Away Game

By Bob Levin

An exploration of the often-fraught relationship between fathers and sons is at the heart of Bob Levin’s baseball-themed novel Away Game.

It’s the story of Hank Bauman who, through the magic of an old baseball board game, is transported from the present to 1955, to Game 7 of the Yankees-Dodgers World Series where his

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burnstown Publishing House
• Release date: Sep 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781772571271

Book preview

PART 1

Jimmy

CHAPTER 1

Igrew up without a father and with a mother who forever mourned him, telling the old stories, sniffling over their wedding photo, making her special brisket on his birthday, his absence so acute it was practically a presence. Maybe that explains what happened. Damned if anything else does.

It started with a spinner. That’s the last thing I recalled of the latter-day world, flicking the spinner on my ancient, rediscovered, taped-together All-Star Baseball game, and then I felt as if I were spinning, like on one of those playground gizmos where some sadistic big kid jumped on and nearly made you vomit. No vomiting here; the wave passed and off I went. Don’t ask me how this works. All I know is that one moment I was a sixty-year-old man visiting my childhood home in Philadelphia, cleaning out the attic for my mother, messing with an old board game, and the next I was the same man in a ballpark full of oddly well-dressed fans, and not just any ballpark but Yankee Stadium, the Bronx, October 4, 1955.

Of course, I didn’t realize this right away, the where and when, nor did I foresee what would follow, the drop-in becoming an odyssey — though I like to believe, while I didn’t make the magic, I was at least uncommonly open to it. I was hooked from the start. I was standing in the aisle along the left-field line, looking toward the diamond, the infielders tossing the ball, the pitcher taking his warm-ups, the upper and lower decks draped with red-white-and-blue bunting — lovely sights all, and sounds, the crowd emitting a sweet expectant din, a siren song. A dream? Maybe, though in dreams you don’t think it’s a dream, all the strangeness just accepted, like Stonehenge or hanging chads. There was a giant Ballantine beer scoreboard in right, as in the Connie Mack Stadium of my youth, but the other signs I didn’t recognize: Seagram’s, Manhattan Shirts, Philip Morris, Flying A.

Manhattan?

Where is this? I asked a young guy hurrying by.

What? he said, stopping short in his black jacket and gray fedora hat.

Where — where are we? I said, knowing instantly I sounded like a loon, trying again. I mean, what’s today’s date?

It’s, I dunno, October, it’s the World Series for chrissake.

The World — what year?

He eyed my torn jeans and paint-stained T-shirt, my clean-out-the-attic clothes, as if I were dressed weirdly. You’re for the Bums, ain’t ya, he said.

What? Oh yeah, yeah sure.

Figures, he said, snorting. Look, want my advice? Go to the can, stick your head under the faucet, sober up. Plenty time to get plastered later after the Yanks beat your Bums again.

And then I knew. I just knew, even if it was a dream (a notion that would take time to wear off, like a bad hangover), because here’s what was happening before I landed in this hallowed stadium, before I flicked that spinner: I was talking to my mother about my father, Mel Bauman, who died on October 4, after attending Game 7 of the 1955 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers, when I was two years old.

In my life, even entering my seventh decade, that’s still the essential event.

My mother was ninety-one now. She lived alone in our old Philadelphia duplex, having refused my offer to move in with us in Toronto. Actually, that was more my wife’s offer, back when our son Luke was small and our hearts big (not to mention we could use the baby-sitting), but Luke had left and my wife, my wonderful Jess, had passed on. Your mother is not supposed to outlive your wife. And while we no longer spoke of her coming to Toronto, even my mother allowed that, frail little old lady that she’d become, she was ready for a nursing home if I’d help her move.

Your father was a very handsome man, she said when I traipsed down the stairs with my latest attic treasures, an autographed Duke Snider ball and a framed photo of my father in front of the grand Ebbets Field entrance, looking sharp in the leather jacket he’d worn bombing Germany. "He was also the biggest Dodger fan that ever lived and moving to Philly didn’t change that. The Duke, Gil Hodges, and oh Jackie, Pee Wee, Campy, Johnny Podres — to your father those guys were like — like Superman. No, above Superman — Superman couldn’t throw a slider, your father said."

