Oh, that was him on that wall, Benny Mayer as a young boy, hanging in that museum where–for heaven’s sake–anyone could see. The photo which photographer Seymour Koenig had named “Outcast 1937.” And in giving it that name, also hanging that label–outcast–on Benny. Koenig’s award-winning “Outcast” hanging in New York’s Finch Collection, alongside his “14th Street Shoppers ’35,” his “Bowery Eatery ’36.”
“You’re sure, Benny?” said Lilly. Forty-eight years together, 48 years the photos of Benny as a boy, taking them out, showing them to their kids, the grandkids, 48 years and his wife has to ask him, “You’re sure?”
As for the Finch, the exhibit hall was quiet that morning, from overhead a light so white it made Benny Mayer’s eyes tear, the gallery walls the gray of a house where money’s no problem, where there’s always meat on the table, where nobody–not a mother, not her son–where nobody’s got to do what it takes to make ends meet.
“I know myself when I see me,” he said, trembling slightly, pointing to that boy.
“Not me,” said Lilly. “Sometimes in pictures I confuse me with Rose.”
“Rose is your sister,” he sniped. “If I had a brother, maybe this kid would be him. But I don’t, Lilly. Now do I? Well, do I?”
“Maybe your cousin Danny. . . . “
“It’s me, Lilly. Me. Not Danny. Not Abe. . . . “
And yes, he shouldn’t have raised his voice to Lilly. Not Lilly. But outcast? To call Benny Mayer an outcast? And all at once Benny Mayer was thinking tombstones. He was thinking eternity. This being tagged with “outcast,” the idea itched, it festered, an insect with scales digging under his skin.
As for the picture itself, it was a scene split down the middle. On the left, a bunch of crouching young boys, their sides and behinds facing the camera. If it’s nowadays you could say, laying out a football play. But back in ’37 who had time to think football? You thought money. And food. And your father’s latest excuse to Saperstein the landlord. So what were they doing, those crouching, huddled-up boys? Shooting dice? Hatching a plan? Something . . . something told Benny Mayer he really ought to remember. That, or the very least, where the picture was taken.
On the right side of the photo, some 5 feet from those boys, and staring dead on into the camera, there he is–Benny. White shirt, suspenders, a pair of wool knickers. A kid with hands deep in his pockets, shoulders up around his neck like he’s shivering cold. A cute little guy, he’ll say that for himself. But a kid with a faraway look, eyes you can’t help calling sad, even lost. And it’s this kid, it’s him, who’s Koenig’s subject, the only kid whose face you can see. The kid who, if you didn’t know better–and this Koenig, this picture-taker, Benny would guarantee you he didn’t–you’d say this kid had just been kicked out of that group. But fact is, if anyone was calling the shots around there it was Benny. Benny himself. And don’t take his word for it. Go ask Feder. Ask Isaacs. Two of those crouching young boys. Go on and ask them. If either one of them’s still alive.
“Easy enough to tell for sure if it’s you,” he heard Lilly. “Just come back with some of your old pictures. . . . “
Which is just what Benny Mayer decided to do. The very next day. Bright and early. Though Lilly couldn’t understand what’s the big rush.
“Listen,” he said. “No man wants ‘outcast’ on his tombstone, Lilly. Especially if it’s a lie–which this is. You get to my age, how you’re going to be remembered, your legacy, it’s something you worry about. And sure, we had the kids. And my business. But I know me, Lilly. I obsess. I can’t let go. And long as that picture’s hanging there–and they say it’s the permanent collection, so we’re talking forever–I’ll be worrying. And I know what you’re thinking: Who’s gonna know? Well the answer is, me. I’ll know. Every time I think of a museum, I’ll think of that photo. And every time I see a photo, I’ll get myself upset. And nobody wants that, Lilly. Least of all you. So you better hope that they change it. Hope and pray. Let them call it ‘The Kids.’ Call it ‘The Boys.’ “
Lilly nodded. But fact is there was more, something Benny did not, would not say, a nagging in his gut, an uneasiness, something he could not put his finger on. A something he’d stashed away; something maybe better off not remembered. But one thing Benny knew. The big clock was ticking, ticking away. And he was not going to die with that outcast name hanging over his head. And he was almost out the door on his way to the Finch when he heard his wife call after him,
“What was going on with you that day, Benny? Because you don’t look exactly happy, you know.”
