Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

by William Kennedy

  Connie was also a wino, and people who saw the child without understanding anything of the family unit, thought the boy was a kind of mascot, a pet for winos. But he was the child of two alcoholic people who loved him. In the years when Jubjub passed the age of reason, when he got his prize possession, a bicycle, he became a wild boy. He slept in doorways. He became a truant. Jenny the surrogate mother, who came from a family of ten herself but raised no family except another woman’s castoff, loved the child. Like her own, some said. But Jenny could not know whether that was true or not, having had none of her own to compare.

  The boy loved Jenny. When the wine corroded her, gave her constant diarrhea, Jubjub got money. Don’t ask how he got it. He got it and bought Kaopectate, that his mother drank to bind her body. It was one of many sicknesses that Jenny and Connie fell heir to. Two of Jenny’s sisters died of lung ailments, and Jenny had lung trouble for as long as anybody could remember. Connie had hepatitis, leg trouble, hemorrhages through the nose. Two years ago he became as victimized as Job, not with boils but with peripheral neuritis so that nobody could touch him, not his arm, not his leg, not his shoulder, not anyplace, because he hurt everywhere. He lay down on the top of a stoop on Dongan Avenue and he listened to a radio somebody put beside his ear and he stopped drinking and stopped eating and prepared to die. When anybody hurts as much as Connie hurts they assume that death is the only consequence.

  But friends took him to the hospital and after a few weeks he was out and well; thin as glass and just as fragile, but off the wine and with the neuritis gone, a kind of new man.

  Jenny was in the hospital at the same time. Her vital capacity was minimal, her lungs all but collapsed. She occupied a bed on a floor below Connie in the Albany Medical Center and some said they were going to die together. But then she too recovered and they came regularly to meetings of the Better Homes and Community Organization in the South End, the neighborhood organization that functions in the midst of bordellos and wino caves and the squalid life of the poorest of Albany’s poor.

  Connie cracked jokes and dressed in the way that he still clung to in his most sober times: dapperness out of a long-gone time when dapperness was status too. Jenny listened, but with her bright mind she was the first to detect irony. Full of self-awareness, she saw through others who became grotesque when they articulated their cockeyed little egos. Jenny was a smart one. Would have made a wonderful seamstress. Would have made a wonderful mother. Would have made a wonderful cook. Wonderful wife. Wonderful homemaker. Had a husband. Had a child. Had a talent, could sew. Too bad, Jenny, too bad you never flowered.

  Jenny was dying. Sick since 1948. Very sick for the last seven years. So thin she wasn’t there at all inside those baggy clothes. Yours sincerely, wasting away. And everybody knew she was dying. Connie’s father came to see them when they were both deep in the sickness, deep in the wine. You wouldn’t want to read about how bad the room was that they were both living in that day. Connie was sick and bleeding. Jenny was on the couch with her stick legs out at the end of a blanket.

  “You’re in the bed,” Connie’s father said.

  “I know,” Connie said.

  “Woman,” the father said to Jenny, “what are you gonna do?”

  “Papa,” she said, “I’m not gonna do nothin’.”

  “You know what that means?”

  “I know.”

  The father did not argue with despair. Possibly a task force of humanists and sociologists and social therapists and miracle workers could have reclaimed Jenny. But the father was not a task force.

  “You don’t have to settle for this despair,” an optimist said to the gray-haired old man.

  “You do have to settle for it,” the old man said.

  And so Jenny moved through her last days. She still narrowed her eyes with knowingness, she still called people Doll, if they were men, and Dolly if they were women, she was still able to respond when Connie was comatose and hemorrhaging, no matter how sick she was herself; and though all these human responses were perpetuated in her twig-like frame, she was dying. And everybody knew.

  Jenny couldn’t get her breath last week. And every breath hurt, every breath drew a moan from her. Connie collected himself and took her to the hospital and knew when he left her that she was really dying this time. Really. He went home and slept and dreamed he was fishing. Dreamed he caught onto a great fish that tugged him almost into the water himself; then he’d pull it in; then it’d swim away and when he finally pulled the line in he found a little horseshoe kind of hook at the end of the line, empty. The waters he was fishing in were muddy, a sign of death. The empty hook: a good try, but too bad.

