by Roger Kahn
Elisabeth removes her underpants and does not remove her dentures. The body is broad and functional. “Wow,” I say, finding my voice. “Wow, Elisabeth, you’ve got a build.”
“Ach.” She shakes her head, pleased. “I’m a woman, aren’t I?”
She bathes, puts on a rayon nightgown and shoos me off to sleep. In my own bedroom, I can hardly believe my fortune. Age germinates allure, and Elisabeth must be thirty-five. Two weeks later, my parents return to Carnegie Hall and Elisabeth invites me back to her bath. At thirteen I have a steady date. Elisabeth bathes. I watch. In my mind I prepare an arcanum of advances, but I cannot act. At length, out of boredom or bitchery, Elisabeth betrays me. She confesses to Donald the daytime doorman, a tiny man with wisps of white hair running down his neck. Donald wears buff uniforms and shouts at eight-year-olds playing catch in Lincoln Place. “Ge-radda-here. Go backa shannytown.” Thirteen-year-olds are not assaulted by the war whoop of Donald the Doorman. Most are bigger than he. This undersized tormentor of children not only became the repository of my secret, but with the terrible righteousness of menials, he recounts all that he has heard to Olga. A stormy scene breaks in the living room, between the French doors and the massive ivory-colored bookcases Olga herself has designed. From my bedroom I can hear the tone but only a few of the words. Olga is saying something must be done. Shrill fragments rattle down the hall like shrapnel. “Wastrel. Pitching in a Pinch. Dodgers! Baseball! Sex fiend!”
I open the door. “Applesauce,” Gordon Kahn is saying. “Absolute applesauce.”
“Speak to him. You have to speak to him! Before he does something terrible!”
“All right. It’s all a lot of bosh, but I’ll speak to him.”
The next day, Saturday, my father speaks to me about baseballs. Don’t I want a new one? Gordon says.
“It’s okay, Dad. I got a baseball.”
“What kind?”
“A quarter ball.” All baseballs were described by price. The nickel ball was worthless. Jerry Surewitz hit a nickel baseball once. It split. The cardboard halves were stuffed with crumpled pages of a Japanese newspaper. The dime ball was better. It was made in America. The twenty-five-cent baseball was really good. You could hit a quarter ball for days and when the cover ripped, you peeled it off, exposing tightly wound yarn. You then wrapped the yarn in black friction tape and you could use the ball for another month, although the tape made it heavy and hard to throw.
“I’m talking about a real baseball,” Gordon says. “A fifty-center. Come on over to Levy’s Stationery on Nostrand Avenue.” My father is a short man who walks with long bouncing strides. Although it is Saturday, he wears a suit and necktie. He has several suits, all from Howard Clothes, all blue or gray, or blue and gray, all herringbone. He explains that two Howard suits are better than one from Saks, but the truth is he does not care about clothing. The radio program, “Information Please,” is a national success and he has made one error, one inconsequential error in business, something he does not care about either. He is on salary. He has not demanded a half, a third, a tenth of his brainchild, “Information Please.” Dan Golenpaul, the man who came to him for help, owns it all. And as Golenpaul grows rich, his arrogance rises like a miasma and he finds this short, bald, mustached man from Brooklyn, who remembers poetry, Jeffersonian sentences and the sequence in which roads intersect Saw Mill River Parkway, a thorn to conscience but a necessity to the program. No one can prepare and edit so many questions on so many topics so deftly as Gordon J. Kahn. Golenpaul is galled by his dependence, which he denies, and Gordon J. Kahn, still teaching high school, starting at eight each day, travels to Madison Avenue for radio work and Golenpaul’s abuse at three. The only sign of pressure is that now, instead of smoking one pack a day, he smokes three, Pall Mall king-sized cigarettes, which one finds “wherever particular people congregate.”
“Red Barber is going to be a guest expert,” Gordon Kahn tells me, as he lurches toward Nostrand Avenue, a Pall Mall preceding him, an inch of ash suspended at the tip.
“Watch the ash, Dad.” Too late. The burnt tobacco congregates with the blue-gray herringbone Howard suit. “You gonna have a lot of baseball questions for him? Have you met him?” (A nod.) “Say, what is he like to talk to? He knows Durocher.”