Incredible, eh? Sixty-three years–a lifetime–and she expected him to remember that one day.
From the journals of Seymour Koenig:
“1937: October 15. More and more I am struck by the young ones, the boys. Older than their years, ten, twelve years old, but with the nothing-to-lose defiance of twenty. Life has not been good to these boys. Hunger, cold; these have driven them to the streets, sharpened their senses, rewarded their toughness with the ability to sniff out opportunity (stealing one’s expensive camera, for example). They travel in packs these boys, wild dogs, wolves, eyes cold, their movements swift and sudden. . . . “
On his way to the Finch he leafed through the Finch Collection’s brochure. Seymour Koenig’s reputation was built during the Depression, ’32 to ’39. His photographs of New York–silver gelatin prints, the leaflet called them–the hungry, the at-the-end-of-their-ropes, tattered men, grizzled, in line for work, or if no work, then for bread. Koenig mostly shot close-ups; men’s faces hopeless but all the same angry, you could even say proud. Pictures ordered by the government no less. No money for jobs, but for pictures, for that they had plenty.
And according to that brochure the mystery when it came to Seymour Koenig was always, How did he get up so close, close enough to catch the suspicion in one man’s eye, in another the mouth with teeth that were rotting? And it wasn’t the lenses. And Koenig did not ask permission. No. This Koenig invented what he called a Periscope Lens. A fancy name for a small lens stuck onto the side–not the front–of his camera. So, when it seemed that Koenig was looking straight ahead what he was actually doing was focusing off to the side. Aha! Which explains how, when he walked up to young Benny Mayer that day–63 years ago now–Benny didn’t say, “Get lost,” never thought to smash that camera of Koenig’s (10, but Benny already tough as they come). A periscope camera; Benny picturing the images bouncing off more mirrors than in the regular kind. And so an image, Benny decided, which was especially distorted. Which explains how Koenig had made that mistake, his naming it “Outcast.”
Benny brought several 1937 photos of himself to the Finch. The resemblance to the young Benny in that picture? Unmistakable. Beyond debate. The Finch’s assistant curator was a fellow named Fletcher. Thirty, at most. A striped shirt, yellow tie, a crop of wheat-colored hair longer on top than the sides. A man of privilege, involved more with his looks than with what goes on inside–that was Benny’s read.
“Remarkable,” he said, looking at Benny Mayer, then the Finch picture, then the photos Benny had brought. But when Benny told him the reason he’d come the young man’s expression took a turn. Was Benny out of his mind? Even dangerous? And after taking a step back in his office–all leather and chrome, table tops made of glass–the young curator asked, “And you want the title changed because . . . ?”
Benny made his case. Told him everything (at least everything he’d told Lilly). And when he was done, and with Fletcher’s expression changed to amused, the same amused you have when a baby tries his first step, Fletcher said, “I see. And I do understand. But of course there’s nothing I can do. . . . “
Of course Benny Mayer did not know this man Fletcher. But he did know this much: Fletcher did not understand. For one, he was young, too young to care about what one leaves behind. And two, Fletcher had not spent one hungry day the whole of his life, so hungry he cannot sit up without pain, cannot think, cannot sit. . . . So why go to school? He did not see his mother get up at 4 in the morning, put out clean clothes for her son, her daughter, put out bread and jam for her still-in-bed husband. That, then take the subway up to the Bronx, to Riverdale, to clean other people’s houses, to change filthy sheets. Mr. Fletcher did not have a father too proud, too full of himself, to take what work there was, who called himself a philosopher, whose “work” was more important than taking time out for God (not that he believed in a God, no, no, not his pop). His pop’s work? Getting the garment industry bosses to recognize the unions. Not that the man belonged to a union, his father who spent afternoons in Bryant Park with his cronies talking Lenin and Trotsky and how every man deserves his share. And Mr. Fletcher did not have to steal to get money to get shoes repaired. Benny’s shoes. And Fanny’s, his kid sister’s. Shoes he stole. Pants he stole. Tomatoes and apples, he stole them, then sold them. Ten years old, for heaven’s sake, robbing people almost as poor, as hungry, as he. From stores, from pushcarts. And face to face with that Fletcher, Benny suddenly remembered the synagogue. His neighborhood’s Osheh Zion, of all places. The green metal contribution box, stored in a small room behind the pulpit (this he had learned from the rabbi’s big-mouthed son), the back-room window left open to air the place out. And it was up through that window young Benny would go every Saturday, the rabbi too busy being holy to count change on the Sabbath (or like his father, too important, to worry over money). He took a little at first–25 cents. Later, more. So he stole. He stole from his own. Stole from God, you could say. And this Mr. Fletcher–who can’t change the name on a picture–he never had to dirty his hands, never had to stoop so low. Why? Because men like Benny Mayer, they did what they had to do to survive, to create a world where the Fletchers, where Benny’s own son, never would have to.
