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It's like this, cat
by Emily Neville
ILLUSTRATED BY EMIL WEISS
Cat curled up below. Tall apartment building in background.
IT'S LIKE THIS, CAT
BY EMILY NEVILLE
PICTURES BY EMIL WEISS
tall apartment building on left; car driving by;
bike-riding boy behind running boy and dog;
mailman handing mail to woman on sidewalk.
Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, 49 East 33rd Street, New York 16, N.Y.
IT’S LIKE THIS, CAT
CAT AND KATE
My father is always talking about how a dog can be very educational for a boy. This is one reason I got a cat.
My father talks a lot anyway. Maybe being a
lawyer he gets in the habit. Also, he’s a small
guy with very little gray curly hair, so maybe he
thinks he’s got to roar a lot to make up for not
being a big hairy tough guy. Mom is thin and
quiet, and when anything upsets her, she gets
The big hassle that led to me getting Cat came when I earned some extra money baby-sitting for a little boy around the corner on Gramercy Park. I spent the money on a Belafonte record. This record has one piece about a father telling his son about the birds and the bees. I think it’s funny. Pop blows his stack.
“You’re not going to play that stuff in this house!” he roars. “Why aren’t you outdoors, anyway? Baby-sitting! Baby-talk records! When I was your age, I made money on a newspaper-delivery route, and my dog Jeff and I used to go ten miles chasing rabbits on a good Saturday.”
“Pop,” I say patiently, “there are no rabbits out on Third Avenue. Honest, there aren’t.”
“Don’t get fresh!” Pop jerks the plug out of the record player so hard the needle skips, which probably wrecks my record. So I get mad and start yelling too. Between rounds we both hear Mom in the kitchen starting to wheeze.
Pop hisses, “Now, see—you’ve gone and upset your mother!”
I slam the record player shut, grab a stick and ball, and run down the three flights of stairs to the street.
This isn’t the first time Pop and I have played this scene, and there gets to be a pattern: When I slam out of our house mad, I go along over to my Aunt Kate’s. She’s not really my aunt. The kids around here call her Crazy Kate the Cat Woman because she walks along the street in funny old clothes and sneakers talking to herself, and she sometimes has half a dozen or more stray cats living with her. I guess she does sound a little looney, but it’s just because she does things her own way, and she doesn’t give a hoot what people think. She’s sane, all right. In fact she makes a lot better sense than my pop.
It was three or four years ago, when I was a little kid, and I came tearing down our stairs crying mad after some fight with Pop, that I first met Kate. I plunged out of our door and into the street without looking. At the same moment I heard brakes scream and felt someone yank me back by the scruff of my neck. I got dropped in a heap on the sidewalk.
I looked up, and there was a shiny black car with M.D. plates and Kate waving her umbrella at the driver and shouting: “Listen, Dr. Big Shot, whose life are you saving? Can’t you even watch out for a sniveling little kid crossing the street?”
The doctor looked pretty sheepish, and so did I. A few people on the sidewalk stopped to watch and snicker at us. Our janitor Butch was there, shaking his finger at me. Kate nodded to him and told him she was taking me home to mop me up.
“Yas’m,” said Butch. He says “Yas’m” to all ladies.
Kate dragged me along by the hand to her apartment. She didn’t say anything when we got there, just dumped me in a chair with a couple of kittens. Then she got me a cup of tea and a bowl of cottage cheese.
That stopped me snuffling to ask, “What do I put the cottage cheese on?”
“Don’t put it on anything. Just eat it. Eat a bowl of it every day. Here, have an orange, too. But no cookies or candy, none of that sweet, starchy stuff. And no string beans. They’re not good for you.”
My eyes must have popped, but I guess I knew
Off and on since then I’ve seen quite a lot of Kate. I’d pass her on the street, chirruping to some mangy old stray cat hiding under a car, and he’d always come out to be stroked. Sometimes there’d be a bunch of little kids dancing around jeering at her and calling her a witch. It made me feel real good and important to run them off.
Quite often I went with her to the A & P and helped her carry home the cat food and cottage cheese and fruit. She talks to herself all the time in the store, and if she thinks the peaches or melons don’t look good that day, she shouts clear across the store to the manager. He comes across and picks her out an extra good one, just to keep the peace.
I introduced Kate to Mom, and they got along
real well. Kate’s leery of most people, afraid
they’ll make fun of her, I guess; my mom’s not
leery of people, but she’s shy, and what with
asthma and worrying about keeping me and Pop
calmed down, she doesn’t go out much or make
dates with people. She and Kate would chat together
The day of the fight with Pop about the Belafonte record it’s cold and windy out and there are no kids in sight. I slam my ball back and forth against the wall where it says “No Ball Playing,” just to limber up and let off a little spite, and then I go over to see Kate.
Kate has a permanent cat named Susan and however many kittens Susan happens to have just had. It varies. Usually there are a few other temporary stray kittens in the apartment, but I never saw any father cat there before. Today Susan and her kittens are under the stove, and Susan keeps hissing at a big tiger-striped tomcat crouching under the sofa. He turns his head away from her and looks like he never intended to get mixed up with family life. For a stray cat he’s sleek and healthy-looking. Every time he moves a whisker, Susan hisses again, warningly. She believes in no visiting rights for fathers.
Kate pours me some tea and asks what’s doing.
“My pop is full of hot air, as usual,” I say.
“Takes one to know one,” Kate says, catching me off base. I change the subject.
“How come the kittens’ pop is around the house? I never saw a full-grown tom here before.”
“He saw me buying some cans of cat food, so he followed me home. Susan isn’t admitting she ever knew him or ever wants to. I’ll give him another feed and send him on his way, I guess. He’s a handsome young fellow.” Kate strokes him between the ears, and he rotates his head. Susan hisses.
He starts to pull back farther under the sofa. Without stopping to think myself, or giving him time to, I pick him up. Susan arches up and spits. I can feel the muscles in his body tense up as he gets ready to spring out of my lap. Then he changes his mind and decides to take advantage of the lap. He narrows his eyes and gives Susan a bored look and turns his head to take me in. After he’s sized me up, he pretends he only turned around to lick his back.
“Cat,” I say to him, “how about coming home with me?”
“Hah!” Kate laughs. “Your pop will throw
“Yeah-h?” I say it slowly and do some thinking. Taking Cat home had been just a passing thought, but right now I decide I’ll really go to the mat with Pop about this. He can have his memories of good old Jeff and rabbit hunts, but I’m going to have me a tiger.
Aunt Kate gives me a can of cat food and a box of litter, so Cat can stay in my room, because I remember Mom probably gets asthma from animals, too. Cat and I go home.
Pop does a lot of shouting and sputtering when we get home, but I just put Cat down in my room, and I try not to argue with him, so I won’t lose my temper. I promise I’ll keep him in my room and sweep up the cat hairs so Mom won’t have to.
As a final blast Pop says, “I suppose you’ll get your exercise mouse hunting now. What are you going to name the noble animal?”
“Look, Pop,” I explain, “I know he’s a cat, he knows he’s a cat, and his name is Cat. And even if you call him Honorable John Fitzgerald Kennedy, he won’t come when you call, and he won’t lick your hand, see?”
“He’d better not! And it’s not my hand that’s
“All right, all right.”
Actually, my pop sometimes jaws so long it’d be a relief if he did haul off and hit me, but he never does.
We call it a draw for that day, and I have Cat.
CAT AND THE UNDERWORLD
Cat makes himself at home in my room pretty easily. Mostly he likes to be up on top of something, so I put an old sweater on the bureau beside my bed, and he sleeps up there. When he wants me to wake up in the morning, he jumps and lands in the middle of my stomach. Believe me, cats don’t always land lightly—only when they want to. Anything a cat does, he does only when he wants to. I like that.
When I’m combing my hair in the morning, sometimes he sits up there and looks down his nose at my reflection in the mirror. He appears to be taking inventory: “Hmm, buckteeth; sandy hair, smooth in front, cowlick in back; brown eyes, can’t see in the dark worth a nickel; hickeys on the chin. Too bad.”
I look back at him in the mirror and say, “O.K., black face, yellow eyes, and one white whisker. Where’d you get that one white whisker?”
He catches sight of himself in the mirror, and his tail twitches momentarily. He seems to know it’s not really another cat, but his claws come out and he taps the mirror softly, just to make sure.
When I’m lying on the bed reading, sometimes he will curl up between my knees and the book. But after a few days I can see he’s getting more and more restless. It gets so I can’t listen to a record, for the noise of him scratching on the rug. I can’t let him loose in the apartment, at least until we make sure Mom doesn’t get asthma, so I figure I better reintroduce him to the great outdoors in the city. One nice Sunday morning in April we go down and sit on the stoop.
Cat sits down, very tall and neat and pear-shaped, and closes his eyes about halfway. He glances at the street like it isn’t good enough for him. After a while, condescending, he eases down the steps and lies on a sunny, dusty spot in the middle of the sidewalk. People walking have to step around him, and he squints at them.
Then he gets up, quick, looks over his shoulder at nothing, and shoots down the stairs to the cellar. I take a look to see where he’s going, and he is pacing slowly toward the backyard, head down, a tiger on the prowl. I figure I’ll sit in the sun and finish my science-fiction magazine before I go after him.
When I do, he’s not in sight, and the janitor tells me he jumped up on the wall and probably down into one of the other yards. I look around a while and call, but he’s not in sight, and I go up to lunch. Along toward evening Cat scratches at the door and comes in, as if he’d done it all his life.
This gets to be a routine. Sometimes he doesn’t even come home at night, and he’s sitting on the doormat when I get the milk in the morning, looking offended.
“Is it my fault you stayed out all night?” I ask him.
He sticks his tail straight up and marches down the hall to the kitchen, where he waits for me to open the milk and dish out the cat food. Then he goes to bed.
One morning he’s not there when I open the door, and he still hasn’t showed up when I get back from school. I get worried and go down to talk to Butch.
