Fourth Street East

by Jerome Weidman

  “How much?” Miss Bongiorno said.

  “Eleven-fifty,” the man said.

  Miss Bongiorno opened her purse, counted out the money, and said, “We’ll take it with us.”

  We did. When we had entered the store I had noticed the clock over the door of the hot-dog stand across the street. I took a look at it as we left. The entire transaction had consumed eighteen minutes. It took Miss Bongiorno and me another twenty-two minutes to walk back to East Fourth Street. My mother was, of course, surprised to see her. Or perhaps she was surprised to see the new suit.

  “What happened to the old one?” she asked.

  It had never been given the chance to become old.

  “Tell your mother I made a mistake,” Miss Bongiorno said. “Ask her please not to show this suit to anybody. Tomorrow night I’ll come and get you myself and we’ll go to Town Hall together.”

  “What did she say?” my mother said.

  “She said in this suit I can’t lose,” I said.

  It was not what Miss Bongiorno had said, of course, but it was less taxing than a complete translation of the day’s events. And anyway, it proved to be true.

  Town Hall was somewhat different from Washington Irving High School, but the difference was a matter of numbers. At Town Hall, I competed against only one boy, the finalist from northern Manhattan. He was very good, better than any of the eight boys I had faced at Washington Irving, but he was no match for Miss Bongiorno. She had sandpapered my every phrase and polished my every gesture. I did not even have to think of the rise and fall of my voice. All I had to do was face the audience, open my mouth, start the magic sentence “In the drama of history,” and what emerged for the ears of the audience was not unlike a beautifully edited phonograph recording. The judges were not the two men and the woman who had handed me the laurel at Washington Irving, but the result was the same. The only difference between my triumph at Town Hall and my victory at Washington Irving High School took place after the event.

  None of my classmates had come to Town Hall. I am not sure of the reason. Forty-third Street west of Sixth Avenue was certainly a longer walk from East Fourth Street than Irving Place. The subway fare may have had something to do with it. It was a nickel each way, and a dime was a large coin in those days. It is also possible that I was having my first taste of public fickleness. The boys who had walked me home from my first victory in Washington Irving may well have become bored with an orator who recited the same speech, with the same gestures, every time he came out on a platform. If they had turned to another hero, I can say honestly it did not bother me. Not at the moment, anyway. I came out onto the sidewalk of Forty-third Street with Miss Bongiorno’s arm across my shoulders and the applause of the audience still making a nice noise inside my head.

  “We’ll go home in a taxi,” she said. “I don’t want you to catch cold.”

  I had never been inside a taxi, but like every boy on East Fourth Street, I gave them a great deal of attention. Yellows and Checkers were a waste of time. Luxors were the ones to watch for. Luxor cabs were all white and had fat chrome pipes that snaked in and out of the motor hood on both sides. I’m pretty sure these pipes were purely decorative, or so I was told years later, but they were very dashing to the eye and very important to your fate. When you sighted a Luxor cab, if you spit into your palm and then punched the blob of saliva home with your fist before the taxi reached the corner, you were guaranteed twenty-four hours of good luck. I was thrilled, therefore, when Miss Bongiorno raised her hand as we reached the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-third Street, to see a Luxor cab cut out of the traffic toward us. When it stopped, I was surprised by two things: the door opened from the inside, and Miss Bongiorno tried to pull me away. She was too late. An arm had reached out and dragged me into the taxi. I fell onto the back seat and turned. Miss Bongiorno was standing on the sidewalk, hesitating. It was only after I saw the look on her face that I realized I was frightened. Miss Bongiorno looked scared stiff.

  “You better get in,” a voice said above my head. I looked up. It was the man with the shiny black hair and the unlighted cigar. Miss Bongiorno’s hesitation seemed to annoy him. He reached out, grabbed her hand, and tried to pull her into the taxi. She held back, not exactly struggling, but clearly not cooperating, and then a strange thing happened. A man came out of the passers-by moving along the sidewalk and gave Miss Bongiorno a violent shove. She came sprawling into the taxi on top of me. The man on the sidewalk shoved the door shut and the driver gunned his motor. The taxi lurched away from the curb, into the traffic. Miss Bongiorno and I helped each other to straighten up on the back seat. The man with the shiny black hair just sat there, holding his unlighted cigar and looking sad.

