The Christmas Kid Page 17

  The girl backed away as the men moved along beside her, speaking a kind of code. She noticed that her father had begun to walk differently, his weight falling heavier on his right foot. He was gesturing with his hands, too, and his words were clipped now, his mouth pulled back tighter against his teeth. Laverty turned to her at one point and saw the abandoned look in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just…”

  D’Arcy hurried into a candy store. She shrugged and said, “Maybe we—”

  And then D’Arcy was back. “Here you go,” he said. He handed Laverty a Spaldeen. Laverty held it in his hand as if it were something precious, and squeezed it, then rubbed it against his face, and then bounced it. Once. Again. And then he turned, and threw it against a stoop, thinking: I’m home. I’m home. I’m home.

  The Waiting Game

  EVERYBODY AGREED THAT THE best fruit and vegetable store in that neighborhood was run by Teddy Caravaggio. In the summer, the stands and bins outside the store were plump with the products of the earth: oranges, grapes, apples, and melons, tomatoes, lettuce, onions, and leeks. The garlic was moist and thick; the basil was always fresh. Teddy’s array of greens and reds and purples seemed lavish and extravagant on that avenue of redbrick old-law tenements.

  His customers arrived from the farthest reaches of the neighborhood and some even came back after they had moved to Flatbush and Bay Ridge. When the A&P opened its giant store, Teddy continued to flourish, six days a week, from eight in the morning until eight at night. His prices were a little higher than they were in the supermarkets, but his goods had been chosen by a human hand, not hauled to market by a corporation. All the women of the neighborhood knew this and shopped at Teddy’s with a certain passion. All except Catherine Novak.

  “The tomatoes at Teddy’s are beautiful this week, Catherine,” her neighbor, Mrs. Trevor, would say. “Jim would love them.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Trevor,” Catherine would say. “But the A&P’s more convenient.”

  Nothing was made of this. In that neighborhood of working people, the few who took time to notice simply dismissed Catherine Novak’s little boycott as a mysterious failure of taste. They all kept going to Teddy’s. One reason for his excellent reputation was that Teddy gave his produce the kind of attention that could only be called love. Some of the women remembered coming into the empty store and hearing Teddy whispering to the tomatoes or the melons. And he gave the store his total attention. Altar boys, rising for the six o’clock Mass, could see Teddy arriving at the store in his old Plymouth to unload the boxes of produce. He’d already spent two hours at the market. Arguing, haggling, choosing. The store had his complete fidelity. He lived alone in one large room in the back, where he listened at night to opera on the Italian radio station while hand-lettering the small signs that he would place in the morning among his beloved parsley, plums, celery, and artichokes.

  Nobody ever asked why Teddy Caravaggio lived alone; it was his choice, after all, like the priesthood, and his choice had certainly granted benefits to the neighborhood. In fact, nobody really knew Teddy Caravaggio outside the store. He was a thickset, blocky man, with black eyebrows and thinning hair. He never went to church, and had been too old for World War II and so was not a member of the American Legion or the VFW. Teddy existed only in the context of his wonderful store; he was what he did.

  Then one morning in the fall of the year, Catherine Novak’s husband, Jim, fell over at his desk in a Wall Street brokerage house. He was dead on arrival at Beekman Downtown Hospital, and the news shocked the neighborhood. He was, after all, only forty-three, a tall, good-looking Swede. Cops, firemen, ironworkers, and longshoremen might die young, victims of the risks of their trades. Wall Street guys were supposed to die in bed. Even the low-level guys. The wake at Mike Smith’s funeral parlor was packed with mourners; the funeral filled the church; and everyone said that Catherine Novak and her three children faced the ordeal with courage and dignity. If they cried, they did not cry before an audience.

  A month after the funeral, the VFW and the American Legion combined forces to throw a beer racket at Prospect Hall for the benefit of Jim Novak’s wife and children. The great hall was filled early, the beer flowed, whiskey bottles and setups crowded the tables, and the band played old songs. Catherine Novak sat with her neighbors at a table near the front of the hall. And then, a few hours after the racket had begun, Teddy Caravaggio appeared at the door. He was wearing a new blue suit and new black shoes. His face gleamed. His thinning gray hair had been freshly cut.

