The Great American Novel

by Philip Roth

  And after those two stories went crackling out over the wire services, not even Bud Parusha, miserable and solitary misfit that he was to be with a team of commonplace duffers like the Reapers, ever longed to return to the Mundys again.

  5

  THE TEMPTATION OF ROLAND AGNI

  5

  A word on the Mundy winning streak and an observation on the law of averages. The secret meeting between Roland Agni and Angela Whittling Trust, in which Roland delivers a monologue on his batting prowess that approaches the condition of poetry. The history goes backward to recount the adventures of Mrs. Trust: a description of her love affairs with Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Jolly Cholly Tuminikar, Luke Gofannon, and Gil Gamesh. Her great address to Agni on her transformation from a selfish woman into a responsible human being. A dire warning to Agni, in which the reader will be no less astonished than the rookie to learn of the international conspiracy against the Patriot League. Concluding with an account of the history of the Greenbacks under Jewish management, including scenes of Jewish family life which will appear quite ordinary to most of our readers, albeit they are enacted in a ball park.

  NEAR THE END of September, just as the ’43 season was coming to a close, a phenomenon so unlikely occurred in the Patriot League that for a couple of weeks the nation ceased speculating upon when and where the Allied invasion of the European fortress would be launched and turned its attention to the so-called “miracle” of the sports world. The pennant races themselves had people yawning: in a hapless American League, the Yanks were running away with the flag on an un-Yankeeish team batting average of .256, and in the National, the Cardinals, who still had Musial to hit and Mort Cooper to pitch, were eighteen games ahead of the second place Reds and twenty-three in front of Durocher’s Dodgers. The only race that might have been worth watching was over in the P. League, where for months the Tycoons had remained only percentage points ahead of the Butchers; by September, however, both clubs were playing such uninspired ball that it seemed each had secretly come around to thinking that winning the flag in that league in that year might not be such an honor after all. No, the “miracle” in the Patriot League wasn’t taking place at the top of the standings, but at the bottom. The Ruppert Mundys were winning.

  The streak began on September 18, with a fourteen-run explosion against Independence, and it did not end until the final day of the season, and it took Tri-City to do it: Tycoons 31, Mundys 0, the worst defeat suffered by the Mundys all season, and unquestionably the worst game ever to be played by any team in the history of the major leagues.

  Nonetheless, that the Mundys should give up thirty-one runs on twenty-seven hits and twelve errors—nineteen runs in a single inning—on the final day of that grim year was not beyond human comprehension; what was, were those eleven consecutive victories by scores of 14–6, 8–0, 7–4, 5–0, 3–1, 6–4, 11–2, 4–1, 5–3, 8–1, and 9–3. How in the world had a team like that managed to score eighty runs in little more than a week, when they had barely scored two hundred in the five months before?

  “They wuz due maybe,” said the fans.

  “Law of averages,” wrote the sportswriters.

  But neither explanation made any sense; nobody who is down and out the way the Mundys were is ever due—that is not the meaning of “down and out”—and as for the “law of averages,” it doesn’t exist, certainly not in the sense that he who has lost over a considerable length of time must, on the strength of all that accumulated defeat, inevitably begin to win. There is no mechanism in life, anymore than at the gaming tables, that triggers any such equalizing or compensatory “law” into operation. A gambler at the wheel who bets the color black because the red has turned up on ten successive turns may tell himself that he is wisely heeding the law of averages, but that is only a comforting pseudoscientific name that he has attached to a wholly unscientific superstition. The roulette wheel has no memory, unless, that is, it has been fixed.

  HOW THE MIRACLE CAME TO PASS

  It all began when Roland Agni, an Ace bandage wound round his face and over his blond curls, broke into Tycoon Park one night, bound and gagged the night watchman, and then, having relieved the old man of his key-ring, made his way to the underground bunker of Angela Whittling Trust, owner of Tri-City’s team of aging immortals. The only weapon Agni carried was his bat.

