Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (19 page)

“He’s had it,” disagreed my mother. “Bring on Erskine.” But it was Ralph Branca who began the long walk to the pitching mound. I was horrified. Images of Branca’s other failures filled my mind—his reputation for giving up hits in tight situations, the home-run balls he had pitched to Bobby Thomson and Monte Irvin in the first game. “No,
no,” I whispered, addressing my entreaties to the empty, indifferent air, “please send him back; anybody but Branca.”

But my pleas were fruitless. The stage was set, the moment irrevocable. Ralph Branca stood on the mound, the destiny of millions in his hands. And Bobby Thomson was advancing to the plate.

“Don’t worry,” Jeanne said to me. “Everything’s going to work out.”

“This is it,” announced Charlotte. “He’s going to hit a homer right now and win it for the Giants.”

Almost instantly, before I could even feel angry, my hands clenched, my body rigid, I saw Thomson swing. Then came the never-to-be-forgotten voice of Giant announcer Russ Hodges. “There’s a long fly…. It’s gonna be … I believe.” He stopped for a moment. Then, as the ball dropped majestically into the lower deck of seats, there came that horrifying shout. “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”

I threw down my scorebook, the last page never to be completed. For a moment I believed that my sister’s prophecy had influenced the outcome and I hated her with all my heart. That night and the following day, I couldn’t bear to talk about the game, nor did I read the papers the following day, though I did catch a glimpse of Branca stretched out alone on the clubhouse steps. I was told that he couldn’t stop crying, repeating over and over, “Why me, why me?”

It was the worst moment in my life as a fan, worse even than any loss to the Yankees in the World Series, and clearly I was not alone. From that moment to this, Bobby Thomson and the Brooklyn Dodgers would be forever linked, the mere mention of his name calling forth in every Dodger fan instant recognition, comradeship, a memory of
where they were, how they felt. I now live in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, not far from the Old North Bridge, where the American Revolution began. Whenever I take visitors to see the monument, and stand before the marble shaft, reading that lovely inscription which commemorates “the shot heard round the world,” I think privately of Bobby Thomson’s home run.

Despondent and humiliated, I could not make myself return to the butcher shop to complete the last entry on the Bryn Mawr bulletin board. When walking to and from school, I would cross to the opposite side of the street so they couldn’t see me. After almost a week had passed, a large bouquet of red roses arrived at my door addressed to me. It was the first time anyone had sent me flowers.

“Ragmop, please come back,” the card read. “We miss you. Your friends at the Bryn Mawr Meat Market.”

My excitement about the flowers drowned my humiliation and pain over the Dodgers’ collapse. I ran to the store to thank them, and while I was there, I took a deep breath and made the final entry.

M
Y FIRST EXPOSURE
to the Cold War that dominated American politics in the decades after World War II came through the disheveled figure of Whittaker Chambers, the most notorious alumnus in the history of South Side Senior High School in Rockville Centre. Chambers’ sensational accusation that a high-ranking State Department official, the patrician and greatly respected Alger Hiss, had spied for the Soviet Union, catapulted him into the national spotlight. Chambers went on to provide the House Committee on Un-American Activities with the names of other government officials who, he alleged, had secretly served the Soviet Union. His testimony helped inaugurate a search for traitors in our midst; and, not incidentally, gave an enormous boost to the political career of Richard Nixon, who, like John Kennedy of Massachusetts, was a war veteran serving his second term in Congress.

However one felt about Chambers, and judgment was
seriously divided, he had become the most controversial of our local citizens. Memories were searched for tales from his boyhood, for the origins, as it were, of this traitor turned patriot. He had, according to rumor, made a suicide pact with his brother Dick, but after Dick had killed himself, Chambers reneged on his end of the deal. Later, he scandalized our area of Long Island by bringing a woman of “low repute” to live in his mother’s house. Although I heard these stories and more, the only one that hit home was the tale of his outrageous class-day address—a story I first heard while listening to my sister and her friends discuss the graduation oration which Jeanne had been chosen to deliver.

“I’m going to pull a Chambers,” Jeanne asserted.

“What’s a Chambers?” I asked.

