by Pete Hamill
But there was fun too. Michael showed him how to play a tune on an empty Chiclets box, opening one end, leaving the cellophane intact. Michael played “Don’t Fence Me In.” The rabbi took the chewing gum box and played “And the Angels Sing.”
“At last!” he exulted. “I am a Ziggy Elman!”
Michael brought a second empty Chiclets box one morning, and they played duets. “Don’t Be That Way” and “Sing Sing Sing” and “One O’Clock Jump.” They tried a Count Basie tune called “Open the Door, Richard,” which sounded awful, and were much better on “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” They finished with “And the Angels Sing,” with Rabbi Hirsch doing the trumpet solo. They agreed that the yellow peppermint box had the best tone.
“On a shofar I can’t play a tune,” the rabbi said, his face beaming. “But on a Chiclets box I am Mozart! I am Ziggy Elman! My instrument! We practice hard, boychik, we go to the hall of Mr. Carnegie.”
One Tuesday afternoon, Michael let himself into the synagogue and heard the rabbi playing alone on a Chiclets box. He had slowed down “And the Angels Sing.” Now it was mournful and melancholy. Like the blue books described Jewish music. When he saw Michael, he changed the tempo and once again became Ziggy Elman.
“Music we get from everywhere,” the rabbi said. “From the sky. From the air. From chewing gum even.”
At night, Michael had trouble falling asleep. The bulky cast was a hard reminder of what had happened to him, and he always had trouble getting comfortable. He thought every night about Sonny and Jimmy and wondered if they ever thought about him.
In the rising summer heat, he wondered how his life would have been if it hadn’t snowed so hard that day in December and he hadn’t gone shoveling and if Unbeatable Joe hadn’t paid them a dollar. He wondered how it would have been if they had gone to Slowacki’s candy store that day instead of to Mister G’s. Or if they had started an hour earlier or an hour later. They never would have been in Mister G’s when Frankie McCarthy walked in and Mister G wouldn’t have stuck up for Sonny, and Michael wouldn’t have seen all the violence that came after that. Sonny and Jimmy wouldn’t have run out. The cops would never have come to ask him questions. Nobody would have thought he was a rat. It would have been a different summer. Mister G would still be selling newspapers, cigarettes, and candy. Michael wouldn’t have a broken leg. He’d still have his friends, and he’d be playing ball across the endless afternoons or traveling with them to the beaches of Coney Island. Ten minutes on a snowy winter afternoon had changed his life. It was so goddamned unfair.
Then one night, he was walking home from the Grandview with his mother, discussing a movie called Boomerang. A vagrant had been accused of murdering a priest in some town in Connecticut. The cops thought the vagrant was guilty and the newspapers wanted to put him in the electric chair. But a lawyer played by Dana Andrews proved that the man was innocent. What was different was that Dana Andrews didn’t find out who really killed the priest. He’d never before seen that kind of ending in a movie.
“Life is like that sometimes,” Kate Devlin said. “You think you know, and you really don’t.”
“But this is a true story.”
“That’s what they say. It’s still a movie, son.”
Then they turned into Ellison Avenue to walk the final three blocks home. And Michael stopped moving, tightly gripping the handles of the crutches. Walking straight at them were five of the Falcons, including Tippy Hudnut, Skids, and the Russian. They were talking loudly, shouting at two girls on the far side of the avenue.
“Come on,” Kate Devlin said, placing a hand in the small of Michael’s back. She knew they could not turn and run. Not with Michael on crutches. So she walked straight at them. Defiantly. And then the Falcons saw them. Tippy, thin and long-haired, with tattooed arms, smiled and widened his arms in a gesture commanding the others to wait. They spread themselves across the sidewalk. Kate moved to the space between Tippy and the bulkier, blond-haired one they called the Russian.
Tippy stepped to the side, blocking her way.
“Well, looka who’s here,” Tippy said. Michael could smell the beer on his breath.
“Excuse me,” Kate said.
“Nah, I ain’t gonna excuse you, lady.”
She glanced around, but the street was empty now. She stepped to her right, and Tippy moved again.
