The Christmas Kid (19 page)

AT 4:20 IN THE
afternoon of October 3, 1951, Frankie Bertinelli took to his bed in tears and sorrow, and was not seen again in our neighborhood for more than thirty years.

On that stunned autumn afternoon, Frankie was nineteen, a thin, sickly young man who had pulled some terrible numbers in the lottery of childhood. Scarlet fever weakened his heart. Measles ruined his eyesight. Acne gullied his face. When Frankie was fourteen, his father was killed in an accident on the pier, and since Frankie had no brothers or sisters, he was left alone with his mother. She was a pale Irish woman named Cora. Sometimes, in the evenings of those Spaldeen summers, she would arrive at the corner, looming in a ghostly way, and order Frankie home, saying: “Remember, you got a bad heart.” And Frankie would go.

When the Korean War broke out, most of us started the long journey out of the neighborhood by going into the army or navy. Frankie, of course, was rejected by all the services, and soon was the only one of the old crowd left along Seventh Avenue. He took a job in a brokerage house as a clerk (his handwriting was superb and he was taking typing at Lamb’s business school) and lived his friendless, womanless life with one intense and glorious passion: baseball. Specifically, baseball as played by the Brooklyn Dodgers.

“The whole calendar is wrong,” he said to me one Christmastime. “The real year doesn’t begin on January first. I mean, what’s the difference between January first and December thirty-first? Nothing. They are the same kind of a day. The real year begins the day Red Barber starts broadcasting from spring training.”

He was right, of course; the year did begin in the spring, and nothing was more beautiful than baseball. In his apartment, Frankie Bertinelli had compiled immense scrapbooks about all the Dodgers, and even about the prospects in the farm clubs at Montreal and Saint Paul and other towns peopled by Branch Rickey. He had saved every scorecard from every game he’d ever seen at Ebbets Field. On the walls, he had pictures of Reese and Robinson, Hodges and Furillo and Reiser. His bureau drawers were crammed with baseball cards. He had composition books filled with mysterious statistics of his own devising, stacked copies of the
Sporting News,
back pages from the
News
and
Daily Mirror.
When childhood ended and his friends went away, baseball was all that Frankie Bertinelli had left.

“I love the Dodgers,” he once said, forcing a smile after a girl turned him down at a dance. “I don’t need nothing else.”

But then it was October 3, 1951, the third game of the playoffs against the Giants. On this chilly gray day, Frankie Bertinelli did not go to work. Frankie Bertinelli was genuinely sick. He had been sick for months. In July, Charlie Dressen said, “The Giants is dead,” and everybody thought the Dodgers manager was right. But on August 12, the Giants started their ferocious run for the pennant under the leadership of the turncoat Leo Durocher. They had won thirty-seven of their previous forty-four games, sixteen in a row at one time, the last seven in a row enabling them to catch and tie the Dodgers. It was as if everything Frankie Bertinelli knew about certainty, even justice, was eroding. Leo Durocher had been the greatest Dodgers manager of all time and then defected to the Giants; it was as if Benedict Arnold could end up a hero. It was wrong. It was awful.

“This can’t be,” Frankie said after Jim Hearn pitched the Giants to a 3–1 victory in the first game at Ebbets Field. Frankie Bertinelli got so mad that day he threw his radio across the room. When he turned it on, half the stations were missing, including WMGM, which broadcast the Dodgers games. The next day, the Dodgers came roaring back at the Polo Grounds. Labine pitched a six-hitter; Rube Walker hit a home run over the right-field roof. The Dodgers slaughtered the Giants, 10–0. That night, Frankie Bertinelli was elated. But on the morning of October 3, he looked out at the gray, overcast sky and was filled with dread.

