Looking back on it, the only thing that seems strange to me about the whole business is that I did not find it strange. Some instinct told me it was crucial to my mother’s existence for her not to acknowledge my participation in any life outside her own orbit. Out of this same instinct came my total acceptance of the structure she had created, as well as my skill at maintaining my role in it.
That is why I could not believe my eyes on the night when I wigwagged twenty-five words with a single red and white Morse flag across the gym of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House in two minutes and ten seconds flat.
“Come on!” Chink Alberg barked from somewhere down near my left knee. “All I got is u, n, t, o!” I didn’t answer. I was staring with astonished disbelief at my mother’s figure at the other side of the gym. “For Christ’s sake!” Chink yelled. “What the hellzamatter with you?”
“It’s my mother,” I said.
“To hell with your mother,” Chink snarled. “Start calling, for Christ’s sake. Them other bastids, they’re getting ahead of us!”
I was aware of this. I could see George Weitz at the other side of the gym. His flag was whipping left and right. I could see Hot Cakes Rabinowitz kneeling to the left of George, calling the letters from his clipboard. I could even see the four rival teams, two on each side of George and Hot Cakes, wigwagging away like crazy, wiping out the lead I had gained with my two minutes ten, and pulling ahead. But I saw them all only peripherally. Like the clouds around the edges of a portrait in a museum. Or the grass under the feet of the painted main subject. My eyes were nailed to the stranger in the center.
My mother had never been inside the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House. During the months of my involvement with Troop 244 she had never acknowledged its existence. I had every reason to believe she did not even know its location. It could have been in her native land. Which was where? Hungary? Far Cathay? The Mountains of the Moon? When you got right down to it, how did I know where she had come from? She could not possibly be here. Therefore she wasn’t. This creature who had erupted in the middle of my signaling triumph and was now destroying it, was somebody else. Not my mother. Who? Across the length of the gym I examined her.
A skinny little woman. With blond hair pulled back into a neat knot on top of her head. Her little head. Everything about her was little. Especially her face. A fierce little face. But out of that little face two big blue eyes shone like lights. The whole thing—I had the impression of a force, not a human being—sheathed in something black. Not dressed. Wrapped. What she was wearing could have been painted on her body. High neck. Long sleeves. Skirt sweeping the yellow boards of the gym floor. She—no, it!—reminded me of something. I could hear Chink snarling furiously at my feet. I knew I was losing for Troop 244 the right to participate in the All-Manhattan rally. I felt in my sinking gut the waves of contempt and rage I was earning from my fellow scouts. But my mind had room for nothing but the desperate question: Who in God’s name was this stranger?
The answer surfaced abruptly out of my life at school. More accurately, out of my American history textbook. Coming across the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House gym was Molly Pitcher, moving firmly to take over the gun in the middle of the Battle of Monmouth at which her husband had fallen from a heat stroke. The fact that she looked like my mother didn’t matter. Nobody was fooling me. This was Molly Pitcher.
“What the hellz she think she’s doing?” Chink Alberg screamed.
“How should I know?” I screamed back.
“She’s your mother, ain’t she?”
This regrettable fact now came crashing down on me like a toppling wall. Because at my mother’s side, moving along beside her across the gym, I saw Mr. O’Hare.
The scoutmaster was swung slightly to one side and bent over, so the words he was uttering as he moved dropped into my mother’s left ear. It was about two feet below his mouth. I could not, of course, hear Mr. O’Hare’s words, but I knew they were angry. I could tell from his gestures. Great chopping swirls at the air, like an untrained swimmer plunging ahead with a primitive breaststroke. And the color of his face. Like the skin of a tangerine. I knew something else. Mr. O’Hare’s words did not matter. Not to my mother, anyway. Mr. O’Hare was unaware of this. Why should he know that my mother did not understand English?
“You can’t do this,” Mr. O’Hare was saying as he and my mother reached me and Chink. This was not the first time I had been impressed by the lack of logic, if not intelligence, in the remarks uttered by grownups. It was no time, however, to make notes on mental scoreboards. The fact remains that my mother had done it, and what she had done I found incredible. She had just brought the whole 1927 All-Manhattan rally eliminations finals to a halt.
“You come with me,” she said to me.
“What is she saying?” Mr. O’Hare snapped.
“Listen, Ma,” I said desperately in Yiddish. “For Christ’s sake,” I added angrily in English. “What the heck are you doing?” I concluded hysterically in a combination of both.
“God damn that bitch,” Chink Alberg said from somewhere around my knees. “She’s messing us up!”
“Morris, we’ll have none of that language, if you please,” said Mr. O’Hare.
He had once explained to the troop that to call a fellow scout Chink was like calling the king of Italy a wop. I didn’t quite grasp the comparison. Everybody I knew called Victor Emmanuel a wop. Everybody who talked English, anyway. Mr. O’Hare, who talked nothing else, grabbed my arm and said, “If this lady is your mother, will you please ask her to listen to me for one moment?”
“Ma,” I said, “Mr. O’Hare wants to tell you something.”