  He entered the hall hesitantly, even shyly, and eased over to the crowded bar. The men didn’t know him very well, but the women started coming over, happy to see him. A few were surprised, because they knew that Catherine Novak didn’t patronize Teddy’s store, but they were pleased that he had come in a show of neighborhood solidarity with the grieving widow. He said his hellos, murmured his regrets, sipped a beer. And all the while, he looked through the gathering nicotine haze at Catherine Novak.

  Just before midnight, he walked down the length of the hall, staying close to the walls, and came over to her.

  “Hello, Catherine,” he said.

  “Why, Teddy,” she said. “How nice of you to come.”

  “Like to dance?”

  She looked around uneasily, her hands moving awkwardly. The tables were empty as dancers moved to a tune called “It’s All In the Game.” She smiled, tentatively, and said: “Well, sure.”

  They went out to the crowded floor and began to dance. Teddy moved gracefully, but maintained a discreet distance.

  “I’m sorry what happened, Catherine,” he said. “If there’s anything I can do, you know, give a holler.”

  “Thanks, Teddy.”

  There was an uneasy moment. Then Teddy said: “I never thought I’d dance with you again. It’s hard to believe.”

  “I never thought you’d talk to me again.”

  “Me, neither.”

  “You’re not angry with me?” she said.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m a little angry,” Teddy said. “But not too much. Not like I was.” He paused. “A long time ago.”

  “Yes,” she said. The band ended the first tune, and started playing “Because of You.”

  “I’m sorry Jim died,” Teddy said. “But you know, while he was alive he was the luckiest guy in the neighborhood.”

  “Teddy, please don’t talk like that.”

  “It’s what I believe, Catherine,” he said. “Sometimes I used to come home from the market in the morning, and I’d go out of my way just to pass your house. Sometimes I’d stop at the corner, and I’d look up. And the lights’d be on, and I’d say to myself, look, there’s a real life up there. They live a real life, Jim and Catherine, with kids making noise in the morning and bacon frying and the radio on and everybody getting dressed. I’d see Jim go past the store sometimes in the summer with the kids, and they’d have a baseball bat and gloves, and they’d be going to the park to play ball, and I’d want to cry. Sometimes I’d see you go by, too, with a baby carriage, or on the bus at Christmas, or in the car with Jim and the kids going to the beach. And I’d be sick for a day, or a week, or a month.”

  She squeezed his hands. “Teddy, I—”

  “Why didn’t you ever come to the store?” he said. “All those years, you never came, even once.”

  “I thought that would make it worse. I didn’t want to hurt you, Teddy. I did it once. I didn’t want to do it again.”

  “Well, maybe you were right. ’Cause you hurt me real good, Catherine. Worse than a punch. Worse than a bullet.”

  “I know,” she said. “And I’m sorry. I thought I was doing the right thing, and it was wrong for you.”

  The ballad ended; an uptempo Lindy began. Catherine disengaged her hand from Teddy’s and started to walk off the suddenly jumping, pulsating dance floor. He followed behind her. At the table she turned to him.

  “Well, thank you, Teddy, for the dance,” she said,
forcing a smile. Her features had thickened in twenty-five years; her hair was scratched with gray. Teddy faced her, started to say something, then abruptly stopped. He looked around, as if certain that everybody was watching him; but the beer racket was roaring now, and nobody was looking their way.

  “Will you at least come in the store once in a while?” he said.

  “Of course,” she said. “I know it’s a wonderful store. Everybody knows that.”

  “I gave it everything I had.”

  “I’ll come by,” she said, and smiled. Looking directly at Teddy’s aging, decent face.

  “Well,” she said. “Thanks again.”

  He started to leave, then turned and took her hand.

  “I told you I’d wait for you the rest of my life,” Teddy Caravaggio said. “And I did.”

  “I know.”

  His face trembled, he squeezed her hand, then released it and said, “I’m still waiting.”

  Then he turned and walked away, his back straight, looking proud, easing his way through the crowd to the door.

