City Boy: The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder Read online

  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.

  “What were you doing up here, anyway?” said the boy at last, feeling that ease of speech was deserting him.

  “I'm on the girls' Police Squad,” said Lucille Glass, “and I'm supposed to watch this staircase during lunch.”

  She pulled a red band from her pocket and commenced pinning it around her arm. Encountering difficulty, she was gallantly aided by Herbie, who received the reward of a bashful smile. All this while Herbie was struggling with the question, whether it was not inconsistent for a Radiant One to be practically a member of his family, as Lucille's tie to his father's lawyer made her. His sister and his cousins were so empty of grace that he classed all family females in the low rank of girlhood. The aura of Red Locks seemed to waver and dim. However, as they grew silent once more, gazing out at the yard, Herbie felt himself quite tongue-tied, and the 10 glory brightened and shone as strongly as at first, and he realized that charms sufficiently powerful could overcom
e even the handicap of belonging to the family.

  “Well, gotta make my rounds,” he said abruptly. “So long.”

  “Good-by,” said the little girl, wrinkling her snub nose and red, firm cheeks at him in a friendly grin. As Herbie walked off the landing into the corridor, she called after him, “Are you really going to Camp Manitou this summer?”

  The boy turned and looked down his nose at her in the crushing way teachers reacted to silly questions. He was no taller than the girl, so the effect was rather hard to get, but he managed a good approximation by tilting his head far back, and sighting along the edge of his nose.

  “You'll find out,” he enunciated after a dignified pause, and stalked off down the hall.

  Mrs. Mortimer Gorkin had a weary afternoon of it with Herbie. Shortly after the children came back to class, she was summoned out of the room for a few minutes and returned to find her trusted monitor standing on top of her desk, reciting a parody of “The Village Blacksmith” with an idiotic preciseness that she recognized as a burlesque of herself. “The muss-uls on his ba-rawny arrrms,” he was saying, “are sta-rrong as rrrrrubba bands-sah.” She punished this malfeasance of office by ordering Herbie to sit in the last seat of the last girls' row and forbidding him to speak for the rest of the day. He broke the injunction twice by shouting spectacularly accurate answers to questions that had reduced the rest of the class to silence. This put the teacher in the bad predicament of having to reproach brilliance. The second time she tried sarcasm, saying heavily, “And pray, what makes you so very, very clever this afternoon, Master Bookbinder?”

  It was a mistake. Herbert was inspired to jump to his feet and rejoin, “Just celebrating your wedding, Mrs. Gorkin,” touching off a demonstration of screaming hilarity which the reddened, angry teacher could not control until she stood, pounded her desk and shrieked, “Silence! Silence!” She effectively snuffed out Herbert by offering to conduct him down to Mr. Gauss's office the next time he uttered a word. But this came too late. By his repartee, and by forcing her to a display of temper, he had clearly won the day.

  When the class marched into the school yard at the end of the afternoon and broke ranks, he was at once surrounded, the girls giggling and shouting at him, the boys pounding his back, shaking his hand, and assuring him with various curses that “he was a regular guy, after all.” It was admitted by everyone that he had been under the spell of a “crush,” an ailment which all the children understood. The great Lennie Krieger himself condescended to lounge up to Herbert and say, “Nice work, Fatso,” which set the seal on his acclaim. He was received back into society. He was even permitted to pitch the first inning of the softball game as a mark of his redemption, and no criticism was heard of his mediocre efforts.

  An ugly little girl with a fat face and straight whitish hair, Shirley Schwartz, who secretly adored Herbie but had learned in lower grades, from other boys, the bitter necessity of hiding her hopeless loves, watched this triumph of her hero with joy. When he left the game after several innings, she decided to follow him home on the forlorn chance that he might speak to her. She hovered while he gathered up his books, and dogged him discreetly as he left the yard. But to her astonishment he did not take the direction to his house which she knew well, but turned and went into the teachers' entrance to the school. Love made her bold—she knew, anyway, that the entrance was not monitored after school hours—so she followed him in.

  Five minutes later she returned to the yard, pallid and shaken, with a tale that set heads shaking and tongues clacking among the pupils of 7B-1. Shirley had seen Herbie's amazing new deed with her own eyes. Without being ordered to do so, and with no word to any pupil about his reasons for such suicidal folly, Herbie had walked up to the private door of the principal, Mr. Gauss, which even teachers never used, approaching the Presence only through the outer office; had knocked boldly; and, in response to a muffled, surprised call from inside in the dreaded voice, had vanished within.

  THREE

  The Visitor

  The evening was purple, and the naked electric street lights cast a brightening glow from under their wrinkled reflectors along Homer Avenue in the Bronx, when Herbie Bookbinder wrested himself away from a discussion of religion around a fire in a vacant lot and wended homeward. The argument over the nature and powers of God had been raging for hours like the fire, and had been kindled, like the fire, by a piece of newspaper printed in Hebrew lettering.

