Between that first night, when he came into my life, and another night, almost two years later, when he left, I learned a lot about Mr. Osterweil, but I no longer remember how I learned it. For example, I don’t know how I learned he was a bachelor and lived with his mother in a house in New Rochelle in which both of them had been born. Not that at twelve I was what you would call shy, exactly, but I can’t believe I ever asked Mr. Osterweil for this piece of information.
I have a theory, which I can’t prove but which I will never stop defending, that if you feel strongly about anybody, if you really love or really hate, you pick up information about them without trying, the way a blue serge suit picks up lint, because all your pores are always open, so to speak. Or maybe I don’t mean pores. Maybe I mean antennae.
Whatever I mean, this much I know: what I remember about Lester Osterweil, I remember because I was crazy about him; and what I remember about Jazz L. McCabe, I remember because for years, from the time I won the hiking merit badge, until this morning when I read his obituary in the Times, I have not lived through a day during which at least a few moments have not been spent on hating the bastard. Even now that he has finally gone to what I used to think only hypocrites call his just reward, I won’t take odds that getting this off my chest will free those terrible moments for more useful and more worthy thoughts. He was something, Jazz L. McCabe was. Something rotten.
Not Lester Osterweil. He was just the opposite. Goodness came out of him the way hot air comes out of politicians. He didn’t even have to try. To my knowledge, he never did. Maybe that’s what drew him to the boy scout movement. There is something simple-minded about it. Like the Golden Rule. If you want boys to be decent, if you care about helping them grow up to be good men, why, just get them out into the open, take them on hikes, teach them to tie knots, make fire with flint and steel, and believe that the kingdom of heaven is not a bull market but a scrap of embroidered khaki the boy has won by proving he has accepted the ludicrous belief that it is admirable to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. Silly stuff, of course. I shudder to think what a fool I must have been at the age of twelve to believe such nonsense. I have, however, a good excuse. I was corrupted by Lester Osterweil.
Not only did he believe this nonsense. Mr. Osterweil built his life around the belief. He had very little money. This is no reflection on F. W. Woolworth and Company. I’m sure they paid their store managers a fair wage, and I’m sure Lester Osterweil was paid as much as he deserved. If the money didn’t go as far as he wanted it to go, that was his fault, not Barbara Hutton’s. Where Lester Osterweil wanted it to go was to the boys of East Fourth Street, and he didn’t have enough to go around because his mother lived in a wheel chair and she earned very little herself by sewing for her New Rochelle neighbors. Mr. Osterweil did pretty good, though.
He helped me and Natie Farkas and a dozen other kids to buy our first scout uniforms. Troop 224, which met every Saturday night in the downstairs reading room of the Hamilton Fish Park Branch of the Public Library, always met as a troop should meet. Every member properly dressed. Every member wearing the insignia to which he was entitled. I still get a kick out of remembering the day I gave Mr. Osterweil four quarters, a dime, and a nickel, the last $1.15 I owed him for the $3.50 he had advanced so I could buy and wear a merit-badge sash at the troop ceremony when I was inducted as senior patrol leader. I earned the money by taking over Natie Farkas’ job of stacking empties for his father. Natie hated the job. Not me. I wore that merit-badge sash the way Arthur wore Excalibur. For the man who made it possible for me to wear it, I would have killed. I very nearly did.
Before that happened, though, there were the good times. Pretty damn near a year and a half of them.
The weekly meetings. The new skills. The shiny badges. The useless knowledge picked up for the fun of it. I don’t know why, but I still enjoy knowing that the large-toothed poplar can also be identified as the trembling aspen. Or that the square knot is used for tying ropes of equal thickness. If they are of unequal thickness, you’ve got to use a sheet bend, and I still do. Morse Code? I can wig-wag ten words a minute to the marines with a single flag. Assuming there are still any marines around who can read wig-wagged Morse. If there aren’t, I can send it electronically, with a bug, or vibroplex, faster than the AP bulletins come in on a news ticker. I haven’t had occasion to call on my knowledge of the proper pressure points to stop much arterial bleeding lately, but once not too long ago, when on our lawn a neighbor’s son went back for a long fly and instead came through our kitchen window on his back, the ambulance interne later complimented me on the neatness of the spiral reverse bandage I’d put around the kid’s forearm. Just a few of the things I learned from Mr. Osterweil.
