The Brooklyn Nine

by Alan Gratz

The Pinkerton released his prisoner and nodded. “West Brighton’s the place for you,” he said. “Now move along.”

  Walter’s father dragged him away, sparing him at least the ministrations of his mother.

  “What were you thinking, getting into a scrap at the Brighton? Not a week goes by I don’t get called into school for your fighting, but on vacation?”

  “They jumped me!” Walter protested. “They called me a sheeny!”

  “That’s enough of that talk,” his mother scolded. Walter saw his mother and father exchange a look.

  “Why aren’t we staying at the Brighton this year?” he asked. “We stayed here last year.”

  “I told you, they’re out of rooms.”

  “They have a thousand rooms,” Walter said. “How can they be sold out? It’s not even summer. I thought we had a reservation.”

  “The West Brighton is just as nice,” his mother said, and her tone put an end to the conversation. Walter sighed.

  The West Brighton was just as nice, only it was twenty times smaller. Even so, they had plenty of rooms open.

  “The name is Snider,” Walter’s father told the clerk. Walter thought he’d misheard his father. Their name was Schneider, not Snider. But then his father spelled it for the clerk—S-N-I-D-E-R—and that was how they were entered into the hotel register. Walter started to open his mouth, but a nervous shake of the head from his mother cut him off.

  A colored porter carried their bags to their hotel room. Along the way, Walter saw something else different about the West Brighton Hotel. There were Jews here. Lots of them. Russian Orthodox Jews with full beards and long curls who’d been flooding into New York the past few years. The Schneiders—now suddenly the Sniders—were silent until the porter deposited them in their room and closed the door behind him.

  Walter could barely contain himself. “Why did you tell that man our name is Snider?”

  His father sat on the bed and put his head in his hands. “Please, Walter, not now.”

  “But our name is Schneider, not—”

  “Don’t you think I know what our name is?” his father erupted.

  Walter’s mother avoided the argument by unpacking their bags into the bureaus in the room.

  “It’s those Russian Jews that have been coming over,” said Walter’s father. “Why can’t they be . . . more American? If they would just blend in more, not cling to the old ways so much. Didn’t President Roosevelt say there should be no more hyphenated Americans?”

  Walter began to put it all together.

  “You mean they kicked us out because they think we’re Jews!?”

  “They didn’t kick us out,” his father told him. “There were no rooms left.”

  “But we’re not even Jewish!” Walter cried.

  “I told you—”

  “Did you tell them we’re not Jews? What made them think that?”

  “Walter—”

  “You didn’t even tell them? You just let them send us away?”

  “I’m sure the hotel manager is a good man,” his father said. “Put yourself in his shoes. If the other guests don’t want us there, he loses business. It makes no sense for him to hurt himself.”

  “So we get hurt instead?”

  “No one’s been hurt.”

  “The West Brighton is just as nice,” Walter’s mother finally said. “I like it smaller anyway.”

  Walter shook with anger. “But we’re not Jews! Schneider isn’t even a Jewish-sounding name!”

  “But Felix Schneider was a Jew, and there’s no reason to remind anyone. From today our name is Snider. Not Schneider. Understand?”

  “What am I supposed to do, go back to school and say ‘My name’s not Schneider anymore, it’s Snider’?”

  “There are plenty of people who change their names to fit in,” his mother said.

  “Sure. When they step off the boat as greenies at Ellis Island! Not a hundred years after they got here!”

  “Don’t yell at your mother!” his father told him.

  “But I don’t understand! We stayed there last year and nobody said anything!”

  “It’s just the way things are now,” his father said.

  “So,” his mother said, “what shall we do before lunch? It says here there’s croquet and horseshoes on the front lawn.”

  Walter got up and left the room. He slammed the door behind him, then sprinted the length of the hall and down the stairs before his father could come after him and punish him for it. He didn’t want to play horseshoes or croquet or do anything at the West Brighton. He wanted to be back at the real Brighton hotel.

