“Yeh! Bong! Bong! Bong! The clubs jumped in the air after us.” Ira giggled suddenly. “We ran. Everybody ran.”
“They could have split your head. Your father is right: You’ll be ruined by these wild Irish. They’ll bring you upstairs with a broken head. You can’t find good Jewish boys to play with?”
“Where’m I going to find them? There’s Davey and there’s Maxie, and all they like is gambling.”
“If you’d go to cheder, you’d find them.”
“And if they live on 114th Street, or on 115th Street? Or by Fifth Avenue?”
“Go there. Play there.”
“So why don’t you live there!”
“I’ll show you why.” She waved her hand, but her eyes were worried. “You do wrong; you sin: What can I do if he wants to live here? You mock at my sorrows.”
“Yeah? You didn’t want to live here? You didn’t want to move to Harlem? To Baba, to Zaida? We don’t even see them. Who wanted to live in the front? You.”
“You’re becoming like a stone,” she said.
Even without the election float, the bonfire on election night was spectacular. The blaze raged in the middle of the block, and sparks flew as high as the six-story roofs, while at street level the flames luridly mirrored themselves in grocery-store and tailor-shop glass fronts. The heat was felt yards away, and most of the tenement occupants, Mom and Pop included, leaned out of their windows watching the display — until the firemen arrived. They scattered the blazing debris with a powerful stream from the hose which they had connected beforehand to the hydrant. And suddenly the street darkened. A Sanitation Department truck rolled into the street the next afternoon. Men shoveled up the charred and still-dripping litter into the vehicle. The odor of molten tar filled the street. Ira and the other kids watched the ruined area of asphalt being patched: the laborers tamping the macadam with their heavy implements, the jumbo steamroller traveling and returning. .
That was seventy years ago, Ira reflected: That was more than seventy years ago. My God! Who’s alive? Yonnie True, Eddie, Mario, Vito, the barber’s two sons, Petey Hunt? As if he had suddenly dislodged them, the images came tumbling into mind: The pipes, the copper-lined box over the flush toilet in the hall froze during a cold snap, and thawing again, torrents of water cascaded down. “A tub! A flood! The janitor!” Mom rushed from the kitchen to the hallway toilet and back. “Gevald! Run, Ira! The goya! The janitor!”. .
Because of the falling-out between his parents and Mom’s kin, he could no longer avail himself of the hot water and bathtub in Baba’s house (for a short time Mamie too was included in Pop’s blanket ill-will). How black grew the grime encrusting his feet, unwashed the whole winter long, so black, the crust that coated his ankles was something to admire, like a dark peel — to pare off, to part with almost regretfully, as he did in Baba’s bathtub in the spring when reconciliation between families finally took place. “What were your happiest years in America?” he once asked Mom, fully expecting her answer would be the East Side, corresponding to his own sense of well-being, his sense of belonging.
But no: “Those first years in Harlem were my happiest years,” Mom replied: “When Baba was still alive, and all my kinfolk lived close by.”
“Those were?”
“Yes.”
Sitting in the rocking chair in Baba’s front room, he would croon mindless tunes to himself, as the Sabbath drew to an end, as the Sabbath twilight grew, before the turning on of lights, while the women chatted endlessly, Mom and her three sisters and Baba.
And again, because it was Saturday night, and Mom was loathe to tear herself away, and Pop was working an “extra,” as he called his supernumerary waiting at tables at a banquet, Mom would send Ira out to the Hebrew National Delicatessen on 116th Street and Madison where he bought two kosher frankforts (though not kosher enough for Zaida, who still swallowed saliva, while eschewing), a quarter of slant-sliced, crisp white bread, a paper-twist of mustard. Swiftly returned upstairs, the Sabbath over, he waited impatiently for Mom to boil the frankforts. And so ravenously did Ira bolt down his food, a bit of frankfort with a mouthful of scarcely masticated bread, that more than once he heaved up the whole mess into Baba’s flush toilet — and came out wailing at the loss of his most prized victuals. “What can I do,” Mom laughed at him, “if you eat like a wild animal?”
That was Ira, the kid in midwinter, with the drear night coming on, swinging his tin can by a loop of wire, while the flames from slivers of wood, roasting the small spud inside that Mom had given him, spurted through the vents punched in the bottom. As through a dark medium, between stone stoop and curb, bundled-up figures hurried home from work, hurried past him through the winter night, and he, for once carefree, whirled his roasting spud in front of the house — until Mom called him in her contralto voice from the window that it was time he came upstairs for supper. . They were like strata, these new impressions, goyish impressions, strata built up by goyish ways and diversions drifting down over memories of 9th Street and the East Side: Halloween, when the Irish kids filled the feet of long black stockings with coal ashes (a few, a very few, with flour), stocking-slings that thudded cruelly against one’s back, printing a dusty, pale stamp of impact on jacket or mackinaw (if one didn’t wear them inside out, as some did to escape parental reproof). “Sliding ponds,” long, icy ribbons slicked out of snow to glide on, but a hazard to steel-shod horses, suddenly skating in mid-stride. Snow-forts on opposite sides of the street, and the wild melee and abandon of snowball fights, snowballs often with chunks of ice embedded in them.
IX
Lightning, sulphurous as pebbles rubbed together, burned far off in sweltering summer. The nice Gentile neighbor — who wasn’t Irish, and said wawtch for watch, and Wawrshington for Washington, lifted him up from the stoop stair to sit on the stone ledge that capped the sides of the stoop after the dented brass banister ended — was so surprised how wet and smelly his armpits were that she sniffed her hands twice with wrinkled nose, and exclaimed in dismay. And yes, that same stone ledge, where everyone did stunts by holding on while hanging upside down over the cellar a flight below — what a scare it gave him! The skinny ones could do it — safely — like Eddie, or like Weasel, after Eddie and his mother moved away.
But Ira weighed twenty pounds more than they did; and when he tried the stunt, the ledge tipped, the ledge tipped! Terrified, he flung his body back to the stoop. What would Mom have said had he and the ledge plunged down into the cellar? That might have been the end of him. Think of it: the end of him at nine years of age, plunging down into the cellar, holding onto the heavy stone ledge and screaming as he hurtled down. Benny Levinsky, whose big brother with the hook nose was a crook and was shot by a cop when he ran away after holding up a crap game, Benny fell off the roof of the treife butcher shop on Third Avenue, German butcher shop, where the beautiful fat sausages hung — the beautiful plump knockwursts and balonies. Oh, they made meat look so nice in a goyish butcher store — even Mom said so — with the bones of a roast raised like a crown and pot roast all neatly tied around with twine, and a turkey with breast pouting and enticing — not like a kosher butcher store where meat looked dead and a chicken hung from its hook in the show window as if it was sorry it looked so unappealing. Benny was trying to steal a salami, even though it was treife, but fell off the roof instead right on top of the butcher store awning. Wasn’t he lucky? All he got was a kick in the ass. So at nine, if Ira had fallen down the cellar, he would have been extinct.