City Boy (9 page)

Back before a mirror in the bathroom once more, Herbie fumed and agonized as he put his treacherous hair to rights. He blamed Felicia for the blasted afternoon, blamed Lennie, blamed his mother, blamed everyone and everything except himself. He murmured aloud, “I'll show 'em! I'll get even! Try to make a fool out of
me,
will they?” and lashed himself into such a state of indignation at a plotting world that he soon felt much better.

Not for long, though. When he stepped out into the party room, he was surprised and sickened. In the middle of a circle of children, Lennie Krieger was dancing with Lucille to music from a radio. The little girl's movements were stiff, and her face intently serious, as she followed the adept boy's steps. Herbie joined the circle and heard the low comments—envious and jeering from the boys, admiring from the girls—and tasted the gall of jealousy. He tried to catch Lucille's eye. Once she looked at him with unseeing gravity as though he were a piece of furniture, and spun away. Felicia came to his side and said, “Hello, sheik,” but the heart was not in her spite, for she was suffering, too. Lennie was her admirer, and snubbing him was the food of her feminine nature, but for once he had snubbed her when the music started, to ask the “baby” to dance.

A game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey was next played. Herbie, blindfolded, fell over a chair on his face, and caused roars of merriment. When Lennie's turn came he worked loose the bandage on his eyes, pretended to grope to the donkey, and pinned the tail squarely where it belonged, to great applause. Herbie detected the cheat, but felt powerless to do anything about it. They played a number of kissing games under the watchful eye of the aunt. Somehow it happened that Lennie kissed Lucille three times and she kissed him twice. Herbie only had one chance to do any kissing, and then it fell to his lot to kiss Felicia. It was a thoroughly ghastly afternoon. And when, at a quarter to five, Herbie managed to corner the red-headed girl, and whispered, “Come on back out in the garage a minute,” she froze him with, “I can't. I promised to show Lennie my camp pictures,” and dashed away.

From the demeanor of the four members of the Bookbinder family when they rode home, 2645 Mosholu Parkway might have been the address of Woodlawn Cemetery. Jacob Bookbinder broke the bleak silence once to say, “If you ask me, Louis Glass is being paid by Powers to say the blue paper is no good—” but his wife said, “Please. Even in front of the children do we need to discuss it?” No further sound was heard, except the rattling song of the Chevrolet, until it drew to a stop on Homer Avenue.

As she opened the door, Mrs. Bookbinder said to the children in the back seat, “Why so quiet? Did you enjoy the party?”

“Party!” sniffed Felicia. “Please, Mom, don't drag me to any more nurseries.”

Herbie said nothing. He was already out of the car, on his way to the highest rock in the vacant lot, where he often sought solitude. There in the sunset he undertook some emergency repair work. For an hour he tried to rebuild the ruins of the underground palace, but it was wrecked forever. Nothing was left but its queen, and she no longer wore crown and robe, but a white bow and a party frock. And he could not even compel her to sit by his side. Her faithless Majesty went on and on dancing with Lennie.

M
a, can I go to the museum with Cliff today?”

It was Saturday morning. Herbie and Felicia were eating breakfast at the luxuriously late hour of eight-thirty in the Bookbinder kitchen. The narrow white room was bright with a shaft of sunlight that illumined it for about forty minutes each morning, when the sun appeared in a cleft between two apartment houses across the street. It shone not into the kitchen but upon the windows of the Feigelson living room across the court, which cordially bounced the glittering beam over to the Bookbinders.

“I suppose so,” said the mother, busy with onions at the sink. “What's at the museum?”

“Aw, you know, it's just a museum. Mrs. Gorkin said we should all go.”

“Where is it?”

“Downtown in Central Park.”

“How much is it?”

“It's free, Mom.”

“You can go.”

“How come,” said Felicia, spooning lumps out of her oatmeal with a wry face, “that you're not going to the movies today?”

“A museum is more important than an old movie,” said Herbie haughtily.

