The Jewish year was 5702, but in Boston it was still mostly 1963. Shavuot was the day Herschel Kohn, Philly’s father, had picked to hit the Revere Beach white way with McGuirk, his cook. After copious clams and ale and fan dancers he elected to get the word Bunny, furled in circus letters around a grinning rabbit, tattoed on his pastrami-carving arm. Bunny was what they’d called Philly’s mother at Dorchester High. But after they broke the glass and she joined the Hadassah board she wanted to be Bertha and only Bertha. And, even more than that, she wanted her first-born son to attend Hebrew Teachers College and become a cantor – that’s how beautiful a voice Philly had. Beautiful from the day he was born.
Now we can’t be buried together, Bertha screamed at Herschel. They won’t sell us a plot. Forty years old, he defiles his flesh. And I was in temple– with the kid.
Philly listened in on the screaming and wished he had been out of temple and off in Revere with his old man and McGuirk.
From that day on, Herschel was never again seen at a family gathering wearing a short-sleeved shirt. But all the same, word of the tattoo leaked out and reached Philly’s doctor uncle, Mitchell Schromstein, the big ear, nose and throat man. On the occasion of Dr. Schromstein’s daughter’s wedding, Herschel rented a nice tux and kept his cufflinks on. Still, every time he crossed the dance floor to the Schromstein table the doctor put his nose so high in the air Herschel could see right up the nostrils. To the brain pan. Herschel swore it was true. On my honor as a Jew, Philly overheard him say to Bertha, I poured him a glass of slivovitz, and he wouldn’t drink with me.
You defiled your flesh, that’s why, was his mother’s snarling answer. He’s a doctor, he knows. You can’t hide it from him with a tux.
Philly next saw his doctor uncle at his own Bar Mitzvah, when he was just starting to develop his tonsillitis. His voice was still sweet as a flute – a flute played in Heaven - even though it smarted every time he went up high and attempted vibrato.
After the service Dr. Schromstein hunted him down. He had the look of a warden or a truant officer or a fierce prophet. He buttonholed Philly in the vestry and put an arm on his shoulder.
You did well up there, he said, you’ve learned your alephs and gimmels. But your father… that thing on his arm is as a big as a yarmulke.
He paused and said no more, but the way he rolled his eyes said that doctors do indeed have X-ray vision – and the way his nose rose said even more: If you need a Jewish father, a real one, talk to me. You have my love, you have my pity.
Philly would never forget how the doctor uncle put his proboscis in the air and swept out of the vestry, like an avenging angel taking off for heaven on high.
Not a week after his Bar Mitzvah, Philly was back in the deli, bussing tables in spite of the pain. On either side of his Adam’s Apple were two balloons, and each time he swallowed it was like battery acid going down.
He watched Foley the cop barrel up to the counter. It was the slow part of the afternoon. His old man was behind the glass, wiping down the slicing machine and the steamtable. He had on his short-sleeved whites, and his Bunny tattoo shimmied on the thick part of his arm as he worked the ammonia onto the stainless steel with the cloth.
Philly’s tonsils were raging and the old man was depressed – for reasons that had nothing to do with tonsils. He was in a mood to murder Kindelman’s, the bakery that baked his rolls. For Herschel, it was a dark day if the rolls came in too big. This day they had sent over ten dozen, each and every one bloated like a football.
Fill up a roll that size with meat and I’m in the poorhouse, the old man said. The rule was 3.5 ounces per Hoagie, but not as determined by anything as scientific as a meat scale. Your fingers had to be the scale, and if they were off by the merest smidge, the old man would attack.
You’re killing me, he would say.
When the rolls had come in, Herschel held one up as though he were displaying a genetic monster. He sliced the roll, picked up 3.5 ounces of cold cuts and slipped them in the pocket. The roll swallowed the cold cuts and still looked empty. Philly looked at the roll and felt it was the approximate size of one of his tonsils.
Even as cops go, Foley was big. And notorious for his side business, which worked as follows:
He would wait in hiding at the side of a stop sign. When drivers ran the sign he’d bag them and conduct an on-the-spot trial. The fine was two bucks cash, direct from the driver’s billfold to Foley’s. Therefore the world knew him as Two-Buck Foley.
Two-Buck Foley had a tried and true way of protecting his profit margins. He never paid for what he ate, never even offered. His diet was as predictable as a rhino’s. He subsisted on Hoagies, morning, noon and night.
Philly watched Herschel drop the cloth and stiffen as Foley leaned over the counter and pointed to the biggest of the bloated rolls. That one, he said, and stuff it.
The old man said nothing. His fingers picked up 3.5 ounces, no more and no less. They were incapable of doing otherwise. Once again the roll swallowed the cold cuts and looked as empty as it had in the Kindelman’s box. He threw in a heavy fistful of onions and lettuce, making sure some hunks and leaves protruded. Vinegar was cheap, and the old man squirted on so much it could have cut all the grease on the six glass panels of the counter. Then he plated the sandwich, set a quarter-pickle to the side of it and presented it to Foley on a brown tray.
Coffee with that? Cream?
Foley’s left hand curled into a ham-fist, while his right gripped the black nightstick hitched to his hip. What are you trying to pull? If I wanted a roll I would have asked for a roll. I want a Hoagie, not a roll. Now stuff it – with meat – or you can stuff your victualer’s license.
Philly watched the old man and Foley lock eyeballs, an encounter he had never seen before. What Foley wanted Foley got – it was the house rule. But never before had a roll of such gigantic proportions been part of the picture, and this time the old man was different. He reached to take the roll back but his fingers froze. They froze so long Philly thought Foley was going to rap them with his nightstick.