“You tell this pudding-headed goy to get out of my way,” my mother said.
She grabbed my arm and started to hustle me across the gym floor, toward the doors behind George Weitz and Hot Cakes Rabinowitz. Mr. O’Hare loped along.
“My good woman,” he said.
“Get dead,” my mother said.
I swallowed my gum. She had said it in English. Not very good English. In fact, I wasn’t sure my mother had spoken English. I allowed her to drag me along. My mind seemed to follow like a reluctant dog on a leash. An astounding thought had erupted in my mind: Maybe I wasn’t the only one who had been leading a double life?
“I must say, madam,” Mr. O’Hare said. He didn’t say any more. We had swung around George Weitz and Hot Cakes Rabinowitz and reached the doors to the lobby. My mother put her free hand up to Mr. O’Hare’s bulging belly. One hundred and five pounds, remember. And she shoved. What she shoved, remember, was at least two hundred and twenty pounds of solid suet, maybe more. And Mr. O’Hare toppled back.
Not exactly into the arms of George Weitz. He couldn’t. There was that eight-foot bamboo pole between them. It was in a relaxed position because George had forgotten all about Matthew XXV:29, and was staring at my mother in astonishment. As a result, the red and white Morse flag at the top of the pole clearly marked for all observers in the gym of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House the precise spot where the bamboo pole and Mr. O’Hare made contact. William Tell, aiming for the apple on his son’s head, couldn’t have done better. Bull’s-eye. Mr. O’Hare screamed. My mother—still one hundred and five pounds, remember—punched open the swinging doors and dragged me through them into the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House lobby.
“Ma,” I said. “Do you know what you’ve just done?”
“Come on, come on, come on,” she said. “There’s no time.”
“Ma, they’re waiting for me,” I said. I was talking to her back. The dragging process had resumed. Across the marble floor of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House lobby. Through the great big double doors. Out into Avenue B. “It’s my team,” I said. “Ma, we were winning. I wigwagged twenty-five words in two minutes and ten seconds flat.”
“You can do it again,” my mother said, dragging me down Avenue B. “Some other time.”
“But there won’t be any other time,” I wailed. “Th
is is the eliminations, the semifinals. You just got us eliminated, Ma.”
“What’s eliminated?”
The English word, imbedded in my hysterical Yiddish complaint, had captured her attention.
“It’s like, you could say, like lost,” I said. “It means we lost.”
“So if you lost, what are you complaining about going back? What’s there to go back for? You can’t be—What did you say—ellimated?”
“Eliminated.”
“You can’t be eliminated twice,” my mother said.
She led me around the corner of Tompkins Square Park into Seventh Street. Halfway up the block toward Avenue A she released my wrist. It was though she had decided the reluctant dog had been dragged so far and around so many turns from the place where he wanted to be, that there was no longer any chance of his escaping from her side. The poor pooch was no longer capable of finding his way back. My mother was almost right. Not in the sense that I couldn’t have found my way back to the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House. My mother was right because I wouldn’t have tried. I was too ashamed of what had just happened to face Mr. O’Hare and the members of my troop. I wondered if I would ever be able to face them. I also wondered if my mother had gone crazy. Not only because she had just told Mr. O’Hare to “get dead,” but because of where she was heading.
To my knowledge my mother had never been further west of the East River than Avenue C. Yet tonight she had come as far west as Avenue B to drag me out of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House gym, and now we were crossing Avenue A on our way to First Avenue. I had, of course, done a certain amount of roaming away from Fourth and Lewis streets during the six years of my double life, and when Mr. O’Hare took the troop out on a Sunday hike, we always met him at the subway station in front of Wanamaker’s on Astor Place. This was quite a distance from the corner of Fourth and Lewis streets. I was an explorer. But all my roaming had always been done in the company of other Magellans like George Weitz and Chink Alberg or another friend from the troop. Also, all of our roaming had been done during the day. Now it was night.
Night was to the greenhorns what Lent is to the Catholics. Watch out. Forbear. Don’t do. Stay home. They did, including my mother, and so did their sons, including me. Yet here we were, both of us, like hypnotized converts to the dictates of Horace Greeley, heading west. Under the El tracks of First Avenue. Across the cracked but brightly lighted pavements of Second Avenue. Into the frightening gloom of Third Avenue.
Frightening, I grasped in a few moments, only to me. My mother plowed ahead, around the shadowed butt end of Cooper Union, into the ominous open terrain of Astor Place, and swung left into Lafayette Street. She moved with a puzzling kind of leaning-forward directness, as though impatient to reach her destination, but also with an even more puzzling familiarity. My mother, plunging into the semi-darkness of Lafayette Street, could have been crossing our kitchen on East Fourth Street with a paper bag full of pushcart apples toward the cut-glass bowl in our front room. She wasn’t frightened. She had made this journey before. I could tell. No, I could feel it. I could feel it, and I couldn’t believe it. Where were we going?
“Here,” my mother said.
She had stopped in front of a dark brown building. In the light from the lamppost it was easy enough to make out the gold lettering spread in an arc like a movie star’s eyebrow across the street-floor plate-glass window: Meister’s Matzoh Bakery, Inc.
