The Boys of Summer Read online

  Bleacher seats at Ebbets Field cost fifty-five cents. You sat in the upper deck behind center field and felt right in the game when you shouted at Goody Rosen, “Come on, Goody, get a hit, get a little bingle, next time up.” (“Yeah, Rosen,” called a blackeyed, black-haired Irishman, “bring home the bacon for Jakey.”) Rosen heard. At least he heard the Irishman. You could see Rosen’s shoulders stiffen. Then he spat.

  If you had $1.10, you bought a general-admission ticket and sat almost anywhere. Weekdays, when crowds were light, you worked your way so close to the dugout that you could glimpse ball players’ faces. Goody Rosen had a short pug nose. It might have been flattened in a fight.

  Without money, you could still assault the ball park. In the deepest corner of right center field, 399 feet from home plate, the concrete wall gave way to two massive iron doors, called collectively the Exit Gate. The base of the doors did not come flush against the ground. Lying prone on the slanting sidewalk of Bedford Avenue, you looked under a crack, twice as wide as an eyeball, and saw center field, left field and two-thirds of the infield. First base lay beyond the sight line, but if you cared enough, you learned to tell whether the man was safe at first by the reactions of the other players. If a man was out at first base, nobody ran to cover second. You had no choice but to learn the game. A sidewalk position was comfortable, except when wind lifted dirt from the outfield and swirled it under the gate and into your eyes, or a policeman poked a shoe into your ribs and said, “On yer feet. Move.” Then you muttered, “Weren’t you ever a kid yourself?” And you moved, sometimes to a garage roof across Bedford Avenue. The garageman, an enormous but agile Italian, barred the direct route, so you climbed another building and then, at a height of thirty feet, leaped an alleyway that was four feet wide. I did it once, noticing in flight that the alley was paved in pebbled concrete. From the garage roof you could see the entire infield and a third of the outfield, which would have been satisfactory had I not been nagged by the idea that I was going to have to make that jump again. The alley paving was not merely hard. It was rough. If you fell, pebbled imprints would stipple an entire side of your body. In the fifth inning of a Dodger-Pittsburgh game, I sneaked down the ladder to the garage and, while the garageman spoke with a customer, I fled, hearing behind me, “Go wan, run, ya big-nosed little bastard. Ya sheenies wanna own the world.” Anything, even anti-Semitism, was better than trying that leap again, and after a while I made a friend at 200 Montgomery Street. His roof was almost as good a viewing place as the garage, and more congenial.

  These adventures helped make plausible the idea of becoming a professional ball player. Ebbets Field was always in reach. There were obstacles—money, the policeman’s shoe, a leap, the greasy garageman—but a boy could contend with them and triumph, if he had wit and persistence and a touch of courage. It was easy and absolutely irrational to relate getting to see a Dodger game with getting to be a Dodger. Which, in the fine irrationality of boyhood, is what generations of Brooklyn children did.

  “Find the tennis ball,” Gordon Kahn suggested. “Let’s catch. You’ve got a hitch in your throw I want to work on.”

  We repaired to the long hall.

  “Reach back; reach. You want to zip it.”

  “Gore-don! Is that child playing ball in the hall again? He should be reading.”

  Olga again was exorcising Philistinism. She thrust forward Little Stories of the Great Musicians, a large yellow book with “full color” illustrations. “When Franz Josef Haydn conducted at the Court of Esterhazy, he noticed that many of the nobles were dropping off to sleep right in the middle of his symphonies. Well, thought Papa Haydn, placing a hand to his powdered gray wig, I think I shall compose another symphony that will give all the lords and ladies a surprise!”

  “Hey, Dad. Whosa better fielder? Cookie Lavagetto or Joe Stripp?”

  “Comparisons are nefarious,” Gordon Kahn said.

  “Please, God,” said Olga, who aspired toward atheism, “let him become interested in a book. One book. Please. Any book.”

