The Sportswriter

by Richard Ford

  And what I felt as I drove back the long, slow road that evening toward the little town where Berkshire College sits, crossed the Connecticut and plowed my way into picture postcard Vermont, was: better. Better in all the possible ways. X and I were finally too modern for this kind of perfect, crystalized life—no matter how ours was turning out at the moment. But I had glimpsed a nearly perfect life of a kind, as literally perfect as the catalog promised it could be. And I had done it in a casual, offhand way, which was why Mindy liked me again and could kiss and hug me shamelessly. I had taken nothing away with me, had ruined nothing (though with another kiss I could’ve gotten her to that motel in Concord). I had had, in essence, a brief love affair not-quite. And that was quite enough for me, or for any man trying to get on a better, straighter track, trying to see the brighter side of things and put an end to his dreaminess, which I hoped was on the run by then, though I was certainly wrong.

  9

  A gray, silvermane mist inhabits my room. I lie on the floor of the upstairs sleeping porch, fully clothed, my head cushioned by the boards, which are cold and morning-slicked by mist. In this posture I would often wake up in the months after X left. I would go to sleep reading catalogs, out like a light on the couch as I was last night, or in my bed or in the breakfast nook—but wake up on these same cold deals, still dressed and stiff as a mummy, with no memory of moving. I do not yet know what to make of it. Back then it didn’t necessarily seem a bad sign, and it doesn’t now. And though a longing permeates the cool morning, it is familiar enough, and I’m happy to lie still and listen to my heart harmlessly thump. It is Easter.

  What I hear are typical Sunday sounds. Someone raking spring leaves in a nearby yard, finishing a chore begun months ago; a single horn blat from the first train down—moms and dads early for services at the Institute. A fat paper slaps the pavement. A rustle of voices next door at the Deffeyes’ as they putter in the early dark. I hear the squeeze-squeak of Bosobolo in his room, his radio tuned low for all-night gospel. I hear a jogger on my street heading toward town. And far away in the stillness of predawn—as far away, even, as the next sleeping town—I hear bells chiming a companionable Easter call. And I hear also: weeping. The low susurrus of a real grief being grieved somewhere in the cemetery, close by in the dark.

  I go stand at the window and peer down into the early dawn, through the leafing copper beech and the tulip tree, but I can see nothing beneath the pale clouds-and-stars sky—only the low profiled shadows of white monuments and trees. No deer look up at me.

  I have heard such sounds before. Early is the suburban hour for grieving—midway of a two mile run; a stop-off on the way to work or the 7-11. I have never seen a figure there, yet each one sounds the same, a woman almost always, crying tears of loneliness and remorse. (Actually, I once stood and listened, and after a while someone—a man—began to laugh and talk Chinese.)

  I lie back on the bed and listen to the sounds of Easter—the optimist’s holiday, the holiday with the suburbs in mind, the day for all those with sunny dispositions and a staunch belief in the middle view, a tiny, tidy holiday to remember sweetly and indistinctly as the very same day through all your life. I cannot remember a rainy Easter, or one when the sun didn’t shine its heart out. Death, after all, is a mystery Christians can’t get cozy with. It is too severe and unequivocal, a mistake in adding, we think. And we raise a clamor against it, call on the sun to stay cheery, preach the most rousing of sermons. “Well, now, let’s us just hunker down to a real miracle, while we’re putting two and two together.” (A knowing, homiletic grin.) “Let’s just let plasma physics and bubble chambers and quarks try and explain this one,” (Grinning, nodding parishioners; sun beaming to beat the band through modern, abstract-ecumenical, permanently sunny window glass. Organ oratorio. Hearts expanding to victory.)

  My only wish is that my sweet boy Ralph Bascombe could wake up from his sleep-out and come in the house for a good Easter tussle like we used to, then be off to once-a-year services. What a day that would be! What a boy! Many things would be different. Many things would never have changed.

