“Two on,” the voice said. “Two and one … Miller at bat. You know, Mel, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen … the pitch, low, ball three. It’s been a long time … since a rookie, like Miller … winding up … ball four, he walks. Bases loaded.”
This desultory conversation, the epitome of a summer afternoon, and one of the most soothing things Roger had ever heard, went on and on. “A three-two pitch to Hollins … line drive … base hit. The pitch was up and Stanky jumped to get it. So he has a lead single in the bottom … in the bottom, of the third. He was zero for four … in last night’s game. The pitch, swing … on the way to Allen. Foul over the Yankee dugout. Allen came to the majors by way of Richmond, Virginia—a good place to play ball. … The pitcher winds up. Ball, low on the outside.”
In the spaces within the narrative Roger heard a lovely and persistent sound, like the sound of the ocean, and within that sound were others. Sometimes the speaker would get excited and the ocean would roar, and then, uncharacteristically, he would yell numbers and say how great it was, or how dangerous. For fifteen minutes, Roger listened to this, mesmerized, with absolutely no understanding whatsoever of what it was. Then Schnaiper returned, his pluglike body hauling the alpine basket of gribenes.
“What is that?” Roger asked, pointing up.
“On the radio?”
Roger nodded.
“That? That’s the best part. You could listen all day. I do.”
“But what is it?”
“It’s baseball,” said Schnaiper, “from the House That Ruth Built.”
“From the House of Ruth?” Roger asked, stunned.
“Live,” Schnaiper said.
“Where is it?”
“The Bronx.”
EVIDENTLY, rabbis kept certain things from their students. Wonderful things. Exciting things. If Schnaiper could be believed—and never had he overweighed a chicken—there was a place in the Bronx that—Symbolically? Actually? Miraculously?—was a direct link to the Israelites. Roger knew that such places could be found in Eretz Yisrael, but never had he heard that they existed in the Bronx. Immediately he wanted to go there, to see. The problem was that he did not understand its language, which seemed as dense and impenetrable as his studies in the Talmud, which, after all, had not come on the instant.
So he inquired of Luba, because Luba had been fetching gribenes from the outside world for so long, “Luba, what is the House of Ruth, that’s in the Bronx?”
“The House of Ruth?” Luba closed his lamblike eyes. He had no idea what Roger was talking about, but as a direct descendant of Rabbi Vogelsblume of Hivnis, he didn’t have to know. He closed his eyes, spread his arms, and waited for the answer. This was the way of the Jews in countries where for lifetimes they had been forced to the ground, where fact was never better than dreams. Later rationalists, even among the Jews themselves, mocked this, because they had never been so long in extremis, and did not understand art, ecstasy, or the parting of seas. They did not understand that, for those who have nothing, dreams are real. Luba began to speak as if possessed: “The House of Ruth … is in the Bronx.”
“I told you that,” Roger protested.
“Did I say you didn’t? It’s a palace bigger than the temple or the baths of Babylonia. People dance in the aisles, and its four-hundred-foot-high walls are hung with gold and purple draperies. Lit by divine light that showers down from heaven, beautiful women work in a field in the middle, harvesting wheat, like their great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Ruth. In galleries as high as the Empire State Building, legions of rabbis read the Talmud, and klezmer bands in the vast celebration areas play for dancing as in Simchat Torah. And the food! The food! Vegetables! Roasts! Fat pieces of halvah! Poppyseed cakes! Wine. Every day at sunrise and at sunset the rabbis dance on the wheatfields with the Ruths, like daughters. And, someday, the students will marry the beautiful Ruths, and have babies.”
Luba was still vibrating with longing when Roger asked, “How many women work in the wheatfields?”
“A constant supply. As fast as boys are born, so are girls. They come together as the rivers flow. That’s the way it is. But there’s a catch.”
“What’s the catch?”
“You can’t go there.”
“Why not?”
“You just can’t.”
“So what’s the good of it?”
“After you die,” Luba said, opening his eyes, “you’re taken there on a holy sled.”
“Luba, it exists in the world. I heard it.”
