Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (22 page)

Some measure of distraction from the stark, white hospital room was provided by the crackle of the radio as we huddled around my mother’s bed to share Dodger games. Fortunately, by September of ’53, it was already clear that the Dodgers would win the pennant. It had been a brilliant season: “It’s the greatest team I’ve ever managed,” Chuck Dressen crowed. “It’s a helluva outfit.” Roy Campanella won his second Most Valuable Player award with a batting
average of .312, forty-one home runs, and a league-leading 142 runs batted in. Duke Snider led the team in homers with forty-two while hitting .336. Still possessed of a powerful will to win, the aging Robinson, playing mainly in left field, hit .329 with ninety-five RBIs. Gil Hodges, after a start so appalling that the Brooklyn clergy offered prayers for his revival, finished by hitting .302 with thirty-one home runs. Jim Gilliam, with his dazzling play at second, was named Rookie of the Year.

Sunday, September 6, was my father’s birthday, which we celebrated in my mother’s hospital room with cake and ice cream, listening to the Dodger game on the radio. It was a typical Dodger-Giant vendetta. In the second inning, Furillo (who had twenty-two hits in his last thirty-eight at bats, and would win the batting title that year) was hit on the wrist by a pitched ball. He picked himself off the ground, pushed two umpires and the Dodger manager out of his way, and headed toward the mound. Both dugouts emptied, and after a long interval, the game resumed. But no sooner had Furillo taken first than he turned and charged toward the Giant dugout, certain that Leo Durocher had ordered the pitcher to hit him. The pugnacious Durocher rose to meet him, and the two men converged, fists flailing. Teammates finally separated them, but in the melee a bone in Furillo’s hand was broken, putting him out of action for the rest of the season. “I’ll get him,” Furillo fumed when he went to the hospital that night for X-rays. “On the field, on the street, or anywhere else I find him. I’m only sorry I didn’t get a good sock at him. I wouldn’t care if it cost me a thousand dollars and I wasn’t worried about others ganging up on me because his own players hate him, too.”

My mother was so infuriated by Furillo’s injury that she suddenly sat up in bed and cursed Durocher in a voice
more firm and spirited than I had heard from her for a long time. In a peculiar way, it became clear to me at that moment that she had turned the corner. In the days that followed, her condition began to improve, her appetite slowly returned, and she exhibited her old determination to recover her full strength.

A week later, the Dodgers clinched the pennant, earlier than any modern club, and met the Yankees in the World Series. Once again, Billy Martin was the Yankee hero, driving in eight runs on twelve hits. Even though everyone agreed the Dodgers had the better team, they lost yet again. But for the first time it didn’t seem important at all. My mother was home from the hospital. Our family was together again. There would be other seasons, other chances.

I
N THE SPRING
of 1954, when I came home for lunch, I often found that my mother had set up her ironing board in front of our television set to watch the Army-McCarthy hearings. Indeed, all the mothers in the neighborhood were mesmerized by the dramatic confrontation between Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin and the civilian chiefs of the Army. And what transfixed our mothers inevitably influenced us and, ultimately, would cast an ugly shadow over our own play.

In February 1950, with the country still stunned by the shock of the Soviet nuclear bomb and the invasion of South Korea, Joe McCarthy had burst onto the national scene when he told a Republican audience in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he had a list of 205 known communists in the State Department. Although no such list was ever produced nor any actual communist unearthed, the explosive speech opened one of the most destructive chapters in
American political history. For more than four years, McCarthy’s scattershot accusations of treason created an atmosphere of fear and anxiety that imperiled civil liberties, ruined reputations, disrupted careers, and destroyed countless lives. The entire panoply of congressional inquiries, executive investigations, accusations, and blacklists came to be known by the single word “McCarthyism.”

In 1954, his reckless arrogance swollen by political success, McCarthy went after the United States Army. His starting point was the refusal of Major Irving Peress, an Army dentist, to answer questions about his alleged membership in the American Labor Party. Though Peress was no longer in the Army, he had been promoted to major before his discharge. “Who promoted Peress?” McCarthy demanded day after day, until the question became a refrain. He called for the Army’s personnel files so he could determine who was involved in this “conspiracy” to promote and protect a “known communist.” Army Secretary Robert Stevens refused McCarthy’s demands until leaders of the Republican administration, fearing the issue was dividing and weakening the party, urged him to furnish the records. Stevens’ seeming capitulation set off a storm of protest around the world. The London press said that McCarthy had accomplished what General Burgoyne and Cornwallis had never achieved—the surrender of the United States Army.

Stung by the criticism, Stevens fought back. He denied that he had surrendered, refused to give up the files, and insisted that he would never allow Army personnel to be browbeaten or humiliated by a congressional committee. The stage was set for a showdown. There followed an unprecedented trial by congressional committee on television, in which the Army responded to McCarthy’s charges with accusations of its own, claiming that McCarthy and Roy
Cohn, his chief investigator, had tried to extort favors from the Army on behalf of a former subcommittee consultant, David Schine, who had been drafted.

The hearing supplanted even the soap operas as our mothers went about their daily routine to the clangorous accompaniment of lawyers, senators, Army officers, and the coarse interruptions of Senator McCarthy. In the evenings, our fathers were filled in on the events of the day. And, not understanding what was at stake, we made a game of our own out of McCarthyism, a child’s version of accusation, personal attack, and bitter dispute.

