Snow in August

15

Each day for a week, spring rains slapped against the stained-glass windows of Sacred Heart and the stained-glass windows of the synagogue. Each day, steady sheets of advancing rain, monotonous and soft, were followed by sudden twisted columns of water, skirling and dancing, destroying umbrellas, lifting hats off skulls, spattering the newspapers on the wooden stand outside Slowacki’s until Mrs. Slowacki came out to cover them with a sheet of oilcloth held fast with a piece of angle iron. Basements flooded. Sewers backed up. Tree limbs snapped off and crashed into the yards. Shoes were ruined, their soles flapping like black tongues. Fungus seemed to sprout in clothes. In the apartments on Ellison Avenue, where the rain came pounding from the harbor like liquid ice, tenants stuffed towels into the sills of the kitchen windows and talked in the wet halls about how the weather was all different, wilder and fiercer, since the atom bomb.

For Michael, the raging spring weather was like something from a movie about the South Seas: a monsoon movie, a movie about hurricanes. With Jon Hall and Dorothy Lamour, and the evil prison guard, John Carradine, who looked like Emperor Rudolf of Prague. The power of the storms tested him, as it had tested Jon Hall, but it didn’t feel like punishment. The storms had such a radiant brightness to them, such a newness, that they made Michael Devlin happy. He wanted to run through them, to dive into the little rivers along the curbs, to splash and roll and laugh and dance.

The snow was soon gone, washed down the Brooklyn hills to the harbor. On the radio, Michael listened to Red Barber broadcasting the Dodger games from Cuba through invisible barriers of distance and static. The words coming through the tiny speaker of the leatherette radio were often unclear, gouged, scratched, crunched, making abrupt loops and bends in the air. But when he could hear Barber, the announcer’s voice was full of blue skies and palm trees. He never mentioned Jackie Robinson unless Robinson did something. There wasn’t much argument about Robinson in those radio accounts of distant games, no alarm or anxiety, no mention of dissension; radio was not the same as the newspapers. But Barber’s serene drawl was itself a guarantee that the season lay directly ahead of them. A season in which everyone knew that Jack Roosevelt Robinson would make history, just by showing up.

“I’ll tell you why I want Robinson to come up,” Michael said to his friends one afternoon. “Because it never happened before.”

“There was never an earthquake in Brooklyn before either,” Sonny said. “You want that to happen too?”

“Hey, maybe Frankie McCarthy would fall down a crack,” Michael said.

“I wish he’d fall down the crack of his ass,” Sonny said, and they all laughed.

Then one rain-drowned evening when his mother wasn’t working at the movie house, Michael came upstairs and into the kitchen and saw a large cardboard box off to the side and his mother beaming. The room was loud with Al Jolson singing “April Showers,” and though it wasn’t yet April there had been a lot of showers, and Jolson made their annual arrival sound like an occasion of joy. While Jolson promised that the showers of April would bring the flowers of May, Kate Devlin pointed in the direction of the voice, and on a shelf between the kitchen and the first bedroom, shaped like a small cathedral, was a new Philco radio.

So keep on lookin’ for the bluebird, Jolson was singing, An’ listenin’ to his song, as Michael’s mother joined for the last triumphant line, Whenever April showers come along….

“Up the Republic!” she shouted, as she always did when she was delighted. She had saved and saved and here it was: a new radio, and a Philco at that. An aerial emerged from the back of the radio and snaked around the wall molding to dangle out a window into the yards. No static distorted the voices; the sounds of human beings were as clear as water. The radio also had shortwave, and the names of distant places were printed in tiny letters on the glowing dark yellow dial. Copenhagen. London. Dublin. Paris. Moscow. And there, yeah, would you look at that? Prague!

“It’s beautiful, Mom,” he said. “I can’t believe it.”

“Neither can I,” she said. “It was a real bargain down at Ginsberg’s.”

He didn’t ask how much she had paid; he knew better than to try to get her to talk about money. Instead, he turned away from the new radio, listening now to Les Brown and His Band of Renown, and saw the peeling face of the leatherette Admiral, lying on its side on a chair beside the gas stove. The cord and plug dangled uselessly a few inches off the linoleum floor. The old radio looked as sad as a man without a job.

“What are you going to do with the old one, Mom?” he asked.

“God, who knows? Give it to the St. Vincent DePaul Society, maybe. Maybe some poor soul will find it there.”

A pause.

“Can I give it to Rabbi Hirsch?”

“Och, Michael, it’s a terrible oul’ heap of junk. The rabbi might be insulted.”

“No, no. He’d be — Mom, he’s poor. He has almost no money. I know he wants to hear music. So…”

She smiled. “Do what you like,” she said, and moved the dial in search of the Lux Radio Theater.

The next day, there was no rain. Michael rushed home after school, dropped off his books, picked up the old leatherette Admiral and went back up the hill to the synagogue. When Rabbi Hirsch answered the door, the boy handed him the radio.

“What’s this?”

“It’s for you,” Michael said. “It’s not the greatest, but it works.”

The rabbi held the radio in both hands and for a moment didn’t move. It was as if he were receiving something holy. Michael imagined him in the café in Prague when he was young, listening with his friends to the many languages of Europe.

“A sheynem dank,” he said. Thank you very much. He hugged the radio to his chest as if it were a treasure, and Michael saw his eyes water and his face tremble with emotion. “A sheynem dank.”

“You’re welcome, Rabbi. Nishto far vos.”

“Come,” Rabbi Hirsh said, his voice cracking slightly. “We listen to some music.”

He moved some books and placed the radio on the bookshelf beside the photograph of his wife, Leah. They found an outlet and plugged in the cord. Then they stared for a moment at the Admiral. The rabbi gestured with a hand, urging Michael to turn it on. Michael was puzzled; this was not Shabbos, and besides, turning on a radio couldn’t possibly be considered work.

“You turn it on, Rabbi,” Michael said, putting his hands behind his back.

“Neyn, no, you do it, boychik.”

“I refuse,” Michael said. “It’s your radio now, so you turn it on.”

“Someday I want to tell somebody that a kid camed here and gave to me a radio and put music in my world.”

“Okay. Just tell them you turned it on.”

The rabbi sighed and reached reverently for the knob, the way Father Heaney might reach for a cruet.

And suddenly music filled the low-ceilinged room.

Bing Crosby.

Let me straddle my own saddle

Underneath the Western skies…

Michael started singing with him, the way his mother sang with Al Jolson.

On my cayuse, let me wander over yonder

’Til I see the mountains rye-iiiiiise…

The rabbi hopped around, raising his leg, slapping his thigh, laughing, shouting, “Vos iz dos? Vos iz dos?” And Michael shouted, “ ‘Don’t Fence Me In!’ Bing Crosby!” And sang:

Let me be by myself in the evening bree-ease,

Listen to the murmur of the cottonwood tree-ease,

Send me off forever but I ask you pleee-ease,

Don’t fence me in….

More whoops, more jigs, and then Bing Crosby was gone. Michael had never before seen the rabbi so happy. They moved from station to station, hearing Nat Cole and Perry Como and Doris Day. Michael couldn’t find Benny Goodman or Count Basie, but he showed the rabbi the numbers of the good music stations and how to find the news and the baseball.

“Again I want to hear Bing Crosby,” Rabbi Hirsch said. “About don’t put a fence around me.”

Michael tuned in WNEW and heard the Goodman band. A trumpet player was offering “And the Angels Sing.” The rabbi’s head nodded to the rhythm. And then his face shifted into deep concentration.

“This music?” the rabbi said, his eyes widening. “This I know. From Prague, I know this. At weddings, we play this, only slower. And dance.”

Michael glanced at the photograph of Leah. “Did you dance to it at your wedding?”

The rabbi’s face twitched. “No. We never got to dance.”

Michael suddenly pictured his father dancing with his mother. To “And the Angels Sing.” A slow jitterbug, his father singing, You speak, and then the angels sing…, and his mother laughing. He wished he could have seen them dancing and happy, and then tried to imagine the rabbi in the same way, with Leah. There was a hint of sadness in the air. Michael talked past it. He told Rabbi Hirsch the name of the song in English and explained that the trumpet player’s name was Ziggy Elman.

“He’s Jewish?” the rabbi asked, brightening.

Michael didn’t know, but Ziggy Elman was in Benny Goodman’s band, and he did know that Benny Goodman was Jewish. He had read that in some newspaper story. He told the rabbi that Goodman played the clarinet and his band was almost as great as the band of Count Basie, who definitely was the greatest. Goodman even had Negroes in his band long before baseball got around to it. Lionel Hampton. Teddy Wilson. The rabbi smiled and nodded to the music.

“This music,” he whispered. “This I know.”

At the end of “And the Angels Sing,” there was a commercial.

“Ziggy Elman,” the rabbi murmured, like a man saying a prayer. “Ziggy Elman! Ziggy Elman? Ziggy Elman…”

Then the six o’clock news came on and Michael had to leave. Rabbi Hirsch ran a hand over the peeling leatherette radio and bowed slightly to Michael.

“Is the nicest thing happen to me in America so far,” he said. “Please to thank your mother when you go home and study.”

He went to the door with Michael.

“Ziggy Elman!” he said. “If my father only have called me Ziggy, I would have been a different person. Imagine a rabbi, name of Rabbi Ziggy?”

On his way home, Michael surged with the happiness that radiated from the rabbi. For an hour, the rabbi had been so happy, so full of delight, so overcome with the sounds of music and words, that the air of the tiny synagogue rooms seemed to sparkle. It was as if a deaf man had suddenly begun to hear.

That joy filled Michael’s head as he passed the alley beside the Venus and started to turn into Ellison Avenue. Then it vanished. There was a small crowd outside the Star Pool Room. Two police cars and the Plymouth used by the detectives were up on the sidewalk. The front door was open. He could see that the green tops of the pool tables were empty. The Falcons were lined up against the wall with Abbott and Costello facing them. Michael drifted to the edge of the crowd, which was being held back by two uniformed policemen.

“What’s going on?” he asked a man wearing a cap covered with union buttons.

“Da bulls are lockin’ up that Frankie McCarthy,” the man said. Michael trembled.

“What for?”

“Beatin’ up some Hebe, I hear.”

Then everyone backed up a few feet, and the detectives were leading Frankie McCarthy out of the poolroom. Frankie curled his mouth, like a gangster from a movie. His hands were cuffed behind his back and each detective had him by an elbow.

“’Ey, Frankie boy,” someone shouted. “See ya in an hour.”

The crowd laughed and so did the Falcons, who were standing just inside the door of the poolroom. A few of them rested pool cues on their shoulders like baseball bats.

“This is a bum rap,” Frankie McCarthy said, lifting his chin defiantly, like Cagney or Bogart. “They got nothin’ on me.”

Then his eyes picked out Michael on the fringes of the crowd. He said nothing, but his eyes chilled to the color of aluminum.

The detectives broke the look by shoving Frankie into the backseat of the Plymouth. Abbott sat beside him, a dead cigar clamped in his mouth. Costello started the car and drove away. The crowd milled around, talking it over. One of the Falcons closed the poolroom door.

“He’s some piece of work, that Frankie,” said the man with the union buttons.

“Yeah: he’s working overtime at being a bum,” said Charlie Senator, who worked at the Bohack grocery store. He was a quiet, nobody guy who didn’t talk much but was liked by everyone. One reason they liked him was that he had a wooden leg and never complained about it. Michael had heard that his real leg was shot off at Anzio.

“You wouldn’t say that to his face.”

“Probably not,” Senator said. “Guys like that jack you up in the dark. But he’s still a bum.”

“What’d he do was so bad?”

“Plenty,” Senator said, and limped away.

Then Michael saw two of the Falcons looking at him from behind the plate-glass window of the poolroom. He turned and walked quickly home.

Going up the stairs, he realized how dark the halls were, full of shadowy places where Frankie McCarthy could jack him up. Why did Frankie give him that look? Why were the Falcons staring at him from the poolroom? Now Frankie was down at the precinct house and they’d want revenge. He remembered Frankie’s knife. He saw Mister G with his broken head. Somebody must have talked. Michael knew that he had held fast with the police; he hadn’t informed, he hadn’t turned rat. But somebody had. And only he, Sonny, and Jimmy had been in Mister G’s store that day. He felt vaguely sick. He thought he knew his friends. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe Sonny or Jimmy had turned chicken and ratted out Frankie McCarthy. And if one of them did, why wouldn’t the coward shift the blame, tell the Falcons it was Michael? Save his own ass.

But no: it couldn’t be that way. They were his friends. All for one and one for all. They wouldn’t turn informers. They wouldn’t risk the mark of the squealer. The cops must have found another witness. Or maybe Frankie bragged in some bar about beating up Mister G. Or maybe they found his fingerprints on the telephone. It had to be something else. Not an informer. Not someone like Victor McLaglen in the movie about the informer in Ireland. Not a Judas. Maybe.

Still, Michael was afraid. He wished his mother were home, but she had another three hours, at least, to work at the Grandview. He locked the kitchen door behind him. He opened the bathroom door, his heart beating fast, poked his head inside, and was relieved that nobody was there. He tiptoed through the other rooms, turning on lights, holding his breath as he opened closets. Finally he felt safe. He turned on the new Philco, and lit a jet on the gas range to heat the stew his mother had left for him. While Ella Fitzgerald sang on the radio, he opened his schoolbag and laid his books on the kitchen table and gazed dully at his homework assignments. Boring goddamned crap. Why did they waste so much time in English with diagramming sentences? Sure, it came in handy, explaining things to Rabbi Hirsch. But it was so simple. They could get it over with in three days. They didn’t need three weeks of dumb sentences. Why didn’t they read Sherlock Holmes and see how A. Conan Doyle wrote sentences? Or Robert Louis Stevenson? They wrote beautiful sentences. Not this stuff. John threw the ball at Jane. Frank reached for his book. Shit. He thought about reading comics first and then doing the homework, but then he might be too tired and he had to get up at seven and serve the eight o’clock mass, and if he came to class without the homework he—

The fire escape window!

