Probation

by Tom Mendicino

  Threats were useless, the situation hopeless, the conclusion obvious.

  SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!

  My parents—rather, more accurately my mother with my father reluctantly in tow—packed themselves in the Chrysler and drove the three and three-quarter miles to the Throne of Solomon. Father Gillen, the parish priest, steeped a pot of tea for my mother and brought out the bottle for my father. The good padre must have sat there, hands folded around his glass, while my mother groped for words to describe “the predicament,” cautiously avoiding the obvious ones like “effeminate” and “sissified,” finally settling on “different.” They’d hoped I’d grow out of “it,” that it was just a “stage,” but I was almost ten years old and “the problem” wasn’t going away. My father wouldn’t have said more than ten words. Father Gillen had seen the world twice over through the bottom of his own whiskey glass and, clearing his throat, suggested the obvious solution.

  And so it came to pass that arrangements were made with Harrison Park Elementary School to excuse one Andrew Nocera from five days of long division and the battles of the War Between the States. My father and I drove down the coast to spend an entire week, just the two of us, in Clearwater, Florida, spring training camp for the Philadelphia Phillies. He bought a pair of red baseball caps for the trip. His rested on his head like a crown; mine was too big and slid to my ears, the visor obstructing my line of vision.

  God knows what that old priest expected to happen that week. I doubt that in his infinite wisdom he envisioned me propped on a bar stool until almost midnight, bribed with Coca-Colas and bags of potato chips, while my father relived Great Phillies Games of the Past, inning by inning, with assorted fanatics and hangers-on. During the day, we baked in the heat, my sunburn getting sunburned, staring at the field as my father read the tea leaves in the meaningless exhibition games that dragged on through the afternoon. My stomach revolted and I dropped my head and threw up the boiled hot dogs I had for lunch. The old man was flummoxed, staring helplessly as if he had never seen a sick child before, which, of course, he hadn’t, having delegated all nursing duties to my mother. A butcher’s wife from Allentown, Pennsylvania, took pity on me and wiped my mouth and cleaned my shoes.

  At night, the old man snored and farted and woke up every two hours to piss. In the morning, I stared at the red puncture scars in his armpits while he dozed. I touched them gently, afraid of hurting him. The Army, he said, when I asked where he got them. Bullets? Shrapnel?

  “No,” he snorted. “Goddamn doctors.”

  He’d been a top prospect, signed by the Phillies out of high school in 1944 to a contract with a clause requiring him to report for assignment in the club’s farm system within thirty days of military discharge. My father’s war was played in innings. Assigned to Special Services, he attained the rank of center fielder and shipped out west, California first, then on to Hawaii. The marquee names of the Great American Pastime were serving their country playing ball for Uncle Sam; career minor-leaguers and promising young kids like my father filled any holes in the rosters. The homesick troops of the Pacific theater who packed Honolulu Stadium on R&R didn’t seem to resent comrades in arms whose greatest risk was being hit by a wild pitch. A mosquito bite ended my father’s baseball career. Stricken by malaria while touring the Philippines, he spent two years in a Veterans Administration hospital, his recovery, uncertain at first, complicated by juvenile diabetes.

  “Wasn’t meant to be. No use crying over spilt milk,” he groused as he sat spread-eagled on the motel bed, injecting insulin in his thigh. Then he doctored his coffee with four packets of sugar and we split a half dozen doughnuts for breakfast before heading out for another afternoon under the blazing sun.

  And finally it was Friday night. My father was nervous as we pulled into the high school parking lot, straightening the knot in his tie in the rearview mirror. He gripped my hand as we entered the auditorium. Grown men and women in baseball jerseys were milling around the tables, engaging in serious negotiations with crew-cut reps from the trading card companies. The old man nudged me as a gent ambled by, greeting fans calling his name. Whitey Ford, he said reverently. Hey, Whitey, he hollered and Whitey turned and shook his hand.

