6
NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT
In game six, Leo went three-for-four. When Babe came into the dressing room to congratulate the Cardinals, Leo’s eyes widened. He hugged Babe like he was a giant teddy bear. “It’s like it wasn’t even me, Babe. I came up on the ball as it was dropping and it just lifted off the bat.”
“Right.”
“Right? It felt all wrong. Felt like I’d got dressed up in women’s clothes.”
Babe laughed. “Leo, if you were a broad, you’d be turning tricks under the bleachers. You’re laying off those scallions now, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“They’re only for a slump. When you’re ripping it, you lay off, or it could have the opposite effect.”
Leo rolled back the cuffs of his starched white shirt and inserted fourteen-carat cuff links. “Sure. I’m laying off.”
“Game seven tomorrow.”
“I don’t know?”
Babe chewed on a cigar as they talked. Leo looked at his watch.
“Hey, let me see that,” said Babe.
“Let go, you big ape.” Leo pulled his arm free. He tried unsuccessfully to put his hand in his pocket, forgetting that he’d had his pockets sewn shut, like George Raft, to keep the line of the trousers smooth.
“You ain’t got no pockets?” Babe laughed.
“Grace sewed ’em for me.” Leo burped.
“Get her to sew up that hole in your glove.”
“I like it that way. Rabbit Maranville gave me that glove.”
Babe nudged Leo. “Don’t forget. Lay off the scallions.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean it.”
“Yeah.”
“When you burped, I smelled scallions.”
“That was onions.”
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. Scallions turn my stomach. Too bitter.”
“Big game tomorrow.”
“Yeah.”
“Let me see that watch.”
Playing minor-league ball with George Raft, Leo picked up his buddy’s penchant for silk suits, in his favorite color, green. In the pool halls of Springfield, Massachusetts—Winterborn’s and Smith’s—he became known as the Green Phantom. His suit this day was not quite scallion green. Still, in a field of scallions with his green suit and white shirt he would be nearly camouflaged from Babe’s view, were he to lie in the green and watch the white that lies just beneath the surface. The essence of scallions—white lies. It ain’t your watch, Babe.
That night Leo would dine on prophylactic scallions, in spite of Babe’s warning not to. His rationale was that throughout his Major- and minor-league careers, every time on deck he felt he was on the verge of a slump. If scallions worked once, they would work again. It might have been cheating, but so were the cut-balls that he and Frankie handed Cardinals pitchers. Honest guys might win ballgames, some of the time, but when you’re born with a short stick you look for an angle, especially when you’ve got six grand riding on it. If there was a counterpart to scallions, Leo would find it to keep Wild Bill Hallahan down tomorrow. He would finagle a Dean start in the seventh game.
Diz sulked back to the dressing room where he showered and changed, then left in need of some chocolate bars, as he always did after a game. In the Trumbull Avenue gutter he saw a brown Hershey’s wrapper, and he imposed the eight letters on the license plates of the cars that passed, filled mainly with depressed Detroiters after their team had lost. They needed a Hershey bar more than he did, but Diz was obsessed in a way Detroiters were not. He could taste it. He imagined two squares at a time in his fingers, his postgame indulgence. He wasn’t thinking of Cardinals owner Sam Breadon’s warning about kidnapping. After game three, Diz was about to accept a lift to the Forest Park Hotel from some louche-looking guys in pin-striped suits and a black car with New York plates when Breadon happened to look out the window. Diz was practically yanked out of the car by Breadon’s staff and hauled back to the owner’s office.
“Didn’t your mother tell you not to get into a car with strangers? They could be kidnappers, for chrissake,” said Breadon.
“Shit-fire, Sam,” Diz replied, “it wouldn’t do ’em no good to get me ’less they got my brother, too. Paul’d be madder than a snake with a plugged asshole, and he’d mow them Tigers down two games in a row.”
As he walked down the wide Trumbull Avenue sidewalk now, Diz’s thoughts moved to a call he’d gotten from an old friend, an admirer, a rival, doppelgänger: He was wondering why Satchel Paige couldn’t play in the Major Leagues, and he decided to press the issue with ‘the Mahatma’—Cardinals general manager Branch Rickey—at dinner that night at Henry Ford’s. Ford had already hosted the Tigers, and it was good public relations to invite the Cardinals as well.
Tiger loyalists were retreating to their domiciles to gear up for tomorrow’s seventh game, as the wind kicked up diverse paper trash from the wide sidewalk and the Tin Lizzies that kept Detroit going kept a slow pace on the wide avenue. Diz walked past a doubled, black steel utility pole and recalled how his brother Elmer insisted on walking between the poles, the way a kid would. Elmer would stand out, too, for wearing a baseball cap backward while every other man wore a respectable emblem of masculinity—a bowler, stovepipe, or snap-brim.
For no particular reason, Diz turned. He found it curious that the four thuggish guys would keep their fedoras on inside the Model A, whose New York license plate brought to mind Breadon’s warning after game three. Curiosity turned to suspicion when the Model A was still behind him a half minute later, obviously trailing him at his foot-speed. The two beefy guys in the front seat, Diz reflected, did not have the sad miens of fans whose team had gone down. He thought about running but decided not to show his hand, decided to trust the same dumb luck he had on the mound. Plus, he really wanted those Hershey bars.
Through the corner of his eye, he noticed another car pulling up abreast of him, then a gun in the hand of the man in the passenger seat pointing at the roof. The back door sprang open.
“Hey, Jay! Come on in.”
Diz saw his brother Elmer smiling at him, then glanced at the Ford pulling up behind them. He got in fast. Elmer himself had been kidnapped in 1927 when the Dean’s Ford truck was stopped with a flat and a cotton picker gave Elmer a ride to the grocery store. The next time the Deans saw Elmer was in 1931.
“I knew you’d be heading for the candy store. I told my friends here. They’re kidnappers. And this one’s Darrow. He’s retired.”
“Kidnapper?” asked Diz.
Darrow shook his head “no,” then looked the tall man in the eye for just a moment and extended his hand. “So you’re Dizzy Dean. This is an honor. Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise,” said Diz. “Those bolagulas in back of us were aiming to kidnap me, too.”
