"You're not gonna be mad at me tomorrow, are you, Vic?"
"Nahh. Your father never got mad at me, and I hear I was a real pain in the neck when we shared this room."
"I didn't mean to do that to my mother, you know. I didn't mean to get twisted around the wrong way."
"Course you didn't .. ."
Minutes later he was snoring, while I lay awake, rubbing my head as if it were a crystal ball.
My nighttime vigil didn't hurt Vic's batting eye in the least. He ended his high school career in a blaze of glory, blasting two home runs. He made the Journal-American all-star team again, this time earning a solo photo of himself taking a vicious swing at an imaginary pitch.
He got a letter from Arizona State University, offering him a full baseball scholarship. That school would later produce major league stars such as Reggie Jackson and Sal Bando.
But the pros were also interested. A scout named Jack Boswell from the Pittsburgh Pirates wanted Vic to sign a contract to play baseball that summer in their farm system, a Single-A team in West Virginia called the Nuggets. He asked to come visit the house.
Connie set the table in the upstairs dining room, arranging unchipped coffee cups with saucers and a plate of pastries. Boswell was gracious. He wore a suit and smelled as if he'd shaved a minute ago.
In a low voice he spoke of Vic's great promise. Vic would learn some fundamentals in the minors, a year or two at most just to hone his skills. He made it sound like a trifling annoyance, like getting a passport to go to Europe. He'd be in the major leagues before his twenty-first birthday.
The Pirates were the defending world champions but they were aging, Boswell noted. Players would soon retire, leaving holes to fill.
Vic interrupted to say, "You know, I always kinda wanted to be with the Yankees."
Boswell scowled. "No you don't. Hey, realistically, now - who are you gonna push out of that lineup? Kubek? Richardson? My gosh, the young kids on that team don't have a chance. Roberto Clemente is a big star with us now, right? If he'd signed with the Yanks he'd still be riding the bench."
"Roberto Clemente," Vic said reverentially.
Angie said nothing but listened intently. Connie stared at Boswell the whole time but was also silent. Boswell looked at his watch and stood.
"I've got to go," he announced. "Mr. Ambrosio, I'll see you and your son later in the week for dinner." He shook Angie's hand and turned to Connie. "I hope you'll join us, too, Mrs. Ambrosio."
Connie nodded and forced a smile. Boswell left the house, having taken just one sip of coffee. Cream dripped from the untouched pastry on his plate.
At the doorway he turned and winked at Vic. "The fences at Forbes Field are mighty cozy, son."
A few nights later Boswell took Vic and Angie out to dinner. Connie begged off, saying she had a headache. She was quiet that night in the basement as she made bread crumbs, one of her favorite activities to relieve tension. She put hunks of stale Italian bread into a meat grinder that was attached to the end of the table by screws and butterfly nuts. She let me turn the crank until it was too stiff to move.
An even brown powder dropped into a paper bag, "cheaper and better" than the "sawdust" they tried to sell at the market.
"Hey, Connie. How come that baseball guy didn't invite me to dinner?"
"'Cause he don't need you to like him, that's why."
"When Vic gets to the major leagues can we go to the games for free?"
She grimaced. "What are we gonna do, move to Pittsburgh? Madonna! Move, let me crank."
She finished grinding the bread, then poured the crumbs from the bag into an empty Medaglia D'Oro coffee can, dropped a bay leaf on top, replaced the lid and burped it.
"Why'd you put that leaf in there?"
"Keeps it fresh."
"How?"
"You and your questions! I don't know, it just does." She put the can on a shelf. "What did he say to you?"
"Who?"
"Hands off the crank, it ain't a toy. . . . Vic, that's who."
"What did he say about what?"
She grew impatient. "You sleep in the same room. Did he say he was gonna sign a baseball contract?"
"He didn't say anything."
"Ah, the way you two stick together . . ." She unscrewed the crank and put it away.
"Don't you want him to sign?"
"No. He should go to NYU. They offered him half a scholarship."
"What about Arizona?"
She hesitated. "Too far away."
She was too upset to cook. She took flat, stale slices of Italian bread, wet them slightly, and cut tomatoes and cheese over them. She dripped oil over that and pronounced it supper.
