“Ralph,” Miss Bongiorno said to me. “Would you mind doing it for us again?”
“No, ma’am,” I said.
She went to a seat at the back of the room, sat down, and folded her hands on the desk in front of her. She smiled at me across the heads of my classmates, and my heart turned over. I could not understand why I had never seen it before. She was beautiful.
“Could you perhaps do it a little louder this time?” the white-haired old lady said. “These words are among the greatest ever written. Let’s hear them.”
She heard them, and Miss Bongiorno must have liked what she heard, because the next day, when my class marched into her room for our fifty minutes of elocution, and she said she thought today, boys, it would be nice if we did “The Ancient Mariner,” guess who was called upon to do the central role? Correct. And I knew all the words, too.
Three weeks later, when Abraham Pincus, fully recovered from his appendicitis attack, returned to class, I did not return to my seat at the back of the room.
I have never been quite sure why Miss Bongiorno shifted her affection from Abraham Pincus to me. The fact that I could recite louder than Abraham undoubtedly had something to do with it. Two other facts probably helped. I was a little taller than Abraham, and much thinner. Miss Bongiorno may very well have felt this made me look more like King Henry and The Ancient Mariner than Abraham did. Whatever the reason or combination of reasons, by the time The New York Times announced the sponsorship of a city-wide oratorical contest about the Constitution of the United States, and Mr. McLaughlin, our principal, appointed Miss Bongiorno to supervise the selection of the boy who would represent J.H.S. 64, Abraham Pincus was not even in the running.
I do not wish to imply that Miss Bongiorno was unfair. Not so anybody could notice it, anyway. She was meticulous in maintaining the appearance of impartiality. She announced in morning assembly, to the entire student body, that any boy who wanted to enter the contest was urged to submit to her within two weeks a written speech of no less than one thousand words and no more than two thousand on any aspect of the United States Constitution. I chose the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. I made the choice after a private meeting with Miss Bongiorno at which she pointed out that this was an aspect of the Constitution that none of the other boys would think of. She was right. I still remember the opening line of my speech: “In the drama of history there has never been, and there probably never again will be, so crucial a year as 1787.” If Miss Bongiorno were alive today, I’m sure she would remember it, too. She wrote it.
The rest of the speech was pretty much my own. If the words ended up in more graceful arrangements than I had given them, or was capable of making, it was due to the time and trouble Miss Bongiorno took to correct and polish my crude first draft. I felt it was a measure of her generosity that she did all this correcting and polishing after class, when we were alone together. I don’t think Miss Bongiorno ever told me not to say anything to the other contestants about the help she was giving me with my speech, and I don’t believe I felt there was anything wrong with her giving me this help, but even at the age of eleven I already had a well-developed instinct for knowing when to keep my trap shut.
On the day the school contest closed, when Miss Bongiorno announced in morning assembly that my speech was the best submitted to her, and thus gave me the right to represent the school in the city-wide contest, I was not surprised, therefore, that nobody complained. If any of my classmates knew or suspected that I was not exactly the sole author of the fifteen hundred words with which I was going to enter the lists, it seems likely that they, too, had already learned when it was sensible to shut up.
My energies during the next three weeks were directed by Miss Bongiorno in the opposite direction: to speaking up. What had drawn us together originally, as I have indicated, was the volume of sound I was able to send forth with my vocal cords. Even without trying I could fill every corner of the classroom. Now Miss Bongiorno started to teach me the difference between a classroom and an auditorium.
Every afternoon, when classes were over, I would meet her in the downstairs hall where morning assembly was held every day, and she would drill me for an hour or more. Miss Bongiorno taught me how to control my voice, how to keep the volume up without loss of breath, and, most important of all, how to gather and hoard energy for my best shots. These were chosen by her.
