Fourth Street East

by Jerome Weidman

  In retrospect I know now, of course, that he was one of the handsomest men I had ever seen. At the time, however, Walter merely looked odd. He did not belong to the world of Jewish immigrants who made up the population of East Fourth Street any more than his shining white and green cottage belonged in the shadow of the ugly gray stone tenements in which everybody else on East Fourth Street lived. He was tall and dark, with jutting, overhanging heavy black eyebrows, and one of those thin, deeply lined, strong faces that seem to have been hacked out of a log somewhere west of the Alleghenys with a few clean strokes of an axe by some primitive artist making up souvenirs of Abraham Lincoln. Even his clothes were an anachronism on East Fourth Street. Walter wore olive-green corduroy pants tucked into high black rubber boots and a khaki brass-buttoned doughboy’s tunic from which the insignia had been carefully cut away.

  His plump little wife wore the checked blue and white gingham dress in which she had been reported to have been seen crawling about on her hands and knees in the tiny garden. I don’t know how she looked on her hands and knees among the carrots, but standing up in front of an open fire, with a bright pink and white smile, and a compact little head that seemed to be held together neatly by coils of tightly laced braided yellow hair, Walter’s wife looked as though that blue and white gingham dress was a part of her. I never saw her wear anything else. Forty years later I still find it impossible to think of her in any other color.

  “What the lad needs, Walter, is a nice hot cup of tea,” she said. “I’ll get it while you hang up his clothes to dry.”

  I wonder if these two commonplace remarks by Walter’s wife convey the totally uncommonplace, indeed the almost explosively extraordinary, world they opened up for me. It was not unlike Alice being plunged down the rabbit hole. Nothing around me seemed in any way connected with the way things had been before Srul Honig offered me a nickel if I would lead the big Percheron down to the dock and deliver the horse to Walter.

  Consider.

  Homes on East Fourth Street were heated by whatever warmth managed to travel on its own, without direction, from the coal stove in the kitchen that was lighted only for cooking. I had never seen an open fire before. I was confused by the roaring flames, and not a little frightened by them, but I had no trouble enjoying the warmth. As for tea, this was a beverage served on East Fourth Street in a glass to adult visitors, who sipped the hot brew through small nibbles of lump sugar. It was never served to children, except as a laxative, but that was another kind of tea, and it was never served to anybody in the sort of delicate white china cup decorated with tiny red roses that Walter’s wife now set before me on a folding table. She pulled up a chair, and when Walter finished draping my wet knickerbockers and sweater and stockings over the brass fender in front of the fire, he pulled up another chair.

  His wife brought over a silver tray on which, in plates that matched the teacups, were set out a number of things I had never seen before: sliced hard-boiled eggs, each oval of yellow yolk crossed with what looked like tiny dark brown stunted herrings and proved to be anchovies; slivers of buttered bread as thin as one of my mother’s freshly laundered handkerchiefs; diced bits of vinegary red vegetable that Walter’s wife later identified as beet-root salad; a mound of horrid brown paste that proved to be delicious goose liver; slabs of brown cake that looked like my mother’s homemade honey cake, but were jammed with bits and pieces of fruit, including bright red glazed cherries; tiny white triangles Walter’s wife called cucumber sandwiches; and at least seven or eight other items—Walter’s wife called them comestibles—I had never seen before but had no trouble getting down in rather large quantities. It was, of course, my first encounter with an English tea.

  Walter was a Yorkshire stable hand who had been gassed at Passchendale and emigrated to America after the war. His wife was a Cockney barmaid he had met while on leave in London at something I think she once called the Lord Palmerston Arms in Brondesbury.

  By the time I got to the end of the platter of cucumber sandwiches—Walter’s wife insisted I have the last one—I had, without knowing it, reached a turning point in my life. Deep down in the place where people learn things, I had learned without phrasing the lesson for myself that the world was larger than East Fourth Street. And the astonishing thing about the lesson was that I had learned it on the East Fourth Street dock. By the time my clothes were dry, and Walter and his wife had helped me get back into them, and I set out to bring in the second horse Srul Honig was shoeing, I knew in my heart that East Fourth Street would never be enough for me.

