The Art of Fielding

by Chad Harbach

  Henry set up farther from home plate than usual, to encourage Dougal to throw his high tight fastball a little tighter than he otherwise might. He went through his age-old routine—touch the far black of the plate with the bat head, tap the Harpooner on his breast three times, make a single, level pass of the bat through the zone—but it had a different meaning now, a counterfeit meaning, or no meaning at all, since he had no intention of swinging at the pitch.

  Dougal checked the runner, began his elegant efficient slide-step toward home. Henry gritted his teeth. It was weird how clear and clean the air felt. His mind subsided into something like prayer. Forgive me, Schwartzy, for quitting the team. He stepped sharply toward home plate, dipping his shoulder as he did so, as if expecting, diving into, a slider low and away.

  76

  His first thought was that he was President Affenlight and that he had died, but the mere fact of thinking such a thing meant that it couldn’t be true. Wherever he was was dark. He tried to lift his left arm to touch his head where it hurt, but the movement was arrested by two tubes that were taped to his forearm. A bitter taste stung his mouth. Schwartz was sitting in a chair by the bed, motionless in the dark.

  The simple act of moving his jaw sent shocks of diabolical pain through his brain, worse than anything he’d ever felt. When he finally managed to speak, the words came out soft and slurred. “Who won?”

  Schwartz cocked his head. “You don’t remember?”

  “No.” He remembered the pitch, a tiny white pellet shoulder-high and rising. He remembered trying to spin away so it would catch him on the helmet rather than flush in the face.

  “You scored the winning run,” Schwartz said, frowning.

  “I did?”

  “That fastball hit you square on the earflap. Everybody in the park thought you were dead. Me included. But you bounced right up and ran to first. The trainers tried to check you out, but you wouldn’t let them. Play ball, you kept saying. Play ball! Over and over again. Coach Cox tried to send Loonie in to pinch-run, but you yelled at him till he went back to the dugout.”

  Henry didn’t remember any of that. “Then what happened?”

  “Dougal got ejected. He screamed bloody murder about it, but the benches had been warned, and he was gone. They brought in their second-best guy.

  “I knocked the first pitch off the wall. I almost hit it too hard, it caromed straight back to the left fielder. But you were flying. I’ve never seen you move that fast. By the time I got to first you were rounding third. Coach Cox tried to hold you, but you never even looked at him.

  “You beat the tag by half an inch. Everybody piled on top of you, including Coach Cox. Heck, half the parents were on that pile. And when everybody else got up, you didn’t.”

  Henry studied Schwartz’s face, or what he could see of it, in the dimness. To see if he was telling the truth, not that Schwartz ever lied; to see in what ratio the sadness of Affenlight’s death was mixed with the joy of winning the national championship; to see if his friend might be beginning to forgive him.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Schwartz said sternly.

  “Done what?”

  “You know what. Eaten that pitch.”

  Henry’s idiot lips were taking forever to form the sounds of words. “I thought it was a slider.”

  “Bullshit.”

  He tried to cover his mouth as he retched, but the tubes inhibited his movement. A few bile-wet Rice Krispies spilled over his lower lip and down his chin.

  “Bullshit,” Schwartz repeated. “I saw it live and I saw it on SportsCenter while I was sitting in the goddamn waiting room at the goddamn ER. You dove into that thing like it was a swimming pool.”

  Henry didn’t say anything.

  “You even set up away from the plate, so he’d have to come farther inside to buzz you. You baited him into it.”

  Henry wasn’t going to admit it any more than he was going to argue with it.

  “What were you thinking, Henry? How many bodies you want to pile up in one day?”

  Schwartz was pissed, no doubt about that, though he hadn’t raised his voice and had barely twitched a muscle, as if he’d reached such a state of exhaustion that he’d never move or yell again. “What about the Buddha? Poor Buddha. He just found out about Affenlight—and now he’s got to sit there and watch you try to kill yourself? You could have just stayed home.”

