by Evergreen
Joseph had a best friend, Benjie Baumgarten. They walked to school together and back, went to the synagogue on the Sabbath and sat together and confided everything in one another. Benjie was curious about Wolf and Doyle.
"What do you do for him?" he pressed.
"Run errands. And write records."
"What sort of errands? And what do you write?"
"It's confidential. Business," Joseph said importantly.
"Oh, you dumb ass! Sure, private business with the Governor, I'll bet. Or the President, maybe."
"No, really." Benjie was envious, of course. Joseph could afford to be tolerant, lofty. "I'd tell you if I could, but I promised. You wouldn't want me to break a promise to you, would you?"
"No . . ."
They were crouched on the cellar stairs in number eleven, an abandoned building down the street from Joseph's house. The house had been condemned and the tenants had all moved out, except for some tramps, who, everybody knew, slept in the basement to get out of the cold.
Benjie had brought a plug of chewing tobacco which they were trying for the first time. This was a good place to avoid being seen.
"The sign says keep out—penalty of the law," Benjie said. "What'll happen if the owner catches us?"
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"Nothing. Mr. Doyle is the owner, if you want to know. Well, a part-owner anyway. He wouldn't mind." Joseph felt important.
So they were hiding under the stairs, feeling faintly nauseated and neither one willing to admit it to the other, when the door in the yard creaked open and a wedge of late afternoon light appeared. Wolf Harris came in, carrying a can.
They drew back, making no sound. The can was filled with some liquid, which Wolf poured out as he moved around among the empty boxes, piled newspapers and broken baby carriages. When he had emptied the can he wently softly out and closed the door. The fumes of kerosene rose up the staircase.
"Now why do you suppose he did that?" Benjie whispered. "I'm going out to ask him."
"You shut up!"
"Why should I!"
"Because. Wolf told me never to talk to him unless he talked to me first. Not to speak to him on the street, especially when he was with somebody else."
"That's funny. I wonder why?"
"I never asked him."
"You scared of him?"
"Yeah, a little."
"He's got a fierce temper, Wolf has. Once I saw him beat up a guy and break his nose. The blood came like water out of a pump."
"You never told me!"
"Well, it happened!"
"I believe you."
"Why do you work for Doyle?"
"What's Doyle got to do with what we're talking about?"
"Nothing. I just wondered."
"Because we need the money, stupid!" He wasn't going to mention anything about the accountancy course. Benjie might get the idea and horn in on it. Friend or no friend.
"Wolf scares me," Benjie said irrelevantly.
"Oh, shut up, will you!"
Joseph felt suddenly uneasy. The tobacco juice puckered his mouth. "I'm going home," he said.
The fire sirens woke him during the night, they and the noise of the crowd in the street. He and his parents got up and went outside. Number eleven down the block was blazing. Smoke, blown
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by the wind from the East River, stretched in ribbons across the sky. Flames exploded like rockets inside the tenement. Their light went surging from the first floor to the second, to the third. On the third floor faces appeared at the windows; arms moved in anguish.
"Tramps!" Ma cried. "My God, the house is full of tramps and they can't get out!"
Of course. In the winter, most people puttied the windows shut to keep out the cold.
"Oh, my God," Pa said.
The fire burned all night. Its flames warmed the night air all down the street. The water from the fire hoses froze on the sidewalks. The fire horses neighed at the flames and stamped their huge feet. Toward morning the fire burned out. The interior of the building had been hollowed; the blackened stone front was a jagged ruin. There were seven known dead. The crowds came silently to stare.
Joseph was very quiet. All day at school he turned things over in his mind: to tell Pa first and then Mr. Doyle? Or to go straight to Doyle? He wanted to talk it over with Benjie but Benjie had not come to school that morning.
On the way home a three o'clock Benjie hailed him. "I went over to see your boss this morning, Joseph."
"You went to see Mr. Doyle?"
"I told him I knew who set the fire. I told him about Wolf and the kerosene."
"Did you tell him I was with you?" Joseph demanded.
"Oh," Benjie said, "I'm sorry. I didn't. I guess I wanted to take all the credit myself."
Well, he had no one to blame but himself. Why hadn't he thought of staying out of school today and running over to Mr. Doyle's? Then Wolf would be arrested and Joseph would have been the hero instead of Benjie. Slow, like Pa. Old-fashioned. Let everybody get ahead of me. I don't think fast.
"I can't understand the whole thing," Benjie puzzled. "I thought Wolf and Mr. Doyle were thick. So why would Wolf want to burn the man's house down? Can you figure it out?"
"Oh, hell," Joseph said, brushing past Benjie.
He was still puzzling things over at breakfast the next morning, sore and silent, angry at Benjie and most of all at himself, when Mrs. Baumgarten appeared at the curtain to their kitchen.
