Inside, Outside, page 18
I left with Le Sourire all rolled up. I didn’t know much, but I knew it was contraband. Back on my cot in Bunk Four, I leafed through Le Sourire with mingled feelings of guilt, delight, and ever-rising warm disturbance, all shot through with visions of Betty Seidman, Rosalind Katz, and my old neighbor Bare-behind. A new world of sensation was opening to me, and Quat was quite right, a knowledge of French was not essential.
Now mind you, Le Sourire was pitiably tame compared to what’s around nowadays, all these glossy magazines with pictures of girls showing their hairy crotches under klieg lights, interspersed with short stories by Nobel Prize authors, and interviews with eminent politicians. We live in peculiar times, or at least they strike me as peculiar. I don’t fight the trend, in fact I helped bring it about by winning the obscenity cases; but I will have my senile headshake at such goings-on. Le Sourire had, I now realize, a sort of quaint art deco charm. All illustrations, no photographs; and for my money those colored pen-and-ink sketches of naughty mamselles, in various stages of peek-a-boo undress, had it all over the stark genito-urinary closeups which today’s adolescents get off on, as I believe they put it.
Anyway, Uncle Phil came bounding into the bunk very much like Laddie, with much the same gaping jaws and hanging red tongue, and he frightened me by roaring, “Where the hell did you get that?” To Uncle Phil, Le Sourire was of course the hottest of hot stuff.
Unnerved, I spoke the simple truth. “I got it from Peter Beater.”
“From WHO?”
Shakily I repeated, “Peter Beater. Peter Quat. In Bunk Eight.” Jimmy Levy’s brother always referred to the rebellious oddball as Peter Beater. To me it was just an innocuous nickname.
Uncle Phil took the magazine from me, sat down on my cot, and shifted to a clergyman voice. “Davey, do you know what that means?”
“What what means?”
“What you’ve just said.”
A Talmudic mind can put two and two together. My disquieting sensations over Le Sourire, Frankenthal’s tales of the big guys in the lots, and some other things I had heard at camp fell into one squalid picture. Naturally, I said I hadn’t the slightest idea. Uncle Phil left, thumbing through the magazine, and he stumbled in the doorway and fell down the steps. He picked himself up and made off toward Bunk Eight.
All kinds of a crisis ensued. Le Sourire was confiscated. A solemn meeting took place in Bunk Eight, chaired by Bill Winston, ranging from sex matters to the need for harmony in the bunk. Quat offered to give a wienie roast and make his bed thereafter, and the other guys agreed to stop calling him Peter Beater. Bill Winston was delighted. They had the wienie roast next night after taps, and Frankenthal got hoggish and demanded a fifth or sixth frankfurter, and Quat told him to go to hell, and Frankenthal said, “Okay for you, Peter Beater,” and Quat laid his head open with a mustard jar. That chilled the new era of good feeling. The story got out all over camp that Quat had put Paul Frankenthal, the star athlete, in the infirmary with many stitches in his scalp. Quat still didn’t make his bed, and they still called him Peter Beater, only now they did it in front of Winston. Le Sourire passed from one counsellor’s hand to another, until Mr. Seidman himself collared and kept it. Remembering Mrs. Seidman, I’d say Le Sourire ended up where it did the most good.
***
Meanwhile, my romance with Betty Seidman flourished. We would slip off at canteen time to the gray rock above the lake, and hold hands and talk, and maybe I’d beg a kiss or two. Nothing more. After-images of Le Sourire were haunting me, and I would daydream of trying every lascivious devilry with Betty Seidman. But when she was right there in the flesh, in big thick green bloomers and a white middy blouse, with those dark eyes sparkling at me, I fell apart. All my indecent intentions dried up. The fact is, I’ve never changed much. Women awe me. I have to nerve myself after nearly thirty years, if you’ll believe it, for every pass I make at Jan, my own wife. Some say women prefer rough tough guys who yank down their panty hose without a by-your-leave, but I’ll never know. I’m not saying I’ve done badly in the long run with my reverential approach—I’m not complaining, shall we say—but it got me exactly nowhere with Betty Seidman.
