The Boys of Summer (29 page)

A large-thewed arm reached toward a beam. “I got some bats up here.” He chose two signed “George ‘Shotgun’ Shuba.” Both had been drilled and filled with lead. He set his feet, balancing as he had when my father joked about Franz Shuba, and he looked at the clumped string and I rose and drew closer, and he swung the bat. It was the old swing yet, right before me in a cellar. He was heavier, to be sure, but still the swing was beautiful, and grunting softly he whipped the bat into the clumped string. Level and swift, the bat parted the air and made a whining sound. Again Shuba swung and again, controlled and terribly hard. It was the hardest swing I ever saw that close.

Sweat burst upon his neck. “Now you,” he said, and handed me the bat.

“I’ve been drinking.”

“Come on. Let me see you swing,” he said. Cords stood out in Shuba’s throat.

I set my feet on green and white linoleum. My palms were wet. “Okay, but I’ve been drinking, I’m telling you.”

“Just swing,” Shuba ordered.

I knew as I began. The bat felt odd. It slipped in my hands. My swing was stiff.

“Wrist,” George commanded. “Wrist.”

I swung again.

“You broke your wrists here.” He indicated a point two-thirds through the arc of the swing. “Break ‘em here.” He held his hand at the center. I swung again. “Better,” he said. “Now here.” I swung, snapping my wrists almost at the start of the swing. “All right,” he said, moving his hand still farther. “Snap ‘em here. Snap ‘em first thing you do. Think fast ball. Snap those wrists. The fast ball’s by you. Come on, snap. That’s it. Wrists. Swing flat. You’re catching on.”

“It’s hot as hell, George.”

“You’re doing all right,” he said.

“But you’re a natural.”

“Ah,” Shuba said. “You talk like a sportswriter.” He went to the file and pulled out a chart, marked with Xs. “In the winters,” he said, “for fifteen years after loading potatoes or anything else, even when I was in the majors, I’d swing at the clump six hundred times. Every night, and after sixty I’d make an X. Ten Xs and I had my six hundred swings. Then I could go to bed.

“You call that natural? I swung a 44-ounce bat 600 times a night, 4,200 times a week, 47,200 swings every winter. Wrists. The fast ball’s by you. You gotta wrist it out. Forty-seven thousand two hundred times.”

“I wish I’d known this years ago,” I said. George’s face looked very open. “It would have helped my own hitting.”

“Aah,” Shuba said, in the stuffy cellar. “Don’t let yourself think like that. The fast ball is by the both of us. Leave it to the younger guys.”

In the comedian’s story, Carl Erskine has been having difficulties throwing strikes. Someone scratches a single. Two men walk. Now with nobody out and bases loaded, that paradigm of constancy, the archetypal Dodger fan, rises in Ebbets Field. “Come on, Oiskine,” he bellows. “These guys stink.” A curve breaks low.

“Don’t worry,” the fan shouts. “I’m witcha.” A curve is wide.

“Hang in there,” calls the fan. “You can do it, Oisk.” A fast ball sails high. Ball three.

“Go get ‘em,” the fan shouts. “We love ya, Oisk, baby.” A final fast ball is inside. The batter walks, forcing in a run. “Hey, Dressen,” screams the constant fan, “take that bum out.”

I had all but forgotten the story, a specialty of a comic named Phil Foster, until Erskine, replying to a letter, signed himself “Oisk.” He lives where he was born, in Anderson, Indiana, amid
oaks, sycamores, Hoosiers and memories that resound in Brook-lynese.

When I last saw Erskine, he had shouted from a taxicab near Madison Avenue and Fiftieth Street in Manhattan. That is an epicenter of the advertising world and finding Erskine there was like encountering a poet in a television studio. Not impossible but incongruous. “What are you doing here?” I demanded, climbing into the cab.