“He’s an intelligent man.” “Intelligent man” is the highest award in Gordon Kahn’s private storehouse. It is his Medal of Honor. “Barber is extremely intelligent,” he says. “He may make a living broadcasting Dodger games, but his interests go beyond that. He knows American history, particularly the Reconstruction Period. He likes poetry. His name is Walter Lanier Barber and he’s a distant relative of Sidney Lanier.”
“Who’s Sidney Lanier?”
Gordon Kahn lights a new Pall Mall from the old and says, “When we get back, you are to look up a poem called ‘Song of the Chattahoochee.’”
“I thought we were playing ball.”
“I mean after that. You might even read the poem. It wouldn’t hurt you to read more poetry.”
“Aah,” I say. “Who has time for stuff like that?” Doubt and pain film Gordon’s gray-green eyes.
With the new ball, we drive to Cunningham Park in Queens. Or rather, we are driven by Olga. Gordon Kahn stopped driving one morning four years earlier when, confusing brake and accelerator, he drove a new Studebaker into the glass front of a stationery store. I sit in the rear seat of the new Dodge, thumping the fifty-cent ball into the old Camp Al-Gon-Kwit mitt.
At Cunningham Park, Olga excuses herself to walk. My father and I find an empty diamond, number five, and Gordon says, “We’ll start with grounders, then we’ll go to flies.”
I station myself at first. The grounders skip out hard on two or three bounces. There is no faking on sharp grounders. You put your head down and follow the ball and hope that the last bounce will be true, or at least playable, and not carom into your mouth or groin. Head down is the secret. To follow the ball into your glove you have to keep your head down, but when you do, you leave your nose and mouth and eyes unprotected. “Head down,” my father calls. “The ball can’t bite.” Oh, baseball is a game of subtle terrors. You hope for the last bounce to be high. A high bounce is as easy as a throw. But nobody who understands the game is fooled. One grounder bounces high; and then another. “L. H.,” my father calls. “L. H. Kahn.”
“What’s that?”
“For Lucky Hop. Be ready.”
A kind of test is under way. Coming of age at Cunningham Park, Queens. Gordon Kahn is testing to see if his indulged, skinny, quick-tongued son dares show his face to hard ground balls. For once the gabbling is quieted. The bald mustached man, with the thick wrists, who wears a white shirt and bow tie to hit fungoes, and the boy are reaching, sensing, challenging and I suppose loving one another through a fifty-cent baseball, whose cover, even now, is showing spots of grass stain. One bad bounce hits me in the wrist. Another smacks my shoulder. I am not Jersey Joe Stripp, but I keep forcing myself. Head down. Head down. The baseball smarts, but pain passes and I feel a crown of sweat and all sensations are obliterated by pride. I am showing Gordon Kahn that I am not afraid of the ball.
Olga returns from her walk. She is wearing a plaid skirt and sensible brown shoes. “Gore-don. Have you talked yet?”
“Please, woman!”
But the cue for action has been sounded. Olga has commanded exorcism of the satyr. After four more ground balls, my father beckons with one finger. My left wrist is red. My glove is soft with perspiration. I half-turn, flip it to the fringe of outfield grass, and lope in, knees pumping high, head up. Then I lean forward, palms on knees, the way major leaguers do when they are awaiting an artful stratagem from the manager. “You know,” Gordon announces, “women are different from men.”
He rests the bat against a hip and wastes three matches lighting a Pall Mall. Then he puffs furiously. I realize. The warm sweat freezes. I lose my breath. They know I have been watching the maid. In the hot sun on the ball field, I cannot
envision the maid naked or any woman naked or myself fool enough to lust to see. But I have wanted, and now I have fetched myself a retribution. A dozen punishments spin about my brain. They’ll take the radio. That’s it. They’ll commandeer the black Air King radio and I won’t be able to hear Red Barber and his sidekick AI Helfer broadcast any more Dodger games.
“Once a month,” my father says, “women have a flow of blood through their private parts. This flow has to do with ova, the eggs women produce, internally. They produce a new one every month. The bleeding is called the menstrual period.”
“Is that right? I didn’t know that. I never heard about that.”
“Well, it’s true, even so,” my father says. “This is called the menstrual period, although in certain vulgar quarters it is referred to as the monthlies. Nobody we know or would care to know could possibly refer to it in that way.”
“Once a month, they bleed? From there?”
