Once I bought a box of peaches from her, and she asked, “Benny a smart boy in school?”
“Oh yes. Very.”
“I know.” She gave me my change. “Don’t tell him I asked. I know he’s smart.”
Another time I passed the stand with Benny and bought an apple for three cents. Benny took the money out of her hand and gave it back to me.
“You’re a friend of mine,” he said.
I didn’t want to take the apple for nothing and returned the three cents to Mrs. Frankel. He took the pennies out of her hand and threw them quickly into the gutter.
“He’s my friend, I tell you,” Benny said. “What do you take his money for?”
“I’m sorry. Don’t holler on me like that.”
I couldn’t say anything, and we left her. At the corner I turned back and saw Mrs. Frankel searching for the pennies in the gutter.
We walked up Seventy-ninth Street without knowing where we wanted to go.
“What do you hang around that track team for?” Benny said. “What’s the sense in it? You run back and forth, and where are you? In fifteen years you’ll die of athlete’s heart.”
“I don’t strain myself.”
“That’s not the idea. How can you stand being in the company of those pinheads day after day? It’s a wonder those morons manage to stay eligible.”
THIS eventually led to a rift. I was crazy about running and stayed with it, and finally Benny gave me up in disgust. When I stopped copying his homework my grades fell off badly. For this and other reasons I regretted the loss of his friendship, but I had my pride. After a while we began pretending not to notice each other in the streetcar. And in time I could follow Benny’s progress only through Karl Denling, who maintained civil relations with everyone.
It was Karl who told me about the stunt Benny pulled at the dual meet between the math teams of Stuyvesant and Harris. A dual meet of that sort is held between teams of five contestants, who are given a set of algebra problems to be solved within a stipulated time limit. It occurred to Benny that if he could somehow distract the attention of the Stuyvesant team his own side would have a great advantage. So he released a laboratory white mouse during the contest and it scampered up and down until the Stuyvesant boys went for it. The Harris team, who had been told what was going to happen, remained at work and won the meet.
Benny didn’t always need trickery to put over his triumphs. There was nothing phony about the way he copped the freshman medals in Algebra, English, and History. Pride or no pride, on the day of the awards I went over to his locker to see those medals and feel them. Karl was with him.
“I’m glad you came,” Benny said. “I got something to say to you.”
“You suppose they’re real gold?” I said.
“What’s the difference what they are?” he said mildly. “Keep up with your track and one of these days you’ll win a silver cup that’ll be worth ten times as much as these.”
I didn’t quite know how to take him. “Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?”
“No, this is something important. Let’s go where they can’t overhear us.”
The three of us went to a stone bench on the campus.
“It’s a dizzy scheme, if you ask me,” Karl said.
“So stay out of it if you think so. I’m not so sure I want you in on it anyway,” Benny said.
“Well, go ahead, tell him.”
“It’s this. Did you ever read ‘The Thirteen,’ by Honoré de Balzac?”
“No,” I said.
“You want to,” Benny said. “It’s some book. All about thirteen guys who swore they’d stick together all their lives and help each other in every way possible. By the time they got through they were the most powerful organization in France. Just thirteen smart guys. I got the idea of getting up an outfit like that right here in New York, young guys like us. There’s no end of things we could do if we worked it right.”
“Who’d be the thirteen guys?” I said.
“We wouldn’t have to make it thirteen at first. We could start with the three of us as a base. I got the whole thing figured. I’m not letting you in on it just because you’re friends of mine. I think we’re the three smartest guys in the class. That’s the one requirement we’ll have for membership—a man will have to be extra smart. And we’ll call ourselves the Mentocrats.”
“Mentocrats?”
“Yeah. Mental aristocrats. Get it? Mentocrats. Thirteen of the smartest guys in the country working together. Pooling their brains. That’s power.”
“If anybody crossed us up, then what?” I said.
“Just this.” Benny drew a finger across his throat. “But nobody will. There will be a probationary period of a year for every new member, and then the Oath. Nobody will want to violate that Oath, not the way I got it framed. I tell you this is foolproof. I’ll let you see the Oath tonight. Can you meet me in front of the Seventy-ninth Street library at nine?”
“Nine? My mother won’t let me out that late,” Karl said.
“You know, I don’t think I want you,” Benny said. “If you had any will power you’d make it. Brains aren’t all that’s needed in a Mentocrat. It takes guts. No, I don’t think you would do.”
“Well, I can’t get out that late. But even if you don’t let me in, you can depend on me keeping it a secret.”
“I know I can,” said Benny slowly. “You know what’s good for you.”
OFFHAND I couldn’t see Benny’s plan either, but I declared myself in. I spent a good part of the afternoon thinking up amendments to the Oath I hadn’t seen, and at nine I met Benny in front of the library. He carried a large package.
“Let’s go where we can talk,” he said.
“Down the docks?”
“No good. You know Dolan’s Express office next to my house?”
“Yes.”
“They leave the skylight on their back room open at nights. We could climb down and talk away all night without being interrupted. And they got a typewriter in there. I want to type out some copies of this Oath so it looks like something.”
