Authors: Pete Hamill
Snow in August (2 page)
“Hamill blends fiction and fantasy to produce a masterpiece… in a book that comes along about as often as there is snow in
August…. All of the elements strike a chord without coming across as clichés…. He has written a great American novel.”
—
Winston-Salem Journal
“Delightful… endearing… absorbing… Hamill has written a telling episode of faith, a faith which professes that major or minor
miracles might readily occur along the streets of ancient Prague or modern Brooklyn’s East New York.”
—
Midstream
“Re-creates the Brooklyn of days gone by lovingly…. Hamill, the journalist, puts just the right amount of realistic detail
into the time and place and characters to make this story burst with life.”
—
Kliatt
NOVELS
A Killing for Christ
The Gift
Dirty Laundry
Flesh and Blood
The Deadly Piece
The Guns of Heaven
Loving Women
SHORT STORY
COLLECTIONS
The Invisible City
Tokyo Sketches
NONFICTION
Irrational Ravings
A Drinking Life
Tools as Art
Piecework
Why Sinatra Matters
Diego Rivera
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Excerpt from “April Showers” by DeSylva and Silvers. Copyright © by Range Road Music, Inc., Quartet Music, Inc., and Stephen
Ballentine Music Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
Excerpt from “Don’t Fence Me In” by Robert Fletcher and Cole Porter. Copyright © by Warner Bros. Inc. Reprinted by permission.
Excerpt from “Zip-ah-dee-doo-dah” by Ray Gilbert and Allie Wrubel. Copyright © by Walt Disney Music Co. Reprinted by permission.
Excerpt from “Penthouse Serenade” by Will Jason and Val Burton. Copyright © 1931 by Range Road Music, Inc., and Quartet Music,
Inc. Reprinted by permission.
Warner Books Edition
Copyright © 1997 by Deidre Enterprises, Inc.
Reading Group Guide copyright © 1999 by Deidre Enterprises, Inc., and Warner Books, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc.
Hachette Book Group
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New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: October 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56966-8
Contents
PRAISE FOR PETE HAMILL’S SNOW IN AUGUST
my brother John
AND IN MEMORY OF
Joel Oppenheimer
who heard the cries of
“Yonkel! Yonkel! Yonkel!”
in the summer bleachers of 1947
.
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things not seen.
HEBREWS 11:1
A Jew can’t live without miracles
.
YIDDISH PROVERB
O
nce upon a cold and luminous Saturday morning, in an urban hamlet of tenements, factories, and trolley cars on the western
slopes of the borough of Brooklyn, a boy named Michael Devlin woke in the dark.
He was eleven years and three months old in this final week of the year 1946, and because he had slept in this room for as
long as he could remember, the darkness provoked neither mystery nor fear. He did not have to see the red wooden chair that
stood against the windowsill; he knew it was there. He knew his winter clothes were hanging on a hook on the door and that
his three good shirts and his clean underclothes were neatly stacked in the two drawers of the low green bureau. The
Captain Marvel
comic book he’d been reading before falling asleep was certain to be on the floor beside the narrow bed. And he knew that
when he turned on the light he would pick up the comic book and stack it with the other
Captain Marvels
on the top shelf of the metal cabinet beside the door.
Then he would rise in a flash, holding his breath to keep from shivering in his underwear, grab for clothes, and head for
the warmth of the kitchen. That was what he did on every dark winter morning of his life.
But this morning was different.
Because of the light.
His room, on the top floor of the tenement at 378 Ellison Avenue, was at once dark and bright, with tiny pearls of silver
glistening in the blue shadows. From the bed, Michael could see a radiant paleness beyond the black window shade and gashes
of hard white light along its sides. He lay there under the covers, his eyes filled with the bright darkness. A holy light,
he thought. The light of Fatima. Or the Garden of Eden. Or the magic places in storybooks. Suddenly, he was sure it was like
the light in the Cave of the Seven Deadly Enemies of Man. That secret place in the comic book where the faceless man in the
black suit first took Billy Batson to meet the ancient Egyptian wizard named Shazam. Yes: the newsboy must have seen a light
like this. Down there, beyond the subway tunnel, in that long stone cave where the white-bearded wizard gave him the magic
word that called down the lightning bolt. The lightning bolt that turned the boy into Captain Marvel, the world’s mightiest
man.
Michael knew that the magic word was the same as the name of the wizard:
Shazam!