That afternoon, he sat in the kitchen, listening to the horrible Giants announcers on WMCA, while his mother made coffee and tried to get him to eat something, anything. Sal Maglie was pitching for the Giants, and Frankie Bertinelli could picture his face: lean, mean, shrewd, hard. Newcombe was pitching for the Dodgers, big and strong, but always something wrong, never quite what he should be. First inning: Reese and Snider walk. Robinson singles to left, scoring Reese; 1–0 Dodgers. This weird Russ Hodges says the lights have been turned on at 2:04. Lights! In a
day
game! Frankie Bertinelli sat on the floor. Newcombe is pitching great, but then in the last of the seventh, Irvin doubles, and Lockman moves him to third with a bunt single. Irvin scores on Thomson’s sacrifice fly; 1–1. Frankie Bertinelli’s stomach knotted, churned, flopped around. Then, top of the eighth, the Dodgers score three runs, and in the last of the eighth, Newcombe strikes out the side; 4–1 Dodgers! Justice! Certainty! Beauty!

And then it’s the last of the ninth. Newcombe still pitching. Alvin Dark singles through the right side. Okay. So what? Keep the ball down. Get a double play. But no…Don Mueller singles to the right of Hodges, who for some insane reason is holding Dark tight on first with a three-run lead. Dread. Then Newcombe gets Monte Irvin to pop up a foul ball to Hodges. One out, two to go…And then here comes Whitey Lockman.
Walk him
. Load the bases, get the double play! Something about Lockman…and then Lockman slices a double down the left-field line. Dark scores. Mueller slides like a crazy man into third and breaks his ankle! They’re carrying him out through center field, all the way to the clubhouse. In the Dodgers bullpen: Carl Erskine and Ralph Branca are warming up. And Bobby Thomson is the batter.…

“Bring in Erskine,” Frankie Bertinelli shouted, while his mother moved around the kitchen. “Not Branca. Please not Branca. Thomson hit a homer off Branca in the first game! Into the upper deck! Please not Branca…” But Dressen calls in Branca. Clint Hartung goes in to run for Mueller at third. And it’s Branca. “Walk Thomson!” Frankie Bertinelli shouted. “Walk Thomson and pitch to the kid, to that Willie Mays. He’s a kid, he won’t handle the pressure, he—”

And then Frankie went silent, and listened to Russ Hodges:

Frankie Bertinelli got up, walked around, leaned his forehead on the wall. He could hear other radios from open windows.

That was at 3:58 p.m. At 4:20, Frankie Bertinelli got undressed, put on a pair of blue pajamas, and went to bed. Two days later, some kids found bags full of baseball cards in the garbage cans downstairs, along with old copies of the
Sporting News,
shredded photographs, torn scorecards. Cora continued to move in her dim way around the neighborhood, shopping at Jack’s, picking up fish at Red’s and meat at Semke’s, and black-and-whites at the Our Own bakery. But nobody saw Frankie.

“He’s not feeling well,” she would say if anyone asked. “He’s got the bad heart, you know, from the scarlet fever.…”

After a while, nobody asked anymore. The years went by. Cora got old. Delivery boys from the grocery stores said that the apartment was very strange. A man was always sleeping in the bed off the kitchen. There was no sound in the place, no radio, no TV. The shades were drawn. Sometimes, late at night, neighbors in the building could hear a man weeping.

More than thirty years later, Cora Bertinelli died. She was waked at Mike Smith’s, and late on the first night of the wake, I dropped by the funeral parlor. The large room was empty. Cora Bertinelli was dusty and white in the coffin. There was no sign of Frankie. I went out to the sidewalk and a small, fat, bearded man was standing there, staring at the church across the street. It was Frankie. He looked at me blankly, and I introduced myself, and said I was sorry about his mother. He looked tentative and lost.

“What about you, Frankie?” I said. “How’ve you been?”

He looked at me, and blinked, and said, “They shoulda walked Lockman.”

I followed him back into the funeral parlor.

SHAWN HIGGINS, AGE SIXTEEN,
5 feet 11 inches and still growing, stepped into the kitchen of the railroad flat on the top floor right. He laid two wrapped sandwiches on the table. It was about six o’clock and he was finished with his deliveries from the corner grocery store, where he worked. The source of free sandwiches and tips. He could hear a voice coming from the new television set in the living room. He hurried in to see his Uncle Jimmy, who was parked in a ratty armchair, staring at the solemn black-and-white face of an announcer. The news was, of course, about Korea. That was all anybody talked about over the last two weeks. The new war. More guys being drafted. Others being called back, five years after the last war. The war was on the front pages of the
Daily News
and the
Brooklyn Eagle.
The war was on the radio each evening.

