Choosing Sophie

by Leslie Carroll

“Well, Mom,” Sophie replied, standing her ground, “sometimes you have to take a step back if you want to move forward.”

  So I once more stepped up to the plate, reminding Barry Weed (using Sophie’s examples of success) that the Oakland A’s general manager had been successfully relying on sabermetric principles for years; and the Boston GM’s use of the system has often been credited with helping the Sox win the 2004 World Series. But the Cheers’ GM was not sold on the idea. He and Dusty frustrated me no end by insisting on sticking to the status quo. Their decision was supported by the team’s two limited partners. Being outvoted by the testosterone brigade made me wonder if I had enough clout, or stock shares, to limit Peter Argent and Dick Fernando’s creative input!

  I phoned Cap Gaines for advice and told him what was on my mind. “I’m being stalemated at every turn,” I said. “They’re hampering me from doing the job I was charged with, and I’m tired of being the one getting hammered for it.”

  I shared a couple of ideas with him and Cap dispensed a bit of professional advice. “You have to look out for your interests, Olivia. If you’ve got the funds to do what you just proposed to me, I’ll put the ball in motion.”

  So, after several conversations with my accountant and my financial adviser, I called a meeting of the Cheers management. My only regret was that I hadn’t done it sooner and saved myself a lot of tears. Once again, we convened in Cap’s conference room.

  “Well, all I can say to you guys is that Ms. deMarley is proof that you don’t need a dick to run a team. All it takes is a pair of balls.” The attorney took an official-looking document from his leather folder. “Mr. Fernando, Mr. Argent, this instrument effectively strips you of your limited partnerships. Pursuant to a clause in the ball club’s bylaws, Ms. deMarley has purchased your individual interests in the Bronx Cheers and is now the sole owner of the team.”

  Every man at the table looked utterly shocked. Completely blindsided. They could not have appeared more stunned had I literally emasculated them with a hatchet.

  “If she can fire you guys, what else is she capable of?” Barry Weed said nervously. Argent and Fernando remained too shaken for words.

  Finally, Peter Argent thumped his fist on the conference table and jumped up from his chair. “We’ve been with the Cheers since the beginning!” He exchanged a look with Dick Fernando, who sat slumped in his seat as though he’d been clocked in the head with a bat. “We were like nephews to old Augie!”

  “I was his nephew, and he never offered me as many shares in the Cheers as you two,” Marty deMarley grumbled. He turned to me and asked, “Are you going to cut me out, too, Venus?” He looked like he was going to cry.

  I shook my head. “I can’t do that to family, Marty. Besides, you don’t have enough of a legal interest to be able to tell me how to run my ball club. But I will no longer have my business decisions derided by two men who are waiting for me to fail, and who have so little respect for me, and for their mentor, that they insult and belittle his daughter—which in itself challenges the wisdom of Augie’s choice and betrays his trust.”

  I rose to my feet and picked up my portfolio. “Now, if you gentlemen will excuse me, I’ve got a team to run.”

  After Tommy DuPree blew his next two starts for the team, I could no longer rationalize my decision to give Sophie the benefit of the doubt, and even Barry realized that something had to be done about the kid. “We’ve got to cut the deadwood,” he agreed. “It’s not the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last, that the sparkly nugget we picked out of the stream turned out to be just a piece of a crushed beer can.”

  I was mightily reassured that Barry was willing to see things my way. My buying out the limited partners must have really shaken him up. But how would I break it to Sophie? How could I explain to my daughter that her judgment—on which I had so heavily relied when I asked Barry Weed to give Tommy a contract—had been, well, wrong?

  And what would it do to our fragile new relationship? We were still getting to know each other—as family, as grown, independent women—each of us a strong, and rather opinionated, personality. I learned the hard way, from old Augie, that being blood isn’t an automatic “gimme” when it comes to love. Or respect. Or trust. Earning those precious commodities couldn’t be done overnight Sophie and I were engaged in a delicate dance that was being incrementally choreographed over time, and the thing I feared most was making a misstep.

  “It’s business, sweetheart,” I explained to her a few days later, as we watched a purportedly promising pitcher warm up in deMarley Field. Overhead, a flock of seagulls hovered, ready to share its opinion.

