Once Upon a Fastball

by Bob Mitchell

  It dawns on him that these people and places from History are appearing in chronological order. From the beginning of a human presence on earth to, well, there’s Napoleon at Waterloo, so the tour is at least taking him up to 1815.

  Nope, even further. There’s Edison with his bulb and Bell with his phone and the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk…

  The Beatles’ riff is about to conclude orgasmically in its final burst of a chord.

  …and Chancellor Hitler speechifying and the crumbling battleships at Pearl Harbor and the atomic bomb mushrooming at Hiroshima and Gandhi’s assassination…

  And the music intensifies even more, almost unbearably now, then ends abruptly, in that rousing, raucous, brash, clashing, strident, high-pitched, piercing, trumpety climax. And the tornado decelerates and grinds to a halt. And Seth is deposited gently on the ground. And he looks around, gawking, his jaw dropped in disbelief.

  It is no longer 2006.

  2

  MIRACLE?

  IT IS 1951.

  Seth knows it is, because, still gawking, he is standing next to a pile of New York World-Telegram and Suns stacked messily on the ground in front of Hessing’s Luncheonette.

  The wrinkled page on top tells him it’s 1951. As he looks up, the street signs tell him he’s standing at the corner of Forty-ninth Street and Thirteenth Avenue.

  Dear Lord.

  This is where…Papa Sol and Grandma Elsie lived in the early days…their old neighborhood…Borough Park…Brooklyn, New York…Forty-ninth Street and…

  You could have knocked him over with an egg cream.

  Seth strolls up Thirteenth Avenue, greeting the unknown with a nervous anticipation akin to what Neil Armstrong must have felt when he took his first steps up there.

  He didn’t notice the exact date in the paper. Must be autumn, though, since virtually every man on the street is wearing an overcoat and a hat. The scene is a monochrome. Same color coats (gray, black, navy, brown), same style hats (fedoras). Like he’s stuck in a black-and-white movie or a sepia daguerreotype.

  “Those were simpler days, Setharoo,” Papa Sol used to tell him while reminiscing about this epoch. “Nothing fancy, nothing hi-tech, just, well, simpler.”

  Historian Seth is beginning to understand. My God, I’m actually here. Seeing how Papa Sol lived back then.

  It is early evening. Men walk briskly from workplaces and bus stops and perches at watering holes, eagles heading back to the aerie for a hot, wholesome, home-cooked meal with the wife and chicks.

  Ambling up Thirteenth Avenue, Seth is mesmerized by the parked cars, two rows of hippos napping curbside until it is time to awaken and mosey along. They are all curvaceous and corpulent, and you could just about squeeze two of today’s compacts into any one of them. Lots of two-tones, loads of chrome. And the huge grilles. Looks like they’re all grinning. Especially that Buick over there, the one with the overbite and the eighteen oversize, curved chrome teeth on the grille, and the ship’s portholes on the sides. And getta loada those gigantic bumpers and those mammoth, protruding hood ornaments, birds and beasts of every imaginable species. And some models are wearing shades over the tops of their windshields, like the visors worn by those old-time newspapermen.

  These behemoths are lined up, single file, only six to a block, one big, gorgeous cartoon tugboat after another. Not a Japanese or Korean or German creation in sight. Yep, every single one of these beached whales is made right here, in the good ol’ US of A. And the names—so virile, so adventurous! Packard Patrician. DeSoto Sportsman. Dodge Wayfarer. Buick Roadmaster. Kaiser-Frazer Vagabond. Nash Statesman. Studebaker Commander.

  Seth’s nose is assaulted by a battery of alien aromas chattering in a crazy, exotic dialect with which he is not conversant. Pungent, spicy whiffs of pastrami and corned beef and stuffed derma emanate from Skilowitz Delicatessen. From Barton’s Bonbonniere waft smells of chocolate and nuts: turtles, assorteds, Viennese crunch, truffles, almond bark. From Miller’s Appetizing, a confluence of smoked herring in sour cream and schmalz, lox, whitefish, butterfish, and sour and half-sour pickles, bobbing like petite green kayaks in their Brobdingnagian barrels of brine.

  Crossing Thirteenth, he doubles back aimlessly past Ebinger’s bakery, where his nostrils continue to party, luxuriating in the scents of chocolate seven-layer cakes and blackout cakes and Othellos and huckleberry crumb pies.

