Last Respects Page 9

  Until that day came, however, I had to cope with my mother. What was I going to do with this stranger who had come out of the woodwork in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House gym to lose me a medal, lead me into a crazy conference with a couple of Italians behind a window that said Meister’s Matzoh Bakery, Inc., and earn me a belt in the kisser from George Weitz? Answer: stall.

  This seemed easy enough. Several clearly defined opportunities presented themselves. My weekdays were broken up into neatly defined units.

  Morning to three P.M. belonged to J.H.S. 64. From four to six I was in the hands of Rabbi Goldfarb in his cheder on Columbia Street. Six-thirty to about seven-thirty was what my mother called “sopper” time. After that, until ten-thirty, I worked in Mr. Lebenbaum’s candy store around the corner on Avenue C. The rest was not exactly silence, but close enough: on East Fourth Street you learned very early how to sleep surrounded, like the seed in an avocado, by a fatty layer of outside noises.

  As an opportunity for stalling my mother, I saw at once that supper didn’t count. My father would be there, at the kitchen table, as he always was. It would be simple enough to avoid my mother merely by concentrating on him. Well, maybe not simple. My father was silent most of the time. The rest of the time, when he came edging timidly into the silence with a remark, what he said was not exactly stop-press news. But he got through his evening meal, as he got through the rest of his life, without creating any tensions around him. No, stalling my mother at that time would not be too difficult.

  There was, then, only one danger spot. The hour between my departure from J.H.S. 64 on Ninth Street and my arrival in Rabbi Goldfarb’s cheder on Columbia Street.

  This time was always spent in hurrying from Ninth Street to Fourth, dumping my schoolbooks, downing the glass of milk and slice of honey cake or plate of eierküchel my mother had set out for me on the kitchen table, and then either hotfooting it or hitching a wagon ride to Columbia Street. This interlude should have been pleasant. My mother was a rotten cook, true, but at that time I didn’t quite appreciate the fact that good cooks were preferable to bad. Food was food. My mother’s eierküchel sopped up milk satisfactorily, and her honey cake, like anybody else’s honey cake, was sweet. Unfortunately, she acted about them the way a gold miner in a Jack London story watched the assayer test the ore the weary prospector had managed to bring back to civilization.

  First bite. My mother: “It’s good?” Me: “Wait till I chew it.” I chew it. My mother: “Well?” Me: “Yeah.” My mother: “Yeah what?” Me: “Yeah, it’s good.” My mother: “That’s all you can say?” Me, in English: “No, but that’s all you’re going to hear.” My mother: “Speak so I can understand.” Me: “I said it’s the best honey cake you ever made.” My mother: “So why do you take such small bites?” I take a big bite. My mother: “Don’t eat so fast. You’ll get sick.”

  I never had. But this just might be the day. It was a risk I decided not to run. When the three o’clock bell rang, I did not go home. Carrying my schoolbooks, I headed down Avenue C. I got as far as Second Street before an ice wagon came clopping along, heading my way. In those days ice wagons were the only vehicles in the neighborhood that had a nice low-slung wooden step on the back. I hopped on. The horses made good time. Too good. When I hopped off in front of Rabbi Goldfarb’s cheder, I was early. I could tell by the garbage cans on the sidewalk.

  Today, of course, I own a wristwatch. If I forget to wind it, I can always, as I move around town, learn the time of day by looking up at the Paramount clock or at the jittery little device in front of the IBM Building on Madison. Even in those days the clock atop the Con Edison tower on Fourteenth Street was considered pretty accurate. But to see the Con Edison tower from the arena in which I spent my early years you had to go up to Avenue A for a clear view north, and that was going a bit far to learn it was suppertime. Aside from the J.H.S. 64 school bells, therefore, which were as inexorably accurate as the East River tides, the only reliable timepiece to which I had access were the two garbage cans in front of Rabbi Goldfarb’s cheder.

  The cheder was located on the top floor of a three-story faded red brick building. It looked a little peculiar, to me anyway, among the crumbling, crowded, leaning-against-each-other six-story dirty gray tenements of Columbia Street. The street floor was occupied by a stable. Here were housed the horses used by local distributors of ice and coal and by the many undertakers who did business in the area.