  The Home Run

  AT 4:20 IN THE afternoon of October 3, 1951, Frankie Bertinelli took to his bed in tears and sorrow, and was not seen again in our neighborhood for more than thirty years.

  On that stunned autumn afternoon, Frankie was nineteen, a thin, sickly young man who had pulled some terrible numbers in the lottery of childhood. Scarlet fever weakened his heart. Measles ruined his eyesight. Acne gullied his face. When Frankie was fourteen, his father was killed in an accident on the pier, and since Frankie had no brothers or sisters, he was left alone with his mother. She was a pale Irish woman named Cora. Sometimes, in the evenings of those Spaldeen summers, she would arrive at the corner, looming in a ghostly way, and order Frankie home, saying: “Remember, you got a bad heart.” And Frankie would go.

  When the Korean War broke out, most of us started the long journey out of the neighborhood by going into the army or navy. Frankie, of course, was rejected by all the services, and soon was the only one of the old crowd left along Seventh Avenue. He took a job in a brokerage house as a clerk (his handwriting was superb and he was taking typing at Lamb’s business school) and lived his friendless, womanless life with one intense and glorious passion: baseball. Specifically, baseball as played by the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  “The whole calendar is wrong,” he said to me one Christmastime. “The real year doesn’t begin on January first. I mean, what’s the difference between January first and December thirty-first? Nothing. They are the same kind of a day. The real year begins the day Red Barber starts broadcasting from spring training.”

  He was right, of course; the year did begin in the spring, and nothing was more beautiful than baseball. In his apartment, Frankie Bertinelli had compiled immense scrapbooks about all the Dodgers, and even about the prospects in the farm clubs at Montreal and Saint Paul and other towns peopled by Branch Rickey. He had saved every scorecard from every game he’d ever seen at Ebbets Field. On the walls, he had pictures of Reese and Robinson, Hodges and Furillo and Reiser. His bureau drawers were crammed with baseball cards. He had composition books filled with mysterious statistics of his own devising, stacked copies of the Sporting News, back pages from the News and Daily Mirror. When childhood ended and his friends went away, baseball was all that Frankie Bertinelli had left.

  “I love the Dodgers,” he once said, forcing a smile after a girl turned him down at a dance. “I don’t need nothing else.”

  But then it was October 3, 1951, the third game of the playoffs against the Giants. On this chilly gray day, Frankie Bertinelli did not go to work. Frankie Bertinelli was genuinely sick. He had been sick for months. In July, Charlie Dressen said, “The Giants is dead,” and everybody thought the Dodgers manager was right. But on August 12, the Giants started their ferocious run for the pennant under the leadership of the turncoat Leo Durocher. They had won thirty-seven of their previous forty-four games, sixteen in a row at one time, the last seven in a row enabling them to catch and tie the Dodgers. It was as if everything Frankie Bertinelli knew about certainty, even justice, was eroding. Leo Durocher had been the greatest Dodgers manager of all time and then defected to the Giants; it was as if Benedict Arnold could end up a hero. It was wrong. It was awful.

  “This can’t be,” Frankie said after Jim Hearn pitched the Giants to a 3–1 victory in the first game at Ebbets Field. Frankie Bertinelli got so mad that day he threw his radio across the room. When he turned it on, half the stations were missing, including WMGM, which broadcast the Dodgers games. The next day, the Dodgers came roaring back at the Polo Grounds. Labine pitched a six-hitter; Rube Walker hit a home run over the right-field roof. The Dodgers slaughtered the Giants, 10–0. That night, Frankie Bertinelli was elated. But on the morning of October 3, he looked out at the gray, overcast sky and was filled with dread.

  That afternoon, he sat in the kitchen, listening to the horrible Giants announcers on WMCA, while his mother made coffee and tried to get him to eat something, anything. Sal Maglie was pitching for the Giants, and Frankie Bertinelli could picture his face: lean, mean, shrewd, hard. Newcombe was pitching for the Dodgers, big and strong, but always something wrong, never quite what he should be. First inning: Reese and Snider walk. Robinson singles to left, scoring Reese; 1–0 Dodgers. This weird Russ Hodges says the lights have been turned on at 2:04. Lights! In a day game! Frankie Bertinelli sat on the floor. Newcombe is pitching great, but then in the last of the seventh, Irvin doubles, and Lockman moves him to third with a bunt single. Irvin scores on Thomson’s sacrifice fly; 1–1. Frankie Bertinelli’s stomach knotted, churned, flopped around. Then, top of the eighth, the Dodgers score three runs, and in the last of the eighth, Newcombe strikes out the side; 4–1 Dodgers! Justice! Certainty! Beauty!

