Though I’d never smoked in front of him before, that morning I took the cigarette from Jake’s fingers and inhaled deeply as we watched King teach Albert how to handle a baseball. Their two faces were cheek to jowl, as if dancing a tango. I saw Albert’s eyes close, for just a moment, as he tilted his head back against King’s shoulder. King pursed his lips and kissed Albert’s temple. It happened so fast I doubted Jake had noticed. But there was no misunderstanding the joy on Albert’s face as his eyes blinked back open.
Jake pressed his handkerchief into my hand. “Don’t fret, Helen. I’ll tell Huggins to leave him in Missouri if you think he’s still a risk.”
They separated, jogging away from each until they both turned, like opponents in a duel—except, instead of bullets, a baseball traveled the distance between them. It sailed easily through the air now, each soft toss followed by a sweet catch. “Couldn’t you trade him away somewhere?”
“Why, you don’t think sending him back to Kansas City will be enough?”
My mouth didn’t open. There were no words I could be accused of saying. But I knew what I was doing as I shook my head from side to side.
“I seem to recall one of our scouts had his eye on a player with the San Francisco Seals. I suppose we could arrange a trade.”
California. I’d once hoped the state would be distant enough for me to start a new life. Now, I only hoped it would be far enough to keep King away. “The Pacific Coast League plays a long season, doesn’t it?”
“Over two hundred games a year.” Jake put his hand on the back of my neck, bowing my head. He placed a single kiss on my crown. “I’ll tell Huggins to make the trade.”
We stayed in the window seat together, my head on Jake’s shoulder, watching Albert and King have a catch. If Claire had seen us like that she never would have believed we weren’t lovers. But the man I loved was down there on the grass, his heart a plaything in my hands.
1939
Chapter 39
The only sounds in the bedroom of Jake’s Manhattan apartment were the thin hiss of the oxygen tank and the soft rustle of newsprint. Through the plastic window of the therapeutic tent, Jake’s face was so pale and slack I wondered how we’d know the difference when he died. Albert and I sat beside the bed, leafing through the paper, looking for a story we thought he might like to hear. Not that we could tell if he could hear us anymore. He’d been drifting in and out of consciousness since yesterday, when the priest gave him last rites and Dr. Schwerdtfeger warned us the end was imminent. They’d done all they could for him at Lenox Hill Hospital to treat the phlebitis in his blood. The only thing left, the doctor had said, was to make him comfortable at home, among his family and friends.
For the moment we had the room to ourselves. The nurse was eating her lunch in the kitchen with Jake’s cook. George Ruppert had gone out to telephone Jake’s nieces and nephews. I wasn’t sure where in the sprawling apartment Mr. Nakamura had gotten to, but experience taught me he’d materialize the moment he was needed.
I turned the pages of the New York Times, but nothing in the news that day seemed appropriate. Jake was upset enough about the state of affairs in Germany. He wouldn’t want to hear about Jewish refugees stranded in Czecho-Slovakia or Neville Chamberlain’s trip to Rome to appease Mussolini. Displaced Negro sharecroppers protesting along the highways of Missouri was no sickroom story. There was the news out of Washington—Congress’s vote to cut funding for the Works Progress Administration, the Senate’s filibuster of antilynching legislation—but Jake had stopped following politics months ago. “How about the preparations for the World’s Fair in the Bronx?”
Albert shook his head. I realized it would be cruel to speak of something Jake would never live to see. He pointed to a different article. “Read about Lincoln Ellsworth’s flight over Antarctica. The Colonel always wished he could go on that kind of adventure.”
“Oh yes, he’ll like that.” If it had been up to Jake, he’d have set out himself across the ice to rescue Admiral Byrd from his lonely outpost. As it was, he’d had to settle for funding the expedition. The closest Jacob Ruppert had ever come to Antarctica was when the supply ship they’d named after him delivered its load of dogs and equipment to Little America. Throughout the 1930s, he could never tear himself away from the Yankees long enough to go to Europe, let alone to the bottom of the world. He’d sponsored expeditions across the globe, but in all his seventy-one years, Jake had never so much as gotten his passport stamped.
