Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  I should raise my Olympus now and snap his picture in this official happy moment. Only I can’t risk breaking his spell, since soon enough he’ll look again on life and conclude like the rest of us that he used to be happier but can’t remember exactly how.

  “But look,” I say, staying in the spell with him, my hands cold, gazing at the top of his gouged head while he studies his waffle, his mind springing and lurching, his jaw muscles dedicatedly seeking the best alignment for his molars. (I love his fair, delicate scalp.) “I like real estate a lot. It’s both forward-thinking and conservative. It was always an ideal of mine to combine those two.”

  He does not look up. The old skinny-armed fry cook, wearing a stained tee-shirt and a dirty sailor’s topper, leers at us from behind the row of empty counter stools and salt-and-pepper caddies. He senses we’re locking horns—over a divorce, a change in private schools, a bad report card, a drug bust, whatever visiting dads and sons usually bicker over within his earshot (usually not a father’s midlife career choices). I flash him a threatening look that makes him shake his head, hang a damp cigarette from his snaggly mouth and reconsider his grill.

  Only three other diners are here with us—a man and woman who aren’t talking, merely sitting by a window staring at the lake over coffee, and an older, bald man in green pants and green nylon shirt playing an illegal poker machine in the dark and farthest corner, once in a while scoring a noisy win.

  “You know the tightrope walker act? About falling off and having that be your great trick?” Paul is ignoring what I’ve declared about the delicate balance between progressivism and conservatism, with the fulcrum being the realty business. “That was just a joke.” He looks up at me, narrows his eyes over his three-quarters scarfed waffle and blinks his long lashes. He is a smarter boy than any.

  “I guess I knew that,” I lie, clamping eye contact back on him. “But I took you seriously, though. I was just pretty sure you knew that making wild changes didn’t have much to do with real self-determination, which is what I want you to have, and which is really pretty much a natural sort of thing. It’s not that complicated.” I smile at him goonily.

  “I’ve decided where I want to go to college.” He inserts one finger in the slick residue of maple syrup, which he’s moated all around his waffle, drawing a circle, then licking the sweet off with a pop.

  “I’m all leers,” I say, which makes him give me an arch look; one more of our jokes from the trunk of lost childhood, Take it for granite. A new leash on life. Put your monkey where your mouse is. He, like me, is drawn to the fissures between the literal and the imagined.

  “There’s this place in California, okay? You go to college and work on a ranch and get to brand cows and learn to rope horses.”

  “Sounds good,” I say, nodding, wanting to keep our spirit level high.

  “Yep, it is,” he says, a young Gary Cooper.

  “You think you can study astrophysics on a cayuse?”

  “What’s a cayuse?” He’s forgotten about being a cartoonist. “Aren’t we going fishing?” he says, and quickly moves his gaze outward to where the big lake extends from the boat slips toward folded indistinct mountain headlands. On the dock’s edge a girl is seated wearing a black bathing suit and an orange float vest, a pair of short water skis fastened to her feet. A sleek speedboat with her friends inside, two boys and a girl, rocks at idle fifty feet out, its motor gurgling. All in the boat are watching her on the dock. Suddenly the girl flags her hand up and wide. One boy turns and guns the boat, which even through our window glass gurgles loudly, then roars, seems for an instant to hesitate, then surges, almost leaps to life, its nose up, its rear sunk in foam, catching the thick rope-slack and yanking the girl off the dock and onto her skis, lariating her forward over the water’s mirror top away from us, until she is—faster than would seem possible—small upon the lake, a colorless dot against the green hills. “That’d be the butt, Bob,” Paul says, watching fiercely. He has seen this, almost exactly, on the Connecticut yesterday, but offers no sign of remembering.

  “I guess we’re not going fishing,” I admit reluctantly. “I don’t think we’ve got time now. I had a big imagination. I just thought we had forever. We may have to miss Canton, Ohio, and Beaton, Texas, too.” It doesn’t matter to him, I think, though I wonder bleakly if one day he’ll be my guardian and do a better job. I also wonder just as bleakly if Ann actually has a boyfriend, and if so where she meets him, and what she wears and if she lies to truth-teller Charley the way I used to lie to her (my guess is she does).

