by Pete Hamill
Words themselves had a special power and mystery to Michael. In Latin or Yiddish, they were like those secret codes used by spies, or members of secret societies, which he sometimes wrote down while listening to Captain Midnight on the radio. But even in English, a word wasn’t as simple as it looked. The letters H-O-R-S-E were combined into horse. But what kind of a horse? Which horse? Gene Autry’s horse Champion? Roy Rogers’ horse Trigger? And that other cowboy, Ken Maynard, had a horse named Tarzan even though they didn’t have any goddamned Tarzan books in the Wild West. There were big police horses and the small horses people rode in Prospect Park in the summertime and the racehorses that the men in Casement’s Bar bet on with Brendan the bookmaker. There were colts and stallions and ponies and yearlings, pintos and broncos, steeds and mustangs, and those were just horses he’d learned about at the movies in the Venus. And down at the lumberyard at the bottom of Collins Street they used sawhorses, which were made of wood! Sometimes, words didn’t name things very clearly. They could get confusing.
Michael would think these things late at night, trying to sleep. The right words helped drive out the terrible occasions of sin, those images of women that kept swimming through his head: Judith with her golden skin and Hedy Lamarr and a French woman he saw in a Tarzan movie in the Venus. Denise Darcel. Their eyes and skin and hair and teeth would come from nowhere into his mind and he would feel strange and his penis would get hard and he would want to touch it. Then he would try to resist with words. Magic words. Europe. Steeples. The Vatican. Japan. Horses. Hallways. Pigeons. Jeeps. Each word was like the cross held aloft to confront Dracula. Each word was like the magic amulet employed by Tiny Tim in the Sunday comics of the Daily News.
Words had assumed another importance too. He was thinking about them in new ways because of Rabbi Hirsch. There were words he knew without having any memory of learning them; he just knew them, the way he knew baseball. But Rabbi Hirsch didn’t know these words in English, so he had to explain them, spell them, look them up in dictionaries. And when he had given those words to Rabbi Hirsch, the man made them his own. If Michael corrected his pronunciation, the rabbi never again made the old mistake. He repeated the word, wrote it into a school composition book, tried it out in sentences. The rhythms of those sentences were often wrong; the verbs were in the wrong place. But the rabbi treated words as if they were jewels. He caressed them, handled them with his tongue, repeated them with delight, turned them over for a view from another angle. Sitting with the rabbi on January afternoons, watching him plunge into words, Michael couldn’t believe he was ever afraid of the man, and he wished everyone in the parish could see how hard the man was working at becoming an American.
The rabbi also taught by example. Michael realized that he had never done with Latin what the rabbi was doing with English. He barely knew what the Latin words meant, and he certainly could not speak Latin. And neither could the priests at Sacred Heart. They all spoke English to each other. The priests and the altar boys recited Latin, like actors in some play. The priests often read the Latin prayers from books, while the altar boys called up the replies from brute memory. And Father Heaney raced through Latin prayers as if they were a bore. Michael did love the sounds of the Latin words, the flowing vowels, the abrupt consonants. But they were part of a code he didn’t fully understand.
Spurred by the example of Rabbi Hirsch, he went to Father Heaney and borrowed a translation of the liturgy of the mass, and within days the Latin code was partially cracked. But the new knowledge made him feel deflated. What was being said in the ceremony of the mass no longer seemed as mysterious. Ite, missa est, for example, meant Go, the mass is finished. Deo gratias meant Thank God. He laughed when he read that, because that’s how he sometimes felt, after a long, slow, drowsy mass. Thank God this is over, he would think, because now I can pick up the buns at the bakery and go home to breakfast. Deo gratias.
But Michael’s sudden interest in Latin wasn’t as impassioned as his growing desire to learn Yiddish. At first, he had agreed to learn the rabbi’s language out of politeness; that agreement had even felt like a trap. But then the lessons began to feel like part of an adventure. Not like visiting the Taj Mahal, the way Richard Halliburton did in those fat books he saw at the library. Or like Frank Buck going after man-eating tigers in India. But Michael did feel that learning the language was like entering another country.
