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Altschuler is waiting for the bus on the corner of my street the next morning. I say hello to him, and he just nods. I ask a lot of dumb questions about whether or not the bus is always on time, and if we will get seats, and what happens if we miss it. Altschuler just shrugs his shoulders or nods his head to answer me, and the less he says the dumber my questions get. I’m angry at him. I’m trying to be friendly, and he’s acting like I’m a big annoyance. I’m glad when I see the bus pulling up in five minutes. Altschuler goes right to the rear seat again, and a couple of little kids who were sitting there jump up and move to seats toward the front. I tell myself not to be so friendly and to sit in one of the front seats myself. Altschuler can keep his silence to himself. I don’t need it.
“I’m Frankie Menlo,” the little kid I sit next to says. “I’m eight.”
“I’m Davy Ross.”
“I know,” Frankie says. “Are you rich?”
“No,” I answer.
“Neither am I. I have cousins in New Jersey who are though.”
“It’s probably fun to visit them.”
“I guess so.”
“You’re probably richer than you think,” I say.
“I don’t think so. My cousins have a color television set. We don’t. Do you?”
“No.”
“They also get bigger allowances than I do, even Margaret Mary and she’s only five.”
“You’ll get a bigger allowance someday,” I tell Frankie.
“My allowance is adjusted to the United States Government cost-of-living index,” he says. “Last week it was a dollar and eighteen cents. My father wants me to be a businessman.”
I ask him if they call him Menlo at school or Frankie. He says they won’t call him Menlo until the fifth grade, but I can call him Menlo. He’s a pretty bright little kid, and I tell him I’d be glad to call him Menlo if he wants me to. He asks if I will sit with him every morning. I look around at Altschuler, who has himself spread out in the back of the bus as though he owns it, and I tell Menlo that I’ll sit with him a lot but maybe not every morning. He says that will be fine, and then he tells me that he likes me a lot. The bus has arrived at school.
“I like you too, Menlo,” I tell him, which I am glad to do since he’s the first person to exert himself and welcome me to this school. I don’t care if he’s only eight.
Menlo takes hold of my hand when we get out of the bus, and we walk toward the school together. Menlo runs ahead to tell some other little kids his own age about me. I know he does because he keeps pointing to me as they stand around outside. I pass them, and he says, “See you on the bus this afternoon, Ross.”
“Right, Menlo,” I say.
The kid smiles, and all his friends look at him and me with a sort of envious look. I can hear them calling him Frankie, and I guess that Frankie has taken several leaps ahead in his buddies’ eyes now that an old kid like me calls him Menlo.
I don’t feel so conspicuous in school on the second day, and a couple of the guys ask me to sit next to them during morning chapel, which is only for about fifteen minutes and isn’t bad. The priest reads a couple of things from the Bible, and we say a few prayers and sing two hymns. I know the Lord’s Prayer of course, so I can say that one OK, but I don’t know the other prayers. I guess that I’ll have to learn a whole lot of prayers before long. Davy the monk. And I don’t know the hymns either. Even if I did, I wouldn’t sing them, being the hummer that I am from way back. It’s worse now because my voice cracks all the time. Boy, me and puberty!
I see Altschuler waiting outside when we leave chapel and I ask him if everyone doesn’t have to go. He says it’s optional for non-Episcopalians.
“It is?” I say. “I didn’t know that. I thought everyone had to go.”
“No.”
“What are you?” I ask.
For a few seconds he looks at me as though I’m crazy. I wonder if I’ve asked something no one ever asked him before. Kids at home used to know what everyone was because there were only so many things you could be in a little town. Or you could be nothing, of course, except for Christmas and Easter, and then you could choose from a lot of churches, as I frequently did. My grandmother did too, though she went to church more than twice a year. Come to think of it, she would go to one church several times in a row, then go to another one in the same way. She got involved with the Methodists, the Unitarians, the Catholics, and the Congregationalists, and she got a lot of mail from all of them, asking her to contribute to building funds. Churches in my town were always building new schools or community halls or new churches even.
After Altschuler has had his fill of staring at me, he says, “I’m an agnostic.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s someone who doesn’t know if there’s a God or not.”
“Do you have special churches?”
“Agnostics don’t go to church. The point of being an agnostic is that you’re not certain if there should be any churches.”
“Oh,” I say. “Are your parents agnostics too?”
Altschuler looks at me again as though he doesn’t believe the question I asked, but finally he says, “We don’t talk about religion at home. It’s a personal thing for us to make up our own minds about.”
I tell Altschuler that I guess I’m an agnostic too, but that I’ve never thought very much about it. I tell him about my church-going habits, which are not regular, as I explained, and that people in my family seemed to move from one church to the other without bringing God’s wrath down on them. By this time we are in the algebra class, and Altschuler is talking to me in a regular if not friendly way, so I sit behind him after I introduce myself to the teacher.
