by Pete Hamill
“This music,” he whispered. “This I know.”
At the end of “And the Angels Sing,” there was a commercial.
“Ziggy Elman,” the rabbi murmured, like a man saying a prayer. “Ziggy Elman! Ziggy Elman? Ziggy Elman…”
Then the six o’clock news came on and Michael had to leave. Rabbi Hirsch ran a hand over the peeling leatherette radio and bowed slightly to Michael.
“Is the nicest thing happen to me in America so far,” he said. “Please to thank your mother when you go home and study.”
He went to the door with Michael.
“Ziggy Elman!” he said. “If my father only have called me Ziggy, I would have been a different person. Imagine a rabbi, name of Rabbi Ziggy?”
On his way home, Michael surged with the happiness that radiated from the rabbi. For an hour, the rabbi had been so happy, so full of delight, so overcome with the sounds of music and words, that the air of the tiny synagogue rooms seemed to sparkle. It was as if a deaf man had suddenly begun to hear.
That joy filled Michael’s head as he passed the alley beside the Venus and started to turn into Ellison Avenue. Then it vanished. There was a small crowd outside the Star Pool Room. Two police cars and the Plymouth used by the detectives were up on the sidewalk. The front door was open. He could see that the green tops of the pool tables were empty. The Falcons were lined up against the wall with Abbott and Costello facing them. Michael drifted to the edge of the crowd, which was being held back by two uniformed policemen.
“What’s going on?” he asked a man wearing a cap covered with union buttons.
“Da bulls are lockin’ up that Frankie McCarthy,” the man said. Michael trembled.
“What for?”
“Beatin’ up some Hebe, I hear.”
Then everyone backed up a few feet, and the detectives were leading Frankie McCarthy out of the poolroom. Frankie curled his mouth, like a gangster from a movie. His hands were cuffed behind his back and each detective had him by an elbow.
“’Ey, Frankie boy,” someone shouted. “See ya in an hour.”
The crowd laughed and so did the Falcons, who were standing just inside the door of the poolroom. A few of them rested pool cues on their shoulders like baseball bats.
“This is a bum rap,” Frankie McCarthy said, lifting his chin defiantly, like Cagney or Bogart. “They got nothin’ on me.”
Then his eyes picked out Michael on the fringes of the crowd. He said nothing, but his eyes chilled to the color of aluminum.
The detectives broke the look by shoving Frankie into the backseat of the Plymouth. Abbott sat beside him, a dead cigar clamped in his mouth. Costello started the car and drove away. The crowd milled around, talking it over. One of the Falcons closed the poolroom door.
“He’s some piece of work, that Frankie,” said the man with the union buttons.
“Yeah: he’s working overtime at being a bum,” said Charlie Senator, who worked at the Bohack grocery store. He was a quiet, nobody guy who didn’t talk much but was liked by everyone. One reason they liked him was that he had a wooden leg and never complained about it. Michael had heard that his real leg was shot off at Anzio.
“You wouldn’t say that to his face.”
“Probably not,” Senator said. “Guys like that jack you up in the dark. But he’s still a bum.”
“What’d he do was so bad?”
“Plenty,” Senator said, and limped away.
Then Michael saw two of the Falcons looking at him from behind the plate-glass window of the poolroom. He turned and walked quickly home.
Going up the stairs, he realized how dark the halls were, full of shadowy places where Frankie McCarthy could jack him up. Why did Frankie give him that look? Why were the Falcons staring at him from the poolroom? Now Frankie was down at the precinct house and they’d want revenge. He remembered Frankie’s knife. He saw Mister G with his broken head. Somebody must have talked. Michael knew that he had held fast with the police; he hadn’t informed, he hadn’t turned rat. But somebody had. And only he, Sonny, and Jimmy had been in Mister G’s store that day. He felt vaguely sick. He thought he knew his friends. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe Sonny or Jimmy had turned chicken and ratted out Frankie McCarthy. And if one of them did, why wouldn’t the coward shift the blame, tell the Falcons it was Michael? Save his own ass.
