Last Respects Read online

  Humble. Resigned. Accepting the inevitable without protest. Even with a touch of grace. After all, was not a scout, in addition to trustworthy, loyal and so on, also courteous? It worked. There are things you can do with your voice when you are fourteen that Demosthenes could never have achieved with a mouthful of pebbles at sixty. Mr. O’Hare’s round, unbaked apple-pie face creased in a troubled frown. He wanted to win even more than George Weitz and I did.

  “Why don’t you young men just pop on to the gym,” Mr. O’Hare said. “Mr. Krakowitz is well aware of his duties as a referee. I am absolutely certain nothing of a surprising nature is in store for you.”

  I was unaware then that Mr. O’Hare had uttered one of the more foolish statements the human animal is capable of making.

  The message Mr. Krakowitz wrote for me to signal was: We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done. Twenty-five words from the Book of Common Prayer.

  I did not know this at the time. In fact, at the time I didn’t even know there was such a thing as the Book of Common Prayer. All I knew, when the starting gun went off and my reader-receiver tore open the sealed envelope, was that if Troop 244 was going to make it into the All-Manhattan finals, we would have to break our collective rear ends. The four teams we were competing against were hot. They had a reputation that had preceded them all the way uptown to Avenue B.

  This did not worry me. I had assumed they would be hot. If they weren’t, how had they come up as far as this phase of the eliminations? The reason their reputations did not worry me was that I had a feeling about Morse Code. A sort of green thumb, you might say, for sending and receiving dots and dashes. I don’t know where I got it. When Mr. O’Hare had told the troop I handled a Morse flag better than any scout he had ever known, I accepted the compliment without any of that digging-my-toe-into-the-hot-sand nonsense. So far as the denizens of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House were concerned, false modesty had not yet been invented. Mr. O’Hare’s compliment seemed to me no more than just.

  I was pretty good at knot-tying. I could whip up a spiral reverse bandage as well as most members of the troop. I could without too much effort get a spark and then a bit of fire out of a piece of flint, a slab of broken steel file, and a wad of singed surgical gauze. But it was my skill with the Morse flag that had bumped me up to senior patrol leader of Troop 244, and it was this skill that made me feel that night we were going to win, no matter how fancy Mr. Krakowitz got.

  What I got, when I whipped out the last letter of the last word in my message, was a tap of approval on my tail from Chink Alberg. His real name was Morris, but on East Fourth Street, Morris Alberg was known as Chink because he had slant eyes. He was squatted down on the shiny yellow wood of the gym floor, about three feet to the left of my widespread legs. This kept him clear of my wigwagging flag which was mounted on an eight-foot bamboo pole, and yet close enough so I would have no trouble hearing him call out the letters of the message from the sheet that had been handed to him in a sealed envelope by Mr. Krakowitz just before the starting whistle blew.

  “Two minutes ten!” Chink said from somewhere down around my knees. I could hear the excitement in his voice. It made my heart jump. Two minutes ten for twenty-five words, averaging out to six letters each, was better than I had done even in my best practice sessions. “We’re ahead!” Chink said. “Jesus, we must be! Two minutes ten is—!”

  “Shut up!” I said without moving my head or shifting my glance. At the other end of the gym George Weitz had set his flag in motion. I could see Hot Cakes Rabinowitz, squatting at George’s feet, moving his lips as he called the letters from the sheet of paper fastened to the clipboard in his lap.

  “Start writing!” I hissed at Chink. Inside my head the wigwags of George’s flag recorded dot, dot, dash. “U,” I yelled. Dash, dot went the flag. “N,” I yelled. George’s flag dropped to the left in a single dash. “T,” I yelled. Three flips to the left. “O,” I yelled, and even though Mr. O’Hare had cautioned us over and over again that a receiver must never worry about the words but merely call the letters, I could not stop myself from putting these first four together and yelling, “Unto!”

  Thus I knew that for the second half of the Troop 244 segment of the flagged Morse eliminations contest for the 1927 All-Manhattan rally, Mr. Krakowitz had chosen something from either the Bible or Shakespeare. At that time these were the only two areas of printed material in which I had encountered the word “unto.”

