Snow in August

by Pete Hamill

  On the way home with his mother, he talked about the way Robinson had been booed, not because he was a Dodger, obviously, but because he was a Negro, and she tried to explain how there were all sorts of people in the world, and how some of them were ignorant or afraid or full of disappointment, and how you had to pity them and pray for them.

  “They just don’t know any better,” she said. Then her voice lowered. “But, to tell the truth, some of them…”

  She just shook her head, as they turned into Ellison Avenue for the last two blocks to home. The night sky was clear, bright with dense stars and a huge moon. There were more people in the streets now. The night was cool but not cold, with a brisk wind blowing up from the waterfront, and they were both glad they’d worn coats. A half-full trolley car raced by on its metal tracks. The bars of Fitzgerald’s and Casement’s were packed. They turned into the apartment house.

  “We’ll have a nice cup of tea,” she said, “and then a good night’s sleep.”

  On the second floor landing, as they passed Mrs. Griffin’s flat, Michael could hear the squeak and bang of the roof door. He was suddenly wary. He remembered clearly hooking it shut. He stepped ahead of his mother on the last flight of stairs and turned cautiously on the landing. He could see a rectangle of sky through the open door.

  “Why is that thing open?” Kate Devlin said, fumbling for her key. “Go up and lock it, son.”

  He went slowly up the roof stairs. When he reached the door, he could see it: a bright red swastika painted on the inside of the black door. Paint was splashed around the small landing.

  “Mom! You better come up here, Mom!”

  Coatless now, she left the apartment door open and hurried up the stairs.

  “Good God,” she whispered.

  She stepped outside, with Michael behind her. In the bright starlight they could see the words JEW LOVR painted on the outside of the door, the paint still wet to the touch. The words filled the door. There didn’t seem to be room for the E in LOVER.

  “Those cowardly bums,” she whispered, then went back to the doorway. “Now be careful, don’t get the paint on yourself.”

  She hooked the door shut and led the way downstairs. In the kitchen she pulled on her coat. Her face was cold and focused.

  “That does it,” she said. “I’m calling the police.”

  “They won’t do anything, Mom.”

  “I’m calling them anyway. Lock the door behind me.”

  From the window, he saw her cross Ellison Avenue and walk into the back door of Casement’s Bar, where there was a pay phone. I should have gone with her, he thought. Suppose they’re down there? Suppose the Falcons are watching her? If they do anything to her, it’s because of me. I’m the one who goes to see Rabbi Hirsch. I’m the one who went to get Father Heaney. Not her. He imagined men in black uniforms and polished boots coming out of the dark to hurt her. A phrase rose in his mind. Got shtroft, der mentsh iz zikh noykem. God punishes, man takes revenge. If they touched her, he would find them and kill them. No matter where they went, if they ran to the four corners of the world, he would find them. He didn’t care if he was caught. He didn’t care if they took him to the death house at Sing Sing and strapped him in the chair. Got shtroft, der mentsh iz zikh noykem…

  And then he saw her come out of the back door of Casement’s and step between two parked cars. She ran across the street. In the kitchen, he unlocked the door and peered down the stairwell. He saw her hand on the banister, heard her quick steps, and then she was coming up the last flight and he took her hand and led her into the kitchen and locked the door.

  “All right,” she said, removing her coat. “Let’s have our cup of tea.”

  Two uniformed cops arrived about an hour later. One was beefy, gray-haired, and bored. He said his name was Carmody. The other’s name was Powers. His skin was the color of oatmeal. Their polite boredom made Kate Devlin seethe.

  “Whatta ya want us to do about it, lady?” Carmody said. “Clean it off?”

  “Investigate it!” she snapped. “There’s paint all over the floor up there. These idiots probably took the can to the roof and threw it into the yards. Maybe you could find the can. Maybe you can find the brush. Maybe you’ll even find fingerprints!”

  “Well, well, a sleuth,” Carmody said. “We’ve found ourselves a sleuth, Powers.”

  “Gee, we’d better do what the sleuth says,” Powers said.

  Kate’s eyes narrowed to cold slits.

