by Susan Wilson
The dark tunnel of doubt opened to a bright new day.
* * *
Rick and I tied the knot in mid-October, not four months after that day in the ballpark. As soon as the season was over, Braves foundering in seventh place, Rick took the train for Mount Joy and I introduced my fiancé to my astounded parents. He knew Casey Stengel. That was enough to win over my father. He was well-bred, and that was enough for Mother. It might have looked a bit like a shotgun wedding, but it wasn’t. “Marry in haste, repent at leisure” might be a well-founded adage, but we laughed at the thought that if we hadn’t married, we might have ended up with my father’s shotgun pointed at Rick’s back. After all, Saint Paul did suggest that it was better to marry than to burn, and we burned for each other. That’s the best way I can describe it. But I was an Iowa girl and he was a gentleman, and marriage was the only acceptable route.
My two best girlfriends, Gertie Fenster and Patty Olafson, stood up for me, and my older brother Arnie acted as best man, with Sid as his groomsman. At Rick’s insistence, Pax performed ring bearer duties, wearing a black bow tie around his neck, the rings tied to it with blue ribbon. I was just glad he hadn’t wanted the dog as best man. The guests threw rice for luck and I wept for joy.
We stayed in the Elyria Hotel in downtown Mount Joy. Our window overlooked the mighty Mississippi, but I’m not sure either one of us ever looked out at the view.
* * *
As much as I liked the big dog, to Rick, Pax was his baby. Pax was Rick’s blind spot. He didn’t see anything wrong with the dog following him around from room to room, so that anywhere Rick was, there was Pax. Even in our bedroom. Basking in afterglow, I’d look over and there would be Pax, the patient voyeur. At least Pax didn’t get up on the bed, but I couldn’t ignore the weight of his muzzle as he studied Rick’s face for any damage I might have caused. Eventually, he’d humpf and flop down into his basket, clearly dissatisfied with my remaining in Rick’s (in Pax’s view) bed.
I began to feel like I hadn’t passed some test, that I wasn’t worthy of Rick. Those amber eyes would fix on me as I rubbed Rick’s shoulders, sore from his day of hard practice, or sat in his lap as we canoodled while listening to the radio. Pax would lay with his head between his paws and sigh, exactly like my mother might do when one of us disappointed her. A hand-to-God sort of sigh. Rick thought I was nuts.
“He loves you.”
“Does not.”
“What makes you say that? Look, he’s sitting right beside you.”
“The better to keep me separate from you. He’s between us, Rick.” I wasn’t sure if I was speaking metaphorically or literally at that moment, although Pax did always keep himself in the middle. We sat on the couch and the dog sat on the floor, his big head resting in between us.
“That’s just so we can both pet him.”
“What happens when we have a baby? How will he be?” As much as we knew that we wanted children, we were giving ourselves at least a year of marriage. The only advice my mother gave me on the eve of my wedding night was that if I relaxed, it wouldn’t be so bad. The best advice I got was from the shortstop’s wife, who knew a female doctor with a modern outlook on birth control and an admiration for Margaret Sanger.
“He’ll devote himself to our babies. He has a massive capacity to love.”
The very first thing I learned about being married to a professional ballplayer, was that I had to keep his state of mind in perfect equilibrium. Numbers were everything. In those days, there was no designated hitter, so Rick batted and pitched. He was a better pitcher, and no one expected him to be a great batter, but he still believed in his earned run average like it was tea leaves forecasting our future. Which, I suppose, it was. Those numbers dictated our lives. Good ones, and we got to stay put. Sinking ones, and who knew where we might end up. Bad ones, and his career might be over. Rick loved being a ballplayer; it was his first love, and I understood its importance in his concept of himself. Being a ballplayer defined Rick. So I swallowed my annoyance with having a big, shedding, slightly sloppy, all-boy dog in our one-bedroom apartment and molded myself into the best ballplayer’s wife in the league. Supportive, pennant-waving, consoling, and laudatory.
Right after spring training, Rick started traveling two or three days a week; our honeymoon winter was over. Pax and I were left alone together.
