The Babe Ruth Deception

by David O. Stewart

  “Come on, you know Briggs is telling it right. Ain’t nothing going to be given us. We need to stand up and seize it. You used to tell me that over in the trenches, told me your daddy told you that your whole life.”

  “Cecil, you need to think over all this standing up business. Standing up just makes it easier for the government to find you. Then they write your name down, come see you in the middle of the night. If Mr. Briggs doesn’t watch out, he’s going to get himself a one-way ticket to the pokey, or out of the country, sent away like all those Russian reds got sent away.”

  Lowering his voice, Cecil increased his intensity. “Joshua, you know there’s got to be revolution, just like they had in Russia. Seize the government and take the wealth of the rich for the benefit of the poor. For black folks, ain’t no other way. We’re never going to get anything that we don’t take. Things can’t keep going on this way.”

  “Cecil, we just need to think this thing through.” The tobacco was starting to taste as sour as Cecil’s dedication to the African Blood Brotherhood. Joshua balanced the cigarette on the rim of the saucer. “You say you want to take the wealth from the rich folks. You really think that’s going to bring money to black folks? Haven’t you noticed how all those Bolsheviks are white? You think they’re going to forget all of a sudden how that skin makes them better than us? We may take the money, but they’re going to keep it, leave us with nothing except maybe that ticket back to Africa, where nobody in the Cook family has lived for a few hundred years.”

  Cecil sat back with some force, clucked his tongue and shook his head. “Come on, you can’t really think it’d be any worse than it is now. Look at your daddy—smartest colored man I ever met, right? Back in Africa, he’d be a goddamned king. What’s he do now? Hustles bets on some broke-down Negro ballplayers who play for nickels and dimes. And he’s got to pay off Jewish gangsters just to do that.”

  Joshua stared through the cafeteria. New customers were working their way down the food line. He was sorry he’d introduced Cecil to his father. Sorry, too, that he’d spoken about his father’s business, such as it was. Cecil never knew his own father, so he’d got real impressed with Speed Cook. Too impressed.

  “Joshua?”

  He raised his eyebrows in answer.

  “You sound like you’re ready to go into business, turn into a capitalist, maybe with your old man, like he wants you to.”

  “Hell, he doesn’t want me to do that. That’s about the only thing we agree on—I should do something better. I don’t even like baseball—playing it, watching it, even knowing it exists. My daddy knows that. ’Course, he does want to stop me consorting with dangerous revolutionaries like you.” Joshua traced his finger around the rim of his coffee cup. “But you know, I’ve been thinking. . . .” His voice drifted off and he stared for a minute more.

  “Bully for you.” Cecil made a face and shook his head. Joshua was his friend, his best friend, but sometimes the man acted like the whole world should stop and wait for him.

  “No, listen to me. I’ve been thinking about this for a while.” He pushed the cup aside and leaned forward. “What about bootlegging?” When Cecil made an exasperated sound, Joshua held out a hand. “No, no, hear me out. You know, there’s some colored men moving into it now. It’s a brand new business, so it’s wide open. And there’s lots of money just wandering around in it, looking for a place to go. People’re drinking more than ever now we got Prohibition. It’s like if you said turnips was against the law, suddenly everyone’d want nothing but turnips.”

  “Bootlegging’s against the law.”

  Joshua laughed. “Some revolutionary you are. I thought you wanted to break all the laws, bring down the government!” He drained the room-temperature coffee from his cup. “How about this? Think of bootlegging as a way to undermine the government, American style. It’s a revolutionary act that just happens to put dollars into empty pockets like yours and mine.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “I think I am. I’m heading over toward lower Broadway, an errand for a couple of bootleggers. They were hanging around the old man’s baseball team. It’s a little collecting work, some speakeasy.”

  “Look at that. Capitalism is already making you a criminal. They won’t let you make an honest buck.”

  Joshua smiled. “But Prohibition’s such a dumb law.”