But the best things were the Sunday hikes. That’s what I remember. The Sunday hikes.
Getting out of the bed I shared with my kid brother, and out of the house without waking him or my mother. She thought Mr. Osterweil was an American militarist working to turn me and Natie and the other boys of Troop 224 into “pogromniks,” her word for all people who wore uniforms, whether they worked for the New York Sanitation Department or Czar Nicholas II. Meeting Natie in the grocery store, which would not open officially for another hour. We sneaked in with a key Natie was not supposed to have. Stuffing our knapsacks with stale rolls, a scoop of butter out of the big wooden tub in the icebox, a block of silver-wrapped cream cheese, a can of baked beans. No, let’s take two. Baked beans were the best. But what about your old man? Aah, I’ll push the other cans to the front of the shelf. He won’t notice we took two. I think Mr. Farkas did notice. But I also think he didn’t mind. If we thought we were fooling him, he let us continue to think so. He was proud of the way Natie’s merit badges kept piling up. Mr. Farkas had come to America when he was still a young man. He was not as scared as my mother.
Knapsacks loaded, there was the long walk across town to the Astor Place subway station. Except that it never seemed long. Mornings at seven. Especially Sunday mornings. Browning knew. The streets empty and quiet, except for the sparrows screaming their heads off, and with their screaming somehow making it all seem quieter. The sun coming in across the First Avenue El, putting golden covers on the garbage cans. On Seventh Street, beyond Second Avenue, the young priest, his skirts hiked up to avoid the dust, sweeping the steps of the church, getting ready for early Mass. On Third Avenue, in the slatted shade from the El, the sleeping drunks looking friendly and curiously clean in their insensibility. And the sky, like a long wedding canopy over the tenements, smooth and blue as Waterman’s ink all the way to Wanamaker’s. Yes, Robert Browning knew. Robert Browning, and Natie Farkas, and I.
Then the troop gathering slowly outside the subway kiosk. The comparison of knapsack contents. The arrival of Mr. Osterweil. The long ride in the almost empty subway car up to Dyckman Street. The ferry crossing, standing at the gate up front, catching the spray in your face when she hit a big one. On the other side, the briefing by Mr. Osterweil. Tall, skinny, his Adam’s apple bobbing in and out of his khaki collar, his yellow hair blowing in the wind, his sad face looking sadder with the seriousness of his instructions: we needed flint for our fire sets; he’d heard there was quite a lot of it lying around as a result of the blasting they were doing for this new bridge, so would we keep our eyes open?
We kept our eyes open. By the time we arrived at our camp site, we were loaded down with so much flint, I’ve often wondered how they managed to get the George Washington Bridge finished without it.
Then the fires. And the cooking. And the smell of roasting hot dogs. And lying around on the grass, digesting the baked beans, while Mr. Osterweil read aloud from the Handbook. Watching the traffic on the river. Skipping stones out toward the sailboats. The sinking sun. And finally, as Mr. O’Neill once put it, the long voyage home.
I never realized I was doing anything more than having the time of my then still very short life, until we
won the annual all-Manhattan rally. Then, all of a sudden, I was famous. Well, Troop 224 was famous. The morning after I won eight of our winning forty-nine points for speed knot-tying, and Natie Farkas rolled up sixteen for flint and steel and two-flag semaphore, a picture of Troop 224 appeared in The New York Graphic. All thirty-three of us, standing around Mr. Osterweil, who looked as though the cameraman were pointing a gun at him. The Jewish Daily Forward ran a somewhat smaller picture, but my face and Natie’s were clearly visible, and they called Mr. Osterweil, in Yiddish of course, “a fine influence on the young people of the Sixth Assembly District.”
All this was very surprising and very pleasant. None of it was a preparation for the appearance in our lives of Jazz L. McCabe. The typewritten letter over his signature that scared my mother, because she thought it was a moof tzettle, was in our mailbox the morning after the pictures appeared in the Graphic and the Forward. The letter was addressed to me, as the troop’s senior patrol leader. I stared at it for a while, then took it across the street, where Natie stared at it for a while.