It was rocky at first. The big dog didn’t want to take orders from me, so I found myself cajoling rather than ordering: “Come on, Pax, let’s go outside.” “Come on, Pax, there’s a good boy, don’t get on my couch.” Even though Rick expected me to, I certainly didn’t walk Pax as much as he did. Just like the dog, I loved those evening walks with Rick, when we’d go hand in hand, talking about our days, or our future. But when Rick was on the road, I’d take Pax once around the block, me towing him along or being towed by the dog, depending on where his nose took him, and then head home to listen to the game on the radio, or wait for Rick’s late-night phone call from a pay phone somewhere far away.
* * *
Rick was in Baltimore, and the heat in Brighton certainly rivaled that of Maryland. Hot, sticky, the only relief coming in those early hours before dawn, when the wind might shift a little and drag some of the cooler ocean air off Boston Harbor and inland enough to reach our stifling first-floor bedroom with its single window and no cross ventilation. Now, as a midwesterner, I knew heat. Our corn-raising community was unbowed by routinely high temperatures in summer; every woman carried a fan and a capsule of smelling salts in her purse to church. But this sticky, wet, humid heat was intolerable to me. The only cool place at night was on the front porch, so in the middle of the night, desperate and wide awake, I placed a thick collection of wedding-present blankets down on the deck of our first-floor porch and hoped that no one passing by in the predawn—the milkman, for instance—would notice a grown woman stretched out on the porch in a mysteriously glowing white nightie. Because of the arrangement of our front door and that of our neighbors’, who, in their second- and third-floor flats, were more likely to be catching the thin breeze, I worried a little that Pax might dash down the steps. I gave him the first command I’d ever tried: “Stay.” He looked at me with a dog’s version of “Make me” but stayed, lying flat on his side against the short end of the porch railing. His soft panting put me to sleep.
I shivered, smiled at the sensation, then woke fully, to see the dog standing over me, head lowered, teeth bared. I fought the urge to push him away, freezing in place like a rabbit hoping the fox doesn’t see it. Then I realized that Pax wasn’t baring his teeth at me, but at the man who was urinating loudly into the hydrangea bushes planted against the porch. Pax’s dewlaps twitched over his bared teeth. A growl percolated deep in his throat. I touched him, trying to tell him that it was all right, not particularly pleasant, but harmless. The growl went from barely audible to ferocious, and the man literally ran off half-cocked. Pax leaped over the railing, and the frightened drunk ran for his life.
“Pax! Come!” I had no real hope that he would, and I pictured this poor unfortunate guy with the seat of his pants torn out. Perhaps worse. Pax was fast; Pax was in high dudgeon. But he surprised me and returned to my side in three strides. If a dog’s face can express “Wasn’t that fun?” Pax’s did. His long muzzle split wide and his long tongue lolling, he rolled his eyes up to me, and in them I saw that a sea change in our relationship had occurred. He’d protected me; ergo, I was now part of his responsibility. I hugged him then, and he took it as if it meant something to him, tail sweeping the porch floor. After all, it was possible that the drunk, seeing a woman in such a vulnerable position, had had more ominous plans post-urination and Pax had known that. Who knows? All I knew was that Pax had protected me whether or not it was really necessary. He’d done his duty by me.
We sat there a long time after that, Pax leaning his big body against mine as we sat on the porch steps. I kept an arm around him. The first bird sent out notice that the sun would make its
appearance soon. Slowly, the night paled, and I heard the clop of the milkman’s horse from down the narrow side street. I needed to get into the house before anyone saw me like that, dressed in my honeymoon negligee. “Come on, Pax. Let’s put the coffee on.” Before I could push myself up off the step, Pax did something that stopped me. He gently pressed his muzzle under my chin, just like Rick sometimes did to raise my face to his. Then he licked my cheek. Even though I didn’t assign any human qualities to animals like, well, like Rick, I understood completely that I had been accepted. We’d always be rivals for Rick’s attention, but at least now we could be friends.
Chapter Six
The frightening rumblings coming from Europe were only mildly concerning until the mandate came down in September 1940 that every man between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-six needed to get himself registered for the draft. If the invasion of Poland hadn’t prompted this belated Selective Service Act, the bombing of London had. Every day, the news worsened and the newsreels portrayed a sickening disaster seemingly without end.
