Suddenly the memory turned painful. “How I loved!” she clasped her hand to her chest. “No one should love that much.” Then as if by will, she drifted past the pain, even further back, and for a moment Wheeler thought she might fall away completely. “The waltz,” she whispered dreamily, and slowly opened her eyes. He was completely with her in that moment. What a beautiful woman she was. Then she snapped back.
“I would like to waltz,” she said with her famous resolve, and she rose from the couch, suddenly the tiredness giving way to a kind of affectionate formality. “I feel like dancing with my favorite grandson.”
She was twenty again, with a twinkle in her eye, and a burst of almost reckless energy. She walked over to the hi-fi and put on a record, then walked back toward him holding out her hands. “Shall we?”
“I don’t know how, Grandmother.”
“Nonsense. Everyone knows how to waltz. It’s in your fiber, waiting to be released.” She pulled him after her as she took little steps around the carpet. “One, two, three . . . One, two, three,” she whispered a few times, then let the gentle rhythm of the steps take over. Within no time they were dancing. “Isn’t it divine? When I was young, people would waltz until they dropped. It was absolutely wicked.”
The music seemed louder than usual for his grandmother’s house, and for an instant he found himself lost in it, forgetting he was dancing with his eighty-seven-year-old grandmother. She was lithe in his arms, and she seemed to pull him toward her. It was at once sensual and delicious. Her eyes were closed and she smiled as if in a fabulous reverie.
Wheeler had lost track of time. He felt for another moment in his life that he was in that state of flow, connected to all things in the universe. It felt absolutely wonderful.
Suddenly he thought of her heart. “We had better stop, Grandmother. Your—”
He paused and looked down at her beauty. He had no idea where it came from, but he had a sudden impulse to kiss her. He stood frozen and looked into her face for an interminable instant before her eyes fluttered open and she became aware of his rapture. “I hoped—” she said and guided them gracefully over to the couch. She took his hand in both of hers. “Thank you, my dear grandson. I hoped just for a moment that I would be taken away right then. Is that awful?”
“You have many more years,” Wheeler said bravely, as if suddenly he was the elder.
She squeezed his hand tightly. “Dear Wheeler—” She had never before called him by that name. “You will have to remember this for later. You will have to know this later.” The words were puzzling to him, but he did remember them for use later. Then the evening was over. “Thank you,” she said, “for giving your old grandmother an evening to hold forever. ” He looked into her face again and saw pure beauty. They parted, and he went to his room.
Mrs. Spurgeon came to get him at one thirty in the morning, wringing her hands. “You must come, Master Standish.”
His grandmother had expired in the night. She had been propped up on pillows, her reading light still on, and then had tried to rise from the bed apparently and had fallen awkwardly, as if trying to get somewhere suddenly. The book she was reading had fallen out ahead of her, and her hand reached toward it protectively. The book, which Wheeler barely noticed in that moment of great trauma, was an old leather-bound volume, a diary or journal of some sort. It would be picked up by Mrs. Spurgeon afterward and placed in a box of special things, out of circulation. Wheeler walked over to his grandmother and lifted her back onto the bed, and closed her eyes. Then he sat down beside her and he wept with a ferocity that surprised him and that he had never experienced before. He sat there, guarding her, until the men from the funeral home came and took her away from the house where she had spent her childhood, in the dead of night.
At her funeral at Trinity Church, one of the saddest events in Wheeler’s life, there was a huge collection of people. He sat in the front pew with his two aunts and his four girl cousins. Among the mourners was Arnauld Esterhazy, the Venerable Haze. The main eulogy was delivered by the Trinity rector, an old family friend, and an eminent churchman and orator. Wheeler was too much in the fog of grief to hear all the details, but he absorbed the main points: Eleanor Burden’s childhood surrounded by intellectual luminaries, her distinguished college career, her accomplishments in the arts, her role as mother of two distinguished daughters and, of course, the legendary Dilly Burden, and finally her largely unknown prominence in the eleemosynary life of Boston. “Eleanor Burden,” he said, “was a far greater force for good than any of us know. She was always one to hide her light and allow others to bask in glory. She wist not that her face shone.” Wheeler did remember one detail among the flood of tributes and accolades when a small scholarly man from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, the president, it turned out, described her as “a significant force” and said that it had been a substantial gift originated and engineered by his grandmother’s family that had brought Sigmund Freud to the university in 1909. Freud’s famous “Clark Lectures” introduced psychoanalysis to this country and launched the modern psychological revolution. “The little-known fact,” the president said, “is that the idea had been entirely Eleanor Burden’s.”
