All-American

by John R. Tunis

  What struck him most was the different discipline. Even in Mr. Wendell’s class, which was known for its informality throughout the Academy, the class discipline was much stricter. While the teacher distributed some corrected papers, there was a steady hum of talk and conversation. She looked up and stopped. “Shsss... not quite so much noise, please....” Ronald smiled to himself, thinking how the masters at the Academy would have immediately handed out detentions.

  The papers were finally distributed and she called on the class for book reports. “Gordon Brewster.”

  A small, black-haired, olive-skinned boy, slender and rather good-looking, walked to the front of the room. With assurance he began an account of a book he had read. It was done, to Ronald’s amazement, more smoothly and better than many boys could have done on the Hill. But Stacey’s head with the bristling red hair kept wagging in disapproval. His hand shot up. The teacher saw it but paid no attention. Stacey made it evident that he didn’t like the boy who was reciting. Finally he could restrain himself no longer and interrupted.

  “Naw... he’s wrong, Miss Davis, he’s wrong on that date. 1862.”

  She was cool, sharp, efficient in her tone. “I’m sorry, Jim; he’s right. It was 1864.”

  The snub didn’t affect Stacey in the least. He continued to make derisive noises, apparently doing his best to upset Gordon Brewster who refused to be upset. This continued until the bell rang and the class, taking no notice of the boy reciting, cut off his last sentences in a Niagara of noise. Gathering their belongings, most of the boys and girls turned their backs on him and tramped out.

  From every room crowds poured into the wide, cool corridors, filling them completely. The sound was terrific; the strangeness of it all, the uproar and confusion, dazed him. It was like being lost in a big city; so many unfamiliar faces, so much rush and bustle and turmoil on every side, that he was completely unsettled.

  Then he heard a sound. A sound which pulled him from the deep well of his bewilderment, which yanked him back to that hallway. It was a voice from behind in the milling mob, a boy’s voice, high-pitched, imitating a girl. It was calling in derision.

  “Oh, Ronny! Oh, Pretty Boy...!”

  II

  Class followed class. His head was dizzy with the confusion and largeness of the place. Shortly after twelve he tagged along with Stacey to the cafeteria on the third floor, for luncheon.

  The cafeteria was an enormous room running the whole length of the building, with what seemed like hundreds of tables in rows. Around the walls were more oil paintings. Opposite the doorway was the cafeteria itself. You entered, took a tray from the counter, put on it whatever you wished from the menu, and then paid as you went out. Ronald chose scrambled eggs, potato chips, a piece of pie, a bottle of milk, bread and butter. Cost: 27 cents.

  They emerged from the cafeteria proper to the main dining room, or at least he did, and stood holding his tray and feeling awkward. It seemed as if a million girls sitting at the tables were watching. After a minute Stacey joined him, holding out silverware.

  “You forgot yer tools.”

  “Oh, thanks.” They found an empty table and sat down on the aisle, Ronny opposite the other boy. Stacey ate rapidly and in complete silence, although judging from the noise around them he was the only silent person in the entire room. As Ronny ate his scrambled eggs, he looked about.

  To his surprise he saw that those paintings on the four walls were actually scenes of life in and around the town. Not mythological Greece, or ancient history; but the town itself, today. There were scenes of people eating lunch in Forest Grove, or swimming in the Lake, or skiing in the hills up back of Jamestown. As he ate, looking at the paintings on the walls, he became aware of the same high-pitched giggling he had heard in the corridors. Girls with heads together at different tables were glancing his way. Across the aisle he saw Fronzak the big tackle. He hoped he’d look up and smile; but he didn’t. Ned LeRoy was eating at a table in one corner with half a dozen colored boys. The table next to them was half-filled with colored girls. Ronny observed that most of them were eating out of paper bags containing lunches brought from home, not off trays purchased at the cafeteria as did nearly everyone else.

  Then he realized that his conductor had finished and was leaning back in his chair. No one wastes much time eating in this place, he thought.

