Snow in August

30

On the Fourth of July, Michael watched the fireworks from the roof, where grown-ups cheered and the noise was like an artillery barrage. Sonny and Jimmy were not there. They were in the streets, where they could believe what everyone else believed about Michael.

In the days that followed, Michael heard laughter from those streets and the phwomp of spaldeens and the rise and fall of arguments. But he was no longer part of it. His world had shrunk to the apartment and the roof, his room and the cellar, with occasional trips to the Grandview when his mother was working. In the dark theater, he saw Double Indemnity and To Each His Own and The Spiral Staircase, imagining himself scheming with Barbara Stanwyck or waltzing in wartime London with Olivia de Havilland or protecting Dorothy McGuire in a vast, evil mansion. When the movie was over, he was still on crutches, still facing the long hobble home through streets more dangerous than any in the movies. On that walk, he often felt like a five-year-old, guarded as he was by his mother.

Alone in the apartment, he read great hunks of the Wonderland of Knowledge. On the way to the Grandview with his mother, he stopped at the library and borrowed books and looked up names that were not in the Wonderland of Knowledge. He devoured Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Captain Blood. But he could not share these imaginary adventures with any of his friends anymore, the way he did in other summers. He couldn’t tell them the stories or debate the heroism of the characters. He couldn’t try to make those books fit into the realities of the street.

On a few mornings, Rabbi Hirsch came by, always when Kate Devlin was there. They had tea. Michael and the rabbi worked on words. Sometimes Mrs. Griffin popped in, to quiz Michael about his dreams. She was always polite to the rabbi. He was always formal with her. But then, like a spy on a dangerous mission, the rabbi had to move out again without being seen. There were still people out there who loved swastikas.

When Michael received his grades from Sacred Heart, he was temporarily elated. His average was 99, surely the highest in the class. But only his mother celebrated the report card, with cookies from the bakery and rich, dark tea.

On the night he received his grades, he heard terrible news from Kate. Father Heaney was leaving Sacred Heart, to take up duties in distant South America. Michael’s elation over his grades vanished, and he begged her to allow him to go alone to Sacred Heart to say goodbye to Father Heaney. Maybe he was going to the Dominican Republic, where Rabbi Hirsch had friends. And he was sure Rabbi Hirsch wanted to say goodbye too. But Kate Devlin insisted that Michael wait until her day off; it was still too dangerous for him in the streets of the parish. And when she finally took him by trolley to the church, Father Heaney had packed and gone. Michael felt as if an entire Allied army had left the field.

The priest wasn’t the only one leaving the parish. They saw moving vans now on almost every Saturday, packed with furniture and clothes, bound for Long Island or Queens. The war veterans led the way, using the GI Bill to get mortgages on homes with driveways and grass and safety. Familiar faces disappeared from the streets. One Saturday morning, Billy Dorrian moved out of the first floor right to be replaced by a family named Corrigan, whose kids were four, three, and two years old. Then Michael heard from his mother that Charlie Senator had left, giving up his job, gone to a place called Levittown. He remembered the day Father Heaney and Charlie Senator and the other veterans had cleaned the swastikas off the synagogue and wondered who would be brave enough to do that job now.

Day and night now, his mind was full of the words and rhythms of Yiddish. He worked on his aleph-bayz, trying to master the alphabet. He greeted his mother each morning with “Vie gehts?” And she answered, “The top of the morning to you too.” He learned the difference between a shlemiel and a shlimazel, explaining to his mother that a shlemiel walks into a living room, bows to his host, and knocks over an expensive lamp; the lamp falls and breaks the foot of the shlimazel. Harold Stearns from the second floor was a boring shlub. Tippy Hudnut from the Falcons was a grobber yung, a stupid young man, thick, as his mother would say. How many of the men at Casement’s Bar were gonifs, and which among them might be the big makher they all so desperately needed? Lots of hustling gonifs, but no makhers. He told his mother that sha meant shush, and she said, “Well, doesn’t ‘shush’ sound Yiddish too?” The Falcons were a load of khazerai, pig meat, eaters of garbage, or behamas, animals. They all ought to be put in the bays oylem, six feet under. And the cops? Bupkis, that’s what the cops give you. Nothing. Zilch.

