The Boys of Summer (5 page)

“But hardball?” says Olga. “Won’t the child be hurt? Do you have a program in arts and crafts?”

“Maaaa!” Who wants to twist leather into bracelets? You might as well spend a summer in school. “Who did Uncle Iz Brown play for?” I ask Uncle Lou Kleiderman.

“Well, he went to the University of Idaho or Ohio and he can fill you in on the rest.” Uncle Lou’s smile is beginning to turn.

“Gore-don. Aren’t injuries more likely in hardball?”

“We have a full-time physician, Dr. Hy Kogelman, and a nurse.” Uncle Lou’s face quivers and the smile is gone. Superior medical care is nothing to smile at.

“I dislocated a shoulder sliding once,” Gordon Kahn says. “I was stretching a single into a double.”

“Good for you,” says Uncle Lou, confused by the terminology.

“But I was only out for a few seconds,” Gordon says, not wanting to cause a fuss.

“What does Kogelman think of focus of infection?” says Dr. Rockow.

Uncle Lou winces, makes a gastric noise and promises to mail Dr. Rockow a photograph of the infirmary. “First thing in the morning. First-class mail.”

“Pip, pip,” says Emily Kahn. She is six and she has learned the
rule of the house. Whether you have something to say is unimportant. What is important is to make a sound.

“How’s that shoulder now?” Uncle Lou says. Gordon explains that the effect is most severe when he serves a tennis ball and he is still explaining when he signs the contract to send us to Camp Al-Gon-Kwit. “A real athletic family,” says Uncle Lou Kleiderman. “That’s what we like to see.” Ooops, wrong coda. Olga’s face freezes in horror.

“Would you believe,” Uncle Lou says, desperately, “they’re some who say Jews are afraid of sports?” But Olga glares him to the door.

Since I will play first base for the Dodgers, my new glove is a first baseman’s mitt, big, heavy and, for $2.95, stiff as a shirt cardboard. To soften a glove, you work neats-foot oil into the palm and fingers and when the oil dries into a stain, soft mottled brown on tan, you place a hardball in the pocket. You put one hand into the glove and move the ball up toward the webbing and down toward the heel until you find the spot where the feel is perfect. It is a matter of sensors and quite precise. Being careful not to jiggle the baseball, even a quarter-inch, you slip your hand out, wrap the leather around the ball and tie the glove tightly. Then you leave it alone. Except that in a few days you want to see how the pocket is coming so you untie the glove and toss the baseball underhand and catch it, aware of touch and listening for the sound you want, a deep clean
thwack!
Then you add more neats-foot oil, replace the ball and tie the glove again. After a while, a pocket develops that makes you seem a better fielder than you are. By that time, you have fallen in love with the glove.

I am overwhelmed by the first baseman’s mitt and soon we are sharing a bed. Now, in the middle of the night before a train will leave Grand Central Station for Camp Al-Gon-Kwit, I have untied the glove for the penultimate time. It is 11:45 by a radium dial and I am tapping the pocket softly when Dr. Rockow coughs,
turns in the other bed and calls my mother’s name.

“Pappa? What’s the matter?”

“Motter? Nothing is the motter. I have a little cough. But it may be contagious. You had better sleep somewhere else.”

I bed down in another room with my sister and my glove, and in the morning Gordon takes us to Grand Central and a black and white sign that says “Al-Gon-Kwit Indians Pow-Wow Here.”

What a summer of tragedy. With my stickball swing, I’m not much of a hardball hitter. A baseball bat weighs as much as five broomsticks. I can’t pull and I haven’t any power. My arm is weak. I would be all right at first base because I’ve mastered catching thrown balls in the hall on St. Marks Place. But throws can be short, and a hardball bounces erratically off dirt, especially the pebbly, grassless Berkshire soil of Diamond 2 at Camp Al-Gon-Kwit (not depicted in the brochure). I am the third best player in Bunk 4. I am good enough to play the first half of Al-Gon-Kwit’s game against Camp Ellis (named for the owner) and to line a single to right field. But Wally Siedman (two doubles) is a better ball player and so is Lonnie Katz, who has long, sleek, veiny muscles and cracks a home run down the left-field line. I am no idiot. I know about Hephaestus and Haydn and about Tinker and Matty and McGraw and I have even, not telling my mother so as not to give her satisfaction, read a little of
Ivanhoe.
If, in my bunk alone, Siedman and Katz are already better, will there be room for me on the
Dodgers?
And first base! In practice, I lean toward a short throw which bounces off a stone and hits the side of my head. It is a minute before double vision passes. “You’re a pretty fair ball player,” says Uncle Flit Felderman, my counselor, rubbing my head as we sit on an embankment. He is in dental college and understands first aid.