  The line snaked around the auditorium. The old man and I took our place. A young woman with a sweet Florida drawl walked the line, issuing instructions to the faithful. No baseball cards, no bats, no gloves. Don’t use your own balls. Only the official baseball, ten dollars each, will be signed. No photographs. Please don’t try to start a conversation. Don’t ask to shake his hand.

  My father nodded obediently, memorizing the ground rules.

  The line moved quickly, but he still fidgeted, his hand deep in his pocket, slapping his keys against his leg. He pulled out a crisp twenty, enough for two pristine, snow white baseballs. And then the fat woman ahead of us stepped aside and there he sat: crisp in his navy pinstriped suit, a silver pen in his long tapered fingers, diamond chip cuff links sparkling in the harsh auditorium lights.

  “Hello,” he said, not bothering to look up.

  “Joe,” the old man said, his voice cracking, “Tony Nocera.”

  “Nice to meet you, Tony,” said the Great DiMaggio, brandishing the pen to etch his name into the first of my balls.

  “We’ve met.”

  “We have?” he asked, uninterested.

  “Special Services. Forty-four. Honolulu.”

  The Great DiMaggio looked up from the ball, mildly intrigued.

  “I fielded your line drive. You complimented my arm.”

  The Great DiMaggio smiled, not pretending to remember.

  “Your boy?” he asked, nodding at me.

  “Yessir.”

  “Looks like a ball player. Name?”

  I was speechless and the old man answered for me.

  “Andy.”

  “Last name again, paisan?”

  My father spelled it slowly and the Great DiMaggio inscribed the balls to me. We had ninety seconds to bask in the Presence before we were hustled away, the old man’s hand still extended for the handshake that wasn’t meant to be.

  Saturday we would get up at dawn for an early start. The old man’s sight wasn’t what it used to be, fucking diabetes, and he wanted to be home before dark. But we had one last night away from the watchful eye of my mother. He heaped sour cream on his baked potato and ordered two scoops of ice cream and a slab of Black Forest cake, but he seemed to chew his food without tasting it. He was distracted, a million miles away, and when the waitress was slow to bring the change, he was irritated, mumbling under his breath. I was sure I’d done something to spoil his evening, that I’d slipped up, embarrassed him. I shrank when he reached for me in the parking lot, certain he was going to reward me with one of his harmless swats for some transgression. But all he wanted to do was rub his hand on my head.

  “Tired?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, lying.

  He wasn’t interested in talking with his friends at the bar, dismissing the drunk who wanted to argue Ted Williams’s claim as the Greatest Living Ball Player. He ordered another shot and a beer to chase it. “Asshole,” he muttered. “Just another goddamn jerk running his goddamn mouth about things he doesn’t know shit about.”

  “Your teachers think you’re real smart,” he said, firing up another smoke. “Father Gillen too.”

  He told the bartender to pull him another draft and bring another Coke for his son. I sat up straight on my stool and nodded at the bartender, making sure there was no mistaking I was that son and this was my dad.

  “I bet you can be anything you want to be. A doctor. A lawyer. An engineer.”

  He ground his cigarette out in the ashtray.

  “Don’t ever let me see you pick up a baseball bat again or I’ll break both your hands.”

  It’s getting on for eleven Friday night and I’m sitting at the bar of the Carousel, again, nursing a beer, furious with Matt, angry with myself for telling him that goddamn sto
ry. I should have known that fucking priest would never understand, that he’d make some stupid comment.

  “You must have been very frightened when your father threatened you like that,” he said, expecting revelations and catharsis.

  Frustrated, mad, rejected. Those were the emotions my father could arouse, not frightened. He could pop and sputter, his face a virtual pyrotechnic display while he bellowed like a wounded ox. He might give my backside a gentle whack or drop a soft knuckle rap on my skull. Once he grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me until my eyes rolled back in my head, not because he was angry, but because he was terrified when I absorbed a brutal shock after sticking a screwdriver into an electrical outlet. But he never hit me. Not once. Never. Corporal punishment was strictly a maternal duty.

