The Great American Novel

by Philip Roth

  According to the next day’s newspapers, Mrs. Trust suffered her broken nose in the bath of a Detroit hotel room; true enough, only she had not got it by “slipping in the tub,” as the papers reported.

  The Yankee was Ruth. How could she resist?

  “George? This is Angela Whittling Trust. We happen to be in the same hotel.”

  “Come on up.”

  “With Spenser or without?”

  “Surprise me.” He laughed. It was October of 1927; he had already hit sixty home runs in the course of the regular season, and that afternoon, in the third World Series game against the Pirates, he’d hit another in the eighth with two on.

  Surprise me, the Bambino had said, but the surprise was on her when he answered her knock, for the notorious bad boy was unclothed and smoking a cigar. Still slender, still silken, Angela was nonetheless a white-haired woman of fifty-five in the fall of ’27, and in her silver-fox cape the last woman in the world one would think to greet in anything but the manner prescribed by society. Which was of course why the Babe had chosen to appear nude at the door—and why Mrs. Trust had entered without any sign that she was discomfited in the slightest. Of course he was a clown, a glutton, an egomaniac, a spoiled brat, and a baby through and through … but what was any of that beside those tremendous home runs?

  “I been expectin’ ya’, Whittlin’ Trust.”

  “Have you now.” She removed her cape and draped it over a trophy that the Babe had placed to ice in a champagne bucket. What wit. What breeding. She took a good look at him—what legs. But who cared, with all those home runs?

  “Since when?” Angela asked, removing her gloves in a most provocative way.

  “Since 1921, Whittlin’ Trust.”

  “Really? You thought I’d ring you up for fifty-nine home runs, did you?”

  He smiled and sucked his cigar. “And one hundred seventy r.b.i.s. And a hundred seventy-seven runs. And a hundred nineteen extra-base bits. Yeah, Whittlin’ Trust,” said the Yankee immortal, chortling, “as a matter of fact, I thought you might.”

  “No,” she said, as she set down her watch and her rings and began to unbutton her blouse, “I thought it would be best to wait. I have my reputation to consider. How was I to know you weren’t just another flash-in-the-pan, George?”

  “Come ’ere, W.T., and I’ll show you how.”

  A season with Ruth—and then in ’29, the first of her pitchers, the first of her Mundys, the speedballer, Prince Charles Tuminikar. Yes, they called him a prince when he came up, and they called swinging and missing at that fastball of his “chasin’ Charlies.” That was all he bothered to throw back then, but it was enough: 23–4 his rookie year, and by July 4 of the following season, 9–0. Then one afternoon, locked in a 0–0 tie going into the fourteenth, he killed a man. Everyone agreed it was a chest-high pitch, but it must have been coming a hundred miles an hour at least, and a dumb rookie named O’del, the last pinch-hitter off the Terra Inc. bench, stepped into the damn thing—exactly as Bob Yamm was to do against Ockatur thirteen years later—and he was pronounced dead by the umpire even before the trainer could make it out to the plate with an ice pack. Everyone agreed O’del was to blame, except Tuminikar. He left the mound and went immediately to the police station to turn himself in.

  Of course no one was about to bring charges against a man for throwing a chest-high pitch in a baseball game, though maybe if they had, he could have served four or five years for manslaughter, and come on out of jail to be his old self on the mound. As it was, he never threw a fastball of any consequence again, or won more games in a season than he lost. Or was worth much of anything to Angela Whittling Trust.

  And so it was, in her sixtieth year, that she came to Luke Gofannon, the silent Mundy center-fielder who had broken Ruth’s record in 1928, as great a switch-hitter as the game had ever known, a man who made both hitting and fielding look like acts of meditation, so effortless and tranquil did he appear even in the midst of running with the speed of a locomotive, or striking at the ball with the force of a pile driver.

  “You’re poetry in motion,” said Angela, and Luke, having reflected upon this observation of hers for an hour (they were in bed), remarked at last:

  “Could be. I ain’t much for readin’.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like you, Luke. The equanimity, the composure, the serenity…”

  To this he answered, in due time, “Well, I ain’t never been much for excitement. I just take things as they come.”