“When we purchase a collection,” Fletcher was saying, hands clasped like a preacher’s, “we purchase the names the artist has given his work. Think of Picasso, think Dali, Kandinsky. My goodness, you would never see anyone suggest we change the names of their paintings . . . . “
“Not a painting,” said Benny. “We’re talking real life here, mister. What if Koenig, what if he called the photograph ‘Flowers’? Or ‘Airplanes’? Everyone would tell him, ‘Koenig, you’re crazy’–am I right? And calling it ‘Outcast,’ that’s just as crazy. Me, an outcast? Who dated the prettiest girls–including, I might add, my wife? Who built his business up from nothing to five locations? Who, three times running, was elected president of the congregation, who raised the money for the Hebrew school my own children attended?”
Beneath the photo, beneath the title, was another, smaller plaque. “From the Collection of Elias Koenig.” “We purchased the items from the Koenig family,” said Fletcher. “His son. If there is any changing of titles to be done–and believe me, there’s no chance, none whatsoever–we’re going to have to get permission from him. Those were the conditions. They keep final say over how the photos are exhibited.”
“Put me in touch with this Elias,” said Benny. He didn’t know Seymour Koenig. Never laid eyes on him or his trick of a camera. But he had to have been a grown man when he took those government pictures. So this son, this Elias, a good chance he was a contemporary of Benny’s, a very good chance. And men his age, they all have one thing in common. They all worry about how they’ll be remembered.
From the journals of Seymour Koenig:
“1937: October 16. A new approach. Rather than the ‘shoot and run’ I have been following I will attempt to remain with a subject, to tell more of a story than can be rendered in one exposure. Whether I can accomplish this, I do not know. Whether I can do this safely, covertly, this is an even greater concern. I am, I should tell you, no fighter. No runner. What confidence I have comes from the apparatus I have added to my camera; the side lens. While it does not render me invisible, I do appear less intrusive, less a threat. . . . “
Benny’s oldest son, Jeffrey, is 40. A lawyer. “Legacy, Pop? What you’re remembered for? What nonsense. You talk as though your life’s over. But it’s not, Pop. Not by a long shot. You’re healthy–your 5-mile walks, your waist size the same as 10 years ago. You’re vital, Pop, full of spunk. What I’m saying, Pop–if you’ll stop looking at me that way–is, put your vitality to good use. Travel. Volunteer. Spend more time with Mom. Not this, Pop. Because who’s going to know that it’s you? And who’ll care? And what if. . . . suppose the name Koenig gave the picture is right, is somehow . . . appropriate? You say yourself you can’t remember everything. Well what if this photographer had his eye on you kids? Stealing tomatoes. Stealing apples. For all you know, Koenig might have taken other pictures too. Might even have seen something that caused him to give that picture that name.”
Koenig called his side-mounted lens a Periscope, a way to see what you want without anyone knowing. As for Benny, whatever he knew from periscopes back then, he learned from his Uncle Joe, his mom’s brother. In those days they sold soft cheese in a box, a box out of wood, the size of a milk carton. A cheesebox they called it, the dairy’s name–Benny’s mother bought Breakstones–on the side. At both ends of the box, openings to scoop out the cheese. And inside, in three of the corners, his Uncle Joe attached mirrors, small, like the neighborhood ladies carried in their purse. The boys able to look in and see out the other end of that box but–because of the mirrors–at a right angle. It let them look around corners. And into first-floor apartments, like the Epsteins’, where Lena and Bessie were sometimes undressed. And into the back room of the synagogue, it let Benny Mayer look in there too.