“’Lo, Uncle Jimmy,” Shawn said.

“Yeah,” Jimmy said, curling the fingers of his good right arm, but staring at the small set. Patting the white-haired man’s stooped back, Shawn saw tears running down his face. They had to be tears about the war. The new war. The old one. The boy didn’t know what to say and so said nothing. On the mantelpiece behind the television set, down at the left, there was a picture of Shawn’s father, killed at Anzio in 1943, when his only son was eight. He was smiling, wearing his army uniform. Beside it was a second framed photograph, this one of his father with his mother, all dressed up at their wedding. She was gone now, too.

Shawn eased into his room, the only one with a door, the tiny room where his sisters shared a bunk bed until each got married, three months apart, and vanished into Long Island. The room was tiny and hot and smelled of his own dried sweat. The shade was drawn to keep out the heat. Beyond the shade was the rusting iron fire escape. His clothes were hanging off the rack below the top bunk, his shirts and underwear and socks folded on the old unused mattress. His books were stacked on the floor, beside his comics. A
Daily News
color photograph of Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese was Scotch-taped to the wall. Two days earlier, the
Eagle
said that even some of the ballplayers could be called up for the new war.

Shawn removed his sneakers, khaki trousers, and underpants, then pulled on a gray bathing suit. He was tying his sneakers again when he heard Uncle Jimmy say “oh” once, then again, and he wanted to hug him. Out at the VA hospital in Bay Ridge, the doctors told Shawn last year that his uncle was okay, except for the shell shock. Christ. When Shawn’s mother died just after the war, of heartbreak, his sisters said, he and his sisters had moved in here with Uncle Jimmy, who would take care of them. They learned quickly that they had to take care of Uncle Jimmy. One sandwich in the kitchen was for him.

Shawn dug out his hand weights from under the bed, a pair of eight-pounders that had once belonged to his father. Now the news was finished in the living room, and he could hear gunshots and horses galloping, as his Uncle Jimmy entered the Wild West. And thought: I have to get us out of here. Leave high school. Get a real job, not just delivering groceries, but real work. And make real money. Get a place on the first floor of some new building. Let Uncle Jimmy sit in a garden, and smell grass or roses, or go walking without help. Gotta do that. Gotta do it soon.

He inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, told Jimmy he was going up the roof. Then climbed the stairs two at a time.

Shawn loved the roof in summer. The tenements were on the avenue between 11th and 12th Streets. They had no backyards. No gardens right outside a door. But on the roof, there was always a breeze blowing from the harbor, and he could stand there and see the skyline of New York, off to the right, and remember that night in 1944 when the lights came on again, on D-day, when the armies landed in France to kick Hitler’s ass. All the women of the block seemed to be on the roof, and their kids, and a few old men, and someone began singing “The White Cliffs of Dover” and he heard those words about peace and laughter and love ever after. Something like that. Knowing it was already too late for his father. Knowing that Uncle Jimmy was there in that France and guys from all over the neighborhood were with him. Not one of them was up the roof that night. They were fighting the war. Shawn didn’t know until a few years later how many of them did not come home.

He took off his T-shirt and faced west. The sun was slowly descending into New Jersey, and the sky was full of new colors, blue and purple and red, all mixed together, changing every minute. Beautiful. He did fifty curls with the hand weights. Paused. Did fifty more. Then faced the remains of the abandoned pigeon coop, where the birds once fluttered and murmured behind wire walls and now were gone forever. He did moves he had seen the boxers doing at the gym on 8th Street. Jab, jab, jab, bend, left hook. Jab, right hand, hook. The rooftops of the block’s six tenements were all different. Different kinds of chimneys, some bare, some cowled. Some had clotheslines, some did not. Some were covered with gray pebbles, a few with raised wooden planks, others with tar paper. In the summers, they called those rooftops Tar Beach. People would get home from work, too late to grab the trolley to Coney Island, and try to spend an hour or two in the fading sun. On weekends, some of them would spread blankets and cover themselves with suntan lotion, all the while drinking iced tea or soda or beer. Tar Beach. For Shawn, it was just the roof. All of it.

Now he turned to face north, beginning his bends, touching his left ankle with his weighted right hand, the right ankle with his left. Doing each bend very hard. Grunting. Feeling the sweat on his face and shoulders and back. Feeling muscles tightening in his gut. Turning from north to east to south.

Then he saw a woman on the roof of the last house on the 11th Street end. A woman with long black hair, wearing a pink bathrobe. She was smoking a cigarette.

When she saw him staring, she smiled.

When Shawn first met Marilyn Carter on the roof, he was a virgin. Three weeks later he was not.

She lived in the apartment just below the roof and went down to fetch him a glass of cold water, introduced herself, and just started talking. That day, and on the afternoons that followed. She wasn’t some beautiful kind of movie star. In the real world, who was? She was on the chubby side and her hair was often tangled in a frantic kind of way. But she had a beautiful smile, and good white teeth, and talked very clearly, without an accent. She definitely wasn’t from the neighborhood.

“I grew up in New Jersey, way down, below Atlantic City,” she said one afternoon that first week. “Whatever you do with your life, Shawn, never move to New Jersey.”

He learned that she was a teacher at PS 10, the public school six long blocks away, teaching English. In the mornings now, she taught summer school. One afternoon she asked Shawn the name of the last book he had read, and he told her
The Amboy Dukes,
by a guy named Shulman.

“Hey, Shawn,” she said with a laugh. “You could do better than that.”

And brought him a copy of
The Red Badge of Courage,
which he read across three nights on the bottom bunk in his room. A book about a young soldier who was afraid. He wondered if his father had been afraid when he landed at Anzio. He wondered if Uncle Jimmy felt fear, too, but didn’t ask. Uncle Jimmy never talked about his war.

On the evening he returned the book, they talked about the characters and the writing, and what it was like in the Civil War, and then her voice abruptly dropped and her face darkened.

“My husband, Danny, is in the army,” she said softly. “In Japan.” She turned her head and stared at the darkening harbor. “I’m real worried now,” she said. “Korea’s right up the block.”

She turned away from the harbor, looking now at nothing.

“I can’t call him,” she said. “He can’t call me. We write every day, but the letters take forever.… I
told
him not to go in the army, but no, he knew better. He wanted to go to college, get the GI Bill, get a degree. Like I did. That was a year ago. He—”

She turned to Shawn and smiled in a thin way. “Why am I telling you all this? Don’t worry. I’m okay.” A pause. “I just hope my husband’s okay.”

That evening she invited him down to her place for a cup of tea. They sat facing each other at the kitchen table, and in the muted light he thought she looked beautiful. Her husband watched them from the photographs on the walls. His name was Danny Carter. Blond and handsome in the photographs from civilian life. Looking like a soldier in the photographs from Fort Dix, where he did his basic training. Marilyn saw Shawn stealing looks at the photographs.

“Danny’s such a wonderful man,” she said. “A man with a good heart. A
very
good heart. My parents wanted me to marry, oh, I don’t know, a doctor, a lawyer, a school principal, at least. They barely talk to me anymore.” She looked again at Danny Carter in his soldier’s uniform. “I can’t imagine him killing anyone.”

She stood up and started into the other rooms, flicking on lights as Shawn followed her. There were paintings and photographs on most walls. One room had two walls packed with books. He had never seen so many books in a person’s house.

“Let me find you another book,” she said.

Two days later, on a Saturday morning, a pair of uniformed soldiers came to her building.

Shawn was in the basement of the grocery store, unpacking cans of Del Monte peaches, when he heard her screaming.

He didn’t see her leave, and didn’t see her, or hear her voice, for five more days. He rang her bell. No reply. He tried the roof door. Locked from the inside. At night, no lights ever burned in her top-floor apartment. As he worked at the grocery store, leaving with deliveries, then returning, he watched her front door. Other tenants came and went. But there was no sign of Marilyn Carter.

