The Great American Novel

by Philip Roth

  “Film?” said Gamesh. “Oh, sure. My uncle. He’s the super-duper photographer in the family. Babylonians love pictures, you know—worth a thousand words, we say.”

  “Your uncle’s a Communist spy! You’re one too! That’s why you’re teachin’ them hate!”

  “Play ball!”

  Before the umpire could descend upon them, Gamesh started back to the dugout—but his parting words were chilling, their meaning as well as their tone: “Use your head, Hero. I can ruin your life, destroy your reputation forevermore.”

  After working the count to 2 and 2, Terminus popped up foul on an Ellis hit-and-run and not all the abuse in the new Mundy lexicon could cause the Kakoola third-baseman to drop the fly ball, nor was he intimidated by Applejack’s bat as it came careening toward his ankles. The put-out made, however, the third-baseman started after Ockatur (later, from his hospital bed, he claimed that the dwarf had spit in his eye as he crossed the coaching box in pursuit of the pop-up), whereupon the Mundys sprang from the bench and were kneeing (some said knifing) the fielder before he could lay hold of the misshapen coach. Scores of police charged on to the field from beneath the stands—on hand, as of old, when Gamesh came to town—and when finally spikes were plucked from flesh and fingers from eyeballs, Ockatur, Astarte, and Rama were ejected from the game, and the Kakoola third-baseman, as well as the shortstop—the sole Reaper who had dared to come to his defense—were carried unconscious from the diamond. How times do change! Who would have believed this of the Mundys only the season before?

  The field clear at last of law-enforcement officers (and their horses), Gamesh came off the Mundy bench once again and started out to home plate, where Agni waited for the Reaper utility infielders to take a practice throw before stepping in for his turn at bat.

  Making no effort to hide his disgust, the umpire said, “Now what, Gamesh? You gotta start in too? Ain’t they crazy enough from Mazuma?” he asked, motioning out to the bleachers, where the irrepressible Kakoola owner, in an Uncle Sam beard and suit to celebrate the day, and with the assistance of daughter Dinero, was loading an iron ball into a mock cannon aimed in the direction of the Mundy bullpen.

  “So what do you say, Rollie,” Gamesh whispered, “you don’t want to go down in recorded history like Shoeless Joe, do you? You wouldn’t want the world to know about those W-h-e-a-t-i-e-s, would you? Why not give over the fil-um then, okay? And then go get yourself a nice new bat, and we will forget we ever crossed swords today—what do you say, Roland? Otherwise your name will be anathema for centuries to come. Like Caligula. Like Judas. Like Leopold and Loeb.”

  “What—what’s anathema!” asked the young center-fielder, weakening under Gamesh’s maniacal, threatening gaze.

  “Mud, my boy, mud. You will be an outcast from decent society worse even than me. You who could be greater than Gofannon, greater than Cobb, greater than the great Joe D.”

  “But—but you’re out to destroy America!”

  “America?” said Gamesh, smiling. “Roland, what’s America to you? Or me, or those tens of thousands up in the stands? It’s just a word they use to keep your nose to the grindstone and your toes to the line. America is the opiate of the people, Goldilocks—I wouldn’t worry my pretty little reflexes about it, if I was a star like you.”

  When the bang sounded, all faces turned—grinning—toward the open center-field bleachers, where the bearded, top-hatted Mazuma, and daughter Dinero, clad for a summer day in a strip of red, a cup of white, and a cup of blue, were still wrestling with the cannonball (and one another). The fans whooped and barked with delight. Then came the second report, and with it the realization that it wasn’t Mazuma setting off firecrackers, and it wasn’t a joke.

  Spectators turned up afterwards (publicity hounds, one and all) who claimed to have heard as many as six and seven shots ring out, thus giving rise to the “keystone combo” conspiracy theory of assassination bandied about for months and months in the letters column of the Kakoola papers; however, the investigation conducted by General Oakhart’s office in cooperation with the Kakoola Police Department concluded “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that only two bullets had been fired, the one that shattered Gil Gamesh’s left shoulder before ricocheting into Roland’s throat, and the bullet that penetrated Agni’s head directly between his baby-blue eyes, at the very instant, it would seem, that he was either to betray his country so as to save his name, or sacrifice his name so as to save his country.

