Clark heard the click and hung up the receiver. It suddenly occurred to him that he might be the butt of a prank being played by some of his teammates. He had to consider the unstamped envelope with its mysterious message, the strange voice on the telephone, as if someone was purposely disguising his own, and this Mr. Espirito knowing immediately who it was that called.
By the time he returned to his locker, the clubhouse was empty. He decided to do as he’d been told, even if it meant being further embarrassed by falling harder for the same joke. Clark realized that he’d be creating a stir by not going out for practice after the coaches had seen him in uniform, but changed back into his street clothes nevertheless. A few minutes later he was upstairs, in the team’s offices. He found Bob O’Brien, the assistant general manager, in the reception area.
“Bob,” he inquired, the words spilling out eagerly, “do we have a book or anything that shows who wore a particular number for the team over the years?”
“I’m pretty sure we do. What are you looking for?”
“I want to see who else wore my number.”
O’Brien had other matters on his schedule that morning. This was trivial, something that could wait, he concluded. “Okay, but give me a while to find it. I should have it by the time your practice is over.”
“I’m not working out today, Bob,” Clark answered. He suddenly felt as if there were beads of sweat on his forehead. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow. “I’d appreciate it if you’d look for it right now. It’s important.”
O’Brien was irritated. He was ready to lecture the player about keeping things in perspective. But the serious look on Clark’s face and the way he’d emphasized the word “important” convinced him to heed the request.
“Okay, make yourself comfortable,” he said. “I’ll be as quick as I can. There are a bunch of files I’ll have to go through.”
O’Brien returned about twenty minutes later. He was carrying two folders, one manila and one colored dark green. The latter was very full and had several wide elastics around it to keep it together. Clark got up to meet him.
“Here’s the stuff,” O’Brien said. “The small file tells you who wore all the numbers, and the big one is full of biographies of the players. Some of the bios are more complete than others. I thought you might want to refer to them after you checked out your number.”
Clark took the folders and thanked him. O’Brien pointed to the conference room across the hall. “You can look them over in there—no one will be using it—and then just leave them on my desk if I’m not here when you’re through.”
“Thanks, Bob,” Clark repeated. Moments later he closed the conference room door behind him.
There were two full pages of players who had worn the number “22” for the team, starting in 1930 when numbers were put on uniforms for the first time. Clark went to the end of the list, where his name appeared with the notation “1996– ” next to it. Before him came Len Carlsen who had it for three years, 1993–1995, and Terry Ruger for the ’91–’92 seasons. He knew them both. They had been flashes in the pan, power hitters in the minor leagues who turned into singles hitters when they were brought up. Their defensive play, at third base and right field, respectively, didn’t make up for their lack of punch at the plate. Each had been let go by the Red Sox as part of a trade and neither survived very long in the big leagues after leaving Boston.
Working backwards, Clark found that the last Red Sox second baseman to have the uniform number “22” was Paul LaRoque. He had played with the team for just one year, in 1945. As soon as he mumbled the date out loud, Clarke remembered the sign with the number “45” on it from his first dream. He felt a shiver inside and then a heightened tension throughout his body. Something convinced him that he’d made the connection he was looking for.
In the other folder, under “L,” Clark found a short biography of LaRoque. He was a homegrown product, born in Medford, just outside Boston, in 1923. His parents, Marie and Charles LaRoque, were French immigrants who had no other children. His mother was widowed when Paul was seven years old and died herself seven years later. Neither the ages of his parents nor the cause of their deaths were mentioned.
LaRoque played Park League baseball in Boston for three years and was signed to a professional contract by the Red Sox in 1941, shortly before his nineteenth birthday. Nothing in the biography indicated with whom LaRoque lived in the years immediately following his mother’s death. He spent three minor league seasons in different locations, quickly moving up the baseball ladder when both his defensive skills and his batting average improved consistently. He was brought to the team’s temporary spring training facility in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1945 when its roster of veteran players was depleted by their earlier enlistments in the armed forces during World War Two.
LaRoque was the best second baseman in camp and won the job. He had excellent statistics that season, batting .317 with eleven home runs, while the team finished next to last in the eight-team pennant race. The club’s regular players returned in 1946, following the end of the war, but LaRoque had enough talent to remain with the Red Sox as a spare infielder and pinch hitter. Then, on April first of that year, the day before the team was scheduled to break camp in Florida and head north by train for the opening of the new season, LaRoque drowned. It happened at a local beach when he tried to help a lifeguard save three young boys who had been carried out over their heads by a fast receding tide. He was the only victim of the unfortunate incident.
Since there was no living relative known to the team, they arranged the funeral. LaRoque was laid to rest in a plot close to the one containing his mother and father in Medford’s Oak Grove Cemetery. At the funeral, the Red Sox honored his memory by having the wife of manager Joe Cronin place LaRoque’s uniform shirt on the casket before he was buried.
