Snow in August (29 page)

But maybe it was something else. Lying in the dark at night, he wondered if they thought he had squealed. Not about the beating
but about Frankie McCarthy. They could have heard this on the street. Maybe Frankie had spread rumors that the
DA was using Michael as a witness. Maybe the cops had spread the word that they had gotten Michael to talk, in order to scare
Frankie. Why not? They all lie. Cops lied and judges lied and politicians lied. Everybody knew that.

The maybes warred in his head. And there was one other. Maybe they’d heard that Michael had shit in his pants. That would
have meant that he was scared, that he had no heart, that he couldn’t take a beating like a man. No matter what they knew
about him, he could be just another momma’s boy. Maybe that’s what they thought. The worst maybe of them all.

He wished he could talk about these things with Rabbi Hirsch. The rabbi would come up with a Yiddish proverb that would make
him feel better. He would ask Michael for the name of a good boy who could serve as the Shabbos goy, filling in until Michael
came back. Like Carl Furillo was filling in for Pete Reiser. And because Michael didn’t want to send Sonny or Jimmy into the
synagogue, he would tell Rabbi Hirsch to ask Father Heaney. And Father Heaney was the kind of guy who’d go down and turn on
the lights himself. Then Rabbi Hirsch would change the subject to Jackie Robinson and talk about the latest game and try out
some new words he had learned from Red Barber. And maybe he would sing “Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah” or “Don’t Fence Me In” and make
Michael laugh. Or he would talk about how punishment was the job of God. Even if Rabbi Hirsch was angry with God. Even if
he didn’t, maybe, believe in His goodness anymore, after everything that had happened in Europe.

But there was no Rabbi Hirsch coming down the corridors of Brooklyn Wesleyan. It was as if he had never existed.

And Michael felt more alone than he’d ever felt in his life.

On the fourth day, the nurses allowed him to go on his own to the bathroom in the corner of the room. This was an enormous
relief; Michael hated the cold steel bedpans of the first days and thought he saw the nurses smirking at him, as if they knew
what had happened on the evening of the beating. Now he was free to swing off the bed and hobble to the bathroom without a
nurse’s help. The cast felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds. But there was something worse. When he looked in the mirror
for the first time, he saw a stranger. The stranger’s face was lumpy and swollen. The skin on the right side of the stranger’s
face was the color of an eggplant. He touched the mirror and then his face, and knew that he was the stranger.

Later, dozing in his bed, he remembered the evening of his beating and the four Falcons stinking of beer, and he wanted to
hurt them back. He wanted to cause them pain. To turn their faces purple. To break their fucking legs. Pricks.
Momsers
. And then he sobbed, because he could do nothing; even if he caught them one at a time, he could not hurt them. If his father
were alive,
he
could hurt them, really badly, so they’d never hurt anyone again. But Michael was too young and too small. He could hit a
spaldeen harder now, but he could not beat up men. And they were men. They were as big as soldiers. As big as the detectives.
He could hurt them with a bat. Maybe. But if they took the bat off him, it would be worse than the first time. And a gun…
the police would know, his mother would be shamed, and where would he get a gun anyway? He tried to imagine himself with a
gun in his hand, making them beg. But he could not imagine himself firing the gun, shooting holes in their heads and their
hearts.

His face was an hourly reminder of the power of the Falcons. He wondered what Mary Cunningham would think if she could see
his face now. After all, his new suit would do nothing for his face. Any more than a new suit could change Jackie Robinson’s
face.

And then he thought: My face, or most of it, is now as dark as Robinson’s face. He got up and hauled his cast into the bathroom
again and stared at the mirror. They made me into Jackie Robinson, he thought. They did to
me
what a lot of people want to do to
him
. They made me into him. Into Jackie Robinson. My blackened face is like Robinson’s. I’m as helpless as he is. He can’t fight
back, because he promised Branch Rickey he wouldn’t. Not yet. Not now. He can fight back with his bat, with his glove, with
his speed. But not with his fists. Neither can I. Not now. Not yet.

