Pete Hamill - The Christmas Kid

“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.

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!