15 April 2011 OPEN WOUNDS by Joseph Lunievicz, WestSide Books, May 2011, 352p., ISBN: 978-1-934813-51-5

If you thumb through my high school yearbooks; page through to the back of the sports sections, behind just about every other sport imaginable, you will find the photos of our high school's varsity and junior varsity fencing teams.  And me. 

Just like Holden Caufield, I spent a couple of years as the manager of the fencing team.  As with some of my other extracurricular pursuits, I became familiar with the fencing team because of Lenny Fox, an older boy who was my longtime buddy from Boy Scouts.  

So it was, with my fond memories of tending to and repairing the equipment and uniforms for the fencing team, that I was excited to discover OPEN WOUNDS, a coming-of-age story of swordplay and Shakespeare and Depression-era Queens, New York. 

"The footsteps landed -- one dull, one sharp.  Tap-boom, pause, tap-boom.  Then the voice became louder.

"'The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a ling

For you but not for me.'

"I heard an intake of breath.  It was Sister Bernadette.  She must have been waiting outside the door.  The Sisters did that at St. Agnes, standing outside of doorways, listening to us, watching over us, spying on us.

"The singing stopped.  There was a final tap-boom.  The sound of two heels clicking together followed in its wake.

"'Winston Arnolf Leftingsham, at your service,' the voice rasped with a slight English accent.

"There was silence, then Sister Bernadette's voice said crisply, 'There is no singing in the halls unless it's in the service of the Lord.'

"'My apologies to the Lord, Sister.'

"Sister Bernadette snorted, then cleared her throat.  'In there,' she said.  'I'll be down the hall should you...need anything.'

"'There is nothing I shall need.'

"'Very well,' she replied, and I heard her footsteps recede down the hall.

"I was curious so I turned toward the door.

"Winston Arnolf Leftingsham stepped awkwardly in the doorway, one leg bent, the other stiff.  The light from the lamp shined onto his face.

"The left side seemed to have melted down over his eye and off his chin.  The cheek was sunken, covered mostly by a patch of white scar tissue.  His hair was tan, sticking out of his scalp like sharp stalks of dead grass.  It sat in random patches, surrounded by scarred and flaking skin.  The right half of his face was untouched. He had no left arm and his empty sleeve was pinned flat to his side. 

"He focused his right eye on me and twisted his lips into a smile.  He leaned on a cane that he held with his black-gloved hand.  The gray suit he wore was too big and hung on him.  The vest was threadbare and stained at its bottom edges.  A tarnished brass pocket-watch chain dangled from its pocket.  His left leg seemed longer than his right, tilting him to one side.  A faded gray winter coat was draped across his shoulders.

"'You are Wymann, son of Theodore,' he said slowly, as a statement of fact.

"I nodded."

Cedric (Cid) Wymann is a boy who has grown up in the rough-and-tumble of 1930s Queens.  When we first meet him, he is being homeschooled by his paternal grandmother who also takes him along with her to the movies on Saturdays.  It is there that he gets to gaze upon the swashbuckling heroes of the big screen such as Errol Flynn, and watch the fight scenes in the 1936 release of Romeo and Juliet.  Meanwhile, back in his neighborhood, Cid and his two friends --Tomsik and Siggy -- must deal with the terrorizing beatings at the hands of the young neighborhood thugs who will continue to haunt his life.

Cid's mother having died giving birth to him, his life completely changes when his alcoholic father disappears and his grandmother throws herself before a train.  Cid then spends five years in the orphanage at St. Agnes until his grown-up cousin Winston Arnolf Leftingsham (Lefty) arrives in the City and takes him to live in Manhattan's Chelsea Hotel.  Lefty's terribly-damaged visage, his wooden arm and leg, and his morphine addiction, are all the result of being bombed and gassed while in the trenches during the Great War. 

It is Lefty and his old acquaintance, the drunken but amazing Russian Nikolai Varvarinski, who owes Lefty an immense favor, who will immerse Cid in the arts of fencing and stage fighting, and who will each in turn become a father figure to the young man.  Reuniting with his two childhood friends, each day of practicing brings Cid closer to a showdown with the same thugs who'd so affected their earlier lives.

OPEN WOUNDS is a gem of a tale that is filled with guy relationships, flavored with a lost era of New York City, and features the intricacies and athleticism of a sport that is rarely part of young adult literature.