Once Upon a Fastball

by Bob Mitchell

  It has been quite a day.

  3

  INCHES

  YOUR LEGACY IS IN THE ATTIC.

  Of the sixty-two words that make up the tantalizing note Solomon Stein had left behind, these are the six that especially haunt his grandson.

  Seth sifts through artifacts collected by Grandma Elsie in three large cardboard boxes that have lain fallow for two years deep in the bowels of her attic. He has been up here for over an hour, searching for answers.

  Stacks of yellowed letters, newspaper articles, old Red Sox programs, Sports Illustrateds and Sporting Newses, assorted tools and carpentry paraphernalia, odd scraps of cherry and mahogany, baseball cards, a weather-beaten mitt from the thirties, a couple of poetry anthologies: all residua of Papa Sol’s life that resonate with Seth, but nothing that suggests anything approaching a legacy.

  Seth looks at his watch. It says one thirty, and it’s only half an hour until his history class with those bushy-tailed freshmen. Gotta get a wiggle on.

  He descends the nine stairs to the second floor, pops his head in the bedroom to check on Elsie. She is asleep, snoring, arms folded across her chest, her tranquil visage belying the terrible conflict she is still grappling with in her soul regarding her vanished husband.

  Seth kisses her forehead, and Elsie parts her lips.

  “Love you, bubeleh,” she whispers.

  Seth wants to wake her up, blurt out everything. Tell her all about the wooden box and the ball and the tornado and Thirteenth Avenue and 1270 and the Hornet in the garage and young Sol working on the chair and Uncle Miltie and his toddler father and the Polo Grounds and the Catch and the pistol to the temple in the basement.

  “Love you, too, Elfie.”

  Seth and Jezebel bump their way toward Harvard Yard. Cottony snow gobs helicopter down from the heavens, and Seth is reciting in his head a poem that he adores, Paul Valéry’s “Neige,” which, when he was thirteen, Papa Sol had helped him memorize in the original French:

  Quel pur désert tombé des ténèbres sans bruit

  Vint effacer les traits de la terre enchantée

  Sous cette ample candeur sourdement augmentée…

  Seth often recites this poem to himself when it is snowing. Finds it comforting, not only the gorgeous images of silence and whiteness, but also the sounds of the word clusters, of the dentals and the sibilants as they trip gallically off his tongue.

  Flakes parachute onto Jeze’s trunk, roof, and hood as she wheezes her way past the cemetery. When she spontaneously accelerates for no apparent reason, Seth smiles slyly, imagining that she always gets a wee bit nervous when she lumbers past a graveyard, especially on a frigid and snowy day.

  Trooper that she is, Jeze slaloms around potholes and slams through moguls of slush that litter the length of Mt. Auburn Street, her weary wipers toiling at the speed of Vermont maple syrup to clear her windshield, but only barely, for Seth. Her battle-hardened, six-year-old Bridge-stones manage a dainty left onto JFK, skid past Harvard Square and the Coop, slide a right onto Cambridge Street, then bear right, slipping onto Broadway, and eke out a harrowing, hard right onto Quincy Street, past the old Fogg Art Museum on the left, and—there, there’s a spot!, a rara avis indeed, across from Lamont Library and only a few minutes’ walk from Robinson Hall and the seminar room where Seth will soon be strutting his History stuff.

  Ol’ Jeze comes through once again. You go, girl!

  On his way to Robinson, Seth’s mind is not on the class he’ll be leading in seven minutes. He is thinking about his urge to tell Kate and Grandma Elsie and Sammy about his visit to 1951. He wants to, but he can’t, not yet. Can’t, because he still needs answers, and how, to Papa Sol’s mysteries. Can’t, because he’s still uncertain about whether it even happened.

  The snow continues to descend. It is thick and lush and soft, as Cambridge snow can be at its breathtaking best, transforming Harvard Yard from weasel to ermine.

  As Seth approaches Robinson Hall, the rectangular, nondescript home of the History department tucked away at 35 Quincy Street in the northeast corner of the Yard, he re-recites a phrase from the Valéry poem that captures the regal white expanse spread out before him: Sous cette ample candeur, “Beneath this ample innocence.” He loves parsing words, reveling in the unraveling of the connotative ambiguity of language, and he turns over in his mind the linguistic possibilities of the deceptively simple word candeur: innocence…purity…whiteness…

  So why the hell can’t I figure out Papa Sol’s note?

