by Mark Helprin
“Hit one right to him. See if he can catch it,” Stengel commanded.
“What?” Mantle asked. “He just hit a ball out of the park, five times in a row, Casey. You think he can’t do what he says he’s going to do?”
“He’s probably never caught a ball,” Stengel insisted.
“So what,” Berra said. “The start of the middle is the end of the road for the beginning.”
“That may be so, Yogi,” Stengel said, “but let’s make sure to start where he is.”
“I’ll do that if you want,” Mantle agreed, and hit one toward Roger. Mantle was so good that Roger didn’t even have to shift his feet to position himself for the catch, which he accomplished swimmingly.
They weren’t expecting what happened when Roger threw the ball in. Never having thrown a baseball, or even held one, he overthrew. The ball sailed into the back of the upper grandstand. “This has gotta be a dream,” Stengel said.
“It isn’t,” said Berra. “You know how, when you’re dreaming, there’s a sign that says, ‘You’re Dreaming’? There’s no sign.”
“Yeah,” said Stengel. “You’re right. There’s no sign, so we know we’re not dreaming. Okay, Mickey, let’s see if he can do this. Hit him one as far back on the third-base line as you can.”
“I have a feeling he can do it,” Mantle said, hitting with newfound strength.
The ball went deep into left field, and Roger followed—no, preceded—it with inexplicable speed. His run had nothing about it of gravity. He just burned across the grass, like a fast train, and waited for the ball to come in. This was astounding, but not impossible.
Stengel continued to direct. “I want to see this. He’s standing on the third-base line. Hit one right along the first-base line. If he can cross the field … if he. …”
The ball went high into right. Roger kept his eye on it as he ran. He ran so fast that one of the players said, “Look at that! Look at that!” and Roger arrived in right field in time to catch the ball.
They motioned for him to come in, and as Roger glided toward them along the first-base line, this time carrying the ball with him, Stengel turned to the team and said, “This is a whole new situation.”
BECAUSE OF THE MANY complications that ensued, Stengel knew it wasn’t a dream. Dreams are notable not for their complications but for their lack of them, which is not to say that they aren’t complicated. Precisely because it wasn’t a dream, everyone who had seen what had happened had to be bribed, threatened, begged, or cajoled into silence. This meant the Yankees themselves, including a few coaches and assistant managers, four groundskeepers, and a hot-dog-roll contractor who witnessed the remarkable events while wheeling in several thousand pounds of hot-dog rolls. Stengel (who, as Berra said, was the smartest jerk who ever lived) enlisted those in the conspiracy not only with huge amounts of money but with roles to play. The hot-dog-roll man was retained at $5,000 per week to provide covert transportation for Roger in a hot-dog-roll truck. The groundskeepers were promised, if they kept mum, new lawns and new houses. The Yankees themselves had everything to win.
The problem of secrecy wasn’t overwhelming. The real trouble was that Roger would have to quit a week before Rosh HaShana, which meant he couldn’t play in the World Series. This was unbearable, and as the Yankees played—brilliantly, if losingly—against Kansas City that afternoon, the conversation in Stengel’s office went as follows:
“You’ve got to play in the Series, Roger. You can have anything you want. What do you want? Money? Broads? A car? A trip to Israel?”
“I want the Yenkiss to win.”
“So do I, Roger. That’s why you’ve got to play in the Series.”
“I can’t.”
“Roger, this is important here, really important. Who exactly says that you can’t play in the Series?”
“God.”
“I understand. You want to be a good guy. You want to be devout. You want to follow the rules. But God wouldn’t mind if you played in the Series. I’m sure many famous rabbis would uphold my statement.”
“He would mind, He told me.”
“What passage says that? We’ll get the best rabbis to look at it.”
“There’s no passage. He told me.”
“He told you directly?”
“Yeh.”
“I mean He actually … He … told you Himself? You spoke to Him?”
“I always speak to Him. But this time He came down to the roof.”
“Symbolically.”
“No.”
“No?”