  “How many times do you think you’ll get married?” Paul says, still watching the faraway skier, not wanting to trade eyes with me on this subject—one he does care about. He looks quickly around behind the grill at the big wall-size color photo of a hamburger on a clean white plate, with a bowl of strangely red soup and a fountain Coke, all coated with grease enough to hold a fly captive till Judgment Day. He has asked me this question as recently as two days ago, I think.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I say. “Eight, nine times before I’m good ‘n’ done, I guess.” I shut my eyes, then slowly open them so he is in dead center. “What the hell do you care? Have you got some old bag in the stripping business you want me to meet down in Oneonta?” He, of course, knows Sally from our visits to the Shore but has remained significantly silent about her, as he should.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says almost inaudibly, my fear—the ordinary and abiding parent’s fear that he’ll miss his childhood—clearly unfounded, given the look on his face. Though Ann’s fear, of harm and of his frailty, rises to my mind’s view like a warning—a boating mishap, a collision at a bad intersection, a kid’s punch-out whereby his tender forehead kisses a curb. Letting him sly away into the dark unguarded last night would definitely be frowned on by the experts, might possibly even be seen as abusive.

  He is pick-picking at the duct tape that holds together The Water’s Edge’s ancient plastic booths. “I wish we could stay here another day,” he says.

  “Well, we’ll have to come back.” I’m out with my camera then in half a second. “Lemme make yer pitcher to prove you really came.” Paul quickly looks behind him as if to find out who’ll mind having his picture taken. The coffee drinkers have slipped away and wandered off down the dock. The poker player has his back humped over his machine. The cook is occupied whipping up a breakfast of his own. Paul looks back at me across the little table, his eyes troubled by a wish for something more, for more to get in the picture—me, possibly. But that’s not possible. He is all there is.

  “Tell me another good joke,” I say in behind my Olympus, through which his girlish boy’s face is small but fully captured.

  “Have you got the hamburger in the picture?” he says, and looks stern.

  “Yeah,” I say, “the hamburger’s in.” And it is.

  “That’s what I was worried about,” he says, then brightly, wonderfully smiles at me.

  And that is the picture I will keep of him forever.

  Up the welcomingly warm morning hill we trudge, side by each, bound finally for the Hall of Fame. It’s 9:30, and time is in fact a-wastin’. Though when we round the corner onto sunny Main, a half block from the Hall—red brick, with Greek pediments and dubious trefoils on the gable ends, an architectural rattlebag resembling the building-fund dream of some overzealous flock of Wesleyans—something again is amiss. Out front, on the sidewalk, another or possibly the same cadre of men and women, boys and girls, is marching a circle, hoisting placards, sporting sandwich boards and chanting what from here—the red-white-and-blue-buntinged corner by Schneider’s German Bakery—sounds again like “shooter, shooter, shooter.” Though there seem to be more marchers now, plus an encircling group of spectators—fathers and sons, larger families, assorted oldsters, alongside normal every-Sunday parishioners just sprung by Father Damien down at Our Lady—all crowding and observing the marchers and spilling back into the street, slowing tra
ffic and jamming the building entry, the exact coordinates Paul and I are vectored for.

  “What’s this happy horseshit again?” he says, scowling at the crowd and its nucleus of noisy protesters, which suddenly blossoms into two circles rotating in opposite directions, so that ingress to the Hall is essentially stoppered.

  “I guess something is worth protesting at the Hall of Fame,” I say, admiring the protesters, their (from here) illegible signs jutting in the air and their chants becoming louder as stronger-voiced marchers rotate our way. To me it all has a nice collegial feel of my Ann Arbor days (though I was never involved back then, being a scared-stiff, Dudley Doright frat-rat possessor of a highly revocable NROTC scholarship). Yet it feels laudable today that a spirit of manageable unrest and disagreement can be alive still on the fruited plain, even if it’s not associated with anything important.