Then, thinking about Robinson, he felt another wave of loneliness and isolation. He wanted to be home. If he was going to
be alone, if his friends had truly abandoned him, he wanted to be alone in his own room. Not here in this hospital, with its
strange odors of ether and medicine, and stranger faces. Home. Where he would read every book he could get his hands on. Where
he’d study harder than he ever had in his life. Yeah. And get the highest grades in the class. Yeah, yeah. The way Robinson
fought with his bat and his glove and his speed. Wasn’t a batting average really a kind of grade? You get an answer right
in a test, that’s like a hit. You get a lot of answers right, you get a higher grade, a higher average.

He could do that. And keep doing it. Get a high school diploma. Nobody around here ever finishes high school. They go to work
in the factory. They shape up on the docks. They become ironworkers or cops or firemen. I’ll get a diploma, Michael thought,
then get the hell out of the parish. Go away to the army or the navy or—shit, maybe even college. Why not? The college boys
in the movies all looked like shmucks. They wore short-sleeved sweaters with letters on the chest and said things like boola-boola
and got drunk at football games. Michael thought: I could do better than those guys. I could
get out of here and go to college. Ride the white horse over the factory roof. Live in Manhattan in a penthouse like the guy
singing that song.
Just picture a penthouse, way up in the sky, with hinges on chimneys, for clouds to go by
. Yeah: a house with hinges on chimneys. And I’d go to work in an office where my hands never got dirty and have a closet
full of suits and shirts and ties and shoes. More than any gangster, and I wouldn’t have to break the law. Yeah: get out.
Go.

Then Sonny and Jimmy would be sorry they walked away from him. He’d be a big shot. In his penthouse. Reading at breakfast
about Frankie McCarthy going to the hot seat in Sing Sing. Reading about Tippy Hudnut shot down in a cheap holdup in Coney
Island. Reading about Skids and the Russian being sent up for life, and Ferret’s body washing up on the beach with two holes
in the head. He’d run into Sonny and Jimmy someday on Park Avenue, as he walked out of his building, a building fifty stories
high. There they’d be, throwing garbage cans into a goddamned truck, and they’d say, Jeez, Michael, we’re sorry we were such
shmucks back in the parish that time you got beat up, and Michael would raise an eyebrow, like Joseph Cotten did in the movies,
and say, Pardon me, but what’s your name?

Yeah.

Maybe he couldn’t shout
Shazam
and turn into the world’s mightiest mortal. But he could wait in silence, like the Count of Monte Cristo, and build himself
up. First, get smart, just like Edmond Dantès did, studying his books in the dungeons of the Chateau d’If. That wasn’t all.
He’d lift weights and learn how to box and he’d handle the Falcons himself, one at a time. Maybe not this year. Maybe not
next year. He’d hold it all in, for now, the way Jackie Robinson did, and then when he was ready, he would explode. They wouldn’t
even remember him
anymore, but he would find the guys who had hurt him and he would hurt them back. All by himself.
Got shtroft, der mentsh iz zikh noykem
. God will punish them, but I’ll have my revenge.

And
then
get out. Take my mother. Get her a house with her own yard. And steam heat. Far away. Out.

After the sixth day, the nurses gave him crutches and let him walk around the third floor, in a pale green bathrobe. The crutch
made it easier to swing the cast behind him. In one room, he saw a man who’d been shot. He saw another man who’d had a heart
attack on the F train. In one of the rooms, an ironworker was in a cast from neck to toe after falling off a building, and
his friends laughed and whooped and held beer bottles to his lips. They had written their names all over his cast. Michael
would look out the window at Ellison Avenue and wish that
his
friends would come and laugh and whoop. He wished someone would write on his cast. Anyone.

Then, at last, it was time to go home. His mother arrived around nine o’clock with warm clothes and some old trousers with
the leg slit so he could push the cast through it. She led him out through the lobby, carrying his newspaper clippings and
comic books in a shopping bag, and they took the Ellison Avenue trolley car home. Boarding the trolley, he felt awkward with
the crutch, clumsy and defenseless, as he passed it up to his mother and then took her hand to pull himself up two steps.
Actions that once were easy were now difficult; he wondered how many times he’d jumped up those stairs without thinking about
them for a second. The driver nodded as they boarded, then paused as Michael and Kate moved to the rear and started the trolley
after they took seats in the row facing the back door. There were only a few people in the trolley. Michael stared out the
window, afraid of seeing Tippy Hudnut
and Skids, Ferret or the Russian. He didn’t want to see them, and he didn’t want them to see him. He just wanted to go to
his room. And close the door. And get in bed. And read about the Dodgers. His mother glanced at him.

