by Pete Hamill
And opened his eyes. And saw two pigeons watching him from a chimney. He wondered what Dvoák’s symphony really sounded like and vowed that if he ever lived in a place where there were hinges on chimneys he would play Dvoák at breakfast.
The makeup exams were scheduled two days before the ball game at Ebbets Field. He did not want his mother to escort him to school to take the tests. He wanted to go on his own. But she insisted, promising to leave after he’d walked into school. They took the trolley car. As they passed the poolroom, he saw Skids and the Russian standing outside, laughing, smoking, combing their pompadoured hair. He slumped down in the seat.
“I thought they were in jail,” he said.
“They were,” Kate Devlin said. “But they let them go.”
“How come?”
Her face was troubled but she spoke in soothing tones, as if concerned about upsetting him before the examinations.
“The district attorney said you would have to testify against them. They came to see me at the Grandview, and I told them you couldn’t remember much about the night. It was too quick. I said I was willing to talk to them, but they said anything I had to say was just hearsay. They needed you. I told them they couldn’t have you. And that is bloody well that.”
Michael remembered her cold fury when she saw him in the hospital. Now something had changed her. Maybe she just couldn’t allow her son to be an informer. Maybe she was afraid.
“It’s a terrible thing,” she said. “Them getting away with it, I mean. But we’ll talk about it after your tests.”
“They can’t get away with it forever, Mom.”
“I hope not.”
She dropped him at the school at five minutes to ten, and he swung into his classroom on the crutches. The room was completely empty except for Brother Donard, a younger teacher with curly red hair. Brother Donard told him to choose a seat and they could begin.
The exams seemed like the pink spaldeen that morning when he and Sonny and Jimmy were still musketeers. Big and fat. All you had to do was swing. He was finished with all of them before one o’clock. Brother Donard glanced at the clock and looked surprised; he picked up the papers and told Michael to enjoy the summer. The same to you, Michael said, and swung down the empty corridor on his crutches. Then he stopped.
Down by the double doors leading to the schoolyard, he saw Sonny Montemarano walking in. Sonny saw him too, turned slightly, and seemed about to run.
“Sonny! Hey, Sonny, wait a minute!”
Sonny looked vaguely ashamed of himself as he waited for Michael to teach him.
“Where you been?” Michael said. “What are you doing here?”
“Summer school.”
“In what?”
“I’m not supposed to talk to you,” Sonny said, his head and eyes moving around in search of witnesses. The corridor was empty.
“Says who?”
“Says everybody.”
“How come?”
“They say you’re a rat.”
“That’s bullshit, Sonny, and you know it.”
Sonny said nothing.
“Sonny, the charges were dropped against those guys. I just saw Skids and the Russian in front of the poolroom. The reason they’re out? I wouldn’t talk.”
“They say you ratted them out and then got ascared of them. That’s what they say.”
“The cops came to see me in the hospital, Abbott and Costello themselves. But I wouldn’t say anything. I swear to God. Go ask them.”
“Why would anybody believe them? They’re cops!”
“Why would anybody believe the pricks who did this to me? Four on one, they held me, they beat the crap out of me, for what? What are they, goddamned heroes? You believe them before you believe me, Sonny, and you’re supposed to be my friend?”
Sonny glanced at Michael’s face, then at the cast, and stared into the schoolyard.
“I’m sorry, Michael,” he said. “I think you didn’t rat. But everybody else thinks you did.”
“They’re all wrong.”
“But we gotta live with them.”
“Okay,” Michael said, and pushed forward on the crutches to leave.
“Hey, Michael,” Sonny shouted.
“Don’t bother, Sonny,” Michael said. “I heard what you were saying. I’ll see you.”
“Maybe later, you get the cast off, we could play a little ball.”
“Where? The Bronx?”
He swung away on his crutches, angry and alone, feeling that a part of his life was over.