  “I thought I’d be able to turn my shoulder into it, get a free base that way,” Henry said. “I didn’t expect him to throw it so high.”

  “Well, Dougal’s a crazy bastard. Just not as crazy as you.”

  This was the gentlest thing Schwartz had said. An odd giddiness was tickling up and down Henry’s spine, despite the intensity of his headache. “I didn’t have a lot of options out there,” he said.

  “Swing and miss. Get us on a plane back home. That was an option.”

  “Aren’t you glad you won?”

  Behind the shut curtain of the room’s lone window, a little light was beginning to appear. Schwartz’s watch, glowing yellow-green in the grayness, read 5:23—Henry felt too confused to subtract forty-two, but it was four-something in the morning.

  “Yes,” Schwartz finally said. “I am.”

  The giddiness was washing over Henry from his toes up to his neck. It felt beautiful, like angel-song. Maybe in some partial way, and despite Schwartz’s anger, Henry had redeemed himself in the eyes of his friend.

  The giddiness deepened into bliss. His limbs lacked energy to move, but a different type of energy was moving through them, originating somewhere in his bones and organs and spilling outward, scrubbing and scouring him from within, suffusing him to his skin. Maybe it was Schwartz’s presence, maybe it was the fact that the Harpooners had won the national championship—but the bliss laughed at those things, and Henry realized that they were irrelevant where the bliss was concerned. Maybe this was what dying felt like.

  “Am I okay?” he said.

  “Depends what you mean. You’ve got a concussion. A pretty bad one. Dougal throws ninety-two, you know.

  “But that’s not why the doctors think you collapsed. According to your blood work you’ve run out of pretty much every mineral and nutrient necessary for life. Even salt. It’s not easy to run out of salt. I think you’re going to be here for a while.”

  “—”

  “Tried to drown himself from the inside was how one of the doctors put it.”

  Henry looked toward the white underbelly of his forearm, where a length of transparent tape kept the needles and gauze in place. “Is this morphine?”

  Schwartz half smiled at this. “If it was I’d have ripped it out and stuck it in my own arm. Those are both just nutrients.”

  “Hm.” He had begun to imagine that the bliss was a function of morphine or some other spectacular sparkling drug being shuttled into his blood. But maybe it was mere food that was making him feel like this. In which case maybe it was worth it not to eat for a few weeks, to reach this bliss at the end.

  “How’s Owen?”

  Schwartz shook his head as if to say, Don’t ask. “He headed back right after the game. To take care of Pella.”

  “How’s Pella?”

  Schwartz stood up, looked at his watch. “I’m going to try to catch the early flight,” he said. “Some of the other guys will probably stop by later to visit, if they wake up in time. They’re out partying now.”

  “Okay,” Henry said.

  “Don’t mention Affenlight. They’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Okay.”

  A little bit of dawn was seeping past the dense hospital curtains. Schwartz stood there, a hulking shadow in the dimness. With undisguisable difficulty he hoisted his huge beat-up backpack and slung it onto his back, adjusting the straps so they wouldn’t cut into the meat of his chest. Then he shouldered his equally huge equipment bag.

  “This is the psych floor,” he said.

  Henry nodded. “Okay.”

 
; “Figured I’d give you a heads-up. They’re going to send in the shrinks to talk to you about not eating. Your anorexia, as they referred to it.”

  “Okay.”

  “I told them only cheerleaders get anorexia. You’re a ballplayer—you’re having a spiritual crisis.” Schwartz’s smile returned, rueful this time. “They thought I was being serious.”

  “Well,” Henry said. “You’re a serious guy.”

  Schwartz had never seemed like a college kid exactly, but now he looked flat-out old, sleepless and worn, the creases in his forehead deep. His knees wavered under the weight of his bags. He grabbed the railing at the end of the bed to steady himself. “Get some rest, Skrimmer.”

  His big body eclipsed the doorway and vanished down the corridor, the thump of his shambling footfalls and the scratch of his backpack against his jacket diminishing as he went.

