Corky's Brother

by Jay Neugeboren

  A quarter of an hour later he asked Helen to get up. “Guess we’d better get the new safety valve out,” he said, nodding toward the calendar. “You never know.” She clung to him, her arms locked around his shoulders. “Do you want me to get it for you?” he asked. She moaned. “Do you?” he asked again. When she didn’t answer, he stroked her hair and said that he would get it for her. But she wouldn’t let him go. “Please,” he said. “We have to, honey. I don’t want to, either, but we have to.” “No,” she said, clutching him. “No.” “But it’s an ’evil day,’” he said, laughing. “I don’t care,” she said fiercely. Their child began wailing again, and he tried, gently this time, to get away from Helen so that he could tend to the child. She was choking on something now, wailing, sputtering. “I don’t care,” Helen said again. The baby’s screaming stopped for a while. When it started the next time—louder, more painful than before—he tried to get away, but by then he knew that he could do nothing but agree with what she repeated endlessly in his ear, that there was nothing to worry about.

  Elijah

  ONCE, I remember, Izzie tried to get up a petition for us to sign, saying that unless Hebrew school was changed to two afternoons a week instead of three, we would all get our parents to switch to another synagogue. But Mrs. Bluestone caught him with it before he’d gotten half a dozen signatures on it and by the time the rabbi got through with Izzie he wasn’t in a mood to pass around any more petitions. He didn’t hate Hebrew school any less. None of us did—in fact, if anybody had taken a vote in those days on what we hated most in the world, Hebrew school would have won easily. It wasn’t so bad in the winter, when you couldn’t do much outside, but in the fall and spring when you wanted to be playing stickball and punchball or going to the Parade Grounds for hardball, those three afternoons a week were enough to turn us all into Catholics.

  While we’d wait for classes to start—or during the five-minute recess we had every day at four o’clock—we’d talk about what a lousy deal it was being Jewish, and sometimes when it was a really beautiful day outside and we felt brave, we’d parade up and down outside the bathrooms, singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Louie would be lookout and when he’d see one of the teachers or the rabbi coming, he’d yell “Chickee!” and we’d break ranks and be sitting on the steps, making believe we’d been studying all along.

  Usually, if the rabbi came, he’d lecture us about “desecrating the Temple of God” with what he called our “vulgarities.” I could never look into his eyes when he spoke—and the same went for most of the guys. He was a little man, short and stocky—not much bigger than we were then—but he had a way of looking at you that made you certain God was going to find some special way to punish you. “You have come to the House of God dressed like an iceman!” he said to me once, and I never came to Hebrew school without a tie again.

  Probably the worst thing about Hebrew school was in the winter when it would be dark out by the time we left and these tough guys would be waiting across Bedford Avenue in the doorway to the Flatbush Boys Club or Al Roon’s Health Club—they’d make fun of us for having to go to school so much. And then, when we’d hide our Hebrew books under our coats, the girls would walk next to us for protection—or they’d get the Negro janitor to come out from the synagogue and chase the guys from across the street. There was nothing we hated more than having anybody think we needed protection. It made the tough guys tease us even more about being sissy Jews, and then we could do only one of three things: feel bad, punch the girls around and throw their books in the air, or answer the tough guys back, cursing them the way they cursed us, calling them dirty Micks or Wops, and telling them they weren’t such “rocks,” that they talked so big because they were scared to fight. A few times they chased us down Bedford Avenue, and a few times everybody kept daring and double-daring everybody else until we had a real fight. But the fights never lasted long—most of the time a grown-up from the Boys Club or the synagogue would break it up—and the worst anybody ever got was a bloody nose or a good shiner. Then, for a few weeks after, we’d all tell each other how tough we’d been or how many punches we’d connected on, and we’d get pretty brave in answering the Boys Club guys back. Izzie had a whole repertoire of lines about nuns and brothers and what dogs did to “rocks,” and we’d stand around the steps of the synagogue cheering him on as he shouted them across the street. The thing we’d all wait for would be when he’d say, “If you’re so strong, let’s see you pick that up—” and then he’d rear back and let fly with a tremendous gob of spit, which, when he caught the wind right, would usually land three-quarters of the way across Bedford Avenue. Izzie could spit farther than any guy I’ve ever met.

