The Spirit Gate (59 page)

Nikolai
smirked. “You mean you’re going over to watch ghost baseball with
him. You been going over there for a month of Sundays. You ever seen
any old ghost-ball game?”

“The
season hasn’t started yet,” said Yevgeny. Mr. Ouspensky says it’s
a matter of timing. He says what we want is a Saturday afternoon just
after Opening Day.”

Nick
shook his head. “You two are such
shlubs
. And Mr. O knows it.
He’s just fooling with you.”

“No
he isn’t,” said Yevgeny defensively. “He says there’s a spot—
The
Spot
. He knows how to find it. And if we get there at just the right
time—”

“You
might see a twenty-year-old ballgame?” Nick finished for him. “That’s
dumb.”

“Baba
says there are magic spots like that all over Poland,” said Ganady.
“Why wouldn’t there be magic spots here, too?”

Now
Nikolai’s eyes rolled. Baba Irina, he’d be thinking, still thinks
she’s in Keterzyn, and that Poland is still an imperial force—or
ought to be. All he said was: “This is America. The New World. There’s
no magic. There’s movies.”

“But
Baba remembers—” Yevgeny began, and Nick’s eyes made another circuit.

“Eugene,
you’ve known Baba all your life and you still don’t get that when
she says, ‘I remember . . .’ she’s about to tell a
boobeh myseh
?
I bet you still believe in fairytales, too, huh?”

Yevgeny
winced at this abuse of his name, but Ganady had barely heard his brother
at all, for something had called to him from the corner of 21
^st
and LeHigh.

“You
know what Mr. Ouspensky says is magic?” he asked, looking away over
rooftops and telephone poles. “A five-four-three triple play.”

The
other boys considered this. Then Yevgeny nodded agreement.

“You,”
Nick disparaged, “are obsessed with baseball. You and Mr. O, all three.”

“You
sleep with your mitt under your pillow,
Nikki
,” said Yevgeny.
“Same as us.”

Nikolai
blushed crimson to the roots of his dark hair. “Don’t call me that,”
he said, but he didn’t deny where his fine, red leather catcher’s
mitt spent the hours between dusk and dawn.

oOo

“Connie
Mack wasn’t always a mean man,” said Mr. Ouspensky. “But money
made him mean. That’s what I think.”

Ganady
and Yevgeny regarded the bluff wooden face of the so-called ‘spite
fence’ from the flat roof of Mr. Ouspensky’s apartment building.
The fence had gotten its name from Connie Mack’s motivation for raising
it to keep the people in Mr. O’s apartment buildings from watching
games free of charge.

“It’s
ugly,” said Yevgeny, wrinkling the freckles that powdered his nose.

“So
is greed,” said Mr. Ouspensky. He handed Ganady one end of his new
clothesline and pointed at the rusty pulley mounted on a stalwart upright.

Ganady
obediently took his end of the rope to the pulley, looped it over the
roller, and gave it a yank. The pulley resisted, then turned with a
squeal of protest. Ganady brought the loose end back to center where
Yevgeny stood waiting with the nether end.

“Could
one of you tie it, please?” asked Mr. Ouspensky. “These hands aren’t
good for nothing anymore.”

As
Yevgeny tied a neat square knot in the clothesline, Ganady glanced over
at Mr. Ouspensky’s hands. They were gnarled, the knuckles outsized.
Ganady wondered how he managed to do anything with such hands.

He
felt sorry for Mr. Ouspensky. Where the Puzdrovsky house was full of
family, Mr. O’s house was full of quiet. He had not even a cat or
a canary. Some of Baba Irina’s old
gleyzele tey
friends had
canaries. Mr. Ouspensky had nothing. And if people were conspicuously
absent from his small apartment, so too were any memorials to them.
There were no little shrines such as decorated seemingly every flat
surface in the Puzdrovsky home. No heirloom lace graced the tabletops,
no fragile teacups cluttered the shelves, no family photographs hung
on the walls or filled keepsake books. Mr. Ouspensky’s bookshelves
were stacked with issues of Dime Sports Magazine, his photo albums were
full of baseball cards and baseball clippings. It was these he brought
out to show his visitors.

Faces
looked up at Ganady from the black construction paper pages of the books.
On this page, Phillies faces: Cy Williams, Lefty O’Doul, Freddy Leach,
Chuck Klein. Players from the Thirties.

“He
was the great one.” Mr. Ouspensky tapped the Chuck Klein card with
an arthritic finger. “Phillies sold him twice during the bad years,
but he kept coming back. Ended his career with them.”

