The Might-Have-Been

by Joe Schuster

  The driver shifted the cab into gear and began to edge away from the curb, but Julie said, “Wait,” and he stopped. She rolled down her window.

  “I’m—” he said, trying to figure out how to explain the crazy woman he had encountered, her sad, sad story and how he had felt sorry for her. It was nearly true—or was a kernel in a much more complicated truth. But she cut him off.

  “I am going to say this and then I want you to never call me again.” She raised her hands, palms up as if she were pushing something away from herself. “I have been through hell ever since I found out. I wasn’t going to call. I wasn’t going to call. Then I called. And called. And you never called back. Not fucking once. I was just going to decide on my own. End it? Keep it?

  “My dad. I will never forget telling him. Waiting in our living room for him to come home, knowing what I had to tell him. I was his little girl and I was going to disappoint him.” She paused. Edward Everett realized the cab’s meter was running. Through the open window, he could hear it ticking off the fare. He glanced at it. Eighty-five cents, ninety-five. “He said you had a right to know before I—” She shrugged. “I was going to send you a letter but I thought, I had no idea when you would get it. My dad gave me plane fare. He—” She shook her head, fighting tears. “ ‘It’s okay,’ you were going to say. All the way here, that’s what I heard you say. ‘It will be okay.’ ” She shook her head. “I’m going to leave now and I don’t want you to call me or try to see me.”

  “What are you—”

  “Going to do?”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Can’t you at least tell me when—”

  “No,” she said. “You don’t get to know. Not anymore.” She tapped the headrest of the seat in front of her and made a gesture to the driver: Go on.

  “Wait,” Edward Everett said, but there was an opening in the flow of traffic and the cab pulled away from the curb.

  He became aware that people had been watching: the family of seven, the woman with the lion’s-head cane, the attendant at the valet parking podium. He hobbled back toward the hotel, where a bellhop held the door for him, giving him a curt nod.

  Upstairs, the door to his room was locked and he realized that he had left the key on the dresser. He knocked. “Estelle?” he called, but there was no answer. “Estelle,” he said louder, but she still didn’t answer. He hobbled to the hall where the elevators were. Someone had propped the broken table against the wall, where it leaned unsteadily on its three remaining legs. The courtesy phone sat on the floor beside it. He picked up the receiver and dialed “0” and asked the person who answered to please send someone up to his room. He’d locked himself out.

  When the bellhop let him in and then left, he could see that Estelle was gone. She had made up the bed and his suitcase sat beside it, snapped closed, none of his clothing in evidence. On the table beside the bed, he found a piece of hotel stationery with the single word scrawled on it: “Sorry.”

  He sat on the bed for a moment, trying to think what to do. When he got to the airport, he had intended to buy a ticket to fly on to Columbus. He thought: I should fly to Springfield instead, find Julie, tell her the entire story of sad sad sad Estelle. Bring her flowers. Every day. Court her. He remembered the afternoon they’d sat in the church when Julie had pushed him through the throngs just after the Olympics left town. She’d done so much for him, both when she came to Montreal and when they were seeing each other in Springfield. Once, as he was about to leave on a road trip, he’d told her that he hated the long bus rides and she’d brought him a gift at the ballpark just before the team shoved off. It was four-fifteen in the morning and he had been surprised to see her standing beside the team bus, holding a grocery sack. The rest of the team had chided him. “No broads on the bus,” someone said. “Are you going to share?” someone else said. Julie had blushed and handed him the bag. He gave her a quick kiss and didn’t open the bag until the bus was under way. In it, he found a paperback murder mystery, a box of snack crackers and a package of salted peanuts. Sitting in his hotel in Montreal, he realized he had forgotten to acknowledge the gift. And now she was pregnant. With his son or daughter. He picked up the phone, dialed the desk and asked for a bellhop to come to his room to help him with his bag.

  When he stood to limp across the room to retrieve his crutches, his right leg went out from under him. He had used up whatever strength he had in it chasing after Julie. He sat on the floor until the bellhop knocked.

