Toby Scott wondered aloud if he’d get to take over the play-by-play. I got the impression Toby liked being recognized. He kept shooting weasel-eyed looks around the room, probably hoping someone would spot him and come over to chat or to ask for an autograph. One thing not so all-out wretched about Toby was his raven-black hair. He had a cleft chin and raven-black hair, and if you could ignore his voice, his eyes, and his paunchy ex-goaltender’s body, maybe you’d share your sweet roll with him on a frozen steppe in Asia.
“Time for the likes of me to be wending my weary way,” Merle said.
“I guess I’ll go, too,” Toby said. “I’m speaking to a bunch of juvenile offenders tomorrow. Real mean kids. Hardened delinquents. I want to do some more work on my talk.”
“What’s the subject?” I said.
“Goaltending. How goaltending prepares you to let Christ into your life.”
“Will there be a guard there?” Merle said.
“I don’t know.”
“Make sure there’s a guard there,” he said.
After the announcers left, Sanders tried to get me drunk, which I thought was a schizy thing for a general manager to do to one of his players the night before an afternoon game.
His voice was husky with rum, which I have to say I found appealing even in a Yalie.
In Los Angeles, Murray Jay Siskind interviewed me for a major piece he was doing. Murray was one of the new breed of adult sportswriters. He hated hockey, baseball, football, track and soccer, all of which he covered. He liked boxing because it was animal, but his paper wouldn’t let him cover it.
Murray had a little Amish beard that came straight down off his lower lip like a baggage tag. It was interesting that he had no moustache because Wadi Assad says somewhere that men with beards but no moustaches believe themselves to be holy, persecuted, and doomed.
After the interview, Murray and I had a drink with Sanders Meade (again), this time in a cliff-top lounge where the waitresses wore jump suits and parachute harnesses.
“I talk about your downy white thighs in this piece,” Murray told me.
He wore owlish glasses and had big pink lips.
“Has he seen your thighs?” Sanders said.
“Have you seen my thighs, Murray?”
“Not up close, no, but I manage to catch glimpses in the locker room. We’re all waiting for this schmuck over here to let you dress with the rest of the troops.”
“So am I,” I said.
“Unconscionable,” Sanders said.
“It’s hypocritical not to,” Murray told him. “She gets beat up like the other players, she scores goals, she contributes. You can’t segregate her on the basis of sex. It’s a thing I could easily attack.”
“Attacks on hypocrisy are a dime a dozen,” Sanders said.
Although I agreed with Murray, I have to admit I liked the way Sanders came out with that line. It was the way people who know they are dead wrong try to find a humorous twist, and besides, his voice was husky with tequila.
In Minneapolis-St. Paul, Jeep hoisted himself over the plastic barrier to attack some college kids who were shooting water pistols at him. Tired, cursing, locked in a two-all tie, the whole team followed. By the time we scrambled over, the kids were gone and there was nothing to do but punch innocent people and swing our sticks at the stadium cops.
I’ve been trying not to do this in short, quick bursts because it doesn’t seem very reflective or thematic that way. But this is how my memories of those events are arranged, in bursts and flashes, in little jumps from city to city.
In Denver, I called Floss Penrose for the third time, trying to apologize for the incident with Shaver. Her secretary said she was on another phone to Seoul, South Korea, and would I mind waiting.
The other two times I called. Floss had been on another phone to the Indianapolis Speedway and the Golden Gate Bridge.
As soon as I hung up, the phone rang. It was Shaver Stevens calling from his small, lonely, pathetic apartment out in Flushing somewhere. At least that’s how the place had sounded to me when he described it.
“They’re coming to turn off the phone,” he said. “I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye.”
“Where are you going?”
“Red Deer, I guess.”
“You’re leaving for good?”
“I don’t think I’m making any progress here, so I might as well do my sad-sacking where they know me.”
“Progress in what?”
“Nothing you want to hear about.”
“Those appointments you have?”
“You don’t want to hear about it.”
“Shaver, when are you going to start talking to people about this problem of yours?”
“Oh, never, I guess.”
“You’re such a big dope. Look, here is what I want you to do. I want you to hop in a cab and go to my apartment building. As soon as we hang up, I will call the twenty-four-hour doorman and tell him to expect you. He is the only black doorman on the block, Washington Post, an oldish, string-beany man, so you’ll know him right away. He will let you in. I will be back on Tuesday, when we play the Bruins. This game is followed by three off-days. You and I will spend a lot of time together. You will tell me what has been troubling you. It will be good for you to discuss it with a friend. Then you will decide about Red Deer.”
“Why are you talking so slowly and clearly?”
“I always do that when I give instructions.”
“It’s eerie.”
“My mother used to do that when she gave me instructions. And her mother before her. Slowly, very clearly, in complete sentences. Our women believe that mumbling is the devil’s work. Who’s this doctor you’ve been seeing?”
“How do you know about that?”
“Someone mentioned it.”
“Dr. Glass. Clinical psychiatry.”
“At least I got that out of you.”
“I won’t miss him.”
“No, but you’ll miss me, won’t you?”
“Yes, I will.”
