by Pete Hamill
“Great day for baseball,” he said.
“Sure is,” Michael said.
“Enjoy da game,” Rabbi Hirsch said.
A group of young men came up the aisle, laughing, posing, about six of them, and took seats across the aisle on the right, a few rows higher than Michael and the rabbi. They wore T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up over their shoulders and tight pegged pants. None of them wore a hat, and their Vaselined hair glistened in the light. They were all smoking cigarettes, and one held a pint bottle in a paper bag. They reminded Michael of the Falcons.
For a moment he felt a coil of fear in his stomach. But he turned away and gazed down at the field. This was Ebbets Field in broad daylight, not a dark street beside the factory. The Dodgers ambled to their positions. And Holy God, there was Pete Reiser! Going out to left field! Back from the dead. Furillo was in center and Gene Hermanski in right. But Pistol Pete Reiser was with them, down there on the grass. Michael pointed him out to Rabbi Hirsch.
“He looks okay, boychik,” the rabbi said. “Maybe some prayers helped. And maybe some hits he’ll get.”
The outfielders were right below them, casually tossing a ball while the cheers faded and the organ played “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Branca was throwing warm-ups to catcher Bruce Edwards. And the infielders were firing the ball, from Eddie Stanky to Spider Jorgensen at third, from Jorgensen to Pee Wee Reese at short, and from Reese to Robinson.
“He looks cool,” said the man beside Michael, peering through the field glasses, talking to his friend. “Real relaxed. Like he been playin’ the damned position all his life.”
Everybody stood for the national anthem. The Negroes put their hands over their hearts. The men behind Michael took off their union caps, and Michael whispered to the rabbi to take off his hat. The anthem ended and there were shouts of “play ball” and the game started. Branca retired the first two Pirates on ground balls.
“He’s got good stuff, dis kid,” the union guy named Jabbo said. “Pray for your paisan, Ralphie.”
“Let’s see what he does wit’ Kiner.”
Kiner hit the first pitch into the upper deck. Foul by a foot. The whole park groaned at the crack of the bat. Michael explained foul balls to the rabbi, and then Branca struck out Kiner and everybody applauded.
“Scared da crap outta me wit’ dat foul ball,” the one called Louis said. “I thought it would land in Prospeck Park.”
“In Prospeck Park, it’d still be foul, Louis.”
Reese led off for the Dodgers and grounded out. That brought up Robinson. There was an immense roar. The two Negro men stood up and applauded proudly.
“Here we go,” said the one with the field glasses.
Robinson dug in, his bat held high, facing the pitcher. And he was hit with the first pitch, twisting to take it on the back. The crowd booed.
“They ain’t wastin’ no time today,” the man with the field glasses said. “Gah-damn!”
A voice came bellowing from the right. One of the young toughs. Wearing a black T-shirt.
“Don’t hit him in the head: you’ll break the ball!”
His friends laughed. The Negro with the baseball cap glanced at them and then returned his attention to the field.
“Forget it, Sam,” the one with the field glasses said. “Don’t you be gettin’ riled, now, hear me?”
Rabbi Hirsch was staring intently at the field. Hank Greenberg was playing first base for the Pirates, and Robinson seemed to be talking to him. “I wish I could hear them,” Rabbi Hirsch said. “I wish I could know what Henry Greenberg says to Jackie Robinson. A letter I should write him.” Then Robinson took a lead off first, hands hanging loose, legs wide, focused on the pitcher. The pitcher glanced over his left shoulder at first, went into his windup, and before the ball reached the catcher’s mitt, Robinson stole second. The place exploded. Michael’s heart pounded. This was Robinson, doing what he had to do. They hit him with a pitch? Okay: steal second, and up yours, schmuck.
“Dat’s da way,” the union guy named Louis shouted. “Good as a double!”
“Hold on to your hat, Sam,” the Negro with the field glasses said, smiling broadly.
Robinson was jittering off second base now, the number 42 on his back, taking short pigeon-toed steps, wary, alert, drawing a stare from the pitcher, waiting, now drawing the throw, and abruptly stepping back on the bag. The batter was Furillo. As Robinson did his dance, Furillo took a ball, then another ball.
“Jackie’s got him crazy,” the man with the field glasses said. “He’s losin’ control.”
