by Pete Hamill
“Lungs,” Michael said. “So you have enough breath.”
“Yes, yes, lungs.”
He turned the shofar over in his hands.
“Why can’t I make from it music?” he said softly. “Why can’t I make from it joy?”
Michael could offer no answer.
“Why can’t I make from a shofar like a regular Ziggy Elman?”
Rabbi Hirsch laid the shofar on a shelf of the bookcase and switched on the radio. It was tuned to WHN. Red Barber was explaining that with runners on first and third and none out, the Dodgers were sitting in the catbird seat.
“There’s a bird in America that looks like a cat?” the rabbi asked.
“I don’t know,” Michael said.
“So why does Red Barber say the Dodgers, they are in the catbird seat?”
“He says it all the time, like he says rhubarb.”
The rabbi was flicking through the dictionary.
“Rhubarb? That’s like a fruit I see in Roulston’s grocery store.”
“Red Barber uses it to describe, like, well, a big fight. You know, if a batter gets hit by a pitch and he charges the mound? Or when Leo Durocher comes out to holler at the umpires. That’s a rhubarb. And he says ‘We’re sitting in the catbird seat’ when he means the Dodgers are in good shape. They have the upper hand. They’re sitting pretty. Know what I mean?”
“No.”
The words zipped through Michael’s mind, and he realized what they must sound like to Rabbi Hirsch. Good shape and upper hand and sitting pretty. How did they come to mean what they mean?
“It’s like to have an advantage,” Michael said. “Like, you don’t have to worry now. You can’t lose. You can do it.”
Rabbi Hirsch nodded, as if finally understanding Michael’s fumbling attempts to explain. He went to the bookcase and lifted the horn again.
“If like Ziggy Elman I can play this shofar,” he said, “I am sitting in the catbird seat.”
Michael smiled.
“You said it.”
18
One Saturday morning a few weeks before Easter, Michael, Sonny, and Jimmy were playing ball against the factory wall on Collins Street. The day was bright but still too cold for a full game of stickball; the other kids remained huddled in their apartments, and there weren’t enough players to choose up sides. But Jimmy had found an old broom in his uncle’s junkpile, and Sonny had saved a spaldeen from the previous summer, and they stripped the straw off the broom and then took turns whacking the ball off the factory wall. Home plate was chalked in front of the wall of O’Malley’s Garage. Each player got ten swings at the ball, then they switched positions. The baseball season wouldn’t begin until April 16. Nobody yet knew whether Jackie Robinson would join the Dodgers. As a Royal, he was now hitting .625 against the big club.
“They gotta bring him up,” Michael said. “How couldn’t they, the way he’s hitting? He goes one-for-three, he’s in a slump.”
“We’ll know real soon,” Sonny said. “Hey, Jimmy, throw me a curveball, you see what I do to it!”
Jimmy kept throwing fastballs to Sonny, who hit every one of them, while Michael moved around as the fielder, retrieving the ball as it bounced off the factory wall. When Sonny finished his ten hits and it was Michael’s turn to bat, he discovered he was hitting the ball harder than he did the previous summer. He knew he was fifteen pounds heavier and two inches taller now, but for some reason he could also see the ball better. He watched the spaldeen leave Sonny’s hand, and it really did get fatter and pinker as it came closer. Every time he swung, he made contact, and the ball rose high against the wall. He was finished quickly: ten pitches, ten hits. As good as Sonny. Then he pitched to Jimmy while Sonny played the field. Jimmy missed four of the ten pitches. And then they switched again. Around noon, a garbage truck wheezed up the street, its gears grinding, and stopped in front of O’Malley’s Garage, blocking home plate. The boys stood around while the sanitation men heaved cans of trash into the truck.
“So what’s the latest up there on Kelly Street?” Sonny said. “You know, the synagogue?”
“I haven’t seen a thing,” Michael said. “I looked and looked,” he lied, “but nothing.”
“So where did the story come from?” Jimmy said.
“Three guys were playing stickball,” Michael said, “and then a sanitation truck got in the way and—”
“Maybe we should go up there some night,” Sonny said in a cold way. “Maybe we can find it.”
“We got more important things to do,” Michael said.
“What’s more important than a fortune of money?”
“The goddamned Falcons, that’s who.”