  Sophie scowled at me. “You sound like a character from The Godfather.”

  “Kyle Angel was a hot prospect out of Springfield last year,” Barry Weed informed me. “But the Batavia Muckdogs dropped his contract.”

  “I can see why,” I replied, unimpressed by the speed, or lack thereof, of Angel’s fastball.

  Weed lit his fourth cigarette of the tryout, stamping out butt number three in the stands. He retrieved it only after I gave him a prolonged dirty look. “Actually, they dropped him because they were deep enough in right-handers.”

  “Could have fooled me.” I shielded my eyes with my hand and focused even more intently on the young man standing nervously on the mound. “He’s a very good-looking kid—I mean if I were scouting models for a Ralph Lauren ad, I’d sign him immediately—but am I missing something here? As a pitcher, he’s no great shakes. Certainly not a future major leaguer.”

  “She learns fast,” Dusty said to Barry. He grinned at me, and I didn’t quite know how to react. I was tickled that such a veteran of the game was impressed by my increasing astuteness as to its rudiments, but there was more behind the manager’s smile. Since The Kiss, we hadn’t conversed about anything except baseball. All the unsaid stuff hung in the air like a nasty cloud of Barry’s cigarette smoke.

  “You’re right, Venus, I’m not seeing the love.”

  “The—huh?” Dusty had caught me off guard.

  “Angel doesn’t seem hungry enough. This is a tough row to hoe. You gotta want it. Most minor leaguers don’t come out of college, or even high school, or even a cornfield, with a million-dollar contract. This is a minimum-wage job. If they want to get the call to the majors, it takes a lot more than raw talent. Ya gotta have grit and guts and drive and determination—”

  “You gotta have heart!”

  “Exactly, Venus!” Dusty scratched his head, and in all earnestness muttered to himself, “You gotta have heart. That’s good! Where’ve I heard that before?”

  His tryout was lackluster; in all good conscience, we couldn’t sign young Mr. Angel. When we gave him the news, he looked disappointed, but unsurprised. And for us, it was back to the drawing board to see who else we could dredge up, with the season already under way.

  The other shoe dropped at the end of the week, when Barry Weed got a call from Kyle Angel. The GM punched up my number and conferenced me in.

  “I told you, kid, it just wasn’t going to work out,” Barry reiterated. “You just don’t have major league stuff.” He didn’t add that Kyle’s pitching was so erratic, it made him regret dumping Tommy DuPree.

  “I need to explain something, sir,” Kyle said. “You didn’t see my stuff out there the other day.”

  “Well, then, whose stuff did I see?” Weed asked sarcastically.

  “I…I had the stomach flu that day. And it was really bad.”

  “I’m sorry; I can’t give you a second chance, Kyle. There are no do-overs in baseball.”

  “But it wouldn’t be a do-over. You never saw me pitch.”

  “Excuse me?!” Weed was utterly flummoxed. “If this is some kind of joke, I don’t have time for it. I have twenty-four more hours to find a new right-handed starter to complete our pitching roster.”

  “I’m telling you, I’m your man. You didn’t see me pitch. You saw my twin brother—Lyle.”

  Then
the penny dropped, but neither Barry nor I could believe what we were hearing.

  “I didn’t want to blow you guys off, but there was no way I was gonna make it up to the Bronx that morning. I couldn’t even get out of the bathroom. So I asked Lyle to pinch-hit—well, pinch-pitch—for me, so you wouldn’t think I was irresponsible by canceling on you at the last minute or not showing up at all. Or that I was injury-prone by calling in sick. I swear I’m telling you the truth. It’s not a do-over, and it’s not a second chance—it’s a first chance. I promise you, Mr. Weed, Ms. deMarley, you won’t regret it.”

  I didn’t know what to make of this last-minute switch. But Kyle sounded so desperate, so plaintive, so…hungry. Dusty had said you have to be hungry.

  “I say let’s give him a shot, Barry.” My GM knew enough to realize this was not a suggestion: it was a command. I write his paychecks.

  “I need you out at deMarley Field at two o’clock this afternoon,” Weed told Kyle. “You—not your twin brother—assuming you actually have one.”

