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Ebbets Field

By Philip Martin Cohen

But I was, one of the biggest.

The Bronx flowed through my veins. You see, my grandmother lived a few stops from Yankee Stadium. Heading across the city to see the Yankees meant a visit to her. And my grandmother always fed me.

“You’re such a smart boy, Ira. Someday you’re going to be a brilliant scientist,” she’d say, as she put before me something made of beef, or served me a piece of apple cake with a cup of hot tea with lemon in a thick glass. I’d tell her I wanted to be a writer not a scientist, but she’d say, “You’re going to be another Einstein. I can tell.” Einstein she could make sense of, F. Scott Fitzgerald less so. She’d declare my brilliance again. Then she’d pack a salami sandwich on rye wrapped in a paper napkin, some sugar cookies also wrapped in a napkin, and a six ounce bottle of Coca-Cola, all into a paper bag from the A&P. She’d roll the bag up tight so it wouldn’t seem absurdly large housing these few items. They were for the game so I wouldn’t be tempted to eat the non-kosher food they sold at ball parks, and, God forbid, so I wouldn’t starve.

As I would walk toward the door she’d say, “You don’t have to come by yourself all the time. I got plenty of food. You have maybe a nice girl you can bring along next time?” And as I walked out the door she’d always say, “Don’t forget to tell Shelley I said hello.” I always told her I would, and I always did.

At seventeen I didn’t have a nice girl I could bring along. Anyway, I preferred going to the Yankees alone. I enjoyed the solitude. Yankee Stadium is nothing like a monastery, I know. Sitting by myself up there in the cheap seats in the midst of the crowd, story notebook on my lap, pencil in hand, watching the game unfold in its unhurried way, eating my salami sandwich and sugar cookies—it was always a contemplative time.

There is truth in that statement. Sitting in the cheap seats for me was a moment of quiet, of sanctuary. But it’s not the whole truth. There is a “beside that…”

Since I was eight years old, whenever they played on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, my brother Morris and I would go to the Yankees, just the two of us. Only family vacation or death prevented us. Even the certainty of rain and a rainout wouldn’t deter us from heading north across two boroughs to Grandma’s and then to Yankee Stadium. It was our special tradition, our private time. But it ended two years ago. Morris was killed somewhere in the Pacific. We got a letter and later a flag, but I lost my brother and friend. Someday I might go to the Yankees again with somebody. But the spring of 1947 was too soon.

“Promise you won’t go to the Yankees with anyone else?” Morris asked before he shipped out. “It’ll give me all the luck I need to bring me back home, kid.” In the spring of 1947, my whole family, including Sylvia his wife, was still mourning that I wasn’t able to give Morris enough luck to fend off the Japanese bullet.

“No one else,” I said to him with the passion I would use pledging loyalty to a girlfriend. I meant it, too. As much as wanting to give him all the luck I could, there was no one else who would make the trip unique, with the private language and jokes we’d concocted over the years. Big brother and little brother riding the subway from Brooklyn to the Bronx on a Saturday or Sunday morning to have lunch with Grandma before the game, then to the game, then for the ride home through Manhattan to Brooklyn---it was a full day’s adventure. It was a day in another country; no, it was a day on another planet.

With Morris gone I had no wish for company. The day became my private adventure, a day touched with melancholy, yet also filled with a certain tranquility. Someday, perhaps; perhaps in a few years when Shelley was five or six. But not in the spring of 1947. I went alone with my story notebook that I would hold on my lap working on a story while I watched the game.

Shelley was Morris’s son. He was conceived not long before Morris shipped out, as if that act, too, banked a fortune in good luck. But father and son never met. The boy was now past three years old. Morris’s son, he was the focus of attention for everyone in the family. His every movement, from bowel to crawling to walking, was carefully chronicled and celebrated by everyone in the family. Shelley was a living memorial to a decent guy who didn’t make it back to again live a fifteen minute walk from Ebbets Field.

Friday night my mother always made Shabbos dinner. The menu varied but it always ended with my mother’s apple cake and tea. When they could come, which was almost always, Sylvia and Shelley would be there. Once a month for the last five years, since my grandfather died, Grandma would come in by subway from the Bronx bearing a strudel. Lately the subway trip had become difficult for her. When he could my father would drive to the Bronx to get her.

Grandma would always stay the night. In the old days I’d stay in Morris’s room. Lately when she stayed over, I slept on the cot in the almost finished basement with the cat and the banging furnace. No one had the heart to dismantle, or use, Morris’s room. The entire room had become a mausoleum, testimony that he had lived. Thus it remained until years later when my parents sold the house. By then, even Shelley was confident that Morris Graber, his father and my brother, had for twenty-three years walked among us and had lived a life that meant something.

That Friday night dinner, the day before I received the package from Dallas, the usual crowd was there. My mother and father, my grandmother, Sylvia, and Shelley sat around the table eating and chatting. Everyone told Shelley how handsome he looked with his new haircut. With that self-conscious look he wore whenever he received too much attention, he messed up his hair with both hands and knocked his yarmulke to the floor.

That night we had a visitor.

“He’s a handsome kid. Got his mother’s eyes.” It was Morris. “How’s Sylvia?”

“She’s doing all right,” I answered. “She doesn’t make a lot as a secretary. And she has to shlep into Manhattan for the job. I think she’d like to go back to school, but it’s hard with the boy.”

“We never had a life together.”

“I know. It breaks everyone’s heart.”

“And Grandma?”

“She’s getting older, but she can still cook.”

“I see her strudel hasn’t suffered.”

“No.”

“And Mom and Dad?”

“You can see, they’re doing okay. Dad goes to work every day and Mom keeps the house. They have their friends. But they miss you. Your room is a museum.”

“And Shelley?”

“He’s a great kid. I really love him. I babysit him when Sylvia has something to do on a Saturday night.”

“He’s mine, but he’s not mine, you know?”

“We all know.”

“And how are you doing, kid?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m a loner at school. I don’t know why. I’ve got friends, but I don’t have to do much with them. All I want to do is write.”

“You’ll be fine, Ira. You got good stuff in you. Just take your time. And start going to the Dodgers once in a while. It’s going to be a great year for them.”

The year 1947 was the year the Dodgers brought Jackie Robinson up to play first base. It was also the year of the second Yankees-Dodgers Subway Series for which I received a pair of tickets. I went to all seven games, obviously including the ones at Ebbets Field, to which I walked the fifteen minute walk. The Yankees took the series, and it was a good one. But I am way ahead of myself.