“But you’ll never get there,” Luba said, holding his finger up the way Rabbi Eisvogel did when he drove home a point, “unless. …”
“Unless what?”
“Or,” Luba said.
“Or?”
“Unless you die, or they are in peril and need a champion to save them.”
“What kind of peril?”
“Defeat. Such a place is always under siege, but sometimes a champion prays and prays, and then maybe the Holy One, blessed be His name, allows him to champion the House of Ruth. But the champion must have great virtue, for he will carry in his hand the very staff of the Lord.”
“How will he know that it is the staff of the Lord?” Roger asked.
“It will be passed to him in the fields, and it will be as if of gold, and it will shine in the light.”
UNTIL THE NEXT erev Shabbos, Roger dreamt of the House of Ruth. He knew in his American mind that what Luba had said could not be and that no such place could exist, just as he knew that people, even the holiest mystics, could not fly. But in his Eastern mind he knew that the ancient rabbis of Breel and Talakreblach actually did fly, even if in earthly terms they did not leave the ground. How was this? To say that they flew, they would have had to have made, in defiance of gravity, a vertical distance between themselves and a point of reference. When Rabbi Vimy of Breel and Rabbi Canopy of Talakreblach concentrated, their point of reference was not the mere earth. They envisioned the limitless universe, in which they floated as freely as sparkling fish. And was it not true that they did float amid the phosphorus-glistening stars? That the earth came between them and what kept them otherwise afloat was a fact and not a dream, but it was not much of a fact in comparison to the gravityless infinity in which it existed. The earth was just a speck, less than a speck, and Rabbis Vimy of Breel and Canopy of Talakreblach were, in fact, flying at blinding speed through space, as are we all, but at the time of their visions they were the only ones who both knew it and felt it, which is why they did fly, and which is why Roger could picture the House of Ruth in the Bronx: a place that, even were it not real, God—having hinted to trusting imaginations—would be obligated to make real in one way or another, such as by having Ruth build it.
The rabbis let Roger be—even Rabbi Eisvogel, who was something of a cold bird. When a student suddenly didn’t pay attention and fell off in his work, the rabbis looked carefully in his eyes. If his eyes were as eyes usually are, they brought him back around in various ways. But if within the eyes they saw a fire, they left him alone. In fact, they asked him what he required—food in his room, a certain scroll, time to pray, a trip to the ocean, music, a conference with a mystic—and they tried to supply it, to breathe air into the fire for the express purpose of keeping it alight.
Rabbi Eisvogel asked the question, inquiring about what Roger might need.
“I want to go to the butcher’s and listen to the radio,” Roger said decisively.
“Which butcher?” Rabbi Eisvogel asked.
“Schnaiper. He’s the one with a radio.”
“Go,” Rabbi Eisvogel told him, trustingly. “We’ll keep your book open where you left it.”
FROM SCHNAIPER’S RADIO, which had never ceased playing, came the same, languorous, slow, Southern conversation once again. “Do you know what they’re saying?” Roger asked Schnaiper, who was very busy.
“What?” Schnaiper asked back.
“This conversation on the radio.”
“Baseball,” Schnaiper said, cleaving a veal chop. “You know, the game.”
“Do you understand it?” Roger asked.
Schnaiper rested his cleaver on the butcher block as if he were a stork resting a broken leg. “Of course I do.”
“Tell me how it works.”
“The whole game? The rules?”
“Yes.”
“It’s simple. I’ve never seen it, but I know from the radio.”
Roger nodded.
“First, there’s a peetch-hair,” Schnaiper said, breaking into their exchange of Yiddish with an English word.
“A peetch-hair? What’s that?”
“I don’t know, but without the peetch-hair they can’t play the game. I heard once how a peetch-hair was hit by a flying object of some sort, and they stopped the game until they brought in another peetch-hair. From this, don’t ask me.”
“But what do they do?”
“Well, they run around besses, and sometimes they steal the besses.”
“What are besses?”
“Puffy white things they stick in the ground.”
