Teddy closed his eyes, breathed, breathed again. Head bowed, he no longer saw the manager or the worn carpet or the dark windows and faded posters of Major League Collectibles. Instead, he saw the top shelf at Third Base in Cooperstown, where he’d built his collection: a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle, rookie card; a mint 1916 Babe Ruth, issued when the Babe was still with the Red Sox; a shoeless Joe Jackson and a rookie Joe DiMaggio; an autographed Jackie Robinson and a limited-edition Roberto Clemente.
On the second shelf were the living Hall of Famers, former players who returned to Cooperstown every year for Hall of Fame Weekend, with its free meals, cocktail hours at the Otesaga hotel, golf and tennis matches at the country club, and shooting the shit with one another about old times. Some of these guys looked good, strong and tall, and you knew they could still hit the wall, could still throw an eighty-mile-an-hour fastball if they wanted to. And some were getting old.
When Teddy was ten, he’d gone with his father to the country-club tennis courts to watch Ted Williams—one of Teddy’s namesakes, the other his dead uncle George—rally with his son, John Henry. It wasn’t a competition, but Ted Williams kept slicing it and lobbing it until John Henry was throwing his racket and kicking up the Har-Tru. It was a cloudy day and when the thunder started the other players packed it in, but the Splendid Splinter wouldn’t call it. Then the rain came and John Henry took off for the parking lot and didn’t look back.
For a few seconds, Ted Williams was alone on Court 4 in the rain, a white towel around his neck, and he looked lost, an old man, but then Teddy’s dad had struck like lightning and the next thing Teddy remembered his father’s hero was riding shotgun in their station wagon, Teddy in the backseat behind him. No one spoke during the short drive along West Lake Road—his father had been too awed and Teddy had known better than to break the silence. At the gate to the Otesaga hotel, Ted Williams spoke to the guard and they drove on to the hotel’s covered entrance.
I have a card, said his dad when they stopped. You signed it for my brother when we were boys.
The signature had faded in the thirty years since, but Teddy’s dad had brought along a black ballpoint pen and now he handed the pen and the card to Ted Williams and said, Would you sign this for me again?
Teddy could not swallow the knot in his throat. It was pushing up from his chest and into his mouth and nose and eyes.
The manager was down to the last binder.
What’s this? he asked.
Wait, said Teddy.
The manager looked up.
Not that one.
The manager studied him, then studied the card through the plastic without touching the sleeve. It was a 1957 Topps—the year they’d cut their cards to the new industry-standard size—and they’d taken the top off Ted’s hat. Ted at bat, Ted on the follow-through, Ted with his arms crossed wrist over wrist, his bat breaking behind his right shoulder, his hips twisted to the side. Character was the word Teddy’s dad used. The Splendid Splinter had fought in two wars. He had flown a plane over Korea. He had left and come back, left and come back. He hadn’t been afraid of anything. But Teddy was afraid.
I’ll give you eight hundred for it, the manager said. You can keep the others.
Teddy paused as the figure scaled his eyes and played a quick game of what-if on his mind.
Nine hundred, said the manager.
But it was like his dad was in the store with him.
Nine-fifty.
No, said Teddy. He moved his hand to the plastic sheet and silently slipped his father’s card from its sleeve, stowing it in his shirt pocket.
The manager shrugged, showed him a figure on the calculator, then opened the cash register and paid Teddy in twenties and tens.
In the car, Teddy tossed his empty backpack behind his seat and slammed the door. Let’s go, he said.
Dave started the Saab. What happened? You were in there forever.
Nothing, said Teddy. Go.
Dave reversed out of the parking lot and shifted into first, joining the traffic on the road. So? How much did you get?
Seven hundred, Teddy lied.
Really? Dave glanced over his shoulder at Teddy’s empty backpack. Even?
Yeah, said Teddy. He felt sick and wanted to be home but they still had an hour and a half to go.
Where do I turn? asked Dave. Teddy opened the map and tried to read it, but the picture was a jumble of blues and reds.
Teddy said, Where the fuck is Route 20 on this thing?
Dave had to pull over and read it himself. He made a U-turn and they sped back past Major League Collectibles, but Teddy kept his eyes straight ahead.
They listened to the rest of R.E.M., then to Morrissey, sides A and B. The tape flipped again but Teddy heard nothing. He stilled his mind. It was after one o’clock when Dave sailed past the shortcut by the Tepee souvenir shop on Route 20: they’d have to take the long way. Five miles later, Dave exited onto 166 in Cherry Valley.