“I’m not crying, Uncle Flit. A hit in the head just makes your eyes water.”

“You’re all right,” Uncle Flit says. “With a little more size,
you’ll start to pull. But not first base. The outfield.”

Hasn’t Uncle Flit noticed—
I
have noticed—that I am a terrible judge of fly balls?

“Or second.”

I’m not crazy about hard grounders either. “Thanks, Uncle Flit,” I say. A week later in batting practice, Uncle Iz Brown throws a medium-speed pitch into my ribs. I spin in pain but keep my feet and rub dirt into my palms. “You want to play the game,
play the game,”
barks Uncle Iz. “Get in and hit, or go to the infirmary.”

As the camp train carries us slowly down the Harlem Valley toward New York, I am coughing just often enough to remember the sensation of a baseball striking ribs. On my lap the outsized first baseman’s mitt shows the scratches and scars of a vigorous summer.

I cannot tell my father. How can I admit to the old City College third baseman what I have grasped, that I will never be good enough for the Dodgers? “You want to play the game,
play the game!”
My sister? A child, and sometimes vicious. My mother? She wants me to make leather bracelets. That leaves my grandfather, the dentist, the white-haired whizbang continental Marxist toothpuller, wearing a white jacket, out of Minsk, U.S.S.R., Brooklyn’s leading battler against foci of infection, Dr. Abraham Rockow, D.D.S.

My mother, the enemy, meets the camp train and kisses me softly and says, “Oh. By the way. We’ve moved.” A taxi takes us to Lincoln Place, near Grand Army Plaza, and a large apartment building of red brick. “We have seven rooms on the top floor,” my mother says. She shows me the living room, which leads to glass doors opening onto a tiny terrace. “Those are called French doors,” Olga says. “Now would you like to see your name in the
New York Times?”

“Who? Me? In the
Times?
Yeah, sure.” We walk to my parents’ bedroom in the strange apartment. I have never heard the
household so quiet. Olga reaches into a bureau, a chiffonier, she calls it, and shows me a clipping from the
New York Times. Rockow, Abraham, D. D. S., suddenly on June 30.
My name appears two lines lower in the agate type.
Beloved grandfather of Roger.
What he had called a little cough was a massive coronary.

The world is never again as it was before anyone you love has ever died; never so innocent, never so fixed, never so gentle, never so pliant to your will. But these are afterthoughts. Generations vie and the young recover swiftly, or believe they do. A few years later in the new apartment there is some horseplay and then Elisabeth, the Austrian maid, makes a lively proposition. “Would you like to watch me take a bath?”

“But.” Long indrawing of breath. “What? Sure.”

It is Saturday night. Emily is asleep. Olga and Gordon have gone to hear Dimitri Mitropoulos conduct the New York Philharmonic. From the black Air King in my room, the theme of the “Lucky Strike Hit Parade” blares, “All your friends are here to bring good cheer your wa-a-a-y.” Then, “And here’s number seven, still on the top ten: the Hit Parade orchestra brings you an exciting instrumental version of’I Hear a Rhapsody.’ “ That song? In a neighborhood schoolboy joke the druggist jumps a lady customer, who cries out, leading a chocolate malted to comment to the glass on its left, “I hear a rape, sody.” That song? That ridiculous song? And now?

“Well?” Elisabeth says. I cannot joke. My throat is dry. I nod. Elisabeth leads the way down a hallway into the kitchen, through a door into her small bedroom, which is tidy and painted white. She turns to face me and removes her dress and slip. She does not wear a brassiere. I stand motionless and gape.

Elisabeth removes her underpants and does not remove her dentures. The body is broad and functional. “Wow,” I say, finding my voice. “Wow, Elisabeth, you’ve got a build.”

“Ach.” She shakes her head, pleased. “I’m a woman, aren’t I?”

