“I’ll be glad to, Aunt Bertha,” I answered.
She gave me some change, told me what store she wanted me to go to, and I left the house.
It was near seven and people were beginning to go to work. I picked up the stuff she sent me for, and bought a News on the way back.
Once in the house, I put the stuff on the kitchen table and sat down to read the paper. A few minutes later my aunt came in and put on the coffee. About ten minutes later my uncle came in, sat down at the table and said: “Good morning, Frankie. Did you sleep all right?”
“Fine, Uncle Morris,” I said.
“I see you have the paper,” he said. “Anything new in it?”
“Nothing much,” I answered and held it towards him. “You want to see it?” “Thanks,” he said and took it from me.
Aunt Bertha came over with the plate of toast and put glasses of orange juice in front of us. Without looking at it, my uncle reached over his paper and picked it up. I drank mine slowly.
Then we had some eggs and then coffee and some pieces of Danish pastry that I had brought up from the store. About the time we finished, the kids came in and sat down.
“Good morning,” they said in unison, and going to each side of their father, they kissed him on the cheek. He gave them each a squeeze and went back to reading his paper and drinking a second cup of coffee. Then they went over to Aunt Bertha and kissed her. She
bent to kiss them and whispered something.
They came over to me and kissed me. I laughed. They pulled up chairs to the table and sat down.
Uncle Morris looked at his watch. “Time for me to go,” he said. “Are you going up to school today, Frankie?” he asked.
“I guess so,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “let me know tonight how you make out.” He kissed his wife and went out.
“What school are you going to, Frankie?” asked Essie, the younger. “George Washington High,” I answered.
“I go to P. S. 181,” she said.
“That’s nice,” I said. We were quiet for a while. I didn’t know what else we could talk about.
Aunt Bertha gave the kids their breakfast and then sat down. She smiled at me. “Did you like your breakfast?”
“It was swell, Aunt Bertha.” “I’m glad,” she said.
“I think it’s time you got started,” she said. “You don’t want to be late the first day you go there.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t.” I went into my room and put on my tie and jacket—then back into the kitchen. “So long,” I said.
Aunt Bertha got up from the table and walked to the door with me. In the foyer she gave me some money. “This is your allowance for the week,” she said, “for lunches and things. If you need any more, let me know.”
It was three dollars. “No,” I said. “It’s enough. I don’t think I’ll need any more.
Thanks.”
“Good luck,” she said, and I closed the door behind me. I felt funny. I didn’t know why. Everything seemed so different. Maybe it was because I didn’t have to attend Mass before I went to school.
George Washington High School was at 191st Street and Audubon Avenue. It stood on the top of a hill overlooking the Heights and across the Harlem River to the Bronx. It was a new red brick building with a dome on it.
I was sent to the superintendent’s office. I gave the clerk my name and waited while she looked up my card. She found it and told me to go to Room 608 when the nine o’clock bell rang.
When the bell rang, the halls were full of kids running back and forth to their rooms. I found the room without too much trouble. I went in and gave my card to the teacher in charge. He directed me to a seat in the back of the room. I looked around me. The class seemed mixed—about twenty coloured boys and girls, and twenty white. The boy sitting next to me was coloured.
“New here?” he asked with a big smile. “My name’s Sam Cornell.” “Mine’s Kane,” I said. “Francis Kane.”
Things certainly were different here.
It was at the end of the week in school that we first got around to talking about religion. I had often wondered why Jews were as they were; now I thought I understood. They didn’t go to church during the week—not even on Saturday, which was their Sunday. I supposed I missed the routine of not attending Mass every morning.
It wasn’t that I was particularly religious. Most of the time I went only because I had to, and many were the times I had ducked Mass if I possibly could. But it left a void in the routine I had been used to ever since I was a kid.
I was sitting around the house. I had read all the papers and was getting restless. Uncle Morris was down at the office Saturday mornings squaring up his accounts for the week. Just Aunt Bertha and I were in the house; the kids were out playing. Finally I put the papers down and got up. “Aunt Bertha,” I asked, “is it O.K. for me to run downtown for a while?”