“More important than episode fourteen of
The Green Archer
?”

How was it, wondered Herbie, that his sister had such skill in prodding his weak points? His heart yearned to know what had happened when the Archer's mask had been shot off by a bullet from the hero's gun. By the worst luck the Archer had had his back to the camera when his face was bared, and the episode had ended. Who would he turn out to be? After following the serial through snow, rain, bankruptcy (solved by mortgaging his skates), and illness (he had seen episode eight with a temperature of 103½), he found it hard not to be in at the kill. But greater matters were afoot.

“Aw, the heck with that old serial,” said Herbie. “What's the sense of payin' money 'n' sittin' through a rotten movie every week, just to see an episode that lasts five minutes?”

Mrs. Bookbinder jumped with surprise and dropped an onion. She had been using this line of reasoning on Herbert for three years with no effect. To hear it now from his mouth gave her as joyful a thrill as a missionary might feel over his first converted cannibal. She stopped peeling onions long enough to pat her son's head and say, “You're growing up, Herbie. Bless you.”

Herbie basked in the approval, and tried to look like a profound man of affairs.

“Which museum are you going to?” pursued Felicia. She sensed intrigue strong in the air.

“Which one do you think?” parried Herbie.

“There are two, you know,” said his sister.

“Well, whaddya know! Two museums! Imagine that! Guess you hafta be in 8B to know that,” said Herbie, and, drinking his milk, he rose and walked out of the kitchen.

He put a rubber ball in his pocket and sauntered forth to kill the morning. Saturday morning was the laziest, therefore the best, time of the week. The release from school was fresh and sweet, and the boredom of aimlessness had not yet set in. Boys from more religious families went to Sabbath services at the synagogues, where cake, candy, and cream soda rewarded their devotion after the last hymn was sung. But Herbie had tried worship and found the sugar coating too thin for the struggle with Hebrew. He knew that on his thirteenth birthday he would have to chant a chapter from the prophets before the congregation, and he rather looked forward to the brief chance at being the center of all eyes, but thirteen, to a boy of eleven, seems like seventy to a man of thirty-five. Meantime, since the weekly visit of old Mr. Taussig, the Hebrew teacher, for one hour's wrestle with the strange backward-printed language satisfied his parents, it more than satisfied Herbie.

Bouncing the ball with relish as he walked into the street—it was a new red solid-sponge rubber ball, not one of your pumped-up gray shells that go all flabby when they have a pinhole—Herbie spied Harold Sorensen, and smiled. Harold was a blond boy with white eyebrows, even fatter than Herbie, dogged and bad-tempered. He was not quite a match for Herbie at the constricted little sidewalk games that have evolved in the Bronx; a perfect opponent, in short. Harold promptly took up a challenge to a duel at boxball, and was beaten. Next they played double boxball, each boy guarding two squares in the pavement as they slapped the ball back and forth, and Harold lost again. Then they played “points,” tossing the ball against the line of plaster molding along the ground floor of the apartment house. Herbie won. Next they clashed in something they called baseball, using the same molding. The number of times the ball bounced in the gutter before being caught was hedged with a scoring system that produced the illusion of a game played by eighteen men in a ball park. Herbie won this, too. An encounter at handball followed, and another at Chinese handball; the blond boy sweated out both victories. But Herbie came back to conquer him at hit-the-coin and dodgeball. They tried punchball, but that really required at least two men on a side, and they abandoned it. They cooled off with a game of pickups, which Herbie also won easily, and were in the midst of stickball when the noon whistle of the nearby power plant blew. Thereupon they reluctantly parted and went home to lunch, regretting that they had lacked time to play at least two or three more games, such as stoopball, slugball, and salujee.

These were just a few of the games that city boys have created out of two elements: a world of hard, flat surfaces and a bouncing ball. Herbie knew the rules and tricks of more than twenty games. The effort of memory by which he had acquired these, applied to school work, would have made him the wonder of the New York school system. But that was impossible, of course. Street games were the business of life and required devotion. School work was the penalty for the crime of being a boy.