“Mr. Stengel”—which Roger pronounced “Stengeleh”—“I weigh thirteen and three-quarter shvoigles. I’m two yumps tall. How do you think I hit the ball out of the house? Do you think I could do such a thing alone? Who do you think is in charge here? You? Me?”
NOT ONLY WOULD ROGER have to quit a week before Rosh HaShana, because of study requirements and holidays, he could play only in five games. Also, he had to have kosher food, and a place to live. Even had Roger been willing to accept money (Stengel foolishly told Mantle that the Yankees would have signed Roger for $10,000,000 a year—contingent on performance), the Yankees would have put him up in the presidential suite at the Carlyle anyway. As they didn’t even have to pay him, this was almost effortless. No one in the world, Stengel reasoned, would ever make the connection between Roger Reeves, the new rookie fresh out of the Carolinas or possibly Georgia (who knew?), and Winston Wilgis, a neurotic and reclusive rubber heir whose aides paid the hotel staff large amounts of cash to be discreet, and who was never seen and never left his room, although his adopted son, a Hasidic teenager who sometimes wore a baseball uniform, came and went regularly in a hot-dog-roll truck that pulled up to the loading dock.
Roger had bodyguards—two huge couches in bulging suits and bowllike haircuts, whose enormous Magnum revolvers were like giant swellings under their coats. They stood in front of his door whenever he was there, and checked the rabbis who brought carts of kosher pancakes and chocolate milkshakes for milk meals, and Bessarabian shish kebab and chopped-liver sandwiches for meat meals. They shook the Cel-Ray celery tonic bottles to make sure they were not bombs (which, when Roger opened them, they were), and kept all maids and waiters in total ignorance of the occupant of the hotel’s best accommodations. Roger was rather alone.
The first night he was brought to the hotel, after ten hours of unwritten-contract negotiations in which he was totally inflexible and got exactly what he wanted, he was tired. At his insistence they had stopped at a delicatessen at 100th Street and Broadway, where he ate like a cow and drank six bottles of Cel-Ray, his favorite drink in the world, that he had had only once before in his life, during a raucous and disorganized Simchat Torah when he had mistakenly grazed at the rabbis’ sweet table.
They popped him into the hotel room as if he had been in a hotel before, which he hadn’t, and there he was, in the presidential suite of the Carlyle, on the day that he had hit five balls out of Yankee Stadium, but luxury meant nothing to him, and this kind of glory little.
The furniture was so European that Louis XIV might not have noticed had he by some miracle been transported to the Carlyle from his own time and place. The carpets were soft and dense, the walls smooth and solid, everything clean and well lit, the colors bleeding into one another like wounded comrades in the French foreign legion. Roger wandered from room to room, but only in the living room did he fully realize what was happening, for there, as high above the earth as an airplane, huge banks of whistle-clean windows opened out on Manhattan, which roared and glowed, fading into the distance in never-ending avenues of a million flares, draped with necklaces of bridge lights, and banked high with massive buildings twinkling like starshine on a lake. Someone else standing in the same place, a president perhaps, a tycoon, a movie star, or even a baseball player, might have felt a feeling of power and vindication. To be high and to see the world marked out below you in cool fire is, after all, the dream of angels, but Roger felt neit
her pride nor vindication. Instead, his heart swelled at the great expanse of lights and a blood-red pennant left in the sky by the setting sun. He had no thought of what he had accomplished or where he had come. Looking over the miraculous work that stood before him he saw no reflection or reminder of himself, but only the kind of high glory that rides from place to place and time to time on a shower of sparks.
JUNE WAS HOT, perfect, and strange. It started magnificently and was slowly transformed into the initial bakery days of summer, tolerable for their novelty, when the beaches are as hot and white as molten glass but the ocean is blue and numbingly cold. A day of prairie heat would surrender to a northern European evening with cool breezes veering off the Hudson and sailing down the avenues like Dutch sloops. Morning fogs as thick as cotton could burn off in a minute, leaving behind them a newly shining world. It was a gorgeous month, but its brilliances were a foil for many peculiar things.
