The Art of Fielding

by Chad Harbach

  “It was very sudden,” he said.

  “Yes.” Pella nodded with the somberness that was both expected of her and easy to muster.

  “That is to say… it was very sudden, then? There wasn’t some kind of… precipitating illness?”

  “No,” Pella said. “Not at all.”

  “Ah. Aha.” Dean Melkin wrinkled his turned-up, slightly fetal nose. He seemed dispirited by the lack of a precipitating illness. “It was very sudden, then, but it wasn’t… that is to say, it was…” He hesitated, pursed his lips. “It was a matter of natural causes?”

  “Sure.” Pella peered at Dean Melkin, trying to figure out what he was saying. “What other kind of causes are there?”

  “Oh, well. None, I suppose.” He looked up at her, his expression deeply pained. “But there wasn’t any way in which it could have been… or been construed as… intentional?”

  What? Suddenly it felt like their entire meeting, not to mention his summerlong pursuit of her, had been building toward this moment of anxious prying. “My father died of a heart attack,” Pella said sharply. “For which my family has a strong genetic predisposition. The men, at least. The women live forever.”

  “Ah.” Dean Melkin sank into his chair. He looked, though still uncomfortable, perceptibly relieved. “Well, then. It couldn’t have been avoided, could it?”

  What was going on? Did Dean Melkin think that her dad wanted to kill himself? Why in the world would he think such a thing? Maybe because her dad had been so ruddy and hale and energetic; maybe it was difficult for Dean Melkin to imagine him just ceasing to live. But her dad was also so cheerful, so downright life-affirming, in his public persona, that she couldn’t imagine anyone thinking that he might commit suicide. And not just thinking it but thinking it with sufficient intensity to ask her about it, as Dean Melkin had essentially done, which was truly bizarre, not to mention seriously unprofessional.

  Unless there was some reason for Dean Melkin to think it. Some inside info, some hurt or scandal or hidden rot in her dad’s life that she didn’t know about but that other people did. Was she going too far? Was she living inside her head again?

  But Dean Melkin was sitting right there, acting so bizarrely, still fiddling with the buttons on the cuffs of his too-big imitation-dean jacket, not that he wasn’t a real dean, but he looked more like a watery kid who wanted someday to be a dean, and her point was that she’d arrived here in an okay mood, really the best mood she’d been in all summer, and it was Dean Melkin whose agitation was agitating her, whose strange behavior and strange words were causing her to think strange thoughts. It wasn’t her. It was him, and she had to get to the bottom of it. And if she thought of hurt and scandal in relation to her dad, well, she could think of only one possibility. Of one person.

  “Of course,” she said with great gravity, “all this has been exceptionally hard on Owen.”

  Dean Melkin looked more perplexed and tortured than ever. But not in a who’s-Owen-and-why-did-you-utter-this-strange-non-sequitur kind of way. No, it was more the perplexity of a person trying hard to craft a reaction to news he already knew. “Of course,” he said, nodding thoughtfully. “I can see how it must be very difficult.”

  He knows, Pella thought. He knows about Owen. The dean of students knows about Owen. He knows about Owen and he’s wondering whether my dad committed suicide. And now she was wondering whether her dad committed suicide. Because the dean of students knew. And if he knew, he wasn’t the only one. Which meant that her dad had gotten strung up, or had been about to get strung up, or something.

  Could he have killed himself? Was there a way to kill yourself that looked enough like a heart attack to fool people who expected you to have died of a heart attack? Well, yes, there had to be. But it just wasn’t possible. Her dad didn’t have a morbid bone in his body, had always been a terrible fraidy-cat where death was concerned. He didn’t like doctors, her mom at least partly excluded, and he didn’t like the pills that, paradoxically, reminded him he would someday die. No, he couldn’t have killed himself, though he had been smoking too much—she regretted not realizing that earlier, not harping on it more. When Mrs. McCallister found him his right hand was on his chest, gripped around his pack of Parliaments, which were thoroughly crushed.

  “Within the administration,” she said, “I suppose that pretty much everyone knew about him and Owen.”

