The Christmas Kid

The Christmas Kid

IN THAT LOST CITY of memory, the wind is always blowing hard from the harbor and the snow is packed tightly on the hills of Prospect Park. They are skating on the Big Lake and the hallways of the tenements are wet with melted snow and the downtown stores are glad with blinking lights and the churches smell of pine and awe. And when I wander that lost Christmas city, I always think of Lev Augstein.

He was to become our Christmas kid. But he came among us one day in summer, a small, thin boy, nine years old, speaking a language we had never heard. His eyes were wide and brown and frightened, and he wore short pants that first day, and he stood on the corner near the Greek’s coffee shop, staring at us as we finished a game of stickball. When the game was over, my brother, Tommy, asked him to play with us, but the boy’s face trembled and he backed up, his eyes confused. Ralphie Boy handed him the Spaldeen and the boy shook his head in refusal and said something in that language and then ran away on toothpick legs to 11th Street.

“He don’t speak English,” Ralphie Boy said, in an amazed way. “He don’t even speak Italian!”

Within days, we learned that the new kid was from Poland, which we located with precision in our geography books. Poland was wedged between Germany and Russia, and the language he spoke was called Yiddish. We also learned that the boy was living with his uncle, a cool, white-haired man named Barney Augstein.

“If he’s related to Barney,” my father said at the kitchen table, “then he’s the salt of the earth.”

Barney Augstein was one of the best men in that neighborhood, and one of the most important. He was the bookmaker. Each day, dressed like a dude, smiling and smoking a cigar, Barney would move from bar to bar, handling the action. Until Lev arrived, Barney lived alone in an apartment near the firehouse, and they said in the neighborhood that long ago, he had been married to a Broadway dancer. She had left him to go to Hollywood, and this gave Barney Augstein an aura of melancholy glamour. Ralphie Boy, Eddie Waits, Cheech, and the others all agreed that any nephew of Barney Augstein was okay with us.

We learned that the new kid’s name was Lev. Ralphie Boy showed Lev how to hold a Spaldeen, throw it, catch it, hit it, and the rest of us taught him English. We told him the names of the important things: bat, ball, base; car, street, trolley; house, roof, yard, factory; store. Soda. Candy. Cops. Lev stood there while we pointed at things and he named them, proud when he got the word right, but trembling when he got it wrong. “I hate when he does that,” Ralphie Boy said one morning. “It’s like a dog that got beat too much.” And we noticed two things about him. He never smiled. And he had a number tattooed on his wrist.

“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.

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.

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.

Barney Augstein’s living room was packed. Charlie Flanagan was mixing drinks in the kitchen. A woman named Bridget Moynihan was cooking a beef stew. In the living room, seated in a large chair, there was a lean, suntanned, dark-haired man with an amused look on his face. Lev brought me over and said something in Yiddish to this man, and the man shook my hand politely, while Lev told me that the man was his Uncle Meyer.

“Nice to meet you, sport,” Meyer said to me. “You take care of this kid, okay? He’s been through a lot.” He looked down at a diamond pinkie ring. “His mother, his father, the whole goddamn family, except him. They all got it. Know what I mean?”

Then he turned his attention to the TV, talking about Willie Pep with Charlie Flanagan, and about Ray Robinson with Barney Augstein, and then about baseball, and somehow the talk got around to Pete Reiser.

“Pete Reiser,” Lev said. “Like Christmas every day.”

“Now, there’s a smart kid,” said Meyer, and they all laughed. Meyer and Barney argued for a while about the fight on TV, and then Meyer produced the fattest roll of bills I’d ever seen. “Put your money where your mouth is,” Meyer said, and smiled.

“Come,” Lev said, and led me to his room. It was very small — a bed, a bureau, a chair. But it felt like a library. There were stacks of comic books everywhere, grammar books, two fat dictionaries. And drawings that Lev had made: Batman, the Green Lantern, Captain America, Donald Duck. There were other drawings, too; buildings with spirals of black cloud issuing from chimneys; barefoot men with shaved heads and gray pajamas; watchtowers; barbed wire.

