The Boys of Summer (48 page)

“Walter,” I said, “putting this aside, what are you worth?”

He blinked, unoffended, and said, “I can’t tell you exactly. There are still some litigations.”

“Well,” I said, remembering the old Froebel Academy Trustee with $15,000 or so in a bank, “suggest a sensible figure I can quote.”

O’Malley brushed his jowls. “A fair figure,” he said, “would be twenty-four million dollars.” He turned and gazed at his California stadium with delight.

Buzzy Bavasi’s window wall commands the sea. Rounder, balder, with sadder eyes than I had known, Bavasi gazed toward the Pacific in winter where young people swam. “The water stays warm and we don’t have much pollution yet,” he said. “This is the highest hill in La Jolla, and the only person with a higher house is Dr. Seuss, who writes the children’s stories. He lives above us and we have to watch it. If a child walks onto his land, Dr. Seuss beats him.”

Bavasi smiled at his own joke. “A nice guy,” he said. “Let’s have some Chivas.”

In the bar off the living room a foot-high Frankenstein monster stood beside a pleasantry of bottles. I pushed a red button on a black base and the monster made a strident sound. His face turned green. Then the sound stopped and the monster’s trousers fell. His undershorts were polka-dotted. Green faded from the face, the monster blushed a brilliant pink.

“I want to ask about a sentence,” Bavasi said. He walked to a high bookcase in the paneled room and took down
The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
“Look at this,” Bavasi said, showing me the beginning of the book:

An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay—Lyme Bay being that largest bite from the underside of England’s outstretched southwestern leg—and a person of curiosity could at once have deduced several strong probabilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867.

“Is that a good first sentence?”

“Well, it’s out of Hardy, and the author says so, and you more or less have to see what comes after.”

“But that isn’t the way you wrote or Dick Young.” Bavasi strode about the hard-bought room. “Great team you got to cover. Best team I ever saw. The game, it worries me. Arnold Smith, the man whose money started it down here—I got a cut—they hit him hard. And now we’re trying to sell tickets with the ocean to the west, the desert to the east, Mexico south and two established teams north, including the Dodgers. The game isn’t changing as fast as it should, not getting young people. They should have hired Senator McCarthy as Commissioner. Young people follow him.

“You know all those years in Brooklyn I never got paid. Less than twenty thousand dollars for a couple of seasons and never an offer of a piece of Walter’s action. Even after I put together the L.A. team, Walter didn’t pay me enough.

“After I became an owner we were sitting at a league meeting and Walter said, ‘Well, Buzzy, now that you’ve seen
all
the books, I guess you think I was cheating you.’ I could have told him something, but I said, ‘No, Walter, I’ve got the World Series rings.’ I was thinking about the old team, Erskine and Campy. I had associations that were priceless. Was I gonna bitch now because he stiffed me?”

Bavasi walked to a telescope. The air curling about the hills was warm and clear. “Look through this,” Bavasi said. At the other end of the telescope, a half dozen miles away, a Little
League field stood flat on a hilltop. “I can watch my youngest boy play ball there,” Bavasi said. “That’s something, isn’t it? Drive him to the game. Come home. Have a Scotch. And watch him hit six miles away.”

He talked for a while about the great players with calm professionalism, how Reese endured and Furillo cruised in right center and how he wished he had come really to be Jackie Robinson’s friend. His lips set when he asked about O’Malley. “What did that man tell you he was worth?” Bavasi said.

“About twenty-four million.”

Bavasi looked at me and shook his head and mused, and when he spoke, his voice was charged but soft. “That’s true,” he said. “That’s honest. All Walter left out were three hundred acres of downtown Los Angeles.”

In the days after the Dodgers had found their way west and the Brooklyn team withered into retirement, John Lardner introduced me to a wheezing journalist who stood at the long bar of the Artist and Writers Restaurant and tried to talk baseball with us, and drank. He had been blacklisted for his politics, and this cruel deed bowed the man’s spirit and made him afraid. Only the cold fire of Leo Corcoran’s martinis revived a touch of the dashing fellow who had been. Sober, the man spoke banalities. “Say, you guys really like sports, don’t you?” Drunk, he recited a poem he had composed on the creation of the atom bomb. Each stanza drew imagery from a different Shakespearean play. I don’t remember if the poem was good or bad, but the recitation sounded overwhelming.

