In a confusion of thought I saw my friend in my mind as I went to sleep that night. I was restless. I could not get the pillow right. Finally I lay on my side, curled, with the pillow turned lengthwise so that it was between my legs. I experienced a diffuse sense of urgency all through my body, my limbs, my fingers and toes. I found that I was angry. And then all at once I was feeling sorry for myself. I heard no sound in the house. My father was not home. My mother was reading in the living room. The corner street light shone on the ceiling. I heard a steady hum of traffic. I didn’t know where I was. We had new Venetian blinds, of which my mother was proud, but no matter how they were adjusted the bright light of the Concourse shone through.
Y
et it gradually came to me that I now had a private life. Nobody in my family saw Meg and Norma, only I did. I liked that. Living in a new neighborhood had made me independent. I ranged now. I did not run right home after school. I could see Meg without even telling anyone. This was an unusual household, this mother and daughter. It had no father. It brought out in me a certain feistiness. My loins stirred with protective feelings. This was my secret life of adventure. Norma was nothing like other mothers I had known, including my own. There was some carelessness of spirit about her, which I perceived in the way she pushed at her hair with her fingertips, or looked at herself in her living room mirror over the sofa. She did not represent authority in my mind. Once, on her day off, she and Meg and I sat down to play a board game. I started to read the rules just as Donald always did. “Let’s not bother with that,” Norma said. “Let’s just play.”
I could not envision my mother sitting down with Meg and me on the floor and playing one of our games with us. Maybe that was the sort of thing that made my mother dislike her. Both daughter and mother had got down on their knees, and sat back on their legs the way girls do. Except that Norma was wearing a housecoat and it fell back over her thighs, which looked very white and soft to me; she kept pulling the material over herself and it kept falling away, and I noticed that. Then she noticed me noticing and she smiled and tousled my hair.
With my new freedom I was developing a certain confidence. I was reading more than I ever had, three or four books a week, sea stories and boys’ stories, and sports and adventure novels; and I began to feel hampered having to wait for an adult, my mother particularly, to find the time to accompany me to the library. The library was in the East Bronx, on Washington Avenue. It was quite far. I applied now and received
permission to go to the library myself. After the first or second time, I had no fear of getting lost. I went every Saturday morning. It was May, the weather was warm, and I walked along in the sun of the season holding two or three books in each hand at my side. I developed a modest shortcut or two, walking east on 176th Street past an old people’s home, where they sat on rockers on a porch and looked at me, and then down a steep grade curving to a junction with Tremont Avenue, a main thoroughfare, just at the site of an Eye Hospital. At the bottom of the hill was Webster Avenue, with its trolley cars and cobblestones of Belgian block. Crossing Webster at Tremont could be dangerous, trolley lines bisecting and branching off, trucks rumbling along, you had to keep your wits about you. Then I passed over the New York Central tracks at Park Avenue, and with the Third Avenue El in sight, I turned right on Washington Avenue and only one block away was the library. It was an Andrew Carnegie branch library. Across the street was a company that sold stones for cemeteries. A big display room was filled with these immense granite monuments with names of imaginary dead people carved in them. Around the corner was the Pechter Bread Company. The whole neighborhood smelled of delicious bread baking. They baked those hard-crust rye breads with the little postage-stamp union labels stuck on them. Our family bought the Pechter breads and here was the very place they were made.
I never made this trip carelessly. These were still dangerous precincts. The East Bronx turned out not only criminal boys but, as I now knew from the kind of history children collect in schoolyards, major big-time gangsters. My library was not far from the late Dutch Schultz’s old beer barns. He’d owned taverns on Third Avenue, under the El. I knew I had more to fear from the boys than from the grown-up gangsters, but altogether there was a culture here that was not mine. No, the East Bronx was not a place to take lightly. I had to admit to myself to being slightly relieved when I reached the front steps of the Washington Avenue branch and passed into the quiet rooms with the oak bookshelves.
