The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (6 page)

“Hey, sir. Mr. James! Is it true you were a pastrycook in the war?”

“We hear you were wounded grating
latkas.”

“There’s Stanley. Hey, Stan! Jeez, he’s an officer or something.
Stan!
It’s O.K. about Friday night but Rita says Irv’s too short for her. Can you bring Syd instead? Stan!
Stan?”

Over the intersection where Gordie Wiser had burned the Union Jack after many others had trampled and spit on it the day Ernest Bevin announced his Palestine policy, past the house where the Boy Wonder had been born, stopping to mark time at the corner where their fathers and elder brothers, armed with baseball bats, had fought the Frogs during the conscription riots, the boys came marching. A little slower, though, Boxenbaum puffing as he pounded his drum and thirteen or thirty-five others feeling the frost in their toes. The sun went, darkness came quick as a traffic light change, and the snow began to gleam purple. Tansky felt an ache in his stomach as they slogged past his house and Captain Bercovitch remembered there’d be boiled beef and potatoes for supper but he’d have to pick up the laundry first.

“Hip,
hip
. Hip-hip-hip.”

To the right the A.Z.A. clubhouse and to the left the poky Polish synagogue where Old Man Zabitsky searched the black windy street and saw the cadets coming towards him.

“Label. Label, come here.”

“I can’t,
Zeyda
, it’s a parade.”

“A parade.
Narishkeit
. We’re short one man for prayers.”

“But
Zeyda
, please.”

“No buts, no please. Rosenberg has to say
Kaddish.”

Led by the arm, drum and all, Lionel Zabitsky was pulled from the parade.

“Hey, sir. A casualty.”

“Chick-en!”

Past Moe’s warmly lit cigar store where you could get a lean on rye for fifteen cents and three more cadets defected. Pinsky blew his bugle faint-heartedly and Boxenbaum gave the drum a little bang.
Wheeling right and back again up Clark Street, five more cadets disappeared into the darkness.

“Hip, hip.
Hip-hip-hip.”

One of the deserters ran into his father, who was on his way home from work.

“Would you like a hot dog and a Coke before we go home?”

“Sure.”

“O.K., but you mustn’t say anything to Maw.”

Together they watched the out-of-step F.F.H.S. Cadet Corps fade under the just starting fall of big lazy snowflakes.

“It’s too cold for a parade. You kids could catch pneumonia out in this weather without scarves or rubbers.”

“Mr. James says that in the First World War sometimes they’d march for thirty miles without stop through rain and mud that was knee-deep.”

“Is that what I pay school fees for?”

W
HERE DUDDY KRAVITZ SPRUNG FROM THE BOYS GREW
up dirty and sad, spiky also, like grass beside the railroad tracks. He could have been born in Lodz, but forty-eight years earlier his grandfather had bought a steerage passage to Halifax. Duddy could have been born in Toronto, where his grandfather was bound for, but Simcha Kravitz’s C.P.R. ticket took him only as far as the Bonaventure Station in Montreal, and he never did get to Toronto. Simcha was a shoemaker, and two years after his arrival he was able to send for his wife and two sons. A year later he had his own shop on a corner of St. Dominique Street. His family lived upstairs, and outside in the gritty hostile soil of his back yard, Simcha planted corn and radishes, peas, carrots and cucumbers. Each year the corn came up scrawnier and the cucumbers yellowed before they ripened but Simcha persisted with his planting.

Simcha’s hard thin dark figure was a familiar one in the neighborhood. Among the other immigrants he was trusted, he was regarded as a man of singular honesty and some wisdom, but he was not loved. He would lend a man money to help him bring over his wife, grudgingly he would agree to settle a dispute or advise a man in trouble, he never repeated a confidence, but about the conditions of his own life he remained silent. His wife was a shrew with warts on her face and
she spoke to him sharply when others were present, but Simcha did not complain.

“He’s only a shoemaker,” Adler said, “so why does he act so superior?”

Once Moishe Katansky, a newcomer, dared to sympathize with Simcha Kravitz about his marriage, and Simcha raised his head from the last and looked at him so severely that Katansky understood and did not return to the shop for many months. Simcha’s shop was a meeting place. Here the round-shouldered immigrants gathered to sip lemon tea and to talk of their fear of failure in the new country. Some came to idolize Simcha. “You could,” they said, “trust Simcha Kravitz with your wife – your money – anything.” But others came to resent their need to go to his shop. They began to search him for a fault. “Nobody’s perfect,” Katansky said.

