Free The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn Page A

embarrass Walker, or risk refusal.
    Robinson was competent but uninspired in the World Series, by which time another Negro had begun to play in the majors and dozens were being scouted. The most exciting Series play was a catch made in deep left field by a stumpy outfielder named Al Gionfriddo. The batter who hit the long drive was Joe DiMaggio and, while I was saluting Gionfriddo’s genius, as reportedby Red Barber, my father suggested that against a hitter like DiMaggio, Gionfriddo should have been stationed far into left, in the first place.
    “What do you mean, Daddy?” Emily said.
    “Hell,” I said. “He caught the ball.”
    “Good legs,” Gordon said, “but he doesn’t qualify as an intelligent man.” Gordon turned to his daughter and lectured on the basics of positioning oneself in defensive baseball. Her round face lit, as though she were hearing a Philippic. After a while, I excused myself, pleading homework. The Yankees won the Series, four games to three.
    Olga was aging softly. She maintained her weight at 105 pounds, and as lines furrowed her face they fell in flowing contours. Wedged between polio and baseball, she became more militantly intellectual. She subscribed to little reviews and no obtuseness could stay her from finishing an essay. Wandering into the living room, I would find
Hudson, Sewanee, Partisan
and
Kenyon
stacked on an end table beside a blue couch. With time, copies became dog-eared. We owned the world’s only dog-eared collection of essays by Philip Rahv. Further, Olga acted on the essays seriously. The library, housed in high cases that faced the French doors, grew with new copies of Henry James, Wallace Stevens, Edgar Allan Poe, Yvor Winters, giants of letters and princes of bombast as the season commanded. Abruptly John Keats was “rather quaint.”
    Gordon consumed himself with work, with baseball talk at his crippled daughter and, when he and Emily were not closeted, with the escapes of crossword puzzle and detective story. I was not interested in the little reviews. I disliked puzzles. There was no place for me in a closet scene. One morning at the age of twenty, I awoke a stranger in the household where I was born.
    “It’s time seriously to discuss what you intend doing for a living,” Gordon said. Then, yielding to his Mahleresque weakness for triteness when most serious, he said, in a portentousbass-baritone: “I think it’s time to take stock.”
    “The idea of sending you to college may have been a mistake,” Olga said. “You may not be good college timber and we—I am certainly very much to blame—should not have inflicted so many demands on your intelligence.”
    After high school, I decided on a semirevolution. I would run away to familiar ground. I prepared preliminary applications for Cornell, Olga’s college, mentioning that I intended to major in English. My grades were strong in English, but spotty, and my parents were surprised when an admissions dean wrote an encouraging letter. The problem, Gordon said very tightly, was that the expense of hospitalization and physiotherapy for Emily precluded my going to Cornell. He was sorry, but there was only so much money and, by the way, if I hadn’t really decided on a career, he wanted to suggest radio law.
    “Radio law?”
    “Yes indeed. There’s a chap who does legal work for Golenpaul. It’s fascinating and he is very affluent. I never thought of affluence as being important but, as you can see, I was wrong.” His eyes dropped. I was accepted at the Bronx campus of NYU, where, I told the admissions dean, I intended to pursue a career of radio law.
    “Radio law?” the dean said.
    The University College of Arts and Pure Science offered compulsory ROTC, clasp-hands-on-desk discipline, an ancient faculty, a persistent strain of anti-Semitism and a kind of justifiable paranoia among cadres of young Jews who craved good marks, but not learning, as they thrashed recklessly toward the common goal, medical