  Up the three steps of the main entrance, inside Robinson now, shake the snow off the Red Wings, unzip the parka, off with the Red Sox cap. On his way up the first flight of stairs, Seth puts his right hand instinctively into his right pants pocket, expecting to find three or four coins, which he is habitually fond of twiddling, like Bogie with the steel balls when he played Queeg. Instead, his fingertips discover a piece of paper. Like a blind man, he palpates the object in an attempt to guess its identity. Its texture is more like soft, thin cardboard, thicker than regular paper. It is smooth, no bumps or raised letters. About an inch wide, maybe three, four inches long, serrated edge on only one end. Doesn’t ring the slightest bell, but his curiosity is sure piqued.

  It’s almost two by Seth’s watch and he doesn’t have the time to futz around with the little guessing game, so he yanks the object out of his pocket.

  Gadzooks.

  He reads the writing on the artifact, every last letter, top to bottom and side to side. Then reads it again, just to be sure. Nope, no doubt about it.

  RAIN CHECK…UPPER RES. SEAT…$2.00…N.Y. GIANTS Baseball Club… POLO GROUNDS…GAME NO. PO-2…PLAY-OFF GAME…NOT REDEEMABLE FOR CASH…See Other Side For Conditions…Play-off Game…In the event of a postponement this coupon will admit the holder to the game numbered hereon. Not good if detached from RAIN CHECK…Upper Reserved Seat Est. price $1.67-Tax Paid .33 $2.00…Right reserved to revoke license granted by this ticket by refunding purchase price…

  President

  Seth is immobilized right in the middle of the staircase, bustling students flickering around him in both directions like an animated army of ants circumventing a dead twig.

  Could it be? Was I actually there? I must’ve been…how else…this ticket…

  Huh?

  But this is clearly impossible. Patently absurd. No way, Jose. A visit back to 1951, my ass.

  But the ticket stub?

  Dazed, Seth makes his way to the seminar room, struggling to resolve the troubling paradox but knowing that he’s got to postpone sorting it out, that, after all, he’s got responsibilities—

  “Ladies and gentlemen…”

  “Dr. Stein…”

  “Today we’re going to discuss…”

  For the very first time in his professorial career, the usually eloquent, personable, and glib Seth Stein is an inarticulate imbecile, a babbling buffoon at a loss for words. He has forgotten his lesson plan, even the gist of the discussion he has prepared for today. He has forgotten how to speak.

  “…to…to…discuss…”

  A pen clatters on the floor of the classroom. Hands fidget. Fingers play with parka zippers. Notebook pages rustle. Seth pulls himself together.

  “…to discuss whether History is a truly noble study or total bullshit.”

  The nine freshmen sitting around the rectangular wooden table in the seminar room are taken aback, momentarily stunned, their collective breathing halted in mid-exhalation. It is not Seth’s colloquial, student-friendly language that they find shocking. No, they are used to it, in fact, find it refreshing compared to the starched, patrician airs of some of the formal, full-professorial Cantabrigian characters they’ve taken classes from. It’s just that they were expecting a lively discussion of the JFK assassination this afternoon, not this open-ended, abstract topic that seems risibly ambitious, way too much to handle in a paltry fifty minutes.

  Dr. Stein, on the other hand, is inspired. Having found himself in a pedagogica
l pickle, inarticulate and trapped deep in his own backfield, he is having to improvise, to juke and change direction and evade tacklers and find a hole and break into the didactic open field for a long gain. He has succeeded in ad-libbing his way into a brand-new, unplanned discussion topic, one that has been gestating in his thoughts, its genesis in his purported trip back in time.

  This is what teaching is all about, Seth thinks.

  “So then, who wants to initiate the discussion?”

  Dead silence. The freshmen are still in shock. Even Stephanie Lowell, who always has her hand up.