Back in the Bookbinder kitchen, Herbie bolted his lunch and then said, “Mom, how about carfare for the museum?”

“Can you wait until I finish my tea, or is the museum going to run away?”

“Sorry, Mom.”

“Say,” said Felicia, “how about me going with you? I haven't been to the museum in a long time.”

Herbert was appalled, but kept a cheerful face. “Why, sure, Fleece, come on. If you want to spend the day walkin' around with me and Cliff, that's fine. Mrs. Gorkin says the museum is real educational. You'll have lots of fun.”

“That's nice, Felice,” said the mother. “I'm glad you want to be with your own brother one day instead of that rotten Emily with her lipstick and rouge. You can take carfare for both—”

“No, no, Mom, wait,” said Felicia hurriedly. “I'm going to the movies. I just wanted to see what he'd say.” She looked at Herbie, baffled. “You really are going to the museum, aren't you?”

“Yes, and you
will
go with him,” said the mother. “What's playing at the movies that's better than the museum?”

“Mom, please,” cried Felicia, panicky at finding her foot caught in her own trap. “I promised Emily I'd go with her last week. I can go to those stuffy museums any old time.”

“Aw, be a sport, come with me, Fleece,” exulted Herbie. “Is a girl friend more important than a brother? Please, Mom, make her go with me.”

Felicia rose from the table, declaring that she would
die
rather than be seen anywhere with a slovenly little thing like him who didn't even wash below his chin. Mrs. Bookbinder was diverted to an examination of the boy's neck, and his sister escaped from the room under cover of this thin smoke screen.

All this played into Herbie's hands. Loudly declaring that he would show Fleece who was slovenly, he proceeded to beautify himself. When he left the house with a quarter clutched in a hand reeking honestly of soap, he looked as strangely clean and gentlemanly as he had a week before en route to the Mosholu Parkway disaster, but neither mother nor sister became suspicious.

Cliff was waiting for him under the clock at the Simpson Street subway station. As Herbie walked up the cousin inspected him from head to foot, and slowly, softly whistled.

“There ain't any girl I could like that much,” he said.

“Wait till you see her,” answered Herbie.

A Lexington Avenue express thumped and shrieked its way into the station, and stopped with a jerk that shook the platform and every other platform along the track for a mile either way. The boys ignored the terrifying shudder under their feet and boarded the train. They had been permitted to travel by themselves on the subway since their ninth year, and were calm about it. The rickety railway, which ran on steel stilts over their heads in the Bronx and dived into a narrow black hole to go to Manhattan, was part of the world, like the stars and the wind. The subway might fall down, and so might the stars, but Herbie and Cliff were not worrying about either possibility.

They walked to the front of the train, rolling with each sway and bump like sailors, and posted themselves at the front windows where they could enjoy the hurtling. Tracks flew under them; apartment houses careened drunkenly by. Intervale, Prospect, Jackson Avenue stations went past; the waited-for lovely moment came, and with the squeals and howls of a lost soul plunging to hell, the express rushed crazily downhill into the darkness. This crashing change from sunlight to night in an instant was one of the most agreeable experiences in the boys' ken. They looked at each other and sighed with pleasure. Herbie glanced back at the people in the car, and saw them staring vacantly, or reading newspapers, or dozing, all oblivious to the poetry of the event.

“Cliff,” he said, “whaddya suppose is the matter with them?” He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. Cliff took his eyes from the window to look at the passengers briefly.

“They're old,” he said. And the cousins returned to the enjoyment of the blinking red and green lights, the jeweled brilliance of stations far down the dark tube, the sensation of terrible speed imparted by the close tunnel walls, and all the other subterranean delights that a small boy gets so cheaply in New York.

They climbed out of the subway at Eighty-sixth Street into the sparkle and roar of Manhattan traffic.

“Now the question is,” said Herbie, “which museum?”