was divided into endless yesterdays,
endless tomorrows, resting only on the cusp of the event, a wall with many
windows, but the house gone. I must shatter the walls and windows, the last
shell of the lost body, if I am to rejoin the present. That is why I no
longer look into the eyes or through the eyes, but by the legerdemain of
will swim through the eyes, head and arms and legs to explore the curve of
vision. I see around myself as the mother who bore me once saw round the
comers of time. I have broken the wall created by birth and the line of
voyage is round and unbroken, even as the navel. No form, no image, no
architecture, only concentric flights of sheer madness. I am the arrow of
the dream's substantiality. I verify by flight. I nullify by dropping to
earth.
Thus moments pass, veridic moments of time without space when I know
all, and knowing all I collapse beneath the vault of the selfless dream.
Between these moments, in the interstices of the dream, life vainly
tried to build up, but the scaffold of the city's mad logic is no support.
As an individual, as flesh and blood, I am levelled down each day to make
the fleshless, bloodless dty whose perfection is the sum of all logic and
death to the dream. I am struggling against an oceanic death in which my own
death is but a drop of water evaporating. To raise my own individual life
but a fraction of an inch above this sinking sea of death I must have a
faith greater than Christ's, a wisdom deeper than that of the greatest seer.
I must have the ability and the patience to formulate what is not contained
in the language of our time, for what is now intelligible is meaningless. My
eyes are useless, for they render back only the image of the known. My whole
body must become a constant beam of light, moving with an ever greater
rapidity, never arrested, never looking back, never dwindling. The dty grows
like a cancer; I must grow like a sun. The dty eats deeper and deeper into
the red; it is an insatiable white louse which must die eventually of
inanition. I am going to starve the white louse which is eating me up. I am
going to die as a dty in order to become again a man. Therefore I dose my
ears, my eyes, my mouth.
Before I shall have become quite a man again I shall probably exist as
a park, a sort of natural park in which people come to rest, to while away
the time. What they say or do will be of little matter, for they will bring
only their fatigue, their boredom, their hopelessness. I shall be a buffer
between the white louse and the red corpuscle. I shall be a ventilator for
removing the poisons accumulated through the effort to perfect that which is
imperfecdble. I shall be law and order as it exists in nature as it is
projected in dream. I shall be the wild park in the midst of the nightmare
of perfection, the still, unshakeable dream in the midst of frenzied
activity, the random shot on the white billiard table of logic. I shall know
neither how to weep nor protest, but I shall be there always in absolute
silence to receive and to restore. I shall say nothing until the time comes
again to be a man. I shall make no effort to preserve, no effort to destroy.
I shall make no judgments, no criticisms. Those who have had enough will
come to me for reflection and meditation; those who have not had enough will
die as they lived, in disorder, in desperation, in ignorance of the truth of
redemption. If one says to me, you must be religious, I shall make no
answer. If one says to me, I have no time now, there's a cunt waiting for
me, I shall make no answer. Or even if there be a revolution brewing, I
shall make no answer. There will always be a cunt or a revolution around the
comer, but the mother who bore me turned many a comer and made no answer,
and finally she turned herself inside out and I am the answer.
Out of such a wild mania for perfection naturally no one would have
expected an evolution to a wild park, not even I myself, but it is
infinitely better, while attending death, to live in a state of grace and
natural bewilderment. Infinitely better, as life moves towards a deathly
perfection, to be just a bit of breathing space, a stretch of green, a
little fresh air, a pool of water. Better also to receive men silently and
to enfold them, for there is no answer to make them while they are still
frantically rushing to turn the corner.
I'm thinking now about the rock fight one summer's afternoon long long
ago when I was staying with my Aunt Caroline up near Hell Gate. My Cousin
Gene and I had been corralled by a gang of boys while we were playing in the
park. We didn't know which side we were fighting for but we were fighting in
dead earnest amidst the rock pile by the river bank. We had to show even
more courage than the other boys because we were suspected of being sissies.
