Big League Dreams (Small Worlds)

by Allen Hoffman

  Although he was lying still in his bed, Matti’s eyes were wide open. A breeze pushed the filmy curtains apart and revealed the great dark bulk of the sycamore trees. He could hear their stiff, hand-shaped leaves rustling. Yes, he thought, it was as if the rebbe had parted a curtain. Perhaps the rebbe’s view of his future was suspect, but certainly he was right in picturing Matti’s past as verging on folly. A folly of dishonesty, bogus romance, and fake identity that he could now expiate simply by helping defeat the Detroit Tigers—or, as the rebbe put it, by “burning the cats.” That was an amusing analogy. And who was Zloty? Ty Cobb! How would the rebbe have worked that out? No, that would be no problem. The Krimsker Rebbe believed that nothing happened by accident: an unseen hand touched everything. Well, almost everything. What had Reb Gedaliah taught them as children? Everything depends upon heaven except the fear of heaven.

  Staring through the open window into the dark, unformed night, Matti felt very much at ease. He couldn’t remember ever having experienced such a sensation of well-being and relaxation. The world seemed so new and mysterious. But best of all, it was his world. Was an unseen hand tracing his destiny across this world, just as the invisible man inside the great black scoreboard posted the results, inning by inning? What was there to fear in that predestined game? It would be his life, his world. Not a child’s game, not an imagined romance, not a counterfeit success. Tomorrow he could find out about his world, but now he had a delicious sense of anticipation, the way the first scent of the rich sweet cloud of bubbling fish broth made his mouth water Friday afternoon before the table was even set. He could hear the great scaly-barked sycamores kneading the darkness with their stiff green leaves, but they held no fear for him. He was secure, and with the indolent comfort of a silky red apple ripening on a warm, smooth tree in his boyhood town of Krimsk, he closed his eyes.

  Shayna Basya’s eyes were closed, but she was wide awake. She was wondering why her husband had not made love to her tonight. Her eyes were closed in the now rather forlorn hope that the rebbe would kiss them in his special way. Tonight things had seemed so very promising after the rebbe had decided not to visit the savage Osage reservation. Since their American honeymoon began, they had always spent the Sabbath together, celebrating the Sabbath night of “holy unions,” as Yaakov Moshe called it.

  She put her finger gently to her eyelid and felt the many furrows. Although a myriad of fine lines crisscrossed Shayna Basya’s face with the geometric precision of a doily, they were not deeply ingrained. Testifying to her age, this ceaseless fretwork said little about her spirit. Indeed, Shayna Basya radiated a youthful sensibility, for she was something a doily could never be. Quite simply, the Krimsker Rebbetzin was a woman in love. From that final Tisha B’Av night in Krimsk when she lay in her husband’s arms and Yaakov Moshe had called her by name, her loneliness had ended. When his name was mentioned, she felt a glow. When he entered the room, she found herself smiling, and when he held her and pronounced her name, the passion returned.

  Ever since that night, she had felt more like a girl than a woman. When the rebbe announced that their daughter Rachel Leah was engaged to Hershel Shwartzman, a man she had neither heard of nor seen, she simply said “mazel tov,”and when the rebbe announced their precipitous departure from Krimsk, she immediately began packing. The journey to America and the years in St. Louis were an extended honeymoon. The distance from Krimsk, the strange new American world, all these things that intimidated the other older Jewish women who hovered close to the sink and stove, Shayna Basya enjoyed. She delighted in the sputtering cars rushing down Delmar Boulevard in a neverending procession, as if over the horizon God himself were taking them out of a great box and winding them up. Strolling in her neighborhood, she enjoyed the symmetrical sidewalks, the gas streetlights, and the friendly goyim who nodded at her when she went to the market, which was filled with every sort of forbidden food.

  The broad green expanses of the city’s Forest Park seemed fit for royalty. Downtown the great train station soared above the trains and men as if it were the first of the seven firmaments. The rebbetzin liked to wander through the massive department stores, square-windowed mountains that took up entire city blocks, where narrow aisles separated entire worlds. The metallic clang of the streetcar’s bell and the klaxon beep of the automobile’s horn aroused her to the strange but wonderfully frenetic world that rushed around her in never-flagging exotic energy. All so alien, so fantastic, and so perfect for a distant kingdom where she and Yaakov Moshe could live in privacy, love, and passion.