  Her large eyes gazed on the off-white ceiling toward Yahweh. And soon, in His infinite humor, the Lord God of Yisroel placed in my hands a book that enslaved me. Pitching in a Pinch, bound in dun, published in 1912, was a memoir written (with help) by Christy Mathewson, who, say the canons of legend, is “the greatest pitcher ever to toe the mound.” It appeared one day on a high shelf among botany guidebooks and novels by Frank Norris and Michael Arlen. “A relic of my own boyhood,” Gordon Kahn said, and he fetched Pitching in a Pinch and displayed a photograph of “Ty Cobb, the Georgia Peach, sliding. Note spikes high.” Interested in a book? I was overcome. Pitching in a Pinch became my constant companion. No one has ever read a baseball book harder or for more hours of a day or with such single-mindedness. I read nothing else, no Dickens, no Twain, no Swift. Mathewson (with help) created a baseball world that added humor to the earnest and heavy baseball cosmos of my fantasy.

  In Pitching in a Pinch, Johnny Evers of the Chicago Cubs studied “deaf-and-dumb sign language” after learning that John McGraw, who managed Mathewson and the Giants, was using it to flash signals. But Evers, “no match for McGraw, threw a finger out of joint in a flash of repartee.” According to Mathewson, Silk O’Loughlin, “the umpire who invented strike tuh,” always kept his pants so perfectly pressed that “players were afraid to slide when Silk was close for fear they’d bump against the trousers and cut themselves.” Jinxes caused bad luck and “seeing a cross-eyed lady” brought about a jinx of terrible power. To kill an ordinary jinx, “you spit in your hat,” “but when a cross-eyed girl fell in love with one of the Giants and began going to the ball park every day, McGraw told the Romeo to find another Juliet—or go back to the minors.” Mathewson’s opening to Chapter Ten, “Notable Instances Where the Inside Game Has Failed,” was a particular favorite.

  There is an old story about an altercation which took place during a wedding ceremony in the backwoods of the Virginia Mountains. The discussion started over the propriety of the best man holding the ring and by the time it had been finally settled the bride gazed around on a dead bridegroom, a dead father, a dead best man, not to mention three or four very dead ushers and a clergyman.

  “Them new fangled self cockin’ automatic guns has sure raised hell with my prespects,” she sighed.

  That’s the way I felt when John Franklin Baker popped that home run into the right-field stands in the ninth inning of the third game of the 1911 World Series with one man already out. For eight and one-third innings the Giants had played “inside” ball, and I had carefully nursed along every batter who came to the plate, studying his weakness and pitching it. It looked as if we were going to win the game, and then zing! And also zowie! The ball went into the stand on a line and I looked around at my fielders who had had the game almost within their grasp a minute before. Instantly, I realized that I had been pitching myself out, expecting the end to come in nine innings. My arm felt like so much lead hanging to my side after that hit. I wanted to go and get some crape and hang it on my salary whip. Then that old story about the wedding popped into my head, and I said to myself: “He sure raised hell with your prospects.”

  It is 1936. Gordon and Olga are embarking on a tour of Mexico by boat, leaving the children and housekeeper in care of Dr. Rockow. For one month I am the ward of the continental dentist. “It won’t hurt you to be apart from us for a time,” my mother says. “And at least you’ll find something to do beside playing catch with your father in the hall. But we want you to be happy. We’ll leave your grandfather money for tickets to games during August.”

  “How many games?”

  “How many, Gore-don?”

  Gordon Kahn pursed his lips. His new mustache had grown in three-shaded, brown and black and like the herring sometimes red. “There are two home stands. One game each should be sufficient.”

  “Bleacher seats?”

  “No,” Gordon conceded, “general admission.”

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p; “All right, all right, you’ll miss your boat,” Dr. Rockow said.

  On the next day, I sat behind home plate and saw the Dodgers lose to the Cubs. Then I spent an afternoon at stickball. On the day after that, I sat between third and home while the Dodgers lost to the Cubs again. August was three days old and I had exceeded my quota of major league baseball.

  “All right, allrrright, if it means so moch to you,” Dr. Rockow said, “we can both go Thursday afternoon when I don’t practice.” I saw four more games before my parents returned, two by myself and two with my grandfather. Dr. Rockow began to root for Johnny Cooney, a very smooth center fielder, and drew from me an oath never to tell my parents about the games or his own rooting. “Don’t ee-wen speak too moch of Cooney,” he said. “Bahtter these games be jost between us.”

  It is 1937. The family considers sending my sister and me to camp. The camp director, “Uncle” Lou Kleiderman, visits and asks what I like best.

  “Baseball.”

  “Wonderful,” says Uncle Lou Kleiderman, a stocky mustached man who limps and smiles. “We like boys who like baseball.” Boys? Baseball? Uncle Lou Kleiderman likes families with two parents teaching and a grandfather pulling teeth, who pay the full tuition in advance. “We have three baseball fields,” Uncle Lou says.

