by Pete Hamill
Amazing: first came the Jews, and then the Catholics! As he read the text, his excited eyes moved from a statue of Moses, heroic, stern, as muscled as Tarzan, to a picture of a beautiful woman named Judith. The caption told him that Judith entered a city called Bethulia accompanied only by her handmaiden, murdered the Assyrian general, and seized the town. In the picture she was wearing a headband, her long black hair tied in pigtails, and jeweled bracelets on her wrists, along with necklaces and earrings. She was walking proudly, swinging her arms. Behind her on the left was a bearded guy on a horse. Obviously he was behind her because Judith was the boss, the commander. On the right was a bare-shouldered woman in a striped dress, her head downcast under a shawl, carrying a bag. She must be the handmaiden, Michael thought, some kind of maid, the one who polished Judith’s bracelets and necklaces and earrings. There were more horses and a lot of guys with spears, and off in the distance there was the outline of a walled town. Bethulia.
It was like a scene from a movie.
Michael could see it now, in Technicolor, on the screen at the Venus. Hedy Lamarr slips into the town. She and the maid walk around, the general sees her, he looks at her in that certain way they have in the movies and he tells the maid to wait outside. The general takes her to his room. He’s telling her stuff and offers her wine, and as he lifts his own goblet to drink, taking his eyes off her, Hedy Lamarr cuts his goddamned throat!
The movie scene vanished. Michael read on, all about how God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, thus setting up the laws we were supposed to live by, most of them the same ones he had to memorize from the Baltimore Catechism. There was nothing about turning on light switches. And none of what he was reading was like the stuff he heard on the streets. There was no mention of the Jews killing Jesus. There was nothing about Jews being greedy and sneaky and vengeful. Were the people who wrote the encyclopedia hiding something?
The story in the blue book did say that the Jews, who were nomads, also set up laws about health and cleanliness. And they gave the world the Bible and the first alphabet. The goddamned alphabet! And music too!
The music of the Jews also has come down to modern times as a special contribution to art. It is a unique form of music—full of pathos and melancholy melody, yet beautiful and tender.
Michael realized he’d never heard Jewish music. He knew Catholic music, like “Tantum Ergo” and “Mother Dear, O Pray for Me.” He knew all the words, in English and Latin. And he had come to love jazz music, listening to it on the radio, wishing he could play some instrument. A piano. Or a trumpet. But Jewish music… what did it sound like? He read the words again—full of pathos and melancholy melody, yet beautiful and tender—and thought it must sound like the blues.
He glanced out at the falling snow, saw the blurred red neon sign of Casement’s Bar, and again felt a sudden darkness in his mind. What if the encyclopedia was lying? Maybe this was a terrible trick. Maybe a Jew wrote the story in the book. Or paid someone to write it the way the Jews wanted it to appear. To fool the Christians, make them let down their guard. That’s what they’d say down on Ellison Avenue. That’s probably what they’d say if he took the blue book across the street to Casement’s and said: What do you think of this, pal?
But that couldn’t be. This was an encyclopedia; if it was full of lies, someone would write to a newspaper or the mayor or some other big shot; they’d expose the lies. If they were lies. Maybe the stuff he heard on the street was the real lie. He would have to ask his mother about it. Or Father Heaney. Father Heaney was tough, but he wasn’t mean. He didn’t say much, but shit, neither did Gary Cooper. Father Heaney would tell Michael the truth. The boy didn’t completely trust what he heard on the street. The grown-ups knew a lot more than he did about most things. But he also knew that some of what they had to say was what they all called bullshit. Until he died, they talked lots of bullshit about President Roosevelt. They were talking bullshit now about Jackie Robinson. Maybe they were also talking bullshit about the Jews.
He turned from the falling snow and resumed reading through the entry, his eyes glazing over the details, seeing words like Talmud and Torah, and a long history of dates going all the way back to 722 B.C., about things that were done to the Jews and how, in spite of everything, they continued to survive. He wanted to find out more about Judith, but there was nothing else. Down near the bottom, his eyes widened.
