“The week while I was in bed,” my mother said as I bit into the first cookie, “guess who moved away from Fourth Street?”
I did not have to guess. The day after we brought the ten pounds of knubble carp from Friedlander’s, Henny Leopolstadt and I had watched the Mishig furniture being loaded into the wagon from Weltner’s stable. But I remembered the hurt look on my mother’s face the day Mrs. Mishig refused to accept some of Uncle Berel’s white sugar from the wife of a draft dodger. I remembered the savage contempt in the voice of the only woman on East Fourth Street who owned a Hudson seal coat. It seemed to me my mother was entitled to the satisfaction of breaking the news.
“Who?” I said.
3
A Kid Or A Coffin
WHEN I WAS A boy on East Fourth Street, Monroe Klein was known, in Yiddish of course, as “The Knife with Hair on It.” The last four words were intended to distinguish Monroe from his father. Mr. Klein was totally bald. Mr. Klein was also the first professional politician I ever met, but at the time I didn’t think of him that way.
At the time, which was shortly after the First World War, I didn’t think very much about anything that was happening around me. I just accepted it. I was approximately eight years old, and what was happening around me seemed perfectly reasonable. After all, it was also happening to everybody else.
I say I was approximately eight years old, because at that time on East Fourth Street, birth certificates were a hit-or-miss proposition. Women in labor did not go to hospitals. They screamed for a neighbor. As I put together the verifiable facts about my entrance into the twentieth century, when my mother screamed, Mrs. Lichtblau responded.
It was around noon. Even though I have no way of nailing down the exact moment with the sort of historical fidelity practiced by the biographers of our martyred Presidents, there are reliable compass points. The city’s garbage collection trucks, for example. In those days they managed to make it to East Fourth Street only once a week, on Tuesdays, and, for no reason I can sensibly explain, around noon.
Two weeks ago, when Mrs. Lichtblau came to my father’s funeral, we discussed the day of my birth. Mrs. Lichtblau was ninety-three last year, and she was having trouble with her upper plate, but she remembered the event clearly.
“It was a Tuesday,” Mrs. Lichtblau said. “I know it was a Tuesday because the day before I put the saltpeter in my corned beef pot, and I always put in the saltpeter on a Monday because to make corned beef right, it has to be with the saltpeter five days. No more, no less, just five, and I always put in the saltpeter on a Monday so I could remember always to take off the stone from the meat and spill away the saltpeter on Friday just before I used to light the candles. Lighting the candles on Friday night, that you never forget. So anything you have to do just before you light the candles, that you’ll never forget either. So if you put in the saltpeter on a Monday, and it has to stay in five days, you couldn’t make a mistake. That’s how I know you were born on a Tuesday. The day after I put in the saltpeter and the stone on my corned beef, I heard your mother scream. The same time I heard the scream, I was sending my Benny downstairs with garbage, because I just heard the garbage truck in the street. So like that, from the saltpeter I know it was a Tuesday, and from the garbage truck I know it was twelve o’clock, because that’s when they always came. Twelve o’clock. I ran across the hall to your rooms,” Mrs. Lichtblau said. “I took one look at your mother, and I ran back, and I screamed down in the street from my window to my Benny, forget the garbage, run quick, go get Dr. Gropple.”
Dr. Gropple lived and practiced in a brownstone on East Fourth Street just in from the Avenue C corner, going toward Avenue B. He did not have office hours. Nobody ever made an appointment to see him. For one thing, nobody on East Fourth Street had a telephone. Not even Dr. Gropple. For another, he did not own an engagement book. When you were sick, you walked over and sat in the front room of his parlor floor until he was ready to see you. You carried your fifty cents with you. If you were too sick to be trusted with holding the money, your mother wrapped the coin in a piece of paper and pinned the paper to your coat. Dr. Gropple never sent out bills. He had no time to write bills. He worked around the clock. He had no nurse. He did everything himself. He never refused to make a house call. He never delayed a house call, either. The moment he was summoned, day or night, he went. No, he ran.
