Authors: Herman Wouk
The shot went home; the teacher colored a little. Perhaps pretty Diana Vernon was herself not quite happy about becoming Mrs. Gorkin. The name still rang strangely in the bride's ears.
“Herbie,” said the teacher with an uncomfortable smile, “even though I'm Mrs. Gorkin now, we're still friends, aren't we?”
(The injured male may be eleven or fifty; the approach of the injuring female does not vary.)
“Sure,” said Herbie dolefully. He hitched up his sagging gray kneepants.
“Someday,” said Mrs. Gorkin, “I hope you will meet Morti—that is, Mr. Gorkin. He's assistant principal at Public School Seventy-five. I know he'd like you. He admires clever young men.”
Herbie saw through the compliment with contempt. “Sure,” he said again.
The erstwhile Diana Vernon said, “Come closer, Herbie.” The boy reluctantly obeyed, sidling along the edge of the desk, his hand resting on top. The teacher put her hand on his. He jerked it away.
“When you are as old as I am, Herbie,” said Diana Gorkin softly, “you will be a handsomer man than my husband, and you will marry a finer woman than I am, and I hope you'll remember to bring her back here and let me meet her, but I doubt that you will.”
This speech had no meaning at all for Herbie, who knew perfectly well that he would never be as old as a teacher. “Sure,” he said once more. Mrs. Gorkin unwrapped a sandwich, and acknowledged defeat by a curt dismissal. The boy retreated to his desk, snatched his lunch bag, and scurried from the classroom.
Once outside, he stopped, assumed a dignified air, and pinned around his right arm a yellow strip of flannel decorated with three silver stars. He then sauntered along the deserted corridor to the boys' staircase. An ordinary lad at this hour was required by law to go without delay to the lunchroom or playground, under pain of receiving a purple slip for loitering. But Herbert could choose, in all the huge building, a private place for his noonday meal.
Herbert, you see, was one of those privileged beings of the school world, a head monitor. He was captain of the Social Service Squad. This was not at all the same thing as the dread Police Squad, of course, whose members stood at gates, doorways, and turns in corridors, shouting, “Double up! Hurry up! No talking!” The police could pounce on offenders with the fearsome green slips which meant wrath from on high, but Herbie's Social Service Squad had no power of arrest. Its members were assigned to various areas of the school, and their duties were simply to keep the building and yards clean. So the squad had irreverently been dubbed “the Garbage Gang” by the members of the police, who never tired of pointing the contrast between the might in their red armbands and the feeble symbolism of the yellow armbands of Herbie's squad.
Since the police were recruited from the tallest, huskiest students, Herbert had despaired of gaining the red band, and had therefore worked his way to the top of the Social Service Squad. He figured that if one was not destined for the proud life of a wolf, it was still better to be a dog than one of the helpless sheep. This proved perfectly sound. As captain of his squad he could rove everywhere on the pretense of inspection. He could come late and walk unchallenged through any gate he chose. All at once he had stopped accumulating the orange slips for tardiness which had plagued his days since kindergarten. His monthly conduct mark raised itself above B-minus for the first time in his career. Let the ignoramuses rave at him with their taunts of “Garbage King!” Herbie had found one of the great secrets of life, the immunity from public law that comes of being a public official, and he was fully enjoying the fruits of his discovery.
He skipped down the stairs, which echoed with metallic hollowness, to the third floor. Coming upon the brown leather-covered, brass-studded door of the auditorium, he decided that the big empty hall suited his melancholy mood. He pushed the door open, walked across the rear of the hall to one of the broad windows, curled up on a sill in the sunshine, and opened his bag of lunch with a sigh as nearly expressive of contentment as a broken heart would permit.
At this moment, through the small, high window of the door leading to the girls' staircase, he caught a glimpse of red curly hair gleaming in the sunlight. Craning his neck, he saw that it belonged to a well-dressed, pretty girl about eleven years old.
