While I was getting ready for bed, my mother came up to my room, and in a tone devoid of sympathy said, “I don’t understand what you’re so afraid of.” I felt trapped between the fearsome realities of Old Mary and my mother’s accusing tone. I did my best to relate how she had yelled at us and then chased us down the road. “And what provoked her to do this?” my mother asked. “I have no idea,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “Is it possible that you were on her property and trampled her flowers?” “I never did,” I replied, stressing the “I” so that my response was not completely untrue.
Sternly, she told me that my behavior was unacceptable, that Mary was simply a poor, sick old woman who had come from the Ukraine and had never learned to speak English very well. In fact, my mother explained, she had lived on our block longer than all the rest of us. Originally, her house stood in the midst of the vacant lots on which all the other houses were eventually built. Even some of the adults, she admitted, complained about the condition of Mary’s house and the weeds that violated the rules of the game in the suburbs. “Age and poverty are not a sin,” she said. Unconvinced, I rejoined feebly that all the other kids felt the same way, which only further irritated her. That night, I couldn’t sleep; every shadow looked like a witch’s broom.
“I am going to visit Mary, and you’re coming with me,” my mother announced as I entered the kitchen for breakfast the next morning. I tried to protest, but her tone brooked no argument, so I followed her out of the house and down the block. As we approached the dirt path which led through the weeds to Mary’s door, I alternated between closing my eyes as a kind of protection, and observing every detail so that if I got out alive I would have a great tale to tell. We passed through the outer tangle of weeds that surrounded the house like a palisade, and I was stunned to see a magnificent garden. The place was a wilderness of gold and purple and violet. There were marigolds, giant zinnias, and daylilies, and a rosebush climbing up the walls of her shack filled the air with perfume. Now I realized what she was doing as we watched her stooped and digging in her yard.
When she came to her door in response to my mother’s knock that morning, Old Mary didn’t seem quite so hideous and menacing as before. Quickly, I glanced inside. There were no rugs or couches. Her cabin was dark and unpleasant. My eyes scanned the room for the skull we had seen through the window, long a fixture of our fantasies. It didn’t take long to find—a mannequin’s head, decked in a wig, was placed on the counter in front of the window. I turned back to look at the intricately patterned garden and suddenly realized why someone crashing in and trampling upon her flowers was so threatening to her. Our feared witch was simply a reclusive old lady, a remnant from another time and culture, minding her own business and cultivating a beautiful garden.
Two months later, Old Mary died. When the police came to her house, they found several hundred thousand dollars in cash hidden beneath some boards behind her toilet. No one ever figured out where the cash had come from, or why Mary had not used it to make her life easier. In short order, the bulldozers came and razed Old Mary’s shack, erasing the last visible reminder of the poverty from which all our families had escaped.
· ·
MY FIRST YEAR as a Dodger fan ended with a dramatic flourish as the pennant race between the Dodgers and the Cardinals came down to the final week. On September 21, 1949, with the Cardinals a game and a half ahead, the Dodgers arrived in St. Louis for a three-game series, including a day-night doubleheader. Second grade forced me to miss most of the first game, but I arrived home in time to hear the Cardinals, sparked by Enos Slaughter, rally in the bottom of the ninth to break a scoreless tie and win the game. Fortunately, the tide began to turn in the second game: Preacher Roe, so skinny that he looked like the schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, pitched a shutout to beat the Cards 5-0. The Dodgers convincingly won the third game with nineteen runs and nineteen hits, the kind of lopsided victory which delighted me far more than a tension-filled pitching duel. Trailing now by only half a game, the Dodgers went on to split a series with the Phillies and win two from the Braves. The two teams entered the last game of the season with the Dodgers on top by one. A Dodger victory would win the pennant, a loss would force a playoff.
In 1949, with the help of Robinson, Reese, Hodges, and Cox, the Dodgers won the National League Pennant on the last day of the season with a thrilling tenth inning victory.