Grandma was with us the Friday night before the package from Dallas arrived. The Yankees were playing Detroit the next day, so she and I planned to take the subway together in the morning back to her place for lunch.

“Don’t worry Ira, I made plenty for lunch,” she said.

Believe me. I wasn’t worried.

The conversation turned to the Dodgers and Jackie Robinson, in the spring of 1947 the only Black man in Major League baseball.

“He’s Jewish you know,” my father said, dipping his bread into the soup and putting it into his mouth like a train speeding into a tunnel.

“What do you mean he’s Jewish?” my mother asked. “He’s a Negro. Everyone knows that. The paper says he was born in Georgia.”

“He’s Jewish,” my father insisted.

“How do you know?”

“You know the Robinsons, Irv and Lanie?”

My mother, I think knowing where this bit of logic was headed, nodded suspiciously. “Well Irv and Lanie are Jewish, aren’t they?” Dad asked.

“So because the Robinsons are Jewish, Jackie Robinson, who was born in Georgia, where everyone knows no Jew lives, is Jewish, too?”

“Precisely,” said my father with a tone expressing the inevitable victory of a bit of deductive reasoning so clear it would have made Sherlock Holmes proud.

“Get out of here,” my mother said. “If Jackie Robinson’s Jewish then I’m Eleanor Roosevelt.”

My grandmother got into the act. “Maybe it’s not that Jackie Robinson is Jewish. Maybe this Irv and Lanie are Negroes.”

That caught my father the logician by surprise.

But then, seriously, Dad said, “The real question is, are they going to let him alone to play baseball, or are they going to call him names and make his life so miserable he quits the game?”

My mother said, “I think the best hope we’ve got is that they leave him alone enough so he’ll stay on the team.” Then she turned to me and said, “You’re going to the Yankees tomorrow? Aren’t they playing the Tigers?” Mom knew her baseball. You had to give her that.

“Yeah,” I said. Detroit was having a great season. So were the Yankees.

“You won’t see Hank Greenberg at Yankee Stadium tomorrow,” my grandmother said. “He’s playing for Pittsburgh, you know. He wanted more money than Detroit would pay him. He’s making eighty thousand dollars a year. Can you imagine that? Eighty thousand dollars. That’s a nice living for a Jewish boy.”

Sometimes my grandmother astonished me.

“And as a matter of fact,” added my father, “Pittsburgh’s playing a series here in Brooklyn next week. How about you give up your hatred of the Dodgers and come with me to the game next Saturday night, Ira? We can see Hank Greenberg and Jackie Robinson in a duel, with both on first. Greenberg’s Jewish, too, you know.”

“You know this because of Mike and Renee Greenberg?” my mother asked not a trifle sarcastically. My father gave her The Look, the one that said I am not to be ridiculed in front of my son. But that would never stop my mother.

“Why not come with me? It’ll be the duel of the Jewish first basemen.”

“You’re going to go with him, right?” Morris asked.

I said, “I don’t hate the Dodgers. It’s just that I love the Yankees. You know that, Dad.”

“So you’ll come?”

“Sure you’ll come,” Morris insisted.

“Sure I’ll come. It’ll be a great game.” I turned to my grandmother. “How do you know so much about baseball, Grandma?” I asked

“Who do you think taught your father?”

Over the tea and cakes Sylvia asked, “Ira, do you have a trick for Shelley?”

I thought for a minute. “Sure. Wait a minute,” I answered. I ran upstairs and extracted one of my simpler tricks from the middle drawer of my desk.

I returned to the dining room. I sat in my chair and invited Shelley to come over. He got down from the chair. This required some effort, since he had to climb atop the Manhattan phone book to reach the table. He walked around to my side.

I produced a small rectangular piece of wood. In the middle of the wood was a round indentation large enough for a dime. “Look at the dime,” I told Shelley. As he looked at it, I pulled it apart. The plate holding the dime came out. With a few abracadabras I covered the frame and reinserted the piece. When I lifted my hand, the dime had vanished.

“Wow!” Shelley said. “How’d you do that?”

“Not at the dinner table, Shelley. I’ll show you after dinner.”

After I showed him how to do the trick, he insisted everyone join him in the living room for a demonstration. When he showed everyone that the dime had disappeared, he shouted, “Ta Da!” and squealed with joy.

Grandma said,“Shelley, show Grandma how to do the trick.”

“A magician never tells,” he said.

The next day Grandma and I took the subway north to her apartment in the Bronx.

“What’s in your bag, Ira?” she asked.

“My notebook and some pencils and a novel.”

“What’s the novel?”

“It’s called The Village of Coal by Richard Anderson.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about what happens to a coal town in Southeastern Kentucky during the Depression.”

“You like this book?”

“It’s wonderfully well written. It gives a great picture of Appalachia. Appalachia’s a part of America I don’t know anything about. Anderson won a Pulitzer Prize for it.”

“That’s a big deal, no?” she asked.

“It’s a big deal, yes,” I answered.

“What’s in your notebook?”

“Stories I’ve written, or outlines of stories, or sometimes the first page or two of a story to help me get started.”

“What do you write about?”

“I write science fiction stories mostly.”

“About creatures from outer space?”

“Things like that.”

“Do you ever write about your family?”

“Not directly.”

“You should. I could tell you stories about your grandfather and the Russians. Those sons of bitches would make any man from Mars look like Mickey Mouse.”

My grandmother reserved the term “sons of bitches” for the Russians and especially the Nazis.

“I thought you wanted me to be another Einstein.”

“So you’ll be the Einstein of writers.”

I smiled.

“Do you know that he ran away from those sons of bitches? It’s true. The Czar loved the Jews so much he wanted to keep them in the army for twenty-five years.”

My grandmother had told this story many different ways. It was a good story no matter which way she told it, and, besides, it was my Grandpa’s story.

My grandfather Izzy Graber made his living running a candy store in the Bronx. A candy store sold everything: cigarettes, newspapers, magazines, soda, and of course candy. My grandfather’s candy store had a soda fountain and a grill. He’d make you a hamburger or a hot dog. From the soda fountain he’d make an ice cream cone or a milkshake. For Morris and me he’d make an egg cream the moment he spotted us coming. “The best in the Bronx,” he’d always say as he handed the glasses to us.

“They drafted my Izzy,” Grandma said. “One day some son of a bitch Cossacks came into the village and they took him away. We were supposed to get married Izzy and me, and I thought I’d never see him again. But one night maybe three months after he left there was a knock on my bedroom window at maybe three o’clock in the morning. It was my Izzy. “Come Rivkele,” he said to me. We’re going to America.” He was in such a hurry.