I
t was at this library that I learned about the contest for boys sponsored by the New York World’s Fair Corporation. An essay contest. A poster on the bulletin board told all about it. The topic was the Typical American Boy. You had to write in two hundred and fifty words or less what you thought were the qualities that best exemplified American boyhood. You had to submit a signed photograph of yourself and you had to write the essay clearly in your own hand and on one side of the paper. The paper could be lined or unlined but it had to be eight by eleven in size.
I had a keen eye for contests. Many were false and ridiculous, and only the innocent would enter them. They usually required you to say what you liked about a product in twenty-five words or less and send in your remarks with a boxtop or label. The contest was really designed to get you to buy the product. My friend Arnold had made up a contest for Castoria, the laxative. “I like Castoria because it’s foul-tasting and gives you terrible diarrhea, and we all know what fun that can be.”
But this was different. This was run not by a company but by the World’s Fair. I read the rules carefully. They wanted original thought. Whoever won would have a statue made of him by a famous artist, and the name of the statue would be “The Typical American Boy.” There were other prizes too, including free trips to the Fair, all expenses paid. My mind began to race.
In the old days Donald and I had collected coupons from newspaper promotions of various sorts. Enough coupons and you collected your premium—in one memorable instance the
New York Evening Post
offered a set of ten volumes called
The World’s One Hundred Best Short Stories
. That had taken a year of coupons. We had been very methodical and efficient, cutting the coupons out on the dotted line, keeping them in order in packs, slipping rubber bands over them and storing them in a cigar
box. But there were contests too of an intellectual sort, puzzles, rebuses, tests of vocabulary and grammar. With success you could earn subscriptions to magazines or even money. All these were means of entry in my mind to a just and well-regulated world of carefully designed challenges to boys. By accepting these challenges you advanced yourself. So I recognized this World’s Fair essay contest. I recognized it. In my early days I had joined secret organizations run by Tom Mix and Dick Tracy, among others. I had in the depths of my desk drawers numerous artifacts of entry, a Jack Armstrong whistle ring, little lead Buck Rogers rocket ships with wheels, water pistols, magnifying lenses, badges, secret code cards, and so on. For each of them I had once eagerly awaited the mail. The mail was very much a part of all this. There were rules of postmark to consider and specifications as to format. Wherever you were, at whatever far edge of the world’s consciousness, one three-cent postage stamp could vault you into the heart of things.
Under the printing of the contest rules were the palest, most meaningful shadows of the Trylon and Perisphere. Only gradually did I perceive them. They emerged in my mind as a message just for me, a secret summons, wordless, indelible.
I fully understood why our family hadn’t gotten to the World’s Fair. Nobody had said anything, but I knew. Boldly I asked the librarian if I could borrow a pencil. I asked also for a piece of paper. I didn’t care if she smiled. I copied down the information on the poster. My heart was beating wildly. I worried that the old people trying to read their periodicals would hear it and the derelict men nodding in their hard chairs would wake up, and all of them would give me dirty looks.
S
etting out for home, I thought past the sentences I would compose for my essay, and saw my own noble head in bronze gazing into the sky over the New York World’s Fair. One day
Meg and her mother would arrive at the Fair and see it prominently displayed. Their mouths would drop open.
I decided not to return home the way I had come but to walk past the Pechter Bread Company to Park Avenue and go north along the railroad tracks to Tremont. I wanted to see the trains in their wide trench below the street. This was the line my stately uncle Ephraim rode to and from his mansion in Pelham Manor. Park Avenue was split down the middle by the tracks and each narrow half was cobblestoned, barren of people, bordered on one side with windowless red-brick warehouses and on the other by a fence of black iron spears. I walked along this fence in weeds strewn with garbage and imagined myself doing a tightrope act on the grid of electrified wires over the tracks.
At this moment I was confronted by two boys with knives.
They were on me before I even saw them. They pushed me up against the fence, prodding me with the tips of their knives until I was pressed fast. I felt the fence imprinted on my back.
My terror afforded me a stunned clarity of mind. These boys were big, they were my brother’s age. The thinner one had the lightest, deadliest eyes I had ever looked into; they were close together in a narrow, lopsided face. There was a loutish droop to the small mouth, the lip turning outward at one side, the lower teeth showing.
