1957

It is the cool sweet aftermath of a summer’s day in East Armitage, Long Island, America. None of the terrible things that will happen to the world have happened yet. Richard Nixon is not yet President. Sputnik has not been launched. The Dodgers are still in Brooklyn. Montovani and the Everly Brothers play out of AM car radios.

On field Number 3 of Luther Armitage Park, the Meadowbrook Plumbing Supplies “Giants” are having team practice. Baseballs fly back and forth across the diamond. The boys are fifteen and sixteen, their bodies like balsawood kite frames, strong and kinetic under their smooth skins, intoxicated by their new musky scents.

One boy’s body is not strong or kinetic. Bruce “Porky” Devlin stands alone in right field. His belt strains at its last loop. His glasses rest on his freckled, marshmallow cheeks. He had been staring into the blazing ball of the setting Sun, watching the rubble of colored ornaments float across his cornea, while trying to hum the tune of Old Macdonald backwards. He looks like a person who will always be vulnerable to surprise.

When the batting coach lofts a lazy fly ball in Bruce’s direction, he does not break instinctively with the crack of the bat. He does not pivot and lope with inherent grace to the point of intersection with the descending baseball. He does not elevate his gloved left hand beside his ear and squeeze the ball firmly in its leather pocket.

No.

When the cries of his teammates roust him from his reverie, yelling PORKY, GO BACK, GO BACK, he thinks they mean to the beginning of the song. The ball plops into the grass twenty feet behind him. When he squats to retrieve it, the seam across his doughy backside gives way. He is not immediately sure what has happened until he feels the cool current of air between his legs. He scoops the ball with his glove into his bare hand and throws it back to the infield. He has a decent enough arm. But now what? He can remain out there as if nothing catastrophic has happened. Or he can do something else. But no alternate plan comes to mind.

The adult in the coach’s box on the first base line beckons the boy in with a curt nod of his head. It is a studied gesture, meant to convey an aura of steely resolve, of eyes that see deeply and with profound understanding. But the man’s body is too indoorsy to carry it off. He is still dressed in the pleated grey trousers, the short-sleeved white shirt and cordovan oxfords he wears at the Nassau County Courthouse where he is the head legal stenographer.

Bruce trundles in toward the bench holding his glove behind his pants. He says,

“Sorry, dad.”

Vern does not glance at the boy, but keeps his gaze focused out on the diamond. “On the field you call me coach.”

In the shade of The Great Potato, the twenty-foot tall Plaster-Of-Paris sculpture honoring the town’s recent past, Bruce’s best friend, Kenny Danziger, is limbering up. Tall and lanky, square shouldered with alert probing eyes, Danziger is by far the best pitcher of the eight-team Babe Ruth League. His motion is pure elegance. His arms hang still at his sides until he leans forward over his right leg. They swing once over his head as his hips rock back. His left knee rises, torques to the right, his body always in perfect balance. His back foot pushes off against the pitching rubber, sending all the coiled force toward home plate, left leg preceding his torso, taking the strain off his arm and leading it fluidly from behind his back over his head and whipping forward and down. It looks like nothing. Until the ball has exploded into the pocket of the catcher’s mitt with the batter still waiting to see what will happen.

Bruce knots the sleeves of his lightweight jacket around his waist so it drapes over the ripped seam and scuttles over.

“What were you doing out there in right field,” Danziger says, “auditioning for Clown School?”

“I lost it in the sun.”

“You are too much in the Sun.” Danziger glances meaningfully toward Bruce’s father, but the reference to Hamlet sails by unnoticed.

With the team’s regular head coach, Bob Springer, is inexplicably absent, Vern hustles to the mound to pitch batting practice. His leather bottomed shoes slip all over the dirt and his arm is not practiced enough to throw strikes. His pitches balloon over the batter’s head, or when he tries too hard to aim, bounce in front of the plate.

“Swing at something,” Vern goads. “It’s called batting practice not walking practice.”