  “Don’t get sarcastic with me, Officer. You’re here as a civil servant. You’d better be civil and you’d better be a servant.”

  Carmody sighed in a mixture of surprise and surrender. Kate Devlin wasn’t like some of the Irish, who she once told Michael were far too docile in the presence of the police. Michael watched her with a kind of awe. Look at the way she was dealing with these shmucks. She was tough. Carmody took out a notebook and a stubby pencil and sat down heavily at the table, facing Kate Devlin. The other cop gazed around the apartment, peering into the darkened rooms off the kitchen.

  “Name, age, employment, number of years in this apartment.”

  “Kathleen Devlin. Thirty-four. I work at the RKO Grandview. We’ve been here since 1940.”

  “Where’s your husband, lady?” the sallow cop said.

  “In Belgium.”

  “Whatta you mean, Belgium?”

  “He’s buried there. That’s where he died,” she said, and pointed toward the roof. “Fighting people that used that sign.”

  Carmody saw the framed photo of Tommy Devlin for the first time, cleared his throat and looked at his partner. His face flushed. They were both more polite now.

  “Yeah, well, ya know, Mrs. Devlin, this is really a matter for the detectives, and they can’t do much at night.” He closed the pad and stood up. “But we’ll go up the roof and make sure everything’s okay, all right? Don’t touch nothing.”

  They went out and Michael could hear their heavy feet moving on the roof above the kitchen. His mother washed the teacups in silence. And he loved her a lot for what she had done. He had never heard her use her husband’s death to make people feel sorry for her. Never. And she hadn’t done it with the cops either. It was more like telling them that if her husband could die doing his job, they could try doing theirs. She didn’t weep in public. She didn’t fly the flag like the patriots. She had a mass said every year around Christmas on the anniversary of her husband’s death. But that was all. Some things, she always said, you kept to yourself. Now both of them had called up the memory of Tommy Devlin on the same day.

  “Mom, could my father dance?”

  “Why do you ask that, son?”

  “I was wondering about it,” he said. “Rabbi Hirsch told me that he’d never had time to dance with his wife. And, I, well—”

  “He was a wonderful dancer,” she said. “We used to go on Saturday nights to the Webster Hall in Manhattan. In the summer, we danced at Feltman’s in Coney Island. He could jitterbug, all right, and he danced a lovely fox trot. But his favorite was the waltz. Mine too.”

  A waltz, Michael was thinking, what is a waltz? And was thrilled at the image of his father dancing. He had imagined him doing a slow jitterbug, smiling and graceful, but now that he knew that Tommy Devlin really could jitterbug, he had trouble imagining this other dance, a waltz. Kate seemed to read his mind.

  “That’s the dance that goes one-two-three, one-two-three,” she said. “Here, I’ll show you.”

  She took his hand and put another on his waist, and stepped, one-two-three, one-two-three, moving him in the tight space between the table and the sink, and then humming a tune. Do-do-da-dee, da-da da-da, do-do-da-dee…

  “That’s Strauss,” she said. “‘The Blue Danube.’ Sure, you’ve heard it before.” He had. “They’re always playing it on Rambling with Gambling, in the morning.” He pictured his father dancing with her, in some ballroom out of a movie, and then Rabbi Hirsch offering a hand to his wife. And then saw a fla
shlight beam scanning the backyards.

  He released her hand and moved to the window. The lights went on in one of the Collins Street apartments, and he could see an annoyed Mr. Rossiter gazing up at the source of the light beam. Michael opened the window and leaned out to see better. He could hear his mother turn on the hot-water tap for the stacked dishes.

  “Be careful there, Michael. Don’t, for God’s sake, fall out.”

  “No way.”

  Then the flashlight beam held on something, and he could hear urgent voices from the roof, and sure enough, there it was, lying in some weeds. The paint can.

  “Mom, you’re better than Sherlock Holmes,” Michael said.

  She came over to the window, drying her hands on a dish towel.

  “Glory be to God,” she said.

  “I better tell them it’s Sapolin number 3.”

  “Of course, my dear Watson.”

