“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.