This was a time when the attitude of teachers in the public school system toward tobacco was not unlike what their attitude today is toward marijuana, LSD, and heroin. In private a great many teachers probably smoked. By private I mean away, and probably far away, from the school premises. But the official point of view was so clear and inflexible that the sight of a cigar in a classroom rocked me back, almost literally, on my heels. I think I would have felt the same way if the cigar had been lying down. On a desk, for instance. But this one wasn’t. It was held between the fingers of this short, thick man’s hand, and as he moved the cigar to his lips, I noticed three things: he wore a large diamond ring on his pinky, his hair was black and slicked straight back but the sideburns were white, and his complexion was almost exactly like Miss Bongiorno’s—swarthy.
“It’s not something for you to argue about,” were the first words I heard him utter. “It’s something for you to do.”
“I’m sorry,” Miss Bongiorno said. “I’m not going to do it.”
It was the tone of her voice that completed the act of recognition. Miss Bongiorno and this stranger looked exactly the way she and Mr. James Murchison of The New York Times had looked when they came in from their private talk in the corridor outside the dressing room at the Washington Irving High School just before the other contestants and I had walked out onto the stage.
“You know something?” the man said. “For a teacher here in a school, a woman that’s supposed to teach kids, you got a great big fat stupid mouth hung on you.”
“And you’ve got a dirty one,” Miss Bongiorno said. “This is my classroom. I belong here legally. You don’t. Now get out of here before I ask the principal of this school to call the police and have you thrown out.”
The unlighted cigar went up to the mouth, which I now saw was lipless. A razor nick in the swarthy skin. A set of the straightest, strongest, whitest teeth I had ever seen clamped down on the pulpily chewed end of the cigar.
“You know who you’re talking to?” the man said through the teeth clamped down on the cigar.
“I certainly do,” Miss Bongiorno said. “And I’m not going to talk any more to your kind. You can scare a lot of people, I know that, but you better know this. You can’t scare me. So just get out of here right now.”
“Okay, sister,” the man said. “You asked for what you’re gonna get. Remember that when you get it. Remember you asked for it.”
“This is not Sicily,” Miss Bongiorno said. “This is America. A lot of stupid immigrants don’t know that, so you can frighten them, but you can’t frighten me.” She turned and saw me. So did the man. “Benjamin,” she said.
The thick hand decorated with the diamond ring went up and removed the unlighted cigar from the lipless mouth. I now saw that the eyes in the swarthy face were a dark nut-brown. They seemed to shine, as though the pupils were marbles that had been rubbed down with some sort of oil. The polished marbles rested on me steadily as their owner came slowly up the aisle of the classroom, tapping the desks as he moved with the two fingers that held the unlighted cigar. He stopped in front of me, paused for a moment or two, then tapped my head delicately with the unlighted end of the cigar.
“So this is him, huh?” the man said. He did not sound at all the way he had sounded when he was talking to Miss Bongiorno. The gravel was gone from his voice. He now sounded friendly. Bemused. Contemplative. Almost gentle. I was not surprised when he chuckled. It made his face crinkle pleasantly. “Nice-looking boy,” he said. “Very nice-looking boy.”
“And the best orator in the southern part of Manhattan,” Miss Bongiorno said sharply.
The man turned back to face her. “Not so good like Frankie Lizotto,” he said. The gravel was back in his voice.
“I don’t know Frankie Lizotto,” Miss Bongiorno said. “I never heard of him.”
“That’s why I came here today,” the man said. “To educate you about Frankie Lizotto. I been here. Now you heard of him.”
“I don’t want to hear about him,” Miss Bongiorno said. “He does not attend this school.”
“Your trouble, you don’t listen,” the man said. “I told you where he attends. Mangin Junior High. On Goereck Street.”
“I happen to know that Mangin Junior High has a very fine elocution teacher in its English department,” Miss Bongiorno said. “Frankie Lizotto is her responsibility.”
The man with the diamond ring shook his head. Slowly. From side to side.