“Now you know Jewish girls in Russia didn’t just run off like that in the middle of the night with someone who escaped from the Russian Army. What would my parents think? “I have to ask Mama and Papa,” I said to him.

““Don’t do that,” he said. “They’ll say no, and I’ll have to go by myself. Come with me to America. We have to go now.”

“So I did what a girl in Grodno never did. I got up and three in the morning, packed some clothes into a bag along with a few other things. I took what little money I had. I washed my teeth, I combed my hair, and put on a kerchief. I wrote Mama and Papa a note. Then, I climbed out the window and I joined my army deserter. We made our way to Hamburg where everybody took the boat, and we came to America. Now I’m here with you on the New York City subway without my Izzy, who five years ago died from cancer. And you know, I never saw my parents or my brothers or sisters again. They didn’t want to come to America. Hitler killed them all, that bastard.”

“That bastard” was reserved for Hitler alone.

He died young, my grandfather. It left my grandmother a widow in a world where widows rarely remarried. Without her siblings, aside from my Uncle Avigdor and some cousins, we were her family.

“How did he get out of the army, Grandma?” I asked.

Every time I heard the story I tried to get another detail.

“So what Jew wants to work for the Czar for twenty-five years, anyway?” she began. “Izzy, he got caught right in his house. The Cossacks came too fast into the town, and the next thing you know he’s off to the army.”

She paused for a moment and adjusted herself on her seat.

“So one night it hit him. He realized that he wasn’t going to get out anytime soon unless he did something about it himself. He hated it in the army. He decided to desert. Lots of Jews were deserting from the army, so why not him? He had a brother already in America, Uncle Avigdor. He knew he’d be okay if only he could get to New York. So that night he made like he was going to the bathroom, only he never came back. He ran and he ran and he just kept running. The Russians didn’t look too hard for deserters. If they found one, they weren’t so nice to him, but they didn’t try too hard to find them. I guess there was always another Jew sitting in his house minding his own business to replace the one who ran away. He had a little money and a good sense of direction, and he made it back to Grodno. He woke me up and we came to America. Simple.”

Simple?

“How’d you get the money to take the boat to America?”

“That’s for another time, Irale. Right now I need to close my eyes.”

And she did.

I remember when I was younger and she’d sleep on the subway. I’d sit there nervously wondering if she’d wake up in time for the right stop. When I was five or six, I didn’t know what the right stop was. I never had to worry. Like a precision instrument, she’d always wake up one stop before ours. She’d usher me off the train with plenty of time. It was uncanny.

Where the money came from for the transatlantic journey would have to wait.

We made it to her place, and we had a nice lunch. On my way out the door on my way to the Yankees, I said, “Grandma, the day you give me all the details of that story I promise you I’ll write it up real nice. You’ll be proud.”

“You won’t add in any men from Mars, will you?”

“No men from Mars. I promise.”

“Okay, maybe next time when I come for Shabbos. If there’s no Yankee game the next day, we’ll sit and we’ll talk on Saturday, and I’ll tell you the whole geschicte.”

“Great.”

I sat in the cheap seats watching the Tigers and Yankees play. I missed Greenberg, I really did. He was so tall and gawky looking he was easy to spot even up there. I had the notebook on my lap, pencil in my hand, and my mind was wandering between the game and my story.

“What’s this one about?”

It was Morris.

“It’s a story about a guy from the nineteen-twenties who travels into the future and sees what Hitler did to Europe. Then he goes back to his time, and has to figure out if he should find Hitler and kill him.”

“If he kills Hitler you’re going to have to figure out what the world’s gonna be like without him. But that’s not the problem, is it?”

“No. The problem is is it okay to kill someone if it does something good.”

“Well, sounds like fun. Are you going to send it off to get published when you’re finished?”

“I don’t know. I keep getting rejection letters. I don’t know if I have the strength to keep doing this. I love the writing, but I have no stomach for rejection. And that’s all I keep getting. Rejected.”

“What did I tell you about that, little brother?”

Our conversation was interrupted when DiMaggio hit a double. By the time the season was over he’d have 168 hits. I stood up and cheered along with everyone else. Everyone loved DiMaggio.

I said, “I know. I know. I got to develop a thick skin. It’s the only way I’ll get anything done.”

“It’s the only way you’ll get an Anderson. Don’t let anyone discourage you from writing your stories.”

“I’ve got a million of them, you know. Ideas for stories just keep popping into my head. I got a whole notebook filled with ideas and outlines and first paragraphs.”

“I know you do. Keep at it.”

“Grandma wants me to write our family story.”

“You mean about how Grandpa deserted from the Russian Army and conned her into leaving her family to come with him to America?”

“Yeah that one. I can’t figure out how they got the money for the boat, and she wouldn’t tell me today.”

“She’ll never tell. It’s up to you to find out, kid. Whatever it was, when you write it up it’ll sound like a million bucks because you wrote it. You’re gonna be a great writer, Irale.”

“It’s not what Dad wants me to do.”

“I know. I know. Dad wants you to teach high school chemistry. And why not? It’s a secure job. You won’t make a lot of money, but you’ll make enough. You’re pretty good at chem. But it’s not what you want to do. Hell. Why can’t parents see their children for who they really are?”

“I just think he wants me to be secure. Nothing wrong with that, really.”

“Except it’s not what you want to do.”

“Except for that,” I said.

“Well, you know The Plan.”

Yeah, I knew The Plan.

The Plan was simple if deeply flawed. I would go to City College. Dad would argue that Brooklyn College was closer. But I would respond that the commute was my problem. The tuition would be the same, and in those days the subway might as well have been free it was so cheap. He wouldn’t put up much of a fight on that score.

The reason I wanted to go to CCNY was because Richard Anderson taught there.

Richard Anderson, you see, was at the center of The Plan.

I would go to CCNY to double major in chemistry and education to please Dad. But the real reason I would go there was to study creative writing with Richard Anderson. By the time I was ready to graduate, I would be a published author and Professor Anderson’s favorite student. He would help me matriculate into a good graduate school to earn a doctorate in English literature. It would be a program where I could also study creative writing. I’d spend my professional life at a good university teaching and writing and one day win the Nobel Prize, at least the Pulitzer.

