In college, 1966, about two years after my father was killed in a car wreck, Skidmore and I had a major falling-out. It was simple why. At a party which I did not attend, he'd quietly passed along to those who were attending that my father, dead two years, had had, in earlier days, an affair with some woman in town. I never knew the source of this rumor, but always suspected Skidmore's dad was somehow at the root of it.
The next morning I was in bed when my mom yelled up that I had a phone call.
"Hi, it's me." It was a girl named Kitty whom I sometimes dated.
"Last night," she said, "your pal Skidmore said something I think you ought to know about. He said your dad had an affair a few years ago, with that lady Mrs. Dodd, at the hospital."
I sat there. Something like that had never occurred to me. In fact, it took me a laughable ten seconds to imagine what my girlfriend meant by the word "affair." Then my initial reaction was that this was another vicious thing Skidmore dreamed up to say. But then I realized something about him—that his meanness was rarely in outright lies, more often in the brutal administering of the truth.
"He said there might even have been a child," Kitty said.
I knew Mrs. Dodd's youngest daughter, who was then about nine. By subtraction, we came to the summer of 1957. I recalled seeing him through the binoculars, standing alone in the shadows at the ball park.
I could tell you a great story about Leonard Skidmore, my old coach. He was a first baseman way back when, but when the war came and he was drafted he went to Europe and you might think he forgot baseball. It happened that he was in the Battle of the Bulge, and so was Warren Spahn. In the evenings Leonard would scout out a catcher's mitt and let Spahnnie throw a few. Spahn was already well known, famous even. His return from his duty fighting the war was anxiously awaited by Johnny Sain and the Boston Braves. To hear him tell it, Leonard had to get a slab of ham from the mess officer to put inside the catcher's mitt, to take out a little of the big-league sting. Anyway, there they were, my friend Skidmore's dad and Warren Spahn, playing catch at the Battle of the Bulge.
Cliff Webb, who had provided me with my Opening Day hangover, was three years older than me, and it turned out that he had mostly played catcher later on. He had always seemed easygoing, but now, in middle age, he had very oily skin and nervous, worried eyes. He'd sat down next to me at the bar (I'd been there a while), recognized me past the beard in just a few seconds, and, even though we hadn't seen each other in twenty years, a minute didn't pass before he embarked on a long joke about tits and the Pope.
I had heard that he had a reputation for being tough on wives—in fact, had been in jail for beating up one of them. Which was a lot like his father, who'd been in jail for something right during the time Cliff and I'd been playing ball together. I assumed the scars on his face were where his women raked him as they were going down for the count.
"I remember your dad," he said. "Yelling at you to hit behind the runner. Hell, at the time I didn't even know what he meant. He'd yell, 'Okay, touch any base, touch any base!'" Cliff was laughing. "There we were, twelve or whatever. Your dad, he must have known a lot about baseball."
"He did," I told him. "He was an old infielder and the game got inside him when he was little. Like us." I recalled one night after going to a game between the Cardinals and the Giants we went to the coffee shop at the hotel and Dad ended up sitting at the counter talking baseball with Harvey Kuenn. "Remember him?"
"Managed the Brewers in '82, right? Against St. Louis in fact, right?"
"This was around '63 or so. Kuenn was a third baseman then, and outfield of course."
"Well, he was something, your dad. I'll bet everyone on our old team remembers how he yelled for you."
"At me, was more like it." I laughed, but I didn't think it was so funny.
"Whatever happened to that asshole Skidmore?"
I always wonder how people weather time in other people's memories.
"Lives in Nebraska. He's an attorney."
"Oh boy, that's about what I'd expect. He go to Vietnam, do you know?"
"Nope."
"You?"
"Nope."
Cliff needed to talk about Vietnam, so we did, getting plowed on beer which he was buying for us by the pitcher. I was turned on my stool and had a good view of the whole bar. I in fact was deep in eye games with a woman sitting at a corner table way off behind him. She was my age, maybe younger, but hard—maybe older, who could tell in the dark?
