City Boy

by Herman Wouk

Genres: Classics; Coming of Age; Historical Fiction; Jewish Fiction

Synopsis

An "enormously entertaining" portrait of "a Bronx Tom Sawyer" (San Francisco Chronicle), City Boy is a sharp and moving novel of boyhood from Pulitzer Prize winner Herman Wouk.



A hilarious and often touching tale of an urban kid's adventures and misadventures on the street, in school, in the countryside, always in pursuit of Lucille, a heartless redhead personifying all the girls who torment and fascinate pubescent lads of eleven.

Release date: June 27, 2009

Publisher: Back Bay Books

Print pages: 338

Sample

CITY BOY:The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder

City Boy, my second novel, was published in 1948. I had no reason to think then that the book would survive its season, let alone more
than half a century. None of my novels ever had a less promising start.


Just a year earlier, I had entered the American literary frogpond with a noisy splash, and before that I had never published
so much as a short story in a magazine. For my livelihood until World War II, I had been a script writer for the great radio
comedian Fred Allen. My first novel, Aurora Dawn, was a facetious spoof of commercial radio, and the little book caught a publisher's fancy, so he launched it with a blast
of ecstatic advertising. In quick obedience to Newton's third law, critics blasted back. All this dazed me. A naval reserve
officer, I had written most of Aurora Dawn aboard a minesweeper in the South Pacific, to while away boring wartime hours at sea. I did not know enough about the literary
world to object to the overblown launching, nor to expect the boisterous counter-attack. It was quite a debut. When the dust
settled I had in hand a Book-of-the-Month selection of my first novel, a so-so sale, and a literary reputation demolished
before it was built. New authors, fuming over insufficient advertising of their masterpieces, might ponder this true tale.


But there I was, a professional novelist, if a somewhat black-and-blue one. I wrote City Boy, and found real delight in the task. To this day the fat little hero, Herbie Bookbinder, remains one of my favorite creations.
But my publisher, set back by the critics' onslaught on Aurora Dawn, and probably convinced that no novel with Jewish characters could sell anyway—this was gospel back then in the book trade—launched
the work as one buries a body at sea. City Boy slid off the plank, and with scarcely a ripple went bubbling down. No club selected the book. Nobody bought it. Almost nobody
reviewed it. The remainder shops were piled with this novel, while I was still reading scattered out-of-town notices. End
of poor Herbie, to all appearances.


Alas! Total disaster with a second book; a very usual thing. Still, I now had a family, and I had come to love the fiction
art. I thought I had better have one more shot at the target. I started another novel. My habit was, and still is, to read
my work chapter by chapter to a discerning, lovely, but taciturn wife. Once she suddenly remarked, when I was reading aloud
an early scene in that story, “If they don't like this one, you had better try some other line of business.” The book was
The Caine Mutiny.

Meantime Aurora Dawn and City Boy had gone out of print, but I had a new publisher, who liked the books and brought them back to light. That was about forty-five
years ago. Aurora Dawn remains in print, and the publishing history of City Boy since then records successive new editions, translations into several languages, club selections, and usage in school textbooks
and anthologies. In the arts, as in most risky walks of life, the good word is never say die.

My life goal of authorship was fixed when I first read Tom Sawyer at eleven, and my working title for City Boy was Tom of the Bronx. I grew up in a Bronx neighborhood that later became notorious as Fort Apache, but in my boyhood there were idyllic green
spaces called “lots,” and more than a trace of the golden light of Hannibal, Missouri, fell on those stony neighborhoods.
That glow was what I tried to capture in City Boy. Without taking the comparison further, I hope that Herbie and his tantalizing Lucille still come to life in their modest
citified way, as Tom and Becky Thatcher will do in Mark Twain's book while the English language lasts.