  “You didn’t listen to me,” he said.

  “I couldn’t,” Miss Bongiorno said. “This boy won the lower Manhattan. His name is in the records. The New York Times has his name. He was the winner. I had to bring him here tonight.”

  “I told you names mean nothing,” the man said. “I told you to bring Frankie Lizotto and forget the records. I told you we would fix the records. But you wouldn’t listen. No, you wouldn’t listen. So now you better.”

  The expression of sadness on his face did not change as he put the cigar into his mouth. He set the wet end firmly between his beautiful white teeth, as though he did not want the cigar to be damaged by what was going to happen next. What happened next made Miss Bongiorno scream. The man had punched her cheek with the side of his fist. The old lady fell against me. The man reached over, grabbed a handful of her beautiful white hair, pulled her toward him, and with a hard downward chopping motion, smashed his fist on the back of Miss Bongiorno’s neck. She screamed again, just once, then lay still.

  “Hey!” I said.

  “You shut up,” the man said, and then he made it impossible for me to do otherwise. He smashed his open hand across my mouth. The hand went up for a second blow. I covered my face.

  “Leave the boy alone.”

  I spread my hands and peered through the fingers. Not to see who had spoken. Even in a series of strangled gasps I recognized Miss Bongiorno’s voice. I felt I couldn’t duck the second blow unless I saw where it was coming from. It came, curiously enough, from her. The old lady put up her hand to shield me. The man’s fist, coming down as though he were driving an ice pick, caught her on the elbow and drove her hand against my head. It was the first time I realized Miss Bongiorno wore a ring. The small diamond tore down the side of my face.

  “Leave the boy alone,” she gasped again.

  “It’s up to you,” the man said.

  “All right,” the old lady said.

  The man reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a large, immaculate, neatly folded white handkerchief, and handed it to Miss Bongiorno. Her breath kept coming in gasping sobs as she wiped my face. When the taxi passed under a lamppost I saw the blood. It looked black.

  “It’s not deep,” Miss Bongiorno said to me through her sobs. “It’s just a scratch.”

  It was more than a scratch, of course, but I didn’t know that until later. At that moment the taxi stopped at the corner of Avenue D and Fourth Street. Again the man with the shiny hair reached into his breast pocket. This time he pulled out a knife. One of those large, ugly affairs that you see in the windows of stores that sell hunting equipment. He pressed something in the side of the bone handle. There was a click. A long, shining blade leaped to ugly life. I screamed again.

  “Shut up,” the man said again.

  Then, with clean, methodical, and surprisingly graceful movements, as though he were peeling an apple, he proceeded to cut the brand-new Wanamaker’s suit from my body. He left just enough of the pants to make it look, when he opened the taxi door and shoved me out on the sidewalk, as though I were wearing a pair of torn swimming trunks.

  “Don’t do any more public speaking,” he said. “It could be bad for your throat.”

  He threw the pieces of sliced suit out at my feet a
nd pulled the taxi door shut. Miss Bongiorno looked out at me through the window. I have never been able to understand the expression on her face. What confuses me to this day is the recollection that she looked out at me not only with bitterness, but also with contempt. In some way I had not measured up. It was clear from the look on her face that I had failed her. The cab pulled away from the curb.

  The next day Mr. McLaughlin, our school principal, announced at morning assembly that the Board of Education had transferred Miss Bongiorno to a junior high school in Brooklyn. Perhaps they had. I don’t know. I never saw her again.

  She was replaced by a Miss Carney, who was a very good teacher, but did not care much for volume. She said I shouted. I lost interest in public speaking.