“The fuckin’ troublemakers,” the Russian said, his yellow teeth showing as he grinned.
“I want no trouble with you, young man,” Kate said.
“She don’t want no trouble,” the Russian said, and the others laughed.
“But you’ll have plenty of trouble,” Kate said, “if you don’t let us go home.”
“Oh, wow: a threat,” Tippy said. The word sounded to Michael like tret. Tippy’s eyes were glittery, his nostrils flaring. “Are you scared, fellas?”
“Oh, yeah, I’m scared,” said Skids, who was the shortest, with thick muscles bulging from his T-shirt and black eyebrows that met above his nose. “I think I’m gonna shit my pants.”
“A broad and a gimp,” Tippy said. “Very, very scary.”
“The broad ain’t bad-looking but,” said the Russian.
“Great tits,” said Skids.
Kate slapped him. And then Skids grabbed her blouse and tore it down. She started to cover herself and then Michael piled in, swinging his crutch, saying, You bastards, you bastards, you fucking bastards. Skids shoved Kate backward and then jerked one of Michael’s crutches from his hands and swung it, hitting him in the back of the neck, and then the other crutch was gone, and he was toppled over on his side and one of the Falcons kicked him. Shouting, Stool pigeon, rat-fuckin’ stool pigeon… He saw his crutches placed across the curb and the Russian stomping them into pieces. He started to get up and saw Tippy shoving his hand under his mother’s skirt, while Skids held her from behind, squeezing her breasts. She was screaming now: You pigs, you dirty pigs, you cowardly pigs.
And then a window rolled up from one of the apartments, and another, and voices were shouting, Hey, you bums, stop that you bums, and then one of the Falcons said, Awright, let’s get da fuck outta here. And they were gone.
Michael pulled himself up by holding a lamppost. His neck ached. His side was burning. He turned to his mother. Her face was a ghastly mask of anger and humiliation. She pulled her blouse together with one hand and hugged Michael with the other.
“Hey, lady, you all right?” someone shouted from the upstairs apartments.
“We’ve got to go,” Kate whispered to her son. “We’ve got to get away from here. We’ve got to leave.”
31
She didn’t speak again that night, nor did she speak in the morning. He asked her a few questions: Did she feel all right? Did she want to see a doctor? She shook her head yes, then no. At breakfast, Michael made the tea. Then he went downstairs to Teddy’s grocery store, swinging with one hand on the wall and one on the banister, and bought her some pound cake. Her favorite. She poked at it with a fork. He told her he was going to the cellar to look at the hot-water furnace. But he took a stickball bat from the back of the hall, to use as a cane, and kept going out the front door, heading for Kelly Street.
The parish was just waking up. There were shreds of morning fog. He took the long way along MacArthur Avenue, slowed by the cane, driven by the need to summon Rabbi Hirsch, to have him talk to his mother. Father Heaney was gone. He didn’t want neighbors to know what had happened because his mother might be ashamed. He couldn’t call the cops. He needed Rabbi Hirsch. His soft voice. His humor. His wisdom. Finally, he turned into Kelly Street.
And stopped in front of the door as if he had been smacked.
Someone had carved a swastika into the wood. The gouged edges were rough, as if they’d used a can opener. He banged on the door, called Rabbi Hirsch’s name, used the bat to bang harder.
And then he saw him.
Lying in the gutter between two parked cars. Like that poor wino who died duri
ng the blizzard. Up at the end of the street, across from the armory, the corner where nobody lived.
“Rabbi Hirsch!” Michael hobbled quickly to his side.
But the rabbi could say nothing. His face was crusted with drying blood. There was a gash over his right eye. His jaw hung slack and loose. His lower teeth had been snapped off at the gums. There was a huge swelling on the left side of his head, and blood seeped from his left ear, puddling on the asphalt.
Michael raised his bat and began screaming at the sky.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
Then the world was red as rage, and he smashed with the bat at the trunk of one car and the windows of the other, he swung at the air, he struck at the ground, he cursed and bared his teeth, and hammered again at the cars, while Rabbi Hirsch lay there, and people were shouting from windows, away down the block, and he wailed again at the sky, wolf howl, banshee wail.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
The ambulance came and a police car and a crowd of kids and women and the owners of the two ruined cars. An orderly said, He’s alive. But as they lifted Rabbi Hirsch on a stretcher into the ambulance, Michael heard one cop asking him whether he’d done this to the rabbi, and someone was shouting, Lookit my cah! Who the fuck’s gonna pay for my cah? And the other cop was saying, Your insurance company pays, pal, and the man said, I don’t got any fuckin’ insurance! And then Mr. Gallagher was there, on his way to work, and he said to the cop, This kid couldn’t do this, this kid was with us when we cleaned off the last swastikas, this is a good kid, and look, he’s got a cast on his leg, for Christ’s sake, and there’s no blood on the goddamned bat.
What about these cars? a cop said. Who did this to these cars? Mr. Gallagher said, Find the guys that beat up this rabbi and yiz’ll have your answer.
While they talked, Michael’s head filled with images of violence. He imagined Tippy and Skids and the rest of the momsers, kicking, stomping, laughing, while one of them gouged the swastika into the door; imagined Rabbi Hirsch fighting back, the way he tried to fight at Ebbets Field, and falling between the cars, while fists and shoes and sticks rained down on him; and wished he could have arrived when it was happening, shown up with his father, and Sticky the dog, and Father Heaney, and Charlie Senator. Then there would have been a fair fight. He imagined his mother telling his father what had happened on Ellison Avenue and how they had put their hands on her. And pictured his father getting his M-1 and going hunting for Falcons. I wish I could do that. Go and get them.
He said none of this to the police. And after Rabbi Hirsch was lifted into the ambulance, Mr. Gallagher drove Michael home. Don’t worry, the older man said. The cops will get those bums. Michael did not reply.
As he climbed the stairs, he felt numb and slow, his strength drained away. He gripped the banister to steady himself, and then made an effort to finish the last flight. His mother was sitting where he’d left her, but suddenly her own numbness vanished. She got to her feet and went to her son.
“Jesus Mary and Joseph, son. What’s happened?” she said.
He told her. And dissolved in tears and then in rage again. He punched at the air. He shook his fists. He ground his teeth.
“I’m gonna get them!” he shouted. “I’m going over to the poolroom and I’m gonna kill them! I don’t care what they do to me! I’m gonna kill them, kill them, kill them.”
“Don’t bother, son,” she whispered, hugging him until the rage ebbed. “We’ll be leaving.”
Then she turned away from him, folding her arms, and for the first time since the news of the death of Tommy Devlin, she began to weep. The sound was full of a deep, grieving helplessness. And Michael thought: They have to be punished. Here. On earth. Not in Purgatory or Hell. Here.
And then he thought about the only way that punishment might be certain.
32
On the following morning, Kate Devlin was up early. Michael heard her say that she had lost one day of work, she could not afford to lose two; but the words were just words to him. Rabbi Hirsch was in the rooms, his blood on the walls, at the table, in the bathroom. He heard her say that they had to hurry to the hospital, it was the day his cast would be removed; but the words receded behind the screen of blood. He chewed cereal and saw the rabbit’s teeth snapped at the gums. He heard the radio, and saw the blood leaking from the rabbi’s ear. He turned on the water tap to wash his face and saw blood. He combed his hair and saw the great swelling of the rabbi’s skull.
“I have to see him,” Michael said. “I have to see Rabbi Hirsch.”
He heard his mother say that if he was in critical condition, they might not allow visitors. Her voice seemed to be coming across a vast distance. He heard her say she would check with her friends who still worked at Wesleyan. Heard her groping for words of comfort.
“They say your leg could be as good as new,” she said. “You know, when bones break, they heal harder than ever.”
Michael wanted to believe this, wanted to believe that when he healed and his mother healed, and if Rabbi Hirsch healed, they would all be stronger than ever. But if Rabbi Hirsch died, he would not heal. The rabbi’s face forced its way into his mind, and everything else seemed trivial. I am sitting where he sat that night, Michael thought. I am sitting where he told his story. He is here. I must try to believe.