Years later, when I was the senior patrol leader of Troop 224, Dr. Gropple’s son Morris explained why. Morris was the leader of the Beaver Patrol, and he had asked me over to his house one night for a meeting at which we were to lay out the program for an elimination knot-tying contest that Mr. Osterweil, our scoutmaster, felt was the only fair way to select the team that would represent our troop in the annual all-Manhattan rally. Morris and I were working with a pad and a pencil at the Gropple kitchen table in the basement of the brownstone. Suddenly the iron areaway gate clanged noisily. Morris ran out to see what was happening. A couple of moments later I heard him running upstairs to the waiting room on the parlor floor. I went to the window and looked out into the night. On the sidewalk, under the lamppost in front of the Gropple stoop, a man was standing and staring up the brownstone steps to the Gropple front door. He was shivering, which was not surprising, since it was January and he had obviously come running from his home without pausing to dress. He was wearing pants and a sleeveless undershirt. But he was shivering with more than the cold. The man looked terrified.
A couple of moments after I got to the window, Dr. Gropple came running down the brownstone steps, carrying his little black bag and adjusting his pearl-gray fedora. On East Fourth Street the effectiveness of a doctor depended to a large extent on the clothes he wore. Dr. Gropple dressed like Woodrow Wilson. When a man who dressed like Woodrow Wilson told an immigrant woman to take two of these every hour, and never mind how bitter they tasted or if they were kosher, she took them. Dr. Gropple’s pearl-gray fedoras, which I learned years later he bought uptown at Dobbs, were just as important on an East Fourth Street house call as his stethoscope.
He seized the arm of the frightened, shivering man and they hurried off toward Avenue C. A few moments later, when Morris came back to the kitchen, I asked him what had happened. Morris shrugged as he picked up the pencil. “Who knows?” he said. “But you can be sure it’s either a kid or a coffin. The people around here, before they’ll spend a dollar on a house call, it’s either somebody is getting born, or somebody is getting ready to croak.”
I had no idea that I was about to croak on that day, so few years after I was born, when Dr. Gropple made his second house call to our tenement flat.
Ten days before his appearance in the bedroom I shared with my father and younger brother, Miss Kitchell had taken her P.S. 188 class for a walk during recess to what was known in our neighborhood as the “Roof Garden.” This was a dark green structure, the color of a dirty park bench, with many uselessly decorative spires and turrets. This structure partially enclosed the dock that jutted out into the East River at the end of Third Street. It was actually no more than a foolishly fancy shed that the city, for perhaps perfectly sound reasons, had built soon after the Civil War. By the time Dr. Gropple brought me into the world, those reasons had long been forgotten. By the time Miss Kitchell took her class out for a walk in the bright June sunlight, I had seen the Roof Garden used for only two purposes.
During the war soldiers had on several occasions been disembarked on the Third Street dock, then put through some sort of drill or inspection under the dark green shed before they were marched up Third Street to that mysterious and to me as yet unexplored region called “uptown.” Also, two or three times every summer, on Sunday afternoons, a group of men in gold-braided uniforms appeared on the Third Street dock, carrying musical instruments and metal folding chairs. They would arrange these in a square at the far or river end of the Roof Garden, tune up their instruments, and start to play.
Nobody seemed to know where these men came from, or why t
hey were playing. They did not live in our neighborhood, and they did not play any of the songs my mother had learned as a girl in Hungary, and had later taught me and my brother and sister on East Fourth Street. These songs were different. Some were strange. The older people, however, especially boys and girls who had graduated from P.S. 188 and were now earning money uptown, seemed to like these songs. After a while, I found I did, too. I didn’t dance to them, of course, the way the older boys and girls did. By the time I learned to dance, I no longer lived on East Fourth Street. It was from these Sunday afternoon band concerts, however, listening to the young—but to me at the time very old—couples singing as they danced under the Roof Garden, that I learned all the words to “K-K-K-Katy,” “Over There,” “Apple Blossom Time,” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
On the day Miss Kitchell took her class for a constitutional, I learned something else: why rules and regulations, the raw material that fed the minds of men like Hammurabi and Clarence Darrow, come into existence. It was quite a lesson to learn from a tiny, humpbacked lady with white hair and dark brown eyes as bright as shoe buttons. Miss Kitchell couldn’t possibly have weighed more than eighty pounds and she never raised her voice. Except in the morning when, after sounding the correct note on her pitch pipe, Miss Kitchell led the class in singing “Dear Lord, Who Sought at Dawn of Day” or “By Roads That Wound Uphill and Down,” her two favorite hymns.
