by Andre Dubus
They were a family from Brooklyn: two children, about ten and twelve, in the back seat; the wife was younger than the husband, and the husband was terrified. I’m not a good driver, he said. Daddy’s not a good driver, one of the children said. The children were frightened and, with their father, gentle. My friend’s daughter said: My father’s a good driver, he can get us down the mountain. The other father got into the back seat with his children. My friend and his daughter got in front, the wife between them, and he turned the car around. I’m not a good driver, the father said. Everything will be all right, the wife said. Everything will be all right, the father said. He’ll get us down the mountain, she said. He’ll get us down the mountain, the father said.
That Saturday night, after running at Kenoza, I couldn’t sleep. I swallowed the pill that wouldn’t work and prowled the house, prowled with the nameless terrors until my wife woke up sick at the old dread three in the morning, and she needed me to go downstairs and see if her children had it too, for they had gone to bed with stomach cramps, and I told her their foreheads were cool and they were sound asleep, and then she needed me to hold her while she hurt and I held her and stroked her hair and talked to her and thought if they are sick, tomorrow I’ll take care of them, and then I slept. In the morning they were all well.
1977
UNDER THE LIGHTS
for Philip
THE FIRST PROFESSIONAL baseball players I watched and loved were in the Class C Evangeline League, which came to our town in the form of the Lafayette Brahman Bulls. The club’s owner raised these hump-backed animals. The league comprised teams from other small towns in Louisiana, and Baton Rouge, the capital. The Baton Rouge team was called the Red Sticks. This was in 1948, and I was eleven years old. At the Lafayette municipal golf course, my father sometimes played golf with Harry Strohm, the player-manager of the Bulls. Strohm was a shortstop. He seemed very old to me and, for a ballplayer, he was: a wiry deeply tanned greying man with lovely blue eyes that were gentle and merry, as his lined face was.
Mrs. Strohm worked in the team’s business office; she was a golfer too, and her face was tan and lined and she had warm grey-blue eyes with crinkles at their corners. In the Bulls’ second season, she hired me and my cousin Jimmy Burke and our friend Carroll Ritchie as ball boys. The club could not afford to lose baseballs, and the business manager took them from fans who caught fouls in the seats. No one on the club could afford much; the players got around six hundred dollars for a season, and when one of them hit a home run the fans passed a hat for him. During batting practice we boys stood on the outside of the fence and returned balls hit over it, or fouled behind the stands. At game time a black boy we never met appeared and worked on the right field fence; one of us perched on the left, another of us stood in the parking lot behind the grandstands, and the third had the night off and a free seat in the park. Our pay was a dollar a night. It remains the best job I ever had, but I would have to be twelve and thirteen and fourteen to continue loving it.
One late afternoon I sat in the stands with the players who were relaxing in their street clothes before pre-game practice. A young outfielder was joking with his teammates, showing them a condom from his wallet. The condom in his hand chilled me with disgust at the filth of screwing, or doing it, which was a shameful act performed by dogs, bad girls, and thrice by my parents to make my sisters and me; and chilled me too with the awful solemnity of mortal sin: that season, the outfielder was dating a young Catholic woman, who later would go to Lourdes for an incurable illness; she lived in my neighborhood. Now, recalling what a foolish boy the outfielder was, I do not believe the woman graced him with her loins any more than baseball did, but that afternoon I was only confused and frightened, a boy who had opened the wrong door, the wrong drawer.
Then I looked at Harry Strohm. He was watching the outfielder, and his eyes were measuring and cold. Then with my own eyes I saw the outfielder’s career as a ballplayer. He did not have one. That was in Harry’s eyes, and his judgment had nothing, of course, to do with the condom: it was the outfielder’s cheerful haplessness, sitting in the sun, with no manhood in him, none of the drive and concentration and absolute seriousness a ballplayer must have. This was not a professional relaxing before losing himself in the long hard moment-by-moment work of playing baseball. This was a youth with little talent, enough to hit over .300 in Class C, and catch fly balls that most men could not, and throw them back to the infield or to home plate. But his talent was not what Harry was staring at. It was his lack of regret, his lack of retrospection, this young outfielder drifting in and, very soon, out of the profession that still held Harry, still demanded of him, still excited him. Harry was probably forty, maybe more, and his brain helped his legs cover the ground of a shortstop. He knew where to play the hitters.
