Snow in August (28 page)

“Is like a story,” the rabbi said. “Each day, a new chapter.”

“It’s history,” Michael said.

“And something else,” the rabbi said. “In America, he is
new
. Just like me.” He paused and ran his hand over one of the clippings. “With Jackie Robinson, the book I am not starting in
the middle. In America, it takes so long to learn what happened before. But here, we are at a beginning.”

When the game was on the radio, all that had happened before to Rabbi Hirsch seemed to disappear. He never talked
about Prague. He didn’t evoke the spires of the cathedrals. There was no need for the Golem, if Jackie Robinson was taking
a long lead off first. There were too many questions to be answered, too much to learn. The rabbi wanted to know about Sportsman’s
Park in distant St. Louis, where a man named Country Slaughter—such a name!—hit one over the pavilion roof. He wanted to know
about Forbes Field in Pittsburgh and Shibe Park in Philadelphia. Forbes, who was he? And Shibe? He was a ballplayer? The rabbi
tried hard to imagine these sun-drowned places in the vastness of America. While he had baseball, there was no place in his
mind, it seemed, for night and fog.

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah
, the rabbi sang during a game, when Robinson scampered home from second on a wild pitch.

Zip-a-dee-ay
,

My-oh-my, what a wonderful day…

Baseball made him sing. He was always out of tune, but it didn’t matter. He learned the words to “Don’t Fence Me In,” all
about straddling his own saddle underneath the Western skies, and Michael found the English words to “And the Angels Sing.”
These the rabbi sometimes changed.
You hit
, he would sing,
and then the angels sing
… and laughed at himself.

One warm evening in June, Michael was walking home from the synagogue, brooding about Pete Reiser. Nine more days until the
end of the term, and then Sonny can help us get PAL tickets so we can go to Ebbets Field, and Pete Reiser runs into another
goddamned wall! Ends up in a hospital. Unconscious. Just like ’42. Reiser was hitting .383 that year, then he runs into a
wall and hits .200 the rest of the season and we lose
the pennant. In ’41, he hit .343, led the league in doubles and triples, and we
won
the pennant. We need Pistol Pete. We need him. And where is he? In the goddamned hospital, just like Mister G, and he can’t
talk, and the sportswriters said when his head hit the wall, the sound was sickening. That’s like Mister G too. When Frankie
McCarthy hit him with the cash register. Sickening. We never saw Mister G again, and his wife left and his kids left and the
store is empty, like it has a curse on it. Maybe center field will have a curse on it. The curse of Pete Reiser. Oh sure,
they put Carl Furillo there for now. Great arm, but not Reiser. And they brought up this Duke Snider, but he strikes out too
much. Shit. Jackie Robinson can’t do it alone. The Dodgers need Reiser too. I wish I could go to the hospital and pray and
pray and Reiser’s eyes would open and he’d get up like nothing happened and take a cab to the ballpark. Maybe if I prayed
hard enough, Mister G would get up too and go to the candy store and everything would be the way it was before. And summer
would come, all hot and green, and we could go to see Reiser and Robinson. Watch Reiser steal home. Against the Cardinals.
Cheer Robinson dancing off second base against the goddamned Phillies, just the way Red Barber describes him.
And here comes Robinson!
And
There goes Reiser…

Michael was crossing the street beside the factory, his head full of green fields and roaring crowds, when they reached him.

His arms were grabbed and he was lifted and jerked sideways and shoved hard against the picket fence of the factory. The streetlight
was out. But Michael saw the faces. The Falcons. Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian. He smelled sour beer. Stale
sweat. He felt hard fingers digging right to the bone of his arms and his heart pounding. This can’t be happening. Not now.
No. Not tonight. No. Please,
no. Then he was twisted around and one of them drove a punch into his stomach. His body exploded in pain. He couldn’t feel
his legs. His belly felt split. He couldn’t breathe. He tried to speak, but no words came from his mouth, only a kind of whimper.
A shameful kid’s whimper.

Then he smelled shit.

His own shit.

No.

Then there was another tearing jolt.
No
, and he bent over,
No, no
, and something, a bat, a billy club, smashed against his legs.

“Little cocksucker,” one of them snarled. “Singin’ like a canary.”

“Fuckin’ Jew-lover,” a second voice growled, panting as another punch smashed into Michael’s stomach. “Half a fuckin’ Hebe.
How do you like
dat
?”

