by Bob Mitchell
“Sol honey? Time to come up now. It’s nearly eight, and you don’t wanna miss your Uncle Miltie!”
The voice of twenty-two-year-old Elsie Adler Stein, urgent and ululant, echoes down the basement stairs, interrupting the disconnected monologues of Solomon Stein and his grandson. It’s time for Sol to come up to bed.
Sol sweeps up the mess, puts away his chisel, negotiates the twenty-eight stairs from basement to bedroom. Seth, invisible shadow, follows close behind, his brain abuzz with reflection.
How freaky to see Papa Sol again, as a young man. Sol at twenty-three! Sol without a beard! Sol doing his carpentry! He never let me watch him work, but he used to talk all the time about this passion of his. Used to tell me how a bad carpenter blames his tools. How he was the last in a long line of great Jewish carpenters that began with Jesus. One of my favorite poems he used to read to me was Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” And I remember the first lines of poetry he ever taught me, written by Anne Sexton, and how I memorized them and first became aware of the instinctive side of being a carpenter:
But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
How lucky some people are to be able to do one thing brilliantly. Willie Mays and his baseball. Leo Kottke and his guitar. Papa Sol and his carpentry.
Solomon Stein is brusha-brusha-brushing his teeth with Ipana dental paste, having left Seth in his wake. Seth stands at the threshold of the bedroom, staring at both the squat little television and the lovely young woman in the bed, his grandmother-to-be.
Leaning back on two feather pillows, Elsie Stein positions herself in a supine pose reminiscent of Goya’s La Maja Vestida. Unlike the painting’s provocative damsel, Elsie is bedecked in thick pink flannel pj’s dotted with big red hearts and is watching commercials.
Halo, everybody, Halo,
Halo is the shampoo that glorifies your hair.
So Halo, everybody, Halo!
Seth is pleasantly stunned to see his future grandmother as a young woman, with her customary smile instead of the recent frown. With skin that is smooth and taut, not rough and wrinkled. In perky jammies, in contrast to a matronly nightgown.
Of secondary importance, but no less fascinating, is the television, a twelve-inch-screen, antediluvian beaut of a DuMont. It is more like a piece of furniture, the tiny raft of a screen floating in an ocean of mahogany. Its odd hexagonal shape resembles a doghouse, with little wooden pedestals protruding from the bottom. Five funky buttons below the screen, in lieu of a remote—one on the left, four on the right, for on-off, volume, contrast, tuning. To the right of the screen are six funny-looking slits in the wood with cloth behind them, and below them, a small, round, glass-covered opening revealing two horizontal black bars on a lit orange background, to indicate that the TV is on, then a large wheel—the first, troglodytic TV invention?—that you turned around and around and around, painstakingly and clockwise, to get to the desultory dearth of individual channels: 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13.
Use Ajax (bum bum),
the foaming cleanser (bum-a-bum-a-bum bum bum),
floats the dirt…
right down the drain (bum-a-bum-a-bum-a-bum).
“You almost done in there, sweets? Mr. Television’ll be on in a minute or two!”
“Ahl me rah ing, mng dallig!”
Brylcreem, a little dab’ll do ya…
“Okeydokey, Elsie m’love, here I come!”
Hey Mabel, Black Label!
Seth turns his eyes away from the Carling beer commercial to see Sol crawl into bed and give Elsie a loving look for the ages. Sol settles in, holds Elsie’s hand, and they are ready to watch their favorite program, Tuesday night’s Texaco Star Theater, starring their Uncle Miltie, the incomparable Milton Berle.
Six eyes are now trained on the teeny DuMont screen. A curtain rises, and four Texaco servicemen pop out, lined up side by side, marching in place, in lockstep, dressed in gas attendant suits, bow ties, and Texaco caps, each one holding a tool of his trade: wrench, nozzle, rag, hubcap.
Oh, we’re the men of Texaco,
We work from Maine to Mexico,
There’s nothing like this Texaco of ours…
“Sweetheart?” Sol says.