My mother and father and I went to most home games, and some nights in the off-season we ate dinner at Poorboy’s Restaurant with Harry and his wife. One of those nights, while everyone but my mother and me was smoking Lucky Strikes after dinner, my father said to Harry: My son says he wants to be a ballplayer. Harry turned his bright eyes on me, and looked through my eyes and into the secret self, or selves, I believed I hid from everyone, especially my parents and, most of all, my father: those demons of failure that were my solitary torment. I will never forget those moments in the restaurant when I felt Harry’s eyes, looking as they had when he stared at the young outfielder who, bawdy and jocular, had not seen them, had not felt them.
I was a child, with a child’s solipsistic reaction to the world. Earlier that season, on a morning before a night game, the Bulls hosted a baseball clinic for young boys. My friends and I went to it, driven by one of our mothers. That was before seatbelts and other sanity, when you put as many children into a car as it could hold, then locked the doors to keep them closed against the pressure of bodies. By then I had taught myself to field ground and fly balls, and to bat. Among my classmates at school, I was a sissy, because I was a poor athlete. Decades later I realized I was a poor athlete at school because I was shy, and every public act — like standing at the plate, waiting to swing at a softball — became disproportionate. Proportion is all; and, in sports at school, I lost it by surrendering to the awful significance of my self-consciousness. Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.
In the fall of 1947 I vowed — I used that word — to redeem myself in softball season in the spring. I used the word redeem too. We had moved to a new neighborhood that year, and we had an odd house, two-storied and brick, built alone by its owner, our landlord. It had the only basement in Lafayette, with a steep driveway just wide enough for a car and a few spare inches on either side of it, just enough to make a driver hold his breath, glancing at the concrete walls rising beside the climbing or descending car. The back wall of the living room, and my sisters’ shared bedroom above it, had no windows. So I practiced there, throwing a baseball against my sisters’ wall for flies, and against the living room wall for grounders. In that neighborhood I had new friends and, since they did not know me as a sissy, I did not become one. In autumn and winter we played tackle football, wearing helmets and shoulder pads; when we weren’t doing that, I was practicing baseball. Every night, before kneeling to say the rosary then going to bed, I practiced batting. I had learned the stance and stride and swing from reading John R. Tunis’s baseball novels, and from Babe Ruth Comics, which I subscribed to and which, in every issue, had a page of instructions in one of the elements of baseball. I opened my bedroom door so the latch faced me, as a pitcher would. The latch became the ball and I stood close enough to hit it, my feet comfortably spread, my elbows away from my chest, my wrists cocked, and the bat held high. Then one hundred times I stepped toward the latch, the fastball, the curve, and kept my eyes on it and swung the bat, stopping it just short of contact.
In the spring of 1948, in the first softball game during the afternoon hour of phy
sical education in the dusty schoolyard, the two captains chose teams and, as always, they chose other boys until only two of us remained. I batted last, and first came to the plate with two or three runners on base, and while my teammates urged me to try for a walk, and the players on the field called Easy out, Easy out, I watched the softball coming in waist-high, and stepped and swung, and hit it over the right fielder’s head for a double. My next time at bat I tripled to center. From then on I brought my glove to school, hanging from a handlebar.
That summer the Bulls came to town, and we boys in the neighborhood played baseball every morning, on a lot owned by the father of one of our friends. Mr. Gossen mowed the field, built a backstop, and erected foul poles down the left and right field foul lines. Beyond them and the rest of the outfield was tall grass. We wore baseball shoes and caps, chewed bubble gum and spat, and at the wooden home plate we knocked dirt from our spikes. We did not have catcher’s equipment, only a mask and a mitt, so our pitchers did not throw hard. We did not want them to anyway. But sometimes we played a team from another neighborhood and our catcher used their shin guards and chest protector, and we hit fast balls and roundhouse curves. I don’t know about my other friends, but if Little League ball had existed then I would not have played: not with adult coaches and watching parents taking from me my excitement, my happiness while playing or practicing, and returning me to the tense muscles and cool stomach and clumsy hands and feet of self-consciousness. I am grateful that I was given those lovely summer days until we boys grew older and, since none of us was a varsity athlete, we turned to driving lessons and romance.