“How much?”
“I can’t put a number on it, Cleo.”
“Come on. How much?”
“Bunches,” he said.
“Then do what I say. Three generations of Presbyterian ladies from Badger, Ohio, agree on this. Go to my apartment and wait for me.”
There was a pause and then a strange sound—almost the sound of someone clapping hands—and then the phone either went dead or Shaver put it back on the cradle. I called back several times and could hear it ring, but no one picked up.
I began to get depressed. Partly it was Shaver, partly the city-jumping. I wasn’t sure I’d talked him into going to my place. And I wanted him there. I wanted someone there when I walked in. I guess the airports and the hotel rooms and the long, empty nights were already beginning to get to me.
I called Washington Post and told him Shaver might be coming. I definitely wanted to feel there was someone waiting at the end of it all.
In Montreal, I saw some TV newsfilm of Archie Brewster winning a tournament in Melbourne. Instead of throwing his racket in the air, he just dropped it on the ground, probably out of sheer travel fatigue.
In Toronto, the big snows hit. We were one of the last flights in before they closed the airport. Our bus moved slowly around huge drifts. We couldn’t see a thing out the windows.
At the hotel, I tried Shaver at his place, but the phone had been disconnected. And then I tried my place, but no one answered.
Five hours to game time.
I hung around the lobby awhile, talked to some of the other players, bought some magazines and went back up to the room. I called my place again. No answer.
I tried to sleep. I tried to read.
I called Eric Torkleson’s room and asked Eric if he wanted to go out in the snow. Eric was a good-natured guy who stood about six-six in skates and had a penis so humongous it was given a sepa
rate identity by the other players. Eric was Torkleson; his penis was Torkle.
A player would say, “How’s Torkle doing today?” Or, “Who’s playing Torkle in the movie version?” Or, “Is it true Torkle’s being asked to endorse Jimmy Carter?” Or, “There’s a story the airlines aren’t counting Torkle as carry-on anymore. You’ll have to buy an extra seat or crate him.”
A torkle was a unit of measurement. If a player took a shot that went wide, someone on the bench might say he was off by half a torkle. If another plane came into our air space, someone would say we were sixteen torkles from flaming death.
A straight torkle was Torkle erect, and the phrase was used to describe events of only the most tremendous magnitude. It had to be something that brought on practically worldwide awe. The sinking of Atlantis was a straight torkle. The Russian Revolution was only a rising torkle. The building of the pyramids was a straight torkle. Beer was a straight torkle. The loaves and fishes were a classic straight torkle.
“What do you mean, go out in the snow?” he said.
“You know, just go out and see what it’s like.”
“There’s a blizzard raging, Cleo.”
“We won’t go far. We’ll stay near the hotel. I want to see if the snow packs.”
“If the snow packs?”
“You know, for snowballs. A blizzard isn’t necessarily what you need for snowballs. Sometimes the best snow is the quiet snow. The snowfall with big, wet flakes. That kind of snow really sticks.
If you’re walking around and feel the flakes sticking to your eyelashes and blurring your vision, you know it’s going to pack. Otherwise you can forget snowballs.”
“Cleo, I like to take it easy before a game.”
“In Badger, the best snows were the quiet ones. It always seemed to start in the afternoon. Two-fifteen, about. Look out the window and there it is, sort of like it snuck up, this beautiful, white, silent, feathery snowfall. And someone would say, ‘It’s the real McCoy,’ by which we meant it was going to stick and not just vanish on the wind.”
“Badger?” Eric said. “What is this Badger?”
“Never mind.”
I didn’t like these moods. I called my apartment again. No answer. I got a bright idea, and dialed the number of the apartment building. After a while, Washington Post, or Mr. Willie as the other tenants called him, picked up the phone.
“Did someone come over? This is Birdwell, Seven-D. You loaned me your bayonet.”
“Birdwell, Cleo?”
“That’s right.”
“I recall he came and went.”
“Who?”
“He didn’t leave his card. Missus.”
“Was his name Stevens?”
“You don’t expect that of a man in my position. I deal with names all day. There’s sixty-seven apartments in this building. All those people have the same name? You don’t expect that.”
“Can you describe him?”
“White Caucasian.”
“That’s him,” I said.
“Good, I’m glad. That make my day.”
“But he’s not there anymore?”
“I don’t know where he went to, Missus.”
“Do you know if he’s coming back? Did he say he’d be back?”
“He never said he was going. I spun the door around and out he went.”
“Thanks, Mr. Willie.”
“I have to cross the lobby and go into the office here to answer this phone every time it rings. Meanwhile, who’s walking in the door unannounced? You know what happens when unannounced people are at large in this building? It comes down on my head. I get crimped looks for three days after.”
“It was important.”
“They could be coming in right now, filling the elevators, and here I am with this phone alongside my head.”
I got all bundled up in long Johns, woolen pants, heavy sweaters, boots, a big sheepskin coat, and a bright red wool cap (to make it easy for rescue workers in case I got lost in the drifts). I took the elevator down and walked through the lobby, to the mute amazement of the half-dozen players sitting around, and pushed and pushed and pushed against the revolving door before the wind finally let up enough to allow me to get outside, where both my arms were nearly torn from my body by the arctic blasts and where my face was pelted red by about half a million little crystals of stinging ice.