My father puffs the Pall Mall. “Get out in left and I’ll hit some flies,” he says, concluding the only discussion of sex that is ever to pass between us. I run down fly balls poorly. “You’re probably tired,” Gordon calls. “But you weren’t bad on the grounders. Not bad at all.” That is the second highest trophy in his storehouse. “Not bad at all” is my father’s Distinguished Service Cross.
We rejoin Olga at the gray Dodge, feeling very close. “Did you listen to your father?” Olga says.
“Yeah, Ma.”
“Your father’s a very sensible man,” Olga says.
“He’s okay, Ma.”
I feel tears welling. “Your wrist,” Olga says. “It’s all red and it’s swelling. Gordon! What have you been doing to that child?”
IV
When the wind blew from the south and the French doors had been opened, the sound of cheering carried from Ebbets Field into the apartment. It was astonishing, to hear cheers from a major league crowd while sitting at home. Over the Air King, Red Barber talked in his wise, friendly way. “Camilli up. Dolph isn’t the biggest man in baseball, but there are none stronger. No, suh. They don’t come stronger than Dolph Camilli. Down in training camp one time some of the ball players went to visit a zoo. Hold it. Here’s Warneke’s pitch. A curve down low. There was a gorilla in the zoo and Camilli got to staring at the gorilla and the gorilla got to staring back at Dolph. Warneke’s a fast workman. A curve stays wide. Ball two. And they’re both a-lookin’ at each other and someone, I think it may have been Whit Wyatt, John Whitlow Wyatt of the North Georgia Wyatts, says, ‘You know I think Camilli could take him, hand to hand.’ Hold it! Camilli swings! There’s a high drive to right. It’s way up there. Way up! Slaughter’s at the base of the wall looking up, looking, but Enos can plumb forget this one. It’s gone. Over the 344-foot sign. Number 16 for Dolph Camilli. Say, folks, I think Wyatt may have something there.” Muffled cheering escapes the Air King. I thrust open the bedroom door. Seconds later an undulating roar, the real cheer arrives, borne by the wind. “That line drive was still rising when it went out of sight over Bedford Avenue. Did you see where that one landed, Brother Al?”
“No, I didn’t, Red, but where’s Canarsie?”
“Hey,” I shout. “Camilli hit another.”
“That was a real Old Goldie,” says Red Barber on the Air King, “and we’re rollin’ a carton of Old Golds, two hundred fresh-tastin’ real cigarettes, down the screen to Dolph. We know he’ll ‘preciate ‘em. He’s quite a guy.”
The Dodgers arose out of the 1930s, the wretched of the earth, armored by the tactical cunning of their new president, Larry MacPhail, Leland Stanford MacPhail, a man who tried to kidnap Kaiser Wilhelm in 1918 and failed but did capture a genuine Hohenzollern ashtray. MacPhail was gutty and brilliant and he rebuilt the team with remarkable trades and with monies cadged from the Brooklyn Trust Company. He put lights up in Ebbets Field, and for the first night game, the first Brooklyn contest ever under the arcs, John Vander Meer of Cincinnati pitched his SECOND consecutive NO-HITTER. Double-no-hit Vander Meer! MacPhail was not only good, he was lucky, and Dodger baseball became a carnival. He hired Babe Ruth to coach, which didn’t work out, and signed Leo Durocher to manage, which worked wonderfully, and he brought Barber, the Ol’ Redhead, to broadcast. Even if the baseball wasn’t really that exciting, how could you tell when you listened to that siren-sweet Southern tongue? Red knew his players and his league and his game and how to tell a story and how to let rhythms run. A ball game told by Barber was a drama, with plots and subplots, but going onward, always onward among stories rounding out scenes, and climaxes described with such dramatic restraint that you cried out, “Come on, Red, come on, Old Friend, Companion of a Hundred Afternoons, let go, come root with us.” And from the Air King: “These Phillies are an interesting team. They’re in for three days and they’re plenty of tickets, heah! Syl Johnson has been to the mound before. That runner on first, Tuck Stainback, won’t bother him. Not a bit. Been pitching in the major leagues since 1922. They used to talk about O rare Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s friend, but the Phils have their own rare one in Syl.” All right, Red. Great sportsmanship. Hurray for all the Johnsons! But do you have to tell us when the lousy Phillies are beating us 2 to 1? “There’s a second strike on Coscarart. Fine curve ball.” All right, Red. But he’s against us. Crack. Cheer. “Coscarart lines the two-strike pitch cleanly into center field. Base hit.” Hey. We’re alive! “Plenty of tickets left for tomorrow. Two-thirty game. I’ll be looking for you, heah! They’re stirring in the ol’ pea patch, and with men on first and second and nobody out, here comes the Phillies’ manager, Doc Prothro, to the mound, with the potential Dodger winning run at first base.”