Darrow and James Atwood nearly knocked heads looking in the rearview mirror, while John Henry stuck his head out the window to check out the thugs.
“New York guys,” Diz continued. “Mr. Breadon warned me about ’em. I’m sure glad my own brother kidnapped me instead.” Darrow could not decide whether to take Diz seriously or not. Diz slid forward on his seat, looking at the pistol, and spoke to John Henry Seadlund. “Say, where’d you get that? Can I see?”
“Never mind where I got it. I got it, and I can use it.”
James Atwood turned and spoke to Diz. “Your brother’s telling the truth. We’ve been thinking about holding you for ransom. But the reason we came down here in the first place was to talk some sense into you about holding out for more money. Then we got to thinking we could make some ourselves, and maybe be famous.”
Darrow looked through the back window. “I suggest we get out of here fast and talk about it later.”
John Henry craned in front of James Atwood and looked in the mirror. He saw a beefy man in a pin-striped suit opening the passenger-side front door of the Ford. He fumbled for the bullets in his pocket and quickly loaded his gun, stuck his head out the window, followed by his arm, but he didn’t shoot. The angle was bad for a right-hander. He pulled his torso back into the car and the man behind them quickly got back in his car.
“Drive!” John Henry ordered.
Darrow pulled out.
“Where are we going?” asked James Atwood.
“Shit! I’ve got to think,” said John Henry.
James Atwood pointed at a police car at the end of the block. “Look! There’s cops. Pull over.”
“No. Keep going.” said John Henry. “We can’t call in cops if we’re kidnapping Dizzy Dean.”
“Oh, hell. I won’t say nothin’. Just pull over.”
Darrow was approaching the cops. He looked at John Henry. “What do I do?”
John Henry’s mind was freewheeling. He just stared straight ahead. James Atwood looked back and forth between the cops and John Henry.
“Look,” said Darrow, “you’ve got a peashooter. Those guys probably have four Thompsons. We’re seriously outgunned. I’m going to pull over.”
John Henry was still dumbstruck. Darrow pulled over, and the Ford stopped right on their bumper. James Atwood waved out the window and shouted to the cops. “Hey!”
The two cops were already approaching the Rolls-Royce with guns drawn. Darrow figured the pursuers would keep going rather than shoot it out with cops. He figured wrong. When the cops got close, Darrow blanched and his myopic eyes widened. “They’re not cops!”
James Atwood looked over his shoulder at Darrow, as did John Henry. No flies on Darrow’s foot. The black cop dived out of the way of the accelerating Rolls.
“How do you know?” shouted Diz.
“ ’Cause I defended him ten years ago in the Sweet trial. Mingo Drumgoole has done more time in jail than you’ve done in baseball, and his record’s a lot worse than yours. He’s a psychopath with an IQ of about ten.”
Diz shook his head and smiled. “Shit, that was a good plan—having phony cops stop us.”
“Jesus, this thing flies,” said James Atwood.
Darrow turned to John Henry. “Where to now, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Just keep driving,” said John Henry.
Diz slid forward on the leather seat. “Let me tell you how to get rid of these hound dogs. We got a dinner in a couple of hours with Henry Ford, and I been to Henry’s place once before. It’s like Fort Knox there. We’ll just head on to Henry’s a little early, and if these goons want to take on Harry Bennett’s army, we can watch the carnage.”
James Atwood and John Henry looked at each other. John Henry looked out the window at the pursuing Ford.
“Head that way. Let me think about it.”
Diz directed Darrow to Michigan Avenue. The Ford Estate in Dear-born was twenty minutes away by car.
“Say, how’d y’all like to be in a parade?” said Diz.
“What kind of parade?” asked James Atwood, who loved parades as much as John Henry did.
“When we get back to St. Louis, tomorrow. Gonna have a great big parade after game seven. The whole city’ll be out. After today, when Rickey hears about the two guys who saved me from kidnapping, you’ll all be celebrities. Heroes. The both of you. You’ll be my personal bodyguards. Go everywhere I go. Ride in the parade with me and Paul, Leo, Pepper, Ducky, the whole Gashouse Gang.”
James Atwood scratched the straw that passed for hair and glanced at John Henry. “What do you say?”
John Henry could see that his partner in crime had gone south on him. Diz slapped John Henry on the back and preempted him. “All right, then. It’s a deal.”
“Not so fast. I’m still thinking. The Cardinals will pay good money to get Dizzy Dean back. I figure he’s worth a hundred grand, easy.”
Darrow scoffed. “Breadon? Rickey? Those guys want to make money, not give it to you. Besides, where are you going to hide him? Not to mention Elmer and me. You’ll have the whole country looking for you. If folks were angry about Lindbergh’s baby, how do you think they’re going to feel about Dizzy Dean?”
James Atwood glanced at John Henry. “Maybe he’s right, John Henry. We ain’t thought it through the way we said we would.”
“We ain’t been invited to Ford’s,” John Henry protested meekly.
Darrow shook his head in disbelief at the kidnapper worried about the etiquette of crashing a dinner party.
“And don’t forget about the parade,” said Diz.
“I’d like that,” said Elmer. It was the first thing he’d said in minutes, and it seemed to have just the right weight.
“All right, then,” said John Henry. “Henry Ford’s place. Step on it.”
Parade. The word itself cast a spell that captivated John Henry. There was an inherent innocence to it that felt to him like the road to redemption. Riding through the streets of St. Louis with the Gashouse Gang was irresistible. Girls as beautiful as Ginger twirling batons, fathers with bats that swatted nothing but balls. Dizzy Dean tossing baseballs into the crowd. Flags, balloons, balls, confetti, shouts, and the sounds of shining brass, the thunder-simulating rolls of drums, all soaked up by the insatiable air of a parade.
John Henry’s rumination halted abruptly, along with the Rolls, at the gate of Henry Ford’s residence, where an armed guard looked down from a tower. The Model A slowed and two mustachioed men posed, puzzled, heads out the windows. Diz got out and motioned to the guard who recognized him and waved the Rolls on in.
“How are me and John Henry gonna get into the party?” James Atwood grumbled. “We ain’t ballplayers, and we ain’t famous, like Darrow.”
Diz slapped him on the shoulder. “Bodyguards, like I said. After game three, Breadon had four of them following me everywhere. Two ought to be easy to get in.”
