The Boys of Summer (6 page)

At Cunningham Park, Olga excuses herself to walk. My father and I find an empty diamond, number five, and Gordon says, “We’ll start with grounders, then we’ll go to flies.”

I station myself at first. The grounders skip out hard on two or three bounces. There is no faking on sharp grounders. You put your head down and follow the ball and hope that the last bounce will be true, or at least playable, and not carom into your mouth or groin. Head down is the secret. To follow the ball into your glove you have to keep your head down, but when you do, you leave your nose and mouth and eyes unprotected. “Head down,” my father calls. “The ball can’t bite.” Oh, baseball is a game of subtle terrors. You hope for the last bounce to be high. A high bounce is as easy as a throw. But nobody who understands the game is fooled. One grounder bounces high; and then another. “L. H.,” my father calls. “L. H. Kahn.”

“What’s that?”

“For Lucky Hop. Be ready.”

A kind of test is under way. Coming of age at Cunningham Park, Queens. Gordon Kahn is testing to see if his indulged, skinny, quick-tongued son dares show his face to hard ground balls. For once the gabbling is quieted. The bald mustached man, with the thick wrists, who wears a white shirt and bow tie to hit fungoes, and the boy are reaching, sensing, challenging and I suppose loving one another through a fifty-cent baseball, whose cover, even now, is showing spots of grass stain. One bad bounce hits me in the wrist. Another smacks my shoulder. I am not Jersey Joe Stripp, but I keep forcing myself. Head down. Head down. The baseball smarts, but pain passes and I feel a crown of sweat and all sensations are obliterated by pride. I am showing Gordon Kahn that I am not afraid of the ball.

Olga returns from her walk. She is wearing a plaid skirt and sensible brown shoes. “Gore-don. Have you talked yet?”

“Please, woman!”

But the cue for action has been sounded. Olga has commanded
exorcism of the satyr. After four more ground balls, my father beckons with one finger. My left wrist is red. My glove is soft with perspiration. I half-turn, flip it to the fringe of outfield grass, and lope in, knees pumping high, head up. Then I lean forward, palms on knees, the way major leaguers do when they are awaiting an artful stratagem from the manager. “You know,” Gordon announces, “women are different from men.”

He rests the bat against a hip and wastes three matches lighting a Pall Mall. Then he puffs furiously. I realize. The warm sweat freezes. I lose my breath.
They know I have been watching the maid.
In the hot sun on the ball field, I cannot envision the maid naked or any woman naked or myself fool enough to lust to see. But I
have
wanted, and now I have fetched myself a retribution. A dozen punishments spin about my brain. They’ll take the radio. That’s it. They’ll commandeer the black Air King radio and I won’t be able to hear Red Barber and his sidekick AI Helfer broadcast any more Dodger games.

“Once a month,” my father says, “women have a flow of blood through their private parts. This flow has to do with ova, the eggs women produce, internally. They produce a new one every month. The bleeding is called the menstrual period.”

“Is that right? I didn’t know that. I never heard about that.”

“Well, it’s true, even so,” my father says. “This is called the menstrual period, although in certain vulgar quarters it is referred to as the monthlies. Nobody we know or would care to know could possibly refer to it in that way.”

“Once a month, they
bleed?
From
there?”

My father puffs the Pall Mall. “Get out in left and I’ll hit some flies,” he says, concluding the only discussion of sex that is ever to pass between us. I run down fly balls poorly. “You’re probably tired,” Gordon calls. “But you weren’t bad on the grounders. Not bad at all.” That is the second highest trophy in his storehouse. “Not bad at all” is my father’s Distinguished Service Cross.

We rejoin Olga at the gray Dodge, feeling very close. “Did you listen to your father?” Olga says.

“Yeah, Ma.”

“Your father’s a very sensible man,” Olga says.

“He’s okay, Ma.”

I feel tears welling. “Your wrist,” Olga says. “It’s all red and it’s swelling. Gordon! What have you been doing to that child?”

