Island of Divine Music (10 page)

Beg pardon?

You misspelled all those verbs I conjugated on the board the other day.

I’ve always had a conjugal problem.

When she laughed he could see her teeth, which were a little crooked and coffee-stained. At this distance he could see the fine wrinkles around her squinched eyes, the flecks of blond in her red hair, the filigree hem of her slip. Join the club, she said.

That year, the year DiMaggio’s former wife and the president’s gorgeous mistress took an overdose, the Giants were the best team in baseball. They made Paulie miserable and ecstatic at the same time. Here it was September 23 and they were four games behind Los Angeles with seven left to play. Here they had gone out of their way to lose ground in the stretch, and Lu and Joe and all the older men had written them off, but Paulie had to believe in them.

He sensed that his baseball fanaticism made him weird for his age, that he lacked friends for ample reason, even though he was a
nice-looking kid and a good athlete. Paulie had to listen to every game for the rest of the season and perform rituals for certain players, Mays, McCovey, Cepeda, the three Alou brothers, José Pagan, new heroes who’d come to the city of Italian gods like beautiful black and Caribbean Argonauts. He had to squeeze the visor of his cap once and touch his left foot with his right twice before they batted. He had to say the words,
Hum, baby,
in hushed tones and tap his glove with a fist between pitches.

Like DiMaggio, Paulie was tall for an Italian American, and he had a big, level swing which his father always compared to that of the great man. In addition, he was quiet and shy like Joe D., and his game was one which beat you with its beauty and not, as in the case of his father and uncle, with its dogged tenacity. Paulie loved the game and thought it the most blessed and democratic vocation in the world. He loved Orlando Cepeda, he loved the way black guys, or guys who couldn’t speak English, were spoken of like family members at the dinner table. He loved the way little guys and fat guys who would be trampled or laughed at on a gridiron or basketball court could win by their craft and idiosyncrasies, by fashioning a knuckler or a perfect swing, like some artisan at his bench, and bringing it to bear in the clutch.

Baseball touched the deepest place in Paulie. He pictured one spring day in an African valley when some knuckle-draggers learned to feed their young by throwing cobbles at an ibis or swinging branches at hyenas. Baseball felt like what his body was meant to do. The way ballplayers moved embodied some mythic system of personality. The way first basemen and catchers and shortstops and
relief pitchers moved was as distinct from their fellows as figures along nine stations in a zodiac.

And the Giants had it all, but they also had the single greatest player in the game, a man whose presence shone above the others like Achilles driving his chariot before the walls of Troy: Willie Mays. Even so, the Dodgers usually found their weak heel and beat them with pitching and cunning, and now they were ahead by four with seven left, and only a fool would hope as he hoped. He ducked out of school at lunchtime in order to park by the bay and perform his hat and foot rituals while listening to the game against Houston. It worked: the Giants won, and Los Angeles lost to Saint Louis.

On Tuesday neither team played, and Paulie sat in class thinking: Three down with six to play. He didn’t hear Mrs. Rinaldi’s question until she’d repeated it:
Ou est la bibliotheque? Monsieur Paul, attention, s’il vous plait.

She kept him after class again and had him practice conjugating verbs. She made him scoot a desk right up to the board where she wrote the verbs, and when her back was to him he watched the way her dress moved over her hips as she wrote. She turned and leaned over him and had him watch her lips as she enunciated. When he pursed his lips and copied what her mouth did she congratulated him. So, why did you miss class yesterday?

I got sick. Something I ate in the cafeteria.

The next day, Wednesday, he skipped class again and listened on the transistor radio as the Giants beat the Cardinals. Russ Hodges, the Giants’ announcer, kept him updated on the Dodgers’ loss to the Houston Colt Forty-fives. Paulie danced along the bay, on a strip
of scummy sand and sea cobbles near the freeway. A couple of old Japanese men with bamboo fishing rods asked about the scores. They smacked his shoulders, and one of the guys gave Paulie a bottle of beer with an unreadable label. Two down with five to go!