“It’s complicated,” he said. A shirt manufacturer had asked him to take executive training and then direct a band of retired athletes selling sportswear. “How much is a house in Westchester?” he said.

“Better figure thirty-five thousand, and up,” I said. It was 1960.

He winced. He had lost some hair. “That’s what other people told me.”

“How do you feel about leaving Indiana?”

“Mixed. This is challenging.”

“How are the children?” I said.

“Fine. There are three now. And Betty’s expecting again.”

The cab stopped in traffic. I had somewhere to get to. I scribbled my number. “It’ll be great having you back.”

“I’ll really call you,” Erskine said, but never did.

Later Ralph Branca explained that the Erskines’ fourth child had been born mongoloid. “A lot of people thought he ought to be put in an institution,” Branca said, his dachshund face more sorrowful than usual. “But Carl and Betty wanted to bring it up themselves. So they took off. They’re gone.” Erskine had stopped house-hunting in Westchester. He had quit his position with the shirt manufacturer. He had brought Betty and all the children back to Anderson. There he felt native and believed he stood a chance to make Jimmy Erskine as fully human as a mongoloid can become.

Near Toledo, I left the Turnpike for Highway 24, which follows
the Maumee River southwest through Ohio towns called Texas and Napoleon and Antwerp. It is a pretty road winding into back country. When you have driven turnpikes too long, you develop a variety of fears. What would happen if, at seventy-five miles an hour, a tire exploded; or if the trailer ahead should lose a wheel; or if suddenly you sneezed with blinding violence? These are, of course, distant possibilities, but the fear is immediate. It is as if the human organism, controlling a vehicle for hour upon hour at the speed of a cheetah in full spring, asserts a protest by exaggerating dangers. Turning onto a country road, and having to cut the speed in half, one is flooded with relief. The road is respite.

“If you want to git to Interstate 69,” a boy said in a gas station at Milan Center, Indiana, “jes’ keep goin’.”

“That the way to Anderson?”

“Where’s Anderson?” To the boy at the pump, Milan Center and the village of Leo, sixteen miles north, were the world.

IS 69 leads down from Huntington County into Grant and on to Madison, through farmland mixed with stands of wood: thick oak, luxuriant maple, hickory, birch, ash, beech. Indiana trees are a deep-rooted, towering breed. The state was forest before man assaulted it with axes and with plows.

Anderson, Madison County seat, is an expanding industrial community, 69,923 strong according to the 1970 Census, up 42.5 percent since 1960 and, some demographers predict, the heart of a one-million-population area when
a.d.
2,000 arrives. The city begins four miles west of IS 69, and as I turned, the sky glowed orange. It had been a long day’s journey and, remembering the Shubas’ V.O., and the Erskines’ earnest baptism, I stopped on Arrow Avenue, and bought a bottle of Scotch from a back shelf. Anderson is a blue-collar town; men there drink blended whisky and Canadian.

The Erskines live on West Tenth in a two-story red-brick building with a modest front yard like ten thousand private
homes in Fiatbush. “Well, it’s about time. We’re getting hungry.” At the doorway, Carl, who was forty-three, looked grayer than I had anticipated. His features were sharp. But the body still held trim. It surprised me when he walked to see him limp.

“You look well.” Betty Erskine, a round-faced comfortable woman, appeared not to have changed at all. She smiled and we sat for a moment in their living room, spacious, nicely furnished and carpeted. On a spinet, against one white wall, a music book stood open to Chopin. Susan Erskine, blonde and fifteen, was studying piano. Looking at Susan, you knew, without asking, that she was a cheerleader for Anderson High. “And Gary,” Betty said, “our second son, is finishing college at Texas. The Dodgers have already drafted him. Danny is rugged, and he plays football for DePauw at Greencastle. And this is Jimmy.”

Jimmy Erskine, nine, came forward at Betty’s tug. He had the flat features and pinched nostrils of mongolism.

“Say, ‘Hello, Roger,’ “ Betty said.