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"I'm sorry to bother you but I thought you might know where Benjie is? He didn't come home last night."
"I saw him yesterday after school," Joseph said.
Mrs. Baumgarten began to cry. "What can have happened to him?"
Joseph's mother spoke comfort. "He's probably staying with a friend, that's all, and didn't tell you."
"Where? What friend? Why would he do that?"
"Don't worry, nothing's happened to him, I'm sure."
But something had happened. Benjie's body was pulled out of the river on the following Saturday afternoon. The police came to the synagogue looking for someone to come and identify it. Joseph's father shouted to him not to go but he pretended not to hear and went along with the crowd. Afterward he was sorry he had gone. They had killed Benjie with an ice pick and fish had eaten away a part of his face.
Joseph walked back home. People pulled at him with questions, whispering as people do. But he couldn't talk, just walked on past the burnt-out tenement. It was said that the insurance had already been collected. All of a sudden the boy, just twelve years old that summer, saw and understood the whole thing. He went into his parents' store, pushed open the curtain and sat down on the cot next to the stove. All of a sudden he was old; it seemed to him that he had just learned all there was to know about life. That people will do anything, that people will kill for money.
He began to cry. His father and mother came over and sat one on each side of him. They put their arms around his shoulders and sat there with him, not speaking. They thought he was crying for his friend, and of course he was, but also he was crying for much more, for his father's innocence and his own lost innocence, for everything that was dirtied and ruined in the world . . .
He never spoke to Wolf again, making sure that Wolf would never see him. Wolf wasn't around too much on this street, anyhow. It was said that he owned a fancy suit and went to dinner at Rectors with millionaires and Diamond Jim Brady. Another world.
He never saw Doyle again, either, except once to go and tell him, trembling inwardly, that his mother was in need of help at the store and he couldn't work for him anymore. For a long time he wondered, and in a way still did wonder, how you could reconcile the kindness of Doyle, the undoubted kindness (just for votes? just
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for power and votes?) with all these other things. . . . That would be what some might call the gray area. Well, he didn't believe it; to him nothing was gray. It was black or it was white. You
make it too simple, a man said once years later over beer, a learned Russian man who wrote for a newspaper: things are never that simple. Perhaps not, but Joseph preferred simplicity. He was at ease with it. Black or white. Good or bad. That's why religion was a comfort. It gave you the rules of the game, the signposts on the road. You knew where to go. You couldn't go wrong.
For two years his father kept asking him why he wouldn't go back to work for Mr. Doyle when there was such good opportunity in it for him. But he could not, he would not, explain. Perhaps if his father had had more time he would eventually have got the truth out of him. Perhaps. But he didn't have more time. He dropped dead a few months later after a silly argument with the milkman who had left the milk to sour in the sun. Worked himself into a rage over a few bottles of milk, his mother said afterward, shaking her head, mourning. But Joseph knew it had not been the milk that had caused his father to stand there, shaking his helpless fists until the cords stood out on his temples, turning his blind eyes toward the flaring, angry light; knew that it might just as well have been a nail or a penny or a scrap of dust that turned on Pa's bitter rage because the world was not what he wanted it to be, what it could be and what it never had been for him. Joseph understood all that. He was not quite fifteen years old.
"Your father wanted you to go to college," Ma said.
They were on the roof where he was helping her hang up the wash. In four directions the tenement roofs stretched like a prairie, a network of clotheslines, chimney pots and iron cornices. Beyond to the east were the river, factory chimneys and the flung arch of the Brooklyn Bridge. Farther north and out of sight were Fifth Avenue, mansions, banks and churches. He had been there once and never forgotten them. They too were New York. The real New York.
"I'm not a scholar, Ma," he said.
She pressed hopefully. She was always pressing him, not too hard but ceaselessly. Join the debating club, make a name. There's a city-wide contest, you might win. Mrs. Siegel's son goes to law
school at night. You're a smart boy, what are you going to do, stay in the grocery store? Is that what we came to America for?
He wanted to say, You certainly didn't come for my benefit, you didn't know you were going to have me. . . . But instead he said, "Even if I wanted to we haven't got the money. We need what I make."
Right after high school he had got a job with a painting contractor. Now, after two years, he was quite skilled and, through working in the tenements alongside other trades, he had picked up some knowledge of carpentry and plumbing as well.
"You could go at night. And I manage in the store. We could manage."
"Ma, I don't want to be a lawyer." "But Mrs. Siegel's son-"
"Yes, and the Riesners' two sons are doctors and Moe Myerson teaches high school. . . . But I'm not Siegel, I'm not Myerson or Riesner. I'm Joseph Friedman."
