Last Respects Read online

  “Wednesday?” my mother said when I asked her on Tuesday if she would launder and press my uniform in time for the eliminations contest. “Every week I wash on Friday. What’s all of a sudden Tuesday?”

  “This is something different,” I said.

  “Different how?”

  My mother spoke only Yiddish and Hungarian. My Hungarian was weak, but Yiddish was to me what Greek had been to Homer. Until this moment I had assumed I spoke it with the same sort of ease. This moment, however, involved an explanation of why the Manhattan Council had scheduled its rally for Wednesday night. Words didn’t exactly fail me. I have always had a capacity for keeping them coming under pretty nearly all conditions. But Yiddish, I saw soon enough, was in this instance proving inadequate. Besides, there was this curious game in which my mother and I were both involved: her pretense that the scout movement did not exist, and mine that I went off in uniform every Saturday night to some sort of vaguely defined social activity. My mother gave me the look she usually reserved for my father at all times, and for any shopkeeper’s first quotation of a price for anything.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said. Her tone implied clearly that if she got it any straighter her comprehension could be used as an architect’s plumb line. “You want me to wash and press the khaki shirt and pants on Tuesday?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You see, Ma, I gotta have it for Wednesday.”

  “And Friday?” my mother said. “You’ll want I should wash and press it again so you can wear it on Saturday?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “You see, Ma, this Wednesday thing, the eliminations contest, that’s something special. It’s extra. It has nothing to do with the regular Saturday night meeting.”

  “It has nothing to do with me either,” my mother said. “A slave over the washtub for uniforms, this I did not come to America to be.”

  It was her constant refrain, her endless quest. Why she had come to America. It was also her exit door from everything she did not want to do.

  “But, Ma, I’m the captain of the signaling team,” I said. “You want I should go looking like a slob?”

  “Tell them to hold these alimations on Saturday.”

  “Eliminations,” I said.

  “Whatever they are,” my mother said, “tell them to do it Saturday, so you’ll have the clean shirt and pants I wash on Friday. On Tuesday, no. I’m busy.”

  This was preposterous. How could she be busy? All she did was cook and clean and wash for my father and me, my sister and brother. If she was able to wash my uniform on Friday, why couldn’t she also do it on Tuesday?

  “Ma, I could get a medal for this.”

  “For what?”

  “For signaling,” I said. “Morse Code. With a flag. I’m the best in the troop. If we win these eliminations, our troop, we go on to the finals. Everybody who wins in the finals, they get a medal.”

  “So you be different from everybody,” my mother said. “You win in a dirty uniform.”

  I didn’t doubt that I could. According to Mr. O’Hare I handled a Morse signaling flag with more skill than anybody he had ever known. Not to be dishonestly modest about it, the main reason Troop 244 had managed to get as far as the eliminations finals in the 1927 All-Manhattan rally was my dexterity with a Morse signaling flag. I was secretly convinced I could carry the troop into the final finals and go on to win the rally. But somehow, I don’t know why, I didn’t want to get up there in a soiled, unpressed uniform. So I took my problem to George Weitz, my teammate.

  “You are a shmendrick,” said George. “But you are one hell of a signaler.”

  At fourteen, I thought I was pretty grown up. I did not think I was a shmendrick. But I did not think I was St. Francis of Assisi, either. On East Fourth Street in those days, I was trying to do what everybody else was trying to do: hang in there. I did not know this, of course. Years went by before I realized what had been wrong. I was bucking a tide without even being aware that I was immersed in water. Every adult on the block was an immigrant from some part of Central Europe, and every child was, like George Weitz and myself, a first-generation American. We talked to each other like illiterate diplomats. The simplest communications were papal encyclicals in garbled syntax. But not when I was talking to someone like George. George was on my side. I liked George, but I did not like being called a shmendrick.

  “You say I’m a shmendrick because I beat you for senior patrol leader,” I said. “If you’d beat me, I’d say you’re a shmendrick. But never mind that. I want you to do me a favor.”

  “Like what?” George said.

