Two in the Field

by Darryl Brock

  He sat quietly for a moment. “You really don’t want to be in your present life, do you, Sam?”

  A vision of a dark-haired woman with green eyes haunted my mind. “I want to be with Cait.”

  “And you can’t.” Sjoberg spread his hands flat on the folder. “So you try to construct bridges to her—the vintage baseball caps are just one more example—and then you rage and despair when your bridges don’t make the connection you want.”

  I said nothing, resenting him.

  “Feeling helpless, you embrace your vision by attacking what threatens it. Your anger brings it closer, makes it seem real.”

  “So you’re saying I had some kind of adrenaline hallucination after that fight?”

  He folded his hands together, his eyes losing some of their softness. “Exactly what is it about the past,” he asked, “that makes you want to give up everything and dwell there?”

  I struggled to find words to describe the connectedness I’d felt more than a century earlier. And not just with Cait. I’d found a brother in Andy, a son in Cait’s boy, Tim. I’d found boon companions of a sort that didn’t seem to exist now. Had adventures that no longer could happen. Felt a wild, raw sense of vitality. My emotions were sharper and grander, my senses fresher. I missed sensations like the odor of wet leather in the early morning, the clink of milk cans as they were delivered, the raucous crowing of roosters even in the hearts of large cities, the clatter of hooves and wheels on cobblestones.

  I guess I didn’t do a very good job of communicating it. Or maybe I did, but it made no difference. Sjoberg glanced at his watch, a signal our time was ending.

  “Sam, let me be blunt.” He tapped my folder with his pen. “You escaped into drink and vanished for months, then reappeared claiming to have traveled back in time. You’ve consistently refused to consider other explanations for what transpired. If things are to go better, you must occupy yourself with the task of coping with this life. There’s no other constructive choice.”

  “Why not?” I retorted, fed up with having my experience tossed into a psychological trash bin. “Maybe there are other explanations. Mysteries that can’t be explained.”

  He shrugged dismissively. “I don’t see how you can benefit from further magical thinking. I will not encourage it. Your task is to discard fantasies.”

  It was hopeless. I might as well claim I’d been abducted by space aliens. “One thing still bugging me,” I said, to provoke him, “is that Twain expected me at his wedding.”

  Sjoberg sighed. “That would be Mark Twain?”

  “Who else?” I rose and turned toward the door. “The ceremony was set for next winter, 1870. I missed it.”

  “Wait a second.” His words quickened, as if inspiration had struck. “Since you found her once, Sam, why not do it again?”

  “I can’t, that’s the whole damn—”

  “Why not go to Cincinnati?”

  “What?”

  “Isn’t that where you last saw Cait?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “You need closure on this. If that’s where you knew her, why not go back?”

  “And do what?”

  “Well, if you don’t find her”—there was an unspoken and you sure as hell won’t—“you could at least verify that she once existed.” He smiled. “Or not.”

  He meant check the public records. Of course I didn’t need to go to Cincinnati for that. It could be done by phone or fax. But he was challenging me: Put up or shut up.

  “Go right away?” Closure resonated in me. Did I really want it? I realized how he was steering me, that he meant this to be a reality check. I wasn’t at all sure I could bring myself to view proof of Cait marrying (if she had) and dying. Yet the notion of traveling there carried tremendous appeal. At least I’d be closer to where she’d been.

  “Why delay?” He tapped his pen, a staccato rhythm. “I’ll excuse you from the anger sessions.”

  I’d done my best to adjust to being in the present, but it didn’t seem to be working out very well. By taking extra assignments the past two years, I’d piled up dozens of comp days on top of sick leave and vacation. The rawest of cubs could handle my regular beat of obits and nightside cop checks. Did I have any compelling reason not to go?

  Sjoberg raised his eyebrows. “Well?”

  The blue tunic and brass buttons … a shadowy face? … had the arm beckoned?

  “I think I can get away next week.”

  “It’s okay, Daddy.” Looking into my eyes, Hope spoke with impressively clear diction for a seven-year-old. “Mommy told us how you want to be with your other family, and that’s why you get upset sometimes.”

  She did? Did she also say I’m stark raving nuts?