  “You’ll need to unlock it,” he shouted, not sure the bellhop could hear him through the door. “You’ll have to—” But the bellhop had heard and opened the door.

  “Can you …” Edward Everett said, nodding toward his crutches leaning in the corner near the door.

  At the airport, when the taxi let him out, he asked a baggage checker at the curb for a wheelchair. He couldn’t go to Springfield like this, he knew. How could he? He couldn’t even get around on his own; he needed physical therapy. He took his ticket out of his breast pocket and consulted it. “Gate 22-B,” he said to the baggage checker.

  He’d go home, get healthy. Spring training was nearly half a year off—time to heal, to learn to walk again, to run without pain, to get in shape. He would heal and then he would go to Springfield, find Julie—right after Christmas, he promised himself. Soon after the first of the year at the latest. She would be large with the baby then.

  If she kept it, he realized. If she kept it.

  Chapter Eight

  The next June, he drove to an Indians tryout camp in Cleveland, booking a room in a Holiday Inn a few blocks from the stadium. It was an extravagance. He had less than six hundred dollars to his name and the three days and two nights in the city would consume a third of it. But he knew the less expensive places would be near the highway and the constant thrum of traffic would keep him awake. He saw this as a last chance: if they gave him a contract, it wouldn’t be for the majors, but no worse than double-A, six hundred a month and within shouting distance of the big club if he played well and found some luck—an injury up the line, a trade, a manager who wanted to shake things up.

  He had hoped his room would have a view of the stadium but it didn’t; it was on the second floor, overlooking the littered roof of the parking garage. A convention of optometrists was in town and nearly every room within a mile radius of the city center was booked; he was able to get the one he did only because the hotel had a cancellation. “It’s a sad story,” the clerk said, taking his reservation two days earlier. “They were coming for their sixtieth anniversary but the gentleman was hospitalized.”

  “For what?” Edward Everett asked.

  “I’m not certain,” the clerk said. “Is that Y-E-A-T-S?”

  Although the anniversary couple had canceled their reservation, guest services clearly hadn’t gotten the word. When Edward Everett checked in, three vases holding five dozen roses sat on the bureau, a card stuck among the flowers: To my Gloria, all my love, Jasper. Beside them, a bottle of 1961 Grand Dom champagne chilled in an ice bucket. He considered calling the clerk, letting her know it was there, but didn’t. If he got a contract, he could take it home, celebrate. It struck him: if he didn’t get a contract, he might just drink it to toast the end of his days in baseball.

  He left a six a.m. call. The tryouts began at nine but he wanted to get to the stadium early; show them that he was willing to do whatever it took to get back into the game. When the desk clerk phoned to wake him, he ordered a bagel and grapefruit and gave the bellhop who brought it a five-dollar tip on a two-and-a-half-dollar expense. He was not much more than a kid: short, skinny, wearing an ill-fitting uniform, the jacket cuffs swallowing half his palms. Edward Everett thought he’d be surprised by the tip, appreciative, but he only glanced at the bill and left without a word. No matter, Edward Everett thought. It was about aligning the stars in his favor.

  When he arrived at the stadium shortly after eight, already a dozen or
fifteen players were running sprints across the right field grass or playing toss. In the right field bullpen, two pitchers warmed up, their throws smacking the catchers’ mitts with a sharp snap.

  In the shade of the home dugout, a stout older man in a Cleveland Indians polo shirt sat in a folding chair behind a card table, and Edward Everett went over to register. As he filled out his form, he glanced at those from the other players, lying loose on the table. So many were younger than he was, he realized with a sinking heart: eighteen, seventeen, twenty-one. He considered shaving five years but didn’t. If they signed him, they’d find out his true age soon enough. He handed the form back to the man, who gave it a quick glance, flicking his finger against the box that Edward Everett had checked: “Professional experience.”

  “Release?” the man said, snapping his fingers and holding out his hand without even bothering to look up. Edward Everett felt color rising in his neck and unzipped his equipment bag where he’d stowed his wallet, fished it out and found the letter he’d folded into it: the notice the Cardinals had sent him saying they were letting him go, that he was no longer their property. It was an absurd document, he thought, as he passed it to the man: less than a quarter of a page, a single-typed sentence:

  “The St. Louis Cardinals National Baseball Club hereby grants Edward E. Yates his full and unconditional release.”