Sonny gazed around the street. There was no sign of danger on this cold spring day.
“If we had a fortune of money,” Jimmy said, “we could all move to Florida. You could take your mother, Michael, Sonny could take his aunt—”
“Your uncle stays here!” Sonny said.
“You know,” Jimmy said, “if we do go in there some night, the synagogue, we better wait till after Passover. The Jews, during Passover—”
“They kill babies and put the blood in the matzohs?” Michael said sharply.
“Well… yeah.”
Michael thought of Brother Thaddeus and the tunnels in Prague and the Golem and he didn’t want to play ball anymore.
“I gotta go wash the halls,” he said, handing the bat to Sonny, who looked at him in a confused way. Michael drifted away from them toward Ellison Avenue. Thinking: You goddamned idiot, Jimmy. Because of you and your big-mouthed uncle, we have to look over our shoulders when we walk the streets, I’m scared shitless every time I go down the cellar to shovel coal, there’s guys looking at us like they want to cut our goddamned throats, and you believe Jews put blood in the matzohs? Fucking imbecile. I gotta talk straight to them. Gotta. Got to tell them Rabbi Hirsch is a good man. Gotta tell them there’s no treasure. Gotta come clean about what I’m doing there. Gotta gotta. Got to tell Rabbi Hirsch too. Gotta gotta gotta.
He turned into the avenue and then froze. His legs felt heavy, his hands cold. Frankie McCarthy was two blocks away.
Coming in Michael’s direction.
With three other members of the Falcons.
All of them walking with a rolling swagger. Grab-assing. Bumping each other. Smoking cigarettes.
Michael thought: Holy shit.
Frankie McCarthy.
He’s back.
He’s free.
Jesus.
Michael couldn’t cross to his own house without being seen. He flattened himself against the windows of Pete’s Diner, then inched around the corner into Collins Street, trying to look casual. He hoped Frankie and the Falcons were yelling at girls. He hoped they had gone to Unbeatable Joe’s to drink beer. Most of all, he hoped they hadn’t seen him.
The garbage truck was gone. Sonny was batting against Jimmy Kabinsky.
“Hey, let’s go!” Michael shouted. “Frankie McCarthy’s out of jail. He’s coming up Ellison Avenue.”
“Oh, shit,” Sonny said.
He pocketed the ball and held the bat like a club as they trotted together toward MacArthur Avenue, away from Ellison, away from Frankie. Only two blocks away to the right, on the corner of Kelly Street, was the synagogue. We’d be safe there, Michael thought. But how could he bring Jimmy to a place where he believed Jews mixed human blood into the goddamned matzohs? That would be what Rabbi Hirsch called meshugge.
So they ran another long block to the park, leaping onto the slats of the benches, then scaling the stone wall and dropping four feet to the ground. They were all silent, breathing hard as they moved through the debris of the winter: fallen tree limbs, pine cones, beer containers, overturned trash baskets, a lone shoe. They kept moving until they reached a stone transverse bridge, with a few cars moving over it, and found shelter in the darkness under the wide arch. They were now all breathing hard.
“He musta made bail,” Sonn
y said. “The Falcons musta chipped in to get the two hundred and fifty bucks.”
“You know he’s gonna come after us,” Michael said.
“Probably,” Sonny said. “He’s gotta blame somebody. He’s up on a felony. Maybe worse, if Mister G never comes out of the coma. That could be murder, for chrissakes. And he probably figures we’re the only witnesses, that we could put him in the can for years.” He shivered in the stony darkness. “We tell him about Jimmy’s uncle, he won’t believe us. Nobody’s that fucking stupid.” He glanced at Jimmy, sucked in deep breaths. “But you know, if he gets caught pullin’ any shit while he’s out on bail, they’ll really hang his ass. So you ask me, he won’t do nothin’ direct, know what I mean?”
“In other words,” Jimmy said, “the Falcons could get us, even though Frankie’s not with them in person?”
“Exactly,” Sonny said. “Frankie throws up his fucking hands when the cops come knocking at his door, and says, hey, I was home listening to the fuckin’ radio and I got witnesses to prove it.”
“Meanwhile, we take a good beating,” Jimmy said.
“If we’re lucky,” Sonny said, “it’s only a fucking beating.”
A dozen cars roared across the stone bridge above them and then were gone.
