Be Careful What You Wish For

Careful/Kruh 1 CHAPTER 1. Warm-ups To understand Jonathan Bailey and his obsession, we have to go back to Boston’s old West End, a teeming neighborhood of Italians, Poles, Jews, Albanians, Lithuanians, African-Americans, and pretty much anyone else the rest of the city didn’t want. They were as diverse a group of people as have ever been crammed into one tiny plot of land, with nary a white collar in the bunch. Tough as nails and loaded with strong opinions on everything from taxes to the Holy Ghost, but on this day it was a sure bet that everyone was in agreement on one thing: with Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, and a host of other stars, the Red Sox were sure to beat the St. Louis Cardinals in the seventh and final game of the World Series. “Dad, there’s no sound!” It was about six in the afternoon on October 15, 1946, and Theodore Bailey of 29 Joy Street had his head and hands inside an old, wooden console radio. The urgency in his son Alexander’s voice was clear. “Don’t you think I know that?” came the agitated, muffled response from behind the speaker. “But the game, dad, the game.” Careful/Kruh 2 “Son, I’m trying as hard as I can to fix it,” Theodore said tenderly as he poked his head out from behind the console. “But I can’t make any promises.” Alexander tried to mask his frustration, but what nine-year-old has that capacity? His father smiled sadly. Just about every week something else on the old radio needed repair, and more than anything, Theodore wished he could afford to buy a new set, but with rents going up and the cost of food, it seemed like every time they had enough money saved up… He looked at his son and said sincerely, “Look, if you want to go up to the Zipesi’s on the second floor or the O’Briens on the third and listen to the game there, I’ll understand. It isn’t every day the Red Sox are in the World Series.” The younger Bailey looked tempted—just for a second. But then he looked at the tired face of his father and shook his head. “No, it wouldn’t be the same. We have to listen together.” Theodore gazed back at the boy and wondered how he ever got so lucky. “Let me try one more thing. If it doesn’t work, we’ll both find some other place to listen to the game—together, okay?” Young Alexander’s smile of encouragement was all Theodore needed. He nodded with determination to the boy before reinserting himself inside the console, and as he jiggled the wires and tapped on the tubes he began speaking. Alexander smiled as he listened to the sound of his father’s voice coming from the radio, just as if it were Dick Tracy or Fibber McGee speaking to him directly. “You know, I remember the last time the Red Sox were in the World Series,” Alexander heard Dick Tracy say. “That was almost thirty years ago, in nineteen eighteen. ‘Course we didn’t have radio back then so you either went to the game—if you could afford it—or went down to Washington Street and stood outside one of the Careful/Kruh 3 newspaper offices and waited for them to post the score on a big blackboard. Ow, that smarts.” “You okay, Dad?” “Yes, yes, I’m fine. Just a little shock. But I think I might have found something,” the now hopeful voice from the console said. “Anyway, I remember my old man saying ‘we may not be able to afford a ticket to the game but we sure as hell can afford a ticket to stand in the street.’ So off we went with a couple of sandwiches your grandmother made and –” ZAP! “Enos Slaughter connects and drives the ball into right field and is on first with a single.” “Dad! You did it!” Theodore’s beaming face appeared from behind the console. “Just call me Marconi,” he said as he sat down next to his son, hiding a burn on his right thumb. “So here we are in the bottom of the eighth inning in St. Louis,” Arch McDonald, the Red Sox announcer, seemed to be summing up just for their benefit. “The score is tied three-all and there are two outs with a man on first. Up next for St. Louis is Harry ‘The Hat’ Walker… Harry stands in the batter’s box now. There’s the pitch… and it’s a shot into centerfield!” Little Alex jolted upright and grabbed his father’s hand—the one with the burnt thumb, of course. “The ball drops into centerfield and look at Slaughter go! Slaughter had taken a big lead from first and is already past second as Culberson finally gets the ball and is heaving it in to Johnny Pesky, the Red Sox shortstop. Slaughter is around third and he’s heading for home! Pesky has the ball, now and—" There was this terrible moment of silence from the radio. Had it broken again? Alex squeezed even tighter onto his father’s hand (to the elder Bailey’s credit he barely Careful/Kruh 4 winced) until they finally heard McDonald say “And now Pesky makes the throw to home! But it’s not in time as Slaughter slides across under the tag, and now the Cardinals lead the Red Sox by a score of four to three.” Now Alex, his disappointment settling in, slowly released the vice-like grip on his father’s hand. “Don’t worry son,” the elder Bailey said through the intense throbbing of his damaged thumb, “we’ll get ‘em in the ninth inning.” “But we didn’t,” thirty-year-old Alex Bailey was saying to his fiancée, Alice O’Brien, as they sat in the living room of his family’s home in Medford. The Baileys had moved to this modest suburb just outside Boston ten years earlier, after the city forced them and twelve thousand others out of their West End homes to make way for high-rise apartment buildings. The story of the West Enders is still regarded as one of the great urban renewal tragedies of all time. Bad enough that these proud people had to endure the indignity of hearing their neighborhood described as a slum by politicians and developers. Worse yet was an implicit promise by the city that they would be given first crack at the new glass and steel apartments which would replace their wooden triple-deckers. Not only wasn’t that promise kept, but the rents of those fancy high-rise apartments were way beyond their reach, and in the resulting Diaspora the members of this close-knit community were scattered throughout the Boston area. To complete the indignity, many of them had to pass the site of their old neighborhood on their way to work, where a giant sign read: If you lived here, you’d be Careful/Kruh 5 home now. “I did,” many of them would say bitterly every day. It was a tough thing for many of these immigrants to swallow, some of whom had escaped dictators and pogroms and holocausts to come to the land of freedom and equal opportunity to find out that even in America, some people are more equal than others. But life, as they say, goes on. The third-floor O’Briens and their girl Alice moved to Medford, just a block away from the first-floor Baileys and their boy Alex, who went from being friends, to sweethearts, to engaged lovers. On this Thursday afternoon in October of 1967 the young couple and just about everyone else who could afford to skip work or school, was somewhere watching or listening to the Red Sox play the seventh and deciding game of that year’s World Series. Even though his fiancée’s family had a new color television and the Bailey’s was only black and white, Alex convinced Alice to watch the game at their house so he could watch the game with his father. And so there Alex and Alice sat, crossed-legged on the floor between the couch and the Bailey’s Zenith television set. “If God-damned Pesky hadn’t held the God-damned ball, we would have won that God-damned game,” Alice heard the old man’s voice croak from behind them. “Theodore, please don’t take the Lord’s name like that,” Theodore’s wife, an older woman named Anna, said. “I’ll do whatever I God-damn well please in my own God-damn house,” the old man growled as his wife crossed herself for the fifth time in the last thirty seconds. Alice couldn’t help from smiling. This was just like in her house a block away, except there, the accents were Irish instead of Polish. The old man grunted at the woman sitting next to him and stared at the television set. “I got every reason to be angry. Look at this, it took ‘em over twenty years to get Careful/Kruh 6 back to the Series. Would have been there in forty-eight, too, if McCarthy hadn’t pitched Galehouse in that one game playoff against Cleveland, you know. Had two all- stars he could’ve used, but he goes with some jerk who won only eight games that year. Galehouse,” he said as he fairly well spit the name.

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