Today persecutions and oppressive measures are still carried on in some European nations. In Germany the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler has deprived Jews of political and civil rights which they previously enjoyed. The result has been a gradually increasing exodus of Jews from Germany. Poland, where oppressive measures have existed for many years, has more than 3,000,000 Jews….
Hitler was now dead, so this must have been written before the war. He looked at the small type in the front of the book. Copyright… 1938? That was almost nine goddamned years ago. So even then, long ago, before the war, in 1938, when Michael was three years old, people knew what Hitler was doing. And what he was going to do. His mother was right: Hitler hated Jews and killed millions of them. But if people knew, why didn’t anyone stop him from doing it? Why did they wait until it was too late? Better: why didn’t some Judith go in and cut his goddamned throat?
The United States, where religious and political freedom have attracted Jews from all lands where they have been oppressed, has the greatest number of Jews, the blue book said. In the forty-eight states and possessions there are 4,229,000, of whom nearly 2,000,000 live in New York City.
Michael suddenly realized that he knew almost no Jews. There was Mister G, of course, and Mr. Kerniss, the landlord, who was about seventy years old and came around every month to collect the rents from the super. Now there was this rabbi on Kelly Street, but he didn’t really know him. He’d met him, but he didn’t know him. He didn’t even know his name. Almost everybody else in the parish was Irish, Italian, or Polish, or as some of them said, Micks, Wops, and Polacks. They were Americans, of course. But they described themselves on the basis of where their parents or grandparents came from. Michael was Irish. Like his mother, who came from Belfast in Northern Ireland. Or his father, who came from Dublin. And Sonny Montemarano was Italian. And Jimmy Kabinsky was a Polack. No matter where their people came from, almost all of them were Catholic. There were a few Protestants around too; they went to the public school and the Protestant church on White Street and played in the street like the others. But they were just plain Americans; their parents never talked about the Old Country; they acted as if they had been in Brooklyn since Indians roamed in Prospect Park.
But there were no Jewish kids at all. Even Mister G’s three kids were like phantoms. They didn’t hang out in the parish. They didn’t play on the streets in summer. They were just blurry faces in the back of the candy store. Michael had never seen any young people going in or out of the synagogue on Kelly Street. Not one. On Saturday mornings, there were only a few old men and women on the sidewalk. How could that be? If there were two million Jews in New York City, where did they live? Where were their kids? Did they play stickball? Were they Dodger fans? Did they pitch pennies in the summer and trade comics and read about Captain Marvel? Why weren’t more of them around here?
He wanted to wake up his mother and ask her all these questions. He wanted to tell her about his discoveries about the Jewish laws and the health codes and the alphabet. He wanted to ask her why all those Jews had been killed by Hitler if even before the war everybody knew what he was up to. He wanted to ask her if she’d ever heard Jewish music and where those two million Jews lived in the city of New York.
But she looked exhausted, tired from the long hike through the snow to the hospital and the harder walk back, when the snow was deeper. Her jaw hung slack, her mouth open. He touched her forearm. Her eyes opened.
“Mom,” he said, “you better go to bed.”
She looked startled. “What time is it?”
“It’s late,” he said. �
��Go to bed.”
In his own room, with the door closed, his teeth brushed, warm under the covers, Michael lay awake. The walls glowed brightly from the freshly falling snow. There was no wind and no sounds as the snow fell all over the parish. In the back room of the candy store, while the snow piled up on the sidewalk, Mister G’s wife was probably weeping. Her husband had been taken away in an ambulance, unconscious, his face a swollen, bloody mess. Everybody saw the ambulance and the police cars and nobody said anything. At the synagogue on Kelly Street, the snow was gathering on the doors and the front steps and the roof, while the bearded man with the sad eyes listened, Michael was sure, to Jewish music, beautiful and tender.
The rabbi was from over there. Somewhere in Europe. Michael knew that from the accent. He wasn’t from here. But how did he escape? The newspapers said that maybe six million Jews were killed. Why wasn’t he one of them? Was he from Poland too? Did the Nazis come to his door? Did he hide in an attic or a closet? Did he pick up a gun and fight? The rabbi had to have a story, and Michael wondered what it was.