Danziger trots nonchalantly out to the mound and asks permission to throw a few pitches to loosen up a kink in his arm. It amazes Bruce how Danziger can talk to adults. At sixteen, he’s only a few months older than Bruce but it seems as though he is seeing life for the second time. With Danziger throwing, every pitch comes in belt high at perfect hitting velocity. Compact leadoff man Ed Bliss raps two solid line drives. Stan Bliss watches his son from behind the backstop. He is short and round-shouldered with a five o’clock shadow that gives him a furtive, weasely look. He growls out of the side of his mouth for his boy to blast one over the fence.

Bliss taps the bat on the plate and challenges Danziger to put something on it. There is no indication that Danziger has heard him, but with the same effortless motion, his next pitch cracks across the plate before Bliss can blink. Suddenly feeling overmatched and scared, Bliss digs in and sets for another fastball. Danziger throws him a slow curve that Bliss misses awkwardly. The senior Bliss growls at Danziger to stop showing off. The next three pitches come in belt high and easy. Bliss tries too hard to kill them and barely nubs them out of the infield.

The players hit in their usual batting order, first-stringers followed by the subs. Bruce is already on the bench taking off his cleats when it’s his turn. Danziger flings his mitt at him and tells him to get up there and take his cuts. “Nah,” Bruce says. “It’s getting dark.” Nobody argues or seems much to notice, except for loudmouth Ray LaFuqua, who accidentally on purpose shoulders into Bruce, knocking him back down onto the bench as he was getting up.

Cookie Devlin is kneeling alongside the bushel of crabgrass she has uprooted from their front lawn when Vern’s 1955 two-tone Dodge Coronet pulls into their driveway. She is wearing a checkered sleeveless blouse and orange pedal pushers. Her thin face and wiry body bear some resemblance to Kathryn Hepburn, but without all the pesky self-assurance. She greets her boys with a cheerleading smile.

“How was the game?” she asks. “Did you win?”

“It was only a practice, ma. Mister Springer died.”

“What?”

“He did not die,” Vern stipulates. Inaccuracies nettle him. Imagine a mistaken transcription like that in court.

“You said he might die.”

Vern allows that he might.

Cookie is horrified. “What happened?”

Vern is reluctant to answer in front of their gossipy neighbor, Vivian Reemis. She is leaning against the split rail fence that bounds their adjacent properties, sipping what is no doubt her second or third Tom Collins from a perspiring purple fiesta cup. She is wearing yellow Bermuda shorts, a mistake, given her elephantine thighs. Her Italian husband is a good bit older than she and rarely seen. Rumors abound.

She tips her glass and bids Cookie a good night. Vern has the grinding suspicion that Vivian calls his wife Cookie to aggravate him. Cookie is his private name for her, and he wants sole dominion over it. The rest of the world can call her Helen.

“What happened?” Cookie has held her breath until they are inside their own kitchen.

When Bob Springer had not shown up to practice, Vern had loaded the team’s equipment bag--all their bats and balls and catcher’s equipment--into the trunk of his car and driven directly to Springer’s house. They live a few blocks away, in the same subdivision of homes, called “The Russets.” All the streets are named for potatoes. The Devlins are on Fingerling; the Springers on Spud Circle.

Bob Springer is a huge man--six foot six, two-eighty. His wife, Annette, is barely five feet tall, and so blond she gets lost in backlight. When Bruce pictures them doing it, he thinks of a walrus swamping a kitten. One of Springer’s co-workers had phoned from the nearby air force base, where Bob is a civilian loader, that he had suffered a heart attack and been taken to the hospital. Bruce had never before seen a grown-up cry. He has staked his hopes on the belief that inconsolable grief is something people grew out of.

Wednesday is chicken chow mein night at the Devlins. After dinner, Vern and Cookie settle down in front of their snappy new fourteen-inch RCA to watch Father Knows Best. Bruce’s bedroom window looks onto their back yard. Fireflies waver slowly through the low altitudes. He is sure the pattern of blinking lights contains the answers in semaphore to everything he needs to know about how to live a happy life, if only he could crack the code.