That's how it happened that we killed one of the rival gang. Just as they
were charging us my cousin Gene let go at the ringleader and caught him in
the guts with a handsome-sized rock. I let go almost at the same instant and
my rock caught him in the temple and when he went down he lay there for good
and not a peep out of him. A few minutes later the cops came and the boy was
found dead. He was eight or nine years old, about the same age as us. What
they would have done to us if they caught us I don't know. Anyway, so as not
to arouse any suspicion we hurried home: we had cleaned up a bit on the way
and had combed our hair. We walked in looking almost as immaculate as when
we had left the house. Aunt Caroline gave us our usual two big slices of
sour rye with fresh butter and a little sugar over it and we sat there at
the kitchen table listening to her with an angelic smile. It was an
extremely hot day and she thought we had better stay in the house, in the
big front room where the blinds had been pulled down, and play marbles with
our little friend Joey Resselbaum. Joey had the reputation of being a little
backward and ordinarily we would have trimmed him, but that afternoon, by a
sort of mute understanding. Gene and I allowed him to win everything we had.
Joey was so happy that he took us down to his cellar later and made his
sister pull up her dresses and show us what was underneath. Weesie, they
called her, and I remember that she was stuck on me instantly. I came from
another part of the city, so far away it seemed to them that it was almost
like coming from another country. They even seemed to think that I talked
differently from them. Whereas the other urchins used to pay to make Weesie
lift her dress up, for us it was done with love. After a while we persuaded
her not to do it any more for the other boys - we were in love with her and
we wanted her to go straight.
When I left my cousin at the end of the summer I didn't see him again
for twenty years or more. When we did meet what deeply impressed me was the
look of innocence he wore - the same expression as the day of the rock
fight. When I spoke to him about the fight I was still more amazed to
discover that he had forgotten that it was we who had lolled the boy: he
remembered the boy's death but he spoke of it as though neither he nor I had
had any part in it. When I mentioned Weesie's name he had difficulty in
placing her. Don't you remember the cellar next door.. .Joey Kesselbaum ? At
this a faint smile passed over his face. He thought it extraordinary that I
should remember such things. He was already married, a father, and working
in a factory making fancy pipe cases. He considered it extraordinary to
remember events that had happened so far back in the past.
On leaving him that evening I felt terribly despondent. It was as
though he had attempted to eradicate a precious part of my life, and himself
with it He seemed more attached to the tropical fish which he was collecting
than to the wonderful past. As for me I recollect everything, everything
that happened that summer, and particularly the day of the rock fight. There
are times, in fact, when the taste of that big slice of sour rye which his
mother handed me that afternoon is stronger in my mouth than the food I am
actually tasting. And the sight of Weesie's little bud almost stronger than
the actual feel of what is in my hand. The way the boy lay there, after we
downed him, far far more impressive than the history of the World War. The
whole long summer, in fact, seems like an idyll out of the Arthurian
legends. I often wonder what it was about this particular summer which makes
it so vivid in my memory. I have only to close my eyes a moment in order to
relive each day. The death of the boy certainly caused me no anguish - it
was forgotten before a week had elapsed. The sight of Weesie standing in the
gloom of the cellar with her dress lifted up, that too passed easily away.
Strangely enough, the thick slice of rye bread which his mother handed me
each day seems to possess more potency than any other image of that period.
I wonder about it... wonder deeply. Perhaps it is that whenever she handed
me the slice of bread it was with a tenderness and a sympathy that I had
never known before. She was a very homely woman, my Aunt Caroline. Her face
was marked by the pox, but it was a kind, winsome face which no
disfigurement could mar. She was enormously stout and she had a very soft, a
very caressing voice. When she ad- dressed me she seemed to give me even
more attention, more consideration, than her own son. I would like to have
stayed with her always; I would have chosen her for my own mother had I been
permitted. I remember distinctly how when my mother arrived on a visit she
seemed peeved that I was so contented with my new life. She even remarked
that I was ungrateful, a remark I never forgot, because then I realized for
the first time that to be ungrateful was perhaps necessary and good for one.
