It used to be so easy with Connor and me. We didn’t even have to talk; just knew what was up. But everything’s different now, since the FBI poked their noses into our lives. Who’s left I can count on? Old faithful, Mickey Mantle. No doubt about it, the Mick’s still my man. I don’t write him memos anymore, though. Not since a couple years ago, when I decided it was dumb for a guy hitting fifth grade to scratch notes to some other guy who wouldn’t read them anyway, even if I’d had the guts to drop them in the mail. Which I didn’t.
But here I am dragging the shoebox full of memos from the top shelf of my closet. Why now? What’s the FBI got to do with the Mick? Nothing, although I’m starting to think nobody’s safe from their clutches, and man, the feds sure went after Jackie Robinson a few years back.
The house is quiet this afternoon. It used to be swarming with students from everywhere from Athabasca to Zurich—which, if you asked me to find them on the map, forget it. Some nights I’d wake up to their shouting. I’d trundle out to the hall. Cigarette smoke would be coiling up the stairs, and I’d hear them rant about some guy named McCarthy. Not Charlie McCarthy, the ventriloquist, and not Joe McCarthy, the manager who’d taken the Yankees to four consecutive World Series in the ’30s. That would be worth getting fired up about. No, they were ranting about Joe McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator, the one known around our house as the Lie-Mongering, Red-Baiting Carnivore, since he eats up peoples’ lives. Turn over every rock, the Carnivore says, and you’ll uncover a cowering communist red menace.
It’s tough being the son of two college profs, especially the doctors Rosalie and Irwin Rafner. Other families sit around the dinner table talking about I Love Lucy, or about whether you squeeze the toothpaste tube from the top or the bottom, or whether there was an air raid drill at school. Not my mom and dad, the super-brains who turn a warm meal into a hot debate.
Everyone in my family has strong opinions, except me—unless it’s about baseball.
Far as I can see, the only great part about being a professor is these neat memo pads with my dad’s name printed in green ink. Just the size I needed to keep the Mick up to date on my baseball team, right? Har-de-har, like he was dying to know.
The memo pad didn’t take much doctoring to make it mine, like this first one:
From the desk of
IRWIN RAFNER, Ph.D.’s son Marty
DATE: August 29, 1951
TO: Mickey Mantle
Man, what a rookie season you’re having, a bat outta H-E-Double Toothpicks. So just when everybody (mostly me) was figuring you for Rookie of the Year, you go and hit a slump and get yourself booted down to the Triple A farm club. Hey, I know about slumps. Look the word up in Webster’s, and it’s got a snapshot of me: Martin Weitz Rafner, known on the field as Marty el Magnifico. You haven’t heard of me? Gimme time, and you will, because by seventh grade I’ll be the lead-off batter for the Palmetto Pirates JV’s. Won’t take long until the scouts discover me, like they did you down in Oklahoma. And if you believe that, you’d believe chickens had eyelashes. Hey, wait, this just came over the radio. They’re bumping you back up to New York, and you’ll be wearing Number 7. Great news for all the sevens in the world.
Your friend,
MARTY
See what I mean? What a birdbrain. So, I’m thinking of making confetti out of the whole shoebox full of memos. Then I’ll soak the pieces in Clorox and toss the pulpy mess at the Palmetto dump before the G-men grab all my family’s personal stuff, like they did to Amy Lynn’s family. It’s happened to other people we know, too. Some of them are locked up. Look at Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg, cooling their heels in Sing Sing. On Death Row.
A couple of months before they went to jail, their family came to our house for dinner when they were in town for some sort of meeting over in Wichita. It was before my tenth birthday. Michael and Robby were younger than me. If I’d known they were about to be accused of espionage, I might’ve expected people like movie stars, all fancy-dressed and snooty and full of snappy stories.
Later, I racked my brain trying to remember how they’d acted at the dinner table—if they’d said or done something courageous or at least interesting, but they were just a regular Jewish family like us.
I remember Mr. Rosenberg gazing out of those little round glasses that made his eyes look as big as ping-pong balls. “Splendid pot roast, Rosalie,” which it wasn’t, because my mother is a poet, not a cook. She could win the Nobel Prize for Shoe Leather.
Michael, the bigger kid, was chawing on a slab of pot roast speared on his fork when Mrs. Rosenberg hollered, “Put that meat down, Michael!” Next thing, his little brother Robby, who was so small that he had to sit on two phone books, accidentally knocked a glass of apple juice across the table, which sent us all laughing like hyenas, and that was my first clue that everybody was super nervous, and that this wasn’t normal company in our home.
I never saw them again, but they sure get a lot of air time at our house.
Yeah, so what about Michael and Robby, who’ll be losing both their parents when the guy with the black hood throws the switch? One switch for two?
Man, it’s just not healthy for a guy my age to personally know people who are gonna fry in the electric chair on June 18. That’s—wait, let me count—sixty-two days from today. Yikes.