She marked every line of the speech for the words on which to pause, the areas where my voice was to sink, which were not many, and the places Miss Bongiorno called “the real sockdologers.” For these she would step out of the assembly hall into the corridor and pull the heavy doors shut. If she was smiling when she came back in, I knew my voice had reached her. If she was frowning when she came back in, I had to try again.
After ten days I could go through the entire rehearsal session without seeing a single frown on her face. Miss Bongiorno felt I was ready for gestures. She inserted these with the precision of a watchmaker and sank them into my consciousness with the efficiency of a Marine Corps drill sergeant.
To this day, almost half a century later, when I hear the word “history” spoken aloud I must restrain myself from raising my right hand, palm upward, to the height of my ear. And nobody had better be carrying a bowl of hot soup within my reach when the words “founding fathers” are uttered in my presence. On hearing the first “eff” my arms sweep out automatically and my eyes turn toward the sky in a gesture I have learned, since Miss Bongiorno taught it to me, is more appropriate to a rainmaker testing for the results of his most recent effort.
The effort Miss Bongiorno poured into me seemed to please her. The day before the southern Manhattan eliminations, which was to be my first public appearance, she told me we would skip our regular rehearsal.
“You’re perfect right now,” she said. “I don’t think we should do any more practicing. Overtraining can be just as harmful as undertraining. Between now and tomorrow night I want you to relax. Don’t even think about the contest.”
This was not easy. I had been thinking about nothing else for weeks. What astonished me when I came home from school that day was to learn that my mother had been thinking about it at all.
My life at school, on the street, anywhere outside our tenement flat, was something to which she paid no attention. So long as I brought home satisfactory school report cards my mother did not seem to care what I did while I was not in her presence. Subsequent years of troubled thinking have led me to conclude that she did care, probably desperately, but her desperation I now believe was motivated by the fear that she might, if she probed even casually, uncover things about this New World to which she had fled from the Old that might be worse than the horrors she had left behind in Europe. At the time I did not understand this, mainly because I was not interested in exploring it, but I accepted it. Perhaps out of fear for parental authority. Probably out of laziness. Undoubtedly selfishness had a lot to do with it. I was living my own life. I was having fun. The desire to share it with my immigrant, illiterate, and (I can’t avoid confessing, I must at the time have felt) my stupid parents never crossed my mind. I was astonished, therefore, when I came home from school the day before my first public appearance in The New York Times oratorical contest to find my mother waiting for me in the kitchen with a flat rectangular parcel wrapped in tan-colored glazed paper.
I was not astonished by her physical presence. She was always waiting for me in the kitchen when I came home from school. My mother left our flat only once a day—while my father was working in the pants shop on Allen Street and I was in class at J.H.S. 64—to shop for the ingredients of our evening meal at Deutsch’s grocery and the Avenue C pushcarts. She was, therefore, never out of the house when I came home. What I was always met with when I came home from school was the usual glass of milk and plate of sugar cookies. The flat rectangular parcel wrapped in tan-colored glazed paper was, therefore, a surprise.
“What time tomorrow night it takes place thi
s contest?” my mother said.
In Yiddish, of course. I do not know to this day if, at the time, she understood English, or if she was capable of speaking some fragments of the language. All I know is that she never did.
“What contest?” I said.
I didn’t really say it. I merely uttered the syllables in a sort of rumbling mutter of astonishment. How did she know I was involved in a contest? I had never mentioned it at home. She had never asked about the after-school hours of practice I had been spending with Miss Bongiorno. The word contest itself was so alien to my life in the tenement flat, as opposed to my life on the streets and in school, that in Yiddish translation it did not sound like an exploration of American history sponsored by a distinguished New York newspaper. My mother made it sound like a pogrom.
“The speech,” my mother said. “What time tomorrow night?”
“Eight o’clock,” I said.
“Here,” she said. “I want you to wear this.”