For example, a Mr. Winston Wilgis, rubber heir and recluse, called the Hotel Carlyle front desk to ask for a complete set of the Babylonian Talmud and sixteen cases of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic on ice. The next day, he asked for deep-sea fishing equipment, and if you had been walking on the street below his suite and had had occasion to look up, you would have seen, at various times, tarpon lures, bagels, socks, and a banana flying with dampened grace ten feet above you, a pendulum suspended by semi-invisible line.
As much as he caused others puzzlement, Roger himself was puzzled. Worked with great skill into a fruitwood enclosure in the living room of his suite were two televisions and a high-fidelity radio. One television played in black and white, the other in experimental color. Neglecting these wonders on his first night, Roger awoke early the next morning and turned the knobs. He had never seen a television. At first, nothing happened, but then a white dot appeared in the center of the pudding-gray glass, soon to move and intensify like a supernova, and then, like the opening of an umbrella, to expand into what became a picture accompanied by a hardly bearable tone. The picture was of something that looked like a spiderweb, and had written in the corner, WPIX-TV, Channel 11. Utterly useless. The one in color was not much better, though it looked like a Herschel Trixie, the only abstract artist Roger had thought he had heard of, though he had actually not heard of any.
The radio played more than just one station, and because no liver-filled refrigerator case interfered, you could turn it on or off whenever you wanted. The quality of its sound far exceeded that of the butcher’s radio, and the first time Roger turned it on the most extraordinary music filled the room, music such as he had never heard. He listened in wonderment as someone sang a lyric that sounded like, A wop bopa loobop a pop pop pop, a hop poppa loopa, a wop bop pop, and so on, with a pace and excitement that, though entirely foreign, seized him and made him dance around the room in abandon. Not even a Memphis lounge lizard could have done a better number, or swiveled his hips, bit his lips, and raised his cheeks until his eyes were slits, than did Roger, who, when the song ended and was replaced by a jingle that went, Brusha brusha brusha, new Ipana toothpaste, healthy for your tee-eeth!, stopped dead in delight.
Roger was not the only one that June to be astonished as both the sports and rabbinic worlds were thrown off balance by inexplicable changes to the New York Yankees. The only plausible explanation, that the Yankees wanted to draw new fans from the perhaps-underrepresented Orthodox Jewish community, was fairly unsatisfactory in that it did not actually explain the extraordinary measures. First came the announcement that hot dogs sold at the stadium would be only kosher. They were mainly kosher anyway. Then the revelation that on “ice-cream days” (a new term in baseball), hot dogs would not be served, and vice versa. This caused quite a stir.
At the press conference called to announce the food plans a reporter asked Stengel if and when peanuts would be available. “I’m told that peanuts are parve, and will be available at all times,” he answered. Most of the reporters thought that “parve” was a Stengel word (perhaps picked up from Berra, who was always inventing new ways to say things) that was the equivalent of the beatnik “cool,” or the now dated “swell.” This quickly infiltrated the sports press, and announcers began to talk about “the really parve double-header,” in Baltimore, or Y. A. Tittle’s “parve new contract.”
The nation became aware that now before every game in Yankee Stadium the stands echoed with Hebrew prayers, and that Hasidic rabbis stood behind the umpires at each of their positions. Disputes that had once taken seconds or minutes now sometimes took hours, with boys in black silk running to and fro to fetch or return leather-covered tomes for support. Stengel began to pronounce his own name with an “eh” at the end, and no longer referred to his team as the Yankees but as the Yenkiss, with the last syllable pronounced as in the last syllables of “hocus pocus.”
Speculation was that all of this was an inexplicable commercial strategy of the management, and as long as people credited the theory the inexplicable seemed explicable. Even when the team refused to play on Saturdays, everyone thought it was simply a disastrously stupid move somehow designed to increase attendance. But the changes were not solely the work of management. Some of the players now wore what everyone in New York called yamakas, a strangely Japanese way of referring to what Roger called kipote, or, in the singular, a kipah. When the press finally got up enough nerve to ask Eustis Jackson Jr., the second baseman, why he was wearing such a thing, he said, with some heat, “I’m a colored man, this is a free country, and I can do what I want.”