“Wa-a-l,” says Butch, “sometimes that cat sit and talk to me a little, but most times he go on over to Twenty-first Street, where he sit and talk to his lady friend. Turned cold last night, lot of buildings put on heat and closed up their basements. Maybe he got locked in somewheres.”
“Which building’s his friend live in?” I ask.
“Forty-six, the big one. His friend’s a little black-and-white cat, sort of belongs to the night man over there. He feeds her.”
I go around to Twenty-first Street and case Forty-six, which is a pretty fair-looking building with a striped awning and a doorman who saunters out front and looks around every few minutes.
While I’m watching, a grocery boy comes
along pushing his cart and goes down some
stairs into the basement with his carton of
groceries. This gives me an idea. I’ll give the
I go down, and the coast is clear. The elevator’s gone up, and I walk softly past and through a big room where the tenants leave their baby carriages and bicycles. After this the cellar stretches off into several corridors, lit by twenty-watt bulbs dangling from the ceiling. You can hardly see anything. The corridors go between wire storage cages, where the tenants keep stuff like trunks and old cribs and parakeet cages. They’re all locked.
“Me-ow, meow, me-ow!” Unmistakably Cat, and angry.
The sound comes from the end of one corridor, and I fumble along, peering into each cage to try to see a tiger cat in a shadowy hole. Fortunately his eyes glow and he opens his mouth for another meow, and I see him locked inside one of the cages before I come to the end of the corridor. I don’t know how he got in or how I’m going to get him out.
While I’m thinking, Cat’s eyes flick away from
me to the right, then back to me. Cat’s not making
I don’t know why any of the building men would be way back there, but that’s who I figure it is, so I start explaining.
“I was just hunting for my cat ... I mean, he’s got locked in one of these cages. I just want to get him out.”
The guy lets his breath out, slow, as if he’s been holding it quite a while. I realize he doesn’t belong in that cellar either, and he’s been scared of me.
He moves forward, saying “Sh-h-h” very quietly. He’s taller than I am, and I can’t see what he really looks like, but I’m sure he’s sort of a kid, maybe eighteen or so.
He looks at the padlock on the cage and says, “Huh, cheap!” He takes a paper clip out of his pocket and opens it out, and I think maybe he has a penknife, too, and next thing I know the padlock is open.
“Gee, how’d you do that?”
“Sh-h-h. A guy showed me how. You better get your cat and scram.”
Golly, I wonder, maybe the guy is a burglar, and that gives me another creepy feeling. But would a burglar be taking time out to get a kid’s cat free?
“Well, thanks for the cat. See you around,” I say.
“Sh-h-h. I don’t live around here. Hurry up, before we both get caught.”
Maybe he’s a real burglar with a gun, even, I think, and by the time I dodge past the elevators and get out in the cold April wind, the sweat down my back is freezing. I give Cat a long lecture on staying out of basements. After all, I can’t count on having a burglar handy to get him out every time.
Back home we put some nice jailhouse blues
on the record player, and we both stretch out on
the bed to think. The guy didn’t really look like
a burglar. And he didn’t talk “dese and dose.”
Maybe real burglars don’t all talk that way—only
the ones on TV. Still, he sure picked that lock
fast, and he was sure down in that cellar for
some reason of his own.
Maybe I ought to let someone know. I figure
I figure Pop’ll at least ask me what he was doing, and maybe I’ll tell him the whole thing—about Cat and the cage. But Pop says, “In case you didn’t know it, burglars do not all look like Humphrey Bogart, and they don’t wear signs.”
“Thanks for the news,” I say and go on eating my dinner. Even if Pop does make me sore, I’m not going to pass up steak and onions, which we don’t have very often.
However, the next day I’m walking along Twenty-first Street and I see the super of Forty-six standing by the back entrance, so I figure I’ll try again. I say to him, “Us kids were playing ball here yesterday, and we saw a strange-looking guy sneak into your cellar. It wasn’t a delivery boy.”
“Yeah? You sure it wasn’t you or one of your juvenile pals trying to swipe a bike? How come you have to play ball right here?”
“I don’t swipe bikes. I got one of my own. New. A Raleigh. Better than any junk you got in there.”
“What d’you know about what I got in there, wise guy?”
“Aw, forget it.” I realize he’s just getting suspicious of me. That’s what comes of trying to be a big public-spirited citizen. I decide my burglar, whoever he is, is a lot nicer than the super, and I hope he got a fat haul.
Next day it looks like maybe he did just that.
The local paper, Town and Village, has a headline:
“Gramercy Park Cellar Robbed.” I read
down the article:
“The superintendent, Fred Snood, checked the cellar storage cages, after a passing youth hinted to him that there had been a robbery. He found one cage open and a suitcase missing. Police theorize that the youth may have been the burglar, or an accomplice with a guilty conscience or a grudge, and they are hunting him for questioning. Mr. Snood described him as about sixteen years of age, medium height, with a long ‘ducktail’ haircut, and wearing a heavy black sweater. They are also checking second-hand stores for the stolen suitcase.”
The burglar stole a suitcase with valuable
papers and some silver and jewelry in it. But
the guy they were hunting for—I read the paragraph
over and feel green. That’s me. I get up
Slowly I peel off my black sweater, which I wear practically all the time, and stuff it in my bottom drawer, under my bathing suit. But if I want to walk around the street without worrying about every cop, I’ll have to do more than that. I put on a shirt and necktie and suit jacket and stick a cap on my head. I head uptown on the subway. At Sixty-eighth Street I get off and find a barbershop.
“Butch cut,” I tell the guy.
“That’s right. I’ll trim you nice and neat. Get rid of all this stuff.”
And while he chatters on like an idiot, I have to watch three months’ work go snip, snip on the floor. Then I have to pay for it. At home I get the same routine. Pop looks at my Ivy-League disguise and says, “Why, you may look positively human some day!”
Two days later I find out I could’ve kept my
hair. Town and Village has a new story: “Nab
Cellar Thief Returning Loot. ‘Just A Bet,’
He Says.”
The story is pretty interesting. The guy I met
The story in the paper goes on to say this guy was broke and hunting for a job, and some other guy dares him to snatch something out of a cellar and finally bets him ten dollars, so he does it. He gets out and finds the suitcase has a lot of stocks and legal papers and table silver in it, and he’s scared stiff. So he figures to drop it back where it came from. The paper says he’s held over to appear before some magistrate in Adolescent Court.
I wonder, would they send a guy to jail for that? Or if they turn him loose, what does he do? It must be lousy to be in this city without any family or friends.
At that point I get the idea I’ll write him a
letter. After all, Cat and I sort of got him into
Dear Tom Ransom:
I am the kid you met in the cellar at Number
Forty-six Gramercy, and I certainly thank you
for unlocking that cage and getting my cat out.
Cat is fine. I am sorry you got in trouble with
the police. It sounds to me like you were only trying
to return the stuff and do right. My father is
a lawyer, if you would like one. I guess he’s
pretty good. Or if you would like to write me
anyway, here is my address: 150 East 22 St. I read
in the paper that your family don’t live in New
York, which is why I thought you might like
someone to write to.
Yours sincerely,
Dave Mitchell
Now that I’m a free citizen again, I dig out my black sweater, look disgustedly at the butch haircut, and go out to mail my letter.
Later on I get into a stickball game again on
“Got any burglars in your basement these days?” I yell to him while I’m jogging around the bases on a long hit.
He looks at me and my short haircut and scratches his own bald egg. “Where’d I see you?” he asks suspiciously.
“Oh—Cat and I, we get around,” I say.
CAT AND CONEY
Nick and I have been friends pretty much since I
can remember. Our mothers used to trade turns
fetching us from kindergarten. Nick lives
around the corner on Third Avenue, upstairs
over the grocery store his old man runs. If anyone
asked me how come we’re friends, I couldn’t
exactly say. We’re just together most of the time.
Neither of us is a real whiz at sports, but we
used to roller-skate and play a little king and
Queen Mary docks. This is about the
only time I remember my mom getting really
angry. She said Pop ought to take my bike away
from me, and he did, but only for about a week.
Nick and I still ride bikes a lot. Otherwise we
sit and do our homework or play chess and listen
to records.
Another reason we’re friends is because of this creepy little kid who lived down toward the corner, between me and Nick. He always tagged along, wanting to play with us, and of course in the end he always fouled up the game or fell down and started to cry. Then his big brother came rushing out, usually with another big guy along, and they figured they were entitled to beat us up for hurting little Joey.
After a while it looked to me as if Joey just
worked as a lookout, and the minute me or Nick
showed up on the block, one of the big guys came
to run us off. They did little things like throwing
sticks into our bike spokes and pretending it was
just a joke. Nick and I used to plot all kinds of
ways to get even with them, but in the end we
Summers, up in the country, the kids seem to be all the time wrestling and punching, half for fun and half not. If I walk past some strange kid my age up there, he almost always tries to get me into a fight. I don’t get it. Maybe it’s because sidewalks are uncomfortable for fighting, but we just don’t do much scrapping for fun. The only couple of fights I ever had, I was real mad.
Come spring, Nick and I got restless hanging around the street, with nothing to do but stickball and baiting the super at Forty-six. It was so easy to get him sore, it wasn’t even fun. Cat stayed out of that basement, but I wanted to get him really out in the open, where he could chase squirrels or something.
One day we rode our bikes up to Central Park. I put Cat in a wicker hamper and tied it on the back of my bike. He meowed a lot, and people on the street would look at me and then do a double take when they heard him.
We got up to Central Park and into a place
they call The Horseshoe, because the parking
Then we hit a hot Saturday, the first one in May, and I get an idea. I find Nick and say, “Let’s put Cat and some sandwiches in the basket and hop the subway out to Coney.”
Nick says, “Why bring Cat? He wrecked the last expedition.”
“I like to take him places, and this won’t be like Central Park. No one’s at Coney this time of year. He can chase around on the beach and hunt sand crabs.”
“Why do I have to have a nut for a friend?” Nick moans. “Well, anyway, I’m keeping my sandwich in my pocket, not in any old cat basket.”