As the hearings progressed, even those somewhat sympathetic to McCarthy began to turn against the senator. A growing revulsion was fed, not simply by the absurdity of his attack on the patriotism of the U.S. Army, but through television’s pitiless daily exposure of his coarsely abusive manner and his reckless disregard for facts. The inevitable end came in an exchange between McCarthy and Army counsel Joseph Welch, a patrician Boston lawyer. Angered and frustrated by Welch’s persistent cross-examination of Roy Cohn, McCarthy charged that Welch had planned to bring a young communist from his Boston law firm to work with him on the hearings. When Welch disregarded the attack, McCarthy named the young man, Frederick Fisher, and charged that Fisher had been a member of the Lawyers Guild. In fact, after discussing Fisher’s law-school membership in the Lawyers Guild, both Welch and Fisher had decided it would be best for the young man to stay behind. And now, for no compelling reason, out of the purest malice, McCarthy was trying to destroy him.

Stunned by the unexpected accusation and close to tears, Welch turned to McCarthy: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Have you no sense of decency, sir? If there is
a God in heaven, [this attack] will do neither you nor your cause any good.” When Welch finished his eloquent and emotional riposte, the crowded hearing room burst into applause. Reporters rushed to the counsel’s table, where McCarthy sat alone, his head in his hands. “What did I do?” he asked, a look of bewilderment on his face. What he had done was to reveal himself to the entire nation as a savage and self-aggrandizing bully. The hearings continued for a few more days, but McCarthy was finished. His blistering attacks would no longer find a sympathetic audience in the nation at large.

Our children’s version of McCarthyism would come to a similar end. We had begun by transforming our living rooms into a counterpart of the Senate chamber. We set up a table facing a single chair in the middle of the room. The person designated as the accused sat in the chair while the rest of us asked questions and made charges from behind the table. As our accused fidgeted uneasily on the stand, we grew increasingly hostile, interrupting explanations with points of order, claiming we had documents and proof to back up our accusations. We shouted and argued just as we had seen the counsel do on television. Day after day we played the treacherous game, even though one of us usually ended up running from the room in tears. We accused one another of being poor sports, of cheating at games. We exposed statements of the “accused” which denigrated others. Marilyn Greene accused Elaine of saying that the new girl on our block, Natalie, was fat; Elaine accused Marilyn of saying that Eileen was a crybaby. I accused Elaine of whining that Eileen always took the role of mother in our games of house. Eddie accused Eileen of complaining that Elaine was too bossy. Often these charges were true. We did, indeed, talk behind one another’s backs, but we had never imagined that our slurring words, bad-mouthed
comments, and hurtful language would be made known to others.

When I was on the stand, Eileen Rust charged me with pretending that she and I were best friends while Elaine was away on vacation. She claimed that, within minutes after Elaine had departed for Crescent Lake, Maine, in the Friedles’ packed Hudson, with their bird in a covered cage on the back seat, I had raced over to Eileen’s house and told her that she was my best friend. For two weeks, she said, we had played together every day. But as soon as Elaine returned, I had lost interest in her. What Eileen said was true. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” I cried, as I burst into tears.

As the games progressed, they became even more vicious and mean-spirited. Marilyn said she knew the truth about my family, that my real mother had died when I was born, that my mother was really my grandmother. Stung by the attack, I lashed back: “How can you say such, a thing? Your name isn’t even Greene. It’s Greenberg. You’re the one who’s hiding things, not me!”

Our game created rifts between us, dividing us into rival camps, until we finally grew tired, and a little afraid, of the anxiety and the nastiness. One day, as we sat in our circle trying to decide whose turn it was to be the accused, we chose instead not to play anymore. It was as if a terrible fever had gripped us, and now it was broken. We moved the chair and table back to their proper places and never again conducted our mock trials.

T
HE ARRIVAL
OF adolescence altered my relationship to my family, diverted my attention from the Brooklyn Dodgers, and distanced me from my best friend, Elaine Friedle. My appearance, the thoughts that demanded my attention, the different ways I related to the pleasures of my childhood—everything was changing, and I was in control of neither the direction nor the nature of these changes. Now my daydreams, which had once been filled with the sight of Jackie Robinson leaping to snare a line drive, were occupied with thoughts of Howie Rabinowitz and Danny Schechter, the most handsome boys in my junior-high-school class. Most troubling to one who had always maintained a resolutely cheerful disposition, my moods shifted unpredictably. Some evenings, I happily sat with my parents and watched the Dodgers play. Other nights, I would suddenly find their company oppressive and would withdraw to my room to listen to Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino.

Some of the kids on the block as we grew older, including tall Elaine in the middle and me on the right. The complications of being a twelve-year-old were increased by the move from my small grammar school to the much larger South Side Junior High.

The complications of being a twelve-year-old were increased by my graduation from a small, familiar grammar school to the much larger South Side Junior High, whose pupils came from different parts of the town. Many kids from other grammar schools seemed more sophisticated and stylish than did my neighborhood friends. Two of the other grammar schools drew from areas far more affluent than ours. A third school was made up of mostly African Americans. Amid this initial confusion, we all scrambled to make new friends and find out where we belonged.