Inside, Outside, page 11
I stood. “I’m Goodkind.”
“Well? And are you David or Israel?”
I was mute; struck dumb by the Dracula gaze of Paul Frankenthal, in the direct line of sight from me to the doctor. In those eyes was the glitter of sunset, and in his white smile were fangs. On Aldus Street I was Davey, and always had been. Nothing else. My father’s pet name for me, “Yisroelke,” had never registered among the kids.
“Well? Do you have a brother named Israel here in school, or what? Speak up, child.”
Child! The man who had solved the square root of 625!
“My name is Israel David,” I choked out.
“Well then, Israel David, come on up here.” I stood still, embarrassed and paralyzed. In a tremendous burst of medical wit the doctor added, “Don’t be afraid, Izzy. You may have two names, but you’ll only get one needle.”
An insane gale of classroom laughter! Even Mr. Winston—I forgive him, he’s undoubtedly in his grave—even Mr. Winston laughed. Frankenthal’s face lit up in a frightful smile, as I passed him on the way to the needle. “Hi, Izzy,” he hissed.
***
A short disquisition on “Izzy,” reader. This happened back in the 1920’s. You have to grasp what “Izzy” meant then, or the rest of this part will make no sense; the whole rest of this book, in fact.
In 1948, as all the world knows, the State of Israel was reborn. Five Arab states at once invaded it, and Israel won its War of Independence. American Jews like myself—I was then just starting law practice—were stunned by this military miracle, and filled with a new wondering pride in our people. At the time, Jewish nightclub comedians worked one joke hard.
Fine thing, the new Jewish state. Just great. Only it’s a shame they called it Israel. Why didn’t they name it Irving?
The attitude is so dated that the joke is no joke any more, but it does suggest what “Izzy” implied in the 1920’s. And not only Izzy; Abey, Ikey, Jakey—that is, the three patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—were the standard Jew names in cartoons, vaudeville routines, and dirty jokes.
Izzy comes home and finds his best friend Abey in bed with his wife, see? He says, “Vot’s dis? Abey, mine bast frand, you! Und you, Reba, mine own vibe! How could diss heppen, und—say, you could at least stop, vile I’m talking to you!”
And so forth. Hundreds, hundreds of jokes and songs. Always Izzy, Abey, Ikey, Jakey. There was even a comic popular song about Izzy, at the time I entered Winston’s class; in a burlesque Jew accent, a wife who suspects she has a rival wails, “Whose Izzy izzy, izzy yours or izzy mine?”
Nobody worried about ethnic sensitivities then. Nobody thought about them. There were Jew jokes, Irish jokes, wop jokes, nigger jokes, ad infinitum, and all, all the Jew butts were Izzy, Ikey, Jakey, or Abey. The immigrants, arriving with old-country biblical names, had fixed the stereotypes. Their children and grandchildren, in protective mimicry, took to using Irving and Irwin for Israel, Arthur and Alan for Abraham, and so on; what I’ve called the inside and outside names. Nowadays, of course, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Israel are perfectly fine American names once more; they can even have a tart New England ring to them, if they go with suitable manners, dress, education, and possessions, instead of with beards, skullcaps or derby hats, thick accents, and pushcarts.
Now you are ready to hear what happened on Aldus Street that night. It was Halloween.
18
Hollooeen
I left school with a sore arm and a sorer heart. The usual witch and pumpkin cutouts decorated the classroom walls, and in the candy stores you could buy masks and orange-colored Halloween candies and such. But on Aldus Street, I must tell you Halloween took an odd form. Maybe it still does. Childhood folkways are ancient and persisting. There was no trick-or-treat. Dressed in old clothes, pieces of chalk in hand, we roamed the neighborhood marking each other and shouting “Hollooeeen!” Tough kids would show up on our block swinging stockings filled with flour, and they would shout “Hollooeen” and belt the unwary. Them, you avoided. That compacted flour hurt like a flung baseball, and the white splotches made a hell of a mess.