The rest of the day goes by fine, though Altschuler doesn’t have anything else to say to me. When it’s time for physical education, we go to this crummy dark gymnasium in the school’s basement and change into shorts and T-shirts for basketball. Altschuler is the class jock, it develops, and he plays circles around everyone. I just sort of mess around, and no one goes batty when I manage to sink a few long ones. Malcolm is the class clown on the basketball floor as well as in the classroom. He can’t dribble. He bounces the ball on the floor once but can’t bring his hand and the ball together again, so he makes a big joke of it and tells me that he hates basketball. He says he’s a good football player and I should see him playing guard on the varsity team next fall. Malcolm is two times the size of any of the other kids, so I suppose the school sits him down in the middle of the line and figures opposing teams will have a rough time just getting around him. Malcolm laughs a lot whenever he gets the basketball by accident. All the kids yell at him when that happens. “Toss it here, Malcolm!” “Let’s have the ball, Malcolm!” Everyone knows that Malcolm will never try to lob in a basket.
Miss Stuart is all ready to go into rehearsal with our production of Julius Caesar and says the first thing we have to do is write the script. Everyone who is playing a part has to write his own part, and in that way we’ll be sure to get the most out of the play. Some of the guys are playing murderers and that’s all, so they’re going to have a pretty easy week. People like me and Altschuler and the good-looking kid who’s going to be Mark Antony have to do a lot of work though, and I’m sorry that I got elected.
We start to talk about the play and about the character of the various people who took part in the events surrounding Caesar’s murder and about how Shakespeare thought of them, and before you know it everyone is very down on Caesar. Altschuler is telling them how Caesar wants to rule forever, and I pipe in with the fact that Caesar deserved the gratitude of the Roman people for leading them in so many battles and getting so much of the world for them and all that. Altschuler says that Caesar was like Hitler, which really turns all the guys against me, and we haven’t decided anything before the class is over. Miss Stuart says that we’ll begin to write the script tomorrow.
At three thirty when I go out to the bus, Altschuler is standing there, waiting outside the bus door. I say hello to him.
“Do you want to walk home?” he asks.
I am surprised and don’t say anything. Then I hear a tapping on the window next to the first seat. It’s the kid Frankie Menlo. I wave to him, and he waves back, a big smile on his face.
“I don’t know. I have to get home to walk my dog,” I say to Altschuler.
“OK,” he says and then turns away from me a little bit. Frankie Menlo has stuck his face against the window and is waiting for me. I go up the first step of the bus.
“Hi, Menlo,” I say to him.
“Hi, Ross,” he answers. “I saved a seat for you.”
I go up into the aisle. A lot of little kids are looking from Frankie to me, wondering if I’ll sit down. Frankie pats the seat as though he is going to make it more comfortable for me to sit on. I look back out the door and see that Altschuler has moved away a few feet and is beginning to walk away.
“Menlo,” I say, “thanks for the seat. I’m going to walk.”
Frankie looks as though I dumped boiling water on his face, so I say, “Save me a seat in the morning, Menlo. OK?”
He doesn’t answer, and I run off the bus in a second. I call to Altschuler and ask him to wait up. He keeps walking but slows down a little and I catch up to him.
“I thought you had to walk your dog,” he says.
“I do.”
“It doesn’t take so long to walk home anyway. On some days I’m there almost as fast as the bus.”
We walk along for a few minutes in silence. The bus with Frankie Menlo on it pulls by, and I raise my hand to wave to Frankie. But he’s looking the other way. I wonder if it’s on purpose. Not that it matters. But I am sorry to disappoint the kid.
“There’s this little kid on the bus,” I start telling Altschuler. “He’s really a bright little kid. We had a talk together this morning, and he wanted me to ride home with him.”
“Yes,” Altschuler says. “I saw him.”
I tell him about Frankie’s allowance and the cost-of-living thing connected with it. I tell him I think that’s pretty funny, to have an eight-year-old kid on an allowance with a cost-of-living clause. I ask Altschuler if he doesn’t think that’s funny, and he shrugs his shoulders. I begin to be sorry that I didn’t ride with Menlo. At least with him there’s some conversation, to say nothing of the fact that Frankie looks at me as though I am a big deal.
So I start looking around the street where we are walking. Altschuler knows the direction all right, so I just tag along with him.
It’s warm out, and the sun is shining. It’s January thaw, and now that I’m walking, I’m in no rush. The street we are on is crowded. A lot of the people are only a few years older than me, and they look friendly. I ask Altschuler why some of them look so dirty, and he tells me they are hippies. I have read about hippies a lot of course, as who hasn’t, but I’ve never seen any. A couple of the dirty-looking guys are wearing American Indian clothes and beads, and I ask Altschuler if they are Indians. He laughs, and I think that is the first time he has laughed at something I said, so I laugh too. He tells me that the real hippies are on the East Side, not here on Eighth Street. Someday if we have time, he will take me to see them. He laughs again when he says maybe we can let our hair grow for Julius Caesar and put on a hippie production of the play for Miss Stuart.