  From the stands it was at first assumed that the bodies lying atop one another across home plate were both dead; but though Gamesh’s famed left arm lay stretched in the dust, lifeless as a length of cable, the right edged slowly down Roland’s bloody shirtfront, and while pandemonium reigned in the stadium, Gamesh reached into Roland’s pants and fished the microfilm out from where the innocent youngster had (predictably) secreted it.

  The assassin was dead within minutes. Kakoola mounted police, low in their saddles, charged the scoreboard, placing as many as twenty bullets into each of the apertures from which the shots appeared to have come. As a result, they got not just the assassin, but also the scorekeeper—a father of four, two of whom, being boys, were assured within the week of admission to West Point when they should come of age. At a memorial service at Kakoola City Hall, a service academy spokesman standing in full-dress uniform beside the two small boys, Mayor Efghi, Frank Mazuma, and a veiled, voluptuous Dinero, would call the appointments “a tribute to the brave father of these two proud young Americans, who had perished,” as he put it, “in the line of duty” (perished along with Mike the Mouth Masterson, who was, as the reader will already have surmised, the murderer).

  The coroner’s inquest revealed that of the two hundred and fifty-six slugs fired by the Kakoola police, one had grazed Mike’s ear; however, the long night he had spent with his high-powered rifle in a remote corner of the scoreboard, sucking chicken bones and drinking soda pop and dreaming his dreams of vengeance, followed by the excitement of the assassination itself, apparently had been enough to cause him to keel over, at eighty-one, a victim of heart failure.

  THE ENEMY WITHIN

  Two days after Agni’s death, from the studios of TAWT, Angela Whittling Trust’s Tri-City radio station, General Oakhart revealed to the American people the magnitude of the plot to destroy the Patriot League, Organized Baseball, the free enterprise system, democracy, and the republic. Seated to either side of the microphone from which the General read his statement were Gil Gamesh, Angela Trust, and Mr. and Mrs. Roland Agni, Senior, parents of the slain center-fielder, who, it was now revealed, had not been the accidental victim of a vengeful madman, “a loner” acting on his own, but had been murdered deliberately for refusing to play ball with America’s enemies.

  “My fellow Americans, and ladies and gentlemen of the press,” General Oakhart began. “I have here in my hand the names of thirteen members of the Ruppert Mundy baseball team who have been named as dues-paying, card-carrying members of the Communist Party, secret agents of a Communist espionage and sabotage ring, and Communist sympathizers.”

  He proceeded then to outline the scheme hatched over a decade ago in the inner sanctum of the Kremlin, and that had erupted in violence two days earlier with the tragic murder of the 1943 Patriot League batting champ, and the attempt upon the life of Gil Gamesh. “I am shortly going to ask the Mundy manager to tell you his own remarkable story in his own words. It is a story of defeat and dejection, of error and of betrayal; it is a story of the horror of treason and the circle of loneliness and misery in which the traitor moves. I know that some of you will ask, How can you have any respect for the integrity of a man who now admits to such a heinous past, who admits to us now that he did not tell anything like the whole truth about himself the first time he appeared before the nation only a few brief months ago? My answer is not one of justification but of extenuation. My fellow Americans, is it not better to tell the whole truth in the end than to refuse to tell the truth at all? Is it n
ot better to be one who has been a Communist than one who may still be one? I think one need only contrast the searing frankness and the soul-searching courage of Gil Gamesh with the deviousness and treachery of the Mundy Thirteen—twelve of whom still staunchly refuse to admit to the crime of treason—to conclude that Gil Gamesh is indeed an American who deserves not only our respect, but our undying gratitude for this warning he has given us of the conspiracy we face and the battle that lies ahead.”

