Fourth Street East

by Jerome Weidman

  I came out at the top of the dock area and led the horse toward the stable. At once I saw that something was different. Walter had always kept the stable doors open. The stable was always empty when I arrived with the horse or horses Srul Honig had just shod. At that time of day the other horses owned by the Forest Box & Lumber Company and the Burns Coal Company were harnessed into the shafts of the big wagons, dragging lumber and coal across the city. Now the stable doors were closed.

  I stood in front of them, holding the horse’s bridle, and trying to decide what to do. If you give it a moment’s thought, as I did, you don’t knock politely on a closed stable door the way you knock on the door of a friend’s apartment where you have been invited to dinner. On the other hand, what was I going to do with the horse? I could lead it back up the street to Srul Honig, but then I would probably have to return the nickel. What broke the impasse was an odor. The smell of thin slices of cucumber bedded down on richly buttered slices of thin white bread.

  I turned toward the white cottage with green shutters. Four or five steps, and the horse and I had circled the tiny garden. I knocked on the door. No answer. The smell of cucumber sandwiches, however, was now irresistible. I knocked again. Curious, unidentifiable sounds started to work their way through the smell. One sound was readily identifiable. Bare feet slap-slapping hurriedly across a linoleum-covered floor. The door opened.

  “Oh,” Walter’s widow said, “it’s you.”

  I stared at her in some confusion. I had never, as I already stated, seen her in anything except the checked blue and white gingham housedress. She was in it now, but she wasn’t very far in it. She kept tugging at buttons, trying to bring them across to buttonholes, as she smiled down at me.

  “He sent me with a horse,” I said. “Mr. Honig the blacksmith.”

  Across the room, through the door that led to the bedroom, came a man in a gray turtleneck sweater. He, too, was barefoot, and he, too, was not very far into his denim pants.

  “What the hell is going on?” he said as he struggled with the buttons.

  Walter’s wife turned and said, “It’s the boy from the blacksmith.”

  Then the man, who could have used a shave as well as some help with his buttons, saw me in the open doorway and the big gray horse behind.

  “Son of a bitch,” the man said. “I told that red-headed Jew bastard not to deliver the horse till after five o’clock.”

  He strode across the room, pushed Walter’s widow aside, seized the lead strap from me, and pulled the horse away to the stable.

  “I haven’t seen you for a long time,” Walter’s widow said.

  “Mr. Honig doesn’t send me with any more horses,” I said. “He brings them himself.”

  “He was supposed to bring this one himself,” Walter’s widow said. “Why did he send you?”

  “He said I should give you this note.”

  I handed it over. She unfolded the paper, studied it for a moment, then looked up with a frown.

  “It’s not in English,” she said.

  I took back the paper. It sure wasn’t in English, and I understood why Srul Honig had wanted me to carry it for him.

  “It’s in Yiddish,” I said.

  “Can you read it?” she said.

  Srul Honig knew damn well I could read it. That’s why he had asked me to carry it for him.

  “Sure,” I said, and I did read it. Out loud. “I can’t stand how you are living. I’m a blacksmith, yes, and I smell from horses, but no worse than the men on the dock. I’ll buy more soap. I’ll do anything you want. Just so long as you stop the way you are living and marry me. Please.”

  I read it out loud. Just like that. There are a lot of things you can do at eleven that you can never do again.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “Thank you, yes,” I said to Walter’s widow.

  She nodded toward the tray in front of the fire. “Have a cucumber sandwich while I put the kettle on.”

  Before she went out through the other door, the door that led to the kitchen, she crumpled Mr. Honig’s note and threw it into the fire. I picked up a cucumber sandwich and took a bite. I was disappointed. It didn’t seem to taste as good as I remembered. The front door opened. The man who needed a shave came in.

  “What the hell you doing?”

  “Walter’s wife asked me to have a cup of tea,” I said.

  “She ain’t Walter’s wife any more,” the man said. He grabbed me by the collar, dragged me across the room, and shoved me out onto the dock. “Beat it,” he said. “And don’t ever show up around here.”