“Yes, my pudding face?”
“Listen, I’m going to the game tomorrow, as you know, and it’s a really, really big one, as you know, and I was thinking I have that extra ticket Nat gave me because he couldn’t go, and I was thinking that maybe Simon could come with me?”
Our show tonight is powerful,
We’ll wow you with an hour full
Of howls from a showerful of stars…
Simon?, Seth thinks. My dad? He must be…1951 minus 1948…three!
“Honey,” Elsie responds with gravity. “You know how I feel about this. Simon’s only three, fer chrissakes. You can’t take him to a ball game, with all that screaming and carrying on and craziness. Not until he’s older, at least. He’s three! And that’s final!”
We’re the merry Texaco men,
Tonight we may be showmen,
Tomorrow we’ll be servicing your cars!
“But, sweetie pie, this is baseball! And you’re never too young to go to a baseball game. And Simon would have an absolute ball, and I’ve often seen kids at games who were even young—”
“No, no, no, no, and no!”
I wipe the pipe
I pump the gas
I rub the hub…
“Lovey-dovey, listen to me. I do know how young Simon is. But…
I touch the clutch
I mop the top
I poke the choke…
“…we’re talkin’ baseball here. It isn’t just any old game. It teaches a kid passion and resilience and humility and sacrifice, and you can never be too young to—”
I clear the gear
I block the knock
I jack the back…
“I know, I know,” Elsie says, appreciating Sol’s passion.
Seth appreciates it, too.
Elsie sits up in bed, crosses her arms on her chest. “I hear you, my dear, but…the queen has spoken!”
Sol so wants to take Simon to the ball game, but he also loves Elsie too much to press on. He contorts his face into a moue, protrudes his pouty bottom lip so it covers his top one, furls his eyebrows, and emits a poorly faked, pathetic whimper.
All three present in the room crack up.
And now, the star of our show, Milton Berle!
“Good evening, ladies and germs …”
Shelving his disappointment, Papa Sol, in his suavest Paul Henreid move, lights up two Luckies in his mouth, places one between his parted lips and one between Elsie’s. They take in long, deep lungfuls of smoke and, hissing softly, exhale them languorously between their teeth.
An intense look between the two future grandparents expresses an ineffable nuance of love that a dictionary could not provide.
Standing at the threshold, a kvelling Seth shares the joy.
Uncle Miltie is doing his black-and-white thing on-screen. He is dressed in drag: dark lipstick, ridiculous Carmen Miranda–style fruit hat, frilly dress, six gaudy necklaces, high heels.
Seth has never seen anything like it before. Whacked-out, slapstick, manic, frenetic, over-the-top stuff. But fun-ny. A muffled, embarrassed laugh escapes from his mouth.
“Excuse me, sir. Yes, you, in the front row. Is that your wife sitting next to you?”
“Why, yes.”
“Well, now I know why married men live longer than single men. Or maybe it just seems longer.” [Rimshot. Audience screams with delight.]
Berle does one of his patented double takes, mugs at the camera, presses his lips against the camera lens and kisses it. He mugs again, trips and picks himself up, gawkily and unladylike. The audience howls.
Seth can’t suppress a guffaw. Since no one can hear him, he sneaks in another, even louder o
ne. Sol and Elsie laugh uncontrollably.
“Y’know, folks, I’m only kiddin’, only kiddin’. Actually, marriage is a great institution, but who wants to live in an institution?” [Rimshot. Hysterical laughter.]
“My uncle believes that marriage and a career don’t mix, so when he got married he stopped working!” [Rimshot. Earsplitting chortles.]
“I told my wife that a husband is like a fine wine—he gets better with age. The next day she locked me in the cellar.” [Rimshot. Absolute bedlam.]
Uncle Miltie trots offstage.
Sol and Elsie take another drag on their Luckies. Seth chuckles unabashedly.