Jimmy shook his head and sniffed.

“Come on,” Carl said.

“Hosh-uh,” Jimmy said. “Hosh-uh. Hosh-uh.”

“He’s proud,” Carl said, beaming. “He’s been practicing to say your name all week, and he’s proud as he can be.” The father’s strong right hand found Jimmy’s neck. He hugged the little boy against his hip.

The Erskines’ den extends square and compact from the living room. The walls are busy with plaques and books. “Would you like to drink the present you brought?” Carl asked. It was after dinner. He went to a cabinet under a bookcase and produced three scrapbooks, bound in brown tooled leather. “Some old fellow kept these. We didn’t know anything about them until I came back here to live.

“I was looking beyond baseball, beyond a lot of things and I enrolled in Anderson College as a thirty-two-year-old freshman.”
Erskine tells stories with a sense of detail. “All right,” he said. “Monday morning. Eight-o’clock class. The start of freshman English. I get to the building. I got these gray hairs. It’s two minutes to eight when I walk in, a little scared. All of a sudden the room gets quiet.” Erskine grinned. “They thought I was the professor.

“I got in about sixty-five credits before Dad died and for a lot of reasons I had to quit. Heck, I wasn’t only a thirty-two-year-old freshman. I became a thirty-six-year-old dropout.”

Betty went for a Coke and a drink, and the ceremony of scrapbooks began. “Here’s one of yours,” Erskine said. “How does it read?” He had opened to the World Series strikeout story:

“John Mize,” Erskine said, “was some hitter. But he had a pretty good mouth, too. All afternoon I could hear him yelling at the Yankee hitters. ‘What are you doing, being suckers for a miserable bush curve?’ Then he’s pinch-hitting in the ninth and I get two strikes. Wham. John Mize’s becomes the strikeout that breaks the record.”

“On a miserable bush curve?”

“A sweet out.”

“Here’s the Scotch,” Betty said. “And a Coke for you, Carl.”

“But I wasn’t out of it,” Erskine said. He was sitting forward on a plush chair, his face furrowed with thought. “After Mize, I had to pitch to Irv Noren. I walked him. All right. Now here comes Joe Collins. I forget the record. All I can think is that the right-field wall is 297 feet away and Collins is a strong left-handed
hitter who has struck out four times. Baseball is that way. One swing of the bat. He hits the homer. He scores two runs. He goes from goat to hero. He wins it all. Collins had the power and I’m thinking, ‘Oh brother, he can turn this whole thing around for himself.’

“That’s in my head. What I didn’t know is over on the Yankee bench Mize and the others have been kidding Collins. They tell him the World Series goat record is five strikeouts. One more and his name goes into the book forever.

“He goes to the plate entirely defensive. He’s choking up six inches on bat. He’s using it like a fly swatter.

“I get two strikes on him real fast. Still, I have this fear of the short porch in right. The last. pitch I throw is a curve and it’s a dandy. It snaps off and it’s about ankle-high. So help me, he swings straight down. He beats it into the ground and gets enough of the ball to nub it back to me. I get my record. Think of the two minds. It ends with me scared to death of the long ball and Collins scared to death of striking out. He doesn’t get to hit the long ball and I don’t get to strike him out.” Erskine grinned and refilled our glasses.

“A great thing about our family comes ten years later. It’s 1963. Sandy Koufax goes out and strikes out fifteen Yankees. We’re living here then, but we see it on television. And one of the boys, looking real blue, says, ‘Don’t feel sad, Dad. You still hold the record for
righthanders.’

“All of the kids give pleasure, in different ways, the older boys, Susan, Jimmy. It’s hard for some to understand that Jimmy is fun. Heck, we had an Olympics for all the retarded kids of Madison County and Jimmy won a big event.”

“What event was that, Carl?”

“Ball bounce. He bounced a basketball twenty-one times.”