Why haven’t I seen these? I asked.

You did see them, a long time ago. But I can’t have them all out — too much dust. That baseball, though, you should keep that. Or sell it on — what’s that computer thing? I’m sure it’s worth a pretty penny.

My mother, as she liked to say, still had all her marbles, or most of them anyway. She was often fuzzy on whether she’d taken her pills or turned the stove off, but she could tell you, in numbing detail, about the day her dad bought his Packard wagon and the time she’d posed for an Ipana toothpaste ad. Or about my dad, the love of her life and the gaping hole in mine.

My greatest regret, she said before I returned to my attic labors and my old board game, is that you never got to know your father. He was a Cracker Jack, your father, and quite the ballplayer himself once. And he sure loved you.

About that board game: All-Star Baseball was created by an ex-player and first sold in 1941. Mine was the 1957 edition, my mother feeding my innate love of baseball at an early age. It featured stars of the day and all-time greats, each player having a cardboard disc with — here was the genius part — numbered spaces whose size was based on their actual batting records. (Babe Ruth’s home-run space, for instance, was huge, as was his strikeout space.) Put a disc on the spinner and spin away. Which I did endlessly as a kid, though I hadn’t seen the game in years, not since trying, futilely, to interest my young son in it on a visit to grandma’s, electronic gadgets having already benumbed his brain against anything so sedate and cerebral.

So I was thinking of my father, who loved me and died young, and of my own son who never seemed to want what I had to offer — I was thinking of those things (as I pieced them together later, trying to decode the magic) when I was whisked from a Philadelphia attic to a New York stadium more than a half-century before, like a combination lock clicking open. That’s it, that’s all I know. And one more thing: I’d put the Duke Snider disc on the spinner …

Duke Snider strode to bat here in the Bronx. It was the fourth inning, no score, some familiar figures on the field: Moose Skowron, Billy Martin, Scooter Rizzuto, Gil McDougald. As a boy I’d seen some of these Yanks, older then, play on TV, though I knew — because I’d read up on this day, my father’s last — that a lame Mickey Mantle was not in the lineup. I knew it all: how the Dodgers had never won a World Series, falling to the Yanks five times since ’41; how it was always Wait ’Til Next Year and now, in ’55, how the Series was knotted at three, forcing a fateful Game 7 — bits of history lodged in my head alongside Bunker Hill and Gettysburg.

You better find your seat, bub, someone official-looking said, just after the Duke struck out swinging, and I started walking, even knowing where to go, more or less. Sixty-thousand-plus people and I knew to head further down the left-field side, toward the corner, because my mother had told me where my father sat that day, in what would turn out to be a propitious spot, and surely I had come here — if I had come here — to see my father live his last moments on Earth.

A cheer went up, abrupt and rising, as I hustled along — Roy Campanella had cracked a double to left. Full credit to these Brooklyn fans, thoroughly infiltrating this shrine of the uptown Yankees. I picked a likely aisle and headed down, certain someone would stop me, ask to see my ticket, and as I scanned the rapt faces in the stands, searching for the one in my mother’s photos, a voice cut through the racket aimed straight at me.

Wanna seat, sir?

What? I turned and saw a young sailor, in full whites.

"Guy sittin’ here had to leave, said his wife’s havin’ a baby. Like he couldn’t think of that before he comes to the game, right?" The sailor grinned, revealing two missing teeth, and patted the seat.

Thanks, I said and scooted in.

It was a bright sunny day, the American flag flapping slightly on the pole in center, high above the monuments to Yankee demigods placed right in the playing field (peculiar, like displaying classic cars in the middle of the highway). Beyond the outfield stands squatted the apartment buildings of the Bronx, blocky and constant, while on field Carl Furillo hit a roller that Rizzuto gloved and fired to Skowron, Campanella advancing to third.