There was another thing too. In some way, because he had heard it all of his life, Latin was familiar. It was like the parts of the parish that everyone else knew: the church, the factory and the police station, the Venus and the Grandview. But Yiddish was strange, secret, special; in the world of the parish, it would be his. After all, the Egyptian wizard didn’t give Billy Batson a magic word in English or Latin. It was a private word in a private language. And even if Michael did master Latin, he couldn’t speak it with anybody. As a language, it was dead. The blue books said so. By the end of the eighth century after Christ, Latin was no longer the common spoken language, and was diverging into Spanish and French and other forms…. Yiddish was different. Right there, on page 3067 of the Wonderland of Knowledge, was the entry.
From Eastern Europe has come Yiddish, an extremely flexible language spoken principally by Jews. It is based mainly on the German of the Middle Ages, but the inclusion of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Slavic words and phrases has made it quite distinct from the language spoken in Germany today. Although Jewish scholars once frowned on Yiddish as a vulgar tongue, it is now accepted as a language of wide literary merit. Numerous high-grade works of literature have been written in Yiddish; first-rank writers have used it as their medium; and there are a number of newspapers printed in Yiddish. Russia, Poland, and the United States have produced the principal Yiddish literature….
If he could learn Yiddish, he could read the newspaper that Rabbi Hirsch sometimes had on his table, the Forvertz, and find out what they said about the goyim in a language the goyim could not read, and how they would cover the arrival of Jackie Robinson. And he could borrow books from Rabbi Hirsch’s bookcase and read them. He was thrilled by the example of Balzac. He wrote his books in French, which came from Latin, and here they were in Yiddish, which came from German, and wouldn’t it be something if an Irish kid could read those stories after they had traveled all the way to Brooklyn? It would be like reading Latin, French, German, and Yiddish all at once, and turning them into English in his head. There were some books by Balzac on the shelves in the public library, but Michael did not even try to read them. He wanted to hold off until he could read them in Yiddish, the way he had held off looking at the snow on the morning of the blizzard. But more than anything else, he wanted to have a secret language. Among his friends and classmates, among the priests and the shopkeepers, in a world where Frankie McCarthy swaggered around with the Falcons and old rummies died in the snow, Yiddish would be his.
By the end of January, he had established a routine with the rabbi for their classes. Saturdays were out. The rabbi had to preside over the downstairs sanctuary. A small group of old people would arrive early, and sometimes stay all day, and the rabbi had to be available for discussion. Michael did show up early on Saturday mornings to be the Shabbos goy, refusing money from the rabbi but always accepting a glass of tea. Sometimes he brought the rabbi a sugar bun from Ebinger’s Bakery, where the day-old pastries were only three cents. Sometimes they talked quickly about the weather. But then they would say goodbye until Tuesday. The lessons now were on Tuesdays and Thursdays, after school, which still gave him time to see his friends.
But it wasn’t only the rabbi’s obligations that made Saturday lessons impossible. The rhythm of Michael’s week was changed one evening near the end of the month. He came up from the streets and found his mother happy and whistling as she listened to Edward R. Murrow on the radio.
“I’ve got great news,” she said, turning down the volume on the radio. “We’re going to be the janitors. And I’ve got a new job.”
She turned the hamburgers in the frying pan on the coal stove while she spoke, and stirred the boiling carrots. The McElroys were moving out of the first floor, his mother explained, going to Long Island, and Mr. Kerniss, the landlord, had asked her if she wanted the job of janitor. She had accepted.
“The first thing he’s going to do is take out the damned coal stove and give us a gas range,” she said. “How do you like that?”
“No more rotten egg smells!” Michael said.
“And we won’t have to pay any rent,” she said, her face happier than he’d ever seen it. “We’ll have to sweep and wash the halls once a week, and make sure the garbage cans are set out, and change the lightbulbs. And put coal in the furnace in the cellar for the hot water. It’ll be hard work, but with your help, Michael, we can do it.”
