“Two men on base and it’s low and wide, ball three…  a high fly to left field.” The announcer’s incantatory play by play magically emerged from my father’s miniature transistor radio as I played with paper dolls.  The crowd’s roar would catch my attention and I’d ask:  “Daddy, what’s the score?” During the week, I hardly saw my father since he worked late in his downtown law office, letting his dinner get cold, and annoying my mother. She stayed home, baked cookies and complained about her chores, suffering from the common malaise of fifties housewives.

Stalwart, religious and hard-working, my father gamely tolerated his two daughters and unhappy wife.  Nightly he prayed according to Jewish Orthodox custom, swaying under his skullcap, facing east toward the ancient temple in Jerusalem. His rituals were comforting. He would pick lint off the carpet, or wipe the counters clean, implying that my mother’s efforts were inadequate.  Every weekend from April until October, he was accompanied by that reassuring drone as he carried the game along with the announcer’s voice rising and falling as the batteries jostled.  For me the liturgical chant of baseball’s play by play seemed nearly as sacred as his prayers.  Though love was deeply submerged in our family quartet, my question: “What’s the score?” asked over and over again, became my coded way of saying “I love you.”  When he replied: “The Tigers are ahead five to three,” I felt a special connection to him, sharing our victory.

In spring, before our Passover celebration of the flight from Egypt, my little sister and I looked forward to the annual hunt for the chometz, a ritual my father shared with us, excluding my mother.  The evening before the holiday, we were pledged to silence as we followed him. Like secret conspirators, we watched him scatter bread crusts onto counter tops and bookshelves throughout our house, even in the bathroom and bedrooms.  Then, carrying a candle, his finger to his lips, he retraced his steps. Using a feather, he dramatically swept each bit of stale bread into a bag. Excited, I would race ahead to find the next piece. Finally, when all the crumbs were gathered, he wrapped the package tightly, and the three of us ventured into the dark alley behind our house where he burned the crumbs.  Only then was the house clean and pure enough for Passover. For the next eight days, we would eat matzoh (unleavened bread), so we wouldn’t forget the Jews fleeing Pharaoh, who had no time to bake their bread.

When my father finally agreed to take me to a ball game, I felt as if I’d entered a restricted male bastion, as if a sign above the stadium read: “No Girls Allowed.” Like Little Lulu in my favorite comic books, I’d outsmarted the boys; I could be Daddy’s companion.  Even if I couldn’t play baseball, it could belong to me almost as much as to the men.   Sitting on the bleachers next to him, I tried to keep track of hits and errors and outs on my scorecard, but writing was too hard as the spectacle unfolded before me.  The grass was so green, much greener than our lawn at home. Numbers flashed as the scoreboards changed; vendors shouted, selling root beer, popcorn, and hot dogs, which we couldn’t eat because they weren’t kosher. The people surrounding us were unlike anyone in our neighborhood; they shouted and swore at Al Kaline as if they knew him; suddenly frightened, I looked at my father full of questions.

“Don’t worry, it’s part of the game. They don’t mean what they say. “Despite his reassurance, I sensed something fragile about him which made me worry, yet when he bought me a forbidden hot dog, and treated himself to a Stroh’s beer, I considered it proof of his love.

After the game, he reminisced about his immigrant Jewish neighborhood near Briggs Stadium: he remembered Zeman’s Bakery and the warm Challah they baked on Fridays. At the Dairy Café strict dietary rules were observed—no meat permitted.  He remembered the People’s Theatre, and Workman’s Circle, all gone along with the children of immigrants who’d relocated to northwest Detroit. Then he spoke about his accident. He rolled up his left trouser and pointed to the ugly purple flesh near his knee.

 “See, how the bone is eaten away,” he said with pride, as if he’d spoken of  a war injury, though I knew he’d been classified 4F and hadn’t served in the military. Then he explained how it happened. To help his family, he’d begun delivering The Detroit News on his new bicycle.  In 1921, he was only eleven; women had just gotten the vote, prohibition ruled, and Henry Ford was publishing virulent anti-Semitic rants.  Despite Ford’s success with the model T, cars were scarcer than streetcars or bicycles. Carrying his papers, he cycled behind a streetcar, moving close to the vehicle so its momentum would pull him along.  When it came to a sudden stop, his bicycle became entangled with the bus fender. As the car lurched forward, he struggled to free himself, but his leg became wedged in the vise created by the conjoined metal. For blocks he was dragged along, attached to the bus. By the time someone alerted the driver, his knee was a raw, open wound.  At the hospital emergency room, they treated him and sent him home, but his injury festered. For months he hobbled around on crutches, in constant pain as the inflammation spread to his bone. 

“My mother was afraid I would die. She didn’t know what to do,” he told me.  “We had a neighbor lady, a woman who knew about healing salves. When she said she could help me, we stopped going to the doctor. Instead, I went to Mrs. Duke every day. She would massage my leg and put her herbal ointment on the infection. Pretty soon, it cleared up and I stopped using crutches.” He shook his head and choked up for a moment.  “If not for Mrs. Duke, I would have been a cripple.”  What did that mean for me, I wondered? If he’d been unable to walk, would I have been born? And if he’d died, I wouldn’t exist.

After he told me about his knee, whenever he mowed the lawn, I imagined him collapsed by the mower.  “Can’t you make him stop?” I asked my mother.  “He’s a grown man,” she said. “He can do what he likes,” but despite the controlled anger in her tone, I knew that she worried, too.  When he finally hired someone to cut the grass, I was relieved.  

Later that summer, I watched him play softball from the sidelines, and though I wanted to feel proud when he stepped up to bat, instead I closed my eyes and prayed that he’d strike out or walk. Not only did he have that bad knee, but he also took pills for high blood pressure, weighed too much and rarely exercised. Did he want to die? Was he doing this on purpose to frighten me?  A boy in my fourth-grade class had lost his father, suddenly dead from a heart attack. It could happen, so I held my breath.

“Please, please, let me play in your place?” I begged. “I’m afraid something bad will happen to you.”

He laughed. “It’s for men, for the grown-ups. Kids have their own games. Besides, I like it–I’m having a good time. You shouldn’t worry so much.” But I did. It was so much safer to stay inside the house listening to the Tigers game on the radio.  That way I could keep my eye on him.  For most of my childhood, I feared that I’d lose him and be left with my mother’s unhappiness.  My question: “What’s the score?” really meant: “Daddy, I love you and I’m glad you’re here.”

After he survived a stroke in his sixties, he made daily calls from home to his law office, determined to keep it going, never admitting how ill he was. When he died of prostate cancer at seventy-eight, I didn’t make it home in time to say good-bye. If I’d known that he’d be around for most of my adult life, I might have loved him less desperately; that constant threat of loss, however unreal, made my passion more intense.

Today I have no interest in baseball, and though I’ve lived in Boston for many years, I care little if the Red Sox or the Tigers win. But, if I happen to hear the radio play by play, that slow, seemingly aimless drone, I listen for the score, and I think about my father.

– Judith Beth Cohen