  “Diamonds,” corrects Gordon J. Kahn.

  “And”—the camp director is spieling, not listening—“I have pictures of them in this folder right here.”

  “A hardball diamond,” I cry.

  “That’s right, son,” says Uncle Lou, smiling, “and the baseball counselor, Uncle Iz Brown, once had a tryout for the major leagues.”

  “But hardball?” says Olga. “Won’t the child be hurt? Do you have a program in arts and crafts?”

  “Maaaa!” Who wants to twist leather into bracelets? You might as well spend a summer in school. “Who did Uncle Iz Brown play for?” I ask Uncle Lou Kleiderman.

  “Well, he went to the University of Idaho or Ohio and he can fill you in on the rest.” Uncle Lou’s smile is beginning to turn.

  “Gore-don. Aren’t injuries more likely in hardball?”

  “We have a full-time physician, Dr. Hy Kogelman, and a nurse.” Uncle Lou’s face quivers and the smile is gone. Superior medical care is nothing to smile at.

  “I dislocated a shoulder sliding once,” Gordon Kahn says. “I was stretching a single into a double.”

  “Good for you,” says Uncle Lou, confused by the terminology.

  “But I was only out for a few seconds,” Gordon says, not wanting to cause a fuss.

  “What does Kogelman think of focus of infection?” says Dr. Rockow.

  Uncle Lou winces, makes a gastric noise and promises to mail Dr. Rockow a photograph of the infirmary. “First thing in the morning. First-class mail.”

  “Pip, pip,” says Emily Kahn. She is six and she has learned the rule of the house. Whether you have something to say is unimportant. What is important is to make a sound.

  “How’s that shoulder now?” Uncle Lou says. Gordon explains that the effect is most severe when he serves a tennis ball and he is still explaining when he signs the contract to send us to Camp Al-Gon-Kwit. “A real athletic family,” says Uncle Lou Kleiderman. “That’s what we like to see.” Ooops, wrong coda. Olga’s face freezes in horror.

  “Would you believe,” Uncle Lou says, desperately, “they’re some who say Jews are afraid of sports?” But Olga glares him to the door.

  Since I will play first base for the Dodgers, my new glove is a first baseman’s mitt, big, heavy and, for $2.95, stiff as a shirt cardboard. To soften a glove, you work neats-foot oil into the palm and fingers and when the oil dries into a stain, soft mottled brown on tan, you place a hardball in the pocket. You put one hand into the glove and move the ball up toward the webbing and down toward the heel until you find the spot where the feel is perfect. It is a matter of sensors and quite precise. Being careful not to jiggle the baseball, even a quarter-inch, you slip your hand out, wrap the leather around the ball and tie the glove tightly. Then you leave it alone. Except that in a few days you want to see how the pocket is coming so you untie the glove and toss the baseball underhand and catch it, aware of touch and listening for the sound you want, a deep clean thwack! Then you add more neats-foot oil, replace the ball and tie the glove again. After a while, a pocket develops that makes you seem a better fielder than you are. By that time, you have fallen in love with the glove.

  I am overwhelmed by the first baseman’s mitt and soon we are sharing a bed. Now, in the middle of the night before a train will leave Grand Central Station for Camp Al-Gon-Kwit, I have untied the glove for the penultimate time. It is 11:45 by a radium dial and I am tapping the pocket softly when Dr. Rockow coughs, turns in the other bed and calls my mother’s name.

  “Pappa? What’s the matter?”

  “Motter? Nothing is the motter. I have a little cough. But it may be contagious. You had better sleep somewhere else.”

  I bed down in another room with my sister and my glove, and in the morning Gordon takes us to Grand Central and a black and white sign that says “Al-Gon-Kwit Indians Pow-Wow Here.”