“This is from Frankie,” a third voice said. “He sends you his best. He wants you to have a real good fuckin’ summer. He’ll
think about you every night. You and your fuckin’ friends.”

Michael thought: I’m going to die. They’re going to kill me.

Then the shit-stained world exploded into a high, white, ringing emptiness.

H
is mother’s voice was soothing and whispery but her eyes were wide and anxious, and then she went away. A bald man with thick
eyeglasses peered at him and used his smooth fingers to pull back one of his eyelids. Behind the bald man there were horizontal
bars of light and dark. They went away too. Father Heaney’s face peered at him and his lips moved but no words came out and
then he went away. A tube of cold glass was slipped under his tongue and then grew warm and then slid out. Every time he tried
to move, he hurt. He felt warm and wet and realized he had pissed in the bed and was embarrassed. His mouth tasted like nickels.
There was something attached to his arm, and when he was alone and stared at the bars of light and darkness and then closed
his eyes he saw purple lines and pink bars. Sounds came from a long way off. Wheels squeaking. Dishes clattering. A blurred
loudspeaker voice. He heard rosary beads clicking smoothly against each
other. He smelled something soapy. He was tossed, pierced, penetrated, moved, washed, handled.

He lost two days.

And then woke to his mother’s face again, her eyes wide in relief, her cool hand touching his cheek. He said, Hello, Mom,
and she exhaled and said, Thank God.

His tongue felt furry, and she held a glass to his lips while he sipped the cool water. The taste of nickels remained. After
a while, her eyes narrowed, and her face was full of wrath, and she said, Who did this to you, son?

He tried to tell her. He described the Falcons. He tried to make them clear without naming them. He did not say the names
of Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian. He wanted to tell what he could tell, without violating the codes. The
Irish codes. The codes of the parish. Even though they had done this to him. Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian.
Even though they had beaten and broken his body. Even though they had put him in this room.

But then he remembered the humiliating smell of his own shit, and he could not hold back. This wasn’t the police. This wasn’t
the district attorney. This was his mother, right here in a third floor room at Brooklyn Wesley an Hospital. He told her the
names, as precise as a batting order: Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian. He didn’t know their full names. He
knew what they were called on Ellison Avenue. He told her how. Ferret and Skids held his arms while Tippy and the Russian
took turns hitting him. He told her about the smell of beer. He told her what they’d said about delivering a message from
Frankie McCarthy. He did not mention the shit.

“Did they use a club on you?”

“Yeah. On my leg. I couldn’t see what it was—a bat or a club or what.”

“They’ll not hit another boy around here,” she said. “I promise you that.”

Her face was a grid of lines, with her green eyes burning. She went away to fetch the doctor, and he came back with her, his
face shiny and smiling. There wasn’t a hair on his head. Unlike Brother Thaddeus, he had a mustache, eyebrows, and eyelashes.

“Well,” he said, “you’ve got two badly bruised ribs, young man, a fractured bone in your lower leg, the tibia we call it,
along with multiple contusions and a few loose teeth.” He smiled in an insincere way. “Otherwise, you’re fit as a fiddle.”

Michael tried to laugh but his ribs hurt too much. He wondered if Pete Reiser hurt this much. Or Mister G. Kate told him to
lie still. When the doctor left, Michael reached for his mother’s hand.

“What about my friends?” he said. “What happened to Sonny and Jimmy?”

“Nothing,” she said, a hair of bitterness in her voice. “Nothing that I know of.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said. “Why? Was something supposed to happen to Sonny and Jimmy?”

“The Falcons, they told me they were gonna get them, sort of,” he said. His voice sounded disappointed. He didn’t mean to
sound that way. “They must think the three of us squealed on Frankie McCarthy.”

“If anything had happened to them,” she said, “I’d have heard about it.”

“We didn’t tell the cops anything, Mom,” he whispered. “We’re not informers.”

She squeezed his hand in a comforting way and glanced at the cast on his leg.

“But Jimmy’s uncle, he’s so dumb, it could be he said something to the cops, and maybe—” His head hurt, trying to figure things
out. “They might have taken something he said and added it to something else and, oh, who knows, Mom? But I didn’t rat. I
swear… I didn’t. I didn’t squeal.”

There was a long silence, and Michael could feel confusion coming off his mother like a mist.

“Sonny and Jimmy—when I was, you know,
out
—did they come to see me here?”

