City Boy: The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright 1948, 1952, © 1969 by Herman Wouk

  Copyright © renewed 1975 by Herman Wouk

  Preface copyright © 2004 by Herman Wouk

  Foreword copyright © renewed 1980 by John P. Marquand Jr.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: June 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-316-07700-2

  Contents

  Copyright

  Preface

  ONE: The First Step in the Mending of a Broken Heart

  TWO: Further Steps

  THREE: The Visitor

  FOUR: The “Place”

  FIVE: The Safe

  SIX: The Party

  SEVEN: The Romance of Art and Natural History

  EIGHT: The Dubbing of General Garbage

  NINE: Promotion Day

  TEN: A Man Among Men

  ELEVEN: On to Manitou

  TWELVE: Mr. Gauss's Camp Manitou

  THIRTEEN: The Green Pastures

  FOURTEEN: The Coming of Clever Sam

  FIFTEEN: The Envelope Mystery

  SIXTEEN: The Triumph of Lennie

  SEVENTEEN: The Victory Speech of Mr. Gauss

  EIGHTEEN: The Dance

  NINETEEN: Herbie's Ride—I

  TWENTY: Herbie's Ride—II

  TWENTY-ONE: Herbie's Ride—III

  TWENTY-TWO: The Triumph of Herbie

  TWENTY-THREE: Disaster

  TWENTY-FOUR: Lennie and Mr. Gauss Take Falls

  TWENTY-FIVE: Going Home

  TWENTY-SIX: The Truth Will Out

  TWENTY-SEVEN: The Truth Often Hurts

  TWENTY-EIGHT: The Reward

  Books by Herman Wouk

  Novels

  Aurora Dawn

  City Boy

  The Caine Mutiny

  Marjorie Morningstar

  Youngblood Hawke

  Don't Stop the Carnival

  The Winds of War

  War and Remembrance

  Inside, Outside

  The Hope

  The Glory

  A Hole in Texas

  Plays

  The Traitor

  The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial

  Nature's Way

  Nonfiction

  This Is My God

  The Will to Live On

  This story is dedicated to my mother

  PREFACE TO THE 2004 EDITION

  CITY BOY:The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder

  City Boy, my second novel, was published in 1948. I had no reason to think then that the book would survive its season, let alone more than half a century. None of my novels ever had a less promising start.

  Just a year earlier, I had entered the American literary frogpond with a noisy splash, and before that I had never published so much as a short story in a magazine. For my livelihood until World War II, I had been a script writer for the great radio comedian Fred Allen. My first novel, Aurora Dawn, was a facetious spoof of commercial radio, and the little book caught a publisher's fancy, so he launched it with a blast of ecstatic advertising. In quick obedience to Newton's third law, critics blasted back. All this dazed me. A naval reserve officer, I had written most of Aurora Dawn aboard a minesweeper in the South Pacific, to while away boring wartime hours at sea. I did not know enough about the literary world to object to the overblown launching, nor to expect the boisterous counter-attack. It was quite a debut. When the dust settled I had in hand a Book-of-the-Month selection of my first novel, a so-so sale, and a literary reputation demolished before it was built. New authors, fuming over insufficient advertising of their masterpieces, might ponder this true tale.

  But there I was, a professional novelist, if a somewhat black-and-blue one. I wrote City Boy, and found real delight in the task. To this day the fat little hero, Herbie Bookbinder, remains one of my favorite creations. But my publisher, set back by the critics' onslaught on Aurora Dawn, and probably convinced that no novel with Jewish characters could sell anyway—this was gospel back then in the book trade—launched the work as one buries a body at sea. City Boy slid off the plank, and with scarcely a ripple went bubbling down. No club selected the book. Nobody bought it. Almost nobody reviewed it. The remainder shops were piled with this novel, while I was still reading scattered out-of-town notices. End of poor Herbie, to all appearances.

  Alas! Total disaster with a second book; a very usual thing. Still, I now had a family, and I had come to love the fiction art. I thought I had better have one more shot at the target. I started another novel. My habit was, and still is, to read my work chapter by chapter to a discerning, lovely, but taciturn wife. Once she suddenly remarked, when I was reading aloud an early scene in that story, “If they don't like this one, you had better try some other line of business.” The book was The Caine Mutiny.

  Meantime Aurora Dawn and City Boy had gone out of print, but I had a new publisher, who liked the books and brought them back to light. That was about forty-five years ago. Aurora Dawn remains in print, and the publishing history of City Boy since then records successive new editions, translations into several languages, club selections, and usage in school textbooks and anthologies. In the arts, as in most risky walks of life, the good word is never say die.