  “Somethin’ bad gonna happen, Jubjub,” he told the boy. “Somebody gonna leave us.”

  She died Monday at 2:15, the death certificate said. It didn’t specify whether it was A.M. or P.M. The police tried to find Connie but it was Wednesday before he knew the police had called at his house. A neighbor told him. He wondered: why the hell the police lookin’ for me? I ain’t done nothin’. And he went to the station where the desk sergeant said they weren’t looking for him at all. Bureaucratic confusion. And then a friend from Better Homes called him and told him: Your wife passed away.

  He sat in the big armchair at his father’s house, having unsuccessfully tried to get some extra money so Jenny wouldn’t have to be buried strictly with a welfare funeral. He wanted to add a few hundred, get something more than a pine box. But he couldn’t get it.

  At the edge of life himself, Connie remembered how Jenny’s sister said she shouldn’t marry Connie. “I was a rough young guy in those days,” he said. “I didn’t care about nothin’. But I changed.” And Jenny and Connie stayed married for 16 years.

  Connie was in that state of random grief. Now he would weep, now laugh. Now he would grow nostalgic, now he would think of the future.

  “I’m through with women,” he said. “No joke. I had my time. I don’t care if she was born with gold. I had my woman.”

  Nuns from Saint Rose College gave Jenny a dress to be buried in. It was a black wool dress. The nuns knew her from their attendance at the Better Homes meetings. Of course they didn’t have to know her to give something to a woman with nothing at all. The Saint Rose nuns who attend the Better Homes meetings are some of the very few people who know or care about people like Jenny.

  At his father’s house Connie talked about death with the old man.

  “There’s no rent to pay up there,” the old man said.

  “I wanna look good when I go up there,” Connie said. “I look good now, don’t I?”

  “No,” his papa said. “You look too bad even to die.”

  Connie took that as a joke. But he spruced up and went to the undertakers and arranged for Jenny’s $250 funeral, paid by the County Welfare Department. Later he went home to bed, and at 3 A.M. he got up and walked to the bus station to meet one of Jenny’s relatives who was arriving. But the relative never came, and Connie walked back home in the cold.

  1967

  Baseball at Hawkins Stadium:

  “Here’s Your Son, Mister.”

  I owned a rubber baseball, a glove, a bat, and a uniform at such an early age I can’t know how young I was. I know from photographs that I was using them well before my precocity with spheres, diamonds, numbers and letters allowed me to enter first grade at age five in 1933. My uncle Peter pitched to me on the front lawn, and my great-aunt Lella caught the pitches I didn’t hit. The glove was a pair of leather slabs without padding, and for catching a ball it was as practical as a tin plate.

  By perhaps 1935 or 1936 the New Deal had come to North Albany, and the Rooseveltian minions in the Works Progress Administration were building tennis courts and leveling the huge open field behind Public School 20 (and next door to our house), where everybody played baseball and football and golf and where, Lou Pitnell tells me, he and I caught fly balls and grounders hit by the tall, thin, fiftyish foreman of the WPA gang, a man named
Mac, while Mac’s underlings cleared rocks, moved and raked dirt, planted grass, and beautified the sandlot where cows had grazed when this was a pasture on the Brady farm.

  I’ve tried to dredge Mac up from memory but he’s not even a phantasm. But I remember Lou Pitnell’s glove from those days: very stiff leather but with a good pocket, and my own: a yellow first baseman’s mitt that I still have, although the yellow is now mostly black, and the rawhide webbing has rotted. That glove was why I usually played first, even though I was a right-hander. Lou threw righty but batted lefty, something I never understood in people until I began to write about politics. Bob Burns, another sandlotter, remembers very few left-handed players—Billy Corbett, Billy Riedy—but no lefty pitchers whatever. Neither of us can explain this phenomenon.

  If I don’t remember Mac I do remember the other “older guys” who hit and caught fly balls and grounders (“hittin’ ’em out” was the official name of this game)—a rollicking band of aging players who came out for exercise, and a communal reveling in the sport of their youth, many nights after supper when it wasn’t raining.

