A Princess of Passyunk

Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

One: If Market Street Flooded

To my father, Henry T. Harber, who began his life in the Polish quarter of Philly and fueled my curiosity.

With thanks to W.P. Kinsella for introducing me to the magic that is baseball.

“If Market Street ever flooded,” said Stanislaus Ouspensky, “South Philly would be an island.”

He contemplated this possibility over a bowl of chicken soup in a postage-stamp-sized deli on South Tenth Street between Cross and Tasker.

Across the counter, the deli’s owner, Izzy Davidov, looked up from the newspaper spread across the worn linoleum of his countertop and raised a graying eyebrow. “How so?”

Ouspensky straightened from his soup and flung his arms wide, dripping chicken broth across the counter. “Just look. Water on three sides; history on the fourth. All it would take is a little push”—he demonstrated on the lone matzo ball still bobbing in the bowl—”and we’re cut off from the present. Because Time gets confused in South Philly.”

At the end of the counter closest to the door, Ganady Puzdrovsky and his best friend, Yevgeny Toschev, locked eyes over their root beer. The boys had heard Mr. Ouspensky hold forth on this subject before and knew that Mr. Ouspensky believed Time flowed into Philly and eddied there, unable to find a way out again. At least, that’s what he claimed to believe.

Stanislaus Ouspensky, who had lived in a walk-up on 20^th Street across from Connie Mack Stadium since the Creation, had watched many baseball games from his rooftop before the notorious ‘spite fence’ went up in ‘35. To Ganady and Yevgeny he had privately intimated that because of these so-called time-eddies, he could still watch them. At the ambiguous age of sixteen—stranded midway between childhood and adulthood—neither boy could completely discount the claim. Neither was sure he wanted to.

“Confused?” repeated Izzy, eyeing the golden beads of liquid on his previously spotless countertop. “How does Time get confused?”

“Abigail Adams’s Bed and Breakfast is how,” said Mr. Ouspensky. “The Betsy Ross Museum is how. Time slides down the Broad Street Line and finds these places, and it eddies around them and gets stuck. Do you know what you get when Time gets stuck?”

“No,” said Izzy, rattling his paper. “But I suspect you will tell me.”

“Windows into the past. Windows into history. That’s what you get.” He glanced at the two boys out of the corner of his eye and winked, making them parties to his theory.

As indeed, they were. Thanks in large part to Mr. Ouspensky and his philosophical ramblings, their Philadelphia was not circumscribed by the neat grid of streets or a modern façade. Their Philly wasn’t merely trapped in Time, it was sinking back into it.

This meant there were times when Izzy’s deli was a tavern at which thieves and pirates gathered in the wee hours. And Saint Stanislaus’ Church was a grand and massive cathedral gone to weed, in which sad monks carried out their daily rites, and at night worked for an unspecified Underground.

“Windows?” repeated Izzy, his eyebrows just visible above the edge of the newspaper. “I’ll tell you what I know about windows, Ouspensky. I know that mine haven’t been washed for above a week thanks to that hulyen, Nikolai Puzdrovsky.”

Ganady snorkeled into his straw, root beer exploding up the sides of the bottle. Hearing his elder brother referred to as a “hellraiser,” even in Yiddish, was not without humor. Lazy, Nikolai might be called, careless, maybe—but a hulyen?

The hulyen himself appeared just then as if magically summoned, stepping through Izzy’s door with the sharp April wind nipping after him. He closed the door in its face and said, “Hey, Mr. O. Hey, Izzy. Can I get a grape soda?”

Izzy’s eyebrows rose again at the sound of his pet name coming from Nikolai’s lips. Neither of the other boys would have dared address him in such fashion, but Nikolai was seventeen and as of this past winter, considered himself to be sufficiently grown up to experiment with such adult privilege.

“How do you do, Mister Puzdrovsky?” asked Izzy mildly. “I’ll be happy to see to your soda as soon as I’ve finished my business with Ganady.”

Ganady’s ears perked up at this, for he had no idea that business was being done with him.

Izzy said, “So, Ganady, since my windows have gone unwashed this week past, I am wondering if you and your young friend might be interested in a bit of work. One could do the windows, one the floors...”