  “You take yer tray and hand it in at that window back there by the door, on the way out.” Stacey indicated the window over his shoulder, and Ronald noticed boys and girls already passing by with their empty trays. He finished his pie and gulped his milk. Grabbing the tray, he rose hurriedly just as Stacey, across the table, was getting ready to rise also. Clumsily he hit the Irishman’s foot, stumbled a little, not much but enough. CLASH! BANG! CLATTER! There they were—tray, dishes, silverware in a mess on the floor.

  Before the noise had died away a roar started. Gently at first, then louder, louder still. All over the room in unison six hundred and fifty throats opened wide.

  He stood dazed by the sound. It was terrifying. Every eye in the room was on him. Never in his life, not even out there alone in the backfield on the Academy gridiron, had he felt so conspicuous. And so helpless. The roar continued. It grew. Red and flushed he leaned over to scoop up the remains of his luncheon.

  Then down the aisle holding the fragments of disaster in his hand. It seemed a million miles long, that aisle. Gosh, what a dope I am! What a way to begin a school! How could I come to make such a fool of myself!

  The aisle was endless. Finally he reached the window. Stacey was there beside the pile of trays and dirty dishes with a kind of malicious grin on his face. Shoving his burden beside the others, Ronald turned and went into the corridor with his red-haired companion. Behind them the roar was slowly dying away.

  “Yeah... they always do that when you smash or drop something. It’s a custom here.” The boys and girls passing by grinned widely, and Ronald, still red and angry with himself, hardly heard Stacey’s comments as they went downstairs.

  “See that guy, see him? He’s Mr. Morgan, physical ed. You hafta take it twice a week if you aren’t on the varsity. This here’s the liberry. This is the music room. We’ve got the best high school band in the country.”

  Oh, you have, have you? thought Ronald, vaguely remembering the band from the day of the game. He was still too annoyed with himself to talk, and through the next class, an advanced algebra course, he felt hot and conspicuous all the time. Luckily this class was attended by fewer girls than boys. In fact there were only two girls in it. Evidently girls disliked algebra as much as he did.

  Discipline here was stricter, attention better, although he saw that nearly everyone still kept an eye on the clock in the rear of the room, something never tolerated by the masters at the Academy. He himself had to follow closely, and he liked the teacher, a quick, active, elderly man who seemed to know his stuff. This man made the boys recite. They got away with nothing. “I don’t think the others can hear you,” he remarked to a pupil who was mumbling the lesson.

  Then followed a Latin class with a woman teacher, and before he knew it the final bell rang. He was tired, dead tired. The noise and confusion and especially the newness of it all were wearying.

  With Stacey he went upstairs. Already lots of the kids were pouring down, the girls carrying books home to study. Ronald noticed that few of the boys had books under their arms. He grabbed his coat from the hook in the locker.

  “Well, s’long. I’m gonna try out for the swimming team. You can’t swim, y’know.”

  Ronny slammed his locker shut. Two or three hundred lockers up and down the long corridor were being slammed at the same time and the noise was overpowering.

  “Oh! Why not?”

  Stacey had to shout over the sound of banging lockers and yelling boys and girls. “Ten weeks rule. No transfers can play varsity athletics ’cept after ten weeks.” Was there a trace of satisfaction in his tone? “S’long. See you tomorrow.” He turned aw
ay and was lost in the crowd.

  Tired, confused, still annoyed with himself, Ronald went down the stairs alone in the chattering crowd. Every one of these hundreds of boys and girls knew each other, called each other by first names, yelled at each other. Everyone was either with a group or some one kid. The girls each had an arm in another girl’s, the boys were joking to a pal as they rushed down the long hallways. Ronny felt almost homesick for Keith and Rog and the boys with whom he had fought at the Academy.

  There was a sort of jam at the main doorway. He stood aside watching them swarm through. Then he came out with the crowd into the sunlight. Cars were lined up at the curb; at one side was the long bicycle rack with double rows of bikes awaiting their owners. Then from behind, from inside the door, he heard it, now distinctly.

  “Oh, Ronny! Oh, Ronny!” It was a boy’s voice, high-pitched, imitating a girl. Or trying to.

  Ronald went down the steps. Somehow this wasn’t working out quite as he’d expected.

  III

  On the bed was the boy in the leather collar, looking straight ahead, and in the chair at the foot of the bed was the boy who had helped put him there.