A twitch of his eyelids was the only sign he heard us. Albert finished reading the article while I opened the curtains. Across the street in Central Park, bare tree branches made a dark pattern against the gray January sky. It seemed heartless to me that the traffic along Fifth Avenue continued to flow as if a life were not about to end fourteen stories above. Albert joined me at the window. “Think it will snow?”
“The weatherman on the radio is predicting it.” I hadn’t heard Mr. Nakamura come in. He was exchanging the untouched water glass on Jake’s nightstand for a fresh one. “Babe Ruth is on his way up.”
“Really?” I was surprised. Jake hadn’t spoken to Babe since he’d unceremoniously traded him away to the Braves. “I thought he was still in the hospital.”
“He was released this morning, I believe. Colonel Ruppert’s brother took the call.”
Indeed, at that moment George Ruppert entered, accompanied by the nurse, who worried the room would be too crowded once Babe arrived. “We’ll go,” Albert volunteered, but George caught his arm. He wanted Albert to stay, in case he had to step out to welcome his nieces, who were expected any minute. “We’ll need a witness to give the reporters a quote, if Jake says anything to Ruth. But, Helen, perhaps you wouldn’t mind waiting in the library?”
“Of course not.” During the months Jake had been ailing, I’d gotten used to being shunted off to the library whenever his nieces or nephews or sister came to visit. Jake had long ago explained his preference for keeping his family and his employees separate. In all the years, his brother George was the only relative I’d spoken to directly. I went to the bedside and reached under the oxygen tent to take Jake’s swollen hand, gently stroking the knotted veins. I told him I’d be back soon. I felt a slight pressure as he attempted to grip my fingers. The weakness of the gesture broke my heart. I fled to the library, temporarily blinded by my tears.
I spent the next half hour alone with Jake’s aging Boston terrier. Her hearing was diminished and her eyes were clouded with cataracts, but sensing my presence she stepped out of her basket and teetered toward me on stiff little legs. I lifted her onto my lap. She made me miss my Pip, dead seven years now. Jake had offered me another one of Princess’s progeny, but I’d refused. My sweet Pip was irreplaceable.
The cook brought me a sandwich, which I shared with the dog, her appetite unaffected by her age. It was no wonder Babe wanted to see Jake so urgently, I thought. Healing the rift between the two men would erase a sour footnote to Babe’s legacy. I suspected it had been Claire’s idea rather than his own. She always did have a keen instinct for appearances, especially since becoming Mrs. Ruth. Babe’s daughter, Dorothy, had luckily been away at boarding school when his first wife was killed in that house fire. Along with Claire’s daughter, the four of them were now the very picture of a happy household. Dorothy still had no idea that the family friend who occasionally visited was her real mother.
I put the dog back in her basket and crossed the library. There weren’t many books, but the shelves were heavy with porcelain vases and bronze sculptures and silver-framed photographs. I examined the pictures one by one. Jake’s parents at Linwood decades ago. Jake as a young man, handsome and dashing. The Ruppert children lined up by a Christmas tree lit with candles. It must have been taken around 1880, I thought, estimating Jake’s age to be twelve or thirteen, his face recognizable across all the years. Of the three sisters and two brothers posing with him, only two were still alive. Their brother Frank had died of typhoid years ago, and their siste
r Anna had recently passed. Then, of course, there was Cornelia. Though her face in the photograph was only the size of my fingernail, there was a familiar line to her mouth and jaw. I rummaged through the frames and was surprised to find what I thought for a second was a photograph of myself. But no, it wasn’t me, but rather another woman posed in a similar way to that portrait I’d had done when I was in drama school.
“You won’t believe what happened.” George came into the library and dropped into a chair. “I never thought I’d hear my brother’s voice again, but he actually opened his eyes and said ‘Babe.’ I don’t know how he managed it. Anyway, Ruth has gone to give his story to the papers.” He saw the photograph in my hands and grew pale. “Cornelia. You remind me of her sometimes, Helen. It’s the great regret of our lives, the way our parents reacted when Cornelia ran off with Franko. Jake was devastated to lose her.”
