Another book I read over and over was My Ántonia. The main character was named Jim Burden, an orphaned boy from the East who was brought up by his grandparents on their farm in Nebraska. After he finished high school, Jim found himself filled with great, conflicted feelings about his duty to head back East and go places in the world, and his yearning to remain forever on the wide, grassy Nebraska prairie where under the huge skies there were houses filled with beautiful Bohemian and Scandinavian girls named Tiny, Lena, and especially Ántonia, whose eyes were large and full of light, whose feelings outran language. When you danced with Ántonia, each step was a new adventure, a fresh outlook. On the wall of my room there was a map of the country, and looking up from My Ántonia I wanted more than anything to go to Nebraska, where there were beautiful Bohemian girls and Wahoo Sam, a place a person wanted to be from, a place with no Brad and Simon.
And yet, though I hated some of what had become of my life, I also wanted to stay right where I was and endure it. It was my life as it was supposed to be. All that sixth grade winter I walked to school closing my eyes for long seconds to squeeze away the threat of tears on my eyelashes, waiting to get back to kilter, waiting, as it turned out, until April, when the baseball season began.
With a glove or bat in my hand I felt free and powerful. The physical actions particular to the game appealed to my limbs, the binary torsion of hips and shoulders unfurling into perfect geometries: a low line drive, a strong throw from the shortstop hole. They were motions you could refine, make distinctly yours, and that I was my swing had powerful resonance to me. I spent hours improving it, adjusting my rear elbow, the placement of my feet, the tilt of my chin, how high I held my hands before at last engaging my wrists—all the while thinking of Ted Williams, who told in his autobiography of doing the same thing, even in hotel rooms where, late one night working in front of a hotel mirror with a bat in his hand, he miscalculated and connected with his sleeping roommate’s bedpost, taking the roommate, in effect, deep.
That spring in Little League, on the day of my games I’d lie in bed watching for the morning play of sunlight creeping across the wall from behind the shade to tell me there was no rain. Even on rainy days I always believed we had sufficient light to play. The year before I had been treated as a Little League liability all the way up until my team’s final game of the season when my coach told me I was pitching and I nearly threw a no-hitter.
I thought baseball would always be that way, a progression of expectations where first you only aspired to make the team. Once you’d accomplished that, you wanted to receive a starting position, and then, secure in the lineup, you hoped to bat third, be a star. This was a year all that came true. I hit third, batting .500 while pitching and playing infield for Latella Carting—The Garbagemen, as the New Haven Register referred to us when they wrote up our games. On the field, between white chalk lines, within boundaries of logic and order, aggression was my natural state. The day burly Mark Perez and I hit consecutive homers, our whole team was elated, all of us embracing as the beaming Perez yelled “Back to back” at me and pounded my arms. As I walked home up Willow Street, the whole sidewalk looked different; even the chemical whiff outside Edward’s Cleaners smelled pretty close to perfect after you went four-for-four. At school all the best players began to talk shop with me, including the dominating Munson Auto Body pitcher “Mutsy” Anderson, who, like a lot of other black guys, came to school with one of his pant legs rolled up close to his knee exposing the borax whiteness of his tube sock. Fashion had begun to interest me. “Hey, Muts, why do you do that with your pants?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Muts,” I said, “it’s because you want everyone to see how good your sock is, right?” That was it and he blushed. The year before he had been divinity to me.
At the end of the season I was selected for the league All-Star team, and then also, when an All-City roster of players was chosen from New Haven’s four baseball leagues to play in the annual East–West Game, for the first time I heard my name announced over a PA system, leading off and playing second base for the East under the lights before a huge twilight crowd at Blake Field. Walking to the plate to begin the game was all that I could have asked out of life. If I was a good enough person, I believed, these were the things that would keep happening to me until someday I would become a great ballplayer and therefore a great man. There would be many more tribulations and, as in the books, they would be overcome. My belief in the hard skin of self-determination had become complete.
Somewhere in those years between 1972 and 1974, I began switching from being a fan of the Mets to the Red Sox. I don’t know when this happened or how the decision evolved, only that somehow it did. I was giving up a long-standing cause, and I wasn’t proud of that. I did my best not to notice that I was abandoning the Mets. But looking back, I realize that it was not the Mets or the Red Sox, those objects of my affections, that truly mattered, but rather the desire to feel affection, the intense childhood longing to be close to something. So instead of thinking about or admitting what I was doing, it was easier just to drift away from my New York team and quietly migrate to Boston—which I associated with my grandfather. I began to love the Red Sox because I just couldn’t love the Mets anymore.