There were three or four of those baseball seasons. In that first one, in 1948, we went one morning to the Bulls’ clinic. The ball field was a crowd of boys, young ones like us, eleven or twelve, and teenagers too. The day began with short drills and instruction and demonstrations; I don’t remember how it ended. I only remember the first drill: a column of us in the infield, and one of the Bulls tossing a ground ball to the first boy, then the next boy, and so on: a fast, smooth exercise. But waiting in line, among all those strangers, not only boys but men too, professional ballplayers, I lost my months of backyard practice, my redemption on the softball field at school and the praise from my classmates that followed it, lost the mornings with my friends on our field. When my turn came I trotted toward the softly bouncing ball, crouched, took my eyes off the ball and saw only the blankness of my secret self, and the ball went between and through my legs. The player tossed me another one, which I fielded while my rump puckered as in anticipation of a spanking, a first day at school. Harry Strohm was watching.
So later that summer, amid the aroma of coffee and tobacco smoke at the table at Poorboy’s, when he gazed at me with those eyes like embedded gems, brilliant and ancient, I saw in them myself that morning, bound by the strings of my fear, as the ball bounced over my stiffly waiting gloved hand. Harry Strohm said nothing at the table; or, if he did, I heard it as nothing. Perhaps he said quietly: That’s good.
I was wrong, and I did not know I was wrong until this very moment, as I write this. When Harry looked at me across the table, he was not looking at my body and into my soul and deciding I would never be a ballplayer, he was not focusing on my trifling error on that long day of the clinic. He was looking at my young hope and seeing his own that had propelled him into and kept him in this vocation, this game he had played nearly all his life. His skin was deeply, smoothly brown; the wrinkles in his face delineated his skin’s toughness. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and slacks. I cannot imagine him in a suit and tie, save in his casket; cannot imagine him in any clothing but a baseball uniform, or something familiar, something placed in a locker before a game, withdrawn from it after the game and the shower, some assembly of cotton whose only function was to cover his nakedness until the next game, the next season. He had once played Triple A ball.
So had Norm Litzinger, our left fielder. A shoulder injury was the catalyst for his descent from the top of the wall surrounding the garden where the very few played major league baseball. I do not remember the effect of the injury on his performance in the Evangeline League. Perhaps there was none, as he threw on smaller fields, to hold or put out slower runners, and as he swung at pitches that most major leaguers could hit at will. He was brown, and broad of shoulder and chest, handsome and spirited, and humorous. He was fast too, and graceful, and sometimes, after making a shoestring catch, he somersaulted to his feet, holding the ball high in his glove. Once, as he was sprinting home from third, the catcher blocked the plate. Litzinger ducked his head and ran into the catcher, who dropped the ball as the two men fell; then Litzinger rose from the tumble and dust, grinning, holding his shoulders sloped and his arms bent and hanging like an ape’s, and walked like one into applause and the dugout.
He was in his thirties. At the end of every season he went home, to whatever place in the North. For us, everything but Arkansas above us was the North; everything but California, which was isolate and odd. One season he dated a beautiful woman who sat with another beautiful woman in a box seat behind home plate. I was thirteen or fourteen. Litzinger’s lady had black hair and dark skin, her lips and fingernails were bright red, her cheeks rouged. Her friend was blonde, with very red lips and nails. They both smoked Chesterfields, and as I watched them drawing on their cigarettes, marking them with lipstick, and blowing plumes of smoke into the humid and floodlit night air, and daintily removing bits of tobacco from their tongues, I felt the magical and frightening mystery of their flesh. The brunette married Norman Litzinger; and one night, before the game, the blonde married Billy Joe Barrett with a ceremony at home plate.