Once more, the pitcher glared over his shoulder at Robinson. The park was hushed. The pitcher pitched. Furillo sliced it down the left-field line and Robinson was racing around third, his cap flying off, and fading into a hook slide as he crossed the plate in a cloud of dust.
Ebbets Field erupted into cheers and flying balloons and some brassy tuba music from a band near first base. The two black men were laughing and applauding. The union guys, Louis, Jabbo, and Ralph, shouted: Way ta go and Dat’s all we need and Call a doctor, da pitcha’s bleedin’. Michael felt like he was part of a movie. And Rabbi Hirsch was jigging, clenching his fist, waving his hat, dancing.
“What a beauty is this!” he shouted to Michael. “What a beauty, what a beauty!”
The man with the field glasses turned to Michael, glancing at the Jackie button.
“You ever see him before?”
“No. This is my first time in Ebbets Field.”
“Take a look.”
He handed Michael the field glasses.
“You got to adjust them,” he said. “But don’t try to read the writin’ on them. I took them off a dead German.”
After adjusting the lenses, Michael could see all the way to first base, where Furillo was taking a lead; all the way to the dugout, where Burt Shotton was sitting in a civilian suit and Robinson was standing alone, with one foot on the top step. He could even see the dirt on Robinson’s uniform.
“Thanks,” Michael said, handing the glasses back.
“You got to see a great play, boy,” the man said, adjusting the lenses again for himself.
“I sure did,” Michael said.
The man said his name was Floyd, and he shook Michael’s hand and then introduced his friend, Sam—“We were in the army together”—and then Rabbi Hirsch reached across Michael to shake hands with the two men. “My first time in Abbot’s Field too,” he said. “Like Michael.” There was a great sigh as Hermanski grounded into a double play to end the inning.
In the top of the second, Hank Greenberg came to bat. A few people stood to applaud. So did Rabbi Hirsch.
Then they heard the voice:
“Siddown, Rabbi, don’t hurt your hands clappin’.” It was the youth in the black T-shirt. “This sheenie can’t hit no more.”
Rabbi Hirsch turned toward the voice and slowly sat down.
“This word?” he said to Michael. “What is it?”
“What word?”
“Sheenie.”
“Ah, it’s one of them dumb words.”
“A word for Jew?”
“Yeah.”
The rabbi turned again to glare at the young men. His face trembled. But then he turned back to Greenberg’s at bat.
The voice again, shouting at the Dodger pitcher: “Give dis Hebe a little chin music, Branca. He’ll quit right in front a ya.”
Rabbi Hirsch turned again to Michael; his early joy seemed to be seeping out of him.
“What means chin music?”
“It means, like, throw the ball close to his chin.”
“So they think, throw near Hank Greenberg’s head, he will quit? Because he’s a Jew?”
“That’s what that guy thinks.”
Greenberg took a ball, low and away.
“You said Hank Greenberg, he was a hero in the war. These young men, they don’t know this?”
Floyd heard him and leaned over.
“They are ign
orant, Reverend,” he said. “They are stupid.”
But the loudmouth in the black shirt wasn’t going away. He bellowed: “Hit him in the Hebrew National, Branca. Let’s see how big his salami is.”
A few people in the crowd laughed, but Louis stood up.
“Hey, whyn’t you bums keep y’ traps shut? Yiz are insultin’ people!”
“Ya wanta do somethin’ about it?” the young man shouted. His friends were all laughing now.
“I’ll come over dere and give you a fat lip, buster!”
“You and what army?”
Greenberg swung and lined a ball deep and foul. The whole park groaned in relief.
“His cousin caught it and sold it on da spot!” the young man shouted.
Now Rabbi Hirsch stood up and faced them.
“Please! The mouth, shut it up, please. This is America!”
The tough guys started singing the first lines of “America the Beautiful.” Sarcastically. Out of tune. Full of the courage of superior numbers.
“Please,” the rabbi said. “The big mouth!”
Then Greenberg walked.
“Whad I tell you?” the young man shouted. “Dis old Hebe can’t hit no more!”
“All right, can it, shmuck,” Louis the union man shouted.
“Kiss my ass!” the youth replied.
