Broken Vessels (2 page)

1978

R
UNNING

A
SATURDAY AFTERNOON
in late July, the heat wave has broken, and I am running at Lake Kenoza with my friend. We first ran together in 1958 when we were second lieutenants in the Officers' Basic School in Quantico, Virginia: ran in the twilit evenings on a dirt road through woods near the apartments where we lived. We ran then, my friend said, for catharsis: from the classes, from the captains and majors, from the patterns of the days. Now on this July afternoon nineteen years later, married to second wives, we are still running for catharsis: the patterns of our lives are more complex, and the running has become more necessary.

The air is cool and dry, as it was Friday, the day after the heat wave broke. That afternoon my wife and her two children and I went to Seabrook beach. I wanted to see the deep blue color the ocean has when the air is dry. The wind and current were strong, from the north. The wind blew sand that stung our flesh, and finally the children wrapped themselves in towels, their faces covered too, looking, to me, like victims of something unspeakable. I lay upwind from my wife and folded a small foam mattress between us, bundling, to shield her small body from the sand. I loved the sun on my flesh, and told my wife I wished I could work at night and sleep on the beach by day, for then I would be free of the night terrors.

At Lake Kenoza on Saturday, the dry air gave the pond and the lake a deeper blue, and the evergreens and leaves were brighter green. Kenoza is on Route 110, going east out of Haverhill, toward the sea. The city tennis courts are there. Across the road from the courts is a pond, and purple loosestrife grows in the marshy earth alongside it. Some people fish there, from the bank. A wide finger of wooded ground separates the pond from the lake. It is a reservoir, so its large surface is free of boats, of swimmers, of fishermen. Mallards and Canadian geese stop here. The best run at Kenoza is five and a half miles, starting at the tennis courts, the road turning left around the pond and into the woods, past the finger of land before the lake, then it curves to the right, following the lake, and as you run you can look to your left at the water, on windy days hear it lapping at the bank, and you can look to your right at the woods. The road leaves the lake only once, going deeper into the woods, toward the hill. As it approaches the hill, there is a second road that goes to the left, down toward the lake again, where the bank drops sharply, and the slope to the right is steep and pine-grown, and brown needles cover it.

This lower road joins one which goes up the hill, a long, curving, deceptive climb; it looks gentle but it is not; a crest appears, you reach it, and look ahead at another one. This is the part of the run where the legs always hurt, the heart pounds, the breathing is hardest. My oldest son ran it with me for the first time three years ago, when he was fourteen; going up the hill he stopped sweating, his face turned red, and I told him he should stop but he shook his head no. I believed he should stop, hoped he would not, remembered first aid I had learned years ago. We reached the top, where the blackberries grow. Another time he ran with me, wearing shoes that were too small. Within the first mile he said the tops of his toes hurt. We slowed the pace, and I urged him to keep going. When I drove him home, he took off his shoes: all his toes were scraped raw on top, bleeding. Later I told that story to a writing student whose novel was beating her. After she had given up on the novel, had her head shrunk out west, and was trying to believe she could live peacefully without daily combat, she wrote to me and said maybe your son should have stopped running. This was before he ran cross-country, then read
Pumping Iron
and accumulated weights, a series of exercises, girth, strength, a new walk, defined muscles, and an identification card for Massachusetts General Hospital where now a specialist tries to cure his injured back. After the crest of the hill, the road goes down again to the lake; the run back to the tennis courts is two and a quarter miles, the water on the right now, the sloping woods on the left, until you leave the shade and run on the open road past the purple loosestrife, the pond, to the tennis players, the parked car, the drive home through the city.

On this Saturday in late July I am not running the hill. I am running one mile, recovering from the west coast of Mexico and two weeks of Montezuma's revenge. (“The last thing I ate before it hit me was fish,” I tell Doctor Harbilas in Haverhill. “Ha,” he says, “I've been there. It could be somebody breathed on you. It could be
you
breathed.”) On the porch of the shed by the courts, young men have finished playing tennis and are listening to the Red Sox game on a transistor radio. My friend and I start running, and he tells me what happened to him two days ago, hiking Mount Washington with his seventeen-year-old daughter. After a mile I turn back and walk, while he runs on. A family is walking behind me. A young couple approaches me, passes on: she has long blonde hair, and they have about them an intimate, furtive look. Once a friend of mine was running up the hill; he looked down toward the lake, saw a boy and girl making love on a large rock; an epiphany, he said, which cheered him the rest of the way. Two young men come up the road; they are wearing shirts and slacks, dull grays and blues, and their faces remind me of young men in the fifties, on their day off from indoor jobs leading nowhere. One of them carries a transistor; they are listening to the ball game. I run back to the tennis courts. The fans on the porch have gone, and I turn on the car radio and listen to the game while I stand waiting for my friend.

