by Pete Hamill
Listening to Sonny, and reading the stories, Michael tried to imagine how Robinson felt. After all, he graduated from college out in California. He was smarter than any of the idiots on the Phillies. And he had to take this crap from them? They could say things in a ballpark, in Ebbets Field, that they wouldn’t say to him out on the street? Thinking like Robinson, Michael grew enraged. He saw himself walking into the Phillies dugout with a bat in his hand and breaking heads. He saw himself sliding into second with his spikes high. If you hurt me, I’ll hurt you back.
And he thought: Jackie Robinson needs the Kabbalah.
Jackie Robinson needs the secret name of God.
Jackie Robinson needs the Golem.
Everybody else said that all the Dodgers really needed in the series with the Phillies was Leo Durocher. Leo the Lip was the Dodger manager since before the war, and he didn’t take any crap. He was a tough guy. He’d go right over to the Phillies dugout and, as Sonny said, knock Ben Chapman on his dumb fucking ass. If Robinson couldn’t do it, Durocher would, and that would be the end of that. But Durocher had been suspended before the season started by some fat southern bozo named Happy Chandler, who was the commissioner of baseball. Chandler said the reason was “conduct detrimental to baseball.” Everybody in the parish learned the word detrimental on the same day, including Michael. And everybody knew it was a bum rap.
Michael tried to explain this to Rabbi Hirsch one afternoon, as Red Barber described a game on the old Admiral.
“First, a bum rap, what is this?” the rabbi said.
“It means, well, that the guy is convicted of something he didn’t do.”
In Durocher’s case, the detrimental conduct took place in Havana. The Dodgers were playing the Yankees. Everybody in Brooklyn hated the Yankees. They wanted to beat the Giants, but they flat out hated the Yankees. Anyway, Durocher had been warned to stay away from certain people. Gamblers. Guys he knew in nightclubs or something.
“This he didn’t do?”
“No, no, he stayed away from them,” Michael said. “But at this Yankee game he noticed that two of the gamblers he was supposed to stay away from were sitting in Larry MacPhail’s box. Larry MacPhail is the president of the Yankees.”
“This is—the word is hype… heep-oh-crazy?”
“Hypocrisy. And Leo told the sportswriters about it—and they put it in the papers. But Happy Chandler didn’t suspend MacPhail for having the gamblers in his box. He suspended Durocher for talking about it!”
“Hypocrisy!”
“And here’s the worst part, Rabbi. The reason behind it? I read it in the Daily News. The reason was that Larry MacPhail got Happy Chandler his job!”
“Corrupt!”
“A straight payoff!”
Oh, there were some other things too. Leo had married a divorced woman named Laraine Day. Last year, he was supposed to have beaten up a fan. But basically his detrimental conduct was in pointing out the truth. The result was that an old guy named Burt Shotton was managing the Dodgers in 1947. And Burt Shotton didn’t wear a uniform. He wore a suit and tie. When he left his last team, he swore he would never wear a baseball uniform again, and he didn’t. But he couldn’t go out on the field. And he was too old to kick the crap out of Ben Chapman.
“Crap, what is this word?”
Michael was embarrassed but he explained what the word meant. The rabbi laughed.
“That would be good to see!”
Rabbi Hirsch was working hard at understanding baseball. On the table, there were sports pages marked with a red pen, and sheets of blank paper covered with names and numbers and Hebrew letters. He seemed to have chosen baseball as his key to understanding America. He had been listening to the games since the beginning of spring training, and even his language started to change. On some days, he almost sounded like Red Barber.
“Ho, boychik, you just missed some rhubarb,” he said one afternoon, slurring the word in a southern way. “But don’t worry. Higbe’s sitting in the catbird seat!”
The games, and Barber’s voice, made Rabbi Hirsch happy. But he also was disturbed by Robinson’s slump. He shook his head one afternoon, as they listened to the game and Robinson grounded out to the shortstop. He said that soon they would have to will Robinson into hitting. He and Michael, if nobody else. They must pray. They must chant. They must light candles. They must believe.
“Why can’t we use the Kabbalah?” Michael said. “There must be words there we can use.”