“There’s something fishy about this,” he said finally.
It was the mot juste, all right. The letter advised me that Mr. Lester Osterweil had resigned as scoutmaster of Troop 224, and the National Council had appointed as our new scoutmaster the man whose name appeared at the bottom of the letter and who looked forward eagerly to meeting me and my colleagues at our next weekly meeting: “Jas. L. McCabe.”
“Why should Mr. Osterweil resign?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Natie said. “Who is this Jazz L. McCabe?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Let’s go over to Avenue B and find out,” Natie said.
Mr. Osterweil had asked us long ago never to visit him during working hours. He did not think it was fair to his employers to devote to scouting any of the time for which they paid him to serve the customers of the F. W. Woolworth Company. We had always obeyed Mr. Osterweil’s wishes, but Natie and I agreed that Jazz L. McCabe’s letter was important enough to justify breaking this rule. We did not, however, get the chance to do it. Mr. Osterweil, we learned when we got to the store, had not shown up for work that day.
He did, however, show up at our next troop meeting, which took place the following night. When Natie and I came into the meeting room, the scoutmaster was standing at the table up front, talking to a man I had never seen before.
Mr. Osterweil called us over. “This is Mr. McCabe,” he said. “He says he wrote you a letter.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
I pulled the letter from my pocket and handed it over. While Mr. Osterweil read it, Natie and I studied Mr. Jazz L. McCabe.
I have always had a tendency, which I’m sure is fairly common, to form mental pictures of people I have not yet met from the sound or appearance of their names. From seeing the syllables Jas. L. McCabe at the bottom of his letter, my mind had at once constructed the image of a large, bluff, hearty Irishman. I was wrong.
Jas. L. McCabe, when I saw him for the first time that Saturday night, reminded me at once of the man pictured on the bottle of Ed. Pinaud’s Eau De Cologne that stood on the marble shelf in Mr. Raffti’s barber shop on Lewis Street.
Jas. L. McCabe was small, neat, and dapper. He wore a tight double-breasted sharkskin suit and highly polished black shoes with sharply pointed toes. A diamond stickpin in the form of a fleur-de-lis supported his tightly knotted black tie in an elegant little fop’s bulge that arched out under his stiff white collar. His face was round, and either plump or seemed plump, because his collar was so tight that the flesh of his neck bulged out in sagging little dewlaps. His black hair was parted in the middle and slicked back with some sort of ointment that gleamed in the glaring electric light. Under his tiny button nose the two sharp points of a waxed mustache gave Mr. McCabe something to do with his nervously darting hands, and he kept them both constantly busy doing it, so that he seemed to be swatting flies that were trying to settle on his greasy skin.
He didn’t look as though he had ever heard of a sheet bend, much less knew how to tie one. Jas. L. McCabe looked as though he was ready at any moment to whip a towel around your neck and give you a haircut. What he gave me and Natie Farkas that night was the willies. When Mr. Osterweil looked up from the letter, the scoutmaster’s face was pale.
“This letter is a lie,” he said to me and Natie. “I have not resigned as scoutmaster of this troop.”
What happened next was, to me at any rate, startling. The man who looked like a foolish barber suddenly looked like one of those men handcuffed to policemen on the front page of the Daily News.
“Okay, you son of a bitch,” he said in a cold, hard voice to Mr. Lester Osterweil. “You asked for it.”
He stalked—no, he sort of hopped—furiously out of the meeting room, and slammed the door.
“Do you want this back?” Mr. Osterweil said.
A couple of moments went by before I realized he was talking about the letter.
“No, sir,” I said.
Slowly, deliberately, as though he wanted me and Natie to realize his movements held a message for us, Mr. Osterweil tore Jazz L. McCabe’s letter into small pieces, and dropped them into the wastebasket.
“All right, senior patrol leader,” he said. “You may call the meeting to order.”
