What Makes Sammy Run? (31 page)

We finally found a copy boy who had actually seen the file and he guided me to a remote part of the building where I was left
to continue my quest for Sammy Glick. For this was part of the quest, though I was in no condition to realize it then as I thumbed foggily through the yellowing cards, thinking I was just ending a pointless, drunken argument when I was really stumbling onto the terrible mysteries of the child Sammy.

The cards shuffled slowly through my fingers, Gang, Gifford, Glennon, and then I reached Golden and wondered how I had missed Glick so I went back more slowly and then I discovered why. I had hardly been reading the names, mostly searching for that one quick syllable and the cards went Glennon, Glessner, Glickstein, only this time it registered and I yanked the card out, vaguely annoyed with myself at the excitement that came with it.

NAME…….
SAMUEL GLICKSTEIN

OCCUPATION…….
Copy Boy

ADDRESS…….
136 Rivington St

LAST OCCUPATION …….
Western Union messenger

PHONE…….
none

AGE…….
17

HT…….
5’7”

WEIGHT…….
126 lbs
.

PARENTS’ NAME…….
Mrs. Max Glickstein

ADDRESS…….
Same as above

I wondered when he had dropped that “stein” from around his neck. Something that Sammy once said about his father came back to me and I wondered what had happened to Max. I thought, just for the hell of it, of copying off the card, but that was too much trouble so I just slipped it into my pocket.

It seems to be a human failing to accumulate a great many things in our pockets, all of them absolutely useless, but which we transfer conscientiously from suit to suit. That is how I happened to reach into my pocket the following Sunday and find the card still with me. Now, psychologists may say that I purposely brought the
card with me that Sunday because of a subconscious determination to trace Sammy back to his roots. And the psychologists may even be right. It is very hard to say. All I know is that when I went strolling through Central Park that morning my only conscious purpose was to watch the ducks and feed the pigeons and get a little air, and that it was a genuine surprise to find
SAMUEL GLICK-STEIN
, Copy Boy, 17, in my hand when I reached for a cigarette. And when I turned casually out of the park and began strolling down Fifth Avenue, it was without the slightest knowledge of where I was heading.

But by the time I had walked down to 38th Street I was beginning to suspect. I thought of that scrapbook I had started. It was like putting a jigsaw puzzle together and some of the pieces were still missing. I was down to 34th Street, my mind trailing a ghost, the swift, fresh phantom of a pasty-faced copy boy, my body following foolishly after my mind.

Half an hour later I was walking into the world of his childhood, a foreign world of clotheslines, firetraps, pushcarts and pinch-faced children that stretches for too many blocks along the East River. I walked down Avenue A, down Allen, down Rivington, wondering at the irony of the fascist charge that the Jews have cornered the wealth of America; for here where there are more Jews than anywhere else in the world, millions of them are crowded into these ghetto streets with the early American names.

The Glicksteins lived between a synagogue and a fish store, in a tenement laced with corroded fire escapes and sagging wash-lines. It looked as if one healthy gust of wind would send its tired bricks tumbling down into the narrow street. The hallway gave off a warm, sweet and infinitely unpleasant odor of age, of decay, of too many uncleaned kitchens too close together. I found the name Glickstein on the mailbox, pressed the buzzer for 4C and started up the moldy wooden staircase that groaned protestingly as I climbed to the top floor.

A frail round-shouldered young man with sick skin opened the door as far as the safety-latch would permit. He looked suspiciously at me through the crack.

“Yes?”

Suddenly I was overwhelmed with the ridiculousness of this visit. I had an impulse to turn and hurry off. But it was too late. I had already begun to explain who I was, why I had come. As if I knew, as if I could.

“My name is Manheim,” I faltered. “I … I knew … I’m a friend of Sammy Glick’s from Hollywood.”

“From Sammele!” I heard a woman’s voice cry out. “Israel, quick, open up the door!”

As I entered, she rose from her seat at the window. The window was closed, so she could not have been sitting there for the air. After all these years she must have been still curious about what was going on down there in the street. The indoor complexion of her emaciated, wrinkled face was emphasized by the black lace shawl which she wore, peasant-fashion, over her head. My appearance seemed to frighten her, for she hurried over to me, looking up into my face with an anxiety that made me uncomfortable.

“Oi weh’s mir
, my little Sammele! Something has happened to him! Tell me, mister, please. He sent you to tell me, maybe?”

“No, no, Mrs. Glickstein,” I said, wondering what had made me walk into this. “There’s nothing wrong with Sammy, absolutely nothing, he’s getting along fine.”

“Please, I’m his momma—so if something’s wrong with my Sammele I want I should know.”

“Believe me, Mrs. Glickstein,” I had to reassure her. “That’s not why I came. Sammy couldn’t be better.”

“Ach
,” she sighed, slowly regaining her composure. “Excuse me, please. When I hear you come from Sammele I get so excited …”

“We haven’t heard from Sammy in so long that Momma’s been worried about him,” the sallow-faced Israel explained.

“But Sammele’s a good boy,” Mrs. Glickstein added hastily. “Every month regular comes his check in the mail. Only he is all the time so busy he never has time for writing.”

She looked at me and her face creased into the deeper wrinkles
of a smile. “So maybe my son sent you, you should tell me something from him?”

Here I go again, I thought. Sammy’s trusted friend bringing the message of devotion from the faithful son. Why do I always have to be defending the bastard?

“He said to be sure and tell you how well he’s feeling,” I heard myself saying. “He said that even if he hasn’t much time to write he wants you to know he is always thinking of you.”

