Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (20 page)

Now that I had formulated a reasonable plan for the evacuation that would allow me, my family, and our entire neighborhood not only to survive the bomb but to flourish intact in our subterranean shelter, I was ready to resume ordinary life.

O
N THE
J
UNE DAY
in 1950 when the Korean War began, the summer’s first heat wave had sent temperatures into the nineties. I was sitting with my parents on the porch in front of an old General Electric fan when the radio reported that North Korea had invaded South Korea. My most vivid memory is the whirring sound of that fan and the anxious faces of my parents.

My sisters recalled in detail the world map that hung on the wall of our breakfast nook during World War II. It came with a set of pins which my father would move every few days to mark the position of the American troops. But there was no equivalent map to trace the course of battle in Korea. I had very little awareness of the events in what would later become known as the “forgotten war.” It seemed to have very little to do with me. If I knew about the spectacular parade honoring the return of General Douglas MacArthur in April 1951, it was largely because the procession delayed the opening game of the first series
between the Dodgers and the Giants, thus allowing me time to get home from school and watch most of the game.

Although I thought of myself as a patriot, my heart full of pride each morning as I recited the ritual phrases of the pledge to the flag, the tragedy of war seemed real to me only when it directly affected the fortunes of the Brooklyn Dodgers. For three years, Don Newcombe had been our best and most consistent pitcher, with seventeen victories in his rookie year, nineteen the next year, and twenty the year after. Only Warren Spahn of the Braves had won more games during that period. Then, in 1952, at the height of his powers, the twenty-six-year-old Newcombe was drafted into the army. Other teams suffered losses just as great—the Yankees lost Whitey Ford, the Giants Willie Mays, and the Red Sox Ted Williams—but the only thing that concerned me was Dressen’s ability to compensate for the loss of Newcombe.

The summer of 1952 was one of the hottest New Yorkers had ever experienced. Day after day, the temperature stayed in the high nineties. Under the strain of the heat wave, flowers wilted and tempers flared. At night, the small electric fan at the foot of my bed only circulated the heat. Unable to jump rope or play hopscotch on the steaming sidewalks, Elaine and I conceived a plan to make the best of the heat: we would read
Gone with the Wind
. We sat in the shade of the large maple tree on Elaine’s lawn and let the story of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler absorb our imaginations and distract us from the scorched brown lawns of that blistering summer. Vicariously, we lived the great romance. Elaine identified with the gentle decency of Melanie Wilkes; I preferred the shrewd strength of the outspoken Scarlett. We both fell for the unscrupulous Rhett with his dancing dark eyes and his white Panama hat. We were both titillated when, during the Siege of Atlanta,
Rhett asked Scarlett to live with him. Expecting a proposal of matrimony, Scarlett is furious: “Mistress!” she snaps, “What would I get out of that except a passel of brats?” We parsed the sentence as if it were a passage from the Bible. What exactly did she mean?

The summer was almost over when we reached the final pages. Devastated by Rhett’s rejection of Scarlett in the final scene, I could not accept his argument that “what is broken is broken,” that it was too late to glue together the fragments of their love. I ran into my house to ask my mother what she thought.

“She’ll get him back, won’t she?” I asked. “Once she gets to Tara, she’ll figure out some way, won’t she?”

“No,” she said softly, “I don’t think so. Maybe Scarlett could have reached out to Rhett when the little girl died, but by the end, it was too late.”

Disconsolate, I ran up to my room. There I began to imagine, complete with dialogue, ways in which I might help bring about a reconciliation.

The fictional romance of Scarlett and Rhett occupied my imagination, but my sister Charlotte was involved in a romantic adventure of her own. While working the night shift at Lenox Hill, she had met a young intern, Dr. Paul Ovando. When he first saw her picture in the hospital yearbook, he told her he had decided that she would one day become his wife. Charlotte scoffed at his presumption, but within weeks she had fallen in love and they were making marriage plans. Both families felt it was too soon for them to marry. Paul had just finished his internship, and was scheduled to start five years of surgical residency at Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire. Once the residency was completed, he faced specialized training in thoracic surgery. It seemed better, both sets of parents agreed, to postpone marriage until he was further advanced.
Unwilling to accept delay, Charlotte and Paul eloped in the summer of ’52. I couldn’t understand how they could marry without a proper wedding, but their decision to run away together seemed enviably romantic and only served to fix Charlotte’s glamorous image in my mind.

With my mind aswirl with hazy ideas of love and romance, the fictional mingling with the actual, the friendship I rekindled with Johnny that summer acquired new possibilities. I hadn’t seen him much the previous two summers, because he had gone to sleepaway camp, but during the summer of ’52, he had returned to Jones Beach. He was now eleven and at least six inches taller than I. We resumed our conversations about baseball, but our relationship was not as relaxed as it had once been. Though he always seemed glad to see me, he was given to occasional bouts of teasing. After talking for a few minutes, he would sometimes shove me under water and swim away. I would come up coughing, irritated, and perplexed. To my amazement, Jeanne explained that his behavior meant he liked me.

One afternoon, after a long talk about how well the Dodgers were doing, Johnny mentioned that he was returning to Jones Beach that night with his older brother to see the musical production of
A Night in Venice
at the new outdoor theater.

“So am I,” I said. “With my sister.”

“Well, look for me,” he mumbled, “and we’ll sit together.”

Jones Beach was a different world at night, its dazzling colors softened, the menacing heat of the day diminished by a cool breeze. The new outdoor theater, a semicircular shell of brick and concrete on Zach’s Bay, was capable of seating over eight thousand people. Michael Todd’s production
of the musical extravaganza
A Night in Venice
featured a cast of three hundred, including singers from the Metropolitan Opera Company, a fifty-piece orchestra, singing gondoliers, precision swimmers, and world-famous divers, performing spectacular stunts off three diving boards at once.

