The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  My mother died when I was in my third year of high school. When I graduated the following year, Leander claimed to be too infirm to come to the ceremony, and when I looked down from the platform into a gathering where there were no near relatives of mine, it occurred to me—without pleasure or guilt—that I had probably not been up to bat more than three times.

  My Cousin Juliana put up the money to send me to college, and I entered college feeling that my troubles with Leander and baseball were over. Both my sisters had married by then, and gone to live in the West, and I dutifully spent part of my Christmas holiday at West Farm and planned to spend all my Easter vacation there. On the morning that college closed for the spring recess, I drove with my two roommates over to Mount Holyoke, where we picked up three girls. We were planning to have a picnic somewhere along the river. When we stopped for lunch, one of my roommates went around to the back of the car and got out his camera to take a picture of the girls. Glancing into the luggage compartment, I noticed a baseball and a bat. Everyone was around in front of the car. I couldn’t be seen. The ground was loose, and with my hands I dug a hole nearly a foot deep. Then I dropped the baseball into this hole and buried it.

  It was late when we got into Boston, and I took the last train down to St. Botolph’s. I had written Leander that I was coming, in the hope that he would not lock the house up, but when I reached there, after midnight, all the doors and windows were secured. I didn’t feel like spending the night in the barn, and I broke a windowpane in the dining room and climbed in. I could hear Leander moving around upstairs, and because I felt irritated, I didn’t call out to him. A few seconds later, there was an explosion in the room. Somebody had shot off a pistol and I thought I had been killed. I got to a switch and turned on the lights and saw, with a wild, crazy uprush of joy, that I was alive and unharmed. Then I saw Leander standing in the doorway with the pistol in his hand. He dropped it to the floor and, stumbling toward me, laid his head on my shoulder and wept. “Oh, Eben! Eben! Eben!” he sobbed. “I thought it was a prowler! I heard someone trying to get in! I heard the breaking glass. Forgive me, forgive me.”

  I remember that he was wearing a fez, and some kind of ragged and outrageous robe over his shoulders. He had, up until that year, always dressed with great simplicity and care, feeling that a sensible regard for appearances facilitated human relationships. He had always put on a dark coat for dinner, and he would never consider as acquaintances or as business associates men with grease in their hair, men with curls, men who wore pointed shoes or diamond cuff links or who put pheasant feathers in their colored hats. Age seemed to have revised these principles, and during the Easter holidays he appeared in many brilliant costumes, many of them the robes and surplices of a fraternal order that had been disbanded in the twenties. Once when I stepped into the bathroom, I found him before the full-length mirror in the ostrich-plumed hat, the cross-ribbon heavy with orders, and the ornate sword of a Poor Knight of Christ and the Temple and a Guardian of the Gates of Gaza. He often quoted from Shakespeare.

  The first job I got after leaving college was at Chatfield Academy. The school was in New Hampshire—in the mountains—and I went north in the fall. I liked teaching, and the place itself seemed oddly detached and peaceful. Chimes rang at the quarter hour, the buildings were old or copied old forms, the leaves fell past the classroom windows for a month, the nights smelled of smoke, and, leaving my classroom one evening in December, I found the air full of a swift, dry snow. The school was conservative, and at its helm was old Dr. Wareham. Robust on the playing field, tearful in chapel, bull-necked and vigorous in spite of his advanced age, he was that kind of monolithic father image that used to be thought a necessity for the education of youth. After the Easter recess, I signed a contract for the following year and arranged to teach summer school. In April, I got a notice that faculty participation in the annual meeting of the board of trustees was mandatory. I asked a man at supper one night what this meant.

  “Well, they come up on Friday,” my colleague said, “and Wareham gives them a dinner. Then they have their annual meeting. We have demonstration classes on Saturday and they snoop around, but they’re mostly intelligent and they don’t make trouble. Then Saturday noon, the old troll barbecues a side of beef and we have lunch with them. After this, there’s a ball game between the trustees and the faculty members. The new members are always expected to play, and you’d better be good. The old troll feels that men get to know one another best on the playing field, and he doesn’t miss a trick. We had a frail art teacher here a couple of years ago who claimed to have a headache, but Wareham got him out of bed and made him play third base. He made three errors and Wareham fired him. Then, after that, there’s a cocktail party at Wareham’s house, with good sour-mash bourbon for the brass and sherry for the rest of us. Then they go home.”

