Snow in August (11 page)

In the morning, there was a great crowd on Collins Street and a police car with its doors open. Michael ran over. One of the
uniformed cops told him to stand back, and a woman grabbed him by the arm and jerked him aside and said, “Don’t look at this.”
But he looked anyway and saw the frozen body of an old man, wedged between two snow-covered cars. Michael could see rotten
brown teeth in the man’s open mouth. The eyes were wide and scared and had no color. Snot was frozen in his nostrils. Someone
said, “Name’s Shields, Officer. Jack, or Jimmy, I can’t remember. A wino from down the Hook.” The cop wrote this in a notebook.
Michael stared at the dead man,
whose arms were half-raised, his clothes too frail for the snow that covered them, and wondered if he’d had a wife or children.

Then in his mind he put his father’s face over the face of the dead man and he left Brooklyn. He saw his father sprawled in
the snow in a frozen forest in Belgium. The trees around him had no tops. Ruined tanks were everywhere, covered with snow.
Other soldiers were leaning down to look at his father’s face.
Don’t look at this
, a woman’s voice said in the snows of Belgium, but there were no women to be seen. Michael stared at his father’s eyes. They
were seeing him, knowing him, full of need, as if he were trying to say words. And then he was gone and Michael was back in
Brooklyn.

At Sacred Heart School, he could not explain to Brother Donard that image of the dead man in the snow and the way it was mixed
up with the face of his father. He did not even try. Nor did he decide to mention it to Rabbi Hirsch, who had heard enough
about death. Instead, he worked hard in class, doing homework during study periods, making notes while Brother Donard spoke.
Most of the other kids didn’t bother with notes. They stared out the window. They drew airplanes. They made faces at each
other, trying to provoke laughs. But Michael had discovered that making the notes helped him to remember things. If he wrote
down a word, then a memory of it was stamped in his brain. When he needed it, the word appeared. He didn’t know why. The brothers
didn’t teach them to do it that way. But it worked for Michael. And besides, when the time came to study for a test, he could
look at the notes and all the words would come back to him. It was a form of magic. The words were gone, vanished, disappeared
from the world, and then suddenly—
Shazam!
—they were there when he needed them.

Words themselves had a special power and mystery to
Michael. In Latin or Yiddish, they were like those secret codes used by spies, or members of secret societies, which he sometimes
wrote down while listening to
Captain Midnight
on the radio. But even in English, a word wasn’t as simple as it looked. The letters
H-O-R-S-E
were combined into
horse
. But what kind of a horse? Which horse? Gene Autry’s horse Champion? Roy Rogers’ horse Trigger? And that other cowboy, Ken
Maynard, had a horse named Tarzan even though they didn’t have any goddamned Tarzan books in the Wild West. There were big
police horses and the small horses people rode in Prospect Park in the summertime and the racehorses that the men in Casement’s
Bar bet on with Brendan the bookmaker. There were colts and stallions and ponies and yearlings, pintos and broncos, steeds
and mustangs, and those were just horses he’d learned about at the movies in the Venus. And down at the lumberyard at the
bottom of Collins Street they used sawhorses, which were made of wood! Sometimes, words didn’t name things very clearly. They
could get confusing.

Michael would think these things late at night, trying to sleep. The right words helped drive out the terrible occasions of
sin, those images of women that kept swimming through his head: Judith with her golden skin and Hedy Lamarr and a French woman
he saw in a Tarzan movie in the Venus. Denise Darcel. Their eyes and skin and hair and teeth would come from nowhere into
his mind and he would feel strange and his penis would get hard and he would want to touch it. Then he would try to resist
with words. Magic words. Europe. Steeples. The Vatican. Japan. Horses. Hallways. Pigeons. Jeeps. Each word was like the cross
held aloft to confront Dracula. Each word was like the magic amulet employed by Tiny Tim in the Sunday comics of the
Daily News
.