If I dose my eyes now and I think about it, about the slice of bread, I
think almost at once that in this house I never knew what it was to be
scolded. I think if I had told my Aunt Caroline that I had killed a boy in
the lot, told her just how it happened, she would have put her arm around me
and forgiven me - instantly. That's why perhaps that summer is so precious
to me. It was a summer of tacit and complete absolution. That's why I can't
forget Weesie either. She was full of a natural goodness, a child who was in
love with me and who made no reproaches. She was the first of the other sex
to admire me for being different. After Weesie it was the other way round. I
was loved, but I was hated too for being what I was. Weesie made an effort
to understand. The very fact that I came from a strange country, that I
spoke another language, drew her closer to me. The way her eyes shone when
she presented me to her little friends is something I will never forget. Her
eyes seemed to be bursting with love and admiration. Sometimes the three of
us would walk to the riverside in the evening and sitting on the bank we
would talk as children talk when they are out of sight of their elders. We
talked then, I know it now so well, more sanely and more profoundly than our
parents. To give us that thick slice of bread each day the parents had to
pay a heavy penalty. The worst penalty was that they became estranged from
us. For, with each slice they fed us we became not only more indifferent to
them, but we became more and more superior to them. In our ungratefulness
was our strength and our beauty. Not being devoted we were innocent of all
crime. The boy whom I saw drop dead, who lay there motionless, without
making the slightest sound or whimper, the killing of that boy seems almost
like a clean, healthy performance. The struggle for food, on the other hand,
seems foul and degrading and when we stood in the presence of our parents we
sensed that they had come to us unclean and for that we could never forgive
them. The thick slice of bread in the afternoons, precisely because it was
not earned, tasted delicious to us. Never again will bread taste this way.
Never again will it be given this way. The day of the murder it was even
tastier than ever. It had a slight taste of terror in it which has been
lacking ever since. And it was received with Aunt Caroline's tacit but
complete absolution.
There is something about the rye bread which I am trying to fathom -
something vaguely delicious, terrifying and liberating, something associated
with first discoveries. I am thinking of another slice of sour rye which was
connected with a still earlier period, when my little friend Stanley and I
used to rifle the icebox. That was stolen bread and consequently even more
marvellous to the palate than the bread which was given with love. But it
was in the act of eating the rye bread, the walking around with it and
talking at the same time, that something in the nature of revelation
occurred. It was like a state of grace, a state of complete ignorance, of
self-abnegation. Whatever was imparted to me in these moments I seem to have
retained intact and there is no fear that I shall ever lose the knowledge
that was gained. It was just the fact perhaps that it was no knowledge as we
ordinarily think of it. It was almost like receiving a truth, though truth
is almost too precise a word for it. The important thing about the sour rye
discussions is that they always took place away from home, away from the
eyes of our parents whom we feared but never respected. Left to ourselves
there were no limits to what we might imagine. Facts had little importance
for us: what we demanded of a subject was that it allow us opportunity to
expand. What amazes me, when I look back on it, is how well we understood
one another, how well we penetrated to the essential character of each and
every one, young or old. At seven years of age we knew with dead certainty,
for example, that such a fellow would end up in prison, that another would
be a drudge, and another a good for nothing, and so on. We were absolutely
correct in our diagnoses, much more correct, for example, than our parents,
or our teachers, more correct, indeed, than the so-called psychologists.
Alfie Betcha turned out to be an absolute bum: Johnny Gerhardt went to the
penitentiary: Bob Kunst became a work horse. Infallible predictions. The
learning we received only tended to obscure our vision. From the day we went
to school we learned nothing: on the contrary, we were made obtuse, we were
wrapped in a fog of words and abstractions.
With the sour rye the world was what it is essentially, a primitive
world ruled by magic, a world in which fear played the most important role.
The boy who could inspire the most fear was the leader and he was respected
as long as he could maintain his power. There were other boys who were
rebels, and they were admired, but they never became the leader. The
majority were clay in the hands of the fearless ones: a few could be
depended on, but the most not. The air was full of tension -nothing could be
predicted for the morrow. This loose, primitive nucleus of a society created
sharp appetites, sharp emotions, sharp curiosity. Nothing was taken for
granted: each day demanded a new test of power, a new sense of strength or
of failure. And so, up until the age of nine or ten, we had a real taste of
life - we were on our own. That is, those of us who were fortunate enough
not to have been spoiled by our parents, those of us who were free to roam
the streets at night and to discover things with our own eyes.
