If I Never Get Back

by Darryl Brock

  “Of me?”

  Andy nodded. “See, me ‘n’ Sweaze’ve always been roomies. That’s mostly what he’s riled about.”

  “Well, hell, I never intended to break up—”

  “I know you didn’t. It was my idea, Sam. Like I say, don’t pay it any heed. The tour only runs a couple more weeks. Sweaze an’ me board together in Cincinnati. Everything’ll be hunky by then.”

  “What was that Irish stuff?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “Dick was just carryin’ on. As for Sweaze, I reckon I’ve changed since we were kids. He’s still the old way, an’ he resents me coming to want new things.”

  “Am I connected with that too?”

  “No, you’re different.” He did not elaborate.

  The morning papers were flooded with descriptions of the victory. Several featured play-by-play accounts. One writer’s use of “red-legged porkopolitans” baffled me, until George explained that it referred to Cincinnati’s thriving hog industry.

  Again we took the ferry at midday, but this time the weather was clear and sparkling. Sun sprites danced on the river; a breeze freshened the air. Sweasy, I noticed, wore colored glasses, and Hurley looked dead.

  A noisy crowd of twelve thousand awaited us at the Capitoline Grounds in Brooklyn. I grew increasingly tense. Vehicles jammed the surrounding streets—Nostrand, Marcy, Putnam, Halsey—and spectators scrambled for vantage points. As we alighted from our bus, the Stockings formed a tight phalanx around me according to plan. Forging ahead, bats riflelike on our shoulders, we marched briskly to the diamond. Seeing one loony with binoculars clinging to the lightning rod of a church steeple, I thought it a very good thing that telescopic sights weren’t yet around.

  The Capitoline Grounds were spacious enough to hold two games at once. The grass was smooth and level as a billiard table. Banked inclines beyond the foul lines were jammed with wagons and carts. Blue-jacketed cops patrolled in substantial numbers—a comforting sight. The wooden stands were packed beyond capacity.

  From a cupola waved the Atlantics’ tiger pennant and banners from years the club had captured the whip pennant: ’61, ’64, ’65, ’66. They reminded me of Celtics’ flags hanging from the rafters of Boston Garden. Andy informed me that Brooklyn had dominated New York baseball for the past decade, the local Eckfords taking the pennant virtually every year the Atlantics didn’t.

  Brooklyn and baseball. Grandpa and I listened faithfully to broadcasts of Dodger games in the years just before they moved to the West Coast. My first heroes were Pee Wee, Jackie, and Duke. How powerful I’d be, I used to think, with a name like Duke Snider.

  It was ironic to learn from Andy that out on the field now, in ice-white jerseys and charcoal pants and caps, were men who had been his particular boyhood idols: Joe Start, known as “Old Reliable,” the Atlantic first baseman; Dickey Pearce, the dodgy shortstop; and “Young Jack” Chapman, the left fielder.

  In recent seasons the Atlantics had added talent: Tommy Pratt, a speed-balling pitcher; Lipman Pike, a true rarity as a power-hitting, left-handed second baseman; Freddy Crane, the whippet center fielder who threw his cap down before grabbing flies; and Bob Ferguson, whose showy one-hand grabs had earned him the press sobriquet “Death to Flying Things.”

  I was surprised when Dick Pearce came up to me. He was short and thickly built, with a brush mustache and intelligent brown eyes.

  “I heard about your baby hit against the Haymakers, Fowler. Hoped you might show it off for me.”

  “Baby hit . . . oh, the bunt.”

  “That how it’s called?”

  After he assured me he wouldn’t try it against us, I demonstrated squaring away and cushioning the bat. He watched me with a sharp professional eye. “I see it would take some little practice.”

  “Some little,” I agreed modestly.

  Later, when Pearce squared away at the plate during the game, I thought I’d been suckered. But he used the stance to punch a fair foul past Waterman, despite the latter’s playing him a step in foul territory. There was simply no way to defense the maneuver, I realized. Pearce seemed even more adept at it than Waterman or Hurley, and for good reason: later I learned that he had invented it. With bunts added to his weaponry he would drive opposing infielders crazy.