Simcha’s stature increased immensely when it became known that he was respected even among the Gentiles in the district. That came about after Blondín the blacksmith had been kicked by a horse. Simcha, not the first man on the scene, forced Blondin to drink some brandy and set the broken bone in his leg before the doctor came. After that whenever there was an accident as far as the lead foundry eight blocks away on one side and the sawmill nine blocks away on the other, Simcha was sent for.

The old grizzled man would not talk about his private life, but there was one thing that even he couldn’t hide. His firstborn son, Benjy, was a delight to him. The others would often see Simcha Kravitz coming out of the synagogue and walking down St. Dominique Street holding the boy’s hand, and that, if you knew the man, seemed such a proud and difficult display of intimacy that the others would turn away embarrassed. Those who liked him, the majority, and knew about his bad life with his wife hoped that Benjy would justify his love. But some of the others, men who had broken down in the shop and still more who owed him money they couldn’t repay, sensed
that here at last Simcha was vulnerable and they wished bad luck on Benjy.

“He’s got his mother’s dirty mouth.”

“He’s fat and feminine. Poor Simcha. He doesn’t see.”

But fat, caustic tongue, and other failures too, Benjy prospered. And more. He revered his father and did not once abuse the old man’s love. He was a shrewd boy, intelligent and quick and without fear of the new country, and he undoubtedly had, as Katansky put it, the golden touch. The fat teen-age boy who ventured into the country to sell the farmers reams of cloth and boots and cutlery was, at twenty-six, the owner of a basement blouse factory. From the beginning he paid the highest wages and like his father lent money and, though he was loquacious, he never repeated a confidence. On Saturday mornings father and son could be seen standing side by side in the synagogue, and when Benjy began to read Mencken and Dreiser and no longer came to pray his father said:

“Benjy does what he believes. That’s his right.”

Nobody, not even Katansky, could have accused Benjy of marrying for money. The bride was a pants presser’s daughter. A beauty. Ida was a slender girl with curly red hair and a long delicate neck and white skin. She went everywhere with Benjy and everywhere she went with him she could not stop looking at him. The old man adored her too. He often brought her vegetables from his garden and on Sunday afternoons the three of them had a habit of going for a drive, leaving Mrs. Kravitz and Max and Minnie and their children to wait at home. A year later, when Simcha’s wife died, he refused to go and live with Benjy and Ida; he said it would not be wise, and he continued to live alone. Then the trouble started.

“I went to see Benjy in his office yesterday,” Adler said, “and I’d swear he was drunk.”

Ida began to take trips alone and the round-shouldered men in the shoe repair shop began to ask questions.

“When are they going to have children?”

“These modern marriages. Oi.”

Simcha never replied and the questions stopped for a time. Simcha was hurt because Benjy did not visit very often these days and when he did come to the house it was only after he had had a lot to drink. Then one day Adler came into the shop and patted Simcha tenderly on the back. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I hear your daughter-in-law’s off in Miami again,” Katansky said.

At the synagogue the other old men became sad and gentle with him. Simcha never asked why. He took his regular seat every Saturday morning and acknowledged the others’ sympathetic looks with the stiffest of nods. But he began to look at the rest of his family with more curiosity and, without any preamble, he took Duddy into the back yard one Sunday morning to teach him how to plant and fertilize and pull out the killing weeds. Then, one day soon after Ida had left on another trip, he sent for Benjy. This was the first time he had ever actually asked his son to come to see him.

“If there’s something the matter with her I’m your father and you can tell me.”

Benjy turned to go.

“Strangers know something I don’t know.”

“It’s Max. He talks too much.”

“Max is a fool.”

When Benjy came again about six months later Duddy was working with his grandfather in the back yard. He watched his uncle follow his grandfather into the kitchen. Duddy couldn’t hear what was said, but only two minutes later Uncle Benjy came out of the house carrying what looked like a little jar of preserves. Seeing Duddy, he stopped and gave the boy a frightening look. “If you hurt him …”

“Wha’?”