  His name was not even typed, but scrawled in ink above a blank line in the text, in handwriting that appeared to be that of someone in a hurry, his first name rendered as a capital “E,” a lowercase “d,” and then a squiggled line. The signature of whoever sent the letter was not even an actual signature but rubber-stamped and smeared.

  The man gave just a twitch of his eyes in the direction of the paper, as if he had seen hundreds of them, and then thrust it back toward Edward Everett and mumbled something that took Edward Everett a moment to decipher: “Guwuhma.” Go warm up.

  “Yes, sir,” Edward Everett said, and stepped out of the dugout onto the field in search of someone to play catch with.

  The release had come in the mail on the day after Christmas. He was carrying out the holiday garbage—a trash can overflowing with torn wrapping paper and the carcass of the turkey his mother had cooked for dinner the day before—when the postal truck pulled to the curb. The mail carrier gave him a honk and a wave out the window and then held the mail aloft for Edward Everett. “I think you’re gonna wanna see this one,” he said, waving a business envelope in the air. They had been classmates, Edward Everett and the carrier, Geoff Symons. “It’s from the Cardinals,” Symons said, opening the door. He was vastly overweight and thrust himself out of the truck only with a great effort, then waddled to the curb with the mail in his hand, the letter from the Cardinals on top. “What’re they offerin’ this year? A hundert grand, I’m guessin’.”

  Edward Everett felt his head go light when he saw the envelope. Contracts came in thick manila envelopes, but only one thing came from the team in a thin business envelope. He took the mail from Symons dumbly and walked back inside.

  “Ain’t you gonna open it?” he was aware of Symons calling after him, but went on into the house. “Man, you’re going to have one great-ass season.”

  “What on earth are you doing?” his mother asked. She was rehanging the ornaments the cat had knocked off the tree and he only then became aware that he was still holding the trash can, canted at an angle so that daubs of dressing and cranberry sauce oozed onto the carpet. He set the trash can down and stared at the mess he’d made.

  “Oh, my God,” his mother said. “Someone died. Who died?”

  “I did,” he said.

  By then, he was nearly fully healthy, walking without pain. When he ran, he was still conscious of the fragility of his joint, though: doing laps at the high school track, his knee was often stiff and he could hear disconcerting pops. He had yet to test it completely, running full-out, but he knew he would have to get past his fear if he was to play again: speed had been his greatest asset, compensating for his shortfalls—it added points to his average because it gave him eight or ten more hits in a season than someone slower might have, and that was the difference between batting .300-something and .280-something; without power, .280 didn’t get you noticed, but .300 did.

  He called Hoppel, certain someone in a rush had copied a wrong name onto the letter. It would turn out to be something they laughed about. Frame it, kid, Hoppel would say. The letter will be as famous as “Dewey Defeats Truman” someday.

  Hoppel’s wife answered the phone. He couldn’t remember her name: “M” something. Madeline. Martha. She was large-boned and lacked what Edward Everett’s mother would call “polish”: her voice was gruff and her movements awkward. On the one occasion Hoppel brought her to the clubhouse, he seemed to show her off as if she were a great prize of a woman. Some of the team was undressed, coming out of the shower, wet towels draped over their shoulders, but she gave them no mind. “Hell,” she snapped as one of them—a young black kid who played second base—darted back into the shower when he saw her, “ain’t nothin’ I ain’t seen before.”

  “Yeah?” she said into the phone now, as if challenging whoever called. When Edward Everett asked to talk to Hoppel, she shouted, without taking the receiver away from her mouth. “Hop? Hop?”

  “What is it?” Hoppel said when he picked up. In the background, Edward Everett could hear voices: loud laughter and the squeal of a baby.

  “It’s—” Edward Everett started to say, but Hoppel interrupted him.

