Huck

by Janet Elder

  CHAPTER 5

  I LOVE THAT MOMENT on vacations when the plane touches down and you realize the bonds of your everyday responsibilities have fallen away. Whatever adventure you have embarked on is yet to unfold, whether across an ocean or across state lines. That is exactly how it was when the plane touched down in Tampa. It was a moment of possibility and excitement.

  After being confined in an airplane seat for three hours, with its scant leg and elbow room, I stood up, pulled together the books and magazines I had toted onboard, the giant bottle of water, my needlepoint project—all barely touched. Freedom. It is hard to know whether I felt freed from the captivity of the plane or freed from the demands of daily life or freed from the nightmare that I had been living in for so long, but it didn’t matter.

  “Welcome to Tampa,” the pilot said. “The temperature here is 75 degrees.”

  As I walked off the plane, I thanked the pilot, the copilot, the flight attendants, just about anybody I could find. Never, ever had I been so happy to be in Florida. I was practically giddy. By the time we got there, I didn’t even miss Huck all that much. I was glad to have left the responsibility of walking him three times a day and worrying about him to someone else for a while.

  I had been to Florida before—mostly while covering presidential campaigns. I also had been there to visit Rich’s mother a few times, and once to visit a family friend, but never on a true vacation. Florida always felt too hot, a state in need of shade trees. Not this time. It was forty degrees warmer that day than it had been in New York. We peeled off our jackets and sweaters and headed for the car rental counter. It was only about 10:30 in the morning, the day was still fresh, and we were ready to take on Tampa.

  In its heyday, Tampa was a city of laborers who culled the surrounding waters for phosphates and shrimp. They also once produced a fair amount of the world’s hand-rolled cigars.

  That was then. Now Tampa’s waterfront is full of gleaming steel office buildings and banks and fancy restaurants, with boats tied up outside. It is not nearly as interesting as it must have been in the cigar days. Still, no matter what time of year you might visit, you’re bound to find a professional sports team in midseason. They have a baseball team, a hockey team, and a football team. They have a minor-league baseball team. They even have a women’s football team called the Tampa Bay Terminators.

  There must be something strategic about Tampa’s location in the middle of the water with Tampa Bay on one side and the Hillsborough River on the other, both emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. MacDill Air Force Base and Central Command take up about six thousand acres of the city’s real estate. Part of that acreage is used to protect endangered species, including the bald eagle. The Persian Gulf War and the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq were run from that base. Some of the generals liked it so much, they stayed. Generals Norman Schwarzkopf, who ran the first Gulf War, and Tommy Franks, who ran the second one, both now private citizens, are said to live in the same gated community in Tampa. I’ll bet their neighbors feel safe.

  We picked up our rental car and headed for the hotel. We were staying at the Hilton Westshore, close to the airport and to the Yankees’ winter home, Legends Field. For more than thirty years, the Yankees had played their winter games in the eastern part of the state, in Fort Lauderdale, in a stadium named for the city. But George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees, was from Tampa and spent most of his winters there, so he decided to move the team to Tampa.

  George Steinbrenner owns the Radisson Hotel in Tampa and decreed it the team’s official hotel. But the million-dollar ballplayers don’t stay there. If I had done some decent reporting beforehand, I might have been able to figure out the team’s habits—where they ate breakfast, or where they bought gas—and we could have planned to accidentally run into Derek Jeter or Jason Giambi.

  Our hotel wasn’t downtown near the water, or even out near the wetlands and the bald eagles; it was near the Yankees, near their practice fields, their stadium, their souvenir shops. We stayed out that way for Michael. He wanted to breathe the same air as the team.

  There isn’t much else for tourists in that part of Tampa, except for several shopping malls, the flashiest of which is the International Plaza. Full of upscale stores, like Nieman Marcus, Tiffany, Louis Vuitton, and Burberry, it is the Madison Avenue of Tampa. Shopping malls are now ubiquitous in just about every corner of the country except Manhattan. For Manhattanites, when all else fails, malls are a tourist attraction.