He was talking about Vietnam, but now he was selling for State Farm and a lot of that kind of language invaded his speech and bored me. After he told me about the war, he briefly skirted his marriages, then hit upon the topic of an old fishing rod he loved. Once in a while I'd glance over his right shoulder at the girl in the corner. She seemed shy in a way, looking down. But then she'd be looking my way the next time I looked hers. A couple of times we held the gaze until one or the other of us looked away.
He was repeating himself—I'd missed something in the conversation. "Hey, you ever play softball? I said—looks like you're in pretty good shape."
"No. Wish I did, though."
The girl in the corner, her hair was dark brown, held back with a small ribbon and a flower.
"Wish I did," I said.
Vietnam kept sneaking back into his conversation. He'd been a marine, and had a very rough time. Fifteen years had passed, and it still wasn't settled inside of him. He said he'd like to go back. He said it was where he knew himself best.
The girl in the corner half smiled at me once. She seemed to be alone, although in a little town like this it was in terribly bad taste for a girl to show up at a bar alone. It made me wonder about her.
Cliff was talking about Hill 881 and how he'd watched from a hilltop as North Vietnamese tanks ran over some little villages on the way to the siege of Khe San. Once the girl seemed almost to toast me with her beer—she raised it, nodded my way. Suddenly Cliff said, "You gonna listen to me or watch her?" I looked back at him, startled. He was looking right at me, his eyes watering. He turned and looked at her, then back. "Really. I'm supposed to meet some people anyway." He polished off the last of his beer.
"Sorry, Cliff. I really am."
"Well, damn. It's irritating." He'd gotten my apology but he was angry and seemed to want more. "I hate talkin' to somebody, their eyes climbing the wall."
"I don't blame you," I said.
"You gonna talk to me, or you gonna watch her?" he said, his face just a little red in the creases.
"Well, since you ask, Cliff—I'm gonna do both," I told him, putting my hand on his shoulder. "I'm not perfect either."
The girl in the bar, she wasn't Missy Dodd, who is probably my half sister. The town isn't that small.
I know this town too well, and the people in it. I really ought to move away. When I go to my boy's ballgames, I frankly can't stand to watch the game from the bleachers, among Dad's old patients who will take the time to tell me about an ailment or ask me something I don't know the answer to about how things have turned out since his death. And I don't know what his last words were—car wrecks can kill you without last words. I don't know if he's up there looking down. I dodge those people the way Dad did. Sometimes I actually even take the video camera and find that great shade down beyond third base under the IC maple, where the angle on shortstop is good for picture-taking at sundown and a fellow can have a drink if he needs one.
The Valence of Common Ions
I'm at Chamberlain's Funeral Home standing in a crowd of mourners, separated momentarily from my date. Actually she's a mourner and I'm simply accompanying her. It's her friend who has died—a twenty-eight-year-old woman killed in a collision at an intersection. She was thrown out of the car, so the casket's closed.
The visitation seems to have brought together a blend of people who don't know each other, but it's a large crowd. Then again, Chamberlain's is a large funeral home, and there are four visitations going on simultaneously. A si
gn at the door directs you. In the Cambridge Room are the Arnold mourners; in the Coventry Room there are the friends and family of Miles Overman; the Kensington Room has Miss Milly Key's loved ones; and we're in the Devonshire Room.
This is a shocking death. A man has read some scripture, standing near the head of the casket, and the dead woman's sister has read a poem the woman wrote when she was little. High school kids, dressed up, are crying. I imagine they're her cousins, or friends of younger brothers or sisters. There are old people, perhaps grandparents or friends of parents or grandparents. The woman was a nurse, and there are ten or so nurses in attendance in their white uniforms. The people are talking quietly in this large room, which has flowers banked up against the wall all around.
Two children are near the casket, and I watch them. For a while they whisper. But when I look back, the game seems to have become tag of some kind, low-key but with the potential to escalate. The taller boy, maybe five years old, hides in the flowers. The littler guy, about four, goes in and gets him. At that point an older woman politely asks them to settle down, but she's cautious. For all she knows, these are children of the deceased.
