The Great American Novel

by Philip Roth

  Around the league, at the start of that season, they would invariably begin to boo the headstrong nineteen-year-old when he stepped out of the Greenback dugout, but it did not appear to affect him any. “I never expect they are going to be very happy to see me heading out to the mound,” he told reporters. “I wouldn’t be, if I was them.” Yet once the game was over, it invariably required a police escort to get Gamesh back to the hotel, for the crowd that had hated him nine innings earlier for being so cocksure of himself, was now in the streets calling his name—adults screaming right along with kids—as though it was the Savior about to emerge from the visiting team clubhouse in a spiffy yellow linen suit and two-toned perforated shoes.

  It surely seemed to the General that he could not have turned up in the league president’s box back of first at Greenback Stadium at a more felicitous moment. In 1933 just about everybody appeared to have become a Greenback fan, and the Patriot League pennant battle between the two Tri-City teams, the impeccably professional Tycoons, and the rough-and-tumble Greenbacks, made headlines East and West, and constituted just about the only news that didn’t make you want to slit your throat over the barren dinner table. Men out of work—and there were fifteen million of them across the land, men sick and tired of defeat and dying for a taste of victory, rich men who had become paupers overnight—would somehow scrape two bits together to come out and watch from the bleachers as a big unbeatable boy named Gil Gamesh did his stuff on the mound. And to the little kids of America, whose dads were on the dole, whose uncles were on the booze, and whose older brothers were on the bum, he was a living, breathing example of that hero of American heroes, the he-man, a combination of Lindbergh, Tarzan, and (with his long, girlish lashes and brilliantined black hair) Rudolph Valentino: brave, brutish, and a lady-killer, and in possession of a sidearm fastball that according to Ripley’s “Believe It or Not” could pass clear through a batter’s chest, come out his back, and still be traveling at “major league speed.”

  What cooled the General’s enthusiasm for the boy wonder was the feud that erupted in the second month of the season between young Gil and Mike Masterson, and that ended in tragedy on the last day of the season. The grand old man of umpiring had been assigned by General Oakhart to follow the Greenbacks around the country, after it became evident that Gamesh was just too much for the other officials in the circuit to handle. The boy could be rough when the call didn’t go his way, and games had been held up for five and ten minutes at a time while Gamesh told the ump in question just what he thought of his probity, eyesight, physiognomy, parentage, and place of national origin. Because of the rookie’s enormous popularity, because of the records he was breaking in game after game, because many in the crowd had laid out their last quarter to see Gamesh pitch (and because they were just plain intimidated), the umps tended to tolerate from Gamesh what would have been inexcusable in a more mature, or less spectacular, player. This of course was creating a most dangerous precedent vis-à-vis the Rules and the Regulations, and in order to prevent the situation from getting completely out of hand, General Oakhart turned to the finest judge of a fastball in the majors, in his estimate the toughest, fairest official who ever wore blue, the man whose booming voice had earned him the monicker “the Mouth.”

  “I have been umpiring in the Patriot League since Dewey took Manila,” Mike the Mouth liked to tell them on the annual banquet circuit, after the World Series was over. “I have rendered more than a million and a half decisions in that time, and let me tell you, in all those years I have never called one wrong, at least not in my heart. In my apprentice days down in the minors I was bombarded with projectiles from the stands, I was threatened with switchblades by coaches, and once a misguided manager fired upon me with a gun. This three-inch scar here on my forehead was inflicted by the mask of a catcher who believed himself wronged by me, and on my shoulders and my back I bear sixty-four wounds inflicted during those ‘years of trial’ by bottles of soda pop. I have been mobbed by fans so perturbed that when I arrived in the dressing room I discovered all the buttons had been torn from my clothing, and rotten vegetables had been stuffed into my trousers and my shirt. But harassed and hounded as I have been, I am proud to say that I have never so much as changed the call on a close one out of fear of the consequences to my life, my limbs, or my loved ones.”

