City Boy: The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder

by Wouk, Herman

  “I know I shouldn't of.”

  “Rotten ol' Gauss.”

  “Aw, why blame him? I shouldn't of stole it, that's all.”

  “Well, heck, you didn't think it was stealing.”

  “I was crazy.”

  The train was speeding through forests and fields, but the city seemed close to Herbie. He could almost smell asphalt, auto fumes, and the acrid electric air of the subway. He fished a cardboard box out of his pocket and opened it. A little rose-colored lizard looked out at the boys with bulging, steady eyes. The pouch under its throat palpitated.

  “He's cursin' you,” said Cliff.

  “He's cursin' because he's goin' to the city.”

  “I like the city.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I dunno. I just like it. You can play ball when you feel like it, not when some counselor says so, and there's good movies and everythin'.”

  “Yeah-and school.”

  “Well, school is pretty awful,” Cliff admitted.

  The lizard reached up one claw and made a half-hearted attempt to get out of the box. Herbie pushed it back, shut the lid, and returned the box to his pocket.

  “He'll be dead when you get home, Herbie.”

  “Naw, he'll be O.K. I'll put him in a goldfish bowl. I want somethin' to remind me of the country.”

  Uncle Sandy's whistle blew, loud and out of place in the narrow car.

  “All Gooferdusters report to the lounge!”

  The cousins rose, self-conscious in the extreme newness of their distinction, and walked down the aisle and through the dusty green curtains into the lounging room. The black leather seats were already filled with Manitou nobility. A few boys were perched on the edge of the metal washbasins. Uncle Sandy leaned against a mirror on the wall, smoking his pipe.

  The Gooferdusters consisted of a few of the younger counselors who had once been eminent campers, also all the leading athletes like Yishy, Gooch Lefko, and Lennie, and a few boys like Herbie and Cliff who had won unusual attention in one way or another. For example there was Willie Sutro, who was an Intermediate of the most ordinary sort, except that he came from Toledo, Ohio. Since everybody else in camp was from New York, Willie enjoyed a sort of geographical glamour that had won him speedy election to the Gooferdusters.

  It is impossible to describe how wonderful it was considered at Manitou to be a Gooferduster, and luckily it is not necessary. There is no community, no walk of life, no age group without its Gooferdusters, and every reader knows exactly how fine it is to be in the elect circle, and how sad it is to be out. No matter what they are called—circles, clubs, societies, sororities, or what you please—they are all Gooferdusters, and their virtue lies in this, that they enable a few people to come together and agree solemnly among themselves that they are better than other people. Such is the power of positive assertion, this verdict is usually accepted by the unlucky outsiders. At the last judgment all this shall pass away, and we shall every one of us become Gooferdusters.

  Uncle Sandy put away his pipe, drew himself up, and raised his right hand with the two middle fingers bent under the thumb, and the index and little fingers standing up like horns.

  “Sinai, Gooferdusters,” he intoned.

  “Sinai, Goofermaster,” responded the others, imitating his salute.

  The head counselor dropped his hand, and with it his priestly attitude, and became casual.

  “Now, fellows, you know it's the ancient Gooferduster custom to meet for the last time on the train. The old members tell the new members who were elected this year the great secret—the real meaning of the password ‘Sinai.’ I suppose you neophytes all think it means the same as Mount Sinai, in the Bible.” Uncle Sandy grinned knowingly.

  The new members looked abashed, and the old members exchanged glances of superior wisdom.

  “Well, it doesn't. It's spelled S-Y-N-Y. Sinai, S-Y-N-Y. … And now the Gooferdusters will whisper the real meaning to the neophytes.”

  Gooch Lefko pulled Herbie toward him by an arm, bent, and enunciated hoarsely in his ear, “S-Y-N-Y. See You Next Year. Syny!”

  “Syny!” Herbie whispered in return, feeling that this was expected of him. But his heart wasn't in the ritual, and the disclosure of the awful mystery gave him no thrill. Cliff's unpleasant reminder of the stolen money was haunting him.