“Who cares where you keep your crumby sandwich?”
So we went. Lots of people might think Coney Island is ugly, with all the junky-looking booths and billboards. But when you turn your back on them and look out at the ocean, it’s the same ocean as on a deserted beach. I kick off my shoes and stand with my feet in the ice water and the sun hot on my chest. Looking out at the horizon with its few ships and some sea gulls and planes overhead, I think: It’s mine, all mine. I could go anywhere in the world, I could. Maybe I will.
Nick throws water down my neck. He only understands infinity on math papers. I let Cat out of the basket and strip off my splashed shirt and chase Nick along the edge of the water. No need to worry about Cat. He chases right along with us, and every time a wave catches his feet he hisses and hightails it up the beach. Then he rolls himself in the hot, dry sand and gets up and shakes. There are a few other groups of people dotted along the beach. A big mutt dog comes and sniffs Cat and gets a right and a left scratch to the nose. He yelps and runs for home. Cat discovers sand crabs. Nick and I roll around in the sand and wrestle, and after a while we get hungry, so we go back where we left the basket. Cat is content to let me carry him.
Three girls are having a picnic right near our basket. One yells to the others, “Hey, look! The guy went swimming with his cat!”
Cat jumps down, turns his back on them, and humps himself around on my sweater until he is settled for a nap. I turn my back on the girls, too, and look out at the ocean.
Still, it’s not the same as it would have been a year ago. Then Nick and I would either have moved away from the girls or thrown sand at them.
We just sit and eat our sandwiches. Nick looks over at them pretty often and whispers to me how old do I think they are. I can’t tell about girls. Some of the ones in our class at school look about twenty-five, but then you see mothers pushing baby carriages on the street who look about fifteen.
One of the girls catches Nick’s eye and giggles. “Hi, there, whatcha watching?”
“I’m a bird watcher,” says Nick. “Seen any birds?”
The girls drift over our way. The one that
spoke first is a redhead. The one who seems to be
the leader is a big blonde in a real short skirt
and hair piled up high in a bird’s nest. Maybe
“You want a couple of cupcakes? You can have mine. I’m going on a diet,” says the blonde.
“Thanks,” says Nick. “I was thinking of going after some cokes.”
“Why waste time thinking? You might hurt your head,” says the redhead.
The third girl bends down and strokes Cat between the ears very gently. She says, “What’s his name?”
I explain to her about why Cat is Cat. She sits down and picks up a piece of seaweed to dangle over his nose. Cat makes a couple of sleepy swipes at it and then stretches luxuriously while she strokes him. The other kids get to talking, and we tell each other our names and where we go to school and all that stuff.
Then Nick gets back on the subject of going for cokes. I don’t really want to stay there alone with the girls, so I say I’ll go. I tell Nick to watch Cat, and the girl who is petting him says, “Don’t worry, I won’t let him run away.”
It’s a good thing she’s there, because by the
time I get back with the cokes, which no one
“He’s a stray. I got him from an old lady who’s sort of a nut about cats. Come on, I’ll see if I can get him to chase waves for you. He was doing it earlier.”
We are running along in the waves when the other kids come back. The big blonde kicks up water at me and yells, “Race you!”
So I chase, and just as I’m going to catch up, she stops short so I crash into her and we both fall down. This seems to be what she had in mind, but I bet the other kids are watching and I feel silly. I roll away and get up and go back to Cat.
While we drink cokes the blonde and the redhead say they want to go to the movies.
“What’s on?” Nick asks.
“There’s a Sinatra thing at the neighborhood,” the blonde tells him, and he looks interested.
“I can’t,” I say. “I’ve got Cat. Besides, it’s too late. Mom’d think I’d fallen into the subway.”
“I told you that cat was a mistake,” says Nick.
“Put him in the basket and call your mother and tell her your watch stopped,” says the redhead. She comes over and trickles sand down my neck. “Come on, it’d be fun. We don’t have to sit in the kids’ section. We all look sixteen.”
“Nah, I can’t.” I get up and shake the sand out.
Nick looks disgusted, but he doesn’t want to stay alone. He says to the blonde, “Write me down your phone number, and we’ll do it another day when this nut hasn’t got his cat along.”
She writes down the phone number, and the redhead pouts because I’m not asking for hers. The girls get ready to leave, and Mary pats Cat good-bye and waves to me. She says, “Bring him again. He’s nice.”
We get on the subway and Cat meows crossly at being shut in his basket. Nick pokes the basket with his toes.
“Shut up, nuisance,” he says.
FIGHT
I actually get a letter back from Tom Ransom. It says: “Thanks for your letter. The Youth Board got me a room in the Y on Twenty-third Street. Maybe I’ll come say Hello some day. They’re going to help me get a job this summer, so I don’t need a lawyer. Thanks anyway. Meow to Cat. Best, Tom.”
I go over to Nick’s house to show him the
letter. I’d told him about Tom getting Cat out
One thing about Nick sort of gripes me. He
has to think up all the plans. Anything I’ve done
that he doesn’t know about, he downgrades.
Also, I always have to go to his house. He never
comes to mine, except once in a coon’s age when
I have a new record I won’t bring to his house
because his machine stinks and he never buys a
new needle.
It’s not that I don’t like his house. His mom is pretty nice, and boy, can she cook! Just an ordinary Saturday for lunch she makes pizza or real good spaghetti, and she has homemade cookies and nut cake sitting around after school. She also talks and waves her arms and shouts orders at us kids, but all good-natured-like, so we just kid her along and go on with what we’re doing.
She’s about the opposite of my mom. Pop does
the shouting in our house, and except for the one
hassle about bike-riding on Twelfth Avenue,
Mom doesn’t even tell me what to do much.
Also, my mom is always home and always ready to listen if you got something griping you, like when a teacher blames you for something you didn’t do. Some kids I know, they have to phone a string of places to find their mother, and then she scolds them for interrupting her.
Mom likes to cook, and she gets up some good meals for holidays, but she doesn’t go at it all the time, the way Nick’s mother does. So maybe Nick doesn’t come to my house because we haven’t got all that good stuff sitting around. I don’t think that’s it, really, though. He just likes to be boss.
One day, a couple of weeks after we went to Coney, he does come along with me. We pick up a couple of cokes and pears at his pop’s store.
Cat is sitting on my front stoop, and he jumps down and rubs between my legs and goes up the stairs ahead of us.
“See? He knows when school gets out then it’s time to eat. That’s why I like to come home,” I tell Nick.
We say “Hi” to Mom, and I get out the cat
“Yeah.”
“Well, I got the blonde’s phone number, so Sunday when I was hacking around with nothing to do, I called her up.”
“Yeah? What for?”
“You stupid or something? To talk. So she yacked away a good while, and finally I asked her why didn’t she come over next Saturday, we could go to a movie or something.”
“Yeah.” I was working on my pear, a very juicy one.
“That all you can say? So she says, well, she might, if she can get her girl friend to come too, but she doesn’t want to come alone, and her mother wouldn’t let her anyway.”
“Which one?”
“Which one what?”
“Which girl friend?”
“Oh. You remember, the other one we were kidding around with at the beach, the redhead. So I said, O.K., I’d see if I could get you to come too. I said I’d call her back.”
“Hmp. I don’t know.”
“What d’you mean, you don’t know?”
“How do I know if I like that girl? I hardly
even talked to her. Anyway, it sounds like a date.
I don’t want a date. If they just happen to come
over, I guess it’s all right.”
“So shall I tell them it’s O.K. for Saturday?”
“Hmm.”
“It’s nice you learned a new word.”
“Do I have to pay for the girl at the movies?”
“Cheapskate. Maybe if you just stand around saying ‘Hmm,’ she’ll buy her own. O.K.?”
“O.K. But this whole thing is your idea, and if it stinks it’s going to be your fault.”
“Boy, what an enthusiast! Come on, let’s play a record and do the math.”
Nick is better at math than I am, so I agree.
Saturday morning at ten o’clock Nick turns up at my house in a white shirt and slicked-down hair. Pop whistles. “On Saturday, yet! You got a girl or something?”
“Yessir!” says Nick, and he gives my T-shirt a dirty look. I go put a sweater over it and run a comb through my hair, but I’m hanged if I’ll go out looking like this is a big deal.
“We’re going to a movie down at the Academy,” I tell my family.
“What’s there?” Pop asks.
“A new horror show,” says Nick. “And an old Disney.”
“Is it really a new horror show?” I ask Nick, because I think I’ve seen every one that’s been in town.
“Yup. Just opened. The Gold Bug. Some guy
wrote it—I mean in a book once—but it’s supposed
to be great. Make the girls squeal anyway.
I love that.”
“Hmm.” I just like horror shows anyway, whether girls squeal or not.
“You’ll be the life of the party with that ‘Hmm’ routine.”
“It’s your party.” I shrug.
“Well, you could at least try.”
We hang around the subway kiosk on Fourteenth Street, where Nick said he’d meet them. After half an hour they finally show up.
It’s nice and sunny, and we see a crowd bunched up over in Union Square, so we wander over. A shaggy-haired, bearded character is making a speech all about “They,” the bad guys. A lot of sleepy bums are sitting around letting the speech roll off their ears.
“What is he, a nut or something?” the blonde asks.
“A Commie, maybe,” I say. “They’re always
The girls look at each other and laugh like
crazy, as if I’d said something real funny. I catch
Nick’s eye and glare. O.K., I tried. After this I’ll
stick to “Hmm.”
A beard who is listening to the speech turns and glares at us and says, “Shush!”
“Aw, go shave yourself!” says Nick, and the girls go off in more hoots. Nick starts herding them toward Fourteenth Street, and I follow along.
At the Academy Nick goes up to the ticket window, and the girls immediately fade out to go read the posters and snicker together. I can see they’re not figuring to pay for any tickets, so I cough up for two.
Nick and I try to saunter up to the balcony the way we always do, but the girls are giggling and dropping their popcorn, so the matron spots us and motions. “Down here!” She flashes her light in our eyes, and I feel like a convict while we get packed in with all the kids in the under-sixteen section.