The very heart of The Plan was the assumption that I’d win an Anderson, The CCNY Richard Anderson Prize in Undergraduate Creative Writing, to be precise. This was a prize awarded to an incoming freshman whose published work was deemed meritorious by Richard Anderson himself. The prize included a stipend of $500 a year for four years, and automatic admission into Professor Anderson’s writing seminars.

The problem with The Plan lay in several unknowns.

The first was how big a fight my father would actually put up. About this I worried the least. Brooklyn College was good, but CCNY was Harvard on the Hudson, and Dad was not insensitive to prestige.

But that led to the second unknown. Could I get into City College? My grades were above average but not great. Admission to CCNY for me, according to Mr. Menchik my English teacher, was an open question.

The third unknown was the most unknown. Studying with Richard Anderson was problematic on two levels. I could gain admission to CCNY and petition every year to be admitted to his seminar and consistently be rejected. Even if he admitted me, he could well despise my writing. No Ph.D. in literature.

And as for winning the Anderson, that was a fantasy. After a feast of rejection, I had no reason to expect I’d have anything accepted for publication anytime between now and the middle of my senior year of high school, around seven months away.

So you see The Plan was a theoretical construct with little chance of entering my reality.

“You’re going to become a great writer, Ira,” Morris said. “Just don’t give up.”

“Thanks, Morris. I’ll try my best.”

“Great. I’ll see you next week.” And he was gone.

I missed seeing Hank Greenberg in Yankee Stadium, but I would get to see him in a week in Ebbets Field. It was a great game that day. I got to see DiMaggio hit a home run. I wrote five hundred words of my story.

I talked to my brother two days in a row. God I missed him.

When I got home that night sitting on the table in the foyer was a small package hand addressed to me. There was no return address, but the postmark indicated that the package came from Dallas, Texas. I knew not a soul in Dallas.

Well, I opened it of course at about the speed of light. Inside were a letter and something surrounded by two pieces of cardboard held together with tape. The letter read:

“Dear Mr. Ira Graber,

I hope this letter finds you well.

The notebook that accompanies this letter is your brother Morris’s. Morris and I were good friends. The day before he died he gave me the notebook. He had a premonition, he said, and he wanted me to hold it. He told me that if he died in the next week I should send it on to you when I returned stateside. He made me promise not to read it, and I kept that promise. Believe me. Not a word.

Your brother was a wonderful guy. I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am he got killed. Anyway, I was one of the lucky ones and got to come home. But I got pretty seriously wounded toward the end there. I was in the hospital for a long time, and the notebook kind of got misplaced. That’s why it’s coming to you so long after the end of the war. Please accept my apologies for that.

But now it’s yours. I hope it will be a blessing for you.

Yours truly,

Tom Stevens”

I retrieved a pair of scissors from a drawer in the table in the hallway and cut the tape that held the cardboard pieces together. Pulling them apart I saw a small spiral notebook with most of the pages pulled out. I opened it up carefully. The first page was a letter addressed to me. “Ira,” it began. “If you are reading this then I have died in combat and my buddy Tommy Stevens has sent this on to you.”

It was impossible for me to continue reading. Tears had filled my eyes, and my head was muddled. These few pages from my dead brother had parachuted into my life compliments of the U.S. Postal Service, and I didn’t know what to think. How could I? I had made my peace with Morris’s death and was well into filling in the gap he left; we all were. Are these new words from him a blessing or a curse? In one sense it depended on their content. But in another sense, I feared that their very existence, brought to our attention two years after his death, would revive all the old feelings that we had worked through.

Well, good or bad, my brother’s words would have to be read I decided. I would let the content determine whether I shared them with the family.

But not now.

Now I went upstairs to my room and placed Morris’s notebook in the middle drawer of my desk. I guess I put it away because I was afraid of what Morris had written. But I couldn’t tell you what exactly I feared. What could he possibly say?

And what would I say if someone were to ask me what had come for me in the mail all the way from Dallas, Texas? That was easy enough.

“So what came from Texas?” my mother asked at dinner.

“Just a magic trick I ordered off the back of a comic book. It’s a really great one, too” I answered.

“When will we get to see it?” my father asked.

“Not until I learn it well. You know that,” I answered. “Maybe the next time Grandma comes for Shabbos I’ll put on a little magic show for everyone.”

“That would be lovely,” Mom said.

“You know how Shelley likes to be my assistant.”

We finished dinner and cleaned off the table. Mom was at the dishes, and Dad was in the living room reading the paper and smoking his pipe, his feet resting on the ottoman. I said to him, “I guess I’ll go upstairs and work on my homework.”

“Homework?” Dad said. “It’s Saturday, not Sunday, or perhaps you forgot.”

“No, I didn’t forget. I’ve got a chemistry test early next week. Thought I’d spend some time getting ready for it.”

“You don’t have anything else to do?” My father seemed concerned over my social life, or absence of it. I was impressed.

“Well, then, better you should be working on chemistry than those tales of yours. Chemistry will get you a job and writing short stories will only cause me and your mother aggravation.”

I let the remark pass.

“Still, don’t you want to listen to the radio with me and Mom? I seem to remember that The Dark Silhouette left off at a pretty tense moment last week.”

The truth is, I loved The Dark Silhouette. The show had lately had some trouble inventing credible villains with the Nazis and the Japanese out of the picture. But the writing was above average and so was the acting. But not tonight. I had other business.

“The Dark Silhouette always leaves off at a tense moment, Dad. Or else no one would tune in the next week, and the sales of Sabbo Soap would plummet. Then where would the world be?”

“A world without Sabbo Soap? A tragedy. And you want to participate in bringing this tragedy into the world?”

“If I’m not by the radio tonight, I don’t think the Sabbo Corporation will collapse. But if the president of Sabbo should call and ask if I’m down here listening, just tell him I’m glued to the radio. He won’t know if you’re telling the truth.”

“Okay, Ira. Go on up to your room then and study for that exam. See you in the morning.”

And that was that.

I went to my bedroom, shut and locked the door, and pulled the notebook out of the middle drawer of my desk. I opened it and continued reading from where I had left off.

“Ira, I want to tell you how much I miss you and everyone else in the family. I know I missed Shelley’s first birthday and that breaks my heart. I am scared I’ll miss all of his birthdays. Men die here like clockwork, and I’m afraid my number is up. If I don’t make it, tell Sylvia how much she meant to me, and how much I loved her. Tell her how much it meant to me that I had someone so precious to hold on to in the midst of the strange life of a combat soldier. I’ve told her this a hundred times in my letters, but I want you to tell her again for me.