  “Is Mommy like Cait?” asked Hope.

  I looked at her, startled. “How’d you know her name?”

  “You said it when the policemen gathered around us.”

  “That’s right, Daddy,” Susy chimed in from the corner, where she had blockaded herself behind Lego units easily worth several thousand bucks. “I heard you!”

  We were in the girls’ room of the house Daddy Dave had built for Stephanie, my ex. I sat cross-legged facing Hope on the lower level of a bunk bed roughly the size of my studio apartment. Plans were afoot to add a wing for when the girls would want separate rooms; it would hold a sound stage, a video lab, and the latest miracles in work/play stations. Having gone dot-com and then cashed his stock options before Nasdaq had crashed, Daddy Dave was richer than ever. He indulged the girls shamelessly. If we were involved in a competition, he’d won it long ago. I’d nixed his adopting them, but even that seemed to be growing less important.

  “Cait isn’t like Mommy,” I began. Actually, Cait was fully as independent as Stephanie, but women in her era were practically strait-jacketed in terms of realizing themselves. Where Stephanie was materialistic and cool, focused on practical goals, Cait was passionately idealistic, dedicated to the cause of a free Ireland. Stephanie looked forward; Cait regretted the past. Both were fiercely committed mothers. It all seemed too complicated to explain. “Cait has green eyes,” I said, “and long black curly hair and a few freckles and—”

  “Mommy’s hair is short and brown and her eyes are gray!” Susy exclaimed, now completely hidden behind the building set.

  Hope leaned forward. “It’s okay if you go see her again, Daddy,” she whispered, wrapping her small hand around two of my fingers and squeezing reassuringly. “Mommy says people have to do weird things sometimes.”

  “Funny you should say that,” I said softly, “because I have been planning a trip.”

  “I knew it,” she said smugly. “You miss your Cait.”

  “She’s your invisible friend,” Susy chimed in.

  Great, I thought. Permission to visit my invisible friend. I waited for them to say more, but instead a dispute erupted when Hope moved a crucial Lego block and Susy objected vociferously. After I restored peace, I sat gazing at the shelves crammed with toys. You have Mommy and Daddy Dave, I thought. You have family.

  Maybe Sjoberg had been right about my preparing them to get along without me.

  Now I wondered if I’d done the job too well.

  “I’d like to leave these for the girls,” I told Stephanie. “I’m going to be away for a while, and, you know, just in case …”

  She looked at the two things I handed her: the quilt which had come through time with a patch from the yellow dress Cait wore the morning I left her; and Grandpa’s old watch, the one that saved my life when O’Donovan’s bullet struck it.

  “All right.” Her level tone matched the coolness of her eyes. Refracted light played over her face from beveled window panes and a crystal chandelier. In the past she’d offered coffee before I left. Not now. The ballpark fracas marked a final turning. She no longer wanted dangerous, crazy me in the girls’ lives.

  For an instant I felt a pang of the old regret that things hadn’t worked out between us. To live with my daughte
rs would be unspeakably sweet. But it wasn’t going to happen. And I couldn’t fit Stephanie into that happy picture anyway. She’d been replaced.

  Forever.

  I reminded her of the trusts I’d set up. With accumulated interest they would provide a very nice nest egg for the girls in case I vanished. Not that they were likely to need it, with Daddy Dave in charge. Still …

  “Sam, why are you telling me these things?” She cocked her head on her slender, best-of-breed neck. “What are you up to?”

  “Just a little trip.”

  As she paused and weighed that, I wondered exactly what her suspicions were. That I’d try to abduct the girls or something? “An assignment?” she persisted, studying me.

  “Sort of,” I said. “You might call it behind-the-scenes work.”

  “You seem so distant,” she said. “I can’t read you at all. Is this something you want to do?”

  “Sure,” I said casually, thinking, More than you could ever know.