  Later, at Mr. O’Hare’s post-mortem analysis of our performance, I learned that the message George Weitz had started to wigwag to me was from Matthew XXV:29: Unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. At the time, however, I knew as much about Matthew as I knew about the Book of Common Prayer, which was nothing.

  I did, however, know two things: Chink’s excited analysis was probably correct, we were ahead; and I was receiving George Weitz so clearly and easily that the odds were good we would finish ahead.

  After all these years I am still uncertain about how many words of Matthew XXV: 29, George Weitz managed to wigwag at me across the gym, but I am absolutely certain about my performance at the receiving end. I never got beyond that first word “unto.”

  A split second after I yelled the letter “O” down to Chink at my feet, I saw my mother.

  There are those who may not consider this startling. Or even interesting. After all, sons and daughters have been seeing their mothers since Cain and Abel began to notice that the Garden of Eden was becoming a bit cramped. And while it is true that Cain and Abel would undoubtedly have raised an eyebrow if they had caught sight of my mother, the reason for their surprise would have been considerably different from mine. In a manner of speaking, until that moment in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House, I had never before seen my mother.

  Let me clarify that.

  The first five years of my life had been lived in our tenement flat about two hundred feet from the docks that jutted out into the East River to accommodate the coal and lumber barges. More accurately, those first five years had been spent in that railroad flat and in the shadow of my mother’s slender and almost tiny figure: she put on only a little flesh in her middle years; she weighed a hundred and five pounds the day I was born, and she was still almost exactly that the day she died.

  When I say I lived in that flat, I do not mean what most people mean when they say they live in a certain place, a geographical point from which they leave daily, let us say, to go to work, and to which they return nightly to be fed, have some entertainment, and then go to sleep. When I say I lived in that flat on East Fourth Street for the first five years of my life, I mean it the way Edmund Dantes would mean it if he were describing his residence in the Chateau d’If.

  I never went down into the street without my mother. I never met a human except in her presence. I don’t recall that I wanted to. It never occurred to me to question my way of life. I hope Dr. Spock is not listening, but I have a strong feeling that very few five-year-olds do. I just jogged along from day to day, doing what I was told, trying to stay out of trouble, and listening quite a lot. What I heard was not very exciting. The adults who lived on our block were almost all, like my mother, immigrants from Hungary or, like my father, immigrants from Austria. They spoke what my parents spoke: Yiddish and Hungarian. So did I.

  Then, in the middle of my sixth year, the laws of her new country penetrated to my mother’s consciousness. I don’t know how. Perhaps a neighbor warned her that by keeping me in the house she was doing something that would bring down on her the retaliation of authority. This seems to me a reasonable guess. My mother’s whole life, as I look back on it, was directed by a ceaseless effort to avoid tangling with the law. Anyway, she took me around the corner to P.S. 188 and registered me in kindergarten class. The English language exploded all around me.

  The immed
iate result was to force on me a double life. It lasted for six years, and I loved every minute of it. Every minute of my double life, I mean. For those six years it was Yiddish on the fourth floor of 390 East Fourth Street; English in P.S. 188 and on the surrounding pavements. I’m pretty sure my mother was aware of my double life. But she pretended she knew nothing about it. Which leads me to conclude that she was afraid of my life in P.S. 188 and on the surrounding pavements, because I learned as I grew older that her way of treating anything terrifying was to turn her back on it. What didn’t exist could not hurt her. Or so she thought. All I thought about was the fun I was having.

  Then one day I was summoned from my 6-B class to the office of Mr. McLaughlin, the principal.

  “A great honor has been conferred upon you,” he said. Mr. McLaughlin looked like a British officer in one of those steel engravings that illustrated Vanity Fair. Perhaps he was aware of this and tried, when he spoke, to underscore the image. The word honor, when he pronounced it, came out as un-oar. “You are going to be transferred from P.S. 188 to a rapid advance class in Junior High School 64 on Ninth Street,” he said. “This is being done because of your brilliant scholastic achievements.”

