I make him sound like a snob. He was not. He felt that given the advantages (family background, security, and good education), a certain obligation existed to follow a proper pattern, as solid in his mind (the right jobs, clubs, marriages, and so forth) as if he were a Brahmin, a "topdrawer" Hindu.
During my convalescence both of them wrote long letters to keep in touch. They knew their chances were slim that they could reach me by phone. Their letters were impersonal. They never mentioned my troubles. Always financial matters. Gossip. The Davisons ("You remember them, of course") had run their Columbia 32 into Execution Rock in a fog. "Your sister has been traveling ..." In the bungalow in Pass-a-Grille I kept their letters in a packet fastened with a rubber band. They always ended their letters with the unintentionally mocking postscript "Do write."
How possessed they must have thought me. I read with envy about authors who professed how little trouble it was to write-Robert Frost, who could write anywhere, take his shoe off in a railroad car and turn it over to use like a little desk in his lap. My sister took me once to hear Archibald MacLeish lecture on poetry at Columbia not long after my return. He stood in a heavy woolen suit that looked as though he had woven it himself and he said that poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive. I took my sister by the elbow afterward and I said, "Well, that's my problem, isn't it? I'm not really alive. I'm perhaps a quarter alive."
"You're coming along," she said.
In Florida I lived by what I called my "master plan of idleness"-the cardboard with a daily schedule marked on it. Monday morning-the visit to the marina. In the afternoon-the trip to the mangrove swamps. Tuesdayfish day. That sort of thing.
Fishing became an obsession-bait fishing with a red and white bob in the quiet mangrove-flanked channels, off an ancient gray-planked dock that swayed eerily under me as I ventured to its end, easing myself down, legs dangling toward the water. The mangroves formed a small amphitheater, closed off from the traffic of the deeper channels. Sometimes I could hear the slow puttering of a skiff trolling on the far side of the trees. The bob moved slowly in the tide. Sometimes the blue crabs, swimming up from the silt of the bottom, would collect the bait, pulling the bob down so that it was half submerged, the current flowing slowly past it. There were times, I am willing to admit now, when I did not even bother to bait the hook; at the end of the line the silver shaft and barb hung harmlessly in the murky water. I felt the sun on my eyelids; car tires would occasionally thunder on the wooden bridge beyond a turn in the line of mangroves. It helped to wear dark glasses. I found a pair smoked almost black, so that even the sunlight was removed from the brightness of the Florida afternoon. I stirred in a cocoon of darkness.
II[
THOUGHT you'd like to hear what's been going on with Sidd Finch." s
Frank Cashen was on the other end of the phone.
"Yes, sir," I replied. "I have been curious."
"First of all, I want to thank you. Nothing's leaked out so far."
"I'm surprised," I said.
Cashen explained that hardly anyone had noticed Finch. He arrived in the Mets car (he was chauffeured by a local kid named Elliot Posner) around noontime when the playing field was closed down for the midmorning break. He only pitched in the enclosure for about five minutes. Other than Mel Stottlemyre and, on occasion, a couple of the Mets top brass, no one was in there with him except the catcher.
"Who's the catcher?"
"Ronn Reynolds," Cashen said. "Kid from Kansas."
"He was the guy under the blimp?"
"He's the one." Cashen laughed. "After his day with the blimp he's one guy who's never going to worry about camping under a high pop foul!"
"Well, how's your boy?" I asked.
"Finch? Well, he's an odd one. First time I ever heard a British accent out there on the grass. He plays a horn. Did I tell you that?"
"No."
"We're having a little trouble with that. Mrs. Butter field, his landlady, called to say that he's a French horn player. She hadn't been told that. She says the sound seems to come from everywhere at once. Sometimes she thinks all the radio clocks and her TV set have gone on simultaneously. I'm not sure she can take it. You wouldn't mind taking in a boarder, would you?"
I thought he was joking.
I asked Cashen how fast Finch was. Cashen hemmed and hawed, but then he said that, well, the Mets had brought in a radar gun.