That was enough. Louis was up, leaping across the aisle. He grabbed the young man by his black shirt and smashed him with his right fist. The young man’s friends rose as one, throwing punches, and the two other union guys piled in, and then everybody in the area was up. Floyd and Sam stood to watch, carefully, warily. Then they looked at each other. Without a word, Sam slipped off his glasses and his wristwatch and tucked them into his pocket. Floyd handed the field glasses to Michael, who thought: If I didn’t have this cast, if I only could swing at them, hurt them.… But now others were diving into the brawl, and the young men were backing up as the union guys went at them. Jabbo knocked down a kid with red hair. Ralph kicked a sunburned kid in the balls. The one called Louis grabbed the loudmouth by the hair and whacked his head into the top of a seat. The young man squealed.
“I’m bleedin’! I’m fuckin’ bleedin’.”
“Wrong,” Louis said. “You’re fuckin’ dyin.”
And banged his head again on the seat. Suddenly Rabbi Hirsch hurried over and tried to get into it, but now it was all fists and feet and curses and he was shoved back. His glasses fell and he was groping for them on the concrete steps when two of the young men started kicking him. Michael grabbed one of his crutches and hobbled toward them, but then Floyd and Sam pushed him down in his seat. “Watch the stuff,” Floyd said. He grabbed one of the young men attacking Rabbi Hirsch, spun him, and presented him to Sam, who knocked him down with a punch. The other one looked up, his eyes wide with fear. Floyd bent him over with a punch to the belly, and then kicked him in the ass, tumbling him down the steps.
Suddenly it was over. The six young toughs were ruined. Bleeding, groaning, whining. Rabbi Hirsch found his glasses and looked around in amazement. Floyd and Sam took their seats. The union guys sat down.
“Can’t even watch a fuckin’ ball game in peace no more,” Louis said.
“Hey, Louis, want a hot dog?” one of his friends said.
And now the cops arrived, ten of them, beefy and pink-faced and Irish, all in blue with their batons at the ready. Rabbi Hirsch was still standing, baffled, his eyes wide. One of the cops looked at the battered youths and then at the rabbi.
“Did you do this?” he said.
“I wish,” the rabbi said.
“They went dattaway,” one of the union guys shouted. Floyd and Sam laughed for the first time.
“Who did it?”
“The Jewish War Veterans, Officer.”
The cops hauled the young men to their feet and led them away. The whole section burst into applause. Louis stood up, faced the fans, lifted his hat, and bowed.
“What a rhubarb!” Rabbi Hirsch said, laughing and making a fist. “What a great big excellent goddamned rhubarb!”
30
On the Fourth of July, Michael watched the fireworks from the roof, where grown-ups cheered and the noise was like an artillery barrage. Sonny and Jimmy were not there. They were in the streets, where they could believe what everyone else believed about Michael.
In the days that followed, Michael heard laughter from those streets and the phwomp of spaldeens and the rise and fall of arguments. But he was no longer part of it. His world had shrunk to the apartment and the roof, his room and the cellar, with occasional trips to the Grandview when his mother was working. In the dark theater, he saw Double Indemnity and To Each His Own and The Spiral Staircase, imagining himself scheming with Barbara Stanwyck or waltzing in wartime London with Olivia de Havilland or protecting Dorothy McGuire in a vast, evil mansion. When the movie was over, he was still on crutches, still facing the long hobble home through streets more dangerous than any in the movies. On that walk, he often felt like a five-year-old, guarded as he was by his mother.
Alone in the apartment, he read great hunks of the Wonderland of Knowledge. On the way to the Grandview with his mother, he stopped at the library and borrowed books and looked up names that were not in the Wonderland of Knowledge. He devoured Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Captain Blood. But he could not share these imaginary adventures with any of his friends anymore, the way he did in other summers. He couldn’t tell them the stories or debate the heroism of the characters. He couldn’t try to make those books fit into the realities of the street.
On a few mornings, Rabbi Hirsch came by, always when Kate Devlin was there. They had tea. Michael and the rabbi worked on words. Sometimes Mrs. Griffin popped in, to quiz Michael about his dreams. She was always polite to the rabbi. He was always formal with her. But then, like a spy on a dangerous mission, the rabbi had to move out again without being seen. There were still people out there who loved swastikas.