Harry Bennett, Ford’s chief of security, greeted them and had no problem believing that John Henry and James Atwood were bodyguards. He had a problem with their attire, but he had a closet full of extra suits for occasions like this. John Henry and James Atwood ended up looking like the hundred thousand they were going to demand for Dizzy Dean’s return. None of Bennett’s suits quite fit Diz, who was 6’2”, and Diz insisted on keeping on his western leather string tie and his cowhide belt with a buckle the size of a longhorn’s head.
Henry Ford’s chef, Wagner, was unmistakable for the high white hat, if not the arrogance. He carried a stack of menus, which he distributed to the quintet of Diz, Elmer, Darrow, John Henry, and James Atwood.
“What’s pheasant?” said Diz.
“A game bird, monsieur.”
“Got feathers?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t eat feathers.”
“We dress it.”
“Red meat?”
“No.”
“I don’t eat red meat unless it’s well done.”
“Then it’s not red.”
“Oh, shit-fire, mister, spare me the pheasant and all the rest. I’ll tell you what I want and you make it, okay?”
“We should be able to manage that.”
“And make it the same for my brother Elmer.”
“Pheasant’s good,” said Darrow.
“Then you eat mine, and Elmer’s.” Diz turned to the chef. “So, your honor, I’d like scrambled eggs, bacon, biscuits, gravy, Johnny bread, crackling bread, beans, milk, and Lea & Perrins sauce. Okay?”
The chef scribbled it all on the back of a menu, looked up at Diz, and nodded. He started back to the kitchen. Diz called after him, “Better make that three helpings. My other brother don’t like squirrel, either.”
The first thing that James Atwood stuffed into his pants pockets was a small silver gizmo used to pick up sugar cubes. It looked like something he’d seen Garbo pluck her eyebrows with in a movie, and he thought it would be a swell present for the girlfriend he was bound to find sooner or later.
Ducky Medwick was the first of the other players into the Ford mansion. “Wow! Ain’t it grand?”
It was grand, all right, but its grandiosity made Diz uncomfortable. The dimensions of everything were all wrong. The windows were too tall and went down too low. A window should not start at the strike zone, in Diz’s estimation. And the ceiling was too high. The room went on too far. Posts turned into ornamental columns that were all Betsy Ross and George Washington. It had nothing to do with the Deans of Arkansas. Even if he could afford it, this house would flaunt its class at him, would put him in his place, would keep him in the kitchen eight hours a day, as the army had done.
Diz had the feeling of being watched, but not in the good sense of thirty-eight thousand people at Sportsman’s Park watching him fog it in. These were not fans. These folks looked at him from pedestals, from paintings. They had strange hairdos and their faces were as stern as his father’s. These guys were watching for your mistakes, making sure that you ate your soup as if you were feeding it to somebody else then changed your mind. These guys were making sure no one stuck a piece of bread in his pocket, a roll down his pants, the silverware inside his shirt.
“This is what they call opulence,” said Frankie Frisch, which made Diz think “opossums”—all these guys on the walls whose eyes probably glowed in the dark. They’d all been struck by something moving, perhaps a Ford. They’d been stuffed and mounted. A family of animals. Predators.
“They can call it anything they want,” said Diz, “and they can keep it.”
They were not keeping a good eye on James Atwood. He’d pocketed an antique gold letter-opener with a beautifully carved whale-bone handle. The only letters he ever got were from court. He smiled at the thought of opening a summons with a purloined gold letter-opener.
In old khaki pants, torn sweater, and beat-up loafers, Branch Rickey was sitting in a leather chair reading his Bible, glasses on the end of his nose, thinking about the importance of piety. Piety was the fence between the neighbors that made them good. Piety was what brought us to put people in the ground for as long as they could be remembered, making good neighbors of the dead as well as the living.
The short and stocky general manager of the Cardinals looked like a cross between a preacher and a turtle. The distance between his nose and his upper lip was vast enough to disconcert the interlocutor. His smile was pleasant, without showing any teeth. Behind the gold-rimmed glasses were kind eyes, which disarmed all those who negotiated with him as he snapped. He was both ruthless and ingenious at finding ways to convince a player of the rightness, even righteousness, of a pay cut. Rickey invented the farm system in baseball and was responsible for the great St. Louis teams of the thirties. He was notorious for getting rid of an aging player who was still good but would command a high salary. Every time he unloaded a Dizzy Dean or a Rogers Hornsby, he came up with a Rip Collins, who would have a fabulous year or two.
Darrow excused himself and went to the bathroom, which was as big as most folks’ dining room, and cleaner. Everything that wasn’t marble was brass or plated gold. He looked in the mirror and smoothed down his hair with some water. The hair objected. Had always rebelled. But today the overrule came with a thunderous finality, from somewhere Darrow didn’t know was in him. The mane of his hair would lie down ungreased beneath the earpieces of his sheepish spectacles, or by God he would shear it himself. He pulled a hanky from his pocket, wiped off the grease, and discarded the hanky that held, he reflected, a king’s ransom for Bobo Newsome, who put similar quantities on his curveball. Darrow opened a drawer and took out an ironed hanky. He blew his nose, let the wild phlegm flow. Did the Huns have summer colds? Goths a flu? Did the Visigoths suffer croup? Ague? My nose, thought Darrow, isn’t running. It’s galloping.
Henry Ford spotted him as he left the bathroom and asked, “Aren’t you the lawyer from that Scopes trial?”
Darrow nodded.
“Darrow got a lot of publicity from that trial,” said Will Rogers, who spent most of the evening at Ford’s coattails. “But I don’t know if it was worth it. He’s had to spend the last fifteen years proving he’s not descended from a socialist.”
Ford risked a smile. “You beat the pants off William Jennings Bryan. He had it coming to him. Never heard a man so full of himself and determined to spew it out.”
Diz walked over with a glass of sherry in his hand and the best cigar he’d ever had in his mouth. He slapped Ford on the back. “Mr. Ford, I want to tell you how to get this country out of the depression it’s in. You take Burgess Whitehead, Frankie Frisch, and Moe Berg and put ’em in charge, and we’ll be out of the hole in no time. Those are the three smartest sons of bitches you ever met. Burgess is a Phi Beta Kappa, and you know what that is. Also has the biggest hands in baseball.”
