The Boys of Summer Read online

  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. “W
e’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

  AN EPILOGUE FOR THE 1990s AND THE MILLENNIUM

  When the Saturday Evening Post fell dead at Christmas time in 1969, I felt the pain one suffers upon the loss of a particularly loving relative. By this time, soon after my forty-first birthday, I was tending three children, supporting one wife who was pursuing a graduate degree at Columbia and helping out a former wife with alimony checks. In these circumstances, the abrupt loss of my $35,000 annual retainer was unsettling. Even worse was knowing that the Post calamity sundered bonds with gifted and generous editors. Sundered them forever. Great editors, the late Otto A. Friedrich and William A. Emerson, Jr., at the Post, qualify as cultural treasures. Like the right wife or a perfect third baseman, each is irreplaceable.

  I could have gone to work for a newsmagazine, but I didn’t want to bow to a salaried regimen and the censorship and corporate thinking that went with that secure and suffocating life. I hoped to keep my spirit and manual typewriter free. And all the while make a living.

  One book, I thought. I’ll write one book that I want to write. A book for readers, of course. But first a book for myself alone. I’ll write about things and places and people I have loved. Newspaper days. My father, Ebbets Field, Jackie Robinson. A baseball team. The players who laughed and wept in a society that beats down men of muscle and sweat. My father, as a man of muscle and sweat, who knew botany and Gibbon, relished vector analysis and stirred to the restless chords of the César Franck Symphony in D Minor, had himself been beaten down. I would write a book about people who knew defeat and rose to heroism. If I can just get that one book written, I thought, whether it succeeds or fails, my own life will assume a meaning. If I get that book done, and it doesn’t sell, I’ll go back to one of those groupthink newsmagazines and take the money and the pension rights and complain not at all.

  Or very little.

  The title came immediately to my brow. I had heard the great Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, recite on two occasions. Once he drank himself silly and spouted randy doggerel, such as “Getting Fanny’s Bun.” On the other evening he spoke with great control, in tones of surpassing beauty. That was the night I heard Dylan say, “I see the boys of summer in their ruin.…”

  The title troubled some at the publishing house. It came from a poem, for goodness sake, and poetry doesn’t sell. Didn’t I know that? Others, thinking of a popular play, The Boys in the Band, announced that Dylan’s line and my title suggested homosexuality (as though that were an evil). In my first contract for this book, an editor substituted his own title idea. Safely, prosaically, dully, he wanted to call the book The Team. Months of dialogue followed before I was able to win a debate which should not have been begun.

  When I was three-quarters finished with the manuscript, my muses disappeared. They had been working hard and took an unauthorized rest trip to their homeland near the Pierian Springs that run down Mount Olympus. A fortuitous meeting with Carl Erskine in New York lured them back into my riverside work room.

  Erskine remembers saying, “If you don’t finish this book, then how do you think you’ll feel when Dick Young comes out with it next year.” My own recollection summons up more inspirational words. “You can finish. You have to finish. Everybody on the whole team is counting on you to finish this book.” The thought of letting down these people, splendid ball players and good men; the thought of failing to make a memorial to the Herald Tribune, to Ebbets Field, to my father … That failure would try my spirit.

  By the following wintry dawn I was back typing.

  When I had written the final word—“home”—in the spring of 1971, $380 remained in the family checking account. Our stocks, our savings accounts, our weekend place in the Berkshire Hills, all had gone to fund a single book. With my enthusiastic support, my wife decided to throw a party. “I might as well celebrate,” she said. “After all I’ve become the world’s outstanding expert on Pee Wee Reese under the age of thirty.”

  Zero Mostel came and Rae and Jackie Robinson and Howard Fast, who, to my surprise, berated Robinson for testimony in Congress that refuted words attributed to Fast’s friend, the great African-American singer, actor, leftist, Paul Robeson. “Mr. Rickey asked me to testify,” Robinson said. “Back then (1949), if Mr. Rickey had asked me to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, I would have done that, too.”

