Three Swings

My daughter was born on a Sunday night, October 16, 1977, at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, while the whole city was still learning how to unclench its jaw.

By then New York had spent the summer scaring itself. Son of Sam had turned parked cars and lovers’ lanes and dark corners into crime scenes in people’s heads long before the cops put the cuffs on him. The blackout had knocked the lights out in July and shown everybody what was waiting under the skin of things. Stores burned. Glass went in. Whole neighborhoods looked like the city had briefly stopped believing in itself. Even after the power came back, something stayed dimmed.

So when my daughter came into the world two months later, red-faced and squalling and furious to be here, I looked at her through the nursery glass and felt what I imagine every first-time father has felt since the caves: wonder braided tight with terror.

This? I thought. This is what they trust me with?

My wife, Elena, had done the real work. She had sweated and cursed and squeezed my hand till I thought the bones would crack, and then she lay there afterward looking emptied out and illuminated at the same time, like somebody who had gone somewhere I could not follow and come back carrying news from the far side. When the nurse placed the baby in her arms, Elena smiled at me with a tiredness so deep it seemed holy.

“Look at her ears,” she said.

That was the first thing. Not ten fingers, not ten toes. Her ears.

“They’re perfect,” I said, because I had no better word.

“Big,” Elena said.

“Perfect and big.”

That made her laugh, and that laugh is what got me through the next two days.

I had to work Monday. And Tuesday too, at least till evening, because babies don’t stop the rent, Con Edison doesn’t waive the bill because you’ve become a father, and Mr. Feldman down at the garment warehouse on 138th Street was not a man much interested in miracles unless they involved meeting a shipping deadline. He gave me Monday morning with a face like he was donating a kidney. By Tuesday he expected me back stacking boxes and checking invoices like the world had not changed shape.

All that day I moved like a man whose thoughts were two neighborhoods away.

The radios were on in the warehouse, the way they always were. The Yankees were playing the Dodgers in the Series, and even the guys who said they didn’t care cared enough to keep glancing up whenever somebody turned the volume knob. Reggie Jackson had already been Reggie all October, all glare and swagger and noise, a man built less like a ballplayer than a rumor. You could feel how people needed him that year. The city was tired of being told what it was: bankrupt, filthy, dangerous, washed up, finished. Reggie played like he had never heard any of that and wouldn’t have believed it if you told him.

I got off at six. St. Barnabas wanted Elena and the baby out that evening, and Elena had made me promise three times not to be late.

So all day at work that was in my head: the tiny neck of my daughter, the soft cave at the top of her head where the skull wasn’t finished yet, the simple impossible fact that by nightfall she would be out in the world with us. It seemed to me there should have been a test, a license, a priest, a fireproof pamphlet, some city office where they took you aside and said, Are you absolutely sure you’re ready to carry something this breakable into the Bronx?

At six-ten I was in the break room gathering my jacket when somebody shouted, “Yo, Lou, don’t move.”

I turned. Half a dozen guys were facing the television mounted up in the corner on a metal bracket. The picture rolled once, then steadied. Game 6. Yankee Stadium looked brighter than the room I was in had any right to be. Reggie was at the plate.

“Two out,” said Eddie from cutting. “Watch this.”

“I gotta go,” I said, but I didn’t.

I stood there with one arm through my jacket and watched Burt Hooton come set. The room went quiet in that funny way rooms do around sports, where nobody says shh but everybody does. On the screen Reggie held the bat high, loose but dangerous, like he knew something the pitcher did not.

The pitch came in and Jackson turned on it.

There are sounds that arrive before you know what they mean. Glass breaking in the next room. A scream from the street. The first cry of your child. The crack off Reggie’s bat was like that. It sounded finished the second it happened. The ball shot out toward right-center, and before it even disappeared into the dark the break room exploded.

Chairs scraped. Somebody slapped the table hard enough to spill coffee. Eddie yelled a curse in the Lord’s direction so joyous it barely counted as blasphemy. On the television, Jackson rounded first with that floating, offended dignity he had, as if the ball had insulted him by not going farther.

“Mr. October!” somebody hollered.

I laughed despite myself.

There was something in me that eased an inch.

Just an inch. Not more than that. But I felt it.

“Go,” Eddie said, grinning. “Go get your family. We got this.”

Outside, the October air had that snapped-wire feeling it gets in New York after sunset, cold trying itself on for the first time. I started toward the subway with my overnight bag in one hand and the folded-up baby blanket Elena’s mother had knit draped over my arm like a ceremonial sash. Every bar I passed seemed louder than usual. Every apartment window with a television in it glowed blue.