  “O.K., fellows,” said Uncle Sandy. “Now, remember, this is a secret that will never be mentioned again until the train ride home next year, on your honor, now. Well, boys, you're the cream of Manitou and it's been a great season, hasn't it? It sure has. So thanks again for your swell co-operation and—SYNY!” He gave the homed salute once more, and all the Gooferdusters responded with the gesture and the password.

  Herbie looked around at the cream of Manitou. A week ago he had had no more thought of being included in this high caste than of becoming President. These superior beings who ran, jumped, swam, and threw balls so well were the giants of the earth, and he was of the stunted herd. Now, in their city clothes, crowded into this lounge, they looked very much like a group of trolley-car riders after school hours. Once off the grounds of Manitou, the glitter of the Gooferdusters was fading remarkably.

  Uncle Sandy paused in stepping through the curtains and said, “You Gooferdusters have exclusive use of the lounge for the next quarter hour. Then break it up.” He went out. One of the counselors offered cigarettes around; two of the Super-seniors accepted them and puffed awkwardly. The athletes began talking about the Senior girls in sniggering tones. Somebody twitted Yishy about Felicia. He made a sullen answer, and Herbie felt his face grow hot.

  “Let's get outta here, Cliff.”

  The cousins were the first to leave the aristocratic meeting. As they walked down the swaying aisle to their seats, friendly jokes and greetings were thrown at them, for their exploits were fresh in the campers' minds. But Herbie found little pleasure in the popularity. The campers were beginning to look different. He was used to seeing these faces on brown, half-naked bodies. Overdressed, muffled in voluminous city clothes, choked up with clean collars and dangling ties, they wore a new aspect. Herbie was not the only one to sense the change. Throughout the car conversation had lost the free, bantering tone of summer days and had become uneasy, bashful, or too loud. The common fate which had bound the boys was dissolving. Transition from comradeship to strangeness was taking place rapidly. Abuse of Mr. Gauss was the last subject that could bring warmth into the chatter, and even that once infinite resource was running low, because freedom was so near.

  “I wish to heck this ride was over,” said Herbie, dropping into the seat heavily.

  “So do I,” said Cliff. “Gee, it was such fun comin' out, too.”

  Herbie leaned back on the head cushion and dozed. It was not a refreshing nap, but a sickly half-sleeping, half-waking condition wherein he dreamed a dozen times of the stern face of his father listening to his confession.

  “Lunch, Herbie.”

  The boy opened his eyes and saw Uncle Sid standing in the aisle, holding a wrapped sandwich and a container of milk toward him. Cliff was already removing the paper from his sandwich. Herbie took the food and thanked the counselor. Looking out of the window, he saw by the landscape that they were much nearer the city. There was no wilderness any more. Highways with well-tended shrubbery and groups of houses or entire villages, neat and civilized, were moving quickly across the view. A clutching fear killed his appetite. He bit the sandwich once and laid it aside. He managed to sip most of the milk, but each swallow was an effort.

  Oddly enough, there was nothing for him to fear. Jacob Bookbinder did not know of his deed, and would surely give him an affectionate welcome. But Herbie felt the strongest possible aversion to the prospect of looking his father in the face. Jumping up from his seat, he walked to the rear platform of the car and paced back and forth in the roaring, drafty space, ransacking his brain for a way out of the trap which was closing on him.

  Mingled with the frantic searc
h for an escape was wonderment at his own criminal foolishness for running into this dead end. The midnight trip to the city, the robbery, the triumph of the Ride, all seemed more fantastic, less substantial now than many dreams he could remember. Could it all have happened? Could he, Herbie Bookbinder, Class 8B-3, have done these things? He had nothing to show for them. All had vanished, leaving a tortured conscience and the certainty that, after all, fifty dollars had been taken from the safe of the Place—taken by him. He turned hither and yon like a scared mouse, alone there on the platform, and beat his forehead with his fists.

  A half hour passed and he returned to his seat, pallid and gloomy.

  “Know what, Cliff?” he said.

  “What?” said Cliff, looking up from a tattered copy of Weird Tales, in which he was happily perusing a narrative entitled, “Blood-Drinkers of the Sepulcher.”

  “I figured out what I'm gonna do about the money.”

  “Oh, what?” said Cliff, laying the magazine aside and looking at his cousin with interest.