One season I read a book by Joe DiMaggio. I believe it was a book of instruction, for boys. I only remember one line from that book, and I paraphrase it: If you stay in Class D or C ball for more than one season, unless you have been injured, you should get out of professional baseball. Perhaps DiMaggio wrote the word quit. I can’t. I’ve spent too much of my life in angry dread of that word.
How could I forget DiMaggio’s sentence? I loved young ballplayers who, with the Bulls, were trying to rise through the minor leagues, to the garden of the elect. I loved young ballplayers who, like the outfielder with the condom, were in their second or third seasons in Class C ball. And I loved old ballplayers, like Harry Strohm; and Bill Thomas, a fifty-year-old pitcher with great control, and an assortment of soft breaking balls, who one night pitched a no-hitter; and once, when because of rain-outs and doubleheaders, the Bulls had no one to pitch the second game of a double header, he pitched and won both of them. And I loved players who were neither old nor young, for baseball: men like Tom Spears, a pitcher in his mid-twenties, who had played in leagues higher than Class C, then pitched a few seasons for us on his way out of professional baseball. He was a gentle and witty man, and one morning, because we asked him to, he came to one of our games, to watch us play.
Late one afternoon Mrs. Strohm gave both my cousin Jimmy and me the night off, and we asked the visiting manager if we could be his batboys. Tom Spears pitched for the Bulls that night. This was a time in baseball when, if a man was pitching a no-hitter, no one spoke about it. Radio announcers hinted, in their various ways. Fans in seats looked at each other, winked, raised an eyebrow, nodded. We were afraid of jinxing it; and that belief made being a fan something deeper than watching a game. An uninformed spectator, a drunk, even a thirteen-year-old boy could, by simply saying the words no-hitter, destroy it. So you were connected with everyone watching the game, and everyone listening to it too, for a man alone with his radio in his living room, a man who lacked belief, could say those two sacred words and break the spell.
But Jimmy and I did not know until the night Spears pitched a no-hitter, while we were batboys for the New Iberia Pelicans, that the opposing team transcended their desire to win, and each player his desire to perform, to hit, and instead obeyed the rules of the ritual. We were having fun, and we were also trying to do perfect w
ork as batboys; we did not know Spears was pitching a no-hitter. We sat in the dugout while the Pelicans were in the field, sat with pitchers and the manager and reserve ballplayers. When the Pelicans were at bat we stayed close to the on-deck circle, watched hitter after hitter returning to the dugout without a hit. And no one said a word. Then the last batter struck out on a fastball, a lovely glint of white, and the crowd was standing and cheering and passing the hat, and the Bulls in the field and from the dugout were running to the mound, to Spears. Then the Pelicans were saying the two words, surrounding them with the obscenities I first heard and learned from ballplayers, and they went quickly to their bus — there were no visiting locker rooms in the league — and left their bats. Jimmy and I thrust them into the canvas bat bag and ran, both of us holding the bag, to the parking lot, to the bus. The driver, a player, had already started it; the team was aboard. Your bats, we called; Your bats. From the bus we heard the two words, the obscenities; a player reached down through the door and hoisted in the bag of Louisville Sluggers.
How could I forget DiMaggio’s sentence? Our first baseman, in the Bulls’ first season, was a young hard-hitting lefthander whose last name was Glenn. We were in the Detroit Tiger system, and after Glenn’s season with us, he went up to Flint, Michigan, to a Class A league. I subscribed to The Sporting News and read the weekly statistics and box scores, and I followed Glenn’s performance, and I shared his hope, and waited for the season when he would stand finally in the garden. At Flint he batted in the middle of the order, as he had for us, and he did well; but he did not hit .300, or thirty home runs. In the next season I looked every week at the names in The Sporting News, searched for Glenn in double A and triple A, and did not find him there, or in Class A or B, and I never saw his name again. It was as though he had come into my life, then left me and died, but I did not have the words then for what I felt in my heart. I could only say to my friends: I can’t find Glenn’s name anymore.