56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (7 page)

BOOK: 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports
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Since that day, the stakes in the Yanks-Sox games had gone up, it seemed, and it often felt like the crowd was hoping something like that melee might happen again. The teams were closely bound; Boston had finished one slot behind the Yankees in the standings for three years running. And who knew, the way New York was struggling, maybe this was the year the Red Sox, close on their heels, would come out ahead.

True, Dominic didn’t enjoy it much when some Yankee fans would yell from the bleachers, “Hey little Dommy, go on home will ya! You’re just in the big leagues because of Joe.” But he was used to hearing that. It had been that way when he started playing pro ball with the San Francisco Seals, Joe’s old team. He was so much smaller than Joe, by five inches and 25 pounds, and he wore wire-rimmed eyeglasses.

“You don’t look like a ballplayer,” a fan or an opposing player would dig at him when the Seals went across San Francisco Bay to play the rival Oakland Oaks. “You look like somebody did your big brother a favor.” Then Dominic hit .360, ran the bases like someone was chasing him, and that shut everybody up.

Whatever the barbs in Yankee Stadium, real baseball fans knew by now that Dom wasn’t simply riding Joe’s reputation. Some coaches in the league thought he was an even better fielder than Joe—or just as good, anyway—and as a Red Sox rookie in 1940 Dominic had batted .301. Cronin told the press that except for Joe’s power, he didn’t see much difference between these two DiMaggios at all.
1

The Red Sox and Yankees played a strange game that Friday afternoon, a 3 p.m. start that unfurled into a long, unsatisfying battle, threatened continuously by rain, and finally suspended by the umpires after more than three hours and nine innings of play with the score tied at 9–9 and the cloud-covered sky having darkened so deeply that the hitters could no longer see the ball. Joe knocked a single that helped the Yankees go briefly ahead in the bottom of the eighth. Dominic had two hits in the game. If the DiMaggio brothers didn’t compare themselves to one another—and they did, of course they did—the newspapers would do it for them.

Joe and Dom didn’t talk about how they had played, or much of anything, on the ride to Joe’s apartment after the game. Just being together like this was a rarity; the brothers almost never saw each other off the field during the season. But Joe wanted to show Dom his penthouse, 20 floors up on the West Side of Manhattan and newly leased. Dorothy was making dinner for both of them that night.

The radio played softly in the car on the way downtown, and Joe’s driver chatted about the weather and the news of the war. Joe would make a noise here and there to acknowledge that he’d been listening. The driver was one of Spatola’s friends from Newark, Jimmy Ceres, an amiable, meaty guy—the size of his hands!—who always had something to say. Ceres did more than just drive. He worked things out for Joe, made sure that the people whom Joe wanted to see he saw, and that the people whom Joe didn’t want to see were kept away. He’d done some boxing as a young guy coming up in Newark, which to look at him wouldn’t surprise you.

Ceres must have been about 34 years old and even before he started this part-time work for Joe, even when no one knew just what his job was, he somehow always had money in his pocket. Jimmy Ceres came from a large Italian family and he knew a lot of people in Newark. He put on a clean, full suit each morning. Everyone called him Peanuts.

“See you tomorrow, Joe,” Peanuts said as they pulled up in front of the building. “Regular time?”

“Game starts at 2:30,” DiMaggio said. “Come early.”

“Right,” said Peanuts. “Dominic, we gotta get you out to Newark sometime and really feed you.”

Dom laughed and waved goodbye, and the doorman at 400 West End Avenue nodded in greeting as he held open the thick front door and let the two DiMaggios inside. The elevator operator took them straight up to the penthouse, where Dorothy met them as they stepped out.

Dom liked her. Smart, worldly and beautiful. She could be a little brassy too, crack a joke, especially when Joe was in the next room. Dorothy had seemed at ease on her visits to San Francisco. At Christmas and at other family occasions she would fuss around happily with the four DiMaggio sisters, even as she remained deferential, tacitly conceding her place on the outskirts of the big DiMaggio clan, never helping to cook until Ma asked her to, and then doing things just as Ma showed her, crushing cloves of garlic or cutting tomatoes into hearty wedges. Pa thought Dorothy was great.