  The old taste of blood came into my mouth. My appetite for the meat and potatoes I had heaped onto my plate was gone. I nevertheless gorged myself, for I seemed to have been put into a position where my only recourse was to overlook my feelings or to conceal them where this was not possible. I knew by then that a thorough inspection of the history of the problem would not alter the facts, and that the best I could bring to the situation was a kind of hollow good cheer. I told myself that the game was inconsequential, and presently I seemed to feel this. There was some gossip the next day about Dr. Wareham’s seriousness about the game. The piano teacher—a tall man named Bacon—had refused to play, and somebody said that he would be fired. But I was occupied with my classwork and I nearly forgot about the annual meeting until, leaving my classroom on a Friday afternoon, I saw a large car driven by a chauffeur go around the quadrangle and stop at Dr. Wareham’s house. The trustees were beginning to arrive.

  After supper, I corrected papers until about eleven, when I went to bed. Something woke me at three in the morning, and I went to the open window and I looked out at the night for signs of rain before I realized that this was an old habit of childhood. Rain had meant that I would be free, for a day, of hiding under the field house or in the woods behind the backstop. And now, still half asleep, I turned my ear to the window, listening with the purest anxiety, colored by a kind of pleading, for the stir of rain beginning or the heavier sound of a settled storm. A single drop of water would have sounded like music. I knew from which quarter the rain wind might rise; I knew how cumbrously the wind would blow, how it would smell of wetness, how the storm, as it came west through the village, would make a distant roar, how the first drops would sound on the elm trees in the yard and the shrubs against the wall, how the rain would drum in the grass, how it would swell, how it would wet the kindling at the barbecue pit and disintegrate the paper bags that contained the charcoal, how it would confine the trustees to Dr. Wareham’s house and prevail on one or two of them to leave before the cocktail party, and how it would first fill in the slight indentation around second base and then spread slowly toward first and third, until the whole field was flooded…. But I saw only a starry and a windless night. I got back into bed and, settling for the best I had—a kind of hollow good cheer—fell asleep.

  The morning was the best kind of spring weather; even I saw this. The demonstration classes satisfied everyone, and at noon we went over to the barbecue pit to have our lunch with the trustees. The food seemed to stick in my throat, but this may have been the fault of the barbecue itself, because the meat was raw and the cooking arrangements were a disappointment all around. I was still eating my dessert when the Doctor gave the rallying cry “Into your uniforms, men!” I put down my plate and started for the field house, with the arm of a French instructor thrown warmly over my shoulder and in a cheerful, friendly crowd that seemed blamelessly on their way to recapturing, or at least to reenacting, the secure pleasures of youth. But since the hour they returned to was one that I had never possessed, I felt the falseness of my position. I was handed a uniform—a gesture that seemed unalterably to be one of parting. But it was th
e too large shoes, wrapped with friction tape, that, when I bent over to lace them, gave me the worst spasm of despair. I picked a glove out of a box near the door and jogged out to the field.

  The bleachers were full of students and faculty wives, and Dr. Wareham was walking up and down, leading them in singing to the band. The faculty members were first up, facing a formidable concentration of power and wealth in the field. The first batter got a line drive that was missed by the bank president on first and was good for a double. The second man up struck out, but the third man up reached first, and the industrialist who was pitching walked the fourth batter. I gave a yank to my cap and stepped up to the plate, working my mouth and swallowing to clean it, if I could, of the salty taste of blood. I kept my eye on the ball, and when the first pitch seemed to be coming straight over the plate, I chopped at it with all my might. I heard the crack, I felt the vibration up my forearm, and, telling myself that a baseball diamond, like most things, must operate on a clockwise principle, I sprinted for third and knocked down the runner who was coming in to score. I knocked him flat, and, bending over to see if he was all right, I heard Dr. Wareham roaring at me, “Get off the field! Get out of my sight!”

