Our family spent summers at my grandmother’s house in Owen Sound, Ontario, a small, quiet, picturesque town nestled in the hills near Georgian Bay. My brother and I adopted my grandmother’s neighborhood as our own in the summer. Our first task was to explore the immediate area by walking the streets, cutting through yards, and mapping in our heads the playgrounds, parks, tennis courts, baseball fields, and other useful places nearby. One day soon after we arrived, Brian and I found a few nickels, dimes and pennies someone had dropped on the sidewalk, so we headed straight for the corner store to spend it on penny candy. Thirty cents bought a ton of licorice, gum drops, and malted milk balls and the store owner didn’t seem to mind that it took us twenty minutes to make our selection. Walking back from the store we happened on a pack of kids who must have lived nearby. One kid asked, “You guys live around here?” in a threatening sort of way, so Brian and I offered up our candy and everyone took a piece. From then on, and for the rest of the summer, these were our pals.
They were a scrappy bunch, seven boys aged five to nine, and I was surprised to learn that they didn’t all have bicycles. In Lakewood, my hometown in New Jersey, everyone had some kind of personal transportation like a bike, or a scooter, or a toy car with pedals that you could move around the sidewalks on. Their clothing (torn, dirty, too big or too small) matched the row houses on the street (dirty windows, broken steps, in need of painting). Some of the kids never wore shoes. Brian and I joined in their games of pirates, or army, or just running through the yards of people who hated us running through their yards. “Hey, you kids, stay off my property or I’ll…” But we ran fast and never heard the last few threatening words.
There was one kid called Bunchy who never said anything. I remember seeing him for the first time and staring at him. As I did I felt strange--not sick exactly, but definitely not good. Deke, Bunchy’s older brother, was standing next to him. “Hey,” he said, breaking my concentration. “What are you staring at? His arm? My Mum says it’s not polite to stare.” In fact, I was staring at the place where his arm should have been. He was wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt with red and white stripes, grimy, streaked with food and grease. His right arm came out from the sleeve but ended abruptly, and poking out from the short smooth round stump was what looked like a nipple. I was staring because I’d never seen a kid with half an arm ending in a nipple, and I was trying to figure out how this happened. Deke filled me in.
“Bunchy, he was borned like that. Never had no arm, but he still gets to play with us.”
I dropped my gaze to the sidewalk and mumbled, “Sorry.”
“Yeah well don’t do it again.” He turned to his brother. “You okay Bunchy?” Bunchy nodded and then smiled at me. I smiled back. Somebody started running, and like a flock of birds leaving a telephone wire we all followed, running nowhere, just enjoying the feeling of flying through the neighborhood.
One of the places we liked to go was the baseball field a few blocks from my grandmother’s house. It was a real baseball field, with bleachers and a concession stand made of cinder blocks and painted light green, the green you see in hospital hallways. Several nights a week during the summer there were professional fast-pitch softball games. Once in a while one of my uncles would volunteer to take Brian and me to a game, but we had almost as much fun watching night games from an upstairs window of my grandmother’s house. Strong white lights lit up the field. When a batter got a hit, we saw the ball soar away before we heard the crack of the bat. Every time that happened Brian and I would look at each other in shock and disbelief. “That’s so cool!” he’d say and I’d agree. We could hear the crowds cheering even after we went to bed.
Next to the baseball diamond was a tennis court. The net was raggedy and drooping, and the asphalt was badly cracked and sprouted weeds and grass everywhere. After I found some old rackets and a couple of scuffed tennis balls in my grandmother’s house, Brian and I had everything we needed to play tennis. We had no idea how the game was played so we made up some rules and ran after the ball, swinging our rackets with high spirits and high hopes. On the rare occasion that the ball limped over the net, one of us would proclaim himself the winner.
One day we were on the court when we saw a couple of guys with tennis rackets standing by the fence. They were teenagers and they wore clean white sneakers, white shorts, and white polo shirts, so to Brian and me they looked like professionals. Their rackets weren’t warped like ours; they looked shiny and new in their racket presses.
“You guys gonna be long?”
“No, you can play, we’re finished,” I said, and we walked off the court and sat on the bench on the side. These guys started playing and they actually knew how it was done: overhand serves, lobs, points! I watched, fascinated, and hoped that by watching them I could learn how to play. When they finished, I said to them, “You guys are good!” One guy said, “Thanks.” As he put his racket back in the press, I asked him if he lived around here. He laughed.
“No, we’re from Detroit. We’re just here on vacation.”
“Us, too! My name is Arthur. Arthur Bell. We’re from Lakewood, New Jersey. That’s my grandmother’s place over there,” I said pointing.
“My name’s Arthur, too. Arthur Rockefeller,” he said.
“Like the famous Rockefellers? Are you famous?”
“Well, I’m a Rockefeller, if that’s what you mean. Distant cousin.”
That night at dinner I boasted to my mother that we’d met a real Rockefeller with the same first name as mine. I told her how I felt special because I talked to a rich guy from a famous family.
“How do you know he wasn’t just pulling your leg?” my mother asked. “Maybe he’s not really a Rockefeller, or maybe that’s his name but he’s not related. And what makes you think he’s rich?” I thought about that for a minute, about how he looked, how he talked, his laugh, his clothes. His shiny tennis racket.
“No, I’m pretty sure he was a real Rockefeller.”
“Well,” my mother said, “what’s he doing playing on those broken down old tennis courts?”
I didn’t answer her. I just moved the food around my plate with my fork, feeling cheated because maybe he wasn’t a real Rockefeller. I pushed my chair away from the table and went upstairs to my room. I felt like slamming my bedroom door, but I just climbed onto my bed and stared out the window at the baseball field.