  “I'm gonna pay it back,” said Herbie dramatically.

  “Yeah, but how?”

  “I know what yer gonna say. I ain't got the money. Well, I'm gonna save it. I figure I get about a quarter a week for candy an' sodas. Well, I don't have to eat 'em, do I? A quarter a week is thirteen dollars a year. In four years I'll have fifty-two dollars. Then I'll walk up to my pop and give him the money an' tell him everything that happened.”

  Cliff said at once, “You mean you ain't gonna tell your father for four years?”

  “I just explained to you,” said Herbie in exasperation, “that I wanna punish myself an' pay back the money. Maybe I can go without movies, too, an' save it up in three an' a half years. But I wanna pay it back, see? It don't do no good to tell without payin' it back, does it?”

  Cliff was silent.

  “Well, whaddya think?” said Herbie, after waiting half a minute.

  “Well, it's an easy way out,” said his cousin.

  Herbie grew very angry. “What's so easy about it?” he snapped. “Goin' without candy or a soda for four years! You call that easy?”

  “Yeah, but meantime you don't have to tell your father,” said Cliff. “That's what you want, ain't it?”

  “O.K., smart guy. Tell me this. What would you do if you was me?”

  Cliff considered the question. “I dunno. I think maybe I'd just forget the whole thing.”

  “Aha!” said Herbie with vast sarcasm. “I suppose that ain't an easy way out!”

  “Sure. It's a lot easier'n your way. If I was too scared to tell, why should I fool around with skippin' candy an' sodas? That don't make it right.”

  “But I am gonna tell—after four years,” said Herbie, almost in a frenzy at Cliff's stupidity.

  “O.K., Herbie. If you think yer doin' right, maybe you are. I don't know nothin'. Me, I'd either tell or shut up, that's all.”

  “Honest, Cliff, if you can't understand that what I'm doin' is right you're dumb. Just plain, thick dumb. Dumb!”

  “I never said I was as smart as you,” Cliff answered without rancor.

  “You make me sore. 'Scuse me, I'm gonna sit somewheres else.”

  Herbie rose, stalked to a narrow empty half seat in the back of the car, pushed a tennis racket off it, and sat, fuming at the denseness of his cousin. The scheme he had evolved seemed to him to have every conceivable merit. It was noble. It was self-sacrificing. It required four years of spectacular saintliness. And it spared him the distressing necessity of confessing the robbery an hour from now. If Cliff had said aloud what both boys knew in their hearts—that Herbie would gradually forget about the four-year plan once the first meeting with his father was safely passed—Herbie could have shouted him down. As it was Cliff had spoiled the charm of the scheme, leaving Herbie to wrestle with the question and arrive at no conclusion. At this hour Herbie almost hated his cousin. He did not speak to him during the rest of the ride.

  The scenery changed to small, scattered suburbs, then to large, closely settled ones. Apartment houses, those brick hives that indicate the presence of city dwellers as surely as wigwams indicate Indians, began to fly past in increasing numbers. Herbie's spirits sank lower and lower. Soon he was gazing at a succession of Bronx back yards. The scenery began to appear familiar indeed, and he realized something he had overlooked on the journey outward, being then distracted by Uncle Sandy's speech—this train ran along the “creek,” along the very track he and Cliff had crossed on the day they had encountered the two ragged creek gangsters with their bottles of minnows. He looked sharp, and caught a glimpse of the Place, with the faded red and white sign painted across the top of its long side, “Bronx River Ice Company.” Then the train dived into the tunnel to go under the East River, the same tunnel out of which the freight cars had emerged on that memorable day to cut off the cousins' retreat from the brigands.

