Reuben Katz wrestled the threadbare undershirt onto his spindly, slumping shoulders as the rain thrummed dismally against the dirty windows of their Brooklyn flat.
"We don't play the lottery, Hilda," he finally said.
Hilda shrugged. "Don't play? Don't play? Well we should. It's a better bet than selling shin plasters. No one wears shin plasters these days except tailors and all the tailors are in Japan, and here you are selling shin plasters in Brooklyn. And don't forget your rain hat when you go out. You'll be sneezing for weeks. "
At that she took his hand. "And little Reuben, my boobelah, go to see the doctor, please, and have him remove it."
"Sure," Reuben said, giving Hilda a tiny peck high on her bulging left cheek. At eighteen she had been the blooming, buxom prize of Flatbush Avenue with flashing dark eyes and an exciting mane of auburn, silken hair. And now? But it was too sad to even think about now. Slowly dying in a city cancerous with viciousness, they walked the streets in fear and lived on macaroni.
Hilda flopped on the couch watching Reuben as he stood in front of the ancient vanity with the cracked mirror. He forlornly parted his thinning hair, his suspenders dangling before his colorless, drooping jockey shorts from which protruded yellowing, hairless legs. Well they hadn't always been so feeble. She remembered the summer of '53 with Snider in center, Furillo in right , and Peewee at shortstop when she and Reuben would sit behind the third base dugout. Reuben would shout something encouraging at Leo and she would blow the hell out of her bugle. Rosie Weiss claimed she once heard Hilda blowing from the bus down by Prospect Park. After the game Hilda would coax Reuben to loosen up his purse strings for a giant corned beef on weck at Rosenstein's on Flatbush Avenue and then sometimes they would do the thing that nice Jewish girls were not supposed to think about. Well Reuben's legs were not feeble broomsticks then.
It was the next day that Reuben tried to get Hilda off the couch again. "So off the couch, my Hilda and over to synagogue we'll go? Rabbi Schlivinski says he misses you."
"For a 27 year old Rabbi like Schlivinski we should bother? On our heads on the way both of us could get a lump the size of a challah."
"Now don't argue with me, Hilda. Up from there. We owe it to you know who."
Hilda sighed and tugged herself into the shapeless black dress that showed signs of succumbing to stress fatigue. Then together they clomped down the stairs of the apartment building and up Nostrand Avenue. Hilda held her purse in front of her like a sacrificial offering to the gods of crime so that if any thugs came for a snatching, they wouldn't break her arm in the process. Reuben clutched her other bulging arm as they walked, supposedly to protect her, but in reality to steady himself against falling.
They paused in front of 3396 Flatbush, the former home of Ebbets Field. "Why did they have to go, Reuben? That was the beginning of the end."
Reuben knew exactly what she meant. It wasn't as if he hadn't heard her regret for the sickening Los Angeles departure of the Dodgers before. He too felt the agony of the loss. In those secret Brooklyn days there was still a carpeting of lush green grass inside the safe confines of the ball park where the boys in white, "Dem Bums" cavorted. And then sadly the world got younger, hearts got older, and the Dodgers flew west to California.
"Face it, Hilda, we died and Brooklyn followed when the Dodgers left."
"But, why, Reuben? Is money so important. Is there no such thing as sentiment?"
"Only for sentimental fools," Reuben said as two wolflike black teens with rags around their heads eyed Hilda's purse and laughed out loud.
"You think Jackie Robinson would behave like that?" Hilda said scornfully. It wasn't the boys she was afraid of ; it was the pain, the fragility of the human body.
Reuben tried to shush her up. She had always been a fearless woman. Think of her blowing her bugle for the first time at a Saturday afternoon doubleheader in 1943. Dazzy Vance was pitching. Think what nerve it took for a proper Jewish woman to stand up and trumpet in the middle of the afternoon just because the Dodgers had the bases loaded. She was beautiful then. OK, a little large, so you can't have everything, but cascades of auburn hair falling over her shoulders and a bosom the size of Niagara Falls. Such a delightful woman for a man like him, a shinplaster salesman in an age where shins no longer ached, to be married to.
The teenagers stuck up their middle fingers, not even bothering to say anything.
"Acch, you should be ashamed," Hilda said. "Why doesn't your father give you on your rear a spanking?"
Poor Hilda, Reuben thought, not even knowing that today's children no longer had fathers at home to take a belt to their backside. He wished he could somehow reverse the flow of time and events so she would be happy again. Happy was her nature wasn't it?
