At two in the morning they gave it up.
They had just settled in their beds when the phone rang.
“Western Union with a telegram from Mr. Robert ‘Bob’ Regent,” the operator said.
“Please go ahead,” said Willie, his voice shaking with excitement.
“The message is as follows: The Bird blinds the Cougars. Congratulations. Unity through obedience. Ever your friend. Bob Regent.”
“Is that all?” said Willie.
“That’s all.”
“What’s the address?”
“There isn’t any address.”
“What’s the city?”
“Montevideo, Uruguay.”
That night there was a roaring in the streets of Chicago that was like the roaring of wild beasts.
Willie woke up and went to the window.
There was nothing in the streets but late cabs and somewhere out near Lake Michigan the mournful wail of an ambulance.
He had been dreaming, he supposed, of the crowd at the ball park.
Chapter eight
Cleveland, St. Louis, Kansas City, Washington—everywhere the Hawks played, the vast shouting crowds would pour into the ball parks, crowds so large that many would have to be turned away.
On days when Willie pitched, every seat in the stadium would be sold out by ten in the morning.
Even on his rest days, it was always a full house.
People wanted to see the Miracle Kid, as he was called now, wanted to get close to him, above all, wanted to touch him.
In St. Louis after another perfect game, two older men and a woman tore his shirt away.
In Kansas City, they got his shirt, undershirt and one of his shoes.
In the hotels where the Hawks stayed, in the restaurants where they dined, there were always the crowds, pressing and pushing, striving for a glimpse of Willie.
If they saw him, they would ask him for autographs, baseballs, pictures.
Willie always smilingly obliged.
It made him happy to make others happy even though he saw there was nothing he could do about the underlying wonder-lust that had taken many.
It was tiring work meeting people and signing baseballs and shaking hands and having to demonstrate his pitch.
And sometimes there was the fear.
He would spend a half hour throwing the ball before a group of spectators, inviting them to study his grip of the ball and so on, and after he had no more to show, the people would still stay on, their faces unhappy and resentful, as if he had cheated them somehow.
“It’s just a pitch,” he would laugh, trying to tell them that a miracle pitch was after all nothing but a baseball thrown a certain way.
But that was not explanation enough for everyone.
“Fake!” a man cried in Washington. “It’s a hoax!”
“Part of the conspiracy!” another man shouted at the end of another demonstration.
Sometimes these incidents led to arguments among the fans, and once or twice, to violence.
When that happened, Willie would go to the hotel and lock himself in his room.
One night after a game in Boston, a delegation of players came to his room with a copy of Now magazine. Willie’s picture was on the cover.
The story, after describing Willie as a “truly authentic folk hero” and a “needed reminder that a poor boy can still make it to the top in the United States,” went on to quote a California psychiatrist who had written an article on Willie’s pitch.
It was this article the players wanted Willie to read.
At times of stress, the psychiatrist had written, man returns to a more primitive state. He looks for marvels and wonders and signs of the miraculous. The greater the stress, the greater his appetite for the preternatural. The tendency is manifested in all aspects of culture—in religion, music, dance and the games. Thus, at the present time, a young baseball pitcher is said to have the power of hurling a “miracle pitch.”
From a scientific standpoint, this is absurd. The pitch is nothing more than a well-thrown rising fast ball which gives the illusion of sharply “.skipping” at the plate. The illusion has nothing to do with the pitch itself; it is rather the product of the psychic needs of the players. Caught up in the general and public need for the miraculous and fantastic, they have convinced themselves the pitch is unhittable. They are the victims of a delusion, brought about by a powerful unconscious urge to believe in the mysterious and inexplicable.
“What’s it mean?” said Willie. “I don’t understand those words.”
“It means,” said Essinger, a renowned pitcher of the previous season, “that what you are doing is a trick.”
“But that’s silly.”
“We’re the silly ones,” said Essinger. “You’ve made us look that way. Silly and useless. You’re ruining the game.”
“I don’t understand, Mr. Essinger.”
“This trick pitch of yours makes fools of batters. It also makes fools of all other pitchers. It reflects on everybody in baseball.”
“Mr. Essinger, every pitcher tries to strike the batter out. That’s the idea of the pitch, isn’t it? Every pitcher tries to trick the batter.”
“Not the way you’re doing it.”
“Mr. Essinger, I have shown you the pitch so many times.”
“Without ever showing me the secret of it.”
“There isn’t any secret,” said Willie earnestly.
The other players scoffed at this.
“You act as if you think I’d hold something back,” Willie said, near tears suddenly. “As if I’d lie to my own teammates.”
“What else can we think?” said Essinger. “You won’t explain how you do it.”
“How can I explain what I don’t understand?”
“Okay, Essinger,” said one of the other players, “make the offer.”
Essinger drew an envelope from the pocket of his red, white and blue sports jacket.
“This is a check for 200,000 dollars. It’s all the money we can raise right now. Tell us the secret of the pitch and it’s yours.”