  About the only time all year when anybody looked forward to Hebrew school were the few weeks in the spring when we got ready for Field Day. We’d get to the Hebrew school at about 3:30 but we’d only spend a half hour, maybe less, in the classroom and then Mr. Gleicher would take all of us over to the Parade Grounds for practice. Field Day was supposed to be the celebration for Lag B’Omer, a Jewish holiday, and all the Hebrew schools in Brooklyn got together for it at George Win-gate Field. There were a lot of speeches by rabbis and politicians, and some Hebrew music and pageants and dances that the girls would put on. The only thing we cared about was the track meet. Every Hebrew school in Brooklyn sent a team, and ours had come in first more than any of them. It was the only thing about the school that any of us were proud of.

  Our synagogue was called Congregation Shaare Torah, and it was pretty poor. It only had two floors: an upstairs temple that was nice enough, and a downstairs part that they called the “vestry rooms.” They were very dingy—in fact, they weren’t rooms at all. Just a basement with a bunch of sliding doors. They used this basement for everything—classrooms, offices, the rabbi’s study, the Junior Congregation Services on Saturday, dances, meetings, High Holy Day services, Sunday afternoon clubs, and even Bar Mizvahs and weddings. They were always announcing fund-raising campaigns to build a new center—but during the years we went there they never did, so that we used to be envious of the guys who went to other synagogues where they had basketball courts and swimming pools and ballrooms. The only bright spot in the whole place for us—aside from the fun we had stealing kids’ books and passing them to the back row and under the sliding walls into the next classroom—was the trophy case outside the rabbi’s study. There were silver and gold cups in it, inscribed, and medals, and photographs of winning track teams with the guys laughing and hanging their arms over each other’s shoulders. We spent a lot of time gazing into that trophy case and there was this one photograph of a college runner, I remember, in a Columbia uniform, and he was holding his running shoes, leaning against a high hurdle and brushing his hair from his eyes while he smiled at you. I used to spend hours in front of my mirror at home, trying to get his expression on my face, imagining the day I would be able to send a picture like that back to the Hebrew school. “To Mr. Gleicher, a great coach,” the inscription on it would read, “from your former student, Howie.”

  Next to the trophy case, on a wall with the plaques which represented trees bought in Israel, was the story we all knew by heart, about Mr. Gleicher, who had been a hero with the Haganah during the Arab-Israeli war in 1948. The story came from an old issue of World Over, a magazine that was given out to Hebrew school kids all over the country, and there were pictures in it of Mr. Gleicher in his Haganah uniform—and one of him in his track uniform. That was what interested us most, I suppose—the fact that until he’d had his knee blasted in an Arab mine field, he had been known as “the world’s fastest Jew” and was supposed to have been a sure bet to win all kinds of medals for Israel in the 1952 Olympics. According to the article, Mr. Gleicher had been born in Poland, but had fled to Israel with his family in 1938. Then, when his father had died in 1940, he and his mother had been brought to America by members of their family who had escaped here from the Nazis. The article had a lot of stuff about how much
they’d been persecuted, and how many members of his family had died at which concentration camps—but the important thing as far as we were concerned was Mr. Gleicher’s track feats—his running times and medals and records—and how, when he was going to Brooklyn College, he’d gotten the job at our school, teaching Hebrew to help support his family. It was a nice feeling to see the name of your Hebrew school in print. Except for the one year in the U. S. Army and the two years he’d spent in Israel after the war had broken out there, he’d taught at our school steadily since 1942, and we’d come in first or second at Field Day every year except for the three he was away fighting.

