About the B'nai Bagels Read online

  About the B’nai Bagels

  Also by E. L. Konigsburg

  Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth,

  William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth

  From the Mixed-up Files

  of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

  Altogether, One at a Time

  A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver

  The Dragon in the Ghetto Caper

  The Second Mrs. Gioconda

  Father’s Arcane Daughter

  Throwing Shadows

  Journey to an 800 Number

  Up From Jericho Tel

  Samuel Todd’s Book of Great Colors

  Samuel Todd’s Book of Great Inventions

  Amy Elizabeth Explores Bloomingdale’s

  T-Backs, T-Shirts, COAT, and Suit

  TalkTalk

  The View from Saturday

  Silent to the Bone

  The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place

  The Mysterious Edge

  of the Heroic World

  For my own dear mother who knows almost nothing about baseball and almost everything about love

  &

  stuffed cabbage

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ALADDIN PAPERBACKS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.simonandschuster.com

  Copyright © 1969 by E. L. Konigsburg

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  ALADDIN PAPERBACKS and related logo are

  registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Aladdin Paperbacks edition January 1973

  Second Aladdin Paperbacks edition March 2008

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file

  with the Library of Congress.

  Library of Congress Number 69-13529

  ISBN 13: 978-0-689-20631-3 (hc.)

  ISBN 10: 0-689-20631-3 (hc.)

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4169-5798-0 (pbk.)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-442-43966-5

  ISBN 10: 1-4169-5798-7 (pbk.)

  About the B’nai Bagels

  Up until October of last year my mother had two hobbies: major league baseball and my brother, Spencer. Spencer was her great year-round activity and baseball was seasonal. Don’t get the idea that I was neglected, because I wasn’t. It’s just that Spencer is a lot older than I, and Mother had a lot more years to specialize in him. Actually, she raised us like two only children. Especially Spencer.

  Last October, Spencer, who lived at home with us in Point Baldwin and who commuted every day to New York University, began calling our mother Bessie, and he began arguing with her about everything. Dad said that he was just feeling his oats and acting sophomoric. Which seems funny because Spencer was actually a Junior in college at that time. Mom got her feelings terribly hurt just about every day, and she began having long private discussions with Dad about “Where have I gone wrong, Sam?” and “What have I ever done to that boy?” I often listened in because it was quite a bad habit I had, and that was the only way I knew to find out what they might be saying about me in nine years when I would be twenty-one and feeling my own oats.

  Dad who was very busy at the time—Dad being an accountant and being that he was starting some new big accounts—told Mother to be thankful that Spencer was not a hippie; he still wore socks. He advised her to wait a few months for this phase to pass, see a psychiatrist, or get some new interests.

  Mom was too impatient to wait past Election Day. She refused to take it lying down. On a psychiatrist’s couch or anywhere. So she started an herb garden, but the plants got sick, and all of Mom’s loving care, fertilizer, and chicken soup couldn’t make them well. They died in February, which is rather a doldrums kind of a month anyway, and Mom was feeling defeated again. Too bad it happened just then because in another two months the major leagues would have begun their season, and she would not have wanted to go to that meeting of the B’nai B’rith Sisterhood and get entangled in baseball in Little League in the way that she did. A way that invaded my privacy and might have declared practically the last little piece of my life as occupied territory.

  In a normal February, Mother would have noted the meeting on her calendar and then forgotten about it. She would have stayed at home making stuffed cabbage, as she was doing that Wednesday when Spencer walked into the kitchen and mentioned that he had been to some famous Hungarian restaurant in New York and had ordered their stuffed cabbage, which was delicious because it had raisins in it and why didn’t Mother try it that way?

  “Raisins in stuffed cabbage?” she asked casually at first.

  “Yeah, it’s good. Sort of sweet and sour,” he answered.

  “Raisins in stuffed cabbage? Never. Sauerkraut, I put in my stuffed cabbage. Sauerkraut and a touch of sugar.”

  Spencer snapped at her, “You see, Bessie, that’s what’s wrong with you. You’ll never try anything new. Your mind is closed.”

  Mother snapped back, “I happen to like my own stuffed cabbage. With sauerkraut. That makes my mind closed?”

  “No. But the raisins is symbolic. The raisins are symbolic. You’re resistant to change. What’s so important about stuffed cabbage that you shouldn’t be willing to change it?”

  “You want to know what’s so important about stuffed cabbage? I’ll tell you what’s so important. It takes two and a half hours of my life to make it. That’s what’s so important. Every time, two and one half hours.”

  “I’ll tell you how to cut down on that amount of time,” Spencer shouted.

  “How? By putting raisins in?”

  “No. By cutting me out. Don’t make my portion.” And with that, he slammed the kitchen door except that you can’t really slam it; it’s louvered and on hinges so the two sides just kept flapping back and forth.

  Mother yelled after the flapping doors, “No one tells Heinz how to make ketchup, and no one tells Bessie Setzer how to stuff cabbage.” Turning to me, she asked, “You, Mark, you like the way I make stuffed cabbage?”