On the way down into the 4 train, I touched the tiny knit cap in my jacket pocket just to make sure it was still there. I had bought it from a pharmacy on Jerome for two dollars and ninety-nine cents. Yellow. Too yellow, Elena said. “She’ll look like a taxi.” But it was warm and small and beautiful to me because I had never before in my life bought a hat that could fit in the palm of my hand.

The downtown train came full and stayed full. Men in work clothes. A woman with shopping bags. Two teenagers in Yankee caps drumming a rhythm against the pole. Somebody had a transistor radio pressed to his ear, volume turned up enough for the rest of us to hear the game under the train noise.

I stood holding the overhead bar, swaying with the car, feeling that old city closeness—too many bodies, too much noise, everybody pretending not to study one another while doing exactly that.

The man with the radio was one of those lean, sharp-featured old-timers who always looked as if they had once known a guy who could get you anything. He noticed me listening and tilted the radio a little in my direction.

“Series ends tonight,” he said.

“From your lips,” I said.

“Your stop?”

“Kingsbridge.”

He nodded at the blanket on my arm. “Hospital?”

“My wife and my baby girl.”

That got the attention of the lady with the shopping bags. She smiled at me. One of the teenagers looked up.

“How old?” she asked.

“Two days.”

“Ahhh,” she said, hand to chest. “God bless.”

The train rattled into 149th and Grand Concourse. The radio crackled. On the broadcast the crowd sounded like surf. Then came the announcer’s voice, rising, stretching, and the whole car leaned toward that tiny speaker as if it were a fire in winter.

Jackson swung.

The old-timer smacked my forearm before the announcer even finished saying it.

“He did it again!”

The teenagers shouted. The shopping-bag lady laughed like she knew Reggie personally and forgave him all his sins. Somebody at the other end of the car started chanting, “REG-GIE! REG-GIE!” and a few of us joined in, grinning like idiots.

I don’t know why that second home run touched me more than the first. Maybe because by then I was underground, in motion, unable to stop anything, committed to the trip. Maybe because I was surrounded by strangers who all, for one clean second, wanted the same thing and got it. Maybe because the city had spent so many months giving us reasons to lower our heads, and here was this giant peacock of a man on a baseball field refusing to do anything but lift them.

Two home runs. Two swings. It felt like a pattern.

And because I was already in a father’s state of mind, which is to say half-mad and ready to interpret anything as instruction, I found myself thinking: maybe that’s how it happens. Maybe hope does not arrive all at once. Maybe it comes in loud installments.

Then the train lurched and the spell broke and I had to push through the doors at Kingsbridge and run the rest of the way.

St. Barnabas smelled like all hospitals smell: bleach, boiled linens, old worry, coffee too weak to save anybody. The lobby television was on. The nurses at the desk had one eye on paperwork and one eye on the game. I signed what needed signing with a hand that suddenly felt too big and clumsy for a pen.

“Third floor,” one nurse said without looking up. “And congratulations, papi.”

I took the elevator with an orderly wheeling down empty bassinets. He glanced at the blanket, then at me.

“First one?”

“Is it obvious?”

“You look like you swallowed a grenade.”

I laughed. “That bad?”

“That good,” he said.

Elena’s room door was half open. I could hear the television before I saw them. The game was on, low. I stepped in and there they were: Elena in the bed, hair flat on one side, face pale and strong and more beautiful to me than at our wedding; my daughter in the bassinet beside her, making those little fish-mouth motions babies make, as if they are forever trying to remember the language they were speaking before they got here.

For a second I just stood there, my throat gone thick.

Elena looked up. “You made it.”

“I said I would.”

“You’re late.”

“By three minutes.”

“That’s late.”

I went to kiss her. She smelled like soap and exhaustion. Then I leaned over the bassinet and my daughter opened one eye—just one, suspiciously—and I felt my heart turn over in my chest like an engine catching.

“Hey,” I whispered. “I know. Me too.”

“You hold her,” Elena said.

“What if I do it wrong?”

“You’ll do it wrong. Hold her anyway.”

The nurse had shown me once before, but memory is a poor substitute for terror. I slid one hand beneath the head and one beneath the body and lifted my daughter out of the bassinet. Seven pounds, two ounces, and somehow heavier than any box I’d moved in the warehouse. Not by scale. By consequence.

She settled against me with a warm, astonishing seriousness. Her cheek fit into the hollow below my collarbone as if she had reserved it in advance.

On the television the crowd roared.

“Reggie again,” Elena said.

I turned my head just as the pitcher delivered. Charlie Hough this time. I did not know that then; I know it now because some moments brand themselves so deeply into you that later you go back and learn every name attached to them. But in that room all I knew was the shape of the swing.

Reggie uncoiled.

The ball leapt off the bat and went rocketing toward center field, higher and higher, a thing with no intention of coming back to earth inside ordinary human time. The announcer nearly lost his mind. The stadium on the television became a white storm of people rising.