  I had remembered to pack everything for a sun and sand vacation except the most essential item—my sunglasses. I reminded Michael and Rich to pack theirs, but didn’t remember my own. Rich suggested a visit to Neiman Marcus. I suggested we find a drugstore. Rich won.

  We walked into the store past the Fendi handbags, and the Jimmy Choo handbags, and the Chanel handbags, all displayed like museum pieces under glass, to the sunglass counter. I actually found a pair I could more or less afford, or maybe I was still intoxicated by the warm air and just talked myself into thinking I could afford them. But I now owned a new pair of Kate Spade sunglasses.

  As the saleswoman handed Rich back his credit card, he asked, “Do any of the Yankees shop here?”

  “Oh, yes, Derek Jeter buys his jeans here.”

  The day was only getting better. Maybe Derek Jeter would walk by the sunglass counter on his way to buy jeans. Anything was possible. We decided to get lunch. The saleswoman pointed to the escalator. “You’ll find a lot to eat upstairs. There are all kinds of good restaurants up there, anything you want.”

  As the escalator climbed we found ourselves underneath hundreds of white butterflies made out of some kind of sparkling fabric that were suspended from the ceiling. For a moment, it felt oddly otherworldly. We walked outside, past the Häagen-Dazs shop, and the Nestlé Toll House counter, to the open-air rows of restaurants.

  The pathways near the restaurants were designed with Europe in mind. Strolling the painted brick walkways, an active imagination might be reminded of Sienna, Italy. I said the painted stucco walls of some of the eateries reminded me of a kind of faded burnt-orange color we had seen a lot on our trip to Italy. Michael said the color looked more like nacho cheese. It was all about imagination.

  We found a small Italian restaurant, Pizza Roma, and sat at an outside table. Michael and Rich ordered a three-cheese pizza. I ordered a salad. I could sense how content Rich was in that moment. “It was so balmy. I was so at ease, so relaxed,” he would later say. “I thought it was just delightful. I was with my family. Our vacation was all in front of us.”

  We discussed how excited we all were to see the first of several baseball games that night. For any Yankees fan, it was a matchup to savor—the Yankees versus the Red Sox. They would not meet again until May. Johnny Damon, a former Red Sox player, now a Yankee, would be facing his old team for the first time. Best of all, we were going to the game with our close friends Mimi and John Kepner, whom we had met on a Nantucket beach years ago.

  John and Mimi, college sweethearts, married young. When I first saw them playing Wiffleball in the sand, it was hard to discern that they were the parents. They looked so youthful I thought they and their sons were part of the same group of teenagers. John, in his early fifties, was so agile, a hitter and runner, and every bit as strong as his teenaged boys, Tim and Dave. Mimi, with her baseball cap and dead-on pitches, seemed no different from Tim’s and Dave’s teenaged girlfriends, who were also playing. If anything, Mimi seemed more game. Before I knew her name, I thought she had set an impossible standard for motherhood.

  Our affinity with the Kepners was instantaneous and strong. No sooner had we met than we found ourselves spending every day of our vacation together, lolling on favorite beaches, and trading barbecuing nights. Every summer afterward, we and the Kepners tried to schedule our Nantucket vacations for the same weeks.

  The friendship quickly moved beyond Nantucket. We’d visit the Kepners at their house in Pennsylvania over Christmas and th
ey’d come to see us in the city in the spring.

  Our families shared many passions—baseball, Nantucket, biographies of historical figures, biking, Wiffleball, watching the sunset over the water, board games, and standing around on Main Street in Nantucket at night listening to Tim and Dave play the music they usually performed with their entire band, called Full Service.

  The Kepners felt like family. Tim and Dave treated Michael like a younger brother. Tim, who had played semipro baseball, spent endless hours throwing a baseball with Michael on the beach. Dave let Michael tag along just about everywhere he went. When Michael was very young, John taught him how to throw a football and to play the Kepner family baseball game invented by John, “dice baseball.”

  The Kepners were Philadelphia Phillies fans first and Red Sox fans second. John would torment Rich and Michael by wearing his Red Sox cap to the beach every day.

  By sheer coincidence, Tyler Kepner, the oldest of the Kepner sons, is a sports writer who covers the Yankees for The New York Times. He would be covering the Yankees game against the Red Sox that night.

