The Boys of Summer (24 page)

“I know.” I felt cheated. “That’s the hell of it. That’s the
rottenest thing in this life, isn’t it? The best team doesn’t always get to win.”

Jesse Abramson, the skilled hard-boiled boxing writer, said my dressing-room story showed excessive emotional involvement. Bob Cooke and Irving Marsh agreed. The transpontine madness had me in thrall. “Take a week off,” Cooke said. “Get some perspective.”

I read the newspapers. Nigel Bruce, the great Watson, died at fifty-eight, deserting his confederate, Rathbone-Holmes. Kathleen Ferrier, who made men weep as she sang Mahler’s
Kindertotenlieder,
died of cancer at the age of forty-one. After Herbert Brownell, Jr., Attorney General to President Eisenhower, investigated the personal finances of Joe McCarthy, he cleared the Senator of breaking criminal statutes. That Wednesday night, as ever, I visited my parents for a resumption of
Ulysses
according to Olga Kahn. We tried the chapter in which Joyce describes the birth of Mina Purefoy’s baby at 10
P.M.,
on June 16, 1904, the progress of the language and the development of the embryo coinciding in laborious labor. We drove through it for a listless hour, after which Olga prepared coffee.

“Well,” Gordon said, “at least you can’t complain that it was an uninteresting baseball season. Your assignment certainly wasn’t dull.”

“No, but in the end I felt flat.”

“Maybe you’d enjoy covering another club next year.”

“I’ve got good sources on the Dodgers. I don’t know if I could build up others as good and, anyway, going through the whole thing again would probably bore me.”

“Suit yourself, but isn’t twenty-five early to worry about boredom? By the way, the Erskine strikeout piece wasn’t a bad story, not a bad piece of work at all.” We both felt tired. After coffee Gordon saw me to the door. He was smoking a Pall Mall behind a long, bent ash. His gray eyes were soft, but the deep
voice grated from a cold when he said, “Good night, chief.”

The next day’s newspapers broke the remarkable news that Charlie Dressen was through. Ruth Dressen had written a harsh letter to Walter O’Malley, demanding a three-year contract and O’Malley immediately invited Charlie to the team offices, at 215 Montague Street. He slapped Charlie’s back, indicated a chair and said through a cigar, “Is what Ruth says what you feel you’ve got to have?”

“Yeah,” Dressen said, averting his eyes.

“Then I think we should call a press conference for tomorrow morning. The policy here, as you know, Charlie, is one-year contracts. At the press conference we can announce together that you’re leaving.” Dressen blinked and shook his head. “Me and my wife got to have security,” he said.

“Of course,” O’Malley said. “I wouldn’t try to hold you.”

O’Malley dismissed Dressen and summoned Bavasi and Fresco Thompson. Bavasi recalls that he was willing to argue for a two-year contract, but that Dressen and wife wanted three years or none. Thompson, who could anticipate O’Malley’s moods, lately had lost enthusiasm for Dressen. “It isn’t Hodges’ bat or Erskine’s arm that makes us win,” he had been saying. “It’s Dressen’s brain. We’re thinking of having it sent to the Hall of Fame, collect.”

O’Malley told Frank Graham, Jr., his publicity man, to announce a “very important” press conference for ten the next morning.

“What about?” Graham asked.

O’Malley placed a finger to his lips. “He was tired of Dressen,” Graham says. “I knew there was some resentment of Charlie’s manner and all the publicity he got for himself. But I didn’t suspect what was coming.”

The following morning O’Malley presided suavely. “I appreciate Charlie’s views,” he said. “Many of his colleagues are getting long-term contracts. However, the Brooklyn club has
paid more men not to manage than any other club. The one-year contract is our policy here, and if it weren’t, I’d
make
it our policy.”

“My wife and I,” said Dressen, co-eulogizer of himself, “gotta have security.”

That quickly it was done. A fresh set of realities assaulted me. It was harsh, rather than pleasant, at the top of the baseball business, as it is harsh at the top of any business: survival depends not only on successful striving, as a manager pouring the totality of his being into a pennant winner, but also on avoiding missteps, and so on caution. To Dressen, success made one more strong, and he grew heedless. He did not realize that success, breeder of envy, simultaneously increases vulnerability. He saw himself as the heroic leader, who had managed the Dodgers to successive pennants. He did not see himself as the overbearing, semigrammatical encyclopedist whose indiscriminate chatter with the press, whose innate bluntness and whose blossoming pride made him an irritant to his employers.