It was still a kick that Joe was married to her at all. An actress! Dorothy was good in the serials, especially that strange, suspenseful one with Bela Lugosi,
The Phantom Creeps
. Shapely and slender, her bob of curly hair cut just so, Dorothy often delivered her lines with the hint of a smile, and her characters possessed that same coyness and allure that she had in real life. She moved nimbly on the screen. There was a richness in her voice, like thick honey.

The irony in Joe being with a woman like this—or really, the boys at home might crack, being with any woman at all—was that as a teenager he wouldn’t even talk to girls. He’d disappear when one of his sisters brought home a friend for dinner, then come back and eat later on his own. When Joe showed up to the parish dances at Garibaldi Hall, he would stand off by himself, looking at everything and no one, never once asking one of the girls to dance. And now he was married to a showgirl.

Dorothy, Dominic felt, was good for Joe. She was four months pregnant, her belly ever so slightly swollen beneath her dress.

The apartment tour began, and Dom spent a lot of time shaking his head and grinning as Joe showed him the living room with its weighty, dark wood paneling and the recessed shelves; a fireplace with a few birch logs lying in a low iron rack set up just for show; a heavy polished lintel above the archway that led into the hall. The guest bedroom, furnished with two pristinely dressed beds, had room enough for four; the linen closet was itself big enough for a grown man to sleep in. The view from Joe and Dorothy’s master suite looked south, and on clear days, they told Dominic, you could see for miles, out past the foot of Manhattan and to the Statue of Liberty. The windows in their bathroom, indeed in all three of the apartment bathrooms, were fitted with stained glass so that someone out on the terrace could not see in. At the far end of the apartment, behind the kitchen and through a few small hallways, Joe had his study. This, said Dorothy, chuckling when they finally got there, was Joe’s sanctuary; there were a few newspapers arranged on the writing desk, which had before it a sturdy, high-backed chair.

They all agreed that this was not a night for eating outside, too wet and too windy, but Joe and Dorothy took Dom out onto the brick terrace that wrapped around three sides of the place, and they walked the full length of it. From the north end, the widest area of the terrace where the tables and chairs were arranged, you could see in three directions: across the Hudson River to New Jersey, over the treetops in Central Park and, most impressively at night, straight ahead to the bright lights festooned upon the George Washington Bridge, now twinkling and blurred in the moist sky. They were a long, long way from Taylor Street, from the crowded flat where Joe and Dominic were raised.

Seeing Joe away from the ballpark like this reminded Dom of home, and of the early years, of stepping out of that first-floor apartment to a world of games and youth. He and Joe, the two youngest of the nine children, would listen in the predawn darkness as their father, Giuseppe, pulled on his old boots and crept outside to walk the half mile downhill to the wharf where he would clamber into his boat, the
Rosalie D
(named for Ma) for another day on the water in San Francisco Bay, bait-fishing with Tom or more likely Mike or sometimes both of his older boys along to help him out.

Giuseppe imagined that one day they’d have a fleet of DiMaggio boats, more fish, more money and the old family tradition living proudly on for another generation. But later, when the youngest boys Joe and Dominic were old enough to help fish or clean the boat, they rarely did. Joe especially. He would mend the nets that had torn along the reef. He was good at that, his long fingers working swiftly and nimbly, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. But he did the mending on the dock. As for fishing, Joe said he couldn’t take the smell, and that riding in Pa’s little boat made him seasick.

As boys they ate what they could find in the house for breakfast, on lucky days the butt end—the
culo
as Tom called it, laughing—of a loaf of Italian bread, brushed with a little olive oil. When the bread was stale, as it often was because it came cheaper that way, Ma put it in the oven and made it good as new.

After the day at the Hancock School, which took up the corner at Taylor and Filbert, practically right next door to home, Dom and Joe and maybe their neighbor Dante or one of the other kids from the block would devise a game using a ball and a branch, or perhaps the DiMaggios’ well-worn family bat, to play on Valparaiso Street, a flat, narrow alley off of Taylor’s precipitous drop. That was safer; miss a ball on Taylor and it might roll down five blocks or more. Joe was in the fourth grade. Dom was in the second. When enough boys were around they’d sometimes head down to the dusty horse lot by the wharf, play baseball with a beat-up ball. There were never enough gloves to go around and piles of manure dotted their makeshift field.