  X, I know, is not taking Paul and Clarissa to church, a fact which worries me—not because they will turn out godless (I couldn’t care less) but because she is bringing them up to be perfect little factualists and information accumulators with no particular reverence or speculative interest for what’s not known. Easter will soon seem like nothing more than a lurid folk custom, one they’ll forget before they’re past puberty, A myth. Naturally, there was no time for religion in the Dykstra household, where facts and figures reigned, though Irma tells me she has begun “experimenting” with Orange County Holy Rollerism, which makes me worry that the scales might tip for my own two once they get to the end of what can be sensibly, literally disclosed—which is where extremism lurks. You can, after all, know too damn much and end up with a big thumping loss you can’t replenish. (Paul’s mission for his pigeon three nights ago is an encouraging, countervailing sign.)

  They may already know too much about their mother and father—nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I’ve noticed this is often the time when children begin calling their parents by their first names, becoming little ironists after their parents’ faults. What could be lonelier for a parent than to be criticized by his child on a first-name basis? What if they were mean children, or by knowing too much, became mean? The plain facts of my alone life could make them tear me apart like maenads.

  I am of a generation that did not know their parents as just plain folks—as Tom and Agnes. Eddie and Wanda. Ted and Dorie—as democratically undifferentiable from their children as ballots in a box. I never once thought to call my parents by their first names, never thought of their lives—remote as they were—as being like mine, their fears the equal of my fears, their smallest desires mirrors of everyone else’s. They were my parents—higher in terms absolute and unknowable. I didn’t know how they financed their cars. When they made love or how they liked it. Who they had their insurance with. What their doctor told them privately (though they must’ve both heard bad news eventually). They simply loved me, and I them. The rest, they didn’t feel the need to blab about. That there should always be something important I wouldn’t know, but could wonder at, wander near, yet never be certain about was, as far as I’m concerned, their greatest gift and lesson. “You don’t need to know that” was something I was told all the time. I have no idea what they had in mind by not telling me. Probably nothing. Possibly they thought I would come to truths (and facts) on my own; or maybe—and this is my real guess—they thought I’d never know and be happier for it, and that not knowing would itself be pretty significant and satisfying.

  And how right they were! And how hopeful to think my own surviving children could enjoy some confident mysteries in life, and not fall prey to idiotic factualism or the indignity of endless explanation. I would protect them from it if I could. Divorce and dreary parenting have, of course, made that next to impossible, though day to day I give it my most honest effort.

  To get a divorce in a town this size, I should say, is not the least bit pleasant—though it is easy, and in so many ways the town is made for it, appreciates it, and knows how to act by way of supplying “support groups” (a woman’s counseling unit called X the day of our settlement and invited her to a brown bag lunch at the library). Still, it is troubling to be a litigant in the building where you have gone to pay parking fines or retrieved stolen bikes, been supposed a solid citizen by stenos and beat cops. It leaves you with a bankrupt feeling, since the law here is not made to notice you or even to be noticed, only to give you respectable, disinterested sway. From what I hear, Las Vegas divorces are much better since no one notices anything.

  Ours was the most amicable of partings. We could’ve stayed married, of course, and waited until things got better, but that was not what happened.
Alan, X’s little lawyer with fragrant dreams of a rich entertainment practice—XKEs awaiting him on tarmacs, chorus girls with giant tits—huddled up with my big, slope-shouldered, bearded, ex-Peace Corps, ex-alcoholic Middlebury guy and, across a mahogany table in Alan’s office, struck a bargain in an hour. In principle I surrendered everything, though X didn’t want much. I kept this house in exchange for helping her buy hers with my half of the savings. I laid claim to the Block Island map and three or four other treasures. We agreed on “irreconcilable differences” as the theme for our appearance in court, then all trooped across the street together and sat chatting uncomfortably in the back until our case was called. And in less than another hour we were “done,” as they say in Michigan. X flew off with the children to a golf-and-swim holiday on Mackinac Island, to “open some space.” I drove home, got drunk as a monkey and cried until dark.