Michael felt a surge of emotion that he could not name. For the first time he was being called upon to do a man’s work. He would be able to help his mother in a way that he could never do when she worked at the hospital. Then she gave him the rest of the news.
“I’ll be leaving the hospital on the first of February,” she said, her face telling him this was good news, not bad. “And I’ll start work as a cashier at the RKO on Grandview Avenue. It’s a bit more money, and with us not having to pay rent, we’ll be in the chips.” She smiled broadly. “Well, not really. But 1947 will be a lot better than 1946.”
She seemed abruptly close to tears, and for a moment, Michael wanted to hug her. He wanted to tell her that as far as he was concerned 1946 wasn’t so bad. They hadn’t gone hungry. They didn’t go on relief, like the Kanes or the Morans. He’d done well in school. And right at the end, he’d met Rabbi Hirsch. That was a good year.
But he said nothing and realized how proud he was of the changes in their lives. The RKO Grandview, after all, was one of the big movie houses. It wasn’t like the Venus, where the same movies returned year after year, Four Feathers and Gunga Din, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, along with the serials and cartoons and coming attractions. The Venus was a small, rowdy place that wasn’t very clean. In fact, most people in the parish called it The Itch, implying that you could get fleas just by sitting in its hard seats.
But the RKO Grandview was like a palace. The lobby alone was bigger than their flat, with paintings of old Romans rising along the side walls, the men playing flutes while women with bare shoulders gazed at them like they were heroes. Some of the women resembled Judith from the encyclopedia, or at least Hedy Lamarr. There were hundreds of seats in the orchestra, sloping toward the stage and the movie screen, and when you walked in, the first twenty rows had a mezzanine above them, with boxes like the ones where Lincoln was shot by that actor, and above the mezzanine was the balcony. Michael had no idea how many seats there were in the balcony. It just climbed and climbed into the darkness, with cigarettes burning like dozens of fireflies, and the distant ceiling farther away than the roof of Sacred Heart.
To be sure, Michael had been there only three times. Once, on his fifth birthday, when his mother took him to see The Wizard of Oz. That was long ago. Before the war. They came home after the movie, his mother skipping and singing one of the songs about going off to see the wizard, and then in the kitchen he sat on his father’s knee and felt his rough chin and breathed the tobacco odor and tried to tell him about the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow who talked. His father laughed, and then turned serious, and told him about the time Sticky the dog swam to Africa and enlisted the lions and elephants to fight for Ireland.
“The monkeys built a boat, bigger than Noah’s Ark,” he said, “and they’d have eaten the king of England if it weren’t for the bloody bad weather. It was so cold, the lions and the elephants jumped in the water and swam back to lovely Africa, and Sticky had to sail home alone….”
His father took him to the dark movie palace the second time, after the war had started, and they sat in the vast balcony so Tommy Devlin could smoke, and together they watched They Died With Their Boots On. Errol Flynn played a soldier named Custer and the end was very sad. Michael had never before seen a movie where the hero died. He wanted to cry but didn’t, because his father didn’t cry, and he was sure his father would laugh at him for crying. On the way home, Tommy Devlin said he would take him to the Grandview again, when he came home, but he never did. That Monday, he went away to the army and never came back.
His mother took him one more time, when his father was in North Africa. She didn’t smoke, so they sat in the orchestra and saw a musical called The Gang’s All Here. But all through the movie, Michael kept thinking about his father. He wished he could go up the carpeted stairs, past the candy machines and the bathrooms and the entrances of the mezzanine, all the way to the balcony. He wished he could go up and down the aisles and find his father sitting alone. Smoking a cigarette. Wearing the blue suit and black polished shoes that were still in the closet at home. He wished he could hear his deep voice. He wished he could jump on his lap and hear him tell a story.