When Berra was asked, he responded with a long and phenomenally disjointed essay about freedom of speech, the free-enterprise system, and his ancestors. What did that have to do with his wearing of a yamaka? With a twinkle in his eyes that the press never saw, he said, “They would, had they could, because the least obvious reward for labor is hard work.” But that was not the end of the encounter.
“Hey Yogi,” a reporter said. “What are those threads, those, uh, fringes, sticking out of your pants?”
Yogi tucked them in, saying, “Frayed threads. It happens when it’s washed a lot.”
“Yogi,” they asked. “What is all this stuff, suddenly?”
“What stuff?”
“All this Jewish stuff.”
“What Jewish stuff?”
“You know, kosher stadium food, Hebrew prayers, rabbis behind the umps, yamakas, fringes. What’s going on?”
“Jewish stuff?” Yogi asked. “As Eustis said, it’s a free country, right? Look, guys, when you have a choice, there’s only one way to go.”
They accepted this, and went on. “But closing on Saturday is nuts. Aren’t you worried about attendance?”
Berra laughed. “Just be there for the game against Kansas City.”
THE REMATCH AGAINST KANSAS CITY was also a home game, as the A’s played solely away games that June because their field had been invaded by locusts. In New York at the end of the month it was hot and nearly everyone was either at work or at the beach. That the stands were half full might have been worrisome to management as a sign that the Yankees had lost their touch, but they were worried only about Roger.
Roger was fine, had kept up his extraordinary record in numerous practices (although, to keep the strategy secret, he hit balls out of the stadium only in the dark), and assured them that the presence of a crowd and the press would have no effect on what he could do. But they had seen too many confident rookies turn to swamp mush at the roar of the crowd, to be reassured, and they breathed apprehensively all through June, especially Stengeleh, who thought that perhaps he was having an epic dream.
Just striving to imitate Roger had made the Yankees hit better, run faster, and throw harder. They were losing by lesser margins, and although no one expected them to get to the Series, there was hope that they might hold their own enough to come back the next year. In fact, the sportswriters hoped for the agonizing comeback that would give them a great theme for the rest of the season. In the bottom of the ninth inning in
the Thursday game against the A’s, the score was Kansas City 3, New York 0, which wasn’t so bad, and might be good for stimulating eight hundred words of drivel about a Yankee revival. The radio announcers, however, were used to filling dead air in any circumstance, albeit with a languor that would have been the envy of Oblomov. No matter what, they would broadcast their perfectly timed descriptions in wonderful baseball-afternoon bursts.
Thus, Red and Mel—Red from Alabama, and Mel from Alabama, Red thin and Mel stocky, Red red-haired and Mel blue-black, Red high-strung and aristocratic and Mel what you might call a garage guy, Red a prima donna and Mel a prima donna, and both as comfortable to American ears as the sound of the lines whipping against a flagpole on a windy day. Red was looking forward to catching the train up to Briarcliff, and Mel was going to dinner that night with a broad. They thought the game was more or less over. So, apparently, did a lot of other people, who were headed to the subway and the parking lots. The voices of the announcers, arrowing over the air, conveyed a yearning for scotch on the 5:06 as the sun beat off the brackish Hudson, and the anticipation of the relaxed clink of glasses and ice at ‘21.’
After some light opera in service of Rheingold Beer, Mel summarized: “Yankees versus the A’s, Yankee Stadium, bottom of the ninth.” The word ninth had an upward intonation, like a rising pheasant. “A’s three, Yankees nothing, Koswick on third, Miller on second, two outs.”
“Folks,” said Red, “there are two outs, and Mantle is up. Or will be … in a second. What do you say, Mel?”
“It’s pretty clear, Red. Mantle has to go for a homer, and Zelinka has gotta walk him.”
“And strike the next batter out. … There’s potential drama here, Mel. Mantle has been hitting well.”
“You’re right, Red. If he hits now the way he’s been hitting in practice, the Yanks may have a chance today.”
“I know what you’re gonna say is strange, Mel,” Red interrupted.
