The Boys of Summer (25 page)

When a father dies, a son buys a coffin, entering the mercantilism of mourning. Coffin salesmen are specialists at turning guilt into profit and as Simenon writes, “When someone is dead, you feel guilty, even if for a smile you did not smile.”

A deluge of Gordon’s frightened friends, thirty years older
than I, and glad to have been spared, decided that lawyers should accompany me to the mortuary. Several lawyers vied for the place as, at certain parties where a girl is stricken, rival doctors contend to make the examination. Two lawyers prevailed. Intense, affluent Jack Lippman played good tennis and once at a lake of summer asked me, “Pitch in a few.” Lippman wore eyeglasses and his swing was awkward. After he missed five times, I threw medium-speed high outside pitches. Lunging, he drove some to right field. I would never have thrown that way to my father; he’d have lined the ball back into my teeth. Silent, sorrowing Gus Simpson was a Socialist who had lost an eye in physical combat with followers of the Jew-baiting priest, Charles Coughlin. I drove to the mortuary with two men, physically flawed but living while my father, who could see perfectly and hit a baseball hard, lay wreathed in the faint odor of embalming fluid.

In brilliant, mild weather, I guided my pale-green car through the twisting roadway inside Prospect Park. The mortuary, a modest red-brick building, stood near the southwest corner, between a roller skating rink and the ball fields of the Parade Grounds which stretched for five hundred yards.

It was the morning of October 17. An expressionless man, wearing a dark suit, waited inside the mortuary door. “My office is this way,” he said. He acknowledged the two lawyers. “Are these your uncles?”

“They’re lawyers,” I said.

“Burial is a private matter.”

“We’re here to talk price,” Jack Lippman said, in a high, dry voice, “and we don’t have very much time.”

The mortician looked at Lippman. “Prices range up from four hundred dollars. The price of the coffin is the determining factor. Use of a chapel and one limousine are included. Was the deceased well-off?”

“No,” Jack Lippman said.

“I’m buying the casket,” I said.

“Yes,” the mortician said to me. “We have excellent coffins for men of reasonable but not necessarily extensive means. Something with a copper lining for twelve hundred fifty will last for centuries. With that we include artificial grass, so that the area around the grave is consistent green.”

“He’s being cremated,” I said.

“Where is this four-hundred-dollar coffin?” Lippman said.

“We’ll take the twelve-fifty coffin,” Simpson said. He fixed Lippman coldly and said to me, “Gordon was a wonderful man. He deserves the best.”

The mortician led us into a softly lighted showroom in which an air conditioner whined. Coffins stood everywhere on sturdy bases: dark, carefully rubbed fruitwoods, with white cloth lining; dull, handsome copper; plain pine for Orthodox Jews. The prices, except for the plain pine, exceeded $1,000.

“Where’s the four-hundred-dollar one?” Lippman said.

The mortician pressed his lips and sighed. He opened a door and walked into another room. Here coffins were tightly stacked on shelves. “That,” he said, indicating a coffin covered with gray cloth.

“We’ll take it,” Lippman said.

I walked to the cloth coffin and touched it. This was my father’s coffin; then at last, I had come to the coffin one removed from my own. I withdrew my hand. The cloth beneath was darker. The shade was sensitive to moisture, touch, life. Five hundred people coming to the funeral and I had bought a coffin of chameleon gray.

“No,” Gus Simpson said. “That just won’t do.”

I walked toward a fruitwood coffin marked $685. “This one,” I said.

“Do you wish time payments?”

“I’ve got the money.”

“Shall I notify the newspapers?”

“I’ve taken care of that.”

I followed the mortician back to his office, and while Jack Lippman and Gus Simpson ignored each other’s glares, I signed a funeral contract, which I discovered two weeks later included $15 extra for artificial grass. Was it artificial fescue? I wondered. Was Merion more?

Outside the summer sun was taunting. I walked to the car, a lawyer at each elbow, wholly alone. The wrongness of things seized me. At the Parade Grounds boys were throwing footballs. It was that season; baseball would come again. The team was broken up and with my father dead there was no one with whom I wanted to consider that tragedy, and because there was no one I recognized that the breaking of a team was not like greater tragedy: incompleteness, unspoken words, unmade music, withheld love, the failure ever to sum up or say good-bye.