  After we finished our lunch that first day in Florida, we went back to the hotel for a swim before the game. I sat on a chaise lounge with the sun on my face and felt completely healthy for the first time in a long time.

  We met John and Mimi for an early dinner. Michael wasn’t much interested in dessert. He wanted to get to the ballpark early to watch the teams warm up. He was hoping to catch a stray ball, or get a player’s autograph, things that were nearly impossible during the regular season. Proximity to the players is what spring training is all about.

  On the way into the stadium, we passed a table full of Yankees paraphernalia. Michael, a child who rarely asks for things, spied an unusual Yankees cap that must have been left over from St. Patrick’s Day. It was green, with a shamrock on the right side of the bill. Michael stopped his mad rush into the stadium long enough to look at the hat. “Now, that is a lucky hat,” he said to me. He picked it up and ran his fingers over the shamrock before putting it back on the table.

  “Do you want me to buy it for you?”

  “Let’s get it tomorrow. I don’t want to miss getting balls and autographs.”

  We headed for our seats. They were in the sky. Section 217, Row P, Seats 1–5. We were closer to the yellow foul pole than we were to home plate. You could see the faces of the players, but could not make out their expressions. “I’m going down to the fence,” Michael said, as he took the concrete steps, two by two, and headed toward the field.

  The stadium was starting to fill. Some of the trappings were a lot different from those at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. For one thing, some people were walking around eating giant turkey legs. The only other place I had ever seen people do that was in Disney World.

  But other things about Legends Field were the same as Yankee Stadium. The outfield fences were the same dimensions. And the raucous, passionate fans were no different in Tampa than they were in the Bronx, like the freckled-face boy wearing a T-shirt with a giant baseball on it and the words GET TOUGH OR GO HOME. It was a T-shirt with attitude.

  At Legends Field, just like at Yankee Stadium, there were constant reminders of the Yankees organization’s unbridled chase for money, even if it meant quashing the spirit of young fans. Two hours before the start of the game, old men in khaki pants and yellow shirts with the word USHER on the back stood guarding the field-level seats, keeping anyone without a ticket for one of those seats from getting a close-up look at the players. I don’t know how Michael slipped through, except that he must have learned something from his mother, the journalist, about getting into places unnoticed.

  He stood patiently up against the fence, waiting and hoping. No balls or players came his way, until finally, one of the Red Sox did. It was Terry Francona, the team’s manager. In his excitement, Michael had forgotten to take a program with him for signatures. He took off his Yankees World Series cap and handed it and the pen from his pocket to the Red Sox manager. “Wrong hat, kid,” the manager said with a smile. He signed it and gave it back to Michael.

  It wasn’t the signature of one of Michael’s beloved Yankees, but it was nonetheless a signature of one of baseball’s greats. John Kepner would be impressed.

  We settled into our seats under a setting sun, the sky streaked with orange and red. The temperature started to drop. The groundskeepers wet down the dirt, chalked the batters’ boxes, the catcher’s box, and the foul lines. Everyone in the stadium stood and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” always one of my favorite moments at any game, and the first pitch was thrown. More than ten thousand New York and Boston fans were now packed into the stadium for the showdown.

  Michael sat between Rich and John, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the game of baseball matched Michael’s. Michael never took his eyes off the game, and he never stopped talking.

  Johnny Damon was booed by many in the crowd the minute he walked onto the field. Other players were hit by pitches. One of the Red Sox plunked one of the Yankees in the back. The emotional intensity of the game was so high it felt more like a game in the World Series than an exhibition game in the Grapefruit League. Bernie Williams hit a home run for the Yankees in the second inning. Rich and Michael jumped up and started pumping their fists in the air and high-fiving each other.

  By the middle of the game, I was getting cold, and despite the intensity of the matchup, I was starting to get bored. Mimi and I set off to see if we could find something to warm us up—hoping for hot tea, hot chocolate, or depending on our level of desperation, sweatshirts.