I listened with both my parents to the final game, which took place on a Sunday afternoon at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. The Dodgers scored five runs in the third, but, by the bottom of the ninth, the Phillies had bounced back to tie the game at seven apiece. I couldn’t sit still. My throat felt so dry that it hurt, but I was afraid to leave the room. “Now you’re learning what it means to be a Dodger fan,” my father said. Then, in the top of the tenth, Pee Wee Reese opened with a single, which was followed by two more singles to score two runs, and the Dodgers held on to win the pennant. My father hoisted me up and twirled me around and told me that I was the good-luck charm that brought victory to our team. And so I believed I was.
Soon it seemed that everyone on our block had emptied into the street, laughing and joking and sharing the moment, for that Sunday marked a double victory for New York fans. Thirty minutes before the Dodgers won, the Yankees had clinched the American League pennant with an equally dramatic win over the Boston Red Sox. The Sox and the Yanks had come to the last day of the season tied for first, with identical records: the winner of the last game would win the pennant. Not since 1908 had pennant races in both leagues come down to the last day. New York took a 5-0 lead into the ninth, when the Sox rallied for three runs, but the Yankees held on to win their sixteenth and perhaps most hard-won pennant, since time and again in the course of the season they had come back from adversity, plagued by more than seventy-one major injuries, including the loss of Joe DiMaggio for half their games. In a moment of joyful truce, before we hardened into our partisan camps, prepared to collide once again in the World Series, Elaine and I hugged each other. Mr. Lubar and my father shook hands, Mr. Rust, Eileen and Eddie Rust’s father, patted Gene Bartha on the back.
After the spectacular pennant drive, the ’49 World Series proved anticlimactic. The Yankees took the first game when Tommy Henrich hit a solo homer in the ninth inning to break a scoreless pitching duel between Allie Reynolds and Don Newcombe. The Dodgers returned the favor in the second game with a 1-0 victory by Preacher Roe. After two such close games, however, the Yankees won the next three straight. Our dreams for a world championship in ’49 withered and died. My relationship with Elaine grew strained and suffered for weeks. It was that October that I first understood the pain, bravado, and prayer woven into the simple slogan that served Dodger fans as a recurring anthem: “Wait till next year.”
CHAPTER THREE
MY EARLY YEARS were happily governed by the dual calendars of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Catholic Church. The final out of the last game of the World Series signaled the approach of winter, bringing baseball hibernation, relieved only by rumors of trades and reports of contract negotiations. Even before the buds had appeared on the trees of Rockville Centre, players had sloughed off their winter weight and prepared to reconvene for spring training, bringing the joyous return of the box score (whose existence my father had finally revealed). Excitement mounted as the team returned to Brooklyn for opening day, a day of limitless promise. As spring yielded to summer, the pennant race began to heat up, reaching a peak of intensity—of mingled hope and apprehension—during the sultry days of August, when the hopes of many teams were still alive. By midSeptember, a chill in the air of shortening days, the scales began to tip, depressing the hopes of many teams. For fans of contending teams, however, like the Dodgers of my childhood, it was Indian summer, a glorious respite before the last out of the last game opened the door once more to winter.
Analogous to the seasonal cycles of baseball were the great festivals of the Catholic Church. A month before Christmas we hung the Adve
nt wreath, and each week we lit one of the four candles that presaged the coming of the Christ child. The fulfillment of Christmas followed, symbolized by the decoration of our Christmas tree, the exchange of gifts, and the mystery and wonder of Midnight Mass. When I was five or six, I would lie awake in bed, listening as the thunder of church bells at midnight announced the coming of the Savior, and dream of the day I would be permitted to stay up late enough to accompany my sisters to Midnight Mass. When I was finally allowed to go, none of my imaginings prepared me for the splendor of the church, its marble altars bordered with garlands of white and red poinsettias and dotted with red flames from clusters of small white candles surrounding the central one that symbolized Christ, the Light of the World. My parents worried that I wouldn’t last through the two-hour service, but the sight of the altar, the priests’ gold vestments, the sounds of the Latin ritual, and the soaring choir music overwhelmed fatigue until long after the service was completed.
