by Herman Wouk
SEVEN
The Romance of Art and Natural History
Ma, can I go to the museum with Cliff today?”
It was Saturday morning. Herbie and Felicia were eating breakfast at the luxuriously late hour of eight-thirty in the Bookbinder kitchen. The narrow white room was bright with a shaft of sunlight that illumined it for about forty minutes each morning, when the sun appeared in a cleft between two apartment houses across the street. It shone not into the kitchen but upon the windows of the Feigelson living room across the court, which cordially bounced the glittering beam over to the Bookbinders.
“I suppose so,” said the mother, busy with onions at the sink. “What's at the museum?”
“Aw, you know, it's just a museum. Mrs. Gorkin said we should all go.”
“Where is it?”
“Downtown in Central Park.”
“How much is it?”
“It's free, Mom.”
“You can go.”
“How come,” said Felicia, spooning lumps out of her oatmeal with a wry face, “that you're not going to the movies today?”
“A museum is more important than an old movie,” said Herbie haughtily.
“More important than episode fourteen of The Green Archer?”
How was it, wondered Herbie, that his sister had such skill in prodding his weak points? His heart yearned to know what had happened when the Archer's mask had been shot off by a bullet from the hero's gun. By the worst luck the Archer had had his back to the camera when his face was bared, and the episode had ended. Who would he turn out to be? After following the serial through snow, rain, bankruptcy (solved by mortgaging his skates), and illness (he had seen episode eight with a temperature of 103½), he found it hard not to be in at the kill. But greater matters were afoot.
“Aw, the heck with that old serial,” said Herbie. “What's the sense of payin' money 'n' sittin' through a rotten movie every week, just to see an episode that lasts five minutes?”
Mrs. Bookbinder jumped with surprise and dropped an onion. She had been using this line of reasoning on Herbert for three years with no effect. To hear it now from his mouth gave her as joyful a thrill as a missionary might feel over his first converted cannibal. She stopped peeling onions long enough to pat her son's head and say, “You're growing up, Herbie. Bless you.”
Herbie basked in the approval, and tried to look like a profound man of affairs.
“Which museum are you going to?” pursued Felicia. She sensed intrigue strong in the air.
“Which one do you think?” parried Herbie.
“There are two, you know,” said his sister.
“Well, whaddya know! Two museums! Imagine that! Guess you hafta be in 8B to know that,” said Herbie, and, drinking his milk, he rose and walked out of the kitchen.
He put a rubber ball in his pocket and sauntered forth to kill the morning. Saturday morning was the laziest, therefore the best, time of the week. The release from school was fresh and sweet, and the boredom of aimlessness had not yet set in. Boys from more religious families went to Sabbath services at the synagogues, where cake, candy, and cream soda rewarded their devotion after the last hymn was sung. But Herbie had tried worship and found the sugar coating too thin for the struggle with Hebrew. He knew that on his thirteenth birthday he would have to chant a chapter from the prophets before the congregation, and he rather looked forward to the brief chance at being the center of all eyes, but thirteen, to a boy of eleven, seems like seventy to a man of thirty-five. Meantime, since the weekly visit of old Mr. Taussig, the Hebrew teacher, for one hour's wrestle with the strange backward-printed language satisfied his parents, it more than satisfied Herbie.
Bouncing the ball with relish as he walked into the street—it was a new red solid-sponge rubber ball, not one of your pumped-up gray shells that go all flabby when they have a pinhole—Herbie spied Harold Sorensen, and smiled. Harold was a blond boy with white eyebrows, even fatter than Herbie, dogged and bad-tempered. He was not quite a match for Herbie at the constricted little sidewalk games that have evolved in the Bronx; a perfect opponent, in short. Harold promptly took up a challenge to a duel at boxball, and was beaten. Next they played double boxball, each boy guarding two squares in the pavement as they slapped the ball back and forth, and Harold lost again. Then they played “points,” tossing the ball against the line of plaster molding along the ground floor of the apartment house. Herbie won. Next they clashed in something they called baseball, using the same molding. The number of times the ball bounced in the gutter before being caught was hedged with a scoring system that produced the illusion of a game played by eighteen men in a ball park. Herbie won this, too. An encounter at handball followed, and another at Chinese handball; the blond boy sweated out both victories. But Herbie came back to conquer him at hit-the-coin and dodgeball. They tried punchball, but that really required at least two men on a side, and they abandoned it. They cooled off with a game of pickups, which Herbie also won easily, and were in the midst of stickball when the noon whistle of the nearby power plant blew. Thereupon they reluctantly parted and went home to lunch, regretting that they had lacked time to play at least two or three more games, such as stoopball, slugball, and salujee.
