“And what about Rabbi Hirsch?”
“I haven’t seen him,” she said.
“If they let a priest in, they should let him in.”
“Who knows, Michael? I’ll try to find out. You’d better rest.”
Exhaustion moved through him like a tide. He tried to resist it, tried to force his eyes to remain open. His mother’s hand felt warm. The tide took him.
26
With his lower right leg encased in a heavy plaster cast, Michael remained in Brooklyn Wesleyan Hospital for nine empty days. He did have some visitors. Father Heaney stopped by to tell him not to worry about his final exams; he’d be allowed to take them when he was feeling better, even if the school year was over. On another morning, he woke up to see Abbott and Costello staring down at him. The detectives wanted names. Michael said he didn’t know any names.
“Come on, kid, don’t bullshit us,” Costello said. “Everybody knows the names of these bums.”
“Get their names from everybody then,” Michael said.
“You just don’t want to be helped, do you?” Abbott said.
“It’s too late now,” Michael said.
They sighed and left. Michael wondered why he didn’t just give them the names. Tippy Hudnut and Skids, Ferret and the Russian. Just those names. Street names. Let the cops figure out their real names and where they lived. But he couldn’t do it. Even though they had hurt him, hurt him real bad, he couldn’t be a rat. He knew if he turned rat he’d be sorry for the rest of his life. He’d be walking down a street somewhere and remember the time he ratted to the cops and he’d be through for the day. He’d be in the army, where nobody knew him, and someone would want to know about his life and he’d have to keep this one thing secret. Or he’d take the cop’s test and be assigned to some precinct and then run into Abbott and Costello and they’d remember that he was a rat and tell all the other goddamned cops and they’d freeze him out, because everyone knew that cops despised informers as much as the criminals did. No. If he ratted, he’d be as bad as them. Then they’d really win. Then they’d really ruin him. They’d make him as dirty as they were.
Every morning the bald doctor arrived at Michael’s bedside, carrying a clipboard, flanked by an intern and a nurse. His favorite word was fine. Michael was fine. His progress was fine. He was healing up just fine. Then, feeling fine about himself, he moved to the next patient.
Every afternoon, before going to work, Kate Devlin came to visit, bringing him ice cream and newspapers and once, the latest Captain Marvel. The comic book now seemed childish to him. He had learned that there were truly bad people in the world, and when they went after you, you really hurt. He told her he didn’t want any more Captain Marvels. He was more interested in the newspaper stories about Jackie Robinson. And the condition of Pete Reiser. The great center fielder was conscious again, promising to be back playing soon, and the sportswriters were demanding that Branch Rickey come up with some money to pad the concrete walls of Ebbets Field. They called him El Cheapo and said that half the ballplayers didn’t have enough money to take the subway to the ballpark. But Rickey had brought up Jackie Robinson when all the other owners wanted white players only, and Robinson always called him Mr. Rickey, so how bad could the old man be? Each day, Michael read every word of the sports pages and tore out the stories about Robinson. When his mother arrived the following morning, he’d give them to her to take home.
“You’ll have a scrapbook on this fellow thicker than the blue books,” she said.
“Someday he’ll be in the blue books, Mom,” he said. “This is history.”
But when she was gone, and the doctor and the nurses moved to other rooms, he was left to think. And he began to feel alone in the world. There was no sign of Rabbi Hirsch. Not even a note. Worse, neither Sonny Montemarano nor Jimmy Kabinsky had come to see him. His best friends. One for all and all for one. He didn’t expect the other kids from school to visit him. But he knew that if either Sonny or Jimmy had been hurt, he’d have visited them. He wished that they had telephones at home so he could call them from the booth down the hall near the nurses’ station. But nobody he knew had a telephone, least of all Jimmy and Sonny. They would have to come to the hospital to see him. Obviously, they’d found better things to do. In the first few days, he tried to make excuses for them. Maybe they’d decided to study for the final exams that Michael had missed. Maybe they’d found jobs after school. Maybe Sonny’s mother was sick or Jimmy’s uncle. And yeah: maybe the Falcons had warned them to stay away from the hospital.
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.