Red Menace

by Lois Ruby

  Slumped down in my chair, with my chin nearly clipping the table, I answer in a monotone, “Everybody’s out to make a buck.” Yankees sure lucked out getting Mantle. He hit .345 in the ’52 Series, nipping at the heels of Gene Woodling with his .348 . . .

  “I guess you’ve stripped both ideologies down to the bone, Martin.”

  Is that a smile flickering across Dad’s face? But in an instant he turns professor again. “Under capitalism, there are the haves and the have-nots.”

  “Which are we?” I eyeball our kitchen, with the gas stove older than Mom. Two burners haven’t worked in years. To turn the oven on, you have to stick your head in with a lit match. On television, stoves light up with the turn of a switch. Like the electric chair at Sing Sing. I squirm in my chair, and a cottony clump of stuffing puffs out of a ripped seam. Amy Lynn follows my eyes around our kitchen to the cooking grease that darkens our ceiling. Her kitchen’s so spic-and-span you could do surgery on her table.

  I want to be in my room with the radio blasting the game, Yankees vs. Senators. It’s the Mick’s second anniversary with the team, and I’ve got an itchy palm, which means he’s going to do something colossal. I could have already missed it while I sit here plastered to a hot, sticky chair. Could be the Mick’s not playing tonight, since his son was born a couple days ago. It’s a sure bet he’s never going to be lecturing Mickey Mantle, Junior about commies. Those two, they’ll talk baseball ten hours a day and play hit-and-catch the rest.

  Gotta get this lecture over with. “Okay, Dad, tie the whole thing to Joe McCarthy.”

  Dad summarizes: “In a nutshell, McCarthy’s ruining lives, children. A lot of lives.”

  “My parents’ and mine, that’s three right there,” says Amy Lynn. “Especially if we have to wear disguises every time we go to the five-and-ten.”

  So, the ’52 Series victory made Casey Stengel only the second manager with four back-to-back championships. The first was, yep, the other Joe McCarthy . . .

  I miss Mom’s next few words and tune in when she says, “The HUAC bullies will ask your father to testify about whether he’s ever belonged to a communist organization. Doesn’t matter what he says. Everybody thinks guilty if you’re called up to testify, and guilty by association if you’re friends with one of these defendants.”

  That jolts me. “You mean, people will think we’re communists because Dr. Sonfelter teaches with you guys and lives next door?”

  Amy Lynn scowls at me. “Well, thanks a lot, Marty!”

  “Enough for tonight,” Dad promises. “We’ll just watch how all this plays out.”

  Mom hugs Amy Lynn. “We’re all overwrought. And you, Marty, do you have homework this weekend?”

  “Did it all.” Except for math and earth science. Oh, and a sonnet thing for English. And some stuff for my bar mitzvah.

  “Then do whatever’s on your agenda. A baseball game, I suppose,” Dad says wearily.

  Amy Lynn goes home, and I leave my parents with their elbows on the kitchen table and hang-dog looks on their faces.

  Sprawled out on my bed, I can’t concentrate on the game. My mind keeps floating toward Amy Lynn’s sad, scared face. If that’s what communism will do for me, no wonder the Carnivore is against it.

  The lights of passing cars stream across my walls, and my hand makes up its own mind and turns the volume knob on my radio, which is always tuned to the station to pick up Mel Allen, Voice of the Yankees, whenever my New York guys are playing. How much have I missed? The radio’s all static, and the tuning knob doesn‘t clear it. Wait, it’s not static. It’s the sound of 62,000 people holding their breath, and then I hear Mel Allen telling the big story.

  Mantle’s coming up to the plate . . . switch-hitter’s batting right this time. Yogi Berra’s on first, Billy Martin’s on third . . . Lefty Chuck Stobbs is on the mound for the Senators. Here comes the pitch . . . fastball right to Mantle’s sweet spot . . . he swings . . . it’s a tremendous drive deep into left field! Going, going, it’s over the bleachers and into a yard across the street . . . gotta be one of the longest home runs ever hit! “How about that!” Mel shouts.

  I crank up the radio full blast, and I’m dancing around the room like I’m on red-hot coals.

  Mantle runs the bases head down, faking it’s nothing special. Nobody knows where the ball stopped. Wait, the Yanks’ PR guy, Patterson, he’s pacing it off. He races out of the park with a tape measure. The crowd’s on their feet . . . going wild when Mantle crosses the plate.