  General Oakhart now read into the microphone the names of the Mundys whom he was suspending that day from the Patriot League for their Communist activities. Full files, he said, were available on each and every one of these cases, and had been turned over that morning to the F.B.I., along with the files on another thirty-six Communists and pro-Communists presently active in the league. In that the Thirty-Six hadn’t yet been afforded an opportunity, in closed session with the General, either to refute the charges or to make a full confession, General Oakhart said that he did not consider it “fair play” to make their names known to the public at this time. To date, he reported, not a single one of the Mundy Thirteen that he had interrogated in his office had been able to disprove the allegations to the satisfaction of himself or Mrs. Trust, who had served throughout as his associate in this investigation; and so far only one Mundy—after having laughingly denied his Communist affiliations in the morning—had returned to the General’s office in the afternoon and made a clean breast of his lifelong service as an agent of the Soviet Union. He was John Baal, the Mundy first-baseman. Having confessed to his own conspiratorial role, he had then proceeded to confirm the identities of his twelve Communist teammates, who were, in alphabetical order, Jean-Paul Astarte, Oliver Damur, Virgil Demeter, coach Isaac Ellis, Carl Khovaki, Chico Mecoatl, Eugene Mokos, Donald Ockatur, Peter Ptah, George Skirnir, Cletis Terminus, and Charles Tuminikar.

  General Oakhart concluded his remarks with the assurance that the Patriot League would be cleansed of its remaining thirty-six Communists and the plot against American baseball destroyed before the week was out.

  Now Gamesh, his left arm in a sling beneath his Ruppert warm-up jacket, stepped to the microphone. After being accorded a standing ovation by the assembled reporters (with one notable exception), he delivered himself of the story he had previously told the General in the old family hovel in Docktown. At the request of the reporters, he twice recounted his experience in the radio room of Soviet Military Intelligence, where he had listened one night to the first Yankee-Tycoon World Series game while snow fell upon the Communist capital he never could call home. “I feared that some day I would pay with my life for the longing that had drawn me to that room. And so,” said Gamesh, as the reporters (with one notable exception) scribbled furiously, “I nearly did, two days ago. My fellow Americans, that the Communists should have chosen from their ranks former Patriot League umpire Mike Masterson to be my assassin is an indication of just how shrewd and cynical is the enemy secretly conspiring against us. For had I been killed two days back by the bullet that has instead only shattered my arm, it would have appeared to the world that I was the victim of an act of vengeance taken against me and me alone by a crazed and senile old man who could never find it in his heart to forgive and forget. And it would have been assumed, as indeed it has been until this moment, that Roland Agni was merely an unintended victim of the homicidal umpire’s bullets. But the truth is far more tragic and far more terrifying. Mike Masterson, the umpire who never called one wrong in his heart, was no less a dupe of the Communists than I was—and in his obedience to his Communist masters, deliberately and in cold blood destroyed the life of a very great American—a great hitter, a great fielder, and a great anti-Communist crusader. I am speaking of the youngster I came to know so well, and admire so deeply, in the few brief weeks I was privileged to be his manager. I am speaking of the one Mundy who did not jump to the bait that I dangled before his teammates to determine just which were the Red fish swimming in the Ruppert Mundy sea. I am speaking of the young American who the Communists so feared that in the end they ordered his execution, the youngster who fought the Reds at every turn, at times blindly and in bewilderment, but always armed with the conviction that there was only one way to play the game, and that was the way Americans played it. I am speaking of the player, who, had he lived in happier times, would have broken all the records in the book and surely one day would have been enshrined in Cooperstown with the greats of yesteryear, but whose name will live on nonetheless in the Anti-Communist Hall of Fame soon to be constructed here in Tri-City by Angela Whittling Trust: I am speaking of Ruppert center-fielder Roland Agni.”

  Here Gamesh turned to the parents of the slain young man. The elder Mr. Agni, no less impressive a physical specimen than his son, rose to his feet and extended a hand to Roland’s mother; together the bereaved father and his petite and pretty wife stepped to the microphone. Mr. Agni’s voice was husky with emotion when he began, and his wife, who had been so brave all along, now gave in to tears and wept quietly at his side while he spoke. Mrs. Trust, in a gesture recorded in the Pulitzer Prize photograph of that year, reached up and with her own withered hand took hold of Mrs. Agni’s arm to comfort the younger woman.