They sat on opposite sides of the mahitza at synagogue as the cantor sang the mass. Reuben nearly fell asleep after he finished reading the copy of the Sporting News he had secreted in the sleeve of his shiny suitcoat jacket. The Dodgers were only two games out of first place with a week to go in the season. As if he could care, as if that team in Los Angeles had anything to do with the boys of summer who cavorted at Ebbets so many years before.
It was on the way back to the apartment that the rag-headed boys suddenly blocked their path for the second time that evening. This time they administered a beating that left Hilda sprawled on the sidewalk minus her purse. Reuben helped her struggle home.
After the beating Hilda sat for days swallowed by the remains of the pitiful stuffed chair her mother had given them for their wedding 50 years earlier. She would sit motionless for hours, staring into space.
"You want I should turn on the television, Hilda?" Reuben would say, trying to figure out what was going on behind her blank eyes, once so gay.
"Here I'll turn on the baseball game. The Yankees are on."
Hah, the Yankees. They hated the Yankees. If only the Dodgers hadn't left town, but what good was wishing?
"You never say nothing to me anymore," Reuben said sadly. "Not even to complain or tell me how to dress. Sometimes I think you don't like me no more." He turned his head away so she couldn't see the tear in his eyes, then pulled himself together.
"Rabbi Schlivinski called, Hilda. He invited us for Shabbos. You'd like that , wouldn't you? Like the old days with our grandparents. Remember how it was when we were kids? You remember how you weren't even allowed to wear a short-sleeved blouse to school? They were crazy, weren't they, our parents? And now kids with switchblades and cocaine. We should have stayed 18, Hilda. You remember the year Pete Reiser came up from the minors and cracked his skull running into the wall? You remember the first time you took your bugle to Ebbets? I dared you. You were such a wild and crazy kid. Nothing would stop you, would it? Remember how the Dodgers stood on the dugout steps and applauded you when you sounded reveille?"
Reuben emptied an ashtray that hadn't seen ashes in years as Hilda sat staring in space, her face a blank mask.
"Well then if you won't go to the rabbi's, then maybe I'll go. I'll bring you some lox and salmon. It would do us both good. What do you say?"
Hilda said nothing. There was nobody home there anymore.
It was on the way back from the rabbi's. Reuben was hurrying in the rain, carefully shepherding little styrofoam containers of lox, salmon, borscht, kugel, and babganoosh from Hilda, thinking of how the rabbi said that maybe Hilda had suffered a stroke during the beating and should see a doctor when a man stepped out from between two buildings at the corner of Nostrand and Union and blocked Reuben'spath. The stranger was compact in a black suit with a wide, black hat and a familiar, not too friendly face, that Reuben could n't quite place though he somehow felt he should know.
"You Reuben Katz?"
"If you think I am and think I've got any money to rob, then you're a fool. I'm taking this food home for a sick wife."
"That's what I wanted to see you about."
"Hilda? You know my Hilda?"
"Look, I know everybody. What I want to know is how bad you want to help her?"
"How bad? This you have to ask me, Reuben Katz, but you know everything else?"
"I like to hear things from the horse's mouth."
"OK, so you've heard, so what?"
"So I've got a deal for you. How would you like to have one wish to help your wife?"
"How'd you like to buy the Brooklyn Bridge?"
"No, look I've got connections. I can do things. " The stranger fiddled his fingers, and the rain directly over Reuben's head stopped while all around him a circle of water beat down.
Impressed, Reuben dropped his guard. "So what's your deal?"
"I grant you one wish and you sign this little contract for me."
"What you want a Jew to sign papers without a lawyer? Some kind of meshugeh I guess you think I am?"
"Not at all. I consider you a hard-headed businessman. Didn't you own the last money-losing dime store in Brooklyn?"
The memory of that horrible venture hurt, but Reuben had to acknowledge its accuracy and nodded.
"And weren't you the guy who tried to corner the tanning lotion market for black people?"
Reuben nodded.
"Very shrewd! So take the papers to your lawyer and let me know when you're ready. I'm not hard to find."
The fact was Reuben could not have afforded a lawyer at any time in the past forty years, so he took the contract in triplicate back to the apartment and struggled to read it in the dim light of a 75 watt bulb. As best he could make it out, the contract specified... I, ReubenKatz, agree in payment for one wish fulfilled to bet $2,000 on horse number one in the first race at Aqueduct Race Track on the first day to follow Sukkoth in the year of 0ur Lord 1997.
The last $2,000 dollars! Reuben shook his head and signed. Might as well flush the meager safety money in the bank down the toilet that no longer worked.