But that’s not why I’m writing. No. I’m writing to tell you about something no one in the family knows but me, and someone should. It’s a little bit of truth about our family. Maybe it means something, maybe not. But someone has to know it.

Since I’m afraid my time is up, I’m writing to you about it, kid. If I’m gone, it’s yours.

In my closet on the top shelf you’ll find a box. On the top of the box is my stamp collection. But underneath if you dig down you will find a record. Get the record. When you can, listen to it. But no one else must be in the room when you listen.

Then when you can, I want you to write a story using what you’ve heard on the record as part of the plot. I think it will make a Cracker Jack story. Might even get you that Anderson.

Keep in mind that what you will hear on the record is a secret. I know it, and now you’ll know it, too. It’s our secret. But that’s it. It goes nowhere else, except in the story you write.

I hope to God you never see this letter, kid. But if you are reading it it means something real bad happened to me.

If I’m dead, by the way, I release you from our compact about going to the Yankees alone. Take someone else, or give it up. Who travels to the Bronx when Ebbets Field is fifteen minutes away? Take care of Sylvia and Shelley for me. When you think it’s right, tell her I hope she finds someone else. She’s already heard it from me more than once in my letters. But I think it might mean something different coming from you.

God I miss you, kid.

Love,

Morris”

What could it be? What secret could Morris possess that he would put on a record? In those days there were booths at amusement parks where you could go and for a dollar or so record your voice and when you were finished it would pop out on a seventy-five rpm record. That’s probably how this got made, unless Morris had a secret life as a musician and the record was a studio recording of him singing Boogey Woogie Bugle Boy or By Mir Bist Du Sheyn with the Andrews Sisters. I doubted it. Chances are it was something he made one night at Coney Island.

For the first time since he died, I had a reason to go into Morris’s room. Since he died no one went into his room, except for my mother who went in every now and then to dust. Everything was exactly as Morris had left it. At first I thought I couldn’t go into the room with my parents in the house. My behavior would seem strange to them, and they would demand an explanation. What if one of them caught me in the room with the box on Morris’s bed, and the record in my hand? What could I say to them? I’d have to reveal the whole business about the letter and all. It wouldn’t be easy.

Once I retrieved the record, where could I play it? I’d have to use our phonograph, which sat in the living room. I’d have to do it when no one else was in the house.

That wouldn’t be easy. My mother was in the house a lot; in fact she prided herself on being home when I returned from school. Well, one step at a time.

First to retrieve the record.

Now it will come as no surprise that sleeping that night was impossible. I read until well past my normal bedtime on a Saturday night. Then I tossed and turned until 3:30 in the morning.

You might think that the wee hours would be a perfect time to go to Morris’s room. My mother and father would be asleep, after all, and I could enter without fear of being disturbed by curious parents. The problem with that thinking is that my mother who had always a light sleeper slept even worse with Morris’s death. The truth is, she never slept well ever again.

When she couldn’t sleep, she’d walk downstairs and sit in the living room in the dark, often smoking a cigarette. If I woke up during those times, I’d smell the cigarette smoke and hear Mom weeping. Up until that point in the evening I’d heard no creaking on the steps, nor smelled any cigarette smoke. Morris’s room was right next to mine. I decided to give it a shot. I had a small flashlight in my room, which I pulled out and turned on.

I walked over to Morris’s room, the floorboards creaking like never before in history. Forget about my parents. I was sure to awaken the entire block. But I heard no parent stir, so I turned the door handle. Another enormous noise cut into the night. Still no parents. My luck was large that night. I entered Morris’s room and closed the door.

With the flashlight on, I made my way to the closet. On the top shelf sat several boxes. I would have to go through all of them. But I had excellent luck that night. The first box contained the stamp collection. I placed it on Morris’s bed and put the flashlight down next to it. I made my way to the bottom of the box. I rooted around with my fingers and found an envelope that might have contained a record. I pulled it out. There it was. I replaced the box, and opened the door.

My mother was standing on the other side looking haggard.

“Why are you in your brother’s room?” she asked. The tone wasn’t angry or accusatory, more matter of fact. Oh, you’re in Morris’s room. What’s going on?

Several quarts of blood rushed to my head. The record was back in its envelope and in my hand, so not immediately visible.

“I couldn’t sleep tonight,” I said.

“So you went to Morris’s room?”

“I’ve been thinking about Morris a lot lately. I guess I always do when I go to the Yankees.”

“What have you been thinking?”

“A lot of different things. But it all adds up to the fact that I miss him.”

“We all do, you know.”

“I know.”

“So what brought you to your brother’s room?”

“I wanted to see his stamp collection.”

“Why that?”

“Because he and I always talked about it. it’s partly mine, and I wanted to look at them. He’s got some pretty old American stamps that might be worth some money.”

“You went to look in the dark?”

“I didn’t want to bother you and Dad.”

This could have gone on, but my mother wasn’t the KGB. Nobody entered Morris’s room, but there wasn’t a law against it. Besides she had other concerns.

“All right she said. If you want the stamp collection, I don’t see any reason why you can’t have it.”

“Thanks, Mom, but I think I’ll just let it stay in the closet for now.”

“Fine. The Dark Silhouette was good tonight. It ended with him trapped inside a cabin that was on fire.”

“I’ll catch it next week.”

“Goodnight Ira.”

“Goodnight Mom.”

She didn’t ask anything about the envelope I was clutching in my left hand.

Mom went downstairs to smoke cigarettes until dawn, and I went to my room and put the record in the middle drawer of my desk. It would be over a week before I would have the chance to hear it on the phonograph that sat in the living room. But having possession of it, I ceased being anxious about it. Whatever the secret was it had slept for at least two years and the world still spun on its axis. It could remain a secret for a few more days. I slept until eleven the next morning.

I didn’t do so well on the chem exam. My head was working fine, but my heart wasn’t. Every time I tried to study the record sitting in my desk kept distracting me. But it wasn’t only the record. It wasn’t even primarily the record. The conflict between my plan and my father’s plan for me disturbed me that week. We never talked about it, but I had a lingering sense that Dad was feeling the pressure of putting all of his fatherly energy in one bag when he once had two. I was being made to carry the weight for two sons. We all missed him. We all missed him in different ways.

The next Saturday I went to Ebbets Field, but I went alone. My father suffered from gout, and the day before the game the gout hit him hard. Until it resolved, walking was painful. He apologized that he couldn’t accompany me. I told him that I understood, that we’d go together the next time the Pirates were in town. I went alone.

It was a great game. What happened after the game was even greater. What happened when I got home was the greatest still.