  I walked back to the field house alone. The soberness of my feeling seemed almost to verge on romantic love—it seemed to make the air I walked through heavy—as if I were sick at heart for some gorgeous raven-haired woman who had been separated from me by a convulsion of nature. I took off my uniform and stood for a long time in the shower. Then I dressed and walked back across the quadrangle, where I could hear, from the open windows of the music building, Bacon playing the Chopin preludes. The music—swept with rains, with ruins, with unrequited and autumnal loves, with here and there a passage of the purest narcissism—seemed to outrage my senses, and I wanted to stop my ears. It took me an hour or so to pack, and when I carried my bags downstairs, I could still hear the cheering from the field. I drove into the village and had the tank filled with gas. At the edge of town, I wondered what direction to take, and then I turned south, for the farm.

  It was six or seven when I got to St. Botolph’s, and I took the precaution of calling Leander before I drove out to the house. “Hello, hello, hello!” the old man shouted. “You must have the wrong number. Oh, hello, Eben…” When I got to the house, I left my bags in the hall and went upstairs. Leander was in his room. “Welcome home, Eben,” he said. “I was reading a little Shakespeare to the cat.”

  When I sat down, the arm of my chair crashed to the floor, and I let it lie there. On his thick white hair Leander still wore his fez. For clothing, he had drawn from his store of old-fashioned bathing suits one with a striped skirt. It must have been stolen, since there were some numerals stenciled on the back. He had decided some time before that the most comfortable shoes he had were some old riding boots, and he was wearing these. Pictures of lost sailboats, lost cottages, dead friends, and dogs gazed down at him from the wall. He had tied a length of string between the four wooden pineapples of his high poster bed and had hung his wash there to dry. The cat and his copy of Shakespeare were on his lap. “What are your plans?” he asked.

  “I’ve been fired,” I said. “I thought I’d leave some clothes here. I think I’ll go for a swim now.”

  “Have you any clothes I can wear?”

  “You’re welcome to anything I have. The bags are downstairs.”

  “I still swim every day,” Leander said. “Every day, that is, until the first of October. Last year I went swimming through the fifteenth—the fifteenth or the sixteenth. If you’ll wait a minute, I’ll make sure.” He got up from his chair, and, stooping a little, so the tassel of his fez hung over his brow, he walked to his journal. After consulting it, he said, “I went swimming on the fifteenth last year. I went swimming on the twenty-fifth the year before that. Of course, that was nothing to what I could do when I was younger. I went swimming on the fourth of December, the eighth of January, the second of March. I went swimming on Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, the twelfth of January, and the tenth of February…”

  After I left him to go out to the river, he went downstairs to where my bags were. An old pair of riding pants took his eye. He managed to get his legs well into them before he realized that they were too small. He tried to remove the pants and couldn’t, because his legs had begun to swell. And when he tried to stand, the pants knifed him in the tendons at the back of his knees and brought him to the floor. Halfway out in the river, I could hear him roaring for help, and I swam back to shore and ran up to the house and found him moving slowly and painfully toward the kitchen, where he hoped to find a knife and cut himself free. I cut the riding breeches off him, and we drank some whiskey together, but I left in the morning for New York.

  It was a good thing that I did leave, because I got a job the day I reached the city, and sailed three days later for Basra, to work for an oil company. I took the long voyage out on one of the company ships; it was five weeks after leaving New York that we stopped at Aden and another four days before we docked at Basra. It was hot. The flat volcanic ruins trembled in the heat, and the car that took me across the city to the oil-company settlement traveled through a maze of foul-smelling streets. The dormitory where I was to be quartered was like an army barracks, and when I reached it, in midafternoon, there was no one there but some Arabs, who helped me with my bags and told me the other men would be in after four, when the offices closed. When the men I shared the barracks with came in, they seemed pleased to see anyone newly arrived from the States, and they were full of practical information about how to make a life in Basra. “We practice baseball two or three nights a week,” one of them said, “and then on Sundays we play Shell or Standard Oil. We only have eleven men on the squad now, so if you could play outfield? We call ourselves the Infidels…”

