“Yowooee!” The cry came from overhead this time. They looked up. Shaih and Toik, the two brothers who lived on the third floor back had climbed out on their fire-escapes. They were the only ones in the cheder privileged to enter the yard via the fire-escape ladders — and they made the most of it. The rest watched enviously. But they had climbed down only a few steps, when again the cry, and now from a great height—
“Yowooee!”
Everyone gasped. It was Wildy and he was on the roof!
“I tol’ yuh I wuz gonna comm down higher den dem!” With a triumphant shout he mounted the ladder and with many a flourish climbed down.
“Gee, Wildy!” they breathed reverently — all except the two brothers and they eyed him sullenly.
“We’ll tell de janitor on you.”
“I’ll smack yuh one,” he answered easily, and turning to the rest. “Yuh know wad I c’n do if one o’ youz is game. I betcha I c’n go up on de fawt’ flaw an’ I betcha I c’n grab hol’ from dat wash-line an’ I betcha I c’n hol’ id till sommbody pulls me across t’ de wash-pole an I betcha I c’n comm down!”
“Gee, Wildy!”
“An’ somm day I’m gonna stott way over on Avenyuh C an’ jump all de fences in de whole two blocks!”
“Gee!”
“Hey, guys, I’m goin’ in.” Izzy had won the last of the pointers. “C’mon, I’m gonna give ’im.”
“How many yuh god?” They trooped after him.
“Look!” There was a fat sheaf of them in his hand.
They approached the reading table. The rabbi looked up.
“I’ve got pointers for you, rabbi,” said Izzy in Yiddish.
“Let me see them,” was the suspicious answer. “Quite a contribution you’re making.”
Izzy was silent.
“Do you know my pointers were stolen yesterday?”
“Yes, I know.”
“Well, where did you get these?”
“I won them.”
“From whom?”
“From everybody.”
“Thieves!” he shook his hand at them ominously. “Fortunately for you I don’t recognize any of them.”
IV
TWO months had passed since David entered the cheder. Spring had come and with the milder weather, a sense of wary contentment, a curious pause in himself as though he were waiting for some sign, some seal that would forever relieve him of watchfulness and forever insure his wellbeing. Sometimes he thought he had already beheld the sign — he went to cheder; he often went to the synagogue on Saturdays; he could utter God’s syllables glibly. But he wasn’t quite sure. Perhaps the sign would be revealed when he finally learned to translate Hebrew. At any rate, ever since he had begun attending cheder, life had leveled out miraculously, and this he attributed to his increasing nearness to God. He never thought about his father’s job any longer. There was no more of that old dread of waiting for the cycle to fulfill itself. There no longer seemed to be any cycle. Nor did his mother ever appear to worry about his father’s job; she too seemed reassured and at peace. And those curious secrets he had gleaned long ago from his mother’s story seemed submerged within him and were met only at reminiscent street-corners among houses or in the brain. Everything unpleasant and past was like that, David decided, lost within one. All one had to do was to imagine that it wasn’t there, just as the cellar in one’s house could be conjured away if there were a bright yard between the hallway and the cellar-stairs. One needed only a bright yard. At times David almost believed he had found that brightness.
It was a few days before Passover. The morning had been so gay, warmer and brighter than any in the sheaf of Easter just past. Noon had been so full of promise — a leaf of Summer in the book of Spring. And all that afternoon he had waited, restless and inattentive, for the three o’clock gong to release him from school. Instead of blackboards, he had studied the sharp grids of sunlight that brindled the red wall under the fire-escapes; and behind his tall geography book, had built a sail of a blotter and pencil to catch the mild breeze that curled in through the open window. Miss Steigman had caught him, had tightly puckered her lips (the heavy fuzz about them always darkened when she did that) and screamed:
“Get out of that seat, you little loafer! This minute! This very minute! And take that seat near the door and stay there! The audacity!” She always used that word, and David always wondered what it meant. Then she had begun to belch, which was what she always did after she had been made angry.
And even in his new seat, David had been unable to sit still, had fidgeted and waited, fingered the grain of his desk, stealthily rolled the sole of his shoe over a round lead pencil, attempted to tie a hair that had fallen on his book into little knots. He had waited and waited, but now that he was free, what good was it? The air was darkening, the naked wind was spinning itself a grey conch of the dust and rubbish scooped from the gutter. The street-cleaner was pulling on his black rain-coat. The weather had cheated him, that’s all! He couldn’t go anywhere now. He’d get wet. He might as well be the first one in the cheder. Disconsolately, he crossed the street.
But how did his mother know this morning it was going to rain? She had gone to the window and looked out, and then she said, the sun is up too early. Well what if it — Whee!
Before his feet a flat sheet of newspaper, driven by a gust of damp wind, whipped into the air and dipped and fluttered languidly, melting into sky. He watched it a moment and then quickened his step. Above store windows, awnings were heaving and bellying upward, rattling. Yelling, a boy raced across the gutter, his cap flying before him.
“Wow! Look!” The shout made him turn around.
“Shame! Shame! Everybody knows your name.” A chorus of boys and girls chanted emphatically. “Shame! Shame! Everybody knows your name.”
Red and giggling a big girl was thrusting down the billow of her dress. Above plump, knock-kneed legs, a glimpse of scalloped, white drawers. The wind relenting, the dress finally sank. David turned round again, feeling a faint disgust, a wisp of the old horror. With what prompt spasms the mummified images in the brain started from their niches, aped former antics and lapsed. It recalled that time, way long ago. Knish and closet. Puh! And that time when two dogs were stuck together. Puh! Threw water that man. Shame! Shame!
“Sophe-e!” Above him the cry. “Sophe-e!”
“Ye-es mama-a!” from a girl across the street.
“Comm opstehs! Balt!”
“Awaa!”
“Balt or I’ll give you! Nooo!”
With a rebellious shudder, the girl began crossing the street. The window slammed down.
Pushing a milk-stained, rancid baby carriage before them, squat buttocks waddled past, one arm from somewhere dragging two reeling children, each hooked by its hand to the other, each bouncing against the other and against their mother like tops, flagging and whipped. A boy ran in front of the carriage. It rammed him.
“Ow! Kencha see wea yuh goin?” He rubbed his ankle.
“Snott nuzz! Oll — balt a frosk, Oll — give!”
“Aaa! Buzjwa!”
A drop of rain spattered on his chin.
— It’s gonna—
He flung his strap of books over his shoulder and broke into a quick trot.
— Before I get all wet.
Ahead of him, flying toward the shore beyond the East River, shaggy clouds trooped after their van. And across the river the white smoke of nearer stacks was flattened out and stormy as though the stacks were the funnels of a flying ship. In the gutter, wagon wheels trailed black ribbons. Curtains overhead paddled out of open windows. The air had shivered into a thousand shrill, splintered cries, wedged here and there by the sudden whoop of a boy or the impatient squawk of a mother. At the doorway to the cheder corridor, he stopped and cast one lingering glance up and down the street. The black sidewalks had cleared. Rain shook out wan tresses in the gathering dark. Against the piebald press of cloud in the craggy furrow of the west, a lone flag on top of a school-steeple blew out stiff as a key. In the shelter of a doorway, across the gutter, a cluster of children shouted in monotone up at the sky: