by Roger Kahn
I wrote a thousand words, describing Dressen’s plans deadpan and suggesting that he would be back in the major leagues with another pennant winner before very much longer. (He never was.) I wondered if this was the last story I’d write about him. Against that possibility, I took pains to recast all his remarks in good grammar. I knew Charlie would appreciate that.
At home in my small apartment on Clinton Avenue in Brooklyn, I poured a drink and turned on the radio. A newscaster was talking about an espionage ring within the Signal Corps, “still operating, according to a close friend of Julius Rosenberg, executed atom spy.” I didn’t care. I looked forward to bouncing the Dressen experience off my father, who, for all his scholarship, shared Charlie’s vital lunatic optimism. It would be cloudy tonight, the announcer said, with a low of 55 degrees. The Dressen experience, as I considered it, sounded like a title for a tract. The whole thing, the Dodger loss to the Yankees and the mousetrapping of their manager, possessed, it seemed as I poured a second drink, certain elements of tragedy.
The telephone rang. It was 6:35. “Are you sitting down?” my sister Emily began.
“Which one?”
“Dad.”
“What? What’s that? Was it at least quick?”
“They think so. He died on a sidewalk. There wasn’t any doctor. They think it was a heart attack. Can you come over to Kings County Hospital? I’m taking care of Mother. They want someone to identify the body.”
I drove down dark streets at reckless speed. The sidewalk was a rotten place to die. Pebbled cement scrapes a twitching face. A man deserves privacy at the end, and anesthesia. Surely my father had earned that for a gentle life. Myself, ungentle, now must stand and call the corpse my father. Would they have stripped him naked? My father’s final day on earth I spent with Charlie Dressen. The dying gasp and grimace on cement. Oh, I hope someone has had the kindness to close the mouth.
Corpse consigned to a licensed mortician, municipal codes conformed to, the $7.52 Gordon had been carrying received and signed for, I guided my mother and sister back to the spacious apartment. We sat in the living room with the French doors and blue-gray walls. The apartment was too large now. Everything had shrunk: books, sounds, paintings, carpets, people. My father’s supper waited in the dining room. A half grapefruit had been cut and sectioned. His blue water goblet had been filled.
“There shouldn’t be a rabbi,” Olga said. “He should have an agnostic’s funeral.”
“Sure,” I said. But what the hell was that?
Olga’s dark eyes bulged. She chattered ceaselessly. It was hard to comprehend that this small iron lady, my mother, was babbling.
“I want a cremation,” she said.
That was sensible, Roman, un-Catholic and sensible. Olga sat on the blue couch, legs crossed, circular face normal, except for the eyes. “My father was cremated,” Olga said. “He was your grandfather, you know. Why don’t you ever talk about your grandfather? Or write about him? He was a remarkable man. Many people would be interested in the story of his life. That is what you might write, instead of baseball, if you can. Papa’s story. I want the two ashes, both urns, Daddy’s and Papa’s, side by side.”
“I’ll see about a cremation,” I said.
“How can you cremate Daddy? Don’t you know his favorite joke? When he died, he wanted to be cremated. Then, when a lover came to call some icy night, he said, I could scatter his ashes on the ice, so that my lover wouldn’t fall and hurt himself.” My mother’s hands went to her face. The fingers spread and I saw, without hearing, the hands that once played simple Mozart duets with mine.
Joe Blau, an old associate of my father’s, who taught religion at Columbia, and led an Ethical Culture group, said he would handle the eulogy, asserting neither that there is a God nor that there is none.
“That’s about where we are, Joe,” I said.
“I suppose you’re full of his favorite quotations.”
“Sure.” But I was not. I thought for a long time. Applesauce, he had said, and something about Dressen coming back with Erskine and something from Caesar: It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come. But that was Shakespeare swelling a scene. “What I remember, Joe, is that he really liked the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh.”
“I can think of many quotations,” Joe Blau said with rabbinic solemnity. “Why don’t you console yourself with one from Socrates? ‘To a good man no evil can come either in life or after death.’”
When a father dies, a son buys a coffin, entering the mercantilism of mourning. Coffin salesmen are specialists at turning guilt into profit and as Simenon writes, “When someone is dead, you feel guilty, even if for a smile you did not smile.”
A deluge of Gordon’s frightened friends, thirty years older than I, and glad to have been spared, decided that lawyers should accompany me to the mortuary. Several lawyers vied for the place as, at certain parties where a girl is stricken, rival doctors contend to make the examination. Two lawyers prevailed. Intense, affluent Jack Lippman played good tennis and once at a lake of summer asked me, “Pitch in a few.” Lippman wore eyeglasses and his swing was awkward. After he missed five times, I threw medium-speed high outside pitches. Lunging, he drove some to right field. I would never have thrown that way to my father; he’d have lined the ball back into my teeth. Silent, sorrowing Gus Simpson was a Socialist who had lost an eye in physical combat with followers of the Jew-baiting priest, Charles Coughlin. I drove to the mortuary with two men, physically flawed but living while my father, who could see perfectly and hit a baseball hard, lay wreathed in the faint odor of embalming fluid.
In brilliant, mild weather, I guided my pale-green car through the twisting roadway inside Prospect Park. The mortuary, a modest red-brick building, stood near the southwest corner, between a roller skating rink and the ball fields of the Parade Grounds which stretched for five hundred yards.
It was the morning of October 17. An expressionless man, wearing a dark suit, waited inside the mortuary door. “My office is this way,” he said. He acknowledged the two lawyers. “Are these your uncles?”
“They’re lawyers,” I said.
“Burial is a private matter.”
“We’re here to talk price,” Jack Lippman said, in a high, dry voice, “and we don’t have very much time.”
The mortician looked at Lippman. “Prices range up from four hundred dollars. The price of the coffin is the determining factor. Use of a chapel and one limousine are included. Was the deceased well-off?”
“No,” Jack Lippman said.
“I’m buying the casket,” I said.
“Yes,” the mortician said to me. “We have excellent coffins for men of reasonable but not necessarily extensive means. Something with a copper lining for twelve hundred fifty will last for centuries. With that we include artificial grass, so that the area around the grave is consistent green.”
“He’s being cremated,” I said.
“Where is this four-hundred-dollar coffin?” Lippman said.
“We’ll take the twelve-fifty coffin,” Simpson said. He fixed Lippman coldly and said to me, “Gordon was a wonderful man. He deserves the best.”
The mortician led us into a softly lighted showroom in which an air conditioner whined. Coffins stood everywhere on sturdy bases: dark, carefully rubbed fruitwoods, with white cloth lining; dull, handsome copper; plain pine for Orthodox Jews. The prices, except for the plain pine, exceeded $1,000.
“Where’s the four-hundred-dollar one?” Lippman said.
The mortician pressed his lips and sighed. He opened a door and walked into another room. Here coffins were tightly stacked on shelves. “That,” he said, indicating a coffin covered with gray cloth.
“We’ll take it,” Lippman said.
I walked to the cloth coffin and touched it. This was my father’s coffin; then at last, I had come to the coffin one removed from my own. I withdrew my hand. The cloth beneat
h was darker. The shade was sensitive to moisture, touch, life. Five hundred people coming to the funeral and I had bought a coffin of chameleon gray.
“No,” Gus Simpson said. “That just won’t do.”
I walked toward a fruitwood coffin marked $685. “This one,” I said.
“Do you wish time payments?”
“I’ve got the money.”
“Shall I notify the newspapers?”
“I’ve taken care of that.”
I followed the mortician back to his office, and while Jack Lippman and Gus Simpson ignored each other’s glares, I signed a funeral contract, which I discovered two weeks later included $15 extra for artificial grass. Was it artificial fescue? I wondered. Was Merion more?