  He is a stranger in a strange land, an Alex in a topsy-turvy Wonderland where old is new and stale is fresh and past is present and humdrum is extraordinary.

  Down the avenue he perambulates. There’s Linick’s Toys, whose sign flashes red neon letters (the k is on the blink) and in whose windows are displayed, by category, comic books with unfamiliar titles: Buck Jones, Gabby Hayes, Reno Browne, The Durango Kid (“cowboys”); Rocket to the Moon, King Solomon’s Mines, Mysterious Island, Mystery in Space, Blackhawk (“mystery and adventure”); The Crypt of Terror, The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear, Weird Fantasy (“horror”); and Tom and Jerry, Pogo, Little Lulu, Nancy & Sluggo, Red Ryder (“general”).

  He stops at Markell’s to gawk at odd-looking shoes he’d only heard about in song and story. Blue suedes. White bucks. Saddles. Rockabillies. Alligators.

  “KA-CHING!” sneezes the green monster of a cash register at the back of the store. So, there was life before computers, Seth notes, with a wry smile, as he crosses Thirteenth Avenue again, sauntering back north.

  Like the Siren’s call to Odysseus’s men, a wondrous profusion of notes beckons to him, cascading from the direction of Jaynel’s Music, an otherworldly medley of haunting oldies that are brand-new this year: “Be My Love” by Mario Lanza, “Because of You” by Tony Bennett, “If” by Perry Como, “Jezebel” (“Jezebel”!) by Frankie Lane, “I Apologize” by Billy Eckstine, “Come On-a My House” by Rosemary Clooney, “Tennessee Waltz” by Patti Page.

  Seth could easily stay there all evening, nose pressed against glass, but he presses on, impelled by some force he is only vaguely aware of but that, robotlike, he obeys.

  There’s Moe Penn Haberdasher. Haberdasher. Seth falls in love again with that word, a word he hasn’t heard since childhood. In the window, the cream of the cream is on display when it comes to chapeaux de mode—felt hats, mohair hats, straw hats, you name it. In gray and brown and tan and black and charcoal, with solid bands or two-tone or even plaid, if you prefer. Fedoras mostly, but also homburgs and porkpies and Sinatras and stetsons and boaters and panamas.

  Imagine: a store dedicated solely to hats.

  An obvious historical fact occurs to Seth, but startling nonetheless. No cell phones. People are actually having live conversations.

  Two men walking just behind are engaged in one, a spirited one at that. They are damn near twins: five feet nine, gray fedoras with plain black bands, full-length charcoal overcoats with black faux-fur lapels.

  “Geez, whatta game today, huh? Dem Bums sure showed ’em! What was it, ten nuttin’?”

  “Yeah. Hey, you said a mouthful. That guy Labine, he was sure cookin’ with gas, y’know?”

  “Yep, tossed a dilly, a real humdinger.”

  Seth is triply intrigued, by the accents, the baseball allusions, the colloquial enthusiasm of the two men. Besides, the historian in him naturally wants to make contact with fellow human beings from this bygone day. He slows down a smidgeon so he can join in.

  “Excuse me, fellows, I wonder—”

  “An’ y’know what? We’re gonna win again t’morrow!”

  “No doubt about it, my good friend. No doubt about it.”

  “Pardon me, guys, but I—”

  “Yeah, then on to the Yanks, and us Bums’ll be woild champeens at last!”

  “That’d really be somethin’, now wouldn’t it?”

  “I hate to bother you, gentlemen, but could you—”

  “Well, here’s my block, pal. Can’t keep Helen waitin’ tonight. It’s salmon croquettes and succotash!”

  “OK, kiddo. See ya tomorrow
. An’ let’s go, Bums!”

  Seth now realizes: He’s here, but he’s not here.

  Unperturbed by this discovery and still in awe of just being here, Seth hangs a right up Forty-ninth Street, feeling like a tourist who’s arrived in Paris or Budapest or Addis Ababa for the first time. Everything seems old, but strangely new. There’s Al Del Gaudio’s barbershop on the right, with the weather-beaten, nicked white horsey and the shiny red fire engine car, both jacked up four feet above the floor, both more than happy to accommodate the next bawling toddler for his or her very first tortured haircut.