Roger was nowhere. “So what’s the point?” he asked. “And what are all the numbers for?”
“I don’t think the numbers mean anything, really. Anyway, I pay no attention to them. The point is that there are two teams, and the winner is the one that can stay the longest.”
“What prevents them from staying?”
“When they miss.”
“Miss what?”
“The ball.”
“You never said anything about a ball.”
“Oh yes, there’s a ball. They throw it at each other, and hit it with a stick.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. They don’t know either: ever since I got the radio, they’ve been losing.”
“Who?”
“The Yenkiss.”
“The Yenkiss,” Roger repeated.
“That’s one of the teams. They used to be the greatest team in the world, Mel said. Now they’re dying. They won’t win this year, even with Mental.”
“What’s Mental?”
“Mickey Mental,” Schnaiper replied, knowingly.
“What’s that?”
“A person, the greatest baseball player of our time. But Kansas City, unless a miracle will happen, is going to kill them.”
“Really kill them?”
“You bet.”
“What could help them?” Roger asked.
“Nothing. One more game and they’re finished. But for next year, if they had a champion, another one like Mickey Mental, but better, well, that would be a different story, maybe.”
FROM THE TOP FLOORS of the building where Roger lived, and through the gaps in ocher and brown buildings and within the steel cage-work of bridges brushed with cool sunshine, the East River was visible in wide segments of blue. From the roof, the blue patches were larger, for one could see over some of the buildings that had blocked them from below. And from the top of the stair shed yet another story over the roof, the river was freed. You could see all the way from St. George on Staten Island, along the cliff faces of lower Manhattan and Midtown looming rocklike in the day and sparkling like galaxies at night, to the Triborough Bridge. River traffic arrived suddenly on the swift current and departed with equal speed, or fought north as slowly as a man carrying a desk. Sometimes Roger saw a boat gliding out into the harbor at dusk, its stern light bobbing in recession until it became a star. The lovely light making its way into the vastness of the ocean, like the dead in their quiet departures, grew ever fainter.
That fall and winter when it was neither too wet nor too cold, he ascended the incline to reach the small rectangular space at the top of the stair shed, and there he spent many hours in prayer. He recited nothing. He sought nothing. His prayer was the hopeful resurrection, in his heart, of those who were gone. It was the dissolution, in his mind’s eye, of all elements, colors, and sound—until, lighter than smoke, they formed a picture as full of glory as the patient astronomical photographs that he had never seen and that, in later years when he would see them, would bring to his face a smile of recognition. All was grace and perfection there, all just and redeemed, all prayer answered, ratios exact, rhythms perfect, laws obeyed.
He had known such things, somehow, since infancy. And he understood that, as he grew, his responsibility was to make sense of them: not to adopt them for his purposes but to take a tiny fraction of the light of perfection for use upon the imperfection of the world, like a match that for an instant brings a little daylight to a dark hallway.
Between the Yenkiss’ loss of what Schnaiper called the Verld Series to Kansas City, and the opening of the next baseball season, Roger concentrated upon a single obstruction that he wished to burn through, a single request, a single question. It did not come, and it did not come, and it did not come. The fall’s lucid shadows deepened the colors of Brooklyn and Manhattan, and its cold air enlivened the stars. Winter froze all emotion. Sometimes he would sit in the cold until his heart hardly beat and he was blind, and he would strain, sweeping the darkness in search of a blaze of power, but he would find nothing, he would see no light. Spring came violently and ended in soft air suffused with the scents of flowers and warm brick. Baseball season had started in April. No one was happy. Then came summer, promiscuously scattering great volumes of light, dashing it up streets that had long been in shadow, touching the undersides of bridges as if the sun were boiling in the rivers beneath. Nothing happened, but he refused to give up, and then, on the fourth of June, something did happen.
THAT DAY, as sunburnt as a strawberry, Roger came down from his perch for the last time. Upon seeing him, they went to get the Saromsker Rebbe, for Roger had the pellucid eyes of a tzaddik, and the Saromsker Rebbe, whose eyes were unclouded with age, was the only one who could properly look into them. He knocked on Roger’s door. Inside, the boy was packing a small suitcase.