I was returning to my bunk from one of these tender meetings, via the short cut through the woods, when I noticed a peculiar black thing swinging in the air. I literally didn’t believe my eyes, and for a second or two stood dumbfounded. Laddie was dangling from a heavy clothesline thrown over a high branch of a tall tree, with the other end knotted around a white birch. I snapped out of the daze and reached for him, but he hung too high. With shaking fingers, I tried to untie the hard knots at the other end. The dog was alive, whining and gagging, his head bent to one side, his jaws open, blood trickling from his thrust-out tongue. He looked straight down at me, beseeching help, then the glazed eyes drooped shut.
Peter Quat came crashing through the brush with a scout knife, his clothes torn, his face all bloody and swollen. “Okay, you catch him!” He hacked through the thick line and the dog fell into my arms, the rope coiling around him. He opened dim eyes as I laid him on the ground. Peter cut the noose around his neck, and he feebly wagged his tail. But his head fell to one side, the life went out of his eyes, and he lay still. Peter felt for the dog’s heart and called, “Laddie, Laddie, come back, Laddie! Don’t die!” His bloodstained face was streaming tears.
If you ever wonder, now and then in the rest of my story, why I put up with Peter Quat, remember this, it’s all true. He is now what he was at Camp Eagle Wing, an enfant terrible with a very nasty streak, but there is forlorn bottled-up love in him somewhere, if he seems to have none for his parents or his people. He lay embracing the dog, and howling, “Laddie! Laddie! Don’t die!” He turned his blood-streaked face up at me. “That moronic criminal son of a bitch did it! Just because I love the dog! I caught him at it!” The inert dog uttered a strangled cough and barely moved his head. “Christ, he’s alive!” Peter stood up and glared at me, tears and blood running down his dirty face, and lifted the dog in his arms. “I’ll handle this. You don’t know anything, do you hear? Don’t say a word to anyone, ever. Beat it!”
Next day, Frankenthal left the camp. The last time I ever saw Paul Frankenthal he was crossing the lawn in his city clothes, a real big guy, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. A few days later, Quat also departed. Betty Seidman avoided me after that. I did not know for a while whether Laddie had survived, until I sneaked up to the Seidman house and saw him moping in a small pen of tough chicken wire. All sorts of rumors flew for a few days, and then the fuss died down.
A week or so after this, my parents drove over from Feder’s farm to visit me, bringing along that no-good Harold; also my sister Lee, who with rare good sense had fought off being sent to Camp Nokomis. Poor stumblebum Minsker Godol, in goyish exile! I didn’t want to admit how miserable I was. I bluffed it out. I showed Lee and Harold the canteen, the social hall, the lake, the tennis courts, the playing fields. I told Harold about campfires and overnight hikes. I boasted to Lee that the camp owner’s daughter was in love with me. Mr. Seidman and Bill Winston raved to Mom and Pop about their brilliant son. In that whole orgy of phoniness, there was one moment of truth. I was showing Mom and Pop the mess hall, where the waiters were setting up for supper. I pointed out the milk and butter on the table. “We always have meat for supper,” I said. “And see what they serve, every night.”
My father looked at Mom, without a word.
My mother was dressed to kill in a silk frock and a big picture hat. She had lapped up the praises of Seidman and Winston, smiling, bridling, behaving like an intermediate girl at canteen time; while Pop, who appeared gray-faced and thin, had listened impassively. But when Pop gave Mom that look in the mess hall—just a roll of his wise brown eyes—I realized that he had not for a moment been taken in by Camp Eagle Wing; that he held her accountable for sending me there; but that he would not put her down in front of me. Mom shrugged at his look and dropped her eyes.
“Don’t eat the butter or drink the milk, Yisroelke,” Pop said.
“I don’t,” I said.
He put an arm around my shoulders and we left the mess hall. So I served out my sentence in Camp Eagle Wing, and I went on eating the meat.
***
When I read this part to Jan, she said, “Do you realize how awful your mother is coming out?”
Poor Mama!
Look, remember how young she was, an immigrant in a strange new world, and remember those sauerkraut crocks, will you? Is it really so awful that Mama was bemused by a handsome young fraud of a teacher who flattered her and flirted with her because—as old Bobbeh knew at once—he wanted money? Camp Eagle Wing in those brochures, with Bill Winston flashing his manly smile and his pearly spats at Mama, looked so much like the ploika that she hadn’t the heart to press Douglas Fairbanks with the old Jewish nag: “But is it kosher?” Too redolent of sauerkraut, eh, Mom, that dull old-country query?