Some thirty years ago, Jeanne’s friends explained, Chambers had been selected by his classmates to compose a class prophecy. When he submitted his speech to the principal for required approval, his cynical, vituperative remarks were deemed inappropriate. Unless he changed them, he would not be allowed to speak. He made the required revisions, but on the appointed day, he reverted to his original speech, which, among other unsavory passages, predicted a career in prostitution for one of his classmates. Angry school officials forbade him to attend the graduation ceremony the next day. They withheld his diploma until the middle of the summer, when his distraught mother, arguing that his artistic temperament had gotten the better of him, finally persuaded them to release it.

Jeanne’s friends explained that it was a great tradition to follow Chambers, that it was Jeanne’s responsibility to deliver a perverse speech—to tell her classmates that they should aim low rather than high, follow their self-interest
rather than their ideals, be ready to snitch on their closest friends if it would help them to get ahead.

“You’d never do that, would you?” I asked, not liking the whole business one bit, but Jeanne and her friends simply smiled. By the time Jeanne stood up to deliver her speech on the theme “So Much to Remember,” I was anything but relaxed. As soon as she began to speak, however, I realized that they had been teasing me. Jeanne delivered an idealistic speech, and received a warm welcome from the audience. I was so relieved that I couldn’t even remember to be annoyed. But, clearly, Chambers had left his mark in our small world, his name connoting unimaginable transgressions.

In the larger world, the apprehension that communist subversion was undermining America, heightened by Chambers’ disclosures, was intensified enormously by news that the Soviet Union had exploded an atomic bomb. It seemed inconceivable to many that the Russians had mastered nuclear science on their own. Traitorous spies must have provided the secret. The search for communist sympathizers in the government spiraled into a nationwide hysteria.

Now that America no longer had a monopoly over nuclear weapons, the devastating power which had brought the Japanese to their knees might be turned against us. The threat of an atomic attack not only changed the course of the Cold War; it produced reactions which filtered down from the offices of government into the lives of an entire generation of young people. To us, the Cold War was not an abstraction. It was the air-raid drills in school, the call for bomb shelters, and exposure to the deliberately unsettling horror of civil-defense films. Our generation was the first to live with the knowledge that, in
a single instant, everyone and everything we knew—our family, our friends, our block, our world—could be brought to an end. If a bomb exploded in Manhattan, which was considered a likely target, its fireball would vaporize everything from Central Park to Washington Square, and produce deadly fallout over a twenty-to-thirty-mile radius. On the basis of some obscure calculation, we were informed that the bomb’s impact would reach Rockville Centre in twelve minutes.

The air-raid drills conducted by our school were treated with the utmost seriousness. When the shriek of sirens interrupted our studies, we practiced two different drills. On the assumption that the bomb was close by, we were to fall to the floor, face down beneath our desks, elbows over our heads, eyes shut. Although I could never figure out how my flimsy desk, with its worn inkwell and its years of name-scratching, could protect me from the atomic bomb, I did what I was told, and kept absolutely still while we awaited the shriek of the falling missile. In the second drill, designed for situations in which there was time to take cover, teachers led us into the hallway and down into the basement, where they directed us to lean against the wall and fold our arms over our heads.

We were told to practice the first drill—the one which anticipated an imminent explosion—at our homes at night, so we would be prepared to fall out of bed and onto the floor with maximum speed. Between these practice “atomic fallings,” and the hundreds of prayers I said each night for my own account, for the poor souls in purgatory, and for my family and the Dodgers, it is a wonder that I ever got to sleep.

My Catholic faith provided one peculiar benefit to offset the possible destruction of the entire world in a nuclear holocaust. I had always assumed that my afterlife would
require many restless years in purgatory before I was lifted into heaven. If my death coincided with the last day of the world, however, there would be no layover in purgatory, for on that last day, we were taught, Christ would pass a General Judgment on all the men, women, and children who had ever lived, sentencing each person either to heaven or to hell.

