by Bob Mitchell
Seth rings the buzzer, and Kate answers it, looking her perky, adorable self.
“Hey, babe,” she says, planting a warm kiss on his lips. “Whassup?”
“I just…wanted to tell you how much I love you.”
“That’s it?” Kate says, leading Seth to the sofa. “I mean, that’s wonderful, but…I thought you had something pressing to tell me, by the sound of your voice on the phone last night.”
“That is something pressing. I’m sorry I woke you up, and I’m sorry I might have worried you, but I wanted you to know.”
“I know you love me,” a disappointed Kate says, “but…I guess I thought you were talking about another pressing matter.” Kate gives Seth that look, and Seth gets it.
It’s time to talk turkey, but he’s feeling a little chicken.
“Oh, that? Well, my dearest, you know how much I love you, and I’ve given it some serious thought, really I have. I’ve just been waiting for the right time. But, well, I’m not sure if that time is now.”
“But why not now, sweetie? I think now’s a perfectly perfect time.”
“Kate, it’s just that…well, if you must know, I still have that awful taste in my mouth from my divorce from Julie, even now. I can’t seem to get that out my head. I know it doesn’t make sense, but there it is. And aside from all my work, the teaching and the meetings and the book I’m struggling with, I still have to spend part of my time raising Sammy—”
“But—”
“And then there’s the issue of my heart disease. The bypass surgery is still with me, not physically, but in the way I feel deep inside every single day, and love you as I do, I just don’t ever want to make you feel pain or…make you…a widow….”
Kate blinks her eyes and sets her jaw. “I know, my sweetie, I know, but I do love you so much, and none of that matters, not if we love each other as much as we do.”
Seth looks at Kate, and then into his soul. On top of everything else, he wonders, what if she doesn’t believe me when I do tell her about Papa Sol and my visits to the past? What if we plan a wedding and a life together, and then she ends up not trusting me and calling the asylum to have her lunatic hubby put away?
“Honey,” Kate implores, “I just think it’s time we made a commitment to each other—”
“I know that’s how you feel, Kate…but, well, let me put it another way.”
Seth searches for the right words.
“Do you remember my telling you about that famous playoff game between the Giants and Dodgers in ’51? The one where Bobby Thomson hit that dramatic ninth-inning homer off Ralph Branca?”
Kate nods of course she does but wonders where this is going.
“Well, during his at bat against Branca, Bobby sees two pitches. On the first one, he isn’t committed, because of the fears he has standing there at the plate. He’s as nervous as a kitten and just isn’t ready to be in the batter’s box at that moment and to commit to his pitch, with all that pressure and all those things flying around in his brain. So he stands there like a statue, the bat frozen on his shoulder, and watches a strike blow right by him.”
Kate starts to catch on.
“And so, my sweetheart, it isn’t until the second pitch that he becomes more relaxed, and by then the time is right, and he’s prepared to swing and commit totally to it, and the rest is History.”
Kate gets it.
Seth leaves it at that. He loves the fact that although she doesn’t really follow baseball, she does respect his passion for the game and tries hard to understand its intricacies and life lessons. Unlike a certain ex.
Part of Kate wants to rant and yell and scream about the fact that she’s worked her butt off to get to where she is professionally and now she is finally free to devote some quality time and her heart and her soul to the man she so desperately loves and then what about the issue of her biological clock ticking now that she’s turned thirty and sometimes it is ticking so loud she can’t get it out of her head, just like Captain Hook obsessing about that clock that his nemesis the crocodile had swallowed.
Kate’s eyes are moist, and so are Seth’s. The four eyes are moist with a little sadness and frustration, but mostly with love and caring.
“I love you, Seth Stein.”
“I love you, Kate Richman.”
Seth is sitting in his kitchen, thinking about the morning coffee chat with Gordon and the brief encounter at noon with Kate. About how he didn’t have the guts to tell his best friend what really happened with Papa Sol, in exquisite detail. About how he didn’t have the nerve to tell Kate, either. What a wuss.
No, he isn’t a wuss. He just thought that neither would believe him, not really, that they’d think he was cracked or at the very least a touch unstable. Or was it that he still needed more conclusive proof that what happened wasn’t a dream or a hallucination?