  This last was an allusion to the kidnapping and murder of Mike the Mouth’s only child, back in 1898, his first year up with the P. League. The kidnappers had entered Mike’s Wisconsin home as he was about to leave for the ball park to umpire a game between the Reapers and the visiting Rustlers, who were battling that season for the flag. Placing a gun to his little girl’s blond curls, the intruders told the young umpire that if the Reapers lost that afternoon, Mary Jane would be back in her high chair for dinner, unharmed. If however the Reapers should win for any reason, then Masterson could hold himself responsible for his darling child’s fate … Well, that game, as everyone knows, went on and on and on, before the Reapers put together two walks and a scratch hit in the bottom of the seventeenth to break the 3–3 tie and win by a run. In subsequent weeks, pieces of little Mary Jane Masterson were found in every park in the Patriot League.

  It did not take but one pitch, of course, for Mike the Mouth to become the lifelong enemy of Gil Gamesh. Huge crowd, sunny day, flags snapping in the breeze, Gil winds up, kicks, and here comes that long left arm, America, around by way of the tropical Equator.

  “That’s a ball,” thundered Mike, throwing his own left arm into the air (as if anybody in the ball park needed a sign when the Mouth was back of the plate).

  “A ball?” cried Gamesh, hurling his glove twenty-five feet in the air. “Why, I couldn’t put a strike more perfect across the plate! That was right in there, you blind robber!”

  Mike raised one meaty hand to stop the game and stepped out in front of the plate with his whisk broom. He swept the dust away meticulously, allowing the youth as much time as he required to remember where he was and whom he was talking to. Then he turned to the mound and said—in tones exceeding courteous—“Young fellow, it looks like you’ll be in the league for quite a while. That sort of language will get you nothing. Why don’t you give it up?” And he stepped back into position behind the catcher. “Play!” he roared.

  On the second pitch, Mike’s left arm shot up again. “That’s two.” And Gamesh was rushing him.

  “You cheat! You crook! You thief! You overage, overstuffed—”

  “Son, don’t say anymore.”

  “And what if I do, you pickpocket?”

  “I will give you the thumb right now, and we will get on with the game of baseball that these people have paid good money to come out here today to see.”

  “They didn’t come out to see no baseball game, you idiot—they come out to see me!”

  “I will run you out of here just the same.”

  “Try it!” laughed Gil, waving toward the stands where the Greenback fans were already on their feet, whooping like a tribe of Red Indians for Mike the Mouth’s scalp. And how could it be otherwise? The rookie had a record of fourteen wins and no losses, and it was not yet July. “Go ahead and try it,” said Gil. “They’d mob you, Masterson. They’d pull you apart.”

  “I would as soon be killed on a baseball field,” replied Mike the Mouth (who in the end got his wish), “as anywhere else. Now why don’t you go out there and pitch. That’s what they pay you to do.”

  Smiling, Gil said, “And why don’t you go shit in your shoes.”

  Mike looked as though his best friend had died; sadly he shook his head. “No, son, no, that won’t do, not in the Big Time.” And up went the right thumb, an appendage about the size and shape of a nice pickle. Up it went and up it stayed, though for a moment it looked as though Gamesh, whose mouth had fallen open, was considering biting it off—it wasn’t but an inch from his teeth.

  “Leave the field, son. And leave it now.”

  “Oh sure,” chuckled Gil, r
ecovering his composure, “oh sure, leave the field in the middle of pitchin’ to the first batter,” and he started back out to the mound, loping nonchalantly like a big boy in an open meadow, while the crowd roared their love right into his face. “Oh sure,” he said, laughing like mad.

  “Son, either you go,” Mike called after him, “or I forfeit this game to the other side.”

  “And ruin my perfect record?” he asked, his hands on his hips in disbelief. “Oh sure,” he laughed. Then he got back to business: sanding down the ball in his big calloused palms, he called to the batsman on whom he had a two ball count, “Okay, get in there, bud, and let’s see if you can get that gun off your shoulder.”

  But the batter had hardly done as Gil had told him to when he was lifted out of the box by Mike the Mouth. Seventy-one years old, and a lifetime of being banged around, and still he just picked him up and set him aside like a paperweight. Then, with his own feet dug in, one on either side of home plate, he made his startling announcement to the sixty thousand fans in Greenback Stadium—the voice of Enrico Caruso could not have carried any more clearly to the corners of the outfield bleachers.