You can trust your car to the man who wears the star,
The big, bright Texaco star…
Berle returns onstage, this time dressed as a caveman wearing nothing but a stupid leopard-skin outfit, black socks, and wingtip shoes. He rat-a-tats a furious volley of seven consecutive prehistoric one-liners.
Seth is beside himself with hysteria, and so are Sol and Elsie. This continues for the next fifty minutes solid. Except during brief appearances by singer Yma Sumac and actor John Carroll, and a few more Texaco commercials, the bedroom is filled with wall-to-wall laughter, as Miltie executes pratfalls, one-liners, double takes, triple takes, and assorted shtick, pursing his Señor Wences “Johnny” lips, flashing his phony buck-toothed smiles. The three bedroom spectators guffaw nearly nonstop. By the time Mr. Television sings his trademark tearjerker “Near You” at the show’s conclusion, their six sides hurt so much, they can laugh no more.
Near you. Exactly how Seth feels at this moment toward Papa Sol and Grandma Elsie. Just seeing Sol again. Seeing Sol and Elsie together like this. All that laughter, all that love.
“Hey, Else, I’m beat,” Sol says, sighing.
“Me, too, sweetie pie.”
“I love you so much.”
“Love you, too.”
Elsie turns off the TV, and by the time she gets back into bed, Sol is snoring. She turns off her night table lamp and plants a smooch on Sol’s forehead.
Seth is feeling awkward, standing there alone like an idiot. He wheels around, notices a night-light coming from a smaller bedroom across the hall. Peeking in, he spies a toddler fast asleep in a small bed, tucked under a multicolored Captain Marvel and Shazam blanket. He approaches the bed and, on closer inspection, sees that the toddler bears an eerie resemblance to Seth himself, and to Sammy.
The toddler is Simon Stein, his father.
Twenty-two years before he was even born, Seth is checking in on his slumbering three-year-old dad. He fights the urge to wake the boy up and hug him tight and say how he loves him and he’s so very sorry how things turned out and, oh, how he would’ve liked to have known him.
In the pitch black, Seth Stein descends the sixteen stairs to the first floor, takes a seat on one of the three kitchen chairs.
Seth rubs his eyes. Feels a bit off, groggy really. Maybe it’s just being here and all the walking and all the strangeness and all the emotion and seeing Papa Sol, and then Papa Sol with Grandma Elsie, and now checking in on his toddler father. Feels almost like being in the middle of one of those dreamy, soft dissolves, the kind you see in the movies…
At the other end of the dissolve, Seth Stein sits on a stiff, narrow green wooden seat. He rubs his eyes again, begins to regain his focus. All around him is still hazy but becoming clearer by the second. Now he can see much better. There.
Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod.
Picture Sylvester the Cat in love. Picture that cartoon heart of his beating four feet out of his chest, that swollen, pulsating, vermilion heart, umbilically connected to his body and miraculously suspended in midair, ba-booming like a kettle drum for the newfound object of his feline affection. Such is the manic fibrillation of Seth’s coronary muscle.
His head, to the contrary, is executing a very steady, very controlled, very slow, very wide shot, all in one take, panning from left to right and covering the entire 180 degrees of which his neck is capable. At each juncture of the pan, his brain registers data he is witnessing for the first time but that he knows intimately nonetheless, gleaned from a wondrous fairy tale Papa Sol had recited to him, in exquisite detail and with frightful frequency, over the years.
There’s the left-field bull pen just below…the 447-foot sign in left-center…the nook in dead center, an unthinkable 485 feet away from home plate, and the two bleacher sections and the clubhouse building in between and the Chesterfield sign, yes, with the words ALWAYS BUY CHESTERFIELD and, above them, A HIT! inside a smoke ring coming from the end of a cigarette and the square Longines clock with the flagpole above…the 440-foot sign in right-center…the two-tiered grandstands in right…the pack of Chesterfields and the scoreboard and the 258-foot sign at the right-field line…all that space in foul territory…the huge horseshoe-shaped stands behind home plate…the pack of Chesterfields and the scoreboard and the 279-foot sign at the left-field line…the two-tiered grandstands in left…
Here sits Seth, on a green wooden seat in the upper deck of the left-field grandstands, above the visiting bull pen in the Mecca of New York Giants baseball fans and Papa Sol’s beloved rooting home field. The old bathtub, the odd-shaped horseshoe, the rickety, asymmetrical, funky, weirdly constructed object of Jints fans’ adoration. Between Coogan’s Bluff and the Harlem River, at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue, in the Bronx, New York. Where the fans sit far away from the action, the bull pens are in play, foul territory is too voluminous, the foul lines are too short, and center field too deep. “The Parthenon it ain’t,” Papa Sol used to say.
