Maggie Collins’s Atomic Cocktail: Into a large bar glass pour one and one half pony glasses of brandy and a pony glass of red Curaçao. And now for the surprise of the decade: add two generous scoops of ice cream. Mix thoroughly. Fill the glass with ordinary soda and let the games begin!
The cheese breads didn’t rise. They could have been used to build houses, to bombard cities. It wasted the whole day’s work, all the mixing and measuring the other girls had done, only to turn the dough over to Irini, to Dr. Death. She kneaded and kneaded, draped the loaves in protective towels, set them near the warm, motherly ovens. Somehow she had killed the yeast.
This irritated Fanny, who snapped her towel over the counter tops and scrubbed out the sink in a hasty, abused way. “Maybe we can hollow them out and use them for batting helmets,” she suggested. “Maybe we can whittle them down into bats.” She was so very much larger than Irini. There was no getting away from her, even in the abundance of counters and corners of the Scientific Kitchen.
“Maybe the water you used was too hot,” Irini said.
“All of us?” asked Fanny. “Every single one of us used water that was too hot?”
“Bad yeast,” Irini suggested, and no one even dignified this with an answer.
It rained in the afternoon, a funny, warm rain that came in a sheet the girls could see a block away, from the Kitchen window, moving down Mill Street. Claire ran outside to roll up the windows of her car. She came back drenched. She rubbed down with dish towels by the oven and the combination of wet and heat intensified her perfume, a Florida water with citrus overtones. Usually it was lovely; today it merely sweetened the cheese, cut the tang of the beer. The storm, which could have made the Kitchen cozy, made it overheated instead. The rain played an ominous tune outside on the limestone arch and the gravel drive. There were flashes of lightning, distant percussions.
Practice was canceled, but when work was over it was still light out and not actually raining, so Irini decided to walk to Collins House. Obviously she couldn’t talk to her father about the letter. She couldn’t talk to anyone in the Kitchen who might turn out to have written it, which was all of them. So she thought of Walter. Of course he wasn’t speaking to her, but that was a point in favor of the plan. If she went to him with her troubles, he was going to have to start. At least that much good would come from the whole upsetting incident.
“Aren’t you coming, Irini?” Tracy May asked. She sounded almost as if she cared. Irini remembered her, lying on the grass with flowers in her hair. “I wonder how you’d like it if everyone was suspecting you,” Tracy had said.
And she didn’t like it. But mainly she didn’t like it because she hadn’t done it. This seemed an important distinction.
“No, I’m just going for a bit of a walk.” Irini hoped her own tone was maligned, but not guilty. She watched the others turn right onto Mill Street and then turned left herself. The street ended at the water. She walked along it and then into the woods. The woods were blacker than the town. “Tree darkness,” Irini’s father called it, “almost as good as the real thing.”
As with Claire’s perfume, the rain had intensified all the woody smells. When she looked down, Irini saw earthworms. When she looked up, there were chickadees, enjoying the weather. They hopped along the branches, shaking the raindrops loose in a second, tiny echo of the storm.
Tucked into the side of a small hill, Irini found a garden of white violets, quite out of season. Ada had a February birthday; she was partial to violets. Irini picked some to take along, and got her feet wet. Fortunately, when the boys left Magrit, Irini had taken to wearing sensible shoes.
When she came out of the trees, the sky was clouding up again. It was amazing to watch the storm come back, how the whole sky could change and how fast. How transitory good weather was. She began to hurry.
She hoisted herself over the Collinses’ fence. It took the dogs only a matter of moments to find her. They were muddy, but delighted. “Hey, it’s only me,” she told them, but they danced and barked and all but passed out from the excitement of it.
She let herself in through the back porch. “Hello,” she called out. “Anybody here? It’s Irini.”
No one answered. She moved on to the kitchen. There was no sign of a dinner being prepared. Irini took a small cut-glass vase from one of the high shelves and arranged her violets in it. Then she went through the dining room, to the bottom of the stairs. Walter was at the top.