  I don’t know how the man with the cigar tampered with the records of the oratorical contest, but apparently he did nothing that had a retroactive effect. For having reached the city semi-finals at Town Hall, I was given by The New York Times a bronze medal, which I still carry as a good luck piece, and a check for fifty dollars, with which my father started an account for me in the Bowery Savings Bank. When he learned that Miss Bongiorno had disappeared, my father insisted on placing the cost of the Stanton Street suit into my bank account, fifty cents at a time. Some day she might show up, he said, and we owed her the money. Since he did not have a bank account of his own, he might as well put the money into mine. It took my father a little over a year to reach the amount Miss Bongiorno had advanced.

  The Jewish Daily Forward did not cover The New York Times oratorical contest, so all these years I did not know how it came out. Last week I ran into Chink Alberg on Madison Avenue. He is today a highly successful certified public accountant. We talked about the old days on East Fourth Street. He remembered the walk back from Washington Irving High School on the night of my first triumph. The next day Chink called me on the phone.

  “I couldn’t stand not knowing what happened,” he said. “So this morning I sent my secretary over to the Times. She looked it up. They’ve got everything on microfilm. Guess who represented Manhattan in the finals at Carnegie Hall?”

  “Frankie Lizotto,” I said.

  “Jesus,” Chink said. “How did you know that?”

  “It figured,” I said. “Frankie had a lot going for him.”

  “Not enough,” Chink said. “Frankie didn’t win.”

  He would have, if he’d had Miss Bongiorno in his corner.

  6

  In Memoriam

  ONE THING ABOUT THE obituary page. It starts people talking. Men and women who for years have been afraid to open their traps, they read a four-line item on the obituary page, and suddenly they become garrulous. I’m no exception.

  Yesterday, if you had mentioned the name Jazz L. McCabe to me, I would have given you an innocent look and said, “Who?” Today, try and shut me up. This morning’s Times reports that McCabe died last night at Mt. Sinai. A coronary at the age of sixty-three. High time.

  His name was James, but down on East Fourth Street we called him Jazz because that’s the way he signed his name: “Jas. L. McCabe.” Nobody on East Fourth Street had ever seen that before. The first time I saw it, “Jas. L. McCabe” was written at the bottom of a letter. The letter was typed. That, too, was something new on East Fourth Street. It threw my mother into a panic. She thought it was a moof tzettle, which is Yiddish for eviction notice or, if you took French at Thomas Jefferson High School as I did, a cadeaux de conger. These were just about the only communications written on a typewriter that arrived on East Fourth Street. They arrived often.

  “It’s not from the court,” I said after studying the letter. “It has nothing to do with our rent.”

  “What is it, then?” my mother said.

  “It’s for Natie Farkas,” I said.

  “Then why did the letter carrier put it in our box?”

  “Well, it’s for Natie and me,” I said. “The both of us.”

  This was not strictly true, but things went on in this country that my mother did not understand, and at the age of twelve I had not yet developed any great desire to waste my time enlightening her. I had other fish to fry.

  This one had been hooked by my friend Natie Farkas. His father owned the grocery store at the corner of Lewis and Fourth Streets, and the Farkases lived two floors above us in the huge, dirty gray tenement that faced the store. Natie was a great reader. Most kids on East Fourth Street were. Borrower’s cards to the Hamilton Fish Park Branch of the New York Public Library were standard equipment for every kid on the block. The reason was simple. Art Acord in The Oregon Trail at the American Theatre on Second Street cost a dime. David Copperfield cost nothing. That is, if you got to the front door of the library at nine o’clock on Saturday morning before the next guy. Dickens was big stuff on East Fourth Street.

  What got me involved with Jazz L. McCabe was Natie Farkas’ laziness. He was a tough kid to get out of bed in the morning. Natie was late for Nicholas Nickleby. Some other kid got it. What Natie got was a book called The Boy Scouts of Bob’s Hill.

  My wife doesn’t believe me. But I swear. There once was a book called The Boy Scouts of Bob’s Hill, and it changed my life.

  “I want you to read this,” Natie said to me the day after he missed out on Nicholas Nickleby, and he handed me a book.

  “Why?” I said. I was working my way through Great Expectations. I hated to be deflected.