Herman Wouk

On a golden May morning in the sixth year of Calvin Coolidge's presidency, a stout little dark-haired boy named Herbert Bookbinder,
dressed in a white shirt, a blue tie and gray knee breeches, sat at a desk in Public School 50 in the Bronx, suffering the
pain of a broken heart. On the blackboard before his eyes were words that told a disaster:


Mrs. Mortiner Gorkin

The teacher of Class 7B-1 had just informed her pupils that they must call her “Miss Vernon” no more. Turning to the board
with a shy smile, she had written her new name in rounded chalk letters, and had blushed through a minute's tumult of squeals
and giggles from the girls and good-natured jeers from the boys. Then Mrs. Gorkin stilled the noise with an upraised hand.
She pulled down into view a map of Africa rolled up at the top of the blackboard like a window shade, and the class, refreshed
by the brief lawbreaking, listened eagerly to her tale of the resources of the Congo. But Herbert could not rouse himself
to an interest in rubber, gold, apes, and ivory; not when the lost Diana Vernon was talking about them. The tones of her voice
made him too unhappy.


The anodyne in this boy's life was food. No anguish was so sharp that eating could not allay it. Unfortunately lunch time
was half an hour off. His hand groped softly into his desk and rested on a brown paper bag. He felt the familiar outlines
of two rolls (today was Monday—lettuce and tomato sandwiches) and an apple. Then his hand encountered something small and
oval. With practiced, noiseless fingers he opened the bag, unwrapped some twisted wax paper, and drew out a peeled hardboiled
egg. This was a pretty dry morsel without salt and bread and butter, but the boy popped the whole egg into his mouth and chewed
it moodily. Like an aspirin, it dulled the pain without improving his spirits. He was aware that his cheeks bulged, but he
did not care. Let her catch him! He was her favorite, first on the honor roll, and she could not humiliate him without humiliating
herself more. The boy's calculation was correct. Mrs. Gorkin did see him eating, but she ignored it.


In time a beautiful sound rang out—freedom, proclaimed by the clanging of the gong for lunch. At a nod from Mrs. Gorkin, the
children who had worrisome mothers ran to a shallow closet and returned to their seats wearing coats, while those who had
braved the changeable May weather without coats sat back and gloried in their maturity. A second time the gong sounded. The
pupils stood and quietly began to form a double line at the front of the room. Herbie, on his way to the head of the line,
passed the teacher's desk. She whispered, “Remain behind, Herbert.” Pretending to have heard nothing, Herbie strolled back
to his desk and remained there fussing busily until the class marched out.


A classroom always seems three times larger when the children leave it, and quite bleak. This gives a delicious sense of comradeship
to two people left in it together. For months it had been Herbie Bookbinder's good luck to share this sweetness with Miss
Diana Vernon after classes. She had detained him for such honorable offices as putting away books, filling inkwells, closing
windows with a long hooked pole, and drawing the heavy brown canvas shades; while she combed her long red hair before her
closet mirror in the late-afternoon sunlight and chatted with him. It had been magical. Being alone in the room now brought
these memories vividly to the boy. When the teacher re-entered the classroom she found her star pupil seated at his desk,
his chin resting on his clenched fists, gazing downward at nothing.


The cause of his pain was a slim woman, possibly twenty-seven, with compressed lips, a thin little straight nose, and heavy
red hair. She looked, and she was, strict. But she was a woman, and therefore susceptible to male charm, such as inhered in
Herbie—and, unfortunately, in Mr. Mortimer Gorkin. The boy glanced at her and felt a pang of self-pity. He could tell by her
soft look that she felt sorry for him and wanted to comfort him. Immediately he resolved not to be comforted at any cost.


“Herbie,” she said, walking to her desk and drawing a metal lunch box out of a deep side drawer, “come here and talk to me
while I eat.”


The boy rose, walked to the front of the desk, and stood there with morose formality, his arms at his sides.

“Come,” said the teacher, “where's your lunch? Or do you want some of mine?”

“I'm not hungry,” said Herbert Bookbinder, looking away from her to the corner of the blackboard where his name headed a list
of three in golden chalk—the honor roll for April. He decided vengefully that he would be last in the class in May.


“It seems to me,” said Mrs. Gorkin, laughing a little, “that you were almost too hungry during the geography lesson—now, weren't
you?”


Herbie stood on his constitutional rights and did not testify.

“What's the matter, Herbie, really?” asked the teacher.

“Nothing.”

“Oh, yes, there is.”