What I am thinking of, with a certain amount of regret and longing, is
that this thoroughly restricted life of early boyhood seems like a limitless
universe and the life which followed upon it, the life of the adult, a
constantly diminishing realm. From the moment when one is put in school one
is lost: one has the feeling of having a halter put around his neck. The
taste goes out of the bread as it goes out of life. Getting the bread
becomes more important than the eating of it Everything is calculated and
everything has a price upon it.
My cousin Gene became an absolute nonentity: Stanley became a
first-rate failure. Besides these two boys, for whom I had the greatest
affection, there was another, Joey, who has since become a letter carrier. I
could weep when I think of what life has made them. As boys they were
perfect, Stanley least of all because Stanley was more temperamental.
Stanley went into violent rages now and then and there was no telling how
you stood with him from day to day. But Joey and Gene were the essence of
goodness: they were friends in the old meaning of the word. I think of Joey
often when I go out into the country because he was what is called a country
boy. That meant, for one thing, that he was more loyal, more sincere, more
tender, than the boys we knew. I can see Joey now coming to meet me:
he was always running with arms wide open and ready to embrace me,
always breathless with adventures that he was planning for my participation,
always loaded with gifts which he had saved for my coming. Joey received me
like the monarchs of old received their guests. Everything I looked at was
mine. We had innumerable things to tell each other and nothing was dull or
boring. The difference between our respective worlds was enormous. Though I
was of the city too, still, when I visited my cousin Gene, I became aware of
an even greater city, a city of New York proper in which my sophistication
was negligible. Stanley knew no excursions from his own neighbourhood, but
Stanley had come from a strange land over the sea, Poland, and there was
always between us the mark of the voyage. The fact that he spoke another
tongue also increased our admiration for him. Each one was surrounded by a
distinguishing aura, by a well-defined identity which was preserved
inviolate. With the entrance into life these traits of difference fell away
and we all became more or less alike and, of course, most unlike our own
selves. And it is this loss of the peculiar self, of the perhaps unimportant
individuality, which saddens me and makes the rye bread stand out glowingly.
The wonderful sour rye went into the making of our individual selves: it was
like the communion loaf in which all participate but from which each one
receives only according to his peculiar state of grace. Now we are eating of
the same bread, but without benefit of communion, without grace. We are
eating to fill our bellies and our hearts are cold and empty. We are
separate but not individual. There was another thing about the sour rye and
that was that we often ate a raw onion with it. I remember standing with
Stanley in the late afternoons, a sandwich in hand, in front of the
veterinary's which was just opposite my home. It always seemed to be late
afternoon when Dr. McKinney elected to castrate a stallion, an operation
which was done in public and which always gathered a small crowd. I remember
the smell of the hot iron and the quiver of the horse's legs. Dr. McKinney's
goatee, the taste of the raw onion and the smell of the sewer gas just
behind us where they were laying in a new gas main. It was an olfactory
performance through and through and, as Abelard so well describes it,
practically painless. Not knowing the reason for the operation we used to
hold long discussions afterwards which usually ended in a brawl. Nobody
liked Dr. McKinney either: there was a smell of iodoform about him and of
stale horse piss. Sometimes the gutter in front of his own office was filled
with blood and in the winter time the blood froze into the ice and gave a
strange look to his sidewalk. Now and then the big two-wheeled cart came, an
open cart which smelled like the devil, and they whisked a dead horse into
it. Rather it was hoisted in, the carcass, by a long chain which made a
creaking noise like the dropping of an anchor. The smell of a bloated dead
horse is a foul smell and our street was full of foul smells. On the comer
was Paul Sauer's place where raw hides and trimmed hides were stacked up in
the street: they stank frightfully too. And then the acrid odour coming from
the tin factory behind the house - like the smell of modem progress. The
smell of a dead horse, which is almost unbearable, is still a thousand times
better than the smell of burning chemicals. And the sight of a dead horse
with a bullet hole in the temple, his head lying in a pool of blood and his
asshole bursting with the last spasmic evacuation, is still a better sight
than that of a group of men in blue aprons coming out of the arched doorway
of the tin factory with a hand-truck loaded with bales of fresh-made tin.
