Authors: Herman Wouk
She handed Herbie's card to him.
“Herbert Bookbinder, 8B-3.”
Herbie had won the ultimate prize of promotion day. He had “skipped.”
In the yard, after assembly, a knot of children were congratulating Herbie when Leonard Krieger walked up to him. The talk died.
“Well, General Garbage,” said Lennie, “I see you got away with it and I didn't. I guess it pays to be a teacher's pet. But I'm satisfied. I'd rather get left back a hundred times than be a fat sissy like you an' get skipped.”
The attack flabbergasted Herbie. “Lennie, I done my best—”
“Who asked you to pass me any notes, you fat barrel? If I'd of finished that grammar test, I might of passed. Just you stay out of my way, Fatso. The next time you cross me up, I'll knock your block off. … Come on, who wants to play Softball?” he said to the silent group, and walked off without waiting for answers.
Herbie strolled home to bring his mother the glad news, but he was not happy. He tried to understand Lennie's blaming him, and reviewed the whole sorry affair without finding light. He thought he was a victim of injustice; but he had only had an encounter with ordinary human nature.
As he rounded the corner of Thackeray Street and Homer Avenue he heard “Herbie!” called in sweet tones. Outside Hesse's ice-cream parlor Lucille Glass stood, licking a strawberry ice-cream cone.
“Want some?” she said demurely as he came toward her. “I had one already. I'm waiting for Mama to pick me up in the car.”
Herbie accepted the cone, took two polite licks, and returned it.
“I hear you skipped, and Lennie got left back.”
The boy nodded.
“C'mere, closer.” She beckoned to him, although he was only a foot away. Wondering, he moved beside her. “Closer. I wanna whisper in your ear.”
What new delight was this? Herbie bent his head to the girl's little red mouth. He felt her warm breath in his ear, a delirious pleasure. She barely murmured. “What does ‘outfielder’ mean?”
Herbie shook his head obstinately.
“If you told, Lennie might of got put back to 7A, huh?”
The boy was human. He shrugged, and nodded. Next moment his cheeks were surprisingly rosy, and the girl was running down the street. She had kissed him, halfway between his ear and his eyebrow.
Herbie Bookbinder's escape from being left back was narrower than he knew. After the grammar test, Mrs. Gorkin spent an entire evening discussing and analyzing the “outfielder” mystery with her husband, assistant principal Mortimer Gorkin of P.S. 75. The next day she took it up at a meeting of the seventh-grade teachers during lunch hour without any luck, and finally submitted it to the wisdom of Mr. Gauss himself, who hummed and grunted and finally threw up his hands. It has gone down among the teachers of P.S. 50 as one of the great unsolved crimes of pupil cunning. Strange! Teachers set themselves up to be so wondrous wise—yet to this day it has not occurred to one of them that “outfielder” is a dactyl.
“
A
chocolate frap, please, with chocolate sauce.”
Old Mr. Borowsky, the sad, thin, gray candy-store man, looked at Herbie with the ghost of an expression of surprise. Mr. Borowsky was the perfect candy-store man; the yearnings of the flesh and the emotions of the soul were dead in him. He could trust himself never to go on a rampage and eat up all his wondrous wares. He had not consumed a gumdrop or drunk an ice-cream soda or laughed out loud in the memory of all the youngsters of Homer Avenue. What moved him was the instinct to stay alive, which needed only a knowledge of the relative values of coins and sweets, and wisdom about the shallow devices of hungry and thirsty children. Such wisdom he had in plenty, and it caused the phantom of suspicion—all his emotions were ghosts, not living things—to show on him when Herbie Bookbinder, a known penny customer, ordered a ten-cent item on a weekday.
“That costs a dime,” he said.
Herbie laid a thin bright coin on the wet marble counter with the air of a lord.
“I got skipped,” he said.