The block they live on is a short rung between the two long ladders of Russet Road North and Russet Road South. His window looks out on the back yards of the two rows of houses that front those streets. Occasionally, when Carol Klemming forgets to close her blinds, Bruce can catch a glimpse into her bedroom. He has spent many an idle hour imagining himself as Carol Klemming’s bra. When she stretches and yawns in Algebra class, he thinks of those cramped mounds of sumptuous flesh imprisoned behind their steel and canvas towers, knowing that he could carry them with the care and compassion that no inanimate device could ever supply. He pictures himself weightless and invisible perched astride her back, his legs locked around her waist, her twin treasures perched in his open palms, anticipating when to clutch more them tightly for support--say in gym class when she has to lunge at a volleyball--and when to relax and allow them to present themselves proud and unfettered.

In real life she has the temperament of a hornet with a hemorrhoid. The one time during biology lab when she caught him trying to catch a peek, her expression was so sour it could have curdled milk. Still, contempt is a cheap price to pay for the proximity to sex. For in this “Sahara of Dissatisfaction,” (Danziger’s phrase in an essay he wrote for the school paper), where a girl’s sexual desire is locked away in a safe deposit box that can only be pried open with an engagement ring, even the rumor that somebody is doing it gives you hope that somehow it might accidentally happen to you. And the signs are overwhelming that Carole Klemming is doing it. First off, she’s dating a guy from Cornell. Logic alone tells you college guy is not going to drive four hundred miles every weekend just to cop some bare elbow. Real confirmation came from the one unimpeachable authority on all things female, Danziger’s older brother Terry. TD knows things about women that even women don’t know about themselves, like that their lipstick blot on a tissue is an exact replica of their pussy.

Armed with this information, at the end of homeroom after the girls have finished combing out their hair and putting on their eye makeup and lipstick, the guys scavenge through the garbage pail for their Kleenexes. It’s like reading their secret diaries. The lip blots for nearly all the girls are pairs of thin straight lines going nowhere. But Carol Klemming’s are thick and lush as skywriting on a windy day. Her tissues have become mediums of exchange with established conversion rates. Bruce keeps one folded in the secret compartment of his wallet alongside his other two treasures--the condom that he once unwrapped and put half way on and then tried to re-seal in its foil wrap, and the duplicate key he has made to his father’ car.

He calls to his parents through the closed door of his room that he’s going to Kenny’s, softly enough so there is no way they’d hear him. Not that they’d object exactly, but there would be his mother’s redundant warnings about being careful on his bicycle, and his father’s reminders about what time he’s due home, all of which would clatter in his brain like tin cans tied to his back wheel.

His belly scrapes across the wooden desk that Cookie has fashioned for him out of an unfinished pine door that she has mounted on a pair of three-drawer dressers and ingeniously fit under his window. He alights onto the cement patio where his fat-wheeled Schwinn is propped against the redwood picnic table. He tiptoes past Vivian Reemis’s side door so their idiot German Shepherd won’t start barking at him and banging his brain-damaged head against their dining room window.

He runs the bike down the inclined driveway, and then mounts it like Gene Autry on Champion. He pumps hard up Fingerling North, stands on the pedals and tilts his head back and closes his eyes. He loves the feeling of the night air in his face and the sound the tires make hissing through the puddles left by people watering their lawns at night. Everybody is locked in mortal combat against crabgrass, which Danziger calls the metaphor of the twin horrors of the age, cancer and communism.

Chez Danziger is in its usual state of chaos. Danziger’s parents are fifteen years older than all the other parents, Kenny being the younger brother, not the first born like everyone else they know. The elder Danzigers remind Bruce of trolls that reside under bridges. Mrs. D. has a thin complaining voice and never makes eye contact. She is wearing the same faded pink housecoat and slippers she had on this morning when Bruce called for Kenny. Danziger’s father is in his brown pleated trousers and an undershirt. His dinner is on the table, a single plate. At this late hour he has only just come home from the linotype plant where he works in lower Manhattan. Twenty years bent over a hot letterpress has worn him down like an overused letter ‘e’ that is barely readable. Bruce has the momentary impression that Danziger’s father is looking to him for solace. Either that or giving him a horrified warning about what’s in store for his future.