  “No no no.” Dean Melkin straightened in his chair, tugged at the collar of his white oxford. “No no. It was only me and Bruce Gibbs, and I believe Mr. Gibbs consulted one or two other trustees, in a highly confidential way, just to gauge what the options were. Whether there were any options.”

  There it was, then. He’d been caught. He’d been caught, and he’d been banished. Those bastards. And her father, what an idiot. He hadn’t told her. Had he told anyone? Had he told Owen? No—he couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have. If Owen had known, if she had known, they might have been able to calm him, console him, buck him up somehow. Instead he’d kept it all on that heart of his.

  She had to get out of there. Not just out of Dean Melkin’s office—out of Westish, away from Westish. Like forever.

  Dean Melkin was still worrying the buttons on his cuffs. Clearly he’d been waiting for this moment, had been living all summer with a weird guilt upon him.

  “Pella,” he said, “I’m so very sorry. I wish there was something that could have been done differently. Of course your father was my superior, I had no real say in the matter, but the idea that there may have been some sort of connection between his resignation and his passing, well, it’s terrible, it’s just terrible…”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” she said sharply, a promising beginning to a rant, but she felt too miserable to make a scene. Somehow she managed to get to her feet and swim out of the room, out of Glendinning Hall, leaving her stack of catalogs and carbon copies on the edge of Dean Melkin’s desk.

  She had to get so far away from here. Mike was working at Bartleby’s tonight, was probably there already—when she calmed down she would walk over there and drink whiskey, and tell him why she had to leave. Would he come with her? Surely he would. She was willing to go anywhere he wanted, as long as it wasn’t here. Even Chicago would be far enough.

  She was outside, sweating in the hazy afternoon sun, and she swung wildly around the campus in helpless, hopeless circles for a long while, down to the beach and back, out to the football stadium and back, here there and everywhere. She thought about her dad and how to avenge him. How to shun Westish in the most profound way possible. How to make the entire college and everyone involved with it know and understand that she and her father were shunning it in the most profound and everlasting way possible. She was full of rage but she wasn’t coming up with much.

  She didn’t want to think about Dean Melkin, he was the last scourge-slash-person she wanted to think about, but something he’d said kept flitting through her mind, flitting and flitting until finally it just stuck there in the middle and nothing could get around it. “Nothing meant more to him,” Melkin said, “than having you here.” It was true, wasn’t it. It was all too true. She’d never know what her dad’s last minutes or hours or days were like, but one thing she knew was that Dean Melkin was right, and that no matter what had happened between her dad and Westish, her dad would have wanted her here. If she lashed out at Westish, in whatever impotent way she could lash out, then she’d be doing it for her, not for him. If she wanted to do something for him, it wouldn’t be that.

  She wouldn’t tell Owen. To tell Owen would only make him feel awful and guilty, like he’d contributed to her dad’s death, and for what? For the sake of the sound of her voice. And to tell Mike would be pointless. She would keep it between her and her dad. And she would keep ramming the Affenlight name down the throat of Westish College, over and over, but not like that, not in a vindictive way—she would do it like her dad would want her to do it. She would settle in. She would read the letters of Hannah Arend
t and Mary McCarthy. She would be, to whatever extent was possible, at peace.

  Without Pella realizing it, her wanderings had carried her, for the first time since the funeral, to the edge of the cemetery. Now she braced herself, entered the gate, and walked within sighting distance of her dad’s grave. She didn’t get too close; it was enough, it was hard enough, to be here, forty yards away, and to know that his flat headstone lay near that wide and knotty tree, which she recognized from the haze of the burial.

  She would be here for the next four years, but he was gone, gone from this place, from every place, forever. That’s the deal, she thought, and the thought seemed to come from elsewhere, a visitation. That’s the deal.