There's a man who happens to be standing near me, and he quietly observes that the tall one belongs, he thinks, to the dead woman's sister, who is distraught and, after her reading, has been taken to a small chapel located in the center of the building which services—he uses that word, services—four areas of the funeral home. The chapel has a mauve-colored skylight. He describes it to me from a time when he'd been in there on some other sad occasion. And the littler kid, he confesses, he had thought belonged to me, because I'm the only one in the room he can't match to other people. I tell him I have no children here and am not even currently married. The words sound odd coming out of my mouth. It's a new thing.
Our conversation isn't very good. I can't think of much to say, and don't really want him to say much either. We talk very quietly. I note with a little impatience that he's one of those people who have the practiced ability to sneak in what they evidently consider to be compelling autobiographical details. For instance, he says, while we're discussing the time he was at this funeral home before, "The man who died was a guy I used to know when I was playing Triple A in the Detroit organization—he'd been dating this woman who hated me who looked like a lady I used to live with back in '76."
I have a friend named Dubie—he and I go way back—and if Dubie had said something like this I'd razz hell out of him. But he wouldn't. This guy then works it into the conversation that he's a psychologist, has his own practice, is newly married. His hair is thinning, and he parts it just above his ear, combing the whole works over. I don't ask how he rationalizes this psychologically. His eyes drift while I'm talking, surveying the crowd until his turn rolls around again. I'm feeling low and critical, and he's the handy victim of it. I didn't know this woman. I feel that I shouldn't be here.
At last Roberta, my date, comes up, and she knows him. Her mascara is dampening down onto her lower eyelids. "Hi, Albert—you've met Daniel?"
Albert says he has, but shakes my hand anyway. She's dabbing at her eyes with pink Kleenex. Her eyes are green and sharp. She's been in a cluster of women toward the back of the room, all of them about her age, all of them friends of the dead woman, many of them the nurses who came in a group.
"How you been, Bobbie?" Albert asks, briefly embracing her, using the telltale nickname from the old days. She says she's been great, and some flowers by the casket go over sideways. One boy jumps reflexively and actually bumps the casket. Roses slide to the floor. The boys head for the hallway, trying to walk like gentlemen, but it turns into a race. In the quiet, distracted mourning of the room, few people really notice this activity.
A man in a dark suit wearing a Chamberlain's name tag steps from the crowd like the Secret Service and firmly asks the boys to go outside, and the low drone of conversation resumes. He escorts them to the door and as they go by me I hear him ask, in his practiced funeral-home whisper, who their parents are. It turns out they're in the Arnold party, the Cambridge Room.
"This is something, huh," Albert says. He's speaking of the tragedy. He shakes his head. He's really trying to get into the mourning thing, but he's so self-absorbed he can't quite pull it off.
"How's Howard, do you know?" Roberta asks. Howard is the husband of the dead woman. He was in the wreck, too. To me, Roberta's voice betrays that she doesn't think much of Albert. Can Albert feel this? I wonder.
"He's okay," Albert says. "Fair condition. He was going to make it today if he could, but I don't know."
"Albert's real close to Howard—they go fishing," Roberta tells me. "Who's got the baby?" she asks.
"I don't know," Albert says. The tone shows he doesn't have children of his own. "Howard busted his collarbone and bumped his head real good. But he may come. His friends are here, that's for sure."
"Right," Roberta says.
"Well, like I say . . ." he says. He moves himself so that his upcoming remark won't be heard by anyone but us, but with us has the proper gravity. "Howard likes to drive these little Jap cars. This was a fancy little Toyota he was in. Spun him around, man . . ."
Roberta doesn't want to hear much more of that. I feel the tugs at my arm.
"Lucky the baby wasn't in the car," Albert says. "The back end's wadded up like . . ." He stops short of the metaphor. "Little cars are fine," he goes on, "if you can get some assurance the one that hits you will be little. That's what I always think about."
"Say hi to Jackie, will you?" Roberta says, retreating.