“Oh, no, there isn't—Mrs. Gorkin.”


The shot went home; the teacher colored a little. Perhaps pretty Diana Vernon was herself not quite happy about becoming Mrs.
Gorkin. The name still rang strangely in the bride's ears.


“Herbie,” said the teacher with an uncomfortable smile, “even though I'm Mrs. Gorkin now, we're still friends, aren't we?”

(The injured male may be eleven or fifty; the approach of the injuring female does not vary.)

“Sure,” said Herbie dolefully. He hitched up his sagging gray kneepants.

“Someday,” said Mrs. Gorkin, “I hope you will meet Morti—that is, Mr. Gorkin. He's assistant principal at Public School Seventy-five.
I know he'd like you. He admires clever young men.”


Herbie saw through the compliment with contempt. “Sure,” he said again.

The erstwhile Diana Vernon said, “Come closer, Herbie.” The boy reluctantly obeyed, sidling along the edge of the desk, his
hand resting on top. The teacher put her hand on his. He jerked it away.


“When you are as old as I am, Herbie,” said Diana Gorkin softly, “you will be a handsomer man than my husband, and you will
marry a finer woman than I am, and I hope you'll remember to bring her back here and let me meet her, but I doubt that you
will.”


This speech had no meaning at all for Herbie, who knew perfectly well that he would never be as old as a teacher. “Sure,”
he said once more. Mrs. Gorkin unwrapped a sandwich, and acknowledged defeat by a curt dismissal. The boy retreated to his
desk, snatched his lunch bag, and scurried from the classroom.


Once outside, he stopped, assumed a dignified air, and pinned around his right arm a yellow strip of flannel decorated with
three silver stars. He then sauntered along the deserted corridor to the boys' staircase. An ordinary lad at this hour was
required by law to go without delay to the lunchroom or playground, under pain of receiving a purple slip for loitering. But
Herbert could choose, in all the huge building, a private place for his noonday meal.


Herbert, you see, was one of those privileged beings of the school world, a head monitor. He was captain of the Social Service
Squad. This was not at all the same thing as the dread Police Squad, of course, whose members stood at gates, doorways, and
turns in corridors, shouting, “Double up! Hurry up! No talking!” The police could pounce on offenders with the fearsome green
slips which meant wrath from on high, but Herbie's Social Service Squad had no power of arrest. Its members were assigned
to various areas of the school, and their duties were simply to keep the building and yards clean. So the squad had irreverently
been dubbed “the Garbage Gang” by the members of the police, who never tired of pointing the contrast between the might in
their red armbands and the feeble symbolism of the yellow armbands of Herbie's squad.


Since the police were recruited from the tallest, huskiest students, Herbert had despaired of gaining the red band, and had
therefore worked his way to the top of the Social Service Squad. He figured that if one was not destined for the proud life
of a wolf, it was still better to be a dog than one of the helpless sheep. This proved perfectly sound. As captain of his
squad he could rove everywhere on the pretense of inspection. He could come late and walk unchallenged through any gate he
chose. All at once he had stopped accumulating the orange slips for tardiness which had plagued his days since kindergarten.
His monthly conduct mark raised itself above B-minus for the first time in his career. Let the ignoramuses rave at him with
their taunts of “Garbage King!” Herbie had found one of the great secrets of life, the immunity from public law that comes
of being a public official, and he was fully enjoying the fruits of his discovery.


He skipped down the stairs, which echoed with metallic hollowness, to the third floor. Coming upon the brown leather-covered,
brass-studded door of the auditorium, he decided that the big empty hall suited his melancholy mood. He pushed the door open,
walked across the rear of the hall to one of the broad windows, curled up on a sill in the sunshine, and opened his bag of
lunch with a sigh as nearly expressive of contentment as a broken heart would permit.


At this moment, through the small, high window of the door leading to the girls' staircase, he caught a glimpse of red curly
hair gleaming in the sunlight. Craning his neck, he saw that it belonged to a well-dressed, pretty girl about eleven years
old.


I n the philosophy of Herbie Bookbinder there was a division in the concept, Girls.


