The Pacific and Other Stories (26 page)

The furniture was so European that Louis XIV might not have noticed had he by some miracle been transported to the Carlyle from his own time and place. The carpets were soft and dense, the walls smooth and solid, everything clean and well lit, the colors bleeding into one another like wounded comrades in the French foreign legion. Roger wandered from room to room, but only in the living room did he fully realize what was happening, for there, as high above the earth as an airplane, huge banks of
whistle-clean windows opened out on Manhattan, which roared and glowed, fading into the distance in never-ending avenues of a million flares, draped with necklaces of bridge lights, and banked high with massive buildings twinkling like starshine on a lake. Someone else standing in the same place, a president perhaps, a tycoon, a movie star, or even a baseball player, might have felt a feeling of power and vindication. To be high and to see the world marked out below you in cool fire is, after all, the dream of angels, but Roger felt neither pride nor vindication. Instead, his heart swelled at the great expanse of lights and a blood-red pennant left in the sky by the setting sun. He had no thought of what he had accomplished or where he had come. Looking over the miraculous work that stood before him he saw no reflection or reminder of himself, but only the kind of high glory that rides from place to place and time to time on a shower of sparks.

J
UNE WAS HOT
, perfect, and strange. It started magnificently and was slowly transformed into the initial bakery days of summer, tolerable for their novelty, when the beaches are as hot and white as molten glass but the ocean is blue and numbingly cold. A day of prairie heat would surrender to a northern European evening with cool breezes veering off the Hudson and sailing down the avenues like Dutch sloops. Morning fogs as thick as cotton could burn off in a minute, leaving behind them a newly shining world. It was a gorgeous month, but its brilliances were a foil for many peculiar things.

For example, a Mr. Winston Wilgis, rubber heir and recluse, called the Hotel Carlyle front desk to ask for a complete set of the Babylonian Talmud and sixteen cases of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic on ice. The next day, he asked for deep-sea fishing equipment, and if you had been walking on the street below his suite and had had occasion to look up, you would have seen, at various times, tarpon lures, bagels, socks, and a banana flying with dampened grace ten feet above you, a pendulum suspended by semi-invisible line.

As much as he caused others puzzlement, Roger himself was puzzled. Worked with great skill into a fruitwood enclosure in the living room of his suite were two televisions and a high-fidelity radio. One television played in black and white, the other in experimental color. Neglecting these wonders
on his first night, Roger awoke early the next morning and turned the knobs. He had never seen a television. At first, nothing happened, but then a white dot appeared in the center of the pudding-gray glass, soon to move and intensify like a supernova, and then, like the opening of an umbrella, to expand into what became a picture accompanied by a hardly bearable tone. The picture was of something that looked like a spiderweb, and had written in the corner,
WPIX-TV, Channel 11.
Utterly useless. The one in color was not much better, though it looked like a Herschel Trixie, the only abstract artist Roger had thought he had heard of, though he had actually not heard of any.

The radio played more than just one station, and because no liver-filled refrigerator case interfered, you could turn it on or off whenever you wanted. The quality of its sound far exceeded that of the butcher’s radio, and the first time Roger turned it on the most extraordinary music filled the room, music such as he had never heard. He listened in wonderment as someone sang a lyric that sounded like,
A wop bopa loobop a pop pop pop, a hop poppa loopa, a wop bop pop
, and so on, with a pace and excitement that, though entirely foreign, seized him and made him dance around the room in abandon. Not even a Memphis lounge lizard could have done a better number, or swiveled his hips, bit his lips, and raised his cheeks until his eyes were slits, than did Roger, who, when the song ended and was replaced by a jingle that went,
Brusha brusha brusha, new Ipana toothpaste, healthy for your tee-eeth!
, stopped dead in delight.

Roger was not the only one that June to be astonished as both the sports and rabbinic worlds were thrown off balance by inexplicable changes to the New York Yankees. The only plausible explanation, that the Yankees wanted to draw new fans from the perhaps-underrepresented Orthodox Jewish community, was fairly unsatisfactory in that it did not actually explain the extraordinary measures. First came the announcement that hot dogs sold at the stadium would be only kosher. They were mainly kosher anyway. Then the revelation that on “ice-cream days” (a new term in baseball), hot dogs would not be served, and vice versa. This caused quite a stir.