And he had learned from the comic book that the letters of the name stood for Solomon, Hercules, and Atlas, Zeus, Achilles,
and Mercury. Ancient gods and heroes. Except for Solomon, who was a wise king from Bible days. Mighty symbols of strength,
stamina, power, courage, and speed. They weren’t just names in a comic book either; Michael had looked them up in the encyclopedia.
And their powers were all combined in Captain Marvel. On that
night in the mysterious cave, the wizard named Shazam told Billy Batson he had been chosen to fight the forces of evil because
he was pure of heart. And no matter how sinister his enemies were, no matter how monstrous their weapons, all he needed to
fight them was to shout the magic word.
Shazam!
Alas, on the streets of the parish, the magic word did not work for Michael Devlin and his friends, and for at least three
years they had debated the reasons. Maybe they needed to get the powers directly from the Egyptian wizard. Maybe the word
didn’t work because they weren’t pure enough. Or because, as his friend Sonny Montemarano put it, Captain Marvel was just
a story in a fucking comic book. Still, Michael insisted, it might be true. Who could ever know? Maybe all they had to do
was believe hard enough for it to happen.
Michael was snapped back into the present by the sound of the wind. First a low moan. Then a high-pitched whine. A trombone
choir, then a soprano saxophone. Tommy Dorsey’s band, and then Sidney Bechet. The names and music he had learned from the
radio. It sounded to Michael like the voice of the light. He sat up, his heart pounding, wondering what time it was, afraid
that he had overslept, and swung his feet around to the floor. They landed on the
Captain Marvel
comic book.
I wish I didn’t have to do this, he thought. Sometimes being an altar boy was a huge pain in the ass. I wish I could just
lie in bed and listen to the wind. Instead of dragging myself all the way to Sacred Heart to mouth a lot of mumbo jumbo in
a language nobody even speaks. I wish I could fall back into this warm bed, pull the covers around me, and sleep.
But he did not sink back into the warmth. In his mind, he saw his mother’s disappointed face and Father Heaney’s angry eyes.
Worse: he felt suddenly alarmed, as if he had come close to the sin of sloth. Even Shazam warned against sloth, listing
it among the Seven Deadly Enemies of Man, and Shazam wasn’t even a Catholic. The word itself had a disgusting sound, and he
remembered a picture of an animal called a sloth that he’d seen in a dictionary. Thick, furry, nasty. He imagined it growing
to the size of King Kong, waddling wetly through the city, stinking of filth and laziness and animal shit. A dirty goddamned
giant
sloth
, with P-38s firing machine guns at it, the bullets vanishing into the hairy mush of its formless body, its open mouth a pit
of slobber. Jesus Christ.
So Michael did not even raise the black window shade. He grabbed his trousers, thinking: The antonym for sloth must be self-denial.
Or movement. Or a word that said get off your ass, get up and go. When the priests, brothers, and nuns were not drilling them
in synonyms or antonyms or the eleven times table, they were forever hammering away about self-denial. And so, buttoning his
fly in the dark, he refused himself the pleasure of pulling the shade aside, or rolling it up, and thus revealing the source
of the luminous light. He would wait. He would put off that vision. He would offer up his discomfort, as his teachers commanded
him to do, for the suffering souls in Purgatory. Be good. Be pure. Accept some pain and thus redeem those who are burning
for their sins. He could hear the chilly orders of his catechism teachers as clearly as he could hear Shazam.
Shirtless and shoeless, he hurried through the dark living room and past his mother’s closed bedroom door to the kitchen,
which faced the harbor of New York. The fire in the coal stove had guttered and died during the night, and the linoleum floors
were frigid on his bare feet. He didn’t care. Now he would deny himself no longer. He lifted the kitchen window shade, and
his heart tripped.
There was the source of the light.
Snow.
Still falling on the rooftops and backyards of Brooklyn.
Snow now so deep, so dense and packed, that the world glowed in its blinding whiteness.
The thrilling view pebbled his skin. It had been snowing for two days and nights, great white flakes on the first day and
then harder, finer snow driven by the wind off the harbor. The boy had seen nothing like it. Ever. He could remember six of
his eleven winters on the earth, and there had never been snow like this. This was snow out of movies about the Yukon that
he watched in the Venus. This was like the great Arctic blizzards in the stories of Jack London that he read in the library
on Garibaldi Street. Snow that hid wolves and covered automobiles and crushed cabins and halted trolley cars. Snow that caused
avalanches to cover the entrances of gold mines and snow that cracked limbs off trees in Prospect Park. Snow from a mighty
storm. The night before, someone on the radio said that the blizzard had paralyzed the city. Here it was, the next morning,
and the snow was still coming down, erasing the world.