I called Dressen on the morning after he was fired. It was Friday, October 16, cloudy but pleasant, and I was assigned to write the follow-up story. “Don’t worry about me, kid,” Dressen said. “I’m in real good shape. Thanks for callin’.” Sitting in his hotel apartment, he assumed that I was offering condolences.

“Bob Cooke wants me to write a story. Will you help me out?”

“Sure. Look. I wanna ride around. Come over.”

All Dressen’s friends had preceded me into his paneled suite at the Hotel Granada. There was Red the Florist, short, sharp-featured and with eyes as furtive as Dressen’s. Jerry the Stockbroker, square-faced, guttural, seemed strangely ominous. Herbie, the balding wire-service photographer, would beg Dressen to put on a cotton-picker’s hat during spring training “so we can get a caption about you weeding out rookies.” Invariably, Dressen obliged.

The hotel living room was furnished in neat, nondescript, overstuffed pieces, covered with flowered patterns. Dull prints hung on the walls, but there were no photographs, no trophies, no plaques, no sign that any person, any couple, lived here.

“Where’s Ruth?” I said.

“In the bedroom,” Dressen said, “brushing the little poodle’s hair. Baby. That’s the name of the little poodle.”

“You gonna write a story about O’Malley?” Jerry the Stockbroker said. “That’s what we got you here for.”

“We’re gonna tell you some things,” Red the Florist said.

“Put them in your paper,” Jerry said.

“The car’s downstairs and Charlie wants me to drive,” Herbie, the bald photographer, boasted.

The Granada Hotel stood at an edge of downtown Brooklyn, between the creeping wasteland of Bedford-Stuyvesant and still lively Flatbush Avenue. Across the street rose the Brooklyn Academy of Music, dun-bricked and massive, where Olga Kahn had heard Serge Koussevitzky propel his Bostonians through Sibelius. Now Koussevitzky was gone, dead for more than two years, and the B.S.O. had been passed on to Charles Munch.

“Get this fucking O’Malley,” Jerry ordered, as we crowded into Herbie’s car.

“Show us somethin’,” Red the Florist said. “Charlie will tell ya. All you gotta do is write it.”

Each of these men, a pretender to Dressen’s friendship, was urging him to attack Walter O’Malley, one of the most important men in baseball. Three fight managers were shoving a middleweight into the ring against Rocky Marciano, crying, “Slug him, punish him, deck the bastard, baby.” There was a survival instinct in Dressen, as well as pride and lunatic optimism, and on this one autumn morning he held his tongue. “The guy in Oakland, Brick Laws,” he said. “I got a job with him. I’m gonna manage Oakland next year.
O’Malley offered me forty thousand dollars. The deal in Oakland is the minors again, but it’s maybe gonna pay more. I got some attendance bonuses and like that.”

The photographer drove out of downtown Brooklyn to Eastern Parkway, and then to Interboro Parkway, the oldest of New York City’s expressways. The Interboro rolls narrowly from Brooklyn toward Queens, winding among cemeteries. Outside the windows soldiers’ headstones freeze sergeant and private in perfect formation, equal now and tidy in death, except where frostheaves have broken ranks. Elsewhere marble angels look toward no one’s home. Mausoleums, obelisks and smaller stones cramp one against the other until a man remembers death defined as joining the majority.

“You
have
to keep driving around here?” I said to Herbie the photographer.

“Charlie likes this highway,” Red the Florist said.

“You’re the only reporter in the car,” Jerry the Stockbroker said.

“You oughta be grateful, not complainin’, the story we’re givin’ you,” Red the Florist said.

What an end, I thought. Three years of a man’s life, the wine of press conferences, two pennants, the exultation of two million fans, come down to driving nowhere with strange men, scowling and cursing among gravestones.

“You’ll be all right with another manager, kid,” Dressen said, suddenly. “At least you ain’t no pallbearer. You didn’t like to see me beat. You’ll be all right.”

“I guess.” Dressen punched my knee, and it struck me for the first time and very hard that the team as I had known it was no more; it was broken up now, history with the tombstones. Whoever managed it, and however well, it would not again be this small-eyed, thick-bodied man, who had never read a book and had mixed his Scotch with black cherry soda and had been boundlessly generous to me.

“Two of ‘em called,” Dressen said. “They wanted me to stay. You can guess.”

“Who?”