Rick and Francesca went together, hand in hand, Pax tagging along, as if registering for a peacetime draft was a lark, an excuse to get out in the fresh air and stroll the city streets. The worst, and Francesca agreed, was that his number would come up in the Selective Service’s lottery and he might have to spend twelve months in the service. It would take a year out of his professional life, but maybe he could still play ball or coach on whatever base he might find himself. Francesca teased that maybe he could plead conscientious objector status, as playing for the Braves was, after all, his religion. Rick wasn’t about to let Francesca know how terrified he was that he’d be drafted. Not because he didn’t want to serve, but the fact was that a missed season was much more than just not playing. He was twenty-nine now, and it wasn’t getting any easier to keep up with the younger guys. His arm was still good, but he was soaking it longer and longer. Not to play, even if doing some playground-level pitching, meant that he might never make it as starting pitcher. He was so close. Rick really loathed the idea of a setback.
Besides, this was the year when they were going to have a baby. Maybe Francesca was already pregnant. With a renewed contract with the Braves in hand, life was certain enough that they’d commenced trying. Trying. That sounded so, well, selfless. What they’d been getting up to could hardly have been called anything but self-indulgent. Francesca had been knitting up a storm, booties and caps, buntings and crib blankets, all given away to the other team wives and to their neighbor, who was in her seventh pregnancy. Yesterday, Francesca had shyly handed him a little capelet in the palest green, nearly white, satin ribbon threaded through the eyelets. “This one’s for ours.”
He took her heart-shaped face in his big hands and studied her amber-flecked green eyes and the way that her eyebrows arched over them, sooty lashes oddly dark against the fairness of her skin and hair. This was the face he held most dear. The look of hope, anticipation, and love all given away to him. How could he imagine leaving her for longer than a road trip?
* * *
By April, Rick’s number still hadn’t been called, and he’d packed up for spring training. By July, he was promoted to relief pitcher. By September, the season was over, and if the Braves had finished a lowly seventh in the standings, Rick had gone home nonetheless confident that the upcoming baseball season of 1942 would be his year as a starting pitcher for the Boston Braves.
* * *
“What if Roosevelt changes his mind. What if he decides we should go to war?” Francesca took the newspaper out of Rick’s hands and crumpled it up, throwing it to the floor, as if she wasn’t the one who would have to retrieve it. It seemed like the headlines only ever spoke of the increasing possibility the president would succumb to the pleas of Churchill to throw the weight and power of the United States at Hitler’s rapacious drive toward world domination. The political cartoons, the editorials, the talk on the street all pointed in one direction: the inevitable involvement of the United States in this global disaster.
“Sweetheart, we can’t worry about it. We can only worry about the things we have control over.”
“Like what?”
“Mmm, my batting average perhaps?” Rick pulled Francesca down onto his lap and smooched her, one eye on the big dog, who would very quickly come up with some distraction, like asking to go out, or for new water in his already half-full bowl, or dropping his rubber ball on their combined laps, begging them to stop and play with him.
“You get to worry about that, not me.”
Pax had suddenly found some latent retriever in his heritage and scooped up the crumpled ball of newspaper, gently placing it in Francesca’s hands.
“It’ll never happen” was the consensus of opinion in the clubhouse and the street corner and at the Totem Pole Ballroom, where they went to dance on gameless nights, always claiming the same settee where Rick had proposed. “Roosevelt will keep us out. If your number hasn’t been called by now, it probably won’t be.” Whistling in the dark.
By the end of November, Rick finally got word that the coming spring he’d be in the starting rotation. He’d finally be a starting pitcher.
“Maybe a move is in order. You know, to a place of our own, where Pax can run around and the kids—”
“Kids? Plural already?” They were lying in bed, fingers linked, still vibrating from their exertions.
“Yes. The kids can have a swing set and you’ll never have to worry about men urinating in your hydrangeas. Some neighborhood with a good school, a house with a big yard. The neighbors will say, ‘A ballplayer lives in that house, the one with the lily beds and rosebushes. The one with the beautiful wife and handsome dog.’ It’ll be the house where all the neighborhood kids congregate.”
“Three bedrooms and a den?”
“Four bedrooms. And a two-car garage.”
“Two cars?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll teach you to drive.”
