Inside, Outside, page 22
Staggered, appalled, shaken to my soul, I looked up from the newspaper at Mama. There she sat, radiating happy pride, feasting her eyes on young Isaac, the boy genius of Townsend Harris Hall.
“A pushka,” I managed to choke out. “A pushka.”
“Oh, what can you expect from a goy?” she said. “He got it all mixed up. I certainly never said it was forty feet long. He put that in. But what does it matter? It’s such a nice big story!”
“Mama—Mama, did you tell him I won those medals at Townsend Harris Hall?”
“Of course not.” Mama turned a shade irritable. “Did you hear me say he got all confused, or didn’t you? I never said that, and I never said they were all gold, either. I just said the English medal was gold, and it was, wasn’t it? I told him you won the others at Camp Maccabee. I just answered his questions and gave him the facts. He mixed them up. What’s the matter with you, anyway? Why do you look so upset? Everybody wants their name in the papers, don’t they? You’ve got a whole big story about you! Only the stupid fool calls you Isaac, God knows why, but everybody knows what your name is. The rest is fine, who doesn’t know that papers always get something wrong?”
Even as she spoke, I was calculating my chances of surviving this horror. I myself had never looked at the social page before. It was an inside page opposite the classified ads, and conceivably not a single Townsend Harrisite would notice the story. It would be a close thing, and I’d have to hold my breath until Friday, when I was coming up for my hearing before the Arista Society. Till then a sword would hang over my head.
My mother began to look concerned. My shock and alarm must have been written on my face. The misstatements hadn’t seemed all that serious to her. Why, there was her David’s picture in the paper, with a great big write-up, three columns, all about his wonderful achievements. What more could you ask for? She still glowed with her recent joys. Her color was high, her eyes brilliant. She looked beautiful and very young. To her the whole confounded business—the bar mitzva, the cantor, the maggid, the kishka, the news story, the one-upping of Aunt Sophie—had been a grasp at the ploika, and this time she really thought she had it in hand. I didn’t understand that at the time; yet seeing her turn anxious, I suddenly felt sorry for her. Another first! Sorry for my mother; realizing that any attempt to explain how I felt would be wasted words. A gulf had opened between The Green Cousin and her Minsker Godol. It has never closed.
“It sure is a big story, Mom,” I said cheerily, “and it sure was a great bar mitzva. I don’t care about the mistakes.” I kissed her, and went to my room. The walls swam, but I brushed my tears aside and sat down to Cicero’s second Oration against Catiline. Six days to the Arista meeting.
31
The Arista Meeting
I arrived at Townsend Harris Monday morning in a state of advanced dread.
On the trolley Abby Cohen had not referred to the Bronx Home News. For once his echoes of his father’s views—of the Talmud as a futile waste of time, of kosher butchers as a guild of irreligious fakers and thieves, and of God as a Stone Age bogeyman—were music to my ears, so long as he said nothing about my bar mitzva. He didn’t know it had taken place, because I hadn’t told him. You may find this hard to believe, but I kept my Townsend Harris life and my Bronx life rigidly compartmented, and Abby belonged in the Harris compartment. I had invited nobody from the school, not even Monroe Biberman, though he had a fair Jewish background. I had been moving between two planets, the Inside and the Outside. The horror of the Bronx Home News story was that it leaped the interplanetary void; and “my David,” the synagogue paragon, was proclaimed in public print as the mental and physical giant of Townsend Harris Hall. That was what I had to live down, unless by a miracle it escaped notice.
I passed through the morning periods, through the chess-playing in the crowded lunchroom, and through the afternoon classes, and heard not a whisper of the Bronx Home News. Was the miracle happening? Was God—in whom, unlike Dr. Cohen, I unreservedly believed—overlooking my small thieveries and the serious matter of gartered thighs, and giving me this incredible break as his bar-mitzva present? Even Seymour Dreyer, as we met going down into the subway at the end of the day, cordially waved and smiled. Not what I would expect from Dreyer if he had anything on me; and Dreyer, remember, was from the Bronx.
