Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (10 page)

Sternly, she told me that my behavior was unacceptable, that Mary was simply a poor, sick old woman who had come from the Ukraine and had never learned to speak English very well. In fact, my mother explained, she had lived on our block longer than all the rest of us. Originally, her house stood in the midst of the vacant lots on which all the other houses were eventually built. Even some of the adults, she admitted, complained about the condition of Mary’s house and the weeds that violated the rules of the game in the suburbs. “Age and poverty are not a sin,” she said. Unconvinced, I rejoined feebly that all the other kids felt the same way, which only further irritated her. That night, I couldn’t sleep; every shadow looked like a witch’s broom.

“I am going to visit Mary, and you’re coming with me,” my mother announced as I entered the kitchen for breakfast the next morning. I tried to protest, but her tone brooked no argument, so I followed her out of the house and down the block. As we approached the dirt path which led through the weeds to Mary’s door, I alternated between
closing my eyes as a kind of protection, and observing every detail so that if I got out alive I would have a great tale to tell. We passed through the outer tangle of weeds that surrounded the house like a palisade, and I was stunned to see a magnificent garden. The place was a wilderness of gold and purple and violet. There were marigolds, giant zinnias, and daylilies, and a rosebush climbing up the walls of her shack filled the air with perfume. Now I realized what she was doing as we watched her stooped and digging in her yard.

When she came to her door in response to my mother’s knock that morning, Old Mary didn’t seem quite so hideous and menacing as before. Quickly, I glanced inside. There were no rugs or couches. Her cabin was dark and unpleasant. My eyes scanned the room for the skull we had seen through the window, long a fixture of our fantasies. It didn’t take long to find—a mannequin’s head, decked in a wig, was placed on the counter in front of the window. I turned back to look at the intricately patterned garden and suddenly realized why someone crashing in and trampling upon her flowers was so threatening to her. Our feared witch was simply a reclusive old lady, a remnant from another time and culture, minding her own business and cultivating a beautiful garden.

Two months later, Old Mary died. When the police came to her house, they found several hundred thousand dollars in cash hidden beneath some boards behind her toilet. No one ever figured out where the cash had come from, or why Mary had not used it to make her life easier. In short order, the bulldozers came and razed Old Mary’s shack, erasing the last visible reminder of the poverty from which all our families had escaped.

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M
Y FIRST YEAR
as a Dodger fan ended with a dramatic flourish as the pennant race between the Dodgers and the Cardinals came down to the final week. On September 21, 1949, with the Cardinals a game and a half ahead, the Dodgers arrived in St. Louis for a three-game series, including a day-night doubleheader. Second grade forced me to miss most of the first game, but I arrived home in time to hear the Cardinals, sparked by Enos Slaughter, rally in the bottom of the ninth to break a scoreless tie and win the game. Fortunately, the tide began to turn in the second game: Preacher Roe, so skinny that he looked like the schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, pitched a shutout to beat the Cards 5-0. The Dodgers convincingly won the third game with nineteen runs and nineteen hits, the kind of lopsided victory which delighted me far more than a tension-filled pitching duel. Trailing now by only half a game, the Dodgers went on to split a series with the Phillies and win two from the Braves. The two teams entered the last game of the season with the Dodgers on top by one. A Dodger victory would win the pennant, a loss would force a playoff.

In 1949, with the help of Robinson, Reese, Hodges, and Cox, the Dodgers won the National League Pennant on the last day of the season with a thrilling tenth inning victory.

I listened with both my parents to the final game, which took place on a Sunday afternoon at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. The Dodgers scored five runs in the third, but, by the bottom of the ninth, the Phillies had bounced back to tie the game at seven apiece. I couldn’t sit still. My throat felt so dry that it hurt, but I was afraid to leave the room. “Now you’re learning what it means to be a Dodger fan,” my father said. Then, in the top of the tenth, Pee Wee Reese opened with a single, which was followed by two more singles to score two runs, and the Dodgers held on to win the pennant. My father hoisted me up and twirled me around and told me that I was the good-luck charm that brought victory to our team. And so I believed I was.

Soon it seemed that everyone on our block had emptied into the street, laughing and joking and sharing the moment, for that Sunday marked a double victory for New York fans. Thirty minutes before the Dodgers won, the Yankees had clinched the American League pennant with an equally dramatic win over the Boston Red Sox. The Sox and the Yanks had come to the last day of the season tied for first, with identical records: the winner of the last game would win the pennant. Not since 1908 had pennant races in both leagues come down to the last day. New York took a 5-0 lead into the ninth, when the Sox rallied for three runs, but the Yankees held on to win their sixteenth and perhaps most hard-won pennant, since time and again in
the course of the season they had come back from adversity, plagued by more than seventy-one major injuries, including the loss of Joe DiMaggio for half their games. In a moment of joyful truce, before we hardened into our partisan camps, prepared to collide once again in the World Series, Elaine and I hugged each other. Mr. Lubar and my father shook hands, Mr. Rust, Eileen and Eddie Rust’s father, patted Gene Bartha on the back.