The Saromsker Rebbe closed the door behind him: there were many people in the hall breathing respectfully.
“I’m leaving for a while,” Roger said, “but I’ll be back in a few months.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the House of Ruth, where a miracle will come, a splinter of light, a flicker.”
With everyone following him, the Saromsker Rebbe hurried through the halls. A thousand people packed into the assembly hall, where dust was dancing in beams of sunlight. The Saromsker Rebbe stood on a high platform. “It could be,” he said, “that there is a baal shem tov.”
Before the instruments were taken from their cases and the locks pulled on the schnapps cabinet, Roger carried his butterscotch-colored suitcase down the brownstone steps and disappeared into streets that had begun to darken and glow red with alien neon. Never had he been to the Bronx, he had no map, and did not know the subway, but he was carried as if on a puff of wind through roaring tunnels and white-tiled stations full of the temptations of kosher hot dogs prepared with nonkosher utensils. While the express idled with open doors in the green curve of the Fourteenth Street station, he listened to a saxophone. The notes for which the player of this instrument was reaching and would never attain were the notes Roger had just heard, and even after the doors closed and the train rumbled uptown, he heard them still.
THAT NIGHT, Roger slept on the roof of the 161st Street IRT station, under faintly visible stars that would have blazed but for the emanations of electric light that make the sky above the City of New York the color of a jonquil. He slept neither on a park bench nor on the pavement, because had some Irish bullies tried to beat him silly, it would not have been a mitzvah for Roger had they been struck by lightning. The air in his resting place was relatively cool and dry, and he was so young and flexible that the washboard indentations in his back vanished ten minutes after he left the corrugated roof.
Soon the sun was high and people were streaming from nowhere to the aquarium-dark spaces under the El to buy puffer-fish-shaped fri
ed things the color of apple pie that were filled with potatoes and cheese, triangular slices of pizza (a new thing) from which the ingredients had tried to slide and been killed during their escape, armies of nonkosher fried chicken parts arranged in golden ranks as in the Napoleonic Wars, and candied apples that you could buy only if you signed a statement stipulating that you wouldn’t sue after you ate the paper that stuck to the flat place on the top, had all your fillings pulled out, and were stabbed by the stick. This offered neither the prospect of lunch nor any other meal for a boy whose idea of bliss was herring and dilled potatoes. What did it matter? He wasn’t hungry, and he stepped from the shadows of the El into the bright sun, where the House of Ruth loomed as white as chalk, a Pleistocene cliff against which swirled the gray-black exhausts of the Major Deegan Expressway.
Hours before the game, he approached a ticket booth. “Is this the House of Ruth?” he asked.
“This is it.”
“This is it, just like that? This is her house?”
“His,” the ticket seller said.
“His?” Roger asked.
“His.”
“Ruth was a woman,” Roger stated.
“Ruth was a Babe, but he wasn’t no woman.”
“That’s not true,” Roger said, “but it doesn’t matter. I’ve come to save the Yenkiss.”
“From what?”
“Defeat.”
“You still need a ticket.”
“I shouldn’t just go in?”
“You have to buy a ticket even to save the team. But you’re in luck. If you buy even a cheap ticket now, you can go to the best seats for the pregame practice. Mantle is batting this very minute.”
“Mickey Mental?”
“Yeah, Mickey Mental.”
“He’s the one I’m supposed to replace, I think.”
“He’ll be so disappointed!”
“He can be on the team. I’ll just hit for him.”
Not having any money was no discouragement for Roger, who pivoted away from the ticket booth, faced the massive concrete walls and iron gates, and, with Moses and Joshua in mind, threw out his arms. His chest was expanded (which wasn’t saying much), his fingers spread, and his face upturned in expectation of a miracle, but no breach appeared in the walls. So he repeated the gesture, and said “Liftoach!” Curiously, no breach appeared this time, either, or any of the dozen times thereafter. Still, Roger had no doubt that he had been commanded upon a divine mission.