  His exquisitely proportioned, powerful physique in repose—the repose itself, that pensive, solitary air that had earned him his nickname—filled Angela with a wild tenderness that she had not known as mistress to the ferocious Tiger, the buffoonish Yankee, and the ill-fated fireballer they now called Jolly Cholly T.; he awakened an emotion in her at once so wistful and so full of yearning, that she wondered if perhaps she should not have been a mother after all, as Spenser had wanted her to be, a good mother and a good wife. But before another season began, she would be sixty. Her face, her breasts, her hips, her thighs, for all that she had given them everything money could buy (yes, these had been her children), soon would be the face, breasts, and thighs of a thirty-five-year-old woman. And then what would she do with her time?

  “I love you, Luke,” she told the Loner.

  Another hour passed.

  “Luke? Did you hear me, darling?”

  “I heard.”

  “Don’t you want to know why I love you?”

  “I know why, I guess.”

  “Why?”

  “My bein’ a pome.”

  “But you are a poem, my sweet!”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Luke—tell me. What do you love most in the world? Because I’m going to make you love me just as much. More! What do you love most in the entire world?”

  “In the entire world?”

  “Yes!”

  It was dawn before he came up with the answer.

  “Triples.”

  “Triples?”

  “Yep.”

  “I don’t understand, darling. What about home runs?”

  “Nope. Triples. Hittin’ triples. Don’t get me wrong, Angela, I ain’t bad-mouthin’ the home run and them what hits ’em, me included. But smack a home run and that’s it, it’s all over.”

  “And a triple?” she asked. “Luke, you must tell me. I have to know. What is it about the triple that makes you love it so much? Tell me, Luke, tell me!” There were tears in her eyes, the tears of jealous rage.

  “You sure you up to it?” asked Luke, as astonished as it was in his nature to be. “Looks like you might be gettin’ a little cold.”

  “You love the triple more than Horace Whittling’s daughter, more than Spenser Trust’s wife—tell me why!”

  “Well,” he said in his slow way, “smackin’ it, first off. Off the wall, up the alley, down the line, however it goes, it goes with that there crack. Then runnin’ like blazes. ’Round first and into second, and the coach down there cryin’ out to ya’, ‘Keep comin’.’ So ya’ make the turn at second, and ya’ head for third—and now ya’ know that throw is comin’, ya’ know it is right on your tail. So ya’ slide. Two hunerd and seventy feet of runnin’ behind ya’, and with all that there momentum, ya’ hit it—whack, into the bag. Over he goes. Legs. Arms. Dust. Hell, ya’ might be in a tornado, Angela. Then ya’ hear the ump—‘Safe!’ And y’re in there … Only that ain’t all.”

  “What then? Tell me everything, Luke! What then?”

  “Well, the best part, in a way. Standin’ up. Dustin’ off y’r breeches and standin’ up there on that bag. See, Angela, a home run, it’s great and all, they’re screamin’ and all, but then you come around those bases and you disappear down into the dugout and that’s it. But not with a triple … Ya’ get it, at all?”

  “Yes, yes, I get it.”

  “Yep,” he said, running the whole wonderful adventure through in his mind, his eyes closed,
and his arms crossed behind him on the pillow beneath his head, “big crowd … sock a triple … nothin’ like it.”

  “We’ll see about that, Mr. Loner,” whispered Angela Trust.

  Poor little rich girl! How she tried! Did an inning go by during the two seasons of their affair, that she did not know his batting average to the fourth digit? You’re batting this much, you’re fielding that much, nobody goes back for them like you, my darling. Nobody swings like you, nobody runs like you, nobody is so beautiful just fielding an easy fly ball!

  Was ever a man so admired and adored? Was ever a man so worshipped? Did ever an aging woman struggle so to capture and keep her lover’s heart?

  But each time she asked, no matter how circuitously (and prayerfully) she went about it, the disappointment was the same.

  “Lukey,” she whispered in his ear, as he lay with his fingers interlaced beneath his head, “which do you love more now, my darling, a stolen base, or me?”

  “You.”

  “Oh, darling,” and she kissed him feverishly. “Which do you love more, a shoestring catch, or me?”

  “Oh, you.”

  “Oh, my all-star Adonis! Which do you love more, dearest Luke, a fastball letter-high and a little tight, or me?”

  “Well…”

  “Well what?”