  She turned around, away from the headstone, and faced the lake. Waist-high waves flung themselves at the breakers. She thought of what she always thought of in a cemetery: her dad’s anecdote about Emerson digging up his wife Ellen’s body. Then, still gazing at the water, she remembered his old Harvard e-mail password, which she’d decoded as a kid without him knowing—landlessness, how obvious could you be? An idea was forming in her mind. Her dad had died as the president of Westish, his funeral had been full of pomp and circumstance, he’d been buried here in a spot of honor. And all of those were no small things. But there was a falseness to it too, to him being buried here. Now that he was dead he could be here and not be here; they, the Melkins and Gibbses of the world, could think he was here, while she would know the truth. He belonged out there, in the water, which he loved.

  Maybe it seemed silly to construe an e-mail password as a person’s deepest wish, but now that the idea had occurred to her she knew that it was right. All the lashed sea’s landlessness again. Of course, she couldn’t do it alone. She headed back to the quarters, where they were still staying, to wait for Mike to come home.

  79

  Schwartz’s new job would start in mid-August, when football season began and the new school year’s budget kicked in. Till then he’d been working at Bartleby’s, picking up as many shifts as he could, but there wasn’t much need for bouncers during the slow summer months, and even when he filled in behind the bar, like tonight, he walked home half drunk with no more than forty dollars in his pocket.

  When he got back to the quarters, Pella was curled in a leather armchair in what had been her father’s study, asleep. Schwartz scooped her up in his arms—she was several pounds lighter than she’d been in April, a change of which he did not approve. She murmured and squirmed, wrapped her arms around his neck, but didn’t awake. He supported her bottom with one hand; with the other he plucked her book from a crevice of the chair.

  She groaned and rolled onto her stomach when he laid her down on the bed they shared. He tugged up the hem of her tank top and unhooked her bra, rubbed very lightly the twin pink indents where the clasp had pressed into her skin. Things were not so bad. Lately she seemed to be emerging from the deepest part of her grief, that summerlong coma during which she’d napped and read, read and napped, eyes Xanaxed and dry. A few nights ago they’d made love again, for what felt like the first time.

  The night was warm, too warm to bother with blankets. Schwartz found an extra sheet in the hall closet and spread its seashell pattern over Pella’s sleeping form. Now they had no parents between them.

  He went to the kitchen and boiled water for instant coffee. He made it strong, the way he liked it, and added a finger’s worth of scotch from President Affenlight’s liquor cabinet. He’d been working through the scotch slowly, systematically, starting with the least expensive. Only in the last week had Pella asked him to pour her a little glass too; this was another good sign, the stepwise return of one appetite at a time.

  It was after one. He descended the narrow staircase to President Affenlight’s office, where he’d been spending his nights, his dawns, and many of his days. Contango trailed him down the stairs and curled up in his usual spot on the rug. The financial documents had been carted away by accountants and attorneys, but Affenlight’s books and papers, a lifetime’s worth of learning, were still here. They needed to be dealt with, or at least packed up, before late August, when the newly hired president arrived, but Pella had so far refused to come into this room, the room where her father died. So it fell to Schwartz to comb through the typewritten lecture notes and yellowed journals; the coffee-stained drafts of essays and wrinkled carbons of decades-old correspondence; the grocery lists and scribbles; the copiously annotated copies of antebellum prayerbooks and poetry primers, to decide what should be kept and what thrown away. Everything was paper, paper, paper—he’d brought twenty more boxes of paper from the study upstairs, and these were stacked in the corners of the room. Affenlight had kept a computer on his desk, but it seemed to have been mostly for show.

  One box of 4×6 cards was marked, simply, SPEAKING. Some of the cards contained jokes or anecdotes, along with the dates and occasions of their use. Schwartz remembered many of the more recent occasions, and the jokes. Other cards offered aphoristic rules in Affenlight’s precise hand: With a small group, assonate, as in writing; with a large group, alliterate.

