And then came the dread last hours of Moe’s furlough, the dread time when everyone except Baba knew, even Ira, and everyone had been enjoined not to betray, not to hint, that in a matter of days Moe’s division would be sent overseas — across the Atlantic where the U-boats lurked — to France, to the battlefield. The secret was well kept, the conspiracy of silence remained intact, even till the last moment: Cheerfully, Moe embraced everyone, once more hugged his weeping, clinging mother, her eyes squeezed shut, her hands groping for his chevrons. He told Max and Harry to look after her, and with Zaida and Saul, left the house. The whole family was crammed into the two front windows, waving and calling; and Moe, with upraised arm, kept returning their farewells, until at Madison Avenue, the trio rounded the corner and were out of view. A few feet behind them, scarcely noticed, the eleven-year-old Ira trailed.
A clear, temperate summer day. 1917. Pedestrians seemed more numerous on Madison Avenue, lolling at the fronts of houses or sauntering unconcernedly along. Ahead of Ira, Moe and his two escorts, Saul and Zaida, reached the corner of 116th Street and Madison, crossed to the northwest corner, and wheeled west toward Fifth Avenue. They crossed Fifth Avenue. Ahead of them in the middle of the very long block between Fifth Avenue and Lenox was the marshaling yard, the open court of P.S. 86, the very large gray-stone public school building. Buses were already parked in front of it, buses full or part full of uniformed men. An empty bus, another and still another lumbered up beside the others and double-parked. At the sight of them, Zaida and Saul, who hadn’t said a word all this time but walked as in a daze, suddenly burst out into frenzied lamentations. Howling in despair, each one hung onto Moe’s arm. And Moe, stalwart, the more so with his weeks of training, his countenance under his khaki campaign hat ruddy with effort, dragged them along like a tug between two barges. When they saw it was futile to try and hinder him, each let go. Each abandoned himself to extremity of grief: Zaida tore at his beard, tore out bunches of whiskers, wailing at the top of his voice. Saul snatched at his hair, flung himself about, screaming hysterically. Passersby stopped to watch, automobiles slowed down, people leaned out of windows.
At the very edge of the curb, Moe halted. And still filial and forebearing, “I pray you, Father, spare me,” he said. “Let me be. If not, and you too, Saul, go no further. It’s bad enough I’m a soldier. I wear a uniform. Don’t add to my trials.”
They quieted down, lapsed into suppressed groans. Scared, cringing with embarrassment, near tears, Ira watched them near the marshaling yard mingle with other servicemen and their kin walking toward the buses.
“Will yez look at them Jews,” said the cop on duty to a hanger-on beside him in front of a store, a beefy, blue-coated cop talking to a lean civilian: “Didjez ever see the loik? Ye’d think the guy was dead already.”
IX
So Moe went off to the war across the ocean. For awhile, Baba believed her family’s reiterated fabrication that Moe was still in Camp Yaphank in New Jersey; but then, as the weeks passed, and she saw no sign of him, and though the letters were full of good cheer, she recognized the letter paper was European and asked to see the envelopes. They were never shown her and she saw through the deception. “‘How long will you cajole me with falsehoods?’” Mom told Ira that Baba chided her. “‘You are all frauds. As if I didn’t know where the fighting and the killing were taking place.’” Finally Zaida told her the truth: Moe was in France.
To everyone’s surprise, Baba took the news with strange fortitude. “With God’s help and those stripes on his arms, my Moishe will live,” she said. Nevertheless she brooded a great deal, grew gaunt and worn. She shopped, she went about her household tasks, and though it no longer took a tirade on Zaida’s part to make her eat, she seemed to fade; she seemed to fade waiting. . waiting from letter to letter from her son, but always as if vitality were slowly draining away. Thus the weeks and months of a distant war went by. Aunt Mamie, so buxom, so brash, offered the doughboys who did guard duty under the Grand Central overpass fresh Jewish pastry and hot, sugary café au lait in her enameled milk-bucket with the narrow neck. And Mom, unreticent and frank in her immense pity, would say in barely intelligible English to some young soldier patrolling the viaduct: “You heff such beautiful, strung lecks now. Gott shuld helf you’ll heff them when you come beck.”
And the young American lad would laugh: “Aw, don’t worry, Mom. We’ll be O.K.”
Oh, the terrible years, who can bear them, Ecclesias?
That August afternoon in 1914, when he had been sent into the heat-shimmering street to buy the “Wuxtra” the two vendors cried, Ira was now old enough to connect in his own mind as links, the one with the other, two isolated events, no longer isolated, but as if one was precursor to the other, even if the other came so late you almost forgot the first: a warm Yiddish newspaper bought in the street, and Moe in khaki off to war, off to France — and Saul howling and Zaida pulling out handfuls of beard. . And the cop on the corner sneering to a bystander, “Will yez look at them Jews? Ye’d think the guy was dead already.” Ira had the meaning within him, brooding on it, though he couldn’t tell what it was. He could only think of it just so far: that he contained both episodes in feeling, and they were fused together in his mind but that was all. Other things were fringes to that same indelible fusion: Moe sent letters from France, letters and souvenirs to the nephew he was so fond of, so much more fond of than was Pop — fond of him like Mom almost: brass artillery shell casings, engraved and stippled, a pair of French opera glasses, three German iron crosses. .
Winter came on, and after the return to school from the Christmas holidays, winter brought a new date to write on top of composition papers: 1918. 1918. History swirled about him in little spindrifts. Debs was in jail. IWW meant “I Won’t Work.” Draft dodgers were cowards. Cartoons in the newspapers showed that mosquitoes had bigger souls than profiteers. Bolsheviks wore bristling whiskers and carried round bombs with ignited fuses.
Ira brought the three iron crosses to school to his 6B teacher, Miss Ackley. Miss Ackley was known as the most formidable teacher in the whole school. She was large of body and raucous of voice: “Oh, the audacity! The audacity of this boy!” she would exclaim, while she administered punishment by gripping the culprit’s cheeks between thumb and strong fingers until he yelped with pain. (Audacity, Ira took note, in the midst of chastisement: What a beautiful new word!) Miss Ackley screamed in horror when Ira inventively misinformed her that his uncle had taken the iron crosses from the cadavers of German soldiers on the battlefields of France.
“Take them away!” She seemed close to fainting. “Take them away!”
He was getting even with her, the sudden, expanding buoyancy of his mind told him. Intuitively, he had lied just right, just where it would have the most effect. She had gripped his jaws at least a half-dozen times. Mostly because he had been guilty of disorderly conduct, giggling during penmanship exercises. He couldn’t make Palmer ovals. He tried, but they always changed shape and course and jumped wildly outside their boundaries of blue lines until they looked like smoke blowing in the wind; and he dipped his penpoint too deeply into the inkwell on the desk, so the up-and-down line exercises merged into blotted walls. Shlemiel, as Pop said: A shlemiel in everything. And shlemiels were punished. So Ira grinned to himself, when Miss Ackley nearly fainted at the sight of the iron crosses, because of a lie he made up about dead German soldiers stretched out on the battlefield, and Moe plucking iron crosses off their chests. Maybe he did. .