Spitfire

by Evan Balkan

  Caroline hoped she wouldn’t have too much homework. Her mother wouldn’t let her skate if she didn’t get her work done first.

  “Miss Panski!” Miss Bloom bellowed.

  Caroline snapped to attention. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “I was reminding the class that your brave father, a God-fearing man I am certain, is on the cold battlefields of Korea. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We owe a debt of gratitude to soldiers like your father. It’s because of men like him that we can enjoy the freedoms we have here today. Now let’s practice our air raid drill.”

  The students threw their books and papers into their desks. A siren sounded, and they all dropped to the floor and scurried under their desks. Alma and Genevieve had an unobstructed view of one another. They stuck out their tongues and made silly faces, pausing only when Miss Bloom’s thick, stockinged legs waddled past.

  Caroline didn’t see them. Instead, she stared at the ground. While her father was never too far from her thoughts, and she knew Miss Bloom meant well, she was sorry that her teacher had talked about him to the whole class. It brought back that old familiar feeling deep in the pit of her stomach, the one that threatened to make her sick with worry. She hated it.

  One tear weaved its way down her cheek. It traced a path along the cut still visible on her chin. She quickly wiped it away.

  When the school bell rang at the end of the day, the children burst out the front doors. The boys immediately made for the snow piles. They grabbed handfuls of snow and threw them at one another as the girls dodged and ran as quickly as they could out of the line of fire.

  Once clear and on the shoveled sidewalk, Caroline, Alma, Beatrice, and Genevieve walked toward home together. As they passed the high school, they noticed a small crowd milling around, looking agitated. One man held a sign that read, “Race Mixing is Communism”. Another sign read, “Cursed is the Man who Integrates,” and a woman in a bright blue coat and matching hat waved a sign with big block letters that read, “Go Back to Africa.”

  Caroline stopped and turned to her friends. “I wonder what’s going on.”

  “I think it’s because we’re going to have Negroes in our school,” Alma said. “They call it ‘integer’ or something.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  Alma shrugged. “My parents. They thought I was in bed, but I was sitting at the top of the stairs so I could hear what they were talking about. My dad was pretty upset.”

  “Upset about what?”

  “We’ll, he’s against it.” Alma shook her fist in the air and scrunched her face up to imitate her father. “Those niggers will come to our schools over my dead body. They got their own schools. Why the heck they have to come to ours?’ With a laugh, she let her fist drop. “Course, he didn’t say ‘heck’.”

  Caroline shook her head. “I don’t see what the big deal is. Negroes in school. So what?”

  “They’re just different from us, is all.”

  Beatrice stared at the signs for a moment and then turned to Alma. “Frankly, I think your parents are right. Why do they need to come to our schools when they have their own?”

  “‘All men are created equal’, Genevieve said and started walking, leading the group past the protesters. “I read that somewhere.”

  “But Negroes aren’t as smart as white people. How will they keep up in class?”

  “That’s a bunch of hogwash,” Genevieve protested. “Some people say Jews are greedy, and that’s stupid, too. Mr. Rosenbaum gives me free treats every time me and my mom go in his grocery store.”

  Alma kicked at a pile of snow. “All I know is that they’re really funny. That Ethel Waters in Beulah. As ‘queen of the kitchen,’ she’s great. And Amos and Andy.”

  Genevieve shook her head. “But those people aren’t even real.”

  “On the television show they are,” Alma protested.

  Genevieve rolled her eyes. “Again with the television.”

  “You’re just jealous you don’t have one,” Beatrice chimed in.

  “I can’t deny that,” Genevieve said with a laugh.

  “Well, I just hope none of them try to come to our school.” Beatrice pulled her hat down over her ears as the girls continued on until they reached the place where Beatrice and Genevieve would head one direction and Alma and Caroline would head another.

  “Have fun at piano practice,” Alma said before the group split up.

  “Ick,” Genevieve replied. “I’ve barely practiced all week.”

  “Have a stupendous time doing whatever you two do on Tuesday afternoons,” Beatrice said.

  “We will,” Alma said with a crisp nod. “Indis ... uh ... Indisputablebly.”

