Fourth Street East

by Jerome Weidman

  I didn’t realize that, of course, when a door opened at the far side of the anteroom and a secretary said, “Mr. Osterweil, please?”

  He stood up, and followed her out of the room, and the door closed behind him.

  “When he comes out,” Natie said, “I think it would be a good idea if we talked to him for a couple of minutes before we go in.”

  It was an excellent idea, but we did not get an opportunity to try it because, about a half hour later, when the door opened again, the secretary was alone.

  “Scout Farkas, please?” she said. Natie and I stood up, and she said, “One at a time, please. Scout Farkas first.”

  Natie followed her out of the room, and I wondered what had happened to Mr. Osterweil. Ten minutes after that, when the door opened once more, and the girl said to me, “All right, please,” I wondered what had happened to Natie. I followed the girl into a corridor with doors on both sides. All were closed. At the far end she opened a door on the right and smiled encouragingly at me. I stepped through. She pulled the door shut, and I looked around.

  I was in a room that reminded me of the “closed shelf section” in the Hamilton Fish Park Public Library, except that the walls were lined not with books but with pictures of men like Dan Beard and Sir Arthur Baden-Powell. Also, the windows looked out on Park Avenue instead of on East Second Street. But there was that same feeling of a room in which nobody lived but people came to visit for a special purpose.

  At a long table between the windows sat three men. I had never seen men like these in real life, but I had seen hundreds of their pictures in the newspapers. These were the faces, photographed by Underwood & Underwood, that appeared in the financial section of the Times when the corporations for which they worked announced their appointment to new vice-presidencies and old board chairmanships. They looked prosperous and well scrubbed and what my mother called clean-cut. They were all smiling kindly at me. They all had good teeth.

  “Please don’t be afraid,” said the man in the middle. “We just want to ask you a few questions.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Why don’t you sit down,” said the man on the left, pointing to a chair facing the table.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said.

  “It was you and Scout Farkas who were responsible for the founding of Troop 224, were you not?” said the man on the left.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “May we congratulate you on your fine showing at the recent all-Manhattan rally,” said the man on the right.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  I don’t think, looking back on it, I was all that polite at that time. But there was that Fifth Scout Law, which came out squarely in favor of courtesy, and I was at that moment seated in the heartland of the American scout movement.

  “Now, then,” said the man in the middle, and even if he had not hiked himself forward in his chair and leaned a little further across the table, I would have known the preliminaries were over. There was a main-bout sound to that “Now, then.”

  “We have asked you and Scout Farkas to come here today because we are faced with a very painful problem,” said the man in the middle. “We gather from Scout Farkas that you and the other members of Troop 224 are very fond of Mr. Osterweil. Is that true?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you think he is a good scoutmaster, do you not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good,” said the man in the middle. “Because we assigned him to your troop in the first place, and we would feel derelict in the performance of our duty if we had assigned someone who is not a good scoutmaster. What’s that?”

  I jumped slightly in my chair before I realized that the last two words had not been addressed to me. The man on the left had leaned forward and was whispering into the ear of the man in the middle.

  “Right,” the man in the middle said finally. The man on the left leaned back. “You understand, of course, that to be a good scoutmaster requires more than a knowledge of the various skills in which scouts are trained. He must also be a good man in the moral sense. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, and it is possible that I did, but I think my main interest was in not causing any trouble by appearing to be stupid. If I’d had a minute with Natie before I was brought into that room, I would have been more sure of myself. As it was, feeling my way without advice, so to speak, I felt the best thing I could do for Mr. Osterweil, as well as for myself and Natie, of course, was to appear calm and act as though nothing unusual had ever happened during all the time Mr. Osterweil had been our scoutmaster, because with a man like that in charge, how could anything unusual happen?

  “When we assigned Mr. Osterweil to Troop 224,” the man in the middle said, “we had every reason to believe he was a morally upright person. Otherwise, of course, we would never have admitted him to the scout movement. A couple of weeks ago, however, we received a communication from a man named McCabe. Do you know him?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Jazz.”

  “What?”

  I sensed I had made a mistake, so I said quickly, “It’s the way he spells his name, sir.”

  Again the man on the left leaned forward, but this time he was holding out a sheet of paper and pointing to something at the bottom. The man in the middle leaned over the sheet, adjusted the glasses on his nose, peered for a couple of moments, then nodded and leaned back.

  “I see,” he said to the man on the left. Then, to me, he said, “Mr. McCabe wrote to us that he had only recently assumed certain political duties in your neighborhood, and in his efforts to learn as much as he could about the people he would now be serving, he had made a thorough investigation of the area. He wrote that he had discovered a number of parents were worried about the relationship between the scoutmaster of Troop 224 and the boys in the troop. Are you aware of this?”

  Of course I was aware of this. But I wasn’t going to tell a man with an Underwood & Underwood face that my mother believed Mr. Osterweil was training us all to be “pogromniks” because we wore uniforms, so I said, “No, sir.”

  The man on the right leaned over and whispered in the ear of the man in the middle.