Sunk in misery, I forgot about Halloween as I trudged homeward. Howard Rubin, the mama’s boy, sprang at me from the stoop. “Hollooeen!” he sniggered, chalking my back. So I was reminded. The adenoidal dumbbell was doing it all wrong, of course, marking me while the sun still shone. The whole world knew that you didn’t “Hollooeen” anyone until the street lights came on. No use battering Howard, which anybody could do. A kid who showed up on the first warm April day in short pants and socks—as we all did—but with long yellow underwear showing in the gap, was beneath reprisal.
Hollooeen, eh? Well, that might help. Chasing the girls was usually fun, they would run squealing and shrieking, nymphs fleeing satyrs. My sister Lee in recent years was staying indoors on Hollooeen, for the stocking marauders were a sort of menace to girls. While I waited for nightfall I did homework, and when the windows darkened, I put on a ragged sweater and filled my pockets with chalk. Lee sniffed that I was an idiot to go on taking part in that baby stuff. What did she know about my grief, and my need for diversion? I hurried down the stairs and out into the chilly night.
“Hollooeeen!”
From the shadows Howard Rubin jumped, giggling through his nose. I felt his chalk slide down my sore arm. Halfheartedly I chalked him back. “Hollooeen! Where’s everybody?”
“Paul and the gang went to Hoe Avenue. I have to stay by the stoop, Mama says.” A pitiful case.
Afar off, around the corner of Hoe, I could hear the oncoming shrieks of girls and yells of boys. So Paul and the kids had flushed the game, and all I had to do was wait, chalk in hand. Sure enough, three girls rounded the corner, laughing as they screamed and ran from Paul and his followers. Nobody was making much speed, it was all clearly in play; when suddenly the screams turned piercing and the girls were gone, vanished into an apartment house. At the other end of the block strangers with stockings had appeared.
Just then Paul Frankenthal spied me. “Hey, fellas, it’s Izzy,” he shouted. “Everybody get Izzy!”
The pack came at me behind him, with yelps of “Izzy! Izzy!”
The way Paul shouted “Izzy” and the others took it up boded no good. This year Paul was carrying a stocking, what’s more. From the other corner the strangers were approaching. I had a queasy moment of decision: stand my ground? Run back up the stoop and into the building? But why? Why do that? Why scuttle for safety like Howard Rubin? These were my friends, the Aldus Street kids. Paul Frankenthal was my leader. I grinned like a good sport as they came. Paul cut off any thought of retreat by darting between me and the stoop; and so doing, he began to sing, “Whose Izzy izzy, izzy yours or izzy mine?”
The kids in no time tightened a capering ring around me, as we would do when teasing a girl. One and all they joined in the song, cavorting and laughing. The stocking-armed strangers stood by, silently observing. I was no longer sure who was the greater menace, my own gang that had turned on me all at once to Izzy me, or the tough guys watching in the gloom. Instinct took over, Howard Rubin was part of the ring, and when he came opposite me, I leaped at him with a howl. He flinched and I was through the gap on the instant, plunging for the passageway to the back yards. “Get him!” I heard Paul yell. “Everybody after Izzy!”
Those back yards, bounded on all four sides by rows of tenements, formed one large concrete-paved enclosure, full of clothesline poles and trash cans. Through years of playing hide-and-seek I knew the terrain well.
“Iz-zee! Iz-zee!”
The cries reverberated in the yards. Peeking out of a hiding place between ashcans, I could see strangers whirling their stockings and gleefully chanting “Iz-zee! Iz-zee!” in the exact singsong of “Clip cock! Clip cock!”
Far down the yards there was one janitor’s passage out to Hoe Avenue that was my secret exit. Most of the passages were locked at night, but I had discovered that by jiggling the loose screws on the lock I could work this gate open. In many a game it had been my saving trick. I slid from shadow to shadow and made one short desperate dash in moonlight. Somebody shouted, “There he goes!” But I was back in shadow by then, worming along a wall. I slipped into the passage, ran up the steps, and with shaking hands I loosened the screws on the lock. Behind me voices were closing in: “I saw him go in here! …No, stupid, he went in this one! …He’s over there! …Iz-zee! Where are you, Iz-zee!”
The gate worked free. Saved! I pushed at it. It opened a few inches, and stuck with a jangling sound. Then, and only then, I saw the new padlocked chain that had been hung on it.
“IZ-ZEE!”
Frankenthal: “Hey, guys, here he is!”