She gave me the flat rectangular parcel wrapped in tan-colored glazed paper. It came, of course, from what was known on East Fourth Street as “the Chinks.” The Chinks was a Chinese laundryman named, somewhat improbably but on the whole not inappropriately, James Jew. He functioned in a store on Avenue C, between Fifth and Sixth Streets, and his function was a puzzle to me.
On East Fourth Street soap was looked upon as an item that had to fight for its life on the family budget along with bread, butter, milk, and rent. For laundry purposes, therefore, my mother, like most housewives on the block, bought the cheapest kind. It may have been the best kind because, as I remember it, the shirts I wore to school were always clean. So were the shirts of my classmates and the shirts of our fathers. All, of course, were washed at home. Professional laundries were a luxury that had just begun to appear in the neighborhood. They were all what was then known as wet-wash laundries. You could always tell when a family on the block was doing well. Two or three times a month the horse-drawn wagon of the Demand Wet Wash Laundry, Inc., would arrive from Lewis Street. The driver would collect the family laundry in a dry white canvas sack. A few days later he would deliver it in the same sack, which now seemed to contain bricks, because he carried it bent over. The laundry inside was soaking wet. The prosperous housewife, spared the work of scrubbing and rinsing, still had to hang out her laundry to dry on a clothesline, and then iron it. Nobody, not even prosperous housewives, ever sent out what was known as flat, meaning laundry that was returned dry and ironed. This was a luxury that on East Fourth Street was considered a criminal waste of money, and conceivably a sign of certifiable insanity. Who, then, were the customers of James Jew? How did the proprietor of the shop known as “the Chinks” pay his rent?
The hint of an answer suggested itself on that afternoon when I came home from school the day before my first public appearance in The New York Times oratorical contest. The flat rectangular parcel wrapped in tan-colored glazed paper contained one of my white shirts. Or rather, what looked like one of my white shirts. My mother never used starch. Perhaps because it represented an additional cost in the laundering process. In any case, my shirts, like my father’s, were always ironed soft. My mother had obviously felt that this, while adequate for normal shirt-wearing occasions, was inadequate for the occasion toward which Miss Bongiorno’s preparations had been pointing me. My mother had turned over the preparation for my public appearance to James Jew.
I was deeply impressed. Not only by the way the shirt was folded around a piece of cardboard, and sealed with a pink paper band on which was printed “James Jew Hand Laundry,” but also by what James Jew had done to the collar and cuffs. He had converted them to the appearance, consistency, and flexibility of ceramic tile. I could not believe James Jew’s income was derived from boys in the neighborhood who participated in public contests and, therefore, needed a shirt for the occasion prepared in similar fashion. It occurred to me with a sense of astonishment that there must have been people in the area who had their shirts similarly treated for lesser occasions.
“What’s the matter?” my mother said. “You don’t like it?”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “I was just wondering how much it cost.”
“Fifteen cents,” my mother said. “So you better win.”
All of that evening, and all of the next day, I wondered uneasily if she intended to come along and watch me perform. I know there are some, probably many, who will feel that to report my uneasiness is to sound unfilial. I can’t help it. The truth is that except for the single occasion when she took me to be registered in kindergarten class at P.S. 188, my mother had never accompanied me anywhere in public. I had no trouble imagining how she would look. She would probably wear her good dress, the one with the beaded flowers on the sleeves that she wore to synagogue during the High Holidays. But would she look the same in it while seated in the auditorium of Washington Irving High School, where the contest was to be held, as she looked behind the white curtain that shielded the women from the eyes of the men in the synagogue? She certainly would not understand what she was hearing from the platform. For the first time in my life I realized I was ashamed of her illiteracy. How could I introduce her to Miss Bongiorno, the woman I loved? Worse than that, how would her presence affect my performance? Already, just thinking about it uneasily, I felt she had thrown me off my stride.
The following night, immediately after supper, I got back on it. My mother helped me into the piece of chain mail James Jew had made of my shirt and then she went to the sink.
“Don’t stay out too late,” she said, plunging her hands into the tin basin full of hot water that contained the supper dishes.
