by Roger Kahn
“Aaah,” Elsa Sherman said. “Come, Sol. Come, Gary. And you, my dear. Or poor Olga’s marvelous crown roast will be cold.”
It was hot. The meals were always hot and the meat was always tender. In the dining room, furnished in square walnut pieces, a large mirror contended with Olga’s nonrepresentational paintings, and conversation spun from Eliot to Sholokhov, with a touch of Mann, a dash of Auden, a suspicion of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Through each remorselessly intellectual social session, I caught threads. And when the conversation moved to Dixie Walker, I could weave fragments of my own like an adult. That was how the forties began in the Grand Army Plaza section of Brooklyn before, with sickness, heartstorm and most of all with time, the gaiety weathered away.
First, the maid left. After nine years, Elisabeth said she was sick, moved in with a sister in Queens and sent the brother-in-law for her things. “She only stares at the wall all day,” the man said, shaking his head in what appeared to be concern. But Olga doubted the story. She regarded the abrupt departure as treason. “Do you know, the bitch saved enough from her pay to buy a small apartment house. She was planning to desert us all the time.” Gordon disliked taking sides and by this time he had perfected a diversionary tactic. “I’m having trouble with a question on groupings,” he said. “I have the Four Horsemen, the Three Fates and the Sixteen Nines. You should know the last, son.”
“The major leagues,” I said.
“Amazing,” Gordon said. “Now I need a fourth grouping, but not in music. Wendell Willkie is the guest next week and music isn’t for him.”
“Oh, God, who cares?” said Olga, defeated. “Back-street Annie never gets to meet anyone.”
“The Brahms clarinet quintet would be unfair. Levant will miss the show. He and Golenpaul aren’t speaking again.”
“What is it now?” said Olga, who really did care.
No German governess could be found who would work for what the family could afford. Thereafter the maids were day workers, which rankled Olga. “Information Please” had become successful beyond anyone’s fantasies. Olga recognized the glibness of Clifton Fadiman, the memory of John Kieran and the heavy charm of F.P.A. But basically, she said, there would be no program without Gordon. It was Gordon who polished every question. It was Gordon’s eclecticism that established the tone. “The awful irony,” she said, “is that for all you do, Golenpaul won’t pay you enough for us to hire sleep-in help.”
Gordon blinked and gazed across the dinner table. “Camilli hit any today?”
“Collared again, Dad. Fast balls, I guess.”
“Why don’t you speak to that man and simply put some of these things to him?” Olga said.
Gordon Kahn, who disliked few things but despised unpleasantness, sputtered, “Woman, please.” He could not explain himself. He would not put such things to Golenpaul. (Camilli was finished by fast balls in ‘43.)
Soon afterward on a soft July evening, in a clapboard summer house fifty miles north of Brooklyn, Emily was stricken with poliomyelitis. In twenty-four hours she journeyed from a life of piano lessons, swimming dates and gossip to an isolation ward in a municipal hospital, where she watched vermin cross unpainted walls and heard meningitis victims die. Within a month she was transferred to a private hospital, but it was two years before she could come home. The quadriceps muscle in her right leg was dead. When at length she was discharged, her walk, once airy, had become a sequence of lurches.
Olga took a leave from the English Department of Thomas Jefferson High School and studied physiotherapy. She would return Emily to grace with her own hands. Gordon grew more silent. In a stricken family, the responses of many years abruptly become obsolete. Olga recognized this and she set out, after a lifetime of teaching, to become mother, nurse, healer, all at once. Gordon persisted in his old responses. “Bosh,” he would say, “there’s nothing permanently wrong with the child.” But the rationale was insupportable and he cast about for a language with which to reach his daughter. Emily responded. Broken-bodied at fourteen, she became a devout Dodger fan. By chance, the vanguard of the great and final Brooklyn Dodgers was beginning to appear.
“Is Furillo a better hitter than Galan?” The speaker at supper was not me, but Emily.
“He seems streaky,” I said.
“Galan is past his peak,” Gordon said.
“But the good righthanders, Dad. Furillo doesn’t hit them.”
