The Boys of Summer (17 page)

“How do you know?”

“One of the Cubs told me.”

The Gaiety Bar, never a cover charge, king-sized drinks, catered to itinerants with a little pocket money. A band blared, led by a strident cornet. “Night Train” was what the band was playing. The rhythm accelerated toward a boom and then retreated, then repeated, rooting out thought.

“Beer,” Williams said.

“Gimme a Scotch.” My drink came with a plywood swizzle stick.

“Two bucks a drink, a bucka beer,” announced the bartender.

I only had $24 with me. I sipped the Scotch. It tasted of plywood.

Two girls moved through the dark and started dancing on the bar. They were built well, with long thighs and flat abdomens, but they were vacant-eyed and both their mouths looked hard.

“I didn’t know your grandmother was working, Dick,” I said.

“Christ,” Williams cried, and clapped a hand over his glass.

“What’s the matter?”

“She got a crab in my beer.”

We bought more rounds. Williams, with $10, was even poorer than I.

A girl with tawny hair and tawny skin was dancing now. I tried to catch her eye. “Take it easy,” Williams said.

“She’s all right.”

“She’ll be here later.”

We retreated to a leathered booth. Williams started a joke. The two girls who had danced earlier sat nearby. The music hammered ears. Williams finished three jokes before the tawny girl, now looking collegiate in a skirt and white blouse, moved toward our table and sat down. “I’ve got to drink if I’m going to sit with you,” she said.

“Drink slow, baby,” Williams said.

“Sure.”

“You want a double Scotch, Sharon?” a waiter asked.

“Single.”

The waiter walked off shaking his head.

“How many Scotches can you drink with all that dancing?” I said.

“None.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s tea,” Sharon said. “They just charge you for the Scotch.”

“Tea and soda,” Williams said. “Eech.”

She was an art student, Sharon told us, and a wild baseball fan. She knew a lot of the Cubs and she liked to go to Wrigley Field.

“I’ll leave you a ticket for tomorrow,” Williams said.

“Well, I was supposed to go to art class, but okay. Leave two, one for my friend.”

“When are you through tonight?” Williams said.

“Two o’clock.”

“Son of a buck. And we got a curfew.”

“What?” Sharon said.

“The manager. Dressen. He runs a check at midnight to make sure we’re all in our rooms.”

“Oh, that don’t matter,” Sharon said. “I couldn’t see you anyway. My boy friend’s over there. He plays cornet.”

When Sharon left, I said to Williams, “The second ticket was for the goddamn musician.”

“Can’t make out,” Williams said. “There must be something wrong with me. Last five girls I screwed, two was Filipinos, one was Spanish, one was colored and one was a Jew.” Williams stopped. His mouth fell open. I was a Jew. The awareness choked him.

“But you know something,” he said, recovering. “The Jewish girl was the best lay.”

That evening’s bill came to $17.

The team split in St. Louis, after a smooth ride down the Alton Line. A chartered bus carried the whites to the Chase Hotel, a comfortable and seemingly gracious white-stone building, where the room clerks greeted us by name. The blacks rode black taxis to the Hotel Adams. “It doesn’t bother me,” Robinson said. “I get treated like a hero at the Adams. They give me anything I want there.
Anything.”
(Two years later when the Chase agreed to accept Negroes, provided “they eat in their rooms,” certain blacks rejected these conditions. Robinson said the terms were acceptable; it was a wedge anyway. Presently hotel officials lifted all barriers and someone told Robinson that he should consider himself as just another guest. After that the other blacks followed. When Robinson said he didn’t want the Chase, he spoke in the voice of wounded pride.)

Still in first place, the team won a night game from the Cardinals, and at one the next afternoon, Robinson telephoned me and said, “It’s started again.”

“What’s started?”

“The Cardinals have started racial shit. I’ve been in the league for seven years and I don’t think I have to put up with it any more.” The night before, while Robinson played second, several players in the St. Louis dugout continually shouted “Nigger.” Someone else yelled, “Hey, porter, git my bag.” Another phrase he had heard was “black bastard.” Finally, Robinson said someone, he didn’t know who, had held up a pair of baseball shoes, shouting, “Here, boy. Here, boy. Shine.”

“I’ve got to write that.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say. I think if people knew what was going on, they’d want it stopped.”