  I remember thinking, as I walked back up the dock, that Srul Honig had been right. He smelled no worse than this son of a bitch who had thrown me out of the cottage. I lifted the cucumber sandwich for a bite, but the man had stained this odor, too. I had just reached the top of the dock. Before I stepped out into Fourth Street I did two things: I threw the sandwich into the river, and I waited until Mr. Honig turned away from the open doors of his blacksmith shop to pluck a red-hot horseshoe from the forge before I slipped quickly across the street into our tenement. I did not want to take a chance on being asked to return that nickel. The only thing I understood about what had happened on the dock was that I had earned my money.

  The next day I learned the rest. During the night somebody had entered the white cottage with green shutters on the dock and killed Walter’s widow, the unshaven man who had thrown me out of the house before I could get my cup of tea, and two men—at that time still unidentified—who had late in the day helped bring in a coal barge that had been logged steadily at every check point on the Erie Canal the week before.

  Walter’s widow had apparently been entertaining all three men when the murderer came in and killed them. Anyway, that’s what it said in the Jewish Daily Forward.

  In the Daily News, which Chink Alberg showed me during school recess, it said a blacksmith was being sought. The blood-covered murder weapon, found on the bedroom floor of the cottage, was a short-handled, heavy-headed hammer. The sort of thing used by blacksmiths all over the world.

  They caught him, of course. When the cops arrived Srul Honig was asleep in the small room behind the forge that I had never known existed. I remember my surprise on learning he had a life outside the blacksmith shop. I had never thought of Mr. Honig as a man who had a home.

  The trial was widely reported in the press. Naturally it had a special interest for me. Every night, after my father came home from work, and while my mother was washing the evening-meal dishes, he would read aloud to us large slabs of testimony from the Jewish Daily Forward.

  I think I understood most of it, but one thing was puzzling. The charge on which Srul Honig was tried, it said in all the papers, was man’s laughter. Very odd, I thought. Mr. Honig was a man who had never smiled, much less laughed.

  5

  Mafia Mia

  IF I UNDERSTAND WHAT I read in the newspapers, the country in which I was born and have lived for more than half a century is now run by a network of Sicilians who wear Savile Row suits, get the time of day by consulting the world’s thinnest wrist watches, and operate under the sort of names ordinarily associated with the labels on the sides of cardboard boxes containing uncooked spaghetti.

  I am not surprised. Any more than I think Henry Ford was surprised whenever he walked into his plant and saw the assembly lines cranking out all those tin lizzies. After all, Henry had been in at the beginning. So was I, although I didn’t know it at the time.

  Today even kids of eleven are not ignorant. They know that schoolteachers are cynical civil servants relentlessly bucking for security, their cold calculating eyes so firmly fixed on the pension up ahead that they have no interest in seeing to it that the kids milling about down around their knees learn how to read. Anyway, that’s what I read in the papers.

  In those days, when I was eleven, I did not read the papers. I never saw them. My father could afford to buy only one: the Jewish Daily Forward
. I knew how to read the Forward—you did it by going backward—but I spent very little time with it. I had reached the age where I was more interested in reading English, a language I had learned only a few years earlier. As a result, all I knew about teachers was what I saw with my own eyes and experienced with my own senses. It still is, as it was then, the best way to fall in love.

  It is also the least expensive. No bills for sending flowers. No dinner checks in expensive restaurants. No scalped theater tickets. Not even a taxi fare. All you had to do was walk from your tenement at the corner of East Fourth and Lewis Streets to your school on Ninth Street between Avenue C and Avenue B, walk into Rapid Advance Class 7-1, and there she was: Miss Anna Bongiorno.