“You’re an artist,” I said.

“An artist?”

“Yeah, an artist.”

“Pete Reiser is an artist?”

“Yeah,” I said. “In a way.”

“Like Christmas every day,” Lev said. “An artist.”

Fall arrived. The days shortened. Most of us went to the Catholic school, but Lev enrolled in public school, where Ralphie Boy became his protector. Ralphie Boy had been kicked out of Catholic school.

“The kid is scared all the time,” Ralphie Boy told me. “I gotta teach him how to fight.”

Every day now, the woman named Bridget Moynihan was coming to Barney’s house. She was about forty and lived with her mother and had a plain, sweet face. Barney hired her as a housekeeper, to make sure Lev ate properly and washed himself and always had clean clothes.

“I tried,” Barney said to my father one day. “But I just got no talent for being a mother. This kid is family, you know. I’m his only living relative. But a mother I’m not.”

They started to go to the movies together: Barney and Charlie and Bridget and Lev. They took walks, and went shopping together, too. Then at Thanksgiving, Barney prepared a big dinner. He asked us to come over after our own dinner and make Lev feel like he had a home. But Lev was in his room when we got there, and he was crying. Barney asked me to talk to him.

“Go ’way,” Lev said, turning his back on me, sobbing into his pillow.

“What’s the matter, Lev?”

“Go ’way, go ’way.”

“You don’t like turkey, Lev?” I said.

He whirled around, full of anger. “Too much! Is too much! All food, food, food. Too much!”

I was a kid then, but looking into the eyes of a boy who had survived a death camp, even I understood.

After Thanksgiving, the Christmas season began. Down on Fifth Avenue, store windows magically filled with toys and train sets and red stockings. Christmas banners stretched across the downtown streets, painted with the slogans of Christmas, about peace on earth and good will toward men. Christmas music played from the loudspeakers, and there were Salvation Army bands outside Abraham & Straus and men selling chestnuts and rummies dressed in Santa Claus costumes, ringing little bells. We took Lev with us as we wandered these streets, and he was full of amazement and wonder.

“But what is?” he said. “What is they mean, Christmas?”

“Hey, Lev, fig-get it,” Ralphie Boy said. “You’re a Jew. Christmas is for Catlicks.”

“Explain, please.”

A theological discussion of extraordinary complexity then took place. Was Santa Claus a saint? Did they have Christmas bells in the stable in Bethlehem, and who made them? Did Joseph and Mary put stockings over the mantelpiece, and was there a mantelpiece in that stable? How come the Three Wise Men didn’t come on reindeer instead of camels, and, by the way, where did they come from? If Jesus was the son of God, why didn’t God just show up in person? It got even worse as we roamed around. But Lev stayed with it, almost burning with intensity, as if torn between the images in those store windows and the fact that he was a Jew.

“Why is not for Jews?” he said.

“Because Jesus was a Catlick, Lev,” Ralphie Boy explained.

“No, he wasn’t,” my brother, Tommy, said. “Jesus was a Jew.”

“Come on,” Ralphie Boy said. “Stop kiddin’ around.”

“I ain’t kiddin’,” Tommy said. “Jesus was a Jew. So was his mother and father.”

“That’s right,” I said. “You could look it up.”

“Well, when did he become a Catlick? After he died?”

“How do I know?” Tommy said. “All I know is, while he was here on earth he was a Jew.”

“Ridiculous!” Ralphie Boy said.

If Lev had any doubts about the essential craziness of the goyim, they were not resolved by this version of the Council of Trent.

Then Barney Augstein got sick and was taken to Methodist Hospital. There were whispered conversations about what was wrong with him, and then plans were made by Bridget and my mother and Charlie Flanagan. Bridget moved into Barney’s house, and my mother and Tommy and I came over every night to help Lev with his homework, and the women decided they could give a Christmas party anyway. They would combine Hanukkah and Christmas, get a Christmas tree, hang pictures of Santa Claus around the house, but leave out all the mangers and statues of Jesus. Barney was part of the planning; he called each night from the hospital and talked to Lev and then Bridget, and later Bridget would talk to my mother.