Green Cousin, poor Green Cousin, not so awful, and there is nothing to forgive. Eagle Wing was my first stop on the way to April House, and it had to happen. The thing I will remember is the nickel-plated flashlight. The camping list called for a flashlight, so before I left for Eagle Wing we went to a hardware store. The black flashlight cost a fraction of the nickel-plated one. They both gave the same light. Frugality was your middle name. But you saw Yisroelke yearning over that classy nickel-plated flashlight, and that was the one you bought. Okay, Mom.
25
The Five Medals
“Skip Camp Maccabee,” I wrote in my notes on this part of my life, “nothing important happened there, and it’s all unspeakable.” But I was forgetting the medals when I wrote that. The five medals became a buried dynamite charge that, touched off by my bar mitzva, blew my life apart like a land mine. There is no leaving out Camp Maccabee.
This camp in the Catskills, where I won the medals, was the brainchild of one Mr. Dresser. If Peter Quat were telling this, he could make of Samuel Dresser the most loathsome literary Jew since Fagin, but Mr. Dresser was just another paunchy little cheeseparer like Mr. Seidman. He hired Charles Strongfort, “the world’s most perfect man,” as director. The camp featured body-building, and was called Camp Strongfort at first. That didn’t go, so after a losing year Mr. Dresser changed the name to Camp Maccabee, and made it kosher. Strongfort stayed on, and since he was a devout Catholic who always wore a crucifix on his gigantic hairy brown chest, Mr. Dresser took on a former Jewish boxing champion, Benny Leonard, as “athletic adviser.” He also cut his prices in half. Everybody in the Bronx knew about Benny Leonard, and I was netted, with some three hundred other boys and girls. Mama, penitent over the Eagle Wing botch, jumped at the kosher inducement; and Pop was in financial hot water again, so the cheap fee got him.
I am compelled, however, to draw a curtain over the incredible doings at Camp Maccabee. I can’t compete with Peter Quat or his Jewish-housewife imitators in the fearless candor racket. I’m shooting for the family trade, and you’ll have to admit I’ve stayed pretty genteel so far. April House is right in there with Little Women, and I mean to keep it that way. The camp was something of a Dotheboys Hall—and Dothegirls Hall, too, because there were hordes of girls—except that we weren’t oppressed, not at all. We could do whatever we pleased. There was no barrier of any sort between the boys’ and the girls’ camps, and what pleased all of the counsellors, and most of the campers past puberty, was sex. It was something wild, Camp Maccabee, and not what my parents had in mind in giving me a kosher summer.
I trust the family trade will put up with my merely mentioning, for instance, that the head counsellor, one Uncle Jack, a tall lean bespectacled fellow, was known to one and all as the Scumbag King. This was not meant in derogation. It was descriptive. He pressed one of the seniors into service as a sort of batman, and this kid got into Uncle Jack’s trunk and found an astonishing number of the things, several thousand of them. They could not have all been for personal use; the camp season was too short. I must presume that Uncle Jack had the concession, and sold them to the other counsellors and to selected campers; in which case Mr. Dresser certainly had a piece of the action. Mr. Dresser would not have overlooked such a profitable spin-off from Camp Maccabee.
In my bunk the campers were too young to patronize Uncle Jack, but they displayed such a lively interest in sex, all the same, that I had to move out. I couldn’t stand it. I wasn’t a prude then and still am not, but there was this stout boy named Whitey that my bunkmates kept trying to bugger, when they weren’t comparing lengths of erections, and doing other things even old Peter would have trouble making believable. It was like living in a monkey house with a lot of depraved orangutans. I didn’t know when they might tire of Whitey and cast their hot eyes on me. So one day I just packed up my trunk and carried it over to the tent of Uncle Sam, the dramatics counsellor, where the circumstances seemed quieter.
They were quieter. It was a senior tent, and the campers were away in the girls’ area most of the time. When they came back they were all worn out and just slept. It was days before I was even noticed. Uncle Sam must have been a night prowler, because he slept nearly all the time. I don’t remember seeing him get up for meals. We all tended to eat at odd times, going to the mess hall and foraging around when we got hungry. The scheduled meals were poorly attended, because Mr. Dresser’s menus really were right out of Dotheboys Hall. But there was a canteen, and down the road a ways a sandwich place. Both were open day and night, did a roaring business, and undoubtedly were dummy corporations wholly owned by Mr. Dresser; for the worse the camp meals were, the more he was bound to rake in from those two gold mines.