"It's called a JUGS, after what everyone in the old days used to call a big curveball-a `jug-handled' curve. Black with a big snout. Weighs about five pounds. It's usually pointed at the pitcher from behind the catcher's position."
"Who handled the thing?" I asked.
"Mel Stottlemyre. He took the gun out to the enclosure. It has a glass plate in the back that shows a pitch's velocity. The figure at the top of the gauge is two hundred miles per hour."
"Well, what did it show?" I asked.
"I'd just as soon not tell you on the phone," Cashen said. "I'll tell you when you get here."
"I beg your pardon?"
"That's why I'm calling," Cashen said. "I'd like to see you. Can you come around?"
I put the phone down and went off to look at my master chart. I was scheduled to wander down to one of the marinas and then see Amory Blake, the psychotherapist. I came back to the phone and said, "I guess I can fit it in."
I drove down to Huggins. Cashen's secretary told me that he was busy with an appointment, but that he was expecting me. I was free to wander around. I watched the players shag flies out on the field. I looked in the locker room-wood-paneled in mahogany with toilet stalls that had doors shaped like the swinging doors of cowtown saloons. The carpeting was wall-to-wall and blue, a kind of Astroturf material. To my surprise, Sidd Finch had a locker. It was between George Foster's and Darryl Strawberry's. His name and his number, 21, were painted in white block letters on a blue board. There was no evidence of his presence. A cluster of coat hangers was bunched together at one end of the cross pole.
Down the line the cubicles were cluttered by comparison-clothes, jackets, inevitably a half dozen pair of baseball shoes, gloves, tape, an occasional handgripper, strips of Bazooka gum, packets of sunflower seeds, and bundles of mail. Strawberry's had a long rectangular yellow-metal street sign a fan had wrenched off its standard (STRAWBERRY AVE, it read) jammed in at an angle.
Cashen's secretary appeared and said he was ready to see me. He motioned me to a chair. "I'll come right to the point," Cashen said. "I think you're in a position to help us."
He summarized what had happened since I had talked to him last: the front office had made no headway with Finch. "We haven't signed the guy. He's only here at Huggins for ten minutes or so. We can't persuade him to stay around for lunch. He comes dressed in a baseball outfit which he puts on in the boardinghouse. He doesn't bother with a shower. He hardly pitches long enough to work up much of a sweat. Though we put his name up and everything, to my knowledge he hasn't visited his locker stall. So we don't have much time to persuade him of the virtues of a baseball career. He's gone before we can lay a hand on him."
"Where does he go?"
"We drive him down to the beaches-sometimes near where you live ... Pass-a-Grille. Sometimes the driver leaves him there. Sometimes he waits and drives him back to Mrs. Butterfield's. Apparently Finch sets up targets in the sand dunes-beer cans and stuff-and throws baseballs at them. He watches the Windsurfers."
"Why can't you talk to him on the beaches?"
"We think he'd bolt from anyone he knew was from the Mets organization. It's part of our agreement. He wants to work it out for himself."
"What about the driver?"
"The kid who drives him? Elliot Posner. They talk about religion. Posner is going to study comparative religion at Brown University. Sometimes Finch gives him a koan, one of those Zen word puzzles, just for the fun of it, to work on. Posner gets back here. We rush out. `Did he say anything? What's the word?'
"Posner opens up a notebook.
He reads from it. `When your mind is empty like a canyon you will know The Power of The Way.' The kid walks around here in a daze."
Cashen paused and readjusted his bow tie slightly. "So that leaves us with Mrs. Roy Butterfield, his landlady. She's not your idea of a baseball nut. They tell me she collects dolls and little things made out of coquina shells. She's not comfortable with Finch in her house. `Why didn't you guys send me some normal guy from Arkansas?' This gentleman, well, startles her. He bows a lot. He always seems to be behind her. His feet don't make any sound on the floor. She whirls around a lot. `Namas-te,' he's always saying, which apparently means `hello' and `good-bye.' He talks to himself. She hasn't the slightest idea what the languages are. Sometimes he calls out in a loud voice, `Moo!' Sometimes `Om!' which-according to Elliot Posner-means `the roar of eternity!' She comes around the corner and there he is meditating in the hallway, staring at the wall, his legs tucked under him. He has his own rug, a small little thing. Mrs. Butterfield has never had a boarder who brought his own rug. He has this soup bowl. Mrs. Butterfield thinks he sleeps on the floor-his bed is always as neat as a pin."