On the sixth day, Shawn brought Uncle Jimmy two slices of pizza for dinner, and then went up the roof with his hand weights. He worked out with a kind of fury. Then, his bare hands gripping his knees, facing the sunset, breathless, he heard a door creaking open. When he turned, she was there. She looked forlorn. She gestured for him to come to her.

He did. An hour later, they were in bed. She was his teacher, helping him to do what he had never done before. He entered her wet, gasping warmth, into a kind of grieving heat and closeness he had never known until then. And then she rose to a pitch, gripping him tightly, digging fingers into his flesh, erupting into a deep, aching moan. One prolonged name.

Daaaaaaannnnnyyyy…

After that night, and for a dozen nights afterward, Sean was there with her. She cooked him small meals, even preparing food for him to bring to Uncle Jimmy. She told him about books he must read and gave him copies from her own library. She told him he should never drop out of high school and should try to get into City College, where there was no tuition. She urged him to buy a notebook and when he saw a word he didn’t understand, he should look it up in a dictionary and write it down. “Just writing it down,” she said, “will help you remember it.” She even gave him an extra dictionary. And he started writing down many words from the newspapers. Mortars. Casualties. Shrapnel.

She never mentioned her own future. When he told her the latest jokes he’d heard at the grocery store, she laughed out loud. Sometimes, lying in bed, they watched a movie on her television set, but never looked at the news. She said nothing at all about Danny and how he had been killed in Korea.

Above all, their time was devoted to the joys of the flesh. They pleasured each other in every part of the flat, in darkness or lamplight. In bed. In the bathtub. On hard wooden kitchen chairs and the soft couch and armchair in the living room. On a dark blue exercise mat on the floor beneath the cliffs of books.

Each fleshy embrace ended the same way: with the moaning of her dead husband’s name. Full of regret, longing, desire, and memory.

Then one Saturday afternoon in late August, as the skies darkened with the threat of a storm, Shawn arrived from the roof. Marilyn was in her pink bathrobe. The exercise mat was draped over a chair. There was an urgency in her eyes, and then in her voice.

“Let’s go up the roof,” she said.

“It’s blowing hard up there,” he said. “Someone at the store said there might even be a hurricane.”

“I know,” she said, and grabbed the mat and led the way to the roof.

She laid the mat on the roof and told him to get undressed.

“Here? What if—”

“In this storm, Shawnie, nobody’s heading for the roof.”

The first fat drops of rain began to fall. Trembling with urgency, Shawn pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it away. Marilyn removed her bathrobe and laid it upon the mat. She was naked. Then she kneeled, her body trembling, her arms stretched to Shawn. He squatted beside her. They kissed gently. She pulled away and smiled.

Then the rain came at them angrily, in huge, powerful drops, and they lay out flat, side by side, holding hands, facing the angry sky. Rain poured upon their bodies as they surrendered to the howling power of the storm. And then it changed to hail. Small, fierce pellets of ice. Like shrapnel. The waves of hailstones hammered the rooftops, creating a wordless roar. Shawn turned to protect her body with his own. He heard her making sounds, but not words, held her hair with both hands, kissed her fiercely, felt her amazing warmth, while the endless rounds of ice stabbed at his own flesh.

Then she pulled away from his mouth, her eyes closed, and he heard her high-pitched voice, rising into the roar of the storm. Screaming one long extended name.

Shaaaaaawneeee…Oh, Shaaaaaaawnneeeeee…

He woke late on Sunday morning. Flashes of the storm scribbled through his mind, and he rose, dressed quickly, gazed out the window, and saw that the storm was finished and gone. He quickly prepared some cornflakes and a sliced banana for Uncle Jimmy. And headed to the roof. The door to her house was locked from inside. He went home, then downstairs, and hurried to 11th Street. A small battered moving van was being stuffed with furniture that he knew. Chairs and a couch and cardboard boxes heavy with books. His heart was pounding as he entered the open front door and hurried up to Marilyn Carter’s top-floor apartment.