These were just a few of the games that city boys have created out of two elements: a world of hard, flat surfaces and a bouncing ball. Herbie knew the rules and tricks of more than twenty games. The effort of memory by which he had acquired these, applied to school work, would have made him the wonder of the New York school system. But that was impossible, of course. Street games were the business of life and required devotion. School work was the penalty for the crime of being a boy.
Back in the Bookbinder kitchen, Herbie bolted his lunch and then said, “Mom, how about carfare for the museum?”
“Can you wait until I finish my tea, or is the museum going to run away?”
“Sorry, Mom.”
“Say,” said Felicia, “how about me going with you? I haven't been to the museum in a long time.”
Herbert was appalled, but kept a cheerful face. “Why, sure, Fleece, come on. If you want to spend the day walkin' around with me and Cliff, that's fine. Mrs. Gorkin says the museum is real educational. You'll have lots of fun.”
“That's nice, Felice,” said the mother. “I'm glad you want to be with your own brother one day instead of that rotten Emily with her lipstick and rouge. You can take carfare for both—”
“No, no, Mom, wait,” said Felicia hurriedly. “I'm going to the movies. I just wanted to see what he'd say.” She looked at Herbie, baffled. “You really are going to the museum, aren't you?”
“Yes, and you will go with him,” said the mother. “What's playing at the movies that's better than the museum?”
“Mom, please,” cried Felicia, panicky at finding her foot caught in her own trap. “I promised Emily I'd go with her last week. I can go to those stuffy museums any old time.”
“Aw, be a sport, come with me, Fleece,” exulted Herbie. “Is a girl friend more important than a brother? Please, Mom, make her go with me.”
Felicia rose from the table, declaring that she would die rather than be seen anywhere with a slovenly little thing like him who didn't even wash below his chin. Mrs. Bookbinder was diverted to an examination of the boy's neck, and his sister escaped from the room under cover of this thin smoke screen.
All this played into Herbie's hands. Loudly declaring that he would show Fleece who was slovenly, he proceeded to beautify himself. When he left the house with a quarter clutched in a hand reeking honestly of soap, he looked as strangely clean and gentlemanly as he had a week before en route to the Mosholu Parkway disaster, but neither mother nor sister became suspicious.
Cliff was waiting for him under the clock at the Simpson Street subway station. As Herbie walked up the cousin inspected him from head to foot, and slowly, softly whistled.
“There ain't any girl I could like that much,” he said.
“Wait till you s
ee her,” answered Herbie.
A Lexington Avenue express thumped and shrieked its way into the station, and stopped with a jerk that shook the platform and every other platform along the track for a mile either way. The boys ignored the terrifying shudder under their feet and boarded the train. They had been permitted to travel by themselves on the subway since their ninth year, and were calm about it. The rickety railway, which ran on steel stilts over their heads in the Bronx and dived into a narrow black hole to go to Manhattan, was part of the world, like the stars and the wind. The subway might fall down, and so might the stars, but Herbie and Cliff were not worrying about either possibility.
They walked to the front of the train, rolling with each sway and bump like sailors, and posted themselves at the front windows where they could enjoy the hurtling. Tracks flew under them; apartment houses careened drunkenly by. Intervale, Prospect, Jackson Avenue stations went past; the waited-for lovely moment came, and with the squeals and howls of a lost soul plunging to hell, the express rushed crazily downhill into the darkness. This crashing change from sunlight to night in an instant was one of the most agreeable experiences in the boys' ken. They looked at each other and sighed with pleasure. Herbie glanced back at the people in the car, and saw them staring vacantly, or reading newspapers, or dozing, all oblivious to the poetry of the event.