“There isn’t any secret!” Willie cried. “If I knew the secret, don’t you trust me to share it with you, my own teammates?”
“We could borrow some money and make it 350,000,” said Essinger, “but you’d have to wait till the end of the season.”
“If you had all the money in the whole world, Mr. Essinger, it wouldn’t do any good. I tell you the truth, I don’t know why the pitch does what it does.”
“I told you it would go like this,” said Andrews, the shortstop.
“You make our position difficult,” said Essinger. “If you won’t accept our offer, then we have to ask you to stop throwing the pitch altogether.”
“I can’t do that!” Willie shouted.
“You’ll have to,” said Essinger. “For the good of the club. Look at the dissension you’re causing. Unity is the first word in our club motto.”
“A house divided against itself,” said Andrews, “why—” He could not remember the rest of the quotation.
“The people in my neighborhood, my kids even, laugh at me,” said Phillips, a Golden Glove infielder. “They say, ‘You get paid for nothing. Who needs a glove with him around?’”
“And then articles like this,” said Essinger, “articles which say we have illusions and delusions. Do you think it’s fun going around having people say you have delusions?”
Peters, the oldest player on the club said, “Look, son, it isn’t as if you had to give the pitch up. No, nothing like that. Just mix in a few straight ones.”
“So they can hit it?” asked Willie astonished.
“That’s it. To make a game of it.”
“But the idea is to get them out,” said Willie.
“Not the way you’re doing it, not all the time,” said Peters. “What sport is there in that?”
“What does Mr. Grayson think?” said Willie, perplexed and still near tears.
The players snickered.
“What does he know?” Essinger said.
“He’s the manager,” said Willie.
“He couldn’t manage a box of matches,” said Andrews.
“With the directions printed on the cover,” said Phillips.
“No one on this club has listened to him in three years,” said Essinger. “Him and his Ezee Good Words.”
“Then it seems club unity is a little weak already,” said Willie, surprised by his own argument.
“If you think sarcasm will help, you’re badly mistaken, boy,” said Essinger.
“I did not mean to be sarcastic, Mr. Essinger,” Willie replied. “But I want to get the matter straight in my mind.”
“You better get it straight fast,” said Essinger. “We’re opening at home Tuesday night and you’re pitching. If I were you, I’d have it straight by then.”
After they left, Willie tried to think things out.
He wished he could talk with Clio, but Clio, talking on the phone with Martha in the next room, had his own enormous worry.
He wished he could go out and walk in the streets, but the hotel lobby was jammed with people, people who wanted to stare at him, take his picture, touch him, question him.
In the corridor outside, the players talked among themselves, their voices sometimes rising in anger.
He thought it would cheer him to call home, not to discuss his troubles but just to chat with his mother and Cool Dawn. But the operator said the circuits were out of order, that he should try the call later.
He opened the window and crawled out on the fire escape. He climbed to the top of the hotel and sat down on a parapet and looked out at the old city of Boston.
He could see the red and white lights of the ships swinging in the harbor, the harbor, he remembered, where Englishmen dressed as Indians threw tea in the ocean and set America going. He tried to think of the many things that had happened here in the long ago.
But it was no use.
The loneliness came over his heart like the fog that came rolling in from the sea. He had never felt so alone before.
He went back to the room and wrote to Carolyn on a postcard that showed a picture of the house of the famous American philosopher of the unremembered times, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
I love you. That what I alwas wanted to tell you.
I didn’t know how and was afrade you wd laugh.
Did you know even back in the school I loved you?
Only never knew how to say it. Anyway, I love U.
Dear one, with trew heart.
Chapter nine
The ball parks or stadiums where the Hawks played their road games were stunning creations, by far the most magnificent structures ever built in American cities.
They were more beautiful and graceful than cathedrals.
They were more stately than insurance company buildings.
They were more comfortable than schools and far more habitable than most of the housing in the country.
The cities competed with one another in building bigger and more luxurious ball parks.
They were all enclosed now, like the old Houston Astrodome, and conditioned with the only pure air in the city.
Their playing fields could be converted to ice rinks for hockey, plastic courts for basketball or shiny Road-Pak, as it was called, for jet auto racing.
Sometimes conventions of one kind or another were held in the stadiums. They were so comfortable and had such pure air that people delighted to visit them for any reason.
Often, especially in the winter months, the people of the tenements would break into the playdomes to try to find a warm place to sleep.
This had become a common crime in the United States. It was called dome-passing and was punishable by a fine and 100 days imprisonment in one of the new underground prisons. The President of the United States had recently called dome-passing one of the most disgusting of all crimes because it directly invaded the right of every American citizen to enjoy sports in peace and freedom.
The ball parks of Cleveland, St. Louis, Chicago, Boston, Kansas City and Washington had all been spectacular, but none of those parks prepared Willie and Clio for the Regent Complex of New York City.
