Snow in August (26 page)

On the way home with his mother, he talked about the way Robinson had been booed, not because he was a Dodger, obviously,
but because he was a Negro, and she tried to explain how there were all sorts of people in the world, and how some of them
were ignorant or afraid or full of disappointment, and how you had to pity them and pray for them.

“They just don’t know any better,” she said. Then her voice lowered. “But, to tell the truth, some of them…”

She just shook her head, as they turned into Ellison Avenue for the last two blocks to home. The night sky was clear, bright
with dense stars and a huge moon. There were more people in the streets now. The night was cool but not cold, with a brisk
wind blowing up from the waterfront, and they were both glad they’d worn coats. A half-full trolley car raced by on its metal
tracks. The bars of Fitzgerald’s and Casement’s were packed. They turned into the apartment house.

“We’ll have a nice cup of tea,” she said, “and then a good night’s sleep.”

On the second floor landing, as they passed Mrs. Griffin’s flat, Michael could hear the squeak and bang of the roof door.
He was suddenly wary. He remembered clearly hooking it shut. He stepped ahead of his mother on the last flight of stairs and
turned cautiously on the landing. He could see a rectangle of sky through the open door.

“Why is that thing open?” Kate Devlin said, fumbling for her key. “Go up and lock it, son.”

He went slowly up the roof stairs. When he reached the door, he could see it: a bright red swastika painted on the inside
of the black door. Paint was splashed around the small landing.

“Mom! You better come up here, Mom!”

Coatless now, she left the apartment door open and hurried up the stairs.

“Good God,” she whispered.

She stepped outside, with Michael behind her. In the bright starlight they could see the words
JEW LOVR
painted on the outside of the door, the paint still wet to the touch. The words filled the door. There didn’t seem to be
room for the
E
in
LOVER
.

“Those cowardly bums,” she whispered, then went back to the doorway. “Now be careful, don’t get the paint on yourself.”

She hooked the door shut and led the way downstairs. In the kitchen she pulled on her coat. Her face was cold and focused.

“That does it,” she said. “I’m calling the police.”

“They won’t do anything, Mom.”

“I’m calling them anyway. Lock the door behind me.”

From the window, he saw her cross Ellison Avenue and walk into the back door of Casement’s Bar, where there was a pay phone.
I should have gone with her, he thought. Suppose they’re down there? Suppose the Falcons are watching her? If
they do anything to her, it’s because of me. I’m the one who goes to see Rabbi Hirsch. I’m the one who went to get Father
Heaney. Not her. He imagined men in black uniforms and polished boots coming out of the dark to hurt her. A phrase rose in
his mind.
Got shtroft, der mentsh iz zikh noykem
. God punishes, man takes revenge. If they touched her, he would find them and kill them. No matter where they went, if they
ran to the four corners of the world, he would find them. He didn’t care if he was caught. He didn’t care if they took him
to the death house at Sing Sing and strapped him in the chair.
Got shtroft, der mentsh iz zikh noykem
…

And then he saw her come out of the back door of Casement’s and step between two parked cars. She ran across the street. In
the kitchen, he unlocked the door and peered down the stairwell. He saw her hand on the banister, heard her quick steps, and
then she was coming up the last flight and he took her hand and led her into the kitchen and locked the door.

“All right,” she said, removing her coat. “Let’s have our cup of tea.”

Two uniformed cops arrived about an hour later. One was beefy, gray-haired, and bored. He said his name was Carmody. The other’s
name was Powers. His skin was the color of oatmeal. Their polite boredom made Kate Devlin seethe.

“Whatta ya want us to do about it, lady?” Carmody said. “Clean it off?”

“Investigate it!” she snapped. “There’s paint all over the floor up there. These idiots probably took the can to the roof
and threw it into the yards. Maybe you could find the can. Maybe you can find the brush. Maybe you’ll even find fingerprints!”

“Well, well, a sleuth,” Carmody said. “We’ve found ourselves a sleuth, Powers.”

“Gee, we’d better do what the sleuth says,” Powers said.

Kate’s eyes narrowed to cold slits.

“Don’t get sarcastic with me, Officer. You’re here as a civil servant. You’d better be civil and you’d better be a servant.”