Still got a chance, all up to Hodges now, said my sailor friend, red-haired and fresh-faced — Brooklyn via Dublin, I guessed. He was a Marine, y’know, Hodges. Okinawa. Bronze Star they gave him. How ’bout you, sir, you serve?

What? Oh, no, I said, madly calculating. This would take some work, being a time traveller, if that’s what I was. The first step was acceptance, I told myself — the way, at other moments, you have to acknowledge the reality of an illness, a firing, a birth, a death. No amount of noodling makes it any less real. And now? What was I supposed to say? Actually, I avoided the draft, no way I was going to Vietnam. Right, that would make a lot of sense to this young swabby. Leading to rule number one of time travel: just lie. I was too old, I said. Drove an ambulance in New York.

Oh well, that’s okay, he said with what I took to be understanding and more than a hint of sympathy. I missed the show too. Not old enough. Don’t think I’ll ever forgive God for that. Heck, I was in Korea but it’s not the same — couldn’t really win that one. What good is it if you can’t win?

It was odd, the things I knew that no one else did. Like how Hodges would later manage the Mets — the club created after these beloved Bums were spirited away to L.A., breaking a borough’s heart for all eternity — manage them to one of the most unlikely World Series triumphs ever. And Campanella, a Philly guy by the way, now leading off third — Campy, the incomparable catcher, would a few years later hit a patch of ice in his rented car and slam into a pole, confining him to a wheelchair for life. I knew all this. Rule number two: no matter what you know, keep your mouth shut.

" Yes," the sailor cried, leaping to his feet as Hodges ripped a single to left, scoring Campanella.

I was up too, surveying the throng. Fists were pumped, hugs exchanged. A black guy pounded his buddy on the back. A priest tugged at his clerical collar as if needing air. A woman bashed her hands together repeatedly, like a toy monkey banging cymbals. I wanted, more than anything in the world, to tell Jess all about it.

Attaboy, Gil, a guy hollered. Attaway to beat these damn Yankees.

The Yankee fans just sat, cracking peanuts, looking cocky — certain, I imagined, that victory would eventually be theirs. Yankee-hating is timeless: a pox on filthy-rich front-runners in pinstripes. Which, of course, leaves out the envy part, the grudging-admiration part. The damn Yankees could play.

And then I saw him.

He was down front, in the corner as my mother said, near the foul pole and the 301 Ft. sign — the one who’d apparently yelled Attaboy Gil and was still emitting indecipherable whoops. (I must have missed him when fans stood.) Gray slacks, white shirtsleeves rolled up and collar unbuttoned, striped tie loosened. Black hair short and aviator shades — handsome, as she said, though I could only see him in profile. I could scarcely breathe. All those years of stories and photos, the precious legacy passed down to the receptive son — all that and here he was, the father I had no actual memory of, Mel Bauman in the flesh. About my height, with similar dark coloring, angular face, narrow build, though somehow he carried it all like a dashing ex-flyboy and ballplayer while on me, even in my younger years, the same parts (plus twenty pounds and wire-rims) suggested a pleasant-enough newspaperman, which I happened to be. And keep in mind: my dad, in his mid-thirties here, was a quarter-century younger than I was.

C’mon, Don, make these fat cats squeal, he called, slapping a program into his palm, but Don Hoak grounded out to end the inning.

There was one picture of my father in a baseball uniform. He was a high-school kid in Brooklyn, wearing his Erasmus Hall jersey and leaning against the stands — arms folded, head tilted, slight smirk. It was the sort of photo a parent makes you pose for but you secretly enjoy, imagining a mob of cameramen popping flashbulbs. My father was a pitcher, a fire-balling lefty, and the way my mother told it — though she didn’t know him then — he was scouted by all the New York teams, the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants, and a couple of others too. His heart was with the Dodgers, of course. But before anything could come of it, Pearl Harbor sent him and millions of others packing, my father ending up as a bombardier in a B-17 that, after a successful raid over Munich, returned to England with two engines out and crash-landed, crushing my dad’s left arm.