  77

  The phone rang, and he felt like letting it ring, but he’d just been talking with Dr. Rachels about handling problems as they arose, in the present, one at a time, and here was a problem he could probably handle: a ringing phone. He’d been here for ten days.

  “Henry, it’s Dwight. Dwight Rogner.”

  “Hey Dwight.”

  “Congratulations, my friend. It’s my distinct pleasure to inform you that you’ve been chosen by the St. Louis Cardinals in the thirty-third round of the amateur draft.”

  “What?” Henry sank down on the unmade hospital bed. His first thought was that it was Adam or Rick, playing a joke so absurd it could hardly be considered cruel. “You’re kidding.”

  “I know it’s not what you were shooting for, in terms of the round. But I think it’s a wonderful opportunity for you. And for the St. Louis Cardinals, frankly, to get an athlete of your caliber at this stage of the draft.”

  “But…,” Henry protested. “I mean… I don’t even play anymore. I quit the team.”

  “Henry, I know you haven’t had the easiest season. But the draft is about one word, and that word is potential. And I’ll be damned if the Cardinals are going to find another player in the thirty-third round with your kind of potential. Who I can easily close my eyes and imagine as a star in this league. A legitimate, long-term star.”

  Henry said nothing, but that seemed okay because Dwight kept talking: “You and Mike have done a great job with your training, given the available resources. But the difference between Westish College and the St. Louis Cardinals is night and day. With us you’ll have the best coaches, the best trainers, the best facilities. Everything we do is designed to make you a better ballplayer.”

  “I’ve lost weight,” Henry said.

  “You’ll gain it back. We’ll bring you along slowly. Nobody’s expecting you to play in the majors tomorrow. We just expect you to work hard every day. To follow your dream.”

  “I’m in the hospital,” Henry said loudly. “In the psych ward. I can’t throw.” He slammed a hand down on the bed. Anger surged through him. He didn’t want to talk about dreams. He wanted to talk about what was real.

  “I know you’ve had a rough go,” Dwight said. “It happens to the best of us.”

  “You’re serious,” Henry said. “You drafted me.”

  “We sure did. You have a much higher ceiling than most late-round picks, and we’ll be offering a correspondingly higher bonus to convince you to sign. How does a hundred strike you?”

  “Dollars?”

  Dwight laughed. “Thousands. A hundred thousand dollars, up front. Anyway, we can discuss that later. You have until the end of August to sign a contract. If you don’t sign, we lose your rights, and you’ll go back into the draft next year. In which case I’ll be tracking your progress very closely.”

  Henry said nothing. There was nothing to say. A hundred thousand dollars to play baseball: just what he’d always wanted.

  “By the way,” Dwight added, “the Cubbies picked up your buddy Adam Starblind. He’s made quite an impression the last month or so.”

  “Wow. That’s… wow.” Let it be after me. Just let it be after me. “What round was that?”

  “Thirty-second,” Dwight said. “Right before you.”

  78

  Pella walked through the Large Quad feeling something like herself. It was a blistering day in early August, two months since her father’s death, and the busiest day she’d had since that first awful week, when flowers and condolences were arriving from all over. Mrs. McCallister handled the arrangements and the thank-yous. Pella lay in the guest bed in the quarters, Mike at her side, and refused to cry.

  She’d worked a short shift in the dining hall this morning. Then she’d eaten lunch with Professor Eglantine, who’d offered to supervise her in a one-on-one tutorial for the fall, and who’d insisted she call her “Judy.” Pella worried that Professor Eglantine, Judy, was just being kind, but then again she’d seemed to be enjoying herself, and it would be great to have her for a tutor and possibly, if it wasn’t too much to ask, for a friend. The syllabus they’d constructed, while Professor Eglantine picked unconvincingly at her Cobb salad, centered on the letters of Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt. All in all, it had been a very heartening lunch.