My stomach jumped. Twice, the day before and tonight, George Weitz had made cracks about my mother and Meister’s Matzoh Bakery. He obviously knew something I didn’t know.
“What are we doing here?” I said.
“They talk English,” my mother said. “I want you to talk for me.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “But who are they?”
No answer. She had moved up onto a sandstone step in front of a dark door to the right of the plate-glass window. She was peering at a panel of black bell buttons set like polka dots in a rectangular brass plate. There were no markings under the buttons. This did not seem to bother my mother. She worked at them as though she were doing a puzzle. Muttering to herself in Yiddish, she ran her forefinger horizontally across the black buttons, then down, and making a sharp left, she finger-walked back the way she had come. The muttering stopped. She pressed a button.
Far back inside the house, and it seemed to me above our heads, a bell rang. It sounded somewhat like one of the bells in J.H.S. 64 if you happened to be in the toilet when it went off on the staircase at the far end of the hall. The effect was somewhat the same, too. The sounds of movement behind the dark door. Sounds coming closer, sounds that were unmistakably heel taps. They stopped at the other side of the door.
In the sudden silence, I became aware that I was being watched. I turned nervously. Nobody was in sight. My mother and I were alone on that dimly lighted stretch of Lafayette Street. When I turned back, the dark door was opening. A young man squinted out at us. I was struck by two things. He was wearing the sort of suit Mr. O’Hare wore, and he looked familiar.
“Okay,” he said. He sounded familiar, too. He held the door wide. My mother stepped in. When I followed her, the young man said sharply, “Who’s he?”
“What did he say?” my mother said in Yiddish.
“He wants to know who I am,” I said.
“So why don’t you tell him?” my mother said.
“I’m her son,” I said.
“What does she want to bring her son for?” the young man said.
I translated for my mother.
She said, “I’ll tell his father.”
I translated for the young man. He did not seem pleased, but he closed the door behind us and started to fuss with a complicated metal arrangement that was obviously some sort of locking device. While my mother and I waited for him to work a set of double blue-black steel bars into their slots, I saw why out on the street I’d had the feeling I was being watched. Two thirds of the way up on the door there was a peephole.
“I’ll go first,” the young man said, and he did.
“What did he say?” my mother said as she started to follow and I started to follow her.
“He said he’ll go first,” I said in Yiddish.
“From brains this particular son will never die,” my mother said. “The stupid idiot, he always goes first.”
So my guess was right. She had been here before. When? Obviously during the day. What day? “Always” meant more than once. So she had been here several times. How many? When I was battling plane geometry in J.H.S. 64 and my father was sewing pockets in the pants factory on Allen Street. For the first time since my mother had erupted into the middle of George Weitz’s attempt to wigwag a section of Matthew XXV:29, across the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House gymnasium, I stopped being furious about the elimination of Troop 244 from the All-Manhattan rally and I became interested in my surroundings.
These seemed to be a long, dark hall. Then the young man turned right, my mother and I followed, and we were crossing what looked like an enormous storage room. It was stacked from floor to ceiling with long white boxes, each one tied with string. The room was poorly lighted, but when we passed a spot under one of the bulbs that hung from the ceiling on lengths of long black wire, I saw that all the boxes were marked in the same way as the plate-glass window out in front: Meister’s Matzoh Bakery, Inc.
I had never heard of Meister’s matzohs. My mother was partial to Horowitz Bros. & Margareten. Anyway, that’s what she always bought when Passover rolled around. Could it be that my mother was shifting her matzoh allegiance? It could be, but I doubted it. My mother may have been illiterate, but she was loyal. Also, how did George Weitz hear about it?
“Easy going through this part here,” the young man said. “The ovens are hot.”
“He said...” I started to say to my mother in Yiddish.
“I know what he said,” my mother said. “The idiot always says the same thing. He thinks I’m an idiot like him who wants to get burned.”
We were moving single file through a long room that smelled vaguely of fresh bread. It seemed to be lined on both sides with a series of shoulder-high tin boxes about ten feet wide. There were spaces between the boxes almost as wide as the boxes themselves. On these spaces lay strips of metal belting that seemed to be made from woven bicycle chains. It was like moving past Mr. Pollock’s blacksmith shop on East Fourth Street when his forge was going. You could feel the heat from the tin boxes. The young man led us out of this room into a hall colder and darker than the one we had entered from the street. Here the smell was different. Sharp and odd but not unpleasant. Like fresh wrapping paper. The young man snapped on a flashlight. He turned the beam on my mother’s shoes.
“Watch the corners,” he said. “These bundles sometimes have sharp pieces of wire sticking out.”
“He said...” I started to say to my mother in Yiddish.
“I know what he said,” my mother said. “You watch the sharp pieces of wire sticking out.”
The flashlight beam sliced up and across the wall on my left. I caught a brief glimpse of stacked burlap bundles. The smear of light picked out some of the wires that held the burlap tightly cinched in, the way my father’s belt held his belly.
Fourth Street East Page 27