“He wants to get the lad everything,” Bridget would say. “Train sets, and chemistry sets, and a big easel so he can paint. A camera. A radio. And I have to keep stopping him, because he’s gonna spoil that kid rotten.”

Then on December 19, the first snowfall arrived in the city. Lev was in our house and we took him up to the roof and we stood there while the snow fell on the pigeon coops and the backyards, and obscured the skyline and the harbor, and clung to the trees, all of it pure and white and blinding. We scooped a handful from the roof of our pigeon coop, explained to Lev that it was “good packing,” and started dropping snowballs into the street, hoping that we would see Nora the Nose. She wasn’t there but others were, and soon Ralphie Boy was with us, too, and Eddie Waits, and Cheech, and we were all firing snowballs from the rooftops, as skillful as dive-bombers, and Lev was with us, joining in, one of the crowd at last.

“Good packing,” he shouted. “Good packing!”

That night, while we all slept, Barney Augstein died.

They took Lev away two days later. A man and a woman in a dirty Chevy arrived at Barney’s house at eight in the morning, showed Bridget their credentials, and took Lev to the children’s shelter. Somewhere downtown. Where the courthouses were. And the jails. Bridget swore that she looked across the street and saw Nora McCarthy at her window, smiling. We learned all this that afternoon, when Ralphie Boy told us that Lev wasn’t at school. We went up to Barney’s and Charlie Flanagan was there with Bridget.

“He didn’t have papers,” Charlie said. “Barney got him in through Canada. The kid never had papers.”

“So what’ll they do?”

“Ship him back.”

“To the concentration camp?”

“No,” Charlie said. “To Poland.”

“Well, maybe not,” Bridget said. “Maybe he’ll just go to an orphanage.”

“An orphanage?”

We were filled with horror. Poland was bad enough, over there between Germany and Russia. But an orphanage was right out of Oliver Twist. I could see Lev, like Oliver on the H-O Oats box, holding a wooden bowl, his clothes in rags, asking for more gruel. That’s what the book said. Gruel. Some kind of gray paste, what they always fed orphans, and I thought it was awful that Lev would have to spend all his years until he was eighteen eating the stuff. Worse, he could be adopted by some ham-fisted jerk who beat him every night. Or, even worse, someone who hated Jews. And all of us, in that moment, seemed to agree on the same thing.

“We gotta get him outta there,” Ralphie Boy whispered. “Fast.”

The phone rang and Charlie answered it. He talked cop talk for a while, and mentioned the State Department, shook his head, and said he couldn’t adopt a kid because he was single. He hung up the phone, lit a cigar, cursed, and stared at the wall. Then he turned on us.

“All right, you bozos,” he said. “Beat it.”

I was halfway down the block when I realized I’d left my gloves on the kitchen table. I went back. Bridget answered the door and I hurried past her to get the gloves. Charlie was on the phone again.

“Hello, Meyer?” he said. “This is Charlie…”

He glowered at me until I left.

That night it snowed, and kept snowing the next day, and on the day after that, they closed the public schools, and we listened in the morning to “Rambling with Gambling,” praying for more snow and the closing of the Catholic schools, too. The snow piled up in the streets, and we burrowed tunnels through it, and made huge boulders that blocked the cars in the side streets. The park was like a wonderland, pure and innocent and white, the leafless trees like the handwriting Lev used when he showed us his own language, and kids were everywhere — on sleighs, barrel staves, sliding down the snow-packed hills. All the kids except Lev. He was in the children’s shelter, eating gruel.

Then on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Charlie Flanagan rang our bell. My mother went out to the hall and met Charlie halfway down the stairs. There was a murmured conversation. Then she came up and told us to get dressed.

