Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (2 page)

All through the summer of 1949, my first summer as a fan, I spent my afternoons sitting cross-legged before the squat Philco radio which stood as a permanent fixture on our porch in Rockville Centre, on the South Shore of Long Island, New York. With my scorebook spread before me, I attended Dodger games through the courtly voice of Dodger announcer Red Barber. As he announced the lineup, I carefully printed each player’s name in a column on the left side of my sheet. Then, using the standard system my father had taught me, which assigned a number to each position in the field, starting with a “1” for the pitcher and ending with a “9” for the right fielder, I recorded every play. I found it difficult at times to sit still. As the Dodgers came to bat, I would walk around the room, talking to the players as if they were standing in front of me. At critical junctures, I tried to make a bargain, whispering and cajoling while Pee Wee Reese or Duke Snider stepped into the batter’s box: “Please, please, get a hit. If you get a hit now, I’ll make my bed every day for a week.” Sometimes, when the score was close and the opposing team at bat with men on base, I was too agitated to listen. Asking my mother to keep notes, I left the house for a walk around the block, hoping that when I returned the enemy threat would be over, and once again we’d be up at bat. Mostly, however, I stayed at my post, diligently recording each inning so that, when my father returned from his job as bank examiner for the State of New York, I could re-create for him the game he had missed.

When my father came home from the city, he would change from his three-piece suit into long pants and a short-sleeved sport shirt, and come downstairs for the ritual Manhattan cocktail with my mother. Then my parents would summon me for dinner from my play on the street outside our house. All through dinner I had to restrain
myself from telling him about the day’s game, waiting for the special time to come when we would sit together on the couch, my scorebook on my lap.

“Well, did anything interesting happen today?” he would begin. And even before the daily question was completed I had eagerly launched into my narrative of every play, and almost every pitch, of that afternoon’s contest. It never crossed my mind to wonder if, at the close of a day’s work, he might find my lengthy account the least bit tedious. For there was mastery as well as pleasure in our nightly ritual. Through my knowledge, I commanded my father’s undivided attention, the sign of his love. It would instill in me an early awareness of the power of narrative, which would introduce a lifetime of storytelling, fueled by the naive confidence that others would find me as entertaining as my father did.

Michael Francis Aloysius Kearns, my father, was a short man who appeared much larger on account of his erect bearing, broad chest, and thick neck. He had a ruddy Irish complexion, and his green eyes flashed with humor and vitality. When he smiled his entire face was transformed, radiating enthusiasm and friendliness. He called me “Bubbles,” a pet name he had chosen, he told me, because I seemed to enjoy so many things. Anxious to confirm his description, I refused to let my enthusiasm wane, even when I grew tired or grumpy. Thus excitement about things became a habit, a part of my personality, and the expectation that I should enjoy new experiences often engendered the enjoyment itself.

These nightly recountings of the Dodgers’ progress provided my first lessons in the narrative art. From the scorebook, with its tight squares of neatly arranged symbols, I could unfold the tale of an entire game and tell a story that seemed to last almost as long as the game itself.
At first, I was unable to resist the temptation to skip ahead to an important play in later innings. At times, I grew so excited about a Dodger victory that I blurted out the final score before I had hardly begun. But as I became more experienced in my storytelling, I learned to build a dramatic story with a beginning, middle, and end. Slowly, I learned that if I could recount the game, one batter at a time, inning by inning, without divulging the outcome, I could keep the suspense and my father’s interest alive until the very last pitch. Sometimes I pretended that I was the great Red Barber himself, allowing my voice to swell when reporting a home run, quieting to a whisper when the action grew tense, injecting tidbits about the players into my reports. At critical moments, I would jump from the couch to illustrate a ball that turned foul at the last moment or a dropped fly that was scored as an error.

“How many hits did Roy Campanella get?” my dad would ask. Tracing my finger across the horizontal line that represented Campanella’s at bats that day, I would count. “One, two, three. Three hits, a single, a double, and another single.” “How many strikeouts for Don New-combe?” It was easy. I would count the Ks. “One, two … eight. He had eight strikeouts.” Then he’d ask me more subtle questions about different plays—whether a strike-out was called or swinging, whether the double play was around the horn, whether the single that won the game was hit to left or right. If I had scored carefully, using the elaborate system he had taught me, I would know the answers. My father pointed to the second inning, where Jackie Robinson had hit a single and then stolen second. There was excitement in his voice. “See, it’s all here. While Robinson was dancing off second, he rattled the pitcher so badly that the next two guys walked to load the bases. That’s the impact Robinson makes, game after game. Isn’t
he something?” His smile at such moments inspired me to take my responsibility seriously.

Sometimes, a particular play would trigger in my father a memory of a similar situation in a game when he was young, and he would tell me stories about the Dodgers when he was a boy growing up in Brooklyn. His vivid tales featured strange heroes such as Casey Stengel, Zack Wheat, and Jimmy Johnston. Though it was hard at first to imagine that the Casey Stengel I knew, the manager of the Yankees, with his colorful language and hilarious antics, was the same man as the Dodger outfielder who hit an inside-the-park home run at the first game ever played at Ebbets Field, my father so skillfully stitched together the past and the present that I felt as if I were living in different time zones. If I closed my eyes, I imagined I was at Ebbets Field in the 1920s for that celebrated game when Dodger right fielder Babe Herman hit a double with the bases loaded, and through a series of mishaps on the base paths, three Dodgers ended up at third base at the same time. And I was sitting by my father’s side, five years before I was born, when the lights were turned on for the first time at Ebbets Field, the crowd gasping and then cheering as the summer night was transformed into startling day.

