“You can’t tell the police in secret?”
“No! I tell them and don’t give my name, they do nothing. I give my name, they make me a witness, and then everyone knows my name. Look, I gotta go.”
He started to walk out past the low railing. The world was suddenly blurry. Michael trembled, afraid he would cry, afraid he was about to lose Rabbi Hirsch.
“Wait!” the rabbi called after him.
Michael paused, and the rabbi came to his side.
“I didn’t tell you go to the police,” he said. “I want just to know why you didn’t.” He paused. “Now I know. You’re, what’s the word? Scared.”
“Yes.”
“Of the man who did this to Yossel Greenberg?”
“Not just him.”
“Who else, then?”
“Everybody.”
“Your mother?”
“No.”
“Me?”
“No.”
“So there’s two people. Already we know it’s not everybody.”
Michael tried to smile, but his eyes were full of tears.
“Michael, you are a very good boy,” the rabbi said. “You are kind. You are a worker, I can see. But you are young. You have not already learn some of the hard things in the life. One very hard thing? You keep quiet about some crime, it’s just as bad as the crime.” He paused. “Believe me. I know.”
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.