  Beatrice shook her head sadly. “Really, Alma. A book. Try it sometime.”

  “Not tonight. Webster Webfoot’s on—he’s my favorite.”

  And with that, the pairs said goodbye and went their separate ways.

  “You really think we’ll have Negroes in our school someday?” Caroline asked after they’d turned a corner.

  Alma shrugged. “Beats me.”

  “Well, like I said, I just don’t see the big deal. They have a right to an education, too.”

  “Well, this is me.” Alma skipped up the steps of a rowhouse and disappeared inside with a wave, leaving Caroline to continue on her way until she reached her own house.

  “I’m home!” she hollered when she stepped inside. A few moments later, Sam appeared, twirling a pinwheel.

  “Mom’s next door, at the Knudsens.”

  Caroline absorbed this information for a beat and then raced upstairs. She came bounding back moments later, skates over her shoulder and hockey stick in hand, and bolted toward the front door.

  “Hey!” Sam yelled. “Mom said you’re supposed to help me with my school work.”

  Caroline was halfway out the door, but managed to declare, “Do it yourself,” before she sprinted outside, where she turned left. When she came to the Knudsen’s, a few doors down, she crouched low and skirted past the front stoop, trying to keep from being spotted. As soon as she passed, she took off again, peeling off at the first alley. Caroline emerged from the alley and stopped short.

  On the frozen pond, a dozen or so young boys had already started a game. They were skating roughly, playing with abandon as hip checks sent a few of them teetering across the ice. A few high sticks threatened teeth.

  But then she inhaled deeply, gathering her resolve. Slowly, she made her way over. The boys continued playing—until one by one they noticed her. They stopped, each holding his stick across his knees. It had the feel of a showdown: twelve boys on one side, Caroline on the other, each waiting for the other to do something. Finally, one boy, a kid name Alan, skated forward.

  “You lost? What do you want?”

  Caroline didn’t answer.

  Another boy spoke up. “You dumb or somethin’?”

  A third kid, gangly and awkward even without ice skates, added, “Look, guys: It’s Sonja Henie,” cracking himself up.

  The other boys laughed, too. Gangly, encouraged now by the others, continued, “This ain’t Rockefeller Center, sweetheart.”

  “You can’t figure skate today,” another said. “We got the ice. You can go over to Carlin’s, little girl.”

  “Or Patterson Park—that’s where girls skate.”

  Caroline stood her ground. “I don’t want to figure skate,” she said. “I want to play hockey.”

  The boys burst out laughing, as if this was the most hysterical thing they’d ever heard.

  “Girls figure skate,” the first boy snorted. “Boys play hockey. Now get outta here. Go on over to Patterson Park and let us get back to our game.”

  “But they don’t let you play hockey in Patterson Park,” Caroline said.

  This prompted more laughter. “Well, we’re not gonna let you play hockey here, either!” one of the boys shouted. Caroline stared at them for a moment long
er, but they were already skating away, returning to the chaos of their game. Her fingers gripped her stick as she turned and walked away, eyes burning.

  The boys’ mention of Carlin’s especially stung because that had been where her father first took her out on the ice. It was a destination like no other, and she remembered her parents talking about it when she was little, like it was some mythical wonderland, a crazy place where anything could happen. Days at Carlin’s constituted her father’s earliest memories, and he often told Caroline and Sam about those zany times, when pole-sitting, for some reason, was all the rage. Back in ’29, when the famous “Shipwreck” Kelly came to Carlin’s and sat on top of a platform on a little pole for forty-five days and nights. He even slept up there, and bathed, too, using wet rags. “Well, how did he go to the bathroom?” Sam asked and Mrs. Panski shushed him for his interest in such things, despite the fact that both Caroline and Mrs. Panski herself giggled at the question.

  “He was allowed five minutes off the pole every day,” Mr. Panski answered.

  “So he had to hurry,” Sam said.

  Again, giggles all around.

  “It was a whole craze. After Shipwreck Kelly was here, kids all over the city started climbing into trees and wouldn’t come down.”

  “Did you do that, Daddy?”

  “Shoot. Your granddaddy would have skinned me alive if I tried that.”

  “But there was that one kid—” Mrs. Panski added.