  Above the stable, on the second floor, a heavily bearded scroll writer and his wispily bearded assistants worked on lettering the Torahs that were ordered for presentation to different synagogues on special occasions, and the prayer cloths, embossed prayer books, and phylacteries that were the traditional gifts from parents to sons at their bar mitzvah ceremonies. The top floor of the building was used as a synagogue on Saturdays and special holidays by a burial society composed of immigrants from a small town in the Ukraine, who were held in contempt by my mother. Russian Jews? Pfeh! She didn’t exactly spit. After all, she did all the cleaning around the house. But she made her point.

  Years before I met him, Rabbi Goldfarb, who may or may not have come to America from this Ukrainian town, seemed to have grasped the fact that six days a week, not counting weeks containing special holidays, the burial society’s top-floor synagogue was not used. He made some sort of rent deal with the burial society, and established his afternoon school in their quarters. When my mother enrolled me, Rabbi Goldfarb had a reputation on East Fourth Street as one of the best melameds in the business.

  This meant his teachings took hold. He could be counted on to turn a “nice Jewish boy”—a term employed by all parents for all sons even if the little bastards had already displayed the interests of Jack the Ripper and the proclivities of Boss Tweed—into a “good Jew,” a term that didn’t exactly defy definition but certainly resisted it. More accurately, nobody bothered to make the definition. Why bother? Who wasted time defining Mt. Everest? There it was. A great big fat mountain. There we all were. Good solid unimpeachable Jews.

  During the day, while I and the rest of his pupils were soaking up America’s gentile culture in schools like J.H.S. 64, Rabbi Goldfarb moved through the neighborhood, the way veins of fat marble a good steak, performing good works. He presided at funerals. He cemented friable marriage relationships. He advised troubled mothers. He read the riot act to troublesome sons. He helped arrange the bringing over of relatives from Europe. For all these services he received a fee, of course, but he was famous for leaving the size of his emoluments to the discretion of the people he served. Not so with his fees for teaching in his cheder. These were fixed as strictly as his rules about punctuality.

  Rabbi Goldfarb always arrived at his cheder sometime between three-forty-five and four o’clock. His pupils were due at the same time. It was not essential that he get to class ahead of them. There was nothing to prepare. Whatever it took to transform a nice Jewish boy into a good Jew, Rabbi Goldfarb had it all in his head. The few minutes between his arrival and the time his big silver onion watch showed four o’clock, he spent in hanging up his coat, visiting a hall toilet that would have been spurned by the men and women imprisoned in the Black Hole of Calcutta, and polishing up his chair rung.

  This piece of wood, about twenty inches long, was to Rabbi Goldfarb’s life as a pedant what Excalibur was to Arthur as a king. Rabbi Goldfarb twirled it as a badge of office. He used it as a pointer. He polished it as a tension reliever. And he employed it as an instrument of punishment.

  The causes for punishment were two: stupidity and tardiness. A few moments before four sharp, Rabbi Goldfarb emerged from the toilet, buttoning his fly, and started the day’s lesson with whatever pupils were present. Whenever the door opened, after his watch showed four o’clock, Rabbi Goldfarb would dart forward, and without listening to the inevitable explanation or even giving the offender an identifying glance, begin to swing his chair rung. He always aimed for the ankles. He rarely missed. When he did, Rabbi Gold
farb took another cut at the offender. He never missed twice. It hurt like hell, but he made his point: nice Jewish boys who expect to grow up to be good Jews get to cheder on time.

  I always did. After my first experience with Rabbi Goldfarb’s chair rung, anyway. In fact, after that I was always early. It was easy enough to tell just how early by a glance at the two garbage cans on the sidewalk near the entrance to the building.

  It was a time when few people in that neighborhood used tinned foods. And most bottles were returnable for the deposit. Nobody threw them out. So that garbage cans usually contained mostly soft materials. Almost everybody, however, used coal for heating. So did the owner of the stable on the ground floor of this building. As a result, on top of most garbage cans there was usually a mound of ashes. East Side ashes in those days always contained pieces of black rock that had been dumped into the coal by the seller to fatten his profit and, naturally, had refused to burn for the customer. Every boy who arrived early for Rabbi Goldfarb’s cheder paused at the garbage cans to pick through the ashes for one or more of these black rocks before he went upstairs. These rocks were our only protection against the rats.

