She took his hand and put another on his waist, and stepped, one-two-three, one-two-three, moving him in the tight space between the table and the sink, and then humming a tune. Do-do-da-dee, da-da da-da, do-do-da-dee…
“That’s Strauss,” she said. “‘The Blue Danube.’ Sure, you’ve heard it before.” He had. “They’re always playing it on Rambling with Gambling, in the morning.” He pictured his father dancing with her, in some ballroom out of a movie, and then Rabbi Hirsch offering a hand to his wife. And then saw a flashlight beam scanning the backyards.
He released her hand and moved to the window. The lights went on in one of the Collins Street apartments, and he could see an annoyed Mr. Rossiter gazing up at the source of the light beam. Michael opened the window and leaned out to see better. He could hear his mother turn on the hot-water tap for the stacked dishes.
“Be careful there, Michael. Don’t, for God’s sake, fall out.”
“No way.”
Then the flashlight beam held on something, and he could hear urgent voices from the roof, and sure enough, there it was, lying in some weeds. The paint can.
“Mom, you’re better than Sherlock Holmes,” Michael said.
She came over to the window, drying her hands on a dish towel.
“Glory be to God,” she said.
“I better tell them it’s Sapolin number 3.”
“Of course, my dear Watson.”
They both laughed, and after the flashlights vanished from the yards, they shut the window. Kate Devlin went to her chair and her book, and Michael went to bed. Lying in the dark, remembering the few graceful steps his mother had taught him, humming softly the melody of “The Blue Danube,” he tried to picture a waltz. He must have seen many waltzes in the movies and didn’t know their names. There were always dances in those boring movies set in earlier centuries, where Englishmen wore wigs and wrote with feathers, and the long, satiny women’s gowns exposed parts of pale breasts. Those movies were hard to follow, because when the Englishmen talked so did all the kids in the Venus; they shut up only when the men were riding horses, dueling with enemies, or stabbing each other in marble castles. Certainly they must have waltzed in Emperor Rudolf’s castle. And he remembered from geography class that the Danube flowed right through Vienna, where Rabbi Hirsch’s mother went after leaving him behind. He wondered whether the Vltava itself flowed past Prague into the Danube.
Then he imagined his father in a tuxedo, like a bigger, darker version of Fred Astaire, waltzing with his mother across the gleaming floor of the Webster Hall. It was long before the war, even before Michael was born, and the music soared, and everybody stepped aside to watch, and his father and mother never got tired. Then, at the far end of the vast ballroom, Rabbi Hirsch stepped forward with Leah, and he was as young as Michael’s father, his face blissful, and he bowed to his wife and started his waltz too.
At daybreak of Easter Monday, when Michael awoke, he saw two detectives in raincoats and porkpie hats down in the yards. They took the paint can away and then came to their house and made photographs of the door and some footprints and took another statement from Kate and Michael. They weren’t the same detectives who had arrested Frankie McCarthy. Abbott and Costello must have had the day off. But they knew about the swastikas at the synagogue and they knew about what had happened to Mister G.
“You oughtta try to remember what happened that day, kid,” one of the detectives said to Michael. “You’re gonna need some help someday.”
Michael said nothing. The detectives went away, and the next day, after school, Michael went to Mr. Gallagher’s and bought some solvent and some black paint with money his mother had given him. She had cleared the costs with Mr. Kerniss, the landlord that Michael had never seen. While she was at work, Michael scrubbed the red paint off the floors of the hallways. Then he painted over the swastikas and the words on the floor. But 378 Ellison Avenue felt dirty now. And somehow frail. He knew they would never feel safe there again.
23
For weeks, nothing happened. Everybody had heard about the swastikas, but there were no arrests. Frankie McCarthy drifted around the parish like a ghost, but he ignored Michael, Sonny Montemarano, and Jimmy Kabinsky. Even so, Michael didn’t completely relax. The weather was warm and breezy now, and all the other kids of the parish were back on the streets. He played stickball on the crowded courts of Collins Street, hitting balls farther than ever, but often striking out when he glimpsed any of the Falcons coming along Ellison Avenue. If he was bigger this spring, so were the Falcons, and they moved like they were the true rulers of the parish.
Pushed by Rabbi Hirsch to study, study, study, Michael worked a little harder at his homework and his grades moved into the low 90s. He still traded for old comics and bought new ones and read them in his room. He found a magazine called Hit Parader and learned the words to new songs and passed the lyrics to the rabbi. Now he would hear the rabbi suddenly begin to sing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” or “Cool Water” and, best of all, “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” which he promised to sing for Michael’s mother at next year’s seder.
Michael did more of the sweaty work of janitoring, gladly washing the halls each Saturday morning, using a cream called Noxon to polish the brass mailboxes in the vestibule, feeding coal to the hot-water boiler in the basement. This meant he missed the first stickball games of the morning, but they always kept playing as long as there was light. He remained wary and was sometimes tense, feeling that Frankie McCarthy was like a bomb ticking away. At night, he still dreamed of blood-red snow rising from watertaps and white horses on rooftops and men with hamburger for hair.
He was glad to fill the hours with other matters, and for Michael the most important matter of all was the fate of Jackie Robinson. In a strange way, he felt that he was merging with Robinson. Whenever he was alone, he imagined himself into Robinson’s mind, sharing his loneliness, feeling the way all eyes were upon him, trying to bring glory to Brooklyn while knowing that even in Brooklyn there were people who hated him. That was the lesson of the newsreel at the RKO Grandview: even people who were bound together by a place like Brooklyn and a team like the Dodgers could be split apart by things like skin color. The bitter anger of Rabbi Hirsch on Easter Sunday morning showed that religion could do the same thing. The days of spring were beautiful, but Michael sometimes thought that the world was crazy. And scary too.
When the season had started, Michael read all the stories about Robinson in the Brooklyn Eagle and the Daily News and the Journal-American. He listened to Red Barber on WHN. Days passed. And he knew that Robinson was in terrible trouble. He was drawing sellout crowds to Ebbets Field. But he was 0-for-20 against major league pitching and there were some writers who thought he might go 0-for-the-season. Michael dutifully cut out all the stories and pasted them with mucilage into a large coarse-papered scrapbook he’d bought in Germain’s department store for twenty cents; this was history while it was happening, he thought, and he wanted to keep it for the rest of his life. But each story about Robinson’s failure made him feel worse, and he wondered if he would ever fill the book. In some way he felt that if Robinson failed, he would fail too.
“Maybe the guy can’t hit up here,” Sonny said one gray afternoon, in Michael’s kitchen. “Maybe it’s like too much pressure, Michael. Maybe he’ll be like a pinch runner or something.”
“He’s gonna hit,” Michael said. “I tell you, he’s gonna hit.”