Fortunately for us there was a bakery opposite the tin factory and from the
back door of the bakery, which was only a grill, we could watch the bakers
at work and get the sweet, irresistible odour of bread and cake. And if, as
I say, the gas mains were being laid there was another strange medley of
smells - the smell of earth just turned up, of rotted iron pipes, of sewer
gas, and of the onion sandwiches which the Italian labourers ate whilst
reclining against the mounds of upturned earth. There were other smells too,
of course, but less striking: such, for instance, as the smell of
Silverstein's tailor shop where there was always a great deal of pressing
going on. This was a hot, fetid stench which can be best apprehended by
imagining that Silverstein, who was a lean, smelly Jew himself, was cleaning
out the farts which his customers had left behind in their pants. Next door
was the candy and stationery shop owned by two daffy old maids who were
religious: here there was the almost sickeningly sweet smell of taffy, of
Spanish peanuts, of jujubes and Sen-Sen and of Sweet Caporal cigarettes. The
stationery store was like a beautiful cave, always cool, always full of
intriguing objects: where the soda fountain was, which gave off another
distinct odour, ran a thick marble slab which turned sour in the summer time
and yet mingled pleasantly, the sourness, with the slightly ticklish, dry
smell of the carbonated water when it was fizzed into the glass of ice
cream.
With the refinements that come with maturity the smells faded out, to
be replaced by only one other distinctly memorable, distinctly pleasurable
smell - the odour of cunt. More particularly the odour that lingers on the
fingers after playing with a woman, for, if it has not been noticed before,
this smell is even more enjoyable, perhaps because it already carried with
it the perfume of the past tense, than the odour of the cunt itself. But
this odour, which belongs to maturity, is but a faint odour compared with
the odours attaching to childhood. It is an odour which evaporates, almost
as quickly in the mind's imagination, as in reality. One can remember many
things about the woman one has loved but it is hard to remember the smell of
her cunt - with anything like certitude. The smell of wet hair, on the other
hand, a woman's wet hair, is much more powerful and lasting - why, I don't
know. I can remember even now, after almost forty years, the smell of my
Aunt Tillie's hair after she had taken a shampoo. This shampoo was performed
in the kitchen which was always overheated. Usually it was a late Saturday
afternoon, in preparation for a ball which meant again another singular
thing - that there would appear a cavalry sergeant with very beautiful
yellow stripes, a singularly handsome sergeant who even to my eyes was far
too gracious, manly and intelligent for an imbecile such as my Aunt Tulle.