  “Because Greenback pitcher Gilbert Gamesh has failed to obey the order of the umpire-in-chief that he remove himself from the field of play, this game is deemed forfeited by a score of 9 to 0 to the opposing team, under rule 4.15 of the Official Baseball Rules that govern the playing of baseball games by the professional teams of the Patriot League of Professional Baseball Clubs.”

  And jaw raised, arms folded, and legs astride home plate—according to Smitty’s column the next day, very like that Colossus at Rhodes—Mike the Mouth remained planted where he was, even as wave upon wave of wild men washed over the fences and onto the field.

  And Gil Gamesh, his lips white with froth and his eagle eyes spinning in his skull, stood a mere sixty feet and six inches away, holding a lethal weapon in his hand.

  * * *

  The next morning. A black-and-white perforated shoe kicks open the door to General Oakhart’s office and with a wad of newspapers in his notorious left hand, enter Gil Gamesh, shrieking. “My record is not 14 and 1! It’s 14 and 0! Only now they got me down here for a loss! Which is impossible! And you two done it!”

  “You ‘done’ it, young man,” said General Oakhart, while in a double-breasted blue suit the same deep shade as his umpire togs, Mike the Mouth Masterson silently filled a chair by the trophy cabinet.

  “Youse!”

  “You.”

  “Youse!”

  “You.”

  “Stop saying ‘you’ when I say ‘youse’—it was youse, and the whole country knows it too! You and that thief! Sittin’ there free as a bird, when he oughtta be in Sing Sing!”

  Now the General’s decorations flashed into view as he raised himself from behind the desk. Wearing the ribbons and stars of a courageous lifetime, he was impressive as a ship’s figurehead—and of course he was still a powerfully built man, with a chest on him that might have been hooped around like a barrel. Indeed, the three men gathered together in the room looked as though they could have held their own against a team of horses, if they’d had to draw a brewery truck through the streets of Tri-City. No wonder that the day before, the mob that had pressed right up to his chin had fallen back from Mike the Mouth as he stood astride home plate like the Eighth Wonder of the World. Of course, ever since the murder of his child, not even the biggest numskull had dared to throw so much as a peanut shell at him from the stands; but neither did his bulk encourage a man to tread upon his toes.

  “Gamesh,” said the General, swelling with righteousness, “no umpire in the history of this league has ever been found guilty of a single act of dishonesty or corruption. Or even charged with one. Remember that!”

  “But—my perfect record! He ruined it—forever! Now I’ll go down in the history books as someone who once lost! And I didn’t! I couldn’t! I can’t!”

  “And why can’t you, may I ask?”

  “Because I’m Gil Gamesh! I’m an immortal!”

  “I don’t care if you are Jesus Christ!” barked the General. “There are Rules and Regulations in this world and you will follow them just like anybody else!”

  “And who made the rules?” sneered Gamesh. “You? Or Scarface over there?”

  “Neither of us, young man. But we are here to see that they are carried out.”

  “And suppose I say the hell with you!”

  “Then you will be what is known as an outlaw.”

  “And? So? Jesse James was an outlaw. And he’s world-famous.”

  “True. But he did not pitch in the major leagues.”

  “He didn’t want to,” sneered the young star.

  “But you do,” replied General Oakhart, and, bewildered, Gamesh collapsed into a chair. It wasn’t just what he wanted to, it was all he wanted to do. It was what he was made to do.

  “But,” he whimpered, “my perfect record.”

  “The umpire, in case it hasn’t occurred to you, has a record too. A record,” the General informed him, “that must remain untainted by charges of favoritism or falsification. Otherwise there would not even be major league baseball contests in which young men like yourself could excel.”

  “But there ain’t no young men like myself,” Gamesh whined. “There’s me, and that’s it.”