  And then it’s the last of the ninth. Newcombe still pitching. Alvin Dark singles through the right side. Okay. So what? Keep the ball down. Get a double play. But no…Don Mueller singles to the right of Hodges, who for some insane reason is holding Dark tight on first with a three-run lead. Dread. Then Newcombe gets Monte Irvin to pop up a foul ball to Hodges. One out, two to go…And then here comes Whitey Lockman. Walk him. Load the bases, get the double play! Something about Lockman…and then Lockman slices a double down the left-field line. Dark scores. Mueller slides like a crazy man into third and breaks his ankle! They’re carrying him out through center field, all the way to the clubhouse. In the Dodgers bullpen: Carl Erskine and Ralph Branca are warming up. And Bobby Thomson is the batter.…

  “Bring in Erskine,” Frankie Bertinelli shouted, while his mother moved around the kitchen. “Not Branca. Please not Branca. Thomson hit a homer off Branca in the first game! Into the upper deck! Please not Branca…” But Dressen calls in Branca. Clint Hartung goes in to run for Mueller at third. And it’s Branca. “Walk Thomson!” Frankie Bertinelli shouted. “Walk Thomson and pitch to the kid, to that Willie Mays. He’s a kid, he won’t handle the pressure, he—”

  And then Frankie went silent, and listened to Russ Hodges:

  Bobby Thomson…up there swinging…He’s had two out of three, a single and a double, and Billy Cox is playing him right on the third-base line.…One out, last of the ninth…Branca pitches…and Bobby Thomson takes a strike called on the inside corner.…

  Frankie Bertinelli got up, walked around, leaned his forehead on the wall. He could hear other radios from open windows.

  Bobby hitting at .292…He’s had a single and a double and he drove in the Giants’ first run with a long fly to center. Brooklyn leads it, 4–2.…Hartung down the line at third, not taking any chances…Lockman with not too big of a lead at second, but he’ll be running like the wind if Thomson hits one.… Branca throws…There’s a long drive…it’s gonna be, I believe…THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT!…Bobby Thomson hits into the lower deck of the left-field stands.…THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT AND THEY’RE GOING CRAZY!

&nbs
p; That was at 3:58 p.m. At 4:20, Frankie Bertinelli got undressed, put on a pair of blue pajamas, and went to bed. Two days later, some kids found bags full of baseball cards in the garbage cans downstairs, along with old copies of the Sporting News, shredded photographs, torn scorecards. Cora continued to move in her dim way around the neighborhood, shopping at Jack’s, picking up fish at Red’s and meat at Semke’s, and black-and-whites at the Our Own bakery. But nobody saw Frankie.

  “He’s not feeling well,” she would say if anyone asked. “He’s got the bad heart, you know, from the scarlet fever.…”

  After a while, nobody asked anymore. The years went by. Cora got old. Delivery boys from the grocery stores said that the apartment was very strange. A man was always sleeping in the bed off the kitchen. There was no sound in the place, no radio, no TV. The shades were drawn. Sometimes, late at night, neighbors in the building could hear a man weeping.

  More than thirty years later, Cora Bertinelli died. She was waked at Mike Smith’s, and late on the first night of the wake, I dropped by the funeral parlor. The large room was empty. Cora Bertinelli was dusty and white in the coffin. There was no sign of Frankie. I went out to the sidewalk and a small, fat, bearded man was standing there, staring at the church across the street. It was Frankie. He looked at me blankly, and I introduced myself, and said I was sorry about his mother. He looked tentative and lost.

  “What about you, Frankie?” I said. “How’ve you been?”

  He looked at me, and blinked, and said, “They shoulda walked Lockman.”