I
n the philosophy of Herbie Bookbinder there was a division in the concept, Girls.
As a species of the genus Mankind he regarded girls as low in the scale, a botched job. They played silly games; they had unpleasant shrill voices, they giggled; they pretended to be holy; they were in an everlasting conspiracy against normal human beings (boys of eleven); they wore queer clothes; and they were sly. He regarded most of these squeaky beings with plain scorn.
It was nevertheless part of the mystery of life that from time to time there came to Herbie's view a sublime creation which could only be classified as a girl, since she would have the outside features such as long hair, a dress, and a high voice. But she would be as different from girls as the sun is from a penny candle. One of these angels appeared every year or so. There had been Rosalind Sarnoff, of the black hair and bright smile, in the second grade. Sadie Benz, always dressed in billowy white, in the fourth. Blond Madeline Costigan, who could throw a ball like a boy, in the fifth. And two girls who had lived in his neighborhood, known only as Mildred and Frances respectively, who had reduced his life to ashes twice by moving to other parts of the Bronx.
The radiance of such a divinity could come to surround an ordinary girl. Madeline Costigan had sat beside him in Miss O'Grady's class for two months, undistinguished from the rest of the chirruping females. Then one afternoon they had both been kept after school for tardiness. And while they were beating out erasers together, a grand chord had sounded in Herbert's breast, he had seen the glory envelop Madeline like the dawn, and lo, he was her slave. Equally strangely the spell could die away, as it had in the case of Sadie Benz, leaving a commonplace girl whom Herbie despised. But this was not the rule. Most of these super-beings had been removed from Herbie by the forces of time and change. Diana Vernon had succeeded Madeline Costigan, the first adult in the golden procession.
The little stranger on the other side of the auditorium door who sat on the stairs facing away from him, placidly munching a sandwich, had hair of the same hue as Mrs. Gorkin's, and this may have been the reason Herbert's heart bounded when he first saw her. But a prolonged look persuaded him that, on her own merits, she was a candidate for the vacant office. Her starched, ruffled blue frock, her new, shiny, patent-leather shoes, her red cloth coat with its gray furry collar, her very clean knees and hands, and the carefully arranged ringlets of her hair all suggested non-squeaky loveliness. At the moment of his so deciding, it chanced that she turned her head and met his look. Her large hazel eyes widened in surprise, and at once there was no further question of candidacy. She was elected.
It now became obligatory upon Herbert to pretend that she did not exist. He looked out of the window and began to make believe that an extremely exciting and unusual event was taking place in the girls' playground below—just what, he was not sure, but it called for him to clap his palm to the side of his face, shake his head from side to side, and exclaim very loudly, “Gee whiz! Gosh! Never saw anything like
that
!” (By this time the imaginary sight had started to take shape as a teacher lying in a pool of blood, her head split open, after a jump from the roof.) He was compelled to run, first down the side aisle of the auditorium to look out of the other windows, and then up the aisle again and through the leather door at the rear, feigning amazement at the discovery of the girl on the stairs. She was seated busily reading a geography book upside down, having snatched it after watching all his pantomime up to the point when she saw he intended to come through the door.
After enacting an intensity of surprise at the sight of the girl that would have sufficed had he come upon a unicorn, Herbert recovered himself and said sternly, “What are you doing here?”
“Who wants to know?” said the girl, putting aside the book.
“Me, that's who.”
“Who's me?”
“Me is me,” said Herbert, pointing to his three-starred yellow armband.
“Huh! Garbage gang,” said the girl. Turning her back on him, she drew an apple out of a gleaming new tin lunch box and began to eat it with exaggerated nonchalance, her eyebrows raised and her gaze directed out at the smiling day.
“Maybe you'd like to come down to Mr. Gauss's office with me,” said Herbie fiercely.