“Red Barber says he’s improving,” Emily piped.
“Oh, all the saints,” Olga said, her large eyes rolling upward with great drama. “Is there nothing else in this family but the nightmare of baseball?”
The nightmare was polio. Baseball was simply a point where vectors converged. “Yessuh,” Red Barber liked to say, “baseball is more than a little bit like life.” At carefree times in early boyhood I chose to believe that life was a kind of ball game, but with a mix of years and perception I learned better. The flaw in Barber’s analogy was inevitability. A bad game ended and no matter how ardently you rooted for the Dodgers you could snap the sour mood with a good meal. But life in the household of a crippled young girl was permanently embittered. There was no escape or even avoidance. Whenever I came home, disaster rose before me. The distinction between baseball and life was as the transience of the flambeau to the permanence of night.
In retrospect, the Dodgers won the 1947 pennant with a raggle-taggle team and, also from perspective, the quality of that club was insignificant. In the year 1947 Jackie Robinson became the first black man to play in the modern major leagues. After Robinson’s remarkable season with Montreal the year before, Branch Rickey, who succeeded Larry MacPhail, assigned Robinson to take spring training with the Dodgers, while still under contract to Montreal. Robinson was so good that Rickey imagined that troops of white Dodgers would demand his immediate promotion. “After all,” he said, “Robinson could mean a pennant, and ball players are not averse to cashing World Series checks.” If the players asked, Rickey postulated, Robinson’s place would be at once secure. Actually, no white Dodger demanded Robinson and, when Rickey himself initiated the promotion, a half dozen players threatened to quit. The law of the wallet proved itself in the converse. Rickey invited the dissenters to quit, on principle, which would also have meant abandoning major league salaries. The most extreme of Dodger racists turned out to be Dixie Walker, but even he asked only to be traded. Rickey sent Walker to Pittsburgh a season later, and he played for two more years without incident or distinction.
Elements mixed in 1947 to make Robinson’s challenge an Everest. The Dodger infield was established everywhere but at first base. Robinson, who had never played first professionally, entered the major leagues at an unfamiliar position. There a number of base runners, notably Enos Slaughter of the St. Louis Cardinals, tried to plant spikes in his Achilles’ tendon. As a batter, Robinson was thrown at almost daily. Verbally he was assaulted with terminology proceeding from “nigger” up to the most raw, sexually disturbed vulgarity that raw, sexually disturbed men could conceive. In the face of this Robinson was sworn to passivity and silence. He had promised Rickey that he would encase his natural volatility in lead.
Jimmy Cannon, the columnist, spent a day with the Dodgers in 1947 and concluded that “Robinson is the loneliest man I have ever seen in sports.” Red Barber, born in Mississippi and raised in Florida, was afflicted with doubts. Prejudices from boyhood, like a cypress swamp, still haunted him. But by May, Barber was captivated by Robinson’s ability and courage. One afternoon between innings he made an apparently casual, but touching talk. He, a back-country Southerner, had come to admire Robinson so much, Barber said, “that I hope, I really do, he bats 1.000.”
The season turned on a remarkable story composed by Stanley Woodward in the Herald Tribune. Rud Rennie, who covered the Giants for the Tribune, celebrated his four yearly trips to St. Louis by joining a local band of singing tipplers, which included Dr. Robert Hyland, the team physician of the St. Louis Cardinals. The Giants prec
eded the Dodgers into St. Louis in the spring of 1947 and, late one night, Hyland told Rennie that it was too bad he wasn’t with the Dodgers because one hell of a story would break when that nigger hit town. The Cardinals, he said, intended to strike. Rennie, high, but not drunk, telephoned Woodward, who checked the story with a number of sources, including Ford C. Frick, president of the National League. At length, convinced, Woodward wrote an article describing the projected strike and adding that Frick had already addressed the Cardinals along these lines:
If you do this you will be suspended from the league. You will find that the friends you think you have in the press box will not support you, that you will be outcasts. I do not care if half the league strikes. Those who do will encounter quick retribution. All will be suspended, and I don’t care if it wrecks the National League for five years. This is the United States of America and one citizen has as much right to play as another.