  TWO

  The suspension bridge over the Ohio River had opened for traffic only a few months before I’d first arrived, in 1869. Now, though coated with strange swimming-pool-colored aquamarine paint, it seemed like an old friend as I sped across it in the midsize rental I’d picked up at the Covington airport. Gold-plated globes crowning the bridge towers shone above me in the morning sunlight. A steamboat moved below, a side-wheeler plastered with ads for tourist excursions. I imagined a real working vessel plying the yellowish currents, its tall stacks trailing smoke, steam erupting in pale bursts from blasting whistles. Ahead of me, where the Public Landing had been, rose the concrete shell of Riverfront Stadium—oops, Cinergy Field—and beyond it a gleaming ridge of hotels and offices.

  Coming off the bridge, I tried to screen out the modern overlay and find beneath it what I had known. I tried to replace cars with horse-drawn drays and carriages. The effort gave me a headache, but at least the air was clear. I didn’t miss the smoke that used to pour from factories and add to a dense overhanging pall that blanketed the city with soot.

  Heading for the West End, where Cait had lived, I tried to still the tension in my gut, tried to assure myself I was getting closer.

  Honey, I’m home …

  It wasn’t working.

  I-75 cuts a concrete swath through the West End, and it swept me past Cait’s old neighborhood like a twig in a river of traffic. With difficulty I exited and reversed course. Cait’s two-story boardinghouse, with wisteria climbing over its jigsaw-cut veranda, had sat in the middle of a block not far from the bustling Sixth Street Market.

  No marketplace now.

  In fact, without the green Mill Creek hills to the west, I wouldn’t have known where I was. A convention center stood about where I estimated Cait’s house to have been. I stared at it, my ears awash in the roar of autos. A vibrant ethnic mix had existed here—Jews, Irish, Germans—but now few people were visible. I walked around and recognized only two of the buildings: St. Peter in Chains Cathedral and, facing it, the Plum Street Temple. Oddly, they looked as bright as in my memory. Plaques told me the reason: they’d been restored.

  Not only was the Union Grounds, the old ballpark, gone without a trace, but so was Lincoln Park, the charming wooded square we walked through to reach it. Afloat on its pond, Cait and I had first kissed there one transcendent moonlit night.

  All of it paved over.

  Union Terminal rose from the paved area. In the Thirties the city’s scattered rail stations had been combined in this gigantic deco hive, its arched facade fronted by a long concrete approach. No longer operational, it now housed museums and a historical society. I felt like offering myself as an artifact to be displayed.

  Downtown, on Main Street, I tried to calculate where a popular quartet of Red Stockings—Andy, Sweasy, Allison, McVey—had roomed together. Addresses had changed. Everything had changed. The banks that lined Third Street were long gone. Likewise the department stores on Fourth. I drove past Hamilton County Courthouse, but couldn’t steel myself to go in and seek evidence of Cait’s demise.

  Not yet.

  Sitting in a Starbuck’s on Vine, I gazed out at the suspension bridge and pictured the old landing aswarm with stevedores unloading goods. I’d lived a block away, at the Gibson House, which had given way to the towering Star Bank Center. Across the street from the Gibson had been the comfortable Mercantile Library, now displaced by a sky-blocking 30-story Westin Hotel. Basement saloons on this street had offered free lunches: fresh-baked bread and wedges of cheeses and meats, liberally salted to promote sale of five-cent beers.

  “Vanilla skim mocha, grande, extra hot,” said a voice at the Starbucks counter. I glanced up at an anorectic teenager with purple hair, nose studs, tattooed arms. “Decaf, two equal, no foam.”

  My memory conjured images of women in stylish dresses and men in smart hats and elegant frock coats.

  I got up and left.

  The Enquirer building still stood at its old Vine Street location. Though it no longer housed the newspaper itself, at least the facade was there as it was in my memory. Crowds had gathered here to track the progress of their beloved Stockings as the news by telegraph was posted on sidewalk bulletin boards. Farther on, the old post office was gone, though a sign marked the site as “Postal Place.”

  Fountain Square, the city’s modern heart, boasted the elaborate sculpture proposed by Henry Probasco in 1869, a development that had triggered noisy opposition by Fifth Street Market vendors. The stink of the old butcher stalls once permeated everything. The smell’s absence was a change I approved of.