  Two things, however, troubled her about America. She feared for the rebbe’s life every time he visited the Indian camp. Black and white Americans did not intimidate her; in fact, many charmed her with their friendly openness and willingness to help. But the redskins seemed as bad as the goyim back in Krimichak or worse—even in the pogroms, the peasants didn’t go around scalping people. The rebbe insisted that the Indians had ceased scalping long ago, but in the museum Shayna Basya had seen the tops of human heads hanging stiff and dry from a pole like hairy shrouds of death itself. She was convinced that no one who had once committed such horrible acts could ever reform. Some roads are so long that one can never turn back.

  The great river that had given birth to the trading city also frightened her. This massive swirling river that drained the continent in mud-filled turbulence to the distant sea was appropriately called by an Indian name, Mississippi, the Father of Waters. She hated the mud color, for it seemed to her as if the silent, treacherous river had risen up and scalped the land of its soil.

  She feared the Mississippi River for a more personal reason: the rebbe wanted her to dip in it instead of the ritual mikveh pool that the community maintained in a perfectly well-heated building. Shayna Basya understood his logic. During their final five years in Krimsk, the rebbe had withdrawn mysteriously from the world into his study; there he had been locked in a titanic spiritual struggle with the forces of evil, locally embodied in Grannie Zara the Polish witch. Then, impersonating Lilith the demon queen, Shayna Basya had furtively visited him in the dark of night. Because everyone in Krimsk understood that the rebbe had withdrawn from his wife as well, Shayna Basya could not ritually purify herself in the communal ritualarium. There was no choice other than the River Nedd, where it flowed through the dark pond between Krimsk and Krimichak.

  When she had told Yaakov Moshe how, during all those years she had been visiting him under the guise of Lilith, she had gone alone to dip in the Krimsk pond rather than use the town mikveh, the rebbe’s eyes had lit up. Praising her courage and wifely virtue, he declared that such nobility must be transferred to the New World: she must dip in the Mississippi to regain her ritual purity. But she never did, for she never became impure. The manner of women had ceased a month before they had left Krimsk; otherwise she would not have been able to give herself to her husband that fateful Tisha B’Av night. And her fertile cycle had never returned. Thank God it had not, for the late-night pond had filled her with terror. Trembling, she had waded into the still waters that clothed her nude body in quiet purity. The thought of stepping into and submerging herself in the Mississippi’s muddy, roiling waters, which rushed by the stone levee with such ravaging force, made her heart stop. She imagined that she would be swept away toward the dark bottom and there, turning over and over like a sunken wheel, rolled through a watery underworld for eternity.

  Aside from the Indians and their ominous river, life was really very pleasant in untroubled America. When the hasidim who still frequented the beis midrash now saw her, they would ask deferentially whether they could be of service. St. Louis, however, was large, and the hasidim few, so the rebbetzin could float about freely like a tourist, unrecognized, unhurried, and unburdened by aristocratic obligations.

  The warm, unassuming, almost playful woman who had so surprised Boruch Levi was not aware of how much she had changed over the years. The lack of pretense that was such a significant part of the change preclud
ed thoughtful self-examination. After all, St. Louis was only a brief interlude in her life, a bubble in time, wasn’t it?

  Boruch Levi’s son Sammy had pricked that bubble. In some mysterious way he had reminded her of her daughter, Rachel Leah. There was no physical resemblance, nor were their personalities similar; Rachel Leah had been very shy, religious, and withdrawn. But Sammy’s sweetness and eagerness to please reminded her of Rachel Leah. Poor Rachel Leah had been the great recluse’s daughter, alone and uncertain. She had so desired her father’s love and approval. As a nonwidowed widow during the five years that the rebbe had secluded himself, Shayna Basya had been too busy to provide enough love. She realized now that the rebbe had responded to her need for Sammy by commanding the boy to pray at the beis midrash. The rebbetzin eagerly anticipated his visits. How would he look in a sweater when the crisp cool air of autumn licked at his delicate cheeks? What had Rachel Leah looked like when the first Krimsk frosts—they came so much earlier there—settled their chill on the world? She could no longer remember; it seemed so long ago.