Johnny Podres, a young lefty, was on the hill for the Dodgers now. He’d won Game 3 of the Series and looked smooth today too, though at this point I was mostly watching my father — the voice of the section, self-appointed.

Don’t worry, Moose, he called after the Yankees’ Skowron grounded out, you’ll get yours — it’s almost mating season.

That one got a laugh, including from my sailor friend. Old leather lungs, he said.

You know that guy? I asked.

No, sir, the sailor said, still chuckling, but I sure like his style.

Yes, I’d heard about my father’s style. I knew he returned from the war and wandered some, to California and all around, that he tried to revive his baseball dream but his arm never fully recovered. He was back in Brooklyn, working the Cyclone at Coney Island, when he met my mother, June Edelstein, who was up from Philadelphia visiting a cousin. He gave them free rides, these two pretty girls in polka-dot dresses, and when he got off work he took them on bumper cars and bought them hot dogs and corn-on-the-cob and made them laugh. He was two years older than my mother if considerably poorer, but also, as she tells it, the handsomest, most magnetic man I ever met. They were married three months later, with a certain wariness on her parents’ part (What kind of husband drives a rollercoaster?) but the understanding that they’d live in Philly and he’d learn her dad’s discount clothing business from the bottom up. He was good at it, my mother said, a natural salesman.

The Dodgers scored again in the sixth, Hodges driving one out of the shadows into the sunlight of right-center, a sac fly that sent the Brooklyn faithful into further delirium. A guy in a top hat that said Our Bums flung it skyward and didn’t seem to care it was gone for good. My father thrust his arms up as if signaling a field goal. I don’t know why, but at that moment I thought: What if I’m not just here to observe him? What if I’m supposed to warn him, intervene, keep him from proceeding to the scene of his death — to change his history and mine too? The mere thought of approaching him, talking to him, was terrifying.

Hodges for President, he cried and got his applause.

In the bottom of the sixth the real drama started — I didn’t miss this part, the dreaded Yogi Berra batting with two Yanks aboard, no outs.

Please God, not again, the sailor said, glancing heavenward, and then, to me: I got a bad feeling here.

And why not? The Dodgers always found a way to lose the big one — it was part of their charm. The Brooks were the people’s team (to borrow a Sixties term), they lived in the borough, boasted Jackie Robinson and Campy, Newcombe, Gilliam, the Cuban Sandy Amoros. The Yankees took forever to field their first black player. It was a point of pride, rooting for Brooklyn, but even ahead 2-0 their fans awaited some new wrench of fate, some maniacally imaginative middle finger to their Dodgers and themselves. One kid was biting his nails so hard he was about to hit bone.

The outfielders were shifted around to right for the pull-hitting Berra, who instead lofted a long fly to left. Amoros took off. He was dashing toward the stands, toward us, an endless chase and seemingly hopeless, the ball — no doubt a conspirator in the anti-Dodger plot — slicing toward the foul line, preparing to drop fair and usher home a run or even two and become the new nightmare of all Brooklyn. But Amoros — a lefty, which is key, the glove on his right hand — reached straight out and snatched the conniving ball, then fired it to Pee Wee Reese, who rifled it across the diamond to Hodges at first to double off a straying McDougald.

I love you, Sandy, my father shouted, and the sailor kissed my cheek, and a groundout to Pee Wee ended the inning, and there was a sense, in the almost disbelieving aftermath, that maybe, just maybe, cruel fate could be conquered at last.

And so it was. After three more harrowing frames — after a fan, inebriated or insane or unable to take the tension, ran on the field; after a pinchhitting Mantle popped up; after two ninth-inning outs, Podres still dealing, a steely-eyed kid in his moment, my father doubtless picturing himself out there, hurling this game of games, and me thinking, why can’t I keep him from dying? — after all that, one strike from glory, people on their feet, foul after foul before the ball was hit Pee Wee’s way and he threw to Hodges and the bedlam began, Podres leaping, Campy leaping, players flying out of the dugout to mob them by the mound, fans rushing out to get in on the fun. My father was one of those, hopping the metal fence and running, and I struggled to keep sight of him as he sprinted into the infield and joined the swarm, moving toward the clubhouse as the players fought their way inside. Last I saw he was thumping the back of some unknown Dodger.