For a long time after that, and after they knew that Tommy Devlin was dead, he did not want to go to the Grandview. His mother never mentioned her dead husband when they talked about a movie at the Grandview. She just said it was “too dear.” Ninety cents to get in, while the Venus was only twelve cents on Saturdays and Sundays before five o’clock. Still, Michael longed for the Grandview the way he sometimes longed for his father. He passed it on long walks and gazed in at the murals; he studied the showcards in their glass cases, telling of coming attractions. John Garfield. Betty Grable. Humphrey Bogart. John Wayne. At the Venus, all the movies were old; they returned over and over again, the images ragged and often scratched. At the Grandview they came straight to Brooklyn from the movie houses of Manhattan. Now it might be different. No more Four Feathers! No more Frankenstein! Now he could see the new movies at the Grandview out of loyalty to his mother, even if there was a ghost in the balcony.
“Will we get in for free?” he asked.
“We’ll see about that,” she said, and chuckled. “First let me do the work.”
The deal was done. Three men arrived one Saturday morning and took away the coal stove, using hammers and chisels to separate it from the crusted cement foundations that kept it steady, pulling the stovepipe out of the wall and patching it with a circle of aluminum. Then they brought in the gas range: white, gleaming, with four jets on top, an oven, legs that looked like the legs of women, and even a clock. They connected it to the new gas line that ran up the side of the building, tested the jets and the oven, and then thumped down the stairs, leaving behind bits of broken iron, torn linoleum, drifts of coal dust, and a chisel. When the other tenants could afford to spend a hundred and thirty dollars for a gas range, they could be connected too. For the moment, the Devlins had the only one in the house, and it was free.
“Well,” Kate Devlin said, “let’s have a cup of tea. We can clean up the mess later.”
They divided the janitorial work. His mother changed the hall lightbulbs when they burned out and polished the brass mailboxes every other week. Together they rolled the battered metal garbage cans from the back of the hall to the sidewalk for pickup. They struggled with the much heavier ashcans, filled with ashes from the coal stoves that remained in the other apartments and from the coal-fired hot water boiler in the cellar. The other tenants came in to examine Kate Devlin’s wonderful gas stove, but they still used coal stoves for cooking and heat in the kitchens, while kerosene heaters warmed their living rooms. The women expressed envy and hope that they would have such a glory soon, if only their husbands would stop wasting money in Casement’s Bar, or if they could finally win the Irish Sweepstakes. Mr. Kerniss sent word that he would install central heating the following year—steam heat!—but would have to raise the rent to pay for the new boiler, the pipes, the radiators. For now, the coal stoves produced their many pounds of ashes. Since Michael was usually at school when the sanitation trucks came by on weekday mornings, his mother returned
the empty cans to the back of the hall. Each evening before dinner, Michael would go to the cellar and shovel coal from the coalbin into the furnace, so that everyone in the building would have hot water. If there was snow, Michael shoveled the sidewalk and sprinkled ashes on the pathways so nobody would slip on the ice.
He worked hard at these chores, but one other task filled him with a kind of mindless joy: cleaning the halls. Every Saturday morning, after serving mass, after stopping at the synagogue on Kelly Street to turn on the lights, after greedily consuming buns and hot tea in the company of Rabbi Hirsch, he would race to Ellison Avenue. He would start at the roof door with a broom and sweep his way down four flights to the ground floor. He was always amazed at how much litter would be dropped in seven days: soda bottles, bunched newspaper, candy wrappers, pebbles, birdseed, dirt he could not name. Michael never saw anybody drop this stuff: that was the mystery; it just seemed to erupt and be there. But no matter where it came from, his job was to deal with it. On the ground floor, he would sweep the litter into a dustpan and drop it in a paper bag which he then shoved into a garbage can.
Then he would start again at the top with a mop and a bucket of hot water. When his mother first took the job, Mr. Kerniss bought them a new aluminum two-gallon bucket with a roller at the top and a great thick ropy mop. After Michael swept, his mother would descend the stairs splashing Westpine disinfectant from a bottle, and the pungent scent would fill Michael’s head as he moved behind her with the mop. Once the odor was so strong he had to turn away, gasping, and return to the apartment to wash his eyes with cold water and blow his nose. But he actually loved the smell: its clean, cutting odor erased the smells of food and stale beer, dead roaches and unwashed bodies.