Entrusted into each pupil’s safekeeping when he (or she) “graduated” from P.S. 103, the elementary school on 119th Street and Madison Avenue, was his “blue record card.” On it was recorded his scholastic performance up to and including the completion of his sixth year of school. After that, he no longer attended elementary school; he attended grammar school. Ira was directed to take his blue record card to P.S. 84, the grammar school that extended from 127th to 128th Street near Madison Avenue, and there present himself, together with his blue record card, to one of the teachers in charge of admitting the new pupils. It was an all-boys school, and each boy, his blue record card in hand, stood in one of several lines before the stout oak lunch tables at which sat a teacher registering the newcomers.
It was a February day, the first week in February, 1918. In another few days he would be twelve years of age. And farewell to childhood. .
X
You keep a battery of such pretty signs on the top of your keyboard, Ecclesias. Or should I say, array?! @ # $ % ^ & () — +. . I am seventy-nine years old. In one way, I look forward to dying; in another I am filled with too great a sense of gratitude to M to yield, even in the mind, to the wish of having my life come to an end. Other than that, what’s the use of living? Or what’s the difference? I ring changes on the same theme, the same old theme. I wonder if “the branch that might have grown full straight,” of which Kit Marlowe speaks, retains forever within it a sense of that lost straightness, lost rectitude. Let’s imagine my father, a Zionist. In a few months, the Balfour Declaration will be published. Let’s away to Israel, let’s away to a kibbutz. I would know chiefly hard work, rigor, danger, but also kinship, precious kinship, dignity. But alas, I wouldn’t have known M—
— You’re back on the same treadmill, my friend, or the same roller-bearing race — call it what you wilclass="underline" ball-race. Fate or history devised it. But more to the point, it was only because you could compel yourself beyond it, and thanks to M, you attained a measure of growth, something approaching maturity, an approximate maturity, a passable facsimile. Or to put it another way, for almost five decades you were well-nigh immobilized by your inability to go beyond childhood. Isn’t that true?
Well, my liege. .
The multipurpose lunchroom, drab, indoor-playground-basement where everyone waited his turn to be registered was steamy and rank that winter’s day, a brumous day—
— Proceed. That isn’t the crisis.
And what shall I do when I come to it?
— Do you remember the shaft that Siegfried threw, the unseen Brunhilde aiding? And that leap?
That quantum leap? Yes.
— Have faith in an existential universe, in the dialectic of five decades.
I’d rather, Ecclesias, my friend, have taken that blue record card and hidden or destroyed it. Never attended P.S. 84 at all. Who would have known? Mom and Pop. But otherwise? What primitive trust institutions had those days. Give the juvenile his blue record card to convey from school to school. What control was there? Or what verifying that the pupil had really presented himself and been enrolled in the school to which he had been transferred? Oh, probably there was a list of pupils, their names separately transmitted. But if not, then to hell with the damned card. Chuck it in a trash can in front of a tenement and disappear. Do you remember Kelsey who ran away from home at the age of twelve?
— Yes, good Jewish boys don’t run away from home at twelve. And Mama’s good Jewish boy at that. You would never have known M, and never have striven for and achieved, if only partially, redemption—
Oh, that sounds so jeezly Miltonic—
— Rebirth then, renewal, rehabilitation.
I might not have needed it.
Steamy and rank, the stagnant air of the dreary basement playground was fraught with the exhalation of the slate urinals in the toilets at one end. In the low ceiling, wire cages protected nests of electric lights. Underfoot, muddy slush splotched the dark concrete floors. The small, barred windows looked out on a narrow play-yard on one side, and the street on the other. Against the darkly wainscoted walls stretched rows of heavy, scarred wooden benches. On one of these benches, adjacent to the line in which Ira stood waiting his turn, sat a trio of Irish kids, bigger than kids, adolescents; their size, their air of assurance marked them as eighth graders. “Let’s see your record card,” said one — in a tone that brooked no refusal.
Docile, though hesitant, Ira handed over his blue record card. They examined it a moment, looked around, then all three spat on it. One threw it on the floor, and the others ground the card underfoot. In another second, with an eye on the teacher at the desk, they darted out of the side door into the street.
. . Once again it came to Ira, as he sat recording the incident: how sad. How sad he hadn’t fought every step of the way — like Greeny, even if he lost a tooth, an eye, was stabbed, even if he lost his life — like that kid in the slums whom the toughs in the block called a sissy for wearing a wristwatch: Soldiers had begun to wear them in the trenches. If he had to be wrested from the East Side, if it was his fate to have been pried out of protective homogeneity, then to have fought, and the very attitude, the toughening and belligerence, would have been manifest, would have deterred further abuse, victimization — Oh, hell, he hold himself, paused to reflect: Probably that was the reason why he had chosen Bill Loem for the central character of his second and aborted noveclass="underline" Bill fought. And he, the novelist, had gone overboard because of that, romanticized his fictional character, glorified his belligerence, interpreting it as socialist militance. Everything interwove, as better minds than his had discovered long, long ago. But to try to follow them was vain: One could not follow into the past; one could only be edified, and seek to apply the principle. And had he been able to, he wouldn’t be sitting here writing about his failure to do so. Alas. Docile dolt, already wearing steel-framed eyeglasses.
“What’s this?” The teacher at the table frowned when Ira presented his blue record card. The teacher was Mr. Lennard, Ira was to learn later, a history teacher, a man with lips full to puffiness, whose blue eyes stared up at Ira through a pince-nez.
“Some big boys grabbed it and spit on it and stood on it,” Ira quailed.
“Which ones?”
“They ran away.”
His frown mingled resignation with annoyance. “You’ll have to help me out then. Is that Tysmen where it’s smeared — what? Austria-Hungary.”
“Tysmenitz,” Ira said. “That’s how my father says it. With a ‘z’ near the end.”
“With a ‘z’ near the end.” Mr. Lennard’s gold-nibbed fountain pen formed new letters on top of the smudged-over ones. “And you were born — what day?”