But anyway, there she sat on a little stool by the kitchen table drying her
hair with a towel. Beside her was a little lamp with a smoked chimney and
beside the lamp two curling irons the very sight of which filled me with an
inexplicable loathing. Generally she had a little mirror propped up on the
table: I can see her now making wry faces at herself as she squeezed the
blackheads out of her nose. She was a stringy, ugly, imbecilic creature with
two enormous buck teeth which gave her a horsey look whenever her lips drew
back in a smile. She smelled sweaty, too, even after a bath. But the smell
of her hair - that smell I can never forget, because somehow the smell is
associated with my hatred and contempt for her. This smell, when the hair
was just drying, was like the smell that comes up from the bottom of a
marsh. There were two smells - one of the wet hair and another of the same
hair when she threw it into the stove and it burst into flame. There were
always curled knots of hair which came from her comb, and they were mixed
with dandruff and the sweat of her scalp which was greasy and dirty. I used
to stand by her side and watch her, wondering what the ball would be like
and wondering how she would behave at the ball. When she was all primped up
she would ask me if she didn't look beautiful and if I didn't love her, and
of course I would tell her yes. But in the water closet later, which was in
the hall just next to the kitchen, I would sit in the flickering light of
the burning taper which was placed on the window ledge, and I would say to
myself that she looked crazy. After she was gone I would pick up the curling
irons and smell them and squeeze them. They were revolting and fascinating -
like spiders. Everything about this kitchen was fascinating to me. Familiar
as I was with it I never conquered it. It was at once so public and so
intimate. Here I was given my bath, in the big tin tub, on Saturdays. Here
the three sisters washed themselves and primped themselves. Here my
grandfather stood at the sink and washed him- self to the waist and later
handed me his shoes to be shined. Here I stood at the window in the winter
time and watched the snow fall, watched it dully, vacantly, as if I were in
the womb and listening to the water running while my mother sat on the
toilet. It was in the kitchen where the secret confabulations were held,
frightening, odious sessions from which they always reappeared with long,
grave faces or eyes red with weeping. Why they ran to the kitchen I don't
know. But it was often while they stood thus in secret conference, haggling
about a will or deciding how to dispense with some poor relative, that the
door was suddenly opened and a visitor would arrive, whereupon the
atmosphere immediately changed. Changed violently, I mean, as though they
were relieved that some outside force had intervened to spare them the
horrors of a protracted secret session. I remember now that, seeing that
door open and the face of an unexpected visitor peering in, my heart would
leap with joy. Soon I would be given a big glass pitcher and asked to run to
the comer saloon where I would hand the pitcher in, through the little
window at the family entrance, and wait until it was returned brimming with
foamy suds. This little run to the comer for a pitcher of beer was an
expedition of absolutely incalculable proportions. First of all there was
the barber shop just below us, where Stanley's father practised his
profession. Time and again, just as I was dashing out for something, I would
see the father giving Stanley a drubbing with the razor strop, a sight that
made my blood boil. Stanley was my best friend and his father was nothing
but a drunken Polak. One evening, however, as I was dashing out with the
pitcher, I had the intense pleasure of seeing another Polak go for Stanley's
old man with a razor. I saw his old man coming through the door backwards,
the blood running down his neck, his face white as a sheet He fell on the
sidewalk in front of the shop, twitching and moaning, and I remember looking
at him for a minute or two and walking on feeling absolutely contented and
happy about it. Stanley had sneaked out during the scrimmage and was
accompanying me to the saloon door. He was glad too, though he was a bit
frightened. When we got back the ambulance was there in front of the door
and they were lifting him on the stretcher, his face and neck covered with a
sheet. Sometimes it happened that Father Carroll's pet choir boy strolled by
the house just as I was hitting the air. This was an event of primary
importance. The boy was older than any of us and he was a sissy, a fairy in
the making. His very walk used to enrage us. As soon as he was spotted the
news went out in every direction and before he had reached the corner he was
surrounded by a gang of boys all much smaller than himself who taunted him
and mimicked him until he burst into tears. Then we would pounce on him,
like a pack of wolves, pull him to the ground and tear the clothes off his
back. It was a disgraceful performance but it made us feel good. Nobody knew
yet what a fairy was, but whatever it was we were against it. In the same
way we were against the Chinamen. There was one Chinaman, from the laundry
up the street, who used to pass frequently and, like the sissy from Father
Carroll's church, he too had to run the gauntlet. He looked exactly like the
picture of a coolie which one sees in the school books. He wore a sort of
black alpaca coat with braided button holes, slippers without heels, and a
pig tail. Usually he walked with his hands in his sleeves. It was his walk
which I remember best, a sort of sly, mincing, feminine walk which was
utterly foreign and menacing to us. We were in mortal dread of him and we
hated him because he was absolutely indifferent to our gibes. We thought he
was too ignorant to notice our insults. Then one day when we entered the
laundry he gave us a little surprise. First he handed us the package of
laundry: then he reached down below the counter and gathered a handful of
lichee nuts from the big bag. He was smiling as he came from behind the
counter to open the door. He was still smiling as he caught hold of Alfie
Betcha and pulled his ears: he caught hold of each of us in turn and pulled
our ears, still smiling. Then he made a ferocious grimace and, swift as a
cat, he ran behind the counter and picked up a long, ugly-looking knife
which he brandished at us. We fell over ourselves getting out of the place.