  George was a funny one. He didn’t really live on our block. He lived one block west, in a brownstone between Avenue C and Avenue B. There were no brownstones on our block, Fourth Street between Avenue D and Lewis. Ours was a block of tenements, and they were all pretty much alike. The tenement we lived in, for instance, at the corner of Lewis Street, was typical: thirty-two flats in the six-story “front house” which faced Fourth Street, and thirty-two flats in the “back house” which faced a courtyard full of ash cans. But George Weitz lived in a small narrow house, all four floors of which were occupied by the Weitz family. Nobody thought this odd. George’s father was a doctor. The Weitz family had moved in a short time ago, after Dr. Gropple died. Doctors were different. They were rich. They had servants. One of the servants the Weitz family had was known on the block as a “fat stupid Polish slob,” who was in fact their only servant. She cooked, she cleaned, and scrubbed—there were some smart alecks on the block who said she did other things for Dr. Weitz—and she did the Weitz family laundry.

  “Could you get your girl to wash and iron my uniform?” I said.

  “What’s the matter with your old lady?” George said. “She’s all of a sudden a cripple?”

  “No, but she’s busy on Tuesday,” I said.

  “Doing what?” George said.

  “What difference does it make?” I said. “She washes my uniform on Friday for the Saturday meeting. But this is for Wednesday. She can’t do it. She’s busy on Tuesday.”

  “Doing what?” George said again. “Putting double hemstitches on the new Passover line at Meister’s Matzoh Bakery?”

  It was the sort of thing George Weitz was always saying. He was known on East Fourth Street as a smart-ass. I’d never heard of Meister’s Matzoh Bakery. My guess was that neither had George. But things went on inside his head. Whatever they were, he enjoyed them. George made up those things inside his head, then he said them out loud. But he was not a bad guy. Besides, he was my reader-receiver on the Morse team.

  “It’s just the breeches and the shirt,” I said. “My neckerchief is still clean. I could bring them over after school and you could put them in your family laundry. What the heck, George, your girl won’t know the difference.” It seems odd to me now that on East Fourth Street we said heck when we meant hell.

  “Okay,” George said. “But don’t tell the Feds.”

  It was a George joke. Not funny, perhaps, but part of what a stand-up comic would call his routine. It was the sort of thing he always signed off with. Don’t take any wooden nickels. See you in church. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Keep punching. Now it was don’t tell the Feds. I didn’t tell anybody. I just went home after school and dug out my khaki breeches and shirt, and my mother caught me.

  “What are you doing?” she said. I told her. “No, you’re not,” she said. “In my family, if anything has to be washed, I’m the one that does it.”

  Even now I wonder if she said it with irritation or with pride. Anyway, she did it. On Wednesday night, therefore, when I met George Weitz on the corner of Avenue C and Fourth for the walk to the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House, the crease in my breeches moved crisply an inch or two ahead of my legs, the starch in the collar of my khaki shirt was eating away at my Adam’s apple, and my blue neckerchief looked like the sky over East Fourth Street on a hot summer day.

  “I thought you were bringing over your u
niform for our girl,” George said as we started up Avenue C toward Ninth. “What happened?”

  “My mother changed her mind,” I said. “She found the time yesterday to wash it.”

  “Meister’s Matzoh Bakery probably gave her a day off,” George said.

  I could see where Meister’s Matzoh Bakery, whatever that was, had moved into George’s head and settled down for a long stay. It was going to be the joke of the week, maybe month.

  “Be funny later,” I said. “Now just please concentrate on Morse. We gotta win this thing.”

  “We’ll win it,” George said. “None of these shmohawks from uptown can handle a Morse flag the way you and I can.”

  The “you and I” did not send me. George Weitz was not in my league. But I decided to let it go. He had more than a cockamaymey sense of humor. He had a temper. This was no time for a fight. Besides, let’s face it, George was the second best reader-receiver in the troop. He was entitled to say “you and I.” Suppose he had said “I and you”?

  “Maybe they can and maybe they can’t,” I said. “We still have Mr. Krakowitz to worry about.”

  “You’re not kidding,” George said. “That jerk. Jesus.”

  I wondered about George’s vehemence. I was not so sure that Mr. Krakowitz was a jerk. I mean, I’d never seen him do anything real rotten. There was no doubt, of course, that he was a pain in the ass. You didn’t have to be rotten to be a pain in the ass. Not in 1927 anyway.