  The year most of us were in the sixth grade at P.S. 92, though, we figured we didn’t stand a chance even to place in the first five. What had happened was this: all the guys a year ahead of us in Hebrew school who were good runners had had their Bar Mizvahs by about April—and, naturally, all of them had immediately stopped coming to Hebrew school. This meant that even though Izzie, Stan, Marty, and I were pretty good runners for our age, in the major event of the day—the Senior Relay—we’d be racing against guys a year older. We knew our school would score its share of points in all the other races, but unless you came in first or second in the Senior Relay, you didn’t stand much chance to win the championship and the Bar Kochba Trophy.

  Still, we worshipped Mr. Gleicher, and we kept telling each other that if we tried hard enough, we could do it. So every day, starting about the middle of April—Field Day was scheduled for the second Sunday in May—we were out at the Parade Grounds practicing. Even on days when we didn’t have Hebrew school. Louie had a stop watch and a record of winning times for the last few years, and we drove ourselves until our tongues were hanging out, trying to equal them. We made progress, and you could tell from the quiet way Mr. Gleicher would encourage us that he knew how hard we were trying, but after a couple of weeks it became obvious that it was going to take a miracle for us to win.

  Then Elijah appeared. One afternoon, when there was no Hebrew school and we were out at the Parade Grounds by ourselves, running laps around the baseball backstops, he suddenly appeared beside us. “C’mon, Jewboys!” he called. “Catch me, mothers!” Then he was gone, flying by us as if we were standing still. He’d slow down sometimes, but when we’d be almost up to him, he’d just laugh and take off again.

  The next afternoon, while the girls were off by themselves practicing their dances and we were jogging around the field with Mr. Gleicher shouting to one of us, and then to another, to take the lead, he showed up again. “C’mon, Jewboys,” he said. “Catch me, mothers—” We took after him as fast as we could, but he flew away from us as if, as Izzie put it, he had jets in his ass. Once, when we were coming around the last turn for the final fifty-yard sprint, he even turned around and ran backwards for about twenty yards, but we still couldn’t catch him. “You Jewboys sure can run!” he laughed.

  When we had all collapsed on the grass in front of Mr. Gleicher, Elijah hardly seemed tired. He stood away from us, at a distance of about thirty or forty yards, leaning against a tree, watching us while Mr. Gleicher talked. “You must learn to breathe in regular patterns,” he said. “From down low. You must stretch your diaphragms.” None of us was listening to him too much, though. We all kept glancing over at Elijah. Mr. Gleicher had seen him too, we knew, and he smiled in Elijah’s direction—but he didn’t say anything.

  On the way home that day, most of us were pretty depressed, and some of us even began complaining that Mr. Gleicher wasn’t such a great coach after all, that maybe it was his fault we weren’t improving. Stan Reiss even said what I’d thought a few times—how quiet Mr. Gleicher always was, how he never inspired you—but Izzie got mad at this. “A guy like that’s been through a lot,” he said, and he reminded us about his knee getting shot up, and about his wife. We knew that he had married an Israeli girl who had died in 1949—it said so in the World Over article—and from the first day we entered Hebrew school and we’d heard about Mr. Gleicher from the older kids, they had also passed along rumors about her death, with some pretty gory stories about how she’d been captured by Arabs and what they had done to her before they finally killed her. Then, just as Stan was telling Izzie he was sorry he’d blamed Mr. Gleicher—we were at the corner of Caton Avenue and East 21st Street, outside the BMT station—Elijah was suddenly alongside us.

  “Hey,” he said. “You guys wanna buy things?”

  We stopped—none of us knew quite what to do. What took us by surprise most, I suppose, was that he had come right up to us that way, as if what had happened at the Parade Grounds had never taken place. “C’mere,” he said, motioning to the wall overlooking the train tracks. “Make a circle round me so the cops don’t see. C’mon—you don’t gotta be scared. You with the stop clock,” he said, meaning Louie, “you be lookout.” There were about eight of us and we followed him to the wall. He fished into his side pocket. “You want cigarettes? I got Chesterfield and Old Gold. I give ’em to you cheap—ten cents a pack.”