Mrs. Rinaldi saw him in the hall before lunch Thursday and warned him about the trouble he’d be in if he skipped class. The veins in her neck stood out, and she looked older than he remembered. One day of three is a poor average, she said. He tried to guess her age that afternoon, assessing the various parts of her body, her long legs, the loose skin of her upper arms, the nest of wrinkles around her nervous eyes, the flecks of blond or silver in her auburn hair. Neither French nor Italian, Mrs. Rinaldi was a British girl who’d married an American GI during the war, one of his uncle’s golf cronies, a little old man who drank whiskey on the course and sold houses up and down the East Bay. Paulie knew she wasn’t near as old as Pete Rinaldi. That day when he left her class he meandered home in his jalopy, listening to the end of the game as he circled Lake Merrit in Oakland. His team won without his help, but so did the Dodgers. Two down, four to go.

Friday there was a verb quiz, and Paulie thought he did okay. Mrs. Rinaldi looked frayed around the edges when she handed out the mimeographed sheets, as if she hadn’t slept well. Even her dress was kind of lumpy-looking, thick and unpressed. She yelled at two girls for what Paulie thought was no reason. He left class in time to hear the Giants lose, and he blamed himself for not keeping the fires burning.

On Saturday San Francisco split a double-header with Houston,
and Paulie’s dad said, That’s all she wrote. That night the boy cruised in his salt-faded Ford sedan. He drove it slowly up and down the avenue in a myopic daze, waving blindly to passersby. A couple of freshmen he barely knew tapped on the window at a corner, one of them brandishing a quart bottle, and Paulie threw the door open before he recognized them. The boys looked in some transitional stage between hoods and surfers, their hair slicked back, their shirts baggy madras with cigarette packs bulging in the pockets. They urged Paulie to hit his horn when some girls drove by in a ’56 Chevy, and asked who he was going with, but Paulie just shrugged.

It wasn’t just his vision, his entire connection to everything had lost its edge. A Saturday night, some brew, some chicks rolling by in their daddies’ new cars, some guys trying to get a conversation going. Didn’t register. He dropped them at a drive-in and started for home, slipping the glasses on once he’d left the main drag. At a busy intersection he saw a woman on a bus going the other way, a face ghost-doubled by her reflection in the window and half obscured by the strawberry hair falling across her cheek, and for a moment he thought it was his French teacher and slipped his glasses off.

Sunday morning he consulted the paper and was amazed to see that the Giants were down by one with one left to play. How could LA keep losing? He skipped church and took the rooter bus from Richmond to Candlestick among a crowd of old people in dark glasses and hooded sweatshirts, or black windbreakers and baseball caps, near-identical men and women who passed a hat and dropped nickels on total runs, score spreads, number of home runs, number of hits, number of beanballs, maybe number of rhubarbs, who
knows, all entrusted to a wiry old lady with a clipboard and coin pouch in her purse. Paulie was the only kid, and he ran to the ticket booths and managed to get into the bleachers in time to watch batting practice. McCovey slammed one off a girder supporting the scoreboard, and it ricocheted twenty feet above Paulie’s head. The voice on the PA said it was fan appreciation day, and that five people with lucky seat numbers could win a car, but this didn’t include bleacher seats.

The game progressed slowly, punctuated by blasts of maritime wind and islands of sunshine. A subtle raking slant to the light and smoky taste to the air told him that fall was truly here and ball play soon a memory. Southpaw Billy O’Dell threw for San Francisco, and not much happened at the plate for either team until Ed Bailey, a squat catcher who looked like a balding mechanic, cracked a homer near Paulie’s seat, and then, a couple of innings later, Houston hit Billy three times and tied the score, one each. By then Los Angeles had begun playing St. Louis, and the scoreboard that loomed above Paulie at an oblique angle showed the series of zeroes as the innings passed four hundred miles south.

In the bottom of the eighth Willie Mays dug his foot into the dirt and double-cocked his bat. Paulie squeezed his visor and tapped his feet together. The organist squeaked the first bar of Bye, Bye, Baby, and Mays watched the first ball go by for a strike. The song stopped, the crowd fell silent. Mays was zero for his last ten at bats. Paulie whispered,
Hum, baby,
twice. He added a Lord’s Prayer. Willie crucified the next pitch, and the Giants coasted to a win.

Few people left the stadium, however. Paulie and the others
swiveled their upper bodies as if receiving yoga instructions en masse. The scoreboard looming over his left shoulder showed seven zeroes for Saint Louis, six for Los Angeles. In a moment another square zero appeared, and several people clapped.