"Sure," he says. "She's just over there." He points, almost as though he expects us to hurry over but then he notices we aren't. "Take care, Bobbie," he says, and half turns away.
"Would you not leave me standing again?" I say to Roberta when we're just a little bit alone, and even as I say it I regret the selfishness of it.
"Sorry," she says. "This has to be strange for you. I am sorry. It's just that . . . everyone's so shocked." She's crying.
"I know," I say. "I'm sorry. That guy back there really got on my nerves."
She's wiping her eyes by tracing over and under her mascara with a corner of the Kleenex, talking quietly. "Albert's hall-of-fame psychological utterance," she says, "was his observation that when he married Jackie she had a low profile of herself."
"Jesus. Was he serious?"
"I think so. He said it at a party in front of a bunch of professional people who didn't know he was joking if he was."
I look back at him, still alone, still half-turned.
She's crying again. "Boy, this is very hard—a lot of these people were very close to Michelle. Nobody knows what to say."
Roberta sees another friend, and we go over to her. Roberta has her arm through mine. I'm proud to be with her.
"Hi, Angel—this is Daniel."
"How do you do, Daniel." Angel and Roberta embrace for a moment.
"Angel is really Dr. Gehret, my chemistry prof," Roberta tells me. Roberta is close to completing nurse's training over at UC-Davis. Angel's is a name Roberta has mentioned many times. She is a gracious, classy woman. She shakes my hand, elegant in all her movements. Her hand is bones. She's dressed in black, and whatever her perfume is transfers to me. She's perhaps five years older than I am, her early forties. Roberta is thirty.
"I can't stand this," Angel says. Her eyes too are damp. "She just had a baby."
Roberta now has one arm through mine and one through Angel's. "That's Michelle's mom and dad over there," she says, indicating with an unobtrusive nod of the head. It's hard to see them, with the group of friends around them. "Howard'll come through this, don't you think? Maybe somehow he'll make it." Roberta is just saying these things. She doesn't really know what she's saying. She's just trying to say something. "He always says he's a survivor—Howard does."
Angel's looking toward the box. She says, "You know, Michelle wanted this baby so badly."
Roberta wears her hair f
rizzy, bookish, or like she's just been rained on. I notice that her nose, pink now along with her eyes, is fine, very delicate, much like my ex-wife's. This resemblance is a new revelation to me. We stand there together for some time, no one saying anything.
"Have you seen the note on that one bouquet?" Angel asks after a while. We haven't. "It's there on the end. The card says, 'Best Wishes for a Quick Recovery.' Is that ghastly?"
I look in that direction. Now no one is within twenty feet of the casket. The roses that had fallen are back in their place. Staring at the box, I try to picture this woman named Michelle in there. On a tripod next to the casket is a small studio portrait of her in her nursing uniform. But to take that picture and extract reality from it, and place that reality in the dark gray metallic casket. Hard to do for a stranger, let alone loved ones. Michelle. Embalmed. Ready for the grave. Good-bye.
We stand quietly for a while, looking at the thinning group. People are leaving the visitation in clusters, friends, families. I hear someone say they have to go to the grocery store now.
Roberta's head is down, and Angel tries to comfort her. "There's nothing any of us can do," she says. Then the three of us are in the parking lot—a damp spring evening. On the street at the end of the driveway cars are sliding by under the amber streetlights. Everything seems to have a sparkle and shine. Off somewhere I hear a cat fight.
"People always say that," my girlfriend says. "That there's nothing we can do. I'm going to figure out something. I'm going to do something." I don't know Roberta well enough to know what this means.
"Roberta, call me sometime, please?" Angel says. A gracious smile. "I'm over in Calistoga now. Won't you? Maybe you could come and play the piano for me. Have you heard her play, Daniel?"
"It's hard to think about now. But I'll call you," Roberta says. "I keep thinking of it, looking for an academic excuse."
"Come by and we'll discuss valences of some common ions," Angel says, and she winks.
"Good idea," Roberta says, with a grudging little laugh. "A little bad-grade humor," she says to me.
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