The feeling of surprise gave way to one of pride. I suddenly understood how Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig felt when they stepped up to the plate to take their cut at the old apple and they saw the faces of all those Yankee fans spread out above them in the stands.
“Miss Bongiorno?”
I turned toward the voice. It had come from the man who had entered through the door from the stage. He had gray hair parted in the middle, and wore rimless glasses, without earpieces, pinched to the top of his nose. And he held a sheet of white paper in one hand and a silver pencil in the other.
“Yes?” Miss Bongiorno said.
“You are Junior High School 64?” the man said.
“Yes,” Miss Bongiorno said.
The man smiled down at me. It was one of those “There’s-absolutely-nothing-to-worry-about, sonny” smiles that I had learned really meant “Boy-are-you-in-trouble, kid.”
“And this young man is your contender?” the man said.
“Yes,” Miss Bongiorno said.
Very delicately, almost absent-mindedly, the man touched the top of my head with the blunt end of the pencil. The gesture reminded me of Bobby Jones in the newsreels bending over to sink his tee before blasting off at the first hole.
“I wonder, Miss Bongiorno, if you would mind stepping out into the hall with me for a moment?” the man said.
“Not at all,” Miss Bongiorno said.
He opened the door through which Miss Bongiorno and I had entered the dressing room, held it wide for Miss Bongiorno to precede him, then followed her out. The door swung shut with a neat little click. I looked up into the mirror. The eyes of all eight boys and the eight elocution teachers were fixed on me. Not with hostility, which is what I would have expected. If there is any way to describe the way they were looking at me, I would say what I read in their glance was pity. This scared me more than the man’s “There’s-absolutely-nothing-to-worry-about” smile. Fear always makes me lose track of time, so I don’t know how long Miss Bongiorno and the man remained out in the hall. When they came back in, however, I knew at once something unpleasant had happened. Miss Bongiorno’s beautiful face, set off by her white hair, had become more swarthy. It was not exactly red with anger, but rage had certainly darkened it.
“Very well,” said the man to the entire room. He glared down at the sheet of paper. The glasses pinched to his nose shivered. Somehow his anger no longer bothered me. The fact that Miss Bongiorno was furious wiped out in my mind any threat from this man who was apparently the master of ceremonies. I knew she could take care of anything. “Will you please proceed through that door out onto the stage in the following order and sit down in the chairs arranged for you.”
He called our names. I was number three. I followed the two boys ahead of me out onto the stage, and the six remaining boys followed me. There was a spatter of applause from the audience as we sat down. I noticed that the boys from J.H.S. 64 were clustered in a group at the right. Chink Alberg, who was in my class, waved and winked. I managed a small smile, but I kept it very small. A modest demeanor, Miss Bongiorno had explained, always made a good impression on the judges. The man who had read off our names in the dressing room now came out on stage. He went to a mahogany lectern set in front of the line of chairs and waited while Miss Bongiorno and the other eight elocution teachers came down the aisle, single file, from the back of the auditorium and took the seats that had been reserved for them in the front row. Miss Bongiorno’s eyes caught mine. She smiled, nodded, and sent me a wink. I risked the disapproval of the judges by sending her back a smile somewhat larger than the one I had given Chink Alberg.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the man with the hair parted in the middle, “I am James Murchison of The New York Times staff.”
Mr. Murchison uttered a few modestly complimentary paragraphs about the great newspaper for which he worked. He explained that printing “all the news that’s fit to print” was more than a proud banner under which decent men rode into battle every day against the forces of evil. It was a priceless heritage that flowed from the form of government under which we were fortunate enough to live, a government that was enshrined in one of the world’s great human documents, namely, the Constitution of the United States. It was because The New York Times felt the average citizen, the man in the street, should be made more aware of this priceless heritage that the great newspaper had undertaken the sponsorship of this contest. Mr. Murchison then explained the rules, the series of city-wide regional elimination contests, and the conditions under which the finals would be held in Carnegie Hall.
“And so, without further ado,” he said, “I will call the first contestant.”
The first contestant was a kid with red hair from Cardinal John F.X. Terence High School. After he spoke his first sentence I knew this was one boy who would never get to Carnegie Hall. He had a nice voice but no volume. The second contestant was louder, but it was obvious to me that nobody had done any work with him on gestures. He had only one. Years later it was made famous by Harry Truman. It consisted of raising both cupped palms to chest-height, about six or eight inches apart, as though the speaker’s hands were holding an invisible cocktail shaker and emphasizing a point by jerking the invisible cocktail shaker violently back and forth until the point was made. This boy put a lot of energy into his one gesture but he was not as good at it as President Truman later proved to be. Anyway, in retrospect he does not seem to have been. I suppose high office improves everything, including a speaker’s gestures. When my name was called and, as the third speaker, I rose from my chair and moved to the lectern, I did it with a degree of confidence I wish I could command in certain quarters today. From the moment I intoned “In the drama of history,” and on the word “history” my right hand, palm up, went out in a wide, sweeping arc and rose to the height of my right shoulder, I knew the confidence Miss Bongiorno and I had both placed in me was not misplaced.
