Ira’s mind went blank. Ecclesias; never to have known seventy more years. Never to have known M. Whom would she have known, or loved? All would have been changed. . as howling in terror he hurtled down into the cellar.
What a dub he was playing ball (and was struck in the eye once passing 117th Street, walking home from Baba’s); sat on the curb sobbing, while the owner of the baseball crept up, grabbed it where it had rolled near Ira, and ran. The kindly Jewish housewife asking: “What is it?” And uttering curses at the players — who had by now disappeared. And Ira sobbing as he sat on the curbstone at the corner of 117th and Park Avenue.
Baseball. The very thing he was worst at: A dub, a ham, he couldn’t catch, he couldn’t hit, he couldn’t run: He was the last man chosen in the toss-up — in baseball, in handball, in boxball — chosen after everyone else, if another player was still needed. He was scarcely chosen; he was included with a reluctant groan. Apt at no sport, except touch football (the ball was so large, had to be caught so differently — with arms and body, not hands — and he learned to punt exceptionally well), and swimming — he was at home in the water. But at nothing else was he apt; neither at tops nor at marbles nor at flipping checkers. In the spring when he was in 4A in school, the teacher took him to the playground in Mt. Morris Park, and each one took hold of a long ribbon, and circled the Maypole, singing. The strangeness, the innocence would never wear off. And he rubbed plum pits on the rough granite curbstones in midsummer to make a whistle, after he dug out the seed, the bitter seed. But there was something not usual about the way Ira stayed close to Mom on the stoop in midsummer, even learned to tat on a handkerchief between wooden hoops, the way Mom did. She laughed at him before the neighbors, apologetically. What a marvelous green pool of light filled the western sky one evening after a shower. He would never see the like again, emerald, emerald rare to gaze at in wonder. Kids sneaked into the movies (he could still see the Levine kid caught and roundly cuffed by the movie-manager in front of the theater). Mom took him to a vaudeville show once, of which she understood only a little: the jugglers and the tap dancers. And the Jewish Hawaiians, their grass kilts swaying to the plink of ukuleles as they sang:
“Tocka hula, wickie doolah, Moishe, lai mir finif toolah. I’ll give it beck to you in a day or two. I’ll go to the benk; Sollst khoppen a krenck. Uhmein!”
Unfortunately, Ira was so regaled by the absurdity of the song — Moishe, lai mir finif toolah, meant, “Moses, lend me five dollars”—that he moved his head abruptly — and struck Mom in the nose. She slapped him involuntarily. .
If you went to the movies, alone and on Saturday, it was better to go there with three cents, and wait outside for a partner with two cents (that kind of ratio was more conducive to successful admission than the other way round); and ask an adult who was about to go in, “Mister, will you take us in?” Two for a nickel on Saturday morning was kids’ price. . And once inside, you could see the roly-poly man — was his name Bunny? — Ira never thought him very funny (who some years later was convicted of involuntary homicide in the death of a female guest at some scandalous Hollywood orgy, rupturing her vagina into which he had crammed cracked ice). Nor that lugubrious, downtrodden character, Musty Suffer. But oh, when Chaplin came on the screen, what rib-cracking laughter in those early two-reel films! And how desolate one felt too, after coming out of a movie with Davey and Maxie, who had somehow scraped a nickel together (perhaps their father had won at cards, perhaps there was a little more to spare after the baby died), who insisted on watching the features and the shorts over and over again, to come out into the real world, the real afternoon sunlight filtering through the El on Third Avenue where the movie was, how forlorn one felt, jaded, wasted in spirit. He would never do that again.
They sneaked into the subway, again he and Davey and Maxie, and a couple of Irish kids, and because the others made such a nuisance of themselves, scurrying about and jumping up to hang on the straps, the trainman put them off at the last stop, Bronx Park at 180th Street. Far, far from home. The others giggled nervously, or sat sheepishly on the benches of the platform. Far away from home, from Mama, Mama. He began to blubber: “I wanna go home! I wanna go home! My mama’s waiting!”