29
On the last Tuesday in June, with the sun high in the Brooklyn sky and a clean breeze blowing from the harbor, they went together to Ebbets Field. They met at the entrance to Prospect Park, the rabbi in his black suit, black hat, and white socks, Michael in gabardine slacks and a windbreaker. The boy made good speed on his crutches. His face was no longer black and swollen, but there were still purple smudges under his eyes and his ribs hurt when he laughed. In the pockets of the windbreaker he carried cheese sandwiches prepared by his mother.
“We should take a taxi,” the rabbi said.
“It costs too much, Rabbi,” Michael said. “Besides, I’m getting pretty good with these things. And I need the exercise.”
As they crossed a transverse road into the Big Meadow, he gazed from a hill upon the long lines of fans coming across the swards of summer green. Kids and grown-ups, grown-ups and kids, in groups of six or seven, but following each other in a steady movement, carrying bags of food and cases of beer and soda. He and the rabbi moved to join the long lines, the rubber tips of Michael’s crutches digging into the grass, slowing him down. Some fans wore Dodgers caps and T-shirts, others wore the clothes of workingmen. Some carried portable radios, and music echoed through the great meadow, bouncing off the hill where the Quaker cemetery had been since before the American Revolution. Michael told the rabbi that George Washington had retreated across this park after losing the Battle of Long Island, and the rabbi looked around alertly, as if remembering other hills and other retreats.
The smaller groups came together at the path that snaked around past the Swan Lake. The voices were abruptly louder in the narrow space, the music clashing and then blending like the sound of a carnival. They went past Devil’s Cave and over a stone bridge, with the zoo to the left, another lake to the right, the trees higher, the earth darker. There were no signs giving directions, but they were not needed; everybody knew the way to Ebbets Field.
“In the legs, you will have big muscles, like a soccer player,” the rabbi said, as they reached another roadway through the park and followed the thickening crowd.
“I never played soccer,” Michael said. “Did you?”
“In secret,” the rabbi confided. “My father worried too much, and then my secret he discovered. He stopped me.”
He sighed and shook his head.
“My father said Jews don’t play soccer, and rabbis never!” he explained. “Maybe he was right. I don’t think so.”
Then other lines of people were joining the throng, men and boys and a few women from other parts of Brooklyn, converging like pilgrims coming to a shrine.
“I love America!” Rabbi Hirsch suddenly exclaimed.
Michael smiled.
“Look at it! All around is America! You see it? Crazy people coming for the baseball, for the bunts and the triples and the rhubarbs! Look: Irish and Jews and Italians and Spanish, every kind of people. Poles too! I hear them talking. Listen: words from every place. From all countries! Coming to Abbot’s Field!”
“Ebbets Field,” Michael said.
“That’s what I said. Abbot’s Field! Look at the fanatics, boychik. Up in the morning with nothing to do except see the baseball? What a country.”
“Well, school is out and—”
“But the men! Look at the men! On a Tuesday! How can they not work? In every country, on a Tuesday, you work!”
“Maybe they work nights. Maybe they’re on vacation.”
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“No. No, it’s—they are Americans.”
The rabbi was inhaling deeply as he walked and talked, as if memorizing the odors of the brilliant Tuesday morning. He was free of the closed air of the synagogue basement, and he loved it. He was perspiring heavily in his black suit, wiping away sweat with a finger, stopping to drink from a stone water fountain. But his body seemed oddly lighter, and he walked with a joyous bounce.
And then up ahead, through two stone pillars, the trees vanished and the light was brighter, and they could smell hot dogs frying and hear car horns honking. They were pulled along in the human river, out of the park and into Flatbush Avenue. Now another great human stream was feeding the river, a darker stream, as hundreds of Negroes arrived, many of them with gray hair and paunchy bodies and lined faces. They were walking from Bedford-Stuyvesant. They were coming from the Franklin Avenue stop of the IRT. They were hopping off buses. The older ones had waited decade after decade for a morning like this. They had waited for longer than Michael had been alive.
And he gazed at them, more Negroes than he had ever seen before, some of them coal-colored and some chocolate-colored and others with skin the color of tea with milk. There were flat-faced Negroes and hawk-nosed Negroes, men with wide eyes and squinty eyes, fat men and skinny no-assed men, men who looked like prizefighters and men who looked like professors. All greeting each other with jokes and smiles and handshakes.