When the contract was signed, the stranger smiled approvingly so that Reuben almost, almost recognized him and said, "So now what's your wish and when do you want it granted?"
Reuben ran it down for the stranger in every detail, including the bugle.
The next day Reuben lied to Hilda,"I've got some new drugstores in Queens that are interested in shin plasters." He went straight to the bank and withdrew the last $2,000 and headed for Aqueduct on the subway. Stanley's Surprise , a 30-1 gray nag under a jockey in green polka dots, was the first horse in the first race.
"I gotta be crazy in the head," Reuben told himself as he stood hopelessly by the fence near the finish line, waiting for the official demise of his two thousand dollars. However, Stanley's Surprise came flashing out of the pack and won by two lengths.
Reuben carried home two long-stemmed roses wrapped in green paper for Hilda.
"For you I got these special," Reuben said, placing them in her lap under her large, inert hands.
Hilda gave no response, but Reuben thought he saw a flicker of a tear in her eyes.
"Now tomorrow, Hilda, I've got a special surprise for you, You'll have to come to the window and see when it's time."
That night Reuben could hardly sleep thinking he was crazy, but daring to hope against hope. At 5:30 a.m. a huge blazing sun lifted over Long Island, rising high over Brooklyn, as Reuben stiff-legged it to the window. What he saw almost took his breath.
Across Flatbush Avenue where it used to stand 40 years earlier, that huge pile of brown brick called Ebbets Field replaced the depressing row of high-rises that had supplanted it. A blue Studebaker stood parked at a meter across the street, and a policeman on horseback ambled lazily along the cobblestones.
"Hilda! Hilda Come to the window and look. Hurry now. You must!"
It must have been the urgency in Reuben's voice that propelled Hilda across the linoleum for she had not walked without assistance since the beating.
"Oh my gott in himmel," Hilda shrieked when she looked out the window.
"Look a that sign, Hilda. Look! Yankees here today. It's October, Hilda. The Dodgers are in the World Series!"
"Can we go, Reuben. Can we?" Hilda burst out.
"Of course, we'll go, my babushkeleh," Reuben said, dancing a little jig with his wife of 52 years.
Seven hours later they hurried through the turnstiles, surging forward on a wave of men in black and white shoes and women in stack heels, hurrying up the concrete ramps to field level.
"Wait, Reuben, wait," Hilda said, a little out of breath with excitement.
"I know, boobie, I know."
"I don't know if my heart can stand it, " Hilda said.
Reuben helped her along gently as the smell of popcorn, beer, and bratwursts, wafted through the stadium. And then suddenly they were overcome with green, standing at field level looking out at a manicured infield surrounded by a precious emerald of outfield grass glittering in the afternoon sun in the heart of filthy Brooklyn. Jackie and Peewee and the Duke and Furrillo were sauntering youthfully confident, warming up in their white uniforms with the blue lettering, and down in the bullpen Kirby Higbee was loosening up, getting ready to pitch as the haughty Yankees in visitor's gray pinstripes sat regally in the dugout scornfully regarding their opponents.
Reuben turned to Hilda, who had suddenly lost sixty five pounds, and looked cheeky and buxom and pert in a red dress her father would have died over had he seen, and said, "How you feeling today, kid?"
"Like kicking Yankee ass," Hilda winked as they stepped into their box seats, and she reached for the trusty bugle that was right where they had left it.
"Blow ,kid, blow!" Reuben shouted and Hilda trumpeted a war cry that rolled across the infield, echoed in the dugouts, swelled into the upper deck, rumbled down Eastern Parkway, and ignited the fans of Dem Bums in right field who exploded in a frenzied roar of approval while Furillo, shagging flies in right, suddenly pumped one arm in the air at the sound of living victory on Flatbush Avenue.
The next morning after the Dodgers won to clinch the World Series, Reuben had a wonderful plan. Together he and Hilda would take a walk; he would put his arm around her waist and they would stroll in the sun-light in Prospect Park and not be afraid anymore.
"Hilda," he whispered, but there was no answer. A little startled, he shook his wife gently, but she failed to move. Reuben sat for a long time silent in the gloom of the gray apartment, studying Hilda's sweet young face that continued to smile even in death. Then, tears of defeat blinding his eyes; he trundled around the sagging bed for one departing kiss, then laid the bugle solemnly across her chest before sitting down softly to stroke her graying hair. After all now there was no hurry to call the undertaker.
H. Turnip Smith lives in Dayton, Ohio and practices his jump shot at Wonderly Park. A former fast food service worker, Smith is presently ineffectively pursuing a professional career in writing.
Email: tsmith@sinclair.edu
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