At one point in the service Wheeler looked back at his old mentor and found that noble, dignified, and reserved Viennese aristocrat, like Wheeler, dissolved in tears, sobbing with great heaves of intolerable grief.
Wheeler’s mind raced, and then as if his grandmother’s frail hand reached back to him one more time, he remembered her last words at the conclusion of the waltz a few days before, as they sat on the couch. “You need to know—” she had said, catching her breath in short little gasps, then recapturing her composure. “My life was very different from others. But—” She paused and looked down, as if distracted by a thought too complicated for words. “Because of what I knew.” Then she looked up squarely into his eyes, as if trying to penetrate across time to the deepest recesses of collective history. “You must know—” He remembered something in those strong eyes of hers. What she might have called ardor. She took his hands in hers and held them tightly. “You must know this and remember this.” Wheeler felt something indescribable in her eyes and held them with his. “That I was happy.”
16
Dilly Burden’s Kid
After the funeral, Wheeler’s attitude toward Harvard changed and a lot of his enthusiasm for baseball had gone out of him. He still went to practice every afternoon, as he had for nearly ten years, but much of the spontaneity was gone. The coach, a former Red Sock from South Boston named Eddie Donovan, took the unproven but promising sophomore aside after practice and explained that, as everybody knew, his team was in a slump, and he was looking for some change of momentum against Yale. “I like the way you put the ball over the plate, son,” the coach said, putting a good face on his despair. He then announced with a shrug to the Harvard Crimson reporter that “Burden’ll go a few innings and we’ll see what happens.”
“One and Out’s going to shut down the Yalies,” his teammates kidded, and the Crimson ran the headline, “Son of Legend to Start against Yale.” The article pointed out the rich baseball tradition in the Burden family, how Burden Gate, the entrance to the varsity field, was named after Wheeler’s grandfather—a member of the first American Olympic team of 1896—and how the great Dilly himself had made his great catch in deep center field off a Yale batsman, while also lettering in track the same season. The article pointed out that everyone knew that, although the sophomore had pitched a legendary game at his prep school and could pitch strikes, he was being carried on the team for sentimental reasons. Wheeler was pretty much an unproven entity and a flake—although the writer never actually said it—who cared more about coffeehouse folk singers than baseball. He did have—it was conceded—quite a fastball, when he could control it. Wheeler felt like telling them what his pal Bucky Hannigan had known years ago: “Controlling the ball’s not the problem,” Bucky had said. “Controlling yourse
lf’s the problem.”
The Crimson article also pointed out that a fellow St. Gregory’s alumnus, Prentice Olcott, a junior, was the Yale captain and a candidate for the All-American team. There seemed to be a great confidence on Yale’s part because Harvard’s weakened pitching staff meant that it was having to start the unseasoned Burden. Just about everyone picked the visiting team from New Haven to win.
Wheeler admitted to Joan Quigley that he had had a hard time concentrating since his grandmother’s death. “It’s a great honor to start a Yale game,” she said, although she had never actually been to one, and she was generally pretty much unsentimental. “It would mean a lot to your grandmother. ” Joan’s family was old Boston, and she knew well how much Wheeler’s coming to St. Greg’s and Harvard had been his grandmother Burden’s idea and how much she had enjoyed thinking of him there. She paused, as if he might not accept her as a sports authority. “Because of your father.” Wheeler pointed out that because of her heart his grandmother had never come to see him at Harvard, which now made him sad.