Carmody sighed in a mixture of surprise and surrender. Kate Devlin wasn’t like some of the Irish, who she once told Michael
were far too docile in the presence of the police. Michael watched her with a kind of awe. Look at the way she was dealing
with these shmucks. She was tough. Carmody took out a notebook and a stubby pencil and sat down heavily at the table, facing
Kate Devlin. The other cop gazed around the apartment, peering into the darkened rooms off the kitchen.

“Name, age, employment, number of years in this apartment.”

“Kathleen Devlin. Thirty-four. I work at the RKO Grandview. We’ve been here since 1940.”

“Where’s your husband, lady?” the sallow cop said.

“In Belgium.”

“Whatta you mean, Belgium?”

“He’s buried there. That’s where he died,” she said, and pointed toward the roof. “Fighting people that used that sign.”

Carmody saw the framed photo of Tommy Devlin for the first time, cleared his throat and looked at his partner. His face flushed.
They were both more polite now.

“Yeah, well, ya know, Mrs. Devlin, this is really a matter for the detectives, and they can’t do much at night.” He closed
the pad and stood up. “But we’ll go up the roof and make sure everything’s okay, all right? Don’t touch nothing.”

They went out and Michael could hear their heavy feet moving on the roof above the kitchen. His mother washed the teacups
in silence. And he loved her a lot for what she had done. He had never heard her use her husband’s death to make people feel
sorry for her. Never. And she hadn’t done it with the cops either. It was more like telling them that if her husband could
die doing his job, they could try doing
theirs
. She didn’t weep in public. She didn’t fly the flag like the patriots. She had a mass said every year around Christmas on
the anniversary of her husband’s death. But that was all. Some things, she always said, you kept to yourself. Now both of
them had called up the memory of Tommy Devlin on the same day.

“Mom, could my father dance?”

“Why do you ask
that
, son?”

“I was wondering about it,” he said. “Rabbi Hirsch told me that he’d never had time to dance with his wife. And, I, well—”

“He was a wonderful dancer,” she said. “We used to go on Saturday nights to the Webster Hall in Manhattan. In the summer,
we danced at Feltman’s in Coney Island. He could jitterbug, all right, and he danced a lovely fox trot. But his favorite was
the waltz. Mine too.”

A waltz, Michael was thinking, what is a waltz? And was thrilled at the image of his father dancing. He had imagined him doing
a slow jitterbug, smiling and graceful, but now that he knew that Tommy Devlin really
could
jitterbug, he had trouble imagining this other dance, a waltz. Kate seemed to read his mind.

“That’s the dance that goes one-two-three, one-two-three,” she said. “Here, I’ll show you.”

She took his hand and put another on his waist, and
stepped, one-two-three, one-two-three, moving him in the tight space between the table and the sink, and then humming a tune.
Do-do-da-dee, da-da da-da, do-do-da-dee
…

“That’s Strauss,” she said. “‘The Blue Danube.’ Sure, you’ve heard it before.” He had. “They’re always playing it on
Rambling with Gambling
, in the morning.” He pictured his father dancing with her, in some ballroom out of a movie, and then Rabbi Hirsch offering
a hand to his wife. And then saw a flashlight beam scanning the backyards.

He released her hand and moved to the window. The lights went on in one of the Collins Street apartments, and he could see
an annoyed Mr. Rossiter gazing up at the source of the light beam. Michael opened the window and leaned out to see better.
He could hear his mother turn on the hot-water tap for the stacked dishes.

“Be careful there, Michael. Don’t, for God’s sake, fall out.”

“No way.”

Then the flashlight beam held on something, and he could hear urgent voices from the roof, and sure enough, there it was,
lying in some weeds. The paint can.

“Mom, you’re better than Sherlock Holmes,” Michael said.

She came over to the window, drying her hands on a dish towel.

“Glory be to God,” she said.

“I better tell them it’s Sapolin number 3.”

“Of course, my dear Watson.”

