Apparently in despair of ever resolving the situation, Miss Flaherty, the principal, relieved Harry of regular classroom attendance, and gave him private lessons in English within the sanctuary of the “Principal’s Office.” In between times he was dispatched on errands: to buy bananas at the fruit stand on the corner, to deliver messages to individual teachers, to carry stacks of textbooks or supplies from repository to classroom. The apparition of the lanky, glum greenhorn coming through the door in the midst of a lesson was something Ira would never forget: the snickering, the suppressed catcalls, the taunts, despite the general reprimand of the teacher, would remain clearly in memory all the rest of his life — ineffaceable emblem of his first repudiation of his own kith and kin, cruelly assailed. After many decades, Ira would speculate on what would have been the result had Harry been enrolled in an East Side school, with its myriad of recent immigrants providing the very latest ones with a kind of protective matrix. How much happier that outcome for both himself and his adolescent uncle would have been. As it was, not only was Ira’s first report card marked C C C, failure in all three categories of performance, but his second and his third report card as well. Not till his fourth would the marks improve to B B B, and whether Harry’s quitting school in favor of getting a job had anything to do with the improvement, Ira would never know. He doubted it.
He doubted it because this was not the only instance of rejection of his own kind. The seed of rejection had already been sown — before his abandonment of his youthful uncle — sown weeks and weeks before, before school opened, sown at the first sight of his new kinfolk. At the moment of their entering their new apartment in Harlem, rejection inherent in the chagrin and disenchantment he felt at his first encounter with them. It was then, at that very instant, that irrevocable disappointment made its corrosive inroad: When the two taxicabs drew up to the curb in front of the apartment house, the two taxicabs bearing the six immigrants and their baggage — and their two shepherding sons, Moe in the one cab, Saul in the other — and the newcomers alighted in the sunlit street, Mamie, ever volatile in emotion, and close to fainting with rapture, screamed from the window: “Mominyoo! Mominyoo! Tateh! Tateh!” And Mom, though more self-controlled, carried away by excitement, and tears of joy welling from her eyes, and everyone, even little Stella, Mamie’s child, all crowding into the two front-room windows, screaming down at the uplifted faces screaming upward to mingle in joyful Yiddish cacophony that brought people to the windows of neighboring houses, it was then and there the desolate breach opened between himself and himself that was never to close.
For during the days and weeks preceding their arrival, as Mom’s anticipation grew, her longing, perhaps entangled in the nostalgias of her own girlhood, transmuted itself within Ira into fantasies as remote from the actuality he was soon to encounter as dream: into noble images of uncles and aunts, kindly, munificent, affectionate and indulgent. He imagined, in childish fancy, that the newcomers would be like “Uncle Louie”—Pop’s nephew, though older — Americanized, a government employee, a letter carrier in postman blue; who had served in the United States Army, could reminisce entrancingly about Indians and buffalo, about mountain and desert; and above all, was boundlessly generous with his pretend-nephew, fond and generous, never leaving after a visit, whether to the house on 114th Street, or the one on 119th, without first bestowing on Ira a handful of small change, an entire handful to a child who otherwise could rarely boast of possessing an entire nickel. Though Pop might cry, “Beloy! Beloy!” Desist! Desist! Uncle Louis would override him with his square, gold-dentured smile, his brown eyes arch behind his gold-rimmed glasses. “Beloy! Beloy!” was to no avail with Americanized Uncle Louie! What jingling, silvery rich coins were Ira’s. .
He thought the new relatives would be just like Uncle Louie, bountiful, endowed with a store of beguiling anecdotes, with rare knowledge of customs and places which they were only too happy to impart on their doting little kinsman. In short, they would be somehow charmingly, magically, bountifully pre-Americanized. Instead — they were greenhorns! Greenhorns with uncouth, lopsided and outlandish gestures, greenhorns who, once they cried out how big Leah’s infant had grown since they last saw him, paid no more attention to him, greenhorns engaged in all manner of talk too incomprehensible for him to understand, speaking “thick” Yiddish, without any English to leaven it, about the ways of the New World, the kosher shopping nearby and the work to be found here, and about relatives and friends and affairs in the little hamlet they had left behind: dull, colorless, greenhorn affairs.
Once again — Ira would reflect later — had their advent into the New World taken place in the ambience of the East Side, their outcry, their foreignness, their Yiddishkeit would not have seemed so garish. But here, already translated from that broader, homogeneous Jewish world, already glimpsing, perceiving on every hand, in every cautious exploration of the surrounding neighborhoods, how vast and predominant was the goyish world that surrounded the little Jewish enclave in which he lived, almost at once, a potential for contrast was instilled, a potential for contrast that waxed with every passing day on 114th Street. From erstwhile unawareness, awareness became insupportable; contrast became too much to bear: The newcomers’ crudity and grimace, their green and carious teeth, the sense of oppressive orthodoxy under Zaida’s sway — how they rushed to the sink at his behest to rinse their mouths in salt water — their totally alien behavior combined to produce in Ira a sense of unutterable chagrin and disappointment.
After he returned from his excursion with Max in the pushcart district, a feeling of isolation, of such intense disenchantment pervaded Ira, that to escape from his disconsolateness, he asked Mom if he could go downstairs. She consented, and in token of her joy, gave him a nickel to spend on anything he fancied. He descended the two flights of stairs, came out of the hallway into vacant, bright and comfortless 114th Street; and finding no one there his own age to strike up an acquaintance with, he trudged aimlessly west toward Fifth Avenue, then into the first candy store he came to, and bought a cheery box of Cracker Jacks. Munching the sweet, molasses-covered popcorn, he turned south toward the 110th Street corner of Central Park.