Outside the summer sun was taunting. I walked to the car, a lawyer at each elbow, wholly alone. The wrongness of things seized me. At the Parade Grounds boys were throwing footballs. It was that season; baseball would come again. The team was broken up and with my father dead there was no one with whom I wanted to consider that tragedy, and because there was no one I recognized that the breaking of a team was not like greater tragedy: incompleteness, unspoken words, unmade music, withheld love, the failure ever to sum up or say good-bye.
INTERLUDE I
It was not, as Eugene McCarthy remarked of his decision to challenge Lyndon Johnson for the Presidency, like St. Paul falling off a horse. The metaphysic of conversion is said to have thrown Paul from saddle to roadside, where, for several verses, he sat basking in Christianity. My own decision to find and live again with the Dodgers of my youth proceeded slowly and, so to speak, against the grain. When the idea had developed to embryo and I exposed it to an editor, I found myself being put down, which is rather a different occurrence from being unhorsed.
“Those Dodgers are no more special than, say, the Boston Red Sox of 1948,” said the editor, whose name is Otto Friedrich. “You only think they’re special because you covered them. They’re only special to you.”
“And that Wessex stonemason was special only to Hardy, but Jude came out a pretty good book.” Overkill, but with editors, critics and witches foul is fair.
Friedrich shuddered and reached for his Cinzano. A maître d’ refilled our glasses. Possibly because we were sitting in Toots Shor’s restaurant, under the cubistic rendering of a runner sliding home, Friedrich persisted in discussing baseball. He had grown up on a farm in New Hampshire, he said, where his father, Professor Carl Friedrich, the Harvard political scientist, lived and played the cello; when New England atmospheric conditions were suitable, young Otto fled his own ritual piano lessons for a radio which carried the voice of Red Barber. “I remember those broadcasts distinctly,” Friedrich said. “Am I mistaken or was Barber truly excellent?”
Friedrich was editing the Saturday Evening Post then, about as well as any man could edit inside a sarcophagus, but he possessed a transcending sense of privacy, which sometimes collided with his craft. Those things about which he felt most personally were a priori barred from the mass middle-brow magazine he was trying to make. Indeed, when Friedrich composed a touching memoir of his Paris days, his words were published not in the Post, but in Esquire. Thinking that I was suggesting a magazine article on the Dodgers for the Post (which I was not), and remembering the team with other lost saints, Friedrich shook his head and sipped Cinzano. Leaving, I remembered the virgin queen who at last made love and then inquired if serfs did the same.
“Yes,” said her paramour.
“But it’s too good for serfs,” the queen protested.
And I added one more secret Dodger idolator to a list by then ten years old and numberless as sand. I left the Tribune for magazines in 1954, following what was then the common ladder of journalism. When young, one toiled at a paper, later proceeding to Collier’s or Coronet, where supposedly expense accounts allowed for renting convertibles and buying steak dinners, after which one wrote Of Time and the River, or at least Other Voices, Other Rooms, and became an author rather than a writer. The distinction was said to be immortality and $50,000 a year.
For $9,500, a private, carpeted office and an expense account which did allow for rented sedans and London Broil blue plates, I joined Sports Illustrated, during the first summer of its life. It was also the first summer in which Walter Alston managed in the major leagues. His experiences and mine were equally confusing.
A maxim at the Tribune, and at any good newspaper, commands: “Do not preconceive.” If you go to the ball park, or to the concert hall or to a political campaign, thinking, “Things are probably going to go about like this,” you, writer not author, are going to invent lead paragraphs to describe imaginary events. It is a writing reflex. Then the Phillies upset the Dodgers or Heifetz chooses a slow tempo or John Lindsay slurs a speech and you find yourself the prisoner of preconception. “The Phillies made their first mistake at high noon today, which is when they showed up at Dodger Stadium.” The sportswriter who remembers, or who thinks he has invented, this lead at breakfast, knows pain at 4:20, when a weak fly to left concludes the Phillies ll-to-2 victory. The writer may reverse the joke, which will then not make much sense, or he can expunge the breakfast lead from thought and try to write about what happened. By the time I left the Tribune I had been trained, both by colleagues and by the exciting unpredictability of sport, not to anticipate. That was one important aspect of professionalism. Another was sitting quietly in the press box, despite the rising impulse to bellow, “Come on, go get ‘em, Oisk.”
