Free Last Respects by Jerome Weidman Page B

only peripherally. Like the clouds around the edges of a portrait in a museum. Or the grass under the feet of the painted main subject. My eyes were nailed to the stranger in the center.
    My mother had never been inside the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House. During the months of my involvement with Troop 244 she had never acknowledged its existence. I had every reason to believe she did not even know its location. It could have been in her native land. Which was where? Hungary? Far Cathay? The Mountains of the Moon? When you got right down to it, how did I know where she had come from? She could not possibly be here. Therefore she wasn’t. This creature who had erupted in the middle of my signaling triumph and was now destroying it, was somebody else. Not my mother. Who? Across the length of the gym I examined her.
    A skinny little woman. With blond hair pulled back into a neat knot on top of her head. Her little head. Everything about her was little. Especially her face. A fierce little face. But out of that little face two big blue eyes shone like lights. The whole thing—I had the impression of a force, not a human being—sheathed in something black. Not dressed. Wrapped. What she was wearing could have been painted on her body. High neck. Long sleeves. Skirt sweeping the yellow boards of the gym floor. She—no, it!—reminded me of something. I could hear Chink snarling furiously at my feet. I knew I was losing for Troop 244 the right to participate in the All-Manhattan rally. I felt in my sinking gut the waves of contempt and rage I was earning from my fellow scouts. But my mind had room for nothing but the desperate question: Who in God’s name was this stranger?
    The answer surfaced abruptly out of my life at school. More accurately, out of my American history textbook. Coming across the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House gym was Molly Pitcher, moving firmly to take over the gun in the middle of the Battle of Monmouth at which her husband had fallen from a heat stroke. The fact that she looked like my mother didn’t matter. Nobody was fooling me. This was Molly Pitcher.
    “What the hellz she think she’s doing?” Chink Alberg screamed.
    “How should I know?” I screamed back.
    “She’s your mother, ain’t she?”
    This regrettable fact now came crashing down on me like a toppling wall. Because at my mother’s side, moving along beside her across the gym, I saw Mr. O’Hare.
    The scoutmaster was swung slightly to one side and bent over, so the words he was uttering as he moved dropped into my mother’s left ear. It was about two feet below his mouth. I could not, of course, hear Mr. O’Hare’s words, but I knew they were angry. I could tell from his gestures. Great chopping swirls at the air, like an untrained swimmer plunging ahead with a primitive breaststroke. And the color of his face. Like the skin of a tangerine. I knew something else. Mr. O’Hare’s words did not matter. Not to my mother, anyway. Mr. O’Hare was unaware of this. Why should he know that my mother did not understand English?
    “You can’t do this,” Mr. O’Hare was saying as he and my mother reached me and Chink. This was not the first time I had been impressed by the lack of logic, if not intelligence, in the remarks uttered by grownups. It was no time, however, to make notes on mental scoreboards. The fact remains that my mother had done it, and what she had done I found incredible. She had just brought the whole 1927 All-Manhattan rally eliminations finals to a halt.
    “You come with me,” she said to me.
    “What is she saying?” Mr. O’Hare snapped.
    “Listen, Ma,” I said desperately in Yiddish. “For Christ’s sake,” I added angrily in English. “What the heck are you doing?” I concluded hysterically in a combination of both.
    “God damn that bitch,” Chink Alberg said from somewhere around my knees. “She’s messing us up!”
    “Morris, we’ll have none of that language, if you please,” said Mr.