  “What’s not to like?” I answered. Really, I thought, if it was as unimportant as Spencer told Mother it was, then why was it important enough to have her change? It was obvious that Spencer was becoming grown-up; he didn’t make sense.

  “When I think of all the hours of stuffed cabbage I put into that boy. Wasted. Just wasted.” Mom was holding a slotted spoon and addressing God. Up until the time I began Sunday School, I thought that He lived in the light fixture on our kitchen ceiling. “Raisins are raisins, and cabbage is cabbage,” she mumbled into the pot. Then she jabbed the spoon into the air and announced, “And in my pot they won’t meet.” She stirred some more and continued talking to the pot, “A twenty-one-year-old boy who doesn’t know enough to pick up his dirty socks or hang up his pajamas suddenly becomes Mr. Ladies’ Home Journal. Illustrated.” And without looking up from the pot she added, “Mark, hurry or you’ll be late for Hebrew School.”

  Some days it seemed as if the only conversation I had with my mother was be-lated. Like “Eat now, Moshe, or you’ll be late for school.” Or “Get dressed already, or you’ll be late for synagogue.” Once she even said to me, “Mark, go wash your hair now, or you’ll be late for combing.” I still haven’t figured that one out. Last year there was so much be-lated conversation
in our house that you could actually call it nagging. That was because last year in addition to everything else, I was seriously in the business of being Hebrew, being that I was twelve years old and preparing for my Bar Mitzvah. Bar Mitzvah marks the time you become thirteen years old and can participate as an adult in all the religious services at the synagogue. Preparing for it starts when a guy is eight years old, but the volume is kept soft and low and part-time. Then, BLAST—the commercial comes on when you reach the age of twelve. And in your twelfth year you become devoted. Devoted to lessons on Sunday morning until it becomes Sunday afternoon, and afternoon lessons on Mondays and Wednesdays. Afternoons until 7:00 at night. According to my mother I was always about to be late for one or the other of those devotions.

  She never remembered that I needed five minutes less than I had before to get to the synagogue because I didn’t meet Hersch any more.

  Hersch means Herschel Miller. He and I used to be good friends before his family sold their house two blocks from ours and bought one up on Crescent Hill. Crescent Hill once was a huge estate; someone divided it into lots with houses that were bigger and that looked less alike than the houses in our section of town. All the kids from there went to the Crescent Hill School for the elementary and junior high grades, but they funneled back into our district for senior high. Even in high school, though, they kept a little bit apart from the rest of the kids. I remember Spencer talking about it when he was in high school; they were called the Crescent Hill Mob. Their mothers were always busy with referendums and such to get their own senior high, but something kept stopping the referendums. I think it was fathers. The Mob mixed with us in high school. Some also mixed in Hebrew School. But not thoroughly. They always separated off into car pools when Hebrew was over. In our part of town we walked.

  From third grade through sixth, before Hersch moved, ever since we began Hebrew lessons on a normal twice-a-week basis, Hersch and I would walk home from public school together, would dump our books, would grab something to eat, and would meet on the corner of King and Chestnut. We had two great things going for us: time and geography. We had the same schedules: public school, Hebrew School, Sunday School. And we lived only two blocks from each other. Besides that, we liked some of the same things. I liked baseball more, and last year I talked Hersch into trying out for Little League; he became a pretty good player. Once I had to talk him into seeing a James Bond movie, and he went back twice. Paid each time. And he never missed a James Bond movie after that even though I did.

  Sometimes I thought that Hersch was more of a brother to me than Spencer. We each had some bumps in our personalities, but they were in different places and at least they were the same size. That made it good; you need a friend who is a little different from you to rub against. That way you file down each other’s rough edges.

  I never thought that Hersch’s moving would make a difference, but it did. By February the only times we saw each other were official times. Like at services or lessons. Besides time and distance, there was something else that got in the way of our friendship; someone else—Barry Jacobs. Barry lived up on Crescent Hill, too, near Hersch. There had been no one to take Hersch’s place for me. Hersch had moved over Labor Day; as everyone knows, the year begins right after that. Years move from left to right from September to January and from right to left from January to June; June through August is a hook that links up to next September. Comes September of a Bar Mitzvah year, a guy doesn’t have much leftover time for social life. Making friends from scratch takes time for walking places together or running over to each other’s house to check on the homework assignment. The kind of time I didn’t have.

  So on that fatal night in February, that night of the raisin fight, I walked to and from Hebrew School alone. It was dark before I came from lessons to supper with stuffed cabbage and without Spencer. That makes a quiet meal. Not like chicken soup with crackers and Spencer.

  “Mark,” Mom said, “you clear the table and put the dishes into the dishwasher. I have to go to Sisterhood.”

  “I have homework,” I replied.

  “Another one to sass me back!” She was talking to the Deity again. Then she returned to earth and addressed me. “Is it too much to ask to have you clear the table so that I can get out of the house for a few hours?”

  “O.K., I’ll do it,” I said.

  “For a few hours. And it’s not even recreation. It’s for you, Mark, that I go to these meetings.”