  Mr. Krakowitz owned a men’s clothing store on Avenue B, between Fourth and Fifth, four blocks down from the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House. Some of the guys, guys like George Weitz, for instance, said Norton Krakowitz didn’t give a damn about the boy scout movement. He was in it for business reasons. He wanted to draw attention to his clothing store by posing as a public-spirited citizen. Norton Krakowitz? Owner of Krakowitz Men’s and Boys’ Clothes on Avenue B? A very good man. Works on the Boy Scouts. Some kind of executive on the Lower Manhattan Council. Spends a lot of time with the youngsters. Because he wants to help boys to grow up to be good men. Your son needs a suit for the High Holidays? Buy from Krakowitz. He deserves your patronage.

  Anyway, that’s how some people felt. If I didn’t, or if I wasn’t sure I did, it was because it wasn’t till my bar mitzvah that my father bought me the one suit I had. I mean a whole suit. Pants and a jacket. Before that I even went to schul on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the pants my father sewed for me himself and the sweaters my mother knitted for me. My feelings about Mr. Krakowitz were based mainly on the way he discharged his duties as a member of the Executive Committee of the Lower Manhattan Council. He enjoyed himself. It does not seem now to be a valid reason for disliking somebody, but now is different from 1927. I was fourteen in 1927.

  Norton Krakowitz liked to sing in public, and he was crazy about Shakespeare and the Bible. On Saturday nights, after he shut up shop, he roamed the Lower East Side, from Delancey Street to Avenue B, dropping in for a few minutes each on all the settlement houses that housed boy scout troops under his jurisdiction. I have no doubt, even though I cannot substantiate my certainty by actual eyewitness evidence, that Mr. Krakowitz filled each one of these few-minute sessions in exactly the same way that he filled the few minutes he spent with us every Saturday night in the Troop 244 meeting room at the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House.

  Somewhere around nine-thirty there would be a sharp knock on the door. No matter what we were doing—laying out the itinerary for a Sunday hike, burning gauze pads to make tinder for our flint-and-steel sets—we would stop doing it. Mr. O’Hare, our scoutmaster, would go to the door, open it, and admit Norton Krakowitz. It was like admitting a Japanese trade delegation to a postwar parley. There were a lot of parleys in 1927.

  Much smiling. A joke or two. Hearty laughter, mostly, as I recall, from Mr. Krakowitz. Then the speech. Thirty seconds to a minute and a half on Scouting as the Road to a Better and More Prosperous America. Then the song. It was always “Me And My Shadow.” Norton Krakowitz sang it the way my father ate noodle soup: as though he would never again get a crack at another helping. End of song. Applause. Followed by the senior patrol leader (me) jumping to his feet and yelling, “How about three cheers and a tiger for Mr. Krakowitz?” No dissent. The troop came through with a “Rah Rah Rah, Siss Boom Bah, Mr. Krakowitz! Mr. Krakowitz! Mr. Krakowitz!” The recipient of this noisy adoration smiled, bowed, raised his hand, and announced: “One final word.” It was never one, but it sure as hell—no, sorry, sure as heck—was final. Like: “Vanity of vanities, sayeth the preacher, all is vanity.” Or: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.” Another wave of the hand, and Norton Krakowitz was off to the Clarke House on Rivington Street for a repeat performance. On East Fourth Street the Clarke House was pronounced the “Clock House.” There was a huge clock over the wide gray stone entrance.

  “This bastard could ruin us,” said George Weitz. We had turned up Ninth Street toward Avenue B. “Where the hell does the Manhattan Council get off appointing a crap artist like that to be one of the referees?”

  Crap artists are, of course, familiar decorations of all civilizations. Look at Caligula. Look at Hitler. On the other hand, they are not all so vicious. Look, as long as we’re looking, at Jimmy Walker. I think Norton Krakowitz was closer to Jimmy than to Caligula. I think that’s why I understood but was not terrified by the thoughts of George Weitz.