When the wind blew from the south and the French doors had been opened, the sound of cheering carried from Ebbets Field into the apartment. It was astonishing, to hear cheers from a major league crowd while sitting at home. Over the Air King, Red Barber talked in his wise, friendly way. “Camilli up. Dolph isn’t the biggest man in baseball, but there are none stronger. No, suh. They don’t
come
stronger than Dolph Camilli. Down in training camp one time some of the ball players went to visit a zoo. Hold it. Here’s Warneke’s pitch. A curve down low. There was a gorilla in the zoo and Camilli got to staring at the gorilla and the gorilla got to staring back at Dolph. Warneke’s a fast workman. A curve stays wide. Ball two. And they’re both a-lookin’ at each other and someone, I think it may have been Whit Wyatt, John Whitlow Wyatt of the North Georgia Wyatts, says, ‘You know I think Camilli could take him, hand to hand.’ Hold it! Camilli swings! There’s a high drive to right. It’s way up there. Way up! Slaughter’s at the base of the wall looking up, looking, but Enos can plumb forget this one. It’s
gone.
Over the 344-foot sign. Number 16 for Dolph Camilli. Say, folks, I think Wyatt may have something there.” Muffled cheering escapes the Air King. I thrust open the bedroom door. Seconds later an undulating roar, the real cheer arrives, borne by the wind. “That line drive was still
rising
when it went out
of sight over Bedford Avenue. Did you see where that one landed, Brother Al?”

“No, I didn’t, Red, but where’s Canarsie?”

“Hey,” I shout. “Camilli hit another.”

“That was a real Old Goldie,” says Red Barber on the Air King, “and we’re rollin’ a carton of Old Golds, two hundred fresh-tastin’
real
cigarettes, down the screen to Dolph. We know he’ll ‘preciate ‘em. He’s quite a guy.”

The Dodgers arose out of the 1930s, the wretched of the earth, armored by the tactical cunning of their new president, Larry MacPhail, Leland Stanford MacPhail, a man who tried to kidnap Kaiser Wilhelm in 1918 and failed but did capture a genuine Hohenzollern ashtray. MacPhail was gutty and brilliant and he rebuilt the team with remarkable trades and with monies cadged from the Brooklyn Trust Company. He put lights up in Ebbets Field, and for the first night game,
the first Brooklyn contest ever under the arcs,
John Vander Meer of Cincinnati pitched his
SECOND consecutive NO-HITTER. Double-no-hit Vander Meer!
MacPhail was not only good, he was lucky, and Dodger baseball became a carnival. He hired Babe Ruth to coach, which didn’t work out, and signed Leo Durocher to manage, which worked wonderfully, and he brought Barber, the Ol’ Redhead, to broadcast. Even if the baseball wasn’t really
that
exciting, how could you tell when you listened to that siren-sweet Southern tongue? Red knew his players and his league and his game and how to tell a story and how to let rhythms run. A ball game told by Barber was a drama, with plots and subplots, but going onward, always onward among stories rounding out scenes, and climaxes described with such dramatic restraint that you cried out, “Come on, Red, come on, Old Friend, Companion of a Hundred Afternoons, let go, come
root
with us.” And from the Air King: “These Phillies are an
interesting
team. They’re in for three days and they’re plenty of tickets, heah! Syl Johnson has been
to the mound before. That runner on first, Tuck Stainback, won’t bother him. Not a bit. Been pitching in the major leagues since 1922. They used to talk about O rare Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s friend, but the Phils have their own rare one in Syl.” All right, Red. Great
sportsmanship.
Hurray for all the
Johnsons!
But do you have to tell us when the lousy Phillies are beating us 2 to 1? “There’s a second strike on Coscarart. Fine curve ball.”
All right, Red. But he’s against us.
Crack. Cheer. “Coscarart lines the two-strike pitch cleanly into center field. Base hit.” Hey. We’re alive! “Plenty of tickets left for tomorrow. Two-thirty game. I’ll be looking for you, heah! They’re stirring in the ol’ pea patch, and with men on first and second and nobody out, here comes the Phillies’ manager, Doc Prothro, to the mound, with the potential Dodger winning run at first base.”

For six consecutive years, the Dodgers had been clowns. I never remembered them out of the second division. Now in 1939, with MacPhail and Barber and Durocher and Camilli and Hamlin and Hughie Casey, they finished third and drew a million people. “Everything happens in Ebbets Field,” Red Barber said, “so it’s worth coming out, but still, there are no fans anywhere like Brooklyn fans. Anywhere. No, suh.” In 1940 the Dodgers added Joe Medwick and finished second. Then, in 1941, after a beautifully close race with St. Louis, they won the pennant. You knew they had to win after you heard Barber report a game in Sportsman’s Park, the only major league ball park west of the Mississippi River. It was one of those rare encounters where two teams match strength so heroically that the verdict, the final score, describes not only an afternoon but a season. Twenty years later participants became excited anew in recollection. Whit Wyatt and Mort Cooper pitched three-hitters. In the fifth inning, the Cardinals put men on second and third with nobody out. Wyatt, master of the outside slider and the inside fast ball, overwhelmed the next three batters. Nobody
scored. In the seventh inning Billy Herman and Dixie Walker hit doubles. That was the game: Brooklyn, 1; St. Louis, 0. The Dodgers won the pennant by roughly the margin of that victory.