Nikolai reverted swiftly to his youth. “Gee, Mr. Davidov, I was going to do them Friday, but...well, I had to make up some homework, and then it was getting dark, and you know how Mama is about us being out after dark.”

“My windows don’t know from homework,” said Izzy. “They’re just dirty. Perhaps Ganady doesn’t have homework that must be made up?”

Ganady glanced at Nikolai, whose entire thought process was writ publicly on his lean face. Certainly he wanted the money, but having to do windows on Friday afternoons instead of all the other things that could be done...

Nikolai took a deep breath. “I’ll do them Wednesday. I promise. Right after school. Will that be okay, Mr. D.?”

Izzy grunted what Ganady assumed was an affirmative and poked his long nose back into his paper. “You know where the soda is. Help yourself.”

Nikolai did just that, swinging around the end of the counter to the beaten-up little icebox where Izzy kept his cold stuff. He was back out again in a moment, swigging a grape Nehi. “Seen any good ballgames lately, Mr. Ouspensky?” he asked.

“A few,” said the old man coyly, dunking the hapless matzo ball with his spoon. He did not elaborate.

In days past, he would have waxed poetic about the games, but Nikolai was no longer of the inner circle. To Ganady’s chagrin, his elder brother had begun to change with the onset of this, his junior year, until by now, in early April, he seemed as blasé and unimaginative as his peers.

For his part, Nikolai merely grinned, sucked his soda and said, “Mama sent me to bring you home, Ganny. And Eugene’s wanted up at the restaurant.”

Yevgeny’s eyes shot sparks of perfect delft blue onto his freckled cheeks. “Don’t call me that,” he said.

Nikolai shrugged his shoulders. “Suit yourself. All I know is, your Mama wants you to help out in the kitchen.”

Unlike Yevgeny, who resisted Americanization with every fiber of his being, Nikolai had become relentlessly American, his interests running more and more to cars and leather bomber jackets and chinos and high-school dances. Mama and Baba were the only ones at home who could call him “Nikolai” or “Nikki” these days; everyone else must call him “Nick.” He had unilaterally decided that Yevgeny would be “Eugene” instead of “Zhenya” or some other standard diminutive. He had also coined the shortened version of Ganady’s name on the grounds that the Polish version—”Genna”—”sounded girly.” Everyone had taken to using it—even their Mama on occasion. Ganady couldn’t find it in himself to care with anything like the passion Yevgeny did.

Nick said South Philadelphia was an antique or a museum, or worse, a human rummage sale. Further, Ganady and Yevgeny with their heads full of time eddies and magical windows were yentas who might just as well be doing needlework and sharing neighborhood gossip with Baba Irina’s glayzele tey society.

He rarely joined the other boys on their rambles these days, and when he did, Ganady knew he was only along for the ride. He never brought his imagination with him. To hear Nick tell it, the only reason he spent any time with the younger boys at all was to keep them from dropping permanently through one of Ouspensky’s magic windows, leaving him to explain their disappearance to the elder Puzdrovskys.

Root beer bottles drained, the two younger boys followed Nikolai from the deli.

“Saturday?” asked Mr. Ouspensky from behind them.

“Saturday,” said Ganady and Yevgeny in unison.

And Izzy Davidov muttered, “Mr. D!” and rattled his newspaper.

“Saturday, what?” asked Nikolai as the boys made their way up the street.

Ganady shrugged, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets, trying to lose the root-beer-bottle chill. “Oh, nothing. We’re um...”

Yevgeny said, “We’re going to help Mr. Ouspensky put up a new clothesline.”

Nikolai smirked. “You mean you’re going over to watch ghost baseball with him. You been going over there for a month of Sundays. You ever seen any old ghost-ball game?”

“The season hasn’t started yet,” said Yevgeny. Mr. Ouspensky says it’s a matter of timing. He says what we want is a Saturday afternoon just after Opening Day.”

Nick shook his head. “You two are such shlubs. And Mr. O knows it. He’s just fooling with you.”