When we finished eating she made me carry her rocking chair to the front porch. It was nine o'clock but the day's heat still shimmered from the bricks, and each breeze was a blessing.
The mosquitoes weren't, though - they were everywhere in the June air, having drifted over from the garbage cans. I slapped at them furiously and noticed that Connie never broke her rocking rhythm to kill any.
"Hey, how come they don't bite you?"
She shrugged, her gaze fixed in the distance. "Never got bit in my life. Maybe I got sour blood."
"It isn't fair." I killed one on my forearm, leaving a stain the size of a dime, my blood. "They're all coming after me."
She stopped rocking. "Is that nice? Do you want your grandma to get bit? Would that make you feel better?"
She resumed rocking, ignoring me. I opened my mouth, thought again, closed it. The inattention was getting to me. "I saw where my mother lived."
Connie stopped rocking. "You saw the apartment house?"
"I went inside it, Connie."
"How'd you know where it was?"
"Grace showed me."
"Grace took you upstairs?"
I shook my head. "She only brought me there. I went alone."
Connie peered at me. "Why'd you do that?" she asked softly.
"I wanted to see what it was like." Smack. I killed a mosquito on my neck. She watched me flick it off the end of my fingernail.
"All Puerto Ricans in that building," she said, waiting for confirmation.
I nodded. "The guy who let me in was."
She stopped rocking again. "My God, you went in someone's flat?"
"Sure." I shrugged. I had her in the palm of my hand. "It wasn't so nice. The guy was in his underwear. He was a night watchman. He said I woke him up."
"You're lucky he didn't kill you."
"His window was right by the train."
"You should be in there when a train goes by."
"I was, Connie. The whole house shook." I grinned at her. For an instant she seemed frightened of me.
"Never go there again," she commanded. "They could kill you and we'd never find you."
"Nobody's going to kill me."
"Promise you won't go there again."
I let her hang for a moment. "Don't worry, I won't," I finally said. She began rocking again, breathing hard, as if she'd been holding her breath.
"Were you scared?"
"A little. . . . Did you know my other grandmother?"
"Used to see her on the street. But we never talked."
"Why not?"
"I didn't know her. She was already dead when your father met your mother."
"You still could have said 'hello.' "
"She could have said 'hello' to me, too," she snapped. "Madonna, that Grace has some big mouth." She rocked harder. The chair scraped forward, a centimeter at a time. "If you were so scared, why'd you do it?"
"I felt like it. Is my other grandfather alive?"
"I don't know."
"Would you tell me if you knew?"
"Of course I would. Don't you dare grill me, a shrimp like you," she said, but her voice was shaky.
"I'm not a baby, Connie." She let the crack go without comment.
"Your chair's sliding. You're rockin' too hard."
"Don't worr
y about it."
"Connie, I'm cold."
"Go get your sweater."
"I don't want to."
"Eh, eh, eh .. ."
She slowed her rocking. The chair stopped moving. "I wish I could have met my other grandmother."
"Wishing won't do you no good."
"I still wish it."
"Who's stoppin' you?"
"I'm glad Grace showed me. I'm not afraid now."
"Afraid of what?"
I wouldn't say.
"Don't tell your grandpa where you were, he'd have a heart attack."
A train roared by down the block, bound for territories deep in Brooklyn. Connie stared at me and said, "It was nicer when your mother lived there."
"How do you know? You never saw it."
"I just know."
She wanted to comfort me but I wouldn't let her. I had killed about two dozen mosquitoes by the time Vic and Angie showed up after eleven o'clock, looking like strangers in their dress clothing. Angie's only suit was a real gangster-type job, with slanted pockets and thin pinstripes. Vic didn't even have a suit. He wore a salt-and-pepper jacket, a light blue shirt, and a knit tie.
The thick-knotted tie bulged at his throat like an extra Adam's apple. His face looked fat and shiny.
"Hiya, Ma," he said affectionately, kissing her cheek.
"You had a beer. You smell like a drunk."
Vic gulped. "I'm not drunk."