Clark closed the folder and sat for several minutes staring at the wall in front of him. It was difficult for him to believe how close his dreams had come to the reality of LaRoque’s life. If he had entertained any doubt about Espirito’s message before, he couldn’t any longer. Now there was no denying that LaRoque had been trying to contact him and had been affecting his play in the field to make Clark take notice. He was reaching out to the closest next of kin he probably had, another second baseman with the Red Sox who wore the number “22.” Clark was pleasantly amused by the fact that his being African-American didn’t matter to the dead player. But what did LaRoque want of him, he wondered. What could be troubling his spirit more than fifty years after his untimely death?
Clark returned the folders to O’Brien’s office and left the building through the players’ exit. He decided to visit the cemetery in Medford and get as close to LaRoque as he could. He withdrew some money from an ATM machine across the street and tried to telephone Espirito. After repeatedly getting a busy signal for several minutes, he gave up. Then, instead of driving to an area with which he was totally unfamiliar, he hailed a cab.
Clark told the taxi driver to wait for him when they entered the cemetery grounds and pulled up in front of the administration office. Inside, he learned the location of LaRoque’s grave and directed the driver to the road from which it could be approached. He found it easily, in the sixth row of headstones, and bent down in front of the brown granite marker. Clark waited for something to happen, for LaRoque’s spirit to communicate with him and let him know what it wanted.
After several minutes he got up and walked around the gravesite slowly, observing it from different angles. On the back of the headstone were carved the words, “Son of Marie and Charles,” as if his lonely presence in the midst of others who did not have the LaRoque surname had to be explained or validated.
Suddenly, without his willing it, Clark found all his thoughts focusing on LaRoque’s parents. He pictured them first as happy young immigrants in a new country, ready to work hard and build a life for themselves. He witnessed their joy in the birth of young Paul and saw father a
nd son at a ball game in Fenway Park when the boy was about five or six years old. Charles’s death, he could now see, came without warning down at the harbor. A thousand pounds of bagged coffee beans being mechanically lifted from ship to dock broke loose and fell on him as he worked in one of the holds of the boat that had brought it to Boston. Clark had subscribed Marie’s death to a broken heart when he read LaRoque’s biography and learned that she had never remarried. His vision now told him that she was stricken with a cancer that took her life only months after it was diagnosed. The last picture he saw in his mind’s eye was that of the teenage Paul kneeling and weeping in front of his parents’ grave.
Clark realized that LaRoque was trying to communicate some message about his father and mother. He remembered reading that he was buried close to his parents, and began to look around for their monument. As he walked up and down the rows in that section of the cemetery, he saw that a number of headstones had been pushed off their foundations and were lying flat on the ground. Clark assumed they had been vandalized by some young people who never considered the emotional havoc they might be creating. He avoided those stones in his search for the LaRoques, but was unable to locate them.
The sound of the cab’s horn reminded him that he had already been there fifteen minutes longer than the estimate he’d given the driver. He was about fifty feet away from Paul LaRoque’s grave when he turned around and made his way back toward it. A sudden noise alerted him to a squirrel that was sitting on one of the downed headstones, obviously enjoying its lunch. It remained there, unflappable, until he approached within six feet of it, and then hurried away. Clark couldn’t help looking down at the spot it had vacated and found himself reading the names and dates of birth and death of Charles and Marie LaRoque. Charles had lived only twenty-eight years, seven fewer than his wife.
At that moment Clark realized what was disturbing the spirit of Paul LaRoque. He returned to his gravesite, kneeled down close to the stone, and said, “Don’t worry, Paul, I’ll have their headstone fixed as soon as possible.”
The taxi stopped at the office again on the way out. The manager confirmed that vandalism was responsible for the overturned monuments. “There’s no respect for the dead anymore,” he said.
“Or for their spirits either,” Clark thought to himself. He arranged for the LaRoques’ headstones to be restored to their foundation the next day and paid the total cost of the work in advance.
It was three thirty in the afternoon when Clark got out of the cab at Fenway Park. He tipped the driver generously, signed an autograph for him, and headed for the team parking lot. In his car, he used his cell phone to try reaching Espirito. The line was busy again for a few minutes, but then someone finally picked up.
“Hello,” the female voice said, “Medford Police, Officer D’Allesandro. This call is being recorded.”
“I’m sorry,” Clark answered, nonplussed at first. “I meant to call 391-1813.”
“That’s what you got,” she said. “Area code 617. Did you want the police?”
“No, I don’t,” he said. “I’m a little confused. When I called this same number earlier today, it wasn’t the police. I spoke to someone else. I’m looking right at the number on the note he sent me and that’s what I dialed this morning.”
Officer D’Allesandro was patient with him. “Whom did you speak to this morning?” she asked.
“It was a Mr. Espirito.”
“Well, there’s no one here in the station by that name or anything close to it, and no one answers this line except the officer on duty. I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
Clark tried one more time. “And just to be sure I heard you right, the number is 617-391-1813.”
“That’s been our number for my five years on the force and probably a long time before that.”
“Okay,” he said, “thanks anyway.”
“You’re welcome, sir. Have a good one.”
By the time he arrived at his apartment, Clark had persuaded himself to forget about everything that had happened that day. He cooked dinner, took a hot bath while listening to his favorite music station on the radio, and went to bed. He slept like a baby.
