Free Last Respects by Jerome Weidman

accurately, those first five years had been spent in that railroad flat and in the shadow of my mother’s slender and almost tiny figure: she put on only a little flesh in her middle years; she weighed a hundred and five pounds the day I was born, and she was still almost exactly that the day she died.
    When I say I lived in that flat, I do not mean what most people mean when they say they live in a certain place, a geographical point from which they leave daily, let us say, to go to work, and to which they return nightly to be fed, have some entertainment, and then go to sleep. When I say I lived in that flat on East Fourth Street for the first five years of my life, I mean it the way Edmund Dantes would mean it if he were describing his residence in the Chateau d’If.
    I never went down into the street without my mother. I never met a human except in her presence. I don’t recall that I wanted to. It never occurred to me to question my way of life. I hope Dr. Spock is not listening, but I have a strong feeling that very few five-year-olds do. I just jogged along from day to day, doing what I was told, trying to stay out of trouble, and listening quite a lot. What I heard was not very exciting. The adults who lived on our block were almost all, like my mother, immigrants from Hungary or, like my father, immigrants from Austria. They spoke what my parents spoke: Yiddish and Hungarian. So did I.
    Then, in the middle of my sixth year, the laws of her new country penetrated to my mother’s consciousness. I don’t know how. Perhaps a neighbor warned her that by keeping me in the house she was doing something that would bring down on her the retaliation of authority. This seems to me a reasonable guess. My mother’s whole life, as I look back on it, was directed by a ceaseless effort to avoid tangling with the law. Anyway, she took me around the corner to P.S. 188 and registered me in kindergarten class. The English language exploded all around me.
    The immediate result was to force on me a double life. It lasted for six years, and I loved every minute of it. Every minute of my double life, I mean. For those six years it was Yiddish on the fourth floor of 390 East Fourth Street; English in P.S. 188 and on the surrounding pavements. I’m pretty sure my mother was aware of my double life. But she pretended she knew nothing about it. Which leads me to conclude that she was afraid of my life in P.S. 188 and on the surrounding pavements, because I learned as I grew older that her way of treating anything terrifying was to turn her back on it. What didn’t exist could not hurt her. Or so she thought. All I thought about was the fun I was having.
    Then one day I was summoned from my 6-B class to the office of Mr. McLaughlin, the principal.
    “A great honor has been conferred upon you,” he said. Mr. McLaughlin looked like a British officer in one of those steel engravings that illustrated Vanity Fair. Perhaps he was aware of this and tried, when he spoke, to underscore the image. The word honor, when he pronounced it, came out as un-oar. “You are going to be transferred from P.S. 188 to a rapid advance class in Junior High School 64 on Ninth Street,” he said. “This is being done because of your brilliant scholastic achievements.”
    I did not understand what Mr. McLaughlin was talking about, and no wonder. The truth probably was P.S. 188 was becoming unmanageable because of overcrowding. To solve the problem Mr. McLaughlin had undoubtedly solicited the help of friendly principals in nearby junior highs. Their help enabled Mr. McLaughlin to transfer a number of students out of P.S. 188 to less congested schools. I think I was one of the few boys from P.S. 188 who landed in J.H.S. 64 on Ninth Street.
    At first I was apprehensive about the transfer. Ninth Street was five blocks uptown from the block where I had thus far spent all of my life. It doesn’t sound like much. What’s five blocks? Well, in my day, which was half a