  “All right, guys, I see you’re not gonna make this any easier on me. Well, looks like I’ll have to be the one to start things off. Let’s see. Okay, let’s begin with a quote. Hmmm. All right, I’ve got it. It’s from that eminent historian Alfred North Whitehead. Ol’ Al [assorted titters] once said, ‘The real history does not get written, because it’s not in people’s brains but in their nerves and vitals.’ Now, what do you think he meant by that?”

  A pause, then Old Faithful Ms. Lowell raises her hand and erupts.

  “Well, I think that ol’ Al [more titters] might’ve meant that, y’know, the history that we read about is all about what people in the past are thinking, but we don’t find out what they’re truly feeling. I mean, don’t actions usually stem from emotions rather than thoughts? But we never study feelings!”

  Stephanie, a perky, cheeky, smart-as-a-whip blonde from nearby Natick (Seth thinks she looks like Betty from the Archie comic books), sits back in her chair, quite taken with her response.

  “Very good, Stephanie,” Seth says. “A nice start. But what do you mean by ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’? How can we know only what people think and not what they feel? And don’t we sometimes know what they’re feeling and not what they’re thinking?”

  Another pause, but Josh Greenfield, who’s barely said a word all term, knifes in with, “I’m not sure I really know the difference between thinking and feeling.”

  The class guffaws heartily as one.

  Josh retorts, “No…I mean…I know the difference, but, like, how can they really be separated? Sometimes people from History perform intellectual actions that are the result of their emotions, and sometimes they act with emotions that come from their thinking process, so how can we know which is which, really?”

  “Well, you make a good point,” Seth says. “But what do you think ol’ Al meant by people’s ‘nerves and vitals’? Why do you think he said that this history doesn’t get written?”

  Neofeminist Libby Frank, the mousy Emily Litella look-alike sitting to Seth’s immediate left, pipes up. “It seems to me that we can never really know what people are feeling in their gut, in their viscera, because that is an inner place that doesn’t give out its secrets. That’s why History only records man’s intellectual acts. Now women—”

  “Okay,” Seth interrupts respectfully, “let’s not get too political here. That’s a good thought, Libby. I think ol’ Al would agree with you on that. So that begs the question, why don’t we ever get the ‘real scoop’? Why don’t we ever find out what people in the past are truly feeling? Is it because feelings are short-lived? Are they impossible to ‘record,’ as opposed to facts or data or events?”

  Silence. Deep thinking.

  Jamaal Crosby, a cross between Barack Obama and Maury Wills who’s been giving his best impression of Rodin’s Le Penseur until now, speaks. “I think that life is pretty complicated and that every important moment just gets boiled down to facts. Not what people are feeling deep down, but just the kernel of what really happened.”

  Bingo.

  The mother lode. Just when Seth was thinking the discussion was losing a little steam, it’s good ol’ Jamaal to the rescue.

  “Excellent, Jamaal,” Seth says. “An example that comes to mind from baseball history is the sixth game of the ’86 Series.”

  Inured to Seth’s use of the National Pastime as a pedagogical tool, the students know what’s coming and exhale a sarcastic collective groan.

  “Sure, we know that the game ended 6–5 Mets and that Billy Buckner booted Mookie’s grounder and that Ray Knight scored the winning run, but what about Buckner’s nerves and vitals? A big chunk of the history of this game may never be known as long as Billy remains a recluse in Idaho and refuses to give any more interviews. The true impact and meaning of the game may well remain in his gut and someday end up buried six feet under or strewn in the wind. Now, can anyone think of an example or two outside of baseball to corroborate Jamaal’s theory?”

  Maria Lopez accepts the challenge. “What about the JFK assassination? After all, we were supposed to talk about that today.”

  “Yeah, right on!”

  “Hoo-ha!”

  “You tell ’im, Maria!”

  “Yes, Maria?” Seth asks, attempting to restore order.

  “Well,” Maria continues, “let’s think about it. What was Jackie feeling when she climbed onto the back of the limo? What was Oswald feeling when he squeezed the trigger? What was the guy on the grassy knoll feeling when he saw Kennedy’s brains exploding out? What were all those people in Dealey Plaza feeling when they witnessed the tragedy? What was the whole country feeling when they lost their president? What was the CIA feeling when they cooked up the whole thing? I don’t think we’ll ever know the totality of the real event that happened. All we’ve got is the Zapruder tape, some newsreels, the bullshit Warren Report, and a bunch of conflicting theories. Just artifacts, brain work. No nerves, no vitals.”