“No he isn’t,” said Yevgeny defensively. “He says there’s a spot—The Spot. He knows how to find it. And if we get there at just the right time—”

“You might see a twenty-year-old ballgame?” Nick finished for him. “That’s dumb.”

“Baba says there are magic spots like that all over Poland,” said Ganady. “Why wouldn’t there be magic spots here, too?”

Now Nikolai’s eyes rolled. Baba Irina, he’d be thinking, still thinks she’s in Keterzyn, and that Poland is still an imperial force—or ought to be. All he said was: “This is America. The New World. There’s no magic. There’s movies.”

“But Baba remembers—” Yevgeny began, and Nick’s eyes made another circuit.

“Eugene, you’ve known Baba all your life and you still don’t get that when she says, ‘I remember...’ she’s about to tell a boobeh myseh? I bet you still believe in fairytales, too, huh?”

Yevgeny winced at this abuse of his name, but Ganady had barely heard his brother at all, for something had called to him from the corner of 21^st and LeHigh.

“You know what Mr. Ouspensky says is magic?” he asked, looking away over rooftops and telephone poles. “A five-four-three triple play.”

The other boys considered this. Then Yevgeny nodded agreement.

“You,” Nick disparaged, “are obsessed with baseball. You and Mr. O, all three.”

“You sleep with your mitt under your pillow, Nikki,” said Yevgeny. “Same as us.”

Nikolai blushed crimson to the roots of his dark hair. “Don’t call me that,” he said, but he didn’t deny where his fine, red leather catcher’s mitt spent the hours between dusk and dawn.

oOo

“Connie Mack wasn’t always a mean man,” said Mr. Ouspensky. “But money made him mean. That’s what I think.”

Ganady and Yevgeny regarded the bluff wooden face of the so-called ‘spite fence’ from the flat roof of Mr. Ouspensky’s apartment building. The fence had gotten its name from Connie Mack’s motivation for raising it to keep the people in Mr. O’s apartment buildings from watching games free of charge.

“It’s ugly,” said Yevgeny, wrinkling the freckles that powdered his nose.

“So is greed,” said Mr. Ouspensky. He handed Ganady one end of his new clothesline and pointed at the rusty pulley mounted on a stalwart upright.

Ganady obediently took his end of the rope to the pulley, looped it over the roller, and gave it a yank. The pulley resisted, then turned with a squeal of protest. Ganady brought the loose end back to center where Yevgeny stood waiting with the nether end.

“Could one of you tie it, please?” asked Mr. Ouspensky. “These hands aren’t good for nothing anymore.”

As Yevgeny tied a neat square knot in the clothesline, Ganady glanced over at Mr. Ouspensky’s hands. They were gnarled, the knuckles outsized. Ganady wondered how he managed to do anything with such hands.

He felt sorry for Mr. Ouspensky. Where the Puzdrovsky house was full of family, Mr. O’s house was full of quiet. He had not even a cat or a canary. Some of Baba Irina’s old gleyzele tey friends had canaries. Mr. Ouspensky had nothing. And if people were conspicuously absent from his small apartment, so too were any memorials to them. There were no little shrines such as decorated seemingly every flat surface in the Puzdrovsky home. No heirloom lace graced the tabletops, no fragile teacups cluttered the shelves, no family photographs hung on the walls or filled keepsake books. Mr. Ouspensky’s bookshelves were stacked with issues of Dime Sports Magazine, his photo albums were full of baseball cards and baseball clippings. It was these he brought out to show his visitors.

Faces looked up at Ganady from the black construction paper pages of the books. On this page, Phillies faces: Cy Williams, Lefty O’Doul, Freddy Leach, Chuck Klein. Players from the Thirties.

“He was the great one.” Mr. Ouspensky tapped the Chuck Klein card with an arthritic finger. “Phillies sold him twice during the bad years, but he kept coming back. Ended his career with them.”

Ganady wondered if perhaps Mr. Ouspensky knew everything about baseball in the same way that Baba Irina knew everything about the Old Country, about the Golden Age of a forgotten empire, about mushrooms.

“He batted .386 in 1930.” Mr. Ouspensky wagged his head. “.386. Imagine. But the team finished last.”

