East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's (25 page)

The subway went underground, the blackness clattered and echoed. It was almost night, the day was over. Only the heat was real, only the crush of humans was real, he was back at the beginning of the day with everything close, hot, clammy. But now he was going in the other direction, back to sleeping on fire escapes, of Tar Beach, that was becoming more and more a reality. Suddenly all that was real now, too real. Even on that train now still in Brooklyn, the East Side had become real, Coney Island a fading memory.

He said to Goldie, “We’ll come back next Sunday again, right?” Knowing that next Sunday, seven days away, seemed like a year away.

 A MATTER OF LANGUAGE

During those early Depression years, Marty had been accepted by the tuition-free College of the City of New York, CCNY, as it was called. From the beginning the students had been told that all of them had been the cream, the elite of studentdom, large numbers had been turned away to seek, if they could, entrance at other colleges. But everybody knew that the number of free colleges were exceedingly few. The weeding out had come and gone and now, here he was, at the uptown campus.

He had taken the subway from the Lower East Side, changed trains for the Broadway IRT line and had become lost in his studies while he sat on the woven straw seat of the train and had arrived at the 137th Street station. From there, which was Broadway, he had trudged up the hill to the campus with its gray stone Gothic buildings, its Lewisohn Stadium near Townsend Harris Hall.

Almost without thinking, moving from building to building to where his classes were located, he had entered this world, become a part of it. In the warm weather he ate the lunch his mother had made for him which he carried from home, stuffed in his imitation leather briefcase. Each morning, at his locker, he had deposited the filled brown paper bag into the locker and had returned to remove it when he had a free period sometime around noon.

Sometimes he ate alone, sitting outside on the campus, watching the stream of students flowing in all directions, to the gymnasium, to the Engineering Building, to the Main Building where the Great Hall was located. Other times in the alcoves near the cafeteria he ate along with some of his schoolmates, Danny, George, a few others. During lunch hours the alcoves were a huge babble of noise, of argumentations. Here the political ones, the Socialists and the Communists held sway, preaching to the non-aligned.

That day, after his English class, outside on the campus bisected by a street running through it, Marty looked for one of his friends, but there was none, anyway, not yet. Near Townsend Harris Hall, he saw Earl, sitting alone, beginning to eat his lunch gazing vacantly into space. Marty, still looking for his other friends, approached, said Hi, Earl lost his glazed stare, looked up at Marty and smiled, his teeth white against his brown-black skin.

“Hey, Marty, how’s it going?” Earl said speaking with a broad Southern accent.

“Not bad, Earl, not bad at all,” Marty replied.

Danny appeared at Marty’s side, then along came George, both of them said hello to Earl. George said, “Let’s go to the alcoves to eat, see what’s going on.”

Earl began to shake his head. “Not me,” he said. “Too many speeches, too much buddy-buddy there. Jesus, like they were some kind of insurance agents trying like all hell to sell you an insurance policy. I’ve had my fill of that. Too much.” He bit into his sandwich.

“Come on, Earl,” George said. “Don’t you like to listen? Sometimes I think I can learn something.”

“Unh-unh,” Earl replied. “I don’t like sloganeering, not at all.”

Marty liked the soft sound of his speech, its slow rounded rhythms. Hell, he knew why Earl didn’t want to go, it was obvious. Earl’s skin was a magnet, he would be a prize to those political recruiters in the alcoves if they could sign him up in the Party. Shaking his head Earl said, “I like it right here, nice and quiet-like. No fussing, no speeches, nothing like that. You guys want to go there, go right ahead. I’m staying right here.”

Marty looked down at the small pile of books that lay near Earl. There was the Spanish book containing the lesson that he and Earl could be called on to read and translate in the Spanish class scheduled the hour after this lunch hour.

“I’m going,” George said. “You guys coming?”

“Yeah,” Marty replied. Before leaving he said to Earl, “I’ll be back soon. You’ll be here? We’ll go over the Spanish together.”

“Si, si,”
Earl said with a wan smile, his soft accent flavoring the words.
“La leccion. La
bitching
leccion.”

