Last Respects Read online

  “I quite understand,” Mr. O’Hare said. “And indeed I am most sympathetic, in spite of what your mother’s interruption cost the troop on that ill-fated night. But what I cannot understand, and what I find it most difficult to feel sympathetic about, is your subsequent conduct, Benjamin, as I’m sure you can understand, can’t you?”

  I was not too sure about the word subsequent, but I had a very clear understanding of the word conduct. It appeared every month on my school report card.

  I hesitated, caught between “Yes, sir,” of which I’d had a bellyful, and “No, sir,” which did not seem appropriate. Finally I settled for a hesitant “Well,” accompanied by an embarrassed foot shuffle.

  “I don’t mean to be harsh,” Mr. O’Hare said, and he shifted his weight in the chair as though the layers of fat in which he was sitting had suddenly become too much for him. “But eleven—no, twelve—days have passed since the unfortunate incident took place, and I have not heard from you, Benjamin. You did not come to our last meeting, and nobody to whom I spoke, George Weitz and Ira and Morris, none of them seemed to know what your plans were, or if you ever intended to come back to the troop. I mean they didn’t know, Benjamin, if I make myself clear?”

  I didn’t know, either. But the direction the conversation had taken, especially the tone of Mr. O’Hare’s voice, seemed to indicate an opening in the gummy mass of dipped-in-chicken-fat syllables the scoutmaster was pouring over me as though I was a blintz on a plate and he was a pitcher of sour cream. I jumped through the opening like Rin-Tin-Tin streaking through the crack in the door left open by the careless rustler.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “I would never leave the troop, Mr. O’Hare. That’s why I came here tonight.”

  Since I didn’t know where I was going, I thought I’d better go in his direction. So I matched my voice to his. I mean I tried to copy the throb Mr. O’Hare had got into his last remarks. It wasn’t easy. His hot air was coming up out of the barrel of fat in which he lived. All that flabby suet made a marvelous sounding board. But me, I was just a skinny kid with a concave chest and a voice that was trying to make up its mind about changing. All I had to rely on was my talent for invention. I gave it the works. The works worked.

  “You mean you came here tonight to explain?” Mr. O’Hare said. “To apologize?”

  “Well,” I said. Now I shifted from the foot shuffle to the toe stare. I cleared my throat. For a wild moment, in the grip of reckless inspiration, I gave a fevered thought to a tear or two. I was pretty sure I could do it. Crying on order had got me through several jams in school. But here, in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House, the Scout Law stood in the way. A scout is brave, it said between thrifty and clean. I had a feeling it was the sort of thing Mr. O’Hare would remember. “Yes, sir,” I said. “I came to—to—”

  My voice broke. Not a crash. Just a sort of crumble. Heartbreaking but manly. It made even me feel sad.

  “Benjamin,” Mr. O’Hare said. “Benjamin, I don’t know how to tell you the extent to which your words have moved me. What you have just said—” He paused. It had apparently occurred to him to give a moment of thought to what I had just said. “But how did you know I would be here?” Mr. O’Hare said. “I did not know myself until an hour ago that I would be coming down tonight. I forgot my program book when I went home after Saturday’s meeting. I planned to work on it tonight. When I learned I didn’t have my book, I—I—” Mr. O’Hare paused again. “Benjamin,” he said, “I am puzzled.”

  He was also in my way, and time was running out.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know you’d be here tonight, Mr. O’Hare.”

  “Then how could you come here to apologize?”

  “I didn’t come to apologize in words,” I said. “I came to—to—I came to do something that would show how I felt about the troop,” I said. “I came to borrow the hike wagon.”

  There is this to be said for a fat face: you can’t beat it as a ball park on which to register consternation. It’s like dropping a stone into a lake. There is plenty of room for the ripples to spread out. I could understand their spreading out on Mr. O’Hare’s face. The hike wagon was a cart the members of Troop 244 had constructed from the scoutmaster’s design.