But it’s a gorgeous, crisp Cambridge autumn Saturday morning and Kate is at her place, working on new recipes for seafood stew (ciotola di mare) and terra-cotta chicken (pollo nel coccio), and Seth is luxuriating in the very thought of a once-in-a-blue-moon Solo Breakfast Special and it’s time to get crackin’.
Seth whirls into action. He is performing his special Gene Kelly morning choreography, straight from the opening scene of An American in Paris. With precise, athletic movements that are at once frenetic and graceful, he flicks on a light, opens a pantry door, removes a box of matzoh, kicks the door closed, greases the pan, grinds the beans, pours the water, opens the fridge door, removes the eggs, kicks the door closed, scrambles the eggs, crumbles the matzoh, soaks and drains it, adds and mixes the eggs plus onion powder, heats the pan, opens the fridge, removes the oranges, kicks the door closed, squeezes the oranges, fries the matzoh-egg mix, pours the juice, opens the fridge, takes out the fruit, kicks the door closed, tears off a paper towel, opens the drawer, removes a fork and a spoon, knees the drawer closed, spoons out the fruit, serves the matzoh, pours the coffee, proceeds à table.
He performs these terpsichorean feats in rapid succession, with a multitasking suppleness of all his extremities that would make an octopus turn green.
Spread before Seth on the kitchen table is a breakfast that would make even the most jaded food critic plotz. Including: a tall glass of freshly squeezed OJ; a piping hot cup of Peet’s Indonesian Garuda Blend coffee, served black; a plate of Papa Sol’s special pancake-style matzoh brie, with salt sprinkled on top; and for dessert, a bowl of Fresh Fruit Gingerbubbly, a yummy concoction he’d learned from his Tar Heel friends, Beth and Jake Billwith, which consists of champagne, sugar, and fresh, peeled ginger, strained and poured over sliced oranges, strawberries, kiwi, melon, and pineapple (all of which has been blissfully fermenting overnight in the fridge).
In a little under nine minutes, Seth finishes the regal breakfast, and as he polishes off the last morsel of Korbel-soaked kiwi, he has an epiphany.
Of course. Papa Sol would never have used a capital A in the word Attic in his note by chance, nor would he have made a careless error. No, he was a meticulous man, from his exquisite carpentry to his obsessive love of linguistic niceties to virtually everything he did and said. So he couldn’t have meant that he left something for Seth in the attic of his house as a legacy. The only other meaning that occurs to Seth, then, is that Sol’s legacy to him has to do with something Greek.
But what?
For now, all he can think of is the world of Greek mythology that Papa Sol had taught him so well and so caringly, something to do with that? A lesson in one or more of the myths, perhaps? Or maybe he left him a special, brand-new book of Greek mythology somewhere?
From his perch in culinary heaven, Seth is brought down to earth with this line of thinking. He’s got Papa Sols on the brain now. Papa Sol the loving, giving grandfather reading stories to him. Papa Sol the private, passionate man at the ballparks and reading the newspaper articles. Papa Sol the tormented soul with an S&W .38 pressed against his temple. The Papa Sol whose secrets he can’t yet
divulge even to his loved ones. The Papa Sol who, goddammit, still owes him answers.
Seth walks to Papa Sol’s wooden box in the study. He’s been avoiding it lately. Hasn’t had the time for it. Has been digesting his visits to the past, debating whether to share them. Is maybe a tiny bit nervous about what else he’ll discover.
Seth is ready now. He opens the top of the box, grabs the ball and grips it in his right hand. Even squeezes it, as if to implore it to yield more answers, to take him back one more time and let him at last get to the bottom of it all.
Sweet Momma.
Room spins, faster, Oz music—Dah-de-lah-de-lah—feeling of calm, Beatles’ riff, Slide Show.
What and who’ll it be this time? Aha.
The invention of the sundial and the founding of Carthage and Nero fiddles and the Norman Conquest and the Crusades and Marie Antoinette at the guillotine and the Bill of Rights and the Louisiana Purchase and Darwin publishes The Origin of Species and the stock market crash and astronauts land on the moon and Nixon’s presidency implodes and the Challenger explodes…
And the final burst of the Beatles’ riff and the rousing, raucous, brash, clashing, strident, high-pitched, piercing, trumpety climax. And the tornado grinds to a halt. And Seth is deposited gently on the ground. It is no longer 2006.