Dave said, When will you get the Jeep?
But Teddy didn’t answer. He wanted wind sprints and group stretches, batting practice and red dirt on his hands. He was tottering at the edge of something and he was desperate not to tip over. Teddy lowered his window and stuck his head out like a dog. It was something he’d done as a kid. Ears battered by the wind, eyes dry and bulging, he watched the houses slip by: long driveways cutting muddy paths up to painted two-stories, sunlight starting to burn through the gray overhead and winking off the cars parked beside front lawns. The wind was warm on his face and it smelled like spring—grass and dirt and wet pavement and manure from the dairy farms. Green hills rolled beside them and yellow fields behind them. What was done was done. Colors and shapes blurred before his eyes. His cards were sold. He couldn’t go back.
Hey, said Dave.
Teddy felt the car slow and lifted his head.
Check it out, said Dave. How debonair.
Teddy followed Dave’s gaze to where a woman stood at the wide mouth of a driveway, her right arm extended through the open window of a silver station wagon.
You never see shit like that anymore, said Dave.
But what Teddy saw was not the woman, or even the man’s face bending to kiss the woman’s hand, but the bumper of the station wagon dented in the same place where his mother’s car had nicked his father’s in their driveway the year before.
His first thought: That is not my dad.
His second: That’s my dad.
Dave pressed the gas pedal and Teddy glanced at him nervously—did he know?—but there were at least three silver Tauruses in Cooperstown, and they were not even in Cooperstown, and suddenly Teddy was back to thinking that that could not have been his dad.
He craned his neck, pinning his 20/10 vision on the station wagon in the driveway; on the ski rack that Teddy had installed himself for a trip to Deer Run; on the woman’s hand, moving now to the side of his dad’s face; and on his dad, releasing her hand to touch her face. Caress, Teddy thought, just before closing his eyes.
Stop the car, said Teddy, as a wave of nausea hit him. Dave started to pull over but Teddy said, Not here. He pointed up the road to a bend out of sight of the driveway.
Are you going to throw up? asked Dave.
Teddy shook his head. He felt gutted, his stomach punching up inside him, but he was not going to be sick. What had he really seen? He plugged in to the side-view mirror, to the road spooling out behind them. Teddy watched and waited, but there was no sign of his dad’s car.
Here, said Teddy, and Dave pulled onto the shoulder just beyond a mailbox hammered to a wooden post in the dirt at the side of the road. Teddy opened the door and unbuckled his seat belt, then reached for his sweatshirt and backpack.
What are you doing? asked Dave.
Teddy got out and closed the door, then said through the open window, I think I’m going to walk. I’ll see you back in town.
It’s like fifteen miles, said Dave, but Teddy was already gone.
Maybe Dav
e called his name. Teddy didn’t hear it. Anyway, there was no stopping him. He ducked off the road and ran alongside the woods, his dress shoes mashing his toes and slapping at his soles, the ground below him sticks and mud and patches of snow, the sky above him bright gray. Teddy knotted his sweatshirt around his waist and ran. He tried not to think, but he couldn’t stop his mind: the woman’s skirt had been long and purplish, a hippie skirt. His mom wore ironed skirts in gray and black and dark green, not skirts from fucking Woodstock. And sleeveless—the woman hadn’t been wearing a jacket in this early-spring air. She’d been hugging herself with one arm, maybe trying to keep warm while her other arm was extended for his dad’s kiss. And then his dad’s hand was on the woman’s cheek, his fingers curling around behind her neck, his thumb stroking her skin, and what was Teddy supposed to think?
All the questions his dad was always lobbing him: Did he work hard enough in school, was he 100 percent respectful to his girlfriend, was he kind and generous to his sister? Clearly no, but now Teddy was wondering just exactly what his dad knew about character. Teddy had been ripped off to the tune of seven hundred dollars—his life’s work sold for pennies on the dollar, his dream of buying a car shot to shit—because you don’t sell your dead uncle’s baseball card to a douche in a muscle T, and you don’t cheat on your wife with a hippie chick from Cherry Valley.
That’s what he’d seen, hadn’t he? Teddy slowed to a jog, then a walk, as the weight of the knowledge hit him; he closed his eyes to smother the image of his moon-eyed father, another kiss coming, his dad already tugging her down.