“I called,” Irini told him. “But I guess no one heard me.”
“Grandpa’s gone out. Ada’s fasting and observing a day of silence.”
“It was you I wanted to talk to,” Irini said. Outside the rain began again, softly, at first, then louder. The windows rattled in their frames; the wind whistled and whooped, sliding past the glass. The large clock rang the half hour. All this noise somehow heightened the sense of the house being very quiet.
Walter had changed their relationship, in spite of the fact that it had always worked so well, had been practically perfect as it was, with Walter hopelessly in love with Irini and Irini essentially uninterested, but nice about it. If Walter was not going to be hopelessly in love, then Irini could no longer be essentially uninterested, but nice. This was her favorite role; she couldn’t settle into another she liked as much or was as good at. She stood looking up at Walter, who refused to look back, and she could see the exact moment when he stopped being angry. It was a great relief to her. She could still hear and see the storm, but it seemed tamer suddenly, smaller, cut to fit the Collinses’ windows.
“Go on into the kitchen,” Walter said. “I’ll make you a sandwich.”
It was only tuna, but Walter put a number of unexpected things into it. Little red tomatoes the size of berries, and dill pickles, and hard-boiled eggs. He toasted the bread. If he had buttered both sides, as Maggie recommended, there would have been less danger of the toast going soggy. Still it was a lot better than Irini would have done. There was something very appealing to her about a man in the kitchen. He set the table with Ada’s painted china and the monogrammed silverware and the linen napkins. The silver was so soft, Irini was afraid it would bend if she used it. She ate her sandwich by hand.
“Maybe you’re taking it too personally,” Walter suggested when she told him about the letter. He had turned his chair around and straddled it like a horse. His arms hung over the ladder-back. He’d just gotten a Tarken haircut. His hair was so sun-sensitive, the ends were always blond. A haircut darkened his whole appearance, set off the white band of skin on his forehead where his baseball cap sat. Irini had a band just like that. She was thinking of changing her hairstyle, something with bangs she could comb over it. “Didn’t the first letter seem to implicate Fanny? Maybe the point wasn’t to implicate you, but just to implicate someone.”
That made sense, especially if you knew, as Walter did not, about the middle letter. Someone had tried to implicate Fanny, then Claire and now Irini. It was good company to be in. “Everyone likes you,” Walter assured her, sounding like the old Walter again. “What’s not to like?”
“But Mr. Henry thinks it’s me.”
“Gramps won’t consider any of the Sweethearts. He thinks it’s an outside element, an agent provocateur.”
“And who would that be?”
“Thomas Holcrow.”
Irini was stunned. “It has to be someone at the mill. There’s no way he could get to Maggie’s letters.” She took a bite of her sandwich. She left the imprint of her teeth in the bread, a neat little semicircle, an inverted image of Stonehenge. Thomas Holcrow was in Los Angeles again and had been for several weeks. He’d promised Tracy to return by the Fourth. “He’s not even here,” Irini said.
“You don’t like for him to be suspected,” Walter observed.
“I just don’t see how. And I certainly don’t see why.”
Walter watched her for another couple of chews. He watched her swallow. “I don’t either. But the man does poke around. He
has been to the mill. At night. It’s not as if we lock it. I’ve seen him there. Smooth as a leek when I asked him about it. Guess what, Irini? I just figured your stats. You’re batting .380.”
“I’m doing okay,” Irini conceded modestly. It was cute of Walter to be running her stats, as if the Sweethearts were a real team and she was a real player. And he was a real coach. She noticed that she was feeling a lot better.
Because of the storm, Walter drove her home. Water streamed over the car windows and bounced on the roof. It gave her a protected, isolated feeling, just her, on an island somewhere, in a cave, at the bottom of the sea. And Walter, of course, but that couldn’t be helped.