Words had assumed another importance too. He was thinking
about them in new ways because of Rabbi Hirsch. There were words he knew without having any memory of learning them; he just
knew them, the way he knew baseball. But Rabbi Hirsch didn’t know these words in English, so he had to explain them, spell
them, look them up in dictionaries. And when he had given those words to Rabbi Hirsch, the man made them his own. If Michael
corrected his pronunciation, the rabbi never again made the old mistake. He repeated the word, wrote it into a school composition
book, tried it out in sentences. The rhythms of those sentences were often wrong; the verbs were in the wrong place. But the
rabbi treated words as if they were jewels. He caressed them, handled them with his tongue, repeated them with delight, turned
them over for a view from another angle. Sitting with the rabbi on January afternoons, watching him plunge into words, Michael
couldn’t believe he was ever afraid of the man, and he wished everyone in the parish could see how hard the man was working
at becoming an American.

The rabbi also taught by example. Michael realized that he had never done with Latin what the rabbi was doing with English.
He barely knew what the Latin words meant, and he certainly could not speak Latin. And neither could the priests at Sacred
Heart. They all spoke English to each other. The priests and the altar boys
recited
Latin, like actors in some play. The priests often read the Latin prayers from books, while the altar boys called up the
replies from brute memory. And Father Heaney raced through Latin prayers as if they were a bore. Michael did love the sounds
of the Latin words, the flowing vowels, the abrupt consonants. But they were part of a code he didn’t fully understand.

Spurred by the example of Rabbi Hirsch, he went to Father Heaney and borrowed a translation of the liturgy of the mass,
and within days the Latin code was partially cracked. But the new knowledge made him feel deflated. What was being said in
the ceremony of the mass no longer seemed as mysterious.
Ite, missa est
, for example, meant Go, the mass is finished.
Deo gratias
meant Thank God. He laughed when he read that, because that’s how he sometimes felt, after a long, slow, drowsy mass. Thank
God this is over, he would think, because now I can pick up the buns at the bakery and go home to breakfast.
Deo gratias
.

But Michael’s sudden interest in Latin wasn’t as impassioned as his growing desire to learn Yiddish. At first, he had agreed
to learn the rabbi’s language out of politeness; that agreement had even felt like a trap. But then the lessons began to feel
like part of an adventure. Not like visiting the Taj Mahal, the way Richard Halliburton did in those fat books he saw at the
library. Or like Frank Buck going after man-eating tigers in India. But Michael did feel that learning the language was like
entering another country.

There was another thing too. In some way, because he had heard it all of his life, Latin was familiar. It was like the parts
of the parish that everyone else knew: the church, the factory and the police station, the Venus and the Grandview. But Yiddish
was strange, secret, special; in the world of the parish, it would be
his
. After all, the Egyptian wizard didn’t give Billy Batson a magic word in English or Latin. It was a private word in a private
language. And even if Michael did master Latin, he couldn’t speak it with anybody. As a language, it was dead. The blue books
said so.
By the end of the eighth century after Christ, Latin was no longer the common spoken language, and was diverging into Spanish
and French and other forms
…. Yiddish was different. Right there, on page 3067 of the
Wonderland of Knowledge
, was the entry.

From Eastern Europe has come Yiddish, an extremely flexible language spoken principally by Jews. It is based mainly on the
German of the Middle Ages, but the inclusion of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Slavic words and phrases has made it quite distinct from
the language spoken in Germany today. Although Jewish scholars once frowned on Yiddish as a vulgar tongue, it is now accepted
as a language of wide literary merit. Numerous high-grade works of literature have been written in Yiddish; first-rank writers
have used it as their medium; and there are a number of newspapers printed in Yiddish. Russia, Poland, and the United States
have produced the principal Yiddish literature
….

If he could learn Yiddish, he could read the newspaper that Rabbi Hirsch sometimes had on his table, the
Forvertz
, and find out what they said about the goyim in a language the goyim could not read, and how they would cover the arrival
of Jackie Robinson. And he could borrow books from Rabbi Hirsch’s bookcase and read them. He was thrilled by the example of
Balzac. He wrote his books in French, which came from Latin, and here they were in Yiddish, which came from German, and wouldn’t
it be something if an Irish kid could read those stories after they had traveled all the way to Brooklyn? It would be like
reading Latin, French, German, and Yiddish all at once, and turning them into English in his head. There were some books by
Balzac on the shelves in the public library, but Michael did not even try to read them. He wanted to hold off until he could
read them in Yiddish, the way he had held off looking at the snow on the morning of the blizzard. But more than anything else,
he wanted to have a secret language. Among his friends and classmates, among the priests and the shopkeepers, in a world where
Frankie McCarthy swaggered around with the Falcons and old rummies died in the snow, Yiddish would be his.