There were three judges: a famous Shakespearean actress then playing a repertory of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Beaumont and Fletcher in a former church on West Fourteenth Street; a professor of English from Columbia University, who several years before had caused a stir in literary circles by publishing a rather steam-heated novel about Demosthenes; and a former Congressman from the Sixth Assembly District, who had started his career and come to public attention as a criminal lawyer with a theatrical manner so photogenic and a vocabulary so quotable that he seemed to live in the public prints. According to the rules Mr. Murchison had outlined, the judges could not confer with each other. They were to vote individually, and the majority vote—two out of three—would prevail.
For several minutes after the applause died down for the ninth and last speaker, the sense of tension in the audience came up onto the stage and gave me a few uneasy twinges. Then, from different parts of the auditorium, the judges came down the aisle and, one by one, handed up their sealed envelopes to Mr. Murchison. He tore them open, pulled out slips of paper, and studied them. Then he looked up, and waited until the judges had returned to their seats.
“It gives me great pleasure to announce,” he said finally through a smile that I thought later could have been a bit less grudging, “that the winner, by unanimous vote of all three judges, is the representative from Junior High School 64.”
Miss Bongiorno had left nothing to chance. When Mr. Murchison turned toward me and called my name, I knew exactly what to do. I stood up, came toward him, uttered a modest “Thank you,” turned toward the audience, and bowed gravely into what after all these years it still seems to me accurate to describe as a hurricane of applause.
It was still ringing in or pelting at—depending upon what hurricanes, with which I am unfamiliar, do when imprisoned in a dubious metaphor—my ears out on the sidewalk in front of the Washington Irving High School. I was surrounded by my classmates from J.H.S. 64 and Miss Bongiorno.
“I am very proud of you,” she said. “You are an honor to the school. I will say good night now, and see y
ou in the morning.”
She bent down, kissed me on the forehead, and walked off toward the bright lights of Fourteenth Street and the subway. I don’t remember very much about my own walk back to East Fourth Street, except that I recall clearly being accompanied by my admiring classmates. They had never admired me before. Not to my knowledge, anyway. My first taste of this heady brew sent me up the stairs of our tenement in a state of euphoria. It vanished as soon as I came into our kitchen.
Miss Bongiorno was seated at the table. My mother was standing at the stove. Both women looked upset, as though I had interrupted them in the middle of a fight, and then I grasped what was happening, or rather, what was not happening. My mother did not speak English, and Miss Bongiorno did not speak Yiddish.
“Benjamin, I apologize,” Miss Bongiorno said. “I did not mean to lie to you on the sidewalk in front of Washington Irving High School when I said I was going home, but it was very important for me to come here at once and speak to your parents, and I did not want the other boys to know I was doing it. I knew I would get here before you would, but I did not realize there would be a language difficulty.”
“What did she say?” my mother said.
“Excuse me,” I said to Miss Bongiorno in English, and then, to my mother, I translated into Yiddish what the elocution teacher had said.
“Benjamin,” Miss Bongiorno said, “I didn’t realize you could speak the language so fluently!”
Why not? I had never spoken anything else until I was in kindergarten.
“What did she say?” my mother said.
Even at that age I could see that this sort of exchange was heading nowhere. Like the Conrad heroes about whom I was just beginning to read, I decided to do what the great Pole said they always did in moments of crisis: take the tiller into my own hands.
“She wants to know,” I said to Miss Bongiorno, “my mother wants to know why you came here tonight?”
“Because of what happened in the dressing room before the contest began,” Miss Bongiorno said. “You remember when Mr. Murchison asked me to step out into the hall with him?”
“Yes,” I said.
I remembered also Mr. Murchison’s angry face and the way her own features had grown darker with fury.
“Well, now, Benjamin, I don’t want you to be upset,” Miss Bongiorno said, “but you were almost not allowed to compete in the contest tonight.” The look on my face, which I cannot describe because I did not see it, obviously spoke clearly to Miss Bongiorno. “It’s true, Benjamin,” she said. “Mr. Murchison wanted to forbid your appearance on the stage.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because you were wearing a sweater,” the elocution teacher said.
I looked down over the piece of ceramic tile that still circled my neck. I was still wearing that sweater.
“Surely, Benjamin, you noticed that all the other contestants were wearing suits?” Miss Bongiorno said. “Suits with jackets?”
I honestly don’t know whether I had or had not noticed it. Probably I had. My vision had always been twenty-twenty. Still is. But the fact that the other contestants were wearing suits with jackets had conveyed to me no meaning of special significance. I had not yet reached the age when the inconsequential becomes important. What had mattered to me on that night in the Washington Irving High School was delivering a speech that was better than the speeches delivered by the other contestants. I saw now, however, that to Mr. Murchison this was secondary.