“Not any more,” he said. “Because four days ago, over at Washington Irving, your boy won. So your boy, this boy here, he’s supposed to show up three weeks from now up at this Town Hall, they call it, for the all-Manhattan finals.” The man again tapped my head with the unlighted cigar. “This boy.”
Miss Bongiorno placed both hands on her green desk blotter, pushed herself up out of her chair, and came around the desk into the aisle.
“And this boy will show up at Town Hall,” she said.
The massive head of gleaming black hair began to shake again. Slowly. From side to side.
“No,” the man said. “Frankie Lizotto will show up.”
I was unaware of any change in his tone, his manner, or even his stance. Yet change there must have been, because there was a noticeable change in Miss Bongiorno. Her defiance vanished.
“You’ve got to be reasonable,” she said. I wondered what had caused the defiance to vanish. She seemed to be pleading. I found the change very confusing. Confusing and distressing. “I can’t do what can’t be done,” Miss Bongiorno said. She came up the aisle and put her hand on my head. “This boy won at Washington Irving,” she said. “His name is on the records. This is the boy they’ll be expecting to compete with the winner from north Manhattan. How can I substitute for this boy a boy named Frankie Lizotto?”
“You can call Frankie Lizotto by this boy’s name,” the man said.
Miss Bongiorno looked as shocked as I must have looked when I came in and saw a cigar in a J.H.S. 64 classroom.
“That’s lying,” she said.
“It’s family,” the man said. “We want a family boy should be up on that platform in Town Hall. Frankie Lizotto is a family boy.” The man turned and smiled down at me. Again he tapped my head with the unlighted cigar. “You’re a nice boy,” he said. “But you’re not in the family.”
And he walked out of the classroom.
I have never been quite sure about what happened during the next few minutes. I did not know, of course, who the man was, or why he was in a position to threaten Miss Bongiorno, but I was intensely aware that the threat, though directed at her, was actually designed to affect me. I did not like that. I liked the feeling of victory I had achieved on the stage of the Washington Irving High School auditorium, and I liked the prospect of repeating it on the stage of this place I had never seen but I knew was more important than Washington Irving High School: Town Hall. I remember thinking there must be something I could say to stiffen Miss Bongiorno’s backbone, and I remember the way, after the man left, she turned away from me, and walked slowly back to her desk. She did not sit down. I think she walked around the desk two or three times, and I have a feeling she kept her head down because I did not see her face until she suddenly turned back to me and looked up. All my worries fled. Miss Bongiorno’s face was creased in a smile of determination.
“Did you get the suit?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Yesterday. That’s what I came to tell you.”
“With a jacket?” Miss Bongiorno said.
It seems, in retrospect, a foolish question. A suit without a jacket is not a suit. Nor was it in 1924. But Miss Bongiorno was not a foolish woman. Mr. Murchison of The New York Times had tried to eliminate me from the oratorical contest because I had not been wearing a jacket.
“Double-breasted,” I said.
“Good,” Miss Bongiorno said. “Now to work, to work, to work. I’ve been worried about the opening two minutes of our speech. It could use a bit
of lift right after the reference to Philadelphia. I’ve thought up a couple of ways to strengthen the third paragraph. Where for the first time you mention the names of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin? Go to the back of the room and start from the beginning. Loud and clear, please.”
I went to the back of the room and—loud and clear—started from the beginning. I did it every afternoon for three weeks. Three days before I was scheduled to meet the champion of north Manhattan at Town Hall, I saw for the second time the man with the diamond ring and the unlighted cigar. Again it was after the three-o’clock bell. I was coming down the hall for my after-school-hours rehearsal session with Miss Bongiorno. The man was coming out of her room. He stopped and smiled at me as I approached. I stopped in front of him. I had to. He was standing in my way. I don’t think I was frightened. There was something relaxed and pleasant about him. Nothing to be upset about. But I could not forget the angry words that had passed between him and Miss Bongiorno at our first meeting. So, while I was not frightened, I was not comfortable, either. The man took the unlighted cigar out of his mouth. I thought he was going to tap my head with it, the way he had tapped my head three weeks ago, but he didn’t. He tapped my shoulder.