Now when he thinks back to “the boys,” Benny means himself, and Feder, and Isaacs, and “Fast Eddie” Baum. The four of them jumping the turnstiles of the 3rd Avenue “L,” riding it uptown, farther and farther from their parents, from their neighborhood, from that place where they were looked at as nothing but boys. They called where they were going to Yorkville, East 86th, a load of Germans living up there in those days. Beer halls. Sausage stands. The smell of hot, steamy cabbage. Germans. Big chests and rough hands, but according to the boys’ families, shortchanged in the department of brains. And though nobody knew for sure what was going on over in Europe, their parents suspected. Everybody had an uncle, a brother who sent letters crying they lost their business, their house. So the boys didn’t see it as a bad thing, robbing those Germans. They were Americans, the four of them. American tough. American swaggers. A Robin Hood kind of a thing, that’s what it was.
Isaacs was the largest (in the Finch photo that’s him, the one with his big behind in the air). Blond and blue eyes, hands big as a man’s. So big, so blond, none of those Germans gave a thought to him browsing their goods, touching, squeezing, always with a smile and a nod–whether it was to Krieger the grocer, or Deutch the baker, or the haberdasher named Gottfried. Not once did they catch Isaacs stuffing his long coat with fruit, with cans of tomato herring or sardines, a pair of canvas shoes, a wool hat. But to be extra careful they also had Feder, two years older than the rest, dark skin and dark eyes, a mouth that wouldn’t quit yapping. That’s Feder’s profile in the photo, a face like a possum (they called him “The Rat”), crouching at the right of the group. And while Isaacs was stuffing his pockets, Feder was drawing attention, acting suspicious, which for him was a snap. “Hey, Mister. You got any tomatoes what ain’t smashed?” And Fast Eddie Baum? He was the runner. The others get caught, at least their goods make it back to the West Side, Isaacs passing over his take, Baum jack-rabbiting it up to the “L.” As for Benny himself, he thought of himself as the brains. Officially, the lookout. Looking out for the cops, for anything moving on East 86th Street dressed in blue.
So you’ll forgive Benny Mayer for that one day when he didn’t look out quite so good. The one day he didn’t notice the others, the boys, three maybe four years older than him. “What are you kids doin’ over this side’a town?” But these boys, these Germans, they already knew. Because before Benny could lie, could say he was waiting for his pop to come out of Krieger’s, these boys took from their pockets iron locks. Black iron locks. And when these German kids slipped their fingers through the locks’ iron loops, Benny knew just what was coming. “Cause every time we see you little Jews, next thing you know our pops’ stores have been robbed. . . . ” The talking kid had a head big as half the size of his body, a face that was red, teeth big as the teeth on a saw. And once the German boys started in swinging their iron-lock knuckles, Benny couldn’t breathe for the pain. Punches to his belly, his ribs, punches and more punches. And once he was sprawled down on the cold sidewalk, alongside Feder and Isaacs, even Fast Eddie Baum, there were the kicks. Sixty-three years later, 63 years and he suddenly remembers every one, every boot. And he remembers thinking, I’m not coming back here to Yorkville, not any time soon. No iron locks, no kicking a kid when he’s down. No. From then on what stealing he’d be doing would be closer to home.
From the journals of Seymour Koenig:
“1937: October 16. I have chosen for these longer studies Manhattan’s West Side. ‘Hells Kitchen,’ tenements corner-to-corner, a section tucked between the city’s garment makers and the dozens of piers lining the Hudson. A neighborhood of second generation Americans, Jews, Italians, a spattering of Irish. A neighborhood of afternoon stoop-sitters, sidewalk politicians, the same bands of boys I’d steered clear of during my earlier work on the Bowery. “
Just as he thought, Elias Koenig was a man of Benny’s generation. “If my father called it ‘Outcast,’ he undoubtedly had good reason.” The son was small, froglike, something of an oddball by the look of him. First, and plain as the nose on his face, the hairpiece, a rug black and shiny as shoe polish. And sitting on his nose, in frames the same black as that toupee, a pair of oversize glasses.