  “That’s the ticket, Maria,” Seth responds. “Now we’re cooking with gas. Any other examples from the past?”

  The right arms of all nine students shoot straight up around the table, a picket fence of unbridled enthusiasm.

  “Bron?”

  Bronson Larrabee IV, a shy, lanky hobbledehoy and the fourth generation of Larrabees to attend Harvard, clears his throat. “Umm, how about the Civil War? What comes to us as history is mostly numbers and places and names: six hundred twenty thousand dead, Fort Sumter, Antietam, Appomattox, Lincoln, Grant, Lee. But what were the soldiers feeling? What about the actual pain and misery that went down? And the soldiers’ widows? What were they feeling? And Lincoln, how must he have felt, with all his internal conflict and the tough decisions he had to make?”

  “Wow, Bron. Well said! In fact, you basically expressed the same thought as Walt Whitman, maybe the greatest poet America has ever produced.”

  The students applaud for Bron. Their version of a gold star.

  Seth rifles through his briefcase, fumbles through a few folders, plucks out a yellow index card with a quote on it. He fondles the words as if delivering one of Hamlet’s soliloquies:

  Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of the countless minor scenes and interiors…of the Secession war; and it is best they should not—the real war will never get in the books.

  Seth is having fun. How lovely to see the kids engaged like this. But he’s sorely tempted at this point to talk to them about what precipitated this discussion in the first place, what has been occupying nearly his every thought. He wants to share with them his visit to the past, just like he wants to share it with Kate and Elsie and Sammy. Bat it around a bit, see what their take on it is. Talk to them about how he was privileged to go back in time, to smell and hear and see History, to feel the nerves and vitals of the denizens of 1951.

  Not yet.

  “So,” Seth proffers to his attentive sponges, “this all leads to the query I posed at the outset about History. Noble study? Or bullshit? That is, is studying the past a challenge to us, an opportunity to imagine what happened, to interpret what happened, to conclude what happened? Or is it just too vague and too superficial to have any real meaning? Mind you, I personally am planning to spend the rest of my professional life digging up, studying, thinking about, and teaching this very bullshit.”

  A roar of laughter explodes from the students.


  The discussion sails along like this—stimulating, spirited, opinionated, thoughtful, inclusive—until the bell rings.

  To Seth’s surprise, the students rise in unison and spontaneously give him a rousing standing ovation, a phenomenon generally reserved for the end of the final meeting of the term.

  This is what teaching is all about, Seth thinks.

  Kate Richman has just eaten a canary. Or so her feline smirk seems to indicate.

  The source of her mirth is a delicious evening to remember with serious boyfriend Seth Stein: drinks (Sea Breeze for her, Balvenie for him), session of passionate lovemaking, romantic dinner for two (candlelight; Mozart, James Taylor, Gino Paoli; cream of broccoli soup, Caesar salad from scratch, killer chicken piccata with basmati rice; bottle of Sancerre).

  Seth is still digesting the magnificent repast Kate has served up. He loves it that she is such a spectacular cook and is so proud of her professional trajectory in the field of haute cuisine, working her way up from lowly commis to saucier to chef de partie to, just recently, sous-chef. And of the fact that she’s worked at some of Boston’s finest culinary establishments, including Hammersley’s Bistro, Aujourd’hui, L’Espalier, The Four Seasons, and Silks, in Lowell.

  He examines one of the walls in Kate’s place, where two framed diplomas hang:

  DIPLÔME DE CUISINE

  LE CORDON BLEU

  CERTIFICAT

  DE PERFECTIONNEMENT PROFESSIONNEL

  DE CUISINE LE CORDON BLEU

  Between the diplomas is a framed picture of Kate in chef’s hat, posing between Chef Didier Chantefort and Directeur Académique Sylvie Sofi Alarcon.

  Seth looks at Kate, his heart bursting with pride and love. But now’s not the perfect time to pop the question: There’s the heart disease thing and the specter of his horrific divorce still lurking even after six years and the issue of investing once again in a long-term commitment. But when the time is right, he thinks—