Catch You Later, Traitor

by Avi

  On August 11, the Giants were thirteen and a half games behind the Dodgers. Thirteen and a half games behind!

  That’s when the miracle began to happen.

  On August 12, the Giants beat Philadelphia in both games of the Sunday doubleheader. Then they kept winning. Every game. By August 26, they were only five games behind Brooklyn.

  On September 1, they beat Brooklyn, and did it with a triple play.

  After Labor Day, I began school again, the eighth grade. Mr. Donavan had left PS 10. I had no idea where he went. My new teacher was Mr. Malakowski, although he told us to call him Mr. Mal. He was easygoing, and really liked baseball. He didn’t talk politics.

  Early on, one of the kids raised his hands. “Mr. Mal, Mr. Donavan used to tell us war stories. You got any?”

  Mr. Mal said, “I don’t know what Mr. Donavan told you. But I have to tell you, he never was in the army. No idea where he got his stories. Maybe the movies. Me, I’d just as soon forget all that. I’m just happy to be alive and with you all.”

  There were some kids from my old class in Mr. Mal’s room, but all that Commie stuff seemed to have been melted away. The talk was mostly about Dodgers and Giants. Because the other kids knew I was a Giants fan, things got fun. Razzing, teasing, and joking.

  I was the only Giants fan in my class. In fact, I think I was the only Giants fan in the whole school. Maybe the only one in Brooklyn. I was famous for not being like everybody else. I loved it.

  By September 22, with the Giants still winning and the Dodgers still losing, we would start each day talking about what was happening in the standings. People were getting crazy.

  On September 28, the Giants tied the Dodgers for first place.

  That weekend, each team had only two games to play.

  The Giants won both of theirs. So did Brooklyn, though in the last Dodger game it took a home run by Jackie Robinson to win in the fourteenth inning.

  That meant the Giants and the Dodgers had to have a play-off series, best of three.

  No one talked about anything else except the play-offs. In school, Mr. Mal brought in a radio, and when the games came on in the afternoon, we just sat at our desks and listened to every inning of every game. If the game was still going on at three o’clock—and they did—we just stayed in school. No one left. That had never happened before.

  In the play-offs, the Giants won the first of the games.

  Then the Dodgers won the second.

  It all came down to one, last game on October 3.

  The game was played at the Polo Grounds, the Giants’ field. It was a warm, humid day. For the Giants, Sal Maglie was the starter. For the Dodgers, Don Newcombe. Both were ace pitchers. Each had won twenty games.

  At the end of the fifth inning, the Dodgers were winning one – zip.

  By the end of the sixth, the Giants had gotten one run. So the game was tied, one – one.

  In the seventh, the Dodgers went ahead by three runs.

  The Giants came to bat at the bottom of the ninth, down by three.

  Al Dark, the Giants’ captain, led off with a base hit.

  Don Mueller, next up, got another single that sent Dark to third.

  Monte Irvin, the Giants’ best hitter, was up next. Straining for a home run, the tying run, he popped up, for an easy out.

  Whitey Lockman, the first baseman, came to the plate. He got a double. Dark scored. Mueller got to third.

  The score was now Dodgers four, Giants two.

  The Dodgers’ manager, Chuck Dressen, changed pitchers, bringing in Ralph Branca. Branca had a nickname, Honk, short for Honker, because some people thought he had a big nose.

  Bobby Thomson came to the plate for the Giants.

  Branca threw a fastball. Strike one.

  The whole class was going crazy, shouting, hooting, and banging desks. Mr. Mal was laughing right along.

  The next pitch came in high and inside. Bobby Thomson swung. The announcer, Russ Hodges, said it all:

  There’s a long drive . . . it’s gonna be . . . I believe—the Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! Bobby Thomson hits one into the lower deck of the left-field stands and they are going crazy. I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it!

  I was going crazy, too.

  The next day, October 4, the newspaper headlines read

  GIANTS CAPTURE PENNANT,

  BEATING DODGERS 5–4 IN 9TH

  ON THOMSON’S 3-RUN HOMER

  IT’S LIKE A FUNERAL IN BROOKLYN

  All I could think was, I had to see Kat.

  That week at Mr. Ordson’s, we were talking about the game and the bet Kat and I had made.

  “What’s happened to Kat?” he asked.

  “Still in boarding school.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Westport, Connecticut.”

  “Not so very far,” he said.

  That night I asked Dad if he had an atlas. He gave it to me and I looked to see where Westport was. Mr. Ordson was right. It wasn’t far from Brooklyn. I started thinking about a visit.

