Snow in August

14

For two days, Michael walked on other streets to avoid the synagogue. The rabbi’s words moved in and out of his mind, even while he sat in classes at school. You keep quiet about some crime, it’s just as bad as the crime. He thought about talking it over with his mother. If he told the cops, would he really be an informer? He answered himself: Yes. Besides, if he talked, she’d be in trouble too. They might try to hurt her. They’d have to move. To go somewhere else. Maybe she’d even take him with her back to Ireland. Far from Sonny and Jimmy and games on the street and the Dodgers in Ebbets Field. Far from home. But suppose someone in Ireland heard about what he’d done? They might end up in even worse trouble.

At night, in his dark room, there was a jumble of images as he tried to sleep: Frankie McCarthy’s knife, Mister G’s broken head, Rabbi Hirsch’s steady gaze as he asked him to explain his silence. What was done to Mister G was a crime. No doubt about it. So what was his own silence? To get rid of the faces, he tried to conjure other images, from comics or movies. But Frankie and Mister G and the rabbi kept returning. And then Custer appeared in his mind, right out of the West, and he sat again with his father in the balcony of the Grandview, and wished Tommy Devlin could be there to tell him what to do.

Walking to school in the morning, he thought about what it would be like if he never saw Rabbi Hirsch again. He was certain the rabbi was disgusted with him. After all, Mister G was from his synagogue and he sure couldn’t afford to lose any more people. And maybe I can’t fix Mister G’s head, but I can help teach Frankie that crime does not pay. Just as the comic books said.

Except I can’t be a squealer. Can’t. I just can’t. But I don’t want to stop learning the rabbi’s language, or hearing his stories either. If I never see him again, it’s like finding half the pages in a book are blank. I need to know about Leah — how she died. And how he came to America, to Brooklyn. Maybe I can ask him all that, and then say goodbye and thank him for everything he taught me and tell him how sorry I am for the way it turned out. Yes. I have to see him. I can’t just disappear. I can’t be a coward.

That afternoon, after school, Michael knocked on the door of the synagogue. For a moment, he thought of running. But the rabbi opened the door and smiled broadly.

“Good, good,” he said. “Today we learn the words for food.”

It was as simple as that. There was no mention of the cops. There was no mention of Mister G, or crimes, or justice. The rabbi told Michael that bread was broyt and butter was putter and proper Jewish food had to be kosher. They had resumed their routine. Everything was as it had been. Except at night, when Michael saw faces in the dark.

Michael did not spend every afternoon under the tutelage of Rabbi Hirsch. Nor did his every waking vision turn on the menacing figure of Frankie McCarthy and his knife. As the snows melted and a chilly spring eased in, he and his friends were increasingly absorbed with the coming of Jackie Robinson. For Michael, such talk was a relief, a way to avoid discussing the images that stole his sleep.

“This is screwy,” he said one afternoon, as they moved together through the raw weather of the Brooklyn streets. They were still wearing their winter clothes. “The Dodgers are training in Cuba this year, instead of Florida. Because of Jackie Robinson.”

“How come?” Jimmy Kabinsky asked.

“Because he’s a Negro, Jimmy,” Michael said, using the word that his mother insisted was the polite way to describe colored people. “They don’t let Negroes in the hotels in Florida.”

“I don’t know how they could get away wit’ that in Florida,” Sonny Montemarano said. “There’s colored people all over Florida.”

“How do you know?” Jimmy said. “You never been to Florida.”

“My brother told me. He was down there durin’ the war. He says, some places they got more colored people than white people down there.”

“So where do they stay if they’re driving someplace?” Michael said.

“They have colored hotels, I think. You know, only colored people.”

“So how come Jackie Robinson can go to a hotel in Cuba?” Jimmy asked.

“Because they have a lot of colored people in Cuba,” Sonny said. “I guess there’s so many of them in that Cuba, they can go anyplace.”

And so it went, as they wandered through the parish, avoiding the Star Pool Room, crossing the street if they saw a group of the Falcons moving along the avenue with their pegged pants billowing in the breeze. Michael noticed something about himself on these wanderings: when he was with his friends, he had to talk and act older, which was to say, tougher, more cynical, more knowing; when he was with Rabbi Hirsch he could act his own age. He even walked differently with his friends, falling into the rolling gait that Sonny had adopted from some of the Falcons.

This often made him feel like two people. He assured his friends that he was still keeping his eyes open at the synagogue, while teaching English to the rabbi, but so far there was no sign of treasure or a map. Technically, he was being truthful; there was no treasure to be found, except in the stories told by Rabbi Hirsch and in the books on his shelves. But Michael wasn’t being completely truthful. He didn’t tell them how much he liked Rabbi Hirsch. He didn’t tell them about Prague and Rabbi Loew, Brother Thaddeus and the Golem. Those were his possessions: private, special, as alive in his mind as Sonny and Jimmy Kabinsky, but kept in separate boxes. They even rose from those boxes in his mind and came to him now in dreams. Besides, if he told his friends too much, they might suspect him of going soft, of shifting loyalties. They would treat him as if he were different. He could not imagine what they would do if they ever saw him in a yarmulke.

Baseball was easier to talk about. There was little argument about whether Jackie Robinson could hit big league pitching. All the sportswriters thought he could. They knew he could run too. And field. On Ellison Avenue, they talked about the color of his skin.

“The guy was in the army, right?” Sonny said. “Well, f’ my money, if he can fight for his country he oughtta be able to play in the major leagues. Case closed.”

“Why would he want to go where he ain’t wanted?” Jimmy said.

“Because he can!”

They knew from the newspapers that Robinson had played the 1946 season for the Montreal Royals, the number one Dodger farm team, and tore up the league. Down in Cuba, he was still on the Montreal roster. The Brooklyn Eagle and the Daily News said the Royals would play a series of exhibition games against the Dodgers during spring training and then Branch Rickey, the boss of the Brooklyn team, would decide whether to bring up Robinson. But the newspapers were full of a word that was new to Michael and his friends: dissension. The sports writers used the word as if it were the name of a fatal disease.

“This thing, this dissension, you know, it could ruin a ball club,” Sonny said.

“What do they need it for?” said Jimmy. “Why don’t they just leave things alone and win the pennant? Last year, we was tied for first on the last day of the season. That’s a pretty good team.”

“Not as good as the Cardinals,” Michael said. “The playoffs, suppose Robinson had played. The second game, he gets a triple, steals a couple of bases, maybe forces a third game. Then in the third game he homers in the ninth, and we go to the World Series in Boston, not the Cardinals.”

“I don’t like that dissension,” Sonny said.

Dissension was all about the new colored player. The newspapers were reporting that Dixie Walker, “the People’s Cherce,” had asked to be traded if Jackie Robinson joined the team. Dixie Walker was a southerner. From Alabama or Georgia or someplace. “You know,” Sonny said, “down there where they had that slavery all those years.” Everybody on Ellison Avenue thought that Dixie Walker was also the greatest right fielder in Dodger history. The boys knew that Walker had won the batting championship in 1944, when he hit.357, and Dodger fans weren’t used to their players winning much of anything. But the newspapers now said Dixie Walker had caught the terrible dissension disease. And he wasn’t the only one. There were others, including Eddie Stanky, the second baseman.

“That ain’t dissension,” Sonny said. “He’s worried about his job.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jimmy.

“He’s a second baseman, Jimmy! And Robinson’s a second baseman!”

“Jeez, I never thought about that.”

“Think, Jimmy, think. Some of these guys got angles!”

Walking along the parkside, under the dripping trees, they talked about what position Robinson would play and how the manager, Leo Durocher, would never replace Stanky with a rookie. But maybe Robinson could play first, and there was always third, where the Dodgers were weak. And hey, maybe this wouldn’t happen at all. Maybe dissension would get so terrible that Durocher would go to Rickey and say that as the manager, he couldn’t do it, it was tearing the team apart, and Jackie Robinson would stay in Montreal. How could Dixie Walker put his arm around Jackie Robinson and say all for one and one for all?

At night, Michael struggled to make sense of this. He wished that Jackie Robinson was white, like everybody else. If he was white, they would bring him up and make him the goddamned first baseman and that would be that. No dissension. No trouble. No spring training in goddamned Cuba. Why did Jackie Robinson have to be colored, for Christ’s sake?

But he was. And down on Ellison Avenue, they were predicting race riots at Ebbets Field. If Jackie Robinson struck out or dropped a ball or was hit by a pitch, it would be worse than Harlem in 1943, or the riots in Detroit or Los Angeles, where people were shot and stabbed by the hundreds. They said there’d be muggings at the ballpark. They said Robinson would ruin the Dodgers with dissension and they’d be lucky to finish fifth. Michael wondered if maybe Dixie Walker knew more about all this than he did. Maybe Dixie was afraid that more and more colored people would come to the big leagues and pretty soon even the white players would be calling each other motherfuckers.

