City Boy (47 page)

“Guess I'll turn you loose in the lots,” Herbie said to the lizard. “I shouldn't of brought you here.”

The door of the bedroom was thrown open. Mr. Bookbinder stood in the doorway. At once the mother rose and placed herself between him and the boy.

“Where are the men?” she said.

“They've gone. Glass bought out Powers. We have a new partner.”

Mrs. Bookbinder was staggered by the development. “Glass!” she ejaculated.

“He was on the telephone fifteen minutes with his wife, explaining the proposition to her. Don't worry, he's a clever man. Thirty thousand for Powers' share! Leave it to a lawyer to smell a bargain.”

“And—and the blue paper?”

“Glass accepts it. He's going to draw it up in legal form. He's a gentleman, always was. Powers is out—finished.”

The mother pulled herself together and seized on the amazing news as a means to her end. “Well, so it all comes out fine! Congratulations, Jake! What are we waiting for? Let's all go out and celebrate!”

The father's expression changed. “This boy, too?” he said, in a tone that caused Herbie to cower.

“Why not? Look at this letter. He meant well, Papa, all the time. Hasn't he been punished enough, worrying himself sick?”

She held out the Creek Gang note to him. Mr. Bookbinder read it, crumpled it, and threw it into a corner.

“Leave me alone with him.”

“Papa, don't hit him too hard! He meant no harm.”

“Leave me alone with him.”

Herbie quavered from the bed, “Go ahead, leave us alone, Mom.”

“Papa, remember he's just a small boy. Remember!”

Reluctantly the mother left the room. Mr. Bookbinder closed the door and proceeded to give Herbie a tolerably warm licking. Starting with miscellaneous cuffs and clouts, he soon organized the task, sat on the bed, turned the boy over his knees, and drubbed his rear resoundingly and long. He said nothing during the operation. Herbie had resolved to “take it like a man,” but his resolution waned halfway through the spanking and he ended by taking it like a boy, with wall-shaking howls. Despite the mother's description of him as a small boy, he was pretty big for this sort of thing, and made a cumbersome figure, draped over his father's knees. Mr. Bookbinder managed well enough, however. Mrs. Bookbinder stood outside the door, trembling from head to foot and wincing each time she heard the whack that signaled another contact between palm and posterior. After perhaps two minutes she could bear no more. She burst into the room, wailing, “All right, all right! Must you murder him?”

“Nobody was ever spanked to death yet,” panted the father, but he brought the punishment to a close with a crescendo of thwacks. He rolled the yelling boy back on the bed with surprising gentleness, and walked out, saying, “He can get dressed now, if he wants.”

Herbie availed himself of this permission immediately. His mother slowed the dressing process by fussing with his clothes, trying to soften the effect of the licking, until the boy said impatiently, “Gosh, Mom, I ain't been crippled. I can still dress myself.” Then she was wounded by the ingratitude, and left him alone. She did not understand that her son was rather glad of the beating than otherwise. The guilt feeling had been dusted out of him. Without reasoning closely, he sensed that the reform-school threat was gone. He feared his father's sternness, but he had faith in his justice, and he knew that if prison had loomed Jacob Bookbinder would not have added a whaling to it. The smarting here and there on his anatomy was unpleasant, but it was a welcome substitute for five years behind bars. He cheered up quickly as he dressed.

He was sliding a brilliant yellow and red tie under his collar when he heard his father say in the next room, “Mom, let's eat at Golden's tonight.

“But, Papa, I have a roast.”

“You said yourself we ought to celebrate. I think you're right.”

A slight pause. Then his mother's voice, somewhat hesitant. “Her-bie, too?”

“Of course Herbie, too. We're not going to treat him like a criminal until he's twenty-one, are we?”

Herbie did a caper before the mirror, and sobered instantly as his father came into the room.

“What's taking you so long to dress?”

“I'm done now, Pa.” Herbie knotted his tie with blinding speed.