A blast of light in the passageway! A hurly-burly of voices! My back to the gate, I face into a blinding flashlight.
Strange voice: “Is that him?”
Paul Frankenthal: “That’s him. That’s Izzy.”
Shadowy form of Frankenthal advances into the light, swinging the stocking.
“Paul, what is this? Why? What did I ever do to you?”
“Izzy, you’ve got plenty to answer for.”
I dart past Paul and jump headfirst at the flashlight. It falls. Crash of glass! Darkness! Cursing, shoving! I wriggle through the pack and try a forlorn run up the yards, but they are upon me, Paul Frankenthal in the lead, his voice above the others: “Izzy! Izzy!” His stocking strikes me hard on the side of the head. My ears ring. I stagger. Frankenthal: “HOLLOOEEN!”
Another stocking on my head. Another, another, another.
Thud. “HOLLOOEEN!”
Thud. “HOLLOOEEN!”
Thud. “HOLLOOEEN!”
I go down.
Stockings beating on me; chalk scrawling and streaking all over me; giggles, guffaws, as I lie with my face on concrete, trying to shield my head with my arms from the flailing stockings, coughing and choking in a cloud of flour. “Hollooeen! Hollooeen!”
Voices fading off, laughing and chorusing like marching troopers,
“Whose Izzy izzy,
Izzy yours or izzy mine?”
Such was my farewell to Aldus Street. My grandmother arrived shortly after that, and we had to move.
***
Aldus Street, Aldus Street!
This is no way to leave those scenes, at the worst moment, the moment that brought down the curtain on my childhood, so let me tell you some of the good things about Aldus Street. I cannot go back there. It no longer exists, though the street signs and the tenement shells still stand. Anyway, who can ever go back to childhood scenes and perceive them through the same eyes? This is the last time I will ever visit Aldus Street; here and now, as I scrawl these few words. Let them be words of love, then, because I loved Aldus Street.
When I think of Aldus Street, I think first of winter twilight, and of the vendors of hot roast sweet potatoes, who came by through the snow with tin handcarts in which wood fires burned. I could buy a potato for a penny or two. The vendor would pull out a trayful of potatoes, and fire and sparks would fly up through the little flue, as he put a scrap of newspaper around a scorched potato and handed it to me. I didn’t care much for sweet potatoes; I was happier when the jelly-apple vendor came around with his glass-enclosed cart, or best of all the charlotte-russe man. There is something that I can no more recapture than Bobbie Webb’s first kiss—the taste of the charlotte russe of Aldus Street, that bit of sponge cake in cardboard, topped with spiralling ridges of sublime whipped cream. But a charlotte russe cost a nickel. Maybe that was the charm of the sweet-potato man; usually I had a penny on me, and could buy something from him.
But there was more to him than that. He was warmth in the cold, fire in the dark, sparks ascending to the moon past squat tenements. He was heat in hands chilled by making snowballs. If a potato was no charlotte russe, it still felt warm and good going down. Call the charlotte russe poetry, and the sweet potato a legal brief… or, hell, never mind the metaphors! Just remember the sweet-potato man as I do, and his tin cart full of fire in December gloom amid falling snow: my primal after-image of Aldus Street.
Well, shall I go on about the fragrant summer fruit in the horse-drawn wagons, the rich look and smell of the sweet butter blocks the grocery man sliced out of a tub, the hundred other memories and pictures and tastes and smells of Aldus Street? Peter Quat would no doubt offer a comic chapter on peeking into the girls’ toilet in P.S. 75, before they found the hole and plastered it over. Why force the note? Why imitate? I’m writing out my thoughts as they come, I have no idea whether they’re “literature.” I don’t care. I’ve told you about the lots, about Southern Boulevard where the grand shops and movie theatres were, about the haunted house, about the sweet-potato man, and about the kids. True, the outside was rougher and colder than the inside. True, I was never as admired and petted and happy in the street as within the sheltering walls of Apartment 5-D. But I did have a place out on Aldus Street, a society, a rank, and a leader. I was at home on Aldus Street, as I have never been since. And when that Halloween night Aldus Street turned on me, and I was thrust into the exile which remains my true condition, my childhood ended.