Nick goes in first, then the blonde, then the redhead and me. The minute things start getting scary, she tries to grab me, but I stick my hands in my pockets and say, “Aw, it’s just a picture.” She looks disgusted.
The next scary bit, she tries to hang onto her girl friend, but the blonde is already glued onto Nick. Redhead lets out a loud sigh, and I wish I hadn’t ever got into this deal. I can’t even enjoy the picture.
We suffer through the two pictures. The little kids make such a racket you can hardly hear, and the matron keeps shining the light in your eyes so you can’t see. She shines it on the blonde, who is practically sitting in Nick’s lap, and hisses at her to get back. I’m not going to do this again, ever.
We go out and Nick says, “Let’s have a coke.”
He’s walking along with the blonde, and instead
of walking beside me the redhead tries to catch
hold of his other arm. This sort of burns me up.
I mean, I don’t really like her, but I paid for her
and everything.
Nick shakes her off and calls over his shoulder to me, “Come on, chicken, pull your own weight!”
The girls laugh, on cue as usual, and I begin getting really sore. Nick got me into this. The least he can do is shut up.
We walk into a soda bar, and I slap down thirty cents and say, “Two cokes, please.”
“Hey, hey! The last of the big spenders!” says Nick. More laughter. I’d just as soon sock him right now, but I pick up my money and say, “O.K., wise guy, treat’s on you.” Nick shrugs and tosses down a buck as if he had hundreds of them.
The two girls drink their cokes and talk across Nick. I finish mine in two or three gulps, and finally we can walk them to the subway. Nick is gabbing away about how he’ll come out to Coney one weekend, and I’m standing there with my hands in my pockets.
“Goo’bye, Bashful!” coos the redhead to me, and the two of them disappear, cackling, down the steps. I start across Fourteenth Street as soon as the light changes, without bothering to look if Nick is coming. He can go rot.
Along Union Square he’s beside me, acting as if everything is peachy fine dandy. “That was a great show. Pretty good fun, huh?”
I just keep walking.
“You sore or something?” he asks, as if he didn’t know.
I keep on walking.
“O.K., be sore!” he snaps. Then he breaks into a falsetto: “Goo’bye, Bashful!”
I let him have it before he’s hardly got his mouth closed. He hits me back in the stomach and hooks one of his ankles around mine so we both fall down. It goes from bad to worse. He gets me by the hair and bangs my head on the sidewalk, so I twist and bite his hand. We’re gouging and scratching and biting and kicking, because we’re both so mad we can hardly see, and anyway no one ever taught us those Queensberry rules. There’s no point in going into all the gory details. Finally two guys haul us apart. I have hold of Nick’s shirt and it rips. Good. He’s half crying, and he twists away from the guy that grabbed him and screams some things at me before darting across the avenue.
I’m standing panting and sobbing, and the guy holding me says, “You oughta be ashamed. Now go on home.”
“Aw, you and your big mouth,” I say, still mad
I must look pretty bad because a lot of people on the street shake their heads at me. I walk in the door at home, expecting the worst, but fortunately Mom is out. Pop just whistles through his teeth.
“That must have been quite a horror picture!” he says.
AROUND MANHATTAN
By the next weekend I no longer look like a
fugitive from a riot. All week in school Nick and
I get asked whether we got hit by a swinging
door; then the fellows notice the two of us aren’t
speaking to each other, and they sort of sheer
off the subject. Come Saturday, I sit on the stoop
and wonder, what now? There are plenty of
other kids in school I like, but they mostly live
over in the project—Stuyvesant Town, that is.
Summer is coming on, though, and I’ve got to have someone to hang around with. This is the last Saturday before Memorial Day. Getting time for beaches and stuff. I suppose Nick and I might get together again, but not if he’s going to be nuts about girls all the time.
A guy stops in front of the stoop, and Cat half opens his eyes in the sun and squints at him. The guy says, “You Dave Mitchell?”
“Huh? Yeah.” I look up, surprised. I don’t exactly recognize the guy, never having seen him in a clear light before. But from the voice I know it’s Tom.
“Oh, hi!” I say. “Here’s Cat. He’s pretty handsome in daylight.”
“Yeah, he looks all right, but what happened to you?”
“Me and a friend of mine got in a fight.”
“With some other guys or what?”
“Nah. We had a fight with each other.”
“Um, that’s bad.” Tom sits down and has
sense enough to see there isn’t anymore to say
on that subject. “I start work Memorial Day,
when the beaches open. Working in a filling
“Gee, that’s a long way off. You going to live over there?”
“Yeah, they’re going to get me a room in a Y in Brooklyn.” Tom stretches restlessly and goes on: “I suppose you get sick of school and all, but it’s rotten having nothing to do. I’d be ready to go nuts if I didn’t get a job. I can’t wait to start.”
I think of asking him doesn’t he have a home or something to go back to, but somehow I don’t like to.
“Like today,” Tom says. “I’d like to go somewhere. Do something. Got any ideas?”
“Um. I was sort of trying to think up something myself. Movies?”
Tom shakes himself. “No. I want to walk, or run, or throw something.”
“There’s a big park—sort of a woods—up near the Bronx. A kid told me about it. He said he found an Indian arrowhead there, but I bet he didn’t. Inwood Park, it’s called.”
“How do you get there?”
“Subway, I guess.”
“Let’s go!” Tom stands up and wriggles his shoulders like he’s Superman ready to take off.
“O.K. Wait a minute. I’ll go tell Mom. Should I get some sandwiches?”
Tom looks surprised. “Sure, fine, if she doesn’t mind.”
I’m not worried about getting Mom to make sandwiches because she always likes to fix a little food for me. The thing is, ever since my fight with Nick, she’s been clucking around me like the mother hen. Maybe she figures I got in some gang fight, so she keeps asking me where I’m going and who with. Also, I guess she noticed I don’t go to Nick’s after school anymore. I come right home. So she asks me do I feel all right. You can’t win. Right now, I can see she’s going to begin asking who is Tom and where did I meet him. It occurs to me there’s an easy way to take care of this.
I turn around to Tom again. “Say, how about you come up and I’ll introduce you to Mom? Then she won’t start asking me a lot of questions.”
“You mean I look respectable, at least?”
“Sure.”
We go up to the apartment, and Mom asks if
we’d like some cold drinks or something. I tell
her I ran into Tom when he helped me hunt for
“Do you live around here?” she asks Tom.
“No, ma’am,” says Tom firmly. “I live at the Y. I’ve got a summer job in a filling station over in Brooklyn, starting right after Memorial Day.”
“That’s fine,” Mom says. “I wish Davey could get a job. He gets so restless with nothing to do in the summer.”
“Aw, Mom, forget it! You got to fill in about six-hundred working papers if you’re under sixteen.
“Listen, Mom, what I came up for—we thought we’d make some sandwiches and go up to Inwood Park.”
“Inwood? Where’s that?” So I explain to her about the Indian arrowheads, and we get out the classified phone book and look at the subway map, which shows there’s an IND train that goes right to it.
“I get sort of restless myself, with nothing to
“Why, yes, that seems like a good idea.” Mom looks at him and nods. She seems to have decided he’s reliable, as well as respectable.
I see there’s some leftover cold spaghetti in the icebox, and I ask Mom to put it in sandwiches. She thinks I’m cracked, but I did this once before, and it’s good, ’specially if there’s plenty of meat and sauce on the spaghetti. We take along a bag of cherries, too.
“Thanks, Mom. Bye. I’ll be back before supper.”
“Take care,” she says. “No fights.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll stay out of fights,” says Tom quite seriously.
We go down the stairs, and Tom says, “Your mother is really nice.”
I’m sort of surprised—kids don’t usually say much about each other’s parents. “Yeah, Mom’s O.K. I guess she worries about me and Pop a lot.”
“It must be pretty nice to have your mother at home,” he says.
That kind of jolts me, too. I wonder where his mother and father are, whether they’re dead or something; but again, I don’t quite want to ask. Tom isn’t an easy guy to ask questions. He’s sort of like an island, by himself in the ocean.
We walk down to Fourteenth Street and over to Eighth Avenue, about twelve blocks; after all, exercise is what we want. The IND trains are fast, and it only takes about half an hour to get up to Inwood, at 206th Street. The park is right close, and it is real woods, although there are paved walks around through it. We push uphill and get in a grassy meadow, where you can see out over the Hudson River to the Palisades in Jersey. It’s good and hot, and we flop in the sun. There aren’t many other people around, which is rare in New York.
“Let’s eat lunch,” says Tom. “Then we can go hunting arrowheads and not have to carry it.”
He agrees the spaghetti sandwich is a great invention.
I wish the weather would stay like this more
of the year—good and sweaty hot in the middle
of the day, so you feel like going swimming, but
cool enough to sleep at night. We lie in the sun
We find a few places that you might conceivably call caves, but they’ve been well picked over for arrowheads, if there ever were any. That’s the trouble in the city: anytime you have an idea, you find out a million other people had the same idea first. Along in mid-afternoon, we drift down toward the subway and get cokes and ice cream before we start back.
I don’t really feel like going home yet, so I think a minute and study the subway map inside the car. “Hey, as long as we’re on the subway anyway, we could go on down to Cortlandt Street to the Army-Navy surplus store. I got to get a knapsack before summer.”
“O.K.” Tom shrugs. He’s staring out the window and doesn’t seem to care where he goes.
“I got a great first-aid survival kit there. Disinfectant and burn ointment and bug dope and bandages, in a khaki metal box that’s waterproof, and it was only sixty-five cents.”
“Hmm. Just what I need for survival on the
The store is a little way from the nearest subway stop, and we walk along not saying much. Tom looks alive when he gets into the store, though, because it really is a great place. They’ve got arctic explorers’ suits and old hand grenades and shells and all kinds of rifles, as well as some really cheap, useful clothing. They don’t mind how long you mosey around. In the end I buy a belt pack and canteen, and Tom picks up some skivvy shirts and socks that are only ten cents each. They’re secondhand, I guess, but they look all right.