  As Shayna Basya lay in the darkened room with her husband sleeping soundly at her side, she wondered where her daughter and son-in-law were at that very minute. The rebbe’s last words to Boruch Levi came to her mind. “There was nothing to do but pick up the letters because the pilot had succeeded,” he had admonished. Suddenly Shayna Basya desperately wanted the rebbe to write Rachel Leah and Hershel a letter. Right now it was the middle of the night, and the Sabbath, too, but as soon as the Sabbath was over, he must write. Yaakov Moshe would know exactly what to say and how to say it. He was, after all, the Krimsker Rebbe, the most remarkable of men. A true pilot.

  “Yaakov Moshe! Wake up! I must speak to you,” she said fervently.

  Almost impossible to awaken, he slept as though he were in another world. She climbed out of her bed and approached him. Facing the wall, he slept on his side.

  “Yaakov Moshe, Yaakov Moshe,” she called in a voice coarse with anticipation. As soon as the Sabbath was over, he must write the letter!

  “Darling,” she said softly as she pulled his shoulder toward her, rolling him over onto his back. Facing her, he opened his froglike eyes.

  “Darling, I must tell you something right now before I forget. It simply cannot wait,” she said, apologizing for waking him.

  “Yes?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Now it is the Sabbath, but it will soon be over, and I want—”

  “The holy Sabbath?” he asked slowly.

  “Yes, the holy Sabbath. You were saying earlier that there was nothing to do but collect the letters,” she began to explain.

  “The holy Sabbath?” he asked again in wonderment.

  “Yes, the holy Sabbath, when it is forbidden to write letters, but tomorrow night—”

  “My pure Shayna Basya has awakened me to the holy Sabbath. The holy Sabbath is one-sixtieth of the World to Come, and we must effect the holy union. ‘My love is mine and I am my beloved’s ...’” And, quoting the Song of Songs of Solomon, he drew her onto his bed.

  With a feather touch, he traced the myriad of exciting lines on her closed eyelid with his tongue.

  “Yes, my love, yes,” she gasped as a wave of passion broke over the soft sands of memory, washing away her resolve and the field with its letters scattered about like fallen leaves.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  AFTER ALMOST EIGHT FULL INNINGS, THE ST. LOUIS Browns led the Detroit Tigers three to one. In the third inning Sisler had tripled off the center-field wall for one run, and in the fourth, with bases loaded, Matti himself had pushed a ground single through the infield to score two more. On the mound, Dufer had a live fastball and a sharp, precise curve. With any luck, Dufer should still have been working on a shutout, but in the sixth Cobb had walked on a pitch that Matti thought was a strike and advanced to third when Heilman lifted a blooper down the left field line that just managed to elude both the shortstop and left fielder. On a short fly to center, Cobb tagged up and hustled home, beating the throw by a step. Dufer struck out the next two batters. The Tiger score was very much a solo run. With Dufer in control, and only one more inning remaining, the Browns seemed to have a comfortable lead.

  Secure in the anticipation of victory, the large Saturday afternoon crowd, once enthusiastic, now relaxed and gave more of its attention to sipping cold sodas, licking ice cream bars, and munching roasted peanuts. As the communal focus degenerated from the playing field toward more individual culinary perspectives, the crowd’s voice became haphazard and sporadic. Some of these random calls reached the playing field. Although they seemed innocent enough, they made Matti uncomfortable. As he crouched behind home plate calling Dufer’s pitches, he felt a sense of menace floating somewhere behind him. Ironically, the more pacific the crowd became, the more he felt threatened. He knew what every professional athlete knows: it is easier to play in front of howling anonymous thousands than a small recognizable few. The former aided concentration; the latter undermined it. Fear was too strong a word, but Matti was concerned that out of the purposeless crowd a voice might call to him, causing his mind to wander into the audience rather than remain on the field where it belonged. He feared Penny Pinkham’s demure smile, but most of all, he wished to avoid Barasch’s familiar horsey head tossed in greeting. When he returned to the bench between innings, he stared down toward the ground until he was close enough to focus on the dugout without seeing many of the spectators beyond. In the partially submerged dugout he was able to relax with either the boisterous roar or the almost soporific buzzing of the crowd floating over his sheltered head.