But no: it couldn’t be that way. They were his friends. All for one and one for all. They wouldn’t turn informers. They wouldn’t risk the mark of the squealer. The cops must have found another witness. Or maybe Frankie bragged in some bar about beating up Mister G. Or maybe they found his fingerprints on the telephone. It had to be something else. Not an informer. Not someone like Victor McLaglen in the movie about the informer in Ireland. Not a Judas. Maybe.
Still, Michael was afraid. He wished his mother were home, but she had another three hours, at least, to work at the Grandview. He locked the kitchen door behind him. He opened the bathroom door, his heart beating fast, poked his head inside, and was relieved that nobody was there. He tiptoed through the other rooms, turning on lights, holding his breath as he opened closets. Finally he felt safe. He turned on the new Philco, and lit a jet on the gas range to heat the stew his mother had left for him. While Ella Fitzgerald sang on the radio, he opened his schoolbag and laid his books on the kitchen table and gazed dully at his homework assignments. Boring goddamned crap. Why did they waste so much time in English with diagramming sentences? Sure, it came in handy, explaining things to Rabbi Hirsch. But it was so simple. They could get it over with in three days. They didn’t need three weeks of dumb sentences. Why didn’t they read Sherlock Holmes and see how A. Conan Doyle wrote sentences? Or Robert Louis Stevenson? They wrote beautiful sentences. Not this stuff. John threw the ball at Jane. Frank reached for his book. Shit. He thought about reading comics first and then doing the homework, but then he might be too tired and he had to get up at seven and serve the eight o’clock mass, and if he came to class without the homework he—
The fire escape window!
It was never locked. Anyone could get a boost up to the fire escape ladder on the first floor and walk all the way up to the top. Jesus Christ!
He ran to his room. The window was open about half an inch, with a towel jammed in the space to keep out the rain. He removed the towel and pulled down hard to close the window, but he couldn’t get the crude lock to snap shut. He grunted and strained, but the lock was scabby with too many coats of paint. Still, the window was closed. He leaned a book against the window so that if it opened the book would fall and make a noise. Then he stepped back from the light of the street and looked down at Ellison Avenue. He saw nobody from the Falcons. Then the smell of burning stew summoned him back to the kitchen.
The stew was black at the bottom but the rest was all right. He scooped it onto a plate while Stan Lomax came on the radio, with the day’s doings in the world of sports. Jackie Robinson was closer than ever to coming up to the Dodgers. In twelve games against the Dodgers and clubs in Panama he was hitting .519. Amazing. Five-nineteen! Babe Ruth never hit .519. Maybe Ted Williams or Stan Musial could do it, but they hadn’t done it yet. Robinson was still a Montreal Royal, said Stan Lomax, but it seemed sure he wouldn’t be a minor leaguer for very much longer.
Finishing up the stew, wiping his plate with bread, Michael tried to imagine what it must be like to be Robinson. He examined his own skin, spreading it with his hand, then pinching it with thumb and forefinger. It wasn’t really white. Paper was white. His skin was sort of pink. In the summer, it got red and then brown. It had freckles of a darker, reddish color. What must it be like to look at your skin and see that it was black? Or not really black. A kind of dark brown, really. What was it like to wake up every goddamned morning and see that skin and know that some shmuck looked down on you just for that? You hit .519 in spring training and some fat business guy in a suit, Branch Rickey or somebody, some prick who can’t hit .019, will decide if you play or not? How could that be?
Michael’s anger rose in him and then faded. If I’m angry, he thought, sitting here, still white or pink, how must Robinson feel?
Then, in his head, he was Robinson, down in Cuba or over in Panama, eating dinner alone in some restaurant, a joint filled with all those girls who dressed like Carmen Miranda, bare bellies and tits bouncing and bananas on their heads. In a fancy place with candles and tablecloths and waiters, like all those movies about flying down to Rio, and here come Dixie Walker and Eddie Stanky. The restaurant is packed. There are three empty seats at my table, Robinson’s table. I wave at them, my teammates, to come over and sit down. But Walker and Stanky won’t sit down. They’d rather starve to death than sit with me. Like Englishmen looking at an Irishman.