  My radio’s gonna explode with all this excitement. Connor, are you listening to this game at your house? We’ve gotta play this moment over a million times. Here comes Patterson with the news: Man, that ball rocketed 565 feet!

  Mom pounds on my door. “Turn it down. We can’t hear our own argument.”

  I lower the volume and listen to Mel Allen tell about the lucky ten year old kid who jumped a fence to be the first one to the ball. History’s being made, and I’m right here with it! Nothing can bring me down, nothing.

  Except the shouting that erupts from the kitchen.

  I could be across the street in the FBI car and still hear Mom yelling, “You WHAT? YOU SIGNED THE LOYALTY OATH? How could you, Irwin? I thought I knew you.”

  Whatever my father says in a normal voice makes her madder.

  “I will never sign it. Never!”

  Mumble, mumble, then even Dad raises his voice, a rare happening. “Look how they fired all those University of California professors for not signing. Brilliant people, Rosalie. They cast them into the wilderness. We at Hawthorne, we’re just small potatoes. It would be easy to jettison us.”

  “Let them fire me, I don’t care. Hear me clearly, Dr. Irwin Rafner, I will never sign. How could I, in good conscience, violate the U.S. Constitution, which is as sacred to me as the Torah? How could you?”

  I turn the radio up again, to drown them out. Some voice is chirping, “Fresh up with 7-Up!” I yank the cord out of the wall and bury my face in my pillow.

  You can be sure the Mick won’t be blubbering into his pillow tonight. He’ll be out with Lopat and Berra and Rizzuto before he staggers home to Mickey Mantle, Junior.

  Must have fallen asleep. The moon’s high when I wake up to kick off my sneakers and crawl under the blanket. My first thought: a 565 foot tape-measure homer. But then that thought is bumped by another one that streams along the border of my mind, like a subtitle on one of those boring foreign movies: Life as you’ve known it is pfft.

  Chapter 7

  Sunday, April 19

  Sure, I know all the stats and juicy news about Big League baseball. Like, who else follows the Class A Colorado Springs Sky Sox, since they’re an affiliate of the White Sox? Nobody but me. Yeah, so, knowing baseball and playing it? Two different kettles of fish.

  In centerfield, which is the Mick’s position, I’m not what you call hot, but I’m not a total wimp, either. Every so often I get under a fly, and I’ve got a decent arm to toss to Second and Third. Once I even hurled the ball to the catcher and threw a guy out at Home. But Coach Earlywine likes that thonk-crack sound when the bat slams the ball. Whenever I come up to bat, the sound you hear is the whoosh of my swing-and-a-miss.

  Connor doesn’t say much to me at practice, while Coach is driving us into the ground like our spiked cleats. When Coach calls five minutes for water (“just to restore your electrolytes, not to give you pansies a breather”), Connor hangs out with the first baseman, Larry Jukes.

  Walking home, Connor and I are stretching for neutral topics.

  He says, “You hear that Luke Everly’s back from Korea?”

  “No kidding? Must’ve snuck in when nobody was looking.”

  “Except the G-men.”

  Whoa, that’s not safe territory. Though it’s true. Most of the time they sit there spooking everybody who comes to Amy Lynn’s or my door. They scribble down license plates and notes about Mrs. Blaire’s weekly deliveries, when the only thing red about her stuff is
the juice dripping from the raspberries that grow wild on her farm. Other times, they wait to pounce like blood-sucking vampires. This morning I caught one holding a milk bottle up to the sun, like maybe the milkman passes us pinko commie propaganda directly from the cows.

  It’s like those guys live for the time the Sonfelters and Rafners start overthrowing the U.S. government. Like they’re actually disappointed at the end of each day when the White House is still standing, and Ike can say with a big yawn, “Nothing happened today, Mamie, girl. Let’s hit the sack.”

  I shift my sweaty glove from one underarm to the other, trying to think of something to break the weird silence. Man, in a minute I’ll be whistling something from the Hit Parade. In the good old days, we could spend all day, all summer, talking baseball cards and comparing stats on our favorite players.

  Between little bursts of strained conversation, I remember a night last summer at his house. His father and mother were upstairs watching The Ted Mack Amateur Hour, and Connor and I were bellied out on the rumpus room floor. On the radio, Tommy Edwards warbled a sappy love song: Many a tear has to fall, but it’s all in the game . . .

  “Yeah, same with baseball,” Connor said.

