City Boy (13 page)

“Boys and girls of P.S. 50, I have set to music a piece which is very appropriate to this holiday. I shall now sing for you with the aid of my good friend, Mr. Meng, the first stanza of my song—a musical setting of ‘In Flanders Fields.’”

By the laws of nature there should not be any such thing as a silent groan, but a sound describable in no other terms swelled through the hall. Mrs. Corn glared around, but all the children were sitting with faces of stone. The silent groan went unpunished, and Mrs. Moonvess caroled the first stanza of “In Flanders Fields.” During the next fifteen minutes she tried to browbeat the children into learning it. They had no trouble with the words, which by now they knew almost from memory, but Mrs. Moonvess's bizarre tune was beyond them. At the last, when she drove them through it mercilessly with her baton from beginning to end, the effect was strange and dismal, like a hymn chanted by Chinese monks. Mr. Gauss jumped up as she seemed to be rallying herself for another try, and thanked her for her beautiful contribution to the holiday. Loud applause ensued as she backed unwillingly into her seat.

Mrs. Gorkin now sidled up the platform steps. Herbie whispered, “Chickie!” The card game broke up and the tickets all disappeared in a twinkling. The actors were standing around virtuously when the teacher came in. Lennie had just finished buckling on the sword, but in his haste he forgot to pull the white beard down from his forehead, incurring a tongue lashing. Mrs. Gorkin faithfully promised to put him back to 7A if he spoiled her show in any way. Lennie was hangdog and mute.

Introducing the playlet, Mr. Gauss reviewed the whole Civil War from Fort Sumter to Richmond. He paused at Gettysburg long enough to quote Lincoln's address verbatim. He painstakingly explained that the surrender of Lee's sword, which they were about to see, never really happened, so they need not pay attention to that part of the play. At this, Mrs. Gorkin, who had been wringing a handkerchief between her perspiring hands, ripped it in half.

“And now,” said Mr. Gauss to the drooping audience, “Mrs. Gorkin's play,
The Surrender at Appomattox.
”

The principal sat. Mrs. Gorkin gave Herbie a push, and he walked out on the stage, followed by a general and an orderly. As instructed, he strode to the center, faced the audience, and was about to bellow his first line when lo, he beheld in the second girls' row the face of Lucille Glass, turned up to him with eager eyes. The speech vanished from his memory. He became aware of a thousand faces staring at him in a dead silence. His knees shook. His mouth hung open. Panic gripped him.

A hoarse whisper from Mrs. Gorkin floated to him. “What can be keeping General Lee?
What can be keeping General Lee?
”

“What can be keeping General Lee?” he declaimed. The sound of his own voice filling the hall gave him new life, and he ranted on with zest, “True, as my senior by sixteen years he is entitled to keep me waiting. Ha, ha.” He thrust the cigar vigorously into his mouth, causing shocked chuckles in the audience. From then onward his performance was in the best tradition of that approach to the stage art known as “chewing the scenery.” The absence of a black beard went quite unnoticed in the fireworks of his style.

General Robert E. Lee looked so dashing when he came on the stage that he received an ovation.

“I trust I am not unduly tardy, General Grant,” he said, in a murmur that barely reached Mr. Gauss, sitting five feet from him. Lennie was not frightened. He simply balked at speaking clear, correct English before all the boys he knew, and casting an everlasting shadow on his virility. No vengeance Mrs. Gorkin could take was worse than that. He loved the uniform and the sword, and was happy of the chance to be showing them off before the school. That was enough for him, and it would have to do for Mrs. Gorkin.

The scene proceeded, General Grant shaking the windows with his lines and General Lee confiding his answers to the orderly at his right (away from the audience) because it was his practice to speak out of the right side of his mouth. To the audience, the effect was to make Robert E. Lee out as bashful and deaf, an unexpected characterization. Mrs. Gorkin had revised the lines so that the audience could follow the scene merely from what Grant said, but the alternation of shouts and murmurs was decidedly queer. Mr. Gauss finally intervened.

“Speak up, General Lee, nobody can hear you,” he said, and a wave of giggles went through the girls.