  What else could I do? The cleansing ritual of strong fluids and hot, balming tears is all we have native to us. I looked around for some Rupert Brooke poems or a copy of The Prophet but couldn’t find them. Around eight, I stretched out on the couch, put a taped NBA slam-dunk contest on television, ate a pimento cheese sandwich, began to feel better and went to sleep watching Johnny. And my sleep, I remember, was one of the most sound and dreamless sleeps of my life—till eight-thirty the next day when I woke up hungry as a lion and as trusting to the future as a blind sky-diver.

  Was I not alienated? Depressed? Ashamed? In need of violent cheering up? Schitzy? On the edge? My answer is, not much. Dreamy as Tarzan, perhaps. Lonely. Though in a way that I got over after while. But not chance’s victim. I got myself busy after breakfast, finishing up work on a six-pronged analysis of major-leaguers’ base stealing styles, and before I knew it I was back in the thick of things. Which is how it’s stayed. Bert Brisker told me that after his divorce he went crazy, broke into his ex-wife’s house while she was gone on vacation, threw bricks through the TV screen, slept in her bed and emptied cat shit in all her drawers. But that is not the way I felt. We can make too much of our misfortunes.

  Ever since I was in the Marines (I was only in six months) I’ve been an early riser, and have done my best thinking then. I used to lie nervously in my bunk, wide awake, waiting for the reveille record, my mind thrumming, mapping out how I could do better that day, make the Marine Corps take notice and be proud of me; make myself less a victim of the funks and incongruities my fellow officer candidates were wrestling with, rise to rank quickly, and as a result help protect the lives of my men once we got situated over in Vietnam, where I felt they’d have a lot on their minds (like getting blown to smithereens). I had the advantage of an education, I thought, and I’d need to be their eyes and ears over and above the level they themselves could see and hear. I was an idiot, of course, but we’ve almost always wrong when we are young.

  What I’d like to do as I lie here, and before the day burgeons into a glowing Easter, is put together some useful ideas about Herb, just a detail or two to act as magnets for what else will occur to me in the next days, which is the way good sportswriting gets done. You hardly ever just sit down and write it cold, staring at an empty yellow sheet expecting yourself to summon up every good idea you’ll have ready at the first moment. That can be the scariest thing in the world. Instead, what you try to do is honor your random instincts, catch yourself off guard, and write a sentence or an unexpected descriptive line—the way the air smelled one day, or how the wind lifted and tricked off the lake surface in a peculiar way that might later make the story inevitable. Once those notes are on record, you put them away and let them draw up an agenda of their own that you can discover later when you’re sorting through things just before the deadline, and it’s time to write.

  Herb, though, is no easy nut to crack, since he’s obviously as alienated as Camus. It would’ve helped if I’d filed away one perception or recorded a quote, but I didn’t know what to say or think anymore than I know now. The way the air smelled or the wind shifted or what song was playing on the radio as we drove out, don’t seem to figure. Simple, declarative sentences just don’t exactly flock to big Herb’s aid. Everything is minor key, subjunctive and contingent. Herb Wallagher’s got his eye on the future these days (at least until his mood stabilizer wears through). Herb Wallagher has seen life from both sides (and doesn’t think much of either one). It would be easy for Herb Wallagher to take a dim view of life (if he wasn’t already as crazy as a road lizard).

  The cheap-drama artists of my profession would, of course, make quick work of Herb. They’re specialists at nosing out failure: hinting a fighter’s legs as suspect once he’s over thirty and finally in his prime; reporting a hitter’s wrists are stiff just when he’s learned to go the opposite way and can help the team by advancing runners. They see only the germs of defeat in victory, venality in all human endeavor.