  There was my uncle Peter; and Andy Lawlor: tall, thin, saturnine, with a long-fingered glove that had no padding, and a heart ailment that allowed him to pitch but not hit or field (“Never run for a bus; let it go and catch the next one,” his doctor told him); and his brothers Jim and John (Knockout) and Tommy (Red), Tommy a pepperpot shortstop who remembered his own sandlot days in Carroll’s Field near the railroad tracks, owned by my great-grandfather, Big Jim Carroll. Tommy played in the Twilight League, the organized semipros, and Joe Murphy played in the Class D Eastern Shore League (where Jimmy Foxx came from), and John (Bandy) Edmunds, the man we all remember as North Albany’s best player, went up to play professionally but wouldn’t wear a uniform because of his bandy legs, and came back home to work as a fireman.

  But Bandy had no qualms about showing his legs when he played behind School 20. He hit and fielded in his cap, socks, spikes, and jockstrap, caught long fly balls behind his back, and then, with a whirl and a bullet throw back to the hitter, he would announce: “There’s only a few of us left.” Certain North Albany women conveyed to the parish priest their outrage at Bandy’s jock show, or so I’ve been told—I can’t remember this protest either—and from then on Bandy had to play wearing trousers, what’s the free world coming to?

  The School 20 field was where baseball began in my head, my heart, my right arm—with the kids and with the men. As kids alone we played pickup of any sort: “Roll-y at the bat,” which required you to field a fly and then throw a grounder toward the bat lying on the ground, and if you hit it you took over as fungo man; or maybe, when it was one of those golden days, you could round up two outfielders and three infielders for two teams and have a game of sorts; or maybe even two full squads for a real game, if it was a sunlit Saturday.

  I was about eight when I started taking banjo lessons from a local jazz guitarist and banjoist, Mike Pantone, who was sometimes on time for the lesson, sometimes so early that I was still playing ball; and so the very portly Mike would dig in behind the plate and umpire for us till the game ended and the music began.

  The organization of Little League teams, with managers, uniforms, a stadium, all the necessary equipment, was not even a likely dream for us. We often played with cracked bats and coverless balls whose interior string was held together by black tape. The diamond was in three different places—the first where Mac and his men had put it, then another that we built ourselves to fulfill our most fervent need: to hit toward the chicken-wire outfield fence. I remember vividly the day I lofted my first home run over its distant uprightness, after which the field was moved again—it was too close to the parked cars, and we lost too many balls in the high weeds beyond the fence—moved to a site utterly remote from fences, and my days as a home-run hitter vanished abruptly and forever.

  I learned to hit through the hole to right, coached by my father, who had played second base for a much achieved Van Woert Street team (“The Little Potatoes, they’re hard to peel”), at the turn of the century. He was a Yankee fan, as was Lou. I liked the Giants and the Red Sox. I gave my father a book on the Yankees, the only book I ever knew him to read all through. I later gave him one on the Red Sox but I don’t think he even cracked it. He took me to Yankee Stadium and we saw Lou Gehrig hit what seemed to be a mile-high infield fly that turned out to be a home run over the right-field fence.

  My father read newspapers, as we all did in the family, and his good pal was Charley Young, the sports editor of the Knickerbocker Press. We subscribed to the Knick and the Times-Union and the Albany Evening News, and frequently the Daily News and the New York Mirror turned up, all these papers bringing the writings of Dan Parker and Paul Gallico and Jimmy Powers and Damon Runyon into the living room; and so baseball became almost as pervasive and significant in my life as church and school.

  School was inimical to life on opening day when the Albany Senators of the Class A Eastern League took to the field at Hawkins Stadium in Menands, just north of North Albany, our back yard, really. The stadium seated about 8,500, but eleven thousand would crowd in for special games. All season long we’d find a way to get in, either by shagging a foul ball that came over the wall, and which got you in free when you returned it, or waiting for the friendly Menands village cop (Lou remembers he was overweight and his name was Thorpe) to hook us up with a ticket buyer (“Here’s your son, mister”), for if you arrived with a parent, then the boy scrambled under the turnstile, free. Bob Burns also recalls crawling under the fence near the bleachers. I don’t remember doing this, and Joe Keefe says he lacked the bravery such crime required. Sometimes we actually paid to get in.