“How can you climb down a skylight?”
He tapped his package. “Rope.”
We went up to Benny’s roof and he showed me the open skylight. The climb looked easy enough. No slipup in any of Benny’s plans.
“Karl’s yellow,” he said.
“He stinks.”
We climbed through the skylight, using our rope. Dolan’s office was a small room in back of the garage. All it had was a desk and cabinet and a couple of chairs and the typewriter which Benny had mentioned. You had to hand it to Benny. He had even thought of bringing a candle. He sat in the swivel chair and put his feet on the desk and laughed. I laughed, too.
“This is the life,” Benny said.
We looked in the drawers and they were full of all kinds of stuff—typing paper, pencils, envelopes.
“Let’s see the Oath.”
Benny tightened up. “Listen, boy,” he said. “What do you say we take some of this? The typewriter, I mean, and all the paper. We’ll need it to make the organization look like something.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“All right,” I said. “Dolan’s got plenty of dough.”
Benny went out into the garage and found a gunnysack. We slipped all the paper and envelopes and the typewriter and a box of pencils into the sack and tied up its mouth with the end of our rope. For a moment we stared at each other in excitement.
“Heave-ho,” Benny said. “Yo-ho-ho and a Dough-Dough-Dolan.”
Then somebody began pounding on the garage door. We looked out, and a flashlight was playing all over the shiny cars.
“Somebody saw us,” I said. “Somebody saw you when you went out for the gunnysack.”
“You go first. You can climb faster.”
I began shinnying up the rope. It was thin and nearly cut into my palms. The full gunnysack swung round and round under me. Nearing the roof
, I gashed my hand on the aluminum setting of the skylight. I pulled my legs after me through the opening and turned back to give Benny a hand. But by then a policeman had him around the neck and Benny just had time to yell, “Beat it, beat it, run!”
I jumped two feet across to Benny’s roof and ran down the stairs and out the back yard and over the fence and through a basement to Seventy-sixth Street and up Seventy-sixth, with my hand bleeding and my eyes not seeing. I looked back to find out if anyone followed, but my eyes were blurred and I just ran on, brushing past newsstands and people. Finally I stepped into a doorway and stayed there a full two hours before going home.
BENNY didn’t come to school the next day. I expected the police to pick me up after class, but they didn’t come either. In the afternoon I went past the market, and Mrs. Frankel’s stand was empty. For three days she stayed away.
On the fourth day she resumed her place, but I still had had no word of Benny. I stood that for several more days, and then I went to Mrs. Frankel’s stand and asked for a dime’s worth of oranges. Mrs. Frankel looked the same. All her sweaters were still dark-green with age and her face was red and wind-chapped—a little swollen, perhaps.
“You don’t have to buy the oranges. You the other boy?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“It is all right. What’s the use you should get in trouble too? Benny wouldn’t say nothing about you.”
“Where is he?”
“They take him to orphan home,” Mrs. Frankel said. “Don’t worry. Benny wouldn’t say nothing about you. Even they hit him, he wouldn’t say nothing. But if maybe they should hit him too much, he would tell. Anyhow, they couldn’t take you away. You got a papa.”
“When is he coming back?”
“I don’t know. Go away now if you don’t want oranges.”
“Yes, I want the oranges.” She gave them to me in a bag and I paid her.
The same day I got a letter from Benny in which he also said I shouldn’t worry, because he never would tell on me. He asked me not to answer, because they read all incoming mail. He said he would write again and send me the Oath of the Mentocrats, but he never did.
I don’t know what ever became of Benny Frankel. All this happened ten years ago and still I haven’t heard. I know he can’t be doing so well in a money way, because a short while back I was traveling uptown on the Second Avenue bus and saw his mother standing beside her curb stand. Karl Denling hasn’t heard of him, either. I ran into Karl on Times Square recently. Said he was an accountant now and doing pretty well.
[1939]
DANIEL MENAKER
THE TREATMENT
I WAS GOING TO BE LATE. A fat woman in a vertically quilted brown parka—she looked like a walking onion—had kept everyone waiting in heavy snow at Ninety-sixth and Broadway while she argued with the crosstown-bus driver. She was trying to get him to take a transfer from the day before. She insisted, loudly, that a downtown driver had just issued the transfer to her.
“It couldn’t be, lady,” the driver said. His Caribbean accent, his delicate features, the touch of gray at his temples made him seem like an aristocrat with favors to dispense, especially in the presence of the bulging woman and the freezing masses outside.
“I’m telling you not five minutes ago,” the woman said.
“And I’m telling you that he couldn’t have any transfers from yesterday,” the driver said. “They are destroyed each day.”
Holding aloft the slip of blue paper, the woman turned around and shouted at the rest of us, bunched up against the snow and wind blasting off the Hudson, “Five minutes ago! Five minutes!”
During the silent glaring that followed, another crosstown bus stopped across the street, and among the passengers who got off were a bunch of Coventry School seniors, dressed only in sports jackets and slacks and running shoes. In two hours some of them would jostle their way into my Advanced Placement English class, and I would give them broadly farcical interpretations of the first half of “Billy Budd” until one of the quicker ones began to suspect that I was putting them on.