As a species of the genus Mankind he regarded girls as low in the scale, a botched job. They played silly games; they had
unpleasant shrill voices, they giggled; they pretended to be holy; they were in an everlasting conspiracy against normal human
beings (boys of eleven); they wore queer clothes; and they were sly. He regarded most of these squeaky beings with plain scorn.


It was nevertheless part of the mystery of life that from time to time there came to Herbie's view a sublime creation which
could only be classified as a girl, since she would have the outside features such as long hair, a dress, and a high voice.
But she would be as different from girls as the sun is from a penny candle. One of these angels appeared every year or so.
There had been Rosalind Sarnoff, of the black hair and bright smile, in the second grade. Sadie Benz, always dressed in billowy
white, in the fourth. Blond Madeline Costigan, who could throw a ball like a boy, in the fifth. And two girls who had lived
in his neighborhood, known only as Mildred and Frances respectively, who had reduced his life to ashes twice by moving to
other parts of the Bronx.


The radiance of such a divinity could come to surround an ordinary girl. Madeline Costigan had sat beside him in Miss O'Grady's
class for two months, undistinguished from the rest of the chirruping females. Then one afternoon they had both been kept
after school for tardiness. And while they were beating out erasers together, a grand chord had sounded in Herbert's breast,
he had seen the glory envelop Madeline like the dawn, and lo, he was her slave. Equally strangely the spell could die away,
as it had in the case of Sadie Benz, leaving a commonplace girl whom Herbie despised. But this was not the rule. Most of these
super-beings had been removed from Herbie by the forces of time and change. Diana Vernon had succeeded Madeline Costigan,
the first adult in the golden procession.


The little stranger on the other side of the auditorium door who sat on the stairs facing away from him, placidly munching
a sandwich, had hair of the same hue as Mrs. Gorkin's, and this may have been the reason Herbert's heart bounded when he first
saw her. But a prolonged look persuaded him that, on her own merits, she was a candidate for the vacant office. Her starched,
ruffled blue frock, her new, shiny, patent-leather shoes, her red cloth coat with its gray furry collar, her very clean knees
and hands, and the carefully arranged ringlets of her hair all suggested non-squeaky loveliness. At the moment of his so deciding,
it chanced that she turned her head and met his look. Her large hazel eyes widened in surprise, and at once there was no further
question of candidacy. She was elected.


It now became obligatory upon Herbert to pretend that she did not exist. He looked out of the window and began to make believe
that an extremely exciting and unusual event was taking place in the girls' playground below—just what, he was not sure, but
it called for him to clap his palm to the side of his face, shake his head from side to side, and exclaim very loudly, “Gee
whiz! Gosh! Never saw anything like that!” (By this time the imaginary sight had started to take shape as a teacher lying in a pool of blood, her head split open,
after a jump from the roof.) He was compelled to run, first down the side aisle of the auditorium to look out of the other
windows, and then up the aisle again and through the leather door at the rear, feigning amazement at the discovery of the
girl on the stairs. She was seated busily reading a geography book upside down, having snatched it after watching all his
pantomime up to the point when she saw he intended to come through the door.


After enacting an intensity of surprise at the sight of the girl that would have sufficed had he come upon a unicorn, Herbert
recovered himself and said sternly, “What are you doing here?”


“Who wants to know?” said the girl, putting aside the book.

“Me, that's who.”

“Who's me?”

“Me is me,” said Herbert, pointing to his three-starred yellow armband.

“Huh! Garbage gang,” said the girl. Turning her back on him, she drew an apple out of a gleaming new tin lunch box and began
to eat it with exaggerated nonchalance, her eyebrows raised and her gaze directed out at the smiling day.


“Maybe you'd like to come down to Mr. Gauss's office with me,” said Herbie fiercely.

Mr. Julius Gauss was the principal, a heavy, round-headed gentleman seen by the children only at special assemblies, where
he read psalms in a gloomy singsong and gave endless speeches which nobody understood, but which seemed in favor of George
Washington, America, and certain disgusting behavior found only in mollycoddles. He was regarded by the children as the most
frightful thing outside the storybooks, a view which the teachers encouraged and which several of them seemed to share.