Michael felt ignorant about the whole subject of Negroes. Except for Ebony in The Spirit and Fat Stuff in Smilin’ Jack, there were no colored people in the comics. There were no colored people in the movies, except for Rochester and that guy in the comedies who was always seeing ghosts and saying, “Feets, get moving.” There were no colored cowboys and no colored secret agents and no colored pilots. There were colored guys in the Tarzan movies, but they were natives, chasing Tarzan through the jungle; they weren’t from places like Brooklyn.

There was only one colored man in the parish, a janitor who lived in the basement of an apartment house across from the park. He was tall and bony and his skin was very black, and they would sometimes see him setting out the garbage cans in the mornings. He had no wife and no children and never said anything, not even good morning, and certainly never motherfucker. But he worked very hard. None of them knew his name. He was a man in gray overalls with black skin.

For an hour on this rainy night, Michael tossed and turned, wracked with his own ignorance. Finally he got up, turned on the light, slipped into the living room, and found the volume of the Wonderland of Knowledge marked Min-Pea. Back in his room, he read the one-page entry about Negroes. He knew they had been slaves, of course, knew that Arab traders had captured them and shipped them across the Atlantic. But he didn’t know that the slaveholders would not let them go to school.

The Negro entered America by the back door, and when freedom came to the slaves of the South, it brought with it innumerable problems that have not yet been entirely solved. The worst problem, the book said, was that many Negroes weren’t educated, and this hurt them when they started moving to northern cities after the Civil War. But Michael thought: That’s a problem around here too; Frankie McCarthy isn’t going to be a professor or work in an office. Neither are a lot of other guys. In settling in the Northern cities, the Negroes occupied neighborhoods that had already been lived in by others, creating problems of housing that have become critical in recent years. That’s like us too, Michael thought. We live in neighborhoods that were already lived in by others, and we have problems too, especially since the veterans came home and found out there’s not enough places for them to live. Last year, in a house on Saracen Place, the roof fell in, the building was so old, and three people were killed. There are rats in a lot of buildings. There are six apartments in this building and only one of them has a gas stove and there’s no steam heat. So what’s the big deal? Life in New York isn’t just hard for Negroes; it’s hard for lots of people.

But even with such bad educations, the book said, Negroes had added a lot to the culture of America. The native rhythm of the highly emotional Negro race has become a vital force in American music; and modern music, of which jazz is a form, has been profoundly affected, if not inspired, by the spirituals and “blues” which are entirely different from anything else found in music.

That paragraph made him wonder. Suppose Count Basie couldn’t play in America? Or Duke Ellington? Or Louis Armstrong? What if somebody said that they could only sell their records in Negro neighborhoods? What if Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton weren’t allowed to play in Benny Goodman’s band because they were Negroes? If they followed the rules of baseball, Negro bands would play for Negroes and white bands for whites and the musicians could never play with each other. Roy Eldridge couldn’t play with Gene Krupa. That would be nuts.

But maybe baseball is different.

No, that’s even more nuts.

Michael closed the book and returned to bed. He whispered: Trying to figure this out is one huge pain in the ass. I wish Jackie Robinson was white. But Jackie Robinson isn’t white. And he can play ball. And he could help us win the goddamned pennant. Period. Case closed, as Sonny says.

Besides, skin color was skin color, right? It was just the color of your goddamned skin. There was nothing anybody could do about that. You were born with it. Like some people were born with big feet or blue eyes. You didn’t make the choice. Your parents did. Or God did. God made Jackie Robinson a Negro. God made the choice, not Dixie Walker. What was it Rabbi Hirsch said?

Vos Got get iz gut…. What God gives is good…

In Michael’s drowsy mind, they began to merge into a group: Jackie Robinson, the Jews, the Catholics in Belfast, Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton, Gene Krupa and Roy Eldridge, Rabbi Loew and Dvorele. And coming out of the smoke, sneering and hard, the goddamned Nazis and Brother Thaddeus and Frankie McCarthy swaggering around with the Falcons.

Vos Got get iz gut….

Mumbling his borrowed Yiddish, longing for the dazzling clarity of summer, he fell into sleep, dreamy with images of Jack Roosevelt Robinson playing second base under the sun of Havana.