  Paul, however, doesn’t know what to say in the face of other people’s dissension, accustomed only to his own. “So okay, what’re we supposed to do—wait?” he says, and crosses his arms like an old scold. Potential new Hall visitors are drifting past us but stopping soon to take in the spectacle. Some Cooperstown police are standing across Main Street, two bulky men and two small, blue-shirted, terrier women, thumbs in their belts, amused by the whole event, now and then pointing toward something or someone they think is especially comical.

  “Protests never last very long, in my experience,” I say.

  Paul says nothing, only scowls and raises his hand to his teeth and gives his wart a delicate but incisive bite. All this is making him uneasy; his good-kid spirit has gone with the dew. “Can’t we just go in around ’em?” he says, tasting his own flesh and blood.

  No one, I notice, is getting through or even trying. Most of the spectators, in fact, are looking entertained and talking at the protesters, or taking their pictures. It’s nothing too serious. “The idea is for us to be inconvenienced a while, then they’ll let us go on in. They have some point they want to make.”

  “I think the cops oughta arrest ’em,” Paul says. He makes one emphatic little eeeck midway down his throat and grimaces. (Clearly he has spent more time with Charley than is healthy, since his human-rights attitude favors bulldozer privilege: faced with a blind beggar suffering an epileptic seizure in the revolving door of the University Club, you damn well find a way to bowl through for your court time in the sixty-and-over double-elimination consolation round.) I could easily pose a canny analogy to our nation’s early days, in which legitimate grievances were ignored and a crisis followed, but it would fall on uncaring ears. However, I mean to respect the protestors’ line even without knowing what it’s about. There’s time enough for the little we hope to do.

  “Let’s take a walk,” I say, and set my hand on my son’s shoulder like a regular ole dad and guide us both out into crowded Main toward the Cooperstown Fire and Rescue station, where glistening yellow vehicles sit out in the driveway on Sunday display, uniformed firefighters and paramedics lounging around the bay doors watching Breakfast at Wimbledon. More church cars and several packed Gay Nineties trolleys are stacking up noisily, a few drivers willing to lean on their horns and poke heads irritably out windows to find out what’s what. Paul, I can see, is plainly troubled by this delay and mixup, and I’d like to get us out of the action and avoid another run-in of our own. So I proceed us up the sidewalk against the pedestrian traffic, past more storefronts with sports paraphernalia and trading cards, two open-early taprooms showing nonstop World Series games from the Forties, a movie theater and the tweedy realty office I saw yesterday from the car, with snazzy color snapshots in the window. Where we’re headed, I don’t know. But unexpectedly as we walk across an open side alley, there, straight left and down the narrow passageway, which widens out at the other sunny end, sits Doubleday Field, hallowed and deep green and decidedly vest pocket in the midmorning light—a most perfect place to see and play a ball game (and distract your bad-tempered son). From somewhere nearby and right on cue, a tootling steam organ begins to play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” as if our aimless activities were being watched.

  “What’s that for, Little League?” Paul says, still disapproving and unavailable, done in by his simple failure to gain the Hall of Fame on the first try, though in no time we’ll be inside, soaking up the full wonderment: cruising its exhibits, roaming its pavilions, ogling Lou Gehrig’s vanity license plate, the Say-Hey Kid’s actual glove, Ted Williams’s illustrated strike zone and the United Emirates baseball stamp display, while chuckling at Bud and Lou doing “Who’s on First” (again)—just the way we did it back in Springfield, only much, much better.

  “It’s Doubleday Field,” I say, warmly admiring it. “Those brochures I sent you explained the whole deal. It’s where the Hall of Fame game’s played when the new inductees are enshrined in August.” I try to think of who’ll be ushered in next month, but can’t think of any baseball name but Babe Ruth. “It holds ten thousand people, was built in 1939 by the WPA when the country was on its knees and the government was helping to find jobs, which would be nice if it’d do today.”