  Today, of course, I don’t think she would attract the eye of even a desperate casting director. Unless, perhaps, he was looking for someone to play the part of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. Miss Bongiorno was not a young woman. I might as well be frank. She was an old lady. In her mid-sixties, I would guess. With strong, not particularly feminine features and the sort of dark complexion that I am trying to avoid calling swarthy. I can’t. Miss Bongiorno was a dead ringer for a movie actor whose memory still makes me glow: Eduardo Cianelli. But, and it is a but I want to emphasize, she had snow-white hair. It was my first experience with what snow-white hair does to an Italian face. It made Miss Bongiorno beautiful.

  I did not know this when we first met. How could I? I was scared stiff. After six years in P.S. 188 on Houston Street I was suddenly, without warning, transferred to J.H.S. 64 on Ninth Street. I still don’t know why. I suspect the city’s public school system was beginning to suffer the early twinges of congestion, and one of the first efforts to ease the crowding was to move some of the brighter students—I may have been ignorant but my mother assures me I was not stupid—out of the regular, evenly spaced routine into schools that were experimenting with rapid advance classes. Two terms for the price of one, so to speak. I didn’t want to advance rapidly. I wanted to remain in the comfortable nest I had made for myself in P.S. 188. My wants, however, were not taken into consideration.

  Not even by Miss Bongiorno. She was clearly annoyed by the arrival of a new boy in the middle of the term, and she did not conceal her annoyance. She was not exactly mean to me, but Beth out of Little Women she wasn’t, either. Until the day we did a scene from Henry V.

  Even today, when the things that go on in our elementary schools would no longer surprise either Dr. Kinsey or Thomas De Quincey, I think a seventh-grade class, rapid-advance or slowpoke, doing Henry V would probably raise an eyebrow. Not, however, if Miss Bongiorno were still around. She flourished at a time when “departmental” was just beginning to appear in the school system.

  Up to then teachers who received their pupils at nine in the morning and dismissed them at three in the afternoon broke up the six hours of their stewardship to suit their own convenience, predilections, or prejudices.

  So much time for arithmetic. So much for spelling. History? Well, if the teacher was fond of dates and battles, her pupils might spend more time on history than on long division. If she—I never had a male teacher until ninth grade—did not like dates and battles, her pupils had to wait until they were older to learn about Magellan and Bunker Hill. “Departmental” changed all that.

  Under this new system the school day was divided into six equal sections of fifty minutes each. The ten minutes that completed each hour were allotted to the flow of traffic in the school building as in a psychoanalyst’s office they are allotted to the change of bodies on the old leather. The pupils moved from room to room, where different teachers waited for them with reservoirs of knowledge about multiplication, diagramed sentences, the proper treatment of the alimentary canal, the short- and long-range causes of the Revolutionary War, the boundaries of Manhattan Island, and a thing called “elocution.”

  This thing called “elocution” is defined in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as “The art of public speaking as regards delivery, pronunciation, tones, and gestures; manner or style of oral delivery.” Not bad. If the compilers of the Shorter Oxford had consulted me, however, I could have cut the definition down to seven words. “Elocution: the passion of Miss Bongiorno’s life.”

  God knows how many of the six hours every day during which the education of her pupils was in Miss Bongiorno’s hands before “departmental” came in were devoted to flogging them into declamations of The Vision of Sir Launfal, and acting out The Idylls of the King. When I came to J.H.S. 64 “departmental” had just been set in motion, and so I came under Miss Bongiorno’s spell for only one hour, or fifty minutes, every day. But what an hour, or fifty minutes, it was, or they were!

  I used to sit there during these first weeks, listening to the majestic thunder of English literature break all around me, and I do mean English. Miss Bongiorno did not exactly sneer at Longfellow and Washington Irving, but it was to Shakespeare and the Oxford Book of English Verse that as a girl she had given her heart. She remained faithful. She belonged to a school of elocution that has gone out of fashion. Miss Bongiorno taught her students to declaim.

  “These words are among the greatest ever written,” she used to say to a boy who was not reciting loudly enough to suit her taste. “Let’s hear them.”

