I spent the summer at a Y. M. C. A. camp on the Maine coast. There were no other Jewish boys there, but my aunt had managed to have me placed on the roll-call somehow. I was glad enough of it. I did not want another summer at a fashionable hotel in her and other ladies' company.
Of course, I was "Ike" to the boys of the camp. They were a good, rough-and-ready sort who swam well, ran, tramped, sang rollicking songs on weekdays and hymns on Sundays, grew brown and muscle-bound and manly. Such teasing as I had from them was good-natured, and I suppose I should have taken it in the same spirit. But I had none of their assurance, was like a stranger in a strange land—and came out of the summer with a still deeper shrinking from contact with other boys.
High school began again, went on and on from lagging month to month, and soon enough was over for a second year. But this time my aunt had been as much aroused as she could be to the baffling condition of my mind and spirits. I had by no means lost the old loneliness. I had learned to bear it with greater patience, but it still galled and depressed me.
Only, after that evening when I stood outside the synagogue, I had some dim conception of what the inevitable cure would have to be.
At any rate, my aunt called in the nerve specialist a second time. He insisted that I must be sent away. Perhaps he saw into the unsympathetic quality of our home life.
This sent my aunt into tremors of delight. She had now a legitimate excuse for shipping me off to a fashionable boarding school of some sort. For days she made a feverish study of monogrammed and photogravured catalogues from various schools in the East. It was upon a military school on the upper Hudson that her choice finally fell. And I am sure that this was due to the expensive appearance, the coat of arms and Latin motto of the catalogue's cover.
What ever it was, her choice was made. She talked a good deal of splendid uniforms, of flags unfurled to the sunset—and fired me with a lust for the new chapter in my life.