Greenberg played first base for the Pirates, Jackie Robinson played first base for Brooklyn. During one of his at bats, Robinson bunted and ran to first. The pitcher threw the ball to Greenberg, but the throw wasn’t straight and it drew Greenberg off the base. He collided with Robinson and he missed the ball. Everybody froze for a split second. How would Greenberg react? He looked at Robinson, Robinson looked at him. The Black man took off for second, and made it.

In the next inning, Greenberg walked. When he reached first, you could see him put his hand on Jackie Robinson’s shoulder while the two of them exchanged a few words. Before disengaging, Greenberg leaned over and whispered something in Robinson’s ear. Jackie smiled. He nodded and the two of them went back to the game.

I don’t know what possessed me. Maybe because of something I read in the papers. Maybe something in that gesture of Greenberg’s at first base. I can’t say.

But after the game I went to the players’ entrance of Ebbets Field and hung around. I was the only one there. I waited for possibly ten minutes thinking all the while what a dumb idea this was. As I turned my back to leave, I heard the wide metal door squeak open. I turned around, and, yes, it was Jackie Robinson. Big number forty-two on his chest. I’d read he always left by himself. He had no friends on the team, and he always left first. He didn’t shower, he didn’t change; he just put his glove in his locker, and he went home.

He looked at me. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I answered.

“You come to see me?”

“Yeah, Mr. Robinson, I…” But no words came out. I was stuck.

“What can I do for you, Mr…”

“Graber. My name’s Ira Graber.”

“Well, Mr. Ira Graber, you want to talk to me, or can I go home and eat my supper?”

“I wanted to ask you something.”

“Go ahead.”

I gathered up my courage, opened my mouth and hoped for the best. “I don’t know how to say it.”

“Best way to say it is to say it my Mama always tells me.”

“Then, Mr. Robinson. How, can do you take it?”

“Take what?”

“All that name calling. Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. I looked at you on the field playing really good baseball. You’re great out there. And it was like you were some kind of criminal. I didn’t understand it. Why do you do it?”

“You want to know if it hurts to be out there like that? Sure it hurts. It hurts all over. How’d you like it if you went out in front of thirty thousand people and sometimes it seems half of them are calling you nigger, or coon, or something. Most games I swear at least once I’m never coming back, and I’ve only been at it for two months.”

“Why do you come back?”

“I got my reasons.”

“Tell me one.”

“Why do I come back? I guess I have to tell you a story. Why don’t we sit down over here?” He indicated a bench, and we sat down.

He said, “When I was a boy we moved to California. I mean my Mama, my three brothers, my sister and me. My Daddy he left when I was one years old. Never seen him since.”

“That’s awful, Mr. Robinson.”

“My Mama did all kinds of work to pay the bills. It wasn’t easy for her, but it wasn’t easy for us, either. It’s never easy being Black. And it’s the worst to be poor and Black. My Mama used to say all we got’s our brains and our muscles. The color of our skin ain’t gonna help us in this world. So we always gotta think hard and we gotta work hard.”

“And that’s what helps you on the field?”

“That’s a part of it. The good Lord gave me some talent and I want to use it the best way I can. But it’s not the whole thing.”

“What then?”

“Well, back there in Pasadena we went to a pretty good church that had a pretty good preacher, a fellow named Reverend Billy Jackson. He was tall and thin, but he had a voice that could call down the Kingdom or shout down the Devil if he wanted. Well I’ll tell you, Ira. It was kind of like you meeting me tonight. I waited one Sunday ‘til everyone left the church. He was in his office and I went to talk to him.”

“What did you talk to him about?”

“Things weren’t easy like I said. And there was a gang. I had a couple of friends in it and they wanted me to join. I told them I would, but I was scared. So I went to talk to my preacher. I told him about the gang and he sat back in his chair and he looked down on me with a pair of eyes that burned. “Son,” he said to me. “I know something about you that you don’t know I know.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I know your middle name.”

I asked, “What is your middle name?”

“It’s Roosevelt, for Teddy not Franklin. I’m named after Teddy Roosevelt.”

I pondered that for a moment while Jackie Robinson gathered his memories.

“”You’re named after the twenty-sixth president of the United States of America,” Reverend Billy told me. I already knew that, but I didn’t get the point. So I asked, “Meaning no disrespect, Reverend Jackson, what are you telling me?”

“He got this stern look on his face and said, “That man was a fighter. He charged up San Juan Hill on a horse by himself. But he inspired men, including the Tenth Negro Cavalry led by General Pershing himself, to follow him. They captured that hill and because of it they won the war. Imagine that. One man on a horse took a hill that won a war.””

Jackie Robinson continued, “I wasn’t a very smart kid. I didn’t understand what the preacher was trying to tell me. So I told him so.

““I’m saying that a Negro with the middle name Roosevelt’s gotta charge up San Juan Hill every day. Every day. A Negro with the middle name Roosevelt’s got to have the courage to get on his horse and ride up the hill, even if no one’s behind him and even if what he’s heading into is ugly. Some day someone will be behind him. And then another day a lot of people’ll be behind him. And then you’ll take the hill. But every morning a man whose Mommy and Daddy had the wisdom to give him the name of a great war hero, and a president of the United States of America, that man’s got to have the courage to get up on his horse and do what’s right. Every day.”

I said, “And that’s why you keep coming to play ball?”

“Every day I do my best out there on the field. I’m lucky, cause I’m pretty good at it. But every day I try and do it even better. Every day I do my best to let all that profane name calling mean nothing to me. And some day I know there’ll come a time when a Black man’ll walk out on to the field and no one’ll call him nigger or coon.”

“Uh,” I said. “Did you join the gang?”

“Hell no, I didn’t join the gang.”

A bus went by and a light breeze sent a candy bar wrapper by us. Jackie Robinson turned his gaze on me and said something to me that still amazes me whenever I think about it.

“Mr. Ira Graber, I’m gonna make a bet you got something on your mind. You didn’t come here for me to be your preacher. But I bet a hundred dollars a young man comes to see me to ask me about my troubles, he’s got troubles of his own.”

So I told him about my brother Morris, about chemistry and my Dad, and about the Anderson Prize. He sat there and listened to the whole story.

“That is a tall burden, my man. What are you going to do?”

“I’m not sure. I want to write. But I don’t want to disappoint my father.”

“You’ll do what you think best. I never had a Dad, but I think fathers may have a reservoir of strength to take a disappointment or two. You’re not gonna get killed in war like your brother. Don’t let not talking honest to your dad kill your hopes.”

