“I don’t wanna go!” Ira stormed at Mom after a few weeks. “I’m not going!”
“You are going! I’ll tell your father. He’ll soon give you to understand.”
“I don’t care. Let him hit me, that’s all. I’m not going! The rabbi stinks. His mouth stinks. It stinks from cigarettes and onions!”
“Go tell it to your grandmother. He complained to me how remiss you are. You heed nothing. At all admonition you cavil, you shrug. What has happened to you? A year ago — more than a year ago, the malamut on 9th Street told me himself you were ready to begin khumish, to begin Torah. Woe is me! If he saw what a goy you are today, darkness would shroud his eyes.”
“I don’t care.”
“And what will you know at your Bar Mitzvah, if you don’t go to cheder? And Zaida, what will he say when he hears you daven like a mute?”
“Who cares? I don’t see him. I never go to Baba’s house. I can go to cheder just before Bar Mitzvah.”
“Oy, gevald! Plague take you! I won’t let you become a goy! In this you won’t prevail. We’ll find another malamut.”
She told Pop about what had taken place. “The way you bring him up, that’s what he’s become,” was Pop’s brusque reply. “The right kind of mother would slap his face roundly and make him attend. So you save a twenty-five-cent piece of your allowance if he doesn’t go to cheder.”
“Gey mir in der erd! I said we ought to find another malamut.” Mom flushed angrily. “What the man can contrive: I save a whole quarter of a dollar if the scamp doesn’t go to cheder. Is that a thing to consider? I would gladly give twice that from my allowance if he went to cheder, and went eagerly. What my father will say when he hears of it.”
“Devout Jew. Let him hear of it. I’m not good enough for him. Let his grandson grow up a goy.”
“What has that to do with it?”
“Go relieve yourself. You want him to go, send him.”
“And you not? You’re his father.”
“He’s your pampered son.”
Mom kept silent a few seconds, then sighed heavily. “I see, I already see. As you were, so is he. Did you care to go to cheder? Only your father’s stick compelled you. You tormented your younger brother Jacob when he studied Talmud, no?”
“Gey mir in kehver!” Pop snapped open the Yiddish newspaper. “I don’t want to speak about it anymore.”
“Go also into the dolorous year,” Mom addressed Ira. “The grief you cause me.”
“All right, I’ll go,” Ira conceded. “Jeezis!”
“Spare us so much Jeezising in the house, or I’ll deal you one,” Pop warned.
A few weeks more Ira attended, sullenly — until the exasperated malamut himself dismissed his pupiclass="underline" “Go, tell your mother to seek another malamut. You need, you know what you need? To be whipped to shreds. You’re nothing but a goy.”
“Then woe is me!” Mom mourned when Ira came home and told her. “You have a goya for a mother who doesn’t believe; she has a goy for a son. But I tell you now: Once we become reconciled with your grandfather, you’ll have to go.”
VIII
So the weeks went by without his attending. . Summer passed. . came the fall — November neared. Election Day floats rumbled through the street. Drawn by plodding horses, heavy drays bore prominent signs on them, signs leaning against each other like the walls of a tent, each wall proclaimed: DELANEY FOR ALDERMAN! HONEST AND EXPERIENCED! OR VOTE FOR O’HARE THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE. OR VOTE A STRAIGHT DEMOCRATIC TICKET! VOTE FOR THE PARTY OF THE PEOPLE! Election Day approached. Throughout the block, all available juveniles were marshaled — or volunteered jubilantly — to form teams foraging for wood, combustibles of every kind and condition, discarded furniture, mattresses, packing crates, planks, egg crates, milk boxes snitched from the front of grocery stores, barriers from street excavations. All of it was stored down the cellarways before tenements, piled almost to sidewalk level, the tolerant Irish janitors looking the other way — A fever of collection seized the juvenile and the half-grown. Ira too was infected: he who protested so vociferously when Mom pleaded with him to provide her with a little kindling from broken fruit boxes or other scraps of wood, the way other kids did on the street, so she could build a bed of fire to ignite the coal poured on top of the kindling in the cast-iron kitchen stove. No. He refused.
“Shemevdik! Folentser!” Mom fumed: “Cowering shirker!”
Without effect. But now he was tireless in his enthusiasm to gather fuel, excelling his Irish peers. “They got a float! They got a float!” came the excited cry throughout the block — on the very afternoon of Election Day. “McIntyre an’ Kelly an’ dem — dey got an election float. Dey’re pulling it under de Cut!”
Danny Heffernan and Vito and Eddie and Ira and Davey and Maxie, and a half-dozen more sped to Park Avenue under the Cut, the railroad overpass. And just around the corner, they saw it: approaching from 120th Street, an electioneering dray, with its VOTE FOR JAMES LEAHY still on its oilcloth tent, being tugged by a swarm of kids, and half-grown louts too, toward 119th Street. The newcomers threw themselves into the task of moving the vehicle along Park Avenue. “Steer it, O’Neill! Steer it, Madigan!” The wagon would make the biggest election night bonfire 119th Street had ever witnessed, the biggest in Harlem.
And then: “Cheese it! The cops!”
Bluecoats uptown, three of them, came charging down upon the culprits. Dropping the shafts, letting go of the spokes of the wheels, everyone took flight. In an instant the slowly moving vehicle came to rest, abandoned and forlorn in the gray afternoon light in front of a pillar of the overpass. The cops pursued. Yelling, the juvenile pranksters scattered in all directions. The police hurled their truncheons after them; police clubs bounced on the pavement, rang on the asphalt, bounding after the scampering urchins in malevolent pursuit. Delirious with escapade, Ira raced into his hallway, and up the stairs. Panting, he sat down in the kitchen: “Ooh, the policemen threw their clubs!” he announced.
“At whom?” Mom was blanching cabbage leaves on the oilcloth-covered washtub work surface. “You’re gasping for breath. What is it?”
“We were pulling one of those big wagons to burn in the street tonight. Election night.”
“Oy, gevald! To burn it? A whole wagon? This too I need for you to learn. Oy, veh iz mir! No wonder the police threw their clubs at you!”