“What the hell are we gonna do, Sonny?” Michael said.
“I don’t know yet. I don’t know.”
19
For three straight nights, Michael dreamed of rooms that were both strange and familiar, full of many beds, with brown covers and blue pillows, and chairs draped with sheets. Above the beds there were frames without pictures. The beds were very short, then very long, so that there was no clear path from room to room, and when he came to the end of the rooms, the apartment did not end: other rooms opened, new and strange, filling him with dread. Dogs barked, but he could not see them. Then he was outside and saw white horses on the factory roof. In the dark doorway of Slowacki’s candy store, a man with a sallow face and a toothy grin tipped his bowler hat and the top of his head was made of raw hamburger. Then Michael was alone in his own apartment, with his father’s picture on the wall, and someone was shuffling through the darkness, heavy feet dragging, and his mother wasn’t there and his father wasn’t there and he ran into the bathroom and slammed the door, listening to the shuffling, and turned on the hot-water tap and red snow came from the tap and rose like tiny flowers into the air.
Each night, he woke up sweating and trembling and afraid of falling back into the dream. He could not call his mother. I’m not some little kid, he thought. This is a dream. That’s all. It’s not real. This room is real. That window. This bed. My clothes and my comics. Dreams are dreams. And then he’d drift off and the images would return, sometimes shifting their order: the white horses first, and then the man with hamburger for hair, and then the endless empty rooms.
He thought about asking for help from Mrs. Griffin on the second floor. She had a worn pamphlet called Madame Zadora’s Dream Book, and Michael wondered if it would explain his dreams. She used the dream book to help her pick horses, or The Number. Kate Devlin didn’t gamble; she said she worked too hard for her money; so Michael wasn’t sure what was meant by The Number. But Mrs. Griffin went every morning to Casement’s Bar to give Brendan the bookmaker her choice of numbers for the day, and it was said that back in 1945 she had won two hundred dollars. Maybe she would know.
One afternoon, he knocked at her door. Mrs. Griffin, small, wiry, and dressed in a quilted pink housecoat, smiled at the sight of him. She asked him in and started boiling water for tea. She did all this with a Pall Mall burning in her fingers.
“I’ve been having these terrible dreams, Mrs. Griffin,” Michael explained. “I thought maybe your book would figure them out.”
She looked wary. “What’s your mother say about them?”
“She doesn’t talk about dreams,” he said. “And, I dunno, it’s hard to talk to her about some things. Like dreams.”
She took a drag on the cigarette, then tamped it out in a saucer.
“What kind of dreams?”
He told her. As she listened, horror spread across her face like a stain. “Oh boy,” she said breathlessly. And listened more. “Oh boy. Oh boy. Oh boy oh boy.”
Then they sat there for a long, silent moment. She peered at him.
“You’re in trouble, Michael,” she said. Her voice was burry from cigarettes.
“Maybe.”
She popped a Pall Mall from her pack and lit it with a wooden match. Her eyes glistened.
“But it’s not trouble you caused, right?”
“Right.”
“You’re worried about somebody with a broken head, right?”
“Right.”
“That’s the hamburger head. And you’re trying to make sense of something, like, you know, putting a picture in a picture frame.”
This hadn’t occurred to him, but he thought about Jackie Robinson’s skin, and nodded.
“In a way.”
“You’re thinking of some other place, not yours, the furniture all covered up and stuff.”
Michael thought: The synagogue? Prague? Rabbi Loew’s study? The attic where they keep the Golem’s dust?
“Sometimes.”
“And you’re thinking of moving away. Like getting on a white horse and riding off into the sunset like Gene Autry or something.”
Michael laughed. She served tea, still smoking.
“From time to time,” he said.
She went into another room and came back with Madame Zadora’s Dream Book. It had a red-and-black cover with a drawing of a woman in a gown covered with symbols, caressing a crystal ball. The symbols made him think of alchemists.
“Well, we figured out some of it,” Mrs. Griffin said. “But I’ll be goddamned if I can make any sense of the bowler hat or the red snow coming out of the water tap.”
She paused, squinting at a page. Michael sipped his tea, but it had a metallic taste and he wished he could have a cup of Rabbi Hirsch’s brew.