Just before sleep came, he thought about what it would be like to meet Judith, with her bracelets and earrings and jeweled hair, and touch her golden skin. Then he pushed her from his mind too, as an occasion of sin, whispering the words of the Hail Mary to keep himself pure as a snowy hill in Prospect Park.
6
In the morning, after mass, Sonny and Jimmy rang the bell and Michael bounded downstairs to meet them. Sonny embraced him in the hallway.
“We didn’t leave you flat, Michael,” Sonny said. “That fuck Frankie McCarthy was all over the place with his boys, the fuckin’ Falcons, so we had to hide out.”
“We stayed up the house,” Jimmy said. “Listenin’ to the radio.”
“That’s what I figured,” Michael said, wanting anxiously to believe that he had not been abandoned in Mister G’s store. He didn’t tell them how he’d felt, and didn’t mention to them that he had called the ambulance. That was yesterday; today was today. They started to walk toward the park. The air felt cold and clean. Michael thought that the snowbanks were like mountain ridges now, and they began to name the tall piles on the corners, shoved into peaks by the city snowplows. Mount Collins. Mount MacArthur.
“Fuckin’ mountains will last ’til summer,” Sonny said. They laughed, and watched smaller kids burrowing like miners into the sides of the snow hills. It was hard for Michael to imagine these streets sticky with summer.
They walked into the park, following the kids lugging sleds and others draped with ice skates. At a food stand beside the zoo, Sonny bought a hot chocolate and shared it with Jimmy and Michael. The only animals in sight were the polar bears, and Michael thought they looked happier than he’d ever seen them.
“How do you figure Mister G is feelin’?” Sonny said at last.
“How could he feel?” Michael asked. “Frankie hit him with the goddamned cash register.”
Sonny shook his head and looked off at the snowy forest beyond the zoo. “I know how I feel,” he said. “I feel fuckin’ awful. The guy was stickin’ up f’ me remember?”
Michael remembered.
“It’s over,” he said.
“Like hell it is,” Sonny said.
For the next two days, Mister G’s candy store remained closed. At all hours, Michael and his friends saw detectives moving around the snow-packed streets of the parish in an unmarked police car. These were the cops they called Abbott and Costello, because one was tall and thin and the other short and fat, like the movie comedians. They were not comedians. Most of the kids had heard what they did to bad guys in the third-floor squad room at the precinct house on McGuire Avenue and didn’t want such things to happen to them.
Around noon on the second day, Abbott and Costello stopped in front of Unbeatable Joe’s and went in together and drank beer at the bar for a while and then left. Costello did the driving. Then they pulled up in front of the Star Pool Room, across the street from the Venus, and hurried in. They came out talking to each other, shaking their heads. Costello waddled into the Venus, while Abbott waited outside in the snow, his right hand inside his gray overcoat. Michael saw him spit into a snowbank. Then Costello came out of the Venus and they got in the car and drove away.
“They’re lookin’ for Frankie,” said Sonny. “For beating the shit outta Mister G.”
The boys were standing in the doorway of the variety store next to Slowacki’s candy store, stamping their feet to keep warm.
“I saw them go up his house too,” Jimmy said.
“I hope they get him,” Michael said. “I hope they put him in the goddamned can.”
“What?” Sonny said. “You hope they get him?”
“What he did to Mister G was rotten,” Michael said. “He’s the prick. He’s a coward, Sonny, a goddamned jerkoff, beating up an old man like that. Besides, he was defending you.”
Sonny paused. “Yeah,” he said, “but you better not say nothing. You don’t want to end up with the mark of the squealer.”
“What’s that?” Jimmy asked. Little puffs of steam issued from their mouths when they talked.