  * * *

  Joshua cut across Wall Street to get over to Broadway. He saw some black faces here in the heart of American capitalism, but none of them was dressed as well as he was. He owned two suits and they were both sharp. This one was a soft brown, single-button number with a rich chocolate stripe. The vest had lapels. His cream-colored fedora sported a tan silk band. He looked better than most of the rich men he passed. He kept to the north side of the street to stay in the sunlight.

  At the corner of Wall and Broad, he paused to take in the imperial offices of J. P. Morgan & Co., the beating heart of the capitalist beast. Though only a few stories high, the squat building radiated the self-importance of an Egyptian pharaoh. Joshua craned his neck. Getting out of a taxi over there, that looked like the blond head of Violet Fraser. He’d met her in France the year before, when her father helped him on that business with the army. He liked her. She seemed like more than just a pretty girl. They had vowed to get together back in America, but they hadn’t. No surprise there. He wasn’t from her world, not even a little bit.

  He caught a second glimpse as she crossed the sidewalk. It was definitely Violet. He thought about calling out, but didn’t. She was going into the Morgan bank. She wouldn’t want to deal with him right now, even to be seen with him. She probably had a boyfriend in there, some Ivy League man. And Joshua had business.

  Halfway down the next block, the sidewalk surged under his feet. Something slapped him down on his face. A roar burst into his ears. The world hung suspended. Time stopped.

  When Joshua’s mind began to work again, whenever that was, he had trouble understanding the thought that was struggling to be recognized. It hung right near him but he couldn’t reach it. Then it was there. After surviving six months dodging German shells, he wasn’t about to get blown up on the streets of New York.

  * * *

  Debris was settling around him. Rock and dust. Wood and fabric. Bits that might be flesh. He coughed and squinted, then rolled up on an elbow. He shaded his eyes to look back at the blast site. A crater gaped at the entrance to the Morgan bank. Wagons and cars were twisted heaps. Broken glass lay everywhere. Bodies littered the pavement at terrible angles.

  The silence confused him. No sound. He rose onto all fours, his head hanging down. Still silent. He lifted his head, then raised up on his knees. He squeezed his eyes shut and placed his hands over them. He opened the lids. There . . . there were screams. They were far away. He got to his feet, still shaky, and turned toward the Morgan building. He fumbled in his pants pocket for his handkerchief. He put it over his mouth. His palms were raw, scraped when he was knocked down. A woman knelt nearby. She held her hands over her mouth. They were her screams. He could hear them better now. But only them. Wait. A bell was ringing. A fire truck? In the gutter, off to the right. It was a hand. He looked away, willed his feet to move forward. He’d seen worse in France.

  He could focus. Others were moving in the same direction he was. Toward the bank. They were calling out but their voices were muffled. He heard coughing. Blood pooled under a horse that had been blown out of his harness. The horse had only three legs. Its eye stared up at the sky, the cart reduced to kindling. An open-top car rested on its side, its fender crumpled and driver gone, who knew where.

  Joshua grew steadier. He could hear more. Sirens now. Shouting. The air was still filled with . . . he pushed the thought aside. The front of a building across from Morgan was gone. Girders and struts and wiring stood naked to the world. There was moisture on his lips. He tasted it. Salty. He touched it. Blood was trickling from his nose.

  The Morgan entrance was tor
n open, its heavy doors intact but splayed to the side. A leg in blue serge extended from under one door. Joshua stepped over the corner of the door, over the leg. He peered into the bank. Daylight streamed in from unnatural holes, spotlighting debris in the air. He felt shaky again. His legs froze. He leaned against the thick granite wall that had withstood the blast. He breathed through his handkerchief. A massive chandelier had crashed down on the lobby, pulverizing everything beneath it.

  Nothing he saw looked like Violet. There was movement toward the back. The bomb’s impact would have been less there. He started forward, reaching out with both hands. He struggled past the chandelier, then beyond upended desks and chairs, chunks of ceiling. He veered around two bodies covered with rubble, stopped to cough. The coughing bent him over. He could hear himself. Bells and sirens, too.