We walk over to the East Side subway, which is only a few blocks away down here because the island gets so narrow. Tom says he’s never seen Wall Street, where all the tycoons grind their money machines. The place is practically deserted now, being late Saturday afternoon, and it’s like walking through an empty cathedral. You can make echoes.
We take the subway, and Tom walks along
“So long, kid,” Tom says. “I’ll send you a card from Beautiful Brooklyn!”
“So long.” I wave, and he starts off. I wish he didn’t have to go live in Brooklyn.
AND BROOKLYN
You can’t really stay sore at a guy you’ve known all your life, especially if he lives right around the corner and goes to the same school. Anyhow, one hot Saturday morning Nick turns up at my house as if nothing had ever happened and says do I want to go swimming, because the Twenty-third Street pool’s open weekends now.
After that we go back to playing ball on the
street in the evenings and swimming sometimes
I think Tom must have forgotten about me and found a gang his own age when I get a postcard from him: “Dear Dave, The guy I work for is a creep, and all the guys who buy gas from him are creeps, so it’s great to be alive in Beautiful Brooklyn! Wish you were here, but you’re lucky you’re not. Best, Tom.”
It’s hard to figure what he means when he says a thing. However, I got nothing to do, so I might as well go see. He said he was going to work in a filling station on the Belt Parkway, and there can’t be a million of them.
I don’t say anything too exact to Mom about where I’m going, because she gets worried about me going too far, and besides I don’t really know where I’m going.
Brooklyn, what a layout. It’s not like Manhattan, which runs pretty regularly north and south, with decent square blocks. You could lose a million friends in Brooklyn, with the streets all running in circles and angles, and the people all giving you cockeyed directions. What with no bikes allowed on parkways, and skirting around crumby looking neighborhoods, it takes me at least a week of expeditions to find the right part of the Belt Parkway to start checking the filling stations.
I wheel my bike across the parkway, but even so some cop yells at me. You’d think a cop could find a crime to get busy with.
On a real sticky day in July I wheel across to a station at Thirty-fourth Street, and nobody yells at me, and I go over to the air pump and fiddle with my tires. A car pulls out after it gets gas, and there’s Tom.
“Hi!” I say.
Tom half frowns and quick looks over his shoulder to see if his boss is around, I guess, and then comes over to the air pump.
“How’d you get way out here?” he says.
“On the bike. I got your postcard, and I figured I could find the filling station.”
He relaxes and grins. I feel better. He says,
But just then the boss has to come steaming up. “What d’ya want, kid? No bikes allowed on the parkway.”
I start to say I’m just getting air, but Tom speaks up. “It’s all right. I know him.”
“Yeah? I told you, keep kids out of here!” The guy manages to suggest that kids Tom knows are probably worse than any other kind. He motions me off like a stray dog. I don’t want to get Tom in any trouble, so I get going. At the edge of the parkway I wave. “So long. Write me another postcard.”
Tom raises a hand briefly, but his face looks closed, like nothing was going to get in or out.
I pedal slowly and hotly back through the tangle of Brooklyn and figure, well, that’s a week’s research wasted. I still don’t know where Tom lives, so I don’t know how I can get a hold of him again. Anyway, how do I know he wants to be bothered with me? He looked pretty fed up with everything.
So long as I got nothing else to do, the next
week I figure I’ll get public-spirited at home: I
paint the kitchen for Mom, which isn’t so bad,
but moving all those silly dishes and pots and
Evenings Cat and I play records, or we go to see Aunt Kate and drink iced tea. One weekend my real aunt comes to visit and sleeps in my room, so I go to stay with Aunt Kate, and I pretty near turn into cottage cheese.
I’ve about settled into this dull routine when Mom surprises me by handing me a postcard one morning. It’s from Tom: “Day off next Tuesday. If you feel like it, meet me near the aquarium at Coney Island about nine in the morning, before it’s crowded.”
So that week drags by till Tuesday, and there
I am at Coney Island bright and early. Tom is
easy enough to find, pacing up and down the
boardwalk like a tiger. We say “Hi” and so forth,
and I’m all ready to take a run for the water,
Finally he says, “There’s a girl I used to know pretty well. I didn’t see her for a while till last week, and we got in an argument, and I guess she’s mad. I wrote and asked her to come swimming today, but maybe she’s not coming.”
I figure it out that I’m there as insurance against the girl not showing up, but I don’t mind. Anyhow, she does show up. It can’t have been too much of an argument they had, because she acts pretty friendly.
Tom introduces us. Her name is Hilda and a last name that’d be hard to spell—Swedish maybe—and she’s got a wide, laughing kind of mouth and a big coil of yellow hair in a bun on top of her head, and a mighty good figure. She asks me where I ran into Tom, and we tell her all about Cat and the cellar at Number Forty-six, and I tell them both about my Ivy-League haircut, which I had never explained to anyone before. They get a laugh out of that, and then she asks him about the filling-station job, and he says it stinks.
I figure they could get along without me for
a while, so I go for a swim and wander down
I don’t know just what she means, but we go get cokes and come back and stretch out in the sun. She asks me do I want a smoke, and I say No. It’s nice to be asked, though. We watch Tom, who is swimming out past all the other people. I wish I’d gone with him. I say, “Lifeguard’s going to whistle him in pretty soon. He’s out past all the others.”
Hilda lets out a breath and snorts, “He’ll always go till they blow the whistle. Always got to go farther than anyone else.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t say anything.
Hilda goes on: “I used to wait tables in a
restaurant down near Washington Square. Tom
and a lot of the boys from NYU came in there.
Sometimes the day before an exam he’d be
sitting around for hours, buying people cokes
and acting as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
Some other times, for no reason anyone could
“Tom was at NYU?” I ask. I don’t know where I thought he’d been before he turned up in the cellar. I guess I never thought.
“Sure,” Hilda says. “He was in the Washington Square College for about a year and a half. He lived in a dormitory uptown, but I used to see him in the restaurant, and then fairly often we had dates after I got off work. He has people out in the Midwest somewhere—a father and a stepmother. He was always sour and close-mouthed about them, even before he got thrown out of NYU. Now he won’t even write them.”
This is a lot of information to take in all at once and leaves a lot of questions unanswered. The first one that comes into my head is this: “How come he got thrown out of NYU?”
“Well, it makes Tom so sore, he’s never
really told me a plain, straight story. It’s all
mixed up with his father. I think his father wrote
him not to come home at Christmas vacation,
for some reason. Tom and a couple of other boys
who were left in the dormitory over the holidays
got horsing around and had a water fight. The
college got huffy and wrote the parents, telling
“That was when Tom began coming into the restaurant looking like thunder. The college began needling him for the water-fight damages, as well as second-semester tuition. He took his first exam, physics, and got an A on it. He’s pretty smart.
“He still didn’t hear anything from home. He took the second exam, French, and thought he flunked it. That same afternoon he went into the office and told the dean he was quitting, and he packed his stuff and left. I didn’t see him again till a week ago. I didn’t know if he’d got sick of me, or left town, or what.
“He says he wrote his father that he had a good job, and they could forget about him. Then he broke into that cellar on a dare or for kicks.
“So here we are. What do we do next?”
Hilda looks at me—me, age fourteen—as if I
might actually know, and it’s kind of unnerving.
Everyone I know, their life goes along in set
periods: grade school, junior high, high school,
I say cautiously, “My pop says a kid’s got to go to college now to get anywhere. Maybe he ought to go back to school.”
“You’re so right, Grandpa,” she says, and I would have felt silly, but she has a nice friendly laugh. “I wish I could persuade him to go back. But it’s not so easy. I guess he’s got to get a job and go to night school, if they’ll accept him. He won’t ask his father for money.”
“You two got my life figured out?” Tom has come up behind us while we were lying in the sand on our stomachs. “I just hope that sour grape at the filling station gives me a good recommendation so I can get another job. The way he watches his cash register, you’d think I was Al Capone.”
We talk a bit, and then Hilda gets up and says she’s going to the ladies’ room. She doesn’t act coy about it, the way most girls do when they’re sitting with guys. She just leaves.
“How do you like Hilda?” Tom asks, and again I’m sort of surprised, because he acts like he really wants my opinion.
“She’s nice,” I say.
“Yeah.” Tom suddenly glowers, as if I’d said
didn’t like her. “I don’t know why she wastes
her time on me. I’ll never be any use to her.
When her family hears about me, I’ll get the
boot.”
“I could ask my pop. You know, I told you he’s a lawyer. Maybe he’d know how you go about getting back into college or getting a job or something.”
Tom laughs, an unamused bark. “Maybe he’ll tell you to quit hanging around with jerks that get in trouble with the cops.”
This is a point, all right. Come to think, I don’t know why I said I’d ask Pop anyway. I usually make a point of not letting his nose into my personal affairs, because I figure he’ll just start bossing me around. However, I certainly can’t do anything for Tom on my own.
I say, “I’ll chance it. The worst he ever does is talk. One time he made a federal case out of me buying a Belafonte record he didn’t like. Another time playing ball I cracked a window in a guy’s Cadillac, and Pop acted like he was going to sue the guy for owning a Cadillac. You just never know.”
Tom says, “With my dad, you know: I’m
wrong.”
Hilda comes back just then. She snaps, “If he’s
“O.K., O.K.,” says Tom.
The beach is getting filled up by now, so we pull on our clothes and head for the subway. Tom and Hilda get off in Brooklyn, and I go on to Union Square.
After dinner that night Mom is washing the dishes and Pop is reading the paper, and I figure I might as well dive in.
“Pop,” I say, “there’s this guy I met at the beach. Well, really I mean I met him this spring when I was hunting for Cat, and this guy was in the cellar at Forty-six Gramercy, and he got caught and....”
“Wha-a-a-t?” Pop puts down his paper and takes off his glasses. “Begin again.”