Cashen leaned back in his chair. "Couple more things. Finch has this uncanny knack of imitating sounds. He will hear a sound-oh, a very common one like a tin wastepaper basket going over, and he'll echo it. It's an incredible skill. Mrs. Butterfield thinks her house is a kind of echo chamber. In the kitchen she closes the refrigerator door and a few seconds later the her-thunk sound echoes back from upstairs, from Sidd Finch's room. So you can see why Mrs. Butterfield thinks Sidd is `off-putting' as she says. She's asked us to find Sidd a new place to stay."
I nodded. "Not the easiest sort of boarder."
Cashen said, "He's sort of like a furtive bird. Frankly, we, uh ... thought you could relate."
"What's that?"
Cashen's ruddy complexion seemed to deepen. "There's a real problem with Mrs. Butterfield. We've put you ... uh, down on a list of options for him. We've told him something about you. Southeast Asia, all that. We called your friend Captain Smith of the blimp for info about you. He says it's a great idea. He thinks you need company."
A Buddhist monk? Gee, thanks a lot, Smitty, I was thinking.
"Don't worry," Cashen said. "It's a long list. I don't think it'll come up."
"Well, I hope not," I said. "I'm hardly in the boardinghouse business."
Cashen nodded. "We know that, of course. But if you're ever going to follow up this story, it'll give you an excellent opportunity to get to know something about Finch himself." He stood up from behind the desk. "Of course at the same time you'd be in a good position to make a pitch for us."
"Have you tried to get him to sign a contract?"
"I got Jay Horwitz to come into the office as witness, and I pushed one across to Finch. He looked at it for a while. He gave us one of those koans. He said, `A pair of monkeys are reaching for the moon in the water.' "
"Not what you hoped to hear."
"He sounded like an agent. He's no dummy."
"What makes you think he'll make the move into my bungalow?"
Cashen shrugged. "It may never happen."
I changed the subject. "How fast does he throw? You said you'd tell me."
Cashen sat back down again. "All right. The fastest pitches ever recorded were thrown by Nolan Ryan and Goose Gossage. An All-Star game in St. Louis. Both were clocked at a hundred and three miles per hour. This guy Finch throws sixty miles an hour faster! We thought something was wrong with the measuring gun. But the fact is that it showed a hundred and sixty-eight! You can barely see the ball-just enough of a blur to know that it's not a magic trick."
"What's his motion like?"
"It's a sort of convulsion, one bare foot high in the air; and then the terrifying whip of the arm coming through."
"I'd like to see it."
"No reason not to. We hope," he said pointedly, "that an awful lot of people will come to see him pitch."
"What about the catcher?"
"Ronn Reynolds? There's a kind of explosion of sound when the ball hits the pocket of his mitt. Then a little yell. Who can blame him? He hasn't got time to move the glove an inch. Finch has to be right on target. He has been, so far. It's uncanny. But we haven't got him on board. We're all scared we might do or say something that'll make him take off."
Cashen paused before continuing. "So we've given Sidd your number and address. We've told him you're not connected with the Mets in any way. You happen by accident to know of his skills. You might be someone he'd like to talk to about his future." Cashen shrugged. "Who knows? He may not do anything about it. Sometimes I think this whole damn business is a pipe dream."
I drove from Huggins-Stengel to the marina and puttered around there, watching the elderly fishermen with their slow procedures, until it was three o'clock and time to see Amory Blake. As I drove into the parking area behind his condominium it occurred to me that I was having one of the busiest days I'd had in years.
My sister had recommended Blake. She said that he didn't exactly have official credentials as a therapist (that is, he didn't have a diploma from the University of Rochester or anything like that hanging from the wall) but he had a large clientele who simply trusted him. He had a commonsense approach-his notion being to find some practical way to instill confidence in his patients.