  43

  A few days later, my parents were reading in the radio room when I walked in and said, “On Saturday, I’m taking the train to Connecticut and going to see Kat. At her school.”

  Dad and Ma talked with their eyes.

  “That’s wonderful,” said Ma. “Who are you going with?”

  “Going alone.”

  Dad and Ma exchanged more looks. Dad said, “Do you know how?”

  I said, “IRT to Times Square. Shuttle to Grand Central. Nine a.m. New Haven Railroad to Westport. Taxi to Blessed Saint Anne’s School for Girls.”

  Ma said, “How’d you learn all that?”

  “A librarian with crinkly eyes.”

  Ma said, “I’d be happy to go with you.”

  “Want to do it alone.”

  “Does she know you’re coming?”

  “Going to surprise her. The Giants won and we had a bet.”

  Dad laughed and my parents agreed to let me go after I wrote out all the directions and phone numbers for them in case something came up.

  That night I hardly slept.

  I got up, put on the Giants sweatshirt Dad gave me, and was on the subway by seven. Went to Grand Central Station. Bought a ticket to Westport, and asked ten thousand people the right way. I was the first one on the train to New Haven that left at 9:00.

  A conductor came by. When I handed him my ticket, I said, “Will you tell me when we get to Westport?”

  “I’ll shout it out, sonny.”

  Which is what he did.

  I got off the train and walked out of the station. Outside was a line of taxis. I went to the first one, and said, “Can you take me to Blessed Saint Anne’s School for Girls?”

  “Three bucks.”

  I showed him the money.

  We drove into the country. The leaves were green and golden, and the sky was so blue, the city felt like a memory. Twenty minutes later the cab went through large rusty iron gates, up to a big stone building that looked more like a castle than a school. After I paid him, the driver handed me a smudged card. “If you need a ride back to the station, call this number. Ask for Harry.”

  He drove off. I walked up the wide castle stairs into a lobby where an older girl was sitting behind an old wood table. She was dressed in a green school jacket with a white blouse and a plaid tie.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Katherine Boyer,” I said. “I’m a friend.”

  “What grade is she in?”

  “Eighth.”

  “Eights have team practice Saturday mornings. Do you know her sport?”

  I was about to say punchball, but shook my head.

  She said, “Probably field hockey. Just go out to the back fields. You’ll find her.” She pointed the way.

  I wandered around until I found a big field. It was full of girls in plaid skirts and white shirts, running around
in circles. They carried funny-looking sticks with a bend at the bottom, which they used to whack a ball along the ground—upside-down baseball.

  I stood and watched. Then I saw Kat. She was wearing a short plaid skirt like everyone else. Her legs were dirty, her white shirt’s tails were pulled out, but her hair was tied back with a string. She was wearing a blue Dodgers sweatshirt.

  As she ran, one hand held her stick, her other hand kept pushing up her glasses. She was heading down the side of the field, near where I was standing.

  When she got close, I called, “Hey, angel!”

  Kat stopped and spun in my direction, just stood there and stared. Next moment she flung down her stick and ran toward me, only to stop again three feet away. She said, “Hello, traitor.”

  I said, “Hey, sweetheart! Giants won!”

  Kat, with a grin as big and warm as the first real day in spring, said, “Wait till next year.”

  And just like that, I felt like a kid again.

  Author’s Note

  History is memory researched. Historical fiction is memory brought to life.

  Catch You Later, Traitor comes from many sources, moments that others or I lived. Its true origin can be located some thirty years ago, when I met a man who told me how he had gone to the Soviet Union as a teenager with his father. His story is very like Tom Collison and Frank’s, who go there in this novel. In that man’s case, he and his father were lucky enough to return to the United States in 1939. They had come home to convince his mother and brother to join them in Russia. However, World War Two broke out and he never returned. His fascinating story stayed in my mind.

  A full and tragic account of those who went to the Soviet Union to find work—and never returned—may be read in The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis.

  It was in 1951, as a boy growing up in Brooklyn, New York (I was thirteen at the time), that I switched my baseball allegiance from the Brooklyn Dodgers to the New York Giants, my own Declaration of Independence. It was a glorious year to have done so, for the Giants did indeed win the pennant in that extraordinary play-off series with the Dodgers. The next day the headline, “It’s Like a Funeral in Brooklyn,” appeared in the New York Times. You can read about that season in The Miracle at Coogan’s Bluff by Thomas Kiernan.

  As a boy, I did have a weekly job of reading newspapers to a blind man, a Mr. Smith. The availability of the job was announced during one of my weekly Boy Scout meetings. I wish I could remember his dog’s name.

