Still, Michael was afraid. He wished his mother were home, but she had another three hours, at least, to work at the Grandview. He locked the kitchen door behind him. He opened the bathroom door, his heart beating fast, poked his head inside, and was relieved that nobody was there. He tiptoed through the other rooms, turning on lights, holding his breath as he opened closets. Finally he felt safe. He turned on the new Philco, and lit a jet on the gas range to heat the stew his mother had left for him. While Ella Fitzgerald sang on the radio, he opened his schoolbag and laid his books on the kitchen table and gazed dully at his homework assignments. Boring goddamned crap. Why did they waste so much time in English with diagramming sentences? Sure, it came in handy, explaining things to Rabbi Hirsch. But it was so simple. They could get it over with in three days. They didn’t need three weeks of dumb sentences. Why didn’t they read Sherlock Holmes and see how A. Conan Doyle wrote sentences? Or Robert Louis Stevenson? They wrote beautiful sentences. Not this stuff. John threw the ball at Jane. Frank reached for his book. Shit. He thought about reading comics first and then doing the homework, but then he might be too tired and he had to get up at seven and serve the eight o’clock mass, and if he came to class without the homework he—
The fire escape window!
It was never locked. Anyone could get a boost up to the fire escape ladder on the first floor and walk all the way up to the top. Jesus Christ!
He ran to his room. The window was open about half an inch, with a towel jammed in the space to keep out the rain. He removed the towel and pulled down hard to close the window, but he couldn’t get the crude lock to snap shut. He grunted and strained, but the lock was scabby with too many coats of paint. Still, the window was closed. He leaned a book against the window so that if it opened the book would fall and make a noise. Then he stepped back from the light of the street and looked down at Ellison Avenue. He saw nobody from the Falcons. Then the smell of burning stew summoned him back to the kitchen.
The stew was black at the bottom but the rest was all right. He scooped it onto a plate while Stan Lomax came on the radio, with the day’s doings in the world of sports. Jackie Robinson was closer than ever to coming up to the Dodgers. In twelve games against the Dodgers and clubs in Panama he was hitting.519. Amazing. Five-nineteen! Babe Ruth never hit.519. Maybe Ted Williams or Stan Musial could do it, but they hadn’t done it yet. Robinson was still a Montreal Royal, said Stan Lomax, but it seemed sure he wouldn’t be a minor leaguer for very much longer.
Finishing up the stew, wiping his plate with bread, Michael tried to imagine what it must be like to be Robinson. He examined his own skin, spreading it with his hand, then pinching it with thumb and forefinger. It wasn’t really white. Paper was white. His skin was sort of pink. In the summer, it got red and then brown. It had freckles of a darker, reddish color. What must it be like to look at your skin and see that it was black? Or not really black. A kind of dark brown, really. What was it like to wake up every goddamned morning and see that skin and know that some shmuck looked down on you just for that? You hit.519 in spring training and some fat business guy in a suit, Branch Rickey or somebody, some prick who can’t hit.019, will decide if you play or not? How could that be? Michael’s anger rose in him and then faded. If I’m angry, he thought, sitting here, still white or pink, how must Robinson feel?
Then, in his head, he was Robinson, down in Cuba or over in Panama, eating dinner alone in some restaurant, a joint filled with all those girls who dressed like Carmen Miranda, bare bellies and tits bouncing and bananas on their heads. In a fancy place with candles and tablecloths and waiters, like all those movies about flying down to Rio, and here come Dixie Walker and Eddie Stanky. The restaurant is packed. There are three empty seats at my table, Robinson’s table. I wave at them, my teammates, to come over and sit down. But Walker and Stanky won’t sit down. They’d rather starve to death than sit with me. Like Englishmen looking at an Irishman.
And as Robinson, Michael was furious again. And then felt very sad. What the hell’s the matter with those bozos? Why don’t they try to get to know me? Maybe they could learn something. Hey, I went to college and they didn’t, so maybe they’d find out a few things. How can they act the way they do without knowing anything at all about me except my batting average and the color of my skin?
Idiots.
Bums.
He spent an hour on homework, dealing quickly with grammar and arithmetic, taking longer to answer questions about a history chapter. This told the story of a heroic Jesuit priest named Isaac Jogues, who had his fingers bitten off by Indians and later had trouble saying the mass, because he couldn’t hold the host. He wondered how he could tell this to Rabbi Hirsch without laughing. The goyim are crazy, he told himself. The goyim are definitely crazy.
For a while he listened to music on the radio. When he heard “Don’t Fence Me In,” he wished he had a telephone, so he could call Rabbi Hirsch and tell him the number of the station. But Rabbi Hirsch didn’t have a telephone either. Almost nobody did. Not Sonny. Not Jimmy. There was a phone in the rectory at Sacred Heart. There was a pay phone in Slowacki’s and another across the street in Casement’s Bar, but there were always people waiting to use them. The cops had telephones too. All the telephones they wanted.
He got up from the kitchen table, brushed his teeth, and went into his room. He read comics for a while, and then heard his mother come in from work. She walked through the rooms and knocked at his door.
“You’re all right, son?” she said.
“Fine,” he said. “Good night, Mom.”
He turned off the light and buried his head in the pillow. He remembered the rabbi’s radiant face when he was listening to Ziggy Elman, and was trying to imagine what it was like to be Rabbi Hirsch when sleep took him.
16
By morning, everyone in the parish seemed to know that Frankie McCarthy had been charged with felonious assault in the beating of Mister G and was being held awaiting $2,500 bail in the Raymond Street jail. The old ladies whispered about it in the hallways. It was mentioned across the counter in Slowacki’s candy store. Even Kate Devlin knew the story, although not a word had appeared in the newspapers.
“They should put him away for years,” she said. “But, of course, they won’t.”
She explained to Michael how bail worked. The prisoner had to find a bail bondsman and come up with ten percent of the bail in cash. The bondsman would then put up the full $2,500, and Frankie McCarthy would be free until his trial. If Frankie didn’t show up for trial, the bondsman would lose the $2,500.
“That idjit McCarthy,” she said, “wouldn’t have two hundred and fifty dollars, so he’ll have to wait until his friends steal it.”
Almost nobody in the parish seemed surprised that Frankie had been jailed. After all, they knew he had done it. But they also knew that the district attorney would have a hard time proving the case. If Michael, Sonny, and Jimmy Kabinsky said nothing in court, then it would be the word of Frankie McCarthy against the theories of the cops. From what Rabbi Hirsch said, Mister G might never talk again. But the boys knew there were few secrets in the parish. As the only possible witnesses they were the center of the parish’s whispered attention. Michael most of all, because he had seen the worst part of the beating.