  “You wait and see,” Natie said.

  I didn’t have to wait long. The Boy Scouts of Bob’s Hill was a short book. It told the story of a group of boys about the same age as Natie and I who formed a boy scout troop with headquarters in a cave at a place called Bob’s Hill. Don’t ask me where Bob’s Hill was. Probably somewhere in New England or out West or maybe even in California. Wherever it was, it was about as different from East Fourth Street as I imagine Addis Ababa is from Radio City. Furthermore, until I read this book I had never even heard of boy scouts. But I had never heard of London, either, until I read Martin Chuzzlewit. The effect was the same. It was immediate, and it has lasted. I still feel about London the way Troilus felt about Cressida, and even though I have sons who are draft age, when anybody mentions the Boy Scouts of America in my presence, my heart starts to go like Man o’ War breaking away from the barrier. The moment I finished reading The Boy Scouts of Bob’s Hill I ran down to the grocery store to find Natie Farkas. He was stacking empties out in back, a chore for which his father paid him twenty-five cents a week.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” he said, “and I’m way ahead of you. Let’s start a scout troop.”

  It was not what I was going to say. I was going to say I liked The Boy Scouts of Boy’s Hill and I intended to hotfoot it right over to the library and see if maybe it was part of a series, because if it was, I wanted to read them all. But as Natie had said, he was way ahead of me, and not for the first time, either.

  “How can we do that?” I said.

  “We write to the National Headquarters,” Natie said. “I looked it up in the telephone book. It’s right here in New York.”

  Natie wrote the letter, but I helped with the phrasing, and we chipped in for the stamp. It cost two cents, and no nonsense about zones or zip codes. Two cents, no matter where you were writing to, Seattle or the Bronx. Actually, Natie and I were writing to Two Park Avenue, but the answer came from New Rochelle.

  It was a short, handwritten letter, not unlike the letter Natie and I had written, and it was signed “Lester Osterweil.” The letter said that the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America had advised Mr. Osterweil that Master Nathan Farkas and a friend, both of East Fourth Street in New York City, had made inquiries about organizing a boy scout troop in their neighborhood, and Mr. Osterweil had been asked to pursue the matter because he, Mr. Osterweil, worked not too far from East Fourth Street. Mr. Osterweil asked if we knew the location of the Hamilton Fish Park Branch of the New York Public Library, which was like asking Gertrude Ederle if she knew the loca
tion of the English Channel, and if we didn’t he hoped we could find it, because that was where he would like to meet us the following Tuesday night at eight P.M., a time that was convenient for him, and he hoped it was convenient for us, too, but if it wasn’t he would be pleased to make a more convenient arrangement. In the meantime he begged to remain yours for more and better scouting, sincerely, Lester Osterweil.

  In those days, when life was still uncomplicated, anything was convenient for me that I didn’t have to explain to my mother, and to make things convenient for himself, all Natie had to do was steer clear of the grocery store in which his father and mother were trapped until close to midnight every day except Friday, when they shut up shop at sundown.

  The following Tuesday night Natie and I were on the front steps of the library by seven-thirty, and a half hour later a tall, thin, hatless man with a sad face, wearing a dirty raincoat, came down the block and introduced himself to us.

  Looking back on it now, I would guess that Mr. Osterweil at that time was a young man around thirty, give or take a couple of years, but to me and Natie, who had just turned twelve, he looked as old as Calvin Coolidge. He talked like Coolidge, too. Not that I ever heard Coolidge talk, but there were a lot of jokes in those days about how rarely our President opened his mouth, and when he did, how little came out.

  One of the first things that came out of Mr. Osterweil was an explanation of what he’d meant in his letter when he wrote that he worked not too far from East Fourth Street. He made his living as the manager of the F. W. Woolworth store on Avenue B between Fourth and Fifth Streets, which was like maybe a five-minute walk from the Hamilton Fish Park Branch of the New York Public Library. The next words Mr. Osterweil uttered put me and Natie Farkas in his pocket forever. He asked us how we’d like a couple of ice cream sodas.