Ford gave a smile of recognition. “Now I know who you’re talking about. One player I shook hands with—it was like something out of Barnum & Bailey. He must be one heck of a hitter.”
“Runner, actually. Not much with the stick. But I can see why you might think that. If we had to play the series over again, I’d have him give Schoolboy Rowe’s hand a better shake than Joe E. Brown did.”
Diz put a playful squeeze on Ford’s hand, then looked back at Ford. “Yes, sir, those three guys—can’t get nothin’ by them. It’s a surer thing than Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Ford smiled. Steeped in Emerson, he was more impressed by Diz’s individual effort than by any notion of proletarian infielders.
“To tell you the truth, Mr. Ford, Frankie and I are in kind of a jam, and we were wondering if we could speak somewhere in private.”
“There’s still some light left. Let’s take a walk.”
“Darrow, too. You never know when you might need a lawyer.”
Diz had tried to enlist Darrow in the cause of persuading Ford to pony up for the black versus white All-Star game. Though he loved the idea, Darrow was too busy with the NRA to get involved. He agreed to intervene only if Diz and Frankie failed. Ford signaled Harry Bennett from across the lawn. Harry was Ford’s confidant, as well as his bodyguard and jack-of-all-trades—the unspeakable ones, the ones that he could get away with because he was Henry Ford.
Ford loved the daylilies he had planted around the house, something about their boldness yet plainness. They were the Model T of the flower world. Lunch-bucket flowers. Still, it bothered him that they were encumbered with banality by accident of a name—daylilies. There was none of their vibrancy, energy, robustness in the given name—“day.” He wanted to know their Indian names—their names in Nipmuc, Shoshone, Iroquois, Huron—the right sound for them.
This kind of sentiment he would only communicate to Harry Bennett. Harry would just hop to it. He’d get it done. He’d dig up the last dead Huron if he had to and beat it out of him. Someone would know. Someone, thought Ford, must be in charge of not letting things die—the counterpart of Harry, who let things die. Unionists, anarchists—things like that.
Henry Ford should have posed the question to Dizzy Dean’s trio of knowledge, but he was not a baseball man. Unlike Darrow, Ford had no childhood memories of clouting one over the dry goods store, then dropping the club and running around the ring—what they called the “bat” and “base path” in Ohio in the late nineteenth century. When Ford moved to Detroit, the principal sport was still cricket. Baseball and the motorized engine came to Detroit at about the same time and took off at the same breakneck pace. Ford had his epiphanic encounter with a steam engine at the same time that Frank Woodman Eddy replaced the cricket pitch of the Detroit Athletic Club with a baseball field. He grew up in the era of populism in the late nineteenth century, when tee-totaling hoedowns were popular and the McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers were the limits of literacy. The gilded age grew up on these moral tales, which were big on rags to riches but left empathy out of the pantheon of Christian virtues. Hard work would make Raggedy Dick a Rockefeller. Remaining in your rags was evidence that you lacked virtue. About the time of Ford’s epiphany came Darwin’s. The populist Detroiters were not quick to accept the theory of evolution, but when they did, it was an evolution that did not take into account natural disasters or simple bad luck. If your bootstraps broke, don’t come crying to society. Ford didn’t. In fact, he cut his own bootstraps twice. The first two automobile companies he founded foundered because he was off doing something else. He was a talented tinkerer with a vision and a passion, a man whose heart was in a rural America he largely destroyed. He did not believe immediately in evolution but did believe in reincarnation, and the soldier whose soul Ford believed he inherited from Gettysburg must have been a quondam bicyclist who expired shouting, “Wheels! Wheels! My kingdom for some wheels!”
Ford eventually grew out of McGuffey and into Emerson’s transcendental vision, which he translated as meaning that we should ignore the limitations of reason and embrace the erratic and creative impulses of our rugged individual genius, which was why he warmed up so much to Dizzy Dean. Ford loved Emerson, who loved impulsive and spontaneous action. Emerson was the key to Dizzy, who didn’t know it, and wouldn’t understand Ford’s explanations but would bask in his encomiums. When Jay Hanna Dean decided he didn’t like his name, he just changed it to Jerome, an Emersonian creative impulse. Now only his brothers and his wife called him Jay. Emerson believed that an intelligently designed machine was in harmony with nature. Dean’s right arm was such a machine. The curveball was one of God’s finest creations. The batting order was an assembly line in which each out was a part to be affixed in the most efficient manner possible.
“God moves in you, Jerome, in your right arm.”
“Gol,” said Diz. “My right arm’s kind of sore now. I sure hope God’s not sore at me.”
The quintet walked silently for a moment into the warm front that was blowing the sweet smells of autumn leaves and dying things across a landscape lit up by the fading sun in a cloudless sky. A perfect evening, thought Darrow, for a cabal. He whispered to Diz and Frankie, “Can I give you some advice? Just tell Ford the Jews are behind the Negroes and you can write your own ticket. He doesn’t have much use for Negroes, but he doesn’t hate them, like he hates the Jews.”
They came across two kids tossing a ball, one white, the other black. Both were sons of caretakers on the estate. Ford didn’t know them, and they didn’t know him. But he was comfortable with them, the kind of lower-class kids he’d grown up with.
“What’s your name?” Ford asked the black kid.
“Hank Greenberg.”
Ford straightened up and put his hands on his hips. “You can’t be Hank Greenberg, son.”
“Why not?”
“Well, you’re Negro. And Greenberg’s Jewish. You’re not Jewish, are you?” Ford bent toward the kid, smiling.
“I’m six.”
Ford patted him on the head and looked at the other kid. “And who are you?”
“Schoolboy Rowe.”
“That’s a good choice.”
“Mister, if he can’t be Greenberg, can he be Babe Ruth?”
“I don’t see why not. In America, you can be whoever you want to be.”
“I don’t want to be Babe Ruth. I want to be Josh Gibson.”
“Oh? And who is he?”
“He’s the Negro Babe Ruth,” said Diz. “Hits the ball a mile. Hit one off of me once. I think that ball is still traveling. They say he hit one out of Yankee Stadium. I know he hit one out of Griffith, straightaway center field. That’s four hundred twenty-one feet just to clear the fence, never mind out of the park. DeLancey’s a fine catcher, but I’d sure like to have that Gibson playing for us.”