  It was not until long after my return from Basra, long after my marriage, that Leander died, one summer afternoon, sitting in the rose garden, with a copy of Primitive Sexual Mores on his lap. The housekeeper found him there, and the local undertaker sent me a wire in New York. I did not feel any grief when I got the news. Alice and I had three children by then, and my life would not in any way be affected by Leander’s death. I telephoned my sisters, in Denver, but neither of them felt that they could come East. The next day, I drove to St. Botolph’s, and found that the undertaker had made all the arrangements. The services were to be at two. Three old cousins came out from Boston, to my surprise, and we were the only mourners. It was the kind of weather that we used to call haying weather when I lived in the valley. The fields of timothy and sweet grass had been cut, the cemetery smelled of cut hay, and while the minister was praying, I heard the sound of distant thunder and saw the daylight dim, the way the lights dim in a farmhouse during a storm. After the ceremony, I returned to the house, feeling that there would be a lot there to occupy me, but it turned out that there was not much to do. It had begun to rain. I wandered through the rooms to see if there was anything left in them. I found some whiskey. The bird cages, the three-legged tables, and the cracked soup tureens must have been refused by the junkman. I thought that there must be a will, and I went reluctantly—disconsolately, at any rate—up to Leander’s room and sat uneasily in his chair. His papers were copious and bizarre, and it took me nearly two hours to find the will. He left the house and the land to my older sister. To my other sister he left the jewelry, but this was immaterial, since all the jewelry had been sold. I was mentioned. “To my changeling son, Eben,” he wrote, “the author of all my misfortunes, I leave my copy of Shakespeare, a hacking cough…” The list was long and wicked, and although he had written it ten years earlier and although I had buried him that afternoon, I couldn’t help feeling, for a minute, that the piece of paper was evidence of my own defeat. It was dark then, and it was still raining. The whiskey bottle was empty and the unshaded electric light was baneful. The old house, which had always seemed to have an extensive life of its own, was creaking and stirring under the sl
ender weight of the storm. The feeling that in burying Leander I had resolved a sad story seemed farcical, and if my reaction to his will was evidence, the old fool had pierced the rites and ceremonies of death. I thought desperately of my family in New York, and of the rooms where my return was waited with anxiety and love, but I had never been able to build any kind of bridge from Leander’s world to the worlds where I lived, and I failed now in my efforts to remember New York. I went downstairs to telephone my wife, but the telephone was dead, and for all I knew it might have been disconnected years ago. I packed my bag, turned out the lights, threw the house key into the river, and started home.

  In the years that followed, I thought now and then about Leander and the farm, and although I had resolved to break with these memories, they both continued to enjoy the perfect freedom of my dreams; the bare halls of the house, the massive granite stoop, the rain dripping from the wooden gutters, and the mass of weeds in the garden often surrounded me while I slept. My participation in baseball continued to be painful. I drove a ball through my mother-in-law’s parlor window—and the rest of the family, who were intimidated, didn’t understand why I should feel so happy—but it was not enough to lay Leander’s ghost, and I still didn’t like old men with white hair to be at the helm of the ships I traveled on. Some years later—my oldest son was nine—I took all five boys uptown to Yankee Stadium to see their first game. It was one of the hottest days of the year. I bought my sons food, eyeshades, pennants, score cards, pencils, and souvenir pins, and I took the youngest two to the bathroom several times. Mantle was up in the sixth, with a count of three and two. He fouled three balls into the netting above the backstop and fouled the fourth straight toward where we were sitting—a little high. It was coming like a shot, but I made the catch—one-handed, barehanded—and although I thought the impact had broken some bones in my hand, the pain was followed swiftly by a sense of perfect joy. The old man and the old house seemed at last to fall from the company and the places of my dreams, and I smelled the timothy and the sweet grass again, and saw a gravedigger hidden behind a marble angel, and the smoky, the grainy light of a thunderstorm, when the clearness of the green world—the emblazoned fields—reminds us briefly of a great freedom of body and mind. Then the boys began to argue for possession of the ball, and I gave it to the oldest one, hoping that I wouldn’t have any more use for it. It would have troubled Leander to think that he would be buried in any place as distant from West Farm as Yankee Stadium, but that is where his bones were laid to rest.