  What a summer of tragedy. With my stickball swing, I’m not much of a hardball hitter. A baseball bat weighs as much as five broomsticks. I can’t pull and I haven’t any power. My arm is weak. I would be all right at first base because I’ve mastered catching thrown balls in the hall on St. Marks Place. But throws can be short, and a hardball bounces erratically off dirt, especially the pebbly, grassless Berkshire soil of Diamond 2 at Camp Al-Gon-Kwit (not depicted in the brochure). I am the third best player in Bunk 4. I am good enough to play the first half of Al-Gon-Kwit’s game against Camp Ellis (named for the owner) and to line a single to right field. But Wally Siedman (two doubles) is a better ball player and so is Lonnie Katz, who has long, sleek, veiny muscles and cracks a home run down the left-field line. I am no idiot. I know about Hephaestus and Haydn and about Tinker and Matty and McGraw and I have even, not telling my mother so as not to give her satisfaction, read a little of Ivanhoe. If, in my bunk alone, Siedman and Katz are already better, will there be room for me on the Dodgers? And first base! In practice, I lean toward a short throw which bounces off a stone and hits the side of my head. It is a minute before double vision passes. “You’re a pretty fair ball player,” says Uncle Flit Felderman, my counselor, rubbing my head as we sit on an embankment. He is in dental college and understands first aid.

  “I’m not crying, Uncle Flit. A hit in the head just makes your eyes water.”

  “You’re all right,” Uncle Flit says. “With a little more size, you’ll start to pull. But not first base. The outfield.”

  Hasn’t Uncle Flit noticed—I have noticed—that I am a terrible judge of fly balls?

  “Or second.”

  I’m not crazy about hard grounders either. “Thanks, Uncle Flit,” I say. A week later in batting practice, Uncle Iz Brown throws a medium-speed pitch into my ribs. I spin in pain but keep my feet and rub dirt into my palms. “You want to play the game, play the game,” barks Uncle Iz. “Get in and hit, or go to the infirmary.”

  As the camp train carries us slowly down the Harlem Valley toward New York, I am coughing just often enough to remember the sensation of a baseball striking ribs. On my lap the outsized first baseman’s mitt shows the scratches and scars of a vigorous summer.

  I cannot tell my father. How can I admit to the old City College third baseman what I have grasped, that I will never be good enough for the Dodgers? “You want to play the game, play the game!” My sister? A child, and sometimes vicious. My mother? She wants me to make leather bracelets. That leaves my grandfather, the dentist, the white-haired whizbang continental Marxist toothpuller, wearing a white jacket, out of Minsk, U.S.S.R., Brooklyn’s leading battler against foci of infection, Dr. Abraham Rockow, D.D.S.

  My mother, the enemy, meets the camp train and kisses me softly and says, “Oh. By the way. We’ve moved.” A taxi takes us t
o Lincoln Place, near Grand Army Plaza, and a large apartment building of red brick. “We have seven rooms on the top floor,” my mother says. She shows me the living room, which leads to glass doors opening onto a tiny terrace. “Those are called French doors,” Olga says. “Now would you like to see your name in the New York Times?”

  “Who? Me? In the Times? Yeah, sure.” We walk to my parents’ bedroom in the strange apartment. I have never heard the household so quiet. Olga reaches into a bureau, a chiffonier, she calls it, and shows me a clipping from the New York Times. Rockow, Abraham, D. D. S., suddenly on June 30. My name appears two lines lower in the agate type. Beloved grandfather of Roger. What he had called a little cough was a massive coronary.

  III

  The world is never again as it was before anyone you love has ever died; never so innocent, never so fixed, never so gentle, never so pliant to your will. But these are afterthoughts. Generations vie and the young recover swiftly, or believe they do. A few years later in the new apartment there is some horseplay and then Elisabeth, the Austrian maid, makes a lively proposition. “Would you like to watch me take a bath?”

  “But.” Long indrawing of breath. “What? Sure.”

  It is Saturday night. Emily is asleep. Olga and Gordon have gone to hear Dimitri Mitropoulos conduct the New York Philharmonic. From the black Air King in my room, the theme of the “Lucky Strike Hit Parade” blares, “All your friends are here to bring good cheer your wa-a-a-y.” Then, “And here’s number seven, still on the top ten: the Hit Parade orchestra brings you an exciting instrumental version of’I Hear a Rhapsody.’ “ That song? In a neighborhood schoolboy joke the druggist jumps a lady customer, who cries out, leading a chocolate malted to comment to the glass on its left, “I hear a rape, sody.” That song? That ridiculous song? And now?

  “Well?” Elisabeth says. I cannot joke. My throat is dry. I nod. Elisabeth leads the way down a hallway into the kitchen, through a door into her small bedroom, which is tidy and painted white. She turns to face me and removes her dress and slip. She does not wear a brassiere. I stand motionless and gape.