  It was exceedingly strange to have the two worlds of Manitou and the Bronx collide. Vivid memories revived of his eavesdropping on the business meeting, and his discovery of the combination of the safe. Uncle Sandy began shouting orders about leaving the train, but Herbie heard them vaguely through a swarm of memories and regrets. The scene of the eavesdropping arose in his mind as though it were happening outside the black window before his eyes. He could see his father turning the dial of the safe, hear him saying with sarcastic bitterness, “You'll be interested to know, Mr. Powers, that the combination is my son Herbie's birthday, 1-14-17. I gave him that little honor because with his small hands he smeared the plaster for the cornerstone when he was three years old. …”

  The train slowed. Campers began tumbling over each other, reaching for parcels, putting on coats, shaking hands, exchanging last-minute gifts and jokes, retrieving books, rackets, bats, banners, crudely carved wooden canes and dishes, strips of white birch bark, footballs, basketballs, volley balls, baseballs, tennis balls, and all the other debris of summer. Uncle Irish started up “Bulldog, Bulldog,” but it went mighty dismally, a few discordant voices chiming in with his dogged bellowing while the others were raised in impudent chatter or in more impudent jeers. Uncle Sandy blew his whistle and started to yell a last order, but at the same moment the train came into the lighted platform with jerks, crashes, and hisses, and nobody heard what he said. The cars were still moving slightly when a couple of the more daring boys opened the doors and leaped out with hurrahs. Uncle Sandy galloped after them. The train stopped. Boys came frothing out of one car and girls out of another. A cordon of counselors hurriedly lined up and shunted the rejoicing mob through the gate into a roped-off area of the huge Terminal concourse, where the sign

  CAMP MARICOU

  in the Berkshires

  hung again as it had hung two eternal months ago. Eager-eyed parents crowded against the ropes, and greetings and cries tore the air as the children appeared.

  There was one boy who neither rejoiced nor was eager as he was carried along in the tumultuous rush from the train. Herbie scanned the ranks of parents and could find neither of the familiar faces he longed, yet dreaded to see. One event he noticed which startled him. It was Mr. Gauss being embraced directly under the banner by a big blond-haired, black-browed woman of middle age, who wore a silver-fox cape around her shoulders, though the weather was warm, with a purple orchid pinned to the fur. She hugged Mr. Gauss, who was half a head shorter than she, with one hand. With the other she held a tall, pale girl of about thriteen by the elbow. Herbie had heard legends about Mrs. Gauss from Ted. She had stayed at Manitou during the first two summers, and caused mass resignations of the girl counselors during both seasons; and since that time had gone to California each summer to visit her parents, taking her daughter Flora with her. There were legends about Flora, too; legends not unlike those that have sprung up around the shadowy figure of Judas Iscariot. Nevertheless, it was clear to see that both mother and daughter were human beings. It seemed most odd to Herbie that Mr. Gauss should possess such natural ties. The camp
owner had a monolithic grandeur in the eyes of the boy. He had become one of the seven wonders of the world, a colossus of evil, and it detracted much from his stature that he had a real wife and child. Nevertheless, there were the females. Herbie never felt the same way about Mr. Gauss after this moment. He was only a man, after all. Looking at the brawny, flamboyant Mrs. Gauss and the pale, nervous daughter, Herbie dimly sensed that it was even possible that Mr. Gauss, like all the boys who hated him, could suffer.

  “Herbie! Herbie! Here we are, over here!” It was his mother's voice, cutting through the noise of fourscore other reunions. Herbie turned and spied a lady's dowdy brown hat which he knew at the back of the crowd, and a hand waving in a familiar way above the hat. He plunged toward these symbols of home. Then came a jumble of kissing, hugging, and excited greetings with both his parents, and in the turmoil he hugged and kissed Felicia, too, though he had seen her on the platform a few minutes ago. To repeated inquiries of the mother the children protested that they felt swell and had had a swell time and everything was swell. The family walked out of the Terminal to the automobile, Mrs. Bookbinder plying Herbie with questions at every step about his great last-minute glory at camp. She listened to his account with greedy happiness. As he spoke Herbie often glanced sideways at his father. Jacob Bookbinder looked older and more tired than Herbie remembered him, and after the first greetings he paid little attention to the children, walking beside them in a silent study.

  When they reached the car and his father unlocked the door, Herbie could resist no longer. He broke off his narrative to his mother and said, “How's everything at the Place, Pop?”

  Mr. Bookbinder paused with his hand on the lock. He looked at the boy, compressed his lips, and smiled wryly over his son's head at the mother. Then he opened the door and climbed into the automobile.

  Herbie turned to his mother in wonderment. She patted him on the back and said with a forced grin, “Come, come, get into the car.”