  “Well, if I’m battin’ left-handed, and we’re at home—”

  “Luke!”

  “But then a’ course, if I’m battin’ rightie, you, Angel.”

  “Oh, my precious, Luke, what about—what about a home run?”

  “You or a home run, you mean?”

  “Yes!”

  “Well, now I really got to think … Why … why … why, I’ll be damned. I got to be honest. Geez. I guess—you. Well, isn’t that somethin’.”

  He who had topped Ruth’s record, loved her more than all his home runs put together! “My darling,” and in her joy, the fading beauty offered to Gofannon what she had withheld even from Cobb.

  “And Luke,” she asked, when the act had left the two of them weak and dazed with pleasure, “Luke,” she asked, when she had him just where she wanted him, “what about … your triples? Whom do you love more now, your triples, or your Angela Whittling Trust?”

  While he thought that one through, she prayed. It has to be me. I am flesh. I am blood. I need. I want. I age. Someday I will even die. Oh Luke, a triple isn’t even a person—it’s a thing!

  But the thing it was. “I can’t tell a lie, Angela,” said the Loner. “There just ain’t nothin’ like it.”

  Never had a man, in word or deed, caused her such anguish and such grief. This illiterate ballplayer had only to say “Nothin’ like it” about those God damn triples for a lifetime’s desire to come back at her as frantic despair. Oh, Luke, if you had only known me in my prime, back when Ty was hitting .420! God, I was irresistible! Back before the lively ball, oh you should have seen and held me then! But look at me now, she thought bitterly, examining herself later that night in her mirrored dressing room—just look at me! Ghastly! The body of a thirty-five-year-old woman! She turned slowly about, till she could see herself reflected from behind. “Face it, Angela,” she told her reflection, “thirty-six.” And she began to sob.

  “Luke! Luke! Luke! Luke! Luke!”

  It was only the name of a Patriot League center-fielder that she howled, but it came so piercingly from her throat, and with such pitiable yearning, that it might have stood for all that a woman, no matter how rich, beautiful, powerful, and proud she may be, can never hope to possess.

  And then he was traded, and then he was dead.

  And so that spring she took up with a Greenback rookie, a beautiful Babylonian boy named Gil Gamesh.

  “Till I was eight or nine, I knew we was the only Babylonian family in Tri-City, but I figured there was more of us out in California or Florida, or some place like that, where it was warm all the time. Don’t ask me how a kid gets that kind of idea, he just gets it. Bein’ lonely, I suppose. Then one day I got the shock of my life when my old man sat me down and he told me we wasn’t just the only ones in Tri-City, or even in Massachusetts, but in the whole damn U.S.A. Oh, my old man, he was a proud old son of a bitch, Angela—you would a’ liked that old fire-eater. He wouldn’t change his ways for nobody or nothin’. ‘What do you mean you’re a Babylonian?’ they’d ask him when he filled out some kind of form or somethin’—‘what the hell is God damn Babylonian supposed to be? If you’re some kind of wop or Polack or somethin’, say it, so we know where we stand!’ Oh, that got him goin’ all right, callin’ him those things. ‘I Babylonian! Free country! Any damn thing—that my damn thing!’ That’s just what he’d tell ’em, whether it meant gettin’ the job or losin’ it. And so that’s what I wrote down in school too, under what I was: Babylonian. And that’s how come they started throwin’ them rocks at me. Livin’ down by the docks in those days, there wasn’t any kind of person you didn’t see. We even had some Indians livin’ there, Red Indians, workin’ as longshoremen, smokin’ God damn peace pipes on their lunch hour. Christ, we had Arabs, we had everythin’. And they’d all take turns chasin’ me home from school. First for a few blocks the Irish kids threw rocks at me. Then the German kids threw rocks at me. Then the Eye-talian, then the colored, then them Mohawk kids, whoopin’ at me like it was some honest to Christ war dance; then down by the chop suey joint, the Chink’s kid; then the Swedes—hell, even the Jew kids threw rocks at me, while they was runnin’ away from the kids throwin’ rocks at them. I’m tellin’ you, it was somethin’, Angela. Belgian kids, Dutch kids, Spanish kids, even some God damn kid from Switzerland—I never seen one before, and I never ever heard of one since, but there he is, on my tail, shoutin’ at the top of his lungs, ‘Get outta here, ya’ lousy little Babylonian bastard! Go back to where you belong, ya’ dirty bab!’ Me, I didn’t even know what a bab was. Maybe those kids didn’t either. Maybe it was somethin’ they picked up at home or somethin’. I know my old man never heard it before. But, Christ, did it get him mad. ‘They you call bab? Or bad? Sure not bad?’ ‘I’m sure, Poppa,’ I told him. ‘Bab,’ he’d say, ‘bab…’ and then he’d just start goin’ wild, tremblin’ and screamin’ so loud my old lady went into hidin’. ‘Nobody my boy bab call if here I am! Nobody! Country free! God damn thing! Bab they want—we them bab show all right good!’ Only I didn’t show them nothin’, ’ceptin’ my tail. When those rocks started comin’ my way, I just up and run for my life. And that just made my old man even madder. ‘Free! Free! Underneath me?’ That’s how he used to say ‘understand.’ Or maybe that’s how all Babylonians say it, when they speak English. I wouldn’t know, since we was the only ones I ever met. Don’t worry, it got him into a lot of fights in bars and stuff, sayin’ ‘underneath’ for ‘understand’ like that. ‘Don’t again to let you them call bab on my boy—underneath? Ever!’ ‘But they’re throwin’ rocks big as my head—at my head!’ I told him. ‘Then back throw rock on them!’ he told me. ‘Throw them big rock, throw you more big!’ ‘But there are a hundred of them throwin’, Poppa, and only one a’ me.’ ‘So,’ he says, grabbin’ me by the throat to make his point, ‘throw you more hard. And strong! Underneath?’