It was not, as Eugene McCarthy remarked of his decision to challenge Lyndon Johnson for the Presidency, like St. Paul falling off a horse. The metaphysic of conversion is said to have thrown Paul from saddle to roadside, where, for several verses, he sat basking in Christianity. My own decision to find and live again with the Dodgers of my youth proceeded slowly and, so to speak, against the grain. When the idea had developed to embryo and I exposed it to an editor, I found myself being put down, which is rather a different occurrence from being unhorsed.

“Those Dodgers are no more special than, say, the Boston Red Sox of 1948,” said the editor, whose name is Otto Friedrich. “You only think they’re special because you covered them. They’re only special to you.”

“And that Wessex stonemason was special only to Hardy, but
Jude
came out a pretty good book.” Overkill, but with editors, critics and witches foul is fair.

Friedrich shuddered and reached for his Cinzano. A maître d’ refilled our glasses. Possibly because we were sitting in Toots Shor’s restaurant, under the cubistic rendering of a runner sliding home, Friedrich persisted in discussing baseball. He had grown up on a farm in New Hampshire, he said, where his
father, Professor Carl Friedrich, the Harvard political scientist, lived and played the cello; when New England atmospheric conditions were suitable, young Otto fled his own ritual piano lessons for a radio which carried the voice of Red Barber. “I remember those broadcasts distinctly,” Friedrich said. “Am I mistaken or was Barber truly excellent?”

Friedrich was editing the
Saturday Evening Post
then, about as well as any man could edit inside a sarcophagus, but he possessed a transcending sense of privacy, which sometimes collided with his craft. Those things about which he felt most personally were a priori barred from the mass middle-brow magazine he was trying to make. Indeed, when Friedrich composed a touching memoir of his Paris days, his words were published not in the
Post,
but in
Esquire.
Thinking that I was suggesting a magazine article on the Dodgers for the
Post
(which I was not), and remembering the team with other lost saints, Friedrich shook his head and sipped Cinzano. Leaving, I remembered the virgin queen who at last made love and then inquired if serfs did the same.

“Yes,” said her paramour.

“But it’s too good for serfs,” the queen protested.

And I added one more secret Dodger idolator to a list by then ten years old and numberless as sand. I left the
Tribune
for magazines in 1954, following what was then the common ladder of journalism. When young, one toiled at a paper, later proceeding to
Collier’s
or
Coronet,
where supposedly expense accounts allowed for renting convertibles and buying steak dinners, after which one wrote
Of Time and the River,
or at least
Other Voices, Other Rooms,
and became an author rather than a writer. The distinction was said to be immortality and $50,000 a year.

For $9,500, a private, carpeted office and an expense account which did allow for rented sedans and London Broil blue plates, I joined
Sports Illustrated,
during the first summer of its life. It
was also the first summer in which Walter Alston managed in the major leagues. His experiences and mine were equally confusing.

A maxim at the
Tribune,
and at any good newspaper, commands: “Do not preconceive.” If you go to the ball park, or to the concert hall or to a political campaign, thinking, “Things are probably going to go about like this,” you, writer not author, are going to invent lead paragraphs to describe imaginary events. It is a writing reflex. Then the Phillies upset the Dodgers or Heifetz chooses a slow tempo or John Lindsay slurs a speech and you find yourself the prisoner of preconception. “The Phillies made their first mistake at high noon today, which is when they showed up at Dodger Stadium.” The sportswriter who remembers, or who thinks he has invented, this lead at breakfast, knows pain at 4:20, when a weak fly to left concludes the Phillies ll-to-2 victory. The writer may reverse the joke, which will then not make much sense, or he can expunge the breakfast lead from thought and try to write about what happened. By the time I left the
Tribune
I had been trained, both by colleagues and by the exciting unpredictability of sport, not to anticipate. That was one important aspect of professionalism. Another was sitting quietly in the press box, despite the rising impulse to bellow, “Come on, go get ‘em, Oisk.”