And as Robinson, Michael was furious again. And then felt very sad. What the hell’s the matter with those bozos? Why don’t they try to get to know me? Maybe they could learn something. Hey, I went to college and they didn’t, so maybe they’d find out a few things. How can they act the way they do without knowing anything at all about me except my batting average and the color of my skin?
Idiots.
Bums.
He spent an hour on homework, dealing quickly with grammar and arithmetic, taking longer to answer questions about a history chapter. This told the story of a heroic Jesuit priest named Isaac Jogues, who had his fingers bitten off by Indians and later had trouble saying the mass, because he couldn’t hold the host. He wondered how he could tell this to Rabbi Hirsch without laughing. The goyim are crazy, he told himself. The goyim are definitely crazy.
For a while he listened to music on the radio. When he heard “Don’t Fence Me In,” he wished he had a telephone, so he could call Rabbi Hirsch and tell him the number of the station. But Rabbi Hirsch didn’t have a telephone either. Almost nobody did. Not Sonny. Not Jimmy. There was a phone in the rectory at Sacred Heart. There was a pay phone in Slowacki’s and another across the street in Casement’s Bar, but there were always people waiting to use them. The cops had telephones too. All the telephones they wanted.
He got up from the kitchen table, brushed his teeth, and went into his room. He read comics for a while, and then heard his mother come in from work. She walked through the rooms and knocked at his door.
“You’re all right, son?” she said.
“Fine,” he said. “Good night, Mom.”
He turned off the light and buried his head in the pillow. He remembered the rabbi’s radiant face when he was listening to Ziggy Elman, and was trying to imagine what it was like to be Rabbi Hirsch when sleep took him.
16
By morning, everyone in the parish seemed to know that Frankie McCarthy had been charged with felonious assault in the beating of Mister G and was being held awaiting $2,500 bail in the Raymond Street jail. The old ladies whispered about it in the hallways. It was mentioned across the counter in Slowacki’s candy store. Even Kate Devlin knew the story, although not a word had appeared in the newspapers.
“They should put him away for years,” she said. “But, of course, they won’t.”
She explained to Michael how bail worked. The prisoner had to find a bail bondsman and come up with ten percent of the bail in cash. The bondsman would then put up the full $2,500, and Frankie McCarthy would be free until his trial. If Frankie didn’t show up for trial, the bondsman would lose the $2,500.
“That idjit McCarthy,” she said, “wouldn’t have two hundred and fifty dollars, so he’ll have to wait until his friends steal it.”
Almost nobody in the parish seemed surprised that Frankie had been jailed. After all, they knew he had done it. But they also knew that the district attorney would have a hard time proving the case. If Michael, Sonny, and Jimmy Kabinsky said nothing in court, then it would be the word of Frankie McCarthy against the theories of the cops. From what Rabbi Hirsch said, Mister G might never talk again. But the boys knew there were few secrets in the parish. As the only possible witnesses they were the center of the parish’s whispered attention. Michael most of all, because he had seen the worst part of the beating.
“T’ree times in a week, the bulls came up my house,” Sonny Montemarano said that afternoon, as they stood beside the roof door of his building, gazing out at the rain. “Abbott and Costello, in person. They threaten you. They try to make you feel guilty.”
“Me too,” Jimmy said. “They come to see me day before yesterday.”
“They did?” Michael said. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” Jimmy said. “I didn’t say nothing, I swear.”
“What about your uncle?” Sonny asked, squinting now, staring into Jimmy’s pale blue eyes. “Did he say something?”
“Nah. Just his usual.”
“Whatta you mean, his usual?” Sonny said.
“You know, about the Jews and all.”
There it was, Michael thought. The Jews and all. Jimmy’s uncle was the rat. A rat so stupid he didn’t even know he was a rat.
“Exactly what did he say, Jimmy?” Michael asked.
“I don’t remember exactly.”
“Try,” Sonny said.
Jimmy gazed off at the rain sweeping through the backyards. It was as if he too now understood what had happened.