  The Kyle we saw on the mound that day was certainly not the young man we’d seen earlier in the week. He looked like the first “Kyle,” to be sure, but the second “Kyle” had a ninety-one-mile-an-hour fastball and could have found the strike zone if we’d blindfolded him. In fact, Sophie, who insisted on watching the tryout, had gaily suggested that we impose that particular impediment.

  “Wow,” she murmured, as she gazed at the tall young man with the sun-streaked blond hair unleashing fastball after fastball with pinpoint accuracy. “Fucking wow.” I wondered if she was admiring his golden good looks as much as his impressive pitches.

  The following day, the Daily News published an article headlined: CHEERS’ SALVATION? AN ANGEL LANDS IN THE BRONX.

  Seventh-Inning Stretch

  Though Sophie clearly appreciated the talents of Kyle Angel, she remained fairly pissed off at me over the Tommy DuPree affair. She was an adult and I had questioned her judgment—though with good reason, as it turned out. Perhaps, deep down, she was coming to grips with the fact that as a pitcher Tommy had disappointed her, too. She was acting unsettled, off-balance.

  And after I forbade her to go partying with Romeo Hicks and then caught her cozied up to him on the team bus, she became more circumspect about her personal life. “I don’t have to answer to you about where I go, and who I see, and what I do with them,” she’d insisted.

  Yet she was still living under my roof, and the truth was that she’d grown up a fairly sheltered, moderately indulged suburban girl, who had a lot to learn about the game of life. Glenn and Joy had given me no indication that they’d devoted a lot of time to schooling our daughter in the mating rituals of the postadolescent male. I was fairly certain that for Sophie, up until now the concept of arriving safe at home had had everything to do with scoring runs. Now I wanted to be sure that she walked through the door of my duplex physically and emotionally unscathed. But I didn’t know how to let go and let her be an adult, and take her lumps as they came, just like the rest of us do day to day, while still endeavoring to shelter her from the creeps of the world. I was still very new at this mothering thing, often at a loss myself as to how to handle my role. At least three times a day I wished that long-lost adult daughters came with a how-to manual for moms.

  “Do you have any kids?” I asked Dusty. He’d invited me to a postgame picnic, so I hung around the stadium after a particularly exciting home game. Kyle Angel had pitched the first no-hitter of his career.

  Sophie went back to Manhattan after the win. “Don’t wait up,” she’d happily cautioned me. I think she mentioned something about a nightclub. Funny, how I used to dance at some dicey places, but now that I was a mother, I hoped Sophie hadn’t gone to one of those caverns on the wild, wild west side of Manhattan near the river, known less for the music (such as it was) than for the sporadic gunfights, stabbings, and stalkings that occurred on and around the premises.

  “Yeah, sure, I got kids. Twenty-four of them every year.” Dusty gestured at the empty field. “Rosa never wanted them. She said I was enough of a kid as it is. And I was on the road so often that she didn’t wanna raise ’em on her own half the time. I couldn’t blame her, I guess. Though it would have been nice to have had a kid to toss a ball with, teach ’im how to play the greatest game in the world,” he mused, without the slightest trace of irony.

  His smile was so sweet, wistful even, that I tucked my arm under his and snuggled against his sturdy warmth as we watched the gulls scanning for something to call dinner. “I’m finally beginning to make my peace with the fact that I need to give Sophie her space,” I admitted to him. “I’ve wanted so much to make up for all the years we’ve lost, that in my desire to spend as much time as I can with my daughter, I’m realizing that I’ve been in danger of crowding her.”

  “It’s all about testing,” Dusty said. “Baby bird wants to try her wings; Mommy bird knows she needs to let her do it, but all the same, she’s afraid to let go. Baby bird doesn’t even know if she’s ready yet to fly and wants Mommy bird to keep an eye on her. But they both know that flight from the nest is inevitable. And the fact of the matter is, they’re both scared of it. I’m sure Joy Ashe went through that, too, when Sophie asked to move in with you. You ready to go to the picnic?”

  “Who else is coming along?”

  He smiled and squeezed my arm. “Just you. And some lobster rolls, coleslaw, and pickles, courtesy of the Ancient Mariner.”

  “Would that be you, or the local seafood restaurant you’re referring to?”