For six consecutive years, the Dodgers had been clowns. I never remembered them out of the second division. Now in 1939, with MacPhail and Barber and Durocher and Camilli and Hamlin and Hughie Casey, they finished third and drew a million people. “Everything happens in Ebbets Field,” Red Barber said, “so it’s worth coming out, but still, there are no fans anywhere like Brooklyn fans. Anywhere. No, suh.” In 1940 the Dodgers added Joe Medwick and finished second. Then, in 1941, after a beautifully close race with St. Louis, they won the pennant. You knew they had to win after you heard Barber report a game in Sportsman’s Park, the only major league ball park west of the Mississippi River. It was one of those rare encounters where two teams match strength so heroically that the verdict, the final score, describes not only an afternoon but a season. Twenty years later participants became excited anew in recollection. Whit Wyatt and Mort Cooper pitched three-hitters. In the fifth inning, the Cardinals put men on second and third with nobody out. Wyatt, master of the outside slider and the inside fast ball, overwhelmed the next three batters. Nobody scored. In the seventh inning Billy Herman and Dixie Walker hit doubles. That was the game: Brooklyn, 1; St. Louis, 0. The Dodgers won the pennant by roughly the margin of that victory.
“You have to give these Dodgers credit,” Red Barber confided on the Air King. “They won when they had to win. They weren’t afraid. And plenty of credit goes to the fans of Brooklyn, too.” Thanks, Red, but credit? Credit for what? We weren’t pitching. We were riding the trolley cars for five cents and paying for our tickets or listening to the radio at home. Well, credit for patience, maybe, but mostly that belonged to another generation. The previous Dodger pennant had come during the final days of the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson. “Now there’s a team that was a team,” my father insisted. It was a point of dignity with him not to be caught rooting as ardently or for precisely the same things as I. “You should have seen Zack Wheat, ‘Buckwheat’ we called him, smack that ball down the right-field line, wobbling his back leg before he swung. You should have seen him, but he finished the year before you were born.” Gordon was speaking of Wheat and his boyhood, but he was excited by Camilli and mine. We both knew it in that pennant season. We exchanged quick looks and for the first time we were men together.
That was how the forties began in the Grand Army Plaza section
of Brooklyn. There was concern about the Nazi-Soviet treaty, nervousness about the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and horror at Hitler’s pogroms. But little Abe Fishbein with the faintly red mustache said the Soviets had been encircled. Gary Lapolla thought he had a point. Gus Simpson seemed pained. Jack Lippman looked uncomfortable. Sol Sherman said that as far as he was concerned Stalin was a Russian Hitler. Nothing else. Or could someone explain if he was any better, how he was? “Dinner,” said Olga smilingly, “is served and I don’t see how you can equate Stalin with that monster.”
“What are we having, Ma?”
“It’s impolite to ask.”
“Ah, Olga, tell the kid.” Abe Fishbein with the beetle-bright eyes.
“Crown roast.”
“You’re some Stalinist, with your crown roasts, Olga,” said Gary Lapolla, all olive skin and suavity.
“Those two son of a guns do exactly the same things, isn’t that so?” said Sol Sherman, a thick-chested man with a mustache like Hemingway’s.
“It’s good, Sol, you teach math,” Lapolla said. “If they let you at young people in history, you could do serious damage.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Sol, shouting.
“What do you think of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Regor?” Gary said. “Your mother thinks you think nothing. She thinks you think of nothing but baseball, which she thinks is nothing. Ergo.” The large living room was crowded with bright failed poets and unpublished novelists, now forty-five, teaching or practicing law. “Do you know what ‘Regor’ is?” Gary said. “It’s Roger in a little-known tongue, the obfuscated dialect of Serutan.”
I blinked. “Backwards,” Jack Lippman said, kindly.
“I suppose there’s something wrong, in your cockeyed scheme, with a kid liking baseball,” shouted Sol Sherman.