“Let's go for a walk.”

“Yes, Pa.” Herbie glanced around the room, and picked the lizard off the floor. “Can I drop this guy in the lots? It ain't right to keep him in no apartment.”

The father nodded. As his son followed him to the front door Mr. Bookbinder called, “Mom! Get Felicia and meet us at Golden's at six.”

“Fine, fine, fine!” Sounds of drawers sliding and closets opening punctuated each “Fine,” as Mrs. Bookbinder hurried to reorganize her costume for dining in public.

Father and son walked a block in silence along Homer Avenue toward the lots.

“Well,” said Jacob Bookbinder, as they crossed Cervantes Street, “what did you think of the licking?”

“I deserved it,” said Herbie humbly.

“Why?”

“'Cause I stole.”

“But you were going to leave that note that Mom showed me. Didn't that make it all right?”

“I thought it did, but it didn't.”

“Why not?”

They began to climb the steep, rough rocks of the lot. Herbie was still struggling with the question when they reached the top. The lot was full of dusty weeds that reached almost to his waist, with scattered patches of hardy autumn wildflowers, blue, yellow, and white. Rocks jutted above the vegetation. The boy gratefully sniffed the strong, sweetish smell of this familiar Bronx greenery. It was not as pretty as a field in the Berkshires, but it was home.

“I dunno, Pa. But the note didn't make it right.”

The lizard began wriggling in his palm, as though sensing the nearness of freedom. Herbie stooped and allowed it to run off his hand among the weeds. It was gone immediately.

“So long, Camp Manitou,” said Herbie.

“You probably have plenty of fun in these lots, Herbie,” said his father.

“Yeah. More fun than anyplace.”

The father took his hand and led him to a rock, where they both sat.

“In the old country I spent all my time in the fields when I was a boy. I loved them.”

Herbie tried to picture his father as a boy, but it was impossible. Jacob Bookbinder was as fixed in his present appearance, to the boy's mind, as George Washington in the Stuart portrait that hung in the classrooms at school.

The city noises swam up to them in this solitude, softened by distance.

“Tell me what was wrong with that letter, Herbie.”

“Well—I was doin' somethin' bad when I stole, see?”

“Yes.”

“And I was only
promising
' to do somethin' good later to make up for it.”

The father looked at him as though he were about to smile. It was the first time Herbie had seen a pleasant light in his parent's eye since the arrival from camp. Thus encouraged, he stammered on, “An'—an' the big catch in that was, how did I know
for sure
I was gonna get a chance to do good? Look what happened. Mr. Gauss skunked me.”

Jacob Bookbinder nodded. Many lines faded from his worn face as he smiled. “So what emerges, Herbie?”

Herbie had been through these dialogue lessons with his father before. He knew that a pithy summary was expected of him. He wrestled with words a moment, and said, “I guess—I guess it ain't never right to do bad now and figure to do good later on.”

His father put his arm around the boy's shoulder, briefly squeezed him, and stood. It was a small gesture, but Herbie felt as though he had been set free.

“Let's go to Golden's,” was all his father said.

Indeed, for an eleven-year-old boy, Herbie had not badly stated his lesson. “The end does not justify the means.” Considering that the whole world has been trying to learn that lesson since history began, and is now standing in the corner wearing a flaming dunce cap for its failure to do so, perhaps we may say the boy earned some leniency by understanding his error.

The Bookbinder men went on to the rendezvous with their women folk at Golden's. Felicia, brilliant in a new purple dress, silk stockings, pumps, and rouge, took no part in the lively conversation at dinner. For in the afternoon mail she had received a letter composed on the train by Yishy Gabelson, and she remained in an amorous trance. This epistle was guarded from the eyes of her family, of course, but she did condescend to whisper to Herbie that it contained an original poem. The reader will probably be satisfied by the first couplet, and will ask for no more of the composition:

Beautiful Felicia,

It was sure swell to meetcha.…

As for Herbie, he had learned more lessons than one in the course of his adventures. He ordered one of Golden's steaks instead of boiled haddock. And he was careful to eat only four pastries.