“Pitching,” murmured Yevgeny, echoing the movement.

“You can’t win without pitching.”

Mr. Ouspensky shrugged. “Eh, I was more of an Athletics fan then. After all, there they were, and I could see them for free until that thing.” He nodded toward the window that looked out on Connie Mack Stadium.

Ganady raised his eyes to the window. He could just see the hated fence.

“The Phillies were at the Baker Bowl then,” said Mr. Ouspensky.

“So,” Ganady said, frowning a little, “if we could find a spot...an eddy...”

“...you’d be seeing the Athletics.” Mr. Ouspensky flipped to a new page. Athletics players stared up from it.

Ganady was disappointed. He hadn’t really followed the Athletics. Hadn’t cared much when they’d moved to Kansas City. He was a Phillies fan. Still, a ballgame was a ballgame. “Have you seen Eddie Waitkus play, Mr. Ouspensky?”

“Most certainly, I’ve seen him play.” Mr. O flipped pages, time-traveling the book into the present day. “I saw him play the day he was shot. ‘49, that was. Terrible, terrible thing. That poor girl must’ve been crazy to do such a thing.”

“Da read about it in the paper,” said Ganady. “The papers said she was deranged. That’s the same as crazy, I guess. Ma didn’t like us to talk about it. She wouldn’t let Da take us to games for while after.”

“Almost the whole season,” said Yevgeny mournfully.

“So, what do we need to find a spot?” asked Ganady, tearing his eyes from the fragment of Connie Mack he could see from Mr. O’s kitchen window.

“First, we must have faith. Then, we must have a ritual.”

“There’s a ritual?”

“Last season, I set up a kitchen chair on the roof and brought up some beer and peanuts. In a red-and-white-striped bag. Pretended I was at a game. That worked twice.” He shrugged. “Eh, it’s a bit different every time.”

Ganady refrained from asking how a ritual could be different every time, and watched Mr. Ouspensky turn back the pages of his scrapbook to 1932. He laid the album open on the kitchen table. Newspaper clippings dominated the page. KLEIN VOTED NL MVP, said one. FOXX ENDS SEASON WITH 58 HOMERS, proclaimed another. The other clippings were divided equally between the Phillies and the Athletics. Stanislaus Ouspensky was clearly a fan in conflict.

“We have a year,” he said. “Now we need a talisman.”

“A what?” asked Yevgeny.

Mr. O smiled and held up a finger. Then he moved through his parlor to a dark mahogany hutch. Ganady assumed it held dishes, for it looked much like the cupboard that cradled his mother’s heirloom china, imported with much care from Poland.

It held baseball paraphernalia.

The boys moved as if entranced, coming to flank their host at the cupboard-cum-treasure chest, there to behold its contents. Two whole bats, a third in two pieces, lay upon the bottom shelf. There was also a glove of sorts—an odd-looking thing with unstitched fingers fat as sausages—an unrecognizable jersey, a pair of cleats with leather uppers so dry and aged, the toes had curled up. Lastly, there was an assortment of baseballs, some clean and white, some covered in autographs, some old, muddy, and scuffed. One had the stitching popped open to reveal the tightly wound core.

It was this pathetic specimen that Mr. Ouspensky lifted from the shelf. He held it reverently—the way Father Zembruski held the Host during Eucharist.

“Jimmie Foxx home-run ball,” he said.

The object transformed from trash to treasure, the boys pressed closer.

Yevgeny thrust his nose into the cabinet, sniffing like an inquisitive hound. “Where’d you get all this stuff?”

“Oh, here and there. One place and another.”

His eyes on the faded jersey, Ganady had a sudden flash of insight. “Did you play, Mr. Ouspensky?”

The old man grinned, becoming, in an instant, a 70-year-old boy. Holes showed where back molars had been. “Eh well, I did play some. That’s my jersey, you see? Number 25. Lexington Mills team, 1915. Outfield.” The grin deepened. “They called me ‘The Wandering Jew’ because I had such good range. My rabbi did not think such a pet name was proper. In fact, my rabbi did not think baseball was a proper pastime for a good Orthodox boy. So...”

“You quit?” asked Yevgeny, eyes wide.