In the second week of July, Michael started visiting Rabbi Hirsch again in the synagogue. Tuesdays for now (“Thursdays we can do when your leg, it’s better”) and on Saturday mornings, so that he could once more serve as the Shabbos goy. Father Heaney had sent an altar boy to replace Michael, but the boy was leaving for summer camp, so Michael insisted on getting his old job back. There was only one problem: his mother insisted on walking with him, even on Saturday mornings, making him feel like a little kid. He protested that at such an early hour, the Falcons were still sleeping off beer.

“And suppose,” she said, “they’ve stayed up all night and are just going home?”

So she went with him. But even with his mother beside him, Michael walked first in the opposite direction, away from Unbeatable Joe’s, where the Falcons always seemed to be at the bar. That route also took him away from the stickball court on Collins Street. He didn’t want to see Sonny Montemarano. He had nothing to say to Jimmy Kabinsky.

“This is aggravating,” he said one morning, as they finally reached the synagogue.

His mother answered: “Getting beat up again would be a lot more aggravating, Michael.”

Rabbi Hirsch was always happy to see him, talking in an excited way about the Dodgers and about Jackie Robinson and about how he wished they could get Stanley Musial away from the Cardinals. But he often seemed sadder than before their trip to Ebbets Field. It was as if he regretted the confession he had made to Kate and Michael about his own past. It was as if he knew he could not truly fit into this scary piece of America. He would sing along with the radio and now knew all the words to “Don’t Fence Me In,” but when he sang the part that went Let me straddle my own saddle underneath the Western skies his eyes misted over. He first heard the words before swastikas appeared in the Brooklyn night. Once Michael saw him glance at Leah’s photograph as if he knew that she would never recognize him in his American disguise. Too often, he wore the expression of a man who expected to be struck. By a stranger. By America.

But there was fun too. Michael showed him how to play a tune on an empty Chiclets box, opening one end, leaving the cellophane intact. Michael played “Don’t Fence Me In.” The rabbi took the chewing gum box and played “And the Angels Sing.”

“At last!” he exulted. “I am a Ziggy Elman!”

Michael brought a second empty Chiclets box one morning, and they played duets. “Don’t Be That Way” and “Sing Sing Sing” and “One O’Clock Jump.” They tried a Count Basie tune called “Open the Door, Richard,” which sounded awful, and were much better on “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” They finished with “And the Angels Sing,” with Rabbi Hirsch doing the trumpet solo. They agreed that the yellow peppermint box had the best tone.

“On a shofar I can’t play a tune,” the rabbi said, his face beaming. “But on a Chiclets box I am Mozart! I am Ziggy Elman! My instrument! We practice hard, boychik, we go to the hall of Mr. Carnegie.”

One Tuesday afternoon, Michael let himself into the synagogue and heard the rabbi playing alone on a Chiclets box. He had slowed down “And the Angels Sing.” Now it was mournful and melancholy. Like the blue books described Jewish music. When he saw Michael, he changed the tempo and once again became Ziggy Elman.

“Music we get from everywhere,” the rabbi said. “From the sky. From the air. From chewing gum even.”

At night, Michael had trouble falling asleep. The bulky cast was a hard reminder of what had happened to him, and he always had trouble getting comfortable. He thought every night about Sonny and Jimmy and wondered if they ever thought about him.

In the rising summer heat, he wondered how his life would have been if it hadn’t snowed so hard that day in December and he hadn’t gone shoveling and if Unbeatable Joe hadn’t paid them a dollar. He wondered how it would have been if they had gone to Slowacki’s candy store that day instead of to Mister G’s. Or if they had started an hour earlier or an hour later. They never would have been in Mister G’s when Frankie McCarthy walked in and Mister G wouldn’t have stuck up for Sonny, and Michael wouldn’t have seen all the violence that came after that. Sonny and Jimmy wouldn’t have run out. The cops would never have come to ask him questions. Nobody would have thought he was a rat. It would have been a different summer. Mister G would still be selling newspapers, cigarettes, and candy. Michael wouldn’t have a broken leg. He’d still have his friends, and he’d be playing ball across the endless afternoons or traveling with them to the beaches of Coney Island. Ten minutes on a snowy winter afternoon had changed his life. It was so goddamned unfair.