The Polo Grounds!
So far, this panorama has accounted for 179 degrees of the pan. At degree number 180, the head stops. The final frame of the shot, now an extreme close-up, captures the spectator sitting next to Seth in the stands, in the seat to his immediate right.
It is Papa Sol.
Seth’s eyes are glued to twenty-three-year-old Solomon Stein, whose eyes are glued to the playing field.
“I love you, Papa Sol,” he blurts, touching his grandfather on the shoulder, squeezing it, hoping that this time, somehow, Sol might hear and see and feel him.
Nada.
Seth is letting it sink in, every morsel of it, including, now, his Papa Sol by his side. On Sol’s lap is today’s unopened paper, a New York Herald Tribune. The date underneath the masthead catches Seth’s eye: October 3, 1951.
October 3, 1951. A date drilled into him by fanatical New York Giants baseball fan Solomon Stein. Seth knows the date by heart, like the back of his hand. Knows it like he knows October 19, 1973, the day he was born. Like he knows June 10, 2003, the day he first laid eyes on his darling Kate. Like he knows July 4, 1776, and December 7, 1941, and November 22, 1963, and September 11, 2001, and all those other crucial dates embedded in the library stacks of his brain.
October 3, 1951. One of the immutable, indelible days in American history. A day of great moment, the day of the Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff, of the Shot Heard ’Round the World, of the Giants’ miracle comeback and last-ditch victory over the Dodgers, of the Ultimate Game in the ultimate game of the ’51 pennant playoffs, of the great Russ Hodges, announcing on the radio, hoarsely propelling, in a four-part, four-gun salute to triumph and destiny, the unforgettable “The Giants Win the Pennant!” into the all-time annals of our National Pastime and our Historical Consciousness.
Now that Seth thinks of it, he has never personally witnessed a real, live historical event, not until now. And this one’s a doozy. He’s only heard about this game, boy, has he heard about it.
And now he’s here.
How many times had Papa Sol, his own personal baseball mentor, recounted to him this made-for-Hollywood movie, in CinemaScope and Technicolor? Told him about how significant this game was, about the bitter Giants-Dodgers rivalry, about Leo the Lip leaving the hated Dodgers in ’48 to replace the Giants’ beloved skip Mel Ott, about the nail-biting, gut-wrenching ’51
pennant race between these two teams from the same city, who despised each other, about Leo bringing Willie Mays up from Minny and sticking with the green rookie despite his 1-for-27 start and switching Irvin and Lockman in left field and first base and switching Thomson from center to third when Willie joined the club, about the Giants being behind the Dodgers by a laughable thirteen and a half games on August 11 with a mere forty-four to play and then winning sixteen in a row and thirty-seven of their final forty-four and catching the Dodgers with one to play and then, to force a playoff, the Dodgers themselves had to come from behind 6–1 against the Phillies on the last day of the season (Robby’s homer off Robin Roberts winning it in the fourteenth), about Bobby Thomson homering off Ralph Branca to win the first playoff game, 3–1, and the Jints getting drubbed in the second, 10–0, and the glorious, magnificent rubber game…
And then there’s all the trivia Papa Sol had spoon-fed to him concerning the ninth inning of the final game: Hartung pinch-running for Mueller, Mays being on deck when Bobby hit the big one, Lou Jorda umping behind the plate…
Seth glances at the big scoreboard to his right: