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.
Now that I had formulated a reasonable plan for the evacuation that would allow me, my family, and our entire neighborhood not only to survive the bomb but to flourish intact in our subterranean shelter, I was ready to resume ordinary life.
ON THE JUNE DAY in 1950 when the Korean War began, the summer’s first heat wave had sent temperatures into the nineties. I was sitting with my parents on the porch in front of an old General Electric fan when the radio reported that North Korea had invaded South Korea. My most vivid memory is the whirring sound of that fan and the anxious faces of my parents.
My sisters recalled in detail the world map that hung on the wall of our breakfast nook during World War II. It came with a set of pins which my father would move every few days to mark the position of the American troops. But there was no equivalent map to trace the course of battle in Korea. I had very little awareness of the events in what would later become known as the “forgotten war.” It seemed to have very little to do with me. If I knew about the spectacular parade honoring the return of General Douglas MacArthur in April 1951, it was largely because the procession delayed the opening game of the first series between the Dodgers and the Giants, thus allowing me time to get home from school and watch most of the game.
Although I thought of myself as a patriot, my heart full of pride each morning as I recited the ritual phrases of the pledge to the flag, the tragedy of war seemed real to me only when it directly affected the fortunes of the Brooklyn Dodgers. For three years, Don Newcombe had been our best and most consistent pitcher, with seventeen victories in his rookie year, nineteen the next year, and twenty the year after. Only Warren Spahn of the Braves had won more games during that period. Then, in 1952, at the height of his powers, the twenty-six-year-old Newcombe was drafted into the army. Other teams suffered losses just as great—the Yankees lost Whitey Ford, the Giants Willie Mays, and the Red Sox Ted Williams—but the only thing that concerned me was Dressen’s ability to compensate for the loss of Newcombe.
The summer of 1952 was one of the hottest New Yorkers had ever experienced. Day after day, the temperature stayed in the high nineties. Under the strain of the heat wave, flowers wilted and tempers flared. At night, the small electric fan at the foot of my bed only circulated the heat. Unable to jump rope or play hopscotch on the steaming sidewalks, Elaine and I conceived a plan to make the best of the heat: we would read Gone with the Wind. We sat in the shade of the large maple tree on Elaine’s lawn and let the story of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler absorb our imaginations and distract us from the scorched brown lawns of that blistering summer. Vicariously, we lived the great romance. Elaine identified with the gentle decency of Melanie Wilkes; I preferred the shrewd strength of the outspoken Scarlett. We both fell for the unscrupulous Rhett with his dancing dark eyes and his white Panama hat. We were both titillated when, during the Siege of Atlanta, Rhett asked Scarlett to live with him. Expecting a proposal of matrimony, Scarlett is furious: “Mistress!” she snaps, “What would I get out of that except a passel of brats?” We parsed the sentence as if it were a passage from the Bible. What exactly did she mean?
The summer was almost over when we reached the final pages. Devastated by Rhett’s rejection of Scarlett in the final scene, I could not accept his argument that “what is broken is broken,” that it was too late to glue together the fragments of their love. I ran into my house to ask my mother what she thought.
“She’ll get him back, won’t she?” I asked. “Once she gets to Tara, she’ll figure out some way, won’t she?”
“No,” she said softly, “I don’t think so. Maybe Scarlett could have reached out to Rhett when the little girl died, but by the end, it was too late.”
Disconsolate, I ran up to my room. There I began to imagine, complete with dialogue, ways in which I might help bring about a reconciliation.
The fictional romance of Scarlett and Rhett occupied my imagination, but my sister Charlotte was involved in a romantic adventure of her own. While working the night shift at Lenox Hill, she had met a young intern, Dr. Paul Ovando. When he first saw her picture in the hospital yearbook, he told her he had decided that she would one day become his wife. Charlotte scoffed at his presumption, but within weeks she had fallen in love and they were making marriage plans. Both families felt it was too soon for them to marry. Paul had just finished his internship, and was scheduled to start five years of surgical residency at Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire. Once the residency was completed, he faced specialized training in thoracic surgery. It seemed better, both sets of parents agreed, to postpone marriage until he was further advanced. Unwilling to accept delay, Charlotte and
Paul eloped in the summer of ’52. I couldn’t understand how they could marry without a proper wedding, but their decision to run away together seemed enviably romantic and only served to fix Charlotte’s glamorous image in my mind.
With my mind aswirl with hazy ideas of love and romance, the fictional mingling with the actual, the friendship I rekindled with Johnny that summer acquired new possibilities. I hadn’t seen him much the previous two summers, because he had gone to sleepaway camp, but during the summer of ’52, he had returned to Jones Beach. He was now eleven and at least six inches taller than I. We resumed our conversations about baseball, but our relationship was not as relaxed as it had once been. Though he always seemed glad to see me, he was given to occasional bouts of teasing. After talking for a few minutes, he would sometimes shove me under water and swim away. I would come up coughing, irritated, and perplexed. To my amazement, Jeanne explained that his behavior meant he liked me.
One afternoon, after a long talk about how well the Dodgers were doing, Johnny mentioned that he was returning to Jones Beach that night with his older brother to see the musical production of A Night in Venice at the new outdoor theater.
“So am I,” I said. “With my sister.”
“Well, look for me,” he mumbled, “and we’ll sit together.”
Jones Beach was a different world at night, its dazzling colors softened, the menacing heat of the day diminished by a cool breeze. The new outdoor theater, a semicircular shell of brick and concrete on Zach’s Bay, was capable of seating over eight thousand people. Michael Todd’s production of the musical extravaganza A Night in Venice featured a cast of three hundred, including singers from the Metropolitan Opera Company, a fifty-piece orchestra, singing gondoliers, precision swimmers, and world-famous divers, performing spectacular stunts off three diving boards at once.
Johnny was waiting for me when I walked in, his hair slicked back and his plaid shirt rolled up at the elbows. I felt shy and didn’t say much as we found seats together. At one point in the water ballet, as the music of Johann Strauss floated across the water, Johnny brushed my hand and pointed to the precision swimmers seated atop a huge lotus blossom that had suddenly risen from the bottom of the lagoon. He quickly withdrew his hand, but his brief contact had unaccountably delighted me.
The next morning I couldn’t wait to get back to Jones Beach, but, to my dismay, the papers were filled with reports of a new polio outbreak. None of us were allowed to go to the beach. My mother’s ban remained in force for nearly two weeks. Immediately upon my return, I looked for Johnny. I couldn’t find him, and on the days following, my luck proved no better. I searched the boardwalk, the ice-cream parlors, the pitch-and-putt golf course without result. I wondered if he was trying to avoid me.
The summer came to an end and I never saw Johnny again, but in my mind, he became the leading man in a daydream I invented and elaborated upon. To explain his absence, I imagined that he had become a polio victim and that I was his loving caretaker, pushing his wheelchair along the boardwalk at the beach where we had once run together, propelling him up the ramp at Ebbets Field to share the World Series victory we had both desired for so long. Exactly how the summer heat, my sister’s elopement, my fear of polio, and my reading of Gone with the Wind came together I wasn’t sure, but the combination provided all the ingredients necessary to yield the pleasures and pains of the first full-blown imagined romance of my life.
AN OVERHEARD ARGUMENT between Mr. Friedle and my father constitutes my only clear recollection of the presidential election of 1952. My family almost never discussed politics. As a civil servant, my father never involved himself in individual campaigns; but in ’52, with the fight for the Republican nomination under way, he declared his support for Dwight Eisenhower. Mr. Friedle argued that Robert Taft was Mr. Republican, a loyal member of the party whose conservative ideals had remained consistent for dozens of years. Eisenhower, he asserted, had no political identity, and could as easily have been a Democrat as a Republican. “That’s exactly why I’m for him,” my father replied. “We need a rest from all the bickering of the last few years. We need a healer, a man above politics. Ike is that man.”
As the presidential election approached, the Dodgers won four games in a row to clinch the National League pennant. Three days later, the Yankees won the American League pennant by defeating second-place Cleveland. October would bring the fourth World Series between the two New York teams.
“The simplest argument to support a belief that the Yankees will win,” Red Smith stated in the Tribune, “is to point out that they always do. Since the beginning of time, no Brooklyn team has won a world championship… . It does not, of course, follow that what has always happened in the past must of necessity continue to happen. Yet one suspects that the knowledge of what has always happened must have some effect upon the players and the games.”
The Dodgers’ 1952 pennant-winning lineup: Cox, Reese, Snider, Robinson, Campanella, Pafko, Hodges, Furillo, and Black.