Then one night, he was walking home from the Grandview with his mother, discussing a movie called Boomerang. A vagrant had been accused of murdering a priest in some town in Connecticut. The cops thought the vagrant was guilty and the newspapers wanted to put him in the electric chair. But a lawyer played by Dana Andrews proved that the man was innocent. What was different was that Dana Andrews didn’t find out who really killed the priest. He’d never before seen that kind of ending in a movie.

“Life is like that sometimes,” Kate Devlin said. “You think you know, and you really don’t.”

“But this is a true story.”

“That’s what they say. It’s still a movie, son.”

Then they turned into Ellison Avenue to walk the final three blocks home. And Michael stopped moving, tightly gripping the handles of the crutches. Walking straight at them were five of the Falcons, including Tippy Hudnut, Skids, and the Russian. They were talking loudly, shouting at two girls on the far side of the avenue.

“Come on,” Kate Devlin said, placing a hand in the small of Michael’s back. She knew they could not turn and run. Not with Michael on crutches. So she walked straight at them. Defiantly. And then the Falcons saw them. Tippy, thin and long-haired, with tattooed arms, smiled and widened his arms in a gesture commanding the others to wait. They spread themselves across the sidewalk. Kate moved to the space between Tippy and the bulkier, blond-haired one they called the Russian.

Tippy stepped to the side, blocking her way.

“Well, looka who’s here,” Tippy said. Michael could smell the beer on his breath.

“Excuse me,” Kate said.

“Nah, I ain’t gonna excuse you, lady.”

She glanced around, but the street was empty now. She stepped to her right, and Tippy moved again.

“The fuckin’ troublemakers,” the Russian said, his yellow teeth showing as he grinned.

“I want no trouble with you, young man,” Kate said.

“She don’t want no trouble,” the Russian said, and the others laughed.

“But you’ll have plenty of trouble,” Kate said, “if you don’t let us go home.”

“Oh, wow: a threat,” Tippy said. The word sounded to Michael like tret. Tippy’s eyes were glittery, his nostrils flaring. “Are you scared, fellas?”

“Oh, yeah, I’m scared,” said Skids, who was the shortest, with thick muscles bulging from his T-shirt and black eyebrows that met above his nose. “I think I’m gonna shit my pants.”

“A broad and a gimp,” Tippy said. “Very, very scary.”

“The broad ain’t bad-looking but,” said the Russian.

“Great tits,” said Skids.

Kate slapped him. And then Skids grabbed her blouse and tore it down. She started to cover herself and then Michael piled in, swinging his crutch, saying, You bastards, you bastards, you fucking bastards. Skids shoved Kate backward and then jerked one of Michael’s crutches from his hands and swung it, hitting him in the back of the neck, and then the other crutch was gone, and he was toppled over on his side and one of the Falcons kicked him. Shouting, Stool pigeon, rat-fuckin’ stool pigeon… He saw his crutches placed across the curb and the Russian stomping them into pieces. He started to get up and saw Tippy shoving his hand under his mother’s skirt, while Skids held her from behind, squeezing her breasts. She was screaming now: You pigs, you dirty pigs, you cowardly pigs.

And then a window rolled up from one of the apartments, and another, and voices were shouting, Hey, you bums, stop that you bums, and then one of the Falcons said, Awright, let’s get da fuck outta here. And they were gone.

Michael pulled himself up by holding a lamppost. His neck ached. His side was burning. He turned to his mother. Her face was a ghastly mask of anger and humiliation. She pulled her blouse together with one hand and hugged Michael with the other.

“Hey, lady, you all right?” someone shouted from the upstairs apartments.

“We’ve got to go,” Kate whispered to her son. “We’ve got to get away from here. We’ve got to leave.”