“I tell you what, boys,” said Ford, “you tag along with us and we’ll get you a couple of nice apples.”
The boys nodded. Schoolboy asked him, “Are apples better for you than grapes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you know when you’re bigger?”
Ford smiled wryly. “Why don’t you just ask your mom?”
Schoolboy hung his head and looked sad. After a few steps he asked, “Is your mother dead?”
“Yes,” said Ford.
“Oh.” The sound of authentic understanding, like the closing of the hood latch on a Model T after it had been fixed. Just enough gap in the plug to create the spark with which it all explodes into movement. All’s forgotten. The kids were running ahead and laughing. One picked up a stick and aimed it like a gun at the other, who stumbled as if shot.
“He shoots them. They’re dead. And then . . .” Schoolboy hesitated, pensive, while the elderly mortals—Henry, Harry, Frankie, Diz, and Darrow—hung on his words.
“And then . . . they die.”
Thoughts were coming to Diz like wildfire. When he was alone, they came from around every corner. Sometimes, he thought, he was in a virtual ambush. His mind was a great grab bag of thinking. I don’t want no regular, rectangular grave. I want a big circle, and I want it dirt with grass around it, raised up like a mound. But no headstone. I want me a rubber with my name on it, and I want an inscription to let folks know that if I’m in heaven they can be sure I’m foggin’ ’em in up there.
Frankie broke Diz’s reverie with an elbow to the ribs, and momentarily Diz broke the silence. “Mr. Ford, I just got a call this afternoon from Satchel Paige. You might not know about him, but some say he’s the greatest pitcher of all time. Trouble is, he’s black. Can’t play in the Major Leagues, and neither can a bunch of other guys who ought to. Satchel thinks his boys could beat the Gashouse Gang, and Frankie and I are fixing to show them colored fellas who really is the World Champs, after we beat your Tigers tomorrow.”
“What’s the commissioner going to say when he finds out about this?” asked Ford.
“We’re not telling him,” said Frankie. “Landis is filled with just two things that aren’t brown—himself and God. And so is Rickey. I never understood why those two didn’t get along like two peas in a pod.”
Ford smiled. “The pod’s not big enough for their egos. It’s like two kids fighting over a toy. They both want unlimited power, and neither one of them wants to share.”
Darrow nodded. “If there’s pie in the sky, those two will be in a food fight when they die.”
“Let’s come back down to earth for a minute,” said Ford. “Why are you telling me this?”
“ ’Cuz the only way I can keep the Gashouse boys together for this game is to pay them. Five hundred apiece ought to do it. Ten men. That makes five thousand dollars, roughly. We figured that would be a drop in the bucket for you. What do you say?”
Ford never missed an opportunity to instill the virtue of thrift in younger men. He shook a finger at Diz. “Five thousand dollars will buy a Model A for everyone on your team, with trumpet horns and chrome headlamp shells. But what I’m more worried about is the commissioner. He banned interracial play. If word leaks out about this, he might point the finger in my direction.”
“Maybe we should be taking a longer view,” Darrow interjected. “Maybe we should put our efforts into getting those colored boys into the Major Leagues. They have a right to play.”
Ford laughed cynically. “There are no rights. Every advantage in the world goes with power. Think of a fastball pitcher, like Jerome, at twilight. The batter doesn’t have a chance. It’s just a case of what you can put over, and for the foreseeable future, Negroes don’t have the power to secure the right to play in the Major Leagues. Besides, I have no interest in advancing the cause of Negro players. ‘Souls are not saved in bundles, ’ Emerson said. ‘The spirit asks every man—how is it with thee?’ ”
The soul had bootstraps, too. And a jock, which it put on one leg at a time. Back in Pittsburgh, Satch’s soul might reply, “How is it with me? Me? You talkin’ to me, Ralphy? It’s kind of crowded here, at the soul-bus’s rear end. I’d kind of like to move up to the front, with Ty Cobb’s soul. See that down there? That’s Cooperstown, just a place I go fishin’ in. Mostly I be hangin’ out at the Crawford Grill. . . . So, how is it with me? When I’m playing the Monarchs at Greenlee Field with those portable dim lights and they can’t see my be-ball, it is very well with me indeed. But I’m wondering about what it’s like in the soul locker room of the white boys. I suppose they gets hot water and towels, and if souls got jocks, I wonder if any one of the white souls is big enough to hold mine. But then I hear my soul sayin’, ‘The big leagues? Satch, you got as much business there as a mule in a garage.’ ”
“To tell the truth, Mr. Ford, my soul would be a lot better if we could make this game happen,” Diz replied.
Ford looked at Harry Bennett, whose body and facial language Ford read as a go signal. “Are you sure you can beat these colored fellows?”
Diz laughed. “As sure as I am we’ll beat the Tigers. So, I’ll tell you what. If we don’t beat the Tigers tomorrow, you can forget about the whole deal. If we do, you back us.”
It was hard to say no to the ingenuous smile of Dizzy Dean, especially when he was filling it with one of your own cigars like a kid who’d just found what the tooth fairy had left him. And Ford loved a wager. He shook Diz’s hand, and they walked back to the house. He put an avuncular hand on Frankie’s shoulder and spoke softly. “Harry will take care of you. Anything you need. You’ll like Harry. No tomfoolery there. He won’t piddle in your ear. He’s solid. I like a man with three double consonants in his name. That’s rare. And solid. He’s got balls.”
Frankie was surprised at Ford’s vulgarity. Double consonants. Two balls. They kind of went together.
When Wagner saw Ford approaching, he hit a brass gong. “À table.”
Everyone stood behind a chair. Will Rogers raised his glass. “A toast, please. To Henry Ford. Great educators try to teach people, great preachers try to change people, but no man—produced through ordinary channels—has moved the world like Henry Ford. He put wheels on a man’s home, and a castle in his sedan. So now life’s greatest catastrophe is a blowout. Everybody’s rushing to go somewhere they don’t have no business, so they can hurry back to the place they never should have left.”
“Hear! Hear!”