In her excitement she had forgotten her customary hospitality.

“This is his brother,” she said. “Israel.” Israel nodded like an aged Jew in prayer. He was like an old, bent man with a young face. “Izzy, go in the kitchen and make some tea, like a good boy.”

I watched Israel as he quietly obeyed his mother’s orders. If physical similarity had anything to do with resemblance, he and Sammy would have looked very much alike. But I would never have recognized them as brothers, for Israel’s face seemed to reflect despair and bitterness and the gentleness of resignation, and it was strange to see how these qualities had molded his face to one so different from the forward thrust of Sammy’s.

The small front room was cluttered with ugly furniture. The warm, sticky smell I had noticed in the hallway downstairs was only the faint essence of the odor that hung over this flat, the smell of rotting woodwork and too much living in one place.

The street below vibrated with the harsh, raw noises of kids yelling at each other in a stoop-ball game, merchants driving their hard bargains, women shouting their gossip from stoop to stoop, radios turned up as loud as possible to drown each other out, automobile horns honk-honking to remind everybody that their marketplace, their playground, their social center, their arena, was still a street.

Mrs. Glickstein, sensitive with the suffering of thousands of years, guessed what I was thinking.

“Sammele wants we should move uptown,” she explained, “but it is better here with the synagogue right next door, so I don’t have to do no walking, and the Settlement House where Izzy works
right around the corner, and everybody on the block I am such good friends with like in the old country.”

Israel brought in the tea, in steaming glasses, and some salami and yellow bread. Mrs. Glickstein and Israel poured their tea into saucers and sucked it through the cubes of sugar they held between their teeth.

Then she ceremoniously lifted a picture from the wall. It was a group photograph captioned Lower Grades, P.S. 15. “See if you can tell which one is him?” Mrs. Glickstein challenged me playfully.

I looked across the rows of serious little faces, wondering whether I could pick him out. It was a cinch. My finger went right to him. He was on the left end of the first row, standing a little closer to the camera than anybody else. It looked weird to see that same intense ferret face on this little body in short pants and long black stockings wrinkled over the knees. “That’s him,” I said.

“And also here,” Mrs. Glickstein said mischievously, pointing to the opposite side of the same row. I looked more closely. By God, there he was again, only this time his face was distorted in a big grin. “He ran around behind the bleachers so he should beat the camera,” Mrs. Glickstein explained.

I studied this second image. I had seen that same exultant look on his face before. The moment he watched his name flash on the screen for the first time, the night of his dramatic triumph when the flashlights flared around him and Rita Royce. His face told you that this was a triumph too. When the picture was posted on the school bulletin board Sammy’s achievement must have monopolized the comment, and the triumphant sneer on that dark little puss revealed that this had already become his goal.

Mrs. Glickstein wanted me to tell her how much Sammy weighed and whether he was any taller and if he were a good boy and had he met any nice Jewish girls. And she went on talking about what a fine baby he had been and what a smart, hardworking boy, distilling the story of his youth with the unconscious censorship of a mother’s pride. In English she sounded awkward and ignorant, but when she discovered I understood Yiddish
(though I had practically forgotten how to speak it) she became articulate with that mysterious sense of poetry all peasants seem to have.

All the time we talked, Israel sat there hardly saying a word, noisily sipping his tea or chewing on the dry bread. But the twisted way he smiled at his mother’s naive account of her little Sammele, an occasional comment he could not resist, gave him away. When Mrs. Glickstein boasted of the regularity with which Sammy’s check arrived every week, Israel nodded scornfully, mumbled grimly, “Sure, sure, he’s very thoughtful.” I watched him more and more as Mrs. Glickstein talked, wondering how long this hate for Sammy had been fermenting. He was the one to talk, I thought, this was my man.

At sundown we heard a new sound, a singsong chant of many low voices in weird cacophony. The Orthodox Jews were beginning their evening prayers in the synagogue next door. Israel rose to join them. I said I would like to come along. He nodded, flustered and pleased.

When I left, Mrs. Glickstein blessed me again, asked me to look after her little boy, and pressed a paper bag into my hand.
“Strudel
,” she said, “still hot. I made it today. Sammele used to say I made the best
strudel
in the whole world.”

When she tried to control herself, her eyes only moistened more. “And maybe you will tell him some time he should try to come home and see his Momma.”

It was like a very little moan for a very deep wound. I went out wondering how many other cruelties of Sammy’s she had accepted with the same mild protest.

The synagogue was a bare, shabby place, airless with all the windows shut, where forty or fifty men, mostly aged and bearded, faced east to the Holy Land, humbled themselves before their fierce, demanding God and wailed their songs of endless sorrow. I stood there swaying with them, but only mechanically, for I was raised in the Reform Temple that these traditional religionists
would spit upon, and in recent years I had even strayed from this watered-down Judaism, occasionally doing lip service on the High Holy Days now but coming to believe that if love for your fellow man is in your heart you need no superstructure to dramatize it for you. And if it isn’t, no God and no church can put it there. So I stood there swaying and wondering. What is a Jew? The anthropologists have proved it is not a race, since the only scientific category is the Semitic, which includes Arabians and Assyrians, some of the most fervent anti-Jews in the world. And if it were merely a religion, all Jews like me would have to be excluded. And if it is only a unit of national culture, it is withering away in America, for the customs and traditions that the Glicksteins brought over at the end of the nineteenth century may have been inherited by Israel, droning in his
yarmulka
at my side, but were thrown overboard as excess baggage by anyone in such a hurry as his younger brother.