The Collected Stories (7 page)

The teachers became happier and happier. Their heads were ringing like the bells of childhood. My best friend, Evie, was prone to evil, but she did not get a single demerit for whispering. We learned “Holy Night” without an error. “How wonderful!” said Miss Glacé, the student teacher. “To think that some of you don't even speak the language!” We learned “Deck the Halls” and “Hark! The Herald Angels” … They weren't ashamed and we weren't embarrassed.

Oh, but when my mother heard about it all, she said to my father: “Misha, you don't know what's going on there. Cramer is the head of the Tickets Committee.”

“Who?” asked my father. “Cramer? Oh yes, an active woman.”

“Active? Active has to have a reason. Listen,” she said sadly, “I'm surprised to see my neighbors making tra-la-la for Christmas.”

My father couldn't think of what to say to that. Then he decided: “You're in America! Clara, you wanted to come here. In Palestine the Arabs would be eating you alive. Europe you had pogroms. Argentina is full of Indians. Here you got Christmas … Some joke, ha?”

“Very funny, Misha. What is becoming of you? If we came to a new country a long time ago to run away from tyrants, and instead we fall into a creeping pogrom, that our children learn a lot of lies, so what's the joke? Ach. Misha, your idealism is going away.”

“So is your sense of humor.”

“That I never had, but idealism you had a lot of.”

“I'm the same Misha Abramovitch, I didn't change an iota. Ask anyone.”

“Only ask me,” says my mama, may she rest in peace. “I got the answer.”

Meanwhile the neighbors had to think of what to say too.

Marty's father said: “You know, he has a very important part, my boy.”

“Mine also,” said Mr. Sauerfeld.

“Not my boy!” said Mrs. Klieg. “I said to him no. The answer is no. When I say no! I mean no!”

The rabbi's wife said, “It's disgusting!” But no one listened to her. Under the narrow sky of God's great wisdom she wore a strawberry-blond wig.

Every day was noisy and full of experience. I was Right-hand Man. Mr. Hilton said: “How could I get along without you, Shirley?”

He said: “Your mother and father ought to get down on their knees every night and thank God for giving them a child like you.”

He also said: “You're absolutely a pleasure to work with, my dear, dear child.”

Sometimes he said: “For godsakes, what did I do with the script? Shirley! Shirley! Find it.”

Then I answered quietly: “Here it is, Mr. Hilton.”

Once in a while, when he was very tired, he would cry out: “Shirley, I'm just tired of screaming at those kids. Will you tell Ira Pushkov not to come in till Lester points to that star the second time?”

Then I roared: “Ira Pushkov, what's the matter with you? Dope! Mr. Hilton told you five times already, don't come in till Lester points to that star the second time.”

“Ach, Clara,” my father asked, “what does she do there till six o'clock she can't even put the plates on the table?”

“Christmas,” said my mother coldly.

“Ho! Ho!” my father said. “Christmas. What's the harm? After all, history teaches everyone. We learn from reading this is a holiday from pagan times also, candles, lights, even Hanukkah. So we learn it's not altogether Christian. So if they think it's a private holiday, they're only ignorant, not patriotic. What belongs to history belongs to all men. You want to go back to the Middle Ages? Is it better to shave your head with a secondhand razor? Does it hurt Shirley to learn to speak up? It does not. So maybe someday she won't live between the kitchen and the shop. She's not a fool.”

I thank you, Papa, for your kindness. It is true about me to this day. I am foolish but I am not a fool.

That night my father kissed me and said with great interest in my career, “Shirley, tomorrow's your big day. Congrats.”

“Save it,” my mother said. Then she shut all the windows in order to prevent tonsillitis.

In the morning it snowed. On the street corner a tree had been decorated for us by a kind city administration. In order to miss its chilly shadow our neighbors walked three blocks east to buy a loaf of bread. The butcher pulled down black window shades to keep the colored lights from shining on his chickens. Oh, not me. On the way to school, with both my hands I tossed it a kiss of tolerance. Poor thing, it was a stranger in Egypt.

I walked straight into the auditorium past the staring children. “Go ahead, Shirley!” said the monitors. Four boys, big for their age, had already started work as propmen and stagehands.

Mr. Hilton was very nervous. He was not even happy. Whatever he started to say ended in a sideward look of sadness. He sat slumped in the middle of the first row and asked me to help Miss Glacé. I did this, although she thought my voice too resonant and said, “Show-off!”

Parents began to arrive long before we were ready. They wanted to make a good impression. From among the yards of drapes I peeked out at the audience. I saw my embarrassed mother.

Ira, Lester, and Meyer were pasted to their beards by Miss Glacé. She almost forgot to thread the star on its wire, but I reminded her. I coughed a few times to clear my throat. Miss Glacé looked around and saw that everyone was in costume and
on line waiting to play his part. She whispered, “All right …” Then:

Jackie Sauerfeld, the prettiest boy in first grade, parted the curtains with his skinny elbow and in a high voice sang out:

He disappeared.

My voice burst immediately from the wings to the great shock of Ira, Lester, and Meyer, who were waiting for it but were surprised all the same.

