by Mark Helprin
Like Joshua, he circled the walls. Unlike Joshua, he came to a truck bay into which vendors were carrying trays of freshly baked pretzels, jelly doughnuts, and other things. Stepping up to an immense Armenian who was carrying sacks of roasted peanuts to a baggage trailer inside, Roger said, “Mickey Mental sent me out here to help you because he wants all these beans inside before it rains.”
“What?”
“Mickey Mental. He sent me.”
“Mantle?”
“He can’t do it. A pain in his back, from playing the violin. Get those beans in right away. You know what Rabbi Belknap of Mazlow says about beans in the rain.”
The Armenian looked at the slight, blond, Hasidic Jew, and said, “Rabbi Belknap. …”
“Let’s go!” Roger commanded.
In a kind of trance, the peanut czar of Yankee Stadium agreed. “Okay. Let’s go! You take these beans from the truck. Go ahead! Take them. Take the beans!”
After working for half an hour, Roger was in. Not only had he found the House of Ruth, he had breached its walls without slinging a single stone or slaying a single Boabite. Gliding up a ramp in search of June daylight, he came out on the first tier near left field. Looking east toward the bladder neck of the Bronx and into the vast right-field decks rising unto the crane of his neck and topped by rows of flags and formations of lights like the radars on a cruiser, he realized that although it did not fit Luba’s description exactly—gone were the purple hangings, the maidens, the grapes—it was close. You could fill it with every rabbi in the world and you would still have room for more. He looked at rows and rows of seats as neatly folded as laundry, lacquered hard and beerproof. Remembering the oceanic sounds on Schnaiper’s radio, he filled in the crowd. In his vision of what he heard, he saw whole steppes of people whose faces were like seeds peering from sunflowers, and whose changes of position and sudden cheers were like wind sweeping high grass. Legions disappeared in the shadows, from which a roar echoed like a hurricane. How many places like this, he thought, would it take to hold six million people, and his answer, quickly calculated, was one hundred twenty. Stadiums packed with fifty thousand people could be placed in a line down both sides of Manhattan from Washington Heights to the Battery, with no space in between, and if the souls within could break their silence, the roar would be unlike anything ever heard.
“One foot at a time,” he said to himself, with no idea why he said it. “One foot at a time.” He sighed. If only his father and mother could see him, standing in Ruth’s house, about to save the Yenkiss. They would not know of either of these things, but if only they could see him.
A young Hasidic boy in black robes and a fur hat on a hot June day had no idea how to save the Yankees, but his moving feet carried him to the rail. At the elliptical center of the field a man in a white suit stood on a barrow of dirt and would periodically throw something at two men who faced him. One of the men was in turtlelike armor, squatting. The other stood, with a weapon.
When the thing that was thrown at the man with the staff would come at him almost faster than the eye could see, he would strike at it, and there would be a crack as in the breaking of a cable, after which the thing that was thrown would fly out into the air, along varying trajectories, and land in the grass. Then someone would throw the man on the dirt a new thing, and the process would continue. Sometimes the man who held the weapon missed, and the thing that was thrown was caught by the turtle, who threw it back. Who knew? But this was baseball.
On the back of the man with the weapon was the number 7. This meant, according to Schnaiper, that he was Mickey Mental. It was a good place to start. If you are going to help the needy, help those in most distress, and those in most distress are those who have fallen furthest. Roger was sure that it was no accident that the only thing between him and Mickey Mental, the greatest baseball player of the age (according to Schnaiper), was a hundred feet of perfectly clear air through which sound could easily carry.
THIS WAS AT A TIME in the morning when the field was most like what a field is supposed to be, swept clocklike by golden legs of sun stilting across it as time progressed, insects busy in flight against the huge foils of black shadow. A white blur that is not mist but a condition of the light, a lost and miscellaneous glare, covered the empty stands and bleachers in which, to Mantle’s delight, virtually no one had yet appeared. And those who had come early kept as respectful a distance as pilgrims in St. Peter’s who have stumbled upon the Pope in the dry runs of investiture. Fragrant breezes from the field alternated pleasingly with cool downdrafts of leftover night air rolling off the second level like a waterfall. It was the perfect time for the great player to concentrate on the attainment of perfection in hitting the ball. To allow his gifts free rein, he needed something like the flow of a river. In the mornings, when Yankee Stadium reminded him most of the fields his forebears had farmed, that river flowed best. He was deep in concentration, and doing very well, when he became aware of a distraction.
