by Pete Hamill
“Nothing,” she said, a hair of bitterness in her voice. “Nothing that I know of.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” she said. “Why? Was something supposed to happen to Sonny and Jimmy?”
“The Falcons, they told me they were gonna get them, sort of,” he said. His voice sounded disappointed. He didn’t mean to sound that way. “They must think the three of us squealed on Frankie McCarthy.”
“If anything had happened to them,” she said, “I’d have heard about it.”
“We didn’t tell the cops anything, Mom,” he whispered. “We’re not informers.”
She squeezed his hand in a comforting way and glanced at the cast on his leg.
“But Jimmy’s uncle, he’s so dumb, it could be he said something to the cops, and maybe—” His head hurt, trying to figure things out. “They might have taken something he said and added it to something else and, oh, who knows, Mom? But I didn’t rat. I swear… I didn’t. I didn’t squeal.”
There was a long silence, and Michael could feel confusion coming off his mother like a mist.
“Sonny and Jimmy—when I was, you know, out—did they come to see me here?”
“I don’t know, Michael,” she said gently, responding to the sound of abandonment in his voice. “They weren’t letting visitors in to see you, because it was… well, a police matter, I guess. Of course, I know everybody here, from working here, so I had no trouble. And I am your mother. And Father Heaney came by.…” She turned away, gazing at the bars of the venetian blinds and the street beyond. “I’ll let Sonny and Jimmy know you’re okay.”
“And what about Rabbi Hirsch?”
“I haven’t seen him,” she said.
“If they let a priest in, they should let him in.”
“Who knows, Michael? I’ll try to find out. You’d better rest.”
Exhaustion moved through him like a tide. He tried to resist it, tried to force his eyes to remain open. His mother’s hand felt warm. The tide took him.
26
With his lower right leg encased in a heavy plaster cast, Michael remained in Brooklyn Wesleyan Hospital for nine empty days. He did have some visitors. Father Heaney stopped by to tell him not to worry about his final exams; he’d be allowed to take them when he was feeling better, even if the school year was over. On another morning, he woke up to see Abbott and Costello staring down at him. The detectives wanted names. Michael said he didn’t know any names.
“Come on, kid, don’t bullshit us,” Costello said. “Everybody knows the names of these bums.”
“Get their names from everybody then,” Michael said.
“You just don’t want to be helped, do you?” Abbott said.
“It’s too late now,” Michael said.
They sighed and left. Michael wondered why he didn’t just give them the names. Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian. Just those names. Street names. Let the cops figure out their real names and where they lived. But he couldn’t do it. Even though they had hurt him, hurt him real bad, he couldn’t be a rat. He knew if he turned rat he’d be sorry for the rest of his life. He’d be walking down a street somewhere and remember the time he ratted to the cops and he’d be through for the day. He’d be in the army, where nobody knew him, and someone would want to know about his life and he’d have to keep this one thing secret. Or he’d take the cop’s test and be assigned to some precinct and then run into Abbott and Costello and they’d remember that he was a rat and tell all the other goddamned cops and they’d freeze him out, because everyone knew that cops despised informers as much as the criminals did. No. If he ratted, he’d be as bad as them. Then they’d really win. Then they’d really ruin him. They’d make him as dirty as they were.
Every morning the bald doctor arrived at Michael’s bedside, carrying a clipboard, flanked by an intern and a nurse. His favorite word was fine. Michael was fine. His progress was fine. He was healing up just fine. Then, feeling fine about himself, he moved to the next patient.
Every afternoon, before going to work, Kate Devlin came to visit, bringing him ice cream and newspapers and once, the latest Captain Marvel. The comic book now seemed childish to him. He had learned that there were truly bad people in the world, and when they went after you, you really hurt. He told her he didn’t want any more Captain Marvels. He was more interested in the newspaper stories about Jackie Robinson. And the condition of Pete Reiser. The great center fielder was conscious again, promising to be back playing soon, and the sportswriters were demanding that Branch Rickey come up with some money to pad the concrete walls of Ebbets Field. They called him El Cheapo and said that half the ballplayers didn’t have enough money to take the subway to the ballpark. But Rickey had brought up Jackie Robinson when all the other owners wanted white players only, and Robinson always called him Mr. Rickey, so how bad could the old man be? Each day, Michael read every word of the sports pages and tore out the stories about Robinson. When his mother arrived the following morning, he’d give them to her to take home.