“And here’s to the end of the Depression. The Republicans have been saying they don’t want to rock the boat. But I say, turn ’er over and maybe the bottom side has some barnacles we can eat.”
Burgess Whitehead cheered loudly. Frankie Frisch, a Republican with some sympathy for FDR, was smiling.
“And one more. To the St. Louis Cardinals. Talk about World Series timber . . . we got a whole lumberyard here.”
In a starched white shirt and shiny borrowed wingtips, Diz still looked like a New Deal official in charge of plowing under crops in the Ozarks. He stared at the puzzling array of glasses and silverware, and said to Rogers, “I like breakfast best ’cuz they only give you one fork.”
The waiter appeared between Diz and Paul. “Your Johnny bread and crackling bread.”
Diz took a piece of Johnny bread, opened the bottle of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce, and poured half of it on his eggs. He looked disparagingly at Rogers’s plate. “That bird’s got less fat on it than a Branch Rickey contract.”
Even Rickey chuckled.
“Forgive me if I ask,” said Mrs. Ford, “but what is Johnny bread and crackling bread?”
Diz waited till his mouth was only half full. “Johnny bread’s a kind of cornmeal soaked in grease. Crackling bread is just corn bread with bits of pork rind mixed in the batter. Good, ain’t it?”
“I didn’t know you could make such things, Wagner,” said Mrs. Ford to her chef, who laughed. “I can’t. One of the caretakers’ wives made it. She made me promise to bring her any leftovers.”
“Ain’t gonna be none, if I can help it,” said Diz, who had an appetite.
Rogers shook his head as Diz chowed down. “The only folks I’ve seen eat as much as Jerome are cotton-pickers and opera singers.”
A sparrow caught Diz’s eye on the balcony ledge outside the tall white window. Not that it wanted to come in. It was content with the crumbs. Then with an almost haughty flick of the tail it took a white shit on Ford’s white balcony.
Will Rogers finished his consommé and said to Ford, seated across the table, “I think it’s great that you put $100 million into practical education. Right now, baseball is about the only practical education in America’s schools.”
“There’s a lot to be learned from baseball,” said Branch Rickey, who had the ability to find moralism everywhere.
“Stealing,” said Joe E. Brown, deadpan, without looking up from his soup.
“Look who’s talking,” said Rogers. “Joe was born with a silver spoon in his mouth—sideways.”
They all laughed. Rogers continued, “Henry, you’d better count the silverware, and if there’s anything missing, check Joe’s mouth.”
Joe had even Westbrook Pegler cracking up by eating two hotdogs at the same time at the Navin Field press conference. James Atwood slapped his thigh, ostensibly out of laughter, but checking his own stash. It was still there. When the laughter at Ford’s table subsided, Rogers deadpanned, “Take my friend Diz, what good did baseball ever do him?”
“He can count to four,” Frankie chortled, referring to a base on balls.
“But I’ll bet he doesn’t know the capital of Michigan,” said Rogers.
“Aw, hellfire, I ain’t no capitalist.”
“A little practical knowledge is a dangerous thing,” said Mrs. Ford.
Ford chuckled. “But he’s learned to turn his liability into an asset, like Joe—with his mouth. Jimmy Durante, with his nose.”
“Whitehead, with his dick,” said Leo Durocher, sotto voce, so that only the players around him could hear. Rookie Burgess Whitehead also had the biggest hands in baseball. Pepper Martin bent forward and tried to contain the laughter-spat soup in his bowl. Ducky slapped Pepper on the back. “Hey, mind your manners.” He turned to Mrs. Ford and said, “We call him the ‘Wild Horse of the Osage.’ ”
Frankie mock-frowned. “You can dress ’em up . . .” Pepper wiped his mouth, excused himself, then covered half of his face with his napkin as he kept laughing.
“Why is he turning into a beet?” said Mrs. Ford.
“He’s thinking about Whitehead, who’s got what it takes to play in the Negro Leagues,” said Leo. “I mean—he’s that fast. Fastest man on the team.” The rest of the team, including Burgess, broke up.
When the waiters had cleared the table of the main course, Rogers tapped his glass with a fork. “Another toast, to our distinguished guests Jerome Hanna Dean and Clarence Darrow. Jerome can throw a baseball ninety-five miles an hour over a gum wrapper, and Darrow could write the whole NRA plan on one. Maybe Moses should have gotten into that act, too. Woulda been easier to carry than those tablets, and we could have omitted the less necessary commandments.”
The diners raised their glasses and drank to Diz and Darrow.
“Speech,” said Frankie, elbowing Diz.
Diz stood up in his ill-fitting suit and raised his glass. “I’m sure glad to be here ’cause I heard so much about you, Mr. Ford, but I’m sorry I’m a-gonna have to make pussycats of your Tigers. They’ve got as much chance of winning as a bowlegged white girl’s got of getting into the chorus line at the Cotton Club. If Frankie lets me pitch tomorrow, I’ll have ’em swinging like a ham on a hook. And one more thing—I know y’all don’t like Jews, but you let them play in the Majors. The Negroes get treated the way Hitler treats the Jews. So I just want to say it’s time to let those boys have a shot. You know, the press guys, like Mr. Rogers here, have been writing a lot about Dizzy Dean, saying what a great pitcher he is. But a bunch of the fellows get in a barber session the other day and they start to argufy about the best pitcher they ever see. Some says Lefty Grove and Lefty Gomez and Walter Johnson and old Pete Alexander and Dazzy Vance. And they mention Lonnie Warneke and Van Mungo and Carl Hubbell, and Johnny Corriden tells us about Matty and he sure must have been great, and some of the boys even say Old Diz is the best they ever see. But I see all them fellows but Matty and Johnson, and I know who’s the best pitcher I ever see and it’s old Satchel Paige, that big lanky colored boy. Finally, I just want to thank the Lord for giving me a good right arm, a strong back, and a weak mind. And I want to thank Mr. Ford for this here dinner. Paul, Elmer, and I never ate no special vittles or nothing to put the speed in our soup-bones. God just made us long and loose, like houn’ dogs. So I thank you for not makin’ us eat pheasant, and for givin’ us this corn bread that ain’t made to be exalted by knife and fork.” Diz picked up a piece of corn bread from the plate surrounded by knife and fork and stuffed it into his mouth, then sat down.