“He probably thought so,” said Benny. Then he added, “Look. I didn’t come here to call him a liar. But mistaken? An honest mistake? That’s always possible, right?” Belligerence was going to get Benny nowhere here, this he knew. Elias Koenig’s expression said, Give me just one good reason to tell you to leave. “It’s important to know whose picture you’re taking,” Benny went on. “Their history. You ought to know that before you give them a name, call them an outcast.”
It was one of those prewar Manhattan apartments, a maze of lefts and then rights, large rooms off the hallways. Koenig and Benny were standing in the living room, formal, spotless, no children ever allowed. No children, no pets, no food or drink. A room of overstuffed furniture, of walls trimmed in a cherry-dark wood. And from Elias Koenig there came no “Please take a seat,” no “A little something to drink?” In fact it had taken four calls before he would agree to see Benny Mayer, to give him five minutes. And then only after Benny’s Lilly got on the line and said how impossible her husband had become. How she’d consider it a personal favor. . . .
“There’s something you don’t know,” Elias Koenig began. “Something you couldn’t know. My father kept a journal, a written record of his work. Reflections. The hurt, the pain, the people he spoke with, the people to whom he gave what money he could. And he had very little to give, believe me.” Elias Koenig’s voice, it was not at all what Benny had expected. There was confidence in that voice, admiration for his father, plain and simple. “He was a dedicated man,” Koenig was saying. “Not merely to his craft, but to a cause, the possibility, no matter how remote, that his pictures might somehow improve the conditions. . . . ” Elias Koenig stopped short. As if he didn’t want to get carried away, today maybe not the first time he’d given this speech. “And so, Mr. Mayer, contrary to your assumption, my father did know his subjects, his cast of characters. Oh, not in every case; certainly his shots of crowded streets, the long lines of men, these didn’t allow him that luxury. But a shot such as yours, a more personal statement, would it surprise you to learn my father had taken more than one shot of you? And over more than one day?”
So. Benny’s son Jeffrey had guessed right. And like the photo at the Finch, Benny was split down the middle. One part proud of his boy, the other part afraid of what these other photos might have caught.
“When you called, Mr. Mayer, when you said what you were after, I looked into my father’s archives. . . . “
Archives? Archives? “I can go through them?” said Benny, sparking at the chance, his hand on Koenig’s round shoulder. “These archives?”
When Elias Koenig shook his head, he also jutted his jaw to show he meant business. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We don’t want any unnecessary exposing of the pictures to light. Any unnecessary handling. . . . “
Benny Mayer is not a young man. Seventy-two. And no longer in the market for physical confrontation. But whatever these archives were, whatever and wherever, he was tempted, sorely tempted to push the smaller, lighter Elias Koenig to one side and grab what photos he wanted. What photos he needed. Turns out that these archives of Koenig’s consisted of dozens of cardboard boxes, boxes filled to overflowing with photos. And binders, probably the journals Koenig’s son had mentioned. The whole of this was kept in what in any other house would be a guest bedroom, shades drawn, the room dark and cool. A room that had not seen the light of day in more years than Elias Koenig could remember–Benny was sure. Binders and boxes of photos, stacked one on the other inside an enormous oak armoire, 6 feet wide if an inch, each box, each binder, labeled with a black marking device, year and month. Yes, Benny Mayer was tempted. But instead of the shoving he decided to promise, “I’d be careful.”
“Sorry,” said Koenig. “I’m showing you the room only so you’ll know I took your request seriously. To show that these other photos do exist.”
From the journals of Seymour Koenig:
“1937: October16. And though I have avoided these bands of young boys, something draws me to them now. I tell myself that in these boys lies the future. Europe calls; its deteriorating situation shall lead us to war during the next five or ten years. And it is these boys who might well be the stuff of that war, that stuff sent to defend our shores. And so while it is today’s fathers who are carrying the economic yoke, our hopes for the future will rest with the will of these boys, boys who one day soon will turn from day-to-day pranksterism, day-to-day survival. Turning to the business of our nation’s turnaround, its survival.”
