Midafternoon, late August, Roy and his friend Jimmy Boyle had just finished playing a baseball game at Heart-of-Jesus park. Both boys were eleven years old. They were sitting on a bench alongside the field taking off their spikes and putting on their street shoes when a small man neither of them had ever seen before sat down on the bench. He was wearing a gray hat, a shabby blue sport coat, and a brown-stained yellow tie. He needed a shave. His long, slightly bent nose was pockmarked, as were his pale cheeks. He watched as the boys tied the laces of their spikes together in order to carry them over a shoulder.
“I used to do that, too,” said the man. “We all did.”
Roy and Jimmy looked at him briefly, then turned away.
“Of course that was a very long time ago, more than fifty years. I’m fifty-five now, same as this century. In 1921 I pitched and sometimes played second base for the Orphans, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York City. I grew up there, on the Lower East Side, Second Street. Everybody in the neighborhood knew me, Nappy Buchinsky. I came here to Chicago before the last war, worked on tugboats on the Great Lakes with my friend Harmon Wieseltier. His uncle Phil was in the business. Harmon drowned in 1932, in the St. Lawrence Seaway. His body was never recovered, current took it. I quit the tugs after that, worked in a sausage factory—though I never have ate pig in my life—then begun runnin’ errands for The Outfit. Still do. I like to come to the park here, watch the games.
“You handle yourself pretty good at shortstop,” he said to Roy. “Where’d you learn to backhand grounders to your right instead of tryin’ to front the ball? What’s your name? Mine’s Nappy, short for Napoleon, what the other kids called me ’cause I was always givin’ orders.”
“Watchin’ Chico Carrasquel, the White Sox shortstop. I’m Roy, this is Jimmy, he plays centerfield.”
“You boys have families?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I was raised in an orphanage. My mother, father, and sister, Esther, were killed in a pogrom in Poland. Esther was nine, I was five, when it happened. People from our village hid me and later got me on a boat to America.”
“What’s a pogrom?” asked Roy.
“Soldiers would murder the Jews. You boys Jewish?”
“Roy’s father was.”
“He died when I was four.”
“You still got your mother, though, yes?”
Roy nodded.
“In the Orphan Asylum were kids whose families were slaughtered in Russia, Poland, and Germany, just because they were Jews.”
“My mother’s Catholic, when she was a girl she went to boarding school at Our Lady of Divine Inspiration in Indiana. Jimmy’s parents are from Ireland.”
“I don’t think there’s pogroms in America,” said Jimmy. “I never heard about none.”
“No, not like in the old country,” Nappy said. “But lots of people here don’t like Jews, either.”
“Why?”
“No good reason. Maybe because the Jews consider themselves the Chosen People, a separate race. You don’t have to practice Judaism to be Jewish. In the old country we were called Orientals.”
Jimmy and Roy stood up. All of their teammates were gone.
“We’ve gotta go,” said Jimmy.
“I have a question.”
“Yes, Roy?”
“When you pitched for the orphanage, what was your best pitch?”
“My back-up ball.”
Nappy Buchinsky took a baseball out of Roy’s glove. He had big hands.
“I held it like this, not with my fingers wrapped around it, but back against the palm of my hand. I threw it same as I did a fastball but it don’t go as fast. Got batters to start their swing early. If they hit it, they popped the ball up or hit a weak grounder, usually back to me so I could throw ’em out easy.”
“Why didn’t you play in the big leagues?” asked Jimmy.
“The majors didn’t want Jews, or Negroes, either. I don’t know if I coulda been good enough, anyway. But I got by in New York City. There were lots of Jews there.”
While he and Jimmy were walking home, Roy held the ball in his right hand the way Nappy had.
“I couldn’t control that back-up pitch,” he said. “I’d need to use my fingers more, so it wouldn’t work.”
“Did your dad have big hands?”
“I don’t remember. Why?”
“Maybe Jews got bigger hands than us.”