Pete Hamill - The Christmas Kid

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!

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.”

I followed him back into the funeral parlor.

SHAWN HIGGINS, AGE SIXTEEN, 5 feet 11 inches and still growing, stepped into the kitchen of the railroad flat on the top floor right. He laid two wrapped sandwiches on the table. It was about six o’clock and he was finished with his deliveries from the corner grocery store, where he worked. The source of free sandwiches and tips. He could hear a voice coming from the new television set in the living room. He hurried in to see his Uncle Jimmy, who was parked in a ratty armchair, staring at the solemn black-and-white face of an announcer. The news was, of course, about Korea. That was all anybody talked about over the last two weeks. The new war. More guys being drafted. Others being called back, five years after the last war. The war was on the front pages of the Daily News and the Brooklyn Eagle. The war was on the radio each evening.

“’Lo, Uncle Jimmy,” Shawn said.

“Yeah,” Jimmy said, curling the fingers of his good right arm, but staring at the small set. Patting the white-haired man’s stooped back, Shawn saw tears running down his face. They had to be tears about the war. The new war. The old one. The boy didn’t know what to say and so said nothing. On the mantelpiece behind the television set, down at the left, there was a picture of Shawn’s father, killed at Anzio in 1943, when his only son was eight. He was smiling, wearing his army uniform. Beside it was a second framed photograph, this one of his father with his mother, all dressed up at their wedding. She was gone now, too.

Shawn eased into his room, the only one with a door, the tiny room where his sisters shared a bunk bed until each got married, three months apart, and vanished into Long Island. The room was tiny and hot and smelled of his own dried sweat. The shade was drawn to keep out the heat. Beyond the shade was the rusting iron fire escape. His clothes were hanging off the rack below the top bunk, his shirts and underwear and socks folded on the old unused mattress. His books were stacked on the floor, beside his comics. A Daily News color photograph of Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese was Scotch-taped to the wall. Two days earlier, the Eagle said that even some of the ballplayers could be called up for the new war.

Shawn removed his sneakers, khaki trousers, and underpants, then pulled on a gray bathing suit. He was tying his sneakers again when he heard Uncle Jimmy say “oh” once, then again, and he wanted to hug him. Out at the VA hospital in Bay Ridge, the doctors told Shawn last year that his uncle was okay, except for the shell shock. Christ. When Shawn’s mother died just after the war, of heartbreak, his sisters said, he and his sisters had moved in here with Uncle Jimmy, who would take care of them. They learned quickly that they had to take care of Uncle Jimmy. One sandwich in the kitchen was for him.

Shawn dug out his hand weights from under the bed, a pair of eight-pounders that had once belonged to his father. Now the news was finished in the living room, and he could hear gunshots and horses galloping, as his Uncle Jimmy entered the Wild West. And thought: I have to get us out of here. Leave high school. Get a real job, not just delivering groceries, but real work. And make real money. Get a place on the first floor of some new building. Let Uncle Jimmy sit in a garden, and smell grass or roses, or go walking without help. Gotta do that. Gotta do it soon.

He inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, told Jimmy he was going up the roof. Then climbed the stairs two at a time.

Shawn loved the roof in summer. The tenements were on the avenue between 11th and 12th Streets. They had no backyards. No gardens right outside a door. But on the roof, there was always a breeze blowing from the harbor, and he could stand there and see the skyline of New York, off to the right, and remember that night in 1944 when the lights came on again, on D-day, when the armies landed in France to kick Hitler’s ass. All the women of the block seemed to be on the roof, and their kids, and a few old men, and someone began singing “The White Cliffs of Dover” and he heard those words about peace and laughter and love ever after. Something like that. Knowing it was already too late for his father. Knowing that Uncle Jimmy was there in that France and guys from all over the neighborhood were with him. Not one of them was up the roof that night. They were fighting the war. Shawn didn’t know until a few years later how many of them did not come home.