  Silently he pushed open the heavy steel door and slipped into the vestibule of her apartment. From floor to ceiling the walls were lined with glass showcases containing cups and trophies two and three feet high, topped like wedding cakes with figurines in baseball togs, and lit from above by spotlights: the Patriot League Cup, the Honey Boy Evans Trophy, the World Series Cup, the Douglas D. Oakhart Triple Crown Award … Roland could identify each by its size and shape even before stealing down the corridor to gaze upon the hallowed objects. Further on gleamed a row of goldfish bowls, each containing a single baseball bearing the Patriot League insignia and hung with a small silver medallion identifying the relic within:

  Phil Thor’s

  611⁄3 Scoreless Innings

  in a Row

  1933

  Vic Bragi’s

  535th Lifetime Home Run

  1935

  Smoky Woden’s

  Perfect Sixteen-Inning Game

  1934

  Double Play Number

  216 of the 1935 Season

  “Rustem-to-Izanagi-to-Mazda”

  Like any American who had been a kid growing up in the era of the faultless Tycoon clubs of the early thirties, Agni was overcome when he discovered himself only inches from these record-breaking baseballs out of the Patriot League past. To be sure, the Tycoon stars of the Depression years whose names Agni read with such reverence were the same old-timers against whom he and the Mundys had been playing baseball all season long. Yet, to see the very ball with which Smoky Woden had registered the last out against the Butchers in that perfect sixteen-inning game back in ’34 was a thrill bearing no resemblance to playing against old Smoky himself. That was no thrill at all, but downright humiliating. Yes, the more legendary the star, the more anguished was Roland to take the field with his eight clownish teammates, and thus come to be associated with them in the mind of someone he had idolized ever since he was a nine-year-old boy, dreaming of the Patriot League as of Paradise.

  Now to the naked eye the ball with which Smoky had finished up his sixteen perfect innings back in ’34 looked to be an exact replica of the one Vic Bragi had driven into the stands for his five hundred and thirty-fifth P. League home run in ’35—be that as it may, there was no confusing the depth and quality of the awe that each inspired in someone with Agni’s exquisitely refined feel for the game, one who could sense within his own motionless body that synchronization of strength, timing, and concentration that each achievement must have called forth. For all that he was an outfielder—and what an outfielder!—Roland had only to read “Double Play Number 216” for his muscular frame to vibrate with the rhythms that carry a ball from short to second to first, from second to short to first, from first to second and back to first for two! “Ah oh ee,” he moaned, “ee oh ah … ah ah ah … whoo-up whoo-up pow…” Two hundred and sixteen times and never the same way twice! Every double play as different from the next as one snowflake from another—and each just as perfect! Oh this game, thought Roland, shuddering with ecstasy, how I love and adore this game!

  Tommy Heimdall’s

  65th Double

  1932

  Tuck Selket’s

  23rd Pinch-Hit

  1933

  “All right, Agni,” said Angela Trust, who had rolled her wheelchair to within point-blank range of her ecstatic and spellbound intruder, “drop the bat.”

  At the sight of the black revolver, Agni instinctively fell back from the display of famous balls, as though from a wild pitch.

  “Drop it, Roland,” repeated Mrs. Trust. “Pretend you’ve just drawn ball four, and drop it at your feet—or I’ll send you to the showers for lif
e.”

  The Louisville Slugger slipped from his hands to the carpet. “How,” he muttered through the Ace bandage, while raising his hands over his head, “how do you even know for sure it’s me?”

  The elderly woman, a beauty still beneath the wrinkles, and imposing even in a wheelchair, kept the revolver trained on his groin. “Who else has been sending me candy and flowers for a week?” she said coldly.

  “You didn’t answer my letters!” cried Agni. “I didn’t know what to do. I had to see you.”

  “So you decided on this,” she said, contemptuously. “Take that absurd thing off your face.”

  He did as he was told, returning the bandage to his right knee, which he had twisted the previous week stealing home against the Blues. “Boy,” he said, adjusting his trousers, “that was really startin’ to ache, too. I just didn’t want the night watchman to recognize me, that was all.”

  “And is he dead? Did you crack his head for a home run, you fool?”

  “No! Of course not! I just tied him up and gagged him … with … well … with a couple of my jocks. But I didn’t do him no harm, I swear! Look, I wouldn’t have done nothin’ like this—but I had to! If I call, you don’t even come to the phone. When I write you, you ignore me even worse. My telegrams—do you even get them?”