My own favorite was “Fling Out the Banner! Let It Float” because Monroe Klein, who was twelve years old, almost ready for his bar mitzvah, and went to Junior High School 64 on Ninth Street, had invented a set of obscene lyrics to the melody. When adults were not within earshot, he would sing his version to us. I did not then understand all of the words, and it is possible that Monroe didn’t understand all of them, either, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I think I grasp now what I merely responded to then, namely, the ambiance of leadership. Monroe had it. As I look back on other people I’ve known who had it, it seems to me much of it consists of precocity. If at five you can play the violin well enough to make Mischa Elman sweat, other musicians are bound to look up to you as a leader. If at twelve you can rewrite a deeply religious and very moving hymn with words out of the gutter, your associates are almost certainly going to think of you with a certain amount of awe. I know that’s how I felt about Monroe Klein on the day Miss Kitchell led us out of P.S. 188 for a walk at recess, and we reached the Roof Garden on the Third Street dock. Monroe was coming toward us, trundling a wheelbarrow full of coal for his father’s hardware store on Avenue C. Monroe played hookey regularly to go down to the docks and pick up from the moored barges items his father wanted for the store.
“Hey, kids,” Monroe said. “Look! It’s the Floating Coney!”
This was East Fourth Street’s name for the only mobile link in the city’s chain of structures designed to keep the immigrant population of the Lower East Side in a reasonably sanitary condition. This was no small task.
I, for example, never saw a bathtub until I was eleven. Neither did my mother. As a girl on the farm in Hungary, however, she had grown accustomed to a weekly scrub-down in a tin washtub set near the kitchen stove. The kitchens of the East Fourth Street tenement flats were less spacious. In my years on East Fourth Street, I saw a great many of these kitchens.
They were all exactly like ours: a twelve-foot square, with a black dado running around the four walls, about four feet from the floor. Below the dado the walls were painted dark green; above, somewhat lighter green. The ceilings were always pale brown or dark yellow. It was difficult to tell which, because they were painted so infrequently that what my mother felt was yellow darkened by years of accumulated dirt, my father believed was once white paint turning brown with age. The color of the floor depended on the tenant’s taste in linoleum. My mother in those days favored the sort of unadorned dark brown used in the corridors of public buildings because “it didn’t show the dirt.” The tenant could, of course, add to the room any furnishings he chose, but the landlord provided only three: a large coal stove against one wall, a metal sink in the corner nearest the single window, and a gray cement rectangular washtub, four feet by two. This was divided in the middle by a cement wall to form two square tubs, two feet by two. One tub was for soaping the family laundry, the other for rinsing, and this was how most housewives on East Fourth Street used this piece of standard equipment. Not my mother.
Soon after we moved into our rooms at 390 East Fourth Street, she borrowed a small sledge hammer from the janitor and smashed to bits the cement wall that separated the two sections of the washtub. After my father carried the pulverized cement down to the garbage cans on the sidewalk in front of the tenement, my mother used an old bread knife to smooth down the places where the demolished cement wall had once divided the washtubs. On our first Saturday night in 390, I was the first member of the family to take a bath in the improvised bathtub. My father, who followed, said he felt a bit cramped in the four-by-two space, but it was the depth that counted, and from then on, my mother saw to it that none of us missed a turn at least once a week. Many of our neighbors expressed their admiration for my mother’s ingenuity, but none so far as I can recall followed her example. The general feeling seemed to be that it was the government’s problem. If the city administration did not want the entire Lower East Side to smell like a locker room, it was up to the city to do something about it, and of course the city had done something about it.