***
Now let me fill you in on Dreyer. Early in our first term, he and I had been partners in petty crime. Once when I was going down into the subway, he approached me and proposed that we crowd through a turnstile together. I had no compunction about gypping the subway system, and we did this regularly, each time saving a nickel. (Doesn’t that put the patina of a lost golden age on my youth? Five cents to ride anywhere in New York!) Dreyer next sought to improve our acquaintance by inviting me to see how easy it was to steal books from the library. I was curious enough to go with him to his neighborhood branch. Sure enough, he checked out two books and left with a third under his coat, beaming in triumph. When we reached the street, he offered me the pilfered book, but I wouldn’t accept it. I was capable of mulcting the transit system of a nickel a day, but there was something rotten to me in stealing a book from a library. I took a distaste to Dreyer, and backed off from our subway arrangement.
Once he joined the Stadium staff and got into Arista, Seymour Dreyer had no time for me. Dreyer was a born side-glancer, winker, and snickerer behind his hand. Every now and then I’d see him with some Stadium fellow, the back of his hand to his mouth, glancing toward me sideways with those half-closed Dreyer eyes. At the time, in my naive obliviousness to the whole Arista thing, I wasn’t bothered. Chances are he was proving how superior he was to his Bronx origins, by making jokes about the Bronx butt in the purple suit. You know such people, we all do, and that was Seymour Dreyer, the long and short of him.
***
Well, nothing is as stale as yesterday’s newspaper, and I awoke Tuesday with my spirits reviving. I had another uneventful day at the school. Ye gods, I thought, was I going to make it?
No.
When I got home, a letter awaited me from Seymour Dreyer. He congratulated me on my bar mitzva and my five gold medals. He expressed his wonder at the journalism award, since he wasn’t aware that I had joined the Stadium staff or even tried out for it. About my physical perfection and boxing prowess, he said that he’d have to be more careful around me hereafter; he hadn’t realized that such a powerful body lurked beneath my purple suit. I was bound to get into Arista now, he concluded, since there weren’t many boy geniuses around, and the honor society was always eager to raise the level of its membership.
Next day I approached Monroe Biberman and said I was with-drawing my Arista candidacy. He was dumbfounded. “Why?” he asked. “What’s bothering you?”
How could I tell him? I said the first lame thing I could think of: I had heard there was talk against me in the Stadium office. Biberman pooh-poohed the notion, said I shouldn’t get cold feet now, my election looked all set. Only, he casually suggested that I wear a different suit to the meeting. He didn’t criticize the purple suit; that was all he said. I densely let that go by, even after the Dreyer dig. And so, an ox to the knife, in the gray bar-mitzva suit in which I had marched to glory under the arch of crossed flags, I came to the Arista meeting on Friday afternoon. When I entered the classroom where they held it, about twenty members were lounging in the chairs. Several of them were smoking, and a few had on their laps copies of the Bronx Home News.
“Mr. Goodkind,” said the president of Arista, a dark, mature, and not disagreeable lordling named Jerry Bock, who was the editor of the Stadium, and who by general school whisper actually knew and frequented a whore, “will you please tell us why you think you should be elected to Arista?”
He sat at the teacher’s desk, a copy of the Bronx Home News open before him to the society page. Seymour Dreyer had gone to a lot of trouble, all right. He might have just passed one clipping around, but no, he was driving this nail to the board, establishing once for all his credentials as a Bronxite who despised Bronxites. Dreyer sat in the front row with a hand over his mouth, leaning toward the ear of Monroe Biberman, in the seat beside him, and on his face behind the hand was the beam of triumph with which he had stolen the library book.
—I wish I could break in here to tell you that Seymour Dreyer came to a bad end, but the fact is I’ve never heard of him since I left Townsend Harris. Dreyer was buried deeper in my subconcious than even Frankenthal was; but as soon as I began writing about my bar mitzva, the Bronx Home News came bursting through the six feet of mental cement with which I’ve overlaid it for forty years and more, and so this inconsequent snickering sneak has moved center stage.