The idea, that someone had followed him, snapping, catching him unawares. . . . This notion, it caused Benny to search through his own mental records, to the kind of filling his pockets he’d gotten into once Yorkville was out of the question. And it came to him that climbing through the synagogue window started around that time. And if Seymour Koenig was using his Periscope to maybe catch him at that window, it was his own cheesebox of a periscope that allowed him to look up and into the temple’s small room, lifting that cheesebox over his head and, the coast clear, wriggling inside. The overheated room smelling of sweat mixed with damp, smelling of decaying old books. And under the roll-top of the desk, grasping that green box in both hands, fighting off the cold feet that gripped him each time his hands gripped that box. Because . . . because what if his father was wrong? What if there was a God, a God who was watching? What then? But always Benny shrugged off these thoughts, taking enough coins from the box to make the act worth the trouble, the risk. Second thoughts? It would be a lie to say never. But that synagogue, the same building in which lived Rabbi Strauss and his family, it was warm in the winters where in Benny’s apartment they slept in their coats, the rabbi’s upstairs apartment smelling from stewing meats, his wife, his sons, pink and round from that meat, from rye bread slathered with chicken fat. Fat and warm while Benny sold tomatoes in knickers torn at the knees. While his mother changed sheets.
Benny stole from that temple for weeks. Months. Even when in his neighborhood there were whispers, “Somebody’s robbed the Trade Union Hall.” A large sum–not quarters, not coins–union dues, emergency funds. Naturally now the neighborhood was on guard. And when the new temple on 10th Avenue was robbed–an amount so big they put in an overnight guard–even that didn’t stop Benny. So long as his clothing was wearing out, so long as his sister’s was, too, so long as his temple’s window was open, he took what he could. As for Baum, and Isaacs, and Feder, they went on with their swiping vegetables and fruits (only not up in Yorkville), swiping then selling them, all of them meeting on the Hudson River piers late afternoons to divide up their loot. Even though they didn’t work as a team, what was theirs, it was Benny’s. And what was Benny’s was theirs too.
From the journals of Seymour Koenig:
“1937: October 17. On a wide pier on the Hudson, the pier’s wide wooden planks rotting, the smoke-stacks of Jersey belching haze into the sky, I believe I have found them. They meet here each afternoon. A group, no, no, a gang. Hungry, angry, fearless. My boys. “
‘The piers,” he said to Lilly one night. She looked up from the TV. “The shot of me, the ‘Outcast,’ Koenig took that shot of me on the piers. The guys and me, crouching, divvying up our loot. That’s what we’re doing. And where.”
“Them,” Lilly said. “They’re the ones dividing it up. Them but not you.”
And of course she was right. Them and not Benny. Now the question was, Why?
For the answer he didn’t need Elias Koenig, him or his precious photo archives. Because the brain, the brain is a funny thing. Things you think you’ve forgotten, think you’ve lost, all you really need is a way to get at them–a path. The picture hanging in the Finch, the Periscope Lens, his uncle’s cheesebox, the synagogue window, the trade union, and now . . . now the piers.
It was warm for October, the air heavy and wet. If he’d done this once–lifting his periscope box to that window–he’d done it 30 times. But today, this would be the first time that gadget of his would catch somebody else inside, someone else milling about, the back of a green vest he’d seen before, white sleeves rolled to the elbow, a pair of pink hands too soft for hard work.
Benny’s father had already opened the top of the rabbi’s roll-top desk. He was reaching inside now, pulling open a small drawer. Feeling around, his eyes shut, as though if he didn’t see what he was doing it was not really being done (always his eyes closed when he hit Benny, hit little Fanny). Feeling around and then taking out of that drawer a 1-inch-thick stack of bills. Ones, fives, even 10s, who could say? And why they were there and not in a bank? And how did his father find out? So many questions. . . . But quick-as-a-blink Benny let go his cheesebox, dropped it from over his head to the dirt. And even as it went “clunk,” even as he started away, climbing the back-yard fence, heart thump-thumping at the back of his throat, already his mind was trying hard to make sense. His father who stayed in bed until 9, turns out he did more than spend afternoons in Bryant Park, did more than shout union slogans safe from the crowd. His father–and by now Benny was turning right on West 38th, the gray-gleaming Hudson River already in view–his father stole and stole big. And not just from here, Osheh Zion, but Benny decided it was his father the neighborhood had been buzzing about. The union dues, the 10th Avenue temple. His father. His blood. But did they, Benny’s family, did they see so much as 1 cent? Ha! Because if they did, would his mother have to schlep uptown to Riverdale to carpet-sweep peoples’ rugs, empty their trash? Would she have to get up at 4 in the morning for heaven’s sake?