  I order another Heineken, wondering what ever happened to those goddamn baseballs. They sat on my bedside table until I left for college. I’m growing more tolerant of the ordained clergy as my blood alcohol level rises After all, Father Gillen had proven to be a sage counselor. The old man quickly forgot his prohibition when I begged to join the Gastonia Little Cherokees a few weeks after we returned from Clearwater. I threw like a girl, dropped every ball, and flailed at the plate, but not one of my teammates dared to taunt or mock me or even snicker behind my back, fearing the wrath of their fathers who gathered to watch the graceful arc of my old man’s swing as he shagged fly balls to their sons. They were awestruck by his stillness at the plate, mesmerized by his power, spellbound by the sound of one ball after another being smacked into the outfield. Bullshit, he spat, his anger startling an admirer who told him he could have been another DiMaggio.

  I never graduated to Pony League, moving on to solitary endeavors like the swimming pool and the speed bag. I grew bigger and stronger while my father slowly faded away. He looked odd in his new glasses, almost bookish; his face gradually seemed to shrink behind the ever-thickening lenses of stronger and stronger prescriptions. Eventually he couldn’t go out in the daylight without sunglasses and, finally, his driver’s license was revoked, making him dependent on my mother.

  The last time I saw him wear dress shoes was when he danced at Regina’s wedding. From then on, it was slippers and white socks until he lost his right foot to gangrene. He worked hard at his rehab, insisting he’d learn to walk without a limp or a hobble, but never succeeding before they told him they needed to take the leg below the knee. The procedure was a success. He was recovering nicely. His vital organs, battered by years of exposure to high glucose levels, had withstood the trauma better than had been expected. You’ll be in skilled nursing when I come back next weekend, I promised, the crisis over, the obligations of Tar Heel Heritage beckoning. He was sitting up in bed, leaning forward, his gown dropped to his waist. I rubbed his bare shoulders, no muscle left to massage, just flaps of loose skin that yielded under the gentle pressure of my hands. Look at that, I said, as the Phillies All-Star lefty first baseman launched a magnificent opposite field three-run bomb, dooming the Braves to their fourth loss in a row. Turn it off, he said, I want to go home. Soon, I promised. Later that night, he was restless, unable to sleep, complaining he was cold, his gown damp with sweat. He insisted the staff turn up the lights in his room, trying to keep the dark at bay, and kept calling for my mother, who was standing beside him, unable to calm and reassure him. He struggled to crawl out of bed, resisting the efforts to restrain him, trying to escape the inevitable, if only for another hour or two. He coded just before midnight.

  He was lying in the morgue when Alice and I arrived from High Point at five in the morning. My mother was about to sign the consent to the autopsy to confirm the obvious, postoperative cardiac arrest, when I ripped the form from her hands and tore it to shreds. He’s dead, he’s fucking dead. Why do you want to cut him up again? My wife and mother and sister, for once, were silent in the face of my ferocity. The night before he was buried, I wrote him a long letter, recording every minute of every day of that week in Florida. I’m sure most of it happened just as I remembered. I slipped it in the pocket of his jacket before the undertaker closed the coffin lid. When I think of him now, he’s never old, feeble, broken. He’s that magnificent animal he was when I was a boy, the man I’ll never be, able to swat a baseball a hundred, thousand, million feet, then spit in his hands and do it again, never breaking a sweat.

  “Hi. You remember me?”

  He startles me, pulling me from my sentimental reverie.

  He looks vaguely familiar. Ordinary. Could be a dozen different guys.

  “I’m Harold. We met right before Thanksgiving.”

  “Sure…sure. Hey, how you doing?” I say, determined not to be my usual rude self.

  “You’re Andy, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Can I buy you a beer?”

  “That’s great, but I really have to go. Someone’s waiting up for me,” I say.

  “Your boyfriend?” he asks, his face sagging with disappointment.

  “Believe it or not, my mother. I still have a curfew.” I laugh, a too-subtle joke at the expense of a man who’s way too old to be referring to anyone as a boyfriend.

  “Next time, then,” he says, obviously cheered by my revelation.

  “Next time. It’ll be on me.”