  “A.C. Forman. He went up for ten days. Even the mayor came and stood below the pole, passing out business cards.”

  Caroline would watch wordlessly as they reminisced, enthralled by her parents’ memories, when they lived an unfettered life, a time before she and Sam, a time when they first fell in love. And they were in love still. Caroline could tell when they’d both go on about Carlin’s. Caroline would just watch them, smiling an unembarrassed smile as her mother and father laughed uncontrollably, stopping to touch one another on the hand, her dad having trouble getting through the famous referee story while her mom wiped away tears of mirth. Upon Caroline and Sam’s prompting, her dad would tell it again and again as if it was the first, and not the twentieth, time he’d told it. The one about old Ed Brockman—he was the referee—when his trousers split right down the middle. It was a wrestling match between Ray Steele and George Zaharias. “He was married to the great athlete Babe Didrikson,” Mrs. Panski put in. “Yes, yes, the Babe’s husband. And there they were, grappling with each other, and old Brockman’s trousers … right down the middle.”

  Mr. Panski got up, bowed his legs, demonstrating, to Caroline’s absolute delight. “Someone in the audience threw a pair of lavender bloomers…” Here, Caroline’s parents absolutely lost it, falling all over each other with laughter. “And Brockman put them on. The sight of that man throwing himself between the wrestlers wearing those bloomers. I’ll never forget it.” They could hardly breathe by this time in the story. “Steele and Zaharias themselves were laughing so hard they could hardly stand up.” Her parents eventually got control of themselves, sighing in remembrance of being young and in love.

  Yes, Carlin’s. First it was just stories. But then an actual visit. The wonderful build up, in late winter or early spring, the tension rising for a late summer present before Caroline started school in the fall. When she finally got to actually go, she just couldn’t believe it.

  From the moment she arrived and saw the twin towers flanking the entrance, she realized that, even in her wild imaginings, she had underestimated its grandeur, and these imaginings had derived from her father’s breathless remembrance of the first time he’d been there, as a little tike in the 1920s, when he saw Shipwreck Kelly and all that. In fact, he still held on to a souvenir of that time, a small poster he kept rolled up in a box in the basement. He’d shown it to her, its promise of “Continuous Dancing” to the music of the “Famous Louisiana Five and Mata’s Tropical Marimba Band” in addition to the “Colossal Midway,” the “Tokio Gardens,” “wonderful exhibitions in the magnificent Ice Palace,” and, in big bold letters that seemed to burst forth from the page: “Stupendous Display of Gorgeous Fireworks.”

  The three of them had gone together, before Sam was born, and so Caroline had both of her parents all to herself. She rode the airplane ride, watching the blur of Park Heights Avenue zip by, watching her mother and father’s beaming faces flash by as she swirled round and round. She rode the teacups, too, giggling every time she whipped in a little circle.

  Her father showed his prowess at the rifle range, hitting every swinging target and presenting Caroline with a stuffed teddy bear for his marksmanship. “Fine work, sir,” the attendant told him as he handed the bear to Caroline. She took it in her hands, squeezed it, and clutched it to her side virtually nonstop. For years afterward, it enjoyed a prominent spot at the foot of her bed.

  There were the swinging chairs which made her scared, nauseous, and brought on a torrent of tears, something ultimately salved by an ice cream cone. In the distance loomed the gargantuan roller coaster, of which they steered clear. But the big draw seemed to be roller skating. All around town you could see posters exhorting you to “make a date to roller skate at Carlin’s.” By the time the day ended, Caroline was in her father’s arms, desperately trying to keep her eyes open as she watched with a mixture of fascination and envy a line of boisterous teenagers heading toward the coliseum for an all-night dance contest. The last she could remember seeing was a beautiful young woman, probably seventeen or so, wearing a long billowy skirt and holding a pair of roller skates, entering the park just as the Panskis were leaving. The excitement of that: to be just starting your evening as theirs was ending. She couldn’t wait to grow up, to be out late, to do whatever she wanted to do. It was, up to that point, the most thrilling day of her young life.