It all sounded perfect, even if the gods of conception had been stingy with success. The doctor they’d consulted could find no reason they shouldn’t conceive. “Relax and give it time,” he’d said.
* * *
On December 7, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and all the best hopes for staying out of the war were blasted away, along with Rick’s dream of starting for the Boston Braves and their more private dream of a baby.
Chapter Seven
It isn’t that Keller isn’t grateful—in a way—to his great-uncle for having taken him in when he did. If the old man hadn’t shown up that snowy winter day two years ago, Keller would have spent the rest of his youth behind the wrought-iron fence of the Meadowbrook School for Boys. Orphaned, passed around from relation to relation, none of whom during those dark days of the Depression could afford another mouth to feed. A scuffle with the truant officer had landed Keller in reform school. He’d been living with Aunt Martha and Uncle Bud and their four kids, and they were visibly relieved to hand Keller over to the state, the burden of his presence in their overcrowded Revere flat nullifying any shame in doing so. Without a willing guardian, he went in, at age nine, without hope of release before age eighteen.
At Meadowbrook, Keller was fed, clothed, educated in reading and ciphering; taught the rudiments of the carpentry and print trades and some of the more useful talents of lock picking and theft from his fellow inmates. There were friendlier boys, and there were enemies and bullies. Boys from whom it was all right to bum a cigarette and boys you’d never turn your back on. There were clear rules, clear punishments meted out by teachers and staff and by the concrete hierarchy within the community of the boys themselves.
No praise, but then, he didn’t expect praise, so he never minded its absence. There was no affection, but then, he was unused to affection. As close as Keller got to tenderness was when he’d slip away and visit the groundskeeper’s dog, Laddy. The dog, purportedly meant to guard the groundskeeper’s cottage, would wriggle with pleasure at Keller’s appear
ance, gobble down the crusts or bits of half-chewed gristle, and then flop himself across Keller’s lap to soak up a belly rub. The touch of the mongrel’s soft pink tongue against his cheek was as close to love as Keller had known since the last time his mother kissed his cheek. A time so long out of mind, he could barely conjure up her face in his memory.
* * *
Clayton Britt drove Keller home from Meadowbrook in his ancient Ford truck, the bed filled with fishing nets and lobster pots. Every sideways glance at the boy sitting beside him on the rump-sprung seat bore the avid look of a man getting himself some free labor. Clayton was his dead father’s uncle, Keller’s great-uncle, and before he showed up in the superintendant’s office, not someone Keller had ever heard of. Keller didn’t like the greedy look in his uncle’s eye. Clayton looked at him not like a long-lost and welcome relative, but as a potential slave, his ice blue eyes apprising Keller’s man-size height and the size of his biceps. As they left the grounds of the reform school, Keller had bluntly asked, “How come I’ve never heard of you?”
“Don’t know. Your mother’s people never got on with mine.”
“Then how did you know about me?”
“You’re kin, boy. I’m the only kin you have that’ll take you. Be happy I’m giving you a home.”
Home is Hawke’s Cove, a Jimmy Durante schnoz-shaped peninsula jutting out from the New England coast. Crossing the short causeway that attaches the village to the mainland, Keller gets his first sight of the eponymous cove, a deep natural harbor along which the village clings. The winter sun strikes blinding sparkles off the water and two fishing boats are iced in and coated with a frill of frozen spray.
Clayton doesn’t stop, but passes through the village and deep into the center of the peninsula, eventually turning onto a washboard dirt road that leads to Keller’s new home on French’s Cove Road. The house is a four-square shingled fisherman’s shack, two rooms down and two rooms up, with only the heat from the parlor woodstove to warm the place subjected to the relentless draft pushing through the uninsulated bead-board walls. Meadowbrook may have been a prison, and his sleeping arrangement a dormitory filled with forty-nine other sleeping, farting, stinking boys, but at least he was warm. Behind the house, a yard littered with the detritus of a coastal fisherman’s life: nets, lines, mushroom anchors, a skiff belly-up on sawhorses. Below the bluff, the scallop curve of French’s Cove, with two moorings and a short pier proclaiming Clayton’s ownership of this slice of beach. On the moorings are a squared-off lobster boat also used for scalloping, and a small dragger. Neither vessel has a name.