From behind, from the left-field fence out toward third base, came a kind of squeak. At first he thought it was a bird or a cricket. Then he realized that it was an imploring voice. Once every great while, coarse people got into the stadium before a game and stood at the rail calling out his name, hoping for acknowledgment, a conversation, or an autographed baseball. This he had learned to ignore.
But though he tried, he could not ignore the squeak. He screwed up his face, rested the bat against his shoulder, and held up his left hand as a signal to the pitcher to hold off. What was this squeak? He lifted his head, hand still held out, and squinted, which was what he did when he wanted better to hear something behind him. He heard the calling of his own name, after a fashion. “What?” he said, as if asking why the perfect morning had to include this.
Roger had been squeaking as regularly as a tree frog in heat. For ten minutes, without even a hint of self-consciousness—indeed, with miraculous happiness—he had been calling out: “Mickey Mental! Mickey Mental! Mickey Mental!”
Convinced that he was being mocked, the champion turned his head somewhat like an ostrich and stared over his own broad back as if it were a wall. He was expecting to see a large disorganized lout with a face oriented in many directions at once, or possibly a bland-looking idiot with eyes only inches from his hairline. But he saw nothing, because he was looking too high. When he dropped his aim a fraction he spied a small, funny-looking thing in black. Not budging from the plate, he leaned back slightly on his heels and focused on the object, laboring to understand what it was, while all the time it squeaked at him, shouting, “Mickey Mental! Mickey Mental! Mickey Mental!”
By this time the turtle had stood and removed his carapace. “What is that, Mickey?” he asked. “It’s not a monkey, is it?”
“Monkeys don’t talk, Yogi.”
“Maybe it’s mechanical.”
“It’s making fun of me,” Mickey Mantle said. “I’ve got to take care of this.” He strode angrily toward Roger, bat famously in hand, as irritated and as polite as a steambath attendant. Halfway there, he saw that his tormentor was a boy in Hasidic robes and a shtreimel. The face of this boy was, in fact, oriented in many different directions, but lucidly so, so intelligently in fact that it gave Mantle pause, for in Roger’s young eyes was a depth that, even though they were young, Mickey had never seen except in the eyes of the very old. Roger had stopped squeaking, and was smiling, because everything was going according to plan.
A foot taller than Roger, Mickey bent forward, squinted with his left eye, opened the right very wide, and said, “Are you … calling me?”
“You’re seven,” Roger said in his accented English.
Mickey nodded.
“What a number! What I could tell you about that number!”
“Is that what you wanted?”
“No.”
“Why did you call me that?”
“What?” Roger inquired.
“Mickey Mental.”
Roger shrugged. �
��That’s your name.”
“What’s my name?”
“Mickey Mental. Isn’t it?”
“Say Mantle,” Mickey commanded.
“Mental,” Roger said.
“Mantle,” Mickey repeated.
“Mental,” Roger echoed. He could not hear the difference, and wondered at this strange form of introduction.
“Mickey Mental,” Mickey said. “Are we done?”
“Oh no,” Roger said, “not by a lung shot.”
“Not by a lung shot? Look, kid, I’ve got batting practice. Do you want me to sign a glove or something? I’ll do it, but leave me alone.”
Roger looked at his hands. “Glove.”
“Whadaya want? I’ll give you a minute.”
Now, like clouds dappling the sea, the thinking moved perceptibly across Roger’s eyes. “I’ve been sent to help you,” he said.
He spoke with absolute seriousness, with a gravity of unknown but arresting origin. Mickey forgot the passage of time. Thinking that he was losing his mind, he asked, “Who sent you?”
“Boruch ha Shem,” Roger said, which means, “blessed be the Name.”