So I give it to him again, slow, and with explanations. I go through the whole business about the filling station and Hilda and NYU, and I’ll say one thing for Pop, when he finally settles down to listen, he listens. I get through, and he puts on his reading glasses and goes to look out the window.
“Do you have this young man’s name and address, or is he just Tom from The Cellar?”
I’d just got it from Tom when we were at the beach. He’s at a Y in Brooklyn, so I tell Pop this.
Pop says, “Tell him to call my office and come in to see me on his next day off. Meanwhile, I’ll bone up on City educational policies in regard to juvenile delinquents.”
He says this perfectly straight, as if there’d be a book on the subject. Then he goes back to his newspaper, so I guess that closes the subject for now.
“Thanks, Pop,” I say and start to go out.
“Entirely welcome,” says Pop. As I get to the door, he adds, “If that cat of yours makes a practice of introducing you to the underworld in other people’s cellars, we can do without him. We probably can anyway.”
SURVIVAL
Cat hadn’t got me into anymore cellars, but I can’t honestly say he’d been sitting home tending his knitting—not him.
One hot morning I went to pick up the milk outside our door, and Cat was sleeping there on the mat. He didn’t even look up at me. After I scratched his ears and talked to him some, he got up and hobbled into the house.
I put him up on my bed, under the light, for
I came and looked at him every few hours and wondered if I ought to take him to a vet. But he seemed to be breathing all right, so I went away and thought about it some more. Come night, I pushed him gently to one side, wondering what I better do in the morning.
Well, in the morning Cat wakes up, stretches, yawns, and drops easily down off the bed and walks away. He still limps a little, but otherwise he acts like nothing had happened. He just wants to know what’s for breakfast.
“You better watch out. One day you’ll run into a cat that’s bigger and meaner than you,” I tell him.
Cat continues to wait for breakfast. He is not impressed.
But I’m worried. Suppose some big old cat chews him up and he’s hurt too bad to get home? After breakfast I take him out in the backyard for a bit, and then I shut him in my room and go over to consult Aunt Kate.
She sets me up with the usual iced tea and dish of cottage cheese.
“I had breakfast already. What do I need with cottage cheese?”
“Eat it. It’s good for you.”
So I eat it, and then I start telling her about Cat. “He came home all chewed up night before last. I’m afraid some night he’s not going to make it.”
“Right,” says Kate. She’s not very talky, but I’m sort of surprised. I expected she’d tell me to quit worrying, Cat can take care of himself. She starts pulling Susan’s latest kittens out from under the sofa and sorting them out as if they were ribbons: one gray, two tiger, one yellow, one calico.
“So what you going to do?” she shoots at me, shoveling the kittens back to Susan.
“I—uh—I dunno. I thought maybe I ought to try to keep him in nights.”
“Huh. Don’t know much, do you?” she says. “Well, so I’ll tell you. Your Cat has probably fathered a few dozen kittens by now, and once a cat’s been out and mated, you can’t keep him in. You got to get him altered. Then he won’t want to go out so much.”
“Altered?”
“Fixed. Castrated is the technical word. It’s a two-minute operation. Cost you three dollars. Take him to Speyer Hospital—big new building up on First Avenue.”
“You mean get him fixed so he’s not a real tomcat any more? The heck with that! I don’t want him turned into a fat old cushion cat!”
“He won’t be,” she says. “But if it makes you happier, let him get killed in a cat fight. He’s tough. He’ll last a year or two. Suit yourself.”
“Ah, you’re screwy! You and your cottage
cheese!” Even as I say it I feel a little guilty.
But I feel mad and mixed up, and I fling out
the door. It’s the first time I ever left Kate’s mad.
Usually I leave our house mad and go to Kate.
Now I got nowhere to go. I walk along, cussing and fuming and kicking pebbles. I come to an air-conditioned movie and go up to the window.
The phony blonde in the booth looks at me and sneers, “You’re not sixteen. We don’t have a children’s section in this theater.” She doesn’t even ask. She just says it. It’s a great world. I go home. There’s no one there but Cat, so I turn the record player up full blast.
Pop comes home in one of his unexpected fits of generosity that night and takes us to the movies. Cat behaves himself and stays around home and our cellar for a while, so I stop worrying. But it doesn’t last long.
As soon as his claw heals, he starts sashaying off again. One night I hear cats yowling out back and I go out with a bucket of water and douse them and bring Cat in. There’s a pretty little tiger cat, hardly more than a kitten, sitting on the fence licking herself, dry and unconcerned. Cat doesn’t speak to me for a couple of days.
One morning Butch, the janitor, comes up and knocks on our door. “You better come down and look at your cat. He got himself mighty chewed up. Most near dead.”
I hurry down, and there is Cat sprawled in a corner on the cool cement floor. His mouth is half open, and his breath comes in wheezes, like he has asthma. I don’t know whether to pick him up or not.
Butch says, “Best let him lie.”
I sit down beside him. After a bit his breath
comes easier and he puts his head down. Then
I see he’s got a long, deep claw gouge going from
his shoulder down one leg. It’s half an inch
Butch shakes his head. “You gotta take him to the veteran, sure. That’s the cat doctor.”
“Yeah,” I say, not correcting him. It’s not just the gash that’s worrying me. I remember what Aunt Kate said, and it gives me a cold feeling in the stomach: In the back-alley jungle he’d last a year, maybe two.
Looking at Cat, right now, I know she’s right.
But Cat’s such a—well, such a cat. How can I
take him to be whittled down?
I tell Butch I’ll be back down in a few minutes, and I go upstairs. Mom’s humming and cleaning in the kitchen. I wander around and stare out the window awhile. Finally I go in the kitchen and stare into the icebox, and then I tell Mom about the gash in Cat’s leg.
She asks if I know a vet to take him to.
“Yeah, there’s Speyer. It’s a big, new hospital—good enough for people, even—with a view of the East River. The thing is, Mom, Cat keeps going off and fighting and getting hurt, and people tell me I ought to get him altered.”
Mom wets the sponge and squeezes it out and
polishes at the sink, and I wonder if she knows
what I’m talking about because I don’t really
She wrings the sponge out, finally, and sits down at the kitchen table.
She says, “Cat’s not a free wild animal now,
and he wouldn’t be even if you turned him
loose. He belongs to you, so you have to do whatever
is best for him, whether it’s what you’d like
or not. Ask the doctor and do what he says.”
Mom puts it on the line, all right. It doesn’t make me feel any better about Cat. She takes five dollars out of her pocketbook and gives it to me.
I get out the wicker hamper and go down to the cellar and load Cat in. He meows, a low resentful rumble, but he doesn’t try to get away.
Cat in the hamper is no powder puff, and I get pretty hot walking to the bus, and then from the bus stop to the animal hospital. I get there and wait, and dogs sniff at me, and I fill in forms. The lady asks me if I can afford to pay, and with Mom’s five bucks and four of my own, I say Yes.
The doctor is a youngish guy, but bald, in a white shirt like a dentist’s. I put Cat on the table in front of him. He says, “So why don’t you stay out of fights, like your mommy told you?”
I relax a bit and smile, and he says, “That’s better. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of tomcat. I suppose he got this gash in a fight?”
“Yeah.”
“He been altered?”
“No.”
“How old is he?”
“I don’t know. He was a stray. I’ve had him almost a year.”
All the time he’s talking, the doctor is soothing Cat and looking him over. He goes on stroking him and looks up at me. “Well, son, one of these days he’s going to get in one fight too many. Shall we alter him the same time we sew up his leg?”
So there it is. I can’t seem to answer right away. If the doctor had argued with me, I might have said No. But he just goes on humming and stroking. Finally he says, “It’s tough, I know. Maybe he’s got a right to be a tiger. But you can’t keep a tiger for a pet.”
I say, “O.K.”
An attendant takes Cat away, and I go sit in
the waiting room, feeling sweaty and cold all
over. They tell me it’ll be a couple of hours, so
I go out and wander around a lot of blocks I
When I go back for him, Cat looks the same as ever, except for a bandage all up his right front leg. The doctor tells me to come back Friday and he’ll take out the stitches.
Mom sees me come in the door, and I guess I look pretty grim, because she says, “Cat will be all right, won’t he, dear?”
“Yes.” I go past her and down into my room and let Cat out of the basket and then bury my head under the pillow. I’m not exactly ashamed of crying, but I don’t want Mom to hear.
After a while I pull my head out. Cat is lying there beside me, his eyes half open, the tip end of his tail twitching very slowly. I rub my eyes on the back of his neck and whisper to him, “I’m sorry. Be tough, Cat, anyway, will you?”
Cat stretches and hops off the bed on his three good legs.
WEST SIDE STORY
The regular park man got sunstroke or something, so I earned fourteen dollars raking and mowing in Gramercy Park in the middle of August. Gramercy Park is a private park. You have to own a key to get in, so the city doesn’t take care of it.
Real paper money, at this time of year especially,
is very cheering. I head up to Sam Goody’s
to see what records he’s got on sale and what
Along the way I walk through the library, the big one at Forty-second Street. You go in by the lions on Fifth Avenue, and there’s all kinds of pictures and books on exhibit in the halls, and you walk through to the back, where you can take out books. It’s nice and cool, and nobody glares at you unless you either make a lot of noise or go to sleep. I can take books out of here and return them at the Twenty-third Street branch, which is handy.
Sam Goody’s is air-conditioned, so it’s cool too. There are always several things playing on different machines you can listen to. Almost the most fun is watching the people: little, fat, bald guys buying long-haired classical music, and thin, shaggy beatniks listening to the jazz.
I go to check if there are any bargains in the Kingston or Belafonte division. There’s a girl standing there reading the backs of records, but I don’t really catch a look at more than her shoes—little red flats they are. After a bit she reaches for a record over my head and says, “Excuse me.”
“Sure.” Then we catch each other’s eye and both say, “Oh. Gee, hello.”
Well, we’re both pretty surprised, because this is the girl I met out at Coney Island that day with Nick when I had Cat with me, and now we’re both a long way from Coney Island. This girl isn’t one of the two giggly ones. It’s the third, the one that liked Cat.
