Snow in August (20 page)

E
ach day for a week, spring rains slapped against the stained-glass windows of Sacred Heart and the stained-glass windows of
the synagogue. Each day, steady sheets of advancing rain, monotonous and soft, were followed by sudden twisted columns of
water, skirling and dancing, destroying umbrellas, lifting hats off skulls, spattering the newspapers on the wooden stand
outside Slowacki’s until Mrs. Slowacki came out to cover them with a sheet of oilcloth held fast with a piece of angle iron.
Basements flooded. Sewers backed up. Tree limbs snapped off and crashed into the yards. Shoes were ruined, their soles flapping
like black tongues. Fungus seemed to sprout in clothes. In the apartments on Ellison Avenue, where the rain came pounding
from the harbor like liquid ice, tenants stuffed towels into the sills of the kitchen windows and talked in the wet halls
about how the weather was all different, wilder and fiercer, since the atom bomb.

For Michael, the raging spring weather was like something
from a movie about the South Seas: a monsoon movie, a movie about hurricanes. With Jon Hall and Dorothy Lamour, and the evil
prison guard, John Carradine, who looked like Emperor Rudolf of Prague. The power of the storms tested him, as it had tested
Jon Hall, but it didn’t feel like punishment. The storms had such a radiant brightness to them, such a newness, that they
made Michael Devlin happy. He wanted to run through them, to dive into the little rivers along the curbs, to splash and roll
and laugh and dance.

The snow was soon gone, washed down the Brooklyn hills to the harbor. On the radio, Michael listened to Red Barber broadcasting
the Dodger games from Cuba through invisible barriers of distance and static. The words coming through the tiny speaker of
the leatherette radio were often unclear, gouged, scratched, crunched, making abrupt loops and bends in the air. But when
he could hear Barber, the announcer’s voice was full of blue skies and palm trees. He never mentioned Jackie Robinson unless
Robinson did something. There wasn’t much argument about Robinson in those radio accounts of distant games, no alarm or anxiety,
no mention of dissension; radio was not the same as the newspapers. But Barber’s serene drawl was itself a guarantee that
the season lay directly ahead of them. A season in which everyone knew that Jack Roosevelt Robinson would make history, just
by showing up.

“I’ll tell you why I want Robinson to come up,” Michael said to his friends one afternoon. “Because it never happened before.”

“There was never an earthquake in Brooklyn before either,” Sonny said. “You want that to happen too?”

“Hey, maybe Frankie McCarthy would fall down a crack,” Michael said.

“I wish he’d fall down the crack of his ass,” Sonny said, and they all laughed.

Then one rain-drowned evening when his mother wasn’t working at the movie house, Michael came upstairs and into the kitchen
and saw a large cardboard box off to the side and his mother beaming. The room was loud with Al Jolson singing “April Showers,”
and though it wasn’t yet April there had been a lot of showers, and Jolson made their annual arrival sound like an occasion
of joy. While Jolson promised that the showers of April would bring the flowers of May, Kate Devlin pointed in the direction
of the voice, and on a shelf between the kitchen and the first bedroom, shaped like a small cathedral, was a new Philco radio.

So keep on lookin’ for the bluebird
, Jolson was singing,
An’ listenin’ to his song
, as Michael’s mother joined for the last triumphant line,
Whenever April showers come along
….

“Up the Republic!” she shouted, as she always did when she was delighted. She had saved and saved and here it was: a new radio,
and a Philco at that. An aerial emerged from the back of the radio and snaked around the wall molding to dangle out a window
into the yards. No static distorted the voices; the sounds of human beings were as clear as water. The radio also had shortwave,
and the names of distant places were printed in tiny letters on the glowing dark yellow dial. Copenhagen. London. Dublin.
Paris. Moscow. And there, yeah, would you look at that?
Prague!

“It’s beautiful, Mom,” he said. “I can’t believe it.”

“Neither can I,” she said. “It was a real bargain down at Ginsberg’s.”

He didn’t ask how much she had paid; he knew better than to try to get her to talk about money. Instead, he turned away from
the new radio, listening now to Les Brown and His Band
of Renown, and saw the peeling face of the leatherette Admiral, lying on its side on a chair beside the gas stove. The cord
and plug dangled uselessly a few inches off the linoleum floor. The old radio looked as sad as a man without a job.

“What are you going to do with the old one, Mom?” he asked.