The problem at
Sports Illustrated,
as at all magazines covering news, is that not every story can be built in a day. A number of technical considerations—sophisticated layout and production schedules—demand anticipation. Magazine management must prepare for contingencies. Horse Wins Race. Horse Loses Race. Jockey Throws Race. Lightning Strikes Jockey. The science is imprecise, but it is important to reserve pages and to prepare treatments covering all the likely eventualities. My specific problem at
Sports Illustrated
was that my immediate superior, John Knox Tibby, insisted that we calculate, not all likely contingencies, but the right one. I was his handicapper.

I moved out of the stark
Herald Tribune
newsroom into a carpeted office without a window, but within shouting distance of the managing editor’s suite. “You’re doing fine judging by where they put you,” someone told me on my first day at
Sports Illustrated.
“No view, but a very high-rental area.” I sat for a few afternoons, telephoning friends, who were out covering ball games. Then on Thursday I heard myself being asked, “Who’s going to win that big Yankee-Cleveland double-header this Sunday?”

“I don’t know, Jack, I don’t know the American League that well, and even if I did, I couldn’t be sure.”

“You’re covering it,” Tibby said. “It’s our lead story.” He spread blank pages on his desk and sketched rapidly. “Here we have a picture, over this whole page, that says baseball. Here we run a smaller picture that says crowd. Here’s the head and story. And here”—he printed in large block letters—“is your by-line. Now, who’s going to win?”

“I still don’t know.”

We drank double martinis at the English Grill. We drank single chocolate malteds at the Cromwell Drugstore. “What you really care about is poetry,” Tibby said. “I can see you years from now, forgetting the slider pitches, and happy”—here he paused portentously—“as poetry critic of
Time.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said again and began to think of interviewing E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost.

Toward dusk, worn down, I confessed that I thought the Indians were ready to take the Yankees. Tibby was sophisticated, persuasive and besides, professionalism has a stop. Underneath, we really do think we know.

“Most people here would disagree. They say the Yankees are Olympians.”

“Yes,” I said, bounding apoetically from Greece to Deutschland, “but we’re about to see ‘The Twilight of the Gods.’ “

“That’s it,” Tibby said with soft certitude, and on Sunday night after Early Wynn and Bob Lemon had swept the Yankees, he was jubilant. My story needed revision, but the Wagnerian baseball headline was fine.

“It’s an accident that it worked out,” I said.

“You’re being modest.”

“No. If I really knew who was going to win, I’d bet. I’d tell the DA. Or something. On the
Tribune
we learned: never anticipate.”

“That was the old
Trib,”
Tibby said slowly. “This magazine is something entirely new.” Then, yet more slowly, “You and I, we may be Donner, having crossed the pass without realizing we were doing it.”

I thought about that for a while and, when I had begun to quiver, I called on Richard Johnston, the assistant managing editor, and said that, what with the idle days, my own rhythms as they had developed at the
Trib,
the demand for preconception and problems in diction, communication and attitude, I thought I was going to have to quit.

“And do what?” Johnston said.

“Go to dental school.”

“All right. Some of what you say may make sense. Some doesn’t. Some of your newspaper work was fine. Some I would have laid a heavy hand to. Meanwhile, I’ve been invited to a small private party for a ball player and his wife. Would you join me?”

“Who’s the ball player?”

“Joe DiMaggio.”

“You know something, Dick? I’ve never met DiMag.”

Joe DiMaggio did not appear at the party. Marilyn Monroe stood, gloriously blonde, in the center of a mirrored room, wearing a translucent bodice that outlined rouged nipples, and a black skirt that curved with her buttocks. She stood in the center of the room and she stood in each mirrored wall and Earl
Wilson, the columnist, pointed a camera and said, “Bend forward, Marilyn, so I can get some cleavage.”

Marilyn made a little cry and bent, pulling her bodice up in a gesture of modesty, that showed more nipple still. “And who are you?” said a press agent.

I blurted my name and muttered at Marilyn that I knew some baseball players myself.

“What?” she said, smiling vacantly.

“I used to travel with a ball team.”

“Oh,” she said. “I don’t know very much about that.”

The press agent concluded that I was neither Leonard Lyons nor Arthur Miller and elbowed me toward a corner where Dick Johnston stood mute, gazing from mirror to mirror.

“Why didn’t you help me?” I said. “It isn’t exactly easy to make conversation with somebody like that.”

“Well,” Johnston said, still looking about, “I started to talk to her, but my tongue got stiff.”