  “Daily.”

  “Then why don’t you answer! I am the league’s leading batter and the outstanding candidate for rookie of the year—or I would be, if I was a Tycoon! Oh, Mrs. Trust, how can you be like this to someone who is hittin’ .370!”

  “The answer is no.”

  “But that don’t make sense! Nothin’ makes sense no more! I don’t understand!”

  “You’re a center-fielder, Agni; nobody expects you to understand. There is more at stake than you can ever comprehend.”

  “But the pennant’s what’s at stake right now! Bragi can hardly swing from his rheumatism killin’ him so—and Tommy Heimdall’s so darn tired he don’t even come out for battin’ practice! And Lou Polevik is pooped even worse! Them guys are goin’ on sheer nerve! On what they was, not what they are!”

  Sharply, she replied, “They are fine, courageous men. There will never be another outfield like them. In their prime, they made Meusel, Combs, and Ruth look nothing more than competent.”

  “But you’ll lose the pennant—and to them two-bit Butchers! I could put you over the top, I swear!”

  “And is that what you came here to tell me? Is that why you tied a night watchman in athletic supporters and stole in here with your mighty bat? Did you actually think I would negotiate a trade just because you threatened to fungo my brains against the wall? Or did you plan to rape me, Roland, to assault a seventy-two-year-old woman with a Louisville Slugger if she did not give in to your wishes? My God! Not even Cobb was that crazy!”

  “But, holy gee, neither am I! I wouldn’t dream of anything like that! Gosh, Mrs. Trust, what a thing to say to—to me! About you! And my bat!”

  “Why then bring the bat, Roland?” she snapped.

  “Why else?” he said, shrugging—and smiling. “To show you my form.”

  “And you expect me to believe that? Don’t you think I’ve had the wonderful privilege of seeing your perfect form already?”

  Of course he could tell from her tone that Angela Trust was being sarcastic, but that didn’t make what she had said any less true: his form was perfect, and he knew it. Blushing, he said, “Not close up, though.”

  God, it’s so, she thought. He wasn’t going to bludgeon her into buying him—he was only going to try to seduce her with his form. Oh, he was a .370 hitter, all right—a peacock, a princeling, a prima donna, just like all the other .370 hitters she had known. They think they have only to step to the plate for the whole of humankind to fall to its knees in adoration. As though there is nothing in this world so beautiful to behold as the stride and the swing and the follow-through of a man who can hit .370 in the big leagues. And is there?

  “Pick it up,” she said, without, however, lowering the pistol, “and come into my parlor. But one false move, Roland, and you’re out.”

  “I swear, Mrs. Trust, I only want to show you my swing. In slow motion.”

  At each end of Mrs. Trust’s parlor was a life-sized oil painting, one of her husband, wearing a dark suit and a no-nonsense expression, and seated before a vault at Trust Guaranty Trust; the other was of her father, also in a business suit, but posed with an ax over his shoulder; behind him stretched a sea of stumps. Projecting from the two side walls, some fifteen feet above the floor and at an angle of forty-five degrees, were several dozen baseball bats; at first glance, they looked like two rows of closely packed flagpoles. Slowly walking the length of this old lady’s parlor, from the portrait of the great banker who had been her husband, to the portrait of the great lumber baron who had been her father, one could gaze up on either hand at the bat of each and every Tri-City Tycoon who had ever hit .300 or more in a single season. They formed an unbroken shelter beneath which Angela Whittling Trust conducted her affairs.

  Agni pointed with his own bat to the one directly over his head.

  “Wow. Who’s that belong to?”

  “A forty-two ouncer,” she replied. “Who else? Mike Mazda.”

  “Look at the length of that thing!”

  “Thirty-eight inches.”

  Agni whistled. “That’s a lot a’ bat, ain’t it?”

  “He was a lot of man.”