  The game itself, after yesterday’s cliffhanger, was ho-hum. The Atlantics opened with hustle and confident chatter, but began to deflate when we blanked them in the opening frames. Meanwhile, our hitters jumped on Pratt’s fastballs as if to make up for lean production against Wolters. We tallied five runs in the first and iced things with thirteen in the second. Coasting, we won, 32-10. The crowd, rising between innings in a foreshadowing of the seventh-inning stretch, seemed quite impressed by us, as did the Atlantics themselves. Later we heard that it was the worst defeat ever suffered by the proud Brooklyn club.

  Allison, playing inspired ball, at one point lunged for a foul tip that caromed off his own neck. Pursuing the ball, he barreled into the batter, knocking him flat. Then, tumbling forward himself, he somehow kept the ball in the air with desperate tips and finally seized it as his chin plowed the sod. He rose to appreciative applause, grinning through clumps of grass and dirt. I considered, not for the first time, the possibility of Allison being not quite mentally balanced.

  We moved in a tight orbit from the field. I’d seen no sign of McDermott or Le Caron or even Morrissey—rumor had him winning big on us yesterday—but my blood pumped rapidly. This was when Holt had warned it would come. I wrapped my fingers around the derringer in my pocket. We departed safely. There was no visible threat at the ferry. But I felt a pervasive menace, a sense of being watched by unfriendly eyes. One thing I knew: I wanted out of New York badly.

  That night I ventured from our room only to eat, fearful that Holt’s note had been some sort of ruse. Unable to sleep, I began a Harper’s Monthly story called “The Murderous Gypsy Murillo: A Tale of Old California.” It worked like a charm. I was asleep by the third page.

  Except that we were back in Williamsburg facing the Brooklyn Eckfords, the next day followed the same pattern. A crowd of eight thousand turned out, even though we were prohibitive favorites.

  The Eckfords came out fighting. Their pitcher, Alphonse Martin, who answered to “Phonnie” and “Old Slow Ball,” baffled us with junk in the opening frames. Andy muffed a fly early on, and the Eckfords pushed across several runs. To my relief Andy fielded flawlessly the rest of the way, made a gorgeous over-the-shoulder catch, and lashed four hits. Brainard, relieved by Harry in the closing innings, held the Eckfords to eight hits. The final was 24—5. Our games now completed in New York, the crowd stood and gave us a departing ovation.

  Bunched amidst the others, crouching to keep my head from posing a target, I imagined the sudden flash of a blade, the crack of a gun. Move faster! I urged silently. We made the trip without incident, although as we were entering Earle’s I nearly jumped out of my shoes when a group standing in front of the pool hall next door raised cue sticks in mock salute to us. For an instant I thought they were leveling rifles. Gould wasn’t amused either. He stopped and glared. They retreated inside.

  That night I made it through four more pages of “Murderous Murillo,” the highlight coming when “the tawny bosom of Rosa fired with dark yearnings on seeing the swarthy countenance of the savage Gypsy bandit framed in the flaps of her tent.” There was a subtle hint that Rosa might even be uncorseted beneath her peasant blouse. Hoo boy.

  To the delight of Andy and Sweasy, Champion scheduled a game against the Irvington club. We departed Manhattan after breakfast and crossed to Newark, a booming industrial and shipping center of over a hundred thousand, where smokestacks were eclipsing the earlier charms of graceful church spires and quiet colonial greens.

  Champion also arranged for a team publicity shot at Huff’s Photography Palace on Broad Street. Andy asked that I be included, but I begged off. The last thing I wanted was my likeness available to Le Caron or anybody else McDermott might
send after me.

  I wandered around, eyeing carte-de-visite portraits and stereo cards. On the walls hung samples of everything the studio advertised on the huge sign over its door: Likenesses of Distinguished Statesmen, Eminent Divines, Prominent Citizens, Indian Chiefs, and Notorious Robbers and Murderers. Also—Beautiful Landscapes, Perfect Clouds, and a Bona Fide Streak of Lightning, Taken on the Night of August 26, 1857.

  The photographer, a fastidious German with walrus bristles and cantilevered belly, set up his forty-five-second wet collodion-plate exposures. He hissed at the players to be still, particularly Hurley, who turned his head repeatedly because George was snapping his ears.

  The result, I knew, was destined for national distribution. Frank Leslie’s and Harper’s had approached Champion immediately after we toppled the Mutes. From the photo, artists would create the steel engravings used in printing. Having his era’s Time and Newsweek already in line, Champion was eager to strike with others while we were hot. And just now we were very hot indeed.