“That’s a very nice sweater,” he said. “Where do you get such a nice sweater?”
“My mother,” I said. “She knits them for me.”
“Very nice,” the man said. “Beautiful work. Only a mother could make a sweater like that. You should always wear them. Nothing else.”
Again he tapped me on the shoulder with the unlighted cigar. Then he circled me in a wide arc, as though I were a fire hydrant and he didn’t want to scrape the fenders of the invisible car he was driving. When he disappeared around the bend of the corridor, I turned and went into Miss Bongiorno’s room. She was sitting at her desk, staring across the room at the door with a troubled frown.
“What did he say to you?” she said.
I told her. What strikes me as odd today, so many years after it happened, was that I did not think there was anything odd about my encounter outside Miss Bongiorno’s room or her question about it. I suppose children are so accustomed to expecting the behavior of adults to be odd that they accept the oddity as normal. It even seemed normal to me that Miss Bongiorno now said an absolutely abnormal thing.
“I never saw your suit,” she said.
A pretty silly thing to say, of course. How could she have seen my suit? Since my father and I had brought it home from Stanton Street it had been hanging in the closet of the bedroom on East Fourth Street.
“No,” I said.
“I would like to see it,” she said. “Do you think your mother would mind?”
I didn’t understand the question. Did she expect my mother to bar our door? Or throw my elocution teacher down the stairs? So I said, “No.”
“Let’s go to your house and look at it,” Miss Bongiorno said.
Now that I did understand the question I regretted my answer. My mother did not like visitors. Miss Bongiorno, however, had risen from her desk, crossed the classroom to her closet, and was getting into her coat. There was nothing I could say. More accurately, there was nothing I could think of saying that might have aborted a visit I sensed was a mistake. I was relieved, therefore, when Miss Bongiorno and I arrived at our flat, to find that my mother was merely surprised, not angry. She brought out the suit. Miss Bongiorno admired it. She asked me to slip into the jacket. I did. Her beautiful face spread in a smile of delight.
“It was made just for your speech,” she said. “It’s perfect.”
I translated this for my mother, who seemed pleased, and asked me to ask Miss Bongiorno if she would have a glass of tea and a piece of honey cake. It was just baked fresh.
“No, thank you,” Miss Bongiorno said, “but would you ask your mother if she’d do me a favor? I’d like to take this suit with me and keep it in the school closet until the night of the contest.”
This, it seemed to me, was carrying oddity a bit far. Even for an adult. When I translated Miss Bongiorno’s request, my mother obviously shared my view. A look of suspicion crossed her face.
“What is she afraid of?” my mother said. “We won’t pay her back for the suit?”
I did not, of course, translate this for Miss Bongiorno. Instead, I said, “My mother asked why do you want to take the suit and keep it in the school closet?”
Miss Bongiorno’s smile changed slightly, in a way that distressed me. Ordinarily her smiles were like sunshine. This one seemed fake. I had a feeling that she was worried about something but did not want me and my mother to know she was worried.
“Somebody might steal it,” she said.
“The suit?” I said.
“Yes,” Miss Bongiorno said. “Somebody could break in here during the night. Somebody who doesn’t want you to appear on the stage at Town Hall this Saturday.” She must have seen the look on my face, because Miss Bongiorno said hastily, “But don’t tell that to your mother. She might worry. Just tell her that the man from The New York Times made such a fuss last time about how you were dressed,” Miss Bongiorno said, “I want to make sure it won’t happen again. Three nights from now, when we go to Town Hall, I want to supervise the way you are dressed. Tell your mother you will meet me in my classroom at seven o’clock, and I will help you get dressed. Tell her I hope she doesn’t mind.”