I sat on the ottoman near his feet. “Tell me about her.”
How she died I already knew, though George’s telling added pathos to the story. She’d insisted on marrying Nahan Franko, a divorced Jew, over her parents’ absolute opposition. He’d even converted to Catholicism, George said, but still their parents refused to attend the wedding or so much as speak to their daughter once she became his wife. It frightened them all, especially Jake, to see their sister shunned. Only when she was on her deathbed did their parents relent, but by then it was too late.
I said that Jake had told me her appendix burst. George nodded. “She’d been operated on just the day before. Jake never had the chance to see our sister alive again. Our parents were so remorseful they bribed a gravedigger to exhume her body from the plot Franko had chosen, so she could be buried near our family.” He took the photograph from my hands and gazed at it. “The Bachelor Circle used to host an annual ball at the Liederkranz Society. Jake would always take Cornelia. I’ll never forget watching them dance together. They were the two most beautiful people in the entire ballroom.” He handed the picture back to me. I wouldn’t have said beautiful, exactly, but there was character in her face.
When Albert came in, George got to his feet. “Why don’t you two go home for a while, get some rest. I doubt there will be any change tonight.”
Albert wanted to stay, we both did, but there was no denying the exhaustion we each felt. It was late in the evening by the time we left. Albert said no one would gossip if I slept at his apartment, given the circumstances, but I’d promised my mother I’d come home to update her on Jake’s condition. Albert hugged me for a long time while the doorman went out to hail a taxi.
“I don’t know what happens next, Helen. What will we do without him?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, darling.”
By the time I got home, my hands were so cold my mother insisted on making me a mug of chocolate. We sat together on the couch, our shoes off and our legs tucked up under us. “Did you know about Cornelia Ruppert, Mom?”
“Oh yes, that all happened while I was working at Linwood.” I imagined my mother back then, her blond hair pinned up, a prim uniform snug around her tiny waist. If I’d been casting the role of housemaid, I would have rejected her as too pretty for the part. “They were all up at Linwood when Cornelia ran off to get married. Not one of the siblings was permitted to attend. It upset Jake terribly. I know because I was serving dinner when he and his father had a fight. Jake wanted to be the one to give his sister away, since their father refused, but he threatened to cut Jake off, too, if he so much as sent a bouquet. A year later she was dead.” My mother gazed into her mug of chocolate, as if reading tea leaves. “Poor Jake. He was inconsolable. That summer she died was the last I worked at Linwood.”
I slept on the couch, wanting to be near the telephone in case Albert called. As I closed my eyes, I thought about the ways in which our losses held us in such thrall. The death of my father thirty years ago had done more to shape me than the lifelong companionship of my mother. Jake had obviously been capable of love. He could have married, had children, hosted family holidays at Eagle’s Rest rather than business receptions. Instead he’d kept his heart close all his life, unwilling to risk another hurt as devastating as the loss of his sister.
Chapter 40
I stretched out on the sofa in my shirtsleeves and trousers, jacket and shoes at the ready. Though I wanted desperately to be holding the Colonel’s hand when he took his last breath, I welcomed George’s suggestion of sleep. I was still unnerved by Babe Ruth’s excitement over his dying words. “He said my name, he called me Babe. You heard it, didn’t you, Albert?” I told him I did, though it was little more than a bleat, the sound he made. He could have been saying anything, but it didn’t matter. Babe was happy, the newspapers would love it, and the Colonel always did appreciate good publicity.
After Babe walked out with the Colonel’s brother, I’d sent the nurse away, too, saying I needed a moment with him in private. I was hoping he’d have saved some consciousness for me, but as I lifted the therapeutic tent and crawled in beside him, he seemed to have fallen into a coma. My lungs relaxed in the oxygen-rich air. I smoothed the white hair back from his forehead and stroked his sunken cheeks. I murmured in his ear the words I’d never taken the chance to say, not in the twenty years we’d been together. Because we had been together, he and I, in our own way. We were more to each other than employer and secretary, more even than friends. We’d never been lovers—that one kiss he’d placed on my eye had never been repeated—and yet we had been in a kind of love. I put into words, for the first time, what each of us had known silently all along. That we were alike, he and I. Two of a kind. We’d kept each other’s secrets, and for the sake of everything we’d shared, I assured him that his would remain safe with me as long as I lived. I kissed his dry lips. Though it had been days since he last ate, I would have sworn I tasted a trace of peppermint.