  Often Owen dropped by as late as three or four, mug of tea in hand. Schwartz would share his recent discoveries; Owen, as he listened, would purse his lips into something like a smile. They would seal their evening by smoking a wordless joint on the front steps of Scull Hall. Tonight, though, Owen didn’t come, and Schwartz, feeling rather literary, took down Affenlight’s Riverside Shakespeare and settled in behind the desk to page through it. He scanned the marginalia, paused to read some familiar passages. He somehow felt deeply at home here, in Affenlight’s office, among Affenlight’s thoughts, near Affenlight’s death. Deeply at home but also tenuously so; he considered it a privilege to serve as the de facto custodian of Affenlight’s papers, and he felt a constant worry that someone closer to Affenlight, or at least better versed in American literature, would show up to kick him out. But it hadn’t happened yet, and as the summer crept by it seemed less and less likely to happen. Which saddened Schwartz, in a way: what a smart and thoughtful man Affenlight had been, and how little he’d be remembered.

  The Sperm-Squeezers was a beautiful book, the early exemplar of a critical genre; perhaps grad students would read it for another decade, and intellectual historians mention it for a decade after that. And perhaps Schwartz, as he readied all this paper for the college’s library, could pull together a second, posthumous book, a collection of essays and speeches that a university press would publish. But a Guert Affenlight wasn’t a Herman Melville; wouldn’t burst back into prominence after death and fifty years’ obscurity. His portrait would hang in the dining hall, alongside those of the other former presidents; four years from now, only the kitchen staff would recognize his face. No doubt some conference room or floor of the library would be renamed in his honor—or, Schwartz thought now, what about the baseball diamond? The current name, Westish Field, was strictly by default. Affenlight Field had a nice ring to it. Was that alliteration or assonance? The crowds there usually constituted a small group, though that might change now that they were national champs.

  The office door creaked open, waking Schwartz, who’d been dozing at Affenlight’s desk. Morning light leaked through the blinds. Schwartz jumped up, not wanting to get caught by Mrs. McCallister, who preferred both him and the dog to sleep upstairs. But it was Pella, freshly showered and dressed for work. She hadn’t so much as poked her head in here all summer. “Hi,” she said, and plunked down on the love seat, and told him what she wanted to do.

  Schwartz said nothing for a while; just leaned back in the president’s chair. She’s been reading too much, he thought—had drifted across that line that separated what you might find in a book from what you might do. “I think we should think about this,” he finally said.

  “I’ve been thinking about it.”

  Maybe it was the morning light, or the heat of the shower still flushing her cheeks, but she looked sharpened and repaired. “We have to,” sh
e said. “We have to.”

  “You can’t just dig up a body.”

  “Why not? It’s my dad. It’s my plot. It’s my coffin.” She swept a hand over the room. “You’ve been through all this stuff. So show me where it says, ‘Put me in a box. With fake gold trim. And then stick it in the ground.’ Show me where it says that.”

  Schwartz went to the love seat and sat down beside her. He zipped her hoodie up to her chin and gently knotted the strings. This gesture used to bug her—it bugged her right now—but at least she’d figured out what he meant by it: you are mine.

  “It just makes sense,” she said. “My dad loved this lake. He spent three years on a ship. He spent half my childhood rowing on the Charles. It’s what he would have wanted.”

  Schwartz, having passed the summer among all this Affenlight-annotated Melvilleania, the memoirs of whaling ships, merchant ships, naval ships, couldn’t disagree. “I understand why you want to do it this way—”

  “We should have done it this way to begin with. If I’d had time to think it through, we would have. If I hadn’t been so upset.”

  “I see what you’re saying. But it’s just not possible. It’s a felony, for one thing”—Schwartz was bluffing, but he figured it could easily be a felony—“and you’ve got to remember how deep that hole is. And how much that box weighs. It would take forever. One person walks by and we’re sitting in jail.”

  “Fine by me.” Pella smiled, and Schwartz knew that he had lost the argument, had lost it before it began. He ran his hand over his deepening widow’s peak, scratched his softening belly. He hadn’t worked out once since May.

  He half hoped that Owen would veto the scheme, but Owen just nodded and said, “Call Henry.”

  80

  Henry,” Owen said warmly, wrapping his slender fingers around what remained of his roommate’s biceps. “Is that you? You’re skinnier than I am.”