  When I came out of the white and green cottage the rain had stopped. When I came into Srul Honig’s blacksmith shop he had finished with the second horse. He handed me a nickel.

  “For the first delivery,” he said in Yiddish. “Here’s for the second one.” He dropped a second nickel into my hand. “Just to show I trust you, this one I pay in advance.”

  When I brought the second horse out onto the dock, both Walter and his wife were waiting in the scrap of garden between the cottage and the stable. She looked like a mirror. Her face, I mean. As though the rain had polished her.

  “Good boy,” Walter said, taking the lead rein from my hand. “I’ll just get this one into the stable.” As he led the horse away he said to his wife, “Maybe he’d like another cup of tea.”

  “Would you?” she said to me.

  I thought about the cucumber sandwiches. The tea had been just tea. But the cucumber sandwiches had been an experience. Walter’s wife seemed to understand that.

  “I could make some more cucumber sandwiches,” she said.

  I understood something else. This was a welcome I did not want to wear out.

  “Thanks,” I said. “But I better get home.”

  “Will you come tomorrow?” she said.

  “Well,” I said.

  She smiled. “Mr. Honig is having trouble shoeing the horses and also delivering them,” she said. “And Walter has too much to do here to go up the street for the horses. I’m sure Mr. Honig will be pleased to have your help. Aside from the nickel, whenever you come, there will always be a cup of tea waiting.” She smiled again and touched my forehead. “And cucumber sandwiches, of course.”

  Every day, after school, I stopped in at Srul Honig’s blacksmith shop. He always had at least one horse ready for delivery to the stable on the dock. Sometimes two. After he taught me how to handle two, there was more time for cucumber sandwiches and tea with Walter and his wife. Sometimes, between cups and sandwiches, I went back for another horse. Often for two more. At that age I did not spend much time sorting out my emotions. I just sort of rolled along with them, enjoying the pleasures of nickels earned, delicious foods consumed, and the delight of being liked by a couple of delightful people.

  Then—well, what happened was this. When I came into the blacksmith shop one day after school Srul Honig had a big black horse tethered near the door, and he was hammering a shoe on the back right leg of a smaller brown and white horse.

  “Take the black one,” Srul said.

  “How near finished are you with the brown?” I said.

  “No, take the black and come back for the brown,” Srul said.

  I didn’t like the delay. I wanted to get to Walter’s cottage and that tray of cucumber sandwiches.

  “I’ll wait,” I said.

  “No,” Srul said. “The black one is a mishimid.”

  There is no precise translation. The word means a bad person. It does not quite fit a horse, but then neither does it fit a cobra or a bean-ball pitcher. If you understand Yiddish, however, you understand the word mishimid.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  I untied the rope, took a firm grip on the bridle, and led the black horse down Fourth Street to the dock. Maybe I did it a bit too gingerly. If you’re scared of a horse, stay away from him. He’ll know you’re scared before you do. And what’s terrible about it is that knowing you’re scared, the horse gets scared. And scar
ed horses are the only horses that ever cause trouble. It doesn’t seem the sort of thing a boy of eleven would learn on East Fourth Street, but that’s where I learned it, and I wish I hadn’t. Because when I handed the lead rope to Walter in front of the stable on the dock, I did it with a feeling of relief. I remember that clearly. I remember everything else, too.

  “Where’s the brown and white?” Walter said.

  “Mr. Honig is finishing him up,” I said. “He told me to deliver the black first, and come back for the brown.”

  “Tea’s ready,” Walter said. “Why don’t you go in and have a cup before you go back for the brown?”