Stung, Lennie blared out, “Sir, in yielding this weapon I give you the sword of the South, but not its soul.” He clapped his hand to the hilt, gave a vicious tug, and spun himself clear around. The sword remained fast in the scabbard.

He was astounded. Once more he wrenched at the weapon; it would not budge. The audience was tittering. He took a deep breath. “Sir, in yielding you this weapon,” he yelled, “I give you the sword of the South, but not its soul.” With both hands on the hilt he heaved at it and pulled the belt halfway up his chest, hauling up his jacket and shirt so that his naked chest showed. But the sword did not come out.

“Never mind your soul,” said Herbie in a flash of inspiration. “I'll settle for the sword.”

There was a deluge of laughter. Mrs. Gorkin was almost shouting from the dressing room: “Unbuckle the belt! Unbuckle the belt!” Lennie lost his head, tugged and tugged at the sword, and began to swear. Mr. Gauss rose to take action. Herbie, emboldened by success, suddenly held up his hand and bawled, “One moment, General.”

The laughter stopped and Lennie looked at him wonderingly. Herbie reached over to General Lee's side, seized the hilt, and drew out the sword as easily as if it had been greased. The audience gasped in astonishment. Herbie turned to his orderly and blandly said, “Give General Lee a cup of coffee. He seems to be weak from hunger.”

Amid the roars and handclapping which followed this coup, Mr. Gauss stepped forward and shook his hand. The play was over, and was acknowledged a great hit.

Lennie lay in ambush near 1075 Homer Avenue from four until seven-thirty that evening, waiting for Herbie to come home. The only result was that he missed his dinner. Herbie came home at six, via the basement of 1042 Tennyson Avenue and a connecting passageway to his own cellar. General Garbage outmaneuvered General Lee to the end.

T
he enmity between the two boys was now established forever, apparently. Yet at the hot noontide of a sweet-smelling day in June, only a week later, Lennie and Herbie were sitting together on the granite steps of a stoop on the shady side of the street opposite P.S. 50, eating ice cream turn and turn about out of one paper cup. Lennie was on a lower step, looking up humbly at Herbie. It was he who had paid for the ice cream, and each time he passed the cup up to Herbie it was like a peace offering.

Every phenomenon, however remarkable, has an explanation. This was the first day of promotion tests. Lennie was trying, in one hour, to suck the honey of six months of wisdom accumulated by Herbie on the subject of English grammar.

“Tell me again,” he said, “what the difference is between a phrase an' a clause.”

“Well, a clause is like a sentence inside a sentence, see,” said Herbie patiently, “an' a phrase only has a preposition an' a noun.”

“What the blazes is a preposition again?”

“Well, like ‘on,’ ‘in, ’ ‘to,’ ‘of’—you know.”

“‘If’?”

“Heck, no, ‘if’ is a conjunction.”

“Well, how do you tell 'em apart? Don't a preposition always have two letters?”

“Lennie, for cryin' out loud, don't you ever do homework? Two letters! Holy smoke, there's ‘from,’ ‘toward,’ ‘into,’ ‘under’—”

Lennie crushed the empty paper cup in a callused hand and slung it angrily into the gutter. “I'm skunked for sure.”

“Look, Lennie, it's a cinch. A clause always has a verb in it. A phrase never has.”

“A verb. You mean like ‘run,’ ‘jump,’ ‘fly’?”

“Right.”

“Well, O.K. Gimme an example.”

“Sure. ‘He threw me the ball an' I caught it on the run.’ Pick out a clause.”

“‘On the run,’” said Lennie promptly.

“No, no, that's a phrase.”

“You're crazy. It's got a verb in it—‘run.’”

“That ain't a verb.”

“Look, you little punk, make up your mind. You said a minute ago it was a verb.”

“Well, see, sometimes it is, sometimes it ain't. English is funny.”

Lennie's eyes became slits. “You wouldn't be tryin' to mix me up an hour before the test, would you, General Garbage?” he said, grasping Herbie by the shirt.

“Look, Lennie, I could be studying' by myself if I wanted, couldn't I? That was a bad example, that's all. Here's an easy one. ‘I walk while he runs.’ Which is the clause?”

Lennie paused, looked at his tutor suspiciously, and said, ‘While he runs.’”

“Right! Lennie, you got it now.”