  “Good point,” he said to the man on the right, and turned back to me. “What about your relationship with Mr. Osterweil? Is it a friendly one?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How friendly, may I ask?”

  I thought about what it was like, lying around the campfire on Sundays, watching the boats on the river and digesting roasted hot dogs and baked beans and listening to the sound of Mr. Osterweil’s voice as he read aloud from the Handbook, but I didn’t know how to put that into words. Not for those faces out of The New York Times financial section at the other side of the table. I tried for something I felt they would understand.

  “Well,” I said, “Mr. Osterweil lent me the three and a half dollars to buy my merit-badge sash so I could wear it when I was inducted as senior patrol leader.”

  “You say he lent you the money?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re sure he didn’t give it to you as a present?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “I paid him back by stacking empties.”

  “By doing what?”

  I explained about Natie’s father’s grocery store, and how Natie felt about empties.

  “Oh, I see,” said the man in the middle, but I wondered if he did. He seemed disappointed in my answer. “Just a moment, please.”

  Now both the man on the right and the man on the left leaned forward. There was a whispered conference.

  “Good point,” the man in the middle said finally. All three men leaned back. “I’m now going to ask you something very important,” the man in the middle said. “Please think carefully before you answer, and please answer with complete honesty, on your honor as a scout. Will you do that?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “On your honor as a scout, remember?”

  “Yes,
sir.”

  “Has Mr. Osterweil ever made any attempt to molest you?”

  I thought that over. Not because I didn’t understand the question. I knew what the word molest meant. Miss Marine, my English teacher, had said more than once that I had the best vocabulary in her class. But I was here for a purpose, and that was to keep Mr. Osterweil as our scoutmaster. Just saying no, he had never molested me, was not enough. I had to do better than that.

  “No, sir, he never did,” I said. “Just the opposite.”

  “How do you mean, just the opposite?”

  “Mr. Osterweil is very friendly.”

  “In what way?”

  I knew it sounded a little silly, but I wanted to counteract that crack about molesting, which I knew had come out of that bastard McCabe’s letter, so I said, “Mr. Osterweil puts his arms around us.”

  “He does, does he?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Again the heads on the left and on the right joined the one in the middle for a hurried conference, but this time I wasn’t worried. I could tell from the excitement in the unintelligible whispers that I had given them the right answer. The heads separated.

  “Could you...” the man in the middle said, then paused and cleared his throat. “On your word of honor now, as a scout,” he said, “could you tell us under what circumstances, how often, for example, is what I mean, and yes, with whom, any particular boys, does Mr. Osterweil, as you put it, put his arms around you?”

  “All of us,” I said. “Any time you do something good. Like when we won the rally. Or like when I was inducted senior patrol leader. Mr. Osterweil put his arm on my shoulder and he said he’s proud of me.”

  That was the end of the interview. It was also the end of Mr. Osterweil, but I didn’t know that at the moment. Even when I found out, three days later, I didn’t put it all together. I merely thought—through the pain that later turned into years of hatred for Jazz L. McCabe—I merely thought stupidly: What a funny way to become a part of history. The Department of the Interior had just opened to the public the upper section of the Statue of Liberty, which for several years had been under repair. Lester Osterweil was the first person who ever jumped from the aperture over her left eye.

  7

  Rowboats And Canoes

  YOU NEVER KNEW YOU’VE been living in history until somebody comes along later and writes it. Then you realize that not all history is written by historians. Back in 1930, when I last saw Pinny Slater, I certainly never thought that one day he would turn out the best history I have yet seen about the time when I grew up.

  You would think anybody with brains would have realized, in 1930, that he was living in history. It wasn’t one of those periods, like the Mauve Decade or the Era of Good Feeling, that had to wait for a historian to come along years later and give it a name. Everybody in 1930 knew he was living through The Great Depression, all in upper case. And if I didn’t have any brains, why had Dean Foote made me valedictorian of my graduating class at Thomas Jefferson High School?

  I think my lack of awareness of what I was living through was probably due to my total immersion in it. When you get dropped into an ocean, you don’t have much time to think about being wet. Most of your thoughts and efforts are devoted to the problem of how to stay afloat. I managed it by sheer luck.

  In my last year at Jefferson I had, like all seniors, one free period every day. It was the custom to spend this time doing some sort of volunteer work that would indicate to the faculty you were endowed with enough of the right school spirit to make them give you a couple of second thoughts when they were handing out recommendations for college scholarships. One day, while I was helping Mr. Pullman’s drama group splash paint on some flats they intended to use for a mid-term production of The Pirates of Penzance, I got a poke in the ribs from Natie Farkas.

  “Now, what’s that for?” I said.

  “You enjoying this?” Natie said.

  “The only other thing open today is kitchen monitor,” I said. “At least with paint you know what you’re smelling. Why do you ask?”

  “I been thinking,” Natie said. “Here I am, knocking myself out painting this crap, for what? So some jerk like Pullman or Dean Foote or somebody else will think I’m a great guy and recommend me for a scholarship. Suppose they do? What have I got?”