“And stop eating,” added Herbie, “when you're talking to a head monitor.”

Red Locks quailed and put down the apple, but she tried to brave it out. “You can't make me go down there,” she said. (It
was always “down” to Mr. Gauss's office, possibly because of the general analogy to infernal regions.)


“Can't I?” said Herbert. “Can't I? It so happens that as captain of the Social Service Squad I have to see Mr. Gauss every Thursday, which is today, and make my report to him. And anyone
who I tell to come with me has to come. But you can try not coming—oh, sure, you can try. I don't think you would try it more than once, but you can try.”


The contents of this speech, excepting Herbert's rank, were a lie. But Herbert had not learned yet to draw the line between
the facts devised by his powerful imagination and the less vivid facts existing in nature, and while he spoke he fully believed
what he was saying.


“Anyway,” said the girl, “he wouldn't do anything to me even if you did bring me down there, because I'm going to his camp
this summer.”


“His camp?” Herbie made the mistake of lapsing from his positive tone.

“Yes, his camp, smartie,” sneered the girl. “I thought you knew everything. Camp Manitou, in the Berkshires. You just try
bringing one of his campers down to him. He'll just demote you off your old garbage gang.”


“He will not.”

“He will so.”

“He will not,” said Herbie, “because I'm going to his old camp myself.”

This was somewhat too newly minted a fact, even for the credulity of a small girl. “You're a liar,” said she promptly.

“You mean you are,” said Herbert, with no great logic, but with a natural grasp of the art of controversy.

“I'll bet you a dime I'm going to his camp,” said the girl, falling into the trap and taking the defensive.

“I'll bet you a dollar I am,” said Herbert.

“I'll bet you ten dollars you're not.”

“I'll bet you a thousand dollars you're not.”


“I'll bet you a million dollars.”

“I'll bet you a billion dollars.”


The girl, unable to think quickly of the next order of magnitude, said with scorn, “Where are you gonna get a billion dollars?”

“Same place you'll get a million,” retorted Herbie.

“I can get a million dollars from my father if I want to,” said Red Locks, vexed at being continually on the defensive, though
sensing she was in the right. “He's the biggest lawyer in Bronx County.”


“That's nothing,” said Herbert. “My father owns the biggest ice plant in America.” (He was manager of a small ice plant in
the Bronx.)


“My father is richer than your father.”

“My father could buy your father like an ice-cream cone.”

“He could not,” said the girl hotly.

“My father even has a way bigger lawyer for his ice plant than your father.” Herbie speedily searched his memory, reviewing
conversations of his parents. “My father's lawyer is Louis Glass.”


The girl uttered a triumphant little shriek. “Ha, ha, smartie!” she cried, jumping up and dancing a step or two. “My father
is Louis Glass.”


This astounding stroke left Herbie with no available fact, real or improvised, for a counterblow. He was reduced to a weak,
“He is not, either.”


“Is too!” shouted the girl, her eyes sparkling. “Here, if you're so clever, here's my name on my books—Lucille Glass.”

Herbert deigned to inspect the notebook offered for his view, with the large childish inscription, “Lucille Marjorie Glass,
6B-3.”


“You should of told me so right away,” he said magnanimously. “You can stay here, as long as your father is Louis Glass. 6B-3,
huh? I'm in 7B-1. First on the honor roll.”


“I'm third on the honor roll,” said Lucille, yielding at last the deference due an upperclassman, a head monitor, and a mental
giant.


With this advance in their relationship they fell silent, and became aware of being alone together on the small landing. The
gay voices of the girls playing in the yard came faintly to them through the closed window. Herbie and Lucille self-consciously
turned and watched the darting, frisking little figures for a while.


“What were you doing up here, anyway?” said the boy at last, feeling that ease of speech was deserting him.

“I'm on the girls' Police Squad,” said Lucille Glass, “and I'm supposed to watch this staircase during lunch.”