“You’re thinking about these thugs, aren’t you?” she said.

“No. Yeah. Sort of.”

“Don’t.”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“They’ve been arrested.”

He glanced around, afraid someone might hear them, even in the almost empty car.

“You didn’t give up their names, did you?” he whispered.

“There were plenty of witnesses,” she said. “It was a warm night, people were out. Lots of people—”

“Mom, they’ll come after
you
. They’ll give you the mark of the squealer. They’ll—”

“Stop it, Michael!”

He felt as if he would fall. He’d made her cross, with his fear and his childishness. But she held his hand as the trolley
approached their stop, and he took a deep breath and felt safer. Then she was pulling the cord, and standing, and taking his
elbow, helping him to the door. The trolley stopped. The door opened. She went out first and then helped him down the steps.
The trolley pulled away, steel wheels squealing on steel tracks, and she gave him the crutches. Then she looked warily around
the avenue; so did Michael. There were familiar faces doing the usual things. Teddy polishing apples outside the fruit store.
Mrs. Slowacki arranging newspapers on the stand. Peggy McGinty wheeling a baby carriage in a distracted way. But he saw none
of the Falcons.

“The police have warned the whole rotten bunch,” she said, leading Michael into the hallway at 378 Ellison Avenue. “If
they lay another hand on you, they’ll go away for a long, long time.”

“Yeah, and what about you? What if they get bailed out? What if they wait for you outside the Grandview? They—”

“Och, Michael: they’re a pack of stupid cowards,” she said. “But they are not
that
stupid. They must know now that they’ve gone too bloody far.”

He was very quiet as she unlocked the door to the apartment. They went inside, and the kitchen looked exactly as it did before
he went to the hospital. He gazed at his mother as she started a kettle for tea. He wanted to believe her, to be as brave
as she was, but he was afraid of the Falcons, afraid for himself, afraid for her.

“Don’t let them scare you, son,” she said, looking at his drained face and touching his hand. “That’s how they win.”

He trembled in the warm, bright morning light.

W
ith her son home at last, Kate Devlin took the night off from the Grandview, switching a shift with another cashier. She made
a stew, thick with potatoes, carrots, and onions, and beef that fell to shreds with a touch of a fork. Michael ate two helpings.
They did the dishes together and listened to the radio and talked about things that did not matter. The windows were wide
open to the warm night, and from the dark yards they could hear dishes clattering, laughter, radios, the sounds of the Brooklyn
evening. Kate suggested tea and her son said he would love some tea, and then there were two sharp knocks on the locked kitchen
door.

Kate was suddenly alert. She switched off the radio, as if to hear better, then took a carving knife from the drawer beside
the sink. Michael lifted a chair and shifted his weight to his good leg in order to swing it better. There were two more knocks.

“Who is it?” she said.

“Me. A friend of Michael.”

When he heard the voice, Michael laughed and put down the chair and snapped the lock. He jerked open the door.

“Rabbi Hirsch!” he squealed.

The rabbi stood there in his black suit and black hat, his bearded face nervous and concerned. He had flowers in one hand,
a small box from the bakery in the other.

“Hello to all,” he said, and bowed deeply to Kate from the doorway. She sighed and laid the knife down on the sink.

“Mom, this is Rabbi Hirsch,” Michael said. “Rabbi, this is my mother.”

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Devlin.”

“Come in, come in, Rabbi,” she said, offering a hand. He bowed stiffly again and handed her the flowers and the package from
the bakery. She took the package by its thin white string.

“Thank you, thank you,” he said, stepping into the apartment. Michael locked the door behind him, but the rabbi stood there
awkwardly. His eyes took in the kitchen, but he avoided looking at Michael’s bruised face.

“Have a seat, Rabbi,” she said. “We were just having tea, and I know you like tea. Michael told me so.”

“Thank you,” he said again, taking one of the chairs. Michael sat facing him.