We’ve both forgotten each other’s names, so we begin over with that. I ask her what she’s been doing, and she’s been at Girl Scout camp a few weeks, and then she earned some money baby-sitting. So she came to think about records, like me. I tell her I’ve been at Coney once this summer, and I looked around for her, which is true, because I did.
“It’s a big place,” she says, smiling.
“Say, you live out there, don’t you? How come you get all the way in here by yourself? Doesn’t your mom get in a flap? Mine would, if she knew I was going to Coney alone.”
Mary says, “I came in with Mom. Some friend of hers has a small art exhibition opening. She said I could go home alone. After all, she knows I’m not going to get lost.”
I say, “Gee, it’d be great to have a mother
“Oh, Mom worries.” Mary giggles. “You
should have heard her when I said I liked Gone
With the Wind and I didn’t like Anna Karenina.
I pretty nearly got disowned.”
“What does she think about science fiction?” I ask, and Mary makes a face, and we both laugh.
I go on. “Well, my mom doesn’t care what I read. She worries about what I eat and whether my feet are wet, and she always seems to think I’m about to kill myself. It’s a nuisance, really.”
Mary looks solemn all of a sudden. She says slowly, “I think maybe it’d be nice. I mean to have someone worrying about whether you’re comfortable and all. Instead of just picking your brains all the time.”
This seems to exhaust the subject of our respective
mothers, and Mary picks up the record
of West Side Story and says, “Gee, I’d like to
see that. Did you?”
I say No, and to tell the truth I hadn’t hardly heard of it.
“I read a book about him. It was wonderful,” she says.
“Who?”
“Bernstein. The man who wrote it.”
“What’s West Side Story about, him?” I ask
cautiously.
“No, no—he wrote the music. It’s about some kids in two gangs, and there’s a lot of dancing, and then there’s a fight and this kid gets—well, it isn’t a thing you can tell the story of very well. You have to see it.”
This gives me a very simple idea.
“Why don’t we?” I say.
“Huh?”
“Go see it. Why not? We got money.”
“So we do,” she says slowly. “You think they’ll let us in, I mean being under sixteen?”
You know, this is the first girl I really ever talked to that talks like a person, not trying to be cute or something.
We walk around to the theater, and being it’s Wednesday, there’s a matinee about to start. The man doesn’t seem to be one bit worried about taking our money. No wonder. It’s two dollars and ninety cents each. So we’re inside with our tickets before we’ve hardly stopped to think.
Suddenly Mary says, “Oops! I better call Mom! Let’s find out what time the show is over.”
We do, and Mary phones. She says to me, “I
just told her I was walking past West Side Story
“Why, would she mind?”
Mary squints and looks puzzled. “I don’t know. I just really don’t know. It never happened before.”
We go in to the show, and she is right, it’s
terrific. I hardly ever went to a live show before,
except a couple of children’s things and something
by Shakespeare Pop took me to that was
very confusing. But this West Side Story is clear
as a bell.
We have an orangeade during intermission, and I make the big gesture and pay for both of them. Mary says, “Isn’t it wonderful! I just happened to meet you at the beach, and then I meet you at Goody’s, and we get to see this show that I’ve wanted to go to for ages. None of my friends at school want to spend this much money on a show.”
“It’s wonderful,” I say. “After it’s over, I’m going back to buy the record.”
So after the show we buy it, and then we walk along together to the subway. I’ll have to get off at the first stop, Fourteenth Street, and she’ll go on to Coney, the end of the line.
It’s hard to talk on the subway. There’s so much noise you have to shout, which is hard if you don’t know what to say. Anyway, you can’t ask a girl for her phone number shouting on the subway. At least I can’t.
I’m not so sure about the phone-number business either. I sort of can’t imagine calling up and saying, “Oh, uh, Mary, this is Dave. You want to go to a movie or something, huh?” It sounds stupid, and I’d be embarrassed. What she said, it’s true—it’s sort of wonderful the way we just ran into each other twice and had so much fun.
So I’m wondering how I can happen to run into her again. Maybe the beach, in the fall. Let’s see, a school holiday—Columbus Day.
The train is pulling into Fourteenth Street. I shout, “Hey, how about we go to the beach again this fall? Maybe Columbus Day?”
“O.K.!” she shouts. “Columbus Day in the morning.”
“Columbus Day in the morning” sounds loud and clear because by then the subway has stopped. People snicker, and Mary blushes.
“So long,” I say, and we both wave, and the train goes.
FATHERS
That operation didn’t make as much difference to Cat as you might think. I took him back to the clinic to get the stitches out of his leg and the bandages off. A few nights later I heard yowls coming up from the backyard. I went down and pulled him out of a fight. He wasn’t hurt yet, but he sure was right back in there pitching. He seems to have a standing feud with the cat next door.
However, he’s been coming home nights regularly, and sometimes in the cool part of the morning he’ll sit out on the front stoop with me. He sits on a pillar about six feet above the sidewalk, and I sit on the steps and play my transistor and read.
Every time a dog gets walked down the street under Cat’s perch, he gathers himself up in a ball, as if he were going to spring. Of course, the poor dog never knows it was about to be pounced on and wags on down the street. Cat lets his tail go to sleep then and sneers.
Between weathercasts I hear him purring, loud rumbly purrs, and I look up and see Tom there, stroking Cat’s fur up backward toward his ears. Tom is looking out into the street and sort of whistling without making any sound.
“Gee, hi!” I say.
“Hi, too,” he says. He strokes Cat back down the right way, gives him a pat, and sits down. “I just been down to see your dad. He’s quite a guy.”
“Huh-h-h? You got sunstroke or something? Didn’t he read you about ten lectures on Healthy Living, Honest Effort, Baseball, and Long Walks with a Dog?”
“No-o-o.” Tom grins, but then he sits and stares out at the street again, so I wait.
“You know,” he says, “you give me an idea.
You talk like your dad is a real pain, and that’s
the way I always have felt about mine. But your
dad looks like a great guy to me, so—well, maybe
mine could be too, if I gave him a chance. Your
dad was saying I should.”
“Should what? You should go home?”
“No. Your dad said I ought to write him a long letter and face up to all the things I’ve goofed on. Quitting NYU, the cellar trouble, all that. Then tell him I’m going to get a job and go to night school. Your dad figures probably he’d help me. He said he’d write him, too. No reason he should. I’m nothing in his life. It’s pretty nice of him.”
I try to digest all this, and it sure is puzzling. The time I ran down that crumb of a doorman on my bike, accidental on purpose, I didn’t get any long understanding talks. I just got kept in for a month.
Tom slaps me in the middle of the back and
stands up. “Hilda’s gone back to work at the
coffee shop. I guess I’ll go down and see her
“Say ‘Hi’ for me.”
“O.K. So long.”
The weather cools off some, and Pop starts to talk about vacation. He’s taking two weeks, last of August and first of September, so I start shopping around for various bits of fishing tackle and picnic gear we might need. We’re going to this lake up in Connecticut, where we get a sort of motel cottage. It has a little hot plate for making coffee in the morning, but most of the rest of the time we eat out, which is neat.
We’re sitting around the living room one evening, sorting stuff out, when the doorbell rings. I go answer it, and Tom walks in. He nods at me like he hardly sees me and comes into the living room. He shakes hands like a wooden Indian. His face looks shut up again, the way it did that day I left him in the filling station.
He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a letter. I can see a post-office stamp in red ink with a pointing hand by the address. He throws it down on Dad’s table.
“I got my answer all right.”
Pop looks at the letter and I see his foot start to twitch the way it does when he’s about to blow. But he looks at Tom, and instead of blowing he just says, “Your father left town? No forwarding address?”
“I guess so. He just left. Him and that woman he married.” Tom’s voice trails off and he walks over to the window. We all sit quiet a minute.
Finally Pop says gently, “Well, don’t waste too much breath on her. She’s nothing to do with you.”
Tom turns around angrily. “She’s no good. She loafs around and drinks all the time. She talked him into going.”
“And he went.” There’s another short silence, and Pop goes on. “Where was this you lived?”
“House. It was a pretty nice little house, too.
Dark red with white trim, and enough of a yard
to play a little ball, and I grew a few lettuces
every spring. I even got one ear of corn once.
We moved there when I was in second grade
because my mom said it was near a good local
school. I lived there till I went to college. I suppose
he sold it, or got a loan, and they lit off to
me off their
hands.”
Tom bites off the last word. Suddenly I can see the picture pretty clear: the nice house, the father Tom always talked down and hoped would measure up. Now it’s like somebody has taken his whole childhood and crumpled it up like a wad of tissue paper and thrown it away.
Mom gets up and goes into the kitchen. Pop’s foot keeps on twitching. Finally he says, “Well, I steered you wrong. I’m sorry. But maybe it’s just as well to have it settled.”
“It’s settled, all right,” Tom says.
Mom brings out a tray of ginger-ale glasses. It seems sort of inadequate at a moment like this, but when Tom takes a glass from her he looks like he’s going to bust out crying.
He drinks some and blows his nose, and Dad says, “When are you supposed to check in with the Youth Board again?”
“Tuesday. My day off. And I wind up the filling-station job the next week, right after Labor Day.”
“Labor Day. Hm-m. We’ve got to get moving.
If you like, I’ll come down to the Youth Board
“I don’t know why you bother.” Tom starts to stand up. But while we’ve been talking, Cat has been creeping up under the side table, playing the ambush game, and he launches himself at Tom just as he starts to stand. It throws him off balance and he sits back in the chair, holding Cat.
“You’ve got nothing to worry about,” Pop says. “Cat’s on your side.”
CAT AND THE PARKWAY
Cat may be on Tom’s side, but whether Pop is on Cat’s side is something else again. I worry about this all the time we’re planning the vacation. Suppose the motel won’t take cats? Or suppose he runs away in the country? If he messes up the vacation in any way, I know Pop’ll say to get rid of him.