Eileen Rust and me on our first Communion day, standing together like two miniature brides.
The last weeks of winter brought Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, commemorating the period of Jesus’ fast in the desert. We knelt before the priest, who traced in ash the sign of the cross on our foreheads. “Remember,” the priest intoned, his thumb touching each brow, “that thou art dust and unto dust shalt thou return.” How much nearer death seemed to me when I was a child, when, kneeling like millions of other children, I said the nightly prayer: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” But symbols of death were more than matched by symbols of rebirth, renewal, and resurrection, as the Lenten feast led up to Palm Sunday, marking the triumphal return of Jesus to Jerusalem. Holy Week—windows opening to the onrushing spring—continued through the solemnity of Holy Thursday and the deep mourning of Good Friday, when the church stood desolate and bare, its altar draped in black, its statues covered in purple, giving way to the joyful triumph of Easter Mass, when the church was bedecked in white lilies. As Easter had been preceded by forty days of sorrow, it was followed by fifty days of rejoicing, leading up to Whitsunday, the feast of the Pentecost, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Through these seasonal festivals, so firmly embedded in the routine of our lives, I developed a lasting appreciation of the role that pageantry, ritual, and symbolism play in tying together the past and the present.
I took great pride in the commanding beauty of my church, St. Agnes. Built in the thirties to resemble a fifteenth-century Gothic cathedral, St. Agnes was furnished with oak pews that could seat over twelve hundred people. Its luminous windows made of antique stained glass had been imported from England and Germany, and its bell tower, surmounted by an aluminum cross, was visible for miles. I regarded with awe the serene darkness of the interior, a vast clear space illuminated by the soft amber light of two dozen iron chandeliers, hanging in two rows on long chains from the vaulted ceiling. Like something out of the Arthurian Legend, richly colored banners honoring the saints were mounted on lines of decorated poles projected from the side walls. These colorful lines converged at the sanctuary, with its white marble altar and its enormous crucifix suspended on chains from the canopy.
The scale of the church was the result of the vision of one man, Father Peter Quealy. He had arrived in Rockville Centre at the turn of the century, only two decades after six families had organized a tiny Roman Catholic parish and celebrated Mass in a blacksmith’s shop. Under Father Quealy’s inspired guidance, the pastorate increased to hundreds and then thousands, outgrowing two churches until the present St. Agnes was built, covering an entire block in the center of the village, with the church, rectory, convent, and a parochial school. When the foundation was laid in 1935, many thought Father Quealy’s reach had exceeded his grasp, but in 1957 the church built on the scale of a cathedral actually became a cathedral: Pius XII announced that a new Catholic diocese, encompassing Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island, was to be formed out of the existing Brooklyn Diocese, with St. Agnes Church as its seat. By then Father Quealy’s health was failing, but he lived to witness the celebratory Mass, attended by six hundred priests, one hundred monsignori, three archbishops, twenty-five bishops, and nine hundred nuns, at which Bishop Walter Kellenberg assumed the throne and officially made St. Agnes a cathedral.
WHEN I WAS SEVEN years old, my twin passions for the church and baseball collided. It was 1950, the year of my First Holy Communion. Every Wednesday afternoon at two-thirty, all Catholics who attended second grade in public school, as I did, were released early to attend the classes at St. Agnes that would prepare us for First Communion, admitting us into the congregation of the Catholic Church. Whereas the parochial-school students were allowed to receive their First Communion in the first grade, the rest of us had to wait an extra year, so that the nuns could compensate for all the rigorous hours of instruction that were lost. Our class was held in a dark room in the parochial school, the large map of the forty-eight states that adorned the back wall of our public-school room supplanted by a gallery of the saints. There was the infant St. Ambrose, on whose mouth a swarm of bees had settled, causing his elders to predict great oratorical gifts; St. Patrick, the apostle of Ireland, brandishing a staff as he expelled the serpent of sin and paganism from Ireland. My favorite saint was the Jesuit, Aloysius Gonzaga, the patron of youth, whose name my father had taken at his own confirmation, completing the full name I loved to say aloud—Michael Francis Aloysius Kearns.