Throughout the shattering seasons in which he could not work, the journalist studied Shakespeare, and one evening announced that he had grasped the basic universal theme. “What’s going on,” he said, “is war between generations. It’s waged everywhere, if you know how to look.
Romeo and Juliet,
of course, but why can’t Lady Macbeth kill the king? He looks too much like her father. How does Cassius rouse Brutus? ‘Rome, thou has lost the breed of noble bloods.… There was a Brutus once,’ and so on … King Hamlet’s ghost tortures the
young prince.
Othello
begins with the senator raging at Desdemona’s marriage. And
Lear,
the greatest play, is the final battle. Generations war in Armageddon and all must die.”

Lardner gave a brief smile of commendation, and said it was tricky to slip in the premise that
Lear
was a greater work than
Hamlet.

“Anyway, your theory dies at
The Tempest,”
I said.

The writer wheezed. Excitement and English gin had brought color to his skin. “Not at all,” he said. “By the time of
The Tempest,
Shakespeare knew that even he, Prospero, the Magician, had lost the generation war. The rage is spent. The
Tempest
is
King Lear,
seen again, from the other side of the curtain. No rage at all. The author pleads for prayer.”

Lardner is ten years dead and I have not seen the bowed journalist for still longer, but wandering among old Dodgers I again heard the echoing Shakespearean theme. There is only so much space on the planet. Fathers perish to make room for sons. At the end, some go with grace, but the middle years—and these Dodgers are striding through middle years—shake with contention. Jack and Jackie Robinson; Clem and Jay Labine, father and son circling one another in a spiky maze of love.

It is too easy to lay griefs on the end of summer. Once I wrote the poet Robert Graves, asking, among other questions, how it felt to be seventy years old. He could not tell me, Graves responded, because in his own mind he still was twenty-one.

When what Walter O’Malley called the Dodgers’ Official Family tore apart, it was not a sliding man’s knee or a hitter’s dimming eyes that mattered. Rather, another episode in the transcendent generation war came crashing among unathletic men.

After the Dodgers’ fifth California pennant, Buzzy Bavasi says that he became conscious of a challenge to his position. Walter O’Malley’s son, Peter, was maturing, and had inherited the father’s strain of uninhibited ambition. By 1968 Bavasi
faced an ultimatum. He was to find another position that autumn or be dismissed.

During June Bavasi became president of the new San Diego franchise, beating O’Malley’s deadline by four months. In the way of things, O’Malley appears to have been angered. He had specified autumn and he was used to being obeyed. Fresco Thompson replaced Bavasi and his first assignment was to make a flight to Albuquerque, where Bavasi’s oldest son, also called Peter, was directing a Dodger farm team. Thompson, who had wheeled Peter Bavasi in a carriage, was enjoined to fire a godson. The loyal Fresco was torn asunder, like a wild Irish harp.

When he reached Albuquerque, he prepared for duty by consuming a quart of Scotch, and soon after firing Peter Bavasi he needed help to climb into bed. Thompson did not feel well the next morning, or ever again. The final bout with whisky unmasked cancer symptoms, and after a long and painful time, this man of wit and irony found a ghastly death on November 20, 1968. He was sixty-six years old.

Now the Dodgers’ family was rent. The Bavasis had been beaten southward to a patchwork team in San Diego. Peter O’Malley, at thirty-three, became president of the ball club. Walter O’Malley, retaining his large desk under the slain African antelope, declared himself chairman of the board.

Wanting, needing, but being unnerved at a trip back to the Brooklyn of the Dodgers, I rode a subway train. Rightness is often an accident, and on the morning I chose for the revisit, my wife commandeered the car.

Down all the season when I longed to flee college, mornings began with a cry from my father, “Okay, Cheezix.” Cold hands pressed to my belly, and after this gruff tenderness the world began. Each day’s trip toward New York University, from a station called Eastern Parkway-Brooklyn Museum to another called 181st Street, the Bronx, consumed an hour and twenty minutes. Classmates joined me at Nevins Street and we practiced
holding textbooks buttock-high and standing against pretty girls. The back of the hand is an imperfect vehicle of sexual delight. My subway memories are noise, odor and a vaguely faint feeling behind the knees that tells one he lacks sufficient sleep.

Now impelled toward old, unfamiliar places, I paid a subway fare six times what it had been. People complain, but the cars looked neither better nor worse than I remembered. Men jostled as they had jostled in the days when I had covered the City Hall-to-Coney Island walking race. Newspapers blew on dirty floors. Littering is an ancillary function of the free press.

As I rode back, stations showed unforgotten names. Chambers Street. Fulton. A round man was rattling a
New York Times
and a black teen-ager drummed fingers on his own knees. Wall. Did anyone remember what Harold Ickes said in 1940? “Wendell Willkie is a simple, barefoot Wall Street lawyer.”