"We each had one beer," Angie said. "Take it easy already."
"Sure. Easy." The rocking quickened. I finally realized how dramatic a prop that rocking chair was. No wonder she'd made me lug it outside. Her staging was ingenious.
Vic said, "Ma, I signed. I'm gonna be a Pittsburgh Pirate." He tried a smile on her.
"No, you're not," she said. "You're gonna be a Nugget."
The smile vanished from his face. "All players start out in the minors."
"Uh-huh." Rock, rock. She looked at Angie. "You didn't even call to tell me."
Angie shrugged. "It all happened so fast. . . ."
"So why couldn't you take two minutes to call?"
"What for?" Angie exploded. "A pen? He made up his mind, he signed. End of the story."
Vic slapped at his wrist. "There's a million mosquitoes," he said, but only I was listening to him.
Connie asked, "Where'd you eat?"
"Mr. Boswell took us to the Twenty-one club," Vic said eagerly. "It cost eleven bucks for a steak."
Angie's eyes shut: here it comes, he must have said to himself. Connie's curtain of anger dropped momentarily to reveal astonishment. When she recovered she asked, "That makes you happy, that it cost so much?"
Vic was baffled. He swallowed, making his tie-knot jump. "No, Ma . . jeez, I'm just tellin' ya. Nothin' was cheap at this place. The shrimp cocktail comes in a glass of ice this big." He held out his hands as if he were hefting a basketball.
She looked at Angie, who had opened his eyes. "You too? Steak?"
He cleared his throat. "Lobster tails."
"How much?"
"Fourteen dollars." Angie looked at his shoes.
"Mr. Boswell paid, Ma," Vic said desperately, but that only made Angie wince. "Even the chicken was eight bucks," he added.
Now Connie was nodding. In the distance a fire engine wailed. I was sure Vic and Angie would have loved to be on it, going anywhere.
"Lobster tails," she said, making the words sound like a curse. "Ain't that nice. The only way a lobster tail could get into this house would be if we had a hurricane and the ocean washed over us."
"Mal" Vic began, but he'd done enough damage - Angie touched Vic's arm and he fell silent. It was best to let Connie get all her venom out at once. To stop or interrupt her would be to stagger the flow of poison over days, even weeks.
The lobsters were a ridiculous scapegoat. Angie let Connie handle the money with a free rein. Still he let her talk, and as she did she seemed to give off heat we could feel.
"Sure, you two with your steak and lobsters. Your grandson and me ate bread and cheese tonight, the whole meal cost maybe thirty cents. That tomato had a bad spot on it, I should have thrown the whole thing out. . . ." She paused and caught her breath before resuming the attack.
When she was through Angie kept quiet for a while, to make sure it was all out. Then he said, "Lady, there's a pound and a half of veal cutlets in your refrigerator. And besides, you were invited tonight. You pretended you had a headache. So never mind all this bread and cheese stuff."
A deadlock. Vic looked from parent to parent, his mouth open. "I got eight thousand to sign," he said.
Connie gripped the arms of the rocking chair. "It's final, then."
"Uh-huh. I leave for West Virginia in two days." He couldn't believe it himself. "Two days," he marveled.
"Come on, say something," Angie said. "Eight thousand bucks! How many kids get their hands on that kind of money? Used to take me two years to make that much."
I said, "Can I see it, Vic?" having imagined rubber-banded packets of greenbacks. He rubbed my hair and my spine tingled as I realized it was eighty hundred dollars, eighty times the magical amount my mother used to talk about. Vic could go to the moon eighty times. . . .
"They mail me a check later," he said kindly.
Connie extended a hand to be pulled out of the rocker. Vic and Angie seemed afraid to touch her, so I tried to help her up. She was dead weight, like a sack of cement. I couldn't budge her.
"Lemme rock forward, then pull."
It worked that way. She went to the door alone. "One of you carry my rocker inside. And get out of those clothes. The beer sweats through them and they stink."
She shut the door behind her. Another fire engine wailed. The three of us stood on the porch, the empty rocker still swaying. Angie put his hand out to stop it.
"Carry it in, would you, Vic? I'm beat."