  It was known to Bronx boys of all faiths that to burn a Jewish newspaper on Friday was a piece of rashness that must bring disaster, and there was no youngster in Herbie's neighborhood who would have done it. A fine point of theology had arisen, however, when Herbie had recalled from a lecture at Sunday school that this day, Thursday, was a minor festival, the Thirty-third of the Omer. He suggested that it was perilous to light a fire with the sheets on this day, too, for, although it was not as dangerous a time as Friday, there seemed to remain an element of risk. The Christian boys had at once seen the point and agreed, but trouble ensued when Leonard Krieger saw a chance to cry Herbert down with jeers.

  Lennie was a big, good-looking, black-haired lad, twelve and a half years old, a master of the education of the streets, a hater of school education, a lively athlete, and a natural leader of boys. His father and Herbie's were partners in the ice business, and the two boys had always known and disliked each other. The antipathy had deepened with the years as Herbie overtook the older boy in school, and it now flourished poisonously, with both of them in Mrs. Gorkin's class, Herbie as a sparkler and Lennie as one of the indifferent boys.

  The athlete was verging on the age when the grosser superstitions break down. Expressing much fine sarcasm at the expense of “little fat 'fraidy-cats” and “superstitious yellow-bellies,” he proceeded to crumple up the Jewish paper and light it. His bravado caused mutters of fear among the smaller boys. None of them would heap wood on the fire, and he was forced to tend it himself. Herbie darkly observed that he only hoped Leonard would not come home to find that his father and mother had dropped dead. Leonard at once offered to “show him whose mother and father would drop dead,” advancing on him with raised fists, but the voice of the group, crying, “Pick on someone your own size,” stopped the settlement of the problem by force.

  A long general debate followed as to the chances of bad luck befalling Leonard Krieger, and the argument finally narrowed to these questions: whether God was watching Jewish newspapers all the time, or only on Fridays; whether He had eyes to watch and, if not, how He accomplished watching; and where God was and what He was like, anyway.

  At last Lennie blew the discussion apart by exclaiming, “Aw, all this is a lotta bushwa. I don't believe in God.”

  None of the boys dared speak for a moment after this. Herbie glanced anxiously at the huge setting sun, as though afraid it would turn green or fall to bits. Frankie Callaghan, a red-headed little Catholic boy, cried, “I ain't gonna stay around here. Lightnin's gonna strike that guy,” and galloped out of the lot. The others remained, but moved out of range. If such a spectacular end were to befall Lennie, they wanted to see it.

  The Almighty, however, remained unperturbed, and no blue bolt fell on Lennie.

  “What are you guys lookin' so scared about?” he sneered. “I said it an' I'll say it again. I don't believe in God.”

  “O.K., if you're so smart,” said Herbie, cautiously moving closer to the atheist, “I suppose you're gonna say you made the world yourself.”

  “I didn't say I did. Who do you say made it?”

  “Why, God, of course.”

  “All right, Fatso. Who made God?”

  Two more boys, rendered uncomfortable by the discussion, departed.

  “That's a dumb question,” Herbie replied impatiently.

  “Why is it dumb?”

  “Well, because. If I could tell you who made God, then God wouldn't be God. The other guy who made him would be God.”

  “O.K., so nobody made God, is that right
?”

  “That's right.”

  “Then there ain't no God,” said Lennie with a chortle of triumph.

  A couple of boys snickered reluctantly. Herbie was not felled by the stroke.

  “You mean to say God couldn't just be, without someone makin' him?”

  “'Course not.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because nothin' just is. Somebody's gotta make it.”

  “O.K.,” retorted Herbie, “then who made the world?”

  There was a general laugh at Lennie's expense this time. Herbie had managed to twist the age-old circular argument so that he was now chasing his opponent. The athlete said angrily, “Well, if there's a God, let Him make a can of ice cream appear right here in front o' you 'n' me.”

  All the boys stared at the patch of grass between the debaters, half expecting a cylinder of Breyer's Special Chocolate to materialize. The Creator, however, seemed to be in no mood for showing off. He would produce neither lightning nor ice cream on Lennie's behalf.

  “Well, what does that prove?” said Herbie after a pause.

  “It proves,” declared Lennie, with more passion than conviction, “that you're a dumb little fat slob, even though you're teacher's pet.”

  “Jer-reee!” A squawk from a little girl on the distant sidewalk. “Mom's hollerin' for you for supper.”

  “Holy cats, it's a quarter to seven,” exclaimed the boy thus summoned, and ran.

  The young theologians awoke to the workaday world again. One by one they left the circle around the fire, tramped away through the high green weeds of the lot, scrambled down a slope of rock to the sidewalk, and went away among the canyons of apartment houses. Herbie, who loved fires, arguments, and vacant lots more than anything in the world, except possibly movies, was among the last lingerers around the flames in the gloom. He bade a silent good-by to the cold roughness of rock on which he sat and the fresh smell of the weeds all around him, and dragged himself off to his home, his clothes reeking delightfully of wood smoke.