  Paul, however, is staring at three public batting cages that are just outside the grandstand wall and from which we both can hear a sharp Coke-bottle poink of aluminum meeting horsehide. A small black kid employing a Joe Morgan elbow-trigger stance is at the plate and making repeated, withering contact in what is probably the “fast” cage. It occurs to me, as I’m sure it occurs to Paul, that it is Mr. New Hampshire Basketball again, lording it over everybody in yet another sport, in another town, and that he and his dad are on the same well-intentioned father-son circuit as we two and are having much more fun. Here, though, he’s Mr. New Hampshire Baseball.

  Though of course it’s not. This kid has buddies, white and black, hanging on the cage rungs outside, jeering and insulting in a comradely way, encouraging him to miss so they can jump in and take their big-time cuts. One of these is a skinny, bad-posture Hacky Sack punk from yesterday—one of the lowlifes I imagined Paul bonding with last night over cheese fries and burgers. They seem much older than Paul now, and I’m certain he wouldn’t know how to address them (unless they communicated by barking).

  We walk a ways down the widening alley to the point behind the old brick buildings on Main, where it turns into the Doubleday Field parking lot and where several men—men my age—dressed in new-looking big-league uniforms are departing cars with their gloves and bats, hurrying on noisy cleats toward the open grandstand tunnel, as though they were showing up late for a twin bill. Two teams’ uniforms are in evidence: the flashy yellow and unappetizing green of the Oakland A’s, and the more conservative red, white and blue of the Atlantas. I look for a number or a face I recognize from my years in the press box—somebody who’d be flattered to be remembered—but no one looks familiar.

  In fact, two “A’s” who pass right by us—R. Begtzos and J. Bergman stitched to their backs—have sizable Milwaukee goiters and seam-splitting butts, which argue against their having played anytime in recent memory.

  “I’m clueless,” Paul says. His own outfit is no more appetizing than Bergman’s and Begtzos’s.

  “It’s an important part of the whole Cooperstown experience to take a look inside here.” I begin moving us toward the tunnel behind the “players.” “It’s supposed to be good luck.” (This I’ve made up on the spot. But his euphoria has now burned off like ether, and I’m back to conflict-containment drills and getting through our last hours as friendly enemies.)

  “I’ve got a train to catch,” he says, following along.

  “You’ll make it,” I say, less friendly myself. “I’ve got plans of my own.”

  When we walk through to the end of the tunnel we could easily stroll straight out onto the field where the players are, or else turn and climb steep old concrete steps into the grandstand. Paul shies off from the field as though warned against it and takes the steps. But to me it’s irresistible to walk a few yards
into the open air, cross the gravel warning track and simply stand on the grass where two teams, ersatz Braves and ersatz A’s, are playing catch and limbering stiff, achy joints. Gloves are popping, bats cracking, voices sailing off into the bright air, shouting, “I could catch it if I could see it,” or “My leg won’t bend that way anymore,” or “Watch it, watch it, watch it.”

  Un-uniformed, I venture far enough that I can see up to the blue sky from within my shadow and all the way out to the right-field fence, where the numbers spell “312,” and bleacher seats and treetops and neighborhood rooflines are beyond, and above that a shining MOBIL sign revolves like a radar dish. Heavy, capless men in uniforms sit in the grass below the fence palings, or lie back staring up, taking in moments of deliverance, carefree and obscure. I have no idea what’s up here, only that I would love to be them for a moment, complete with a suit and no son.

  Paul sits alone on an old grandstand bench, affecting timeless boredom, his Walkman earphones clutching his neck, his chin on a pipe railing. Little is afoot here, the place being mostly empty. A few kids his age are far up in the drafty back rows, cackling and cracking wise. A scattering of chatty wives are below in the reserved seats—women in pantsuits and breezy sundresses, sitting in pairs and threes, viewing the field and players, laughing occasionally, extolling a good catch or merely occupying themselves with the neutral subjects they each are at ease with. And happily—happy as linnets in a warm and gentle wind, with nothing better to do than twitter.