  Sportswriters are sometimes damned bad men, and create a life of lies and false tragedies. In Herb’s case, they’d order up a grainy black-and-white fisheye of Herb in his wheelchair, wearing his BIONIC shirt and running shoes, looking like a caged child molester; take in enough of his crummy neighborhood to get the “flavor;” stand Clarice somewhere in the background looking haggard and lost like somebody’s abandoned slave out of the dustbowl, then start things off with: “Quo Vadis Herb Wallagher?” The idea being to make us feel sorry enough for Herb, or some idea of Herb, to convince us we’re all really like him and tragically involved, when in fact nothing of the kind is true, since Herb isn’t even a very likable guy and most of us aren’t in wheelchairs. (If I were paying salaries, those guys would be on the street looking for a living where they couldn’t do any harm.)

  Though what can I write that’s better? I’m not certain. Some life does not give in to a sportswriter’s point of view. It ought to be possible to take a rear-guard approach, to look for drama in the concept of retrenchment, to find the grit of the survivor in Herb—something several hundred thousand people would be glad to read with a stiff martini on a Sunday afternoon before dinner (we all have our optimal readers and times), something that draws the weave of lived life tighter. It’s what’s next that I have to work on. Though in the end, this is all I ask for: to participate briefly in the lives of others at a low level; to speak in a plain, truth-telling voice; to not take myself too seriously; and then to have done with it. Since after all, it is one thing to write sports, but another thing entirely to live a life.

  By nine I am up, dressed in my work clothes and out in the side yard nosing around the flower beds like a porch hound. Following my speculations about Herb, I went back to sleep and woke up happy and alert—my mind empty, the sun speckling through the beech leaves and not a hint of ugly Detroit weather on the horizon. My trip to the Arcenaults, however, is still two hours off, and as is sometimes the case these days, I do not have quite enough to do. One of the down-side factors to living alone is that you sometimes get overly absorbed with how exact segments of time are consumed, and can begin to feel a pleasure with life that is hopelessly tinged with longing.

  Beyond my hemlock hedge Delia Deffeyes is out in her yard in tennis whites, reading the newspaper, something I’ve seen her do a hundred times. She and Caspar have had their morning game, and now he has gone in for a nap. The Deffeyes and I have a policy which says that simply seeing each other in our yards is no reason to have a conversation, and normally we pass polite offhand waves and smiling nods and go about our business. Though I never mind an impromptu conversation. I am not a man who hoards his privacy, and if I am out in my yard spreading Vigaro or inspecting my crocuses, I am per se available for an encounter. Delia and I do occasionally engage in nuts and bolts publishing talk with reference to a book she’s writing for the historical society on European traditions in New Jersey architecture. My experience is years old, but I maintain a kind of plain-talk, common-sense expertise about matters: “Any editor worth his or her salt ought to appreciate the hell out of the kind of attention to detail you’
re willing to give. You can’t take that for granted, that’s all I know.” It is all I know, but Delia seems willing to take a word to the wise. She is eighty-two, born to a storied American business family in Morocco during the Protectorate, and has seen a wide world. Caspar has retired out of the diplomatic corps and came to the seminary afterward to teach ethics. Neither of them has too many years left on earth. (It is, in fact, a revelation to live in a town with a seminary, since like Caspar, seminarians are not a bit what you’d think. Most of them are not pious Bible-pounders at all, but sharp-eyed liberal Ivy League types with bony, tanned-leg second wives, and who’ll stand with you toe to toe at a cocktail party, drink scotch and talk about their time-share condos in Telluride.)

  Delia spies me down behind the children’s jungle gym, fingering a rose bud that’s ready to bloom, and wanders over to the hemlock hedge shaking her head, though apparently still reading. It is her signal and the premise of our neighborliness—all our conversations are just extensions of the last one, even though they are often on different subjects and months apart.

  “Now here, Frank, look at this.” Delia holds up the front page of the Times to show me something. Church bells have begun clamoring and gonging across town. On all streets families are off to Sunday school in spanking new Easter get-ups—cars washed and polished to look like new, all arguments suspended. “What do you think about what our government’s doing to the poor people in Central America?”

  “I haven’t kept very close tabs on that, Delia,” I say from the roses. “What’s going on down there now?” I give her a sunny smile and walk over to the hedge.