  Joe remembered Tony (I think we called him Como) Catelle, a dramatic center fielder for the Senators who caught fly balls with dives, falls, tumbles, and other acrobatics, and Joe thought this was how it was done until he saw Joe DiMaggio let the fly balls drop quietly into his peach basket with that easeful DiMaggian ubiquity.

  It is perhaps banal to remember Babe Ruth, but it is inevitable. Nobody went to school when he came to Hawkins Stadium, first on August 9, 1929 (I missed that one), and maybe five more times in the thirties, one of those nights memorable to us all because the Babe poked one into right center that landed on the roof of the Norwalk burial vault company where spectators sat to watch the games free; and that was the longest ball anybody—Lou, Bob, me—ever saw hit in Hawkins, although the same was said of the Babe’s center-field blast in ’29. Hyperbole is always generational. The Babe himself said in Albany that the longest ball he ever hit was in Tampa, and it went about five hundred feet.

  Richard J. Conners, the New York State assemblyman from Albany, who was both the Senators’ official scorer and local correspondent for the Sporting News from the early thirties to the postwar years, and a neighbor of mine for much of my life, tells me the Babe hit his last home run at Hawkins Stadium in an exhibition game with Brooklyn, against the Senators, on July 25, 1938.

  The attendance record that night, with all passes suspended, reached an all-time high: 11,724 fans cheered the Babe and saw him swack a curve ball (“It broke like it was rolling off a table. I don’t know how he ever hit it,” said the catcher) over the right-field wall.

  The Babe was expansive that night and said Albany was a “real good baseball city, one of the best minor-league cities in the country.” He also reported that he was offered the job of managing Albany when it was in the International League, but friends warned him against taking it; and yet he might have accepted had the salary been right. But it wasn’t.

  When the Senators weren’t at Hawkins, we followed them with great passion even so—hearing the away games announced on radio by, first, Doc Rand, then his son, Gren, who weren’t away themselves, but reading the teletype in an Albany radio studio. They would vivify the wire news with sound effects, a snap of their fingers signifying a crack of the bat, their imagination supplying the “curve ball that
cut the outside corner,” when all the wire offered was “strike two.” We believed in the snap and the curve and were grateful for the fantasy.

  We remember Pete Gray, who played with Elmira against Albany during the war, when most able-bodied players were in service, and in 1945 played a big-league season with the St. Louis Browns: an odd figure, a showpiece, really, but a triumph of willfulness over the adversity that had been his since his right arm’s amputation in childhood.

  We particularly remember Ralph Kiner because, of all Albany Senators, he rose highest, becoming a major slugger for the Pirates (Albany was then a Pirate farm team, and so my National League allegiance was torn between New York and Pittsburgh) and a Hall of Famer (fifty-four home runs in ’49, forty-seven in ’50, and, in the ’49 season, the first player in history to hit four home runs in four consecutive times at bat—twice.) He played left field for Albany in 1941 and 1942 and was a home-run hero even then. Bob Burns remembered the fans calling him “Wiggles” because when he gave three shakes of his tail it meant the next pitch stood a very good chance of going over the wall.

  Baseball players were not only local heroes, they also, on occasions, turned into real people. They ate in the Morris Diner, where we all hung out. Kiner roomed across from Bob Burns’s house on Lawn Avenue. And Lou remembered seeing Jake Powell, an outfielder with the Yankees, at one of the late-thirties World Series games. When Jake saw Lou Pitnell, Sr., the North Albany barber who had cut his hair when he played with the Albany Senators, Jake gave him and his son a very big pregame hello, another reason for young Lou to be a Yankee fan forever.

  Maybe the funkiest Albany saga is the story of Edwin C. (Alabama) Pitts, who was doing time in Sing Sing in 1935 for being the getaway driver in an armed robbery, when the Giants played a prison team as part of spring training, and somebody noticed Pitts had talent at the plate as well as at the wheel.