  Over-the-Rhine, once a bustling German immigrant district, was in sad shape. Few of its quaint Old World townhouses remained, and most of these were crumbling. Gone were the restaurants whose singing waiters delivered Liederkranz sandwiches. Gone the music halls, theaters and gymnasiums. Gone the sidewalk organ grinders and sausage vendors and beer gardens where burghers lifted lager in massive steins. All a slum now, dotted here and there with restoration projects.

  As for the “Rhine” itself—the Miami and Erie Canal—it too had vanished. The water channel had carried traffic through the heart of the city, mule-drawn barges bearing tons of sand and hogs and lumber and whiskey—even ice from Lake Erie—at a stately three miles per hour. Now, filled and paved, it underlay Central Parkway, where vehicles zoomed by at twenty-five times the speed of the old barges.

  I crossed Liberty Street, which in my time had marked the city limits and housed a welter of saloons, gambling houses and brothels, and I climbed Mount Adams clear up to Mulberry, where at Gasthaus zur Rose Cait and I had spent our single night as lovers.

  From a stand of elms I gazed down on the city through a leafy curtain that blocked most of the highrises and left the old church spires as the tallest points. Nearby stood a restored trio of vintage houses, narrow and compacted together, with gingerbread moldings and window boxes bursting with geraniums. Gasthaus zur Rose could be one of them. I closed my eyes and imagined Cait’s body against mine.

  Please …

  A breeze was blowing and I listened for her voice in it. At length I moved on past fenced-off empty lots, where jagged concrete and foundation stones poked up like broken teeth.

  Could Sjoberg be right? Before I’d gone back in time, I’d been drinking heavily. Had I fantasized everything?

  I couldn’t put it off any longer. Stomach churning, I nerved myself to enter the courthouse—only to be informed that old death and marriage records for Cincinnati residents were housed at the Elm Street Health Center. A temporary reprieve. I walked the intervening blocks back to Over-the-Rhine and came to the building: a four-story former schoolhouse fronted by a brick courtyard. Inside, an atrium skylight provided pale radiance. I took the elevator to the top floor and a door labeled VITAL STATISTICS/DATA CENTER.

  “Yes?” A woman with cocoa-colored skin smiled pleasantly. “Do you have an appointment?”

  I told her that I did not, that I was looking for a de
ath record but had no idea when it occurred. I half hoped she would tell me to go away. Instead, she said I was in luck, no researchers were using the records just now.

  “You do have the name of the deceased?” she asked good-naturedly, and led me to a table stacked with blue and brown binders containing alphabetized lists of records beginning in 1860. With trembling fingers I opened the “N-P” binder. No Caitlin O’Neill. No Timothy O’Neill. No Caitlin Leonard in the “K-L” binder. I stood up, not sure what I felt. Probably more relief than anything else.

  “Did you check the marriage entries?” the woman asked helpfully.

  “I don’t want to know about that.”

  “Oh?” She looked at me.

  “No.” I tried to think of some way to explain, then gave it up and spoke the simple truth. “I love her.”

  Long pause.

  “I see.” Her tone said, Well isn’t that interesting? Her eyes said, I’ve got a loony here. “Well, if she was Catholic, you might check with the local archdiocese.” Those archives were outside the city, she explained, at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary, and contained records of all wedding and funeral masses. Not open to the public, but requests could be submitted by phone and after several weeks—

  “Please,” I said, backing toward the door. “I’ve really got to leave now.”

  She smiled politely. “No problem.”

  Doubting myself again, I decided to make a final effort. At the Public Library, on Vine, I found a shelf of vintage city directories and opened the 1869–70 volume. There was Cait, listed as a widow, residing on the west side of Sixth Street. I ran my finger over the line of agate print and for an instant thought I experienced a hint of the milkiness. Cait had been here! On an impulse I checked the volume for ’71–72. No Caitlin O’Neill. Nor in the next volume. Nor any after that.

  Where had she gone?

  Where did that leave me?

  I had no idea.

  The Reds were playing at home. That evening I set out early, walking from the hotel I’d selected off Central Parkway—as close to Cait’s boardinghouse as I could get. Seeing the breast-shaped towers of Procter and Gamble looming against the sky, I couldn’t recalling the company’s old wooden soap factory down on Second and the pleasant, eye-tingling odor of lye it produced.