“I don’t know what to tell him.”

“I think when the time comes the words’ll come, too.”

I took a breath.

“Mr. Robinson?”

“Yes.”

“I have another question.”

“Any other night I’d only give you one. But tonight’s your lucky night. You get to ask me two questions.”

“What did Hank Greenberg say to you out there tonight?”

“You know something, Ira Graber. That’s one very good man that Hank Greenberg. You remember what happened the inning before?”

“When you ran into each other?”

“Yeah.”

“Of course I remember that.”

“Now I don’t know if you realize it, but if that was any number of people I could think of beside Hank Greenberg that I ran into, there could have been some real trouble out there.”

“What do you mean?”

“A Negro running into a white man like that could have started World War Three. But Hank, he knew it was just part of the game, and we both did what we had to do.”

“So what did he tell you the next inning?”

“You gotta promise not to tell anyone if I tell you, Ira Graber.”

“Sure, I promise not to tell,” I said, and I never did until now.

“Okay, then. When he put his hand on my shoulder, he was asking me if I got hurt when we collided. I said hell no, there’s gotta be more than a little bumping into to hurt me. But then he leaned into me and he whispered into my ear. This is what he said. “Jackie,” he said. “Jackie, I’ve got no great wisdom for you. A lotta people might think a Jewish guy might have something to tell a Negro. Not tonight, anyway. Maybe some other time I’ll have something real clever to tell you. So when I move away, I want you to nod your head like I said something real smart, and smile. And then let’s get on with the damn game.”

“And that’s what I did. I smiled and he smiled, and we got on with the damn game. I’ll tell you, it’s one of the smartest things anyone’s ever said to me. “Let’s get on with the damn game.””

And Jackie Robinson let out a big laugh, and, for that matter, so did I.

“I want to thank you for giving me this chance to talk to you,” he said.

“Thank you, Mr. Robinson. Thanks for sitting here with me.”

“It was my pleasure, Mr. Ira Graber, but it’s time for me to be getting home to eat my supper. And I imagine your Mom and Dad are waiting for you.”

And we started on our separate ways. “Wait a minute, Ira.” I stopped. “Tell me, you live in Brooklyn?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s your Dad’s name?”

“Herb, Herbert.”

“Herbert Graber of Brooklyn?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll remember that,” Jackie Robinson said. “Bye now. You be good son.”

“Bye. You be good, too, sir.”

When I arrived home, I found a note sitting on the table in the foyer. “Dear Ira,” it read. “Grandma fell down and hurt herself. We don’t think it’s serious, but we’re going out to have a look. We shouldn’t be out too late.” It concluded with my mother’s signature.

I called my grandmother. “Grandma, it’s Ira,” I said when she answered the phone.

“Irale, how are you?”

“I’m fine. But the question is, how are you?”

“How am I? I’ll tell you. I was washing the floor and I slipped and fell on my tuchus. After a while it still hurt, so I called your mother and father so maybe they could give me some advice.”

“And what did you do?”

“They came out here, and we decided it was a good idea to go to Montefiore Hospital just in case.”

“And?”

“The doctor told me that I got a sore tuchus and that’s all, thank God.”

“Grandma, you got to be careful.”

“I know. I’m no spring turkey anymore.”

“That’s a spring chicken.”

“Chicken, turkey, okay.”

“Look you have to take care of yourself. Who’s going to give me lunch when I come up to the Yankees if you’re in the hospital with a broken tuchus?”

“All right. I’ll be careful.”

“Where are my parents?”

“They’re here. We just got back from the hospital, and I didn’t want them to go without a coffee. I’m making a pot now. Do you want to talk to them?”

“No, that’s all right. Just tell my father to sit down and lift his leg.”

“Yeah, the gout. What kind of Jewish boy gets the gout?”

My folks wouldn’t be home for at least an hour.

The record.

I ran upstairs and retrieved it from my desk. I brought it down and put it on top of our phonograph. I went to the front door just to make sure my parents hadn’t come back by magic. Then I turned on the phonograph, and put it on. After a few seconds of scratchy static, I heard a voice.

It was the voice of my grandfather.

“Morris,” the voice said. “Happy birthday.”

“Thanks Grandpa.”

He spoke as if he was explaining for posterity. “I brought you to this booth because I wanted to tell you something.”

“That’s what you said. What do you want to talk to me about?”

“I’m going to tell you a great secret Shmulik. I don’t want you telling this to no one.”

“If it’s such a big secret, why are we making a record of you telling me it?”

“Because someday when I’m gone and your grandmother’s gone, you can play the record for whoever you want. But until then, this is just between you and me. Especially I don’t want your grandmother should hear. Okay?”

“Okay. Sure,” said Morris, but his voice said he didn’t understand what could be so important.

“So you remember about how Grandma and I got to America, right?”

“Sure, I’ve heard the story a dozen times.”

“Right. By the way, how much time we have in this booth?”

“I think about ten minutes. But if we have to, we can make a second record.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary. We’ll see.”

“So Grandpa, what’s the secret?”

“You heard the story about how we came to America, right? How I took your grandmother out of our town in the middle of the night. So what’s always the big question about Grandma and me coming to America?”

“Where you and Grandma got the money for the tickets once you got to Hamburg.”

“Right. You’re a smart boy, Shmulik, that’s for sure. How could a man who just deserted from the Russian Army and a girl with no more than a few kopecks in her pocket make it to Hamburg and book passage to America?”

“So how did you get the money, Grandpa?”

“That’s the secret, Shmulik, and that’s what I’m going to tell you. But you got to promise this is between you and me.”

Once again Morris promised.

“So you know I was in the army. I didn’t want to go. No Jew wanted to go. And I certainly didn’t want to go into the army for no twenty-five years. And once I was in, it was worse than I thought. I mean everything about it was terrible. The food was bad and always with pork. We lived in these crap tents. The officers were all anti-semits. Every one of them. There was one who was the worst. Yuri Federov. He was my captain. I remember that name to this day. Every time there was an extra job, he always gave it to the Jews to do, and for some reason I was always first. I really hated that mamzer.

“We played poker two or three times a week. Sometimes a lot of money would end up in the pot, but usually it wasn’t very much. Just enough to make it interesting.

“So one night we were playing. All of us were privates, most of us were Jews. Who should walk into the room that night but Federov. Our game was no secret, and we couldn’t do anything to stop him. He walked in and sat down at the table. He removed a great deal of money from his jacket and set it in front of him.