The throaty horns of steamships, the smell of fish and sea salt. Less than a block from the Hudson when something came to him, slapped him on the side of his face. He stopped in his tracks and for a second gave serious thought to not going on, to not meeting the guys today, Isaacs and Baum and the possum-faced Feder. For one thing today he had nothing to share–not a cent. But for another there was this. He was no different, no better than his old man. Oh, Benny could be angry, raging angry. His pop so stay-in-bed lazy, his speeches about one world, the rights of the workers. But really, who was Benny to be angry? To be so holier than thou?
Elias Koenig phoned Benny Mayer one night. A week since Benny had visited his apartment, since he’d said no to Benny’s going through the archives
“I’ve got nothing to say,” he told Lilly.
“Tell him yourself,” she said, and handed over the phone.
“You never asked to see my father’s journals,” said Koenig. “But I looked up the dates. And it happens he wrote quite a bit about you.”
“You said I couldn’t go through the photos. So I naturally assumed. . . . “
To which Koenig said, “And again you assumed wrong.”
He brought his son with him to Koenig’s. For one thing Jeffrey wanted to go. Reading about his old man as a boy, Jeffrey said it intrigued him. But also Benny didn’t know what he was going to hear from those journals, or what else he would want–or demand–to get his hands on. Bringing along his lawyer of a son, it seemed a good idea.
Seymour Koenig’s journals were in tall, hardcover binders, green-lined pages, like bookkeeping ledgers. They made up one entire shelf of the armoire, the one time he’d been in the room Benny had counted 20 volumes at least. On this visit Elias Koenig was far more hospitable, as though what he’d read in those journals had cast Benny in an altogether new light. He asked the Mayers to sit. Benny and Jeffrey on the overstuffed sofa, 30 years old if a day. At an angle to them, in an enormous leather armchair Benny guessed was his father’s, sat Koenig
“Would you prefer to read it yourself?” said Koenig, holding out the journal. “Or I can read it to you. . . . “
“We’ll read it,” said Jeffrey. “And in private.” There was lawyer in his tone–too much lawyer for Benny’s taste–and Benny placed his hand over his son’s.
Elias Koenig smiled–the first time–his hair-piece shifting slightly when he did. “As a photographer, my father was a true artist. As a writer–and here I’m talking about his actual handwriting–I’m afraid it is like reading a doctor’s prescriptions, all scribbles and scrawl. But I’ve become used to his curls, his above-and-below-the-lines. So I’m able to make out. . . . “
“Read,” said Benny. “Read. I’ve got nothing to hide. Besides, I figure you already read it. “
Again Koenig smiled. And after opening the volume to the page he’d marked with a clip, he began:
“1937: October 17. I am forever amazed to see people of this group involved with crime. I was always told that theft, easy-money, was not the province of Jews. That Jews would gain what there was to gain through hard work, through study, through substituting long term growth for immediate gratification. But here is this group of four boys, Jews judging by the last names by which they call each other. More than stealing from shopkeepers, from businesses, these boys are fearless, cold-hearted. Today I saw one of their group swipe money from a restaurant table-top, money just put down to settle a tab. And then later, on my way home, I saw another swiping a nickel from another el rider, just as it was about to be dropped into the turnstile. . . . “
Benny wanted to laugh. His gang, they were all that Koenig said they were, all that and more. So much he’d forgotten. . . .
” . . . But one boy,” Koenig was going on, “doesn’t seem quite so eager. Where the others seem not to have to think about what they are doing, I see in this one boy, concern. Perhaps he isn’t as hungry (though this I doubt). I read hesitation in his moves, a split second off in his grabbing a coin. . . . “
And Benny suddenly decided it wasn’t such a good idea, this inviting along his son. So worried about the way he’d be remembered, but now look what was happening. Exposing to Jeffrey things . . . things there was nothing to be proud of. Because it was a whole other time, you see. A whole other set of circumstances. But would Jeffrey understand? Would he still see Benny as the father who told him, “Save your pennies.”? Who built a business from nothing? Who every time he saw an easier way to make a buck–a loophole, a cheaper price for not-so-good equipment–he thought of his own father, standing in that back room, clutching those bills, Benny then buckling down, working even harder. Just to prove that it was not in the blood, this taking what’s not yours. And his Jeffrey should know this, should see. It is not in the blood.