“God, who knows? Give it to the St. Vincent DePaul Society, maybe. Maybe some poor soul will find it there.”

A pause.

“Can I give it to Rabbi Hirsch?”

“Och, Michael, it’s a terrible oul’ heap of junk. The rabbi might be insulted.”

“No, no. He’d be—Mom, he’s
poor
. He has almost no money. I
know
he wants to hear music. So…”

She smiled. “Do what you like,” she said, and moved the dial in search of the
Lux Radio Theater
.

The next day, there was no rain. Michael rushed home after school, dropped off his books, picked up the old leatherette Admiral
and went back up the hill to the synagogue. When Rabbi Hirsch answered the door, the boy handed him the radio.

“What’s this?”

“It’s for you,” Michael said. “It’s not the greatest, but it works.”

The rabbi held the radio in both hands and for a moment didn’t move. It was as if he were receiving something holy. Michael
imagined him in the café in Prague when he was young, listening with his friends to the many languages of Europe.

“A sheynem dank,”
he said. Thank you very much. He hugged the radio to his chest as if it were a treasure, and
Michael saw his eyes water and his face tremble with emotion.
“A sheynem dank.”

“You’re welcome, Rabbi.
Nishto far vos
.”

“Come,” Rabbi Hirsh said, his voice cracking slightly. “We listen to some music.”

He moved some books and placed the radio on the bookshelf beside the photograph of his wife, Leah. They found an outlet and
plugged in the cord. Then they stared for a moment at the Admiral. The rabbi gestured with a hand, urging Michael to turn
it on. Michael was puzzled; this was not Shabbos, and besides, turning on a radio couldn’t possibly be considered work.

“You turn it on, Rabbi,” Michael said, putting his hands behind his back.

“
Neyn
, no, you do it, boychik.”

“I refuse,” Michael said. “It’s your radio now, so you turn it on.”

“Someday I want to tell somebody that a kid camed here and gave to me a radio and put music in my world.”

“Okay. Just tell them
you
turned it on.”

The rabbi sighed and reached reverently for the knob, the way Father Heaney might reach for a cruet.

And suddenly music filled the low-ceilinged room.

Bing Crosby.

Let me straddle my own saddle

Underneath the Western skies
…

Michael started singing with him, the way his mother sang with Al Jolson.

On my cayuse, let me wander over yonder

’Til I see the mountains rye-iiiiiise
…

The rabbi hopped around, raising his leg, slapping his thigh, laughing, shouting,
“Vos iz dos? Vos iz dos?”
And Michael shouted, “ ‘Don’t Fence Me In!’ Bing Crosby!” And sang:

Let me be by myself in the evening bree-ease
,

Listen to the murmur of the cottonwood tree-ease
,

Send me off forever but I ask you pleee-ease
,

Don’t fence me in….

More whoops, more jigs, and then Bing Crosby was gone. Michael had never before seen the rabbi so happy. They moved from station
to station, hearing Nat Cole and Perry Como and Doris Day. Michael couldn’t find Benny Goodman or Count Basie, but he showed
the rabbi the numbers of the good music stations and how to find the news and the baseball.

“Again I want to hear Bing Crosby,” Rabbi Hirsch said. “About don’t put a fence around me.”

Michael tuned in WNEW and heard the Goodman band. A trumpet player was offering “And the Angels Sing.” The rabbi’s head nodded
to the rhythm. And then his face shifted into deep concentration.

“This music?” the rabbi said, his eyes widening. “This I know. From Prague, I know this. At weddings, we play this, only slower.
And dance.”

Michael glanced at the photograph of Leah. “Did you dance to it at your wedding?”

The rabbi’s face twitched. “No. We never got to dance.”

Michael suddenly pictured his father dancing with his mother. To “And the Angels Sing.” A slow jitterbug, his father singing,
You speak, and then the angels sing…
, and his mother laughing. He wished he could have seen them dancing and happy, and then tried to imagine the rabbi in the
same way,
with Leah. There was a hint of sadness in the air. Michael talked past it. He told Rabbi Hirsch the name of the song in English
and explained that the trumpet player’s name was Ziggy Elman.

“He’s Jewish?” the rabbi asked, brightening.