“I guess I’ll sort of be pitching for her,” he said, suddenly overcome by the sense of loss.
“For her,” Joan said, “and your father, I think.”
On the afternoon of the game, Wheeler was pulling things together in his room, getting ready to head over to the field house when there was a knock on his door. Joan Quigley was standing in front of him, looking more beautiful than ever, wearing a low-cut cashmere sweater and an inviting smile. “Nervous?” she said.
“A bit,” Wheeler said. “That’s an understatement, actually. It’s sort of a big deal.”
“Well, I’ve got something to settle you down,” she said and pushed her way past him and into his room. “It’ll only take a few minutes.”
“Is that what you give your football captain before games?” Wheeler said, when they were finished and she was pulling on her cashmere sweater, which he had discovered had had nothing underneath it, and he was once again putting things together to head over to the field house.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “He’s much too focused for that.”
Wheeler was standing in the middle of his dormitory room, almost naked, the light from the curtained window casting him in dramatic chiaroscuro. Joan Quigley looked up at him and seemed awed for a moment, then she smiled. “My god, look at you,” she said. “Michelangelo’s David in a jockstrap.”
At the field, not long after, Wheeler was operating on pure adrenalin. He began almost by instinct working on the ball in warm-ups, finding that spot by the seam, loading it up with Bucky Hannigan wet ones until it was good and slippery. People came up and patted him on the back to wish him luck. He kept looking over to the Yale bench and seeing the arrogant Prentice Olcott, who didn’t seem to acknowledge him.
He gave the first couple of Yale batters his straight fastball, and it sizzled in there, as Bucky would say, just about exactly where Wheeler wanted it, high, low, inside, outside. He was onto his game.
Prentice Olcott batted in the third spot. When he first walked up to the plate, poised and cool, everyone from here to Worcester knew what was at stake. Wheeler eyed him squarely, tugging at his cap. Olcott’s Aryan blue eyes didn’t flutter; he looked back with warm indifference, tapping his spikes with the handle of his bat. The ill will of the past now, for Olcott at least, seemed a vague and distant memory. Wheeler touched his cap in salute. Olcott seemed not to notice.
Wheeler threw his leg high and fired toward the plate a fastball that would have sent the MIT machine back to the shop for repairs. It zinged into the center of the Yalie’s strike zone, and coolly he fouled it off. Strike one. Again, Wheeler threw his leg high, and again Olcott fouled it back. Strike two. Another high kick by Wheeler, and another foul ball. Still strike two. This could go on all afternoon.
Wheeler slapped the ball into his glove enough times to get the memories rolling in his elephantine sense of recall. This young man in the Yale uniform had dealt him measures of humiliation at St. Gregory’s School, had tormented the younger boys. Olcott was Wheeler’s first run-in with an anti-Semite. A sudden fury grabbed at his gut. “Asshole,” he found his lips whispering. Almost without thinking he sneaked a last gob of saliva onto his middle finger and onto the spot by the seam and rubbed it in. “Good and ripe,” Bucky would call it. He threw up his leg, the same as for the fastball. Down came the arm, and the ball snapped out of his fingers like a watermelon seed.
About halfway to Prentice Olcott it was headed right for the eyebrow hairs between his bigoted all-American blue eyes. He began to lean back, nothing hurried, but pulling his weight away from the plate. The ball dropped down and in, into the pay dirt of his strike zone, and slapped into the catcher’s glove. Olcott was away from the plate catching his balance when the umpire’s right arm shot up. Strike three. Prentice Olcott glared back at Wheeler Burden, as if noticing him for the first time. Inning over.
Wheeler strode from the mound, popping his fist into his glove. His eye caught the face of Fielding Shomsky in the bleachers. He was staring even more in awe than the rest of the crowd, his mouth wide agape, and for just an instant as he sat down in the no-man’s-land beside the old Red Sox coach, Wheeler wondered if the young professor had gotten over his resentment. “I’m in this,” the young pitcher said to the veteran coach, popping his fist into his ancient glove. “I want to go all the way.”