But how much of this ordeal do you really want me to describe? It all happens in Lilliput, and who cares that I am back there, one of the tiny people, in a desperate situation? Well, okay. I stand with my back to the blackboard, my sweaty hands behind me clutching at the shelf where the chalk and the erasers lie, confronting those Arista kids and actually attempting to say why I should be elected. That was my mistake. I should have found a few dignified words and walked out as soon as I saw the newspapers, because I was sunk. I could see that in the smirks all over the room. Only Biberman and Bock seemed to be somewhat embarrassed. I hadn’t gotten far when one grinning face interrupted and asked me please to describe my journalistic achievements. Even as I drew breath to try to account for that accursed write-up, another grinning face declared he was more interested in my boxing record. Was I a welterweight or a bantamweight? Giggles. A third grinning face observed that a perfect physique was a rarity; would I consider stripping to the waist, so that the Arista members could all admire my award-winning body?
Raucous laughter, and the pillorying was on. Such questions and crude jokes shot at me from all sides. Adolescents aren’t kind, they put each other to the test all the time, and they’ll peck a downed one to death. It was my second Halloween. I faced it in silence, and let them joke and laugh themselves out. I didn’t say anything. I just stood there and took it. My knees were shaking, but I’m glad to say, even across this gulf of years, that my face remained calm and my eyes dry.
The noise died down.
“Mr. Goodkind, is your first name really Isaac?” Jerry Bock asked in a sober, almost apologetic way, as though trying to get the meeting back on the track.
“No.”
“Ignatz?” said someone. That someone was Monroe Biberman. He piped up “Ignatz” in a funny voice, and set them all laughing again.
And then, as the hee-haws subsided, Seymour Dreyer said, in the crude Jew singsong of vaudeville, “Tell us, Iggy, where’s your purple suit?”
(“Clip cock! Clip cock!”)
That did not get a laugh. I found my voice and said to Jerry Bock, “My first name is Israel. Any other questions?”
He didn’t answer. He looked out at the Arista members. So did I. No one said anything. Biberman wouldn’t meet my eye, and his face was turning red. Perhaps he was regretting “Ignatz,” now that the thing was done. For a laugh, one laugh, he had finished me off. The other faces were blank, except for Dreyer’s, whose eyes were almost shut in the happy book-stealing look. His kike imitation had over-shot the mark and ended the fun, but he didn’t realize it.
“Thank you, Mr. Goodkind,” said Jerry Bock.
I walked out. Though I had a jug sentence to serve, I went to my locker, got my books, and hurried the few blocks to the trolley, so as to arrive home in time for the first Sabbath after my bar mitzva. That night I intended to go to the synagogue with my father.
For the rest of my time in Townsend Harris, which is truly a blur, I was Iggy. The name caught and stuck. I don’t remember being bothered by that. The school just ceased to matter to me. Biberman and I scarcely talked again, and we didn’t win the short-story prize, by the way. As a matter of fact, Abby Cohen did. It didn’t help Abby on the Stadium, though. He worked like a dog till the end, yet got no higher than associate editor. But then, rather to my surprise, Dreyer didn’t even achieve that. Seymour Dreyer never did quite make it across the bridge.
32
The Art Plates
Aloft, Washington–Tel Aviv
August 17, 1973
Maybe it’s the hour or the altitude. The plane is black dark, I’m writing by a cone of light from the overhead hole, and the bouncing is making these lines straggle and wander like my thoughts. I should quit and try to sleep, but I’m wide awake. So okay, let me get a slug of booze from that fetching little El Al stewardess with the flirty dark eyes, and I’ll try to close out Townsend Harris with Mama’s audacious art plates coup. If not for her, I might never have graduated from Harris; certainly my transcript would have been a crippling disaster. The Green Cousin rescued me, brick in hand, so to speak, and she is entitled to this credit item after the hard time I’ve been giving her, and considering the shape she is in at the moment.
