Mary & Nat In The House That Ruth Built

[sd gross]

Mary & Nat in the House That Ruth Built
by Stephen D. Gross

"She's got a Devil's tongue", fumed Biddie O'Brien, her face a ripe cherry about to erupt. Joey's mom was advising my mom (the sweet Pauline) how dangerous it was for her little Stevie to sit day after day in Mary Brown's third-grade class . "You'd think that the principal...." and then she'd break off in a fit of apoplectic wheezing, and the feral tomcats would take a break from spraying kitty grafitti on the steam radiator in our ancient lobby and look at Biddie vacantly.
Joey would peer up out of red eyes and run a mittened paw nervously over his freckles, and sweet Pauline would politely wait for Biddie to stop hacking. The blathering Biddie wasn't among Mom's favorites but Pauline had developed a deep affection for Mary Brown. She was fascinated by her irreverence and her unhinged, well- barbed tongue. With hair like a raging wildfire, eyes of flinty serpentine and her cocky self-assurance, Mary was the envy of big and little girls everywhere. She drove an old DeSoto (much too fast), white six-button gloves holding a Pall Mall like a smoldering middle finger, as she bore down into Washington Heights from Tarrytown where she lived alone in a stone house on Sherwood Terrace.
The 18th-century house was haunted, she explained, by the spirits of twin brothers, high school ballplayers who showed terrific promise and were destined for the Bigs until a horrible accident the night after they helped win the Southern New York State championship.
Their father, an inebriate bottle blower who worked at the glassworks in Corning, got drunk during the game and with Wayne & Dwayne in the back seat, recklessly ran his Buick under an Erie Lackawana freight train on the way home from the ball park.
The boys lived but their legs had been crushed under the train. The father (Dane was his name) was thrown clear but was found dead in the first new fallen snows of early Autumn with his skull cracked open like a ripe pumpkin. A pair of bloody, splintered Louisville Sluggers were found in a privet hedge near by, and there were tracks in the area made by several narrow-gauge tires but the falling snow had obscured the tread marks. The boys were suspected but after all, they were wheelchair-bound and there wasn't enough evidence to bring them to trial.
A few weeks later, the night after the Cardinals bested the Tigers in their hard-fought seven game series, the boys were found hanging, side by side, dead in their dad's well-stocked wine cellar. On their hands were the battered mitts they'd fielded with throughout their school careers - minus the leather thongs with which they'd hung themselves! Mary says that sometimes in the middle of the night she awakens with the smell of roasted peanuts and new-mown grass fresh in her nostrils and she can hear, faintly between the chirping of crickets, "I don't care if I never come back" repeated over and over and over...
Mary and Pauline got to know each other because of My Uncle Jack. Jack didn't introduce them exactly, but he created the situation that led to their meeting. Jack was very sweet but he hung out with serious horse players (to whom he owed lots, mom told me) and minor league gangsters. As a result he had a nervous eye twitch and an amazingly colorful vocabulary. Because I was his favorite nephew, he was generous about sharing things he'd heard with me, even though I was presumably too young to understand what the hell he was talking about.
One day he taught me a dirty limerick. It had something to do with "A Chinaman sitting in the sand" and a girl who comes along and sits in his lap. I recited it during "Show & Tell" time the next day emphasizing its bright finish which involved rhythmic clapping, which my third grade classmates cheerfully joined in. Mary Brown called Mom in for a conference. I was very nervous until Mom walked out of Mary's office hugging Mary and laughing, like she'd just been catching up on old times with her best friend ever. They'd discovered over a cuppa' or two that they had a lot in common including their love of the New York Yankees and Nat King Cole. Mary had a leather-covered flask of Jamieson's Irish which I think she tipped into their coffee cups once or twice - just to promote communication. Mom liked the way Mary talked, she said. She liked her frankness, her earthiness and her honesty. She also approved of her taste in music, the way she walked, what she wore and how she wore it. And everyone loved sweet Pauline.
A few weeks later we got a phone call in the middle of "Ozzie & Harriet" which we thought rude and annoying. But it was timed so it came during the commercials and it was a very short call. The caller was Mary Brown asking mom if she and I would like to join Mary for an outing at the Stadium. Allie Reynolds was going against Bob Lemon and the big Maple outside of McSherry's Charcoal Pit was helicoptering seeds all over upper Broadway. The air was growing thick with baseball and I couldn't inhale without pine tar and pinstripes filling my sinuses. I couldn't believe it - my teacher was actually playing Hooky and Mom and I were conspiring to hook with her!
The DeSoto's rich baritone bounced off our fire escape and we waved down at Mary who looked elfin in her enchanted coach. My head had been hanging anxiously out the third-story window for the last hour or so and Mary's crimson crown flashed up at me from Broadway like the mouth of a beckoning volcano.
We were downstairs and hugging all around before I remember buzzing for the elevator (we must have walked), and we were on our way East, across town to the Bronx like we were riding a rainbow. The trip took about twenty minutes, Mary and Mom doing a lot of singing and me amusing myself with the scenery and assorted last-of-the-ninth fantasies. Because Mom and I watched "Your Hit Parade" together on Saturday nights while dad was waiting tables, I knew a lot of the tunes that were currently popular. I also liked to listen to Martin Block's "Make Believe Ballroom" (the answer to the schoolboy query, "What do you call a lady with a jockstrap?"), and other top-40 shows. Mom and Mary Brown were really into their Nat King Cole. They had trouble with the "very fars" in "Nature Boy" and "Too Young" became, "...tried to sell us egg foo young". But they did a great duet on "Mona Lisa".