  Now she was on her way to Dean Melkin’s office, on the ground floor of Glendinning Hall, to finalize the details of her enrollment for the fall. Pella wasn’t sure how many details still needed finalizing, or why Dean Melkin, whom she’d never met, was so burningly eager to finalize them. Granted it was August now, but he’d been calling the quarters all summer, beginning much too soon after her dad’s death, begging her to meet. Pella had put him off with a series of brief, widely spaced e-mails, saying she wasn’t yet up for a face-to-face but had been in touch with Admissions, with the Registrar, with Student Health. These other departments of Westish simply e-mailed forms to her, and Mike filled out the forms and dropped them off. Whereas Dean Melkin kept leaving pleading messages on the machine.

  Dean Melkin was on the phone when Pella peered cautiously around his half-closed door. He smiled and waggled two fingers to indicate how many minutes he’d need. After precisely that many minutes he invited her in, a slender man in khaki pants and a too-large houndstooth jacket with elbow patches, youthful in that slightly fetal way of certain descendants of the upper British Isles, his pale hair beating a ragged retreat from all directions at once.

  “Pella.” He smiled at her pinkly. “Thank you for coming in. I know this has been a very difficult summer.”

  Pella nodded in an unforlorn way meant to indicate that they needn’t talk about it.

  “If you’d ever like to chat,” he went on, “morning, noon, or night, please don’t hesitate. I’ve left my cell number on your machine, but I can give it to you now too.”

  “Thanks,” Pella said.

  They sat down. Arranged on Dean Melkin’s desk, beneath a Post-it that bore her name, was a tall stack of materials—materials regarding core requirements, online registration, foreign language requirements, AP credits, dining hall plans, health insurance. He began to talk her through them, or to try to, but each time Pella, after waiting a minimally polite period of time, quietly indicated that yes, and yes, and yes, it had been taken care of. Each time Dean Melkin, seeming oddly nervous, lauded her conscientiousness and moved on to the next already-taken-care-of matter.

  “Last but not least,” he said. “Housing. It wasn’t easy to fit you in—we have limited flexibility regarding late admits—but I did some finagling, and I found not only a room for you, but I think an excellent situation.” He leaned back happily in his chair. “You’ll be rooming with a young woman named Angela Fan, who was not only the winner of this year’s Maria Westish Award, which as you may know indicates an extremely high level of academic accomplishment, but also recently published a chapbook of poetry with a small press in Portland. And she took a gap year last year to work on an organic farm in Maryland, so she’s also a slightly more mature roommate than you might otherwise have had.”

  “Oh no,” Pella said. �
�I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I didn’t mention this earlier. I’ve been making plans to live off campus. In fact I just signed a lease on a place. With my boyfriend.” She didn’t know why she’d added the boyfriend part—it seemed too louche for the dean’s pink-tipped ears.

  Dean Melkin looked very sad. “Ah,” he said. “Hm… it’s college policy that all freshpersons live in the dormitories, we find it encourages a robust immersion in college life. Even our nontraditional students…” There seemed to be a war going on within him, between his devotion to college policy and his desperate desire to accommodate her. Pella couldn’t help sagging in her chair a little, to magnify her grief—damned if she wanted to pretend to live in the dorms, to hustle from her and Mike’s place to weekly popcorn parties in the RA’s room.

  “I’m sure it can be arranged,” Dean Melkin decided quickly, smiling for her benefit. “Your adjustment to Westish is the vital thing.”

  Pella thanked him profusely, and thanked him some more, and stood to leave. But the look on Dean Melkin’s face had become so perplexed, so somehow needy, that she let her butt fall back in the chair.

  “So you’re doing okay?” he said.

  Pella nodded.

  “Your father was a very interesting man. He had a… a way about him.” Dean Melkin plucked at the gold-painted buttons on the cuffs of his jacket. “Nothing meant more to him than having you here.” He looked up at her, his expression only growing in perplexity, so that it could even be called tortured.