I hung up and dialed the Cardinal office and asked for Ed Stanky, an old hero. In 1945, Stanky, a mediocre hitter, drew 148 bases on balls. He battled and won games and once, on accepting an award from baseball writers, he said, “Thank you for recognizing my intangibles.” He was a poor boy from Philadelphia, hard-eyed, Polish and bright.

“What’s on your mind?” he said. “You need an early story?”

“I got an early story. I want to check it.”

“A newspaperman checking out a story. What are you, some kind of Bolshevik?”

“I’m trying to be fair.”

“I’m just kidding you,” Stanky said. “Go ahead.”

I told him Robinson’s accusations.

Silence.

“What I’m asking, Ed, is did this really happen?”

After another pause, Stanky said, “I heard nothing out of line.”

“Are you denying it?”

“I was right there,” Stanky said. His voice was rising. “I’m telling you I was there and I heard nothing out of line. And you can quote me.”

“Okay. I’m just trying to get both sides.”

“Will I see you tonight?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t let yourself become Robinson’s little bobo,” Stanky said. “That’s free advice.”

I wrote a conventional story in which I quoted Robinson’s charge and Stanky’s denial and tried to give each equal space. I telephoned the piece to the paper, then joined Clem Labine in the lobby. “I was in the bullpen,” Labine said. “I couldn’t hear what was going on in the dugouts. But nobody was talking about stuff like that later. I don’t think it’s much of a story anyway.” Clem clenched his right fist and considered his forearm. “Look,” he said, “maybe if someone called me a French-Catholic bastard, I’d tell him to go fuck himself. I wouldn’t come crying to you.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“Why?”

“Because in Mississippi they’re not lynching French-Catholic bastards, only niggers.” Labine winced and then he nodded.

At the ball park, I reported Stanky’s denial to Robinson, as he was getting ready to take batting practice. He made a circular gesture, and his strong, black hands come to rest on the gray uniform shirt. “Do I need publicity? Do I want racial unrest? I wouldn’t have told you what I told you if it wasn’t true.”

With a sudden stab, I understood. Stanky had played me for a fool. I had followed the textbook maxim, consulting both sides (but been lax in gathering neutral opinion) as if there were two sides. I had been misled. Now the first edition of the
Herald Tribune
was on the streets of New York, circulating my misleading story.

In the dusk I charged toward the St. Louis clubhouse and Stanky’s office, angry, confused and in a queer sense hurt. A St. Louis newspaperman lounged in Stanky’s office. “Well,” Stanky announced. “Here comes Robi’son’s li’l bobo.”

He was sitting behind his desk, a square man, with strong arms and burning eyes. A bat rack stood in one corner of his office. I stopped beside it.

“Are Robi’son’s feelings hurt?” Stanky said. “Are they black and blue?” I could not speak.

“Don’t you get it?” Stanky said.”
Black
and blue.”

“I get it.” My voice was high. “I want to clear up that matter of last night.”

“It’s all cleared up,” Stanky said.

“Robinson swears he heard those things.”

“I was right there,” Stanky said, “and I heard nothing out of line. I heard ‘black bastard.’ I don’t happen to consider that out of line.” He half-rose in his chair. His lips and the bridge of his nose had gone pale.

“What?”

“ ‘Black bastard’ and ‘nigger’ are not out of line,” Stanky said. He was standing up, ready. I grabbed a bat. If he charged, I was going to use a bat. Or try to use a bat. I was going to club at an old idol. Suddenly Stanky grinned. “Maybe you aren’t Robi’son’s bobo. Maybe you’re Charlie Dressen’s. That’s all right. Don’t take it all so serious.”

Later in the high press box, I typed a substitute story very quickly:

“Ed Stanky, manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, today confirmed charges by Jackie Robinson.…” I recounted what happened and filed a story, feeling that if I had been naïve in the afternoon, I was enterprising by night. The scoop would reform no bigots, but at the least it would discomfit some. And it would set down the record accurately.

The press box rose in tiers. White reporters sat in the front row. The few Negro sportswriters were confined to the rear. Now, I trotted up the stairs, going from white to black, wreathed in virtue, and fetched myself a beer. I was not thinking of the segregated press box or of the pennant race, when the teleprinter by my side began to clatter:

NOTE TO KAHN: HERALD TRIBUNE WILL NOT BE A SOUNDING BOARD FOR JACKIE ROBINSON. WRITE BASEBALL, NOT RACE
RELATIONS. STORY KILLED. SOL ROOGOW, NIGHT SPORTS EDITOR.