  I hesitated. This was a mistake. I don’t think Walter knew it was a mistake. I believe now that he thought I was being shy. But the horse knew. The horse had known I was scared from the moment I led him out of Mr. Honig’s blacksmith shop. As Walter turned toward the door of the white cottage with green shutters, the black horse blew a blast of terror through its steaming nostrils and turned its back on Walter. I screamed, but it was too late. The enormous hooves kicked out backwards. The metal shoes, brand-new, hammered into place by Srul Honig only minutes ago, sharp as paring knives, caught Walter in the back of the neck, and tore his head from his body. I saw it happen.

  I saw everything else, too. But I’m not going to set it down. After you’ve seen a human head roll across a dock and drop into a river with a splash, as though you have been watching a dribbling basketball, you have gone as far as you want your powers of description to take you.

  The next hour or so may be buried mercifully under the word hysteria. Mine. The wife of Walter from the Docks’. Strange men’s. I did not know then that these men were officials of the Forest Box & Lumber Company and the Burns Coal Company. A couple of white-coated strangers’, who were obviously connected with the Bellevue ambulance. It was because of this general hysteria that Srul Honig stands out most clearly in my recollection of the horror. He was not hysterical.

  This astonished me, and my astonishment saved me. I had never seen Srul Honig outside his blacksmith shop. Standing in front of the blazing forge, naked to the waist, his huge biceps streaming with sweat as he banged the blunt-headed hammer up and down on the white-hot horseshoes and the sparks showered all over him, he had always been a figure of violence. When he arrived on the dock, still wearing his black leather apron and still wet with sweat, Srul Honig was suddenly a figure of serenity. He moved around quietly. He helped the doctors carry the corpse to the ambulance. And it was only when Srul Honig was free to go into the green-shuttered cottage to soothe the widow that her violent sobbing finally stopped.

  I stood around on the dock for a while, not quite sure of what I was supposed to do, or even wanted to do. I did not realize at the time that for the past few months my life had fallen into a rhythm, and now the rhythm had been broken. The ambulance, the doctors, the lumber and coal company executives, the few curious people who had been drawn to the dock by the sound of the ambulance bell, all were gone. I was alone in front of the small white cottage with the green shutters. I thought I would wait until Mr. Honig came out and ask him what to do. But he didn’t come out. So, after a while, I went home.

  The next day, when I came down East Fourth Street from school, I stopped in at the blacksmith shop. Srul Honig, spraying sweat in all directions, was banging a shoe into shape on a horse’s hoof. He looked up.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  And so I knew an interlude in my life had ended.

  “The horse,” I said. “You want me to take him to the dock?”

  “Where’s there to take?” Mr. Honig said. “Walter is dead.”

  At eleven my grasp of economics was still primitive. Mr. Honig’s reply seemed logical to me. Walter from the Docks had been the person to whom for months I had been delivering the horses Srul Honig shod. Now that Walter was gone, there was nobody to receive the horses. It had not occurred to me that the delivery of those horses was part of a commercial enterprise. I had not connected the work Srul Honig did at his forge and the work Walter had done in the stable on the dock as part of the coal and lumber yards on the dock. I had assumed the whole process had been set in motion so I could earn a few nickels and eat a lot of cucumber sandwiches. How dumb can you be at eleven?

  Well, this small chronicle may provide at least one answer.

  I don’t know what I missed most. The cucumber sandwiches or the plump girl with the delicious smile who served them. Considering the appetites of most eleven-year-olds, it is probably accurate to say I missed them both in equal proportions. That is why, when I got home that day and spread my schoolbooks on the table in our front room, where my mother occasionally allowed me to do my homework, I spent more time looking out the window than looking into my arithmetic text.

  Thus, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes after I left him, I saw Mr. Honig lead out of the smithy the horse he had been shoeing. I saw him walk down East Fourth Street to the Lewis Street corner, cross to the top of the dock area, and lead the horse into the stable next to the green-shuttered white cottage. I can describe my state of mind most accurately, I believe, by saying that questions not only came to but actually assaulted it.

  To whom was Mr. Honig delivering that horse? Now that Walter was dead? Somebody must have been in that stable, because a few moments later Mr. Honig came out of the stable minus the horse. He stepped across to the white cottage and knocked on the door. It opened. Mr. Honig entered the cottage. The door was pushed shut from the inside. I did no arithmetic homework that day. I sat at the table and stared down at the cottage on the dock until Srul Honig came out. This was before the days when I owned a watch, so I can only guess how long he had been in there. It was not a short time.