Michael didn’t know, but Ziggy Elman was in Benny Goodman’s band, and he did know that Benny Goodman was Jewish. He had read
that in some newspaper story. He told the rabbi that Goodman played the clarinet and his band was almost as great as the band
of Count Basie, who definitely was the greatest. Goodman even had Negroes in his band long before baseball got around to it.
Lionel Hampton. Teddy Wilson. The rabbi smiled and nodded to the music.

“This music,” he whispered. “This I know.”

At the end of “And the Angels Sing,” there was a commercial.

“Ziggy Elman,” the rabbi murmured, like a man saying a prayer. “Ziggy Elman!
Ziggy
Elman? Ziggy Elman…”

Then the six o’clock news came on and Michael had to leave. Rabbi Hirsch ran a hand over the peeling leatherette radio and
bowed slightly to Michael.

“Is the nicest thing happen to me in America so far,” he said. “Please to thank your mother when you go home and study.”

He went to the door with Michael.

“Ziggy Elman!” he said. “If my father only have called me Ziggy, I would have been a different person. Imagine a rabbi, name
of Rabbi
Ziggy
?”

On his way home, Michael surged with the happiness that radiated from the rabbi. For an hour, the rabbi had been so happy,
so full of delight, so overcome with the sounds of music
and words, that the air of the tiny synagogue rooms seemed to sparkle. It was as if a deaf man had suddenly begun to hear.

That joy filled Michael’s head as he passed the alley beside the Venus and started to turn into Ellison Avenue. Then it vanished.
There was a small crowd outside the Star Pool Room. Two police cars and the Plymouth used by the detectives were up on the
sidewalk. The front door was open. He could see that the green tops of the pool tables were empty. The Falcons were lined
up against the wall with Abbott and Costello facing them. Michael drifted to the edge of the crowd, which was being held back
by two uniformed policemen.

“What’s going on?” he asked a man wearing a cap covered with union buttons.

“Da bulls are lockin’ up that Frankie McCarthy,” the man said. Michael trembled.

“What for?”

“Beatin’ up some Hebe, I hear.”

Then everyone backed up a few feet, and the detectives were leading Frankie McCarthy out of the poolroom. Frankie curled his
mouth, like a gangster from a movie. His hands were cuffed behind his back and each detective had him by an elbow.

“’Ey, Frankie boy,” someone shouted. “See ya in an hour.”

The crowd laughed and so did the Falcons, who were standing just inside the door of the poolroom. A few of them rested pool
cues on their shoulders like baseball bats.

“This is a bum rap,” Frankie McCarthy said, lifting his chin defiantly, like Cagney or Bogart. “They got nothin’ on me.”

Then his eyes picked out Michael on the fringes of the crowd. He said nothing, but his eyes chilled to the color of aluminum.

The detectives broke the look by shoving Frankie into the backseat of the Plymouth. Abbott sat beside him, a dead cigar
clamped in his mouth. Costello started the car and drove away. The crowd milled around, talking it over. One of the Falcons
closed the poolroom door.

“He’s some piece of work, that Frankie,” said the man with the union buttons.

“Yeah: he’s working overtime at being a bum,” said Charlie Senator, who worked at the Bohack grocery store. He was a quiet,
nobody guy who didn’t talk much but was liked by everyone. One reason they liked him was that he had a wooden leg and never
complained about it. Michael had heard that his real leg was shot off at Anzio.

“You wouldn’t say that to his face.”

“Probably not,” Senator said. “Guys like that jack you up in the dark. But he’s still a bum.”

“What’d he do was so bad?”

“Plenty,” Senator said, and limped away.

Then Michael saw two of the Falcons looking at him from behind the plate-glass window of the poolroom. He turned and walked
quickly home.

Going up the stairs, he realized how dark the halls were, full of shadowy places where Frankie McCarthy could jack him up.
Why did Frankie give him that look? Why were the Falcons staring at him from the poolroom? Now Frankie was down at the precinct
house and they’d want revenge. He remembered Frankie’s knife. He saw Mister G with his broken head. Somebody must have talked.
Michael knew that he had held fast with the police; he hadn’t informed, he hadn’t turned rat. But
somebody
had. And only he, Sonny, and Jimmy had been in Mister G’s store that day. He felt vaguely sick. He thought he knew his friends.
Maybe he didn’t. Maybe Sonny or Jimmy had turned chicken and ratted out Frankie McCarthy. And if
one of them did, why wouldn’t the coward shift the blame, tell the Falcons it was Michael? Save his own ass.