After the spectacular pennant drive, the ’49 World Series proved anticlimactic. The Yankees took the first game when Tommy Henrich hit a solo homer in the ninth inning to break a scoreless pitching duel between Allie Reynolds and Don Newcombe. The Dodgers returned the favor in the second game with a 1-0 victory by Preacher Roe. After two such close games, however, the Yankees won the next three straight. Our dreams for a world championship in ’49 withered and died. My relationship with Elaine grew strained and suffered for weeks. It was that October that I first understood the pain, bravado, and prayer woven into the simple slogan that served Dodger fans as a recurring anthem: “Wait till next year.”

M
Y EARLY YEARS
were happily governed by the dual calendars of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Catholic Church. The final out of the last game of the World Series signaled the approach of winter, bringing baseball hibernation, relieved only by rumors of trades and reports of contract negotiations. Even before the buds had appeared on the trees of Rockville Centre, players had sloughed off their winter weight and prepared to reconvene for spring training, bringing the joyous return of the box score (whose existence my father had finally revealed). Excitement mounted as the team returned to Brooklyn for opening day, a day of limitless promise. As spring yielded to summer, the pennant race began to heat up, reaching a peak of intensity—of mingled hope and apprehension—during the sultry days of August, when the hopes of many teams were still alive. By midSeptember, a chill in the air of shortening days, the scales
began to tip, depressing the hopes of many teams. For fans of contending teams, however, like the Dodgers of my childhood, it was Indian summer, a glorious respite before the last out of the last game opened the door once more to winter.

Analogous to the seasonal cycles of baseball were the great festivals of the Catholic Church. A month before Christmas we hung the Advent wreath, and each week we lit one of the four candles that presaged the coming of the Christ child. The fulfillment of Christmas followed, symbolized by the decoration of our Christmas tree, the exchange of gifts, and the mystery and wonder of Midnight Mass. When I was five or six, I would lie awake in bed, listening as the thunder of church bells at midnight announced the coming of the Savior, and dream of the day I would be permitted to stay up late enough to accompany my sisters to Midnight Mass. When I was finally allowed to go, none of my imaginings prepared me for the splendor of the church, its marble altars bordered with garlands of white and red poinsettias and dotted with red flames from clusters of small white candles surrounding the central one that symbolized Christ, the Light of the World. My parents worried that I wouldn’t last through the two-hour service, but the sight of the altar, the priests’ gold vestments, the sounds of the Latin ritual, and the soaring choir music overwhelmed fatigue until long after the service was completed.

Eileen Rust and me on our first Communion day, standing together like two miniature brides.

The last weeks of winter brought Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, commemorating the period of Jesus’ fast in the desert. We knelt before the priest, who traced in ash the sign of the cross on our foreheads. “Remember,” the priest intoned, his thumb touching each brow, “that thou art dust and unto dust shalt thou return.” How much nearer death seemed to me when I was a child, when, kneeling like millions of other children, I said the nightly prayer: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” But symbols of death were more than matched by symbols of rebirth, renewal, and resurrection, as the Lenten feast led up to Palm Sunday, marking the triumphal return of Jesus to Jerusalem. Holy Week—windows opening to the onrushing spring—continued through the solemnity of Holy Thursday and the deep mourning of Good Friday, when the church stood desolate and bare, its altar draped in black, its statues covered in purple, giving way to the joyful triumph of Easter Mass,
when the church was bedecked in white lilies. As Easter had been preceded by forty days of sorrow, it was followed by fifty days of rejoicing, leading up to Whitsunday, the feast of the Pentecost, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Through these seasonal festivals, so firmly embedded in the routine of our lives, I developed a lasting appreciation of the role that pageantry, ritual, and symbolism play in tying together the past and the present.

I took great pride in the commanding beauty of my church, St. Agnes. Built in the thirties to resemble a fifteenth-century Gothic cathedral, St. Agnes was furnished with oak pews that could seat over twelve hundred people. Its luminous windows made of antique stained glass had been imported from England and Germany, and its bell tower, surmounted by an aluminum cross, was visible for miles. I regarded with awe the serene darkness of the interior, a vast clear space illuminated by the soft amber light of two dozen iron chandeliers, hanging in two rows on long chains from the vaulted ceiling. Like something out of the Arthurian Legend, richly colored banners honoring the saints were mounted on lines of decorated poles projected from the side walls. These colorful lines converged at the sanctuary, with its white marble altar and its enormous crucifix suspended on chains from the canopy.

The scale of the church was the result of the vision of one man, Father Peter Quealy. He had arrived in Rockville Centre at the turn of the century, only two decades after six families had organized a tiny Roman Catholic parish and celebrated Mass in a blacksmith’s shop. Under Father Quealy’s inspired guidance, the pastorate increased to hundreds and then thousands, outgrowing two churches until the present St. Agnes was built, covering an entire block in the center of the village, with the church, rectory, convent, and a parochial school. When the foundation was
laid in 1935, many thought Father Quealy’s reach had exceeded his grasp, but in 1957 the church built on the scale of a cathedral actually became a cathedral: Pius XII announced that a new Catholic diocese, encompassing Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island, was to be formed out of the existing Brooklyn Diocese, with St. Agnes Church as its seat. By then Father Quealy’s health was failing, but he lived to witness the celebratory Mass, attended by six hundred priests, one hundred monsignori, three archbishops, twenty-five bishops, and nine hundred nuns, at which Bishop Walter Kellenberg assumed the throne and officially made St. Agnes a cathedral.