Three home runs.

Three swings.

The room erupted, but softer than the break room, softer than the train. Hospital joy. Nurses clapping at the desk. Somebody hollering down the hall. Elena laughing and then crying because she had no more room left for feelings and they were spilling out wherever they could.

And me—God help me—I started crying too.

Not because of baseball exactly. Though it was baseball. Not because I thought the Yankees had saved the city. They hadn’t. The burned-out buildings were still burned out. The dead stayed dead. The scared stayed scared. Garbage still baked in summer alleys. Rent still came due. The trains still groaned. Men still drank too much. Women still waited up. The world remained itself.

But there in that room, holding my daughter while my wife watched and Reggie Jackson circled the bases on a flickering television, it felt as if something had answered something.

All summer the city had seemed to be receiving one message over and over: Be afraid. Be smaller. Expect less. Lock the door. Don’t trust the dark. Don’t trust your neighbor. Don’t trust tomorrow.

And now here was another message, absurd and bright and impossible to miss.

No.

That was what those home runs said.

No, not tonight.

Tonight the ball leaves the park three times. Tonight your wife comes through labor. Tonight your daughter arrives. Tonight you take them home. Tonight the streets fill with noise that is not sirens. Tonight the Bronx throws open its windows and shouts for something besides warning.

I looked down at my daughter, at the little cap of dark hair, the pinched old-soul face, the mouth opening in sleep.

“See that?” I whispered to her. “That’s for you.”

Elena gave me a look. “The game?”

“The sign.”

“What sign?”

I almost said something foolish, something about Noah and the flood, the rainbow after terror, the covenant stitched across the sky. Maybe it was foolish. But fatherhood had already made me more superstitious in forty-eight hours than all my previous years combined.

Instead I said, “That maybe things are gonna be all right.”

Elena studied me for a moment, then nodded once. “Okay,” she said, because she loved me enough to let me have it.

By the time the paperwork was done and the nurse finally trusted us to leave with the child they had been keeping alive better than we knew how, the game was ending and the whole hospital seemed loosened. An orderly held the elevator for us like we were royalty. In the lobby, a security guard leaned out the door and shouted to nobody and everybody, “Yankees in six!”

Outside, the Bronx had turned festive by instinct.

Car horns blared in stuttering rhythms. People leaned from windows banging pots with spoons. Somebody had a boom box on the sidewalk, not even playing music, just postgame radio loud enough for the whole block. Boys ran up the street waving their arms like airplanes. Men in jackets slapped each other on the back. Women laughed from stoops. A kid no older than twelve yelled, “REGGIE OWNS L.A.!” with such authority you’d have thought he handled the paperwork.

The air smelled like exhaust, roasted chestnuts from a cart down the avenue, cigarette smoke, autumn, and that faint metallic city smell that never leaves no matter how many times it rains.

I carried the baby. Elena walked close, one hand on my sleeve, moving carefully but smiling that small private smile I had fallen in love with years before. The blanket was wrapped around our daughter in yellow folds, and above it her face barely showed, as if we were smuggling home a moon.

For the first block I kept waiting for my fear to return full force. I expected the old thoughts to come crowding back in.

What kind of world is this? 

What can you promise her? 

What can you protect her from? 

What do you know about being somebody’s father?

But the questions, though they did not vanish, seemed to fall into step behind us instead of standing in our way.

Maybe that was all hope ever was. Not the disappearance of fear. Just fear forced to walk a few paces back.

On Webster Avenue a passing car slowed and the driver, seeing the hospital blanket and Elena’s wristband and the baby in my arms, leaned out the window.

“Baby?” he shouted.

“Yeah!”

He pumped his fist in the air. “Born champions!” he yelled, and drove on, horn blaring.

Elena laughed so hard she had to stop walking.

We stood there in the Bronx night, under streetlights still humming with power, under apartment windows full of cheering, under a sky that gave no sign except the ordinary dark. And yet it did not feel ordinary to me. It felt marked.

I looked down at my daughter. Her eyes were closed. She did not know about blackouts or killers or bankruptcies or men in the bleachers losing their minds for a right fielder in pinstripes. She knew only warmth, heartbeat, motion, the nearness of voices that loved her before she could answer back.

That seemed, suddenly, like enough to begin with.

I bent my head and kissed the little yellow cap.

“Welcome home,” I said.

Then the three of us turned up the block together, into the Bronx noise and the Bronx light and the Bronx future, while somewhere not so far away the city kept shouting itself hoarse for Reggie Jackson, and all of it—the cheers, the fear we had survived, the child between us, the long hard borough rising to meet another morning—felt joined in one bright impossible promise.