It happens that while Altschuler is turning into this big comedian I am occupying myself with staring at someone, trying to decide if it’s a boy or a girl. I’m not even polite about it, and I can almost hear my grandmother telling me that no one on earth should be looked at as a curiosity but only out of curiosity or friendship. Now I know what she meant because I’m looking at this person in a way Grandmother wouldn’t have liked. And the person knows it.
“It’s love, baby,” the person says. “That’s what it’s all about. You gotta wear flowers in your hair.”
And then the person laughs gently as I hurry on because I don’t have anything to say and am too much of a coward to apologize for staring.
“Did you see?” I ask Altschuler.
He nods that he did.
“I’m sorry I stared. I’ve never seen anyone like that before.”
“You have to keep your cool,” Altschuler says.
“What’s that?”
“You shouldn’t get excited just because people don’t look like other people.”
“I’m not excited or anything like that,” I say. “Did you know if it was a boy or a girl?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Didn’t notice! How could you not notice? I mean the person had all this hair, and the way the person was shaped you couldn’t tell, the sweater was so baggy. Is there a lot of that?”
Altschuler tells me that he guesses there is a lot of everything in New York and that I shouldn’t be so sur-prised at the things I see on the street. He tells me that he doesn’t even notice things he was afraid of when he was a kid. He tells me that he used to get frightened when he saw a person lying asleep on the sidewalk but that he is not scared of that anymore.
“Asleep on the sidewalk!” I say.
“Sure. A lot of times you see people lying on the sidewalk or in a doorway. That’s because they are drunks.”
He goes on to tell me about all the places these sleepers can go to live for a night or two if they want to. Places like the Salvation Army. He tells me that a lot of them like to go to jail, but it’s hard to get in these days just for drinking. You have to toss a brick through a window or something like that. Then they will take you into jail for a few weeks and give you food and a bed. He says that’s why so many store windows get broken in cold weather. Windows aren’t broken in the summer because the jails don’t have air-conditioning. That’s why so many drinking people are on the sidewalk in hot weather, he says.
“Maybe they aren’t all drinking people,” I say. “Maybe some of them are sick.”
“That’s what I thought at first.”
“Couldn’t it be that way?”
“No,” Altschuler says.
We are walking up Sixth Avenue now, and we pass this candy shop with a lot of glass jars filled with wrapped candies in the window. I stop to look at the jars because I like candy. Altschuler tells me to come on if I want to walk with him.
“Dougie!” a lady says from inside the store. “Dougie! I haven’t seen you since before Thanksgiving!”
This lady rushes out from the store and grabs hold of Altschuler. Altschuler stands there looking awkward and embarrassed. The lady gives him sort of a kiss, and Altschuler looks even more embarrassed.
“Oh, Dougie,” she says, “I’ve missed you so. And Larry, poor boy. How is he?”
“He’s home again.”
“That’s good news?” the lady asks.
“I don’t know.”
The lady starts to sigh, and then I think she is crying. She says it isn’t fair that anything should happen to such a nice boy. There are plenty of hoodlums on the street, she says, that something terrible like that should happen to. She says there’s no reasoning with God’s will.
Altschuler is just nodding at the lady. He doesn’t have anything to say to her, and he looks at me as though he blames me for stopping in front of the candy store. The lady sees me then too.
“So? Who’s this? Another Larry?”
Altschuler moves away from the store.
“How do you do,” the lady says. “I’m Dougie’s friend. And Larry’s. If you’re their friend, you’re mine too.”
She holds out her hand and shakes mine. I tell her that I am new in New York and that Altschuler and I are in the same class and we live in the same neighborhood. I tell her that I don’t know Larry.
“So? Already he’s forgotten,” she says.
“I just moved here. I never knew him,” I tell her.
“That Larry,” the lady says, “oh, he’s quite a boy. Dougie and Larry came in every Friday for seven years, didn’t you, Dougie?”
Altschuler nods. He is walking away, so I tell the lady that I am glad to meet her, and she says that I should come into the store the next time and that I should bring Dougie with me. She doesn’t like to conduct her social life on the sidewalk, she says.
“Poor Larry,” she says as we walk on, and she goes back into her store. I can hear her take a deep breath and sigh. Altschuler doesn’t say anything, and I don’t figure that I should ask any questions. We walk without speaking for about ten minutes, and then we are at my corner. I stop and tell Altschuler that this is where I will leave him.
“Larry lives in my apartment house,” Altschuler says suddenly. “You are sitting in his seat in most of our classes. He had to stop coming to class just before Christmas. We always went to school together, ever since we were about three. Something happened to his blood. He gets tired all the time. He’s supposed to die this month.”
I don’t know what to say. Altschuler is standing there, expecting me to say he won’t die or something like that, but I don’t have anything at all to say. I want to say I’m sorry, but I know from when Grandmother died that that is a dumb thing to say about dying, so I just stand there like a twirp and look at Altschuler, who looks at me for a minute and then walks off toward his block.
