entangling himself in their flying ropes. 'H, my name is Hippopotamus — !' The girls would holler at him 'Stop it! Stop it!' and call out for help from the playground director, who had only to shout from wherever he was on the playground to the troublemaker (most days it was the same boy), 'Cut it out, Myron! Leave the girls alone or you're going home!' With that, the uproar subsided. Soon the jump ropes were once again snappily turning in the air and the chanting taken up anew by one jumper after another:
A, my name is Agnes
And my husband's name is Alphonse,
We come from Alabama
And we bring back apples!
B, my name is Bev
And my husband's name is Bill,
We come from Bermuda And we bring back beets!
C, my name is…
With their childish voices, the girls encamped at the far edge of the playground improvised their way from A to Z and back again, alliterating the nouns at the end of the line, sometimes preposterously, each time around. Leaping and darting about with excitement — except when Myron Kopferman and his like would apishly interfere — they exhibited astounding energy; unless they were summoned by the playground director to retreat to the shade of the school because of the heat, they didn't vacate that street from the Friday in June when the spring term ended to the Tuesday after Labor Day when the fall term began and they could jump rope only after school and at recess.
The playground director that year was Bucky Cantor, who, because of poor vision that necessitated his wearing thick eyeglasses, was one of the few young men around who wasn't off fighting in the war. During the previous school year, Mr. Cantor had become the new phys ed teacher at Chancellor Avenue School and so already knew many of us who habituated the playground from the gym classes he taught. He was twenty-three that summer, a graduate of South Side, Newark's mixed-race, mixed-religion high school, and Panzer College of Physical Education and Hygiene in East Orange. He stood slightly under five feet five inches tall, and though he was a superior athlete and strong competitor, his height, combined with his poor vision, had prevented him from playing college-level football, baseball, or basketball and restricted his intercollegiate sports activity to throwing the javelin and lifting weights. Atop his compact body was a good-sized head formed of emphatically slanting and sloping components: wide pronounced cheekbones, a steep forehead, an angular jaw, and a long straight nose with a prominent bridge that lent his profile the sharpness of a silhouette engraved on a coin. His full lips were as well defined as his muscles, and his complexion was tawny year-round. Since adolescence he had worn his hair in a military-style crewcut. You particularly noticed his ears with that haircut, not because they were unduly large, which they were not, not necessarily because they were joined so closely to his head, but because, seen from the side, they were shaped much like the ace of spades in a pack of cards, or the wings on the winged feet of mythology, with topmost tips that weren't rounded off, as most ears are, but came nearly to a point. Before his grandfather dubbed him Bucky, he was known briefly as Ace to his childhood street pals, a nickname inspired not merely by his precocious excellence at sports but by the uncommon configuration of those ears.
Altogether the oblique planes of his face gave the smoky gray eyes back of his glasses — eyes long and narrow like an Asian's — a deeply pocketed look, as though they were not so much set as cratered in the skull. The voice emerging from this precisely delineated face was, unexpectedly, rather high-pitched, but that did not diminish the force of his appearance. His was the cast-iron, wear-resistant, strikingly bold face of a sturdy young man you could rely on.
ONE AFTERNOON early in July, two cars full of Italians from East Side High, boys anywhere from fifteen to eighteen, drove in and parked at the top of the residential street back of the school, where the playground was situated. East Side was in the Ironbound section, the industrial slum that had reported the most cases of polio in the city so far. As soon as Mr. Cantor saw them pull up, he dropped his mitt on the field — he was playing third base in one of our pickup games — and trotted over to where the ten strangers had emptied out of the two cars. His athletic, pigeon-toed trot was already being imitated by the playground kids, as was his purposeful way of lightly lifting himself as he moved on the balls of his feet, and the slight sway, when he walked, of his substantial shoulders. For some of the boys his entire bearing had become theirs both on and off the playing field.
'What do you fellows want here?' Mr. Cantor said.
'We're spreadin' polio,' one of the Italians replied. He was the one who'd come swaggering out of the cars first. 'Ain't that right?' he said, turning to preen for the cohorts backing him up, who appeared right off to Mr. Cantor to be only too eager to begin a brawl.
'You look more like you're spreadin' trouble,' Mr. Cantor told him. 'Why don't you head out of here?'
'No, no,' the Italian guy insisted, 'not till we spread some polio. We got it and you don't, so we thought we'd drive up and spread a little around.' All the while he talked, he rocked back and forth on his heels to indicate how tough he was. The brazen ease of his thumbs tucked into the front two loops of his trousers served no less than his gaze to register his contempt.
'I'm playground director here,' Mr. Cantor said, pointing back over his shoulder toward us kids. 'I'm asking you to leave the vicinity of the playground. You've got no business here and I'm asking you politely to go. What do you say?'
'Since when is there a law against spreadin' polio, Mr. Playground Director?'
'Look, polio is not a joke. And there's a law against being a public nuisance. I don't want to have to call the police. How about leaving on your own, before I get the cops to escort you out of here?'
With this, the leader of the pack, who was easily half a foot taller than Mr. Cantor, took a step forward and spat on the pavement. He left a gob of viscous sputum splattered there, only inches from the tip of Mr. Cantor's sneakers.
'What's that mean?' Mr. Cantor asked him. His voice was still calm and, with his arms crossed tightly over his chest, he was the embodiment of immovability. No Ironbound roughnecks were going to get the better of him or come anywhere near his kids.
'I told you what it means. We're spreadin' polio. We don't want to leave you people out.'
'Look, cut the 'you people' crap,' Mr. Cantor said and took one quick, angry step forward, placing him only inches from the Italian's face. 'I'll give you ten seconds to turn around and move everybody out of here.'
The Italian smiled. He really hadn't stopped smiling since he'd gotten out of the car. 'Then what?' he asked.
'I told you. I'm going to get the cops to get you out and keep you out.'
Here the Italian guy spat again, this time just to the side of Mr. Cantor's sneakers, and Mr. Cantor called over to the boy who had been waiting to bat next in the game and who, like the rest of us, was silently watching Mr. Cantor face down the ten Italians. 'Jerry,' Mr. Cantor said, 'run to my office. Telephone the police. Say you're calling for me. Tell them I need them.'
'What are they going to do, lock me up?' the chief Italian guy asked. 'They gonna put me in the slammer for spitting on your precious Weequahic sidewalk? You own the sidewalk too, four eyes?'
Mr. Cantor didn't answer and just remained planted between the kids who'd been playing ball on the asphalt field behind him and the two carloads of Italian guys, still standing on the street at the edge of the playground as though each were about to drop the cigarette he was smoking and suddenly brandish a weapon. But by the time Jerry returned from Mr. Cantor's basement office — where, as instructed, he had telephoned the police — the two cars and their ominous occupants were gone. When the patrol car pulled up only minutes later, Mr. Cantor was able to give the cops the license plate numbers of both cars, which he'd memorized during the standoff. Only after the police had driven away did the kids back of the fence begin to ridicule the Italians.
It turned out that there was sputum spread over the wide area of pavement where the Italian guys had congregated, some twenty square feet of a wet, slimy, disgusting mess that certainly appeared to be an ideal breeding ground for disease. Mr. Cantor had two of the boys go down in the school basement to find a couple of buckets and fill them with hot water and ammonia in the janitor's room and then slosh the water across the pavement until every inch of it was washed clean. The kids sloshing away the slime reminded Mr. Cantor of how
