he had his tea. He’s probably asleep now. Let’s go.”
“We all chipped in for Stretch’s ticket and we watched him with a mixture of pride and anxiety as he leaned into the box office window and said something to the girl in the booth. They both laughed as Stretch winked and sauntered off into the cool darkness of the theater, leaving the hot street and us behind.
“What if he leaves us out here? Whaddah we do then?” I said.
“What do we do?” Ralph’s smile was a straight seam across his mouth.
“We beat the crap outta him when the show’s over. C’mon.”
We walked down to the Channing Street exit of the theater. The door only opened from the inside and as we stood waiting in the sun, I could visualize Stretch bending over the drinking fountain next to the manager’s office, his long right foot uncoiled and extended behind him, his moccasined foot finding the bar on the door, depressing it as the water gurgled and splashed in the stainless steel receptacle. Gurgle. Click. Three darting figures rushed past. Door closed. The MGM lion roared as we slumped into the cool leather cushions waiting for storms, shadows, candles, deaf mutes, George Brent and Ethel Barrymore to scare us sick.
Stretch didn’t join us. He was down front to the right in “Lover’s Row.” It would take him a while. He might have to change seats, move here, bob there, but he would be making out before Ethel Barrymore even thought of shooting George Brent.
CHAPTER TWO
On up Pearl Street past Stretch’s house, the Flanagan house, a right on Jewett past the lamp post where I clocked thousands of hours in the rain, sun and snow, driving for the hoop with one eye on the curbstone and the other on the lace of the mesh. Left on Gardner—my street—down the steep hill where sleds had flashed in the winter night, a great ride all the way to the Park beyond and a slight rise, then bang, another hill that on good ice-snow could bring you to the other side of the Park.
The Park. Why had it suddenly occurred to me almost at the instant that I turned fifty that the Park could answer all the questions that had been mounting in me since my life began its slow, but perceptible movement to age. And even more, why and how could the Green Box answer any of those questions? Was this just a carry-over from some dramatic scene of a distant movie—Robert Taylor standing in the London mist of Waterloo Bridge, flashing back to Vivian Leigh? Was I living a scenario I wanted to write? I didn’t know as I parked the car and descended the cement steps that had replaced the green tufts of sweet grass of my youth.
It was a Saturday, a little before nine and early May. The wind stirred the winter leaves that clung and hung in the corners of the Park. The morning was overcast with the hint of rain. Not a good park day. Did I say that or had I said that a hundred times in my youth when rain was the great disappointment in childhood—at least in the forties when I was growing up?
The iron gate was lower than I expected but that was no great revelation. That observation of childhood objects diminishing in size the older we become had been made countless times by poets and novelists.
I looked out on the scarred and bald playing surface. There was deterioration, a ragged, unkempt and uncared for disregard for grass and soil and fences and tennis nets that hung like wet, heavy, gray figures in the cracked clay of the courts. The swings - the high-flying, trapeze-like swings were twisted and coiled about the long iron pipes.
I could still see Dapper Lonegan, slicked-back hair, the dandy of the Park, pumping his legs as he committed the worst sin of the summer—standing up on the swings. Legs bent, he gripped the iron chains with both hands, thrust forward, then swung back, pumping again like a skier. When he was up with the birds he stood straight as the trees. Up there Dapper owned that dizzying world and he was not coming down, even when Miss Feeney called Dusty Dowd, the Irish cop who walked his beat; a rolling barrel of a man with a roast beef face whose one great pronouncement from his few years of police work and the study of criminology was, “Get along or I’ll give you a swift kick in the arse,” as the roast beef was turning rare.
Dapper kept pumping and daring those laws of man and science as we, earthbound and helpless, looked up at him as he climbed higher, so much higher that it seemed any moment he would flip over the bars and continue somersaulting, turning horribly over and over until he was wrapped around the very bar itself.
“Sit down on the swings,” Miss Feeney bellowed the one automatic, categorical law of summer. There was no introductory remark, no “Please,” or “Be careful,” or “Dapper, you could hurt yourself,” it was simply the command of all park instructors who yelled it with hands cupped over the mouth from one end of Newton to the other. “Sit down on the swings,” plural as it was, Dapper now ruled only one.
The pumping continued as Dapper peered straight ahead into the clouds. The yelling continued; “Sit down,” Dusty repeated; the arse was now kicked swiftly a dozen times, and the quiet from Dapper’s peers accentuated the squeaking of the chains and the groaning of Dapper’s wooden trapeze platform.
And then as if controlled by some unseen force the speed diminished as Dapper ceased pumping. He slowly came to a halt but not a complete one because just before Dusty Dowd could grab onto The Park’s Flying Wallenda, Dapper pumped one more time, carrying him far out to the grass where he jumped, landing paratrooper style, and raced off up the hill to Gardner Street with Dusty Dowd yelling after him, “I’ll give you a swift kick in the arse,” adding under his breath, “when I catch you.”
Miss Feeney, tanned and stocky, just shook her head as we broke up and headed off to our summer pursuits.
The next year when I was in the ninth grade, I had been playing basketball at the field house next to the Park and was taking a shower while trying to hide the bones and the rib cage of my skinny body in the afternoon shadows that were stretching across through the one, low window, when I heard a voice say, “Miss Feeney died.” A naked figure strode confidently into the shower. “That was too bad.” It was Phil Poirier. I never liked him. He was cocky and his jokes were always at someone else’s expense. I was waiting for him to call me “Bones” or “Frank Sinatra” so when he said, “Miss Feeney died,” it didn’t register at first. Then, the realization slowly dawned on me. Miss Feeney dead. And Phil Poirier even cared. That surprised me, from him, the towel flicker. Right smack across the buttocks. He was a real snapper. Flick! Crack! Ouch! I looked at him. He actually cared. He never seemed to care for anybody. Most of the time he played cards at the Park, sitting with legs spread out over the long, narrow benches, throwing cards down and saying movie stuff like “I’ll never raise you, “or “I’ll see you for a dime.”
So I was surprised when he said it was too bad. I liked Miss Feeney. She was kind and she talked to kids as though they were her equal. My eyes filled up with tears and I wanted to cry, to sob, to yell out how sorry I was. I soaped my face so my eyes would be bloodshot from the stinging soap. I turned up the shower so my voice wouldn’t sound as though it was cracking. “How, how did she die?” I yelled over the din of the showers.
“Cancer,” he said with authority.
Cancer. It was a word that was generally whispered and to hear it yelled over the noise of the shower made it seem even more sinister, like something that everybody got eventually and there was no escaping it, like polio or pneumonia. I would never reach age twenty. I knew that then, when Poirier, almost casually accepting said “Cancer.”
“Yeah,” Poirier continued, “She was O.K.”
“Yes, she was,” I agreed, trying to control myself.
“Yeah,” he repeated as he soaped down, “She was O.K. and she had a real nice pair of knockers.”
On the night that Poirier told me about Miss Feeney, I walked home by myself. I didn’t know much about death although with World War II exploding daily in the newspapers and boys from the neighborhood, who only a few years before were playing in the Park and no doubt standing up on the swings, dying in strange places, death was slowly no longer a stranger.
Joe McCarey, who