The problem at Sports Illustrated, as at all magazines covering news, is that not every story can be built in a day. A number of technical considerations—sophisticated layout and production schedules—demand anticipation. Magazine management must prepare for contingencies. Horse Wins Race. Horse Loses Race. Jockey Throws Race. Lightning Strikes Jockey. The science is imprecise, but it is important to reserve pages and to prepare treatments covering all the likely eventualities. My specific problem at Sports Illustrated was that my immediate superior, John Knox Tibby, insisted that we calculate, not all likely contingencies, but the right one. I was his handicapper.
I moved out of the stark Herald Tribune newsroom into a carpeted office without a window, but within shouting distance of the managing editor’s suite. “You’re doing fine judging by where they put you,” someone told me on my first day at Sports Illustrated. “No view, but a very high-rental area.” I sat for a few afternoons, telephoning friends, who were out covering ball games. Then on Thursday I heard myself being asked, “Who’s going to win that big Yankee-Cleveland double-header this Sunday?”
“I don’t know, Jack, I don’t know the American League that well, and even if I did, I couldn’t be sure.”
“You’re covering it,” Tibby said. “It’s our lead story.” He spread blank pages on his desk and sketched rapidly. “Here we have a picture, over this whole page, that says baseball. Here we run a smaller picture that says crowd. Here’s the head and story. And here”—he printed in large block letters—“is your by-line. Now, who’s going to win?”
“I still don’t know.”
We drank double martinis at the English Grill. We drank single chocolate malteds at the Cromwell Drugstore. “What you really care about is poetry,” Tibby said. “I can see you years from now, forgetting the slider pitches, and happy”—here he paused portentously—“as poetry critic of Time.”
“Well, I don’t know,” I said again and began to think of interviewing E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost.
Toward dusk, worn down, I confessed that I thought the Indians were ready to take the Yankees. Tibby was sophisticated, persuasive and besides, professionalism has a stop. Underneath, we really do think we know.
“Most people here would disagree. They say the Yankees are Olympians.”
“Yes,” I said, bounding apoetically from Greece to Deutschland, “but we’re about to see ‘The Twilight of the Gods.’ “
“That’s it,” Tibby said with soft
certitude, and on Sunday night after Early Wynn and Bob Lemon had swept the Yankees, he was jubilant. My story needed revision, but the Wagnerian baseball headline was fine.
“It’s an accident that it worked out,” I said.
“You’re being modest.”
“No. If I really knew who was going to win, I’d bet. I’d tell the DA. Or something. On the Tribune we learned: never anticipate.”
“That was the old Trib,” Tibby said slowly. “This magazine is something entirely new.” Then, yet more slowly, “You and I, we may be Donner, having crossed the pass without realizing we were doing it.”
I thought about that for a while and, when I had begun to quiver, I called on Richard Johnston, the assistant managing editor, and said that, what with the idle days, my own rhythms as they had developed at the Trib, the demand for preconception and problems in diction, communication and attitude, I thought I was going to have to quit.
“And do what?” Johnston said.
“Go to dental school.”
“All right. Some of what you say may make sense. Some doesn’t. Some of your newspaper work was fine. Some I would have laid a heavy hand to. Meanwhile, I’ve been invited to a small private party for a ball player and his wife. Would you join me?”
“Who’s the ball player?”
“Joe DiMaggio.”
“You know something, Dick? I’ve never met DiMag.”
Joe DiMaggio did not appear at the party. Marilyn Monroe stood, gloriously blonde, in the center of a mirrored room, wearing a translucent bodice that outlined rouged nipples, and a black skirt that curved with her buttocks. She stood in the center of the room and she stood in each mirrored wall and Earl Wilson, the columnist, pointed a camera and said, “Bend forward, Marilyn, so I can get some cleavage.”
Marilyn made a little cry and bent, pulling her bodice up in a gesture of modesty, that showed more nipple still. “And who are you?” said a press agent.