  “I said that I would do it.”

  “Don’t do me any favors!” she said as she began banging the dishes around and stacking them into the dishwasher.

  I looked at Dad and shrugged. “All I said was that I would do it.”

  “Go, Bessie,” Dad said. “Go to the meeting. I’ll clear up the dishes.” And he got up, and he began rinsing dishes and putting them into the dishwasher, too.

  In no time at all, the dishes were done.

  As Mother was leaving, I called to her, “Have a good time.”

  “Who can have a good time with that bunch of biddies?” Mother replied. She often referred to the B’nai B’rith Sisterhood as her Biddie Club.

  “Then why are you going?” I asked.

  “I told you why I’m going. For a few hours I am going. Because you have to go out to have outside interests. Your father and your Aunt Thelma say that I need outside interests.”

  And so it was because of Spencer and a bunch of dead herbs that Mother went to Sisterhood to get outside interests and as a result she moved into and organized another corner of my life. But it wasn’t until later that I wished there had been a good movie for her to go to that night instead.

  The next morning I was eating breakfast when Mother came into the kitchen. Spencer never ate breakfast, a habit that my mother could not adjust to altogether. In fact, if my mother could rewrite the Ten Commandments, one of them would be “Thou shalt eateth of breakfast.” She talked to the ceiling about it a great deal. “You would think that a boy with his education would know that he has to have some food in his stomach to lubricate it. Otherwise, ulcers he’ll get. From the empty walls rubbing together. Peristalsis, you named it, dear God.” Then to Spencer she’d explain, “So help me, Spencer, if you come down with a case of the ulcers, don’t look to me for a cream diet. It’s all I can do to satisfy…” There was usually more to her little speech, but none of it was necessary this morning. Spencer was foraging in the refrigerator for things he usually wouldn’t even look at before noon. With or without raisins.

  “How many in your class, Mark?” Mother asked me, making sure that Spencer was listening. I didn’t much like it when she was mad at Spencer and used me as a bank board to bounce questions to him.

  “Twenty-seven,” I answered.

  “Good,” she said. “I want you to tell the whole class to try out for the Little League team. This year Sisterhood is sponsoring.”

  “They can’t all try out,” I explained.

  “Anyone who won’t be thirteen until after August 1 is eligible. There aren’t any left-backers in your class. They can all try out.”

  “Mother,” I said, “they don’t call it ‘left back’ anymore. They call it ‘retained.’”

  “Whatever they are called, there aren’t any in your class, and I want they should all try out. The Sisterhood is sponsoring.”

  “They can’t all try out,” I repeated.

  I could tell that Mother didn’t want to be drawn into an argument with me because there was nothing that could make Spencer lose interest in a conversation faster than one of Mother’s arguments with me. But Mother couldn’t resist getting answers. “Why?”

  “Because fourteen of them are girls.”

  The information registered. But Mother wanted to get back to Spencer. There was some message she had to get across to him. The passwords seemed to be the Sisterhood is sponsoring, which she said now very loudly.

  “The Sisterhood is sponsoring.”

  Spencer finally asked. “What
happened to the B’nai B’rith Men’s Club?”

  “Did you say something, Spencer?” Mother asked innocently.

  “Yes, I did. I asked what happened to the B’nai B’rith Men’s Club?”

  “Nothing happened. They’re still there. Meeting the last Thursday of every month.”

  “I mean,” he said, swallowing a huge wad of onion roll, “how come they’re not sponsoring the team?”

  “Management problems they’ve got.”

  “What’s that mean?” Spencer closed his eyes and said slowly, “C’mon, Bessie, don’t be coy. I haven’t got all day.”

  “What’s coy about management problems? They’ve got no manager.”

  “So who—whom?—does Sisterhood have?”

  Mother’s eyes grew big and with a hitchhiker’s thumb she pointed to her cheek, smiled, and said, “Me whom. That’s whom.”

  “You!” Spencer shrieked. “That is the end! The absolute end!” And he banged his hand on the table. Too bad he had just taken the tomato juice out of the refrigerator.

  I ran to get the paper towels, but Mother and Spencer hardly noticed. The juice was plip-plipping onto his Hush Puppy size twelves. I scooted under the table to wipe up. I lifted first one foot and then the other and wiped all around. And he just kept stamping his feet.

  “It’s against regulations. No girls allowed.” Stamp. Stamp. Hush Puppy size twelves.

  “No girl players. Doesn’t say anything about managers.” Stamp. Stamp. Lazy Bones bedroom slippers size eight double A.

  Splatter. Stamp. Hush Puppies: “Where will you women stop? Why can’t you stay in the kitchen?”

  Stamp. Tap. Tap. Lazy Bones slippers: “And do what? Make rotten stuffed cabbage?”

  I rinsed out the sponge and was finishing up the tomato juice when Spencer swept his hand along the table and caused it to rain down peanut butter, cream cheese, and five bagels.

  “No one said that your stuffed cabbage was rotten. I said that your mind was closed.”