"You Can't Tell a Man by the Songs He Sings"

According to critical consensus, the penultimate story in Goodbye, Columbus is the weakest. It is also the earliest of Roth's stories in the collection. Nevertheless, it has its humor too and its moral irony, though here the two are not as tightly interwoven as in the other stories. Jokes abound, as when the ex-con Albie Pelagutti, recently returned to high school, asks the boy sitting next to him for "the answer" while they are filling out an occupations questionnaire. Or when Albie turns up for a baseball game in an outlandish costume. Though he has bragged about his skill as a ballplayer, when a fly ball comes his way he lets it land on his chest instead of in his glove and he doesn't know the first thing about holding a bat at the plate.

The unnamed narrator (the boy who gives Albie "the answer" and the one who is duped into picking him for his ball team) learns a lot from Albie and from another ex-con, "Duke" Scarpa. Streetwise, they know when to assert themselves and when to run—for instance, when the cafeteria window accidentally gets broken while the three are horsing around. The ex-cons never make it through high school, but years later, when the Kefauver Committee investigates crime in the area, neither Pelagutti's nor Scarpa's name turns up in the papers. Instead, the wellmeaning, decent occupations teacher, Mr. Russo, is victimized when another Senate committee swoops through the state. Refusing to answer some of the committee's questions, he is fired by the board of education for having been a Marxist during his college years. The point of the story becomes clear at the end, as the narrator contrasts Russo's fate with his own experience in the high school principal's office, where he was sent for breaking the cafeteria window. The principal had warned that the file card on which the disciplinary breach was recorded would follow the boy all through his life. Albie and Duke knew that; that is why they ran when the window was broken. The narrator had not run and was punished. Ironically, poor Russo was just discovering a fact of life that his pupils had learned much earlier, while still boys.