In actual fact my mother did mind, and she said so, but I had even then all the instincts of a Jewish Henry Clay. I did not want my mother and Miss Bongiorno to fight. I wanted to win The New York Times oratorical contest. So I compromised. Not in a manner that Henry Clay would have approved, I’m afraid. But it worked. I juggled the translations back and forth. My mother was not mollified, then she was mollified, then she seemed undecided, but a half hour after Miss Bongiorno and I arrived from school my elocution teacher departed with my brand-new suit.
This proved to be a mistake. Sometime during that night a fire broke out on the second floor of J.H.S. 64. Four classrooms were gutted. One of them was Miss Bongiorno’s. Among the things that were destroyed: her carefully annotated Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and my brand-new sharkskin suit. The police suspected arson, and Miss Bongiorno suspected the man with the gleaming black hair, white sideburns, brown marble eyes, and unlighted cigar.
“If he thinks this is the way he’s going to keep you from appearing on the stage at Town Hall this Saturday,” she said to me grimly when we were examining the wreckage after class, “he’s got another thing coming.”
“Who?” I said.
I didn’t really expect or even want an answer. What I was worried about was the suit that had gone up in smoke. Miss Bongiorno had advanced the money for the suit. My father had pledged to repay the cost. Now I was faced by an upsetting question: the cost for what? The suit had vanished. As I saw it, this meant I would not only be barred from appearing on the stage at Town Hall but my father owed Miss Bongiorno the money for a suit that had been destroyed. Who cared about the name of the man responsible for this mess? What I cared about was the mess.
“That gangster,” Miss Bongiorno said.
It was not, at that time, as definitive a word as it became after Warner Brothers invented the kind of movie that starred Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, and Lew Ayres. In those days, hearing a man described as a gangster aroused in a boy approximately the same emotional response as hearing a man today described as an arboreal designer. I didn’t know what Miss Bongiorno was talking about.
“You come with me,” she said.
She led me out of the school. We walked down to Eighth Street and then headed west. It was not familiar terrain, but neither was it terra incognita. This uncertainty added to the uneasiness I already felt about the fire that had destroyed my brand-new suit and the comments my mother would have to make about the event. As it happened, my mother never got a chance to say a word.
When we reached Astor Place, Miss Bongiorno led me past the asphalt island in the middle of
the street that housed the subway entrance, across Fourth Avenue, and into Wanamaker’s. I had never before been inside a department store. I don’t know to this day if I was more dazzled by walking into this display of seemingly endless artifacts that did not exist on East Fourth Street, or by the authoritative familiarity with which Miss Bongiorno made her way through these massed, puzzling splendors. Without asking any questions she led me across the ground floor, into an elevator, and out into what I later realized was the boys’ clothing department. In view of my recent experience with my father on Stanton Street, what happened that afternoon in Wanamaker’s has always lingered in my mind as A Study in Contrasts.
Miss Bongiorno marched up to a man of, I would guess, middle years. This man in the Boys’ Clothing Department at Wanamaker’s was to the puller-in at Yanowitz’s Apparel Shop, Inc., on Stanton Street as a dripping faucet is to the Yangtze at flood time. I was, of course, partial to Miss Bongiorno. After all, I loved her. Even if I hadn’t, however, I don’t understand how anybody could have been indifferent to her dramatic presence. Nonetheless, this man was. He managed to acknowledge her appearance in front of him by lifting his eyelids a fraction of an inch. He obviously poured into the effort all the energy at his command. Directed into other channels it might have rearranged the dusting on the wings of an ailing butterfly.
“Yes?” he said.
“I want a dark blue double-breasted suit for this boy,” Miss Bongiorno said.
Again the leaden lids lifted. Their owner stared at me for a disinterested moment, then went to a rack against the wall. He took down a suit that was undeniably dark blue, brought it to me, and indicated by an expression of weariness dismaying in its totality that unless I removed my sweater at once he would fade into the woodwork. I removed my sweater. He helped me into the jacket and stepped back.
Fourth Street East Page 16