“Don’t you love him? Such a droll realist. Under the mud language you’ll find the most profound truths,” said Mrs. Ford.
“From the mouths of babes.” Henry patted his wife on the hand.
“Is there something y’all don’t like about the way my friend talks?” blurted James Atwood, with his fork gripped in his fist, not out of menace but because he always held it that way.
Darrow leaned toward James Atwood and spoke softly, “You’re his bodyguard, not his lawyer.”
John Henry swallowed a bit of pheasant. “They called him the Darrow of Ossage, on account of his mouth. Don’t pay him no mind.”
Mrs. Ford changed the subject. “Speaking of babes, I heard someone recently say that something was ‘Ruthian.’ Something gargantuan. Can you believe that that fat man has permeated even our language? Imagine, a booze-hound, a serial adulterer, bequeathing his name to the English language, perhaps for centuries?”
“Wait till someone hits more home runs. They’ll forget about Ruth,” said Henry.
Mrs. Ford seemed to suck in her cheeks as she formulated her thought. “It’s so ironic that ‘Fordian’ just doesn’t sound right. Nor does ‘Fordish.’ But ‘Ruthian,’ it’s like ‘ruffian.’ It has a homonymic cousin. It fits right in.” She looked at the chandelier at which her fork was pointed, drawing inspiration from flickering crystal. “But then ‘Ford’ does have a sturdy sound.”
Diz noticed her gazing at the chandelier and her brow wrinkling in thought. He smiled. “Henry, you didn’t get no crate of lemons when you married Mrs. Ford.”
Henry thought for a moment before returning the smile. “Yes, Mrs. Ford is . . .” but the complement eluded him. Realizing that Ford was at a loss for words, Branch Rickey, who never was, finished the sentence for him. “Mrs. Ford is right, about Ruth. That man is very unsavory.”
“What do you mean, unsavory?” asked Diz.
“He means he’s got a few dames stashed around,” said Durocher.
“You misunderstand me, Leo,” said Rickey. “It’s not the company he keeps. That’s a man’s private business. It’s that he does it on the Sabbath. That’s what riles me.”
“I’ve got to hand it to old Branch,” said Diz. “He keeps the Sabbath.
I ain’t never seen him at a game on a Sunday.”
“Yeah, but if Mammon could hit .300, Branch would sign him,” said Leo.
Whitehead and Frisch laughed at Leo’s gaffe, and Rickey corrected him, “Mammon is riches, not a person.”
“Heck, I thought he was one of those fallen angels,” said James Atwood.
“Baseball, however, does point the way to our salvation,” said Rickey.
Henry Ford didn’t share Rickey’s vision of baseball. Branch might as well have been preaching to eight cylinders.
“You know what they say down at the Rouge?” said Joe E. Brown, curling his wide mouth into a smile. “You cut the top off a cross and you’ve got a ‘T.’ That’s the religion in Detroit—the Model T.” Brown laughed, contorting his mouth wide enough to drop a melon in there without hitting an incisor.
Henry was stuck in time, stuck in the first decade of the twentieth century, when cars were owned by white people, professional baseball was played by white people, and William Jamesian pragmatism was the reigning philosophy. The Model T represented the triumph of pragmatism over style. It looked like the box a Grosse Pointe maven would put her Sunday bonnet in. It looked like the bust of Branch Rickey in a Sunday suit, with the same turn-of-the-century Protestant preachiness. The Model T proselytized. It said, Forget about the frills of Bugatti, Royce, and Cadillac. The stairway to heaven is straight and narrow, black macadam lined with humble servants in black with four wheels, a million strong in the procession to the funeral of style.
“The Model T was made by hard work,” said Rickey. “That’s the ticket out of the Depression. We could do with more hard work and less bellyaching. The only place we’re callused is on the underside of the driving toe.”
John Henry Seadlund scowled. He wasn’t one for talking politics, but he could smell a red herring. “Back in Minnesota I saw a rat eating an onion and crying. Times are rough when a rat’s got to eat an onion.”
Ford glared at John Henry, wary of a socialist in the woodpile.
“Branch loves his Bible,” said Whitehead, baseball’s only Phi Beta Kappa. “But the payroll’s a more important document.”
“The payroll’s the Magna Carta, all right,” echoed Frankie.
Diz spoke with a mouth half-full of apple pie. “Y’all’s frugal when it comes to payin’ a man. But when it comes to paying yourselves, y’all’s prodigal sons-a-guns.”
“What baseball needs is a union,” said Frankie.
Ford looked like he was choking on a bite of pie. “Organized labor is tyranny. What unions do is nothing more than blackmail.”
Darrow had held his tongue as long as he could. “Two years ago there was a hunger march at your Rouge Plant. Four men were machine-gunned to death. The workers who went to the funeral were fired. You’ve got spotters who mark how much time a man spends in the toilet, marked ‘stolen minutes.’ ”
Henry took a little jump in his seat. “Dadblast it, that’s just what they are.”
Will Rogers saw the conversation taking a bad turn. He jumped in to defuse the situation. “They used to say Henry Ford had one foot on the land, the other on industry. But it looks like he’s got a third leg on the potty.”
It worked. Even Henry forced a smile. Rogers continued, “And since most folks don’t have enough land for a garden, Mr. Ford is going to put out a car with a garden in it. A kind of rumble seat for roses and peonies. You hoe as you go.”
Darrow leaned to his right and whispered to Joe E. Brown. “They used to say, when the first Model T came out, that it could be any color, so long as it was black. Now the workers are saying the Model A can be any color so long as it’s red, for blood.”
The gong-servant hit the instrument that gave notice that dinner was formally over and the gang could retire to cigars and brandy in the sitting room, where the heads of dozens of large game animals, most with horns, kept watch through the thickening Havana haze. Mrs. Ford retired to the bedroom, and Joe E. Brown entertained the men lounging in the plush leather seats, while at the other end of the room a quartet played jazz. Frankie Frisch, who was soused, tried to explain it to Paul Dean.
“Jazz . . . see, jazz is it. Jazz can be anything, see. You take classical music, take a piece by Bach, jazz it, and you’ve got ‘Air on a G-string.’ See?”