  “Gil…” It was Mike the Mouth speaking. Off the playing field he had a voice like a songbird’s, so gentle and mellifluous that it could soothe a baby to sleep. And alas, it had, years and years ago … “Son, listen to me. I don’t expect that you are going to love me. I don’t expect that anybody in a ball park is going to care if I live or die. Why should they? I’m not the star. You are. The fans don’t go out to the ball park to see the Rules and the Regulations upheld, they go out to see the home team win. The whole world loves a winner, you know that better than anybody, but when it comes to an umpire, there’s not a soul in the ball park who’s for him. He hasn’t got a fan in the place. What’s more, he cannot sit down, he cannot go to the bathroom, he cannot get a drink of water, unless he visits the dugout, and that is something that any umpire worth his salt does not ever want to do. He cannot have anything to do with the players. He cannot fool with them or kid with them, even though he may be a man who in his heart likes a little horseplay and a joke from time to time. If he so much as sees a ballplayer coming down the street, he will cross over or turn around and walk the other way, so it will not look to passersby that anything is up between them. In strange towns, when the visiting players all buddy up in a hotel lobby and go out together for a meal in a friendly restaurant, he finds a room in a boarding house and eats his evening pork chop in a diner all alone. Oh, it’s a lonesome thing, being an umpire. There are men who won’t talk to you for the rest of your life. Some will even stoop to vengeance. But that is not your lookout, my boy. Nobody is twisting Masterson’s arm, saying, ‘Mike, it’s a dog’s life, but you are stuck with it.’ No, it’s just this, Gil: somebody in this world has got to run the game. Otherwise, you see, it wouldn’t be baseball, it would be chaos. We would be right back where we were in the Ice Ages.”

  “The Ice Ages?” said Gil, reflectively.

  “Exactly,” replied Mike the Mouth.

  “Back when they was livin’ in caves? Back when they carried clubs and ate raw flesh and didn’t wear no clothes?”

  “Correct!” said General Oakhart.

  “Well,” cried Gil, “maybe we’d be better off!” And kicking aside the newspapers with which he’d strewn the General’s carpet, he made his exit. Whatever it was he said to the General’s elderly spinster secretary out in the anteroom—instead of just saying “Good day”—caused her to keel over unconscious.

  * * *

  That very afternoon, refusing to heed the advice of his wise manager to take in a picture show, Gamesh turned up at Greenback Stadium just as the game was getting underway, and still buttoning up his uniform shirt, ran out and yanked the baseball from t
he hand of the Greenback pitcher who was preparing to pitch to the first Aceldama hitter of the day—and nobody tried to stop him. The regularly scheduled pitcher just walked off the field like a good fellow (cursing under his breath) and the Old Philosopher, as they called the Greenback manager of that era, pulled his tired old bones out of the dugout and ambled over to the umpire back of home plate. In his early years, the Old Philosopher had worn his seat out sliding up and down the bench, but after a lifetime of managing in the majors, he wasn’t about to be riled by anything.

  “Change in the line-up, Mike. That big apple knocker out there on the mound is batting ninth now on my card.”

  To which Mike Masterson, master of scruple and decorum, replied, “Name?”

  “Boy named Gamesh,” he shouted, to make himself heard above the pandemonium rising from the stands.

  “Spell it.”

  “Awww come on now, Michael.”

  “Spell it.”

  “G-a-m-e-s-h.”

  “First name?”

  “Gil. G as in Gorgeous. I as in Illustrious. L as in Larger-than-life.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Mike the Mouth, and donning his mask, called, “Play!”

  (“In the beginning was the word, and the word was ‘Play!’” Thus began the tribute to Mike Masterson, written the day the season ended in tragedy, in the column called “One Man’s Opinion.”)

  The first Aceldama batsman stepped in. Without even taking the time to insult him, to mock him, to tease and to taunt him, without so much as half a snarl or the crooked smile, Gamesh pitched the ball, which was what they paid him to do.

  “Strike-ah-one!” roared Mike.

  The catcher returned the ball to Gamesh, and again, impersonal as a machine and noiseless as a snake, Gamesh did his chorus girl kick, and in no time at all the second pitch passed through what might have been a tunnel drilled for it by the first.

  “Strike-ah-two!”