“Boruch ha Shem,” Mickey Mantle repeated. “Who’s that?”
“It’s forbidden to say the Name.”
“But you just said it.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Boruch ha Shem, right?”
“Boruch ha Shem.”
“So, you said it.”
“I would never say it,” Roger said, “Boruch ha Shem.”
“Well, you tell Boruch ha Shem that I’m not interested.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Roger said, in a way that indicated a nervous apprehension and his absolute certainty that one dare not do such a thing.
“Okay,” said Mickey, “your time is up. That’s it.” He turned and began to walk back to home plate, hoping that he would hear no more squeaks and that the next time he looked back Roger would be gone and would not appear again.
But he had taken only a few steps when Roger shouted, “God. I can say it in English.”
Mickey stopped, turned around, and went back. “God sent you?”
Roger nodded.
“He Himself, personally.”
Eyes closed, Roger nodded unambiguously.
“To do what?”
“To lift you from the darkness of defeat.”
“And how, did He tell you, are you to do that?”
“I was not told how,” Roger said. (The problem for Mickey, as he himself saw it, was that he believed Roger.) “Specific instructions I didn’t get, but I was watching, and as usually happens, it came to me.”
“Okay,” Mickey said, “save me.”
“I will,” said Roger. “You were repeatedly hitting that object which was thrown at you, with that axe.”
Mickey looked at the bat and rolled his eyes.
“And I noticed that you hit the object out to many different places, and that people expressed approval or disappointment depending upon where it landed. Is there an ideal place to which to direct it?”
Mickey laughed to himself a little like a crazy person. “Yeah,” he said, “there is an ideal place to which to direct the object.”
“Where?” Roger asked.
Mickey took the bat in his left hand, turned his head to the right, and extended his right hand, pointing up and away. “You see that clock over there, above the sign?”
“That says Longeens?” Roger asked, pronouncing it with a hard G.
“Longines,” Mickey corrected. “The ideal place to which to direct the object is over that clock. No one’s ever done it. No one’s ever directed a ball out of this stadium.”
“I’ll show you,” Roger said.
“You’ll show me.”
“Yes, I will.”
“Kid, we have the best batting coaches in the world. I’m supposed to be the best batter in the world. How can you show me?”
“Listen,” said Roger, losing his patience. “That’s what I was sent here to do. Let me show you, and if I can’t, I’ll go.”
Mickey stared at Roger. “What is this?” he asked.
“The goat can butt because he has horns,” Roger said, as if that settled it.
And, as if it did, Mickey said, “You wait here. I’m going to see.”
“See what?”
“Talk to my friends.”
“Okay.”
Mickey walked quickly back to home. Roger prayed. Davening, he was pulled into the clouds of galaxies and stars, the explosion of suns united and uniting, the greatest glory bleeding perfectly into the smallest thing, the smallest thing assuming effortlessly the greatest glory. It was not that he imagined this or summoned it to appear, but, rather, that his prayer was that the curtain be lifted.
AN AGITATED MANTLE took up the batter’s position and tapped the plate with the end of the bat. Berra pulled down his mask. Mantle raised the bat and made eye contact with the pitcher. To dispel his confusion, he wanted to hit one into the stands. The pitcher, Martin, wound up, released, and a slow ball came down the chute, precisely in the middle of the strike zone. Mantle swung to smash the ball, and didn’t even touch it.
“Stee! Rike!” Berra said.
“Shut up!”
Knowing that his friend didn’t talk this way, Berra flipped up his mask. “What’s the matter?”
“That kid. He’s got me shook up.”
“What did he want, an autograph?”
“No. He’s come here to save us. God sent him. He says he can show me how to hit a ball over the clock.”
Berra thought. “Let him come to the plate. That’s what he wants. Let him hit one. Why not? What can you win?”
“You mean, ‘What can you lose?’”
“No. ‘What can you win?’ It means, ‘Grab the bell by the broom.’ Maybe he can save us.”
“How can he teach me? He’s a kid. I don’t know, twelve? He’s a hayseed,” by which the great slugger meant Hasid.