Mr. Borowsky received this great news as he would have received the news of the sinking of the continent of Europe into the sea, with a blank face, and made up a chocolate frappé
Herbie carried the tin dish with care to the dusty little table with two wire-backed chairs that stood in a corner by the magazine shelves, and sat down to feast like a mighty man. He had bought the privilege with the frappé (Nobody ever sat at the table except a rare “big guy” who, too lazy to walk his sweetheart around the corner to Hesse's, would regale her amid Borowsky's dinginess.) All that was needed now to fill the boy's cup of joy was some other boy to come into the store and envy him. But it was a quiet time; he waited until the treat was half melted, and was forced at last to eat it alone and unadmired. Every pleasure in life seems to come equipped with such a shadow.
Still, it was an event to be treasured. Come what might, he had eaten a frappé on a weekday. Herbie was ignorant of the French origin and pronunciation of the word, but the dish was not the less lovely for that. Some adults, who have nothing better to do, like to argue about what the most beautiful word in the English language is. The leading contenders are usually dawn, violet, starlight, golden, moonbeam, and the like—which proves nothing except what kind of people the arguers are. For the boys on Homer Avenue there would hardly have been a rival for that glorious sound, Frap.
Licking his lips, and wondering why life was not an eternal eating of chocolate frappés, Herbie left the candy store and went home. He came upon his parents sitting together on the red sofa in the parlor, and from their silence and smiles he guessed that they had been talking about his feat at school. Modestly he walked toward his room, but his father called, “Come here, my son.”
Herbie had not been addressed as “my son” by Mr. Bookbinder since his last birthday. It was a signal for something pleasant. He returned to the parlor, pretending that he suspected nothing unusual. His mother rose at the same time, patted his head, and left, saying, “I suppose you gentlemen have plenty to talk about.”
“Sit down, my son,” said Mr. Bookbinder. The formal invitation was another novelty, as unnecessary as inviting a cat to sit down. But Herbie was equal to the event, and took an armchair with aplomb, sitting back with his legs crossed as he had seen grownups do. Not having much slack in his legs, he lost contact with the floor, but he liked the effect nevertheless.
“So, I hear you skipped again,” said Jacob Bookbinder, with a smile that softened and warmed his stern face.
“Yes, Pa.”
“And you go into the last grade of public school next term.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You know, my boy, that was the last class I ever attended. After that I went out and made a living. Of course, that was in Poland. You, thank God, will be able to go to high school and college. Still, you're growing up to be a man faster than you think.”
Herbie would have felt a little more like a man if he had not sunk backward into the armchair so that his crossed knees were as high as his head. He wriggled forward and grasped the arms of the chair to hold himself upright.
“You're not comfortable. Come here on the sofa.”
Herbie obeyed.
“My boy, I'm taking you out to dinner with me tonight in a restaurant. That is, if you want to come.”
A restaurant! This was a glory of even higher magnitude than a frap. Herbie was nearly speechless, but he managed to say, “Sure, Pa. Gosh, that's great.”
“Yes, I'm having dinner with some business associates, and this is a good time for you to start going like a man among men. You've earned the right.”
“Thanks, Pa. I'll go get dressed right away.”
Herbie would have bounced up and down on the sofa, but he knew that a man among men didn't bounce. His father put a hand on his arm.
“Wait. I hear Krieger's boy got left back?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Too bad, too bad. How could such a terrible thing happen?” said Mr. Bookbinder, his smile broadening into pure pleasure.
“Aw, I guess Lennie is just dumb. Anyway, all he thinks about is girls.”
“Foolish. A boy shouldn't bother his head about girls until he's twenty-one.”
“I don't, that's for sure,” said Herbie, and believed it. A frap and prospective dinner with his father in a restaurant had brought a new, mature Herbie Bookbinder into being. The Herbie who had been childishly smitten with Lucille Glass belonged to history.
“Well, Krieger will be at dinner with us. We won't make him feel bad by mentioning it.”
“No, Pa.”
“Of course, there's nothing wrong in mentioning you've been skipped,” said the father, and dismissed his son with a pat on the shoulder.
Herbie trotted gaily to his room, put on a clean shirt, a new tie, and his “other” suit—the new suit bought at Passover was always known as the “other” suit, until the next Passover came. Felicia, returning from an afternoon of loitering along Southern Boulevard, sniffed at him and said, “Hm, the other suit, hey?”