  I was jealous, of course. But not in the way that a grown man would be jealous. I think what I was jealous of, at that moment in my eleventh year, was the throat down which those cucumber sandwiches were going. They were really good.

  They must have continued to meet the high standard Walter’s wife had set when she served my first one. Because, during the next few weeks, from the windows of our front room, when I should have been doing my arithmetic homework, I noticed that Walter’s widow was attracting a great many customers. What else would they be coming for, if not her cucumber sandwiches?

  I hoped she was getting a good price for them. From the words I heard crossing over my head, uttered in Yiddish by my parents and their neighbors, the death of Walter from the Docks had left his wife penniless. These men who started dropping in on her to buy her cucumber sandwiches were her only source of income. Nobody was very happy about Srul Honig’s role in the new business venture. None of the older people, anyway. They were all, like Srul, immigrants from Austria and Hungary. There was nothing wrong with selling his skills as a Jewish immigrant to the gentile “men of the docks.” It was a new world. A man had to eat. Especially a great big barrel of a man like Srul Honig. But to become friendly with the men of the docks?

  Shaking of heads. Clucking of tongues. Sidelong glances at me. Had the boy understood what was being said over his head?

  The answer of course was no. A small indication of how dumb you can be at eleven. Although I wasn’t all that dumb. I knew what, in the eyes of my parents and their neighbors, was wrong with the men of the docks. They were a rough crew. They came from nobody quite knew where, out of the river, riding the coal and lumber barges to the East Fourth Street dock. They worked the cranes in the dock yards. They drove the wagons that carried the coal and lumber west into the city. They played cards. They shot craps. They drank. And they were gentiles.

  They lived together, on the barges, and they played together, in the dock saloons. They came and went with the movement of the river traffic. They never touched the lives of the Jewish immigrants on East Fourth Street. The Jewish immigrants of East Fourth Street were careful not to touch the lives of these men of the docks.

  I had not violated this unspoken arrangement when I started delivering h
orses to Walter from the Docks, because my boss was Srul Honig. It was a Jewish immigrant who had paid me my nickels. Just what I had violated when I started entering the white and green cottage and eating cucumber sandwiches made by Walter’s wife, I don’t know. Neither did my parents. I had never said a word about the things I had enjoyed most during my trips to the dock with Srul Honig’s freshly shod horses. I had an uncomfortable feeling that some of the delicacies Walter’s wife set out along with the cucumber sandwiches were not kosher. Neither was Srul Honig’s conduct.

  About a month after the death of Walter from the Docks, I was coming down Fourth Street on my way home from school. I walked, as I had every day since Walter’s death, on the south side of the street. I did not want to pass the open door of the blacksmith shop. I didn’t have to. Srul Honig had apparently been waiting for me.

  “Come on over,” he yelled from the other side of the street. I hesitated, but crossed over. “I got a horse for you,” Srul said.

  I followed him into the smithy. A big gray horse was tethered near the door. Mr. Honig pulled a nickel from his pocket under the black apron.

  “Payment in advance,” he said through the troubled frown that was his customary expression. From another pocket under the leather apron he pulled a small folded piece of paper. “Here,” he said. “Give this to her.”

  “I’ll have to leave my schoolbooks,” I said.

  “I’ll hold them,” Mr. Honig said.

  He took my strapped bundle of books. I took the nickel and the piece of paper. He untethered the horse and I took the bridle. It was all simple, direct, matter-of-fact, the way it had always been, and yet, of course, it was not. I have often wondered what I could have been thinking as I led the big gray horse down Fourth Street and out onto the dock. Nothing that comes back to me is very satisfactory or even trustworthy. I think I remember a sense of anticipation. I was going back, under the auspices that had directed me there originally, to a place where I had once been happy. I think I thought it might happen again.