  Similar thoughts had been running through my mind during the past few days. The referees of the eliminations contests performed a variety of functions, depending on the events they supervised. The main duty of the One-Flag Morse supervisor was to compose the messages that the competing teams would be wigwagging to each other. My thoughts had clustered around a central uneasy question: What kind of message could you expect to be cooked up by a referee who even before a hat was dropped broke into “Me and My Shadow”?

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said to George. “Whatever this slob cooks up, you and I can send it. Good evening, Mr. O’Hare.”

  The scoutmaster stopped and turned. He was two steps ahead of us on the way up the white marble stoop that led to the front doors of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House.

  “Ah, good evening, young men,” said Mr. O’Hare.

  Mr. O’Hare was very fond of all the members of Troop 244. At any rate, he certainly acted that way. But Mr. O’Hare had a very poor memory. He could not remember our names. So he called us all young men. I must say, in view of what I was called all the rest of the week, especially by friends like George Weitz, I enjoyed being addressed as “young man.” It was like coming up out of a sewer and finding yourself in the middle of a Frank Merriwell novel.

  “Bright and early, I see,” said Mr. O’Hare.

  That was another thing I liked. The way Mr. O’Hare talked. It was as though he had learned English not from Miss Hallock at J.H.S. 64 but by committing David Copperfield to memory.

  “We were sort of worried about what Mr. Krakowitz is going to cook up for the One-Flag Morse message,” George said as we trotted up the marble steps together. I ran on ahead to pull open the heavy door for Mr. O’Hare. Thus I was facing him and George when George said, “We thought, you know, he might come up with, you know, something out of Shakespeare or something.”

  George made it sound as though coming up out of Shakespeare was not unlike surfacing from a septic tank.

  “I shouldn’t worry about that if I were you,” Mr. O’Hare said. “It doesn’t really matter if it’s out of Shakespeare or the New York Daily News, does it? Words are words. They’re composed of letters. All you have to do is wigwag the letters one at a time and the words will take care of themselves, won’t they?”

  “Yes, sir,” George said. Softly, as he followed Mr. O’Hare into the lobby, he added, “You stupid jerk.”

  “Shut up,” I whispered, then fell in beside Mr. O’Hare. I did not like what George was doing. Even then I grasped the wisdom of keeping one’s eye on the ball. The ball
was the One-Flag Morse signaling medal. “What George means, Mr. O’Hare, he means maybe Mr. Krakowitz, you know how he is, he could hit us with a surprise.”

  “Oh, now, really, young men, I doubt that,” Mr. O’Hare said.

  It seemed to me Mr. O’Hare’s voice lacked conviction. Moving along between him and George Weitz down the marble lobby of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House, I sneaked a look at our scoutmaster. I did it quite often. Not because Mr. O’Hare was a man so fat that he didn’t seem to walk so much as shake himself forward, like the jelly quivering around a piece of gefüllte fish when my mother brought the plate in from the kitchen. Or even because his face looked like that of the man in the Admiration cigar ads. What fascinated me about Mr. O’Hare was his total lack of reality. He could have been a specimen in a museum or an animal in the zoo. I always expected to find, somewhere over his head, a small sign identifying his species and native habitat. Mr. O’Hare was a creature from another world: uptown. A goy in a double-breasted blue serge suit, just like the Rogers Peet man, who came down to the Lower East Side three times a week after work. Why? To conduct Jewish boys like me and George Weitz with painstaking care through the absorbing intricacies of the Scout Handbook? Hmmm.

  Years later, whenever he crossed my mind, Mr. O’Hare always left great big fat muddy footprints. They all oozed question marks. Had the fat man been a male Jane Addams? A henpecked husband of limited income driven not to the card table or the bottle but to a virtuous dedication that got him out of the house at night for no greater expense than the carfare down to Avenue B? A closet fairy, maybe, who liked to hang around boys? Or just a plain, ordinary, garden variety uptown dumbbell?

  I don’t know. The question marks remain. So does the shining memory of the man who had said in front of all the members of Troop 244 that he had never seen anybody handle a Morse flag the way I did. I liked Mr. O’Hare, jerk or no jerk.

  “Okay,” I said. “Whatever Mr. Krakowitz gives us to send, sir, we’ll send it.”