“Yes, the other suit,” said Herbie. He savored the enjoyment of saying no more, and Felicia would not give him the satisfaction of asking questions, so he finished dressing in glee while the girl ate herself alive with curiosity. Just as Herbie was leaving with his father, he heard an outraged howl from Felicia, who had finally pried the answer from her mother: “Why can't I go to the restaurant, too?”
“Hush up, you didn't skip,” he heard the mother answer, and he closed the door behind him with a sigh of perfect happiness.
The two men strolled up Westchester Avenue in the humid evening. Trolley cars banged by, women embracing great brown paper bags of food jostled past them, trucks blasted clouds of poison gas at them, children darted under their feet after marbles and rubber balls, and every little while a questing mother a few inches from them would affright their eardrums with a shriek like “Bernice! Come home to supper!” All this plebeian bustle was delightful. It sharpened Herbie's anticipation of the noble act of eating in a restaurant.
“Herbie,” said his father, “what do you want to be someday?”
“You mean when I grow up?”
“That's right.”
“An astronomer,” came the usual prompt reply. But it did not have the usual effect. In discussions with boys the announcement of Herbie's ambition always caused awe among the future firemen, policemen, big-league ball players and candy-store keepers, but it fell very flat with his father. Mr. Bookbinder made a face as though he had bitten into a green apple, then smiled.
“That's fine. That's a very fine profession. You'll never make a good dollar, but if you're interested in stars, you should by all means be an astronomer. A great astronomer.”
“Astronomers make lots of money,” said Herbie, a little less positively than was his habit.
“How?”
“When they find new stars—er—they win big prizes.”
Mr. Bookbinder laughed. Then he said gravely, “Whoever says so, my boy, is a terrible liar. It ought to be so, but it isn't. People only pay for things they want—clothes, laundry, meat, movies, and ice. Who cares about new stars up in the sky? Discovering stars is a great, wonderful thing, but nobody gets fat doing it. Still, you should by all means be an astronomer, the finest astronomer in the world, if that's what you want.”
They crossed the gutter of Austen Avenue at a run to dodge a black coal truck howling toward them, and walked on in silence. Jacob Bookbinder and his son had taken the tone of companions on a walk, and the change from the father-son relationship made them both feel clumsy. The father longed for his usual evening monologue on the problems of the Place, but his boy's ear seemed somehow a less fitting receptacle for it than his wife's. As for Herbie, none of the things that came into his mind seemed worth saying to a fearfully wise man like his father, after the puncturing of his astronomic fiction. The result was that they arrived at Golden's Restaurant on Southern Boulevard without exchanging another word.
Herbie's heart glowed within him at the sight of the steaks, fruits, layer cakes, and thickly creamed pastries in the glittering show window of Golden's, while Mr. Bookbinder, seeing Powers, Louis Glass, and Krieger seated at a table near the window, suddenly wondered whether bringing Herbie had not been a foolish deed. An impulse to honor the boy, a vague sense that he was in the habit of neglecting him, and an equally cloudy notion that the time had come to give his son the baptism of fire of a real business discussion had combined to cause his act. Now he sensed an urge to send him home. But Jacob Bookbinder was not in the habit of altering his resolutions. In fact, it was his way to quell his own hesitancy with grim pleasure. “Do it and see,” was his favorite word to himself. He had invited Herbie to dinner at Golden's, and dinner at Golden's Herbie would have.
“Come, my boy, I see we're late,” he said, and led his son inside.
Introducing Herbie was as awkward as his father expected, but he niet the astonished glances of the others squarely and explained that he was rewarding his boy with a treat because he had skipped. Louis Glass, a fat, rubicund man with a black mustache, shook Herbie's hand and congratulated him. He had seen many youngsters ripen into clients yielding fees. Powers, already out of sorts at being dragged up to the Bronx after dark, permitted himself to look annoyed as he rapped the ash out of his pipe and thrust it into a pocket.