“You’ll have a scrapbook on this fellow thicker than the blue books,” she said.
“Someday he’ll be in the blue books, Mom,” he said. “This is history.”
But when she was gone, and the doctor and the nurses moved to other rooms, he was left to think. And he began to feel alone in the world. There was no sign of Rabbi Hirsch. Not even a note. Worse, neither Sonny Montemarano nor Jimmy Kabinsky had come to see him. His best friends. One for all and all for one. He didn’t expect the other kids from school to visit him. But he knew that if either Sonny or Jimmy had been hurt, he’d have visited them. He wished that they had telephones at home so he could call them from the booth down the hall near the nurses’ station. But nobody he knew had a telephone, least of all Jimmy and Sonny. They would have to come to the hospital to see him. Obviously, they’d found better things to do. In the first few days, he tried to make excuses for them. Maybe they’d decided to study for the final exams that Michael had missed. Maybe they’d found jobs after school. Maybe Sonny’s mother was sick or Jimmy’s uncle. And yeah: maybe the Falcons had warned them to stay away from the hospital.
But maybe it was something else. Lying in the dark at night, he wondered if they thought he had squealed. Not about the beating but about Frankie McCarthy. They could have heard this on the street. Maybe Frankie had spread rumors that the DA was using Michael as a witness. Maybe the cops had spread the word that they had gotten Michael to talk, in order to scare Frankie. Why not? They all lie. Cops lied and judges lied and politicians lied. Everybody knew that.
The maybes warred in his head. And there was one other. Maybe they’d heard that Michael had shit in his pants. That would have meant that he was scared, that he had no heart, that he couldn’t take a beating like a man. No matter what they knew about him, he could be just another momma’s boy. Maybe that’s what they thought. The worst maybe of them all.
He wished he could talk about these things with Rabbi Hirsch. The rabbi would come up with a Yiddish proverb that would make him feel better. He would ask Michael for the name of a good boy who could serve as the Shabbos goy, filling in until Michael came back. Like Carl Furillo was filling in for Pete Reiser. And because Michael didn’t want to send Sonny or Jimmy into the synagogue, he would tell Rabbi Hirsch to ask Father Heaney. And Father Heaney was the kind of guy who’d go down and turn on the lights himself. Then Rabbi Hirsch would change the subject to Jackie Robinson and talk about the latest game and try out some new words he had learned from Red Barber. And maybe he would sing “Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah” or “Don’t Fence Me In” and make Michael laugh. Or he would talk about how punishment was the job of God. Even if Rabbi Hirsch was angry with God. Even if he didn’t, maybe, believe in His goodness anymore, after everything that had happened in Europe.
But there was no Rabbi Hirsch coming down the corridors of Brooklyn Wesleyan. It was as if he had never existed.
And Michael felt more alone than he’d e
ver felt in his life.
On the fourth day, the nurses allowed him to go on his own to the bathroom in the corner of the room. This was an enormous relief; Michael hated the cold steel bedpans of the first days and thought he saw the nurses smirking at him, as if they knew what had happened on the evening of the beating. Now he was free to swing off the bed and hobble to the bathroom without a nurse’s help. The cast felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds. But there was something worse. When he looked in the mirror for the first time, he saw a stranger. The stranger’s face was lumpy and swollen. The skin on the right side of the stranger’s face was the color of an eggplant. He touched the mirror and then his face, and knew that he was the stranger.
