At fifteen, there was only one thing that could keep me from listening to the game, the game that would determine who won the pennant. Even if I'd gone to school, I'd have heard it—they played the broadcast over the intercom. Brooklyn, 1951. A time and place like no other.

But I didn't go to school. Nor did I stay home, like many of my friends did. Hell, even my father was listening to the game on the Armed Forces Radio over in Korea. Dodgers, Giants—a battle royale for the ages. Winner faces the damn Yankees in the World Series, and no one deserved it more than Brooklyn, the team of Jackie Robinson and Gil Hodges and Pee Wee Reese and god knows how many brow-beaten Brooklynites, of which I was third generation. This was the game, and history has upheld that.

I wasn't listening, though. I was sitting on a bench outside the Magnolia Diner, sipping a vanilla shake on a bench next to my girlfriend, Jenny DiComo, she of the glistening black hair and piercing brown eyes, as she ran through the reasons we couldn't be together anymore. Most of them, I gathered, had to do with some guy named Joshua who was a grade older than me and on the football team. Football.

"It just happened," Jenny said, as I sipped my shake and wondered how that kind of thing could just happen, you don't just happen to start seeing someone else, like oops gee guess we're going steady now. She certainly didn't seem too upset by it. Barely looked at me. Maybe in her mind we hadn't been that serious. I know, now, that's what happens when you've fallen in love more than once. You can cut your losses when you have to. I wouldn't learn that for a few more years.

"We'll always be friends," Jenny said, and I grunted something and took a sip of my shake, tasting a hint of cherry in there. Part of me thought, Maybe there's something still there. Another part of me thought, Yeah, its name is Joshua.

Jenny left first. She hugged me and kissed my cheek. I watched her walk away, thinking I'd never love again, wishing I'd never loved the first time. I thought of our first kiss, outside the door to her building, quick and public and unexpected. Her brother had been watching from the fourth story window, and when I ran into him two days later, he'd shoved me into a bunch of trashcans and told me to leave his sister alone. But he hadn't confronted me since then, and I'd taken that as tacit approval. I was fifteen, after all. That much closer to being a man.

I finished my shake, took the glasses back inside, and walked home slowly through Flatbush, nodding to the adults who knew me by sight. "Go Dodgers," one man shouted, to no one in particular. Some fool responded, "Go Giants!" A cussing match ensued. Normally I would've stuck around to see how it played out; Dodgers fans usually won the brawls, they raised ‘em tough in Brooklyn back then. But I just continued home, feeling Jenny's lips on my cheek, the casualness of her goodbye. Friends. Sure, I thought. Not damn likely.

I reached my building and walked up the stairs to the sixth floor, with a brief detour on the fourth floor when I saw Mrs. Henderson struggling with her groceries. I helped her carry them into her apartment, and she smiled at me and gave me a chocolate for my troubles. I stuffed it in my pocket, and wouldn't remember it for a couple of days, after it had already melted.

In our apartment, my mother was reading next to the window. The post-game was on the radio. My mother smiled at me, but there was a wistfulness on her face. She said, "I'm sorry, Charles—" and then stopped herself. "What's wrong?"

I shrugged.

"You heard?"

"Heard what?"

She sighed. "The game, hon. Five-four. Giants."

"Oh."

"Branca coughed up a walk-off to Bobby Thomson. I bet your dad is pitching a fit."

I nodded.

She put her book down. "Alright. Tell me."

So I told her. I could hear the aftermath of the game in the background. They kept playing Russ Hodges's call—The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! Later, our own Red Barber would call Hodges unprofessional, and I would agree. In that moment, it felt like salt on an open wound. A gaping wound. I'll go to my grave cussing Russ Hodges. Right or wrong, some things you don't forgive.

I didn't cry, though. Not then. I thought of Jenny for months. And then I stopped, because that's just how it is. I had other girlfriends, as one does at that age, and became more practiced in romantic denouements. In college, I sat behind a pretty brunette in an introductory literature course; I asked her to help me with my homework, and three years later, I asked her to marry me. We moved to Virginia and raised a family. Made a life, over the course of time, as most do. I even lost some of my accent. Life goes on and we change.

Five decades after Jenny and the game that some say sealed the Dodgers' fate in Brooklyn, I had a grandson starring on the mound for his Little League team. I was there when he gave up a walk-off home run of his own. As he sulked off the mound, the other team spilling from the dugout, it struck me that failure is the same, whether you're Ralph Branca of the Brooklyn Dodgers, or Greg Russo of the Richmond River Hornets. Defeat hangs over you like a pendulum, omnipresent and always threatening.

When we got home, I watched my wife Evelyn head upstairs. I grabbed the paper and sat down in my recliner, opened it to the sports section and saw a headline that gave me pause. I read the article, shock giving way to anger, anger to an unquenchable sorrow. Several former Giants players had admitted to stealing signs from the clubhouse, and relaying them to the dugout via a buzzer. The Dodgers had lost the pennant because Thomson cheated.

Evelyn came downstairs and started to go into the kitchen, then stopped. "Charles?" she said. "Tell me."

Youth and lost love. Youth and love anew. A beautiful and painful thing, indescribable and irreplaceable. Mundane yet miraculous. Time is not an arrow; it is a meandering path, slick with gravel, where one can easily get lost. I thought of Jenny for the first time in years. I thought of Thomson and Russ Hodges and the end of a dream, painful but beautiful in the rearview.


Title image "Shot Heard..." Copyright © The Summerset Review 2023.