The rabbi gave Michael a cautious look.
“We only go to the Kabbalah,” he said, “if all else fails. That is not yet.”
But Rabbi Hirsch did understand how important it was for Robinson to succeed.
“For the colored people, is very important,” he said. “And for poor people, all kinds. And for us too, for the Jews.”
Michael waited for an explanation, and it came.
“A man like this, he is a, a… I don’t know the word. But he is there for others. Catholics, when they are hated, Jackie Robinson is a Catholic. Jews, when they are hated, Jackie Robinson is a Jew. You see?”
“Sort of.”
“So Jackie Robinson we have to help,” Rabbi Hirsch said. “We help him, we help ourselves.”
“I see.”
“You must talk to Father Heaney too.”
“I will.”
And he did. Father Heaney was very grave as Michael explained what Rabbi Hirsch had told him. He nodded his head and said he would offer up the seven o’clock mass the following morning for Jackie Robinson. That afternoon, Robinson went 0-for-3, with a base on balls. In bed that night, Michael whispered in Yiddish.
A gefalenem helft Got.
God helps the defeated. God helps the defeated. God helps the defeated.
And ended his prayers with ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys. He hoped the bad dreams would not come. He hoped he would dream of Robinson hitting a triple. And then stealing home. Against the Phillies.
Please God, help the defeated, he whispered. Let Jackie Robinson hit.
24
In the midst of Robinson’s awful slump, a rumor swept through the parish: Frankie McCarthy had copped a plea. The detectives had traced the cans of red Sapolin number 3 straight to Frankie and found a stiff paintbrush in the lot on Collins Street, six doors from Frankie’s house. The rumors said that a clerk from Pintchik’s paint store on Flatbush Avenue picked Frankie out of a lineup. “They even had fingerprints on the brush,” Sonny explained. “And on the can. This guy is dumb as a cucumber.” Frankie’s lawyer told him it was better to plead guilty to the charge of vandalism than face trial for assaulting Mister G.
“And get this,” Sonny said. “The lawyer was a Jew and the judge was a Jew!”
“They should’ve thrown him in the goddamned river,” Michael said.
“We’ll, he’da gone up the river on the assault charge,” Sonny said. “For a couple of years. Copping to the paint thing, he’s out in a couple a months.”
It didn’t seem right to Michael. Poor Mister G was in a bed somewhere with a broken head. His mind was gone. His store was gone. His wife must cry herself to sleep. His kids were trying to get him to read an old prayer book so they could talk to him before he died. Frankie was going to be all right, with a nice warm cell and all his meals. “Three hots and a cot,” Sonny called it. And because of other things Frankie had done, Rabbi Hirsch had trembled with bitterness and Michael’s mother had been driven to fury. In a few months, Frankie McCarthy would be back on the street. He’d sneer. He’d laugh. He’d hurt someone else. It wasn’t right.
The rumors turned out to be true. But when Michael brought the news to Rabbi Hirsch, the rabbi said nothing. He made a sound. Humf. That was all. Humf. The sound of a man who knew that for some crimes, nobody ever truly pays.
Rabbi Hirsch did not brood, at least not in front of Michael. He was too busy mastering the theory and practice of baseball. Alone in the synagogue, he wrote pages of notes and consulted them whil
e firing questions at Michael.
A bunt is what?
How is explained a southpaw?
This Red Barber, he’s a socialist?
What means picked off?
Harold Reese, why is called Pee Wee?
A double play, this is two runs?
Mr. Shotton, his name is Boit or Burt?
Who is an Old Goldie?
None of this was easy. Michael had tried to teach baseball to his mother and had failed. After fifteen years in America, she still didn’t know first base from third. But Rabbi Hirsch went at the task with Talmudic intensity. After hearing Michael’s explanations, he copied the language of baseball from loose sheets of paper into a kid’s composition book. He made diagrams. He insisted on knowing the rules. Much of this was abstract. The daily newspapers never showed photographs of the whole ballpark, but Michael had a drawing of Ebbets Field that he’d cut out of an old copy of the Sporting News and he used it to explain the positions and the bases. When they talked baseball, the sadness left the rabbi’s eyes. They never talked about Frankie McCarthy. And for a few days they stopped talking about Jackie Robinson too. What needed to be said had been said. The prayers had been offered. God knew what He should do. But it was too soon to use the Kabbalah.