Then she had to run through the storm from the car to the porch. She stood inside the kitchen, shaking the water from her hair like a dog while Tweed danced around her feet. “Was that Walter who brought you home?” her father asked.
“I’m batting .380,” she said. He could hardly believe it. He had to go and work it out for himself. It provided a long diversion.
24
Over the first few games attendance had gone steadily up. Anna Peal plugged the team over the air every Friday. Sometimes she even mentioned home-run hitter Irini Doyle. Henry might accompany them; more often he wouldn’t. He was not feeling well that summer; he referred to his health as indifferent. His lack of energy annoyed him, although he was in his eighties, and what did he expect?
By the end of June, the Sweethearts had established a routine. Fanny would select their opponents for the week. She didn’t wear the uniform; she refused even the cap, which could be pretty cute, if you’d curled your hair first. Instead she appeared in cinch-waisted sundresses which showed her back. Sitting in the stands had given her what in 1947 was considered a healthy tan. She treated her skin with cocoa butter, which she carried with her and reapplied during inning changes, so she glowed lubriciously and smelled like a large piece of candy.
On an average weekend about thirty men would show, hopeful, high-spirited, and dressed to play. Some weeks were easy. The men who showed would be gentlemen. They would have brought their daughters and their sons along. The game would feel like a family picnic. But sometimes a group of men would show up without their families, and already drinking. Sometimes they would be eyeing Helen and talking baseball, but dirty, as though they were the first to think of this. Would these men make less trouble on the field than in the stands? Fanny had a head for such things. In the process of selecting nine men each week she would break up gangs, separate drunks from their drink, and put together the least talented team available without being obvious about it. She would choose, whenever possible, much older men or much younger men. In this way the opposing team generally mirrored the male population of Magrit.
The best-looking men were invariably left out, but encouraged to join her in the stands to help her score the game. Her score sheets had phone numbers and little compliments scribbled over them. “It turns out I love baseball,” Fanny told Irini. “Ain’t that the kick? I can’t get enough of it.”
The Sweethearts would go three good innings. At that point they might be ahead or they might be behind, but the score would be respectable and, depending on the opponents, the game would be fun. Then Tracy’s pitching would begin to fail. Fanny would try to cheer them through it. “Good catch,” she would shout. “Can o’ corn, Arlys. Can o’corn!” But they needed something more than encouragement.
At first Walter wanted Irini to relieve Tracy. Irini was the one with the arm. But Irini lacked control. She loved the all-out aspects of the game. She loved to hit; she loved to run back, jump, and catch a ball on its way over. She was still knocking them out of the park. But she didn’t like the pressure on the mound and she didn’t have the fine motor skills involved. She didn’t want to think about such ticklish matters as hitting the inside of the plate, or of hitting the plate at all. She had a tendency to hit the batter instead.
Arlys could pitch, but not fast and she was too shy for the mound. Besides the infield collapsed without her at short. Cindy could try, and in a gentlemanly game, where people would attempt to hit, she did all right. They might win, they might not. But it would be close enough to keep the game fun. An opponent intent on winning could wait her out, though. It would be a long game of no hits and no fielding. Irini would stand in centerfield and pretend she was in Hong Kong or London or the Sudan, while the opposing team walked around the bases. She would tell herself Anna Banana-peel adventures, only about herself instead of Anna. She would try not to mind losing.
Worse, sometimes, was the batter who hit at Cindy. There was no time on the mound for her to use a glove. She fielded the ball barehanded, with her only hand, or not at all.
Irini didn’t know how such men could live with themselves. She didn’t understand how winning something so small as a ball game could mean so much to anyone. Though current data tells us that the testosterone levels of men—fans, not players—whose teams are winning in sporting events actually increase. The losers’ levels sag. These measurements were taken at soccer games, though. This may not be applicable to baseball. In any case, it sure didn’t occur to Irini.