  We spread our Fleer baseball cards out in front of us. Each package promised “Funnies, fortunes, facts on every wrapper,” plus ten cards and a thin sheet of pink Dubble Bubble you’d snap off in jagged pieces.

  I asked, “Get anybody good?”

  “Stan Musial, but I already had him. You?”

  “Nah, same old stuff. Only Yankee is Phil Rizzuto, but at least he was MVP in ’51.”

  Connor said, “Batting .320 in the Series against the Giants? They wouldn’t dare pick anybody else.”

  “Oh yeah? What about Ted Williams in ’41? He was hitting .406, and Joltin’ Joe beat him out for MVP anyway.”

  “Joe DiMaggio, that guy had it over every guy, every game.”

  I thumbed through my cards, feeling that familiar ping when I didn’t get a Mantle. A package of Fleers without the Mick was like a PB&J without the peanut butter. Sweet, but nothing to sink your teeth into.

  “Another dime down the drain,” we said together, like we always did when a new pack of Fleers was old news.

  Conner snaps me back to the present. “Heard Luke’s pretty shot up, gimpy and kind of wacked out in the head.”

  “Seriously?” What if he can’t stand up on his own two feet, or he doesn’t recognize any of us? More than a year since he left. He’s never even met his daughter, who’s almost walking. She could be walking better than he is. I wonder if he’ll be able to shoot baskets, or fix everybody’s busted appliances, or cut keys, or any of the stuff he’s always been good at. “Think he feels like a hero?”

  “Sure should.” End of conversation.

  On our way to Oxbow Road, we pass through the shopping street for the College. It’s called Hollyhock Hill, though it’s as flat as western Kansas. It got that senseless name fifty years ago, when they built the clock tower on campus. I hear that when you’re standing at the top of Whittier Tower and looking down over Palmetto, the Hill sort of pops up a foot higher than most of the town. I’ve got to check that out for myself someday.

  The Hill is swarming with Hawthorne students—guys in pressed slacks and girls in big swishy skirts, their books clutched to their chests like somebody’s out to steal them.

  “War of the Worlds” is playing at the Rialto, billed as “The mighty combination of entertainment and electronics that makes motion picture history.”

  Connor reads the marquee in his best Walter Cronkite voice: “ ‘From limitless space . . . they’re reaching for YOU!’ ” He starts to grab my arm, then pulls his hand back. We keep walking.

  Big relief to finally reach our corner and the familiar rows of two-story College houses, each with its own square of new spring grass and a double-garage door painted the same pukey pastel color as the house. One block to the east, and one block to the west, the houses look just like ours, which is comforting because lately I’m glad to find any evidence of normal life.

  Whoa. Connor’s house has a huge American flag dipping toward the cement, long enough to mop the driveway and so new that you can still see the fold creases. “You trying to impress the feds, Connor?”

  “Old Glory,” he says with a laugh.

  Amy Lynn comes up behind us. “Urgent business. I’m spitting mad!” She’s clearly hoping her poison look will convince Connor to peel off, but he doesn’t.

  “The girl’s seeing red,” he says. “There’s a lot of that going around.”

  Amy Lynn takes the bait. “I might as well be a bull with a matador waving the red cape in front of my eyes. I am so mad I could gore somebody.”

  I jump aside. “Olé.”

  Connor acts bored.

  “It’s about what they’re doing to my father.”

  I don’t want to hear more. I’m still stuffed from Dad’s last lectures. And I don’t want Connor to hear it, but she’s Amy Lynn, and hey, aren’t we all seeing red? “Yeah, fire away.”

  “I found out why they’re after him.”

  Now Connor’s interested. “Yeah? Why?”

  Amy Lynn yanks up her white bobby sox. “Because McCarthy has this nutty notion that any veteran of the Spanish Civil War is a communist. Ever heard of anything so preposterous?”

  “I’ve never even heard of the Spanish Civil War. Have you, Connor?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, that’s because you’re a grade behind me.”

  That stings, but I listen.

  “Truthfully,” Amy Lynn whispers to me, so Connor can’t pick it up on his radar, “I just heard of it this morning.” Then louder, “It’s about the Spanish Republicans against the fascists, back in the thirties.”

  “Where?” Connor asks.

  “You wormbrain. Wouldn’t it be dumb to have the Spanish Civil War in, say, Antarctica?”

  It would be dumb to have anything except penguins and frostbite in Antarctica, I’m thinking, but also that I’d better keep my mouth shut before I look like a cretin.