“I remember, I remember, the house where I was born …”

Miss Glacé yanked the curtain open and there it was, the house—an old hayloft, where Celia Kornbluh lay in the straw with Cindy Lou, her favorite doll. Ira, Lester, and Meyer moved slowly from the wings toward her, sometimes pointing to a moving star and sometimes ahead to Cindy Lou.

It was a long story and it was a sad story. I carefully pronounced all the words about my lonesome childhood, while little Eddie Braunstein wandered upstage and down with his shepherd's stick, looking for sheep. I brought up lonesomeness again, and not being understood at all except by some women everybody hated. Eddie was too small for that and Marty Groff took his place, wearing his father's prayer shawl. I announced twelve friends, and half the boys in the fourth grade gathered round Marty, who stood on an orange crate while my voice harangued. Sorrowful and loud, I declaimed about love and God and Man, but because of the terrible deceit of Abie Stock we came suddenly to a famous moment. Marty, whose remembering tongue I was, waited at the foot of the cross. He stared desperately at the audience. I groaned, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The soldiers who were sheiks grabbed poor Marty to pin him up to die, but he wrenched free, turned again to the audience, and spread his arms aloft to show despair and the end. I murmured at the top of my voice, “The rest is silence, but as everyone in this room, in this city—in this world—now knows, I shall have life eternal.”

That night Mrs. Kornbluh visited our kitchen for a glass of tea.

“How's the virgin?” asked my father with a look of concern.

“For a man with a daughter, you got a fresh mouth, Abramovitch.”

“Here,” said my father kindly, “have some lemon, it'll sweeten your disposition.”

They debated a little in Yiddish, then fell in a puddle of Russian and Polish. What I understood next was my father, who said, “Still and all, it was certainly a beautiful affair, you have to admit, introducing us to the beliefs of a different culture.”

“Well, yes,” said Mrs. Kornbluh. “The only thing … you know Charlie Turner—that cute boy in Celia's class—a couple others? They got very small parts or no part at all. In very bad taste, it seemed to me. After all, it's their religion.”

“Ach,” explained my mother, “what could Mr. Hilton do? They got very small voices; after all, why should they holler? The English language they know from the beginning by heart. They're blond like angels. You think it's so important they should get in the play? Christmas … the whole piece of goods … they own it.”

I listened and listened until I couldn't listen anymore. Too sleepy. I climbed out of bed and kneeled. I made a little church of my hands and said, “Hear, O Israel …” Then I called out in Yiddish, “Please, good night, good night. Ssh.” My father said, “Ssh yourself,” and slammed the kitchen door.

I was happy. I fell asleep at once. I had prayed for everybody: my talking family, cousins far away, passersby, and all the lonesome Christians. I expected to be heard. My voice was certainly the loudest.

Up early or late, it never matters, the day gets away from me. Summer or winter, the shade of trees or their hard shadow, I never get into my Rice Krispies till noon.

I am ambitious, but it's a long-range thing with me. I have my confidential sights on a star, but there's half a lifetime to get to it. Meanwhile I keep my eyes open and am well dressed.

I told the examining psychiatrist for the army: Yes, I like girls. And I do. Not my sister—a pimp's dream. But girls, slim and tender or really stacked, dark brown at their centers, smeared by time. Not my mother, who should've stayed in Freud. I
have
got a sense of humor.

My last girl was Jewish, which is often a warm kind of girl, concerned about food intake and employability. They don't like you to work too hard, I understand, until you're hooked and then, you bastard, sweat!

A medium girl, size twelve, a clay pot with handles—she could be grasped. I met her in the rain outside some cultural activity at Cooper Union or Washington Irving High School. She had no umbrella and I did, so I walked her home to my house. There she remained for several hours, a yawning cavity, half asleep. The rain rained on the ailanthus tree outside my window, the wind rattled the shutters of my old-fashioned window, and I took my time making coffee and carving an ounce of pound cake. I don't believe in force and I would have waited, but her loneliness was very great.

We had quite a nice time for a few weeks. She brought rolls and bagels from wherever the stuff can still be requisitioned. On Sundays she'd come out of Brooklyn with a chicken to roast. She thought I was too skinny. I am, but girls like it. If you're fat, they can see immediately that you'll never need their unique talent for warmth.

Spring came. She said: “Where are we going?” In just those words! Now I have met this attitude before. Apparently, for most women good food and fun for all are too much of a good thing.

The sun absorbed July and she said it again. “Freddy, if we're not going anywhere, I'm not going along anymore.” We were beach-driven those windy Sundays: her mother must have told her what to say. She said it with such imprisoned conviction.

One Friday night in September I came home from an unlucky party. All the faces had been strange. There were no extra girls, and after some muted conversation with the glorious properties of other men, I felt terrible and went home.

In an armchair, looking at an
Art News
full of Dutchmen who had lived eighty years in forty, was Dorothy. And by her side an overnight case. I could hardly see her face when she stood to greet me, but she made tea first and steamed some of my ardor into the damp night.

“Listen, Freddy,” she said. “I told my mother I was visiting Leona in Washington for two days and I fixed it with Leona. Everyone'll cover me”—pouring tea and producing seeded tarts from some secret Fiatbush Avenue bakery—all this to change the course of a man's appetite and enable conversation to go forward.