  Fast pressed on until I guided him away with a firm hand between the shoulder blades. Robinson looked uncomfortable. A few moments later Zero Mostel trumpeted his name. In that Tevye voice, with which Zero captured Broadway in Fiddler on the Roof, he called, “Mister Jackie Robinson.” Robinson flinched. He was a warm, if somewhat shy, party guest, who had little stomach for arguing politics with a stranger over caviar canapés or poached brook trout. Jack liked to eat.

  “Mr. Jackie Robinson, you are my hero,” Mostel shouted. “And finally to meet you.” He lumbered across the room and gave Robinson a stout-armed, wet-eyed hug. After that, everyone romped and reveled.

  By Monday morning the checking account had shriveled to $80. Monday afternoon an editorial assistant at Harper telephoned and said there were two offers on her desk. “New American Library wonders if you would accept $100,000 for paperback rights. We feel they may go higher. The Book-of-the-Month Club has chosen The Boys of Summer as a special spring selection. That is another $105,000, if I’m not mistaken.”

  The Book-of-the-Month Club assigned Red Smith to write a profile of me for its newsletter and Smith invited me to lunch, near the building that had housed the Herald Tribune. Floors that knew Virgil Thomson, Homer Bigart and John Crosby were now occupied by the employees of a health insurance company,

  Smith was not only a splendid writer, he was a scrupulous reporter. Since I was not a hostile witness, he opened a notebook in which he had written a long set of questions.

  “On exactly what date,” he said, “did you start as a copy boy for the Herald Tribune?”

  To my discomfort and Smiths, I could not remember. The best sports columnist extant asked me a reasonable question, and I had to plead nolo contendere. After drinks came, Smith and I rallied.

  The Boys of Summer was published in March, 1972, to varied reactions. Dick Young wrote a column calling it, “a great book, or anyway, half a great book.” He liked my account of growing up within shouting distance of Ebbets Field. He was less fond of my visits to the ball players. The author Eliot Asinof praised my chapters on the ball players. “But to tell the truth, I don’t give a damn about how you grew up in Brooklyn.” A newspaper reviewer named Jonathan Yardley had trouble understanding the relationship between the two major sections of The Boys of Summer. Yardley complained, not entirely pleasantly, that I had written two books, not one.

  I could parry that his reasoning makes C
anterbury Tales thirty books, rather than one. But to what purpose? As Pee Wee Reese learned that it was folly to read the papers after the Dodgers lost, I have discovered that the harshest book reviewers are hypersensitive to critical comments on their own stuff. And they tend to have long memories. Aside from that, most press comment was wonderful, from Peter Prescott in Newsweek to George Frazier in the Boston Globe to Heywood Hale Broun in the Chicago Tribune to Dave Anderson in the New York Times.

  The first printing—12,000 copies—sold out in days. Harper bought 30,000 copies from the Book-of-the-Month Club to keep stores stocked, while more printings were prepared, Johnny Carson asked me to talk about The Boys of Summer on The Tonight Show. Dick Cavett devoted an entire ninety-minute program on ABC to the book and to some of its principals. But sorrow was not far away.

  On April 2, a heart attack killed Gil Hodges in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he was managing the Mets. He was forty-seven. In affectionate tribute, Reese remembered a fight he had gotten into with Dee Fondy, a two-hundred-pound first baseman for the Chicago Cubs. Hodges moved quickly, grasped Fondy by the uniform shirt and lifted him off the ground. “I don’t know where you’re going when I put you down, Dee, but you’re not going anywhere near Pee Wee.”

  At Hodges’ funeral, Jackie Robinson said, “I always thought I’d be the first to go.” He called me a few months later, after The Boys of Summer moved to the top of best-seller lists. He began in the ball-park language we used to use. “You son of a bitch.”

  “Why am I a son of a bitch, Robinson?”

  “Your damn book has my telephone ringing all the time. I get no peace. Some of them called me an Uncle Tom for working for white bosses. Now they’re finding out I wasn’t an Uncle Tom all because of your damn book.”