  It consisted of a Kirkman’s Soap Flakes wooden box mounted on two baby-carriage wheels nailed at one end to an umbrella-shaft axle. At the other end a length of broomstick, running horizontally, had been nailed to form a handle. A top for the box had been fixed on hinges, so that, when the wagon sat flat on the ground, it could be opened for loading and unloading. In the wagon, when we went on Sunday hikes, we carried the heavy equipment that would not fit into our knapsacks: the iron grill that went over the campfire; the two big aluminum pots in which we cooked stews and soups; the two baseball bats, the balls, the catcher’s mitt, and the pitcher’s glove with which we took our whack at the national pastime when we found a level campsite; the folding cot on which Mr. O’Hare took his nap after lunch; the first-aid kit; and the Morse Code flags.

  The whole thing was painted a ripe almost golden khaki, and on the cover, in purple and red, appeared a twelve-inch reproduction of the scout badge. Above it, in six-inch type, was lettered: Troop 244, Manhattan Council, B.S.A. Below the badge appeared the scout motto: Be Prepared.

  Because of the way the wagon was constructed, it could be moved easily, like an up-ended baby carriage, along sidewalks leading to the Astor Place subway station, down the subway steps and into trains, onto the Dyckman Street ferry, and when we were across the river, along the hiking paths at the foot of the Palisades. Because of its gaudy coloring, the wagon attracted a lot of attention. There was a good deal of rivalry among the members of the troop for the opportunity to push or lug the wagon in public. Because of its markings, it would never occur to a cop or any other law enforcement officer to suspect that the hike wagon contained anything illegal. Especially if it was being pulled or shoved by a boy in uniform. Anyway, that’s what my mother and Walter Sinclair were counting on.

  “You came to borrow the hike wagon?” Mr. O’Hare said. “Is that what I understood you to say?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  Again Mr. O’Hare seemed to hunt for breathing space by rearranging the layers of fat that hung on him like saddlebags.

  “How, if I may ask,” he said, “how do you think that will help you to apologize for what happened on the night of the eliminations?”

  “Maybe not in words,” I said, inventing nervously. “I wasn’t thinking about words. I was thinking of like, say, a sort of an act? Like putting on a show? Something that would do more for the troop than just words. Something that would make people at the Shumansky wedding realize what a great troop 244 is.”

  “The Shumansky wedding?” Mr. O’Hare said. “What is that?”

  The question was not as stupid as it sounded, although I don’t think Mr. O’Hare knew that.

  On East Fourth Street, anybody who heard the words “the Shumansky wedding” would know at once that somebody named Shumansky was going to get married. Also, since weddings are identified by the family that foots the bill, a Fourth Streeter would almost certainly conclude that Shumansky was the name of the bride and not the groom. But Mr. O’Hare did not come from East Fourth Street. Mr. O’Hare came from uptown.

  This did not necessarily make him a dope. In fact, since he had stated publicly that I was the best One-Flag Morse man he had ever known, I was inclined to think Mr. O’Hare was pretty smart. But people from uptown, I had noticed, were limited in many ways. There seemed to be whole areas of experience with which, when these people came into my life, they never seemed to have made contact.

  I did not hesitate. Time was running out. I leaned on the first Scout Law: A scout is trustworthy.

  “Mr. Shumansky owns the chicken store on the corner of Avenue D and Fourth Street,” I said. “His daughter is getting married tonight in Lenox Assembly Rooms. I thought if I came with the hike wagon, and I did a few things l
ike we do on hikes, knot-tying, maybe, or a few words in one-flag Morse, maybe even a spiral reverse bandage, I thought that would be good for Troop 244. I mean the people at the wedding, they’d see things they never saw before.”

  Mr. O’Hare stared down at his program book. This did not seem to help. How could it? The only thing that could help this man from uptown was to be shoved back and born again on East Fourth Street. But who had time for that? Mr. O’Hare tried sucking the end of his gold Eversharp. After a while this seemed to produce results. He looked up.

  “You know, Benjamin,” he said, “I’ve never been to a Jewish wedding.”

  Neither had I. But I had a feeling I was ahead of him. So it seemed sensible to say nothing that would cause me to lose my lead.

  “Could I borrow the wagon?” I said.

  “If you return it safely,” Mr. O’Hare said. “Will you be taking it far?”

  “Lenox Assembly Rooms is on Avenue C,” I said. “Between Second and Third. That’s not far.”