The heavy one was taller and he had very black hair combed back in a pompadour, and he had pimply skin and a roundish jowly face with a snout for a nose. His black nostrils made almost perfect circles. His knife was not held as precisely to my stomach as the other’s. He was nervous and looked up and down the street.
“You Jewish?” the thin one said.
“No,” I said.
He grinned, reached forward with his free hand, and stripped my books from me. The books lay in the weeds. “Jewboy,” he said, “I’m going to cut your ears off. What do you say at confession?”
“What?”
“Let’s see you cross yourself.” I did not know what this meant. “You’re a Jewboy,” he said. He pushed the knife point into me. I could feel it. One shove and it would go right through me.
“Where’s your money.”
“Come on,” the fat one said. “Hurry it up.” He was really nervous. I produced my money, a dime and two pennies. The fat one scooped the coins out of my palm. “Let’s go,” he said to the other one.
“First I’m gonna slice up this lyin’ Jew.”
“My father’s a cop,” I said to the larger boy. I stared at him as resolutely as I could, knowing him to be scared. “He works in this precinct,” I said. “In a patrol car.”
They were both staring at me now. I gave no more evidence. In an instant I could be dead or free as the deadly shorter one casually drifted from one side of his impulse to the other. I felt the point of the knife. The pressure increased.
“Come on, let’s go,” the fat one said.
The thin one grabbed my jaw and banged my head against the fence. “Fuck you, Jewboy,” he said.
They ran across the street, laughing. They turned the corner and were gone.
I picked up my library books. The sheet of instructions I had copied had fallen out of a book and lay crumpled in the grass with a footprint across it. I could still feel the knife point. I pulled my shirt up to see if it had drawn blood. There was the smallest red dot, like a pinprick, just at the top of my scar.
I
decided not to tell anyone what had happened. I walked home quickly, turning every block or so to see if they were following me. The affront increased with every step I took until I was hard pressed not to cry. I found myself trembling.
Why had I mentioned my father! He existed now in their minds. I thought this put him terribly at risk, even if I had portrayed him in a uniform. A policeman! It was the weakest of ploys, if they had been any smarter they would have remembered how infantile a claim it is: My father is a policeman. It is what four-year-olds say to one another.
I was supposed to be on guard in the East Bronx. I had smugly assured myself that I was. All my life I had known about boys like this, and here I had foolishly wandered into their lair. I had come to their attention. If I hadn’t been busy daydreaming, I would have had the sense to stay away from the railroad tracks. Edgar, I heard my mother saying, your head is always in the clouds. Come down if you know what’s good for you.
The last block to my apartment house I ran. I stood inside the street door, in the shadow, and waited for them to appear. When they came in the door I would run out again. I did not want to lead them to my mother.
No one came. Standing in the dark hallway, I played and replayed the scene over in my mind, looking for some small moment of honor, something I could find for the pain. But it came out the same way every time: “You Jewish?” “No.” Humiliation broke over me in waves, like sobs. I was enraged. At this moment if those boys had appeared I would have killed them. I felt ill. Then I began to sweat and grew suddenly cold. I leaned against the wall. A film of cold clammy sweat covered my face and neck and back.
For weeks afterward, whenever I went out, I looked for those two boys, and the fact that I never saw them did not remove them as a threat from my mind. I could go about my business only by the accident of their not being there, a matter entirely of their choice, and so even when absent they had me. But at the same time I knew it wasn’t even these two in particular, because Christian boys were like this all over, and you were free only at their collective whim, only if they happened not to walk down your street or lope through your backyard or otherwise see you. I struggled to understand Christianity as something that would shove a knife into my belly.
I
was not to resume my Saturday trips to the library for some time. But my resolve to enter the World’s Fair contest for boys was unshaken. In fact, writing an essay on the Typical American Boy had now the additional appeal of an act of defiance. I, not those miserable louts, would propose the essence of American Boyhood. They were no models for anything. I doubted they could even read. If, by some accident, they were to hear of the contest, they wouldn’t know the first thing about how to go about writing for it. The best they could hope for was to go along the streets and stick up someone who had written for the contest and to steal what he had written. Well, it wouldn’t be me.