When I had finished describing the game, it was time to go to bed, unless I could convince my father to tally each player’s batting average, reconfiguring his statistics to reflect the developments of that day’s game. If Reese went 3 for 5 and had started the day at .303, my father showed me, by adding and multiplying all the numbers in his head, that his average would rise to .305. If Snider went O for 4 and started the day at .301, then his average would dip four points below the .300 mark. If Carl Erskine had let in three runs in seven innings, then my father would multiply
three times nine, divide that by the number of innings pitched, and magically tell me whether Erskine’s earned-run average had improved or worsened. It was this facility with numbers that had made it possible for my father to pass the civil-service test and become a bank examiner despite leaving school after the eighth grade. And this job had carried him from a Brooklyn tenement to a house with a lawn on Southard Avenue in Rockville Centre.

All through that summer, my father kept from me the knowledge that running box scores appeared in the daily newspapers. He never mentioned that these abbreviated histories had been a staple feature of the sports pages since the nineteenth century and were generally the first thing he and his fellow commuters turned to when they opened the
Daily News
and the
Herald Tribune
in the morning. I believed that, if I did not recount the games he had missed, my father would never have been able to follow our Dodgers the proper way, day by day, play by play, inning by inning. In other words, without me, his love of baseball would be forever unfulfilled.

I had the luck to fall in love with baseball at the start of an era of pure delight for New York fans. In each of the nine seasons from 1949 to 1957—spanning much of my childhood—we would watch one of the three New York teams—the Dodgers, the Giants, or the Yankees—compete in the World Series. In this golden era, the Yankees won five consecutive World Series, the Giants won two pennants and one championship, and my beloved Dodgers won one championship and five pennants, while losing two additional pennants in the last inning of the last game of the season.

In those days before players were free agents, the starting lineups remained basically intact for years. Fans gave their loyalty to a team, knowing the players they loved
would hold the same positions and, year after year, exhibit the same endearing quirks and irritating habits. And what a storied lineup my Dodgers had in the postwar seasons: Roy Campanella started behind the plate, Gil Hodges at first, Jackie Robinson at second, Pee Wee Reese at short, Billy Cox at third, Gene Hermanski in left, Duke Snider in center, and Carl Furillo in right. Half of that lineup—Reese, Robinson, Campanella, and Snider—would eventually be elected to the Hall of Fame; Gil Hodges and Carl Furillo would likely have been enshrined in Cooperstown had they played in any other decade or for any other club. Never would there be a better time to be a Dodger fan.

My mother, my sister Charlotte, and me in the carriage. When she was in her thirties, my mother was told by her doctor that she had the arteries of a seventy-year-old.

·    ·

W
HEN
I
PICTURE
my mother, Helen, she is sitting in her favorite cushioned chair and she is reading. She was slim and tall, several inches taller than my father. Her hair, primly curled with the soft waves of a permanent, was brown touched with gray. She never wore shorts or even slacks. In the grip of the worst heat waves, she wore a girdle, a full slip, and a cotton or linen dress with a bib apron perpetually fixed to her shoulders. Such modesty was the norm in our neighborhood. Indeed, when one of the mothers took to sitting on her front lawn in a halter top and shorts, her behavior startled the block.

My mother had a long face, conspicuously marked by the deep creases and the furrowed brow of a woman twice her age. When she was in her thirties, she was told by her doctor that she had the arteries of a seventy-year-old. Shortly after I was born, she had undergone a hysterectomy after being diagnosed with cancer. Though it turned out that she did not have cancer, the removal of her ovaries and her uterus had precipitated a surgical menopause, which, in those days before hormone replacement, rapidly escalated the aging process. In addition, the rheumatic fever she had suffered as a child had left her heart permanently scarred.

When I was two, she began having angina attacks six to eight times a year, episodes characterized by severe pain on her left side and a temporary loss of consciousness. All we could do, the doctors told us, was break smelling salts under her nose to restore consciousness and leave her on the floor until the pain subsided, which sometimes took several hours. I can still remember the chill I felt from a place so deep within me that my entire body started to
tremble when I first saw her stretched out on the floor, a pillow under her head, a blanket over her body. My father assured me that everything would be all right, and said I could sit beside her for a little while and hold her hand. After these “spells,” as we euphemistically called them, she would quickly resume her household routine, allowing us to imagine that all was well again.

In our family album there was a photo of my mother in her early twenties, sitting in a chair in her parents’ home, her long legs thrown casually over the arm of the chair, her lips parted in the beginning of a smile. Twenty years after that photo was taken, there was in her halting gait and nervous expression scarcely a trace of her former vitality and charm. I used to stare at that picture and try to imagine the high-spirited person she was before I was born, wishing that I could transport myself back in time to meet the young Helen Miller.

Every night, I would fall asleep with the prayer that while I slept the lines on my mother’s face would vanish, the leg that now dragged behind her would strengthen, her skin would lose its pallor. During my waking hours, when seated alone, I would daydream, allowing my imagination to reshape those realities I did not wish to accept. In my fantasy, my mother would appear as the young woman in the photo, wearing a summer dress with a ribbon in her hair. She was no longer short of breath, she could run and skip and dance. All my neighbors were crowded together on our lawn to watch my mother jump rope. My friend Eileen Rust and I each held one handle of the striped rope while my mother counted aloud the number of times she could jump without stopping. She jumped and jumped until she reached one hundred, two hundred, and then five hundred, and still she kept going. The strength had
returned to her arms and her legs, her cheeks were red. The sun was shining and the wind was blowing, and I was so happy I could hardly breathe.