They walked out into the hot morning, slowed by the plaster boulder of Michael’s cast and the need to use the stickball bat as a cane. He could hear Harry James playing “Sleepy Lagoon” from an unseen radio and wondered what it would sound like on a Chiclets box. Or the shofar. And then saw Rabbi’s Hirsch’s face: the snapped teeth, the blood, the swollen skull. Try to believe, he told himself. Try to make him heal by believing.
In front of Casement’s, a fat man sat in his undershirt on a folding chair, fanning himself with a newspaper. The asphalt felt soft. A lone pigeon circled sluggishly over the rooftops. Kate took Michael’s hand as they climbed aboard the trolley car, and then, as they passed Pearse Street, he saw Frankie McCarthy.
“Mom, look.”
“Holy God.”
McCarthy was with some of the other Falcons, swaggering along the avenue, carrying a small canvas bag. He was out of jail for the second time. They could see Tippy and Skids, laughing and joking. They saw the Russian. And Ferret. Frankie McCarthy walked as if he were a veteran home from the wars. Michael wondered if they were telling him what they had done to the Devlins, mother and son, and how they had battered the rabbi from Kelly Street.
“Do nothing,” he heard his mother say in a cold voice. “We’ll be moving.”
At the hospital, he stopped thinking of the Falcons while nurses directed them down corridors that Kate knew from her days working the wards. Rabbi Hirsch must have been rushed through these halls, he thought. With frantic nurses beside him and doctors shouting orders. They went to a tiny room on the first floor, and Michael lifted himself onto a gurney. Maybe he was on this gurney. Maybe they used this to wheel him into the operating room. A young intern in green scrubs looked at Michael’s cast and the hospital records and reached for some large shears.
“You’re Jewish?” he asked Michael.
“Irish.”
“You got Hebrew written here, buddy. It says long life.”
“Can I save that piece?” Michael said. That piece of Rabbi Hirsch.
“Sure.”
Then the intern shoved the shears under the cast and started cutting. This was a simple thing to do; the cast that felt like cement to Michael turned out to be fabric and plaster. The intern first cut down the inside of Michael’s right leg, and then did the same on the outside, cleaving the cast into two parts. He gently pulled them apart and they made a sucking sound where the fabric and plaster had stuck to Michael’s skin. Suddenly, the odor of compacted sweat filled the tiny room. When Michael looked at his skin, it was white and mottled like grass that had lain under a rock. He expected to see worms.
“Can he walk on that?” Kate said.
“Why not?”
“Without a crutch?”
“Hey, it looks as good as ever,” the intern said. “But you gotta get it X-rayed before you leave.”
“Can I wash it off?” Michael asked.
“Right in there.”
Michael slid off the gurney and tried putting his full weight on the leg. The floor was very cold under his bare foot. There was no pain, but the leg felt weak and strange and very light, in spite of all the exercise on the roof. He went into the small bathroom, feeling unbalanced as he walked, and found soap and paper towels and washed his calf and ankle and foot. His soapy hands on the leg made him feel odd, slippery, thrilled. When he was finished, he stepped out and the leg felt fresher but not quite his. The intern was gone. Kate waited by the door, holding one sock, one shoe, and the piece of the cast that bore the Hebrew lettering. She forced a smile.
“You heard him,” she said. “As good as ever.”
They walked down the hall to have the X ray made. He was here, too, he thought. They must have X-rayed his skull. The room was crowded. Everyone was white. Doctors, nurses, and patients. As they waited their turn, Kate studied the classified advertisements in the Brooklyn Eagle, circling apartments with a blue pencil. He thought: She’s serious, she’s giving up, she wants to leave. And how can I blame her? I’m the guy who dreams of white horses racing over the factory roof.
“You’re next, young man,” said a nurse with frazzled blond hair. “Soon as we do this guy.” He heard her bright telephone operator voice. He heard her speak to Kate: “Thanks for your patience, Kate. You know how it goes.”