  “How do I know? Oh, I do, that’s all.”

  “But, Meyer, how do you know?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, Ronald. I know ’cause I’ve been there.”

  Ronny was amazed. “You have! Really! You went to the Academy, to some school...”

  “Nope. You don’t get me. I mean I’ve been where you are now. I’ve been in your place.”

  “In my place!”

  “Uhuh. Y’see, Ronald, it’s like this. A Jewish boy, now, he’s behind the 8-ball all the time. It isn’t enough to be better than the other guy, he’s gotta be a whole lot better.”

  “Has he? How you mean, Meyer?”

  “Well, I mean like this. Is he after a job, he’s gotta be twice as smart as the other boy, else he don’t land that job. Get me?”

  Ronald got him.

  “Like, now, is he trying to get a scholarship to college. His marks must be lots higher than the other boy or the boy grabs off the dough. See?”

  Ronald saw. The other boy. Why, that’s me! That’s Keith! That’s Tommy Gilmore. It’s some of the kids in Abraham Lincoln, even. Ronald saw. What he saw he did not like.

  “Well, yes, I suppose you’re right.”

  “Now me, for instance. I want to be a doctor. I want to, understand. I’m set. My old man says sure, he’ll help me. He’ll give me dough. I get my marks; I’m set. Will I get into Medical School? Maybe so, maybe not.”

  “Why not, Meyer?”

  “Why not! ’Cause I’m Jewish. Lots of the Medical Schools don’t want me. They don’t say so, out loud, that is. But they don’t and I know they don’t.” His face looking straight ahead was stern.

  Ronald felt uncomfortable as that determined voice continued. This was something he’d never before realized. When you were on the Hill, you thought of the kids at Abraham Lincoln as meatballs, not as boys trying to get into Medical School. On the Hill boys were going to Medical School, only they took it sort of for granted. Eric Rodman, for instance. His old man was a doctor and lived in New York. Once Ronald had stayed with him during vacation, and they went to shows, real shows not movies. And when they got home Eric’s old man was there. Eric would get to Medical School, he would get to be a doctor.

  It was hard. But anyhow, there was one place things were pretty ok. He blurted out what he felt. “Only not in sport, Meyer; it isn’t that way in sport.”

  To this remark the stiff-necked figure on the bed would have to agree. But there was a moment’s silence. “Sometimes yes, sometimes not. D’you ever hear of a Jewish boy on the crew at a big college? Nope. It’s like a Negro in the big leagues.”

  Wait a minute. Hold on now. This was too much for Ronald. “You mean to say if Ned LeRoy was a... was a great first baseman like, well, like Hank Greenberg, he couldn’t make the Tigers?”

  He laughed, not a happy laugh either. “Why, no; ’course not, Ronald. Name me one Negro ballplayer, one.”

  “H’m, now, that pitcher, that one, you know...”

  “Satchel Paige. Sure. He’s maybe the best pitcher in all baseball. Only he isn’t in the big leagues. Say! Do you know what league he’s in? I’ll tell you. He’s in our league. And now you’re in our league, too, and you don’t like it. You don’t even understand it the way we do because we were brought up in this league. We’re on to their curves.”

  “Whose curves?”

  “The other guys.” There was hardness in his voice. “The guys who get the jobs, the scholarships, the places on the Yale crew and the Tigers.

  This wasn’t so good. He was going to Yale. Say, was that true? Was Yale like that? Were the rest of the colleges that sort of places? Gosh. Made you sort of think, all this Meyer was saying.

  He looked at the figure stretched on the bed. That’s where he’ll be tonight when I’m doing my French and Latin in my own room, and tomorrow when I’m trying not to hear them in the hallways, and the next day, and the next. This is the guy they called a meatball, this is the boy they ganged up on. We ganged up on. There he is, lying with a queer leather collar up around his neck and a pained look in his eyes.

  It made him angry all of a sudden. “But look here, Meyer, what do you do?” This was unjust. It was unfair. That Meyer couldn’t get a scholarship if he earned it, that Ned could never play first for the Detroit Tigers. Gosh, it was wrong, all wrong.