“America!” the rabbi said. “What a place.”
And then before them, rising above the low houses, above the umbrellas of the hot dog carts and the whorls of cotton candy, right there in front of them was Ebbets Field. Up there was the magnet pulling all of them through the summer morning. Up there was Jackie Robinson.
Michael felt unreal as he moved with the rabbi through the crowd. The scene was like Coney Island and the circus and the day the war ended, all in one. And Michael was in it, part of it, feeding it. Music blared from the concession stands. Men with aprons and change machines hawked programs and pictures of the Dodgers, pennants and posters. A grouchy woman stood beside a cloth-covered board that was jammed with buttons. All were selling for 25 cents.
“Pick one!” the rabbi said.
Michael chose a button that said I’M FOR JACKIE.
“Two!” said the rabbi.
They moved on, their buttons pinned above their hearts. They eased along Sullivan Street, staring up at the weather-stained facade of the great ballpark. It was more beautiful and immense than anything Michael had ever seen. Bigger than any building in the parish. Bigger than any church. He paused, balanced on the crutches, to allow the sight to fill him. So did the rabbi. They stared up at the structure, seeing people walking up ramps, and behind them, thick slashing bars of black girders and patches of blue sky through the bars. As they stood there, like pilgrims, the crowd eddied around them, and Michael felt a tingle that was like that moment in a solemn high mass when the priests would sing a Gregorian chant and the altar seemed to glow with mystery.
Then they turned another corner, into Montgomery Street, and found one more entrance, their entrance, and a guy bellowing, “Program, getcha program here!” The rabbi pushed his glasses up on his brow and squinted at their tickets.
“This is the hard part,” he said. “To find the chairs.”
“Seats, Rabbi.”
“Here, you look.”
Michael examined the tickets and led the way to the gate. A gray little man with a mashed nose like a prizefighter’s was guarding the turnstile. Rabbi Hirsch handed him the tickets and he tore them in half and gave back the stubs.
“Enjoy da game, Rabbi,” the ticket taker said brusquely.
The rabbi looked startled.
“Enjoy da game,” he said to himself, passing through the turnstile after Michael, shaking his head in wonder. America.
Inside, Michael stood under the stands, not moving for a long moment. Savoring it. Inhaling the cool smell of unseen earth and grass. Feeling holy.
I am here, he thought, in Ebbets Field. At last.
Then they climbed and climbed on the ramps, the crutch pads digging into Michael’s armpits, the dank, shadowed air smelling now of concrete and old iron, ushers directing them ever onward, climbing until the street seemed far below them and Michael could see the church steeples scattered across the endless distances of Brooklyn. The crowds thinned. Then they passed through a final darkness. And Michael could feel his stomach move up and then down and his heart stood still.
For there it was. Below them and around them. Greener than any place he had ever seen. There was the tan diamond of his imagination. There were the white foul lines as if cut with a razor through a painting. There were the dugouts. And the stands. And most beautiful of all, there below him, the green grass of Ebbets Field.
Ballplayers were lolling in the grass, tossing balls back and forth, breaking into sudden sprints. They were directly beneath him and the rabbi. The Pirates. The rabbi gripped a railing for a moment, as if afraid of losing his balance and tumbling down the steps and out onto the field.
“Is very high,” he said, his face dubious.
But an usher directed them to their section, and they found their seats, on the aisle, eight rows up in left-center field. The rabbi sat in the end seat. The seats beside Michael were empty. Behind them were three men wearing caps adorned with union buttons. International Longshoremen of America. Michael explained to Rabbi Hirsch that the game hadn’t yet begun, that the Pittsburgh players were taking batting practice, getting ready for the game. Together, as they ate Kate Devlin’s cheese sandwiches, Michael and the rabbi, like new arrivals in Heaven, explored the geography of the field. They could see the famous concave wall in right field and the screen towering forty feet above it, with Bedford Avenue beyond. Red Barber had helped put that screen into their imaginations, and there it was before them, as real as breakfast.