  “So that’s how I come to pitchin’, Angela. I got myself a big pile a’ rocks, and I lined up these beer and whiskey bottles that I’d fish outta the bay, and I’d stand about fifty feet away, and then I’d start throwin’. You mick bastard! You wop bastard! You kike bastard! You nigger bastard! You Hun son of a bitch! That’s how I developed my pick-off play. I’d shout real angry, ‘Run, nigger!’ but then I’d spin around and throw at the bottle that was the wop. In the beginnin’, a’ course, out on the street, bein’ so small and inexperienced and all, and with the pressure on and so forth, I was so damn confused, and didn’t know what half the words meant anyway, I’d be callin’ the wops kikes and the niggers micks, and damned if. I ever figured out what in hell to call that kid from Switzerland to insult him—‘Hey,’ I’d say, ‘you G
od damn kid from God damn Switzerland,’ but by the time I got all that out, he was gone. Well, anyway, by and by I got most of the names straightened around, and even where I didn’t, they stopped laughin’, on account of how good I got with them rocks. And about then I picked up this here fierce way I got too, just by imitatin’ my dad, mostly. Oh, those little boys didn’t much care to chase me home from school anymore after that. And you should a’ heard my old man crowin’ then. ‘Now you them show what bab do! Now they underneath! And good!’ And I was so damn proud and happy, and relieved a’ course, and a’ course I was only ten, so I just didn’t think to ask him right off what else a bab could do. And then he up and died around then—they beat the shit out of him in a bar, a bunch of guys from Tierra del Fuego, who had it in for Babylonians, my mother said—and, well, that was it. I didn’t have no father no more to teach me, so I never did know how to be the kind of Babylonian he wanted me to be, except by throwin’ things and sneerin’ a lot. And that’s more or less what I been doin’ ever since.”

  A callow, untutored boy, a wharf rat, enraged son of a crazed father—no poem he, but still the greatest left-handed rookie in history, and nothing to sneer at at sixty-one … But then he threw that pitch at Mike Masterson’s larynx, and Gil was an ex-lover too. To be sure, in the months after his disappearance, she had waited for some message from the exile, a plea for her to intervene in his behalf. But none came, perhaps because he knew that she was not the kind of woman whose intervention anyone would ever take seriously. “Speak a word to the Commissioner about that maniac,” her husband had cautioned her, “and I will expose you to the world, Angela, for the tramp that you are. Every loudmouth Ty and Babe and Gil who comes along!”

  Even in her grief she found the strength to taunt him. “Would you prefer I slept with bullpen catchers?”