  I looked on in amusement. Everybody’s hair was brushed, Harry’s and Brainard’s whiskers were oiled, Gould’s mustache waxed. Collars were buttoned. Ornamental dickeys, each with scripted C, were on straight. George and Brainard sported cravats. George and Waterman wore their silver medallions awarded by the New York Clipper for leading their respective positions in hitting the previous season. They were posed in two rows, Harry sitting in the center foreground. Next to him Brainard held a ball, while Sweasy and Gould, on the ends, rested bats against their knees.

  “You’re all so beautiful,” I said, mugging behind the photographer during his final countdown. When he turned around to hiss, Brainard brazenly flipped me off. We studied the matter later with a magnifying glass. Unfortunately the surreptitious finger did not record beyond the merest hint of a blur. History’s loss.

  The tiny thatch-roofed frame house in which Andy had grown up sat on a dirt street lined with box elders. A pig wheezed in the shade of the porch. Several bony cows grazed in a side lot. Andy ushered me through the front door. The atmosphere inside was close and hot, with a stale cabbagelike odor.

  It was obvious that I was a guest of honor and that such occasions were rare. Behind a table covered with patched linen and set with crockery and pewter, the Leonards waited in line to meet me.

  Andy’s mother was tiny and birdlike, probably only in her fifties but ancient, her every movement tentative, as if she might take flight. Her rheumy eyes held mine with a quality of vague questioning as she repeated my name wonderingly and touched my hand.

  Next was her brother Gavan, Andy’s uncle, stout and red-faced and bald as a bulb. He pumped my hand and greeted me in dense brogue, something that sounded like “G’aarf bray!” I managed to understand, with Andy’s help, that he’d taken off work early to see the celebrated nine engage in the glorious American game.

  Andy’s sister Brighid was only in her midthirties. She was a hair taller than her mother and had Andy’s coloring, but gray already streaked her hair and crows’-feet bordered her light green eyes; she seemed weary, very weary. When I took her hand she blushed—and astonished me by dipping into a curtsy. I attempted to bow in response—my first ever—and it felt ridiculous. She explained apologetically that her husband couldn’t leave the factory where he worked, but the children were home. And so they were: four of them staring as if a fairy-tale giant had stomped into their home. I suppose I was a giant. Nobody there even matched Andy’s towering five six.

  While he passed out gifts—the prodigal son come home—I looked idly at a bric-a-brac stand. A small wreath-shaped polychrome print caught my eye. On it were pictured eight men’s faces. They bore the names O’Brien, Grattan, Fitzgerald, and others. At the top was “Erin Go Bragh” and at the bottom, “Justice to Ireland.” In the center, on a field of green, appeared Erin herself—she resembled Columbia in militant feminism, but was probably plumper—garbed in flowing shamrock-bordered skirt and chain-mail doublet and trampling a prostrate English king. One shapely arm held a flag bearing the Irish harp; the other brandished a sword. She was nobody you’d want to mess with.

  Beside the wreath was a framed twenty-dollar bond dated January 1866 and issued by an Irish “government in exile”; it bore portraits of Emmet and Tone flanking a bare-armed Hibernia exhorting what appeared to be a Union army soldier to take up the sword in Ireland’s cause.

  Behind it was a small green flag with a sunburst in one corner. Gold letters spelled, “Newark 1st Regt. Irish Army of Liberation. Ridgeway & Fort Erie, June 2, 1866. Presented by the Fenian Sisterhood of New Jersey.”

  I pondered all of that, recalling that I’d heard the term Fenian several times. Then my attention was caught by a group of miniatures; daguerreotypes, I thought. They included a steely-gazed, teenage Andy in a baseball jersey with PIONEERS across his chest; a younger Gavan grinning beneath a jaunty derby; an even younger Mrs. Leonard—God, she’d once been a dark-haired beauty!—on the arm of a smooth-shaven, smiling-eyed man I assumed to be Andy’s father. A studio logo told me the portrait had been made in Ballyjamesduff, wherever that was. I said the name silently as I stared at their faces, trying to imagine what their lives had been in that other land, that other time. My grandparents had kept only one picture of my father. It was a wedding picture. I had stared at it the same way. Who were you?

