Princess of Passyunk (2 page)

As Yevgeny tied a neat square knot in the clothesline, Ganady glanced over at Mr. Ouspensky's hands. They were gnarled, the knuckles outsized. Ganady wondered how he managed to do anything with such hands.

He felt sorry for Mr. Ouspensky. Where the Puzdrovsky house was full of family, Mr. O's house was full of quiet. He had not even a cat or a canary. Some of Baba Irina's old
gleyzele tey
friends had canaries. Mr. Ouspensky had nothing. And if people were conspicuously absent from his small apartment, so too were any memorials to them. There were no little shrines such as decorated seemingly every flat surface in the Puzdrovsky home. No heirloom lace graced the tabletops, no fragile teacups cluttered the shelves, no family photographs hung on the walls or filled keepsake books. Mr. Ouspensky's bookshelves were stacked with issues of Dime Sports Magazine, his photo albums were full of baseball cards and baseball clippings. It was these he brought out to show his visitors.

Faces looked up at Ganady from the black construction paper pages of the books. On this page, Phillies faces: Cy Williams, Lefty O'Doul, Freddy Leach, Chuck Klein. Players from the Thirties.

“He was the great one.” Mr. Ouspensky tapped the Chuck Klein card with an arthritic finger. “Phillies sold him twice during the bad years, but he kept coming back. Ended his career with them.”

Ganady wondered if perhaps Mr. Ouspensky knew everything about baseball in the same way that Baba Irina knew everything about the Old Country, about the Golden Age of a forgotten empire, about mushrooms.

“He batted .386 in 1930.” Mr. Ouspensky wagged his head. “.386. Imagine. But the team finished last.”

“Pitching,” murmured Yevgeny, echoing the movement.

“You can't win without pitching.”

Mr. Ouspensky shrugged. “Eh, I was more of an Athletics fan then. After all, there they were, and I could see them for free until that thing.” He nodded toward the window that looked out on Connie Mack Stadium.

Ganady raised his eyes to the window. He could just see the hated fence.

“The Phillies were at the Baker Bowl then,” said Mr. Ouspensky.

“So,” Ganady said, frowning a little, “if we could find a spot...an eddy...”

“...you'd be seeing the Athletics.” Mr. Ouspensky flipped to a new page. Athletics players stared up from it.

Ganady was disappointed. He hadn't really followed the Athletics. Hadn't cared much when they'd moved to Kansas City. He was a Phillies fan. Still, a ballgame was a ballgame. “Have you seen Eddie Waitkus play, Mr. Ouspensky?”

“Most certainly, I've seen him play.” Mr. O flipped pages, time-traveling the book into the present day. “I saw him play the day he was shot. ‘49, that was. Terrible, terrible thing. That poor girl must've been crazy to do such a thing.”

“Da read about it in the paper,” said Ganady. “The papers said she was deranged. That's the same as crazy, I guess. Ma didn't like us to talk about it. She wouldn't let Da take us to games for while after.”

“Almost the whole season,” said Yevgeny mournfully.

“So, what do we need to find a spot?” asked Ganady, tearing his eyes from the fragment of Connie Mack he could see from Mr. O's kitchen window.

“First, we must have faith. Then, we must have a ritual.”

“There's a ritual?”

“Last season, I set up a kitchen chair on the roof and brought up some beer and peanuts. In a red-and-white-striped bag. Pretended I was at a game. That worked twice.” He shrugged. “Eh, it's a bit different every time.”

Ganady refrained from asking how a ritual could be different every time, and watched Mr. Ouspensky turn back the pages of his scrapbook to 1932. He laid the album open on the kitchen table. Newspaper clippings dominated the page. KLEIN VOTED NL MVP, said one. FOXX ENDS SEASON WITH 58 HOMERS, proclaimed another. The other clippings were divided equally between the Phillies and the Athletics. Stanislaus Ouspensky was clearly a fan in conflict.

“We have a year,” he said. “Now we need a talisman.”

“A what?” asked Yevgeny.

Mr. O smiled and held up a finger. Then he moved through his parlor to a dark mahogany hutch. Ganady assumed it held dishes, for it looked much like the cupboard that cradled his mother's heirloom china, imported with much care from Poland.

It held baseball paraphernalia.