  He approaches New Utrecht Avenue, with its elevated train track, the West End Line. There’s Monte Greenhut’s Mobil station on the corner, the two attendants in uniforms and ties and Mobil caps—helping customers out!—and the impressive sign with the red Pegasus logo on a white background.

  Farther up New Utrecht, at Fifty-first, he passes the Loew’s Boro Park movie theater. White plastic, sometimes crooked, occasionally missing letters on its black marquis harbinger a double feature:

  A STRE TCAR NAM D DESIRE MARLON BR NDO

  TH DAY THE E RTH STO D STIL MICHA L RENNIE

  Seth doubles back and hangs a left at Forty-ninth Street, his pace a tad more urgent now, and there’s Dr. Yachnes’s house on the right, not far from where he began his odyssey, at Hessing’s, at the corner of Thirteenth Avenue. A Geiger counter detecting pay dirt, he freezes in front of number 1270.

  1270!

  He is standing directly in front of the two-story, redbrick edifice that houses Papa Sol and Grandma Elsie.

  Could they actually be home?

  A dumbstruck Seth stands transfixed, his purple Chuck Taylor high-tops epoxied to the sidewalk.

  He notes, with precision and delight, every detail of the house, this house where Sol and Elsie used to live—and that they inhabit now. The brick stoop leading up to the burnt-sienna front door with the gold handle and the gold knocker and the gold numbers 1270. The modest, manicured, rectangular front lawn stretching out between the low, black wrought-iron fencing and the neat row of juniper bushes. The long, badly cracked concrete driveway to the left.

  Seth unglues himself and ventures down the driveway, past the high brown fence and the bakery rooftop on the left, past the length of the redbrick exterior of the house on the right, until he reaches the stand-alone, A-frame-roofed, one-and-a-half-car garage at the end.

  He lifts open the heavy metal garage door, behind which his grandfather’s two-tone green Hudson Hornet hibernates, the one he’d heard so much about.

  Papa Sol must be home.

  Seth’s hands quaver and his heart lub-dubs as he closes the garage door and approaches the back-door stoop. Forgetting that no one can see or hear him, he tiptoes up the five steps of the pebbled stoop, looks to see if the coast is clear, gently turns the knob of the poorly painted dark brown back door. It opens.

  Seth is inside 1270 Forty-ninth Street. Home of Solomon and Elsie Stein. To his left is a tiny blue bathroom that contains nothing but a blue porcelain commode, a mirror-faced medicine cabinet, and a blue porcelain sink with a pristine bar of Lava Soap reposing peacefully in its clear plastic dish.

  He hangs two quick rights, and he is in the kitchen. Spick-and-span, not a crumb or a dust bunny to be seen. That Elsie, always so neat. On the kitchen table are a New York Herald Tribune dated October 2, 1951, a box of Wheaties with a picture of Pirates slugger Ralph Kiner on the front, three place settings for breakfast, and three chairs.

  Seth continues his silent tour, turning right again after the steep, sixteen-step northbound staircase, and enters a rectangular study area.

  Official Museum of the Early Fifties.

  Recently purchased hardcover books are strewn on a black-and-white, faux veined marble coffee table: Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Atop Wouk’s novel sits a letter addressed to Mr. Solomon Stein, a purple 3¢ stamp—with Thomas Jefferson’s solemn profile peering out from under four heavy, wavy black lines—posing askew in the top right-hand corner of the envelope.

  Also adorning the coffee table is a boxy Philco “Transi-tone” radio. Rectangular and made of brown plastic, it features a waffle semicircle insert of gold grille cloth. Looks like a turtle’s shell, Seth notes, and beneath it, for feet, are two round knobs straddling the station numbers: 55…60…70…80…100…120…140…160.

  On another small table squats a funky, squarish, large black rotary telephone whose face is pocked with little holes into which you insert your fingers to dial numbers. Its body is attached to the receiver by a six-foot-long, gnarly, twisted black coil. The phone number of the Stein residence is typed on a round white paper label on its nose: ULster 3-1801.

  On the floor, adjacent to a red-and-black houndstooth armchair, a clunky Victrola phonograph languishes, its exhausted arm resting on a little metal platform, its single viper’s fang protruding, poised to bite into the grooves of one of the 78 rpm vinyl records scattered nearby: Tosca, Iolanthe, Guys and Dolls, Call Me Madam.