She looked up at me shrewdly. “Sure it is, Frankie—you don’t have to ask.”
I went into the other room to get my coat, and came back into the parlour. She was watching me curiously, sort of embarrassed-like. I could see she was too polite to ask me where I was going, and I didn’t know just what to say to her. I didn’t know whether I could tell her I was going to see Brother Bernhard and maybe afterwards drop into church. But she was smarter than me. As I went near the door, she spoke.
“Will you be gone long, Frankie?” she asked.
I stopped. “I don’t know,” I answered. “I thought I’d kinda look around and see some friends.”
“Oh!” she said. “Your uncle and I had planned for you to go over to the synagogue today with us. I thought you might like to go now if you’ve nothing better you’d rather do.”
I stood there quietly a moment while I turned the idea over in my mind. My aunt was smart all right. Maybe she was even a little bit of a mind reader. Then I answered: “Do you think it would be all right for me to go? I’ve never been to one before.”
She smiled slowly, her voice very soft: “Of course it’s all right. We’d be very happy if you would come.”
“O.K.,” I said, “if you say so.”
“Wait a minute,” she said. “I’ll get my coat and go with you.”
As we walked to the synagogue she was very quiet. We came to a grey brick building. “This is the synagogue,” she told me.
I looked at the building. It wasn’t very impressive; just a flat one-storey affair, no statues of saints over the door, not even a Jewish star—just a plain building with a plain door. It didn’t look like a holy place where people came to worship. I felt vaguely disappointed.
I was even more disappointed when we went inside. The door was a few steps below street level and you had to walk down to it. Once inside the door we were in a small room that had very plain grey-painted walls. I started to take off my hat.
My aunt stopped me. “In a synagogue, Frankie, you keep your hat on. You must always cover your head.”
I looked at her for a minute, not understanding. Everything was backwards here.
She led me through the door on the opposite side of the room, and we were in the church. There were a few people in there. This room too was very plain. There were plain mahogany-stained benches on the floor, most of them needing a new coat of paint. The wall too needed a new coat of paint and some plastering because it was badly cracked in some places.
At the far end of the room there was a raised platform with four posters, over which was hung a faded red velvet canopy. Under the canopy there was a sort of a closet; and a man stood in front of the closet. He was reading aloud in Jewish from a scroll that was held in front of him by two other men.
We started down the aisle and entered one of the rows of benches near the front. I started to kneel, but my aunt put her hand under my arm and shook her head slightly. I sat down beside her.
“A Jew,” she whispered, “does not kneel to his God. His humility must be of the spirit, not the body.”
I looked at her, my eyes wide. This wasn’t very much like church at all. You didn’t have to behave very differently here than anywhere else except you had to keep your hat on.
“Where is the rabbi?” I asked her. The only men I saw on the platform were all dressed in plain suits.
“He’s the man reading from the Torah.”
I guessed she meant the man that was reading from the scroll. Maybe I expected someone dressed in elaborate robes; but if I did, I wasn’t to see one.
My aunt picked up a small book from the bench beside her, opened it, and gave it to me. Half the page was printed in Jewish, the other half in English. “This is what he is reading,” she said, her finger pointing to a line. “He reads the Hebrew but you can read the English.”
The man had paused for a moment while the scroll was turned. Then he began again.
His voice had a monotonously soothing, sing-song tone about it. “Boruch atto adonoi, elohenu melech ho’olom….”
I looked down at the book. My aunt’s finger pointed to a line in English. I read it. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God….”
This was something I could understand. I shut my eyes and I could see a picture of Father Quinn, kneeling in front of the altar, the soft light of the candles turning to gold the white of his robe. I could hear the soft voices of the choir rising. I could smell the resin and incense and the warmth of the church. My lips moved involuntarily: “Hail Mary, Mother of God.”
My aunt touched my shoulder, I opened my eyes, startled for a moment. She was smiling softly but I could see the tears sparkling in the corner of her eyes.