I thought, This stuff may not make good snowballs, but there’s a fortune out here in shotgun pellets if somebody can figure out how to package them.
I struggled back inside, gave a little wave to the guys, and went back to my room. I tried to sleep. I tried to watch television. I tried to read.
Four hours to game time.
The phone rang. It was Sanders Meade.
“You’re the first to know,” he said.
“What?”
“Game’s been called.”
“After we risk our lives getting in here?”
“We have teams, we have officials, but there’s not much chance of having any people in the building to watch them. Impossible to get to the Gardens if you live more than a block and a half away. I’m not sure we’d make it ourselves.”
“Why do they call it the Gardens? Why are all these big, dumb, smoky hulks known as Gardens?”
“Feeling out of sorts, Cleo? Weather got you down?”
“Forget it. Why am I the first to know about the cancellation?”
“I want us to have plenty of time to make our dinner plans.”
“Sanders, I don’t like you well enough to have dinner with you.”
“You had dinner with me in Chicago.”
“You snuck up. I didn’t have time to come up with an excuse.”
“You had a drink with me in L.A.”
“You were lurking around when Murray and I finished the interview. Murray wanted you to come along because he likes to have someone to abuse.”
“I don’t believe you, Cleo. You think you dislike me, true. This is because all the other players dislike me, and there’s that feeling, whenever I’m around, of intense, wordless mass dislike. It’s so universal the players don’t even exchange glances when I walk in. At most, one or two of the newer guys will roll their eyeballs up into their heads. You probably think I haven’t noticed.”
“Sanders, I haven’t noticed. I’m in my little cubicle around the corner from all this wordless dislike.”
“But they talk when I’m not around, don’t they?”
“Not to me.”
“Maybe that gives us a bond, Cleo.”
“Maybe camels eat lasagna.”
“I may not be popular, but I think I’m a relatively perceptive person, and what I perceive is that you’re responding to an image people have of me. Kinross’s whipping boy. Kinross’s go-fer. Kinross’s scapegoat. I just walk around mouthing platitudes. I don’t know the first thing about hockey talent, or how the game is played, or where my ass is in relation to my elbow.”
“If you’re accusing me of seeing you in those terms, Sanders, I may have to plead guilty.”
“But that’s it, you see—it’s just an image. And I believe you’re aware of that. I believe you see deeper. I think I detected a certain warming in your attitude the other night in L.A. All I ask is that you examine your feelings a little more deeply and a little more honestly. Get in touch with your feelings, Cleo.”
“What do you want me to say, Sanders? You’ve got a name that goes forward or backward and I want to have your baby?”
“All I want you to do is think about having dinner with me. I have a lot of calls to make. I’ll get back to you. Please think yes.”
“How can we have dinner if we can’t even make it to the curb without a team of huskies? And you can forget room service. And you can forget the hotel dining room. I don’t think it’s a good idea for the only female Ranger to be seen with the only general manager three times in one road trip.”
“You forget the vast underground network in large Canadian cities. All we have to do is take the elevator to the sub-lobby, stroll along a carpeted passageway past a series of shops and a movie theater, walk down a flight of stairs, make a left turn past a bookstore and a hairdresser, and settle ourselves in the plush seats of a warm, darkly lit, wood-paneled restaurant, far beneath the howling snows.”
I called my apartment again. No answer. Nothing. The sound of a phone ringing in an empty room.
New York, New York.
4
I would think of it afterward as the Night of the Howling Snows, like some Indian legend involving terrific events.
I met Sanders by the newsstand that’s located just to the left of the elevator bank (your left, as you emerge), one level below the hotel lobby. We’d agreed not to ride down together. I didn’t like this element of secrecy because it made the whole thing seem like some white hot extramarital romance involving windswept passions, broken homes, and private investigators. But that was better than being seen by reporters or by people associated with the team.
I wore a black and white, satin-finish, double-breasted kind of mock tuxedo—very amusing, very now, very New York. Floss had picked it out for me when we were on better terms. Also a pleat-front dress shirt and a droopy French-impressionist’s cravat. The cravat was somewhere at the red end of the spectrum, drifting toward bullet-wound purple.
Yes, it attracted attention as we walked past shops full of rubber-booted, storm-tossed women and popcorn-eating kids and as we descended a stairway into another carpeted plaza, this one vast, with trees and shrubs and fountains. And, yes, it probably made Sanders’s heart thump a little louder. And of course all of this was directly opposed to common sense, discretion etc. But when you own an outfit like this, which is practically neon, you don’t sit around and wait for an invitation that specifies black-and-white tux. You want to get out and show it and get it over with, so you can resume a normal life.
“There’s something I should have told you on the phone,” Sanders said.
“What?”
“The restaurant I wanted to go to is booked, solidly booked, until ten p.m., and I don’t know about you, but I just couldn’t hold out, food and drinkwise, a minute beyond eight.”
Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League Page 5