  “By all means, then, help yourself, Benjamin,” Mr. O’Hare said.

  I went to the closet and pulled out the wagon. It was loaded, of course. I could tell by the weight. But I had expected that.

  “Thanks, Mr. O’Hare,” I said. I added a little dessert. A man with his shape expected it. I said, “I’m sorry for what happened the night of the eliminations.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Mr. O’Hare said. “Will you come to next Saturday’s meeting?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. A lie, of course. How could I go back to the place where George Weitz had earned the top spot on my verbissen list? But a scout, in addition to being trustworthy, was kind. Especially to his scoutmaster.

  “Good,” Mr. O’Hare said. “We missed you at the last meeting.” He smiled. “You look very nice in your freshly laundered uniform.”

  I was glad to see, as I dragged the wagon up the stairs into the white marble lobby, that I did not look too nice. The upper floors of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House were cut up into small rooms in which lived Jewish career girls from out of town. They were always wandering around the marble lobby with books and magazines from the library back of the office and vacant looks from wondering why they had ever come to New York in the first place. Very often, when they saw a nice boy scout, they smiled and patted his head. I have dents in my scalp to prove it. On that night, however, I was spared. Nobody paid any attention to me. I got the wagon out into Avenue B and turned downtown, moving a little faster than I would have liked. My next step was to get the stuff out of the wagon.

  I had known in advance that I would have to do this, and I had taken into my calculations the time needed to do it. What I had not known was that Mr. O’Hare would be in the meeting room when I got there to borrow the hike wagon. The time it had taken me to get him off my back now began to worry me. It was the first week in May. Without Mr. O’Hare’s interruption, I was sure I could get it all done before dark. Now I was not so sure. Old Man Tzoddick lived in a cellar. They said he always had a candle going after dark, but I had never actually seen this.

  Old Man Tzoddick was a junk dealer. He didn’t do much dealing in our neighborhood because there wasn’t much junk to deal in. People on Fourth Street and the surrounding streets used and lived with what they had. Nobody ever threw anything away. Old Man Tzoddick worked further west, toward Second and Third avenues.

  He moved up and down the streets, dragging a pushcart, shaking it from side to side at regular intervals. This caused the cowbells hung on a piece of clothesline strung across the top of the cart to clang and attract customers.

  Thinking about the contents of Old Man Tzoddick’s pushcart could drive a man—well, a boy scout, anyway—crazy.

  This boy scout, however, had to remain sane. So I scout-paced it—fifty steps walking, fifty steps trotting—down Avenue B and turned into Eighth Street. As soon as I came around the corner, I knew I was all right. Old Man Tzoddick’s pushcart was not standing in the vacant lot.

  The Eighth Street vacant lot was used as a dump for old lumber and as a garage for wagons by Burns Coal and other companies that worked from the East River docks and needed more space. On Election Day we used to count on the Eighth Street vacant lot for a good part of the old lumber we used in our Fourth Street Election night fire. I don’t know if the Burns Company paid rent to the owner of the Eighth Street vacant lot. It never even occurred to me until years later that there must have been an owner. In those days I assumed that vacant lots were part of the landscape, something provided by nature, like the streams and deserts and mountains I saw in the movies and in the pictures in my geography book. Maybe Old Man Tzoddick felt the same way. I certainly never heard that he paid any rent for parking his pushcart in the lot just outside the stone steps leading down to the cellar in which he lived. If I had felt that in addition to Old Man Tzoddick, I would have to contend with a landlord, I don’t think I would have chosen this lot as my first stop after putting my hands on the hike wagon.

  The wagon had to be unloaded before I could move ahead with my part of the plan my mother and Walter Sinclair had laid out? Okay. I would unload it. I couldn’t throw the stuff away, of course. When I returned the wagon it would have to contain everything that had been in it when I wheeled it out under Mr. O’Hare’s nose. My problem was to find a place where the stuff could be stashed for a few hours. What place could be more appropriate than the stone cave halfway down the steps that led to Old Man Tzoddick’s cellar?