  I did not understand what Mr. McLaughlin was talking about, and no wonder. The truth probably was P.S. 188 was becoming unmanageable because of overcrowding. To solve the problem Mr. McLaughlin had undoubtedly solicited the help of friendly principals in nearby junior highs. Their help enabled Mr. McLaughlin to transfer a number of students out of P.S. 188 to less congested schools. I think I was one of the few boys from P.S. 188 who landed in J.H.S. 64 on Ninth Street.

  At first I was apprehensive about the transfer. Ninth Street was five blocks uptown from the block where I had thus far spent all of my life. It doesn’t sound like much. What’s five blocks? Well, in my day, which was half a century ago, it could be half a world. To a boy, anyway. At that time the Lower East Side was not so much a crisscrossed network of streets and blocks, as it was a cluster of different villages with totally different populations.

  Ninth Street was almost exclusively Italian. I remember the feeling, on that first morning when I walked up to J.H.S. 64, that I had entered a strange country. It was. I had never known any Italians. Naturally, I was worried. My concern was short-lived. Aside from the fact that they bought strange foods displayed in store windows that did not look like Mr. Deutsch’s grocery on our block or Mr. Shumansky’s chicken store on the Avenue C corner, the Italians of Ninth Street seemed after a few days no different from the Hungarians and Austrians of my block. In relation to me, that is. They didn’t seem to know I was alive. This suited me fine. I didn’t want anybody staring at me during the settling-in process. This process ended the day my teacher announced that Mr. O’Hare, the scoutmaster of a newly formed scout troop, was looking for recruits, and any boy interested in joining could meet Mr. O’Hare for a talk after school in the gym of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House around the corner on Avenue B.

  I had, of course, belonged to Troop 224 for about two years in the Hamilton Fish Park Branch of the New York Public Library until the scoutmaster died and the troop disintegrated. I missed it. I welcomed this opportunity to become involved again with knot-tying and Morse Code. Once more my mother pretended she was unaware of my involvement in the scout movement. She was dedicated to this pretense with a fierceness that still impresses me. Look at the things she had to pretend she did not see. The signaling flags I brought into the house. The flint-and-steel sets. The knot-tying equipment. The merit badge pamphlets and other technical literature that began to appear after supper on our kitchen table along with my schoolbooks when I was supposed to be doing my homework. My mother never saw any of it. She was determined not to see any of it. She laundered that uniform for me every Friday. She pressed it. She removed grease spots from the breeches with Carbona. She sewed my insignia and, as I earned them, my merit badges on the shirt. She did all that, but she never acknowledged the fact that her son disappeared every Saturday night at six o’clock wearing a khaki uniform and did not come home until almost midnight.

  Looking back on it, the only thing that seems strange to me about the whole business is that I did not find it strange. Some instinct told me it was crucial to my mother’s existence for her not to acknowledge my participation in any life outside her own orbit. Out of this same instinct came my total acceptance of the structure she had created, as well as my skill at maintaining my role in it.

  That is why I could not believe my eyes on the night when I wigwagged twenty-five words with a single red and white Morse flag across the gym of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House in two minutes and ten seconds flat.

  “Come on!” Chink Alberg barked from somewhere down near my left knee. “All I got is u, n, t, o!” I didn’t answer. I was staring with astonished disbelief at my mother’s figure at the other side of the gym. “For Christ’s sake!” Chink yelled. “What the hellzamatter with you?”

  “It’s my mother,” I said.

  “To hell with your mother,” Chink snarled. “Start calling, for Christ’s sake. Them other bastids, they’re getting ahead of us!”

  I was aware of this. I could see George Weitz at the other side of the gym. His flag was whipping left and right. I could see Hot Cakes Rabinowitz kneeling to the left of George, calling the letters from his clipboard. I could even see the four rival teams, two on each side of George and Hot Cakes, wigwagging away like crazy, wiping out the lead I had gained with my two minutes ten, and pulling ahead. But I saw them all only peripherally. Like the clouds around the edges of a portrait in a museum. Or the grass under the feet of the painted main subject. My eyes were nailed to the stranger in the center.