“I see that I’ve got blue-green eyes because you’ve got blue-green eyes,” I protested to my father, “but I don’t see how a team can lose because it lost five or ten or twenty years ago. That doesn’t make any sense.” My father explained that a team’s legend had staying power beyond the individual players; that, as newcomers join the club, they trade tales of the past, just as citizens absorb the legends of their country. When the stories tell of great achievement, as the Yankees’ did, each new player absorbs the confidence of his elders. In reverse fashion, if a new Dodger player repeatedly hears how his team has lost every World Series, he begins to think, as soon as something goes wrong, that once again the team is going to lose. However, my father quickly added that, although this was generally true, it did not apply to this particular Dodger team, which was the best and proudest of all Dodger teams in his lifetime. Certainly, he reassured me, players like Robinson and Reese and Campanella would not be influenced by past defeats and would be spurred to win their first World Series.
The Dodgers won the first game, 4-2, on the arm of Joe Black, the Negro League star whose brilliant pitching in the bullpen would earn him Rookie of the Year honors. It was the first time, Red Smith quipped, “since the dawn of civilization that Brooklyn won a series opener.” The Yankees tied the Series in the second game with a three-hitter by Vic Raschi and a three-run homer by Elaine’s idol, Billy Martin. The Dodgers won the third game behind Preacher Roe; the Yankees took the fourth, 2-0, with a home run by their twenty-year-old golden boy, Mickey Mantle. In the fifth and most exciting game, the Dodgers pulled out a 6-5 victory in the eleventh inning. Ahead three games to two, we needed only one more victory. But the Yankees tied the Series with a sixth-game victory when both Mantle and Berra hit home runs.
The world championship was decided in the seventh inning of the seventh game. With the Yankees ahead by a score of 4-2, and two out, the Dodgers loaded the bases for Robinson. After running the count to three and two, Robinson hit a twisting pop fly which the gusting wind carried to the first-base side of the pitcher’s mound. As the Yankee pitcher, Bob Kuzava, stood frozen on the mound, and first baseman Joe Collins lost the ball in the sun, the Dodgers began to round the bases, until Billy Martin, realizing what had happened, raced the distance from second base, lunged through the air, and caught the ball just before it hit the ground. Martin’s spectacular catch ended the Dodger rally, and the Yankees went on to win the game and the Series, their fourth championship in a row.
As soon as the game was over, Elaine strutted to the entrance of my house. “You have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of,” she magnanimously consoled me, “nothing at all. It could just as easily have gone your way and almost did.” She tried to suppress a smile. “You gave us a real run for …” I couldn’t bear to hear another word. I closed the door in her face and ran up to my room.
ALTHOUGH MY INTEREST in public events rarely went beyond the sports pages, I became absorbed by the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, arrest
ed for divulging atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Their trial, conviction, and death sentence, in the spring and summer of 1953, provided front-page stories month after month.
Brief clips on television and in newspaper photographs made the Rosenbergs appear disturbingly familiar. The short, plump Mrs. Rosenberg looked more like one of my friends’ mothers than an international spy. A photo of the Rosenberg boys showed the older boy, Michael, who was exactly my age, with his arm around his five-year-old brother, Robert, walking along a barbed-wire fence after visiting their parents in jail. They could have been among my playmates on the block. They had “a fine time,” the article reported, running up and down the corridors of the jail. But they didn’t seem happy to me. Whenever I ate Jell-O, my favorite dessert, I was reminded of the Rosenbergs. Julius Rosenberg had reportedly torn a Jell-O box in two, giving one half to his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, who was stationed at Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was built, and the other half to Harry Gold, a now confessed Soviet spy, so the two men could identify one another.
Though the majority of our neighborhood families believed the Rosenbergs guilty, opinion was divided on whether the death penalty was appropriate. Proponents of execution agreed with Judge Irving Kaufman that, by “putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb,” the Rosenbergs were responsible for the Korean War and for the sense of doom that hung over every American. “By your betrayal, you have altered the course of history,” Kaufman told Julius and Ethel Rosenberg when he sentenced them to death. Opponents of execution believed the husband and wife were too unsophisticated to hold key positions in the spy ring and pointed to the more lenient sentences meted out to all the others involved: fourteen years for physicist Klaus Fuchs, who had been a member of the Los Alamos inner circle and had turned over atomic secrets to the Soviet Union; thirty for the courier, Harry Gold; fifteen for Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, and no prosecution for Ruth Greenglass, David’s wife. Was the discrepancy simply, they speculated, because the Rosenbergs had refused to admit their guilt?