The middle innings went about the same. Wheeler’s control was good. He was in the groove, as Bucky Hannigan used to say. One of his Harvard tutors, a Hungarian graduate student with an unpronounceable name, called it “the state of optimal experience.” Wheeler had written in his notes, “A sense that one’s skills are adequate for the challenge. Concentration is intense. No attention left over for anything else. An activity so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with no sense of time.” That is where Wheeler now found himself. He was in the flow.
The good thing about the prongball was that it saved his arm. No one said anything to him after about the fourth hitless, runnerless inning, not wanting to be the one to break the spell. He continued to sit beside Coach Donovan, but there was a good four feet on the bench on his other side. Wheeler knew exactly what he was doing, even if no one else did. He had been here before. It’s just that they hadn’t. After inning five, he plopped himself down and slapped his glove furiously. Donovan put his hand on his knee. “Easy, son” was all he said, but didn’t look at him.
For the second time in his life word of Wheeler’s feat spread through the campus. “Dilly Burden’s kid’s got a perfect game through five” passed across campus. At Harvard, even important baseball games were pretty sparsely attended, but now, with the news spreading, an unusually large crowd began to form. Midway through the seventh inning Wheeler noticed that Professor Walker came up to the back of the stands. Wheeler looked up at him. He was smiling proudly and had brought with him a distinguished gray-haired man: the president of Harvard University. That was when he faced again his old nemesis Prentice Olcott, the last batter in the inning, who now carried his team’s hopes on his broad shoulders. Olcott’s eyes had changed. They now burned with an old Germanic fire, the deep-seated meanness Wheeler remembered from school. Wheeler saved the prongball. First, he let the Yale captain have an inside fastball that he fouled away, then another one inside that missed the zone by inches. Then Olcott took a ferocious rip and missed everything. It did not matter what each of them had done with old injuries and resentments. It did not matter that Yale’s All-American was a bigot and an anti-Semite. There was simply no way Prentice Olcott was going to hit Wheeler’s next pitch, and it was coming right down his strike zone. Wheeler glared into his catcher for the sign and saw in the batter’s Aryan blue eyes something worth a lifetime of waiting. The pitch blew past Olcott. But before the delivery Wheeler had seen what he had come for: in the eyes of his old adversary Prentice Olcott he had seen raw fear.
The eighth inning came and went, and as Wheel
er stood to take the mound for the ninth and last inning, a palpable silence filled the air around Varsity Diamond. Everything seemed to stop. Even traffic out on Massachusetts Avenue, one could imagine. It was as if the eyes of an entire civilization were riveted on this young skinny kid from the Feather River bottomlands of California. He rose and inhaled deeply. Coach Donovan reached out and touched his knee again. Wheeler looked at him. The old major leaguer spat on the ground. “Burden—” he said. Wheeler turned and blinked at him, lizardlike. “You’ve showed a lot of sand today.” If it doesn’t last, he was saying, you’ve done nobly, and a helluva lot better than anyone had expected. Wheeler nodded as he rose and strode out to his place on the mound.
The first batter struck out on four pitches, next batter grounded to the first baseman on two. To the third batter, only the twenty-seventh he had faced, he threw a no-nonsense fastball for a strike on the first pitch. “The horse smells the barn,” Bucky Hannigan would have said. He was two pitches away from a perfect game, no hits, no runs, no errors, no runners on base.
It was the next, the penultimate pitch that everyone talked about, “The Pitch” it was called years later. Wheeler was pumped up, for sure. The ball was just the way he liked it. He was feeling in flow as much as he ever had in his life, and everything seemed present with him on that mound of earth in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where both his grandfather and father had stood. He reared back and threw the ball and it left with his greatest velocity and his fingers slid off the seams to virtually stop the spin. The ball flew toward the plate, then dropped a foot or two in a way that no one could hit it. The Yale batter swung at air, a good twelve inches above the ball. The umpire yelled, “Strike two.” Later, Wheeler thought that was the best he could do, the moment when the whole world stopped, with no need to go any further. The perfect pitch, the penultimate act in the perfect game.
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