They arrive separately. Danny is 25, sturdily built, black-haired, olive-skinned, clad in faded army fatigues. Two-day stubble shades his dark features. Corinne is 21, blue-eyed, wearing a smart Dior knockoff she found at Saks on 34th St. Her blondish hair falls in waves around her face. Thrown into proximity by chance, by friends of friends, she spots him first and nudges Helen, her very best friend.
“See that one? What do you think?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Helen says. “He’s a mess. And he looks Puerto Rican.”
Corinne smirks. “That’s silly, Helen. Not here, not tonight. But I’ll find out.”
**********
They met on a drizzly summer night in 1949 at Ebbets Field, the Brooklyn baseball shrine, a foreign destination for Bronx kids like them. But not to attend a Dodger game.
They were the children of immigrants and the Depression. She spent the war years in high school and part-time afternoon jobs in labor-scarce Manhattan. Four years older than her, he went to Fort Dix, then to France, and returned intact.
“Music Under the Stars,” their tickets announced, sponsored by “The American Fund to Aid Palestinian Institutions,” shorthand for schools in the infant state of Israel. Richard Tucker, Artie Shaw, Leonard Bernstein conducting the Philharmonic. Arias and concertos, the Star-Spangled Banner and Hatikvah. Celebrities and heartthrobs performing for the Jewish cause.
What kind of knowledge did they carry to Ebbets Field that night? She knew her beloved cousin Melvin had fallen in the Ardennes forest. He knew Uncle Max was murdered in Auschwitz and Cousin Davey had helped liberate Dachau. They both knew Yiddish whispers of death and horror. And they knew their own good fortune, surrounded by family, safe in the Bronx promised land of steam heat and spacious parks. They knew swimming and flirting in the summer mountains. They were young and their lives were beginning.
**********
She approaches him at intermission. He’s shy, but Corinne persists. She pries the essential facts from him and sees kindness in his eyes, hears thoughtfulness in his voice. When the music restarts, she corrects her friend.
“Wrong, Helen. He came here with Jack Becker and that crowd and lives near Claremont Park. He finished at City after the war and just got a graduate degree in business from Cornell on the GI Bill! And doesn’t he remind you of Tyrone Power?”
Helen looks again. The Cornell part is impressive. And under the stubble he’s not bad at all. Smart and handsome. “Ok, Cor. I happily stand corrected.”
But he hasn’t asked for her phone number.
**********
He can’t believe his luck. She’s a knockout, the kind he seldom approaches. He considers his rumpled clothing, scuffed shoes, and bristly face. I look like a shlub, he thinks, but she didn’t walk away. When the concert ends, he searches nearby rows of seats, but she’s disappeared.
He hardly thinks about anything else for days and finally asks Jack to track down the girl. Jack is a sharp character, a dresser. He had watched the girl approach Danny.
“Why didn’t you get her number, ya dope? What the hell’s wrong with you?”
He’s no ladies’ man like Jack, whose serial girlfriends span both sides of the Grand Concourse. In France during the war, Danny was assigned to translate in an officers’ brothel and never got laid.
“I don’t know, Jack. I froze up and she was gone when I tried to find her. And I looked like crap that night.”
“You got that part right, Danny. Ok, I’ll do it, but I don’t want to hear how you never called her. And ditch those fatigues. The f*cking war is over.”
**********
Since the day she started working after-school office jobs, Corinne has deflected leering bosses, street-corner Romeos, and subway gropers. Now she’s seeing a perfectly nice guy named Bob, an ambitious NYU law student who couldn’t go to Brooklyn that night. Bob treats her well and has good prospects. She can feel a proposal coming, but Bob doesn’t move her. He’s no Tyrone Power.
She’s in no hurry. Engagements and weddings are accumulating and men are plentiful, but she’s very selective. So, what was it about the guy at Ebbets Field? Sure, he was educated. And gorgeous, even if he didn’t know it. She felt a promise in their short exchange—kindness, yes, he seemed like a gentle man, but honesty too. No artifice, no pretense. But he hadn’t asked for her number. Maybe that was that.
It wasn’t, of course. Danny works up his nerve and calls.
“Hello, Corinne? This is Danny Wach. Remember me?”
“Danny! Of course I remember! How did you get my number? Did Jack give it to you?”
“Yes–you were gone when I looked for you after the show. Now that I’ve found you, would you like to have dinner with me?”
“I’m glad you found me, Danny. I’d love to.”
That went well, he thinks, relieved.
He’s gone to some trouble, she thinks, intrigued.
The next Saturday Danny boards a Tremont Avenue bus to cross the dense Bronx streets. Freshly shaved, he wears a light grey double-breasted linen suit; his Florsheim wingtips gleam in the hallway light outside her family’s apartment door. Corinne introduces him to her parents, who discreetly nod their approval to each other. They take a taxi to Thwaites Inn, the jewel of City Island restaurants, where they enjoy a delicious seafood dinner. He feels wonderfully at ease with this beautiful, confident, encouraging girl. And she knows then, as their conversation flows over shrimp cocktail and broiled flounder, that she had read him well at Ebbets Field.
After dinner, they walk along the pier and hold hands as night falls on City Island. They look over the dusky water toward Long Island, hearts beating, senses waking. And in that moment, I become a possibility, a future, their music under the stars.
________
Howard Wach is a semi-retired City University of New York historian who has given up footnotes and most Zoom meetings. His post-academic writing has been published in the Jewish Writing Project, Judith Magazine, and the Palisades Review. A forthcoming essay will appear later this year in Sport Literate.