Paul wrinkled his brow and moved a little farther from Frankie.
In his study, Henry Ford couldn’t help thinking of Frankie Frisch’s nose. It was bent worse than some fighters’ noses. And it jolted him to recollect his recent dream that his own nose had inverted. It went in instead of out, creating a peculiar hole on his face, a sconce in the architecture of his face, a convenient place to store small objects—paper slips or a key he might otherwise forget, but the isosceles foyer of the hole was prone to collect cobwebs, and it was unpleasant to wipe out the hole that felt so unfamiliar each morning. His dream-self contemplated the difficulty of blowing his inverted nose and filled with dread at the thought of getting a runny nose. He involuntarily tossed his head forward, thinking about it.
The dream was disturbing enough that he consulted the only person he could count on to keep complete confidence. He summoned Harry Bennett to his office. Harry listened, chewing on an unlit panatela and pacing around the table in his office. “I think,” said Harry, “that you’re afraid of paying through the nose for something. I think you’re worried about Edsel taking control of the company and you want to keep it for yourself.”
Ford was not so old as to not see through Harry’s damning of Edsel—Harry was already lobbying for the chairman’s job when Henry retired. But that was something Ford understood, even admired—the guts to stop at nothing to get what you want. He wished a little of Harry had rubbed off on Edsel. Still, he gave Harry a cold stare. “You have any alternative interpretations?”
Harry saw that his gambit hadn’t worked. He reverted to what he knew Ford liked about him, his bluntness and honesty. “Yeah. You’re worried you’re a Jew yourself. Somewhere back in the family line there’s a Jew in the woodpile.”
Ford’s stare intensified, but Ford was looking through Harry, not at him, seeing in his mind the family tree, wondering who, if anyone, the Jew might be. Ford paced about, which was Bennett’s habit, and Bennett joined in, relieved that Ford’s glare was not intended for him. The two men were like gunslingers walking the requisite distance to turn and fire. But only one was packing a revolver. Only one was obsessed with Jews. Ford couldn’t understand how Hank Greenberg could be so good, and he was relieved that Hank’s bat had gone impotent during the Series. Hank was so upset at his performance that he punished himself, refusing food for twenty-four hours. Ford had a flash now, from the dream, of his nose being stove in with a baseball bat. If it wasn’t Greenberg and the Jews, who could it be? He began casting for villains. Could it be, he wondered, the Negroes? Perhaps in the dream he was worried about Negroes polluting baseball, the way the Jews tried to pollute it with gambling in ’19. No other candidates came to mind. Although Ford hired blacks, he was anxious at how their population had increased two thousand percent in seven years. Ford seldom seethed, but he could get a good simmer up, and now he was feeling a combination of righteousness and anger. He was also quick to make decisions when his feelings were clear. The Negroes had to be taught a lesson. He closed his fist and thrust his bony arm across his body. “I like Dean’s idea—his All-Stars against Paige’s. I want you to take care of it. Make it happen. Show those Negroes what a good white team can do.”
Harry nodded.
“One more thing, Harry. That team cannot lose.”
“Understood.”
“I mean it, Harry. Do you know what it would mean for this country if word got out that the Negroes beat our best? It would be a national humiliation. You see how much depends on it.” Harry understood from Ford’s look that his job depended on it. He noted that Ford hadn’t said they had to win, only that they could not lose. There was a difference.
“What’s my budget?”
“No limit. Whatever it takes. Use the slush fund.”
The fund was not unlimited, but enough. Not to buy the result, but to make it happen. Enough to make up the difference when Satchel’s patron used his deep pockets to pack a revolver rather than the money for the black team. If Henry wanted to see a game, what did the fifteen-thousand-dollar team admission ticket mean? Harry wouldn’t even tell Ford about the cash dispersal. The greater task, Harry would find, would be keeping Satch alive. No Satch, no match—he knew well. You made no excuses for failure with Henry Ford. The black team had a routine they called “shadow-ball,” in which they played with an imaginary ball. Harry would shadow Satch, as well as Diz, right up until game day. Or night.
On Satch’s advice, Harry would be in touch with the Kansas City Monarchs, to rent their portable lights. It took him a few more days to figure out the game’s venue. Then it went off like, well, a light bulb in his head. If you wanted lights, you wanted GE. General Electric had a plant and a field for its team in West Lynn, Massachusetts, a Satchelesque stone’s throw from Fenway Park. They also had the best lighting system in the country. It consisted of eight one-hundred-and-thirty-foot towers, each with a forty-four-inch-diameter bulb. Its Novalux projectors produced an astonishing 26,640,000 candlepower. The Monarchs’ system consisted of six telescoping poles, each with six floodlights on the top and two on the bottom. Its one-hundred-kilowatt generator was powered by a two-hundred-and-fifty-horsepower motor, using fifteen gallons of gas per hour. Guy wires and stops held the light posts. The telescoping towers were raised by hydraulic derricks to a height of fifty feet. Each light was four feet across and used thousand-watt bulbs. Harry then learned that Herman Rosner in Brooklyn had a transformer that increased wattage by twenty-five percent. Harry had one brought to Fenway to be used with the Monarchs’ system. Now they could use twenty-five-hundred-watt bulbs, or the Westinghouse CSA-24 bulbs, with twenty-four-hundred watts, that were originally designed to illuminate rail lines. Fenway would not have lights until 1947. It did have the Green Monster in left field, though it was not yet called that. It was covered with ads for Calvert whiskey, Lifebuoy soap, and Vimms vitamins. Until the beginning of the 1934 season, a ten-foot incline in front of the wall, known as Duffy’s Cliff, warned outfielders of the imminence of the wall. When all the stars came out at night, on October 20, they’d light up Fenway, with a little help from the Monarchs and the General Electric Employees’ Athletic Association.
Harry also set his sights on the portable lighting system used by the defunct Class B Northeastern League, which had operated all over New England, but his team of Ford engineers could not locate it. They then protested that the only thing they knew about lighting was headlights.
“You’ve got a couple of weeks to learn,” said Harry. “I want every portable light in New England in Fenway Park. I want everyone in the dugout with a flashlight on. I want the fucking stars to shine on Boston, and if Henry’s money can do it, dadgumit let there be light.”