Paulie dug out the transistor and stuck its nipple in his ear. Russ Hodges blabbered about the car drawing, and Paulie saw a convertible roll out onto the field, as if part of a beauty pageant. A couple of middle-aged guys with New York accents moved into a gap beside him and asked what was what on the radio. One let his hairy forearm lie against Paulie’s knee the way he might with a buddy in a dugout. Who’s up for St. Louie?

Paulie explained that Hodges was getting updates from Vince Scully in LA, but it was kind of periodic. Still scoreless in the top of the eighth. Wait. Fly to left field, caught by Davis. One out.

Jesus, the guy next to him said, does this bring back memories? He started to describe a story Paulie knew well, about the pennant playoff in which Bobby Thompson hit his home run, and though it was a familiar tale of his father’s and uncle’s Paulie hung on every word because this guy had lived in Queens when it happened and could describe the sensation in the streets. His mind felt split in two, with one ear listening to Hodges give the count in LA alongside his patter about Folger’s Coffee while the other ear took in the Polo Grounds and a street in New York in 1951.

An attractive woman stepped onto the field to claim her car, and the crowd cheered. Although her hair was dark, there was something in her manner of walking which made Paulie think of Mrs. Rinaldi, and he pictured her pursed lips as she leaned over him
after school.
Je n’ai pas ta plume, je suis dans mon lit.
I don’t have your pen, I’m in bed. He wondered if she shared a bed with her wizened little husband and hoped that, like Lucy and Ricky on TV, she had her own.

Hodges was talking with Bill King about basketball when he fairly yelped, What? He did what? Just a minute, let’s get that for sure . . .

Something happened, Paulie said. Several people leaned near him now. He leaped to his feet: Gene Oliver hit a homer for the Cards! The guys from New York stood next to him, and the man with the hairy arms squeezed his shoulders as they both hopped up and down, making the plank of the bleachers flex.

There were pockets of applause, scattered sections of the stadium rumbling like the first waves of an earthquake as it might ripple through the concrete structure. The woman on the field turned to wave, and Paulie thought it might be her narrow shoulders and long neck which made him think of his teacher. Then, as the deep, sonorous voice on the PA spread the news, the entire ballpark shook and roared. Some of the Giants jumped onto the field and danced around, and the woman joined in, spinning with Juan Maricial until her dress opened like a flower.

A
n hour later Paulie was on the rooter bus as it rocked above the downtown on its approach to the Bay Bridge. Windows of the skyscrapers were orange with the approach of evening. Half of the passengers were sauced, and the old lady with the clipboard
staggered up the aisle as she handed around fistfuls of coins to the people on her list. Sirens and horns and fire bells sounded all over the city. People waved from their cars, threw cups and scraps of newspaper out their windows. The old guy beside him opened a bottle of Hamm’s, and some of it misted Paulie’s glasses while more of it lapped onto the man’s trousers. Paulie closed his eyes as the bus entered the understory of the bridge.

S
ince the pennant playoff games were televised in the evenings, he didn’t skip French. Mrs. Rinaldi made him sit in the front, and he could smell her perfume and chalk dust. It made an ecclesiastical mixture, a memory of limestone, rosewater, and incense.
In nomine patris, et filii, et spiritus sancti, amen. Je n’ai pas ta plume, je suis dans mon lit.

His entire family sat before the black-and-white TV eating meatloaf and watched the Giants clobber LA eight to nothing in the first game. His brother Angie taunted the Dodgers’ hitters between pitches: Hey batta, hey batta, hey batta,
SWING
batta!

The next evening started out the same, to the point of boring his sisters and parents, and Paulie couldn’t believe how those poor bastard Dodgers were crumbling. He’d seen them beat San Francisco more often than lose to them, and usually by the craft of Sandy Koufax or Don Drysdale, who would shut them out, or little Maury Wills, who would bunt or walk or beg his way to first base, steal second, and score on either a hit-and-run, sacrifice fly, or weakly slapped base hit. None of the Dodgers seemed to know how to
swing a bat, in Paulie’s estimation, but they could make contact and move runners home. He heard Russ Hodges say that they were now scoreless in the last thirty-five innings! Poor luckless bastards. He went to the kitchen and fixed a salami sandwich.