God is good, the sailor was yelling. "All is forgiven. I missed the war but not this, not this. Goddamn He’s good."

* * *

The part of my father’s death I always found curious is that it didn’t occur in Brooklyn. I’d seen photos of that exultant borough when the World Series ended at 3:34 that afternoon, a Tuesday unlike any other. People partying by the Dodgers Café, done up as if they’d bolted their offices or maybe dressed specially for the occasion, even a kid in a sport coat. An old truck promenading down Flatbush, revelers piled on like the Beverly Hillbillies. By all accounts the streets were jammed, as were the phone lines, and the air filled with the sounds of cowbells and church bells and blessed jubilation.

Surely my father would want to be part of all that. But he was due back in Philadelphia for work the next day, as my mother explained it, and he was staying with an old Brooklyn friend, Augie, who’d become a commercial artist and lived in Manhattan, in the east 80s. That’s where my father returned when the game was over — I assumed by subway — and where he died. I didn’t spot him on the platform in the Bronx but took the train to 86th Street. My knowledge of New York geography was limited, having last visited on a touristy trip with Jess and Luke when the latter was maybe ten, but even that was some forty years after this. Confusing, like everything else here. Like whether my two-year-old self was currently toddling around our house in Philly. Like how the stadium had a seat waiting for me and my watch had the right time. Anyway, I knew enough to plant myself by the subway stop, figuring my father would come that way.

And when he did? Just walk up to him maybe, say I was a fellow Dodger fan and wanted to buy him a drink. And then? Tell him who I was? Toss facts at him no one else could know — his mother’s maiden name, say, or where my birthmark was? Anything to keep him from going into that apartment building, right? Or was it right? Because my elementary rules of time travel didn’t tell me this: Can you actually alter the past? And what happens if you do? The only time-travel novels I recalled reading were A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Slaughterhouse-Five, excellent satires both but I couldn’t say they’d taught me any life lessons.

So I watched the stairs and, inevitably, I watched the cars go by, so delightfully old-timey, as if I’d landed not in New York but Havana. Some still had that rounded, stodgy look of the Forties, but others embodied Detroit’s early dabbling in sleek modernity — I’d have gladly cruised off in one blue-and-white Chevy convertible in particular. As for the people, there were no teeming masses of Brooklyn celebrants here, just an occasional shout from the bustling passersby. One came from a beaming young woman in a Dodger-blue blouse, her husband hustling to keep pace, pushing a baby carriage.

"I still can’t believe it," she gushed to him, stopping beside me at the curb.

Believe it, Betty honey, believe it, he said.

I caught the eye of the pink-swaddled infant in the carriage, the way you do sometimes. Only this time the eyes were a startling shade of blue — not like her mother’s blouse but brighter, with a touch of green, an ocean blue, and they stayed right on me, sparkling but steady. It was as though this little girl knew something, like who I was and where I’d come from. I smiled conspiratorially, as if asking her to keep my secret. Jesus, I was losing it here. What was she, six months old? And probably just looking at the stains on my T-shirt.

I was painting the town red, I said to her, winking, and then, to her mom and dad, She’s beautiful.

Thank you, her mother said, "and a very happy girl right now. We’re all happy. No more Bums."

Then came my father. He took the stairs two steps at a time and bounded onto the sidewalk. I made a reflexive move away from him, then toward him, like an outfielder misjudging a line drive.

Excuse me, I said, but were you at the game? Because I’d love to —

I hadn’t finished my sentence when he rushed into the embrace of a striking brunette. Their hug was hard and long, one of her stockinged legs bending upwards. He lifted her, let her down, ran a hand through her hair. They kissed,