The boys moved as if entranced, coming to flank their host at the cupboard-cum-treasure chest, there to behold its contents. Two whole bats, a third in two pieces, lay upon the bottom shelf. There was also a glove of sorts—an odd-looking thing with unstitched fingers fat as sausages—an unrecognizable jersey, a pair of cleats with leather uppers so dry and aged, the toes had curled up. Lastly, there was an assortment of baseballs, some clean and white, some covered in autographs, some old, muddy, and scuffed. One had the stitching popped open to reveal the tightly wound core.

It was this pathetic specimen that Mr. Ouspensky lifted from the shelf. He held it reverently—the way Father Zembruski held the Host during Eucharist.

“Jimmie Foxx home-run ball,” he said.

The object transformed from trash to treasure, the boys pressed closer.

Yevgeny thrust his nose into the cabinet, sniffing like an inquisitive hound. “Where'd you get all this stuff?”

“Oh, here and there. One place and another.”

His eyes on the faded jersey, Ganady had a sudden flash of insight. “Did you play, Mr. Ouspensky?”

The old man grinned, becoming, in an instant, a 70-year-old boy. Holes showed where back molars had been. “Eh well, I did play some. That's my jersey, you see? Number 25. Lexington Mills team, 1915. Outfield.” The grin deepened. “They called me ‘The Wandering Jew' because I had such good range. My rabbi did not think such a pet name was proper. In fact, my rabbi did not think baseball was a proper pastime for a good Orthodox boy. So...”

“You quit?” asked Yevgeny, eyes wide.

“I got a new rabbi.”

“You've been here a long time, huh?” said Ganady. “In America, I mean. In Philly.”

The boy was an old man again, turning a dilapidated baseball in arthritic fingers. He nodded. “A long time, yes.”

“You must've come over when you were a kid.”

“Not so much a kid, no. But come. Let us see if the stream of time will allow us to swim in it today.”

They went back up to the roof then, Mr. O clutching his talisman. Once there, he made a circuit of the rooftop, describing a square with halting footsteps, singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in a quavering tenor.

No, not a square, Ganady realized, following him bemusedly. A diamond—with the back of home plate aimed at the spite fence.

At each corner Mr. Ouspensky paused to assume an infielder's posture—half-crouched, facing home plate. When he had completed his tour of the imaginary diamond, the old man led his acolytes to the invisible pitcher's mound where they faced Connie Mack.

“Take first,” he told Ganady, then to Yevgeny: “Take third.”

The boys moved to their invisible bases. Mr. O struck a pose—a pitcher getting ready to go into the windup.

They waited. The inevitable pigeons waited with them, perched on the new clothesline, on the edge of the roof, on the clutter of little smokestacks, on an empty pigeon cote. Their cooing threw a soft blanket over the other Saturday afternoon sounds. In the street below, cars and trucks purred and rumbled, muted cheers floated from the stadium across the street, farther away on the river, boats hooted at each other over the water.

Ganady's nose itched. He withstood the itch as long as he could before reaching up surreptitiously to scratch it. At once, he felt Mr. Ouspensky's eyes on him and turned the scratch into the Sign of the Cross, hoping Mr. Ouspensky would think he was merely adding to the ritual.

He chanced a glance at the old man. Mr. O's eyes were trained on the stadium wall, large and bright and hopeful. The torn baseball revolved in his hands, over and over, round and round.

Ganady held his breath, straining to hear the stadium sounds—crowd noise, the hawkers shouting, the crack of the bat. Suddenly, that was all he could hear; pigeons, river, and street traffic all dissolved into the game. Sparks floated before Ganady's eyes, and across the street, Connie Mack's great wooden ramparts seemed to shimmer and blur in the afternoon Sun. Was that a bit of emerald green he glimpsed through the heavy boards? Were those bright flecks of color the spring vestments of the people in the stands?

Across from him, Yevgeny let out a long, sighing breath as if he, too, saw...something.

The ball in Mr. O's hands turned and turned and turned, and the old man murmured a jumbled litany of names and stats. The spite fence wavered, melted, faded. Verdant green seeped through its filmy fabric. A pattern began to emerge.

“Hey, what are you guys looking at?”

At the sound of Nick's voice, the pigeons rose up in a great flutter of wings. In an instant, Ganady's view of the ballpark was lost in a flight of tiny angels. In the wake of their leave-taking, Connie Mack's spite fence was as solid as the day it was put up.

Ganady exhaled.

