The Christmas Kid

“A number on his wrist?” my mother said one night. “Oh, my God.” She was silent for a while, then glanced out the window at the skyline glittering across the harbor. “Well, make sure you take care of that boy. Don’t let anything happen to him. Ever.”

The summer moved on. Lev put on weight, and Barney Augstein bought him clothes and Keds and a first baseman’s mitt. We tried to explain all of life to him, particularly the Dodgers. Lev listened gravely to the story of the holy team, and if he didn’t fully comprehend, he certainly tried. He recited the litany: Reiser, Reese, Walker…

“He play baseball good?” Lev said, pointing at a picture of Reiser in the Daily News. “He play stickball good?”

“Good?” Ralphie Boy said. “He’s like Christmas every day.”

“Christmas every day?” Lev said.

II

One afternoon, Barney Augstein came around with Charlie Flanagan. They were best friends, though Charlie was a cop. Their friendship was one reason Augstein could work openly as a bookmaker in the neighborhood without being arrested. My father said their friendship went back to Prohibition, when they lived on the Lower East Side and worked as guards on the whiskey runs to Canada. Now Charlie lived alone. He and Barney went to the fights together, and bought their clothes from the same tailor, and even went to Broadway shows. We were sitting on the cellar board of Roulston’s grocery store when they came over together.

“Listen, you bozos,” Augstein said. “One of yiz has been teachin’ my nephew bad woids, and I want it to stop.”

“Nah,” Ralphie Boy said.

“Don’t gimme ‘nah,’” Augstein said. “I’m warnin’ yiz. If yiz keep teaching Lev doity woids, I’ll have yiz t’rown in fronta da Sevent’ Avenue bus. Ya got that?”

“Dat goes for me, too,” Flanagan said. “Barney wants his nephew to be a gent, not a hat rack like you guys. So teach the kid right. And if I hear he gets in trouble, I’ll lock yiz all up.”

They turned around and walked across the street to Rattigan’s Bar and Grill, a couple of cool older dudes in sport shirts. They were laughing.

III

The trouble started around Labor Day weekend, and it all came from Nora McCarthy. She lived up the block from Rattigan’s, almost directly across 11th Street from Barney Augstein’s house. She was in her forties, a large, box-shaped woman with horn-rimmed glasses, and she was awful. Everybody’s business was her business, and when she wasn’t working at the Youth Board, a job she’d received from the Regular Democratic Club, she was policing private lives. My father called her Nora the Nose. Now she had begun investigating Lev Augstein. On Labor Day weekend, when we were feeling forlorn about the imminent return to school, she came over to us after a game.

“What’s this new boy’s name?” she said, pointing at Lev.

“Why?” Ralphie Boy said. “What business is it of yours?”

“I live in this neighborhood!” she snapped. “I have a right to know when strangers show up. Particularly if they live with a known criminal. And particularly if they are young. Young people are my job.”

We all made rude noises and laughed. But Lev did not laugh. He looked up at Nora McCarthy, at her severe hairdo, her coarse skin, the mole on her chin, the square, blocky hands, the hard judgmental lines that bracketed her mouth, and he sensed danger. He backed away, but Nora McCarthy grabbed his wrist. She moved her thumb and saw the tattooed number and then she smiled.

“You’re a Jew, aren’t you?” she said. “You’re one of those DPs. Those displaced persons. Aren’t you?” She gave Lev’s wrist a tug. “But I bet you don’t have any papers. You got that look. That scared look. Tell me the truth.”

Lev pulled away, but she held on. And then Ralphie Boy came around behind her and gave her a ferocious kick in the ass, and she let go, and then we were all running, Lev with us, and we didn’t stop until we were deep in the bushes of Prospect Park. We sat there, aching from the run, and then laughing at what Ralphie Boy had done. Lev didn’t laugh. He didn’t know a lot of English but he sure knew what Nora the Nose meant when she said the word “Jew.”

That night, my father came home angry because he’d run into a furious Nora McCarthy. He hated giving the Nose even a slight edge and wanted to know why we’d done what we did. We told him. He started laughing hard, and gave us each a hug and told us to dress quickly because we were going to Barney Augstein’s to see a fight on Barney’s new television set. We walked up 11th Street in the chilly evening to Barney’s. Across the street, Nora McCarthy was at the window, inspecting the block. My father walked over, spit in her yard, and yelled up at her: “Benny Leonard was a Jew!” I didn’t know who Benny Leonard was, but I knew from the way he said it that if Benny Leonard was a Jew, then being a Jew was a great thing. Nora McCarthy closed the window.