  They both laughed, and after the flashlights vanished from the yards, they shut the window. Kate Devlin went to her chair and her book, and Michael went to bed. Lying in the dark, remembering the few graceful steps his mother had taught him, humming softly the melody of “The Blue Danube,” he tried to picture a waltz. He must have seen many waltzes in the movies and didn’t know their names. There were always dances in those boring movies set in earlier centuries, where Englishmen wore wigs and wrote with feathers, and the long, satiny women’s gowns exposed parts of pale breasts. Those movies were hard to follow, because when the Englishmen talked so did all the kids in the Venus; they shut up only when the men were riding horses, dueling with enemies, or stabbing each other in marble castles. Certainly they must have waltzed in Emperor Rudolf’s castle. And he remembered from geography class that the Danube flowed right through Vienna, where Rabbi Hirsch’s mother went after leaving him behind. He wondered whether the Vltava itself flowed past Prague into the Danube.

  Then he imagined his father in a tuxedo, like a bigger, darker version of Fred Astaire, waltzing with his mother across the gleaming floor of the Webster Hall. It was long before the war, even before Michael was born, and the music soared, and everybody stepped aside to watch, and his father and mother never got tired. Then, at the far end of the vast ballroom, Rabbi Hirsch stepped forward with Leah, and he was as young as Michael’s father, his face blissful, and he bowed to his wife and started his waltz too.

  At daybreak of Easter Monday, when Michael awoke, he saw two detectives in raincoats and porkpie hats down in the yards. They took the paint can away and then came to their house and made photographs of the door and some footprints and took another statement from Kate and Michael. They weren’t the same detectives who had arrested Frankie McCarthy. Abbott and Costello must have had the day off. But they knew about the swastikas at the synagogue and they knew about what had happened to Mister G.

  “You oughtta try to remember what happened that day, kid,” one of the detectives said to Michael. “You’re gonna need some help someday.”

  Michael said nothing. The detectives went away, and the next day, after school, Michael went to Mr. Gallagher’s and bought some solvent and some black paint with money his mother had given him. She had cleared the costs with Mr. Kerniss, the landlord that Michael had never seen. While she was at work, Michael scrubbed the red paint off the floors of the hallways. Then he painted over the swastikas and the words on the floor. But 378 Ellison Avenue felt dirty now. And somehow frail. He knew they would never feel safe there again.

  23

  For weeks, nothing happened. Everybody had heard about the swastikas, but there were no arrests. Frankie McCarthy drifted around the parish like a ghost, but he ignored Michael, Sonny Montemarano, and Jimmy Kabinsky. Even so, Michael didn’t completely relax. The weather was warm and breezy now, and all the other kids of the parish were back on the streets. He played stickball on the crowded courts of Collins Street, hitting balls farther than ever, but often striking out when he glimpsed any of the Falcons coming along Ellison Avenue. If he was bigger this spring, so were the Falcons, and they moved like they were the true rulers of the parish.

  Pushed by Rabbi Hirsch to study, study, study, Michael worked a little harder at his homework and his grades moved into the low 90s. He still traded for old comics and bought new ones and read them in his room. He found a magazine called Hit Parader and learned the words to new songs and passed the lyrics to the rabbi. Now he would hear the rabbi suddenly begin to sing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” or “Cool Water” and, best of all, “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?,” which he promised to sing for Michael’s mother at next year’s seder.

  Michael did more of the sweaty work of janitoring, gladly washing the halls each Saturday morning, using a cream called Noxon to polish the brass mailboxes in the vestibule, feeding coal to the hot-water boiler in the basement. This meant he missed the first stickball games of the morning, but they always kept playing as long as there was light. He remained wary and was sometimes tense, feeling that Frankie McCarthy was like a bomb ticking away. At night, he still dreamed of blood-red snow rising from watertaps and white horses on rooftops and men with hamburger for hair.