Erskine sipped at his Coke. “You wonder, of course. You look for guilt. When was he conceived? Was somebody overtired? Did you really want him? A few months along in pregnancy
Betty got a virus and ran 103. Did that affect Jim? Whose fault is it? We’ve talked to scientists and doctors and you know what mongolism is? A kind of genetic accident. There’s an extra chromosome there that can come from mother or father and no one has any idea why, except that illness or being tired doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it. You establish that, a man and his wife, and go on from there. You’re not alone. Jimmy isn’t alone. There are three thousand retarded children just here in Madison County, and when we came back to live here, there wasn’t any place for them. I’m on a committee. We’ve set up schools. We’re making beginnings.”

Easy in his den, sitting against his louvered bookcases, the son of the Middle Border let his mind range. “The Erskines are Scots. It would have been my great-great-great-grandfather who settled in Virginia, and then moved on to Boone County, Indiana. That’s sixty miles west. I remembered my Scottish background once in the Ebbets Field clubhouse when a lady wrote me a letter. She lived in Scotland and had seen my picture in a magazine. I must be Scottish and a relative of hers. I looked just like her Uncle Willie.”

“Willie Erskine?”

“Or something.”

“How do Presbyterian Scots become Indiana Baptists?”

“Easy. The Baptists take anybody.”

He got up and brought in a dish of nuts and picked up his story. “When my father was very small—Dad, if he were living, would be eighty-six years old—near the end of the nineteenth century, the Erskines left Boone County and moved here. Anderson was a center of glass-blowing, and there was a naturalgas industry. My family had swampy farmland in Boone County they’d gotten for twenty-five cents an acre. Now it’s been drained, and it’s really valuable. But there are Scots and there are Scots. My family sold the land for twenty-six cents an acre, or maybe twenty-four.

“The auto industry came to Anderson long ago and General Motors tied in with an electrical company called Remy Brothers. And that was Delco Remy, spark plugs and electrical systems. There are seventeen local plants. There’s no one who’s been here any time who hasn’t worked part of his life—a year, a month, a week—for Delco Remy.

“My Dad was real interested in baseball, and I guess I had the most promise of his three boys. At night at the side of the house, there’d be four or five congregated for catch. It got to be quite a thing for these older people to play burnout with me. You know. Step closer and closer, keep throwing harder and harder. I’d hang in and end up with a bruised hand. At nine, I was pitching from sixty feet.

“It was Dad who showed me a curve. First he taught what
he
had: the old barnyard roundhouse. You threw it sidearm and it broke flat. No break at all, except sideways. When I was eleven, Dad bought a book on pitching. We’re in the living room. Dad has the pitching book in his left hand, held open with a thumb and he has a baseball in his right hand. He’s reading, and very engrossed. The arm is carried back. The wrist is cocked. At this position you come forward with a snap and a spin of the fingers. He goes through the motion, staring at the book. He releases the baseball. The ball goes through the doorway to the dining room and into a big china cupboard with a glass front. It breaks the glass. It breaks the dishes. We stand there. Dishes keep falling out. My mother comes in.” Erskine’s eyebrows rose in merriment. “Maybe a year afterward my father said that was the best break he ever got on a curve.”

It was the sort of boyhood Booth Tarkington memorialized with a romantic
Saturday Evening Post
glow, but Erskine is an existential man. “I guess there wasn’t any money,” he said. “I needed a mastoid operation and for a long time I’d keep bringing laundry to the doctor’s house. My mother was paying the surgeon by taking in his wash.

“Around 1930 there was a lynching thirty miles north in a town called Marion. The day after it happened, Dad drove me up and showed me where it was. Two Negroes had been taken out of the jail and hung in the jailyard. The bark was skinned off the tree where they were hung. I can still see that naked branch. There had been a scramble. People had made off with things as souvenirs. But there was a piece of rope. I saw a lynching rope before I was ten.” His soft voice carried controlled horror.