When Michael received his grades from Sacred Heart, he was temporarily elated. His average was 99, surely the highest in the class. But only his mother celebrated the report card, with cookies from the bakery and rich, dark tea.
On the night he received his grades, he heard terrible news from Kate. Father Heaney was leaving Sacred Heart, to take up duties in distant South America. Michael’s elation over his grades vanished, and he begged her to allow him to go alone to Sacred Heart to say goodbye to Father Heaney. Maybe he was going to the Dominican Republic, where Rabbi Hirsch had friends. And he was sure Rabbi Hirsch wanted to say goodbye too. But Kate Devlin insisted that Michael wait until her day off; it was still too dangerous for him in the streets of the parish. And when she finally took him by trolley to the church, Father Heaney had packed and gone. Michael felt as if an entire Allied army had left the field.
The priest wasn’t the only one leaving the parish. They saw moving vans now on almost every Saturday, packed with furniture and clothes, bound for Long Island or Queens. The war veterans led the way, using the GI Bill to get mortgages on homes with driveways and grass and safety. Familiar faces disappeared from the streets. One Saturday morning, Billy Dorrian moved out of the first floor right to be replaced by a family named Corrigan, whose kids were four, three, and two years old. Then Michael heard from his mother that Charlie Senator had left, giving up his job, gone to a place called Levittown. He remembered the day Father Heaney and Charlie Senator and the other veterans had cleaned the swastikas off the synagogue and wondered who would be brave enough to do that job now.
Day and night now, his mind was full of the words and rhythms of Yiddish. He worked on his aleph-bayz, trying to master the alphabet. He greeted his mother each morning with “Vie gehts?” And she answered, “The top of the morning to you too.” He learned the difference between a shlemiel and a shlimazel, explaining to his mother that a shlemiel walks into a living room, bows to his host, and knocks over an expensive lamp; the lamp falls and breaks
the foot of the shlimazel. Harold Stearns from the second floor was a boring shlub. Tippy Hudnut from the Falcons was a grobber yung, a stupid young man, thick, as his mother would say. How many of the men at Casement’s Bar were gonifs, and which among them might be the big makher they all so desperately needed? Lots of hustling gonifs, but no makhers. He told his mother that sha meant shush, and she said, “Well, doesn’t ‘shush’ sound Yiddish too?” The Falcons were a load of khazerai, pig meat, eaters of garbage, or behamas, animals. They all ought to be put in the bays oylem, six feet under. And the cops? Bupkis, that’s what the cops give you. Nothing. Zilch.
In the second week of July, Michael started visiting Rabbi Hirsch again in the synagogue. Tuesdays for now (“Thursdays we can do when your leg, it’s better”) and on Saturday mornings, so that he could once more serve as the Shabbos goy. Father Heaney had sent an altar boy to replace Michael, but the boy was leaving for summer camp, so Michael insisted on getting his old job back. There was only one problem: his mother insisted on walking with him, even on Saturday mornings, making him feel like a little kid. He protested that at such an early hour, the Falcons were still sleeping off beer.
“And suppose,” she said, “they’ve stayed up all night and are just going home?”
So she went with him. But even with his mother beside him, Michael walked first in the opposite direction, away from Unbeatable Joe’s, where the Falcons always seemed to be at the bar. That route also took him away from the stickball court on Collins Street. He didn’t want to see Sonny Montemarano. He had nothing to say to Jimmy Kabinsky.
“This is aggravating,” he said one morning, as they finally reached the synagogue.
His mother answered: “Getting beat up again would be a lot more aggravating, Michael.”
Rabbi Hirsch was always happy to see him, talking in an excited way about the Dodgers and about Jackie Robinson and about how he wished they could get Stanley Musial away from the Cardinals. But he often seemed sadder than before their trip to Ebbets Field. It was as if he regretted the confession he had made to Kate and Michael about his own past. It was as if he knew he could not truly fit into this scary piece of America. He would sing along with the radio and now knew all the words to “Don’t Fence Me In,” but when he sang the part that went Let me straddle my own saddle underneath the Western skies his eyes misted over. He first heard the words before swastikas appeared in the Brooklyn night. Once Michael saw him glance at Leah’s photograph as if he knew that she would never recognize him in his American disguise. Too often, he wore the expression of a man who expected to be struck. By a stranger. By America.