The bigger boy brightened. “Well, if that's all there is to it I'll be O.K. Say, will we get any of them dumb poetry questions?”

“Sure as you're alive.”

“She's got a nerve. None of the other 7B classes got that stuff.”

“I know, but she's bugs on poetry. Anyway, it's easy, Lennie. All you got to know is the difference between dactyl, trochee, and iambic.”

“That's all, huh? What the hell
is
the difference?”

“Well, it's all rhythm, see? Dactyl is one long and two shorts. Trochee is one long and one short. Iambic is one short and one long. There's a thing called anapest, too, but she said we ain't gonna get that on the test.”

Lennie yanked a baseball covered with black tape out of his pocket and smacked it from hand to hand, his head hanging. “I couldn't remember that stuff if I spent the whole lunch hour on it. I guess I flunk that question.”

“Listen, you gotta know it.” Herbie pondered a moment, his eyes following the movements of the baseball. He snapped his fingers and said, “Hey, here's an idea. See if you can remember it this way. ‘Outfielder’ is a dactyl. ‘Shortstop’ is a trochee. ‘Yer out!’ is a iambic.”

“That's more like it!” Lennie slapped the ball sharply into his right fist and put it away. “‘Outfielder’ dactyl, ‘shortstop’ trochee, ‘yer out!’ iambic. Got that. But how'm I gonna—”

“Wait a second. She'll give us a line o' poetry on the blackboard, see? Read it to yourself. If it sounds like ‘outfielder, outfielder, outfielder,’ put down dactyl. If it goes ‘yer out, yer out, yer out’—iambic. An' so on. That's all there is to poetry.”

Lennie mumbled the magic formula to himself several times. “Boy, I got that cold. I hope the whole lousy test is poetry.”

“Now, y'oughta know something' about participles—”

“Aw, can it a minute, Herbie. I'll get some more ice cream.”

The athlete sprinted to the ice-cream wagon at the comer and returned in a matter of seconds, breathing easily, with another paper cup. For a second time that day the foes ate ice cream together. This was the closest they had come to truce in all the lifelong war between them. Herbie, forgetful of years of bullying, felt almost an affection for the enemy he was helping. Lennie, for his part, was ready to forgive Herbie his quick wits, now that they were useful to him.

“Say, Herb,” said the bigger boy, as the cup shuttled, “how come you know that stuff? You sure don't study much. You're always foolin' around down by the candy store at night, same as me.”

“Shucks, Len, how come you run so fast and can chin fifteen times? It comes natural, don't it? Same with me.”

Lennie smelled sophistry. “Now, hold on. I
like
athletics, that's how come I'm good. You ain't sayin' you like grammar?”

“Are you nuts? I hate it,” said Herbie stoutly. To confess his guilty pleasure in the machinery of language would have been as bad as admitting a taste for opium; in fact, Lennie would have been much readier to forgive the opium. “It just comes easy somehow.”

Lennie considered the matter. “Well,” he said at last, “I sure as anything would rather be like me and play good ball than be a teacher's pet like you an' know about clauses an' participles.”

“Anybody would,” said Herbie humbly, “but I can't help it. What should I do—answer a lot of questions wrong on every test? That still wouldn't make me run fast.”

This put things in a new light. It occurred to Lennie that his enemy might not be depraved, after all, but simply constituted badly. “Look, Herb,” he said, “sometimes you're almost a regular guy. You're not so bad at stickball, f'rinstance. Only why ain't you interested in the same things all the guys are? Baseball teams, now. I bet you don't even know who's leadin' the National League.”

Herbie did not answer.

“I bet—no, this is impossible—you
do
know the Yankee lineup, don't you?”

“Sure. Babe Ruth plays right field 'n' bats fourth, Lou Gehrig plays first base 'n' bats third, and—and—” The stout boy broke off lamely.

“Boy, you even got that wrong. Gehrig's fourth and Ruth's third. Herb,” said Lennie kindly, “that's awful.”

Herbie nodded, his face red with shame. It was his turn at the ice cream, but his appetite was gone and he declined it.

“Why, Herb, even Bunny Lipman, that stoop, knows the leadin' ten battin' averages in both leagues. See, there
is
somethin' wrong with you.”