But what if the bomb fell, whole cities were destroyed, and yet some people survived? Though we understood there was no hope of living if the bomb fell directly on our village, the civil-defense authorities optimistically assured us that, with twelve minutes’ warning and with efficient civil-defense mechanisms in place, the casualties in our city could be reduced by 50 percent. I remember seeing a film in school:
How Can You Stay Alive in an Atom Bomb Blast
? The narrator described a self-contained underground shelter which could be built in your backyard for less than two thousand dollars. More practical for most people was the film’s suggestion that an existing basement could be converted into a shelter, and stocked with canned foods, soft drinks, candles, and a first-aid kit. The film also extolled the importance of civil-defense volunteers, who would assume all manner of responsibilities in case of an attack, serving as air-raid wardens and auxiliary policemen, and directing people to emergency shelters.

At regular intervals, the entire town, participated in what were called “Atom Attack Tests.” All pedestrian and vehicular traffic was brought to a halt when the siren rang. Thousands of volunteers were mobilized, including Boy Scouts and high-school seniors, to act the role of casualties and evacuees. Victims were carried to emergency hospitals; makeshift shelters were supplied with cots and blankets. In one location, volunteer firemen fought to subdue a blazing pit of oil, nearly blinded by thick “smoke” provided by
a fog machine that belonged to the Public Works Mosquito Division. Others fought a simulated apartment-fire without the aid of water, on the assumption that an atomic blast would put the water mains out of service. The films and demonstrations were not meant to frighten us, we were told, but to prepare us. No amount of preparation, however, could hide the gruesome fact that an atomic bomb would kill tens of thousands of people, and, as the leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, would later express it: “The living would envy the dead.”

Not wanting to dwell on such macabre thoughts, I concentrated on how to find a safe and pleasant shelter for my family and my friends, one that we could reach in the space of twelve minutes. To my mind, my own basement was terribly inadequate. It didn’t offer even the makings of a proper shelter. No matter how many cans of food we stockpiled there, it remained an unfinished room with no rug on the concrete floor and no couches or chairs. The room contained little besides an old Ping-Pong table, my father’s tools, and our Bendix washer with its clear glass face that allowed you to watch the clothes tumbling through the cycles. I did not think I could tolerate staring at that washer, week after week. The Friedles’ finished basement was much more inviting, but I worried that it wasn’t big enough to accommodate our family along with all the Friedles.

My solution was just around the corner. One day, when shopping for my mother in the delicatessen, I accompanied Mrs. Probst to the basement to find a cardboard box that my mother needed for storage. The staircase led us into a large room stocked with hundreds of cans of food and supplies. As we crossed the room to pick up an empty box, I saw a metal door at the far end of the darkened basement. I questioned Mrs. Probst and she explained that
on the other side of the door was the basement of the soda shop, and that all the stores were connected. Instantly, I envisioned all the doors flung open, creating one block-long rectangular space which provided access to the stores and supplies above, and could accommodate our entire neighborhood below. Everything was there. With Doc Schimmenti as our resident physician, we could use the supplies in the drugstore to set up a makeshift infirmary, complete with Band-Aids, Ace bandages, and all sorts of drugs and medicines. The rack of best-sellers would provide reading material, supplemented by the magazines and comic books from both the drugstore and the soda shop. Canned peas, string beans, tuna fish, peanut butter, and soups would be available from the delicatessen. In a pinch, the huge burlap bags filled with sawdust beneath the butcher shop could provide bedding.

This was too big an idea to keep to myself. Before the afternoon was over, I had visited every store to explain how, once the siren sounded, we could set in motion a system whereby we all worked together to move everything we needed into the connecting basements as quickly as possible. I volunteered to inform the entire neighborhood of the unique opportunity that was available and how best to utilize it. Mrs. Probst nodded approvingly, and Doc Schimmenti patted me on the head.

Later that afternoon, I stopped in the butcher shop to ask Max and Joe if I could leave a few things in the corner of their basement so I’d be ready to move in when the bomb fell. I planned to store my baseball cards, a Monopoly board, a box of my favorite books, and, most important, my collection of scorebooks from previous years. If we were trapped for days or even weeks, I could entertain everyone by re-creating virtually every Dodger game that had been played over the past few seasons. Although the
butchers endorsed my plan, they convinced me that it was unnecessary to implement it immediately, and furthermore suggested that, instead of carting my belongings to their dusty basement, I should keep everything I wanted in a suitcase under my bed, in readiness for transport to the connecting basements should the siren ring. This made more sense than my idea, for I wouldn’t have to part with my beloved possessions. They would always be right under my bed, ready for immediate flight.