His mother started to pick up the clothes basket. He took it from her. She was so old, so much older since Pa died, as if it was an effort to live. His heart ached and he was sorry that he had spoken sharply.
"So tell me, what does Joseph Friedman want to be?" "Joseph Friedman wants to make money and take care of his mother so she won't have to keep a grocery store."
She smiled. It was a small smile, faintly sad. "It's not easy to make money without a profession."
"That's where you're wrong." He spoke eagerly. "My boss, Mr. Block, started as an ordinary painter and now look at him! He gets the work from all the banks that own property on the lower East Side. Well, a lot of them anyway. His family lives uptown on Riverside Drive. And he did it all simply by working hard and planning and he's still a pretty young man."
"So that's what you want to do? Be a contractor?" "Ma, I know you'd be terribly proud for me to be a doctor or a lawyer or something and the fact is I have a lot of respect for men like that. It's just not me, that's all. Tell you what, I'll make money and my sons will be doctors and you can be proud of them."
"I won't live to see your sons."
"Please, Ma!"
"I'm sorry. It's just that there's more to life than money. A man
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wants to be proud of what he does, to use the mind God gave him. Then, if he makes money, that's wonderful too, of course one needs money, but—"
Round and round. One needs money, one wants to pretend it isn't important, one tries to get it while all the time-pretending that one isn't trying to get it. I have no time for that, my children will afford that luxury. I'll see that they can afford it.
"I have a chance to work uptown," he said carefully. He had waited a week before getting up the courage to tell her. "Mr. Block has made connections uptown. On Washington Heights. There's a man named Malone who works for him and they want to start a crew uptown. I'd have to live up there."
She did not look at him. He knew that she had always expected this moment of separation and had prepared herself, no doubt, for a long time past. She said quietly, "You want to go?"
"Yes. Well, I mean, I don't want to leave you, but it's a good chance. He's offered me fifteen dollars a week, believe it or not. . . . Well, I give him a day's work and more besides and he knows it."
"I'm sure you do."
"I'd come back down and see you every week and send you half of what I make. I want to see you get out of that store."
"I don't mind that store. What else would I do with my time?"
"You don't mind my going, then?"
"No, no, go and be well. Only one thing . . . Joseph?"
"Yes, Ma?"
"You won't lose your faith, going uptown? Living up there mostly with Gentiles, I suppose?"
"There are plenty of Jews, too, and I'd rent a room with a Jewish family, of course. But a man's faith is inside him, he takes it wherever he goes. You needn't worry about that."
She took his free hand between hers. "No. I know I don't have to worry about that."
She was still in the store. He sent her money every week, brought more whenever he came to see her, but he saw no signs that she used any of it. She wore the cheap cotton dresses sold from the pushcarts and to the synagogue she wore the same black dress she had worn when he was a small boy. He suspected that she saved everything he gave her and would someday, at her death, return it all to him. A vast lonely sadness filled him when
he thought about her. She was sixty-three and looked much older. More than once he had urged her to sell the store and move uptown to the Heights. But she would not. She had made one great move in her lifetime, across the ocean, had put down a few tentative roots on Ludlow Street and that was enough.
The only thing she seemed to want was for him to be married. One day a year or so after he had moved uptown he had come back to see her and found a visitor sitting at the table in the kitchen, a bearded middle-aged man in a creased black suit. A briefcase lay on the table.
"My son Joseph," his mother said. "Reb Jeselson." A matchmaker. A flash of anger went through Joseph. He stood rigidly, without acknowledgment.
"Your mother tells me you want to get married." "I do?"
"Reb Jeselson came by, we happened to meet and we got talking," his mother interposed. There was alarm in her eyes. "And I happened to mention that I had a son, it just came about quite accidentally and he asked, Well, does he know any nice girls, would he like to meet any? And I said, I suppose he knows some girls, of course he must, but I suppose he might want to meet some more, so if you happen to know any nice girls. . . . After all, a man can never know too many!" she said with gaiety, as if they were joking at a party.
Reb Jeselson removed a folder from the briefcase, spreading half a dozen photos on the table.
"Of course we shall have to talk, you and I. You'll tell me what you have in mind. For instance, do you want an American-born girl or one from the Old Country? I'm sure you want a religious girl, I know something about your background," he murmured. "No, not that one, she's a very fine young woman," removing one of the photographs, "only the
problem is she's so tall, taller than most young men. You wouldn't want to look up to a wife, now, would you? Let me see, now here's a girl from a wonderful family-"
"I'm really not interested," Joseph said firmly. And, softening at his mother's look of dismay, "Some other time. I didn't expect you today. I wasn't prepared—"
Reb Jeselson waved him aside. "No obligation. None at all. I only want an idea of what's on your mind. Then we'll make another appointment at your convenience, no hurry—"
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