  “Hang on.” To someone in the background, he yelled, “I ain’t done with that plate yet. Leave it.”

  It was obvious that Edward Everett had interrupted a family meal, Hoppel and his children and grandchildren.

  “Sorry to bother you, Skip,” Edward Everett said.

  “Who is this?”

  “Yates,” he said.

  “Yates?” Hoppel said as if he were trying to place him.

  “Double E,” he said, hating the nickname as he said it, as if he were a pair of shoes for some large man.

  “What’s goin’ on?”

  “I got this letter—” he began.

  “Those fuckers,” Hoppel said.

  “Yeah, I thought it was a mistake,” he said, thinking that Hoppel was going to say the letter was meant for someone else or at least curse the team for cutting him loose, but Hoppel went on: “Christmas. They send those things out at Christmas. Christ.”

  Edward Everett felt a stone in his stomach. “It’s not—”

  “Look, here’s my advice. Go sell straw or whatever the fuck it is guys sell in whatever neck of the woods you’re from. Indiana, right?”

  “Ohio.”

  “Ohio, Indiana, whatever. Go sell straw or whatever. Tell guys stories. Civilians eat that shit up. If you can’t think of a story, make one up. You’ll sell a lot of straw.”

  “Straw?” Edward Everett said dumbly.

  “Straw. Tractors. Pitchforks. It don’t matter a crap.”

  “Are you saying—”

  “Hey,” Hoppel shouted. “Leave my fucking plate alone.” He hung up and Edward Everett looked at the phone in his hand for a moment before he replaced it in the cradle. He’d expected Hoppel at least to say that the team had made a mistake; that Edward Everett would surely hook up with another organization. It was as if, now that he was dead to the team, he was dead to Hoppel as well.

  Chapter Nine

  He didn’t sell straw, or tractors or pitchforks, but he did sell flour. His father’s brother, Stan, repped for a mill in Steubenville and Edward Everett went to work for him shortly after the start of the new year. At first, his job consisted primarily of getting into his uncle’s Cadillac at five-fifteen every morning, Monday through Friday, and riding with him as he made his rounds of the restaurants, groceries and bakeries in the valley.

  His uncle was a beefy man, less than five-foot-six, and so big-bellied that, after he yanked himself behind the steering wheel, he could
barely reach the accelerator. When he drove, he was frantic, constantly moving, scratching his cheek, picking his nose with his right pinkie, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, smoking. In the car, at least, he rarely finished the sentences he began:

  “John Roberts is the purchasing …” “Christ, I …” “Can you reach …?”

  Despite that, Edward Everett was soon able to pick up on what he meant: John Roberts is the purchasing agent at the supermarket in Oriole. Christ, I hate this song (stabbing an angry finger at the selector button to change the station). Can you reach back and grab afresh pack of cigarettes from the carton on the backseat?

  His uncle smoked constantly, often lighting one cigarette from another, flicking the spent butt out his window. More than once, it bounced back into the car, landing in his lap, and his uncle would bat frantically at it to knock it to the floor, taking his eyes off the road, the car weaving madly from the shoulder to across the center line. Edward Everett was certain he would be dead by March.

  In the offices of supermarket purchasing agents or the owners of mom-and-pop bakeries, his uncle was a different man, however. He kept a metal file card box perched on the backseat and, before going in for a meeting, he flipped through the cards until he found the one that corresponded with the person they were meeting. On each, in surprisingly delicate handwriting, his uncle had made careful notes about the names of wives, the health of parents, the school activities of children, along with symbols that reminded him of changes he needed to make in his attire: tie, no tie; jacket, no jacket; pinkie ring, no pinkie ring. He’d glance at the card, spritz Binaca onto his tongue, yank himself out of the Cadillac and toddle inside for the appointment. There, in offices or industrial-sized kitchens, he was friendly and solicitous, flirty with the women, no matter how old, how attractive. To some of the men, he would relate a dirty joke but, outside in the car, he would say, “Christ, if Margaret,” shaking his head. Christ, if Margaret knew I told jokes like that, she’d have me going to confession seven days a week.