The train veered left, iron wheels keening. The entry to Brooklyn began with eardrums slightly stopped. Air pressure builds underneath the East River. Then with a faint relief from unfelt pain, I heard the train screech into Clark Street. Brooklyn began.

Memories came flooding into consciousness. Above the Clark Street station rises the St. George Hotel. Advertisements once pleaded, “Swim in our
salt water pool.”
For fifty cents everyone was given a knitted bathing suit, and you could watch the girls in clinging wool: flat globes for breasts, a mound of belly and, as they climbed out of the green water on scaly metal ladders, a clear outline of the magic triangle.

After the swelling days, I had come back to the St. George, when Walter O’Malley chose it as press headquarters one World Series. Baseball men crowded one another, standing on cigarette butts before the bar.

Henry Ughetta, justice of the New York State Supreme Court, director of the Dodgers, found two steps in the ballroom
and pitched headlong. Frank Graham, the late columnist, remarked in his soft way, “Sober as a judge.”

The eight cars of the New Lots Local-Express drew into Borough Hall. It is disquieting to ride within a tiled, unchanging tube and to know what stood above and what is gone and what has come. The old Dodger offices, 215 Montague Street, have been destroyed. The old Brooklyn
Daily Eagle
is dead as
The Tattler.
Above Borough Hall station now blank Federal architecture rings an artless plaza. Above, too, in a pleasant narrow apartment Olga Kahn survives, brave as Brünnehilde in viduity. The age of seventy is her unwelcome beckoner. Still, she has found a place to teach and from time to time she asks, “Would you stop by and tell my people at the New School how Robert Frost said to write, although there are newer poets you should pay attention to?”

The train entered the Nevins Street station. Close to the old kiosks a boy and girl could find the Brooklyn Paramount or the Fabian Fox. We saw Susan Hayward there and Barbara Stanwyck, and Lana Turner in
The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Trying—why was it always so
easy
for John Garfield?—I slipped a hand around a back and under an arm. Arm and body tensed, pinning my hand against a rib; another milkless breast of Israel went unsullied.

“Atlantic Avenue,” called the conductor, ordering me into the present. “Change here for the BMT.”

Where O’Malley planned his Xanadu, blight had descended.
“GEM JEWELERS,”
read a sign where O’Malley would have parked a hundred cars.
“LOANS.” “CASA DE EMPEñO. SUITS
$4.95
UP.”
Five streets angled into the unplanned crossing and black strips of trolley track showed through asphalt on Flatbush Avenue. O’Brien’s Bar was open, but the Blarney Stone, under the Hellenic American Democratic Club, had closed. A breeze whipped around the Williamsburg Bank Building. Storefronts gaped empty. Traffic was light.

It took twenty minutes to walk where I had to go. At Bedford Avenue and Sullivan Place a billboard announced, “The happiest families live in New Ebbets Field Apartments.” The sign was ten years old and faded. Behind it rose a tall stand of faceless, red-brick buildings.

Mr. Caulfield, a tall, brown-haired English teacher in eyeglasses, was supervising dismissal at IS 130 on McKeever Place, which had paralleled the left-field line. The children left quietly and Mr. Caulfield said that by and large they were a good bunch. “About 70 percent black, to 30 percent white,” he said, “but everyone gets along. Some of them know there was a ball park here; not all of them care. But say, I was a fan. I remember Billy Cox and Pee Wee Reese, even if most of the kids never heard of them.”

“Jackie Robinson?” I said.

“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Caulfield, with a glint of pride. “We’ve made Jackie Robinson part of our social studies curriculum.”

“I’m not supposed to say anything to writers,” said Patrolman Greene. “The rule is everything got to be cleared downtown. But I remember maybe better than him. Erskine. Furillo. I’d make sure no one banged their cars.”

White teacher and black policeman nodded and moved separately from the place where Ebbets Field had stood. On a handball wall children had scrawled their names: “Shass.” “Rossnean.” “Spain.”

If the Dodgers ever had a decent team, my father told me. They had a decent team. Billy and Pee Wee and Campy and Jack. Loner, captain, colored gentleman, crusader. But what is that to Shass, Rossnean and Spain?

Sweet Moses, white or black, who will remember?

Is that the mind’s last, soundless, dying cry?
Who will remember?
There was no rustling of old crowds as my long, wrenching, joyous voyage ended, only the question, “Who will remember?” and a small sign in the renting office at New Ebbets Field Apartmerits
saying, as if about the past,
“NO VACANCY.
Files closed.”

And then it was time to start uphill toward another morning and another home.

December 15, 1968-May 21, 1971
New Marlborough, Massachusetts,
and New York City