When we got to the comer and looked around we saw him standing in the
doorway with an iron in his hand looking very calm and peaceful. After this
incident nobody would go to the laundry any more: we had to pay little Louis
Pirossa a nickel each week to collect the laundry for us. Louis's father
owned the fruit stand on the comer. He used to hand us the rotten bananas as
a token of his affection. Stanley was especially fond of the rotten bananas
as his aunt used to fry them for him. The fried bananas were considered a
delicacy in Stanley's home. Once, on his birthday, there was a party given
for Stanley and the whole neighbourhood was invited. Everything went
beautifully until it came to the fried bananas. Somehow nobody wanted to
touch the bananas, as this was a dish known only to Polaks like Stanley's
parents. It was considered disgusting to eat fried bananas. In the midst of
the embarrassment some bright youngster suggested that crazy Willie Maine
should be given the fried bananas. Willie Maine was older than any of us but
unable to talk. He said nothing but Bjark I Bjork! He said this to
everything. So when the bananas were passed to him he said Bjork! and he
reached for them with two hands. But his brother George was there and George
felt insulted that they should have palmed off the rotten bananas on his
crazy brother. So George started a fight and Willie, seeing his brother
attacked, began to fight also, screaming Bjork! Bjork I Not only did he
strike out at the other boys but at the girls too, which created a
pandemonium. Finally Stanley's old man, hearing the noise, came up from the
barber shop with a strop in his hand. He took crazy Willie Maine by the
scruff of the neck and began to lambast him. Meanwhile his brother George
had sneaked off to call Mr. Maine senior. The latter, who was also a bit of
a drunkard, arrived in his shirt sleeves and seeing poor Willie being beaten
by the drunken barber, he went for him with two stout fists and beat him
unmercifully. Willie, who had gotten free meanwhile, was on his hands and
knees, gobbling up the fried bananas which had fallen on the floor. He was
stuffing them away like a nannygoat, fast as he could find them. When the
old man saw him there chewing away like a goat he became furious and picking
up the strop he went after Willie with a vengeance. Now Willie began to howl
- Bjork! Bjark I - and suddenly everybody began to laugh. That took the
steam out of Mr. Maine and he relented. Finally he sat down and Stanley's
aunt brought him a glass of wine. Hearing the racket some of the other
neighbours came in and there was more wine and then beer and then schnapps
and soon everybody was happy and singing and whistling and even the kids got
drunk and then crazy Willie got drunk and again he got down on the floor
like a nannygoat and he yelled Bjork! Bjork! and Alfie Betcha, who was very
drunk though only eight years old, bit crazy Willie Maine in the backside
and then Willie bit him and then we all started biting each other and the
parents stood by laughing and screaming with glee and it was very very merry
and there were more fried bananas and everybody ate them this time and then
there were speeches and more bumpers downed and crazy Willie Maine tried to
sing for us but he could only sing Bjork! Bjark! It was a stupendous
success, the birthday party, and for a week or more no one talked of
anything but the party and what good Polaks Stanley's people were. The fried
bananas, too, were a success and for a time it was hard to get any rotten
bananas from Louis Pirossa's old man because they were so much in demand.
And then an event occurred which cast a pall over the entire neighbourhood -
the defeat of Joe Gerhardt at the hands of Joey Silverstein. The latter was
the tailor's son: he was a lad of fifteen or sixteen, rather quiet and
studious looking, who was shunned by the other older boys because he was a
Jew. One day as he was delivering a pair of pants on Fillmore Place he was
accosted by Joe Gerhardt who was about the same age and who considered
himself a rather superior being. There was an exchange of words and then Joe
Gerhardt pulled the pants away from the Silverstein boy and threw them in
the gutter. Nobody had ever imagined that young Silverstein would reply to
such an insult by recourse to his fists and so when he struck out at Joe
Gerhardt and cracked him square in the jaw everybody was taken aback, most
of all Joe Gerhardt himself. There was a fight which lasted about twenty
minutes and at the end Joe Gerhardt lay on the sidewalk unable to get up.