“You have to give these Dodgers credit,” Red Barber confided on the Air King. “They won when they had to win. They weren’t afraid. And plenty of credit goes to the fans of Brooklyn, too.” Thanks, Red, but credit? Credit for what? We weren’t pitching. We were riding the trolley cars for five cents and paying for our tickets or listening to the radio at home. Well, credit for patience, maybe, but mostly that belonged to another generation. The previous Dodger pennant had come during the final days of the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson. “Now there’s a team that
was
a team,” my father insisted. It was a point of dignity with him not to be caught rooting as ardently or for precisely the same things as I. “You should have seen Zack Wheat, ‘Buckwheat’ we called him, smack that ball down the right-field line, wobbling his back leg before he swung. You should have seen him, but he finished the year before you were born.” Gordon was speaking of Wheat and his boyhood, but he was excited by Camilli and mine. We both knew it in that pennant season. We exchanged quick looks and for the first time we were men together.

That was how the forties began in the Grand Army Plaza section of Brooklyn. There was concern about the Nazi-Soviet treaty, nervousness about the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and horror at Hitler’s pogroms. But little Abe Fishbein with the faintly red mustache said the Soviets had been encircled. Gary Lapolla thought he had a point. Gus Simpson seemed pained. Jack Lippman looked uncomfortable. Sol Sherman said that as far as he was concerned Stalin was a Russian Hitler. Nothing else. Or could someone explain if he was any better, how he was? “Dinner,” said Olga smilingly, “is served and I don’t see how you can equate Stalin with that monster.”

“What are we having, Ma?”

“It’s impolite to ask.”

“Ah, Olga, tell the kid.” Abe Fishbein with the beetle-bright eyes.

“Crown roast.”

“You’re some Stalinist, with your crown roasts, Olga,” said Gary Lapolla, all olive skin and suavity.

“Those two son of a guns do exactly the same things, isn’t that so?” said Sol Sherman, a thick-chested man with a mustache like Hemingway’s.

“It’s good, Sol, you teach math,” Lapolla said. “If they let you at young people in history, you could do serious damage.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Sol, shouting.

“What do you think of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Regor?” Gary said. “Your mother thinks you think nothing. She thinks you think of nothing but baseball, which she thinks is nothing. Ergo.” The large living room was crowded with bright failed poets and unpublished novelists, now forty-five, teaching or practicing law. “Do you know what ‘Regor’ is?” Gary said. “It’s Roger in a little-known tongue, the obfuscated dialect of Serutan.”

I blinked. “Backwards,” Jack Lippman said, kindly.

“I suppose there’s something wrong, in your cockeyed scheme, with a kid liking baseball,” shouted Sol Sherman.

“Aaah,” Elsa Sherman said. “Come, Sol. Come, Gary. And you, my dear. Or poor Olga’s marvelous crown roast will be cold.”

It was hot. The meals were always hot and the meat was always tender. In the dining room, furnished in square walnut pieces, a large mirror contended with Olga’s nonrepresentational paintings, and conversation spun from Eliot to Sholokhov, with a touch of Mann, a dash of Auden, a suspicion of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Through each remorselessly intellectual social session, I caught threads. And when the conversation
moved to Dixie Walker, I could weave fragments of my own like an adult. That was how the forties began in the Grand Army Plaza section of Brooklyn before, with sickness, heartstorm and most of all with time, the gaiety weathered away.

First, the maid left. After nine years, Elisabeth said she was sick, moved in with a sister in Queens and sent the brother-in-law for her things. “She only stares at the wall all day,” the man said, shaking his head in what appeared to be concern. But Olga doubted the story. She regarded the abrupt departure as treason. “Do you know, the bitch saved enough from her pay to buy a small apartment house. She was planning to desert us all the time.” Gordon disliked taking sides and by this time he had perfected a diversionary tactic. “I’m having trouble with a question on groupings,” he said. “I have the Four Horsemen, the Three Fates and the Sixteen Nines. You should know the last, son.”

“The major leagues,” I said.