TOUCH AND GO FOR LIFE
During a break in classes at the elementary yeshiva I was attending one spring day in 1956, I wandered as I often did into the school's library stacks. I had gone through all the Landmark books on the outside shelves-Peter Stuyvesant of Old New York, Betsy Ross and the Flag, etc.-and I wanted something else. Dust motes were dancing in the scattered light that had nosed its way through a neglected window at the back of the room.
I noticed a number of dark volumes, which had previously escaped my attention, on the bottom of one of the steel shelves, and I sat down cross-legged to investigate. The leather-bound covers were flaking away, and the interiors, stained here and there by age, were all in Hebrew. The largest book, I soon discovered, contained what we called "stories of the fathers," and I started to turn the pages.
I soon came upon one that was so badly darkened that I couldn't read on. I stared at it for a while, turned the page, and found others just like it. Then I made out a fingerprint in one of them and realized I was looking at a bloodstain.
I left the stacks, overcome by an odd queasiness, and sat down at one of the brightly lit library tables. The whole right side of the maple tree outside the window was bathed in sunlight.
Mrs. Neviere appeared. In her sixties and as alert as a finch, she was wearing her burnt-orange dress that day, and her auburn hair was, as always, piled up on her head in a beehive because she was barely five feet tall. She wore a lot of carefully applied makeup too but no jewelry except for a Phi Beta Kappa pin that hung at her waist from a long chain around her neck.
I waved to her, and she came over. "You know the books in the stacks?" I asked.
"Yes. ?"
I described what I had seen.
"Ah," she said. "And you want to know about those."
I nodded. She was the smartest English teacher I'd ever had, and the most kind. She looked into my eyes. "Well," she said at last, "they're relics. From the Ukraine, I believe. Do you know what a relic is?"
"Something old and precious?"
"Yes. Old and precious. . Sometime in the 1880s, there was a pogrom in a town there, and people entered a cheder, you know, a one-room school, and.and they murdered the teacher and the schoolchildren. And those books came here somehow or other," she added with a shrug. "We take care of them."
I was speechless. An indefatigable reader, I had never imagined you could be murdered for reading a book. My eyes went blank just thinking about it.
The next thing I felt was her hand squeezing my shoulder, and then patting it, and then she handed something to me and left.
When I looked down, I saw it was a thin volume in a flexible red morocco binding with two ribbons, one red and one green. I opened to the title page, opposite which I saw a sepia-toned photograph of a man lying on his back on a river bank, wearing a three-piece white suit with a black tie and black shoes and a white hat pulled down over his eyes. He was holding a fishing rod, and the line drifted out of the photograph. This was the man who had edited the book, an anthology of poems, and I thought that, if fishing like that was what he did for a living, he was a lucky man.
With that in mind, I turned to where Mrs. Neviere had placed the red ribbon, and my life changed forever.
"Hey, listen to this!" I said to Alice Mann as we were crossing 104th Street on our way to the subway after school. I was holding the anthology in front of me. "'Read out the names!'"
She was startled. "Not so loud," she whispered, looking around.
"But you have to hear it," I protested. As usual, people were flooding the afternoon streets, cars stalled in traffic, kids speeding down the hill on bicycles and carts, screaming in Spanish at the top of their lungs.
"Wait a second," I said, and dropped her satchel on the pavement. "'Read out the names, and Burke sat back, And Kelly drooped his head, While Shea (they call him Scholar Jack) Went down the list of the dead. ."
She grimaced. "Fabulous."
"What's the matter, don't you like it? Look at the way that 'Scholar Jack' fits in. That's really neat, Alice."
Two dark-skinned boys in tight pants came sashaying by. "Do we have to stand here in the middle of the street?" she asked. "You know I don't like walking to the subway."
Waving my book around, I said, "Sometimes I wonder about you, Alice. This is great stuff here. This is poetry."
I spotted Arvin Kimpish prowling down the center of the sidewalk, surrounded by a number of his pals. He was always on the alert outdoors, like a bear, with a bear's waddle and outsized thighs. "Hey, Barry," he observed as they passed us, "she gonna buy you another Creamsicle today?"
"Sure," I said. Alice eyed him in disdain.
"You playing some stickball later?"
"Maybe."
Arvin smiled, exposing his square little teeth. "How come you're standing in the middle of the street?" he asked Alice. "He too tired to carry your books? Want me to carry 'em for you?"
"No, I don't want you to carry 'em for me," she replied viciously. Arvin shrugged and flicked his thumb at the little gang behind him as if they were a light switch. Off they went.
"Slob," she muttered, watching them stroll to the subway.
"Ah, come on, Alice. He likes you."
She studied me for a moment with parted lips.
"Really," I insisted. "He told me he does."
She uttered an exaggerated gasp. "Can we please go?"
I hoisted the satchel and paced myself to the rhythm of the poem I had every intention of finishing. "'Officers, seamen, gunners, marines, The crews of the gig and the yawl,'" I declaimed with growing emphasis. "'The bearded man and the lad in his teens, Carpenters, coal-passers-all!'"
"Hmph."
"Hey, I'm a lad in my teens, Alice-almost-case you didn't notice."
Then I heard a voice behind me. "Whatcha doin', Barry? I could hear you half way up the block." It was Muriel. Nobody else had that lush, drawly way of speaking.
"Reading a poem from this book Mrs. Neviere gave me in the library," I explained, turning, glancing quickly at her wide mouth and her eyes that always looked half-closed, as I showed her the book. ".I thought you went home after gym."
"Uh-uh. Nita had to stay late today. Any good?"
"Good? It's wonderful the way this guy writes. It's all about the battleship Maine that they blew up in Havana, Cuba."
"Lemme hear," she urged, slipping beside me.
"I want to go to the subway," Alice said.
"Okay, okay," I agreed. "You get the Creamsicles, and we'll go."
She nodded and descended the concrete steps to the bodega where we always stopped that had been converted from a basement apartment and smelled of tropical fruit and bad meat. "You sure you want to hear it?" I asked Muriel.
She nodded eagerly.
I lifted my arms, raised one eyebrow in imitation of an old sea-dog, and began to read:
Then knocking the ashes from out of his pipe
Said Burke in an offhand way,
"We're all on that dead-man's list, by cripe!
Kelly, and Burke, and Shea."
"Well, here's to the Maine, and I'm sorry for Spain,"
Said Kelly, and Burke, and Shea.
Muriel seemed spellbound. "That's so cool," she whispered. "You read it so-it sounds so real. It makes my spine tingle."
"Really?"
She nodded and searched for Alice, who was waiting with the Creamsicles at the counter of the crowded store, tapping her quarters against the cash register for attention.
"Read some more, Barry," Muriel asked, turning back to me. Her green eyes under their heavy lids were luminous up close. I made a broad gesture with my left hand to properly introduce the next stanza and continued:
"Wherever there's Kellys, there's trouble," said Burke,
"Wherever fightin's the game."
"Or a spice of danger in grown man's work,"
Said Kelly, "you'll find my name."
"And do we fall short," said Burke, getting mad,
"When it's touch and go for life?
Why, it's nearly twenty years, bedad,
Since I toted the drum and the fife-"
"What does 'bedad' mean? asked Muriel.
"I don't know," I said. "Whadda you think?"
She reached for the book and squinted at the page. Her pinky brushed against my hand, and the touch was electric. "It must be 'by God' or something," she concluded. "See? It has to rhyme with 'mad.' That's not as neat as the others."
"But maybe they talked like that-you know, tough old sailors in foreign...