And so in October 1975, during a visit to Croton, Jody and I sat in Susi and Tony’s bedroom watching on television the Red Sox play the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series, I pulling for the Red Sox with everything I had. I remember all the Red Sox players from that time, and, for some reason, recall many of them with avian characteristics: the magnificent rookie center fielder Fred Lynn, whose left-handed swing had a quality of motion (I thought of tacking swallows) that seemed more graceful than those who batted from the other side (I tried replicating it right-handed in Susi’s floor-length mirror—it could not be done); the Red Sox shortstop Rick Burleson, known to his teammates as “Rooster,” who pursued ground balls as though he intended to impede their progress henlike, by descending on top of them; the tall, slender catcher Carlton Fisk, a proud eagle of a man from a small New Hampshire town; and pitcher Luis Tiant, the ebullient Cuban who seemed to be starting every World Series game, and in each of them throwing hundreds of pitches, all delivered with a complicated terpsichorean prelude of bobbing plumage and cantilevered tail feathers; on one leg, with his bearded head swiveled and tucked, he was a flamingo. I also remember how it felt when they did magnificent things, most especially Fisk, whose game-winning home run in the twelfth inning of Game Six, a veering clout he willed safely off the foul pole with ardent waves of both arms, little bounding two-footed jumps and then an ecstatic leap. Watching him in full semaphore made you sure that, if you cared enough, you too really could make the world the way you wanted it.
Except that he couldn’t and neither could you. The Red Sox lost the Series the next day when, with the game tied in the ninth, manager Darrell Johnson brought in a rookie relief pitcher with the melancholy name of Burton to replace sturdy Jim Willoughby. I was still imploring Johnson to reconsider, to go with a more senior reliever, when Reds second baseman Joe Morgan flicked a short single over the infield, scoring Pete Rose, so that when I later read Roger Angell’s account in my mother’s New Yorker of a November scene in a quiet Boston bar featuring an elderly man who looks down into the depths of his drink and mumbles “we never should have taken out Willoughby,” I heard my own inconsolable self.
Or did any of it happen that way to me? It was Fisk himself who many years later said that he had never once watched film footage of his famous home run and never would because memory is so delicate, so easily stripped or altered, and film is such a powerful usurper of truth. Ordinarily I would have felt the same way as Fisk did about retaining the integrity of my own experience. But something had come over me, and I wanted more from those events, wanted them to matter enormously, to have lasting symbolic force. And so into my own memory I welcomed the perceptions of Roger Angell and all other infiltrato
rs, waved and jumped and leaped into great personal moment all the tragic details I could collect of those games, from Ed Armbrister’s crucial uncalled interference with Fisk on a bunt play to the hegiric flight of Tony Perez’s home run off Bill Lee’s “Leephus” slowball, willing into truth the larger distortion, which was this: in October 1975, at age twelve, I was a lifelong, long-suffering Red Sox fan. As for the Mets, they had never meant a thing to me. How could they have? Being good meant remaining loyal and true to those who were close to you—especially when they were down.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Parade’s End
One evening in early 1976, when I was thirteen, the telephone rang on the wall behind me while we were eating dinner. It was Dad on the line. He always asked how I was, how school was going. That year there was plenty to tell. I had begun attending, on the full scholarship given to faculty children, a private school up on a hill across town, and I liked it. My classes had the grave weight of subjects long studied—Latin, geology, and Shakespeare—and I played sports that also had classical rigor, first football and now wrestling. Always I made the team and was its smallest member. After classes, athletics, lunch, and then more classes, at the end of the afternoon a history teacher led a model-building club. He was an elbow-patch and vinegar sort of man, brimming with imperatives about making boys into men and famous for his sesquipedalian vocabulary and his signature methods, such as flunking students on their early assignments on the theory that it would create a sense of urgency about learning. This late in the day, though, with his Oxford-cloth sleeves rolled to his elbows, he was more easygoing. “Take your time,” he told us as he applied sand-colored paint to an Afrika Korps armored car. “I’ve been working on this one for a year.” There were many nice kids at that school who invited me to birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, beach clubs, and to visit them on weekends at homes spread in all directions around the city. When I developed an early reputation for unreadable handwriting, one of them presented me with a pen he said would cure it. I had the feeling that I’d stepped into a fresh chapter of my life.
After a couple of minutes I handed the telephone receiver over to Sally and returned to my meal. Sally also went to a new school, and she had never seemed in better spirits. During those rare afternoons when we were both at home in our rooms, a lot of fun seemed to be going on behind her closed door, especially when her friends, tall Carey with the brown pageboy hair, and Sarah, whose last name sounded to me like “dress-up,” were visiting. They both were very pretty in a lanky, foal-like way and I began to look forward to their passage through my room. I was rarely allowed in Sally’s room. Gradually it occurred to me that I went through my childhood scarcely knowing the sister who slept just on the other side of the wall, that there was so much going on in the world I didn’t know about even though it was all happening right there in front of me, that I knew nothing of my times, and I’d wonder why that was, for I thought of myself as an inquisitive person.
Now Sally was mentioning to Dad that she’d just had a bad day. “You come by that naturally,” he told her. Sally hung the phone up on the wall, looped past me back around the table, and sat down. “Dad says he’s mentally ill,” she announced. My mind filled with images of horrible things going on inside the skull, a miasma of wet, rusted infrastructure, malarial fluids, disconnected wires and faulty parts, bats winging around. Nobody talked about mental illness then. I didn’t know what mental illness was. But I knew what it meant. I can’t remember any more of that evening at all, but my mother says that at this disclosure my whole body went slack before collapsing like a washed-out bridge—“You cried and cried for months.”