Finally the old man spoke, but whatever had come over him made it impossible for him to merely speak. He roared.
Eat your graft or get out of my store, he said. You’re nothing but a goddam cop.
Of all the days of Philly’s life, this was the day he was proudest of the old man. No nightstick came out and no mayhem ensued. Foley merely pointed to the coffee urn and said two hits of the creamer. Then he took his tray and sat down, the way a lion sits down when the lion tamer tells him to. For a few minutes at least, Philly was able to forget his swollen throat, because his chest was swollen with admiration.
That night, his mother made him say aahh and told him it was only a matter of time. Time being the dwindling number of days before she gave him over to her brother to scalpel the two bulging masses out of his neck. Even McGuirk said he should do it when Philly couldn’t swallow McGuirk’s flanken with chrain, which was another dish of his that beat Bertha’s official Jewish version silly. Look at you, said the old gravy wrangler from the carrier S.S. Wasp, palpating Philly’s brow as though he were checking in on a roast. You’re red as blood. That fever could melt your brain.
Those were the days when Dr.Schromstein was slicing as many tonsils as Herschel was slicing corned briskets. When he wasn’t operating – on Saturdays, of course – he was binding his tattoo-free arms in phylacteries and presiding over the holiness of his home.
One evening Philly heard his mother say the words “family discount” into the phone, and the very next day, at near dawn, she hustled him off on a trolley odyssey that ended at a small, dreary hospital high on a hill, at the bottom of which was a row of pawn shops and human beings asleep on the littered sidewalk.
No sooner did Philly, in his shiny Buster Browns, set foot in the ward than he was accosted by an orderly, a real County Clare carrot-top, pushing an empty wheelchair.
Let’s go, sonny, the orderly said. Dr. Schromstein’s ready for you. Sit and I’ll take you in.
Bertha flapped her arms. Shouldn’t he change out of his clothes? Doesn’t he get a johnny?
No time for that, said the orderly. Let him just sit. He’ll be fine.
Not even his shoes?
He’ll be fine.
Moments later, in full street clothes and tied shoes, Philly rolled into a grim room that smelled like a germicide factory. His uncle, as usual, had a skullcap on his head, only this time it was the same grayish green as the rest of his outfit.
He stood right in front of the wheelchair and leaned over with that avenging angel look of his, same as that day in the vestry.
I hope your father didn’t give you pig grease yesterday, he said. It will make you sick when you wake up.
Philly felt the rage roll over him, straight up from the soles of his shoes. But what could he say? In a flash his uncle cupped something over his nose and mouth - a wet, acrid rag in a wire cone, and it quickly began to suffocate him.
Let me hear you count to thirty, the gray-green skullcap said. But Philly was too enraged, and too busy trying to breathe. He pushed to stand up, but strong hands from somewhere pushed him back into the wheelchair.
Philly and Buster Brown responded together – and hard.
With the shoe of his right foot he unleashed the kick of his life, straight into the two balls of the man who was not only insulting his old man, but attempting to murder him in a hospital.
Whatever the outcome, Philly knew he had struck paydirt. The last sound he heard, just as the black ocean rose to swallow him, was Dr. Schromstein’s sharp shriek, followed by a long, bellowing howl.
Everyone knew having your tonsils out was no fun, and they had made no bones about giving Philly their bleak opinions. When you wake up, you’ll swear some janitor poured plumber’s lye down your throat, was the way Herschel had put it.
Bad as it was swallowing, it was even worse when Philly broke through the black bog of ether, fought off the tangled bedsheets and tried to speak. The rasp raised the hairs on his mother’s back.
Eat ice cream, she said, slamming his teeth with a tin spoon of cold vanilla. Tomorrow you’ll sound better. You’ll see.
In the corner was the carrot-top orderly, rolling out the wheel chair, his orange eyebrows cocked in an odd way.
Next day, if anything, Philly sounded even worse. Eat lime jello, said Bertha, ramming his incisors with a tin spoon of green slime, and don’t talk all day. The carrot-top orderly, shaking his head, scuttled off with the bed pan.
Six months later, Philly’s throat was fully healed, as far as pain was concerned. He could have eaten a porcupine. But when he spoke – or, worse, sang – the sound was no different than the moment he came out of the operation.
Bertha wrung her hands. Herschel shrugged.
If I can’t be a cantor, Philly said, why Hebrew Teachers College? What’s the point?
Then came the day he was hauling a sack of onions up from the cellar. McGuirk shot out a tattooed arm, straight as a railroad crossing gate. He asked, do you remember your orderly in the ward, and was his hair the color of Orange Crush?
Turned out the carrot-top was McGuirk’s cousin Mulvihill.
From Mulvihill, who didn’t miss a trick at the decrepit and nearly condemnable Powder Hill Hospital, McGuirk learned what Dr.Schromstein had done as payback for the shod foot uncorked on his groin.
He snipped something from your voice box, sonny, McGuirk said. Your warbling days are over. Kiss them goodbye.
For the next three years, Philly and McGuirk drew closer. In the dead hour before the dinner rush they played blackjack, and McGuirk spun tales of the west, where he had been an Aladdin line cook. He taught Philly the blackjack language, phrases like spit in the ocean and through the goalposts.
After high school, Philly kissed Boston goodbye too and never looked back, except for the occasional family visit when he got the right package out of Vegas. He had a new life, in which he could never be a cantor. But then again, in his old life he never could have made Hoagies for Frankie S., or been a regular ranch guest of Wayne.
Newton that is.