“They take a knife and they dig in the point here,” Sonny said, twisting his forefinger into his cheek at the hinge of his jaw. “They make a hole, see? And then”—he pulled the finger down his cheek to the corner of his mouth—“then they cut it all the way down to your mouth. So everybody knows you got a big mouth. They know that for the rest of your fucking life.”
“Jesus,” Jimmy said.
Michael shuddered.
“It’s real bad,” Sonny said. “Very bad. The mark of the squealer.”
“Still…,” Michael said.
“The bulls come askin’ you questions, Michael, you didn’t see nothing,” Sonny said. “That’s it. For you. For all three of us.”
Michael remembered what Frankie McCarthy had said as he was leaving with his pack of Lucky Strikes. You didn’t see nothing. One of the rules.
“Okay,” Michael said. “But what happens to Frankie?”
“Nothing, probably.”
“That’s not right, Sonny.”
“No, but that’s the way it is.”
“You mean, he can just do that and not get punished? He beat the crap out of an old man. He could’ve beat the crap out of us. So who punishes him?”
“I don’t know. God, maybe.”
Jimmy Kabinsky smiled. “My uncle said Mister G got what he deserved.”
“What do you mean?” Michael asked.
“He’s a Hebe,” Jimmy said. “My uncle says back in the Old Country they would have killed him.”
“For what?” Sonny said. “Resisting assault?”
“No, just, you know, in general.”
“Your uncle is a goddamned jerk,” Michael said.
“What do you mean, a jerk? He’s—”
“Hey, come on, knock it off,” Sonny said. “What do we gotta have an argument over Jews for? Jesus Christ.”
“My uncle says the Jews killed Jesus and they gotta pay.”
“Jesus was killed, what? Five thousand fuckin’ years ago?” Sonny said. “I guarantee you Mister G wasn’t there that day.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Not buts, Jimmy. Look, I don’t like Jews any more than the next guy. But it don’t make no fuckin’ sense to beat the shit out of Mister G because of something he had nothing to do with.”
“Right,” Michael said. “It wasn’t about Jesus. It was about us.”
“Well…”
“Come on,” Sonny said, “let’s go shovelin’.”
They wandered along the snowy ridges and icy hills of Ellison Avenue, repeating jokes they’d heard at school before the Christmas break, discussing the possibility that if it snowed at least one more time they’d never go back to school, arguing about who invented the telephone and wishing they had one, and stopping in shops, where they offered to shovel snow. The shopkeepers had their own shovels, and some of them had kids who
were doing the work. But they earned sixty cents anyway and then went to Slowacki’s and sat at the counter and ordered three hot chocolates.
“You know, I gotta confess something,” Michael said.
“You beat up Mister G,” Sonny said laughing.
“No,” Michael said. “Something else.”
He told them about his visit to the synagogue on Kelly Street and how the rabbi appeared in the blizzard and called him over and asked him to turn on the lights. He couldn’t exactly describe the sound of the man’s voice, or admit to his fear when he stepped into the vestibule. But he did say that he thought the rabbi was a pretty good person.
“That’s it, that’s why you got so pissed off before,” Jimmy said. “You’re in with them.”
“All I did was turn on the goddamned lights,” Michael said, sipping the thick, sweet cocoa. Mrs. Slowacki was busy with other customers; with Mister G’s closed, she was busier than ever, selling candy to kids and cigarettes to men.
“That’s how they get you,” Jimmy said.
“What, to trick me and drop me through a trapdoor? Jimmy, here I am, alive.”
“How do you know he didn’t hypnotize you?”
Then Sonny put up his hands, palms out.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said, halting the argument. “This could be good.”
Michael turned to him.
“What do you mean?”
“The treasure.”
“What treasure?”
“Don’t tell me you never heard of the treasure, Michael. Everybody knows about it.”
“I never heard of no treasure,” Jimmy said.
Sonny lowered his voice and leaned close to Michael and Jimmy. “All the Jews, they give money and jewels and rubies and gold and shit like that to the rabbis. But these rabbis, they don’t put it in banks. They bury it. They hide it. They keep it there, so if one morning they gotta run, they pack it all in a bag and get the fuck out of there.”