By the end of January, he had established a routine with the
rabbi for their classes. Saturdays were out. The rabbi had to preside over the downstairs sanctuary. A small group of old
people would arrive early, and sometimes stay all day, and the rabbi had to be available for discussion. Michael did show
up early on Saturday mornings to be the Shabbos goy, refusing money from the rabbi but always accepting a glass of tea. Sometimes
he brought the rabbi a sugar bun from Ebinger’s Bakery, where the day-old pastries were only three cents. Sometimes they talked
quickly about the weather. But then they would say goodbye until Tuesday. The lessons now were on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
after school, which still gave him time to see his friends.

But it wasn’t only the rabbi’s obligations that made Saturday lessons impossible. The rhythm of Michael’s week was changed
one evening near the end of the month. He came up from the streets and found his mother happy and whistling as she listened
to Edward R. Murrow on the radio.

“I’ve got great news,” she said, turning down the volume on the radio. “We’re going to be the janitors. And I’ve got a new
job.”

She turned the hamburgers in the frying pan on the coal stove while she spoke, and stirred the boiling carrots. The McElroys
were moving out of the first floor, his mother explained, going to Long Island, and Mr. Kerniss, the landlord, had asked her
if she wanted the job of janitor. She had accepted.

“The first thing he’s going to do is take out the damned coal stove and give us a gas range,” she said. “How do you like that?”

“No more rotten egg smells!” Michael said.

“And we won’t have to pay any rent,” she said, her face happier than he’d ever seen it. “We’ll have to sweep and wash the
halls once a week, and make sure the garbage cans are set out,
and change the lightbulbs. And put coal in the furnace in the cellar for the hot water. It’ll be hard work, but with your
help, Michael, we can do it.”

Michael felt a surge of emotion that he could not name. For the first time he was being called upon to do a man’s work. He
would be able to help his mother in a way that he could never do when she worked at the hospital. Then she gave him the rest
of the news.

“I’ll be leaving the hospital on the first of February,” she said, her face telling him this was good news, not bad. “And
I’ll start work as a cashier at the RKO on Grandview Avenue. It’s a bit more money, and with us not having to pay rent, we’ll
be in the chips.” She smiled broadly. “Well, not really. But 1947 will be a lot better than 1946.”

She seemed abruptly close to tears, and for a moment, Michael wanted to hug her. He wanted to tell her that as far as he was
concerned 1946 wasn’t so bad. They hadn’t gone hungry. They didn’t go on relief, like the Kanes or the Morans. He’d done well
in school. And right at the end, he’d met Rabbi Hirsch. That was a good year.

But he said nothing and realized how proud he was of the changes in their lives. The RKO Grandview, after all, was one of
the big movie houses. It wasn’t like the Venus, where the same movies returned year after year,
Four Feathers
and
Gunga Din, Frankenstein
and
Bride of Frankenstein
, along with the serials and cartoons and coming attractions. The Venus was a small, rowdy place that wasn’t very clean. In
fact, most people in the parish called it The Itch, implying that you could get fleas just by sitting in its hard seats.

But the RKO Grandview was like a palace. The lobby alone was bigger than their flat, with paintings of old Romans rising along
the side walls, the men playing flutes while women with
bare shoulders gazed at them like they were heroes. Some of the women resembled Judith from the encyclopedia, or at least
Hedy Lamarr. There were hundreds of seats in the orchestra, sloping toward the stage and the movie screen, and when you walked
in, the first twenty rows had a mezzanine above them, with boxes like the ones where Lincoln was shot by that actor, and above
the mezzanine was the balcony. Michael had no idea how many seats there were in the balcony. It just climbed and climbed into
the darkness, with cigarettes burning like dozens of fireflies, and the distant ceiling farther away than the roof of Sacred
Heart.