“Cliff,” he said, “whaddya suppose is the matter with them?” He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. Cliff took his eyes from the window to look at the passengers briefly.
“They're old,” he said. And the cousins returned to the enjoyment of the blinking red and green lights, the jeweled brilliance of stations far down the dark tube, the sensation of terrible speed imparted by the close tunnel walls, and all the other subterranean delights that a small boy gets so cheaply in New York.
They climbed out of the subway at Eighty-sixth Street into the sparkle and roar of Manhattan traffic.
“Now the question is,” said Herbie, “which museum?”
“Didn't she tell you?”
“No. All she said was her mother was takin' her to the museum Saturday. She don't even know I'm comin'.”
“Say, I thought you said you were gonna meet her.”
“I am gonna meet her, if it takes all day. Look, if you were Mrs. Glass, would you take your daughter to the Museum of Art or Natural History?”
“Depends on whether I wanted to show her statues or skeletons.”
“You're a big help.”
“Anyway, how do you know it's one of them two museums?”
“That's all there are.”
“A lot you know. There's the Museum of the American Indian. They took our class to it in a bus last week.”
“How was it?”
“Awful. Baskets, blankets, and feathers till you wanna throw up.”
“Well, I never heard of it and I bet Lucille's mother didn't neither. Anyway, you know Natural History is way better. They got that big whale hangin' from the ceiling an' everything. Ten to one she's there.”
“O.K. Let's go.”
The boys climbed into a crosstown bus. Cliff paid a dime for the two fares. “I better stick close to you now,” he said as they clung to swaying straps, “Mom only gimme fifteen cents today. I'm busted.”
“How come? You usually get a quarter on Saturday.”
“Mom caught me hitchin' onto a truck yesterday.”
Herbie, who was not agile enough to hitch, said, “Serves you right. Thousands of guys get killed hitchin' every day.”
“Aw, I never saw one.”
“I did. He fell off a truck in front of a trolley car on Westchester Avenue. His head 'n' feet got cut off. His head was rollin' around in the gutter like a ball. You couldn't get me to hitch.”
“Must of been some fat slob who didn't know how to hitch.”
Herbie became silent, not knowing whether this was a personal thrust, while Cliff, who had said it in innocence, mused pleasantly over the vivid picture of a beheaded and footless fat boy bleeding in a gutter. He wished he had been there. It was his luck to miss all these marvels which Herbie saw and described so well. When the bus stopped at the west side of the park and the boys got off, he suddenly said to Herbie, “Where on Westchester Avenue?”
Herbie, who had completely forgotten his fiction after it fulfilled its use in the argument, said, “Where what?”
“Where did this fat guy get his head cut off? I figure there still oughta be some blood there I can go look at.”
“No, the fire department came and hosed the whole street down,” said Herbie.
“My tough luck,” said Cliff.
The boys walked rapidly to the gloomy red pile of the Natural History museum, and roamed the halls. When they halted before the skeleton of the mastodon, Cliff surveyed the towering fossil and wistfully wished there were a live mastadon in the Zoo; Herbie looked at the strolling crowd through the dry ribs and sought a little figure with red hair. For an hour and a half they quested through corridors of bones, horns, skins, rocks, and stuffed beasts and fish. When they halted at last at a water fountain, Herbie said despondently, “She ain't here.”
“Who cares? This is fun,” said Cliff. He narrowed the fountain aperture with his thumb, and the water jumped to the ceiling. “We oughta come here every week.”
“We mighta known an old lady would want to look at pictures 'stead of a lotta bones,” said Herbie. “This is a terrible museum. Let's go across the park to the other one.”
“How much money you got?”
“Twenty cents. We better walk if we want ice cream after.”