R
ound and round a spiral staircase, up and up in a queer greenish twilight, went a boy, a girl, and another boy, all in Sunday best. Above and below them on the winding staircase the trampling of hundreds of feet sounded. The three familiar faces in this climbing procession were Cliff, Lucille, and Herbie, mounting to the top of the Statue of Liberty by the stairway inside the image. Cliff sprang lightly up the steps, pausing now and again to allow his companions to catch up. Lucille plodded steadily, and Herbie wheezed and sweated behind her, grimly maintaining his self-respect by not allowing the gap between himself and the girl to widen. Just when Herbie's heart, lungs, and legs were advising him in strong terms of their intention to quit this nonsense at once even if he wouldn't, a little diffused daylight appeared overhead, and in a last burst of gladness-the three children reached the top of the stairway, on the inside of Liberty's head.

At once they ran to the windows. A handsome spectacle rewarded their toil. The great towers of downtown New York, the endless acres of apartment houses crisscrossed with streets, the green parks, the sparkling, twisting rivers with their webby bridges and fringes of wharfs, all lay spread out before them. The children were awed. Never had they been able to see more than a block or two of the city in any direction. New York is a mammoth cave without a roof, and the walkers in the labyrinths seldom have a notion of its true look.

“Boy, I can see Homer Avenue plain as anything!” Herbie cried.

“Where?” said Cliff.

“Right out there! See, near the river. Good old Homer Avenue!”

“That's Brooklyn.”

“How do you know?” said Herbie belligerently.

“This map here by the window. It says what every place is.”

The children spent a delightful quarter hour picking out the city's landmarks with the help of the map.

“Gosh,” said Herbie at last, staring out at the far bluish hills beyond the streets and buildings, “I bet if we had a telescope we could even see good old Camp Manitou.”

“Who wants to?” said Cliff.

“Not me,” giggled Lucille. “I hope I never see it again. That place was a jail.”

“Aw, I kinda liked camp,” said Herbie.

“You couldn't get me to go back to any camp,” said Cliff. “I'm cured.”

“Bet we're all back there next year,” said Herbie.

They became quiet, each child reviewing favored memories. Cliff, after a while, could almost see a ghostly Clever Sam, rusty and bony as ever, cropping phantom grass in the blue air above New York harbor. He felt a peculiar choking sensation. Being unsentimental, he merely wished it would go away, and it did in a moment, together with the vision. Cliff glanced at Herbie and Lucille. They were holding hands.

“I'm kinda tired,” he observed quietly. “Guess I'll sit down a while.” He withdrew to a bench near by. Neither his cousin nor the girl heeded his going. Lucille looked shyly out of the window. Herbie looked shyly at Lucille.

Finally Herbie said, “Wanna hear somethin' crazy?”

“What?” The girl still regarded the scenery.

“My mother says you're too old for me.”

Lucille turned eyes round as silver dollars at him. “But I'm younger'n you.”

“Yeah, but she says when you're sixteen you'll be ready to get married, and me, I'll still be a—hm!—a young feller.” (The word “baby” caught in his throat.)

“That is crazy. I don't wanna get married when I'm sixteen.”

“When do you figure on gettin' married?”

“Well, when do you?”

“Aw, not forever, almost.”

“Me neither,” said Lucille.

“My mom is all wrong, ain't she?”

“Aw, Herbie, you know how mothers are.”

“Yeah, but anyway,” Herbie persisted despondently, “with you living in Mosholu Parkway an' goin' to a new school I bet we won't see each other any more after a while.”

“Oh, Herbie, how can you say that? We'll see each other lots an' lots of times, for always.”

An extremely dapper boy with blond wavy hair, dressed in a gray suit and carrying a dark green pork-pie hat with a jaunty feather in the band, came lounging past them.