  I do not recall when I first read The Maltese Falcon. The book and its author, Dashiell Hammett, made an enormous impression on me as a reader and a writer. The book is quite extraordinary, and the film version (with Humphrey Bogart) is almost as good. Hammett’s work led me to other hard-boiled American writers, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, among many. I would be honored to think they influenced my writing. My hope here is that Pete Collison, in his narrative, has managed to honor the style and words of the books he, and I, loved to read—and still read.

  As a kid, one could not live in New York City in the 1950s without knowing people caught up in the political turmoil of the time. Yes, it was an astonishing year for baseball, but the Korean War was raging, Truman fired General MacArthur, Senator McCarthy was ascendant, The Adventures of Sam Spade, Detective was taken off the radio airwaves, and Dashiell Hammett was sent to jail for refusing to divulge names of Communist sympathizers, names, it would appear, he did not even know.

  My account of the Subversive Activities Control Board hearing is based on contemporaneous congressional transcripts.

  Public school, punchball, inkwells, Communists and anti-Communists, blacklisting, Mr. Donavan and Mr. Mal, are all very real in my memory. The titles of the short story mystery tales and magazines that Pete reads are real. People really did smoke cigarettes that way at the time. As for Pete, his family, and Kat, they are my inventions.

  There are any number of memoirs of the time. Try Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin, and The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood by Roger Rosenblatt.

  Your loyal Giants fan,

  Avi

  Catch You Later,

  TRAITOR

  Avi

  Questions for Discussion

  Questions for Discussion

  1.The suspicion and fear surrounding Communism in the early 1950s in the United States explode directly into Pete Collison’s life when the FBI investigates his father. How does the investigation and atmosphere affect Pete? What can you infer about his character as you read? Describe characteristics that make Pete a hero in this book.

  2.Pete is a detective at heart and loves mystery stories and radio serials. When a real-life mystery appears in his own life, in what ways is it like the mystery stories he loves? How is a real-life mystery different from what Pete might have expected?

  3.How would you describe Pete's family—his relationship with his mom, dad, and brother and their relationships with one another? What about the relationships in his big extended family? How is your family similar to or different from Pete’s? Do you think there are secrets in every family?

  4.Pete is “shunned” in his class because his teacher, Mr. Donavan, instructs the students not to have anything to do with “Commies.” Discuss how being shunned by friends, excluded from class participation, or isolated in the class by being put in the corner could affect a student. How does Pete handle his feelings? Would you have handled this situation differently? Do you think this was the right way for Mr. Donavan to treat Pete?

  5.The FBI agent, Mr. Ewing, shows up at Pete’s home and begins to question Pete about his dad and his grandfather. How does Pete respond? Talk about why you agree or disagree with Pete’s actions.

  6.Do you agree with Pete’s decision not tell his parents about the FBI visit or his troubles at school? Why do you think it was important to Pete to figure things out on his own?

  7.As Pete begins to question his dad, more questions arise. How does Pete’s natural interest in mysteries help or hinder him as he tries to get to the bottom of his own mystery?

  8.Pete’s relationship with his best friend Kat changes throughout the story. Discuss the changes and how and why they occurred.

  9.Avi weaves feelings of fear, mistrust, anxiety, and mystery throughout the story. As the reader, who did you trust? Who did you doubt? Who did you think the informer was early in the story? Did your suspicions change throughout the story? Were you able to tell from the clues in the story who the informer was?

  10.Think about Pete and Bobby’s relationship. What events make the FBI investigation difficult for both of them? If you had fears or suspicions about a brother or sister, would you share them with an FBI agent or other official? Explain Pete’s father’s statements about family and his position on family loyalty.

  11.There is a metaphor within the story: In 1951 when the story takes place, the Giants and Dodgers are locked in competition. Pete deliberately chooses to identify with the Giants, the underdog nobody roots for. Can you explain how the events of the baseball season reflect the events in Pete’s own life that same year?

  12. After reading this novel, do you feel you have a sense of what life was like during the time of this Red Scare? Do you see any similarities in our lives today?

  Question for Discussion by JoAnn Jonas

  Katherine Warde

  AVI is the author of the Newbery Medal novel Crispin: The Cross of Lead and the Newbery Honor books Nothing But the Truth and The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, among many other books for young readers. Catch You Later, Traitor was inspired by his own childhood in Brooklyn during the Red Scare. He now lives in Clark, Colorado, and his website is www.avi-writer.com.

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  Published by

  Algonquin Young Readers

  an imprint of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2015 by Avi.

  All rights reserved.

  eISBN 978-1-61620-487-7