By the conclusion of this mortifying trip, June had arrived, the Dodgers narrowly held first place and it was time to sail further on the voyage with
Ulysses,
as navigated in the Grand Army Plaza section of Brooklyn by Olga Kahn. Come rain, come losing streak, come headache, come relief, on Wednesdays, when in town I read. These nights, begun with a formal opening statement and concluded with coffee, had shown us Stephen Dedalus rising, teaching, walking, Leopold Bloom meditating and lunching, but in an ambiance of humorless intensity I had not yet grown as fond of
Ulysses
as I was of
Portrait.

“Good evening, Professor,” said Gordon Kahn at the door of the old apartment. He led me through a foyer. “Your mother’s on the phone. Why can’t they get a bigger lead?”

“Furillo isn’t hitting.”

We reached the living room. My father sank into his red Cogswell chair. “It’s nonsense,” he said, “when some boob describes Furillo as ‘The Rock.’ He always throws to the right base. There’s something there.”

“He doesn’t have much actual learning.”

“And Dressen. It isn’t fair to patronize him. He’s doing an excellent job.”

“Yeah.”

“Managing a baseball team is one of those things that looks easy when someone else does it.”

“Look. You know what happened in one town last trip? The team was losing, 5 to 2. They go out on the field in the last of the eighth and Dressen says, ‘Hold ‘em, fellers. I’ll think of something.’”

Gordon Kahn’s eyes showed shock. I wanted that. I had no stomach to be quizzed on my bobbling of the Robinson story or
on the
Herald Tribune’s
sudden censorship.

“Were you on the field to hear that?”

“Reese told me.”

“Has it occurred to you that Reese might want to manage?”

“Boy. Absolutely wrong. You don’t know the club at all.”

“Ah,” said Olga, returning from the telephone. “The chapter tonight is about Hamlet and simply full of puns.” She was carrying the red-covered Modern Library
Ulysses.
“In Dublin on June 16, 1904, it is two o’clock in the afternoon.” She slipped onto her chair, a flowered wingback. “The scene symbolizes the classic Scylla and Charybdis.”

“Don’t oversimplify human relationships,” Gordon said.

“What’s that?” Olga cried.

“He’s talking to me,” I said from the blue couch.

“About
Ulysses?”

“About Dressen.”

Olga said, “Oh, dear,” looked upward and began: “ ‘Urbane, to comfort them, the Quaker librarian purred: And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of
Wilhelm Meister?
A great poet on a great brother poet …’”

“I think that’s enough, for this evening,” Gordon said mildly after two hours of communal reading.

“Yes,” Olga said. “We all know Joyce believed that in
Hamlet,
the ghost, not the prince, was Shakespeare himself. Coffee is waiting.”

“If he wasn’t kidding,” I said.

“Who?” Olga said.

“Joyce.”

“Joyce didn’t kid,” Gordon said. “Is there a good game this week? I haven’t seen one in some time.”

“Tomorrow,” I said. My mind flew between England and Ireland. Shakespeare as a ghostly father.

My father’s basso drew me back to Brooklyn. “Thursday is bad. How about Saturday?”

“Phillies.” I wondered whether Al Laney knew if Joyce were kidding.

“Declining team,” my father said.

“Dad, the way it works is that two games a week are damn good. Two are fair. Three are one-sided.” My own guess was that Joyce was serious.

“Well, then.”

“Do you want to sit behind first or watch the pitching?” What was the difference which one truly was Shakespeare? I thought. Joyce had looked at genius as a genius. That was the exciting thing. “We’ll have a drink afterward,” I said at last unthinking to my father.

The Saturday game was one-sided, but not with the weight of Dodger power. The team’s pitching collapsed and the Phils won easily, 9 to 3, enabling me to start my story during the eighth inning. Twenty minutes after Andy Pafko flied to short right center field for the final out, I joined my father in a deserted section near first base. We had sat there together fifteen years before. “Come on up to the press room,” I said.

He rose, a Pall Mall dropping a quarter inch of ash. “The pitchers couldn’t keep the ball low,” he said. “In a ball park this size you have to keep the ball low.”

“I know. They call that wild high.”

“I certainly wouldn’t suggest that this is a great team.”

“Nobody looks good getting beat by six.”

We walked toward the elevator that rose in the southwestern corner of Ebbets Field. Dressen was waiting at the elevator gate. His small eyes rolled about. His lower jaw twitched.