  He wasn’t sure until he was standing over her. She made no sound. Her hands and arms were free, her eyes wide. One leg was under a heavy desk covered with ceiling plaster. The end of a ceiling beam rested on the desk. He spoke to her, his voice small in his head. She said nothing. Her eyes were scared eyes, but he thought they knew him. His brain was still slow. He didn’t see other people nearby. He stopped to calculate, to figure out how the debris would shift when he moved things. He didn’t want something new sliding on top of her. He started methodically, removing one piece at a time. His strength started coming back. Then he reached the ceiling beam. It was too big. He looked back to the doorway. Others were climbing inside, arms held out for balance, to ward off the horror. He called out and waved his arms.

  A young white man approached. Joshua pointed at the beam, then at the direction it should go. Once the newcomer understood the job, he shouted to the front of the bank. More men came near. The building was filling up. Joshua crouched down to Violet. He explained what they had to do. Her eyes were wet but she nodded.

  Five of them strained. They lifted the beam, pivoted it, then dropped it with a thud. Joshua lifted the side of the desk by himself, fired by the prospect of setting her free. Balancing the desk up on its end, he made sure it was stable, then turned back. Her right leg was turned at a slant. It was black from internal bleeding. He bent down and spoke again, urgently. She shouldn’t look down. She nodded but then looked. Her eyes rolled back in her head.

  Joshua felt his control slip. “Stretcher!” he screamed. Then screamed again. “For God’s sake, where’s a stretcher?”

  Chapter 5

  Fraser walked quickly from his lab to the Flower Hospital, a ponderous brick structure that resembled a home for ghosts and witches more than a place of healing. Happily, the hospital’s human residents included the city’s finest orthopedic surgeon. A week after the bombing, Violet and her poor leg still needed the best.

  The call came through before he heard about the blast on Wall Street. An unfamiliar voice, distorted by the overloaded telephone lines of that terrible day, said it was Joshua Cook. Violet, the voice said, had been in an accident. She was at Volunteer Hospital near City Hall. Fraser hadn’t asked for details. He said he’d be right there, slammed down the phone, ran downstairs, and jumped in his car.

  He had learned more from the shouts of street-corner news vendors, already hawking reports of the disaster. Desperate, he’d raged at the people who swarmed the streets, indifferent to the crisis and how they slowed him down. Horse-drawn delivery wagons, messengers on bicycles, old men with long beards and sad mustaches, and young women tired before their time. They were all malevolent obstacles. When he had arrived in New York twenty years before, he marveled that the air held enough oxygen to support so many. He had grown numb to the wonder of it, insulated by the Ansonia and his hard-won respectability.

  South of the numbered streets, he’d slowed to a crawl. Vehicles avoiding the bomb site butted up against those coming to aid the injured. He’d abandoned his car a mile from the Volunteer Hospital. Out of breath, sweaty, he found the building was only a clinic for the poor, deluged with mangled bodies from the bombing. His white lab coat worked as a badge of authority in the mayhem. He searched the corridors, ignoring anguished cries that came at him from all directions. He was there as a father, not a doctor.

  Joshua saw him first and called his name, waving a hand. The boy didn’t look any better than the other victims. Dust and plaster bits made his hair and skin a spectral white. Blood had crusted under his nose. His suit was filthy and torn. Violet lay on a stretcher on the floor. The boy, crouching, held her hand. Her eyes opened when Fraser took Joshua’s place.

  “Do you have much pain?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “It’s her leg, sir,” Joshua said, and pointed. A rough splint, wrapped with gauze, hung on the outside of her right leg. Fraser’s heart sank. Above the knee. Swelling was stretching her blackened skin to the bursting. Internal bleeding. She needed attention now. Better attention than she could get there. He told Joshua to wait.

  Fraser dodged down the corridor to a supply room he had passed. He told the nurse on duty that he needed morphine for a patient. She gestured to a shelf and let him through.

  When Fraser gave Violet the injection, he spoke to Joshua over his shoulder. “Son, can you carry her with me?”

  “Of course. I got her here.”

  “I mean a long way. It’s madness out there.”