After my parents divorced in 1966, there had never been a conversation about why our family was breaking up. You cannot do that with a three-year-old and a one-year-old, and by the time we were older, it was too late, the moment had passed. My mother’s decision was to look forward, pouring all of her resources into making our new lives as happy as possible. Now we did the same thing, tried to believe the phone call had never happened, didn’t pursue it.
On one level, that wasn’t so difficult, because my father never again made any mention of his problems, and no one else in my family talked about them to me either. My mother never discussed any of it with us because her sense of justice made her believe that she shouldn’t say anything against her ex-husband to his children. Here was the rare instance where she was unsure of how to handle a situation. She felt sorry for him, didn’t want him to be cut off from his kids, and she also feared what he might do if she refused to let us go to New York and see him. There was a legal agreement, and he was a lawyer demanding his rights who she thought wouldn’t hesitate to go to court to get them. She imagined an unfolding disaster. His family would then support him, putting us against relatives we loved. That he was ill intimidated her; how do you deal with an ex-husband who nobody thinks can control himself? She always insisted that we have our visits with him even when I didn’t want to go, telling me many years later, “I was thinking more of him than of you because he was so sick.”
For most of growing up, I had no idea what she and all the other adults knew, that after proceeding through high school as a Long Island rendition of the All-American boy—intelligent, handsome, musical, athletic; the avatar of his immigrant family’s dreams—as a Harvard junior he’d begun to see everywhere around him huge faces with green ears. The creatures told him to give away all his possessions and he did, right down to his graduation watch. I met one of his college classmates years later who told me, “I knew your father then. I didn’t understand what he was talking about, and he didn’t understand what he was talking about. He was nuts.” Later, there was another massive breakdown at Harvard Law School. Again he pulled himself together, completed law school at Yale, came to New York, and seemed to be enjoying life, buying art, paying my mother’s grad school tuition, until he was let go from his job. Then on to Washington where he made it those few more years until becoming more violently unhinged than ever.
The past unremembered figures so much in your life, has such bearing on your existence, that it has an inevitable way of asserting itself even if you don’t want to know about it. Occasionally I overheard a relative making behind-the-hand references to “Donald” being “in the hospital again,” and before I could hurry something else into my mind, I’d be imagining him on the island of the yellow buildings in the river below the Triborough Bridge, which by now I knew were wards for the insane. Behind one of the barred windows I saw my father strapped down, staggered bands of light flickering and dilating across his face. Or I saw him standing high up there in his sallow tower, framed by light and bars, visible to all, staring out at the cars on the roadway, staring at me as I rolled past in the red Dodge on my way to see my grandmother and not him, his haggard, stricken mouth agape, his thin-wristed hands with their copious black hairs clenching the iron shafts the way the chimps had those times we went to the Washington zoo together. I heard him calling out to me.
No doctor ever knew how to help him, nobody knew what to do, how even to talk about “Donald’s troubles.” All was inscrutable, a futile mystery, and yet now this new vivid knowledge of him from the telephone overwhelmed me. Through all these years I’d known that once we’d been a family like any other, until something awful happened in Washington. As I’d grown older, for many years I had felt myself in the presence of crucial information that would explain what had transformed my father, a cuneiform truth hovering right there in front of me that left me both curious and also glad for my ignorance, aware that there were things out there in the world I would be unhappy to know about. Now that the curiosity had been fulfilled I felt scalded by it, right to have been wary. That I had such a dad was so shocking and upsetting and also shameful that I shoved all the implications out of my head. I wanted no part of this knowledge, didn’t want to come from that, and definitely didn’t want to think that it might one day be me. Better not to know, to carry on, seem normal, appear to be a
person who wasn’t sick, wasn’t going to get sick. I fled.
My new school had been founded as a Latin grammar school in 1660, “For the Breeding Up of Hopeful Youths,” according to its benefactor, a Colonial governor, and only in the past three years since the merger with my mother’s school were female youths welcome on the hilltop. It was still mostly men drinking coffee in the wood-paneled faculty lounge, and boys dominated the enrollment in each of the six junior high and high school grades. The place rippled with physicality, achieved its ligature from the assertion of muscle and strength.
On the first day of seventh grade, a tall, lanky eighth grader shoved a seventh grader named Stanley into a row of lockers. Stanley was good-looking, had lustrous ebony skin, but what it covered was a lethal sureness of purpose that galvanized so quickly that Stanley became a blur of recovered balance as he spun and came slashing back at the eighth grader, inflicting blows before other eighth graders could pull him away, the boy more startled than injured, protesting as he backed off that what he had done was his right as an eighth grader, Stanley shouting, telling him, “I don’t care what you are. Do not ever fuck with me again.” Other eighth graders milled around in confusion like ants whose hill had been disturbed—they had been waiting a long year for this day. All of us seventh graders who looked on must have been aware that the eighth grader had chosen the wrong man, that Stanley was way ahead of all of us.
The Crowd Sounds Happy Page 15