  And he wanted his hat back.

  2

  Walter felt a thousand eyes on him as he walked among the guests at the Brighton Beach Hotel. He was sure every single one of them was staring at him and thinking Jew. That he wasn’t Jewish made it all the more infuriating. He and his family weren’t anything. They didn’t go to temple and they didn’t go to church. They weren’t Jewish-American, or German-American, or any kind of -American. They were just American.

  What was it then that made all these people see him as a Jew? It couldn’t be his last name, no matter what his father said. Schneider just sounded German, and there were plenty of Christian Germans. He put a hand to his face. Was it his nose? His curly hair? His complexion? Did he have “Jew” written somewhere on him he couldn’t see, in some language he couldn’t read?

  Walter saw a Pinkerton security man strolling down the Brighton Beach boardwalk and scurried off into the long, crowded field at the foot of the hotel. As big as the place was it would be quite a coincidence to run into the same Pinkerton twice, but it didn’t hurt to be careful. For all he knew they’d put a sign up in the Pinkerton break room: “Warning: Be on lookout for fighting Jew.”

  The colored waiters were still at their game, and Walter found a discreet place to sit and watch. There were more antics—coaches goading players into stealing bases, players speaking what sounded like Spanish, trick throws, hidden balls, primitive acrobatics. But mixed in with all the silliness there was some real baseball being played. After two seasons as the batboy for a National League team—even if it was one of the worst National League teams—Walter knew good baseball when he saw it.

  The big Cuban pitcher he had seen earlier was the best of the lot. When he and his team weren’t clowning around, he would rear back and fire the baseball at his catcher with all the force of a cannon. Walter half expected to hear an explosion and see smoke as the pitcher released the ball, but instead the only sound and sight were the ball smacking the catcher’s mitt, and the dust and dirt that poofed out of the leather. In all the time he watched, Walter never saw one batter even make contact with a pitch.

  What an addition this pitcher would make to the Brooklyn Superbas! Despite their superlative name the team was truly mediocre, finishing fifth in the National League the last two seasons. A pitcher like this could make them instant contenders!

  Walter thought about approaching the pitcher after the game, but in the middle of the eighth inning he spied one of the boys who had beaten him up. He didn’t have Walter’s hat on, but he wasn’t with his friends either. Walter stood and rounded the field, careful to keep an eye out for the other boys or the Pinkertons. The boy he stalked was the smallest of the three, probably nine like Walter. Maybe ten. It didn’t matter to Walter how old he was—he was about to get the thrashing of his life.

  The boy wandered away from the baseball field and Walter followed him down to the beach, where row after row of dressing tents stood unused. When no one else was around, Walter sprinted up behind the boy and shoved him into one of the empty changing rooms.

  “Hey, what gives?” the boy cried.

  Walter popped him one in the nose before the boy got his bearings, and then the fight was on. The little guy wasn’t a good brawler but he was scrappy. It was a nasty bout, with biting and clawing and hair-pulling. Once or twice Walter thought they might go tearing through the can
vas of the tiny tent, but he eventually got his knee in the boy’s back and the kid’s face down in the sand where he could rain down on him with his fists. The boy coughed and sputtered and begged for mercy, but Walter wasn’t in a merciful mood.

  “Did you just fall off the tater wagon? Huh? Did you? I’m—not—a—Jew,” he said, punctuating each of the last words with a blow.

  When he’d beaten the fight out of the boy he got up. The boy was breathing hard, but he didn’t make a move.

  “Tell your pals I’m gunning for them,” Walter said. He kicked sand on the boy and ran far away from the Brighton Beach Hotel, in case the boy or his parents set the hotel security after him.

  Farther down the boardwalk the blaring carousel tunes and piped music from Coney Island’s amusement parks called to him. Screams and laughter came from Steeplechase Park, where people rode mechanical horses around a great railed track, pings and dings rose from the arcade games, and everywhere barkers called out, trying to get people to drop a dime on their show, their ride, their attraction.