“Mick, maybe he knows.”
“I don’t think so, Yogi.”
“You were a hayseed before you got into baseball,” Berra said, expressing the almost universally held impression that Mantle was, somehow, the paradigm of American agriculture.
Mantle looked sharply at the catcher. “I was not.”
“Sure you were. Everyone knows it.”
“A hayseed?”
“Yeah. Ask any baseball fan in America.”
“With the hat, and the sideburns and everything?” Mantle asked.
“That’s right,” Berra said, thinking of straw hat and rural aspect.
“I was not!”
“Yes you were,” said Berra, bobbing his head up and down in confirmation. “You’ve got it written all over you.”
Mickey thought this was a dream. “How come no one ever told me?”
“Because it’s so obvious.”
“It is?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“In the way you dress, the way you talk, the way you look. Your accent. Your face. It’s part of why you’re such a hero. I’m Italian. People look at me differently. It’s a different attitude.”
“Wait a minute,” said Mickey, “wait a minute.” He turned to the pitcher. “Hey, Billy,” he shouted. “Billy. Do I strike you as a hayseed? Do I look and talk like one?”
The pitcher said, “Yeah.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“How come you never told me?”
“Why should I?” the pitcher shouted back. “Who am I, your girlfriend?”
Mickey stared off into space.
“Mick, get the kid,” Berra said. “Bring him out onto the field. We’ll put the guys in position; it’ll be the thrill of his life. Look at ’im. There’s no one with him. If you’re alone, you’re all by yourself.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t know anything about baseball. He calls the ball an object and the bat an axe. He says that he doesn’t know how,
but that God will provide.”
“Get him anyway.”
“You believe him?”
“I’ll get the guys,” Berra announced.
AS MICKEY MANTLE lifted Roger over the fence, the Yankees loped out onto the field. Maintenance workers looked up. What was this? The whole team, in an empty stadium, set up for a game?
“How much do you weigh?” Mickey asked Roger after he set him down and they were walking—Roger’s black costume flowing with the breeze—because the airborne Roger had seemed to Mickey to have had no weight.
“Thirteen and three-quarter shvoigles,” Roger answered.
“How many pounds is that?”
“I don’t know. There are eight beyngaluchs in a shvoigle.”
“Did you ever play baseball?”
“Until a little while ago, I never heard of it.”
“Well, here on the field, awaiting your direction, are the New York Yankees.”
“You know,” said Roger, almost at the plate, “God shifts an untold number of birds twice a year from the top of the earth to the middle, and from the middle back to the top—geese, herons, fingelehs, robins, chickens, starlings, woodpeckers, kibniks, stvittles, albatrosses, sprites, doves. …”
Mickey awaited what was next.
“If He takes the trouble to shift a goose from the North Pole to Havana, He could easily have set me in proper motion to end up here, and He did. Here are the Yenkiss, all spread out, as He intended, and here am I. Hand me the axe.”
Mickey gave him the bat. When it came into his hands, the sun, purely by coincidence, hit it in a peculiar way, and it appeared to glow. Roger held it almost at arm’s length, like an upraised sword, and stunned the Yankees as he swayed back and forth and twirled around, for the bat seemed to them—as it seemed to him—to be a staff with a power beyond that of the maker or the wood. That he would dance so, in front of them, as if unaware of their presence, or not caring, they found extraordinary. He was, in fact, momentarily unaware of them, because his thoughts had been seized, and flowed in only one direction, where the staff pointed, up. The only thing in his heart at that moment was love, and the only thing before his eyes a verse from the book of Ruth: “May the Lord deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead.” What the Yankees did not know was that this boy who knew nothing about baseball had come into their midst to test an ancient compact that of late had been broken. The Yankees did not know that their stadium had been turned into a court of justice in which the prosecutor was an odd little boy and the defendant was the creator of the universe. In Christian theology—and the Yankees were Christians—this is inconceivable. God does not appear in the dock. He does not dispute with those over whom He holds absolute sway. In Jewish theology, however, He does.