“It’s the same God, Frankie.”
I could feel the tension flow out of me. Suddenly I smiled at her.
She was right: the Word meant God in no matter what language you spoke it—English, Latin or … Hebrew.
When we got home Uncle Morris was there, and my aunt told him where we had been.
He looked over at me. “What do you think of it?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered, “it’s pretty strange.”
“Would you like to go to a Hebrew school to learn more about it?” he asked.
I hesitated before I answered, and my aunt spoke for me: “I think we had better let him make up his own mind on that question, Morris. He’s old enough now to decide what he wants. Let him think about it and if he wants to go, he can tell us.”
I was very grateful to her for that. At the moment I didn’t know whether I wanted to go or not. But Aunt Bertha had told me the same thing Brother Bernhard had, and if that was true, I couldn’t see what difference it made whether I went or not.
“But,” Uncle Morris protested, “he should prepare for his bar mitzvah.”
Again my aunt answered, with an understanding smile towards me, “It doesn’t really make much difference now. Bar mitzvah won’t make him any more of a man than he is already, and if he feels the need of a faith, I don’t think he’ll have any trouble finding it. He’s already doubly blessed.”
Those were the last words they ever spoke to me on religion. I was left free to make up my own mind on the subject, and I never gave it more than a passing thought after that. I never went to Hebrew school or to a church or synagogue afterwards, but then I never gave much thought to God either. I felt confident that I would be able to deal with Him when the time came for me to have to—just as I would deal with everything else in my life, when the time came and not before.
Y
OU
can never bring back old times; that was something I learned then. Though Jerry and Marty and I would still pal around together, we couldn’t recapture the closeness that had existed between us before I moved uptown. It wasn’t because of less camaraderie between us, it was rather that I was in process of normalizing. I was no longer on the outside looking in; I had a family of my own and I liked it that way. I began to learn things about care and consideration for others which I had never known before. But that feeling was directed solely towards my family, and to others outside my family I still kept my original attitude. It was like being two different people—almost. It would have been hard to tell where one set of feelings would leave off and the other would begin. But I didn’t think about it, and, what’s more, I didn’t even know about it at the time—so I didn’t care.
Things moved along. I was a fair student, no better or worse than any of the others. Not too greatly to my surprise, I drifted into a position of leadership among the other boys. I took this as being quite in order; I always had been a leader. I was more aggressive than most, more forward than the others. I wasn’t troubled by the vague adolescent speculations about sex, and would look amusedly at their attitudes and conversations. I already had passed that stage. Then too, I was a more than capable athlete. I made the basketball team and the swimming team my first year in school. I played basketball the only way I knew—that was to win. To hell with rules of so-called sportsmanship and fair play! They were only for the dumb-bells who weren’t fast enough or smart enough to get away with breaking them. Besides, I hated to lose.
And yet, despite my attitude towards others, my closeness to my family grew as bit by bit they chipped the raw, sore edges from my nature. Little by little the slightly defensive air I carried within myself like a mental chip on my shoulder began to disappear, and soon left nothing but a forward-looking aggressiveness, which in turn became better concealed as I learned to use the social amenities to bend others to my way of thinking.
The Friday night before the Christmas holiday we had a basketball game between James Monroe High and ourselves, and a dance was to follow the game. I had heard there was some talk about me running for class president, and though I played dumb about it, I was aware of the talk and knew that a great deal would depend on how I showed up in the game tonight whether they would ask me to run or not.
I went out on the court determined to show to the good. I played a hell of a game— rough borderline playing that I learned so well down on Tenth Avenue. I played to the grandstand to the point of taking the play away from the rest of my team. When the final score came on, we had won, and I was the undoubted star of the game.
I knew some of the boys were a little sore, because of what I had heard them say in the showers. I laughed to myself. Let the clucks grumble! If they made too much noise, I’d shut them up. I got dressed and went out to the dance and stood on the edge of the floor watching the crowd for a moment until I caught sight of Marty and Jerry in earnest