Mr. Julius Gauss was the principal, a heavy, round-headed gentleman seen by the children only at special assemblies, where he read psalms in a gloomy singsong and gave endless speeches which nobody understood, but which seemed in favor of George Washington, America, and certain disgusting behavior found only in mollycoddles. He was regarded by the children as the most frightful thing outside the storybooks, a view which the teachers encouraged and which several of them seemed to share.
“And stop eating,” added Herbie, “when you're talking to a head monitor.”
Red Locks quailed and put down the apple, but she tried to brave it out. “You can't make me go down there,” she said. (It was always “down” to Mr. Gauss's office, possibly because of the general analogy to infernal regions.)
“Can't I?” said Herbert. “Can't I? It so happens that as
captain
of the Social Service Squad I have to see Mr. Gauss every Thursday, which is today, and make my report to him. And anyone who I tell to come with me has to come. But you can
try
not coming—oh, sure, you can
try.
I don't think you would try it more than
once,
but you can
try.
”
The contents of this speech, excepting Herbert's rank, were a lie. But Herbert had not learned yet to draw the line between the facts devised by his powerful imagination and the less vivid facts existing in nature, and while he spoke he fully believed what he was saying.
“Anyway,” said the girl, “he wouldn't do anything to me even if you did bring me down there, because I'm going to his camp this summer.”
“His camp?” Herbie made the mistake of lapsing from his positive tone.
“Yes, his camp, smartie,” sneered the girl. “I thought you knew everything. Camp Manitou, in the Berkshires. You just try bringing one of his campers down to him. He'll just demote you off your old garbage gang.”
“He will not.”
“He will so.”
“He will not,” said Herbie, “because I'm going to his old camp myself.”
This was somewhat too newly minted a fact, even for the credulity of a small girl. “You're a liar,” said she promptly.
“You mean you are,” said Herbert, with no great logic, but with a natural grasp of the art of controversy.
“I'll bet you a dime I'm going to his camp,” said the girl, falling into the trap and taking the defensive.
“I'll bet you a dollar I am,” said Herbert.
“I'll bet you ten dollars you're not.”
“I'll bet you a thousand dollars
you're
not.”
“I'll bet you a million dollars.”
“I'll bet you a
billion
dollars.”
The girl, unable to think quickly of the next order of magnitude, said with scorn, “Where are you gonna get a billion dollars?”
“Same place you'll get a million,” retorted Herbie.
“I can get a million dollars from my father if I want to,” said Red Locks, vexed at being continually on the defensive, though sensing she was in the right. “He's the biggest lawyer in Bronx County.”
“That's nothing,” said Herbert. “My father owns the biggest ice plant in America.” (He was manager of a small ice plant in the Bronx.)
“My father is richer than your father.”
“My father could buy your father like an ice-cream cone.”
“He could not,” said the girl hotly.
“My father even has a way bigger lawyer for his ice plant than your father.” Herbie speedily searched his memory, reviewing conversations of his parents. “My father's lawyer is Louis Glass.”
The girl uttered a triumphant little shriek. “Ha, ha, smartie!” she cried, jumping up and dancing a step or two. “My father
is
Louis Glass.”
This astounding stroke left Herbie with no available fact, real or improvised, for a counterblow. He was reduced to a weak, “He is not, either.”
“Is too!” shouted the girl, her eyes sparkling. “Here, if you're so clever, here's my name on my books—Lucille Glass.”
Herbert deigned to inspect the notebook offered for his view, with the large childish inscription, “Lucille Marjorie Glass, 6B-3.”
“You should of told me so right away,” he said magnanimously. “You can stay here, as long as your father is Louis Glass. 6B-3, huh? I'm in 7B-1. First on the honor roll.”
“I'm third on the honor roll,” said Lucille, yielding at last the deference due an upperclassman, a head monitor, and a mental giant.
With this advance in their relationship they fell silent, and became aware of being alone together on the small landing. The gay voices of the girls playing in the yard came faintly to them through the closed window. Herbie and Lucille self-consciously turned and watched the darting, frisking little figures for a while.