They both laughed, and after the flashlights vanished from the yards, they shut the window. Kate Devlin went to her chair
and her book, and Michael went to bed. Lying in the dark, remembering the few graceful steps his mother had taught him, humming
softly the melody of “The Blue Danube,” he tried to picture a waltz. He must have seen many waltzes in the movies
and didn’t know their names. There were always dances in those boring movies set in earlier centuries, where Englishmen wore
wigs and wrote with feathers, and the long, satiny women’s gowns exposed parts of pale breasts. Those movies were hard to
follow, because when the Englishmen talked so did all the kids in the Venus; they shut up only when the men were riding horses,
dueling with enemies, or stabbing each other in marble castles. Certainly they must have waltzed in Emperor Rudolf’s castle.
And he remembered from geography class that the Danube flowed right through Vienna, where Rabbi Hirsch’s mother went after
leaving him behind. He wondered whether the Vltava itself flowed past Prague into the Danube.

Then he imagined his father in a tuxedo, like a bigger, darker version of Fred Astaire, waltzing with his mother across the
gleaming floor of the Webster Hall. It was long before the war, even before Michael was born, and the music soared, and everybody
stepped aside to watch, and his father and mother never got tired. Then, at the far end of the vast ballroom, Rabbi Hirsch
stepped forward with Leah, and he was as young as Michael’s father, his face blissful, and he bowed to his wife and started
his waltz too.

At daybreak of Easter Monday, when Michael awoke, he saw two detectives in raincoats and porkpie hats down in the yards. They
took the paint can away and then came to their house and made photographs of the door and some footprints and took another
statement from Kate and Michael. They weren’t the same detectives who had arrested Frankie McCarthy. Abbott and Costello must
have had the day off. But they knew about the swastikas at the synagogue and they knew about what had happened to Mister G.

“You oughtta try to remember what happened that day,
kid,” one of the detectives said to Michael. “You’re gonna need some help someday.”

Michael said nothing. The detectives went away, and the next day, after school, Michael went to Mr. Gallagher’s and bought
some solvent and some black paint with money his mother had given him. She had cleared the costs with Mr. Kerniss, the landlord
that Michael had never seen. While she was at work, Michael scrubbed the red paint off the floors of the hallways. Then he
painted over the swastikas and the words on the floor. But 378 Ellison Avenue felt dirty now. And somehow frail. He knew they
would never feel safe there again.

F
or weeks, nothing happened. Everybody had heard about the swastikas, but there were no arrests. Frankie McCarthy drifted around
the parish like a ghost, but he ignored Michael, Sonny Montemarano, and Jimmy Kabinsky. Even so, Michael didn’t completely
relax. The weather was warm and breezy now, and all the other kids of the parish were back on the streets. He played stickball
on the crowded courts of Collins Street, hitting balls farther than ever, but often striking out when he glimpsed any of the
Falcons coming along Ellison Avenue. If he was bigger this spring, so were the Falcons, and they moved like they were the
true rulers of the parish.

Pushed by Rabbi Hirsch to study, study, study, Michael worked a little harder at his homework and his grades moved into the
low 90s. He still traded for old comics and bought new ones and read them in his room. He found a magazine called
Hit Parader
and learned the words to new songs and passed the lyrics to the rabbi. Now he would hear the rabbi
suddenly begin to sing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” or “Cool Water” and, best of all, “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?,” which he promised
to sing for Michael’s mother at next year’s seder.

Michael did more of the sweaty work of janitoring, gladly washing the halls each Saturday morning, using a cream called Noxon
to polish the brass mailboxes in the vestibule, feeding coal to the hot-water boiler in the basement. This meant he missed
the first stickball games of the morning, but they always kept playing as long as there was light. He remained wary and was
sometimes tense, feeling that Frankie McCarthy was like a bomb ticking away. At night, he still dreamed of blood-red snow
rising from watertaps and white horses on rooftops and men with hamburger for hair.

He was glad to fill the hours with other matters, and for Michael the most important matter of all was the fate of Jackie
Robinson. In a strange way, he felt that he was merging with Robinson. Whenever he was alone, he imagined himself into Robinson’s
mind, sharing his loneliness, feeling the way all eyes were upon him, trying to bring glory to Brooklyn while knowing that
even in Brooklyn there were people who hated him. That was the lesson of the newsreel at the RKO Grandview: even people who
were bound together by a place like Brooklyn and a team like the Dodgers could be split apart by things like skin color. The
bitter anger of Rabbi Hirsch on Easter Sunday morning showed that religion could do the same thing. The days of spring were
beautiful, but Michael sometimes thought that the world was crazy. And scary too.