I still suspect Mom will bury all the doctors now waiting on her, and Lee and me, too, but at the moment she is hospitalized in Jerusalem, and I’ve been summoned to her bedside. She took it into her head to visit Zaideh’s grave on the Ninth of Av. That’s an old custom, praying at one’s parents’ graves on this day which commemorates the fall of the two temples, but one isn’t expected to fly six thousand miles to do it, not at her age. That was strictly my mother’s idea. That she can’t see, hear, or walk worth a damn, and keeps coming up with mortal symptoms, is for the doctors to worry about. She just bashes on.
Of course I’m concerned as hell.
***
Well, about the art plates. I’ve mentioned the lunatic importance of art at Townsend Harris. All students, semester after semester, had to turn in designs or pictures called “plates.” There’s no way I can tell you why a student’s career hung on his ability to draw and color pictures. Art was called a “diagonal” subject, like Latin and English. I can’t account for that label, either, but if you failed a “diagonal,” you couldn’t graduate.
Now, I never could draw or color for sour apples. I still can’t. After the Arista fiasco, I stopped caring about Townsend Harris, and as for the art plates, I just didn’t do them. I had to turn in eight plates in my senior year; and as I fell behind in art, doodling while the rest of the students daubed out still lifes, posters, landscapes, and whatnot, the teacher, a cold-eyed blond prig named Langsam, warned me that I was heading for my doom. Nobody could fail art and escape a ghastly fate, said Mr. Langsam. A few days before final exams I awoke to this predicament, and sat up nights at home doing desperate things with crayons and watercolors. Maybe Mr. Langsam would even have liked what I concocted. I never knew what pleased that ice-blooded fusspot, and my stuff did have a Picasso grotesqueness about it. But there’s no saying, because on the last day they were due I absentmindedly left those eight plates on a trolley-car seat.
When I realized this I got excused from school, took a cab to the car barns, and raised a hullabaloo, but the plates were gone. I told my sad story to Mr. Langsam, shedding genuine tears, and he listened, glacier-faced, and flunked me. He really couldn’t have done anything else, but there was no compassion in the man. We were alone in his office, and he took out his marking book with an arctic smile. “Well, Mr. Goodkind,” he said, “this is some kind of record, anyway. Your final semester mark in Art Diagonal A-Four is exactly zero.” His pen swooped in a round flourish. “There we are. Zero. I regret that you cannot graduate. You may go, Mr. Goodkind.”
He never dreamed, of course, that that wasn’t the end of it; but then, he had never dreamed of a person like my mother. Next morning there she stood with me in Mr. Langsam’s office. The night before, preparing my parents for the shock of my first school failure since kindergarten, I had warned them that with this black mark on my record I could scarcely hope to get into Columbia or any other good college.
“We’ll see about that,” said Mama. “I’ll go and talk to him. You made the plates, didn’t you? Why, I saw them myself. They were beautiful. I never heard of such injustice. What’s this man’s name again?” She wrinkled her nose at me.
“Langsam,” I said.
“An anti-Semite,” Mama said, stabbing a stiff forefinger in the air.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Mama,” said Lee. We were all at the supper table. “What are you talking about? How could the teacher pass him? Without even seeing the plates?”
“Is that David’s fault? Somebody stole them on the streetcar.”
Gray-faced and weary, Papa said to Mom, “Maybe he can draw more pictures. Or maybe they’ll let him go to summer school and make it up.”
“Why should he? I’ll talk to that man tomorrow,” said Mama. “That Mr. Langsam.”
And so there she was, bright and early, confronting him. I must say that, in this context, Mr. Langsam did look extremely gentile, though the notion had not struck me before. He was also a thoroughly thunderstruck gentile. He had a lot of trouble taking in Mom’s purpose, which was to get him to pass me in Art Diagonal A-4. “Mrs. Goodkind,” he said in a cautious quiet way, as though soothing a madwoman with an ax, “your son didn’t do the work, so how can I pass him?”
“He did do the work. All of it. He did eight beautiful pictures—what do you call them?”
“Plates,” said Mr. Langsam.
“Plates, yes. Plates. Eight fine plates. One of flowers, one of a wonderful red horse, and the Empire State Building, and—”
“He did not submit any such plates in class, madam. He sat at his desk for five months, doing nothing.”
“So he did them at home. That was allowed, wasn’t it?”