  But they didn’t go back to Carlin’s for a long time after. Her mother told her they didn’t have the extra money, especially after Sam arrived. Yet one more reason to loathe her brother. In fact, Mrs. Panski told her in no uncertain terms, after Caroline had asked for probably the tenth time if they could go back, she better stop asking because it wasn’t fair to Sam to have to hear about an event that he did not partake in and that he couldn’t experience or enjoy now.

  And then their luck changed when Mrs. Panski opened her loaf of White’s Big Tip-Top Bread to find two free tickets “for the LEADING AMUSEMENTS at Carlin’s Liberty Heights Park.”

  Then things went from lucky to downright miraculous. Mr. Panski came home that very evening clutching two tickets to Carlin’s he’d won at a raffle at work. So the family, never giving one thought to returning to Carlin’s when they woke that morning, had four tickets by sundown.

  It was a different place when they returned, but no less exhilarating. Still billed as “Clean Fun for the Entire Family,” the roller coaster and teacups and swings were still there, but there were new rides, too. There were also circus acts, live bands, even operas. That, and ice skating. Caroline found it a bit odd why her mother didn’t skate with them but rather sat outside the rink watching Caroline and her dad. Perhaps Sam needed attending to, but Caroline didn’t ask. She was too busy holding on to her father’s fingers as he led her onto the ice. He wasn’t terribly steady himself out there, but he knew enough to keep himself upright and to act as support for her as she took small, chopping steps, clutching on to his forearms and elbows when she threatened to spill. He held on to her no less tightly and no less securely than those moments when he’d come home from work and she’d meet him out on the sidewalk, hopping down the stoop and flinging herself into the air, knowing he’d catch her, that he would never let her fall.

  There was a winter carnival going on with top flight ice skaters performing. Caroline enjoyed this, but she was absolutely enthralled with the next event, a hockey game between the Baltimore Clippers and the Cleveland Knights of the Eastern Amateur Hockey League. Sam was yawning and whining by the end of the first period and the Panskis lasted
only until the middle of the second period, but Caroline’s obvious disappointment over leaving was pacified when her dad, sucker for his crestfallen daughter, promised they’d come back, just the two of them, to see another game one day soon.

  True to his word, and after a few extra overtime shifts, he took Caroline to a game between the Clippers and the Atlantic City Seagulls. The whole atmosphere was electric—hundreds of fans in their seats, screaming and spilling their beer under banners hanging from the ceiling proclaiming the league champion Orioles teams of 1934, 1936, and 1940. Her dad told her that the Orioles had folded but that the Clippers were the new team now, and “they’ll win the championship this year. You can bet on that.” And sure enough they did, breaking the Boston Olympics’ streak of four straight titles.

  But all of that paled in comparison to what happened after the game, a 6-2 Clippers victory. As part of a promotion, all kids under fourteen were allowed on the ice. The players showed them how to hold a stick and how to shoot a puck. One of the Clippers, a 6’4 bruiser missing four of his teeth, handed Caroline his stick. She could hardly lift it, but he positioned himself behind her, helped her wheel it back and wind up. Together, they let fly a spinning beauty that saucered into the upper right corner of the goal. That had been special enough. But the evening wasn’t done. Mr. Panski had another surprise.

  Giddy and beaming, he tapped Caroline’s shoulder as they were leaving the rink, crooked a finger, and beckoned Caroline to follow him. He went to a kiosk selling Clippers gear and asked the attendant, a pimply high school kid, for one of the replica sticks. It cost a buck fifty, nearly as much as the two game tickets themselves. He reached in his pocket, slapped down two dollars, and collected two quarters and the stick. It was a pretty cheap stick, but it was emblazoned with the snappy Clippers logo: a grizzled sea captain, fully bearded and in fisherman’s togs with requisite cap and buttoned woolen jacket, on skates with a stick in his hand, bursting through an anchor and rope.

  Mr. Panski may as well have handed his daughter King Tut’s golden mask for the look on Caroline’s face. She ran her fingers over the varnished wood, lingering over the slight curve at the widened bottom. She put it on the ground and let it slide across the tiled floor. Then she wound back, taking a few practice swings, threatening her father’s shins in the process. “Thank you, Daddy,” she whispered.