The Sweethearts were back on the bus after an awful game in Tomahawk. The opposing pitcher walked Helen, and then tricked her into a pickle between first and second. Both baseman tagged her numerous times with and without the ball; she came to the bench in tears. “I’m not going back out there,” she said. She brushed her hair behind her ears and Irini saw a bruise coming out on the part of her arm nearest her breast. “What a gang of horse whistles,” she added.
Walter summoned Fanny, who sent another man in to replace the first baseman. “My mistake,” said Fanny graciously, but the man stayed to watch, baiting them viciously until Mike Barr, former machinist’s mate, first class, U.S.N., and hero of the Battle of Midway, slugged him into silence. It was the only moment of victory. The Sweethearts lost 10 to 5.
Afterward, Fanny introduced them all to Barr. She had accepted a cigarette, tapping it on her oval fingernail. Now she accepted a light. She drew in a long pull, exhaled a dark breath. Her lovely lips pursed and relaxed in little kissy moues. Mike Barr watched her through the rank veil as though he’d never seen anyone smoke before.
“I wouldn’t mind a cigarette,” Tracy said. She removed her cap and shook out her rich-coffee hair, but Barr didn’t seem to notice.
“Come by the house,” he said to Fanny. “I have something I want to show you. Brought back a little memento from the war.”
They gave him a lift on the bus. He lived in a neat little house downtown, painted yellow, with a maple tree and roses, and a small grocery store next door with crates of apples in the front. The apples were little, but the roses were big and filled with the sound of bees. Barr’s mother came out to greet them, drying her hands on her apron and patting her hair. “Maggie Collins is just my idol,” Mrs. Barr said. “Will you tell her so from me? I do everything she says. I just think she’s so smart! I especially liked her defense of larger women. I always know we can count on our Maggie.”
I have made it sound as if everyone noticed the apples, the roses, and Mrs. Barr straight off the bat, but this is not at all the case. At the very edge of the finely kept lawn, in just that spot where you might have expected to see a stone gnome or a row of plastic ducks or a metal Negro, there was instead a statue. Head only, like the first manifestation of the Wizard of Oz, it was about the size of a washing machine. It was grinning and snarling, half dog and half lion, but not an American dog, not an American lion.
“Five hundred pounds of solid granite,” Mike Barr told them. “And the poundage was nothing compared to the red tape. I had the devil’s own time getting it home.”
“You were in Japan?” Walter said. “I was scheduled to go, but the bomb went instead.”
“My brother’s still in the Pacific,” said Sissy.
“I took this from a Japanese temple on Saipan.” Barr had Fanny by the arm and she was letting him. “You se
e those brown stains? That’s blood. Twenty-five Japanese monks died defending the temple.”
“You fought at Saipan?” Walter asked.
“How many Americans?” said Cindy.
“Don’t worry. It’s not American blood. I promise you that.”
“Is it a god?” Irini wanted to touch it, but the stains stopped her.
“I suppose,” said Barr. “Didn’t help those monks much, though.”
Mrs. Barr had taken a scissors from her apron pocket and was cutting roses with it. The roses were old-fashioned blossoms, pink streaked with yellow and each as big as a fist. “You could have knocked me over with a feather, when Mikey showed up with it. Where are we going to put it, I asked. Don’t expect me to dust that thing.” She turned to give her son a smile. “When your boy comes home in one piece, you don’t much feel like denying him anything. But now I’ve gotten used to it. Gives the yard a certain distinction, Mikey’s father says. A lot of people come by to see it. We had a fellow from the paper in Chicago.”
“A lot of my friends collected samurai swords,” said Barr. “And skulls. I just wanted something a little different.”
Mrs. Barr handed each of the Sweethearts their own individual rose. “Now who’d like a glass of lemonade?” she asked. Irini took one, but it had been overly sweetened.
“Mr. Henry will be pleased to hear we met a fan of Maggie’s,” said Margo. “Maybe he won’t ask about the score.” They were back on the bus, ten minutes out of town. The air inside the bus was a combination of bus fumes, sweat socks, and roses.
The Sweetheart Season Page 21