Last Respects by Jerome Weidman

you can wear it on Saturday?”
    “That’s right,” I said. “You see, Ma, this Wednesday thing, the eliminations contest, that’s something special. It’s extra. It has nothing to do with the regular Saturday night meeting.”
    “It has nothing to do with me either,” my mother said. “A slave over the washtub for uniforms, this I did not come to America to be.”
    It was her constant refrain, her endless quest. Why she had come to America. It was also her exit door from everything she did not want to do.
    “But, Ma, I’m the captain of the signaling team,” I said. “You want I should go looking like a slob?”
    “Tell them to hold these alimations on Saturday.”
    “Eliminations,” I said.
    “Whatever they are,” my mother said, “tell them to do it Saturday, so you’ll have the clean shirt and pants I wash on Friday. On Tuesday, no. I’m busy.”
    This was preposterous. How could she be busy? All she did was cook and clean and wash for my father and me, my sister and brother. If she was able to wash my uniform on Friday, why couldn’t she also do it on Tuesday?
    “Ma, I could get a medal for this.”
    “For what?”
    “For signaling,” I said. “Morse Code. With a flag. I’m the best in the troop. If we win these eliminations, our troop, we go on to the finals. Everybody who wins in the finals, they get a medal.”
    “So you be different from everybody,” my mother said. “You win in a dirty uniform.”
    I didn’t doubt that I could. According to Mr. O’Hare I handled a Morse signaling flag with more skill than anybody he had ever known. Not to be dishonestly modest about it, the main reason Troop 244 had managed to get as far as the eliminations finals in the 1927 All-Manhattan rally was my dexterity with a Morse signaling flag. I was secretly convinced I could carry the troop into the final finals and go on to win the rally. But somehow, I don’t know why, I didn’t want to get up there in a soiled, unpressed uniform. So I took my problem to George Weitz, my teammate.
    “You are a shmendrick,” said George. “But you are one hell of a signaler.”
    At fourteen, I thought I was pretty grown up. I did not think I was a shmendrick. But I did not think I was St. Francis of Assisi, either. On East Fourth Street in those days, I was trying to do what everybody else was trying to do: hang in there. I did not know this, of course. Years went by before I realized what had been wrong. I was bucking a tide without even being aware that I was immersed in water. Every adult on the block was an immigrant from some part of Central Europe, and every child was, like George Weitz and myself, a first-generation American. We talked to each other like illiterate diplomats. The simplest communications were papal encyclicals in garbled syntax. But not when I was talking to someone like George. George was on my side. I liked George, but I did not like being called a shmendrick.
    “You say I’m a shmendrick because I beat you for senior patrol leader,” I said. “If you’d beat me, I’d say you’re a shmendrick. But never mind that. I want you to do me a favor.”
    “Like what?” George said.
    George was a funny one. He didn’t really live on our block. He lived one block west, in a brownstone between Avenue C and Avenue B. There were no brownstones on our block, Fourth Street between Avenue D and Lewis. Ours was a block of tenements, and they were all pretty much alike. The tenement we lived in, for instance, at the corner of Lewis Street, was typical: thirty-two flats in the six-story “front house” which faced Fourth Street, and thirty-two flats in the “back house” which faced a courtyard full of ash cans. But George Weitz lived in a small narrow house, all four floors of which were occupied by the Weitz family. Nobody thought this odd. George’s father was a doctor. The Weitz family had moved in a short time ago, after Dr. Gropple died. Doctors were different. They were rich. They had