  Only once I’m in the car do I realize he was wearing a White Sox jersey. It comes back to me. He was the guy in the Tar Heels hoodie who gave me a chaste kiss last November. What a doofus, I think, smiling. Wonder what he’d think about my encounter with the Great DiMaggio? I’ll have to remember to tell him if I ever see him again.

  Another Diagnosis

  It sounds beautiful, the way the oncologist describes it. A warm, pulsing, living thing. Organic. Almost musical. If I were an artist, I’d draw it on a field of blue. The lymph system. Thin, pliant tubes, the body’s interstate system, a highway conveying precious lymph—colorless, watery—from spleen to tissue, from farm to market. Think of your nodes as pit stops along the way, bustling with activity, generating cells, an arsenal for the war against infection.

  My mind wanders. Why haven’t I ever seen lymph? Cut your finger, you get blood. What happens to lymph when that same paring knife severs a lymph vessel? Where does it go?

  Blood also has a verb. Bleed.

  Lymph is only a noun. No one ever asks if you’re lymphing.

  I’ve never heard of anyone lymphing to death.

  It’s a mystery, this lymph. To you, to me, to my mother. But not to the trained eye of the pathologist peering into the microscope, classifying the node cells harvested in the biopsy into a familiar pattern.

  The lymph node shows a diffuse lymphocytic infiltrate with occasional residual nonneoplastic germinal centers. The lymphocyctic infiltrate is composed of small cells with scant cytoplasm and irregular, cleaved nuclei (hematoxylin-eosin 40x, x 400 and Wright-Geimsa x 1000).

  Wow. Dig that crazy medical lingo, Maynard G. Krebs. Sounds cool to me.

  But not to the oncologist reading the report. Not from the look on her face, the slight knotting of her eyebrows.

  Lymphoma, she says. Pretty word, I think, meant to be modified by adjectives like languorous or lazy, nice phonetic matches, synonyms of indolent. Indolent lymphoma. All we need to do is Watch and Wait. Odds are better of being killed in a car wreck or a terrorist attack than succumbing to your mutant cells. Right?

  Sorry, the oncologist says, the cell pattern indicates adult lymphoblastic lymphoma.

  I don’t think I like what all those syllables imply.

  An aggressive lymphoma, she explains.

  Uh-oh. Aggressive. Rapid action. Carnivorous cells attacking poor, defenseless tissue with their sharp little teeth. Snip, bite, chew, spit. How much have they already eaten? What’s left?

  The oncologist asks the receptionist to bring in coffee. There’s Danish left from the morning staff meeting. Please, help yourself. We’re having a tea party, the oncologist, my mother, and me. The doctor slips her stockinged feet out of her pumps. It
’s all so cozy in here.

  Staging. That’s the next step, she says. Determine the spread. Let’s start with some bloods, draw a little bone marrow, order a CT scan to get a peek inside the body. Now, depending on the results, we may have to consider a laparotomy to…

  My mother twitches, a reflex. She must have misheard. She thinks the doctor said lobotomy. No, I assure her. Or maybe I misheard.

  …that’s actually a surgical procedure. We make an incision in the belly so we can get to the internal organs. We take little snips to view under the microscope. Not likely we’ll have to go that far. The bloods and marrow hopefully will be sufficient and it won’t be necessary.

  The early reviews come in. It’s necessary.

  So we pack a little bag, just enough for a night or two, maybe three, and I whisk her away to the hospital.

  Should I call my sister? She knows nothing yet. What if my mother dies on the table? What if she never wakes up from the anesthesia? Regina will never forgive me for denying her the opportunity to participate in the death watch, to share the ritual.

  But wait a minute. It’s just a test. Just a little exploration, just harvesting a few clippings for the laboratory. My mother will be home in a few days, her biggest worry being the new tinkle in her car engine and whether she remembered to turn off the sprinkler.

  But she’s got it.

  That much we do know.

  Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

  It’s just a question of how far it’s gone.

  And now we know it’s gone far enough that they need to slice open her belly to determine the spread.

  My sister has a right to know.

  No, my mother says, no need for her to worry yet. Let’s not give it to her in dribs and drabs. I’ll tell her when I know everything there is to know.