Later, dozing in his bed, he remembered the evening of his beating and the four Falcons stinking of beer, and he wanted to hurt them back. He wanted to cause them pain. To turn their faces purple. To break their fucking legs. Pricks. Momsers. And then he sobbed, because he could do nothing; even if he caught them one at a time, he could not hurt them. If his father were alive, he could hurt them, really badly, so they’d never hurt anyone again. But Michael was too young and too small. He could hit a spaldeen harder now, but he could not beat up men. And they were men. They were as big as soldiers. As big as the detectives. He could hurt them with a bat. Maybe. But if they took the bat off him, it would be worse than the first time. And a gun… the police would know, his mother would be shamed, and where would he get a gun anyway? He tried to imagine himself with a gun in his hand, making them beg. But he could not imagine himself firing the gun, shooting holes in their heads and their hearts.
His face was an hourly reminder of the power of the Falcons. He wondered what Mary Cunningham would think if she could see his face now. After all, his new suit would do nothing for his face. Any more than a new suit could change Jackie Robinson’s face.
And then he thought: My face, or most of it, is now as dark as Robinson’s face. He got up and hauled his cast into the bathroom again and stared at the mirror. They made me into Jackie Robinson, he thought. They did to me what a lot of people want to do to him. They made me into him. Into Jackie Robinson. My blackened face is like Robinson’s. I’m as helpless as he is. He can’t fight back, because he promised Branch Rickey he wouldn’t. Not yet. Not now. He can fight back with his bat, with his glove, with his speed. But not with his fists. Neither can I. Not now. Not yet.
Then, thinking about Robinson, he felt another wave of loneliness and isolation. He wanted to be home. If he was going to be alone, if his friends had truly abandoned him, he wanted to be alone in his own room. Not here in this hospital, with its strange odors of ether and medicine, and stranger faces. Home. Where he would read every book he could get his hands on. Where he’d study harder than he ever had in his life. Yeah. And get the highest grades in the class. Yeah, yeah. The way Robinson fought with his bat and his glove and his speed. Wasn’t a batting average really a kind of grade? You get an answer right in a test, that’s like a hit. You get a lot of answers right, you get a higher grade, a higher average.
He could do that. And keep doing it. Get a high school diploma. Nobody around here ever finishes high school. They go to work in the factory. They shape up on the docks. They become ironworkers or cops or firemen. I’ll get a diploma, Michael thought, then get the hell out of the parish. Go away to the army or the navy or—shit, maybe even college. Why not? The college boys in the movies all looked like shmucks. They wore short-sleeved sweaters with letters on the chest and said things like boola-boola and got drunk at football games. Michael thought: I could do better than those guys. I could get out of here and go to college. Ride the white horse over the factory roof. Live in Manhattan in a penthouse like the guy singing that song. Just picture a penthouse, way up in the sky, with hinges on chimneys, for clouds to go by. Yeah: a house with hinges on chimneys. And I’d go to work in an office where my hands never got dirty and have a closet full of suits and shirts and ties and shoes. More than any gangster, and I wouldn’t have to break the law. Yeah: get out. Go.
Then Sonny and Jimmy would be sorry they walked away from him. He’d be a big shot. In his penthouse. Reading at breakfast about Frankie McCarthy going to the hot seat in Sing Sing. Reading about Tippy Hudnut shot down in a cheap holdup in Coney Island. Reading about Skids and the Russian being sent up for life, and Ferret’s body washing up on the beach with two holes in the head. He’d run into Sonny and Jimmy someday on Park Avenue, as he walked out of his building, a building fifty stories high. There they’d be, throwing garbage cans into a goddamned truck, and they’d say, Jeez, Michael, we’re sorry we were such shmucks back in the parish that time you got beat up, and Michael would raise an eyebrow, like Joseph Cotten did in the movies, and say, Pardon me, but what’s your name?
Yeah.
Maybe he couldn’t shout Shazam and turn into the world’s mightiest mortal. But he could wait in silence, like the Count of Monte Cristo, and build himself up. First, get smart, just like Edmond Dantès did, studying his books in the dungeons of the Chateau d’If. That wasn’t all. He’d lift weights and learn how to box and he’d handle the Falcons himself, one at a time. Maybe not this year. Maybe not next year. He’d hold it all in, for now, the way Jackie Robinson did, and then when he was ready, he would explode. They wouldn’t even remember him anymore, but he would find the guys who had hurt him and he would hurt them back. All by himself. Got shtroft, der mentsh iz zikh noykem. God will punish them, but I’ll have my revenge.