And then Robinson began to hit.
And then Robinson began to dance off second base, driving pitchers crazy, drawing throws from angry catchers, coming in a rush around third, with Red Barber’s voice rising, saying, And here comes Robinson.
Robinson began to hit, and the Dodgers began to win. And in the synagogue on Kelly Street, Rabbi Hirsch was clipping stories too, from the Brooklyn Eagle and from the Forvertz. Michael brought his scrapbook to show Rabbi Hirsch, and the rabbi got one for himself.
“Is like a story,” the rabbi said. “Each day, a new chapter.”
“It’s history,” Michael said.
“And something else,” the rabbi said. “In America, he is new. Just like me.” He paused and ran his hand over one of the clippings. “With Jackie Robinson, the book I am not starting in the middle. In America, it takes so long to learn what happened before. But here, we are at a beginning.”
When the game was on the radio, all that had happened before to Rabbi Hirsch seemed to disappear. He never talked about Prague. He didn’t evoke the spires of the cathedrals. There was no need for the Golem, if Jackie Robinson was taking a long lead off first. There were too many questions to be answered, too much to learn. The rabbi wanted to know about Sportsman’s Park in distant St. Louis, where a man named Country Slaughter—such a name!—hit one over the pavilion roof. He wanted to know about Forbes Field in Pittsburgh and Shibe Park in Philadelphia. Forbes, who was he? And Shibe? He was a ballplayer? The rabbi tried hard to imagine these sun-drowned places in the vastness of America. While he had baseball, there was no place in his mind, it seemed, for night and fog.
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, the rabbi sang during a game, when Robinson scampered home from second on a wild pitch.
Zip-a-dee-ay,
My-oh-my, what a wonderful day…
Baseball made him sing. He was always out of tune, but it didn’t matter. He learned the words to “Don’t Fence Me In,” all about straddling his own saddle underneath the Western skies, and Michael found the English words to “And the Angels Sing.” These the rabbi sometimes changed. You hit, he would sing, and then the angels sing… and laughed at himself.
One warm evening in June, Michael was walking home from the synagogue, brooding about Pete Reiser. Nine more days until the end of the term, and then Sonny can help us get PAL tickets so we can go to Ebbets Field, and Pete Reiser runs into another goddamned wall! Ends up in a hospital. Unconscious. Just like ’42. Reiser was hitting .383 that year, then he runs into a wall and hits .200 the rest of the season and we lose the pennant. In ’41, he hit .343, led the league in doubles and triples, and we won the pennant. We need Pistol Pete. We need him. And where is he? In the goddamned hospital, just like Mister G, and he can’t talk, and the sportswriters said when his head hit the wall, the sound was sickening. That’s like Mister G too. When Frankie McCarthy hit him with the cash register. Sickening. We never saw Mister G again, and his wife left and his kids left and the store is empty, like it has a curse on it. Maybe center field will have a curse on it. The curse of Pete Reiser. Oh sure, they put Carl Furillo there for now. Great arm, but not Reiser. And they brought up this Duke Snider, but he strikes out too much. Shit. Jackie Robinson can’t do it alone. The Dodgers need Reiser too. I wish I could go to the hospital and pray and pray and Reiser’s eyes would open and he’d get up like nothing happened and take a cab to the ballpark. Maybe if I prayed hard enough, Mister G would get up too and go to the candy store and everything would be the way it was before. And summer would come, all hot and green, and we could go to see Reiser and Robinson. Watch Reiser steal home. Against the Cardinals. Cheer Robinson dancing off second base against the goddamned Phillies, just the way Red Barber describes him. And here comes Robinson! And There goes Reiser…
Michael was crossing the street beside the factory, his head full of green fields and roaring crowds, when they reached him.