The National League will go down the line with Robinson whatever the consequences. You will find if you go through with your intention that you have been guilty of complete madness.
Whether the words were Woodward’s or Frick’s—eloquence was native only to Woodward—the strikers were put to rout. After that, Robinson’s road, although still steep, led from thicket to clearing. He batted well, but not as well as he would, stole more than twice as many bases as anyone else in the league, and fielded adequately. Three times he found himself on base when Dixie Walker hit a home run. Invariably he trotted directly from home plate to dugout, skipping the customary handshake, so as not to embarrass Walker, or risk refusal.
Robinson was competent but uninspired in the World Series, by which time another Negro had begun to play in the majors and dozens were being scouted. The most exciting Series play was a catch made in deep left field by a stumpy outfielder named Al Gionfriddo. The batter who hit the long drive was Joe DiMaggio and, while I was saluting Gionfriddo’s genius, as reported by Red Barber, my father suggested that against a hitter like DiMaggio, Gionfriddo should have been stationed far into left, in the first place.
“What do you mean, Daddy?” Emily said.
“Hell,” I said. “He caught the ball.”
“Good legs,” Gordon said, “but he doesn’t qualify as an intelligent man.” Gordon turned to his daughter and lectured on the basics of positioning oneself in defensive baseball. Her round face lit, as though she were hearing a Philippic. After a while, I excused myself, pleading homework. The Yankees won the Series, four games to three.
Olga was aging softly. She maintained her weight at 105 pounds, and as lines furrowed her face they fell in flowing contours. Wedged between polio and baseball, she became more militantly intellectual. She subscribed to little reviews and no obtuseness could stay her from finishing an essay. Wandering into the living room, I would find Hudson, Sewanee, Partisan and Kenyon stacked on an end table beside a blue couch. With time, copies became dog-eared. We owned the world’s only dog-eared collection of essays by Philip Rahv. Further, Olga acted on the essays seriously. The library, housed in high cases that faced the French doors, grew with new copies of Henry James, Wallace Stevens, Edgar Allan Poe, Yvor Winters, giants of letters and princes of bombast as the season commanded. Abruptly John Keats was “rather quaint.”
Gordon consumed himself with work, with baseball talk at his crippled daughter and, when he and Emily were not closeted, with the escapes of crossword puzzle and detective story. I was not interested in the little reviews. I disliked puzzles. There was no place for me in a closet scene. One morning at the age of twenty, I awoke a stranger in the household where I was born.
“It’s time seriously to discuss what you intend doing for a living,” Gordon said. Then, yielding to his Mahleresque weakness for triteness when most serious, he said, in a portentous bass-baritone: “I think it’s time to take stock.”
“The idea of sending you to college may have been a mistake,” Olga said. “You may not be good college timber and we—I am certainly very much to blame—should not have inflicted so many demands on your intelligence.”
After high school, I decided on a semirevolution. I would run away to familiar ground. I prepared preliminary applications for Cornell, Olga’s college, mentioning that I intended to major in English. My grades were strong in English, but spotty, and my parents were surprised when an admissions dean wrote an encouraging letter. The problem, Gordon said very tightly, was that the expense of hospitalization and physiotherapy for Emily precluded my going to Cornell. He was sorry, but there was only so much money and, by the way, if I hadn’t really decided on a career, he wanted to suggest radio law.
“Radio law?”
“Yes indeed. There’s a chap who does legal work for Golenpaul. It’s fascinating and he is very affluent. I never thought of affluence as being important but, as you can see, I was wrong.” His eyes dropped. I was accepted at the Bronx campus of NYU, where, I told the admissions dean, I intended to pursue a career of radio law.
“Radio law?” the dean said.