  Joshua stepped behind Violet’s head and reached down for the stretcher handles. Fraser told Violet that they had to move to a better hospital. It was the only way. They lifted her and set off. She weighed so little. Fraser called out warnings over his shoulder as he backed through the crowded hallways. Violet’s face looked translucent. Her eyes were out of focus.

  The air was cooler on the street, easier to breathe. They set her down so Fraser could turn to face the direction they were walking. People made way for them. Fraser headed uptown, vaguely toward where he left the car.

  “What do you need, Doc?” A red-faced police officer fell into step next to him.

  Fraser shouted that they had to get to Flower Hospital. They needed an ambulance. At the corner of Park Row and Chambers, the cop told them to head north to Pearl; he’d be there with an ambulance. Then he took off. When they reached Pearl, the ambulance was there. Fraser hugged the cop before climbing in after Violet. There was no space for Joshua.

  Eliza didn’t leave the hospital for the first three days. Now, a week into the siege, they were taking turns, changing off at noon and at midnight. Starting his shift at midday, Fraser stopped to see Doctor Nylander, who was the reason he brought her to Flower. He had served in France with Nylander, who was young enough to know the new techniques. Today Nylander had no news. The thighbone was crushed. Violet had endured two surgeries to ease the swelling and align the remaining fragments. More surgery was possible. Amputation still not out of the question. They were using a Thomas splint, one of the recent innovations, but no one could predict what healing would occur or if infection would set in. When Nylander mentioned amputation, Fraser turned cold. From the war, he knew the emotional price of amputation. It seemed so much worse for a young girl. His beautiful girl, disfigured forever. He could see that leg, dimpled with baby fat, take its first step. He told Nylander not to mention it to Eliza or Violet. Not unless he had to.

  Fraser paused outside Violet’s room. He tried to wipe away his anxiety over all the wrong turns her injury could take. She would feel his anxiety if he brought it in with him.

  Eliza was sitting in the straight-back chair that was the best the hospital had. She had a pillow from home to soften the seat. Both hands held the purse in her lap. She rose as he entered. “Have to fly, dear,” she said. “Another of the leads is trying to bail out on that miserable farce at the Orpheum.” She kissed Violet on the forehead, her hand cupping their daughter’s still, pale face. She smiled. “I think you’ll find the patient doing well.” She nodded at the window. “Keep that open. The smells in here are horrid. They’re hard on her.” She gave him a businesslike peck on the lips.

  T
he departure of Eliza, the natural focus of any group, left a silence. Those who remained had to reorient themselves. Fraser asked Violet how she felt, how she slept, her appetite, the sensations in her leg. He inspected the dressing. He made a note to talk to Nylander about weaning her off the morphine. They had used it too much in France.

  Finally, Violet pulled up the sheet and protested. “Isn’t Doctor Nylander the one who’s responsible for me?”

  “Don’t try that, young lady. I answer to a higher authority. You can’t expect me to face your mother without having formed my own medical opinion.” Fraser’s eye fell on an extravagant new bouquet on a far window ledge.

  “A new secret admirer?” he asked with a smile, lowering himself into the punishing chair. He squirmed in an effort to nudge the pillow to a comfortable position. He wasn’t looking forward to twelve hours in the chair. The bouquet must be from his colleagues at Rockefeller. No, it would be from one of Eliza’s Broadway types. It had that look-at-me quality that theatrical folks bring to everything.

  “It’s from your old friends, Daddy. The Cooks.”

  “The Cooks?”

  Violet allowed herself a small smile and ooched herself higher on the bed. “I think it’s really from Joshua, but he signed it from his whole family.”

  “Really.” Fraser walked over and inspected the bouquet more closely. He read the note. “Do you remember Joshua from that day? What he did?”

  She shook her head. “Not till we got to the hospital.”

  “The first one?”

  She nodded. “I was afraid of him at first. He had all that dust and filth on him. Like some terrible creature from another world. And I didn’t expect to see a colored man. But he was so kind.”

  “If ever there was a knight in tattered gabardine, it was Joshua.” He nodded at the bouquet. “I suppose we should be sending something to him. I’ll talk to your mother about it.”