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.
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.