Whereupon the Silverstein boy gathered up the pair of pants and walked
quietly and proudly back to his father's shop. Nobody said a word to him.
The affair was regarded as a calamity. Who had ever heard of a Jew beating
up a Gentile? It was something inconceivable, and yet it had happened, right
before everyone's eyes. Night after night, sitting on the curb as we used
to, the situation was discussed from every angle, but without any solution
until... well until Joe Gerhardt's younger brother, Johnny, became so
wrought up about it that he decided to settle the matter himself. Johnny,
though younger and smaller than his brother, was as tough and invincible as
a young puma. He was typical of the shanty Irish who made up the
neighbourhood. His idea of getting even with young Silverstein was to lie in
wait for him one evening as the latter was stepping out of the store and
trip him up. When he tripped him up that evening he had provided himself in
advance with two little rocks which he concealed in his fists and when poor
Silverstein went down he pounced on him and then with the two handsome
little rocks he pounded poor Silverstein's temples. To his amazement
Silverstein offered no resistance: even when he got up and gave him a chance
to get on his feet Silverstein never so much as budged. Then Johnny got
frightened and ran away. He must have been thoroughly frightened because he
never came back again: the next that was heard of him was that he had been
picked, up out West somewhere and sent to a reformatory. His mother, who was
a slatternly, jolly Irish bitch, said that it served him right and she hoped
to God she'd never lay eyes on him again. When the boy Silverstein recovered
he was not the same any more: people said the beating had affected his
brain, that he was a little daffy. Joe Gerhardt, on the other hand, rose to
prominence again. It seems that he had gone to see the Silverstein boy while
he lay in bed and had made a deep apology to him. This again was something
that had never been heard of before. It was something so strange, so
unusual, that Joe Gerhardt was looked upon almost as a knight errant. Nobody
had approved of the way Johnny behaved, and yet nobody would have thought of
going to young Silverstein and apologizing to him. That was an act of such
delicacy, such elegance, that Joe Gerhardt was looked upon as a real
gentleman - the first and only gentleman in the neighbourhood. It was a word
that had never been used among us and now it was on everybody's lips and it
was considered a distinction to be a gentleman. This sudden transformation
of the defeated Joe Gerhardt into a gentleman I remember made a deep
impression upon me. A few years later, when I moved into another
neighbourhood and encountered Claude de Lorraine, a French boy, I was
prepared to understand and accept "a gentleman". This Claude was a boy such
as I had never laid eyes on before. In the old neighbourhood he would have
been regarded as a sissy: for one thing he spoke too well, too correctly,
too politely, and for another thing he was too considerate, too gentle, too
gallant. And then, while playing with him, to hear him suddenly break into
French as his mother or father came along, provided us with something like a
shock. German we had heard and German was a permissible transgression, but
French! Why to talk French, or even to understand it, was to be thoroughly
alien, thoroughly aristocratic, rotten, distingue. And yet Claude was one of
us, as good as us in every way, even a little bit better, we had to admit
secretly. But there was a blemish - his French! It antagonized us. He had no
right to be living in our neighbourhood, no right to be as capable and manly
as he was. Often, when his mother called him in and we had said good-bye to
him, we got together in the lot and we discussed the Lorraine family
backwards and forwards. We wondered what they ate, for example, because
being French they must have different customs than ours. No one had ever set
foot in Claude de Lorraine's home either - that was another suspicious and
repugnant fact. Why? What were they concealing? Yet when they passed us in
the street they were always very cordial, always smiled, always spoke in
English and a most excellent English it was. They used to make us feel
rather ashamed of ourselves - they were superior, that's what it was. And
there was still another baffling thing - with the other boys a direct
question brought a direct answer, but with Claude de Lorraine there was
never any direct answer. He always smiled very charmingly before replying
and he was very cool, collected, employing an irony and a mockery which was
beyond us. He was a thorn in our side, Claude de Lorraine, and when finally
he moved out of the neighbourhood