Ganady
wondered if perhaps Mr. Ouspensky knew everything about baseball in
the same way that Baba Irina knew everything about the Old Country,
about the Golden Age of a forgotten empire, about mushrooms.

“He
batted .386 in 1930.” Mr. Ouspensky wagged his head. “.386. Imagine.
But the team finished last.”

“Pitching,”
murmured Yevgeny, echoing the movement.

“You
can’t win without pitching.”

Mr.
Ouspensky shrugged. “Eh, I was more of an Athletics fan then. After
all, there they were, and I could see them for free until that thing.”
He nodded toward the window that looked out on Connie Mack Stadium.

Ganady
raised his eyes to the window. He could just see the hated fence.

“The
Phillies were at the Baker Bowl then,” said Mr. Ouspensky.

“So,”
Ganady said, frowning a little, “if we could find a spot . . . an eddy . . .”

“. . . you’d
be seeing the Athletics.” Mr. Ouspensky flipped to a new page. Athletics
players stared up from it.

Ganady
was disappointed. He hadn’t really followed the Athletics. Hadn’t
cared much when they’d moved to Kansas City. He was a Phillies fan.
Still, a ballgame was a ballgame. “Have you seen Eddie Waitkus play,
Mr. Ouspensky?”

“Most
certainly, I’ve seen him play.” Mr. O flipped pages, time-traveling
the book into the present day. “I saw him play the day he was shot.
’49, that was. Terrible, terrible thing. That poor girl must’ve
been crazy to do such a thing.”

“Da
read about it in the paper,” said Ganady. “The papers said she was
deranged. That’s the same as crazy, I guess. Ma didn’t like us to
talk about it. She wouldn’t let Da take us to games for while after.”

“Almost
the whole season,” said Yevgeny mournfully.

“So,
what do we need to find a spot?” asked Ganady, tearing his eyes from
the fragment of Connie Mack he could see from Mr. O’s kitchen window.

“First,
we must have faith. Then, we must have a ritual.”

“There’s
a ritual?”

“Last
season, I set up a kitchen chair on the roof and brought up some beer
and peanuts. In a red-and-white-striped bag. Pretended I was at a game.
That worked twice.” He shrugged. “Eh, it’s a bit different every
time.”

Ganady
refrained from asking how a ritual could be different every time, and
watched Mr. Ouspensky turn back the pages of his scrapbook to 1932.
He laid the album open on the kitchen table. Newspaper clippings dominated
the page. KLEIN VOTED NL MVP, said one. FOXX ENDS SEASON WITH 58 HOMERS,
proclaimed another. The other clippings were divided equally between
the Phillies and the Athletics. Stanislaus Ouspensky was clearly a fan
in conflict.

“We
have a year,” he said. “Now we need a talisman.”

“A
what?” asked Yevgeny.

Mr. O smiled and held up a finger. Then he moved through his parlor
to a dark mahogany hutch. Ganady assumed it held dishes, for it looked
much like the cupboard that cradled his mother’s heirloom china, imported
with much care from Poland.

It
held baseball paraphernalia.

The
boys moved as if entranced, coming to flank their host at the cupboard-cum-treasure
chest, there to behold its contents. Two whole bats, a third in two
pieces, lay upon the bottom shelf. There was also a glove of sorts—an
odd-looking thing with unstitched fingers fat as sausages—an unrecognizable
jersey, a pair of cleats with leather uppers so dry and aged, the toes
had curled up. Lastly, there was an assortment of baseballs, some clean
and white, some covered in autographs, some old, muddy, and scuffed.
One had the stitching popped open to reveal the tightly wound core.

It
was this pathetic specimen that Mr. Ouspensky lifted from the shelf.
He held it reverently—the way Father Zembruski held the Host during
Eucharist.

“Jimmie
Foxx home-run ball,” he said.

The
object transformed from trash to treasure, the boys pressed closer.

Yevgeny
thrust his nose into the cabinet, sniffing like an inquisitive hound.
“Where’d you get all this stuff?”

“Oh,
here and there. One place and another.”

His
eyes on the faded jersey, Ganady had a sudden flash of insight. “Did
you play, Mr. Ouspensky?”

The
old man grinned, becoming, in an instant, a 70-year-old boy. Holes showed
where back molars had been. “Eh well, I did play some. That’s my
jersey, you see? Number 25. Lexington Mills team, 1915. Outfield.”
The grin deepened. “They called me ‘The Wandering Jew’ because
I had such good range. My rabbi did not think such a pet name was proper.
In fact, my rabbi did not think baseball was a proper pastime for a
good Orthodox boy. So . . .”