“Hey, Mr. Singer,” one boy called.
“Yo, Lenny, where ya headed?” another shouted, probably taking the weather as permission for impertinence.
If I’d wanted to answer the question, I would have said, “I’m going to see my psychoanalyst, Dr. Ernesto Morales.” And if I’d wanted to amplify a bit I’d have added, “He’s a Cuban, and a devout Catholic, apparently. There’s a crucifix in the waiting room and another one on the wall behind his chair. I got his name from the school psychologist.” And if I were histrionic, like the fat woman, I would have gone on, yelling my plaint for all to hear: “You see, boys, I am in real trouble. My mother died when I was six, my father and I are barely on speaking terms, and my girlfriend left me two months ago. When I told her I was thinking about ending it all, she said she thought that was an unlikely course of action for someone who at the age of twenty-eight was afraid to venture outside his own Zip Code. And I’m not going to be head of the Upper School next year after all. I told the headmaster he was kidding himself about his reasons for wanting to expand the scholarship program. He thought they were altruistic, and I thought they had more to do with wanting a league championship in football.”
But no. It would never do even to allude to my problems to the boys. First of all, I wasn’t so crazy that I didn’t know how boring my plight would be to most people. The banality of evil is far outstripped by the banality of anxiety neurosis. Second, the kids weren’t my friends, and, third, even though they weren’t my friends, they were all I had left. Anyway, I wouldn’t be seeing Dr. Morales much longer. He was a madman for whom conservative Freudianism was merely a flag of convenience, and I was just trying to keep him at a distance as I planned my escape—into what, I had no idea. The school psychologist must have been crazy herself.
“How long are we going to allow ourselves to be treated like this?” the fat woman demanded of the wind.
“Come on,” I said. “Here.” I was third in line, and I reached around the person in front of me and handed the fat woman a token.
The woman snatched it from my hand. “It’s not the money,” she said angrily. “It’s the way we are treated. But obviously you don’t care about that. So all right, all right.” She put the token and the transfer into her purse and took out another transfer. She turned around, the fabric of her casing sighing against the metal panels of the bus’s entryway, and handed the second transfer to the driver.
“Can you beat it?” the driver said to me as I paid my fare.
TEN minutes after my session should have started, I pushed the buzzer outside the door of the brownstone in which Dr. Morales’s office occupied the rear of the top floor, and he buzzed me in. In the stuffy, overheated waiting room, the noise machine, which looked like a Starship Enterprise gizmo, was hissing away. The machine could sound like anything—wind in a cane field outside Havana, a wave receding on a beach, a tiger’s warning—but today it was just static. I looked out the window, which was flanked by two big flowerpots out of which Cacti freudii derelicti thornily protruded. In the backyard of the house across the way, snow was building up on the back of the huge sow.
“Yes, I know the story of this pig,” Dr. Morales had said a few weeks earlier. “This was David Letterman’s house, and he had this statue installed in the yard. And when he moved he did not take the pig.”
“It’s strange,” I said.
“I agree,” Dr. Morales said, “but what is even stranger to me is that you have not mentioned it before now. You have been coming three times a week for how long—two months now?”
“Four,” I said. “But who’s counting?”
“We shall get back to your anger in a moment,” he said. “But right now perhaps you could talk a little about why you did not bring up such an odd thing for such a long time.”
This was as far as I got in my recollection of the pig conversation, which had quickly and typically put us a
t swords’ points, when Dr. Morales opened the door to his inner office. He was beaming, as usual, and was bent at the waist the customary ten degrees, in what I took to be sarcastic deference. This upper-body inclination made him seem even shorter than he was. He had on a white shirt and the vest and trousers of a three-piece suit, and his shoulders ballooned out like a miniature stevedore’s. Light bounced off his shiny bald head, and behind his straight, heavy, broomlike black beard and narrow mustache, he was smiling the gleefully diabolical smile he always smiled. “Good morning, Mr. Singer,” he said in his insinuating way—his voice, as always, even more flamboyantly Spanished in reality than it was in my memory. “Please come in.”
“There was this fat woman on the bus,” I started out after I lay down on the couch. I told him the rest. “She was probably on her way to her analyst,” I said at the end. “Life in the city. How can someone let herself get so fat?”
“What do you think?” Dr. Morales said.
“Well, I suppose with some people it’s just their metabolism or glands or something.”
“So you are apologizing for her and for yourself.”
“Myself?”
“With this ‘Well, I suppose.’ This is a habit, as I have pointed out before. You guess, you suppose, you think maybe. You castrate yourself before it happens what you so fear—that if you display your balls someone else will cut them off. Preëmptive self-castration.”
“Opinions are testicles?”
“Yes. And so are feelings. You are amused, but this is the case. And people do not let themselves get fat, by the way. Again we have this passivity. They make themselves fat.”
“Well, so why do they do it?”
“You must tell me what you think.”
“It could be physical. They might—”
Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker Page 45