But he didn’t finish or explain. He walked off, staggering a little, and Duddy went back to pulling weeds. Simcha joined him about a half hour later. “Your grandfather was a failure in this country,” he said.

“Why?”

“Your Uncle Benjy with all his money is nothing too. Of your father I won’t even speak.”

The old man squashed a mosquito against his cheek with a surprisingly quick hand.

“A man without land is nobody. Remember that, Duddel.”

Duddy was seven at the time, and a year earlier his mother had enrolled him in the Talmud Torah parochial school. Uncle Benjy was going through his Zionist phase at the time, and he paid the tuition. Uncle Benjy also knew that his father, whom he hardly ever saw these days, walked hand in hand with Duddy on St. Dominique Street. But the round-shouldered men did not wonder or turn away when they saw Simcha walking with his grandson. The old man had no more enemies – even Katansky pitied him. The round-shouldered old men looked at Duddy and decided he was mean, a crafty boy, and they hoped he would not hurt Simcha too hard.

A
T THE PAROCHIAL SCHOOL UNTIL HE WAS THIRTEEN
years old Duddy met many boys who came from families that were much better off than his own and on the least pretext he fought with them. Those who were too big to beat up he tried to become friendly with. He taught them how to steal at Kresge’s and split streetcar tickets so that one could be used twice, how to smoke with bubble pipes, and the way babies were made. After he had been at the school for three years mothers warned their children not to play with that Kravitz boy. But boys and girls alike were drawn to dark, skinny Duddy, and those who were excluded from his gang, the Warriors, felt the snub deeply.

Such a boy was blond, curly-haired Milty Halpirin, the real estate agent’s son. Milty’s mother drove him to school every day. He was an only child and he was not allowed to ride a bicycle or eat crabapples. Duddy delighted in tormenting him, while Milty, on his side, yearned to join the Warriors. So one day Duddy said it would be O.K. if only Milty agreed to drink the secret initiation potion first. The potion, made up of water, red ink, baking soda, pepper, ketchup, a glob of chicken fat and, at the last minute, a squirt of Aqua Velva, went down with surprising ease. Afterwards, however, Duddy feigned hysteria.

“Jeez. This is terrible. I made a terrible mistake.”

“What is it?”

“The wrong recipe. Jeez.”

“But I drank it. You said if I drank it I could become a Warrior. You swore to God, Duddy.”

“It’s terrible,” Duddy said, “but this means your beezer is a cinch to fall off and you’ll never grow a bush. And Milty, if a guy doesn’t grow a bush …”

Milty ran off crying and that night he was violently ill.

“What is it, pussy-lamb?”

“I’m never going to grow a bush, Mummy.”

“What?”

“Duddy Kravitz says …”

Max Kravitz was called in once more by the principal and Duddy became the first boy ever to be suspended from the parochial school: he was sent home for a week. Milty was terrified. He lived in an enormous house alongside the mountain, and it was he who answered the door when Duddy showed up with three other Warriors the following Saturday afternoon. “What do you want?” he asked in a small voice.

“Why Milty, boy, we’ve come to play with you.”

“Hiya, Milty old pal.”

Milty hesitated. The maid had gone out for a walk; he was all alone.

“You never came to play with me before.”

“Jeez. Aren’t you going to let us in, Milty?”

“No.”

“Wouldn’t you still like to become a Warrior like?”

“You mustn’t touch anything,” Milty said, opening the door. “You promise?”

Duddy crossed his heart. So did the others.

“Some dump, eh, guys? Where does your old man keep his cigs?”

“You can’t stay. You have to go.”

“Gee whiz, Milty.”

“You want to play monopoly?” Milty asked.

“Monopoly! Jeez. Where do your mother and father sleep? Have they got the same bed like?”

Milty bit his thumb.

“He’s going to cwy, guys.”

“I thought you wanted to play with me.”

“Sure. Sure we do.”

Milty watched, terrified, as Duddy wandered about the living room examining china figurines here and there. A rubber plant stood before the glass doors that led into the garden. It reached almost to the ceiling. Duddy stopped to stare at it.

“Why don’t we sit in the garden, Milty?”

“We mustn’t.”

Mrs. Halpirin, an amateur horticulturist, was strict about the garden.

“I thought we were pals, Milty.”