  A Time magazine with Bert Lahr on the cover—he’s wearing a New York Giants baseball cap and mugging in front of a Wizard of Oz background—spreads itself out on the seat of the chair. On the arm is a book of matches with WHITE OWL CIGARS printed on it, accompanied by a pack of cigarettes, three of them jutting out, with the black letters LUCKY STRIKE “IT’S TOASTED” inside a red target logo on the front.

  Papa Sol smoked? And Grandma Elsie?

  A dull thud from somewhere below. Then another. And a scraping noise.

  Burglars?

  Seth opens the door on the right and descends the twelve rickety wooden stairs leading to the basement. He hangs two quick lefts, heads to where he thinks the sound is emanating from. On his right, all along the wall, hangs a pantheon of ten neatly framed pictures of New York Giants greats: Mathewson, McGinnity, Marquard, Merkle, Stengel, Terry, Hubbell, Ott, Mize, Irvin.

  At the end of the long, dimly lit main part of the basement hunches a man who seems to be doing some kind of repair work. The man is working with a tool. The man is toiling over a piece of furniture. Seth stops when he is about three feet from the man.

  The man is Papa Sol.

  Something is caught in Seth’s throat, something that feels vaguely like a chicken bone. A tear wells up in the corner of his right eye and desiccates before it can descend the length of his cheek.

  He takes a deep breath and a long look at this man, this younger, more robust version of Solomon Stein the Elder.

  Papa Sol seems to be in his early twenties. But wait. It’s 1951, so Seth does the math. Sol was born in 1928, so he must be…twenty-three.

  This is the first time he has ever witnessed Solomon Stein doing his carpentry thing. Papa Sol always wanted his privacy when he worked. Said that as much as he loved Seth and Elsie, he couldn’t concentrate when he was being watched.

  Sol is wearing a navy-and-red-checked flannel shirt, gray gabardine slacks, and a pair of battered old Red Wing work boots. What Seth notices most is that he is not wearing a beard. Never seen him clean-shaven, and he notices, too, that Papa Sol is quite the devilishly handsome young man. Despite that wicked magenta scar that runs down the side of his left cheek. It appears to be a keloid, possibly the result of an injury or an accident?

  Funny, Papa Sol never mentioned it.

  Sol’s face presages the one Seth has known since he was little. The salient features are still prominent: the thick, rich head of jet-black hair, pepper not yet specked with salt; the penetrating, close-together brown eyes, intense and cheery; the charmingly Semitic nose, compliments of his father, Jacob, and his sturdy Russian-Jewish genes; the dark lips, curled up habitually in an incipient smile.

  And, of course, the hands. The Michelangelo’s David hands.

  They are putting the finishing touches to the backrest of an oak chair, gouging out the wood
surrounding the head of one of two men playing chess. As in a Flemish painting within a painting, the two chess players are themselves seated on chairs with the very same backrests as the one Sol is working on.

  The exquisiteness of his grandfather’s artistry enthralls Seth. The delicate way Sol manipulates his chisel, caressing the wood with slow, measured movements. Each wood shaving is paper-thin, and before it drops to the floor, Sol looks at it with a tinge of sadness, as if to bid it a fond adieu, to apologize for removing it from its original site. It is as if the chisel were Maestro Sol’s baton, the wood his symphony orchestra.

  Papa Sol is the eighth dwarf, Busy, whistling while he works. How Seth misses his impassioned, trilly whistling. Used to whistle all kinds of stuff to his grandson, from commercial jingles and popular songs to show tunes and opera arias. Now it is “The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring,” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, that soothes Seth’s savage breast.

  Seth is engulfed by a powerful urge to talk to his Papa Sol. His brain—protesting not only that Sol can’t see or hear him, but also that he hasn’t chronologically had a grandson yet—is peremptorily overruled by his heart.

  “Papa Sol. It’s me, your Setharoo.”

  Sol steps back to consider his handiwork. “Not bad for a young whippersnapper, I must admit. Nice work, Solomon Stein.”

  “It is so good to see you again. I miss you so much—”

  “Still needs a bit of work around the chessboard, though. Maybe a little filing.”

  “And so does Grandma Elsie—”

  “And the cheek of the player on the left needs to be smaller, and flatter maybe.”

  “Papa Sol, why did you disappear? What the hell happened—”

  “Hmmm…gotta get up early tomorrow. Better pack it in.”

  “It’s so strange seeing you like this, you as a young man. Strange but nice all the same. Papa Sol—”