Johnny was waiting for me when I walked in, his hair slicked back and his plaid shirt rolled up at the elbows. I felt shy and didn’t say much as we found seats together. At one point in the water ballet, as the music of Johann Strauss floated across the water, Johnny brushed my hand and pointed to the precision swimmers seated atop a huge lotus blossom that had suddenly risen from the bottom of the lagoon. He quickly withdrew his hand, but his brief contact had unaccountably delighted me.

The next morning I couldn’t wait to get back to Jones Beach, but, to my dismay, the papers were filled with reports of a new polio outbreak. None of us were allowed to go to the beach. My mother’s ban remained in force for nearly two weeks. Immediately upon my return, I looked for Johnny. I couldn’t find him, and on the days following, my luck proved no better. I searched the boardwalk, the ice-cream parlors, the pitch-and-putt golf course without result. I wondered if he was trying to avoid me.

The summer came to an end and I never saw Johnny again, but in my mind, he became the leading man in a daydream I invented and elaborated upon. To explain his absence, I imagined that he had become a polio victim and that I was his loving caretaker, pushing his wheelchair along the boardwalk at the beach where we had once run together, propelling him up the ramp at Ebbets Field to share the World Series victory we had both desired for so long. Exactly how the summer heat, my sister’s elopement, my fear of polio, and my reading of
Gone with the Wind
came together I wasn’t sure, but the combination provided all the ingredients necessary to yield the pleasures and pains of the first full-blown imagined romance of my life.

A
N OVERHEARD ARGUMENT
between Mr. Friedle and my father constitutes my only clear recollection of the presidential election of 1952. My family almost never discussed politics. As a civil servant, my father never involved himself in individual campaigns; but in ’52, with the fight for the Republican nomination under way, he declared his support for Dwight Eisenhower. Mr. Friedle argued that Robert Taft was Mr. Republican, a loyal member of the party whose conservative ideals had remained consistent for dozens of years. Eisenhower, he asserted, had no political identity, and could as easily have been a Democrat as a Republican. “That’s exactly why I’m for him,” my father replied. “We need a rest from all the bickering of the last few years. We need a healer, a man above politics. Ike is that man.”

As the presidential election approached, the Dodgers won four games in a row to clinch the National League pennant. Three days later, the Yankees won the American League pennant by defeating second-place Cleveland. October would bring the fourth World Series between the two New York teams.

“The simplest argument to support a belief that the Yankees will win,” Red Smith stated in the
Tribune
, “is to point out that they always do. Since the beginning of time, no Brooklyn team has won a world championship… . It does not, of course, follow that what has always happened in the past must of necessity continue to happen. Yet one suspects that the knowledge of what has always happened must have some effect upon the players and the games.”

The Dodgers’ 1952 pennant-winning lineup: Cox, Reese, Snider, Robinson, Campanella, Pafko, Hodges, Furillo, and Black.

“I see that I’ve got blue-green eyes because you’ve got blue-green eyes,” I protested to my father, “but I don’t see how a team can lose because it lost five or ten or twenty years ago. That doesn’t make any sense.” My father explained that a team’s legend had staying power beyond the individual players; that, as newcomers join the club, they trade tales of the past, just as citizens absorb the legends of their country. When the stories tell of great achievement, as the Yankees’ did, each new player absorbs the confidence of his elders. In reverse fashion, if a new Dodger player repeatedly hears how his team has lost every World Series, he begins to think, as soon as something goes wrong, that once again the team is going to lose.
However, my father quickly added that, although this was generally true, it did not apply to this particular Dodger team, which was the best and proudest of all Dodger teams in his lifetime. Certainly, he reassured me, players like Robinson and Reese and Campanella would not be influenced by past defeats and would be spurred to win their first World Series.

The Dodgers won the first game, 4-2, on the arm of Joe Black, the Negro League star whose brilliant pitching in the bullpen would earn him Rookie of the Year honors. It was the first time, Red Smith quipped, “since the dawn of civilization that Brooklyn won a series opener.” The Yankees tied the Series in the second game with a three-hitter by Vic Raschi and a three-run homer by Elaine’s idol, Billy Martin. The Dodgers won the third game behind Preacher Roe; the Yankees took the fourth, 2-0, with a home run by their twenty-year-old golden boy, Mickey Mantle. In the fifth and most exciting game, the Dodgers pulled out a 6-5 victory in the eleventh inning. Ahead three games to two, we needed only one more victory. But the Yankees tied the Series with a sixth-game victory when both Mantle and Berra hit home runs.

The world championship was decided in the seventh inning of the seventh game. With the Yankees ahead by a score of 4-2, and two out, the Dodgers loaded the bases for Robinson. After running the count to three and two, Robinson hit a twisting pop fly which the gusting wind carried to the first-base side of the pitcher’s mound. As the Yankee pitcher, Bob Kuzava, stood frozen on the mound, and first baseman Joe Collins lost the ball in the sun, the Dodgers began to round the bases, until Billy Martin, realizing what had happened, raced the distance from second base, lunged through the air, and caught the ball just before it hit the ground. Martin’s spectacular catch ended the
Dodger rally, and the Yankees went on to win the game and the Series, their fourth championship in a row.

As soon as the game was over, Elaine strutted to the entrance of my house. “You have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of,” she magnanimously consoled me, “nothing at all. It could just as easily have gone your way and almost did.” She tried to suppress a smile. “You gave us a real run for …” I couldn’t bear to hear another word. I closed the door in her face and ran up to my room.

A
LTHOUGH MY INTEREST
in public events rarely went beyond the sports pages, I became absorbed by the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, arrested for divulging atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Their trial, conviction, and death sentence, in the spring and summer of 1953, provided front-page stories month after month.