“I got a new rabbi.”

“You’ve been here a long time, huh?” said Ganady. “In America, I mean. In Philly.”

The boy was an old man again, turning a dilapidated baseball in arthritic fingers. He nodded. “A long time, yes.”

“You must’ve come over when you were a kid.”

“Not so much a kid, no. But come. Let us see if the stream of time will allow us to swim in it today.”

They went back up to the roof then, Mr. O clutching his talisman. Once there, he made a circuit of the rooftop, describing a square with halting footsteps, singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in a quavering tenor.

No, not a square, Ganady realized, following him bemusedly. A diamond—with the back of home plate aimed at the spite fence.

At each corner Mr. Ouspensky paused to assume an infielder’s posture—half-crouched, facing home plate. When he had completed his tour of the imaginary diamond, the old man led his acolytes to the invisible pitcher’s mound where they faced Connie Mack.

“Take first,” he told Ganady, then to Yevgeny: “Take third.”

The boys moved to their invisible bases. Mr. O struck a pose—a pitcher getting ready to go into the windup.

They waited. The inevitable pigeons waited with them, perched on the new clothesline, on the edge of the roof, on the clutter of little smokestacks, on an empty pigeon cote. Their cooing threw a soft blanket over the other Saturday afternoon sounds. In the street below, cars and trucks purred and rumbled, muted cheers floated from the stadium across the street, farther away on the river, boats hooted at each other over the water.

Ganady’s nose itched. He withstood the itch as long as he could before reaching up surreptitiously to scratch it. At once, he felt Mr. Ouspensky’s eyes on him and turned the scratch into the Sign of the Cross, hoping Mr. Ouspensky would think he was merely adding to the ritual.

He chanced a glance at the old man. Mr. O’s eyes were trained on the stadium wall, large and bright and hopeful. The torn baseball revolved in his hands, over and over, round and round.

Ganady held his breath, straining to hear the stadium sounds—crowd noise, the hawkers shouting, the crack of the bat. Suddenly, that was all he could hear; pigeons, river, and street traffic all dissolved into the game. Sparks floated before Ganady’s eyes, and across the street, Connie Mack’s great wooden ramparts seemed to shimmer and blur in the afternoon Sun. Was that a bit of emerald green he glimpsed through the heavy boards? Were those bright flecks of color the spring vestments of the people in the stands?

Across from him, Yevgeny let out a long, sighing breath as if he, too, saw...something.

The ball in Mr. O’s hands turned and turned and turned, and the old man murmured a jumbled litany of names and stats. The spite fence wavered, melted, faded. Verdant green seeped through its filmy fabric. A pattern began to emerge.

“Hey, what are you guys looking at?”

At the sound of Nick’s voice, the pigeons rose up in a great flutter of wings. In an instant, Ganady’s view of the ballpark was lost in a flight of tiny angels. In the wake of their leave-taking, Connie Mack’s spite fence was as solid as the day it was put up.

Ganady exhaled.

“Your brother,” said Mr. O, “is a klutz.”

oOo

“You don’t really believe you were about to see through that fence, do you?” Nick asked as they made their way home.

“No,” said Ganady, “because the fence wasn’t there then.”

“Then when?”

“In 1932. The year Mr. Ouspensky got a Jimmie Foxx home-run ball.”

Nick smote his forehead with the heel of one hand. “Oh, yeah! How could I forget? You were going to travel back in time to catch the game. C’mon, Ganny. You can’t travel in time by hugging a baseball and staring into thin air. You need a machine. Anybody knows that. Didn’t you read Jules Verne?”

“H.G. Wells,” said Yevgeny and Ganady added, “Maybe baseball is the time machine. That’s what Mr. O thinks.”

“Mr. O is a lonely old meshuggener who likes to play jokes on dummies like you two.”

“He wasn’t joking, Nikolai,” said Ganady. “He meant it. He had a whole ritual and everything. It was like...like...”

“Like mass,” said Yevgeny. “Like sabes.”

Nick shook his head and whistled. “I wouldn’t let Father Z hear you say that. You could end up doing a thousand ‘Hail Marys’ standing on your head.”