  My mother had never been inside the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House. During the months of my involvement with Troop 244 she had never acknowledged its existence. I had every reason to believe she did not even know its location. It could have been in her native land. Which was where? Hungary? Far Cathay? The Mountains of the Moon? When you got right down to it, how did I know where she had come from? She could not possibly be here. Therefore she wasn’t. This creature who had erupted in the middle of my signaling triumph and was now destroying it, was somebody else. Not my mother. Who? Across the length of the gym I examined her.

  A skinny little woman. With blond hair pulled back into a neat knot on top of her head. Her little head. Everything about her was little. Especially her face. A fierce little face. But out of that little face two big blue eyes shone like lights. The whole thing—I had the impression of a force, not a human being—sheathed in something black. Not dressed. Wrapped. What she was wearing could have been painted on her body. High neck. Long sleeves. Skirt sweeping the yellow boards of the gym floor. She—no, it!—reminded me of something. I could hear Chink snarling furiously at my feet. I knew I was losing for Troop 244 the right to participate in the All-Manhattan rally. I felt in my sinking gut the waves of contempt and rage I was earning from my fellow scouts. But my mind had room for nothing but the desperate question: Who in God’s name was this stranger?

  The answer surfaced abruptly out of my life at school. More accurately, out of my American history textbook. Coming across the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House gym was Molly Pitcher, moving firmly to take over the gun in the middle of the Battle of Monmouth at which her husband had fallen from a heat stroke. The fact that she looked like my mother didn’t matter. Nobody was fooling me. This was Molly Pitcher.

  “What the hellz she think she’s doing?” Chink Alberg screamed.

  “How should I know?” I screamed back.

  “She’s your mother, ain’t she?”

  This regrettable fact now came crashing down on me like a toppling wall. Because at my mother’s side, moving along beside her across the gym, I saw Mr. O’Hare.

  The scoutmaster was swung slightly to one side and bent over, so the words he was uttering as he moved dropped into my mother’s left ear. It was about two feet below his mouth. I could not, of course, h
ear Mr. O’Hare’s words, but I knew they were angry. I could tell from his gestures. Great chopping swirls at the air, like an untrained swimmer plunging ahead with a primitive breaststroke. And the color of his face. Like the skin of a tangerine. I knew something else. Mr. O’Hare’s words did not matter. Not to my mother, anyway. Mr. O’Hare was unaware of this. Why should he know that my mother did not understand English?

  “You can’t do this,” Mr. O’Hare was saying as he and my mother reached me and Chink. This was not the first time I had been impressed by the lack of logic, if not intelligence, in the remarks uttered by grownups. It was no time, however, to make notes on mental scoreboards. The fact remains that my mother had done it, and what she had done I found incredible. She had just brought the whole 1927 All-Manhattan rally eliminations finals to a halt.

  “You come with me,” she said to me.

  “What is she saying?” Mr. O’Hare snapped.

  “Listen, Ma,” I said desperately in Yiddish. “For Christ’s sake,” I added angrily in English. “What the heck are you doing?” I concluded hysterically in a combination of both.

  “God damn that bitch,” Chink Alberg said from somewhere around my knees. “She’s messing us up!”

  “Morris, we’ll have none of that language, if you please,” said Mr. O’Hare.

  He had once explained to the troop that to call a fellow scout Chink was like calling the king of Italy a wop. I didn’t quite grasp the comparison. Everybody I knew called Victor Emmanuel a wop. Everybody who talked English, anyway. Mr. O’Hare, who talked nothing else, grabbed my arm and said, “If this lady is your mother, will you please ask her to listen to me for one moment?”

  “Ma,” I said, “Mr. O’Hare wants to tell you something.”

  “You tell this pudding-headed goy to get out of my way,” my mother said.

  She grabbed my arm and started to hustle me across the gym floor, toward the doors behind George Weitz and Hot Cakes Rabinowitz. Mr. O’Hare loped along.