My spirits soared. It was her way of telling me I could stop worrying about her coming along. Now, of course, when I think of that moment, my spirits do not soar. It is my sense of shame that rockets upward. My mother obviously knew it would embarrass me to be seen with her in public.
A half hour later, when Miss Bongiorno met me in the lobby of Washington Irving High School on Irving Place, it occurred to me that perhaps she had expected my mother to show up. Coming across the marble floor toward me, the elocution teacher gave me an odd look. And when she reached me, Miss Bongiorno looked across my head as though she expected someone to be following me.
“How do you feel?” she said.
“I feel fine,” I said.
“Are you alone?” Miss Bongiorno said.
“Yes,” I said. Seeing that she looked troubled, I decided to set things right. “My father couldn’t come because tonight it’s his society meeting,” I said. “And my mother, she’s sick.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Miss Bongiorno said.
She sounded genuinely sorry, so I knew I was on the right track. I decided to make it sound better.
“She’s so sick she couldn’t even wash my shirt,” I said. “My mother had to send it to the Chinks.”
Miss Bongiorno’s troubled glance rested for the first time on the strip of ceramic tile in which my neck was encased.
“It looks very nice,” she said, and then Miss Bongiorno gave it a closer look. “Are you sure it won’t interfere with your breathing?”
It had been interfering with my breathing all during the half-hour walk from East Fourth Street to Irving Place, but I had licked it by tipping my head back and keeping my eyes fixed on the sky.
“No, ma’am,” I said, “I’m fine.”
“Well, then I suppose we’d better go,” Miss Bongiorno said.
We went across the lobby, past the big double doors that opened into the auditorium, toward a smaller door at one side. This led to a short flight of descending stairs that ended in what I later learned was known as a dressing room. When I was led into it by Miss Bongiorno, I did not at first notice the small tables spaced evenly around the walls, and the mirrors hanging over them, but I noticed the boys.
There were eight of them, all about my age, and standing next to each one, bent over slightly in a protective atti
tude, was a woman. These women were of different sizes, shapes, and ages, but I knew at once they were elocution teachers like Miss Bongiorno, and that the boys were the contestants they had trained. All the teachers nodded and smiled when we came in, and then I noticed something else. The smiles were directed at Miss Bongiorno, who nodded and smiled back. The eight boys did not smile. They all watched me.
“Over here,” Miss Bongiorno said. “Here’s a table that’s free.” She led me to one of the small tables and said, “Sit.”
I sat down and found myself staring into the mirror over the table. In it I could see that the other boys were still watching me. I wondered why. Every one of those eight boys had seven other boys to stare at, but I was the one that held their attention. Miss Bongiorno must have noticed it, too.
“Don’t mind them,” she said to me in a low voice. “Just think about your speech.”
I didn’t have to do that. So I thought about why those eight boys were staring at me, and I could feel the excitement begin to mount inside me. They had obviously heard about the work Miss Bongiorno and I had been doing. Rumors about the power of my voice had undoubtedly spread. If any of them had kept their windows open during some of my rehearsal sessions with Miss Bongiorno, I’m sure they heard me. These boys were staring at me because they were scared. I was the one to beat.
They didn’t even come close. Except for a puzzling incident that took place just before the contest got under way, the issue was never in doubt. What was puzzling about the incident was that none of the other eight boys seemed to be aware it was taking place.
We were all sitting there in a sort of restless, ear-scratching, foot-shifting, throat-clearing silence, with our teachers hovering over us, when a door at the other side of the room opened and a man came in. Before the door swung shut I caught a glimpse of the stage on which we were about to perform and, below it, a section of the auditorium. The seats were filling up. I recognized some faces from J.H.S. 64, a few from my own class, and I had a feeling of surprise. It had never crossed my mind that any of my classmates would walk at night all the way to the Washington Irving High School on Irving Place to listen to me speak in an oratorical contest.
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