I did, but it was not a successful meeting. Neither was the next day’s hike. Everything was the same, and yet everything was different. Even the sky, on the long walk across town to the Astor Place subway station, did not look smooth and blue as Waterman’s ink all the way to Wanamaker’s. The unexpected, troubling appearance of Jazz L. McCabe in our lives had spoiled everything, even the feel and smell of those mornings at seven.
I did not realize how upset we were until the next day, in the back of the Farkas grocery store, where I was helping Natie stack the empties, when his father asked what we were making so much noise about. We told him about the letter we had received from Jazz L. McCabe, and the scene that had taken place at the troop meeting.
“What kind of a name this is, a man should call himself Jazz, this I don’t know,” Mr. Farkas said. “But what it means, what he wants, this anybody with a head on his shoulders can see.”
“What does it mean?” Natie said.
“You boys won the rally, so you got Mr. Osterweil’s picture in the papers,” Mr. Farkas said. “This Jazz L. McCabe, he’s the new Democratic leader here in the Sixth Assembly District. What a district leader wants is votes. You don’t get votes if nobody knows who you are. But if you get your picture in the papers, that’s how people learn who you are. So this Jazz L. McCabe, he figures if he gets rid of Mr. Osterweil, and he becomes the scoutmaster, the next time you and the troop you win something, the Jewish Daily Forward it’ll be saying about this Jazz L. McCabe, not about Mr. Osterweil, they’ll be saying it’s Jazz L. McCabe who he’s a fine influence on the young people of the Sixth Assembly District.”
They never got around to saying it. Not in my presence, anyway. Or Natie’s, either. Two days later, there was another typewritten letter in our mailbox.
This one was from the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America. Over a dramatically illegible signature, Natie Farkas and I were asked if we would be good enough to appear in the offices of the National Council at Two Park Avenue on the following day at four P.M. It was a matter of the utmost urgency.
I was impressed. Not because this was a typewritten letter. After all, I had seen one before on East Fourth Street. I was impressed because this was the first time I had ever seen the word “utmost” on anything but a page written by Charles Dickens.
“We better get over to Woolworth’s and ask Mr. Osterweil what the hell this is all about,” Natie said.
We got over to Woolworth’s, and for the second time in a week, we learned that Mr. Osterweil had not shown up for work. The next day, when Natie and I came into the offices of the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America, we found Mr. Oster
weil waiting on a bench in the anteroom. He did not look good.
Under ordinary circumstances this would not have mattered. Or even made an impression on me. Mr. Osterweil never looked good. He always looked sad. But sad in a nice way. As though the cause of Mr. Osterweil’s sadness was not something bad that had happened to him, but his troubled concern because he was afraid something bad might happen to you. These were not, however, ordinary circumstances.
This was a man who had changed my life. He had brought something into it that I had never known existed. And I don’t mean only the knowledge that the large-toothed poplar can also be properly called the trembling aspen. He had broken down the walls that until his arrival had always surrounded East Fourth Street. He had let in the sunlit world outside the ghetto. I did not, at the time, understand all that. But I felt it. And I did not want to lose it.
“Mr. Osterweil,” I said. “What are we all doing here?”
“Well,” he said slowly, “I’m not sure, but I think it’s because Mr. McCabe wants to take over Troop 224.”
Natie, as always, struck nearer to the point. “But why did they ask us to come here?” he said. “Not you, Mr. Osterweil. Us.”
The scoutmaster’s Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times, as though he were revving up the motor in his throat before he could speak, and then he said, “If the boys in the troop want me to stay on as scoutmaster, the Council will have to let me stay on.”
“You mean,” Natie said, “if we say the word, it’s nuts to this Jazz L. McCabe?”
“Pretty much, yes,” Mr. Osterweil said.
“Okay,” Natie Farkas said grimly. “You got nothing to worry about, sir.”
All these years, during all those minutes of every day when I have found myself hating Jazz L. McCabe, I have also found myself hearing again the sound of Natie’s voice as he uttered those words: “You got nothing to worry about, sir.” If it’s confidence you want to feel in the power of decency and justice to direct the movement of the forces that rule the world, the best time to take a shot at it is when you’re thirteen going on fourteen. After that, it’s an uphill fight.
Fourth Street East Page 18