She bathes, puts on a rayon nightgown and shoos me off to sleep. In my own bedroom, I can hardly believe my fortune. Age germinates allure, and Elisabeth must be thirty-five. Two weeks later, my parents return to Carnegie Hall and Elisabeth invites me back to her bath. At thirteen I have a steady date. Elisabeth bathes. I watch. In my mind I prepare an arcanum of advances, but I cannot act. At length, out of boredom or bitchery, Elisabeth betrays me. She confesses to Donald the daytime doorman, a tiny man with wisps of white hair running down his neck. Donald wears buff uniforms and shouts at eight-year-olds playing catch in Lincoln Place.
“Ge-radda-here. Go backa shannytown.”
Thirteen-year-olds are not assaulted by the war whoop of Donald the Doorman. Most are bigger than he. This undersized tormentor of children not only became the repository of my secret, but with the terrible righteousness of menials, he recounts all that he has heard to Olga. A stormy scene breaks in the living room, between the French doors and the massive ivory-colored bookcases Olga herself has designed. From my bedroom I can hear the tone but only a few of the words. Olga is saying something must be done. Shrill fragments rattle down the hall like shrapnel. “Wastrel.
Pitching in a Pinch.
Dodgers! Baseball!
Sex fiend!”

I open the door. “Applesauce,” Gordon Kahn is saying. “Absolute applesauce.”

“Speak to him. You have to speak to him! Before he does something terrible!”

“All right. It’s all a lot of bosh, but I’ll speak to him.”

The next day, Saturday, my father speaks to me about baseballs. Don’t I want a new one? Gordon says.

“It’s okay, Dad. I got a baseball.”

“What kind?”

“A quarter ball.” All baseballs were described by price. The nickel ball was worthless. Jerry Surewitz hit a nickel baseball once. It split. The cardboard halves were stuffed with crumpled pages of a Japanese newspaper. The dime ball was better. It was made in America. The twenty-five-cent baseball was really good. You could hit a quarter ball for days and when the cover ripped, you peeled it off, exposing tightly wound yarn. You then wrapped the yarn in black friction tape and you could use the ball for another month, although the tape made it heavy and hard to throw.

“I’m talking about a real baseball,” Gordon says. “A fifty-center. Come on over to Levy’s Stationery on Nostrand Avenue.” My father is a short man who walks with long bouncing strides. Although it is Saturday, he wears a suit and necktie. He has several suits, all from Howard Clothes, all blue or gray, or blue and gray, all herringbone. He explains that two Howard suits are better than one from Saks, but the truth is he does not care about clothing. The radio program, “Information Please,” is a national success and he has made one error, one inconsequential error in business, something he does not care about either. He is on salary. He has not demanded a half, a third, a tenth of his brainchild, “Information Please.” Dan Golenpaul, the man who came to him for help, owns it all. And as Golenpaul grows rich, his arrogance rises like a miasma and he finds this short, bald, mustached man from Brooklyn, who remembers poetry, Jeffersonian sentences and the sequence in which roads intersect Saw Mill River Parkway, a thorn to conscience but a necessity to the program. No one can prepare and edit so many questions on so many topics so deftly as Gordon J. Kahn. Golenpaul is galled by his dependence, which he denies, and Gordon J. Kahn, still teaching high school, starting at eight each day, travels to Madison Avenue for radio work and Golenpaul’s
abuse at three. The only sign of pressure is that now, instead of smoking one pack a day, he smokes three, Pall Mall king-sized cigarettes, which one finds “wherever particular people congregate.”

“Red Barber is going to be a guest expert,” Gordon Kahn tells me, as he lurches toward Nostrand Avenue, a Pall Mall preceding him, an inch of ash suspended at the tip.

“Watch the ash, Dad.” Too late. The burnt tobacco congregates with the blue-gray herringbone Howard suit. “You gonna have a lot of baseball questions for him? Have you met him?” (A nod.) “Say, what is he like to talk to? He knows Durocher.”

“He’s an intelligent man.” “Intelligent man” is the highest award in Gordon Kahn’s private storehouse. It is his Medal of Honor. “Barber is
extremely
intelligent,” he says. “He may make a
living
broadcasting Dodger games, but his
interests
go beyond that. He knows American history, particularly the Reconstruction Period. He likes poetry. His name is Walter Lanier Barber and he’s a distant relative of Sidney Lanier.”

“Who’s Sidney Lanier?”

Gordon Kahn lights a new Pall Mall from the old and says, “When we get back, you are to look up a poem called ‘Song of the Chattahoochee.’”

“I thought we were playing ball.”

“I mean after that. You might even read the poem. It wouldn’t hurt you to read more poetry.”

“Aah,” I say. “Who has time for stuff like that?” Doubt and pain film Gordon’s gray-green eyes.

With the new ball, we drive to Cunningham Park in Queens. Or rather, we are driven by Olga. Gordon Kahn stopped driving one morning four years earlier when, confusing brake and accelerator, he drove a new Studebaker into the glass front of a stationery store. I sit in the rear seat of the new Dodge, thumping the fifty-cent ball into the old Camp Al-Gon-Kwit mitt.