“Mr. Murchison wanted to disqualify you,” Miss Bongiorno said. “Out in the hall, before the contest, he said showing up in a sweater like that, it was a deliberate insult. You were showing contempt for The New York Times, he said. Well, you should have heard what I said to him. Never judge a book by its cover, I said. Clothes may make the man, I said, but they don’t make the orator. And then I hit him with Othello”
Miss Bongiorno rose from the kitchen table. Her beautiful face was suddenly flushed. In the light of the flickering gas jet that provided the only illumination in our kitchen, her white hair seemed to flash like a jeweled crown. Her eyes were fixed on a moment of glory which, geographically speaking, seemed to be located just back of the black stovepipe at the place where it cut through our kitchen wall to the back yard.
“Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,” Miss Bongiorno bellowed, “Is the immediate jewel of their souls:/ Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;/ ’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;/ But he that filches from me my good name/Robs me of that which not enriches him/And makes me poor indeed.”
Miss Bongiorno’s voice stopped as though the ceiling had collapsed on her head. She sank back into her chair at the kitchen table. She gasped for breath.
“What did she say?” my mother said.
“She said I almost lost tonight because I was wearing a sweater,” I answered in Yiddish.
“You mean you won?” my mother said.
“I beat everybody,” I said. “All the judges voted for me.”
“So what has a sweater got to do with it?” my mother said.
“What did she say?” Miss Bongiorno said.
“My mother wants to know what wearing a sweater has to do with giving a good speech about the Constitution.”
Even at that early age I had a fairly well developed editorial sense.
“Tell her it has absolutely nothing to do with it,” Miss Bongiorno said. “But at the second elimination contest, where you will compete against the winner of the northern Manhattan eliminations, there may be another Mr. Murchison. Or somebody worse. I mean somebody I may not be able to talk down. So I came here tonight to impress on your parents that a month from now, when you compete against the northern Manhattan winner, you must be wearing a suit with a jacket.”
“What did she say?” my mother said.
I scowled thoughtfully at the stovepipe as though I wanted to make sure I had the right Yiddish words arranged in my head before I uttered them. Actually, I knew what the words were. Or rather, what the one word was. Impossible. I did not own a suit. I lived in the sweaters my mother knitted for me and the knickerbockers my father sewed for me. We were all aware that soon, when I reached my thirteenth birthday, a suit would have to be purchased for me. No family proud of the right to call itself Jewish would allow a boy to appear in the synagogue to go through his bar mitzvah ceremony in a sweater. In fact, no rabbi dedicated to the rituals that had kept the faith alive through thousands of years of persecution would allow a boy to approach the Torah in a sweater. The purchase of this suit was still, however, more than a year away. To move up this event for an oratorical contest would not change the word “impossible” no matter how meticulously I translated it. Money in our house at that time was not tight. It was almost nonexistent.
“Miss Bongiorno says,” I said to my mother in Yiddish, “at the next eliminations, when I speak against the winner from northern Manhattan, I must wear a suit with a jacket.”
“How can you wear what you don’t have?” my mother said.
“What did she say?” Miss Bongiorno said.
Even my fairly well developed editorial sense could not cope with the ineluctable laws of economics. A literal translation seemed the only solution. I made it.
“I do not own a suit,” I said in English.
“Oh,” Miss Bongiorno said. I could tell from the expression on her beautiful face that my simple statement had injected into her mind a totally new and conceivably complicated thought. She was a wonderful woman, and I loved her, but she came from uptown. There were things she did not understand. She tried, however, and her attempt emerged as a question. “Benjamin,” Miss Bongiorno said, “the next elimination contest takes place a month from tonight. Surely your parents could buy a suit for you in a month?”
I didn’t bother to translate for my mother. I knew what she would say. Unlike Adam Smith she had learned her economics the hard way.
“It’s the slack season,” I said to M
iss Bongiorno.
“The what?” she said.
“There’s no work in the shop,” I said. “My father isn’t bringing home any money. The slack season will be another two months at least. Maybe three.”
“What are you telling her?” my mother said.
“That we have no money,” I said. “It’s the slack season. You and Papa can’t afford to buy me a suit.”
My mother turned and went to the window. She stared out into the yard. I cannot prove my next observation because I never asked her to corroborate it. Even if I had, I don’t think she would have told me the truth. Not because my mother was a liar, but because she had no education. She had nothing to guide her except rules she had made up herself. One of these, roughly speaking, was: If people want to do something, and you want them to do it, don’t make suggestions; just get out of the way.
Miss Bongiorno cleared her throat. “Benjamin,” she said. “Ask your mother this. If I advanced the money for your suit, would that be all right?”
“Ma,” I said. She turned from the window. I translated Miss Bongiorno’s offer.
“Advance?” my mother said. “What’s that?”
“A loan,” I said. “She’ll lend us the money.”
“Lend?” my mother said. “That means we have to pay back, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Where are we going to get the money to pay back,” my mother said. “From where?”
Chancellors of the Exchequer have asked the same question. None, I feel certain, ever received the reply my mother got.
“From me.”
I turned toward the new voice. So did my mother and Miss Bongiorno. My father was standing in the doorway that led to the bedroom. He had obviously been asleep. Or at least in bed. His hair was tumbled forward and he was wearing the heavy khaki greatcoat, part of his uniform when he had been a conscript in the Austrian army, that he had brought with him to America and had since then used as a bathrobe.
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