  “You’ve got some of your college tuition paid somewhere,” I said. “Maybe all of it, if you’re lucky.”

  “Suppose I’m lucky, okay. I get a full scholarship,” Natie said. “Then what have I got?”

  Natie and I had been together all through P.S. 188 and J.H.S. 64 as well as Jefferson. I thought I knew him pretty well. Yet there were times, like now, when I couldn’t follow his thinking.

  “If you’ve got a full scholarship, you’ve got your college tuition paid for,” I said. “Four years. What more do you want?”

  “Food,” Natie said.

  “Oh, you mean living expenses,” I said. “I hear they have all sorts of jobs for scholarship students, stuff you can do between classes to earn your keep. Like waiting on table.”

  “I’ve got to do better than that,” Natie said. “My old man’s got to close the grocery store. Business is lousy. I’m just going to be able to make it through to graduation. I almost had to quit at the end of last term and look for a job. I mean it’s just a break I’ll be getting a high school diploma at all. The point is what I’ll be needing is not a job that’ll support me, but a job that’ll bring money into the house. I don’t think there’s any jobs like that on a college campus. Jobs where I mean between classes a guy can earn enough to keep himself going, and also send money home to his folks. So if that’s the situation, I ask myself what am I doing on my free period every day polishing Pullman’s you know what?”

  “What else can you do?” I said.

  “I could stop wasting this free period every day and start doing something that will help me get a job after graduation,” Natie said. “That’s the way my thinking is going, kid, and that’s just what I’m going to do.”

  We did it together, because my thinking, which was not always as good as I would have liked it to be, had the benefit of this assist from Natie.

  If business was so bad that Natie’s father had to close the grocery store, what was to prevent my father from being fired from the pants shop? As I soon learned, nothing. My father did not have to ask the permission of his boss to attend the graduation exercises, which were held in the afternoon. When he sat in the Jefferson High auditorium, listening to his son deliver the valedictory, my father no longer had a job.

  Two weeks later, however, I did. Because what Natie Farkas and I had done with our daily free period during our last three months at Jefferson High was sit in on Mr. Tully’s typing and shorthand class.

  When I saw the ad in the Times that said “Male secretary wanted,” I could type ninety words a minute, touch system, and I could take down almost the same number of words per minute in Pitman shorthand. The first thing I did when I read the ad was run over to Natie’s house.

  “He’s not home,” Mrs. Farkas said. “He went out a little while ago.”

  This surprised me. I had bought the Times in Mr. Gordon’s candy store a few minutes before seven o’clock. Job hunting in 1930 was an early-morning business. It was now not quite a quarter after seven. Where could Natie have gone so early?

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Farkas said. “What did you want to see him about?”

  “There’s a job in the paper,” I said. “Male secretary. I wanted to tell him about it. I thought we could go uptown together.”

  “You mean there’s two jobs?” Mrs. Farkas said.

  “No, just one,” I said. “They want a male secretary. I thought Natie and I, we’d go and apply together.”

  “But what good would that do?” Mrs. Farkas said. “If there’s only one job?”

  I hadn’t thought of that. As I’ve already pointed out, my thinking was not always as good as I would have liked it to be.
Natie and I had been friends for a long time. It was because of Natie that I was now able to type and write shorthand. We had learned together. My first thought, when I saw the ad, was that Natie and I would apply for the job together. Anything else would have been—well, I didn’t know what anything else would have been, because anything else had not occurred to me.

  It did, on the way uptown. I had plenty of time to let things occur to me, because I walked. In 1930 a subway ride cost only a nickel, but that word “only” is relative. One Sunday not too long ago I heard my mother talking to one of her young neighbors about The Great Depression.

  “It’s hard to explain,” my mother said. “How can I tell you that in 1930 a nickel looked so big, most of the time you couldn’t see around the edges?”

  I didn’t have many nickels, but my shoes were still good, because my father had bought me a new pair for graduation, and doing boy scout pace—fifty steps running, fifty steps walking—I could get up to Seventh Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street from where we lived on Lewis corner Fourth in a little less than an hour. The ad said “Call for interview at 8:30.” Even if I didn’t rush, I could get there in plenty of time, but I did rush: sixty steps running and forty steps walking. This made me sweat a little, but it didn’t stop me from thinking, and what I was thinking was that going uptown by myself to apply for this job made me a rat. No doubt about that. But it made me a rat only technically.

  After all, I had gone to Natie’s house first. It wasn’t my fault that Natie had not been home. And I was in the clear on another count: I had given Natie’s mother the address from the ad. In case he came home, she could tell him to follow me.

  As it turned out, she didn’t have to. When I came into the outer office of Maurice Saltzman & Company, my friend Natie was crossing to the door on his way out.

  “Don’t waste your time,” he said. “These bastards want a real shark. A hundred twenty words a minute.”

  He was gone before I could answer, and that was just as well, because the answer that had taken shape instantly in my mind was: “Why, you son of a bitch!”