One hole slowly gathered my roving glance like iron filings drawn to a magnet. It was near the gold-embroidered purple curtains that shielded the closet or ark in which the Ukrainian burial society kept its two Torahs. At the edge of this hole crouched a big rat, who was nibbling away at the edges of the hole as though the floorboards were Mary Jane candy bars. Who could blame it? Nothing else in the building was edible.
Gently I pulled the door wide enough to give me a free, full swing. I took aim and let go. I did not achieve the success George Weitz had scored the night before with the tip of his Morse flag when my mother’s shove sent Mr. O’Hare tumbling backward in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein gym. But it was not a bad shot. I winged the bastard. He squealed, leaped, and disappeared down the hole. All his pals went with him down their own holes.
Stepping through the door, I could hear them slithering underfoot and through the walls, playing what sounded like a pretty fast-paced basketball game on their way back to wherever they came from so they could rest up until Rabbi Goldfarb’s class left for the day and they were free to come back and start feeding again.
To encourage their departure, I fired two of my remaining three rocks into different corners of the room. They hit nothing but the walls. The booming noise, however, was very satisfactory. The door behind me opened. Rabbi Goldfarb came in as I was winding up for my last shot.
“All right, enough,” he said. “Get the Chimish.”
The Chimish was a set of battered texts from which Rabbi Goldfarb taught Jewish history by leading his pupils in chanting aloud every day a new section of Our Heritage. The books were kept in an old Sheffield Farms milk-bottle crate on top of the gold-embroidered curtains so they would be out of reach of the rats. By the time I brought the crate down, Rabbi Goldfarb had disappeared into the toilet and about a dozen other pupils had arrived. Each boy carried at least one or two rocks. These were fired against the walls, even though no rats were visible, while I set out the Chimish texts on the three long tables that formed the instruction area of the cheder.
Except by sight, I did not know any of my classmates in Rabbi Goldfarb’s cheder. They came from below Delancey Street or east of Goereck Street, and they went to schools like J.H.S. 97 on Mangin Street and to settlement houses like the Educational Alliance on East Broadway. I had nothing against “97” or the “Edgie,” but between J.H.S. 64 and the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House, my life was pretty full. I had no desire to enlarge my horizons, or dilute my pleasures in what I did have. These kids were not friends. They were just a group of voices with which I did a little chanting every day in a Columbia Street outpost of my world because my mother thought it was good for me. I had never even bothered to learn the names of my fellow chanters. In a vague way I identified them in my mind by their physical characteristics. Sweat Nose. Wart Face. Four Eyes. Fat Ass. Knock Knees. It came as no surprise to me one day to learn that I was known as Wishbone. I was tall for my age, thin for any age, and bow-legged.
I slapped down a copy of the Chimish in front of each boy, piled the rest at the head of the table, and slipped into my seat as Rabbi Goldfarb came in from the toilet buttoning his fly. He picked up his chair rung, hit the edge of the table, and we were off.
I don’t remember how long we were at it. You didn’t have to think about what you were chanting to keep Rabbi Goldfarb at bay. What he wanted was noise. I remember only that Rabbi Goldfarb had taken his cut at the ankles of three latecomers, and we were all bellowing our way into “Ah-ahl kayne, ibber dehn, arroll siffisoyim, ungeshtuppte leftzin,” when my mother came in.
The chanting stopped. Rabbi Goldfarb smiled. Anyway, I think he did, because he was always obsequious to parents. But you couldn’t prove it, because smiling is done with the face and Rabbi Goldfarb had no face. What he had was a furry black fedora with a greasy band that seemed to start somewhere near the ceiling and came down to his eyebrows, and a thick black beard that started under his eyeballs and came down to his plump little belly. In between could be seen a blob of pink. It didn’t look like anything I had ever previously seen attached to a human body by natural growth, but it must have been a nose because Rabbi Goldfarb was constantly blowing it into a red bandanna with dirty gray polka dots that suggested they had once been white. Above the blob of pink were two watery fried eggs with tiny black yolks that were undoubtedly his eyes.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” my mother said. “I came to see if my son is here.”
Rabbi Goldfarb pointed the chair rung at me. He could have been the owner of a famous collection of paintings who at the end of a guided tour for a distinguished visitor had paused at last in front of his most prized possession.
“Today,” Rabbi Goldfarb said, “your son was the first.”
My mother came across to the table and said, “You didn’t come home after school.”
There was no accusation in her voice. Nor was there even the hint of a question. She had simply stated a fact. I was unaccustomed to this. My mother never stated facts simply. When she got her hands on one, she reissued it to the world, meaning me and my father, like a papal bull framed in electric lights.
“I couldn’t,” I said. “I got kept in after class. If I’d gone home to leave my books I would have been late for cheder.”
“He wasn’t late,” Rabbi Goldfarb said. “He was first.”
My mother smiled as though he had told her I stood at the head of the class. “I’m glad,” she said. “I don’t like he should be late for cheder.”
The tone of her voice bothered me. I had never heard her sound like this. Like what? I thought. I concentrated. I struggled. Friendly? Relaxed? Gentle? The words all fit, and yet they didn’t even come near what I felt. I was confused the way I had been confused the night before. The night before, she had been an astonishing stranger, determined, hard, implacably embarked on a single-minded course of action from the path of which she swept all opposition with a ruthless hand, a dose of startling English, and a total disregard for consequences to others. Now, a day later—no, eighteen hours later—she was another kind of stranger. A feminine creature in a male world, a little blond thing with bright blue eyes, uneasy about intruding, hoping for no more than the answer to a question that had been troubling her.
“If all my boys were like yours,” Rabbi Goldfarb said, “I would have no troubles.”
My mother smiled again. My stomach jumped as though it had received a dose of something indigestible and was taking action to get rid of it before the trouble started. Blond little thing or not. Big blue eyes or not. She was still my mother. What was my mother doing in the late afternoon vamping a hill of greasy fedora and bellybutton-length beard who smelled like his own toilet?
“Would you do me a favor?” she said.
“A question to ask!” Rabbi Goldfarb said. “Just say what.”
“He came here straight from school,” my mother said. “The glass of milk, the plate of lekach, I just baked it this morning, they’re standing on the kitchen table. When you finish with him here, you could maybe tell him he shouldn’t go any place else? He should come right home straight?”
The notion that I would even dream of doing anything else was astonishing. I mean, to me. Then I saw that it was equally astonishing to Rabbi Goldfarb. She simpered at him. I know it sounds foolish, even insane. But I saw it happen. My mother simpered. And she got what she obviously wanted. Rabbi Goldfarb swung the chair rung at my ankles.
“Ouch!” I yelled.
“You heard your mother!” he thundered.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1970 by Jerome Weidman
Cover design by Kelly Parr
978-1-4804-1072-5
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