When George suggested Helen and I get some rest, I’d asked her to stay with me, but she’d promised to go home to her mother. I hugged her close before she left, uncertain of what would become of us. For so long, we had orbited around the Colonel like moons around the sun. I didn’t know what we’d do once his light burned out. Helen said we’d cross that bridge when we came to it, and I supposed she was right. Tomorrow would arrive one way or another.
Tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep. I reached for a book and was disgusted to see I’d picked up that copy of Mein Kampf I’d borrowed from the library. I hadn’t wanted to pay for the horrid thing but it seemed important to know what Hitler had planned for Europe. Because Chamberlain was living in a dream if he thought Hitler would be satisfied with a slice of Czecho-Slovakia and the Sudetenland. At least, that’s what Felix said.
I’d contacted him last fall, when the Colonel instructed me to arrange a fund-raiser to support the German Jewish refugees. It felt good to work with Felix again. When we met to plan the event, for a moment I wondered if he’d taken up with a very young man until he introduced the sixteen-year-old with him as Aaron, his son. I shook his hand, ashamed of my assumption. There had been no other children, I learned, this one boy bearing all the burden of his parents’ expectations. I hoped he had the strength for it.
We organized a charity exhibition game at Yankee Stadium that raised thousands of dollars for the Joint Distribution Committee. I thought he’d simply turn over the money, but Felix insisted on traveling to Paris himself to deliver it to their headquarters. His wife had expected him home in a month’s time, but then there’d been that terrible violence in Berlin, the Kristallnacht the German papers called it, and Felix stayed on to facilitate visas for the Jews clamoring to get out of Germany. I could only imagine the strain he was under. Shouldering the responsibility for relocating a thousand orphans had led to his last collapse. How would he withstand the onslaught of hundreds of thousands of desperate people?
I closed Hitler’s book, unread yet again, but there was no muting the news pouring out of Germany. Hateful speeches at every torch-waving rally. Prie
sts arrested, Jews rounded up, politicians murdered, pansies carted off to concentration camps as if their mere existence was dangerous to the Reich. What would King think of his beloved Berlin now? I wondered.
I’d last written to King back in 1933 after reading about the raid on that institute he’d told me about. It had been ages since we’d last corresponded. There’d been a flurry of letters after he was traded to San Francisco, plans for a holiday visit that never materialized. We spoke long-distance a couple of times, but I never knew where to call him. The Pacific Coast League had their players on the road practically year-round and I missed more calls than the operator was able to connect. Eventually I stopped expecting to hear his voice at the other end of the line when I answered the telephone. Weeks turned into months, and before I knew it a year had passed, then two, then ten. I was certain he’d found other companionship. In any place they played, there was sure to be some small-town pansy desperate to catch the eye of a man like King.
Back when Huggins was planning to trade him away, I’d reminded the Colonel of that long-ago day at the Polo Grounds when he’d wished Huggins could find him a strapping player like King. “You know I never interfere in those decisions, Kramer,” was all the Colonel said. I never brought it up again.
It hardly mattered. I was too old now to attract a man with a glance. Besides, it wasn’t safe out on the streets of New York anymore. There’d been a couple of years, after the stock market collapse, when performers like Jack suddenly became all the rage. Speakeasies competed to feature pansy acts, and Jacqueline had moved uptown to a swanky club with a grand piano and a proper stage. The Pansy Craze, as they called it, lasted only a couple of years, but Jack earned enough to retire by the time the police, needing something to do once Prohibition was lifted, started cracking down on immorality. I reminded myself to give Jack a call. Paul said he was like a bouquet of roses left to dry in a vase—still lovely, in a way, but withered and without fragrance.
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