Above left: Though Elaine Lubar was Jewish, her mother bought her a white dress so that she might share in the celebration of our big day.
Above right and below: I took great pride in the commanding beauty of my church, St. Agnes. Like something out of the Arthurian Legend, richly colored banners honoring the saints were mounted on lines of decorated poles projecting from the side walls.
Our teacher, Sister Marian, was a small Dominican nun who seemed ancient at the time but was probably in her fifties, with a gentle manner, a flowing white habit with a wimple pulled so tight her forehead was stretched smooth, and cheeks that bore such deep lines that the bottom and top of her face appeared the composite of two different people. Sister Marian introduced us to the text familiar to generations of Catholic schoolchildren: the bluecovered Baltimore Catechism with a silver Mary embossed on a constellation of silver stars. The catechism was organized around a series of questions and answers we had to memorize word for word to help us understand the meaning of what Christ had taught and, ultimately, to understand Christ Himself. “Who made us? God made us.” “Who is God? God is the Supreme Being who made all things.” “Why did God make us? God made us to show forth His goodness and to share with us His everlasting happiness in heaven.” Although it was learned by rote, there was something uniquely satisfying about reciting both the questions and the answers. No matter how many questions we had to memorize, each question had a proper answer. The Catholic world was a stable place with an unambiguous line of authority and an absolute knowledge of right and wrong.
We learned to distinguish venial sins, which displeased our Lord, from the far more serious mortal sins, which took away the life of the soul. We memorized the three things that made a sin mortal: the thought or deed had to be grievously wrong; the sinner had to know it was grievously wrong; and the sinner had to consent fully to it. Clearly, King Herod had committed a mortal sin when, intending to kill the Messiah, he killed all the boys in Judea who were two years old or less. Lest we feel too far removed from such a horrendous deed, we were told that those who committed venial sins without remorse when they were young would grow up to commit much larger sins, losing their souls in the same way that Herod did.
Every Tuesday night, the day before my class in religious instruction, my mother would drill me on the weekly lesson. She never betrayed the slightest impatience, and she made it fun by playing games with me. She held up playing cards numbered one through seven for the seven gifts of
the Holy Ghost—wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord—placing the appropriate card on the table as I recalled each one. In similar fashion, I learned the three theological virtues, the ten commandments, and the seven sacraments. And when I had to memorize various prayers—the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Apostles’ Creed—she put a glass of milk and a box of Oreo cookies on the table so I could savor my success at the completion of each prayer.
In class, Sister Marian explored each commandment with us in fuller detail. To understand the eighth commandment—“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”—we were told to imagine emptying a feather pillow from the roof of our house, then trying to pick up every feather. If it seemed impossible for us to imagine gathering all the feathers back into the pillow, Sister explained, “so would you never be able to get the rumor you told about someone back from everyone who heard it.”
My imagination was kindled by the concept of baptism. We learned that we were all born with souls that were dead in original sin under the power of the devil, but that baptism gave us new life and freed us from Satan’s grasp. Without baptism, one could not receive any of the other sacraments or go to heaven. The part that particularly aroused me, however, was the thought that, if an unbaptized person was dying, and no priest was present, it was up to us—i.e., me—to perform the sacrament by pouring ordinary water on the forehead of the dying person and saying aloud: “I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” More than once, I used my unbaptized doll to practice the sacrament of baptism. I would make her comfortable on my pillow, run into the bathroom directly across the hall, fill a plastic cup with water, and very solemnly launch her toward salvation.