19
Alienation
Paul Frankenthal fades off in memory after the Izzy night. In fact, he went on haunting me for years, and he’ll show up again. But the pot is boiling over again in the White House, and I may have to break off at any moment, and who knows when I’ll get back to my story? So if I seem to skimble-skamble through the next part you’ll know why. So far, I’ve narrated mainly the outside, the Aldus Street strand of my childhood. Now a brief necessary word about the inside existence which paralleled my street life. In retrospect, these simultaneous things seemed to happen on different tracks of reality.
***
We start back when I’m about six, with the half-dollar. It fell on the open book as I sat with old Mr. Horowitz, starting on my Bible studies. “In… the… beginning,” I was painfully translating, “God… created… the heavens—”
Thump, clink, roll! The big silver coin hit the page and bounced to the parlor floor. I was on it like a cat. From nowhere, in midday, my father had appeared behind the Hebrew teacher’s chair. “An angel dropped that from Heaven,” he said, slightly smiling. “Keep it, and study hard.” And back he went to the Fairy Laundry.
Did I believe the angel story? At age six, hard to say. I pocketed the half-dollar, no questions asked, and resumed the Hebrew work, highly motivated. It’s an old Jewish custom, this coin that falls from Heaven when you start learning Torah. A yet older one was a touch of honey on the Bible page, which the child got to lick off. Same idea, but in the Goldena Medina, money beat honey hands down.
Well, is it playing on the credulity of a child, the coin from overhead? Why, sure, it’s a sort of variant on the Santa Claus theme, I guess. When I found out, in the first grade at public school, about hanging up your stocking on Christmas Eve, I couldn’t wait to try it. I did hang one up, though Pop gently advised me not to bother. Next morning there was something in my stocking all right, an anonymous note: Dear David, you are a great big stupid dope to believe in Santa Claus.
Guess whose handwriting. Mama has never had a light touch. A case in point, about the same time: the incident of the window shade. It happened in the Kelly Street synagogue, on the eve of Simkhas Torah, the Rejoicing of the Law.
That was our merriest religious night of the year. It still is, among the pious. The men marched with the Torah scrolls seven times around the synagogue, singing and dancing between the circuits, and we children paraded behind them bearing paper flags. On the sticks of the flags apples were impaled, and in the apples candles were burning; an unbelievable fire hazard, since the Kelly Street shule was just a wooden store, and the dancing jostling children kept dropping burning candles all over the place. “God watches the simple,” says the Psalmist. The little store never did burn down. Maybe the spirit of Sholem Aleichem, who died in a house next door back in 1916, stood guard over the Kelly Street shule.
Now I was quite content to march around with flag, apple, and flaming candle. Naturally I yearned for a mantled Torah scroll all aglitter with sequins, or at least for one of the smaller velvet-mantled scrolls that the bar-mitzva boys carried: Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and such. But I knew I didn’t rate that, not at the age of six. Mama, however, had a great idea. The shule possessed one prophetic scroll for which nobody had as yet contributed a mantle. The long slender rolled-up bare parchment was visible in the open Holy Ark, and Mama came bustling out of the women’s section, and asked Pop why Yisroelke couldn’t carry that thing around. It was a sacred book, too, wasn’t it? So Papa got out the naked white scroll. “Here,” he said to me with not much enthusiasm, “wouldn’t you like to carry this?”
“That?” I exclaimed. “Why, that’s a window shade.”
“No, no!” He glanced over his shoulder at Mama, back in the women’s section, nodding and smiling eagerly at us over the curtain. “Take it, Yisroelke. It’s just as good as a Torah.”
He was my father, so I believed him. I fell in behind the last of the bar-mitzva boys who carried a mantled scroll, ahead of all the kids with flags, apples, and candles. The marching and singing for the next circuit began. Behind me a child’s voice—not mocking, just inquiring: “Say, Davey, what are you doing with a window shade?”
I, over my shoulder: “It’s not a window shade.”
“Oh.”
A synagogue crowds up on Simkhas Torah. The congregants line the aisles, and mothers hold their children up, and all kiss the scrolls as they go by.
“Mama,” piped one of these tots when I had hardly started out, “do I have to kiss the window shade?”
“Of course not,” said the mother, looking down in puzzlement at the little pudgy lunatic marching with this silly object.