“Let’s see. Washing yourself with snow, that means pain will go away. Eating snow, that’s you’re leaving home. But—was it the hot-water tap?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
“That’s good, maybe. Snow in a warm climate means good luck. But that’s not the same as a hot-water tap. Still, it’s close.”
She turned to another page.
“The bowler hat, the bowler hat. Let’s see… a man’s hat, that usually means, uh, emotional sorrow,” she said. “Losing your hat, that means watch out for false friends. A new hat is a sign of wealth. A big hat means joy and prosperity. But a bowler hat? Jeez, I dunno. Even Madame Zadora doesn’t get into bowler hats. You know anyone that owns one?”
“No. I’ve seen them in the movies, but never in real life.”
She looked hard at him now.
“You got a lot of things on your mind, don’t you, kid?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t blame you,” she said. “Everybody knows what happened to Mister G.” She sipped her tea. “And everybody knows Frankie McCarthy did it and could go up the river for a long stretch. Especially if you turned rat. So you’re worried about that, which it’s natural. And that’s in all the dreams, I guess, that worry. And the ghost walking through the rooms? That’s your father, Michael, God rest his soul. You wish he was here. You wish he could go with you and beat the crap out of that Frankie McCarthy.” She put out the cigarette. Michael counted six butts in the saucer. “But he’s not here. And you can’t run away.”
“So what do I do?”
“Pray,” she said. “And keep the faith. You believe hard enough things’ll work out, they will. Mark my words.”
That night, he didn’t dream. Each morning now, he prayed. He stayed alert to danger. And on the streets, nothing happened.
Michael was careful leaving the house. He watched the rooftops, fearful of falling bricks or garbage cans. He made certain the doors to the flat were al
ways locked. He got permission from his mother to increase the wattage of the bulbs in the hallways. He took different routes through the parish on his journeys to see Rabbi Hirsch or to serve mass at Sacred Heart. Going to mass was always the easiest; Frankie McCarthy and the Falcons didn’t get up until noon.
Sonny tried to keep the three of them calm. From his aunt’s house next door to the Venus, he could see into the poolroom. Frankie was there, all right. Hour after hour. Smoking. Playing pool. Laughing with his boys. But Sonny never saw him go out on a patrol. Never saw him act as if he was looking for anyone.
“Maybe he figured out it’s not us,” Michael said.
“Nah,” Sonny said. “He’s a crafty prick. Like a snake. He knows if anything happens to us, the bulls will drop a fuckin’ subway car on him.” He chewed the inside of his mouth. “He’ll wait. He won’t forget.”
The boys waited too. They went to school. They played in the street. Michael stopped in the synagogue to learn new words and phrases. He added fressing to his vocabulary, meaning eating like a slob. A momser was a bastard, a son of a bitch. Latkes were potato pancakes, and the word for dirt was shmootz. But Frankie remained a presence in his mind, like a bad tooth in a jaw. Even when life seemed normal.
On the Sunday before Easter, while hundreds of people were strolling through the parish with palm crosses stuck in their lapels, Kate Devlin took Michael by subway to Orchard Street in Manhattan. The train was filled with women like her, taking their children to be outfitted for Easter. Most of them had saved for months to buy clothes, and the clothes on Orchard Street were the cheapest in New York. At the Delancey Street station, they emptied the train, and hundreds of them climbed the stairs, dragging their kids into the parish they all called Jewtown.
This was the first time that Michael had come to Jewtown with his mother, and he was excited by its jammed, narrow streets, tiny stores, bearded men, racks of clothing climbing ten feet above the sidewalks. He imagined himself into the Fifth Quarter in Prague. The ghetto. The air was pungent with strange odors. Men and women shouted back and forth in five or six languages. Music played from unseen radios, adding to the din. Everyone seemed to be bargaining, in a frazzled routine of declaration, rejection, compromise, fingers being used to emphasize numbers. Young men in yarmulkes, black pants and collarless white shirts, with straggly beards and sidecurls dangling over the ears, measured waists and chests and trouser lengths with worn yellow tapes, marked them with chalk, then shoved hanging clothes aside to allow a customer to stand before a mirror. Kids looked panicky at the sight of themselves in strange clothes. Mothers tugged at seams and felt the fabrics and told the kids to stand straight. Michael felt sure that if he stayed long enough he would see Rabbi Lowe. Or Brother Thaddeus, his baldness disguised with a wig.