It was too much for one of the station guards. “Now, get on there, and see you behave yerselves.”
“Thanks, Mister! Thanks! Thanks!” Ira was rapturous with gratitude.
And he did behave himself (as he had before, self-conscious and constrained), but not the others: they tore about the train as they had previously. And they teased him: “Crybaby. Crybaby. I want my mama.”
“Yeah, but I–I was the one who made the man let you back on the train!” Ira defended himself. And for the remainder of the return trip, he separated himself from the rest, sat by himself, refused to recognize the others.
Mom gave him a nickel when he was promoted to 5A, and the Irish kid he had once fought and lost to that first time, McGowan, grown taller, but still with the same dripping front teeth, sat beside Ira in the backyard at 114 East, waiting for Ira to decide how the nickel was to be spent. Whether they should spend it in the untidy little candy store next to Biolov’s, owned by the slow-moving, old, old Jewish couple, patiently attending to the Irish kids: “Gimme t’ree o’ dese, two o’ dem, four o’ dem — no, gimme four more o’de udders.” Ah, the euphoria of sitting in the shade of a wooden fence in the backyard at the end of school! He was promoted, with B B B on his report card, and Mom’s blessing in heart. He was promoted, with a nickel in his pocket, and an Irish friend beside him, who said yes to whatever he said, but didn’t understand, his mind elsewhere, maybe couldn’t understand that delicacy of mood, the brief precious bliss of lounging in the backyard amid the golden fences at the beginning of summer.
It should have gone into a novel, several novels perhaps, written in early manhood, after his first — and only — work of fiction. There should have followed novels written in the maturity gained by that first novel.
— Well, salvage whatever you can, threadbare mementos glimmering in recollection.
In part for reasons of health (his lungs were affected, Mom hinted), in part because of his socialist convictions, Uncle Louie lived on a farm in Stelton, New Jersey. And he once took his adoring pretend-nephew there. After they got off the train, Ira rode on the handlebars of Uncle Louie’s bicycle the rest of the way to the small farm. And how wretchedly he had behaved there: He had fought with Uncle Louie’s two sons, teased Rosie, Uncle Louie’s daughter, mimicked her when she was practicing on her cardboard dummy piano keyboard. And when Auntie Sarah scolded him for almost drowning a duckling in a pan of water — and ducking its head under, too — he had blubbered loudly: “I wanna go home!” (What a nasty brat he was; no wonder only Mom could abide him.)
He stole a nickel from Baba — he had noted that she kept her pocketbook in the second drawer of the bureau — which she kept locked. But above the second drawer, the top drawer was left unlocked. How clever of him to pull the top drawer all the way out and get at her pocketbook. Even Zaida acknowledged, after he had chastised his grandson, that he was an ingenious little rascal.
He threw dice in the shade under the Cut once, rolling the tiny dice to the concrete base of one of the urine-malodorous, cross-braced pillars that held up the railroad overpass. It was the only time he ever had any luck gambling, throwing six or seven — or eight! — consecutive passes. Had he been a seasoned gambler like Davey or Maxie, he would have cleaned up; instead, he kept drawing off his winnings after each pass — to the angry disgust of the Irish kids who faded him: What the hell was he afraid of, with a run of luck like that? But he was. So he won only a dozen pennies. (With five of which he bought a hot dog and sauerkraut on a roll from the itinerant Italian hot dog vendor. And conscious of Davey and Maxie, who had been too broke to play and were now watching him with their bright brown eyes, as alertly and mutely as two hungry dogs ready to snap up any morsel, Ira impulsively tendered Davey the last of the tidbit. It was marvelous to watch Davey take a nip of the tiny morsel, and without pause, but with the same sweep that he received the morsel, hand the even tinier remainder to his kid brother.)