  Matti always thought of the crowd as an enormous conglomerate dog, stretching the length of the grandstands. On its feet, roaring, barking, or snapping, it exhibited obvious canine behavior. Even the buzzing was doglike. Matti imagined that the beast had fallen into a stupor, poking its dull muzzle at the myriad of fleas that rose phlegmatically from its hairy hide, producing an insistent buzzing in the afternoon heat. As for the crowd’s fickle affections and lack of patience, well, Matti never had liked dogs. They were stupid, flea-bitten beasts, and if indeed they were man’s best friend as Dufer claimed, that didn’t say very much for friendship or for man. Matti realized that the rebbe’s peroration against the national sport applied perfectly to his own vision of the crowd: on a warm, sunny afternoon, thousands of seemingly pleasant, intelligent persons could innocently gather and create a great monster. So much for the great foundation of devoted fans that sustained the mighty pyramid of the American League.

  As Matti lounged in the dugout watching the Browns listlessly take their turn at bat in the bottom of the eighth inning, he had no intention of examining the rebbe’s ideas. Probably he believed them all, but this was no time for his beloved art of analysis. He must take care of first things first, and without any doubt the Browns’ defeat of the Tigers was first and foremost.

  The emotional luxury that Matti did indulge in was a feeling of self-satisfaction. He couldn’t risk looking into the stands, but with equanimity he could glance around the dugout. To keep his pitching arm warm between innings, Dufer sat draped in a towel. Matti glanced at his partially shrouded figure. Let him win twenty games; let him have Penny Pinkham, too. Neither was for Matti, and he knew it. And if he reached for them, he would be destroyed. Chewing his bitter wad of tobacco, duplicity, and distrust, manager Zack Freeling stood with his left foot on the dugout step. How pathetic! A man Freeling’s age getting ulcers over some kid’s ability to throw or hit a silly little ball. As the Browns’ batter drove a towering pop fly for what was certain to be the third out, the avaricious manager grimaced. Young, the Tigers’ second baseman, moved a few steps back, shielded his eyes from the sun, and waited for the ball to descend on its preordained path into his glove, which it did. The Tigers trotted toward their dugout for their final chance at bat. The Browns stirred from their bench to take the field. Zack Freeling clapped his hands in encouragement, and Dufer dropped the towel f
rom his valuable arm.

  “Hey, Sirdy, let’s get going,” Dufer called out, but Sirdy didn’t respond. “You ready, boy?”

  Matti sat frozen, making no move to put on his cap and mask.

  “Hey, Sirdy!” As Dufer leaned over and tapped Matti’s arm, he noticed that his catcher seemed to be staring off into space.

  “Sirdy, you all right?” he asked anxiously.

  Matti continued gazing toward the outfield. He blinked slowly several times, like a frog closing its lidless eyes.

  “Yeah,” the catcher said. “I’m all right.”

  But he really wasn’t. As he had watched the fly ball falling toward the infield, a glint of silver bobbing over the center-field fence had caught his eye. When he looked again, it wasn’t there, but he was sure that he had seen it. As he passed Freeling, the manager stopped him.

  “Just keep him on target.”

  Matti ignored Freeling and jogged out to home plate. He didn’t think at all about the earthbound crowd. He didn’t even hear the dull explosions as the children popped their empty peanut sacks, a sure sign that their patience had worn thin and the game was almost over.

  Tossing his warm-up pitches, Dufer grew uneasy. Usually Sirdy hollered a steady stream of encouragement at him—“You can do it, relax, just play catch with me.” Instead, Sirdy was silently staring past him into center field. Feeling nervous, Dufer even turned around to see if anything was going on there behind his back. Finding nothing, and hoping that he would capture Sirdy’s attention, he turned back to flash his brightest, most infectious smile. Dufer smiled so broadly that his perfect, glossy teeth might have fallen out, but Sirdy didn’t even respond to the wild abundance of charm. The umpire was motioning the Detroit Tigers’ hitter into the batter’s box when Dufer suddenly called, “Time!” and came halfway to the plate. Matti trotted out to meet him.