“Any reason I can’t play?” he asked. We looked at each other. There were six of us. Not one of us wanted to play with him, but what could we do? And he did just toss down a great deal of money. I wondered if some of that money might not end up in my pocket. One of us said, “Sure Captain Federov, join us.” “Wonderful,” he said. “I have to buy my mother a new bed.”

“And we dealt him in.

“I don’t think he was drunk that night, though with Russian officers you couldn’t be sure. They could be drunk all the time for all we knew, so how could we tell a difference? But if he was drunk or sober, he played like a drunk. He was so bad, some of the men began to misplay their hands on purpose just to let him win sometimes. We didn’t want to make him angry.

“Now I don’t know what you know about poker, but poker is really a game of mindreading. That’s where the skill is, knowing how to read the minds of everyone else at the table. I was pretty good at telling what the other guy was thinking. But with Federov it didn’t matter if you were good or not. When he played cards that night, his face was like a mirror. You looked at the face and you could almost tell what cards he had. If he smiled he had something good. If he picked at his teeth, he had a weak hand. It was that simple. He lost a lot of money very quickly. He lost a very big hand to my friend Viktor.

“And then there was one hand where he was picking at his teeth, and he bet a great deal of money. Everybody had already dropped out but me. I met his bet and raised an equal amount. He sat there picking at a tooth like he wanted to push it in. If he matched my raise, I’d win a lot of money. So I sat there looking at him hard, hoping he’d add to the pot. He looked back at me with a finger in his mouth. He picked up the amount I raised, and slammed it down in the middle of the table looking hard at me. But I showed my cards, and he looked at them. He threw his cards in, face down. He picked up what was left of his money and he left the room like someone was shooting a gun at his back. And that was that, I figured.

“Except that later Victor and I were going to the bathroom before going to sleep. We were talking about a certain restaurant in Grodno where we both came from, and how much we missed the strudel the owner’s wife made . The captain came up to us. It was dark and there was no one else around. He had a dagger in his hand.

“Give me my money,” he said. “I need to buy my mother a bed,” he said, like that made some kind of sense.

“Then don’t play poker like a donkey,” I said

And I stood there thinking. I looked at Viktor. What could Federov do? There were two of us. We should give that bastard our money? I said, “No.” I nudged Viktor in the ribs, and we started walking away. He followed us. He grabbed Viktor by his hair and put the dagger to his throat. “Listen, you Zhids, you give me my money or I’m going to cut this one’s throat. There will be one less Zhid in the world.”

“Give him the money,” Viktor said. “Give him the money.”

But I thought Federov was bluffing. You see I was fixed on getting out and how the money I won that night would help, and I really didn’t believe even he would kill to get it back.

“Don’t do it, Captain,” I said. “Murder is murder. Even if you kill a Jew it’s still murder.”

“Give me my money.”

“It’s not your money.”

And he slit Viktor’s throat like it meant nothing. Viktor fell holding his throat and died in a minute.

Federov got down on his knees and started going through Viktor’s pockets looking for the money. I stared at my friend’s murderer now trying to rob him. He must have thought nothing of me, because he just ignored me and went from pocket to pocket.

But I was furious. You can’t see it today, Morris, but I was pretty fast in those days. I jumped on top of him. In his surprise he dropped the knife. One of my hands held on to him by his head, the other reached for the knife. And before I could think clear, I cut his throat. And there were two dead men right in front of me.

"I had just killed a Russian officer. I don’t need to tell you how bad that was.

“I knew what I had to do, if I could. I was already thinking about deserting. Lots of Jews ran away. We heard very few of them got caught, but it could have been a lie. Now I was going to find out. I dragged the bodies into the shadows. I bent down and reached into Federov’s pockets. I found the rest of his money. He had a gold watch in his pocket, too. I took that. I looked around again to make sure no one was looking, and I started running and it was like I didn’t stop until I got home.

“And that’s how when we got to Hamburg your grandmother and I had enough rubles to get on a boat and come to America. Captain Yuri Federov was our benefactor, because he killed my friend Viktor Borowski.”

“Does Grandma know your story?”

“She knows I had money. But I never…”

The record ended without Grandpa’s entire sentence, and there was no second record to indicate what he said.

“What do you think?” Morris asked me.

“It’s an interesting story. Do you think he really held it in all those years?”

“Seems like he never told anyone, not even Grandma, not even Uncle Avigdor.”

“Why?”

“I asked Grandpa the same question while we were walking to the subway that night. He was always ashamed, he told me, that his action got Viktor killed. He could never wipe away the memory of Viktor lying dead at his feet. They knew each other all their lives. The night he and Grandma ran away from Grodno, as late as it was, he saw Viktor’s father through the window of his house. He didn’t have the courage to tell him what happened. He just ran.”

There you have it. My grandfather the candy store owner, the man who made Morris and me an egg cream whenever we stopped in, that grandfather saw his childhood friend murdered and killed a captain in the Russian Army. He took the captain’s money and ran off to America with my grandmother. He lived with that secret until just before he died.

Well, there’s not much more to tell.

The next time my grandmother came for Shabbos, I put on a great magic show with Shelley as my assistant. We even worked out a prank trick where Shelley disappeared. I love that kid.

I sat Grandma down that Saturday afternoon and got the whole story from soup to nuts. I didn’t ask about how she and Grandpa got the money for the boat. She’d either tell me she didn’t know or she’d lie, and I didn’t want to make Grandma tell a lie.

I continued going to the Yankees, although I went to see the Dodgers every now and then. When I went to the Dodgers, I took Shelley. And now we have our own private language and games. Maybe next year, if he wants to, and his mom lets him, I’ll take him up to the Bronx.

I wrote a pretty good story from Grandpa Izzy’s record. By God, it did the trick. It was accepted for publication. The story won me an Anderson.

Oh yeah. Right after the Dodgers won the pennant that year, I received a letter from the head office of the Dodgers. It contained fourteen tickets, divided up between Yankee Stadium and Ebbets Field. A Subway Series. There was a short note with it.

“Dear Ira,

I hope you’re climbing your hill every day. My hill has gotten a little smaller. Thanks for a great talk that night. I look forward to reading your stuff.

Sincerely, Jackie.”

I sent him a copy of my story.

The record sits in the middle drawer of my desk, where it will remain for as long as my Grandma is alive. Every now and then, when no one else is in the house, I play just the beginning. Not to hear the narrative again. No. I listen only to the very beginning just to hear Morris’s voice. It’s the only way I hear it anymore.

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