“I don’t know, Michael,” she said gently, responding to the sound of abandonment in his voice. “They weren’t letting visitors
in to see you, because it was… well, a police matter, I guess. Of course, I know everybody here, from working here, so I had
no trouble. And I
am
your mother. And Father Heaney came by.…” She turned away, gazing at the bars of the venetian blinds and the street beyond.
“I’ll let Sonny and Jimmy know you’re okay.”

“And what about Rabbi Hirsch?”

“I haven’t seen him,” she said.

“If they let a priest in, they should let him in.”

“Who knows, Michael? I’ll try to find out. You’d better rest.”

Exhaustion moved through him like a tide. He tried to resist it, tried to force his eyes to remain open. His mother’s hand
felt warm. The tide took him.

W
ith his lower right leg encased in a heavy plaster cast, Michael remained in Brooklyn Wesleyan Hospital for nine empty days.
He did have some visitors. Father Heaney stopped by to tell him not to worry about his final exams; he’d be allowed to take
them when he was feeling better, even if the school year was over. On another morning, he woke up to see Abbott and Costello
staring down at him. The detectives wanted names. Michael said he didn’t know any names.

“Come on, kid, don’t bullshit us,” Costello said. “Everybody knows the names of these bums.”

“Get their names from everybody then,” Michael said.

“You just don’t want to be helped, do you?” Abbott said.

“It’s too late now,” Michael said.

They sighed and left. Michael wondered why he didn’t just give them the names. Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian.
Just those names. Street names. Let the cops figure out their real names and where they lived. But he couldn’t do
it. Even though they had hurt him, hurt him real bad, he couldn’t be a rat. He knew if he turned rat he’d be sorry for the
rest of his life. He’d be walking down a street somewhere and remember the time he ratted to the cops and he’d be through
for the day. He’d be in the army, where nobody knew him, and someone would want to know about his life and he’d have to keep
this one thing secret. Or he’d take the cop’s test and be assigned to some precinct and then run into Abbott and Costello
and they’d remember that he was a rat and tell all the other goddamned cops and they’d freeze him out, because everyone knew
that cops despised informers as much as the criminals did. No. If he ratted, he’d be as bad as them. Then they’d really win.
Then they’d really ruin him. They’d make him as dirty as they were.

Every morning the bald doctor arrived at Michael’s bedside, carrying a clipboard, flanked by an intern and a nurse. His favorite
word was
fine
. Michael was fine. His progress was fine. He was healing up just fine. Then, feeling fine about himself, he moved to the
next patient.

Every afternoon, before going to work, Kate Devlin came to visit, bringing him ice cream and newspapers and once, the latest
Captain Marvel
. The comic book now seemed childish to him. He had learned that there were truly bad people in the world, and when they went
after you, you really hurt. He told her he didn’t want any more
Captain Marvels
. He was more interested in the newspaper stories about Jackie Robinson. And the condition of Pete Reiser. The great center
fielder was conscious again, promising to be back playing soon, and the sportswriters were demanding that Branch Rickey come
up with some money to pad the concrete walls of Ebbets Field. They called him El Cheapo and said that half the ballplayers
didn’t have enough money to take the subway to the ballpark.
But Rickey had brought up Jackie Robinson when all the other owners wanted white players only, and Robinson always called
him Mr. Rickey, so how bad could the old man be? Each day, Michael read every word of the sports pages and tore out the stories
about Robinson. When his mother arrived the following morning, he’d give them to her to take home.

“You’ll have a scrapbook on this fellow thicker than the blue books,” she said.

“Someday he’ll be
in
the blue books, Mom,” he said. “This is history.”

But when she was gone, and the doctor and the nurses moved to other rooms, he was left to think. And he began to feel alone
in the world. There was no sign of Rabbi Hirsch. Not even a note. Worse, neither Sonny Montemarano nor Jimmy Kabinsky had
come to see him. His best friends. One for all and all for one. He didn’t expect the other kids from school to visit him.
But he knew that if either Sonny or Jimmy had been hurt, he’d have visited
them
. He wished that they had telephones at home so he could call them from the booth down the hall near the nurses’ station.
But nobody he knew had a telephone, least of all Jimmy and Sonny. They would have to come to the hospital to see him. Obviously,
they’d found better things to do. In the first few days, he tried to make excuses for them. Maybe they’d decided to study
for the final exams that Michael had missed. Maybe they’d found jobs after school. Maybe Sonny’s mother was sick or Jimmy’s
uncle. And yeah: maybe the Falcons had warned them to stay away from the hospital.