It was never locked. Anyone could get a boost up to the fire escape ladder on the first floor and walk all the way up to the top. Jesus Christ!

He ran to his room. The window was open about half an inch, with a towel jammed in the space to keep out the rain. He removed the towel and pulled down hard to close the window, but he couldn’t get the crude lock to snap shut. He grunted and strained, but the lock was scabby with too many coats of paint. Still, the window was closed. He leaned a book against the window so that if it opened the book would fall and make a noise. Then he stepped back from the light of the street and looked down at Ellison Avenue. He saw nobody from the Falcons. Then the smell of burning stew summoned him back to the kitchen.

The stew was black at the bottom but the rest was all right. He scooped it onto a plate while Stan Lomax came on the radio, with the day’s doings in the world of sports. Jackie Robinson was closer than ever to coming up to the Dodgers. In twelve games against the Dodgers and clubs in Panama he was hitting.519. Amazing. Five-nineteen! Babe Ruth never hit.519. Maybe Ted Williams or Stan Musial could do it, but they hadn’t done it yet. Robinson was still a Montreal Royal, said Stan Lomax, but it seemed sure he wouldn’t be a minor leaguer for very much longer.

Finishing up the stew, wiping his plate with bread, Michael tried to imagine what it must be like to be Robinson. He examined his own skin, spreading it with his hand, then pinching it with thumb and forefinger. It wasn’t really white. Paper was white. His skin was sort of pink. In the summer, it got red and then brown. It had freckles of a darker, reddish color. What must it be like to look at your skin and see that it was black? Or not really black. A kind of dark brown, really. What was it like to wake up every goddamned morning and see that skin and know that some shmuck looked down on you just for that? You hit.519 in spring training and some fat business guy in a suit, Branch Rickey or somebody, some prick who can’t hit.019, will decide if you play or not? How could that be? Michael’s anger rose in him and then faded. If I’m angry, he thought, sitting here, still white or pink, how must Robinson feel?

Then, in his head, he was Robinson, down in Cuba or over in Panama, eating dinner alone in some restaurant, a joint filled with all those girls who dressed like Carmen Miranda, bare bellies and tits bouncing and bananas on their heads. In a fancy place with candles and tablecloths and waiters, like all those movies about flying down to Rio, and here come Dixie Walker and Eddie Stanky. The restaurant is packed. There are three empty seats at my table, Robinson’s table. I wave at them, my teammates, to come over and sit down. But Walker and Stanky won’t sit down. They’d rather starve to death than sit with me. Like Englishmen looking at an Irishman.

And as Robinson, Michael was furious again. And then felt very sad. What the hell’s the matter with those bozos? Why don’t they try to get to know me? Maybe they could learn something. Hey, I went to college and they didn’t, so maybe they’d find out a few things. How can they act the way they do without knowing anything at all about me except my batting average and the color of my skin?

Idiots.

Bums.

He spent an hour on homework, dealing quickly with grammar and arithmetic, taking longer to answer questions about a history chapter. This told the story of a heroic Jesuit priest named Isaac Jogues, who had his fingers bitten off by Indians and later had trouble saying the mass, because he couldn’t hold the host. He wondered how he could tell this to Rabbi Hirsch without laughing. The goyim are crazy, he told himself. The goyim are definitely crazy.

For a while he listened to music on the radio. When he heard “Don’t Fence Me In,” he wished he had a telephone, so he could call Rabbi Hirsch and tell him the number of the station. But Rabbi Hirsch didn’t have a telephone either. Almost nobody did. Not Sonny. Not Jimmy. There was a phone in the rectory at Sacred Heart. There was a pay phone in Slowacki’s and another across the street in Casement’s Bar, but there were always people waiting to use them. The cops had telephones too. All the telephones they wanted.

He got up from the kitchen table, brushed his teeth, and went into his room. He read comics for a while, and then heard his mother come in from work. She walked through the rooms and knocked at his door.

“You’re all right, son?” she said.

“Fine,” he said. “Good night, Mom.”

He turned off the light and buried his head in the pillow. He remembered the rabbi’s radiant face when he was listening to Ziggy Elman, and was trying to imagine what it was like to be Rabbi Hirsch when sleep took him.