During batting practice before the first game with the Yankees, Mike Rooney got hit on the leg by a line drive and had to be scratched from the starting lineup. Reluctantly, Dusty Harmon inserted Clark in his place. Three hours later Clark was the hero of Boston’s victory over New York, going four for four with two doubles, driving in three runs, and scoring three more himself. It was the beginning of the most fantastic month he ever had in his major league career.
On the afternoon of the opening game of the World Series, with the Red Sox hosting the Chicago Cubs, Clark returned to the clubhouse after batting practice and found an envelope in his locker addressed to him. It had no return address or postage stamp. The note inside was short and sweet. He recognized the handwriting at once.
“Good luck in the Series,” it read. “Your friends in Medford will be rooting for you.” Mr. Espirito’s signature followed, with a “P.S.” below it. “By the way, do you know anyone who has two tickets for Game Seven?”
BOBBY AND ME
“If people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them?”
—Yogi Berra
LISTEN, I’M GONNA say this first thing to all you writers just so everyone here knows how I feel. And this puts it on the record too, in case I ever start giving myself too much credit later on for where I am today.
Here it is in a nutshell. I don’t know how many times in my life I told Bobby Sadovitz he was out of his mind for getting himself involved in one thing or another—those business deals of his—but every time he put those big bucks on the line, he came out of it smelling like roses. Even when he knew it was a hell of a risk, things just seemed to fall into place. And instead of telling me to get lost or grow a pair of balls, which he could’ve done a few times, he ignored whatever I said and took me along with him to bigger and better things. When I stop and think about it, I’ve had a lot of fun in this life. Most of it, thanks to Bobby, is on account of something I said on a baseball field one Sunday morning about thirty-three years ago.
Okay, okay, don’t all shout at once. I guess that means I’ve got to tell you the story, so let’s get on with it.
Bobby and me both grew up in Dorchester. For you out-of-town scribes, that’s a suburb of Boston, maybe ten miles on a straight line from Fenway Park. He lived in the Jewish section, while our house was a few miles away in a part of town that was mostly Irish and a little Italian. When I say “house,” don’t get me wrong. I’m talking about what’s called a three-decker, with a different family on every floor. Everyone paid rent, except sometimes the landlord had one of the apartments for himself. There was one after another of these three-deckers on every street, with about ten feet of sick-looking grass or dirt between each one. Just enough space to park a car if you couldn’t find a place on the street. They all had a front porch you could go out on and see what was happening in both directions. And there was a porch in back, too, where you could hang laundry out to dry or put a rug over the clothesline and beat the dust and dirt out of it. The fun began whenever an upstairs neighbor started whacking a rug right after someone else hung all their underwear out on a line.
Bobby and me went to different high schools. Most of the Jewish kids went to Dorchester South, and everyone said that’s where you ought to be if you had any brains and were thinking about going to college. Dorchester North was home for the jocks and the kids who couldn’t wait to take woodworking or get into the auto repair shop.
I mean it was set up so that anyone in Dorchester could go to either place, but almost everyone went to the one closest to where they lived because there was no such thing back in the fifties as school buses going from one side of town to another. If your old man left for work at six in the morning, that was it as far as having any wheels to take you someplace. There were no two-car families then eith
er, not where we lived, so your mother couldn’t drive you to school later on in the morning. I had some buddies whose folks had no car at all. Their old man used to have to get out there every day and wait for the trolley—we called it the streetcar—to come and take them near where they worked, or get off at one of the stations where they could transfer to the train into Boston if they had a job downtown.
The streetcar went by half a block from where I lived. When it was freezing cold in the winter, I felt sorry for those guys having to stand out there waiting for it to show up. They’d be hunched way over, with their shoulders pushing right up at their heads and their hands deep in their coat or pants pockets. You could see them beating time with their feet on the sidewalk to try to keep them warm. There was no such thing as a schedule to give you some idea when the next car was supposed to be there. The jokers in the MTA office—that stood for Massachusetts Transit Authority—would tell you a car would be by every fifteen minutes even if you were calling to let them know nothing had shown up for an hour. They said they’d check out the reason for the delay and call you back, but they never did, and the cars came whenever they got there and that was it.
The worst times were when you’d wait out there a half hour or so in the freezing cold, feeling sure you were going to wet your pants any minute. Then two trolleys would show up, one right behind the other, and both of them would be half empty. You could try getting the driver to tell you what the hell took so long by making some joke about it while you threw your money in the box. Like I said, you could try, but they’d just mumble something about trouble on the line and tell you to go sit down. Every one of those guys owed their jobs to a favor some local politician did for them, so I guess they didn’t figure they had to be friendly to the passengers or answer any question they got asked.
My father’s first cousin sometimes worked the line near our house and he wasn’t any different. I never said hello or anything else to him when I got on in case he got into an argument with one of the passengers during the ride. In those days the drivers were allowed to break a dollar bill for you if you didn’t have the right change, and everyone said that the “T”—that was the short name for the system—was lucky if the conductors treated them like equal partners and turned in half the money they collected.
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