“Reese, and the best ball player I ever managed, Robi’son.”

“Well, stay, goddamnit.”

“Nah. I got this here deal in Oakland.”

Back at the
Tribune
, I looked up records for the Oakland franchise. In 1952 the Oakland Oaks had finished seventh. Over the entire season they had drawn 135,784 fans, a good four days of Giant games at Ebbets Field. Charlie’s attendance bonus looked like a promissory note from Willie Sutton.

I wrote a thousand words, describing Dressen’s plans deadpan and suggesting that he would be back in the major leagues with another pennant winner before very much longer. (He never was.) I wondered if this was the last story I’d write about him. Against that possibility, I took pains to recast all his remarks in good grammar. I knew Charlie would appreciate that.

At home in my small apartment on Clinton Avenue in Brooklyn, I poured a drink and turned on the radio. A newscaster was talking about an espionage ring within the Signal Corps, “still operating, according to a close friend of Julius Rosenberg, executed atom spy.” I didn’t care. I looked forward to bouncing the Dressen experience off my father, who, for all his scholarship, shared Charlie’s vital lunatic optimism. It would be cloudy tonight, the announcer said, with a low of 55 degrees. The Dressen experience, as I considered it, sounded like a title for a tract. The whole thing, the Dodger loss to the Yankees and the mousetrapping of their manager, possessed, it seemed as I poured a second drink, certain elements of tragedy.

The telephone rang. It was 6:35. “Are you sitting down?” my sister Emily began.

“Which one?”

“Dad.”

“What? What’s that? Was it at least quick?”

“They think so. He died on a sidewalk. There wasn’t any doctor. They think it was a heart attack. Can you come over to Kings County Hospital? I’m taking care of Mother. They want someone to identify the body.”

I drove down dark streets at reckless speed. The sidewalk was a rotten place to die. Pebbled cement scrapes a twitching face. A man deserves privacy at the end, and anesthesia. Surely my father had earned that for a gentle life. Myself, ungentle, now must stand and call the corpse my father. Would they have stripped him naked? My father’s final day on earth I spent with Charlie Dressen. The dying gasp and grimace on cement. Oh, I hope someone has had the kindness to close the mouth.

Corpse consigned to a licensed mortician, municipal codes conformed to, the $7.52 Gordon had been carrying received and signed for, I guided my mother and sister back to the spacious apartment. We sat in the living room with the French doors and blue-gray walls. The apartment was too large now. Everything had shrunk: books, sounds, paintings, carpets, people. My father’s supper waited in the dining room. A half grapefruit had been cut and sectioned. His blue water goblet had been filled.

“There shouldn’t be a rabbi,” Olga said. “He should have an agnostic’s funeral.”

“Sure,” I said. But what the hell was that?

Olga’s dark eyes bulged. She chattered ceaselessly. It was hard to comprehend that this small iron lady, my mother, was babbling.

“I want a cremation,” she said.

That was sensible, Roman, un-Catholic and sensible. Olga sat on the blue couch, legs crossed, circular face normal, except for the eyes. “My father was cremated,” Olga said. “He was your grandfather, you know. Why don’t you ever talk about your grandfather? Or write about him? He was a remarkable man. Many people would be interested in the story of his life. That
is what you might write, instead of baseball, if you can. Papa’s story. I want the two ashes, both urns, Daddy’s and Papa’s, side by side.”

“I’ll see about a cremation,” I said.

“How can you cremate Daddy? Don’t you know his favorite joke? When he died, he wanted to be cremated. Then, when a lover came to call some icy night, he said, I could scatter his ashes on the ice, so that my lover wouldn’t fall and hurt himself.” My mother’s hands went to her face. The fingers spread and I saw, without hearing, the hands that once played simple Mozart duets with mine.

Joe Blau, an old associate of my father’s, who taught religion at Columbia, and led an Ethical Culture group, said he would handle the eulogy, asserting neither that there is a God nor that there is none.

“That’s about where we are, Joe,” I said.

“I suppose you’re full of his favorite quotations.”

“Sure.” But I was not. I thought for a long time. Applesauce, he had said, and something about Dressen coming back with Erskine and something from
Caesar:
It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come. But that was Shakespeare swelling a scene. “What I remember, Joe, is that he really liked the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh.”

“I can think of many quotations,” Joe Blau said with rabbinic solemnity. “Why don’t you console yourself with one from Socrates? ‘To a good man no evil can come either in life or after death.’”