I came to Uncle Sam’s attention during a week of heavy rains. The seniors kept moving their beds around to get out from under the leaks and a bad leak sprang over Uncle Sam’s head and woke him.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, sitting up and mopping his head with a towel. I was, at the moment, the only camper in the tent. I was pretty wet and bedraggled, because there were no unoccupied dry spots left. I was lying on my soaked bed in my raincoat, reading a book.
“I’m your new camper.”
“What? But you’re just a little kid.” Uncle Sam got up as he talked, shoved a camper’s bed into a puddle under a heavy leak, and moved his cot into the dry place.
“I’m interested in dramatics.”
“Who put you in here?”
“The Scumbag King.”
“Well, that’s all right then. What do you do?”
“I can sing and recite.”
“Good. I can use you.”
But let’s get out of Camp Maccabee fast. I’m just accounting for the medals. I rather enjoyed the anarchy of Maccabee, the freedom to read all I wanted, the absence of athletics—there were casual choose-up games, but no schedules—and to be honest, the sex carnival also entertained me. I think it would have entertained the emperor Caligula. A sort of blithering innocence kept me from any participation in it, but the summer was a great eye-opener.
There were two Parents’ Days, one in July and one in August, when we had fine steak dinners. For the July day Benny Leonard showed up. It was the only time we ever saw him. He gave a mass boxing lesson to two hundred boys, while the parents looked on. A patently silly fraud, it was. That same night Uncle Sam put on a show, and I did a takeoff on Benny Leonard’s boxing lesson. I’d been amusing the kids at rehearsals with such clowning, and Uncle Sam saw this and put me on as a solo act. It made a hit. Benny Leonard in the front row was rolling around, guffawing and wiping his eyes, though my scurrilities were all about how fat and old he was, and how the whole thing was a farce staged for the parents. The parents were laughing, too. Clowns can get away with a lot of truth. Next day Leonard called me into the camp office and gave me the Benny Leonard Proficiency Medal in the Manly Art, picking one out of a large box full of these on Mr. Dresser’s desk. So that was one medal.
At the second Parents’ Day Strongfort did his standard act: rippling his enormous muscles, tearing a telephone book in half, straightening a horseshoe with his bare hands, and all that. It was made for parody, and I was blossoming out as the camp funny man. So that night I lampooned Strongfort. Another hit, and nobody in the audience was more amused than Mama. She and Pop were sitting up front. They had missed the first Parents’ Day, but here they were, and she laughed so loud that my act could have been ruined. Luckily, the campers were starved for some amusement besides lust—the season was winding down and they had all about had it—and they ignored the berserk lady in the front row. After the show, Strongfort invited me and my parents to his tent, and there presented me with the Strongfort Correspondence School Medal for Body-Building Prowess.
Would you believe that Mama took that award seriously? Body-building prowess! I was a physical ruin. That was half the fun of my burlesque. I had been living on candy bars and peanut butter sandwiches, lying indoors and reading day and night. I had scarcely broken into a run the whole time at Camp Maccabee, and I had given up swimming because of the leeches in the lake. I looked like a stunted eunuch, all white and baggy and puffy. But Mama glowed over the medal, and thanked Charles Strongfort, and gave him a kiss. Papa did not say much during the whole visit. When they left next morning in the car, he remarked only that I should try to get a little sun. Mama was gloating over the two medals in her lap, for she had collected the Benny Leonard award, too. “My prizewinner!” she exclaimed, as Pop started the car. Pop looked at me, slightly shook his head, and drove off.
Well, Uncle Sam then awarded me a medal for dramatics, which made three, and one in journalism, for a total of four. There wasn’t much food at Maccabee but medals abounded. About the journalism: Uncle Sam put out just two mimeographed editions of the Maccabee Menorah for the Parents’ Days. Before each occasion he took me to a dusty little office, sat me at a typewriter, with lists of parents who were expected, and a few stencils; and told me to write some gossip about their kids, anything that came into my head, with all names in capital letters. It was fun pecking out words on a machine, and I enjoyed writing up the campers. The hardest part was keeping it clean. I had to press my imagination hard for sex-free items; it was my first try at serious fiction. Toward the end of the second edition I got tired and absentmindedly referred to our head counsellor as the Scumbag King; meaning no harm, I just forgot I was writing for the parents. This caused a few puzzled inquiries, but the summer was waning and nobody really cared much.