“You
quit?” asked Yevgeny, eyes wide.

“I
got a new rabbi.”

“You’ve
been here a long time, huh?” said Ganady. “In America, I mean. In
Philly.”

The
boy was an old man again, turning a dilapidated baseball in arthritic
fingers. He nodded. “A long time, yes.”

“You
must’ve come over when you were a kid.”

“Not
so much a kid, no. But come. Let us see if the stream of time will allow
us to swim in it today.”

They
went back up to the roof then, Mr. O clutching his talisman. Once there,
he made a circuit of the rooftop, describing a square with halting footsteps,
singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in a quavering tenor.

No,
not a square, Ganady realized, following him bemusedly. A diamond—with
the back of home plate aimed at the spite fence.

At
each corner Mr. Ouspensky paused to assume an infielder’s posture—half-crouched,
facing home plate. When he had completed his tour of the imaginary diamond,
the old man led his acolytes to the invisible pitcher’s mound where
they faced Connie Mack.

“Take
first,” he told Ganady, then to Yevgeny: “Take third.”

The
boys moved to their invisible bases. Mr. O struck a pose—a pitcher
getting ready to go into the windup.

They
waited. The inevitable pigeons waited with them, perched on the new
clothesline, on the edge of the roof, on the clutter of little smokestacks,
on an empty pigeon cote. Their cooing threw a soft blanket over the
other Saturday afternoon sounds. In the street below, cars and trucks
purred and rumbled, muted cheers floated from the stadium across the
street, farther away on the river, boats hooted at each other over the
water.

Ganady’s
nose itched. He withstood the itch as long as he could before reaching
up surreptitiously to scratch it. At once, he felt Mr. Ouspensky’s
eyes on him and turned the scratch into the Sign of the Cross, hoping
Mr. Ouspensky would think he was merely adding to the ritual.

He
chanced a glance at the old man. Mr. O’s eyes were trained on the
stadium wall, large and bright and hopeful. The torn baseball revolved
in his hands, over and over, round and round.

Ganady
held his breath, straining to hear the stadium sounds—crowd noise,
the hawkers shouting, the crack of the bat. Suddenly, that was all he
could hear; pigeons, river, and street traffic all dissolved into the
game. Sparks floated before Ganady’s eyes, and across the street,
Connie Mack’s great wooden ramparts seemed to shimmer and blur in
the afternoon Sun. Was that a bit of emerald green he glimpsed through
the heavy boards? Were those bright flecks of color the spring vestments
of the people in the stands?

Across
from him, Yevgeny let out a long, sighing breath as if he, too, saw . . . something.

The
ball in Mr. O’s hands turned and turned and turned, and the old man
murmured a jumbled litany of names and stats. The spite fence wavered,
melted, faded. Verdant green seeped through its filmy fabric. A pattern
began to emerge.

“Hey,
what are you guys looking at?”

At
the sound of Nick’s voice, the pigeons rose up in a great flutter
of wings. In an instant, Ganady’s view of the ballpark was lost in
a flight of tiny angels. In the wake of their leave-taking, Connie Mack’s
spite fence was as solid as the day it was put up.

Ganady
exhaled.

“Your
brother,” said Mr. O, “is a klutz.”

oOo

“You
don’t really believe you were about to see through that fence, do
you?” Nick asked as they made their way home.

“No,”
said Ganady, “because the fence wasn’t there then.”

“Then
when?”

“In
1932. The year Mr. Ouspensky got a Jimmie Foxx home-run ball.”

Nick
smote his forehead with the heel of one hand. “Oh, yeah! How could
I forget? You were going to travel back in time to catch the game. C’mon,
Ganny. You can’t travel in time by hugging a baseball and staring
into thin air. You need a machine. Anybody knows that. Didn’t you
read Jules Verne?”

“H.G.
Wells,” said Yevgeny and Ganady added, “Maybe baseball is the time
machine. That’s what Mr. O thinks.”

“Mr.
O is a lonely old
meshuggener
who likes to play jokes on dummies
like you two.”

“He
wasn’t joking, Nikolai,” said Ganady. “He meant it. He had a whole
ritual and everything. It was like . . . like . . .”

“Like
mass,” said Yevgeny. “Like
sabes
.”

Nick
shook his head and whistled. “I wouldn’t let Father Z hear you say
that. You could end up doing a thousand ‘Hail Marys’ standing on
your head.”