  Then the last picture caught my eyes. Caught and impaled them. I tried later to sort out elements of the moment; I think my first discrete awareness was of the other eyes looking back: pale of iris, dark-lashed, metallic-seeming, gazing out at me.

  Is it unusual to have an overwhelming sense of fatedness about an encounter? To feel from the very first instant that in some unfathomable way your existence is linked with another’s? What I’d felt before with Andy and Twain now seemed almost minor beside this new sensation.

  In her features were traces of Andy and Brighid and Mrs. Leonard. She was young, probably in her teens, at the time of the portrait. And a beauty, no doubt about it, with dark hair piled high, a straight nose, lovely cheekbones, lips in a trace of a smile. There was a haughty quality to that smile, a hint of stubbornness in the tilted chin, a willfulness in the eyes, a sense that she knew well who she was and would not be undervalued. Not quite arrogance, but on the road to it.

  And then abruptly a door wrenched open in my mind. The material of her dress was familiar. Beneath its high ruffled collar, enough of the bodice was visible that I could see the pattern: columns of flowerlike bows trailing long ribbons intermixed with clusters of leaves and rosebuds. In the untinted photograph the material was light gray. In my memory it was pale yellow, dotted with pinks and greens—the only such patch on Grandma’s quilt.

  As my blood careened I tried to tell myself it was doubtless a popular design, had gone into any number of dresses and quilts. But I didn’t believe it. A patch of that fabric had somehow become part of the quilt I knew as a boy. I was certain of it. And finally I had found the clue I’d been seeking to explain why I had come back in time: to deal with the person in that daguerreotype.

  “Everything hunky?” Andy touched my shoulder. The expression, which I thought stupid, came from the slogan of a breath freshener named Hunkidori. He teased me with it frequently.

  I pointed. “Who is she?”

  “That’s Cait, my other sis—”

  Margaret!” said Mrs. Leonard sharply. It came out “Mair-ghread.”

  “Mother, she doesn’t go by Margaret now.”

  “We have no Caitlin,” said Mrs. Leonard firmly, pronouncing it “Cat-LEEN.” “Margaret’s the name my Andrew picked, God rest him”—she crossed herself—“and as Margaret she was baptized in Holy Mother Church.”

  Andy stared at the floor.

  “‘Twas only weeks before her marriage that the lovely portrait was made,” chirped Mrs. Leonard.

  Andy started to speak, then checked himself.

  Marriage? Was a message intended? I turned reluctantly from the photograph. I
wanted to steal it.

  Time was short before we had to leave for the game. With long-handled utensils Brighid served pork and “praties” from iron pots suspended in the high open fireplace that had blackened the walls on either side. Gavan’s spirited jeremiad on inflation accompanied the meal. I understood him better by then. Later I tried to reproduce a sample of his brogue in writing:

  When we first landed, yer honner, I made divil a cint but four dollars a week and find mesilf. But it was aisy livin’ in a manner of spakin’, as the troublesome prices din’ keep eleva-tin’ higher each time a soul turned aroun’. Be jaber, they’ll soon drain all o’ me heart’s blood!

  Charmed by the lilt of it, I found myself following sounds and rhythms more than words. But I paid attention when Mrs. Leonard announced, “General O’Neill stopped in to pay his respects with that handsome Captain O’Donovan”—Andy stiffened in his chair—“close by ’im, as ever. Sure an’ they’re two noble samples of manhood, Andy. The captain said that he was watching over Margaret, out in the West.”

  O’Donovan. The name resonated strangely in me.

  “I wish he’d leave her the hell alone.”

  “Your tongue, Andy!” She crossed herself. “The leadership’s travelin’ about the country these days,” she said. “Since the St. Patrick’s circular from Head Center, it’s been speechifyin’ and money-raisin’.”

  Andy said sharply, “You didn’t give away what I sent you, did you?”

  She pursed her lips.

  “Just a pittance of it, lad,” said Gavan. “It’s her joy, Andrew.”

  “It’s a shameful scheme, is what it is!” He set his fork down with an impact. “They come sniffing in here and leave with—”

  “Andy, don’t,” she wailed. “They’re strugglin’ for our homeland. Yes, yours as well—if ye’d but know it!”

  “Even the Church can’t stomach ’em,” he said maliciously. “The whole lot’re to be excommunicated.”