  “Mine here is thirty-four inches, thirty-two ounces, ya’ know. That’s how come the writers say I ‘snap the whip.’ That’s how come I got that drivin’ force, see. It ain’t because my wrists is weak that I like the narrow handle, it’s because they’re so damn strong. And that’s the truth. My forearms and my wrists are like steel, Mrs. Trust. Want to feel them and see for yourself? Want to see me take my cut now? In slow motion? I can swing real slow for ya’, and ya’ can follow it to see just how damn level it is. Hey, want to try an experiment with a coin? When I’m standin’ in there, waitin’ for the pitch, ya’ know, I hold the big end of the bat so straight and so still, ya’ can balance a dime on the end of it. And that’s the truth. Most fellas, when they start that sweep forward, they got some kind of damn hitch or dip in there, so tiny sometimes you can’t even see it without a microscope—but just try to balance a coin on that big end there when they start their swing, and you see what happens. They see that ball acomin’ at them, and they will drop their hands, maybe only that much, but that is all it takes to throw your timin’ to hell. And your power too. Nope, there is only one way to be a great hitter like me, and it ain’t movin’ the bat in two directions, I’ll tell ya’. Same with the stride. Me, I just raise up my front foot and set it back down just about where I raised it up from. You don’t need no more stride than that. I see fellas take a big stride, I got to turn away—that’s true, Mrs. Trust, it actually makes me nauseous to look at, and I don’t care if it’s Ott himself. They might just as easy put a knife to themselves and slice off two inches of good shoulder muscle, because that’s what they are givin’ away in leverage. I just don’t understand why they want to look like tightrope walkers up there, when all you got to do with that foot is just raise it up and set it down. A’ course, you got to have eyes too, hut then I don’t have to tell you about my eyes. They say my eyes are so sharp that I can read the General’s signature off a fastball comin’ up to the plate. Well, if that’s what the pitchers wanna tell each other, that’s okay with me. But between you and me, Mrs. Trust, I ain’t some eagle that can read handwritin’ comin’ at me at sixty miles a hour—all I can tell is if the thing is goin’ to break or not, because of the way them stitches are spinnin’. If you want, I could stand behind home plate with you durin’ battin’ practice, and you tell the pitcher to mix ’em up however he likes and ninety per cent of the time I promise I will holler out the curveballs even before they break. Maybe I could read General Oakhart’s signature on a change-up, but frankly I ain’t never bothered to try
. It ain’t goin’ to help me get a base hit, is it—so why bother? Want to see me swing again?”

  By now the pistol lay in her lap like a kitten.

  “Want to see me take my cut now?” Agni repeated, when the old woman remained frozen, seemingly uncomprehending in her chair. “Mrs. Trust?”

  He’s Luke Gofannon, she was thinking, it’s Luke Gofannon all over again.

  * * *

  There had been five men in her life who mattered, and none had been her husband; her affair with him had begun only after he was in the ground. Of the five—two Mundys, a Greenback, a Yankee, and a Tiger—she had loved only one with all her heart, the Loner, Luke Gofannon. Not that he was a fiercely passionate man in the way of a Cobb or a Gamesh; no, it was the great haters who made the great lovers, or such had been Angela’s experience with America’s stars. To yield to the man who had stolen more bases than anyone in history—by terrifying as many with his menacing gaze as with his surgical spikes—was like nothing she had ever known before as a woman; it was more like being a catcher, blocking home plate against a bloodthirsty base runner, than being a perfumed beauty with breasts as smooth as silk and a finishing school education; she felt like a base being stolen—no, like a bank being robbed. Throughout he glared down at her like a gunman, snarling in his moment of ecstasy, “Take that, you society slit!” But then, where another would collapse with a shudder, shrivel up, and sleep, the great Ty would (as it were) just continue on around the bag and try for two; and then for three! And then he would break for the plate, and to Angela’s weary astonishment, make it, standing! a four-bagger, where another player would have been content with a solid base hit! The clandestine affair that had begun in his hotel room in 1911—on the day he won the batting crown with an average of .420—came to a violent end at the conclusion of the 1915 season, when he decided to perform upon her an unnatural act he described as “poling one out of the ball park foul.” Actually she did not so much resist as take longer to think it over than he had patience for, or pride. Having stolen his record-breaking ninety-six bases that year, he was not accustomed to waiting around for what he wanted.