  “ . . . So lots of soldiers from around the world went to Spain to fight with the loyalists. On the side of freedom, of course. The right side, which was kind of the left, I mean if you look at it politically.”

  “Yeah, the commies,” says Connor.

  Amy Lynn has her back to Connor, and she rushes through a lot of other stuff, which I translate into something I’m savvy to. It’s the bottom of the ninth, Spanish Republicans in the outfield, fascists up at bat. Bases are loaded when some bullfighter of a guy winds up for a spitball pitch right over the plate, and bam! Fascists strike out! Game’s over. Fans go wild. Olé!

  “My father was one of them, part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of American soldiers.”

  “Figures,” Connor mutters.

  But I’m wowed. Dr. Sonfelter? The drippy guy with the horn-rimmed glasses and the slide rule sticking out of his pocket? Charging at the bad guys! And now the College is canning this war hero?

  “You’re just as shocked as I am, Marty. So, McCarthy’s saying that all the Abraham Lincoln Brigade men were communists just because they fought the fascists. They weren’t, though, they were freedom fighters. The whole thing, totally ridiculous. Tell me you think so.”

  “I think so.” Truth is, I don’t know what to think, and now Connor’s ducked under the American flag and into the open jaws of his garage, probably to spread the word on Dr. Sonfelter’s glorious past. I feel like I’m in a tug of war, with Connor tugging at my right arm, and Amy Lynn dragging me left. The game is to see how far one guy can stretch before he ends up with an empty sleeve flapping in the breeze.

  Chapter 8

  Tuesday, April 21

  Diabolical geniuses that they are, the school honchos decide that we need another air raid drill to keep alert. We gotta be prepared for when the Russians drop the bomb on us. Sixth period, just when I’m thinking, hallelujah, pre-algebra’s in my rearview
mirror for another twenty-three hours, a siren starts an ear-splitting wail. Miss Camden points to the corny poster on the wall—Bert the Turtle, who knows just what to do when the A-bomb explodes in our schoolyard, which is to pull into his shell. That would save him, all right.

  So I’m smashed under my desk inhaling chalk dust on the floor. Bet they don’t do the Bert the Turtle thing at the College. They take flying building chunks and oozing radiation like real men.

  As if the A-bomb isn’t scary enough, everybody’s freaked out about polio. Infantile paralysis. Brrr, just the name freezes my bones. Yesterday Amy Lynn said, “I’d rather die than be flat on my back in an iron lung all the rest of my life.” And that reminds me of Connor saying he’d rather be dead than red. So now, I have four choices: bombed out, dead, red, or locked into one of those giant metal tubes that breathes for me, and the only thing outside the iron lung is my head looking at double mirrors so I can read a book propped up behind me. How the heck do you turn the page?

  No contest: I’d rather be red.

  Which might explain why Connor’s started ditching me at school.

  I walk home by myself and hole up in my room. It’s my thirteenth birthday, the year of my bar mitzvah, and nobody remembers, not even the parents, who were there when I came screaming into the world. They don’t worry about stuff like polio or pinko propaganda. They worry about the school desegregation thing in Topeka that the Supreme Court is dragging its feet on, and whether peasants in Mongolia have enough rice in their bowls, and can the Rosenbergs escape the electric chair in, yikes, fifty-eight days? Plus, they’re too busy with the hot battle over who’s more disloyal, the loyalty oath signers or the stubborn refusers.

  Happy birthday to me.

  I’m feeling so sorry for myself that I get down my old Mickey Mantle memos. Right, I didn’t have the guts to burn them and dissolve the ashes in Clorox.

  From the desk of

  IRWIN RAFNER, Ph.D.’s son Marty

  DATE: October 5, 1951

  TO: Mickey Mantle

  First Series ever televised, Yankees and Giants. Man, I saw it happen, fifth inning, Game 2. Mays leads off for the Giants and pops a fly to center. You and DiMaggio both run for it. He’s old. He shoulda let you have it, but I guess he got greedy in his last Series, and next thing I see is you decked out. What happened out there? Did you trip over your own big feet? Don’t feel bad. I do that a lot, ’cause my feet are growing faster than the rest of me. I’m betting you didn’t trip. Here’s my theory. You saw the Yankee Clipper sailing full speed ahead under that ball, and you slammed on your brakes. Man, I thought you died out there when they carried you off on a stretcher, but I heard on the radio a minute ago that it’s only a torn knee. I’m breathing a lot easier now, in case you were worried.