The University College of Arts and Pure Science offered compulsory ROTC, clasp-hands-on-desk discipline, an ancient faculty, a persistent strain of anti-Semitism and a kind of justifiable paranoia among cadres of young Jews who craved good marks, but not learning, as they thrashed recklessly toward the common goal, medical school. All the NYU Bronx campus lacked was a balanced curriculum, an intellectual climate and girls. It was not a college, but an anticollege. It was not a place of learning but a theater of memorization. It was an institution where students regarded Lear’s catastrophe as insignificant unless it was worth eight points on an exam. During my sophomore year Dr. Theodore Francis Jones, whose history course ranged down a thousand byways from Thebes to Byzantium, summoned me after a lecture. He was bald, with a bird head and bright blue eyes. “I’m surprised to see you’re flunking organic chemistry,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you interested in organic chemistry?”
“No, sir.”
“What do you want to do?”
I paused. Dr. Jones looked like someone to trust. “Well, sir, I believe I’d like to be a writer.”
“A writer!” Dr. Jones spoke so loudly that I blushed. “Then what on earth are you doing at a place like this?”
But in the living room at the Lincoln Place apartment two years later I would not tell my father my longing. We sat in overstuffed chairs, feeling Olga’s eyes, and reading disappointment in one another. “You seemed to like journalism, once,” Gordon said. “Go to the Herald Tribune. Ask for this name. You may be put on a list to become a copyboy.”
“Great.” The word exploded, like hope.
“If this doesn’t work,” Olga said, “you should take a trade. It’s no disgrace. Not everyone can be an intellectual.” We exchanged looks of loathing love.
V
The Dodger DC-3 burst out of overcast near Jacksonville, finding clear air at the border of Florida. “Just like the Chamber of Commerce says,” the pilot announced. No one had gotten airsick and I had neglected to tell Fresco Thompson how I found my way to the Dodgers. It was too difficult, too much on the senses, and, besides, it did not seem plausible. “You can see beach and breakers off to the left,” the pilot’s voice intoned. Minor leaguers lunged to one side of the plane, and the DC-3 tipped slightly. I grabbed both seat arms.
“Don’t worry,” Thompson said, “ball players haven’t overturned a plane in flight yet, not that there haven’t been some crazy enough to try.” The late sun lit the cabin. “Slowest trip I can remember. I’m afraid you’re going to miss your game.”
“I guess I can wait until tomorrow.”
“You can afford to. You’ll see a ball game every day from now until October.” Thompson winked. “You had better like baseball, young man.”
And writing, I thought. At twenty-four, I was passionately fond of both.
Ball players were returning to the Hotel McAllister in Miami when I finally checked in. I recognized
Reese, wearing Puck’s expression, and the soldier bulk of Gil Hodges, and Carl Furillo with a face from Caesar’s legions. It surprised me how many Dodgers I did not know. I had begun to consider the absence of black players—they were not welcome at the McAllister—when someone poked my ribs and cried, “Hiya, Rudolf.” It was Harold Rosenthal, who was abandoning the job I would take. He was a round, stooped man of thirty-eight, with crinkly brown hair and eyeglasses, respected at the Tribune for deft writing. “You know Vinnie,” Rosenthal said. “This is Vin Scully. We’ll get a Scotch.” Scully had a long-chinned, rather handsome face, under a shock of red hair. He was the number three broadcaster on the unit which Barber led.
“Into the gymnasium,” Scully proclaimed.
“Yes,” I said, vaguely. “Hey, Harold. How was the game?”
“Eech,” Rosenthal said. He waved his right hand in a deprecatory motion. “Into the gym.”
When drinks came to our table near the bar, I tried again. “How did it go tonight?” I said.
“What?” Rosenthal said.
“The game.”
“We win, 5–3. Forget it.”
“Just an exhibition,” Scully said.
I still wanted to talk baseball, to draw out the men.
“Pitching good?”
“Whoop,” Scully cried. “There goes one.”
“One what?”
“You know why I call this place the gym,” Scully said. “You’ll see more whores chasing more ball players than in any other place in the world.”
“And breaking the New York A.C. record for the sixty-yard dash time after time,” Rosenthal said.
“Time after time,” Scully sang, in a pleasant baritone voice.
The Miami baseball field possessed some of the gingerbread modernity that characterized the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The stadium roof was a cantilevered arch. Tubes of neon served as foul poles. The press box consisted of individual booths where reporters sat glassed in and comfortable. “Wow,” I said. “This is going to be all right.”