  We walked past the stand where the turkey legs were sold, past the stand that sold smoked crabs (another delicacy not sold in Yankee Stadium), to the hot dog counter. There was no tea, no warm drinks, just beer, lemonade, water, and soda. We passed it all up and went into a small souvenir shop, mostly for a chance to warm up. We decided to forgo the overpriced sweatshirts. We made our way through the aisles of pencils and snow globes and shirts and hats, bumper stickers and balls, and went back outside again.

  We were not far from the vendor selling the green hats with shamrocks on the bills. I went over and looked at the green hats one more time. There were only two left. I decided to buy one for Michael. I knew he wanted it, but had been too excited to stop long enough to buy it on our way in. Who knew if it would still be there on our way out of the stadium that night. I bought it and stuffed it into my purse.

  By the time we got back to our seats, Mimi and I had spent so much time walking around that we weren’t that cold anymore. Tyler had wandered down from the press box and filled Michael in on how Jorge Posada had been taken to the hospital before the game after taking his eye off a pitch that landed somewhere between his left eye and his nose. Michael loved the baseball gossip and the camaraderie.

  For me, the greatest pleasure of the night was watching Michael. I was so happy to see him so happy.

  The game had been tight all along, but the Yankees pulled ahead in the seventh inning, 5 to 3. Things tightened again in the eighth inning, but the game ended just perfectly, a 5–4 Yankees victory. We walked out of the stadium in high spirits singing “New York, New York” along with the recording by Frank Sinatra that is pumped in after every Yankees game.

  I handed the hat to Michael. “I hope this brings you a lot of good luck.”

  “Oh thanks, Mom. I love it. I can’t wait to show it to Jack.”

  Michael’s buddy Jack loved the Yankees, too, and had a fondness for St. Patrick’s Day. I was reminded of another spring break when we had come to Florida to visit Rich’s mother. Michael was only about five years old, and scatological humor could still produce a belly laugh. After seeing a sign that said “Butt’s Road,” he was desperate to call Jack to laugh with him about it. The boys were too old now to find Butt’s Road very funny, but they would both like a green Yankees baseball cap with a shamrock on it. I was sorry I had not thought to buy one of the caps for Jack. I saw the vendor on our way out of t
he stadium and asked if he had any green hats with shamrocks left. They were all gone.

  “Will you have more tomorrow?”

  “No, that’s it for this year. All our lucky greens have been sold. You’ll have to wait ’til next Paddy’s Day.” I was glad I had already secured a lucky hat for Michael.

  Back at the hotel, we sat and had a late-night snack with John and Mimi, and then said good-bye to them. They were heading home in the morning.

  We then went to our room. Michael, basking in the glow of a Yankees victory over the Red Sox, was already planning the next day’s events. He wanted to go to the Yankees practice fields near the stadium to watch the minor leaguers during their morning practice. He also wanted to go swimming in the hotel pool. We had a lot on our to-do list before tomorrow night’s game against the Texas Rangers.

  We were all exhausted. Michael could barely keep his eyes open long enough to change his clothes and brush his teeth. He got into bed and then out again, pulling a picture of Huck out of a book in his backpack and standing it up against the lamp on the bedside table next to his new green Yankees cap and his baseball glove. “Good night, Huck,” he said. He fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

  I was already feeling the effects of having some distance, physical and emotional distance, from New York. I was starting to relax, something I had not done in a long time. The interruption of routine, so dreaded after my cancer diagnosis, was now a welcome respite. But as I got into bed and realized neither Rich nor I had to take Huck for his nighttime walk, I thought about Huck, staying in what to him was a strange house. I asked Rich if he thought Huck was okay. “I’m sure he is, but you can call Barbara tomorrow if you want to put your mind at ease.”

  CHAPTER 6

  THE NEXT MORNING, we set out under an overcast sky to find the minor-league practice fields. The concierge at our hotel directed us to a park where old-fashioned, simple, green stands separated two baseball diamonds. So depending on which way you sat, you could watch the action on either of two fields at the same time. By chance, there was a minor-league scrimmage in progress on each of the diamonds. We sat there for a while watching some young players hit the ball a distance that surprised even them, while others missed routine plays. Michael and Rich critiqued the players.