The Regent Complex, a many-sided affair of glass and steel and alumibronze, was the largest structure in New York City.
It occupied what had once been Central Park in Manhattan.
It soared 294 stories into the air and was the tallest building in the country.
It was so vast and overpowering to the eye that it appeared to be not only the hub of the city but the reason for its existence, as in a sense it was.
The Complex housed some 3,000 business offices, representing the nation’s leading industries.
Many foreign governments had their embassies and consulates there.
The United Nations occupied a part of the 126th floor.
The stadium dome, set on top of the complex, covered the largest ball park in the world with a seating capacity of 150,000.
Three hundred gigantic elevators whisked the fans to the Park at the Top of the World, as it was called, where they were then borne by a system of conveyor belts—like the old escalators—to the bleachers, or to private box seats, or to one of the elegant restaurants ringing the top of the dome.
The night the Hawks opened their season, the stands were filled to capacity. Every table in every restaurant was taken.
The size of the park, the magnificence of the setting, the vast crowd had a numbing effect on Willie and Clio.
Warming up, they were unnaturally calm as if tranquilized or half awake.
Only an hour before, boarding the monorail that brought them to the park, they had been nervous, filled with anxiety, each lost in his own worries.
But here it seemed impossible to worry.
Nothing seemed important but the game, and even the game seemed a remote happening that did not really involve them.
But when they had warmed up and worked up a sweat, their ordinary feelings returned, their concerns and their fears.
Now Willie saw the stone faces of Essinger and Phillips and the other players as they watched him from the dugout.
He had not told Clio of his encounter with the players in Boston—Clio’s worries were already too great.
Clio shaded his eyes against the powerful floodlights of the stadium and peered at the distant restaurants and faintly luminous offices at the top of the park.
“If he’s anywhere, he’s here,” he said to Willie. “He wouldn’t miss his home opening.”
Willie, looking at the enormous crowd, said, “We’d never find him anyway.”
In the dugout they asked Mr. Grayson where Robert ‘Bob’ Regent usually sat at the park.
“He’s apt to be anywhere,” said Mr. Grayson. “Anywhere in the stands or in his office.”
“His office is here?” said Clio.
“There,” said Mr. Grayson, pointing to a row of oblong panels, lit by red and blue lights, at the very top of the dome, above the center field fence.
“How can we get there?” Clio asked. “Maybe he’s up there right now.”
“You wouldn’t go to the office,” said Mr. Grayson quickly.
“Why not?”
“No one goes to the office unless summoned.”
“How do we get there?”
“Don’t go,” Mr. Grayson pleaded. He reached into his red, white and blue jacket and opened the Vest Pocket Ezee Bible. “Listen: When ye see the abomination of desolation… .”
“How do we get there?” shouted Clio angrily.
“The M elevator on this level,” Mr. Grayson said with a sigh. “But, boys, please… .”
The boys didn’t wait to hear what Mr. Grayson had to say. They raced into the clubhouse and down the corridor to the M elevator.
Inside the elevator there were eight numbered push buttons; the ninth was a plain bar, like a military decoration, of red, white and blue.
“Tha
t’s it,” said Clio.
Willie pushed it.
In a moment they were standing in a dark thickly carpeted room that was absolutely bare, without window or doorway, with only a little light coming from an aperture at the top of one wall.
“There has to be a door someplace,” Clio said, plunging off to the left.
“Look over there,” Willie said, pointing to the opposite wall.
As their eyes adjusted to the darkness, the boys saw quite faintly at first, and then more clearly, a blue glow radiating from the wall and outlining a panel of darker blue numbers and buttons.
The boys studied the panel trying to decipher the figures written on the tiny luminous circles and squares.
Suddenly a voice sounded in their midst, so close and so unexpectedly they both jumped.
“The last one on the left, boys.”
“Who was that?” Willie whispered.
Clio pushed the last button on the left.
Behind them there was a whirling sound. A panel of the opposite wall ascended with a soft buzz, then snapped to a stop.
As the boys turned at this sight, a figure appeared in the space opened by the panel, an indistinct figure swaying a little in the blue glow.
In the same voice they had heard before, the figure said, “Clio, you first.”
“Who are you?” Willie said with a shaking voice.
“You ask me that?” the figure asked sadly and Willie thought he caught the tone of Robert ‘Bob’ Regent’s voice.
The boys strained to see the face before them.
“Come, Clio,” the voice said.
“I’m coming with him,” Willie protested.
“This is between Clio and myself,” said the figure.
Both boys now guessed, though they could not be sure, that this was indeed Robert ‘Bob’ Regent.
“It’s all right,” said Clio. “Just wait for me.”
Willie waited—a minute, five minutes, fifteen minutes—waited in darkness, his blood pounding in his veins, fear pounding and pulsing in his veins.
At one point he thought of storming the panel, convinced that Clio was in danger.
But there was no sound from beyond the wall, and he told himself to be calm.
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