His arms were grabbed and he was lifted and jerked sideways and shoved hard against the picket fence of the factory. The streetlight was out. But Michael saw the faces. The Falcons. Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian. He smelled sour beer. Stale sweat. He felt hard fingers digging right to the bone of his arms and his heart pounding. This can’t be happening. Not now. No. Not tonight. No. Please, no. Then he was twisted around and one of them drove a punch into his stomach. His body exploded in pain. He couldn’t feel his legs. His belly felt split. He couldn’t breathe. He tried to speak, but no words came from his mouth, only a kind of whimper. A shameful kid’s whimper.
Then he smelled shit.
His own shit.
No.
Then there was another tearing jolt. No, and he bent over, No, no, and something, a bat, a billy club, smashed against his legs.
“Little cocksucker,” one of them snarled. “Singin’ like a canary.”
“Fuckin’ Jew-lover,” a second voice growled, panting as another punch smashed into Michael’s stomach. “Half a fuckin’ Hebe. How do you like dat?”
“This is from Frankie,” a third voice said. “He sends you his best. He wants you to have a real good fuckin’ summer. He’ll think about you every night. You and your fuckin’ friends.”
Michael thought: I’m going to die. They’re going to kill me.
Then the shit-stained world exploded into a high, white, ringing emptiness.
25
His mother’s voice was soothing and whispery but her eyes were wide and anxious, and then she went away. A bald man with thick eyeglasses peered at him and used his smooth fingers to pull back one of his eyelids. Behind the bald man there were horizontal bars of light and dark. They went away too. Father Heaney’s face peered at him and his lips moved but no words came out and then he went away. A tube of cold glass was slipped under his tongue and then grew warm and then slid out. Every time he tried to move, he hurt. He felt warm and wet and realized he had pissed in the bed and was embarrassed. His mouth tasted like nickels. There was something attached to his arm, and when he was alone and stared at the bars of light and darkness and then closed his eyes he saw purple lines and pink bars. Sounds came from a long way off. Wheels squeaking. Dishes clattering. A blurred loudspeaker voice. He heard rosary beads clicking smoothly against each other. He smelled something soapy. He was tossed, pierced, penetrated, moved, washed, handled.
He lost two days.
And then woke to his mother’s face again, her eyes wide in relief, her cool hand touching his cheek. He said, Hello, Mom, and she exhaled and said, Thank God.
His tongue felt furry, and she held a glass to his lips while he sipped the cool water. The taste of nickels remained. After a while, her eyes narrowed, and her face was full of wrath, and she said, Who did this to you, son?
> He tried to tell her. He described the Falcons. He tried to make them clear without naming them. He did not say the names of Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian. He wanted to tell what he could tell, without violating the codes. The Irish codes. The codes of the parish. Even though they had done this to him. Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian. Even though they had beaten and broken his body. Even though they had put him in this room.
But then he remembered the humiliating smell of his own shit, and he could not hold back. This wasn’t the police. This wasn’t the district attorney. This was his mother, right here in a third floor room at Brooklyn Wesley an Hospital. He told her the names, as precise as a batting order: Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian. He didn’t know their full names. He knew what they were called on Ellison Avenue. He told her how. Ferret and Skids held his arms while Tippy and the Russian took turns hitting him. He told her about the smell of beer. He told her what they’d said about delivering a message from Frankie McCarthy. He did not mention the shit.
“Did they use a club on you?”
“Yeah. On my leg. I couldn’t see what it was—a bat or a club or what.”
“They’ll not hit another boy around here,” she said. “I promise you that.”
Her face was a grid of lines, with her green eyes burning. She went away to fetch the doctor, and he came back with her, his face shiny and smiling. There wasn’t a hair on his head. Unlike Brother Thaddeus, he had a mustache, eyebrows, and eyelashes.
“Well,” he said, “you’ve got two badly bruised ribs, young man, a fractured bone in your lower leg, the tibia we call it, along with multiple contusions and a few loose teeth.” He smiled in an insincere way. “Otherwise, you’re fit as a fiddle.”
Michael tried to laugh but his ribs hurt too much. He wondered if Pete Reiser hurt this much. Or Mister G. Kate told him to lie still. When the doctor left, Michael reached for his mother’s hand.
“What about my friends?” he said. “What happened to Sonny and Jimmy?”