“Charlie’s taking you to see Lev,” she said. She gave us a present she had bought for him, a picture book about Thomas Jefferson, and down we went to the street. Ralphie Boy, Eddie Waits, and Cheech were already in Charlie’s Plymouth, each carrying a present.

“Now, listen, you bozos,” he said, “Don’t do anything ridiculous when we see him. Got it straight? Just do what the hell we tell you to do.”

We drove to downtown Brooklyn, where the government buildings rose in their mean, gaunt style from the snow-packed streets. Charlie pulled the car down a side street and parked. And in a few minutes, a Cadillac parked in front of him. He looked at his watch.

“The party for the orphans is already started,” he said. “So you bozos just come in with us.”

Two men dressed like Arabs got out of the Cadillac. They had headdresses on and mustaches, and shoes that curled up, and pantaloons, and flowing green-and-orange capes. One of them was the largest human being I ever saw. The other one was Meyer.

“Hello, sports,” Meyer said, pulling a drag on a cigar. “Hello, Charlie.”

He handed Charlie a box, and Charlie opened it and took out an Arab costume, and put it on over his suit. In a minute he, too, was a Wise Man from the East, his face covered with a false beard and mustache. We followed the three of them around the corner and into the children’s shelter. There was a scrawny Christmas tree in the lobby, and windows smeared with Bon Ami cleanser to look like they were covered with snow, and cutouts of Santa Claus on the walls, and a few dying pieces of holly. A guard looked up when we walked in, his eyes widening at the sight of the three wild-looking Arabs.

“We’re here for a Christmas party,” the big guy said.

“Oh, yeah, yeah,” the guard said. “Second floor.”

We walked up a flight of stairs. The three Arabs glanced at each other, and Meyer chuckled and opened a door. They stepped into a room crowded with forlorn children, and then started to sing:

“We t’ree kings of Orient are…”

Everybody cheered and they kept on singing and patting the kids on the head, and looking angelic, and then Lev came running from a corner, right to Ralphie Boy, and hugged him and started to cry and then Ralphie Boy started to cry and then everybody was crying and the three Wise Men kept right on singing. They did “Jingle Bells” and “Silent Night” and “White Christmas.” The two guards cheered, and the other kids sang along with them, and then Meyer couldn’t stand it any longer and he lit a cigar, and then the other two lit up, and they were singing “Mairzy Doats,” and the big guy slipped a bottle of whiskey to one of the guards and a cigar to the other, and they went into “Jingle Bells” again, and moved closer to Lev, and after a little while, we couldn’t see Lev anymore. The singing went on. The guards were drinking. And then it was time to go. Meyer, Charlie, and the big guy backed out, doing one final chorus of “We t’ree kings of Orient are…” We followed them outside, waved good-bye, wished all the other kids a merry Christmas, came into the lobby, wished the guard a merry Christmas, too, and headed into the empty street.

Around the corner, Meyer stopped, lifted his whirling Arab costume, and let Lev out.

“Merry Christmas, sport,” Meyer said to the kid. “Merry Christmas.”

For the first time, Lev Augstein smiled.

That night, we sneaked Lev into our house, far from the eyes of Nora the Nose, and said our tearful good-byes. Then we all went down to Meyer’s car. The trunk was packed with suitcases, but they wedged in a few more packages, and then Lev was driven out of our neighborhood, heading into Christmas Day, never to return. A few weeks later, Charlie Flanagan put in his papers, retired from the cops, married Bridget Moynihan, and moved to Florida to live on his pension and serve as a security boss in a certain hotel in Miami Beach. It’s said that he and Bridget adopted a young boy soon after, and raised him as a Jew out of respect for the boy’s uncle. Christmas was a big event in their house, but then so was Hanukkah.

I thought about Lev every year after that, when the snow fell through the Brooklyn sky and turned our neighborhood white, or when somebody told me that the snow was good packing, or when I heard certain songs from hidden speakers. I also thought about him when I met people with tattoos on their wrists, or saw barbed wire. But I didn’t worry about him. I knew he was all right.