  Said Mr. Agni: “My wife and I have lost our nineteen-year-old son. Of course we cannot but grieve, of course our hearts are heavy. But I should like to tell you that we have never in our lives been prouder of him than we are today. To others Roland was always a hero because he was a consummate athlete—to us, his parents, he is now a hero because he was a patriot who made the ultimate sacrifice for his country and for mankind. Where is there an American mother and father who could ask for anything more?”

  The last word that afternoon was Mrs. Trust’s. It was her answer to the Communists, and it was “Applesauce!”

  * * *

  As General Oakhart had promised, within the week thirty-six more Communists and Communist sympathizers were suspended from the Patriot League and their names released to the press: nine Reapers, eight Greenbacks, seven Keepers, six Butchers, four Blues, and two Rustlers. Even more shocking than this list of thirty-six was the exposure of the Communist owners, Frank Mazuma and Abraham Ellis, as well as the Soviet “courier,” Ellis’s wife Sarah. When both owners immediately issued statements in which they categorically denied the charges—calling them outrageous, nonsensical, and wickedly irresponsible—General Oakhart traveled to Chicago to confer with Judge Landis. The incensed Commissioner had already informed reporters that he for one did not intend to do the job of “rodent extermination” for General Oakhart that the P. League President should have been doing for himself while the Communists were infiltrating his league over the last decade; nonetheless, following their three-hour meeting, Landis made a brief statement to reporters in which he announced that Organized Baseball lent its “moral support” to the General’s decision to suspend from league play the Kakoola Reapers and the Tri-City Greenbacks until such time as the accused owners either proved their innocence or divested themselves of their franchises. But in the matter of any legal suits resulting from the suspension of the two teams, Judge Landis made it altogether clear that they would be the sole responsibility of those who had gotten themselves into this mess to begin with.

  Thereafter chaos reigned in General Oakhart’s league. The teams decimated by suspensions had to call on local high school boys to fill out their rosters, if, that is, they could find high school boys of any ability whose fathers were foolish enough to compromise their sons’ prospects by associating them with a P. League club. The suspended players meanwhile loudly proclaimed their innocence in bars and poolrooms all over the country—causing brawls aplenty—or else, following the example of Big John Baal, willingly admitted to whatever it was they were being charged with in the hope that an admission of guilt and a humble apology (“I’m just a country boy, I didn’t know no better”) would lead to reinstatement. Frank Mazuma did go ahead and bring a damage suit for four and a half million dollars a
gainst the Patriot League President, but the Ellises seemed virtually to acknowledge their guilt by locking the gates to Greenback Stadium and disappearing from Tri-City without leaving a trace. Even dedicated P. League fans indifferent to the dangers of Marxist-Leninism (and there were many) grew increasingly exasperated by the shifting schedule, by fourteen- and fifteen-year-old relief pitchers, and by the vociferous American Legion pickets forbidding them entrance to the bleachers. Consequently, by the end of the ’44 season there wasn’t a team in the league, not even the untainted Tycoons, who could draw more than three hundred people into the park to watch them play baseball.

  The day after Max Lanier picked up the final Cardinal victory in the ’44 World Series, the House Un-American Activities Committee began hearings on Communist infiltration of the Patriot League in Room 1105 of the federal court house in Port Ruppert, New Jersey. The Vice President of the United States, Mr. Henry Wallace, in a speech that very morning before the convention of the East-West Educational and Rehabilitation Alliance of the Congress for the Promotion of Humanitarianism in the United Post-War World, described the investigation as “a despicable affront to our brave Russian allies,” and Mrs. Roosevelt, in her daily newspaper column, agreed, calling it “an insult to the people and the leaders of the Soviet Union.” F.D.R. was reported to have laughed the whole thing off as so much “electioneering.” “By whom, Mr. President?” “Doug Oakhart,” the Chief Executive was supposed to have said. “The old war-horse still wants my job.”

  Each day hundreds of Port Ruppert citizens congregated near the statue of Lincoln at the foot of the Port Ruppert court house steps to watch the subpoenaed witnesses arrive; so did they once line the sidewalk ten and fifteen deep outside the Mundy clubhouse door to catch a glimpse of the great Gofannon as the shy star exited Mundy Park in an open-neck shirt and overalls at the end of a good day’s work. Only the crowd back in those days was head over heels in love.