  Competing with the barkers were the soul savers, railing against the sins and depravation across the street. The Salvation Army, the American Temperance Society, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Templars of Honor and Temperance, the Anti-Saloon League. They camped out on the boardwalk in their sandwich boards and uniforms and hurled warnings and damnation at all who passed.

  “Each of these bottles represents crime and corruption!” one of them cried, tossing full bottles of whisky out into the sea. “Alcohol is an abomination, a plague on our cities and our communities and our families!”

  Walter bought a hot dog at Feltman’s, ate it in four bites, then headed for Luna Park. For as long as he and his family had been coming to Coney Island, Luna Park had been his favorite amusement park. It was huge, and always packed full of people—at least in the vacation months, which is when Walter always came. He knew the place like the back of his catcher’s mitt. All he had to do was look up and find the giant Electric Tower in the middle and he instantly knew where he was in the park. The tower was covered with electric light bulbs and glowed like the sun night and day.

  By nightfall Walter had ridden the Virginia Reel, the Helter Skelter, the Whirl of the Whirl, and Shoot the Chutes—Luna Park’s feature attraction—twice. For Shoot the Chutes you rode a cable car to the top of a five-story incline, and then boarded what looked like a long metal cigar to slide down into the lagoon below. Walter thought the ride had to go a hundred miles an hour. After his second trip, when his money was running low, he went to one of the theaters to see what the barker advertised as a “baseball movie.”

  He was disappointed to find that it wasn’t a real moving picture show, just one of those gimmicks where they set slides in front of a projection bulb and show them on a big screen. Still, the photographs were funny, and the guy singing at the piano got laughs with a song about a girl named Katie O’Casey, who was mad for baseball. Walter especially liked the chorus:

  “Take me out to the ball game,

  Take me out with the crowd.

  Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,

  I don’t care if I never get back.

  Let me root, root, root for the home team,

  If they don’t win it’s a shame.

  For it’s one, two, three strikes, you’re out

  At the old ball game.”

  From the pictures Walter wondered if the person who took them had ever really been out to the old ball game himself, but he liked the song well enough. From the sound of the applause, the rest of the audience liked it too.

  Getting up after the show, Walter spied the pitcher from the baseball game at the Brighton Beach Hotel. He and some of his Cuban friends were just leaving from the back of the theater.

  “Hey! Hey you—pitcher!” Walter cried, realizing he didn’t know the man’s name. “Wait!”

  The pitcher didn’t hear him, or didn’t know he was the one being yelled at. Walter worked his way across the theater, but the Cuban and his friends were already gone by the time he got there.

  He couldn’t find them outside right away either. Walter slipped in and out of the crowd, hopping up and down to see, and finally spotted them going into the men’s bathroom.

  The colored men’s bathrooms.

  Walter frowned. The men had dark skin, but Cubans weren’t “colored.” He waited outside, thinking maybe the men didn’t know any better. They were, after all, from another country.

  A white couple gave Walter a strange look for standing in front of the colored bathrooms and he moved to a nearby bench, his ears burning red. When the Cuban and his friends finally emerged, Walter had to hustle to catch up.

  “Hey, uh, Cubans! Wait up!” Walter called.

  The men didn’t hear him or didn’t care. They didn’t stop. Walter ran around in front of them.

  “Cubans, wait! Stop,” Walter said. The men stopped. Wait, how am I going to talk with these guys? Walter thought suddenly. I don’t speak Spanish.

  “Wait-o. Me-o Walter-o,” he said slow and loud.

  The men stared at him openmouthed.

  “Me see you play-o base-o ball-o today-o.”

  One of the men blinked. “I think this boy’s brains are scrambled.”

  “Wait, you speak English?”

  “Uh, what language did you think we’d speak?” the pitcher asked. He had a long drawl like Nap Rucker, the Superba pitcher from Georgia.

  “Spanish. Aren’t you all Cubans?”