“Your brother,” said Mr. O, “is a klutz.”

oOo

“You don't really believe you were about to see through that fence, do you?” Nick asked as they made their way home.

“No,” said Ganady, “because the fence wasn't there then.”

“Then when?”

“In 1932. The year Mr. Ouspensky got a Jimmie Foxx home-run ball.”

Nick smote his forehead with the heel of one hand. “Oh, yeah! How could I forget? You were going to travel back in time to catch the game. C'mon, Ganny. You can't travel in time by hugging a baseball and staring into thin air. You need a machine. Anybody knows that. Didn't you read Jules Verne?”

“H.G. Wells,” said Yevgeny and Ganady added, “Maybe baseball is the time machine. That's what Mr. O thinks.”

“Mr. O is a lonely old
meshuggener
who likes to play jokes on dummies like you two.”

“He wasn't joking, Nikolai,” said Ganady. “He meant it. He had a whole ritual and everything. It was like...like...”

“Like mass,” said Yevgeny. “Like
sabes
.”

Nick shook his head and whistled. “I wouldn't let Father Z hear you say that. You could end up doing a thousand ‘Hail Marys' standing on your head.”

Fridays were stressful for Ganady Puzdrovsky. This was because Baba Irina must go to synagogue and someone from the family must accompany her.

Friday supper, Baba held court at table, performing a ritual that was at least as old as Ganady himself. She would turn to Da first. This was because Da was the One Who Had Caused It. ‘It' being his mother's defection from Judaism. Da had been raised a Catholic and wouldn't enter a synagogue, nor would he allow his wife to do so, had he any say in the matter. He hadn't, for Rebecca Puzdrovsky had no qualms about entering a synagogue. To her, the
shul
was as much a house of God as Saint Stanislaus.

Sometimes she and Da would argue the point. Mother would say, “Look, Vitaly, the Mayflower got here with sails and your family's boat got here with steam. They're both boats—where's the problem?”

This did not mean that Rebecca Puzdrovsky (née Ravke Kutshinska) would actually go to shul, for she would not. And this had only to do with the fact that most of the members were
landslayt
; she'd known them her entire life from Keterzyn; some of them had even come to the States on the same boat. They would look at her with their heavy eyes and she would feel crushed. Ganady had heard her say so to Da.

“Like being stoned,” she'd said, “but with grapes.”

Having laid her guilt blessing upon Mama and Da, Baba would look to Nick, who always had too much homework, or a need to go to library to study (though it was Friday) or suddenly recalled that he must do Izzy's windows. More often, it was a dance at the Catholic Youth Center.

Ganady knew that Nick found Sunday mass intolerable enough. To have to go to synagogue as well was more than he could bear; he preferred guilt. And on those Fridays that the distraction was a dance at the Center, the guilt would get especially deep, because then Baba's eyes would reveal her agony that the grandchildren had lost their
yiddishkeit
, to her, something even more fundamental than a change of religion.

At this point, the most sumptuous of meals would taste like sawdust. And at this point, Ganady would volunteer to take Baba to
shul
and would be her golden
boychik
and his parents would allow it just so they could eat. Mama believed that it was both sinful and dangerous to allow a meal to end in discord.

Ganady wasn't sure why this ritual must play out every week, but it must. He had tried circumvention once, offering his services as escort the moment Baba Irina sat down at table and said, “Well, it's
sabes
,” as if everyone didn't know.

“I'll take you, Baba,” he'd said.

It was as if she hadn't heard him. She'd paused for only a beat, patted his hand, then turned to her son-in-law and said, “Is it too much to ask, you and Ravke should come with, Vitaly? If not you, at least my own daughter...”

Everyone had then assumed his or her customary role, and the guilt had fallen about in its usual pattern. Ganady had never attempted to break the Ritual again.

How Ganady and his Baba got to synagogue depended entirely on upon the amount of guilt that had accumulated at table and upon whom it had fallen most heavily. Ganady found it bemusing that, though the words were almost always the same, the dynamics of guilt were subtly different from week to week, so that some sabes they walked, some they were given bus fare, and some Da would call a cab.

Whatever manner of conveyance they took, Yevgeny Toschev would most likely be waiting for them at the bottom of the front stoop (if he had not been at supper) and would go with. And so, most sabes, Irina Kutshinska entered shul Megidey Tihilim with a good Polish Catholic boy on each arm.