It is 1986.
Seth knows it is, because he is standing in a very familiar kitchen, Papa Sol and Grandma Elsie’s in Cambridge, and on the table is a copy of Time magazine with Reagan and Gorbachev on the cover under the type:
TIME
NO DEAL
Star Wars Sinks the Summit
Over the red E of TIME: $1.95. Over the T: OCTOBER 20, 1986.
Seth compares the kitchen with the ones he visited in 1951 and 1962. The stooping, slouching cavemen of kitchens past have evolved into one who is fully erect, with all the modern gadgets you could ask for: spiffy three-door fridge with through-the-door ice and water service, electric stove, microwave oven, toaster oven, digital clock radio, Cuisinart.
The kitchen is, of course, spotless.
Seth is used to visiting the past by now, but he still finds it strange to be in Sol and Elsie’s house back then. He hears Papa Sol’s familiar voice and bounds up the thirteen creaky stairs to investigate.
The voice is coming from the second bedroom.
Didn’t that used to be my room?
Reaching the threshold, Seth looks into a bedroom filled with dusk. He is standing behind Papa Sol, who is sitting on the bed of a prepubescent boy. The boy’s deep brown eyes sparkle and widen, peeking over the covers, Kilroy-like, as his grandpa’s deep, mellifluent voice speaks to him, his majestic baritone meticulously caressing each syllable. The boy looks uncannily like Seth Stein.
The boy is Seth Stein.
Papa Sol is now fifty-eight. A reasonable amount of salt has been shaken on the pepper in his hair and beard, and a few rogue wrinkles furrow his brow. On his lap is a copy of the sports section of the Boston Globe of Friday, October 24, 1986, its headline gloating about the Bosox victory over the Mets, 4–2, in Game 5 of the World Series, to take a 3–2 lead in games.
“And now for your very special bedtime story, Setharoo,” Papa Sol announces.
The entranced thirteen-year-old waits breathlessly. He adores his bedtime baseball stories, even at his ripe old age.
“It’s called ‘The Curse.’ Wooooooooo!” Sol sings scarily in a trilly, ghostlike, gradually descending soprano.
The younger of the two Seths in the room shivers in mock fear from underneath the covers.
“Are you quite ready for me to continue, young whippersnapper?” Papa Sol asks.
Younger Seth nods.
Older Seth thinks it’s pretty freaky watching the earlier version of himself being read to by Papa Sol. But he remembers the story and feels the love and wipes a misty eye.
“Okay then, heeeeere we go! ‘The Curse,’ by Papa Solomon Stein. Once upon a time, and a very long time ago it was, there lived a mighty baseball team. And the name of this team was…the Bosox!”
Younger Seth giggles.
“Well, this team was as mighty as mighty could be. Yes indeedy,” Sol intones, affecting a pronounced W. C. Fields voice to spice up the action. “Had players the likes of Cy Young and Tris Speaker, yeeesss.”
Younger Seth is in stitch.
“Not to mention, lemme see, oh yeeesss, Eddie Cicotte and Gavvy Cravath and Dutch Leonard and Ernie Shore and Heinie Wagner and Tricky Chickie Shorten.”
And now in stitches.
“And Waite Hoyt and Bullet Joe Bush and Sad Sam Jones and Herbie Pennock, yesssss, and Jack Stuffy McInnis and Everett Deacon Scott and Harry Hoop Hooper and Braggo Globetrotter Roth.”
And now completely beside himself.
“And another feller you mighta heard of, a feller named George Herman Ruth, the Babe,” Papa Sol whispers importantly. The bedroom turns silent.
“Well, my little man, these mighty Bosox teams, they were the scourge of the country back then, yessirreeeee. Played in five World Series, and y’know how many of ’em they won?”
Younger Seth looks adoringly at Papa Sol, shakes his head. Older Seth, in possession of the correct answer, blurts to a deaf audience, “Five!”
“Five!” Sol answers. “Yessirree Bob, five outta five. Whatta team!”
Papa Sol trades in his jocular Fields voice for Vincent Price’s scary and sinister baritone.
“And then, just before the baseball season of nineteen hundred and twenty, do you know what happened, my boy?”
“N-n-no.” If younger Seth were wearing boots, he’d be shaking in them.