  The men looked at one another sheepishly. One of them laughed.

  “Oh. Right,” the pitcher said. “Well, we, uh, we been off the island a long time.”

  One of the men snorted and turned around so his face was hidden from Walter.

  “Great! Even better,” Walter told him. “I saw you pitch today. You were amazing!”

  The big pitcher smiled. “Hey thanks, kid.”

  “I mean it. You were better than half the pitchers in the National League.”

  “More than half,” one of the other men said. The others nodded and chimed in their agreement.

  “Listen, I’m the batboy for the Brooklyn Superbas. Why don’t you come try out? The team gets back tomorrow from playing exhibition games down South. I’m sure I can get Coach Donovan to give you a look, and I can already tell you you’re better than anything the Superbas have got. They’re the turds of misery.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” one of the Cubans said.

  The big pitcher gave Walter a sad smile. “Aw, look kid. That’s awful nice of you, but I can’t.”

  “But why not?”

  The pitcher looked around at his chums, who were trying not to laugh.

  “Look son, I’m sorry to fool you, but that Cuban thing’s all an act.”

  “What?”

  “We’re Negroes, son. We’re colored, see? I’m even part Comanche, but my black daddy means there ain’t no way they gonna let me play ball for no National League team, no matter how good I am.”

  “But—at the hotel. They said you were Cuban—”

  “Nobody really believes that, kid,” one of the others said. “All them white folks, they know we’re colored. But if the hotel tells them we’re Cuban they can pretend we’re Cuban so they don’t have to fess up to watching Negros play ball, see? That way they can all sit there and drink their mint juleps and enjoy a nice afternoon of baseball without having to get all riled up about it.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!” Walter said.

  The Negroes agreed with him.

  “Weren’t always like that. Time was, right after the war, when a black man and a white man played ball right alongside each other.”

  “Who was it made the old American Association? Moses Walker?” one of them asked.

  “First and last,” the pitcher said. “But that was twenty years ago.”

  “The good old days,” said another.

  “Why can’t it be like that now?” Wal
ter asked.

  The big pitcher shrugged. “That’s just the way things are now.”

  Walter was getting tired of people telling him that.

  “It’s a nice dream, kid, but it’s only a dream,” the pitcher said. He and his friends moved away.

  “Wait, I don’t even know your name,” Walter called.

  “Joe Williams,” the pitcher called back. “But you can call me Cyclone.”

  Walter left Luna Park that night mad at the world. Which was bad news for the second of the three boys who had beat him up that morning. Walter caught him coming out of Steeplechase Park alone and he beat the tar out of him right there on the boardwalk.

  3

  It felt like the Pinkertons were out in full force the next day at the Brighton Beach Hotel. Walter wondered if the special attention was for him, but even as he thought it he knew he was just being silly. Still, there had been a rash of hotel guests getting beat up. He smiled at the thought and ducked behind a trash can to avoid passing a security guard.

  Walter had hoped there would be a baseball game on the lawn this morning, but there was a band playing John Philip Sousa music there instead. That meant he was going to have to sneak into the hotel. But he and his family had stayed there last season, back when it was all right to look like a Jew, and he had a good idea of where the dining hall was. There were fewer places to hide in the halls—and fewer avenues of escape—but he had to find Cyclone Joe.

  The dining hall was an enormous room with hundreds of long tables and huge chandeliers that sparkled in the late-morning sunlight. Thousands of guests ate brunch, the noise from their chattering like the hubbub at a ballpark. In between the tables, dozens of colored waiters moved in a complicated dance, delivering silver platters with the grace of a shortstop catching a ball, sideswiping second, and throwing on to first.

  Walter realized someone had come up alongside him and he jumped, worried he’d been copped by a Pinkerton. Instead it was just a colored waiter in a white service jacket.

  “Can I help you find your party, young sir?”

  “Oh, I’m—I’m not with anyone here. I was actually looking for one of the waiters. Joe Williams. Cyclone.”