Off to his right, Teddy heard the faint sound of cars whipping by and climbed a hill to a get a look, panting at the view. The sky had cleared, sun flooding the valley. Below him was Route 20 and, to his right, 166, which put him somewhere between Cherry Valley and the lake. All along he’d been running toward home.
For the next three hours—a guess: in the first week of January, Teddy had lost the watch Kim had given him for Christmas—Teddy walked along the shoulder of the road with his sweatshirt on, the hood pulled up to camouflage his face. Jim Lowry at the Cooperstown Crier and Leo Greer of the Freeman’s Journal had each photographed him for their sports sections so many times that the old guys in the bleachers called him “the mayor.” Height: 6 feet 2¾. Weight: an aspirational 175. Favorite movie: Caddyshack. Favorite book: Friday Night Lights. Favorite food: Sal’s pepperoni pizza. Last month they’d added “Plans after CHS,” which had initially freaked Teddy out. To pitch for Oneida College, he’d finally answered, but, come on, he’d be a freshman at a D-I school: he’d be socked away in the dugout, chewing sunflower seeds or watching the game through a crack in the bullpen wall.
Teddy made for Glimmerglass State Park, at the north end of the lake. It wasn’t open yet for the season and he walked right in through the front gate, past the empty security booth and over a concrete bridge to the recreation hall, with its windows boarded up for winter. Behind the recreation hall was a small, sandy beach and, from there, nine miles of open water to the shores of Cooperstown.
The lifeguard stands stood like storks at the water’s edge. Eventually they’d be moved out into the water, but the ice had only just melted. You couldn’t swim in Otsego Lake before May. Sometimes people drowned. Not in April, but in January, February. It was one of his father’s rules: no swimming before May, because of his uncle George.
But fuck his father, and fuck his father’s rules. It wasn’t even all that cold out—Teddy was still sweaty from his run. He dropped his sweatshirt on the sand and pulled off his dress shoes, then held them in his pitching hand while he examined his socks: wet and sandy and also bloody at the heels. He’d be shit at stealing bases all week. Teddy cocked his arm and torpedoed his shoes into the grass near the beach, where a picnic table was turtled on its head. Then he bent and carefully rolled his argyle socks down over his blistered heels and threw them, too. They unraveled midair, floating like deflated balloons back to the beach.
His dad’s baseball card, secure in his breast pocket, was burning a hole in Teddy’s heart. It was an angry pulse that needed cooling. Still wearing his shirt and pants, Teddy waded straight into the lake, but he didn’t get far, because the cold needled through to his lungs.
Jesus Christ, he said. Fuck fuck fuck. Fuck fuck fucking cold, until his feet started to go numb.
Teddy watched the cuffs of his khakis floating underwater. The mud wasn’t coming out. Maybe in the wash. His mom was excellent with wash. His mom was smart and pretty and tall and thin and earned a lot of money, more than his dad did, but she was also a good mom. She did the grocery shopping and always bought at least two gallons of OJ for him and she remembered that John Rolston had basically fucked Teddy’s ERA last season due to lazy throws to first, even if she didn’t know what an ERA was. And now this: his mom didn’t know, or maybe she did, and Teddy either had to tell her or not, he didn’t know which.
He took another step into the water and his legs went electric, his skin seizing up, his nerves sending charges to his heart. If he’d stopped to think, he couldn’t have done it, but he needed to do it, so he dove straight into the next wave that rolled up against his knees, like diving into a wall of bricks. The water was so fucking cold it hammered him down to the weedy lake bottom. He kicked but he couldn’t put his feet down, and when he touched the ground with his fingers he realized his whole body was numb. It was like when he woke in the middle of the night with a dead arm and threw it against the wall and felt nothing. Teddy was dead, but not. Anyway, his dad was going to kill him.
He slogged on his hands and knees back up the beach, his clothes weighing a thousand wet pounds. Teddy peeled his shirt over his head, then dropped his khakis on the sand and wrung out the legs of his boxers. Shivering, he crossed the beach to his argyle socks and used them to towel off his frozen skin. The sun painted a stripe over the lake, brightening the sand at Teddy’s feet and warming him. Sometimes the water was black and sometimes it was blue and sometimes it was green, and sometimes it was ice-still, which was why it was called Glimmerglass, and other times the wind whipped and chopped across the water until whitecaps rose and crashed.