I noticed, too, that Mary's hand slipped into her coat pocket a couple of times where she kept her leather-bound flask, and she and mom shared tiny nips from a small paper cup they passed between themselves. All very discreetly, of course.
We got to the ballyard early, in time to enjoy batting practice and watch the Stadium's seats slowly fill. It was fun to look out over that folded sea of green and watch it disappear rectangle by numbered rectangle. I saw Snuffy Sternweiss standing with Rizzuto in front of the Yankee dugout and ran down from high in the lower reserved section with my scorecard. I was hoping I could nail down an autograph. I had only one, given me by our neighbor, old Mr. Bramley, who had polio as a youngster and heaved from side to side like a heavily masted schooner when he walked. It was on brown kraft paper and the name (I still have it) says "Joe DiMaggio". By the time I could push myself up to the railing Sternweiss and Rizzuto had their backs to me and were engaged in earnest conversation, so I soaked up what magic I could from being near those guys, and then headed back up to my seat. On the way up I saw a black man (we called them Negroes back then and thought we were being polite) with a very pleasant face sitting some seven or eight rows in front of us. He almost looked familiar but it wasn't someone I knew so I couldn't be sure. Besides, I had Henrich and Woodling and Cliff Mapes on my mind and game time was drawing closer.
Mary sent me for hot-dogs and sodas while she and mom enjoyed their coffees. They were all smiles when I got back and who could blame them? It was almost game time!
Reynolds was good but Lemon was faster and the Bombers seemed to have left their heavy artillery back in the armory. Boudreau and Rosen were having 'three-fer' days and a guy named Kusava began to warm up in the Yankee pen. Bob Kusava was working out with Charlie Silvera in the concrete tunnel, making the catcher's leather pop like a firecracker against the impervious walls. I'd never been so close to a Major Leaguer and it was quite a thrill. I could even see the stadium lights reflected in Kusava's Red Man -juice ejaculations. I felt a presence and looked around. There was a whole crowd of kids in the seven-to-fifteen-year-old range standing there watching Kusava burn it in. Some of them were yelling at him and he was studiously ignoring them. I began to feel he was maybe being a jerk, putting on a show for all these little kids and not really caring whether he'd be able to go out there and stop Cleveland or not. I also wondered why those other kids weren't in school.
Hearing noisy cheering, I headed back up to where Mary & Mom were sitting and again passed that same friendly-faced black man, who this time, gave me a radiantly toothy smile. It was a face, I believed, I'd seen before but I still couldn't hang a name on it.
The Indians finally got to Reynolds - he was fast as hell but emotional, and once he blows his control he's dangerous - so Kusava got the call. Keltner and Doby jumped on him hard and it wasn't long before Cleveland asserted themselves and chased the thinner-skinned fans home. Mary and Mom were taking the Yankee's loss well, however, sweetly serenading themselves and enjoying the choral support of those around them. This served to put those within hearing in decidedly better, if not outright excellent humor.
A tasty selection of lower boxes emptied and I ran down to grab one, with the hope that I'd be ignored by any friendly ushers who might be around. As I hurried by the friendly Black man I suddenly realized why he'd seemed so familiar to me. He was within hearing range of the Mom-and-Mary singers and was pleasantly singing along with them, sounding exactly like - because it was! - Nat King Cole! My momentum had carried me three or four rows passed him and I stopped dead, looking down upon all those choice, empty box seats below me. There was Casey next to the dugout, jawing with Frankie Crosetti and looking very relaxed. And there was Nat King Cole sitting in his aisle seat in the Lower Reserves, happily singing about chestnuts roasting on an open fire with Mom and Mary Brown! I had my Yankee scorecard in my hand and Mr. Cole was looking very approachable. I was a precocious kid and didn't hesitate. "May I please have your autograph, Mr. Cole?" I barely got it out. He almost gave me a funny look when I asked him to please make it out to "Mary", but after a second, he looked back to where the ladies were singing and understood. He gently opened my scorecard to the center where all the starting lineups are listed and warming me with his most radiant smile, he wrote something down and handed it back to me.
I looked up at the ladies - they were having a wonderful time with their new friends - and I headed down to the lowest of the lower boxes. Stengel and Crosetti were back in the dugout. The Yankees were on the short side of an 11 to 5 debacle, and when I headed back up to the Mary and Pauline Show, Nat Cole was nowhere to be seen.
I showed Mary Brown my scorecard and she looked at it with intelligent, but foggy disbelief. The inscription read, "To Mary - I'll always remember the day we sang together - Your admirer, Nat King Cole". I told her I had seen him, once, twice four times and I'd even spoken with him. I tried to explain that he'd actually been singing along with them - but they glanced at each other and both gave me a funny look. Singing his very own songs with them, I practically yelled, tunes that he'd made famous - and enjoying the hell out of it. Puzzled, having an understandably hard time grasping what she was hearing, Mary looked around for confirmation. Fortunately, a few very sober looking people told her that, yes indeed, he'd been there about eight rows down, smiling and humming along and enjoying himself despite the Yankees' depressing loss. An usher told them he'd spoken with him too, commenting on how King Cole was just like any other regular guy enjoying a chilly Spring afternoon at the ballpark. He came out several times during the season, the usher added happily.
Mary drove very soberly - very conservatively, all the way home. Maybe she was being overly cautious because of her long, intimate afternoon with Jamieson's Irish. Mom was very quiet too. She doesn't drive at all and is a very nervous passenger. She believes it's prudent not to distract the driver with idle conversation. Maybe instead, just hum a couple of songs by Nat King Cole.