be with her. Just console her.”
I ran up Gardner Street, past Bessie’s house. Then I stopped and ran back through her yard and climbed over the stone wall. None of us dared go through her yard but since I knew she wasn’t home I had nothing to fear.
I always felt foolish riding the bike. It was my sister’s and it didn’t have a bar. I never knew why girls’ bikes were different, but I reluctantly jumped on and raced past my mother who was laughing at something. I did not understand how she could laugh when Jackie was dead in a faraway land.
The war had always been in movies or in the gold stars that hung in the shadows of dark houses, but now it seemed closer to me. To our family. To the Street. To the Park.
My girl’s bike was a P.38 fighter plane and I mowed down Jap soldiers all the way to my grandmother’s while I repeated the strange sounding place in the South Pacific where my cousin, who always smiled and had a million freckles, now lay still—forever. Saipan, Saipan, Saipan, I whispered as I hovered over the handlebars. I turned into Nana’s yard just as Evelyn was walking up the dirt path.
I had a lump in my throat and I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. Nana had been dead two years. Aunt Louise, my mother’s sister, was still at work in the telephone company, so that left me all alone. “Console Evelyn,” my mother said. Why didn’t my mother console her?
“Ev? Ev,” I repeated as I ditched my bike in the dirt.
She turned to me with the crumpled telegram clutched in her hand. She didn’t say a word as I approached her. Tears streamed down her pretty face. I couldn’t speak. I just put my arms around her and told her how bad I felt.
The war was no longer out there, far away, as other cousins were wounded, even Evelyn’s older brother, Bobby.
It was June 1944 when we received word of Jackie’s death and by August of that summer, because many of the kids in the Park lost relatives on D-Day in Europe or on the Pacific Islands, we would spread the newspaper out on the top of the Green Box and read about Normandy, St. Lo, Marseilles, Belgium, The Ruhr Valley, and the other war—Burma, Peleliu, Bloody Ridge. The headlines bannered names like Patton, Montgomery, Vinegar Joe Stillwell, Merrill’s Marauders, Rommel, Eisenhower, and MacArthur, as baseball and summer continued to roam the Park without interruption. It was as though the movies and the real war were one and the same. And when we thought about the battles and the beachheads, it was with the idea that once victory was established, the credits would appear at the bottom of the front page. Directed by Michael Curtiz or King Vidor. Art Director: Hans Drier—Cedric Gibbons. Screenplay: Dwight D. Eisenhower. Removed from it all, we almost enjoyed the war as news and pictures and conversations buzzed, always just a few feet away from us across kitchen tables or behind radio static, or from an offhand observation of my father’s after supper as I’d be heading out the door.
“Where you headed, Bill?”
“Park.”
“Enjoy it. It’s later than you think.” He’d wink and smile. But sometimes I thought there was a sadness in the remark. Then he’d smile again and sing.
“Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think.
Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink.
The years go by as quickly as a wink.
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.”
I’d go off down to the Park, humming, leaving my mother playing the piano and my father singing along to her the song of the day.
“Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition and we’ll all stay free.”
And then crooning into,
“It seems to me I’ve heard that song before.
It’s from an old familiar score.”
My father’s big song that year, one that he “Crosbied” from the parlor through the open windows and trilled along the sidewalk as I made for the Park, was,
“I had the craziest dream—last night, yes I did I never dreamt it could be—yet, there you were in love with me.”
The Park after supper was a new and different experience than the hot sunny daytime of twenty inning baseball games and marathon appearances of Dapper Lonegan on the high trapeze.
We would sit on the benches or on the Green Box, trading stories of the war or the Red Sox—and then the bats would come. They would mysteriously and subtly appear just as the last hazy glow of daylight slipped over the roof of Jugger’s house.
We would sit quietly, never moving a muscle, watching one, then two, and then a dozen maneuver and cruise above the Park. They dove, they fluttered with almost a banging sound. They speared skyward and they circled in black clusters. They always seemed to circle. The girls, who always sat in giggling groups near the tennis court, screamed as much for our attention as from the fright of seeing the mouse bodies and winged membranes cavorting and diving in our skies.
Short, high-pitched screeches sent electric shocks up our backs to the nape of our necks. One night Dapper Lonegan manned his flying platform to join the flapping bodies above our heads.
“What if they attack him?” Pepper Lucas said.
“They’ll tear him to pieces,” his younger brother, Fat, agreed.
“Good you’re not up there, Fat. They’d have Thanksgiving dinner on you.” Phil Poirier was always there to cut your legs out from under you. No one ever said anything though, because Poirier was strong and he could fight.
“Bats get in your hair and you’ve had it.” Charles Webber was smart. He read the Encyclopedia Britannica and he knew just about everything in the world. His father was dead and he and his mother lived up behind Bessie O’Leary’s house. He was the one who told us that she was a witch. No question. Absolutely. He saw her walking in the dark, around and around her backyard. She caught neighborhood cats and Webber used to hear them shrieking in pain at odd hours of the night.
“Most of us are O.K. because we have crew cuts. Not Dapper, though. They could probably build a nest in that hair of his.” And then Dapper, as though he heard the warning, or had the same radar the bats had, slowly descended and jumped out onto the grass and raced off.
“Now, those girls, if the bats ever got to them, they’d get all matted in those curls.” Charles Webber laughed sometimes as though he was slowly letting air out of a balloon.
The girls continued to scream and that was our signal to go over and scare them even more because that’s what they wanted.
“Let’s go,” Stretch said.
And we were off like a rebel band of Apache warriors, screaming into the night as the girls broke from the intimate security of their benches and ran out into the middle of the baseball diamond. This was pairing off time for most. A few of us, like me and Fat and Charlie Webber and Little John Mahoney, trotted half-heartedly after them.
When the phony wrestling and wagon train captures were complete, Stretch or Birdie Baker, the Mad Looper - who caddied every day, rain or shine as long as there was someone who wanted to swing a golf club - called for quiet.
“O.K., how about Hide and Seek?”
“Oh, yes. O.K.,” Margie Marini said.
“O.K. O.K. Stretch, you take half on your team and I’ll take the other half,” Birdie commanded.
“I want to be on your team, Birdie.” Margie Marini jumped up and down, her large, round breasts bouncing under her white T-shirt.
“Yeah, and we know why,” Stretch laughed. “Try and get back to the Green Box before morning.”
“You’re my first pick, Margie.” Birdie’s ego cracked his voice as he spoke.
Everybody fanned out with final instructions burning in their ears. Stretch’s