Danziger herds Bruce upstairs and shuts his bedroom door. His room is the size of a box kite. Smaller even than Bruce’s room, which is the smallest of the three bedrooms at the Devlin home, the master being occupied by his parents of course, the second largest being kept vacant and called the “Just In Case” room.

Bruce is excited. It is rare that he has information to impart to Kenny. The current always goes in the other direction. “Mister Springer might die,” he says.

“We all might die.”

“But him a lot sooner. Some kind of heart attack I think.”

“Well…he’s lived a lot of height years.”

“Height years? Is that like dog years?

“More like foot candles. Or the Temperature-Humidity index.”

“I see,” says Bruce.

“Balooch, I think you almost do. That’s what I love about you.” Nobody has ever said love to Bruce before. It’s weird that Danziger can do it so casually. He fishes a pack of Luckies out of his drawer, lights up, and offers one to Bruce.

“They let you?”

“Like they have a clue.” His long right pitching arm opens the window. He huffs a stream of smoke out the hatch.

Bruce picks up a book splayed open on Danziger’s pillow: On The Road, by Jack Kerouac. “What’s it about?”

“The rat-a-tat bebop heartbeat of a generation.”

“I’m glad I asked.”

“You should read it.”

“You steal it from Terry?”

Receiving only a non-committal shrug in reply, Bruce describes with great excitement his own reading adventure — The Search for Bridey Murphy, a book about a housewife who gets hypnotized so she’ll quit smoking, but in the process gets age-regressed to a previous incarnation in Ireland in the Seventeen-forties. Bruce is proud of the familiar way he uses the technical terms like hypnotic trance induction, as if he’s participated in many serious conversations on the topic.

“That hypnotism crap is all staged,” Danziger informs him. “It’s worse than wrestling.”

“You’re wrong. When she’s in the trance she talks with an Irish accent. And she knows things she couldn’t possibly know if she didn’t live back there.”

“Well then, it must be true.” Danziger pats Bruce affectionately on the head.

Bruce glances at a few paragraphs of Kerouac and tosses the books aside. “I’ve been thinking of taking hypnotism lessons,” he says.

“That sounds like a venture your parents would eagerly fund.”

“Do you think it’s too late to be a child prodigy? I’ve always hoped that’s what I’d be.”

“At what?”

“See, that’s the problem. I don’t know what I’m good at.”

Danziger’s mother’s shrill voice grates up the wall. “Kenneth, are you smoking?”

“No!” His tone is blunt and dismissive and carries none of the politeness he bestows upon strangers.

Mrs. D caterwauls from downstairs about it being time for his friend to go.

“The third highball always brings out her charm.”

Bruce guesses the time before looking at his watch. The watch is his prize possession. He won it when he was twelve by sending in the winning baseball question to Happy Felton’s “Talk To The Stars,” a fifteen-minute TV show that follows every Brooklyn Dodger home game, where fans send in baseball questions that are answered by the two stars of the day’s game while you get to talk directly to one of them on the phone. Bruce got to tell Duke Snider he played a great game.

He guesses 9:09. He hits it to the minute. He wonders if there’s such a thing as a time prodigy.

When they have finished watching TV, Vern comes into the kitchen where Cookie is drying and putting away the supper dishes. Vern’s mind has been miles away. “The Giants are a mediocre team under Bob Springer,” Vern begins. “ I think I can make them a winner. What do you think of my taking over the team if he dies?”

Vern takes the dishtowel from her hand so she can listen. He puts his hands on her waist. It makes her feel like they are roller-skating. “Cookie, I have a vision. I see you and me on Labor Day leading the Founders Day Parade down Luther Armitage Turnpike.”

“Me?” She flushes all over. Why would I be there?”

“Because the pennant-winning team leads the parade. And the manager leads the team. If I’m the manager, who do you think is going to be team mom?”

By the time Vern finishes telling her about the Sunday barbecues, the picnic table loaded with burgers and dogs and Kool-Aid and coleslaw, the back yard alive with boys eating and horsing around, Cookie feels more married to Vern than she has ever felt.

Now, if only Bob Springer would die.