Sadly, it was no go at the magazine.
Sports Illustrated
was improving and I was growing, but along divergent roads, and when I found myself assigned to ghost-write the football articles of Herman Hickman, my patience snapped and I resigned. At almost the same time, Buzzy Bavasi was selling Preacher Roe and Billy Cox to Baltimore, using the money to sign “a strong lefthanded pitcher named Koufax.” I thought to go back to newspaper work, but I had seen carpeted offices and Marilyn Monroe. Newspaper days were forever behind me, like games of stickball.

In 1955 the Dodgers, past their prime, finally won a World Series. I sat as spectator while John Podres beat the Yankees in game seven, helped by Sandy Amoros, squat eraser of the 50 percent color line, and a change of pace that Charlie Dressen had loved to teach. “Reach back there, kid, like you’re throwing the fast one and when your arm gets to here”—almost fully extended—“pull down like you’re pulling down the window
shade. It spins like the hard one, but it’s got no speed.” Alston managed the 1955 team with calm and skill, and after Podres’ victory, 2 to 0, something that could happen only once had come to pass. The Brooklyn Dodgers had won their first World Series. The exultant cry rang. “This year is next year.” Then a season afterward, when the Yankees won again, humiliating Don Newcombe, the old joke had a wooden stake driven through its heart. “Ah,” comics suggested, “wait till last year.” Robinson retired in 1956. The ball club moved in 1958. The Jackie Robinson Dodgers were no more. In Los Angeles one could see the Walter O’Malley Dodgers, possessed of Koufax, Drysdale and another world championship by 1959. But they were not the team.

I went to work as Sports Editor of
Newsweek,
a position then freighted with obscurity, and began selling articles on sports and other phenomena to a variety of magazines. I was trying to move away from baseball, but my journalistic identity, such as it was, lived with the
Tribune
stories on the Dodgers.

Maturity tugged at me. Farewell, a long farewell, to the first marriage. Farewell to Brooklyn, dining cars and teams. But at parties, among the actresses who wanted to look like Marilyn, when anyone recognized my name, it was always the same. “Say, aren’t you the one who covered the Dodgers?”

“Yes, but I write other things as well.”

“Look, was Billy Cox really all that good?”

“Did you see the piece I sold to
Saga
magazine on the agony of Jonas Salk?”

“And Preacher; how did he hold the spitter?”

“Or the one in the
Saturday Evening Post
on the troubles and promise of Art Carney?”

“What’s George Shuba doing these days?”

“Pardon me. I want to talk to that girl over there.”

I suppose it was Robert Frost who brought me to my senses. Although the old
Saturday Evening Post
pursued a policy “of
discouraging stories by writers about other writers and most especially about other writers who have not published in the
Post
, “ I insisted that a conversation with Frost, an unpublished
Post
author, might be as interesting as one with Jack Webb, Karl Mundt or Arthur Godfrey. At length, I was commissioned to call on the poet.

He greeted me in his weathering cottage, on the shoulder of a Vermont hill, and after some fencing said, “So you’re a sportswriter.”

“Yes, but I write a few other things as well.”

“Of course,” Frost said. It was the dawning of September 1960. He wore a ragged gray sweater over a white shirt. “Nearly everybody has to lead two lives. Poets. Sculptors. Nearly everyone has to lead two lives at the very least.” Frost put a mottled hand to his large brow. “When I was young,” he said, “my family worried all the time that I was going to waste my life and be a pitcher. Later they worried that I would waste my life and be a poet. And they were right.”

The next year I returned at his invitation and found him walking down a reach with two small dogs. He waved and called across a hundred feet of grass, “Did Lefty Tyler pitch in a World Series?” (George Albert Tyler, who grew up in Derry, New Hampshire, where Frost taught school, pitched ten good innings to no decision in the 1914 Series at Boston, and later split two Series decisions for the Chicago Cubs.) To me the poet was saying not merely “hello,” but “I know who you are.”

It was then, in Frost’s last decade, that I began to consider the Dodgers not as baseball players but as baseball-playing men, as some are poetry-writing men, or painting men or men who make decisions of state. The experience of traveling with them was not something to dismiss, nor to let anyone dismiss in arrogant ignorance. It had become part of myself; it was something to be proud of.