  My life goal of authorship was fixed when I first read Tom Sawyer at eleven, and my working title for City Boy was Tom of the Bronx. I grew up in a Bronx neighborhood that later became notorious as Fort Apache, but in my boyhood there were idyllic green spaces called “lots,” and more than a trace of the golden light of Hannibal, Missouri, fell on those stony neighborhoods. That glow was what I tried to capture in City Boy. Without taking the comparison further, I hope that Herbie and his tantalizing Lucille still come to life in their modest citified way, as Tom and Becky Thatcher will do in Mark Twain's book while the English language lasts.

  Herman Wouk

  The First Step in the Mending of a Broken Heart

  On a golden May morning in the sixth year of Calvin Coolidge's presidency, a stout little dark-haired boy named Herbert Bookbinder, dressed in a white shirt, a blue tie and gray knee breeches, sat at a desk in Public School 50 in the Bronx, suffering the pain of a broken heart. On the blackboard before his eyes were words that told a disaster:

  Mrs. Mortiner Gorkin

  The teacher of Class 7B-1 had just informed her pupils that they must call her “Miss Vernon” no more. Turning to the board with a shy smile, she had written her new name in rounded chalk letters, and had blushed through a minute's tumult of squeals and giggles from the girls and good-natured jeers from the boys. Then Mrs. Gorkin stilled the noise with an upraised hand. She pulled down into view a map of Africa rolled up at the top of the blackboard like a window shade, and the class, refreshed by the brief lawbreaking, listened eagerly to her tale of the resources of the Congo. But Herbert could not rouse himself to an interest in rubber, gold, apes, and ivory; not when the lost Diana Vernon was talking about them. The tones of her voice made him too unhappy.

  The anodyne in this boy's life was food. No anguish was so sharp that eating could not allay it. Unfortunately lunch time was half an hour off. His hand groped softly into his desk and rested on a brown paper bag. He felt the familiar outlines of two rolls (today was Monday—lettuc
e and tomato sandwiches) and an apple. Then his hand encountered something small and oval. With practiced, noiseless fingers he opened the bag, unwrapped some twisted wax paper, and drew out a peeled hardboiled egg. This was a pretty dry morsel without salt and bread and butter, but the boy popped the whole egg into his mouth and chewed it moodily. Like an aspirin, it dulled the pain without improving his spirits. He was aware that his cheeks bulged, but he did not care. Let her catch him! He was her favorite, first on the honor roll, and she could not humiliate him without humiliating herself more. The boy's calculation was correct. Mrs. Gorkin did see him eating, but she ignored it.

  In time a beautiful sound rang out—freedom, proclaimed by the clanging of the gong for lunch. At a nod from Mrs. Gorkin, the children who had worrisome mothers ran to a shallow closet and returned to their seats wearing coats, while those who had braved the changeable May weather without coats sat back and gloried in their maturity. A second time the gong sounded. The pupils stood and quietly began to form a double line at the front of the room. Herbie, on his way to the head of the line, passed the teacher's desk. She whispered, “Remain behind, Herbert.” Pretending to have heard nothing, Herbie strolled back to his desk and remained there fussing busily until the class marched out.

  A classroom always seems three times larger when the children leave it, and quite bleak. This gives a delicious sense of comradeship to two people left in it together. For months it had been Herbie Bookbinder's good luck to share this sweetness with Miss Diana Vernon after classes. She had detained him for such honorable offices as putting away books, filling inkwells, closing windows with a long hooked pole, and drawing the heavy brown canvas shades; while she combed her long red hair before her closet mirror in the late-afternoon sunlight and chatted with him. It had been magical. Being alone in the room now brought these memories vividly to the boy. When the teacher re-entered the classroom she found her star pupil seated at his desk, his chin resting on his clenched fists, gazing downward at nothing.

  The cause of his pain was a slim woman, possibly twenty-seven, with compressed lips, a thin little straight nose, and heavy red hair. She looked, and she was, strict. But she was a woman, and therefore susceptible to male charm, such as inhered in Herbie—and, unfortunately, in Mr. Mortimer Gorkin. The boy glanced at her and felt a pang of self-pity. He could tell by her soft look that she felt sorry for him and wanted to comfort him. Immediately he resolved not to be comforted at any cost.

  “Herbie,” she said, walking to her desk and drawing a metal lunch box out of a deep side drawer, “come here and talk to me while I eat.”

  The boy rose, walked to the front of the desk, and stood there with morose formality, his arms at his sides.

  “Come,” said the teacher, “where's your lunch? Or do you want some of mine?”

  “I'm not hungry,” said Herbert Bookbinder, looking away from her to the corner of the blackboard where his name headed a list of three in golden chalk—the honor roll for April. He decided vengefully that he would be last in the class in May.

  “It seems to me,” said Mrs. Gorkin, laughing a little, “that you were almost too hungry during the geography lesson—now, weren't you?”

  Herbie stood on his constitutional rights and did not testify.

  “What's the matter, Herbie, really?” asked the teacher.

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh, yes, there is.”

  “Oh, no, there isn't—Mrs. Gorkin.”

  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.

  Further Steps

  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.