At the press conference called to announce the food plans a reporter asked Stengel if and when peanuts would be available. “I’m told that
peanuts are parve, and will be available at all times,” he answered. Most of the reporters thought that “parve” was a Stengel word (perhaps picked up from Berra, who was always inventing new ways to say things) that was the equivalent of the beatnik “cool,” or the now dated “swell.” This quickly infiltrated the sports press, and announcers began to talk about “the really parve double-header,” in Baltimore, or Y. A. Tittle’s “parve new contract.”

The nation became aware that now before every game in Yankee Stadium the stands echoed with Hebrew prayers, and that Hasidic rabbis stood behind the umpires at each of their positions. Disputes that had once taken seconds or minutes now sometimes took hours, with boys in black silk running to and fro to fetch or return leather-covered tomes for support. Stengel began to pronounce his own name with an “eh” at the end, and no longer referred to his team as the Yankees but as the Yenkiss, with the last syllable pronounced as in the last syllables of “hocus pocus.”

Speculation was that all of this was an inexplicable commercial strategy of the management, and as long as people credited the theory the inexplicable seemed explicable. Even when the team refused to play on Saturdays, everyone thought it was simply a disastrously stupid move somehow designed to increase attendance. But the changes were not solely the work of management. Some of the players now wore what everyone in New York called
yamakas
, a strangely Japanese way of referring to what Roger called
kipote
, or, in the singular, a
kipah
. When the press finally got up enough nerve to ask Eustis Jackson Jr., the second baseman, why he was wearing such a thing, he said, with some heat, “I’m a colored man, this is a free country, and I can do what I want.”

When Berra was asked, he responded with a long and phenomenally disjointed essay about freedom of speech, the free-enterprise system, and his ancestors. What did that have to do with his wearing of a
yamaka
? With a twinkle in his eyes that the press never saw, he said, “They would, had they could, because the least obvious reward for labor is hard work.” But that was not the end of the encounter.

“Hey Yogi,” a reporter said. “What are those threads, those, uh, fringes, sticking out of your pants?”

Yogi tucked them in, saying, “Frayed threads. It happens when it’s washed a lot.”

“Yogi,” they asked. “What is all this stuff, suddenly?”

“What stuff?”

“All this Jewish stuff.”

“What Jewish stuff?”

“You know, kosher stadium food, Hebrew prayers, rabbis behind the umps,
yamakas
, fringes. What’s going on?”

“Jewish stuff?” Yogi asked. “As Eustis said, it’s a free country, right? Look, guys, when you have a choice, there’s only one way to go.”

They accepted this, and went on. “But closing on Saturday is nuts. Aren’t you worried about attendance?”

Berra laughed. “Just be there for the game against Kansas City.”

T
HE REMATCH AGAINST
K
ANSAS
C
ITY
was also a home game, as the A’s played solely away games that June because their field had been invaded by locusts. In New York at the end of the month it was hot and nearly everyone was either at work or at the beach. That the stands were half full might have been worrisome to management as a sign that the Yankees had lost their touch, but they were worried only about Roger.

Roger was fine, had kept up his extraordinary record in numerous practices (although, to keep the strategy secret, he hit balls out of the stadium only in the dark), and assured them that the presence of a crowd and the press would have no effect on what he could do. But they had seen too many confident rookies turn to swamp mush at the roar of the crowd, to be reassured, and they breathed apprehensively all through June, especially Stengeleh, who thought that perhaps he was having an epic dream.

Just striving to imitate Roger had made the Yankees hit better, run faster, and throw harder. They were losing by lesser margins, and although no one expected them to get to the Series, there was hope that they might hold their own enough to come back the next year. In fact, the sportswriters hoped for the agonizing comeback that would give them a great theme for the rest of the season. In the bottom of the ninth inning in the Thursday game against the A’s, the score was Kansas City 3, New York 0, which wasn’t so bad, and might be good for stimulating eight hundred words of drivel about a Yankee revival. The radio announcers, however, were used to filling dead air in
any circumstance, albeit with a languor that would have been the envy of Oblomov. No matter what, they would broadcast their perfectly timed descriptions in wonderful baseball-afternoon bursts.