  “We’re in training,” Stan said.

  “Yeah. I seen you,” he said, and rolled his eyes. “Okay.” He put the cigarettes away. “I got some good rings—take any one you like, a nickel each,” he said, tinkling a handful in front of us. “You go to the store to buy ’em, they cost you forty-nine cents each. The ones with pearls cost eighty-nine, I let you have ’em for ten cents. How ‘bout it?” None of us said anything, and Elijah flashed his fingers in front of our eyes. On every one of them except the thumbs there was a different ring. “I wear ’em, you whiteboys can wear ’em too. Only these ain’t Woolworth rings. These the real thing I wear. This here’s a genuine ruby, and this a topaz with a 14-karat gold setting. You believe it. I get you these too, you don’t like the fake ones.” He looked up. He was a skinny kid, an inch or two shorter than most of us. “You wear these rings, you start to run faster.” He laughed, but none of us joined in. “Okay,” he said, putting the rings away. “I show you something else. I got some necklaces you can give your mother for her birthday.” He drew out pearl necklaces, then ankle bracelets, combs, fountain pens—but we still couldn’t speak; it was as if he had us paralyzed. Even Izzie seemed flabbergasted. “How come you don’t want nothing? Ain’t you got money? My old man says you Jews got all the money.” He rolled his eyes again. “C’mon guys, buy something from me, huh? I got to make some money today. I come home without money, I catch hell.” He licked his lips. “I tell you what I do for you—you give me orders, tell me what you want, and I see if I can get it for you. Get you good prices.” He took a pad from a back pocket and spit on the end of a chewed-up pencil. “What you want—baseball gloves? some nice ties to wear for school? a pipe for your father—?”

  “Okay,” Izzie said, and we all jerked our heads toward him. “Can you get me a Pee Wee Reese model glove?”

  I gulped, but Elijah’s face fit up. “Sure! That’s easy, man!” he said. “But you got to give me a deposit on it first—fifty cents down, a buck and a half when I bring the glove.”

  “C’mon,” Izzie said, starting away. “How dumb do you think we are?—You take our money and we’ll never see you again.”

  Elijah grabbed Izzie’s arm. “You can trust me, kid—honest. Do I look like a guy who’d fade out on you? I bring you the glove at practice tomorrow. I promise.”

  “Forget it,” Izzie said.

  “Look—I bring the glove tomorrow, you have the money?”

  “Yeah—sure,” Izzie said.

  “Okay.” He turned to the rest of us. “You guys sure you don’t wanna buy a ring or a comb or something till then?” He looked down at the sidewalk. “Oh boy, I just got to get some money, guys. You tell me what to do, I do it. I do anything for money!”

  People started coming out of the subway then, home from work, and Elijah dropped back against the wall, gathering us closer around him so nobody would see him. When the train below had clattered out of the station and he told us again how he would do anythin
g for money, I offered to buy a comb for a nickel. The other guys followed my lead and inside of a minute Elijah had sold us a bunch of combs and rings and some candy. He seemed happy again—the way he had when he’d been running in front of us at the Parade Grounds.

  “You guys saved my life!” he said when we’d finished our transactions. “Fifty-five cents I got now. At least my old man won’t lay into me.” He walked us to Flatbush Avenue, then waved goodbye. “I see you guys tomorrow. You bring the money, Shorty, and I’ll have the glove. I got to split now.”

  Izzie acted as if he was mad that Elijah had called him Shorty—even though Elijah was no taller than Izzie—but you could tell that he really felt pretty good that he’d been the only one with enough nerve to order something. “Holy mackerel!” he kept saying. “Two bucks for a Pee Wee Reese model glove. Holy mackerel!”