Soon the sun would settle on the hills over West Lake Road, threatening to set. Teddy knew the time of day by heart. Practice was under way, but—strangely—he did not feel pulled to the red-dirt kingdom of Doubleday Field, to the pitcher’s-mound seat of his throne. Instead, Teddy homed in on the sandy lakeshore. He lifted his white oxford shirt by the collar, a yellowish ring where his sweaty neck had been, then reached into the breast pocket and closed his frozen fingers over his father’s Ted Williams card and pulled gently so he didn’t rip the corners, gently so he didn’t hurt the card more than he already had.
Teddy felt untethered, as if he had let go—or been let go of. Somewhere in the distance, the pine-covered hills bled into the baseball town at their feet. It wouldn’t be long now: headlights, then house lights, the church steeples ringed by the sun’s last light. Teddy couldn’t make out any of this from where he stood, but he could see it in his mind. Back at home on Susquehanna Avenue, they would be worried, and it was strange to think that Teddy had the power to fix it but also the power to make it worse. Maybe he didn’t have to tell. But he was crap with secrets, and he’d been schooled for eighteen years in his father’s preschool curriculum: be honest, take responsibility for your actions, be brave.
7
That night, after writing the note about Carl’s mom, I dreamed that Sam and Carl were super-pops with Teddy, his new pals, best friends. Images of the three of them—in Rick Delaney’s Jeep, in Mr. Hershey’s homeroom, in the dugout at Doubleday Field—minced through my filmic nightmare, and in every scene I was behind them, close enough to hear, but I couldn’t call out, because the words I knew belonged to a dead language, a code with no key, and I alone spoke it, and I was already forgetting what the words could mean.
Wednesday morning Teddy and I left late for school, dragging our feet
on the cracked sidewalks to slow ourselves down. I was nervous about seeing Sam and Carl, worried that my dream would prove a kind of premonition. Teddy was nervous about selling his baseball cards. He kept rehearsing how he’d explain it to Dad, cocurator and patron of his collection, which basically meant Dad owned the cards. I said nothing—Teddy was going to do whatever he was going to do, and Dad definitely wasn’t going to understand.
“See you later,” said Teddy at the door to his homeroom. “Remember.” He held a finger to his lips—we were in on this Jeep-buying business together. I promised not to say a word.
As soon as I entered Mrs. Boulanger’s homeroom, I saw I’d been right about Sam and Carl. Instead of welcoming me into the fold of my empty desk, Carl commenced eye-effing his chemistry textbook, while Sam drew pyramids on an old history handout. I stood behind them for a count of ten, waiting, waiting, but they wouldn’t look at me and they wouldn’t look at each other. Finally I crossed the room to my locker and spun the combo right-left-right through blurry eyes.
“Julia,” said Mrs. Boulanger. “Find your seat, please,” but I stayed at my locker, my classmates’ voices echoing in my ears.
Kneeling in front of my backpack, I glanced at Carl. He wore a Myrtle Beach T-shirt and jeans with a blue ink stain on the pocket, and I could tell that he wasn’t really reading by the way his eyes kept darting to the clock on the wall. In the same way I tried not to know too much about my parents’ disagreements, I guess I’d avoided knowing this about Carl: he liked me, and the evidence was in the way he waited for me after class, looking for reasons to let his arm brush against mine, and in the way he called me at night with homework questions, the answers to which it was clear he already knew. It occurred to me that I was Carl’s Sam, and I pictured a paper chain of broken hearts, each of us hooked on to the one person whose arms were out of our reach.
Just then I caught Sam stealing a look at me, his blond head bobbing up, his eyes—green-blue like the shallows of the lake—sweeping my face and pausing, locking on my eyes. My sinuses started to ache and I pushed my fingers into my tear ducts until I saw white. The day stretched out before me in light-years as I thought of all the places I’d have to see him—gym, lunch, tennis. I felt for the folded-up note about Carl’s mom in my back pocket. In The Sex Cure, the characters were forever sabotaging their relationships because they loved each other too much, and I thought I could understand that. The only people who could really hurt us were the people we loved. I pictured someone unwrapping the note, discovering the nugget about Carl that couldn’t help but be true, and there was a kind of power in the truth—by breaking the social bonds of friendship, I could send Carl running back to me; when the whole school was feeling sorry for him, who else would he want around him but his best friend?
Love All: A Novel Page 17