The city had built a series of public bathhouses. The one I knew was on Rivington Street. You had to bring your own towel, but for a penny a civil service employee in dirty white pants and an even dirtier sleeveless undershirt gave you a sliver of soap and access to a room lined with open stall showers. Each was equipped with hot and cold running water and, on the gray marble walls, graffiti of astonishing ingenuity. I was describing them to my friend Henny Leopolstadt one day soon after my first visit, and my mother heard me. It proved to be my last visit. The same was true of my first visit to the Floating Coney, but for a different reason.
The Floating Coney was named, of course, after the only seaside resort most people on East Fourth Street had ever visited or even heard about: Coney Island. It was a barge, in outer appearance not unlike the barges that were brought by tugs up and down the East River every day to be eased into their moorings at the Fourth Street dock so that their loads of lumber and coal could be transferred to the storage yards of the Forest Box & Lumber Company and the Burns Coal Company, which I could see from the bedroom window. Outward appearance, however, was the only resemblance between these barges and the Floating Coney.
I have never been able to find out whether the city intended it to serve as a sanitary facility or a recreation center. In any case, when the Floating Coney came to our neighborhood, it served as both. It was a large floating swimming pool. The central body of the barge was a huge rectangle with wooden sides and a sort of latticework bottom. Through this bottom the waters of the East River ebbed and flowed. Around the four sides of this open pool stretched a series of lockers, painted the inevitable dirty park-bench green.
Long before I saw the Floating Coney for the first time, I had heard from Monroe Klein and others that, beginning with the first day of June, the city sent the barge on a slow tour of the docks that surrounded Manhattan. The Floating Coney would be towed to a mooring by one or more of the city’s tugs. The barge would be made fast. And for a week or so, before it moved on to another part of the city, the people who lived near the particular dock would be free to board the barge between the hours of nine in the morning and sundown for a swim in the wooden pool.
No charge. No keys to the open lockers, either. Fortunately, these all faced the pool, and none had doors. It was possible, therefore, while swimming in the river water that flowed through the center of the barge, to keep an eye on your clothes. This was important. If they were stolen you were in trouble. Visitors to the Floating Coney swam naked. There were, naturally, Men’s Days and Women’s Days
. The day I first saw the Floating Coney was neither. When Miss Kitchell’s class reached the Roof Garden on the Third Street dock, the barge was being eased into the slip between Third and Fourth Streets by a city tug.
“Notice the skill with which the captain of the tugboat uses the power at his command,” Miss Kitchell said as we stood in two neat rows and watched. “He does not turn loose the full force of his engines. He thrusts and stops. He thrusts and reverses. He thrusts and stops. Then he thrusts and reverses again. In this way he keeps the movement of the enormously heavy barge at a slow and steady pace, easing it gently to its mooring. If he did not do this, if the captain of the tugboat used all his power and used it thoughtlessly, he might damage both the barge and the dock, perhaps even destroy them. There is a lesson in this for all of us.”
I waited eagerly to hear what it was. I was impressed by Miss Kitchell’s lessons. They were totally different from the ones I was taught at home. Or rather, the method was different. My mother, for instance, did not say, “Never come into the house wearing your muddy rubbers. Take them off and leave them out in the hall before you come into the house.” What happened was that one day you came into the house wearing your muddy rubbers. Before you got very far into the house, wham, you caught one across your rear end. As you started to cry or protest or merely pull yourself together, there was your mother, laying down the brand-new law: “Never come into the house wearing your muddy rubbers. Take them off and leave them out in the hall before you come into the house.” It was a good method. Anyway, it worked. You never came into the house wearing muddy rubbers.
Miss Kitchell’s method was refreshingly different. One day you came clumping into her classroom wearing your muddy rubbers. Miss Kitchell would descend on you and begin chirping and buzzing like a house fly trying to get through a window screen.
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