Thus, Red and Mel—Red from Alabama, and Mel from Alabama, Red thin and Mel stocky, Red red-haired and Mel blue-black, Red high-strung and aristocratic and Mel what you might call a garage guy, Red a prima donna and Mel a prima donna, and both as comfortable to American ears as the sound of the lines whipping against a flagpole on a windy day. Red was looking forward to catching the train up to Briarcliff, and Mel was going to dinner that night with a broad. They thought the game was more or less over. So, apparently, did a lot of other people, who were headed to the subway and the parking lots. The voices of the announcers, arrowing over the air, conveyed a yearning for scotch on the 5:06 as the sun beat off the brackish Hudson, and the anticipation of the relaxed clink of glasses and ice at ‘21.’

After some light opera in service of Rheingold Beer, Mel summarized: “Yankees versus the A’s, Yankee Stadium, bottom of the ninth.” The word
ninth
had an upward intonation, like a rising pheasant. “A’s three, Yankees nothing, Koswick on third, Miller on second, two outs.”

“Folks,” said Red, “there are two outs, and Mantle is up. Or will be … in a second. What do you say, Mel?”

“It’s pretty clear, Red. Mantle has to go for a homer, and Zelinka has gotta walk him.”

“And strike the next batter out. … There’s potential drama here, Mel. Mantle has been hitting well.”

“You’re right, Red. If he hits now the way he’s been hitting in practice, the Yanks may have a chance today.”

“I know what you’re gonna say is strange, Mel,” Red interrupted.

“You’ve seen it, too?”

“I have. He’ll hit one into the bleachers, and you’ll see a pained expression on his face, as if that’s just not good enough.”

“That’s what makes a champion, Red. Never satisfied.”

“Okay, Mantle is up. Zelinka can’t take the chance. He’s gotta walk him.”

“There’s Mick. He brushes the dust off his left leg. A few practice swings.”

“He looks intent. He’s gotta hit for the bleachers. Look, people have stopped leaving the stadium. They’re poised at the ramps, their feet toward the exits, their bodies twisted so they can look over their shoulders at the field.”

“I’ll tell you, Mel, I would not walk out of this ballpark if Mickey Mantle was up at bat, or, if I did, I’d stop just like these folks.”

“The pitch,” said Mel. “Ball one. So far on the outside that maybe it was for the Dodgers.”

Red added, “Some people are booing Zelinka.”

“Zelinka doesn’t care. The game could ride on this. He can’t let Mantle drive in three runs and go to dangerous extra innings.”

“Zelinka hasn’t fared well against Mantle in the past. He knows. … He winds up … the pitch.”

The pitch was a slow boat to the outside, so far to the outside that it had to be slow to give the catcher time to get to it. But that was not something to be taken for granted, as the pitcher and the catcher had. Most uncharacteristically, Mantle ran after the ball.

“He’s running!” the announcers shouted. “He bunts! Oh boy! He’s halfway to first already, and there’s no one there to pick up the ball!”

Koswick, the runner on third, started toward home but the third-base coach called him back. “I coulda made it!” Koswick said. The coach just looked away, as did the rabbi behind him. Meanwhile, the catcher went for the ball and found himself in the middle of the infield while Zelinka rushed in to cover the plate. The catcher frantically threw the ball to Zelinka, who almost didn’t catch it, and, when he did, stood on the plate in a state of shock, looking out at bases loaded and knowing that his options were getting fairly narrow. As he returned to the mound, the fans at the exits went back to their seats.

The radio announcers forgot what they had been thinking of, because here was what they lived for. Bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, three nothing, two outs. Of course they and everyone else hoped the next batter up would go to a three-two count, the ultimate precipice of baseball, but even without that, what they had was good enough. A home run would win the game, a triple would tie it, a double would put the Yankees one down, a single or a walk two down. They were still alive, and no one knew what would happen.

“Morgan is up next, Red. With his batting average. …”

“The only question, Mel, is who will be the pinch hitter.”