  Ten minutes, maybe less, after I left Mr. O’Hare, I was squatting on Old Man Tzoddick’s stone steps. I was shoving into the cave the iron cooking grill, the soup and bean pots, the troop first-aid kit, and the Morse flags, when a voice behind me exploded.

  “Momzer!” the voice said. “Goniff! What are you doing?”

  I stopped doing it and turned. It was, of course, Old Man Tzoddick. I had never been this close to him before. I thought fast. It occurs to me, as I survey my youth on East Fourth Street, that there never was time to think slowly. It was always attack and counterattack. I counterattacked.

  “Your steamship ticket!” I yelled. “You crazy old bastard, where the hell is your steamship ticket?”

  It was around his neck, of course. Old Man Tzoddick did not like this country. He had come to America because he had heard it was a land of easy wealth. He intended to pile up the price of the farm in the Ukraine on which his father had been a serf, then go home and buy the place. To make sure he did not lose sight of his objective, Old Man Tzoddick, then no doubt known as Young Man Tzoddick, with his first American earnings bought a return steamship passage to Europe. He put the ticket into a small leather pouch and hung the pouch around his neck on a leather thong. When the time came to return to the Ukraine, he would be ready.

  “My steamship ticket?” Old Man Tzoddick said. His rage had turned to fear. It always did when his steamship ticket was mentioned. “What did you say about my steamship ticket?”

  “It’s no good,” I said.

  He clutched at the filthy pouch on the leather thong around his neck. “What do you mean it’s no good?”

  “It’s worn out,” I said, shouting the Yiddish words with mounting shrillness. “The company went out of business. It’s bankrupt. The ship doesn’t exist any more.”

  “God in heaven!” the old man wailed. “Oh, my God, my God in heaven!”

  He took his head in both hands and banged it against the stone steps, up and down, up and down, as though his forehead was a hammer and he was driving a nail. I was astonished by what I had done. All I had wanted to do was get rid of him so I could unload the contents of the wagon. It occurred to me, as Old Man Tzoddick wailed and screamed and beat his head, that I had. I shoved the stone slab back into place, grabbed the wagon, and dragged it up into the vacant lot.

  Here I hesitated. Neither my mother nor Walter Sinclair had specified how I was to perform my part of their plan so long as I completed it before sundown. I had not worked out a sequence for mys
elf. In fact, I had not thought much beyond putting my hands on the hike wagon. All the rest had seemed simple. This feeling of simplicity had been jolted when I realized I had to get rid of the contents of the wagon. Now all I could think of was getting away from the insane sounds Old Man Tzoddick was making on the cellar steps. I looked quickly toward Avenue C. There seemed to be a few people on the corner. I turned and ran west, toward Avenue B, trundling the wagon behind me.

  I ran for half a block, then shifted to scout pace. The clock over the Standard Bank at the Fourth Street corner showed twenty minutes to seven. It did not seem possible that I had left my mother and her kreplach less than an hour ago. My feeling of guilt about what I had done to old Man Tzoddick disappeared. My spirits zoomed back up to the level where they usually functioned. It looked as though I could still pull off the whole deal. It had seemed difficult when my mother explained it, but simple enough. We had to conceal until the night of the Shumansky wedding eight bottles of Old Southwick Scotch whiskey as Walter Sinclair delivered them to us on the dock two at a time. Two bottles at a time were all he could sneak out of the regular deliveries he made to the dock for the bootleggers who made their pickups in the middle of the night. On the night of the Shumansky wedding, however, he promised to deliver to me in one lump the final ten bottles, adding up to the eighteen my mother had agreed to deliver for the festivities. Walter did not explain how he would manage to put his hands on ten bottles in one lump, and it did not occur to me to ask. I trusted him. I see now what the answer probably was: his bosses trusted him, too.

  Ordinarily, concealing two bottles at a time would have been no problem. My mother would have hidden them somewhere around our apartment, probably under the bed where my father kept his case of Saratoga #2 mineral water. But there was something not quite ordinary about this project. It troubled me, and I worried about it, but I could not nail down just what it was that troubled me. I was certain of only one thing: my mother did not want my father to know about her dealings with Walter Sinclair. She had told me so. She had forbidden me to mention to my father what she and I and Walter were doing.