  On the afternoon following the All-Manhattan rally eliminations, when I hopped off the ice wagon in front of Rabbi Goldfarb’s cheder on Columbia Street, the ashes on top of the garbage cans were two symmetrical mounds. The conical grayish-white masses had not yet been disturbed. So I knew I had arrived first, and knew it was not yet a quarter to four. I pawed through the ashes at the top of both garbage cans and selected four black rocks. They were the best I had ever found. The smallest was as big as a baseball.

  I shoved three of them under the straps of my schoolbag the way a Cossack might have shoved bullets into his bandolier. Holding the fourth rock in my hand, I started up the stairs. I always felt, when I did this, as though I were a character in a novel by James Fenimore Cooper stalking Indians through the Primeval Forest instead of rats up a flight of Columbia Street stairs. The stairs were so decayed that the wood sank under my feet. I always hopped my way up fast, from step to step, afraid that if I remained in one spot too long, my weight would tear through the step below. This gave me the feeling I was climbing a rope ladder. I moved upward as though I were tunneling through a layer cake from the baking pan to the top layer of icing. Up through the ground-floor smell of manure. Up through the second-floor smell of unwashed Talmudic scholars. And finally out into the complicated stink of Rabbi Goldfarb’s domain. I tiptoed across the rotted wood of the landing and put my ear to the cheder door. Like Chingachgook with his ear to the ground, I could feel my heart respond with a leap of excitement. At the other side of the warped and cracked plywood slab I could hear the rustling sounds of my quarry. There was no doubt about it. I had arrived first.

  Crouched low, my ammunition at the ready, I eased the door open and peered in. The synagogue in which Rabbi Goldfarb conducted his cheder was a single large room. It looked like the illustration in my school history book that showed the log cabin birthplace of Abraham Lincoln. Whatever had been done to the rough wooden boards since they had been put up to form these walls had been done not by paint but by the weather. The floor could have been brought untouched from the prairie. It was as full of holes as a Swiss cheese.

  One hole slowly gathered my roving glance like iron filings drawn to a magnet. It was near the gold-embroidered purple curtains that shielded the closet or ark in which the Ukrainian burial society kept its two Torahs. At the edge of this hole crouched a big rat, who was nibbling away at the edges of the hole as though the floorboards were Mary Jane candy bars. Who could blame it? Nothing else in the building was edible.

  Gently I pulled the door wide enough to give me a free, full swing. I took aim and let go. I did not achieve the success George Weitz had scored the night before with the tip of his Morse flag when my mother’s shove sent Mr. O’Hare tumbling backward in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein gym. But it was not a bad shot. I winged the bastard. He squealed, leaped, and disappeared down the hole. All his pals went with him down their own holes.

  Stepping through the door, I could hear them slithering underfoot and through the walls, playing what sounded like a pretty fast-paced basketball game on their way back to wherever they came from so they could rest up until Rabbi Goldfarb’s class left for the day and they were free to come back and start feeding again.

  To encourage their departure, I fired two of my remaining three rocks into different corners of the room. They hit nothing but the walls. The booming noise, however, was very satisfactory. The door behind me opened. Rabbi Goldfarb came in as I was winding up for my last shot.

  “All right, enough,” he said. “Get the Chimish.”

  The Chimish was a set of battered texts from which Rabbi Goldfarb taught Jewish history by leading his pupils in chanting aloud every day a new section of Our Heritage. The books were kept in an old Sheffield Farms milk-bottle crate on top of the gold-embroidered curtains so they would be out of reach of the rats. By the time I brought the crate down, Rabbi Goldfarb had disappeared into the toilet and about a dozen other pupils had arrived. Each boy carried at least one or two rocks. These were fired against the walls, even though no rats were visible, while I set out the Chimish texts on the three long tables that formed the instruction area of the cheder.