“You know, like, ‘What’s the crime, beating a Jew up? What’s the big deal?’ ” His voice lowered in shame. “Then he says—I couldn’t stop him, I swear—he says, ‘So what, if Frankie McCarthy broke his head?’ ” He paused, but didn’t look at Michael or Sonny. “Stuff like that.”
Sonny moaned. “Jesus, Jimmy—”
“He didn’t say we were there,” Jimmy said.
“Maybe not then,” Sonny said. “But they could grab him again on the street, when he’s working, anyplace.” He shook his head. “They could beat the shit out of him until he told them what they wanna hear. They could threaten to deport him, send him back to Poland.”
“One thing’s for sure,” Michael said. “The cops probably figure you told your uncle. He didn’t pick Frankie’s name out of the air.”
“They will def’nitely call your uncle as a witness,” Sonny said.
“And you too, Jimmy,” Michael said.
“And us,” Sonny said, looking at Michael in a trapped way.
Images of courtroom scenes flashed through Michael’s mind. Oaths. Lies. Frankie McCarthy staring at them. The rows filled with Falcons. They knew where Michael lived. They knew where his mother worked. The wind suddenly rose, and rain lashed the roof above them, and backed them away from the open door. They stared out at the glistening black pebbles and the clotheslines and the chimneys.
“Frankie’s boys must figure we ratted,” Sonny said quietly.
“Nah,” Jimmy said. “Why would they think that?”
“Because that’s how they think,” Sonny said. “They don’t know us. They don’t know your goddamned uncle either.”
The rain faded again into a steady drizzle.
“We got to let them know it wasn’t us,” Michael said. “Without ratting on Jimmy’s uncle.”
“How? We write them a letter? We go to the poolroom and say, ‘Excuse me, fellas, but we didn’t rat you out, so don’t do nothing to us, okay?’ ”
There was a silence. Michael felt cold.
“Maybe it wasn’t my uncle,” Jimmy said. “Maybe there was another witness. Maybe somebody was in the back of the store. Maybe a neighbor seen it from a window—”
“Yeah, wit’ X-ray vision, like Superman,” Sonny said.
There was another long silence.
“We’re in deep shit,” Sonny said.
17
One wet Tuesday after school, Michael entered the synagogue through the Kelly Street entrance. The door was open, awaiting his arrival, and he paused for a moment in the vestibule, feeling safe. As he shook the rain off his mackinaw, he heard a hard, almost braying sound from the far side of the door leading to the rabbi’s rooms. The notes were familiar. Braaah, braawp, brah-brah, bruh, brah-brah, braawp… The first notes o
f “And the Angels Sing.”
The sound abruptly stopped. Michael opened the door quietly and saw Rabbi Hirsch standing near the bookcase, deep in concentration, trying to blow on a curved instrument made of polished horn. His eyes were closed. He started to keep the beat with one foot, then tried again. Braaah, braawp… Then he paused, opened his eyes, saw Michael, and laughed.
“You catched me!” he said.
“Caught,” Michael said.
“You caught me,” the rabbi said. “I want to surprise you, but…” He brandished the horn. “I’m going to be a regular Ziggy Elman!”
Michael looked at the horn. “What is that in your hand?”
The rabbi explained that the instrument was a shofar, a ram’s horn. It was used in ceremonies during the holy days called Rosh Hashanah and was the same kind of horn that Joshua had used in biblical days to flatten the walls of Jericho.
Michael started singing a song he’d heard a lot on the radio:
Joshua fit the battle of Jericho,
Jericho,
Jericho.
Joshua fit the battle of Jericho,
And the walls came tumbling down….
“Wait, wait!” the rabbi said, signaling with the shofar. “Now, again!”
Michael sang the words more forcefully and the rabbi played a few notes in the thick, plangent tones of the ram’s horn. Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho… The sound of the shofar was fat, primitive, eerie, as if Rabbi Hirsch were reaching back across the centuries. But there was no melody from the horn. It was not mournful. It was not melancholy. It was just loud and brutal, like a foghorn.
When the rabbi finished, he shook his head sadly, his face drained by failure.
“Is impossible,” he said. “A tune you can’t get from a shofar, just a noise. You need—” He pounded his chest as if asking it to identify itself. “What’s the word?”