“La leccion,”
Marty said with a laugh.
“Con El Profesor
Garcia. The one, the only.”

“The same,” Earl said shaking his head sadly. “See you.”

“To the alcoves, men,” George said. “Let’s go, guys.”

They said their goodbyes to Earl and joined a ragged stream leading to the Main Building. Inside, still clutching their brownpaper lunch bags stained with blots of oily seep from their sandwiches, they entered one of the alcoves.

Italy had invaded Ethiopia and its emperor, Haile Selassie, had beseeched the world for help against the invader. To no avail. In the alcove they had just entered, one dominated by Communists, a speaker was reading aloud Count Ciano’s, Mussolini’s son-in-law’s, lyrical account of the air bombing of Ethiopian villages, the bomb bursts erupting and forming petals like flowers, he had said. The speaker was telling the others there that Fascism was an evil to be fought and eradicated. And what were you doing about it?

Danny, munching on his sandwich said loudly, “Sure, that’s bad. I don’t like the bombing and killing of any people, I don’t like dictatorships of any kind, and I’d go along with you,” pointing to the speaker, “if I heard something about what’s going on in Russia.”

“Trotskyite!” several of the Party people said angrily, their eyes glaring coldly at him.

“The Soviet Union is the bastion of democracy!” someone else said loudly. The crowd in the alcove stirred, looked from Danny to the speaker who said, “There is true democracy in the Soviet Union, there is no discrimination—”

“That’s not what I hear,” Danny said. “My family came from Russia. Once in a while they still hear about what’s going on.”

“Malcontents,” the speaker said. He gave a false smile to Danny as he glanced out at the crowd. “Did your family like it so much

under the Czar, huh? Why in hell did they run to America if it was good there then?”

“They ran like your family ran,” George said. “They didn’t like the pogroms, the forced conscriptions into the army that discriminated against them, they didn’t like being in those
shtetl
ghettoes, they didn’t like being treated like sub-humans. You know that and I know that. But your family also ran to America. Then why do you say or give the impression that this is such a bad place?” The speaker had attempted to interrupt George but the crowd had shouted him down and George had taken over for the moment.

Marty said, “What you just said about people running here away from the Czar, if you think it’s so bad here, why don’t you go there?”

A few listeners said, Yeah, Why? Others, backing the speaker, hurled taunting questions at Marty, All you know is personal attack, is that it? What do you know, talking like that? Argue the question, you’re an ignoramus, there were loud voices everywhere.

Marty wondered why he had come to this alcove, Why hadn’t he remained outside in the sunlight and eaten his lunch there? Was it information he wanted? he asked himself. No, not really. He knew about Italy and Ethiopia, what he wanted were answers to what was going on in the world, a world seeming to go out of control. He wanted a simple answer, yet the world was complex, simplicity had vanished a long time ago. But there had to be an answer, a remedy for what was going on.

The speaker to whom he had directed his question was now saying, “I’m here because I’m an American, that’s why.”

Marty said nothing, it was no use. He shrugged, said to the speaker, “And so are we.”

“So don’t talk about why our families came over here,” Danny said.

“I’m talking about Fascism,” the speaker said. “I’m talking about the illegal invasion of a country by Mussolini. I’m talking about the Fascists killing the Ethiopians, that’s what I’m talking about.”

The friends of the speaker nodded their heads. One of them said, “Down with Fascism!”

Marty turned and said quickly to his friends, “Let’s get out of here.” He crumpled the top of his lunch bag, inside there remained an apple and a slice of sponge cake still to be eaten.

“The same old Party line,” George said. “Over and over again. I get tired hearing it all the time.”

As they began to leave Danny said to them, “I’m staying. I just want to know what they have to say.”

Marty shrugged, he and George left the alcove, joined the flow of students out into the street. As they emerged into the sunlight, more students were now clustered in groups, some still eating their lunches, others discussing class assignments, talking about forthcoming tests, some reading lines from books in half-aloud mumbles. Here and there, a lone student sat reading or slowly eating his lunch.

The two of them stopped near the large bust of Abraham Lincoln sitting on its pedestal, its face blotched with green paint that someone had hurled on it in an act of political defiance. Marty said to nobody in particular, “Yeah, it’s true, the same old Party line. But it’s also true, they’ve invaded Ethiopia, they’re killing people. It could mean the spread of war.”

“No,” George said. “It’s something that’s contained, a sort of private war, something between Mussolini and Haile Selassie. Things’ll settle down, everything’ll become quiet soon, you’ll see.”

“Maybe,” Marty said. “I hope so. There’s enough trouble in this world without adding to it.”

They stood in silence for a moment. George left to go to one of the other buildings where his next class was to be held. Marty looked across the campus, he saw Earl still sitting in the same spot, deep in thought. Marty approached, said Hi, Earl looked up at him and smiled.

“Back so soon?” Earl said with a grin.

“Yeah. Can’t stand the talk, talk, talk,” Marty said.

“I know how it is,” Earl said.

As he sat down beside Earl, Marty reached into his paper bag, grasped the apple and said, “I get tired of their constant recruiting tactics, you know?” He bit into the apple with a liquid crackling sound.

“Oh, I know, I sure do know,” Earl said. “You don’t know what it’s like—” He was about to say more but he suddenly became silent.

Marty glanced at him. Yes, Marty knew, it had been so obvious. All the recruiters had to see was a black face, and it became a crusade, they had to have that person a member of the Party. They discussed among themselves, they planned and campaigned for that prospective member, they never let up. Marty bit into the apple once more.

The apple finished, the slice of cake now in his hand, Marty said to Earl, “Want a piece of cake?”

“No, no,” Earl said in his slow drawl. “Thanks. I’ve had mine. Apple pie, no less. Not blueberry, but apple.” Laughing now, he deliberately pronounced the bee as a cross between a vee and a bee. Marty began to laugh loudly.

Early in the semester Professor Garcia who was on staff at the college for over twenty years and had originally come from Spain over thirty years earlier, had lectured the class on Spanish pronunciation. He would deliberately ask one of the students to read a passage in Spanish containing the word,
vivir.
As the student pronounced the word, the professor stopped the reading and said in his still heavily-accented English, “What is that word? I did not hear it. Again.” The student said the word once more and Professor Garcia said emphatically, almost angrily, “No, no, no! It is
vivir,”
pronouncing the vee as a cross between a bee and a vee.
“Vivir.
You hear it? Say it,” he said to the student. The student pronounced the word with great deliberation and Professor Garcia said to the class, “Say it!” Almost in unison the other students pronounced the word. “That is much better,” Professor Garcia said.

“But our teachers never told us, we always pronounced it as a vee,” one of the students said.

“I cannod be responsible for the lazy teachers,” Professor Garcia said.
“Porque
they do not know, what do American teachers know? Americans, know one thing good, to make apple pie, that is what they know.”

Marty had finished his piece of cake, brushed the crumbs from his clothing, wadded the brown paper bag into a wrinkled ball. He said to Earl, “How’s it going? About Spanish, I mean.”

Earl remained silent for a moment then said, “One thing I learned in Garcia’s class. No zmoking. My friend,” he said with mock seriousness, “I do no zmoke.”

Marty nodded. It was a passion with the professor, his campaign about not zmoking. All that was necessary was for a student to mention the word, smoking, and the professor was off, the entire class would be spent on the evils of smoking. At each class, if he could, one of the students would attempt to bring up the subject to divert that hour to Professor Garcia’s oration instead of the lesson for the day.

“Somebody’ll give it a try at class today,” Marty said.

“Anyway, you’ll do okay, Earl. Don’t let him ride you, just take it easy.”

Earl stared at Marty, finally said, “Yeah. Yeah.”

Finally Marty asked, “You do the reading for today?” Earl nodded and Marty said, “Well, that’s all you need.” Marty knew it sounded false, perhaps patronizing, although he hadn’t meant it to be so, but what could he say to Earl, what was there to say to him?