  Except by sight, I did not know any of my classmates in Rabbi Goldfarb’s cheder. They came from below Delancey Street or east of Goereck Street, and they went to schools like J.H.S. 97 on Mangin Street and to settlement houses like the Educational Alliance on East Broadway. I had nothing against “97” or the “Edgie,” but between J.H.S. 64 and the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House, my life was pretty full. I had no desire to enlarge my horizons, or dilute my pleasures in what I did have. These kids were not friends. They were just a group of voices with which I did a little chanting every day in a Columbia Street outpost of my world because my mother thought it was good for me. I had never even bothered to learn the names of my fellow chanters. In a vague way I identified them in my mind by their physical characteristics. Sweat Nose. Wart Face. Four Eyes. Fat Ass. Knock Knees. It came as no surprise to me one day to learn that I was known as Wishbone. I was tall for my age, thin for any age, and bow-legged.

  I slapped down a copy of the Chimish in front of each boy, piled the rest at the head of the table, and slipped into my seat as Rabbi Goldfarb came in from the toilet buttoning his fly. He picked up his chair rung, hit the edge of the table, and we were off.

  I don’t remember how long we were at it. You didn’t have to think about what you were chanting to keep Rabbi Goldfarb at bay. What he wanted was noise. I remember only that Rabbi Goldfarb had taken his cut at the ankles of three latecomers, and we were all bellowing our way into “Ah-ahl kayne, ibber dehn, arroll siffisoyim, ungeshtuppte leftzin,” when my mother came in.

  The chanting stopped. Rabbi Goldfarb smiled. Anyway, I think he did, because he was always obsequious to parents. But you couldn’t prove it, because smiling is done with the face and Rabbi Goldfarb had no face. What he had was a furry black fedora with a greasy band that seemed to start somewhere near the ceiling and came down to his eyebrows, and a thick black beard that started under his eyeballs and came down to his plump little belly. In between could be seen a blob of pink. It didn’t look like anything I had ever previously seen attached to a human body by natural growth, but it must have been a nose because Rabbi Goldfarb was constantly blowing it into a red bandanna with dirty gray polka dots that suggested they had once been white. Above the blob of pink were two watery fried eggs with tiny black yolks that were undoubtedly his eyes.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” my mother said. “I came to see if my son is here.”

  Rabbi Goldfarb pointed the chair rung at me. He could have been the owner of a famous collection of paintings who at the end of a guided tour for a distinguished visitor had paused at last in front of his most prized possession.

  “Today,” Rabbi Goldfarb said, “your son was the fi
rst.”

  My mother came across to the table and said, “You didn’t come home after school.”

  There was no accusation in her voice. Nor was there even the hint of a question. She had simply stated a fact. I was unaccustomed to this. My mother never stated facts simply. When she got her hands on one, she reissued it to the world, meaning me and my father, like a papal bull framed in electric lights.

  “I couldn’t,” I said. “I got kept in after class. If I’d gone home to leave my books I would have been late for cheder.”

  “He wasn’t late,” Rabbi Goldfarb said. “He was first.”

  My mother smiled as though he had told her I stood at the head of the class. “I’m glad,” she said. “I don’t like he should be late for cheder.”

  The tone of her voice bothered me. I had never heard her sound like this. Like what? I thought. I concentrated. I struggled. Friendly? Relaxed? Gentle? The words all fit, and yet they didn’t even come near what I felt. I was confused the way I had been confused the night before. The night before, she had been an astonishing stranger, determined, hard, implacably embarked on a single-minded course of action from the path of which she swept all opposition with a ruthless hand, a dose of startling English, and a total disregard for consequences to others. Now, a day later—no, eighteen hours later—she was another kind of stranger. A feminine creature in a male world, a little blond thing with bright blue eyes, uneasy about intruding, hoping for no more than the answer to a question that had been troubling her.

  “If all my boys were like yours,” Rabbi Goldfarb said, “I would have no troubles.”

  My mother smiled again. My stomach jumped as though it had received a dose of something indigestible and was taking action to get rid of it before the trouble started. Blond little thing or not. Big blue eyes or not. She was still my mother. What was my mother doing in the late afternoon vamping a hill of greasy fedora and bellybutton-length beard who smelled like his own toilet?