And then get out. Take my mother. Get her a house with her own yard. And steam heat. Far away. Out.
After the sixth day, the nurses gave him crutches and let him walk around the third floor, in a pale green bathrobe. The crutch made it easier to swing the cast behind him. In one room, he saw a man who’d been shot. He saw another man who’d had a heart attack on the F train. In one of the rooms, an ironworker was in a cast from neck to toe after falling off a building, and his friends laughed and whooped and held beer bottles to his lips. They had written their names all over his cast. Michael would look out the window at Ellison Avenue and wish that his friends would come and laugh and whoop. He wished someone would write on his cast. Anyone.
Then, at last, it was time to go home. His mother arrived around nine o’clock with warm clothes and some old trousers with the leg slit so he could push the cast through it. She led him out through the lobby, carrying his newspaper clippings and comic books in a shopping bag, and they took the Ellison Avenue trolley car home. Boarding the trolley, he felt awkward with the crutch, clumsy and defenseless, as he passed it up to his mother and then took her hand to pull himself up two steps. Actions that once were easy were now difficult; he wondered how many times he’d jumped up those stairs without thinking about them for a second. The driver nodded as they boarded, then paused as Michael and Kate moved to the rear and started the trolley after they took seats in the row facing the back door. There were only a few people in the trolley. Michael stared out the window, afraid of seeing Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret or the Russian. He didn’t want to see them, and he didn’t want them to see him. He just wanted to go to his room. And close the door. And get in bed. And read about the Dodgers. His mother glanced at him.
“You’re thinking about these thugs, aren’t you?” she said.
“No. Yeah. Sort of.”
“Don’t.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“They’ve been arrested.”
He glanced around, afraid someone might hear them, even in the almost empty car.
“You didn’t give up their names, did you?” he whispered.
“There were plenty of witnesses,” she said. “It was a warm night, people were out. Lots of people—”
“Mom, they’ll come after you. They’ll give you the mark of the squealer. They’ll—”
“Stop it, Michael!”
He felt as if he would fall. He’d made her cross, with his fear and his childishness. But she held his hand as the trolley approach
ed their stop, and he took a deep breath and felt safer. Then she was pulling the cord, and standing, and taking his elbow, helping him to the door. The trolley stopped. The door opened. She went out first and then helped him down the steps. The trolley pulled away, steel wheels squealing on steel tracks, and she gave him the crutches. Then she looked warily around the avenue; so did Michael. There were familiar faces doing the usual things. Teddy polishing apples outside the fruit store. Mrs. Slowacki arranging newspapers on the stand. Peggy McGinty wheeling a baby carriage in a distracted way. But he saw none of the Falcons.
“The police have warned the whole rotten bunch,” she said, leading Michael into the hallway at 378 Ellison Avenue. “If they lay another hand on you, they’ll go away for a long, long time.”
“Yeah, and what about you? What if they get bailed out? What if they wait for you outside the Grandview? They—”
“Och, Michael: they’re a pack of stupid cowards,” she said. “But they are not that stupid. They must know now that they’ve gone too bloody far.”
He was very quiet as she unlocked the door to the apartment. They went inside, and the kitchen looked exactly as it did before he went to the hospital. He gazed at his mother as she started a kettle for tea. He wanted to believe her, to be as brave as she was, but he was afraid of the Falcons, afraid for himself, afraid for her.
“Don’t let them scare you, son,” she said, looking at his drained face and touching his hand. “That’s how they win.”
He trembled in the warm, bright morning light.
27
With her son home at last, Kate Devlin took the night off from the Grandview, switching a shift with another cashier. She made a stew, thick with potatoes, carrots, and onions, and beef that fell to shreds with a touch of a fork. Michael ate two helpings. They did the dishes together and listened to the radio and talked about things that did not matter. The windows were wide open to the warm night, and from the dark yards they could hear dishes clattering, laughter, radios, the sounds of the Brooklyn evening. Kate suggested tea and her son said he would love some tea, and then there were two sharp knocks on the locked kitchen door.