  There were times during those first weeks when it seemed to me everybody in the school building could hear them. It never occurred to me that anybody might object or even mind. I did not, of course, understand all the words, but the noises they made in my head were thrilling. I became impatient with my role as spectator. I was dying to get up there and yell my head off along with the others. Miss Bongiorno, however, continued to disregard me. Until the day Abraham Pincus had his appendicitis attack.

  Abraham Pincus was Miss Bongiorno’s favorite. He was a small boy but he had a large voice. So large that Miss Bongiorno always assigned to him the major roles in performances involving two or more actors. As for solo recitations, it was Abraham Pincus all the way. When the class did “The Ancient Mariner” it was not the role of the Wedding Guest that Abraham played, and Miss Bongiorno was never overcome by the desire to hear Kipling’s “If” on days when Abraham was home sick. This happened quite often, much to Miss Bongiorno’s distress. We never really knew what was wrong with Abraham, except that he seemed to be plagued by a series of bellyaches, until the day Miss Bongiorno called on him to recite the “a mighty charge” speech from Henry V, Act III, Scene i.

  Abraham went to the front of the room, faced the class, raised his right hand in the commanding gesture I had seen him make at least a dozen times: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” Abraham bellowed, “Or close the wall up with our English dead.”

  Abraham opened his mouth wide for the next line, but it did not come. Instead of Shakespeare, what emerged was a terrible scream. What made it so terrible was not the obvious pain that had triggered the sound but the fact that Abraham’s voice, overwhelming in normal declamation, was terrifying in agony. It seemed to terrify him, too.

  After the first blast he could not seem to listen to any more. He clutched at his belly with both hands, doubled up, fell to the floor, and began to thrash about. Miss Bongiorno jumped from her seat at the back of the room.

  “Frank!” she said sharply. “Ira! Take Abraham to the nurse!”

  Frank and Ira ran to the front of the room, grabbed Abraham, hoisted him to his feet, and hustled him out the door. What happened next has always been for me one of the most astonishing and puzzling recollections of my youth. Without plan, indeed without thought, I slipped from my seat, ran to the front of the room, raised my hand the way Abraham had raised his, and I started to recite, taking up where Abraham had stopped: “In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man,” I bellowed, “As modest stillness and humility.” I kept right on going, without hesitation, all the way to: “Follow your spirit; and upon this charge/Cry ‘God for Harry, England and St. George!’”

  At this point I stopped. Not
because I had come to the end of the speech. More accurately, not because I knew that was all Shakespeare had written for Henry. I stopped because those were all the words I knew. I wondered, for a few moments, how I knew them. Miss Bongiorno was apparently similarly puzzled.

  “Ralph,” she said in a tone of wonder. “I didn’t know you had memorized all that.”

  It did not seem the right moment to tell her my name was Benjamin.

  “Well,” I said. “I’ve, uh, I’ve been sitting here for a few weeks sort of, you know, sort of listening.”

  I was not quite sure what I was saying, but I sensed I was on the right track. I did not then know how to say what I was just dimly beginning to grasp. At eleven I was already what people in the theater call a quick study. I still am. For things I like, anyway. After almost thirty years I cannot remember the address of my dentist, who happens to be a close personal friend. But all I have to hear are the words “Up from the meadows rich with corn, Clear in the cool September morn,” and I need very little urging to embark on all the twenty-nine couplets of “Barbara Frietchie” that follow, right down to “And ever the stars above look down, On the stars below in Frederick Town.” Or if someone merely murmurs within my hearing “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,” the murmurer is in for all thirty-two stanzas of Gray’s “Elegy,” including the epitaph.

  I learned them—and I don’t know how many more—in Miss Bongiorno’s elocution class, and I learned them not by a conscious effort at imbedding the words in my memory, but by listening to the words spoken aloud by my classmates and our teacher. Listening, I must add, with delight. It is the only way to learn.

  That was how I learned the “a mighty charge” speech at a time when I did not know who Shakespeare was. There had been music in Abraham Pincus’ bellowing, even though he may not have known who had put it there. Another thing he did not know was that when he collapsed after the first four lines of that speech, he was changing two lives: his and mine.