Paintings, statues, tapestries, and mummies there were in plenty in the art museum, and several little live girls with red hair too for that matter, but Herbie was seeking the priceless original, and these were imitations. Nature, like a lazy artist, had turned out one good thing and then cheated the market with a lot of bad repetitions. The boys worked their way listlessly to the top floor, pausing to gawk only at the fat red nudes of Rubens.
“Looks like you ain't gonna find her,” said Cliff, as the boys sat on a marble bench surrounded by the gilded saints and martyrs of Italian old masters.
“Aw, who cares? We had our fun,” said Herbie glumly, waving his legs to and fro to cool the hot soles of his feet.
“Too bad you got dressed up for nothing.”
“Who dressed up on account of her? I'm just tired of walkin' around like a bum. You oughta be, too.”
Cliff surveyed his scuffed shoes, wrinkled stockings, sagging breeches, soiled shirt, and limp, threadbare tie, and said, “This ain't Sunday. If I dressed any different, I'd look funny.”
They raced down the flights of broad stone stairs with a clatter that brought angry guards to the landings after they had gone by. Before leaving they detoured through the Egyptian collection to have one more look at the partially unwrapped mummy of a princess. As they passed the great sandstone statues of the Pharaohs, Herbie's heart banged hard against his ribs, for there she was. This time it was she, no mistake, her hand in her mother's, peering into a glass case full of scarabs. He squeezed Cliff's arm once and walked straight toward them, scarlet faced and wondering what to do with his hands. He thrust them into his breeches at the last and said with unnatural loudness, “Hello, Mrs. Glass. Hi, Lucille.” His reward came instantly in a blush and a look of pleasure on the girl's face.
“Why, hello, Herbie,” said Mrs. Glass. “It's nice to see you interested in culture. Is your mother with you?”
“Naw, I go everywhere by myself,” said Herbie. “This here is my cousin, Cliff.”
“Very nice,” said Mrs. Glass. “Most boys would rather go to the movies than to the museum. Come, walk along with us.”
Herbie found himself on the other side of Mrs. Glass, who luckily was a very thin woman, so that it was easy for him to exchange several ardent peeks with Lucille as they strolled among the cases. The chances of prying her away from her mother for a little whispering seemed remote. Mrs. Glas
s kept explaining the objects they passed, and made them seem amazingly uninteresting.
“Now, children,” she said, “here is one of the wonders of the city. A whole Egyptian tomb dug out of Egypt and set up here just as it looked when the explorers first found it. We can all go inside—”
“Gosh, you know all about this stuff, don't you, Mrs. Glass?” said Cliff.
“Not quite all,” Mrs. Glass smiled. “I did teach fine arts in high school, many, many years ago.”
“Mrs. Glass, I sure would appreciate,” said Cliff, “if you would explain a picture I saw on the fourth floor. It's all full of angels, and devils, and naked ladies, and I think maybe God, but I couldn't make head nor tail of it.”
Flattered, the mother said, “It's a pleasure to see a boy take such interest. Come, let's all go up there—”
“Oh, Mother, I want to see this tomb, and anyway I'm tired,” spoke up Lucille, for the first time since Herbert's arrival.
“Well—suppose you stay with Lucille, Herbie, and visit the tomb while I go upstairs with Cliff. Do you mind?”
“No, ma'am,” said Herbie. Behind Mrs. Glass's back Cliff threw his cousin a colossal wink, and walked off.
Hand in hand, Lucille Glass and Herbie Bookbinder walked into the tomb of Pharaoh. A narrow passage meandered between stone walls more than a foot thick, decorated with processions of people with strangely twisted shoulders, the colors of their costumes faint but still visible after several thousand years of slow fading in darkness.
“How did you happen to find me?” whispered Lucille, partly in awe of the surroundings, partly because what she said seemed to call for whispering.
“I looked,” said Herbie.
“You didn't even know which museum,” Lucille said archly.
“I been at Natural History already. Just like you not to tell me. If it was Lennie Krieger, I bet you'd have told him.”