  “What do we do? We don’t do anything. We learn to take it. That’s why you’re in our league now, Ronald, and that’s what you’ve got to do, learn to take it.”

  Thank goodness he didn’t add, “and like it.” No one in his senses could do that. Meyer was right. At the Academy he hadn’t taken it; he hadn’t taken the silent treatment, the unfriendliness, and all the rest. He’d gotten up and walked out. Now he had to learn to take it.

  Only if there was all this unfairness, all this injustice, why did older folks like teachers and the principal and the Duke talk about America? And democracy. And all that sort of thing. Why did they? Why?

  “Look, Ronny, since this... since that game... since I got to seeing you so often, I can tell you things you maybe don’t know. Now take that trick Stacey pulled on you in the cafeteria the other day...”

  “What! You mean to say he did that on purpose!” It was the kind of thing which could never happen in the Academy. Nobody there would think of humiliating another boy before the school. He saw suddenly that not all the meanness and cruelty was in the Academy, that it was here, too, right around him, a different kind perhaps; but there it was.

  They looked at each other; the boy in bed amused, for the first time a sort of smile on the lips above the leather collar. And sitting at the foot the boy who had helped put him there, shocked and worried.

  “Why, sure he did. But look, he’s a good guy, Stacey is. Yes, really. Only he thinks you aren’t one of us, understand. At heart he’s an ok guy.”

  “Takes a funny way to show it,” remarked Ronald.

  “Sure. That’s Stacey. He’ll ride you, but give him time. He’s not a bad guy. I know. He likes to make folks think he’s tough.”

  “Oh! Is that his trouble?”

  “Yeah. Now you’re in the same situation I was. He’ll ride you plenty, all he can. Tried to pull that stuff on me, and finally I told him, I said, ‘Looka here, Stacey, lay off me or I’ll poke you in the puss.’ I’m bigger’n he is, so he quit. Then we became friends, good friends, too. So’ll you.

  “Maybe.” Ronald in his distress doubted it.

  “Of course. Only you mustn’t let him get away with anything. Call him sometime and he’ll quit. He’s ok; I know you mightn’t think so after what he did up in that cafeteria, but he’s a good guy, honest he is. He thinks right, get me? Understand?”

  In a way he did understand. It was hard to believe about a boy who’d stick his foot out in the cafeteria on a stranger; it was hard to
believe about that fresh kid with straight red hair and the freckles and the queer clothes. But if he thought right, after all, that was what counted. Ronald felt he could trust Meyer Goldman. If Goldman said so, it must be so. Besides, many of them like Keith and Tommy wore the right clothes, shirts with collars that buttoned down and saddle shoes, only they didn’t think right. They were nice guys, but they didn’t think right. That was what counted, and if Goldman said so, it must be so.

  He went down the steps to the street, thinking hard. The picture ahead was not attractive. Ronald hated fights, scraps, brawls, especially when people were around. Well, I’m in their league now, Meyer’s and Ned LeRoy’s.

  For the first time since arriving at Abraham Lincoln High he saw the funny side of the thing. You were the best back on the Academy team, and you ended up in the league with Meyer Goldman and Ned LeRoy. This he had hardly expected that morning up in Keith’s room on the Hill when he’d exploded out of Hargreaves, out of the Academy, out of everything he was used to and into a very different league.

  IV

  Stacey leaned toward him. “Hey, Ronald, lemme have a look at your French paper, will ya?”

  Ronald glanced up, uneasy. Mr. Robinson, the history teacher, was handing out corrected papers, with his back turned. So Ronny slipped his French lesson across, feeling uncomfortable. At the Academy this was never done, first because the teachers would catch you, second because they were there for help day and night, and third because as a rule every boy came to the first period prepared. At Abraham Lincoln as a rule almost every boy came to the first period unprepared.

  Mr. Robinson came down the aisle toward him, handing out papers and calling names. “Gracie... John... Rosie... Bob... Sue... Paul... Barbara... Susie... Donald.”

  The first names jarred on Ronny’s ears. At the Academy the masters called you by your last name: Perry, Davidson, Treadway, Rodman. Most teachers at Abraham Lincoln called you by your first name. He much preferred the Academy method.