work hard and that ought to be good enough for him.
But instead of trying to do her any favour, he started to give her a lecture about how many kids came in begging to be trained, willing to work for nothing, so why should he take someone like her, who came in with a lot of lip, and was worried already first thing about how much money she was going to take home, when she’d never even threaded a needle yet. He practically yelled at her, and Hoda was taken aback. Almost, his words had begun to intimidate her; he was a grownup after all. But she realized, suddenly, that he wasn’t going to give her a job anyway. So what was he yelling about? She didn’t have to take it. She didn’t have to bid him a polite goodbye! She was never going to kiss anyone’s asendup again for nothing! So she let him know that she was not that kind of sucker, to work for nothing. Why should she be, when she had guys who looked just like him, only younger, begging to pay her? Only she didn’t tell him that. Instead she thought of what her old teacher Mr. Polonick used to say about the capitalists and their slave labour factories, and she gave him some lip, all right, about that, and plenty loudly too. He didn’t have to yell at her. And she realized suddenly that the noise of the machines beyond the partition had died down, so she yelled even louder about slave drivers and dirty capitalists who expected you to work for nothing. And then she got out fast, clattering down the stairs of the loft, chuckling because she’d got out before he could throw her out, which was what he was even now yelling up there, two flights up, yelling above the noise of the machines that he’d do it to all of them, throw them all out, if they stopped work on him again to listen to some crazy communist crank. They could hold their goddam union meetings on someone else’s time, and heaven help them if he heard about it!
Hoda felt better about her failure to get that job than about any she had tried for so far. She felt so exhilarated she was tempted to go and apply to a few more foremen and managers and give them all a piece of her mind. Someday maybe just for the fun of it she’d do that. Afterwards, when she told the guys about how she’d sassed the manager, it turned out that some of them knew who he was because they’d tried to get jobs there too, only none of them had thought of sassing him, though he was a crud and paid starvation wages and probably turned them down because they didn’t look starved enough. Well, what could you expect? He had shares in the business. Who wouldn’t want shares in a business that could keep a hundred and fifty workers starving?
Hoda wouldn’t, that’s who!
The guys listened to her radical talk respectfully, though maybe they didn’t entirely believe her, but she had a right to talk because she was the only one who’d had enough nerve to tell all those shares to go take a jump.
Hah! They should have heard what she’d said that time to Uncle!
Heartening though her failure to get the factory job was, it did not reduce their own starvation potential, and once or twice she wondered, briefly, whether she had behaved wisely. But slavery? Nuts to him! There must be other ways to earn a living. One by one Hoda tried those she knew, but with little success. One day, because she thought he might like it better, and consequently give her a more substantial ration of meat than what he’d been throwing in the paper package lately, she even offered, boldly, to go all the way with Yankl the butcher, if he wanted her to. To her surprise Yankl was horrified that she even knew of such things. He was shocked and disgusted at what she was willing to do. He gave her a little lecture on immorality, and warned her that she must never try it. She could catch all kinds of diseases doing that. It hurt him to hear her talking this way, just when she was at an age when a girl should be careful and keep herself clean and think of her future. He was so upset it was a little while before she could even soothe him into letting her do what he had trained her to do for her meat scraps. Without looking at her he made her say, first, that she hadn’t really meant it, and that she didn’t even really know what she was talking about. She had just been repeating what she heard some older kids saying. Only then, while she was parroting his words, did Hoda find that his dream was beginning to work for him again. Well, if that’s what he wanted, okay by her. But things were never quite as satisfactory with Yankl after that, which was one more reason that Hoda knew she would have to try to work up a source of steadier income, so as not to have to rely on one person’s whims for hers and her daddy’s well-being.
It was beginning to puzzle Hoda more and more how unreliable people could turn out to be, people you knew, and thought they were your friends, and then it turned out that, like Uncle, for instance, in the first place, and now Yankl and Morgan, they didn’t act like you thought they would at all. In the case of Morgan it wasn’t that he’d done anything directly to Hoda. She wasn’t surprised when he ran away from home. He’d been telling her for a long time that the minute he got hold of some dough he’d disappear, amscray, just like that. But she hadn’t expected him to steal that dough, especially not from his own father. That was a really awful thing to do. Hoda couldn’t imagine taking anything from her daddy. She knew Morgan was a wise guy and a show-off, and sometimes maybe he pinched things, like some of the other guys did, just to show they had the guts to do it, but to really steal, and from your own father; she never thought he would do a thing like that, and could hardly believe the other guys when they told her. And she didn’t think it was funny, either, as they did. They thought it served his old man right for being too strict with Morgan, and making him stay in school, when he hated it. Maybe that was true, but Morgan had told her himself that his dad made him stay in school because he didn’t want him to go bad the way his big brother Lambert had done, and get sent to prison; at least that was what his dad said, but Morgan figured his dad must think he was pretty bad already, because school was worse for him than any prison.
Morgan had often talked about his big brother Lam, and how smart he was, and how much time he’d served already, and how they didn’t know where he was now and his dad said he didn’t want to know, but Morgan would like to find him, and he bet he could, too, if he could get hold of a stake to get started with. Hoda warned him that Lambert might be in jail again, if he was still a crook, and Morgan got a little sore and said how did she know he was still a crook, and anyway even if he was it didn’t mean they were going to catch him again.
Hoda said she hoped he had stopped being a crook, otherwise he’d get sent back to prison again all right, because that’s what happened to crooks, and Morgan got even madder and said that’s what happened only if they got caught, and if he ever turned crooked he’d make sure he wouldn’t get caught, not alive, and if he went he’d make sure he took a few of “them” with him. Hoda knew that he was just boasting; all the guys talked like that. Nevertheless it was a really awful thing he’d done, to steal from his daddy, and if he could do something like that she didn’t know any more what else he might be capable of doing. For all his big talk Morgan had never seemed like that. She bet he would feel lousy when he really realized what he’d done. He was probably feeling pretty awful right now, wherever he was, and wanting to come back and give the money back to his dad and apologize. Maybe he was just too scared to. But if he did maybe his dad would do the right thing too, and say, “All right Morgan, I didn’t know you hated school so much. Maybe you’d better quit and get a job.” That would make everything all right, and at first Hoda expected it to happen any day. But the guys didn’t. They said he’d really taken off for good, and after a while passed, and he must have spent some of the money already, Hoda decided maybe he’d better not come home now, because his old man had told one of the boys that he’d put him in prison if he caught him, for going bad just like his brother. All the guys teased Hoda for a little while, because they thought she missed him. Maybe she did, a little, because he was the first one, and that was a lot of fun on the school steps, under their very noses. Those dumb teachers didn’t know half of what went on. But Morgan shouldn’t have done that to his dad. And anyway, he hadn’t even said goodbye.
Thank goodness she and her daddy at least could be relied on to be good to each other and be what they knew they were and do what they expected of each other. Daddy too was very shocked when she told him about this boy she knew from school who’d stolen from his own father and run away from home. Of course you couldn’t really blame him in a way, for running away at least, as she explained to Daddy, because his father had forced him to stay in school when he wasn’t getting anything out of it. Morgan could never stand the teacher either, so you see she wasn’t the only one. Maybe if his father had let him quit long ago this wouldn’t have happened. She knew exactly how he felt about the school part of it; in fact, Daddy shouldn’t be surprised if she stayed home from school a lot, to study by herself this winter.
