The fried bananas, too, were a success and for a time it was hard to get any rotten bananas from Louis Pirossa’s old man because they were so much in demand. And then an event occurred which cast a pall over the entire neighbourhood – the defeat of Joe Gerhardt at the hands of Joey Silverstein. The latter was the tailor’s son: he was a lad of fifteen or sixteen, rather quiet and studious looking, who was shunned by the other older boys because he was a Jew. One day as he was delivering a pair of pants on Fillmore Place he was accosted by Joe Gerhardt who was about the same age and who considered himself a rather superior being. There was an exchange of words and then Joe Gerhardt pulled the pants away from the Silverstein boy and threw them in the gutter. Nobody had ever imagined that young Silverstein would reply to such an insult by recourse to his fists and so when he struck out at Joe Gerhardt and cracked him square in the jaw everybody was taken aback, most of all Joe Gerhardt himself.
There was a fight which lasted about twenty minutes and at the end Joe Gerhardt lay on the sidewalk unable to get up. Whereupon the Silverstein boy gathered up the pair of pants and walked quietly and proudly back to his father’s shop. Nobody said a word to him. The affair was regarded as a calamity. Who had ever heard of a Jew beating up a Gentile? It was something inconceivable, and yet it had happened, right before everyone’s eyes. Night after night, sitting on the curb as we used to, the situation was discussed from every angle, but without any solution until… well until Joe Gerhardt’s younger brother, Johnny, became so wrought up about it that he decided to settle the matter himself. Johnny, though younger and smaller than his brother, was as tough and invincible as a young puma. He was typical of the shanty Irish who made up the neighbourhood. His idea of getting even with young Silverstein was to lie in wait for him one evening as the latter was stepping out of the store and trip him up. When he tripped him up that evening he had provided himself in advance with two little rocks which he concealed in his fists and when poor Silverstein went down he pounced on him and then with the two handsome little rocks he pounded poor Silverstein’s temples.
To his amazement Silverstein offered no resistance: even when he got up and gave him a chance to get on his feet Silverstein never so much as budged. Then Johnny got frightened and ran away. He must have been thoroughly frightened because he never came back again: the next that was heard of him was that he had been picked, up out West somewhere and sent to a reformatory. His mother, who was a slatternly, jolly Irish bitch, said that it served him right and she hoped to God she’d never lay eyes on him again. When the boy Silverstein recovered he was not the same any more: people said the beating had affected his brain, that he was a little daffy. Joe Gerhardt, on the other hand, rose to prominence again. It seems that he had gone to see the Silverstein boy while he lay in bed and had made a deep apology to him. This again was something that had never been heard of before. It was something so strange, so unusual, that Joe Gerhardt was looked upon almost as a knight errant. Nobody had approved of the way Johnny behaved, and yet nobody would have thought of going to young Silverstein and apologizing to him. That was an act of such delicacy, such elegance, that Joe Gerhardt was looked upon as a real gentleman – the first and only gentleman in the neighbourhood.
It was a word that had never been used among us and now it was on everybody’s lips and it was considered a distinction to be a gentleman. This sudden transformation of the defeated Joe Gerhardt into a gentleman I remember made a deep impression upon me. A few years later, when I moved into another neighbourhood and encountered Claude de Lorraine, a French boy, I was prepared to understand and accept “a gentleman”. This Claude was a boy such as I had never laid eyes on before. In the old neighbourhood he would have been regarded as a sissy: for one thing he spoke too well, too correctly, too politely, and for another thing he was too considerate, too gentle, too gallant. And then, while playing with him, to hear him suddenly break into French as his mother or father came along, provided us with something like a shock. German we had heard and German was a permissible transgression, but French! Why to talk French, or even to understand it, was to be thoroughly alien, thoroughly aristocratic, rotten, distingue. And yet Claude was one of us, as good as us in every way, even a little bit better, we had to admit secretly. But there was a blemish – his French! It antagonized us. He had no right to be living in our neighbourhood, no right to be as capable and manly as he was. Often, when his mother called him in and we had said good-bye to him, we got together in the lot and we discussed the Lorraine family backwards and forwards. We wondered what they ate, for example, because being French they must have different customs than ours. No one had ever set foot in Claude de Lorraine’s home either – that was another suspicious and repugnant fact. Why? What were they concealing? Yet when they passed us in the street they were always very cordial, always smiled, always spoke in English and a most excellent English it was.
They used to make us feel rather ashamed of ourselves – they were superior, that’s what it was. And there was still another baffling thing – with the other boys a direct question brought a direct answer, but with Claude de Lorraine there was never any direct answer. He always smiled very charmingly before replying and he was very cool, collected, employing an irony and a mockery which was beyond us. He was a thorn in our side, Claude de Lorraine, and when finally he moved out of the neighbourhood we all breathed a sigh of relief. As for myself, it was only maybe ten or fifteen years later that I thought about this boy and his strange elegant behaviour. And it was then that I felt I had made a bad blunder. For suddenly one day it occurred to me that Claude de Lorraine had come up to me on a certain occasion obviously to win my friendship and I had treated him rather cavalierly.
At the time I thought of this incident it suddenly dawned on me that Claude de Lorraine must have seen something different in me and that he had meant to honour me by extending the hand of friendship. But back in those days I bad a code of honour, such as it was, and that was to run with the herd. Had I become a bosom friend of Claude de Lorraine I would have been betraying the other boys. No matter what advantages lay in the wake of such a friendship they were not for me, I was one of the gang and it was my duty to remain aloof from such as Claude de Lorraine. I remembered this incident once again, I must say, after a still greater interval – after I had been in France a few months and the word “raisomiable” had come to acquire a wholly new significance for me. Suddenly one day, overhearing, I thought of Claude de Lorraine’s overtures on the street in front of his house. I recalled vividly that he had used the word reasonable. He had probably asked me to be reasonable, a word which then would never have crossed my lips as there was no need for it in my vocabulary. It was a word, like gentleman, which was rarely brought out and then only with great discretion and circumspection. It was a word which might cause others to laugh at you. There were lots of words like that – really, for example. No one I knew had ever used the word really – until Jack Lawson came along. He used it because his parents were English and, though we made fun of him, we forgave him for it. Really was a word which reminded me immediately of little Carl Ragner from the old neighbourhood. Carl Ragner was the only son of a politician who lived on