  He was glad to fill the hours with other matters, and for Michael the most important matter of all was the fate of Jackie Robinson. In a strange way, he felt that he was merging with Robinson. Whenever he was alone, he imagined himself into Robinson’s mind, sharing his loneliness, feeling the way all eyes were upon him, trying to bring glory to Brooklyn while knowing that even in Brooklyn there were people who hated him. That was the lesson of the newsreel at the RKO Grandview: even people who were bound together by a place like Brooklyn and a team like the Dodgers could be split apart by things like skin color. The bitter anger of Rabbi Hirsch on Easter Sunday morning showed that religion could do the same thing. The days of spring were beautiful, but Michael sometimes thought that the world was crazy. And scary too.

  When the season had started, Michael read all the stories about Robinson in the Brooklyn Eagle and the Daily News and the Journal-American. He listened to Red Barber on WHN. Days passed. And he knew that Robinson was in terrible trouble. He was drawing sellout crowds to Ebbets Field. But he was 0-for-20 against major league pitching and there were some writers who thought he might go 0-for-the-season. Michael dutifully cut out all the stories and pasted them with mucilage into a large coarse-papered scrapbook he’d bought in Germain’s department store for twenty cents; this was history while it was happening, he thought, and he wanted to keep it for the rest of his life. But each story about Robinson’s failure made him feel worse, and he wondered if he would ever fill the book. In some way he felt that if Robinson failed, he would fail too.

  “Maybe the guy can’t hit up here,” Sonny said one gray afternoon, in Michael’s kitchen. “Maybe it’s like too much pressure, Michael. Maybe he’ll be like a pinch runner or something.”

  “He’s gonna hit,” Michael said. “I tell you, he’s gonna hit.”

  He believed this the way Mrs. Griffin believed in Madame Zadora. But the truth was that, except for a glimpse in the newsreel at the Grandview, Michael had never actually seen Robinson play. In fact, he had never even been inside Ebbets Field. With Sonny and Jimmy, he had walked around the ballpark during the last days of the 1946 season. But they never got inside; even if they’d had the money, the park was sold out. Michael believed that it didn’t really matter; after all, he had never been in the Vatican either and was still a Catholic. But going to Ebbets Field cost money. Even the cheap seats in the bleachers cost fifty cents. Anyway, he had school during the week, when the bleachers were half empty, and on weekends the whole ballpark was always sold out. He could have used the five dollars from Mrs. Griffin to guy a reserved seat, but he couldn’t just buy a ticket for himself. He’d have to buy one for Sonny and Jimmy, one for all, all for one, and three tickets would cost more than most people made in an hour. He was glad he’d given the five bucks to his mother but sometimes worried that he’d been selfish toward his friends. He wished that Mrs.
Griffin would find a horse named Red Snow and win a fortune. Then they’d all go to Ebbets Field. He could even bring Rabbi Hirsch.

  Meanwhile, all the Dodgers, including Robinson, were more vivid in his imagination than in life. He looked at the photographs in the newspapers, and listened to Red Barber, and imagined them into action. In his mind, he could see Robinson playing first base and Stanky at second, Reese at short and Spider Jorgensen at third. But he couldn’t really see them, in the flesh, until the school term was over. Sonny said that’s when the Police Athletic League, the PAL, started giving out free tickets. Sonny knew all about things like that. But June was a long way off. If Jackie didn’t start hitting, they could send him back to Montreal. Michael wondered if he’d ever get to see Robinson, to be there in the crowd to defend him with his voice, to make him know he wasn’t alone.

  The need to be there for Robinson increased by the day. The Phillies came to Ebbets Field for three games, and they started yelling insults at Robinson. Sonny’s cousin Nunzio was an usher at Ebbets Field and told him all about it. The Phillies manager was a southerner named Ben Chapman, who had been traded away from the Yankees before the war for calling the New York fans Kikes. Now that he was a manager, he could get the whole Phillies team to yell these things at Robinson. Kike didn’t work for Robinson. He wasn’t a Jew. So they called him a nigger. They called him snowflake. They said he should go back to picking cotton. Robinson did nothing. He had promised Mr. Rickey he wouldn’t fight back. At least not that first year. And so he put up with it.

  “That’s the deal he made with Rickey,” Sonny said. “He can’t do nothing about nothing, for a year. They spit on him, he can’t spit back.”