She pulled a red band from her pocket and commenced pinning it around her arm. Encountering difficulty, she was gallantly
aided by Herbie, who received the reward of a bashful smile. All this while Herbie was struggling with the question, whether
it was not inconsistent for a Radiant One to be practically a member of his family, as Lucille's tie to his father's lawyer
made her. His sister and his cousins were so empty of grace that he classed all family females in the low rank of girlhood.
The aura of Red Locks seemed to waver and dim. However, as they grew silent once more, gazing out at the yard, Herbie felt
himself quite tongue-tied, and the 10 glory brightened and shone as strongly as at first, and he realized that charms sufficiently
powerful could overcome even the handicap of belonging to the family.


“Well, gotta make my rounds,” he said abruptly. “So long.”

“Good-by,” said the little girl, wrinkling her snub nose and red, firm cheeks at him in a friendly grin. As Herbie walked
off the landing into the corridor, she called after him, “Are you really going to Camp Manitou this summer?”


The boy turned and looked down his nose at her in the crushing way teachers reacted to silly questions. He was no taller than
the girl, so the effect was rather hard to get, but he managed a good approximation by tilting his head far back, and sighting
along the edge of his nose.


“You'll find out,” he enunciated after a dignified pause, and stalked off down the hall.

Mrs. Mortimer Gorkin had a weary afternoon of it with Herbie. Shortly after the children came back to class, she was summoned
out of the room for a few minutes and returned to find her trusted monitor standing on top of her desk, reciting a parody
of “The Village Blacksmith” with an idiotic preciseness that she recognized as a burlesque of herself. “The muss-uls on his
ba-rawny arrrms,” he was saying, “are sta-rrong as rrrrrubba bands-sah.” She punished this malfeasance of office by ordering
Herbie to sit in the last seat of the last girls' row and forbidding him to speak for the rest of the day. He broke the injunction
twice by shouting spectacularly accurate answers to questions that had reduced the rest of the class to silence. This put
the teacher in the bad predicament of having to reproach brilliance. The second time she tried sarcasm, saying heavily, “And
pray, what makes you so very, very clever this afternoon, Master Bookbinder?”


It was a mistake. Herbert was inspired to jump to his feet and rejoin, “Just celebrating your wedding, Mrs. Gorkin,” touching
off a demonstration of screaming hilarity which the reddened, angry teacher could not control until she stood, pounded her
desk and shrieked, “Silence! Silence!” She effectively snuffed out Herbert by offering to conduct him down to Mr. Gauss's
office the next time he uttered a word. But this came too late. By his repartee, and by forcing her to a display of temper,
he had clearly won the day.


When the class marched into the school yard at the end of the afternoon and broke ranks, he was at once surrounded, the girls
giggling and shouting at him, the boys pounding his back, shaking his hand, and assuring him with various curses that “he
was a regular guy, after all.” It was admitted by everyone that he had been under the spell of a “crush,” an ailment which
all the children understood. The great Lennie Krieger himself condescended to lounge up to Herbert and say, “Nice work, Fatso,”
which set the seal on his acclaim. He was received back into society. He was even permitted to pitch the first inning of the
softball game as a mark of his redemption, and no criticism was heard of his mediocre efforts.


An ugly little girl with a fat face and straight whitish hair, Shirley Schwartz, who secretly adored Herbie but had learned
in lower grades, from other boys, the bitter necessity of hiding her hopeless loves, watched this triumph of her hero with
joy. When he left the game after several innings, she decided to follow him home on the forlorn chance that he might speak
to her. She hovered while he gathered up his books, and dogged him discreetly as he left the yard. But to her astonishment
he did not take the direction to his house which she knew well, but turned and went into the teachers' entrance to the school.
Love made her bold—she knew, anyway, that the entrance was not monitored after school hours—so she followed him in.


Five minutes later she returned to the yard, pallid and shaken, with a tale that set heads shaking and tongues clacking among
the pupils of 7B-1. Shirley had seen Herbie's amazing new deed with her own eyes. Without being ordered to do so, and with
no word to any pupil about his reasons for such suicidal folly, Herbie had walked up to the private door of the principal,
Mr. Gauss, which even teachers never used, approaching the Presence only through the outer office; had knocked boldly; and,
in response to a muffled, surprised call from inside in the dreaded voice, had v