Vic had never traveled and he couldn't pack worth a damn. He laid two open black suitcases on his bed, scuffed at the corners. Angie rubbed Esquire shoe polish on those areas, but up close you could still see the scraped fibers.
The first things he packed - what else? - were his glove and his spikes. He put the spikes in nails up, folded his one jacket in half and laid it on top of the spikes.
"Uh-oh .. ."
He took it out and examined the sole-shaped area of ripped threads. "Nuts, my only jacket," he said, fingering the threads. But then he laughed it off. "Heck, I'll buy a new one! I got the money."
He flopped onto his bed between the suitcases, exhaling deeply. "You can play my records when I’m gone, Joey. And here, this can stay too."
He jammed a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap Boswell had given him onto my head. My ears flattened under it.
"Can I really keep it, Vic?"
"Sure. I can't use it. I'm a Nugget, not a Pirate." Sheepish smile. " Not yet, anyhow."
"Vic. Are you going to write me letters?"
"Sure I will. Only, I ain't much of a writer."
"I'll write to you. . . ."
Why was my throat lumping up? It was crazy. I hadn't cried when my father left, and here I was choking up over a guy I'd known just a few weeks. Vic acted as if he couldn't see me misting up.
"Sleep in my bed while I'm gone, Joey, it's more comfortable."
"When are you going to visit?"
"I don't know. There's no minor leagues in New York City." Another smile. "Ya know what that means, don't ya? I'll have to get called up to the majors this season so I can visit my favorite nephew."
He winked, then his face suddenly darkened. "Wait. No. There's no National League teams left in New York."
"Damn it."
"Hey! You don't curse. Since when do you curse?"
"That was my first time. No, wait, I said 'hell' to Grace once."
"Don't get into the habit, Joey, it's bad. . . . Hey!" His mood brightened. "I got it!" He snapped his fingers. "The Yankees meet the Pirates again in the World Series, just like last year. Then I g
o out there and beat the Yankees. Huh?"
He cackled at his fantasy. "That'll show 'em for not signing me, huh?"
"Yeah!"
"Know what, Joey? We could wind up teammates some day, you and me."
Gooseflesh covered me from head to toe. "You mean it?"
"Sure." He shrugged. "We're, what, eight years apart? Yeah, I'd say it's possible. Very possible."
"Oh, boy!"
We shook hands formally, awkwardly. "Yeah," he mused. "Little more muscle on ya . . . we already know you got a batting eye, right? It could happen. What are you, sweating?"
He pulled his hand free and wiped it on his shirt. I did the same thing with my hand.
"You're the one who's sweating," I accused. I think we both feared the embrace that threatened to follow our handshake.
It rained the morning he left us. Boswell had arranged for a limousine to take him to the airport, and even though it was barely seven-thirty people from Shepherd Avenue were out there to say good-bye.
Angie couldn't stop with the questions: "Got the plane ticket? Got enough cash on you? You'll call soon, collect?"
Vic nodded or grunted his answers. His eyes were on Connie's bedroom window - the curtains were drawn. She'd refused to leave her room that morning.
Angie had made our breakfast. The scrambled eggs had a crust from overfrying. There was no coffee because he didn't know how to make it. Even though I didn't like the taste, I missed the smell. There was a chill in the basement the odor of coffee would have chased.
The limo was the longest and blackest car I'd ever seen. The driver wore a cap with a visor that hid his eyes.
Grace Rothstein, curlers in her wild hair, stuck an oily-bottomed bag of pepper-and-egg sandwiches in Vic's hands and kissed his cheek. "Watch what you eat," she warned.
Uncle Rudy told him to be good. Mel was sobbing out loud, but Rosemary just stood there looking solemn. Vic had visited her for hours the night before and there was nothing left to say.
Across the street, poor retarded Louisa sat on the curb, chanting and pointing: "Big car . . . big car . . . big car . . ."
Angie put his left hand on Vic's shoulder, standing away at arm's length. Vic put his right hand out to shake. He dropped it to his side as Angie extended his. They missed each other's cues a few more times before giving up and embracing.
Shepherd Avenue Page 7