“An Old Goldie you could hit over the fence?” the rabbi said.
Michael said Yes, over the fence was an Old Goldie. He showed the rabbi the famous sign in center field where Abe Stark of Pitkin Avenue promised a suit to any player who hit it with a fly ball. “A heart attack the fielder would need to have for a ball to hit this sign,” the rabbi said, and Michael laughed. There were other signs too, for Bullova watches and Van Heusen shirts, for Gem razor blades and Winthrop shoes, but Abe Stark’s sign was the only one anybody ever remembered. Michael explained the distances marked on the walls: 297 feet to right field, 405 feet to center, 343 to left. He explained the scoreboard. He explained the dugouts. He was explaining the pitcher’s mound, and its height, and the meaning of the word mound, when there was a sudden sharp crack and a ball sailed from distant home plate on a high, deep line to the upper deck in left field.
Then another crack, another ball flying into the upper deck while the crowd ooohed.
Then another.
“Jesus, that Kiner kid can hit the baseball, all right,” a man behind them growled.
“No doubt about it, Louis,” his friend said.
“Even if it’s on’y battin’ practice.”
“He does it in games too, this guy.”
Ralph Kiner! A rookie last year, out of the navy. Now the big young star of the Pirates. Driving one ball after another into the stands. At the lowest point, the drive went 343 feet; balls hit into the upper deck would go 450 feet. Michael was afraid for a moment, imagining Kiner doing it in the game to Ralph Branca, the Dodger pitcher. On this day, the Dodgers must win; he did not want to remember forever a Dodger defeat. Then he thought: The man’s right, it’s only batting practice.
Then Kiner was finished and behind him came another batter. There was a medium-sized cheer, and the rabbi asked why in Brooklyn they were cheering for a player from Pittsburgh. The growling man behind them gave the explanation.
“Here’s Greenboig,” he said.
And Michael then told the rabbi about Hank Greenberg, who spent all of his life with the Tigers in Detroit and was one o
f the greatest of all hitters. One year he hit 58 home runs, only 2 less than Babe Ruth’s 60. Michael didn’t know as much about the American League as he did about the National, but he knew these things from reading the newspapers, and he explained that Greenberg had been in the air corps out in India or someplace and this was his first year in the National League and might be his last.
“Okay, this I understand,” the rabbi said, rising slowly to gaze across the field at the tiny, distant figure of Hank Greenberg. The rabbi stood so proudly that Michael thought he was going to salute. Greenberg lined two balls against the left-field wall. He hit two towering pop-ups. Then, as the rabbi sat down, he hit a long fly ball to center. The Pittsburgh outfielders watched it, tensed, then saw where it was going and stepped aside, doffing their caps and bowing.
The ball bounced off Abe Stark’s sign.
There was a tremendous roar, with shocked pigeons rising off the roof of the ballpark, and everybody was standing and the outfielders were laughing.
“He hits the sign!” the rabbi shouted exultantly. “He wins the suit!”
The guys behind them were also laughing and discussing the sign, as batting practice ended and the Pirates trotted off the field.
“Dey can’t give ‘im da suit from battin’ practice,” one of them said.
“Wait a minnit, Jabbo, wait a minnit. Look at dat sign. Does it say, Hit Sign Win Suit, except in battin’ practice?”
“No, but Ralph, da outfield went in da dumpeh! Dey let da ball go pas’ dem! Dey di’n’t even try.”
“I say Greenboig gets da suit, whatta ya bet?” said the one named Louis.
The debate was erased by another roar, as the Dodgers took the field and everyone in Ebbets Field stood to cheer. Two Negro men arrived at their aisle, carrying programs. One was very dark and wore a Dodger cap. The other was pale-skinned and wore a Hawaiian shirt and had field glasses hanging from his neck.
“Scuse me, pardon us,” said the man in the Dodger cap. They were in the third and fourth seats. The one with the field glasses sat beside Michael. He glanced at the I’M FOR JACKIE button and smiled.