In my case his hope was to get me over my writer's block by trying to compile a notebook of strange facts. "Odd occurrences" as he sometimes referred to them. "We've got to get you putting words to the page," he had announced. "I would ask you to start a diary, but that tends to be traumatic for beginners."
"What sort of facts?" I asked.
"Strange ones. The stranger the better."
"You mean like Ripley's Believe It Or Not?"
He must have sensed an edge to my voice. "What we're working on here is trying to get you back into the process of writing."
"Do you do this with other patients?" I asked. "Is anyone else doing strange facts?"
"Two," he admitted. "They're not really writers. One is an advertising executive. The other is a chauffeur. It's working out very nicely for them. It gives them something to put their minds to. Before you know it, you'll be off and winging...."
"How do I start?" I asked.
Blake said, "I would recommend the reference shelves in the public library. Browse around in there. Four or five good, strange facts a week is your assignment."
So I would drive across town to the public library to pursue my therapy, collecting strange facts for Blake. It was pleasant and quiet. The sunshine streamed through the tall windows. The spaciousness of the reading room was a relief after the low-ceilinged confines of the bungalow. I often felt it was a fine therapeutic practice simply to be there, the empty notepad in front of me, the reference books dutifully removed from the stacks in a neat pile. Sometimes I wondered if one of my fellow researchers on strange facts was one of the occupants of the cubicles opposite-the advertising executive or even the chauffeur. An hour or so browsing would produce one or two items I thought would be appropriate. I never wrote anything down. I memorized the items and rehearsed them just before going into Blake's office.
He motioned me to the chair opposite. We talked for a while. He asked me how I had been doing on strange facts. I thought of telling him about throwing baseballs out of the blimp's gondola, but instead I gave him one from my library research.
"It's about Beau Brummel, the famous dandy," I said. "He kept a special man to make only the thumbs of his gloves."
"Yes?"
"Well, that's all there is to it."
"Well, I suppose that's all right," he said after a moment of reflection. He made a note on a three-by-five card. "In fact, it's very nice. Any more?"
"Here's one of the ones I found," I said. "Near Louisville, Kentucky, a rabbit reached out of a hunter's game bag, pulled the trigger of his gun, and shot the guy in the foot."
"Come on!"
"It was verified in The
New Yorker, May 1947."
"Sensational!" the therapist said. He wrote the facts down. "Mr. Temple, I'm very pleased with you." He looked up questioningly.
"No, I'm afraid that's all I have this week. There were others that I thought marginal."
"I don't mind a clinker from time to time. Do let me be the judge."
"All right."
"I think we can do more than just two."
"I will increase my efforts."
"I notice you have memorized your `odd occurrences.' It's very important that you write them down. After all, that is why you are here."
"I will try."
"Can you draw?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "I can draw hats...."
"Do you draw figures, either male or female?"
"I am not very good at them," I said. "Sticklike. The animals, being four-legged, tend to look more ... rotund. I should be better at it. My sister-"
Blake said, "I'd like you to create some figures and draw a line up from their heads into balloons, right?"
I nodded. "You'd like me to be a cartoonist?"
"What I want you to do is try to put little snatches of conversation in those balloons." He paused. "Of course this doesn't mean you should give up your research on strange facts."
"Okay."
I was tempted to tell him one more strange fact-that the Mets had an English-born Buddhist monk in their organization who could throw a baseball 168 miles per hour with unerring accuracy. I thought of his pencil poised above that yellow legal pad on his knee and the sight of his smile fading.
He would have said, "These odd occurrences have to be absolutely accurate, truthful ... I mean, that's the whole point!"
IV
_ BELIEVE it was the day after. The Mets office called and asked me if I would like to come around to Huggins-Stengel Field to hear a specialist on Eastern religions talk about Sidd Finch. His name was Dr. Timothy T. Burns. I guess the idea was that they had found out so little about Finch that an examination of his religious background might give the management a clue as to how best to keep him content and in camp and finally to sign a contract.
The Curious Case of Sidd Finch Page 5