Papa Sol scrunches up his eyes, moves his face to within two inches of younger Seth’s, and, in a deep voice that quakes and is filled with evil and foreboding, enunciates the two most harrowing syllables younger Seth has ever heard.
“The Curse!”
Gasp. Shudder.
“Yes, it was the Curse that happened to these brave and mighty Bosox boys, just as sure as I’m sitting here telling you this terrible tale. The Curse befell them, a Curse so powerful and insidious that no one who donned a Bosox uniform was brave or mighty or strong enough to lift it.”
Papa Sol stops, overcome by mock exhaustion, takes a breather.
Younger Seth is hanging on every syllable, wrapped up hook, line, and sinker in the action. Older Seth is, too.
“Where was I?” Papa Sol asks. “Ah yes,” he continues in his evil and foreboding baritone. “It was the Curse, I tell you, the Curse…of the BamBIno!” he exclaims, pronouncing the last word in a poetic Tuscan dialect worthy of Dante Alighieri, with the exquisitely enunciated accent falling squarely on the middle syllable.
“This, my young man, was the greatest Curse of all time, greater than the Curse of Sleeping Beauty, greater even than the Curse of the House of Atreus. Yes, this Curse was…”
A hush.
“…the Curse…of the BamBIno!”
“Ooooooooh!” the two Seths whisper simultaneously.
“Aye, mark me words, laddie,” Papa Sol says, switching seamlessly to his Long John Silver voice. “This was not just yer normal, everyday curse, a curse that might last a day er a week er a month er even a year. This was not a curse that would pass before too long a time, that would just go poof! one fine day and be over with. Nae! And d’you know why?”
Again, silence.
“Because it was—aaargh!—the Curse…of the Bam-BIno!
“Aye, it all happened on that fateful day of January the third, nineteen hundred and twenty—remember the date well, me laddie—when a certain Mister Harry Frazee committed the dastardly deed of selling the great Babe Ruth, the mightiest of the mighty Bosox—the BamBIno!—for one hundred and twenty-five thousand smackeroos, just to save his wretched hide and pay the rent! Shipped Babe off—aaargh!—like a head of cattle, like a miserable slave, Harry did, and d’you know what was the worst thing of all about this dastardly deed?”
“N-n-no,” th
e two Seths answer concurrently.
“He shipped the great and mighty BamBIno off to…the hated Yankees!
“Wooooooooo!” Sol sings scarily in a trilly, ghostlike, gradually descending soprano.
Younger Seth hides his head under the covers, then reappears, a willing and eager sucker for more spooky stuff.
“Well now, me boy, here is the scariest part of the story!”
Both Seths quiver.
“The Curse…of the BamBIno has lasted until this very day I am speaking to you! A grand total of…sixty-six years! Aye, ever since the BamBIno was shipped off ignominiously by Mister Harry Frazee to the hated Yankees, d’ya know what has happened?”
“N-n-no,” the Seths answer in unison.
“Well, the Bosox have won exactly no World Series, nothing, nada, zippo, zilch, nihil…ZERO!
“And d’ya know how many World Series the hated Yankees, the same hated Yankees who had never won bupkes before they acquired Babe Ruth, have won since the dastardly trade of the BamBIno?”
“N-n-no.”
“A grand total of…TWENTY-TWO!
“Wooooooooo!” Sol sings scarily in a trilly, ghostlike, gradually descending soprano.
Papa Sol rests again in mock exhaustion.
The mouths of both Seths are agape from Fear and Trembling.
Papa Sol’s voice becomes mellow and kindly. “But do you know what?” he says.
“What?” the two Seths ask, breaths bated.
“This story has a happy ending! Yes, like all curses, this one is about to end!”
“Yay!” the two Seths cheer.
“Aye, tomorrow—remember the date well, me laddie (back to Long John Silver)—tomorrow is the day when the Curse ends at last! When the Bosox, the once again mighty Bosox, finish off the Mets in Game 6 and capture their first World Series since nineteen hundred and eighteen, their first in sixty-eight years, aye, capture a prize that is rightfully theirs! And that, me laddie—aaargh!—will be the end of the Curse…”
“…of the BamBIno!” the two Seths scream together in a hosanna of joy.
Younger Seth smiles and claps his hands in appreciation.