But across from them Elias Koenig had turned to a new page:
“October 20. Where this one boy goes a number of afternoons each week is to the back of a synagogue. Curiously, he carries with him a cheesebox. A cheesebox of all things. But I quickly saw that just as I had my own device for spying, for catching people unawares, this boy has put together a device all his own. One that lets him peer up and in through the synagogue’s window. “
So Seymour Koenig had followed him for who knows how long. And as Elias Koenig read on, Benny heard that Seymour Koenig had stood close by, watching as Benny pulled himself up and in through that window. He had watched Benny for days, watched each time Benny checked that inside the temple the coast was clear. And Koenig had been watching that other time too. The time that someone else was inside that small room. Koenig writing:
“For some reason today the boy chooses not to wriggle inside. Instead the boy turns and he runs. He runs fast, so fast, with such abandon, I thought for certain he would be struck by a Seventh Avenue tram.”
Elias Koenig let out a sigh. The day had moved on. It was late afternoon, the room taking on a warmth in the glow of two old standing lamps.
“The boy had nothing to show for his day,” Koenig went on. “At their customary spot on the 38th Street Pier, tucked behind the night-guardsman’s house, the other boys had already spread their day’s take on the wide wooden planks. A hot wind was in off the river, the boys’ hair wild with the dampness. The boys were squatting, dividing up the coins. I wasn’t more than thirty feet away, closer to those boys than I had ever before dared. But involved in this project so long I have developed a sense about things, about people. A sense which told me that this day, today, would be special. And as I approached, to all the world appearing as though my subject was the elevated West Side Highway, the boy I’d been following announced, ‘I got nothing.’ This seemed of no special concern to the others. In fact when they looked up at him from their coins, their expressions said, OK then, next time. But the boy had something else, something more on his mind. Was it whatever it was he’d seen through his cheesebox in the synagogue’s back room? Perhaps. But the next moment the boy said, ‘No more. I ain’t doing this no more. This, what we’re doing, this stealing ain’t right. . . . ‘ One of the other boys in that group has the face of a fox. A fox or a jackal. In any case, older than the others by two years, even more. A boy I have come to take as the group’s leader, and today I was proved right. Without a word, without warning of any kind, and still in his crouch, this boy’s right hand connected hard with the jaw of the boy with the cheesebox. This followed immediately by his left hand landing hard on the cheesebox boy’s chin. ‘Nobody quits,’ said the boy, his eyes flashing up from under thick brows. ‘You hear me? Nobody.’ And at that the jackal went back to stacking the coins. I thought the struck boy would simply remain in his crouch, those blows to the face all the convincing required. I was wrong. Because a minute or so and that boy stood right up and, stepping away from the group, turned in my direction. I’ve been spotted, I thought. He’s spotted me and is about to tell the others, and if I want to hold on to my camera I’d better get going. But again I was wrong. Whatever this boy was looking at, whatever he was thinking about, it certainly wasn’t me. And as I snapped his photo I said to myself, This cheesebox boy is going to have a rough time of it. Regardless of whether he decides to quit, or decides to buckle under, this boy is an outcast. And somehow he knows it. The look of pain on his face, the pain that comes from making a choice between what he wants, what he believes, and what is being demanded. . . . Quit and he is an outcast to that group, his society, to its ways of surviving. Go along, buckle under, he is an outcast to himself.”
Right here Benny Mayer took a breath, a deep one, and loud. And as he let that breath out, Elias Koenig closed the large book. “That was all.”
Benny said, “Nothing else? Nothing from other days? Something later?”
Koenig shook his head.
“What did you end up doing?” This from Jeffrey. Incredible that after all the lessons he taught him, the examples he had set, that his son should still have to ask. “Did you quit them or not?”
“I want to thank you,” said Benny, standing, his hand extended to Koenig, who was standing himself.
Koenig’s handshake was firm. “I hope, Mr. Mayer, that this puts you at ease.”
“It does,” Benny waved a hand. “Yes, it does.”
“And the name, the ‘Outcast’?”
“It’s what your father saw,” Benny said. “It’s the way that he saw it. And who am I to say that your father was wrong?”