The real games, especially in the years when Joe had begun at Francisco Junior High, took place a dogleg away from home, a block-and-a-half scamper on the coarsely paved streets to North Beach playground. Here’s where people began to take more serious notice of the way Joe played ball. Vince, two years older, was good too, very good, but no one hit the ball farther than Joe, and no one played more intently. Joe never spoke much, and if his team lost, he wouldn’t speak at all.

Even the kids who weren’t playing, guys like Paul Maniscalco, the Crab King’s son, who went to the school at the church, liked to gather to watch the games. They’d sit in clusters in the shade of the evergreens or stand near the concrete wall, flipping baseball cards they’d gotten out of Cracker Jack boxes.

Sometimes there would be betting on the ball games, a dime here or there, a nickel, and nothing got Joe’s attention more than when there was a little money to be won. Then he’d really bear in, hit with a ferocity that flat-out frightened the infielders, even after they’d taken their three steps back when he came to the plate. Joe could intimidate on defense too. If a guy tried to score on him he’d throw the ball in from the outfield so hard it might knock the catcher right off his feet.

In the spring and summer, when the light lasted, they would come home late, miss dinner, and their father, old Giuseppe who never had the time—or the desire—to come down to the playground and watch the games himself, would complain that the boys were wasting their young lives, that all baseball was good for was wearing out the clothes that the DiMaggios could barely afford. Giuseppe and Rosalie spoke only Italian at home.

Joe and Dom got jobs for a while, selling afternoon newspapers—Joe the
Call-Bulletin
, Dominic the
News
—on the busy streets over in the financial district. But Joe didn’t last long at that; he was too shy, too reserved to bellow out the headlines to entice buyers. Perky Dom would sell all of his batch then come help Joe sell his too, so they could go back and play ball for nickels again, or mooch a cigarette, or head to La Rocca’s Corner Tavern on Columbus and try to wangle free plays out of the pinball machine—Joe had a trick—until the bartender ran them out. Later they would sometimes come back to La Rocca’s and listen to Vince sing opera songs. People passed the hat and said that Vince, 15 or 16 then, had the voice to be a star if he only got the chance.

There wasn’t much money in those days—Joe and Dom wore shirts that had first been passed down from Tom to Mike to Vince, and most of the money they made from selling the newspapers went straight to the family—but that didn’t matter so much to Dom.

There was always the smell of something Italian cooking in the neighborhood. As a goof some of the boys liked to hop onto the back of the grape truck that rode up and down the North Beach streets, maybe the only car that they’d see on the block all day, bringing the fruit to all the families for wine-making in their cellars. Giuseppe and Rosalie made wine too. Even in the prohibition years the law allowed wine for medicinal or religious reasons. In North Beach the grown-ups used to joke, “We have a lot of sick people, and we have a lot of devout people.”

Those early years, before they’d started playing ball with the Seals—first Vince, then Joe, then Dom—were the times that lingered richest for Dom. Joe, 27 months older, was bigger and better than he was at everything. Everything physical, that is. Of course Joe was pretty much better than everybody in everything athletic, proving deft and resilient even in the games of touch football the boys played on the horse lot. (In tennis, good lord! Joe could have gone professional if there had been any money in that.) Dom might tease Joe for never learning Italian, or for hating to go out on the boat, but none of that diminished the awe in which he silently held him.

By now, in 1941, the family had left the house on Taylor Street. Ma and Pa were living in the Marina District in the new home Joe had bought for them; a bigger place and a better address. Mike was out fishing in his blue-and-white boat, also a gift from Joe. And Tom ran the restaurant, Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto, on the wharf. Marie and Mamie were married. Things were different for the DiMaggios—better, to be sure. Though for Dom nothing would replace those childhood years with Joe, before they started to drift, when the days stretched long and he felt like he had his big brother all to himself.

The three of them ate that evening in the dining room of the penthouse, not saying much beyond the small talk that Dorothy facilitated. Dom knew not to point out the improbable fact of their current respective batting averages—when the daily DiMag-o-Log came out in
The San Francisco Chronicle
the next morning it would have Dominic on top at .339, Joe at .319 and Vince at .266. It was Joe, though, who brought up baseball during the meal, saying: “You’re playing a little shallow in centerfield, you know, just a couple of strides.”

BOOK: 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports
13.9Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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