I practice putting Cat back in the wicker
hamper to see if I can keep him in that sometimes,
Pop’s pretty snappish anyway. He’s working late nearly every night, getting stuff cleared up before vacation. He doesn’t want any extra problems, especially not Cat problems. Mom’s been having asthma a good deal lately, and we’re all pretty jumpy. It’s always like this at the end of the summer.
Tuesday night when he gets home, I ask Pop what’s happened about Tom.
“We’ll work something out,” he says, which isn’t what you’d call a big explanation.
“You think he can get back into college?”
“I don’t know. The Youth Board is going to work on it. They’re arranging for him to make up the midyear exams he missed, so he can get credit for that semester. Then he can probably start making up the second semester at night school if he has a job.
“Apparently the Youth Board knew his father
had skipped—they’ve been trying to trace him.
I don’t think it’ll do any good if they find him.
You know, I see “bad guys” in television and stuff, but with the people I really know I always lump the parents on one team and the kids on the other. Now here’s my pop calmly figuring a kid better chalk off his father as a bad lot and go it alone. If your father died, I suppose you could face up to it eventually, but having him just fade out on you, not care what you did—that’d be worse.
While I’m doing all this hard thinking, Pop has gone back to reading the paper. I notice the column of want ads on the back, and all of a sudden my mind clicks on Tom and jobs.
“Hey, Pop! You know the florist on the corner, Palumbo, where you always get Mom the plant on Mother’s Day? I went in there a couple of weeks ago, because he had a sign up, ‘Helper Wanted.’ I thought maybe it was deliveries and stuff that I could do after school. But he said he needed a full-time man. I’m pretty sure the sign’s still up.”
“Palumbo, huhn?” Pop takes off his glasses and scratches his head with them. He looks at his watch and sighs. “They still open?”
They are, and Pop goes right down to see the
Dad comes back and goes over to the desk and scratches off a fast note. He says, “Here. Address it to Tom and go mail it right away. Palumbo says he’ll try him out at least. Tom can come over Thursday night and I’ll take him in.”
Tom comes home with Pop Thursday about nine o’clock. They both look pretty good. Mom has cold supper waiting, finishing off the icebox before we go away, so we all sit down to eat.
“Tom’s all set, at least for a start,” Dad says. “He’s going to start Tuesday, right after Labor Day. Palumbo can use him on odd jobs and deliveries, especially over the Jewish holidays, and then if he can learn the business, he’ll keep him on.”
“Never thought I’d go in for flower-arranging.” Tom grins. “But it might be fun. I’m pretty fair at any kind of handiwork.”
Remembering how quick he unlocked the
He starts for his room after supper, and we all say “good luck,” “have a good time,” and stuff. Things are really looking up.
I get up early the next morning and help Mom button up around the house and get the car loaded before Pop gets home in the afternoon. He hoped to get off early, and I’ve been pacing around snapping my fingers for a couple of hours when he finally arrives about six o’clock. It’s a hot day again.
I don’t say anything about Cat. I just dive in the back seat and put him behind a suitcase and hope he’ll behave. Pop doesn’t seem to notice him. Anyway he doesn’t say anything.
It’s mighty hot, and traffic is thick, with everyone pouring out of the city. But at least we’re moving along, until we get out on the Hutchinson River Parkway, where some dope has to run out of gas.
All three lanes of traffic are stopped. We sit in the sun. Pop looks around, hunting for something to get sore about, and sees the back windows are closed. He roars, “Crying out loud, can’t we get some air, at least? Open those windows!”
I open them and try to keep my hand over Cat, but if you try to hold him really, it makes him restless. For the moment he’s sitting quiet, looking disgusted.
We sit for about ten minutes, and Pop turns off the motor. You can practically hear us sweating in the silence. Engines turn on ahead of us, and there seems to be some sign of hope. I stick my head out the window to see if things are moving. Something furry tickles my ear, and it takes me a second to register.
Then I grab, but too late. There is Cat, out on the parkway between the lanes of cars, trying to figure which way to run.
“Pop!” I yell. “Hold it! Cat’s got out!”
You know what my pop does? He laughs.
“Hold it, my eyeball!” he says. “I’ve been holding it for half an hour. I’d get murdered if I tried to stop now. Besides, I don’t want to chase that cat every day of my vacation.”
I don’t even stop to think. I just open the car door and jump. The car’s only barely moving. I can see Cat on the grass at the edge of the parkway. The cars in the next lane blast their horns, but I slip through and grab Cat.
I hear Mom scream, “Davey!”
Our car is twenty feet ahead, now, in the center
I hear Pop shout about something, but I can’t hear what. Pretty soon the car is out of sight. I look down at Cat and say, “There goes our vacation.” I wonder if I’ll be able to catch a bus out to Connecticut later. Meanwhile, there’s the little problem of getting back into the city. I’m standing alongside the parkway, with railroad tracks and the Pelham golf course on the other side of me, and a good long walk to the subway.
A cat isn’t handy to walk with. He keeps trying to get down. If you squeeze him to hang on, he just tries harder. You have to keep juggling him, like, gently. I sweat along back, with the sun in my eyes, and people in cars on the parkway pointing me out to their children as a local curiosity.
One place the bulrushes and marsh grass beside the road grow up higher than your head. What a place for a kids’ hideout, I think. Almost the next step, I hear kids’ voices, whispering and shushing each other.
Their voices follow along beside me, but
I try to walk faster, but I figure if I run they’ll chase me for sure. I walk along, juggling Cat, trying to pretend I don’t notice them. I see a drawbridge up ahead, and I sure hope there’s a cop or watchman on it.
The kids break out of the rushes behind me, and there’s no use pretending anymore. I flash a look over my shoulder. They all yell, “Ya-n-h-h-h!” like a bunch of wild Indians, but they’re about fifty feet back.
I grab Cat hard about the only place you can grab a cat, around one upper forearm, and I really run. The kids let out another war whoop. It’s uphill to the bridge. Cat gets his free forepaw into action, raking my chest and arm, with his claws out. Then he hisses and bites, and I nearly drop him. I’m panting so hard I can’t hardly breathe anyway.
A cop saunters out on my approach to the
bridge, his billy dangling from his wrist. Whew—am
I glad! I flop on the grass and ease up on
Cat and start soothing him down. The kids fade
As I cross the bridge, the cop squints at me. “What you doing, kid? Not supposed to be walking here.”
“I’ll be right off. I’m going home,” I tell him, and he saunters away, twirling his stick.
It’s dark by the time I get to the subway, and most of another hour before I’m back in Manhattan and reach Kate’s. I can hear the television going, which is unusual, and I walk in. No one is watching television. Mom and Pop are sitting at the table with Kate.
Mom lets loose the tears she has apparently been holding onto for two hours, and Pop starts bellowing: “You fool! You might have got killed jumping out on that parkway!”
Cat drops to the floor with a thud. I kiss Mom and go to the sink for a long glass of water and drink it all and wipe my mouth. Over my shoulder, I answer Pop: “Yeah, but if Cat gets killed on the parkway, that’s just a big joke, isn’t it? You laugh your head off!”
Pop takes off his glasses and scratches his head
with them, like he always does when he’s thinking.
Then, of all things, he picks up Cat himself. “Come on. You’re one of the family. Let’s get on this vacation.”
At last we’re off.
ROSH HASHANAH AT THE FULTON FISH MARKET
We came back to the city Labor Day Monday—us and a couple million others—traffic crawling, a hot day, the windows practically closed up tight to keep Cat in. I sweated, and then cat hairs stuck to me and got up my nose. Considering everything, Pop acted quite mild.
I met a kid up at the lake in Connecticut
who had skin-diving equipment. He let me use
it one day when Mom and Pop were off sight-seeing.
Meanwhile, I’m wondering if I can get back up to Connecticut again one weekend while the weather’s still warm, and I see that Rosh Hashanah falls on a Monday and Tuesday this year, the week after school opens. Great. So I ask this kid—Kenny Wright—if I can maybe come visit him that weekend so I can do some more skin diving.
“Rosh Hashanah? What’s that?” he says.
So I explain to him. Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year. About half the kids in my school are Jewish, so they all stay out for it, and I always do too. Last year the school board gave up and made it an official school holiday for everyone, Jewish or not. Same with Yom Kippur, the week after.
Kenny whistles. “You sure are lucky. I don’t think we got any holidays coming till Thanksgiving.”
I always thought the kids in the country were
I don’t figure it’d be worth train fare to Connecticut for just two days, so I say good-bye to Kenny and see you next year and stuff.
Back home I’m pretty busy right away, on account of starting in a new school, Charles Evans Hughes High. It’s different from the junior high, where I knew half the kids, and also my whole homeroom there went from one classroom to another together. At Hughes everyone has to get his own schedule and find the right classroom in this immense building, which is about the size of Penn Station. There are about a million kids in it—actually about two thousand—most of whom I never saw before. Hardly any of the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village kids come here because it isn’t their district. However, walking back across Fifth Avenue one day, I see one kid I know from Peter Cooper. His name is Ben Alstein. I ask him how come he is at Hughes.
“My dad wanted me to get into Peter Stuyvesant High School—you know, the genius factory, city-wide competitive exam to get in. Of course I didn’t make it. Biggest Failure of the Year, that’s me.”
“Heck, I never even tried for that. But how come you’re here?”
“There’s a special science course you can qualify for by taking a math test. Then you don’t have to live in the district. My dad figures as long as I’m in something special, there’s hope. I’m not really very interested in science, but that doesn’t bother him.”
So after that Ben and I walk back and forth to school together, and it turns out we have three classes together, too—biology and algebra and English. We’re both relieved to have at least one familiar face to look for in the crowd. My old friend Nick, aside from not really being my best friend anymore, has gone to a Catholic high school somewhere uptown.
On the way home from school one Friday in September, I ask Ben what he’s doing Monday and Tuesday, the Jewish holidays.
“Tuesday I got to get into my bar mitzvah
suit and go to synagogue and over to Brooklyn