  “Either or,” he grinned. He led me back to the locker room and opened the fridge. “I hope rosé’s okay,” he said, pulling two bottles of wine from a paper bag marked Property of D. F. Touch this and die. “I’m not much of a wine drinker, so I never know what’s good. But you know they say you should match the wine to the meat—red wine with steak, white wine with fish. And lobster’s pink, so I figured, you know, rosé.”

  I suppressed a laugh because I was afraid he’d think I was insulting him, when the truth was, at that moment I found him utterly endearing. “I think it’s perfect,” I said, my smile widening. “Especially for two people who run a team that wears pink uniforms. Hey,” I added softly, “I think they’re beginning to get used to them. Signs are in the air. Did you notice that Shoji’s dyed his blue hair fuchsia?”

  “How could I not?” Dusty gave a bemused shrug, as if to say, “Kids.”

  “Where are we having this repast?” I asked him.

  He pointed to the outfield. “Bleachers okay?”

  “Suits me fine.”

  Dusty handed me the wicker picnic hamper. It looked like a relic of kinder, simpler days; a bit battered around the edges, but frequently appreciated. Like Dusty. “I’ll be ready in just a sec,” he said. “We need a little mood lighting. Besides, it cuts down on the electric bill. When I used to leave the lights on at home, Rosa always said to me, ‘Hey, buster, we don’t got stock in Con Edison!’”

  “My father used to say the same thing.” I laughed. “Maybe we’re related!”

  Dusty chuckled. “I sure as hell hope not.” When I gave him a funny look, he added, “Take it as a compliment.” He retreated into the control room, and I heard him flip a bunch of switches. “Ready?”

  We stepped back onto the field. He’d turned off most of the floodlights, leaving the arena illuminated by the full moon. God can be a pretty romantic electrician.

  “Wanna howl at it?” Dusty asked me.

  “You know something—I do!” I raised my face to the sky. “Aaaoooooooooh!”

  “Ooh, that was a nice one. Lemme try, now. Awwwwwwwwwwooooo!”

  “I’m impressed. You’ve got a good set of pipes on you!” A fleeting thought of organs made me blush, an extremely rare occurrence. I hoped Dusty couldn’t see my raspberry-tinted cheeks. After all, everyone thinks I’m the woman who can take everything in stride. If they only knew the truth.

  So there we stood on the p
itcher’s mound, arms encircling each other’s waists, howling at the full moon over the Bronx. For every yowl I unleashed, Dusty tried to go one better, longer, louder. “You’re quite competitive,” I observed, amused at this slightly portly, gray-haired middle-aged man releasing his inner child’s voice with such unself-conscious gusto. Then again, he dressed like a little kid for a living.

  I slipped off my sandals. The grass felt cool and moist under my arches and between my toes. I was still a few inches taller than Dusty, though I think the extra girth around his midsection made him appear shorter than he really was.

  A briny summer breeze wafted across the outfield, riffling our hair as we walked toward the bleachers. We climbed the steps and looked around. “This looks like a good spot,” Dusty said, pointing to the center of the fourth row. “We can stretch our legs. Well, you can, anyways. I don’t got as much to stretch.”

  We sidled into the row and set the picnic hamper on the plank below us. “Excuse me, madam,” Dusty said with mock formality, reaching into the hamper for a blue checkered tablecloth. He shook it open with a good degree of fanfare, laying it across the plank and anchoring each end with a bottle of rosé. Gingerly unwrapping two hand-painted wine goblets, he asked me, “You want the cardinal or the oriole?”

  “They’re both beautiful,” I replied, admiring his handiwork. Dusty’s delicate hobby still surprised me.

  “Take the oriole, then.” He handed me the wine goblet, a melamine plate, and a set of flatware rolled into a cloth napkin. “Sorry, you’ll have to set your own place. If I reach over you, I might brush accidentally against your—you-know-whats. I don’t want you to think I’m being rude.” He served me a lobster roll and a helping of coleslaw. “Better rest your foot up there, so it don’t all blow away,” he cautioned, as he removed one of the wine bottles from its position anchoring the tablecloth. He filled our goblets with a bubbly glub-glub, then raised his glass to me. “Cheers.”