Two days earlier he had hiked with his daughter past a sign warning them that Mount Washington has the worst weather in North America, that at any sign of a storm, even in summer, they should turn back. The sky was clear, and they went on; joked, he said, about the warning; cursed it, and climbed. Under a clear sky until they reached the top and saw black clouds coming in fast as blowing dust; then it was raining and hailing. They began walking fast down the road. Then the lightning started. It was not, he said, a scribble across a distant sky. It was starting there, behind them, and on their flanks. Not in front of us, he said; thank God, not in front of us. They started running down the road. He believed he would die, he believed his daughter would die, he thought of what to do if she were struck, father-mouth covering hers, breathing. She looked straight ahead, and down, so she wouldn't see the lightning she heard and felt around her. Running down a curve, they came to a car halted on the way up the mountain. She went to the window and knocked and shouted please let us in out of the lightning.

They were a family from Brooklyn: two children, about ten and twelve, in the back seat; the wife was younger than the husband, and the husband was terrified. I'm not a good driver, he said. Daddy's not a good driver, one of the children said. The children were frightened and, with their father, gentle. My friend's daughter said: My father's a good driver, he can get us down the mountain. The other father got into the back seat with his children. My friend and his daughter got in front, the wife between them, and he turned the car around. I'm not a good driver, the father said. Everything will be all right, the wife said. Everything will be all right, the father said. He'll get us down the mountain, she said. He'll get us down the mountain, the father said.

That Saturday night, after running at Kenoza, I couldn't sleep. I swallowed the pill that wouldn't work and prowled the house, prowled with the nameless terrors until my wife woke up sick at the old dread three in the morning, and she needed me to go downstairs and see if her children had it too, for they had gone to bed with stomach cramps, and I told her their foreheads were cool and they were sound asleep, and then she needed me to hold her while she hurt and I held her and stroked her hair and talked to her and thought if they are sick, tomorrow I'll take care of them, and then I slept. In the morning they were all well.

1977

U
NDER THE
L
IGHTS

for Philip

T
HE FIRST PROFESSIONAL
baseball players I watched and loved were in the Class C Evangeline League, which came to our town in the form of the Lafayette Brahman Bulls. The club's owner raised these hump-backed animals. The league comprised teams from other small towns in Louisiana, and Baton Rouge, the capital. The Baton Rouge team was called the Red Sticks. This was in 1948, and I was eleven years old. At the Lafayette municipal golf course, my father sometimes played golf with Harry Strohm, the player-manager of the Bulls. Strohm was a shortstop. He seemed very old to me and, for a ballplayer, he was: a wiry deeply tanned greying man with lovely blue eyes that were gentle and merry, as his lined face was.

Mrs. Strohm worked in the team's business office; she was a golfer too, and her face was tan and lined and she had warm grey-blue eyes with crinkles at their corners. In the Bulls' second season, she hired me and my cousin Jimmy Burke and our friend Carroll Ritchie as ball boys. The club could not afford to lose baseballs, and the business manager took them from fans who caught fouls in the seats. No one on the club could afford much; the players got around six hundred dollars for a season, and when one of them hit a home run the fans passed a hat for him. During batting practice we boys stood on the outside of the fence and returned balls hit over it, or fouled behind the stands. At game time a black boy we never met appeared and worked on the right field fence; one of us perched on the left, another of us stood in the parking lot behind the grandstands, and the third had the night off and a free seat in the park. Our pay was a dollar a night. It remains the best job I ever had, but I would have to be twelve and thirteen and fourteen to continue loving it.

One late afternoon I sat in the stands with the players who were relaxing in their street clothes before pre-game practice. A young outfielder was joking with his teammates, showing them a condom from his wallet. The condom in his hand chilled me with disgust at the filth of screwing, or doing it, which was a shameful act performed by dogs, bad girls, and thrice by my parents to make my sisters and me; and chilled me too with the awful solemnity of mortal sin: that season, the outfielder was dating a young Catholic woman, who later would go to Lourdes for an incurable illness; she lived in my neighborhood. Now, recalling what a foolish boy the outfielder was, I do not believe the woman graced him with her loins any more than baseball did, but that afternoon I was only confused and frightened, a boy who had opened the wrong door, the wrong drawer.

Then I looked at Harry Strohm. He was watching the outfielder, and his eyes were measuring and cold. Then with my own eyes I saw the outfielder's career as a ballplayer. He did not have one. That was in Harry's eyes, and his judgment had nothing, of course, to do with the condom: it was the outfielder's cheerful haplessness, sitting in the sun, with no manhood in him, none of the drive and concentration and absolute seriousness a ballplayer must have. This was not a professional relaxing before losing himself in the long hard moment-by-moment work of playing baseball. This was a youth with little talent, enough to hit over .300 in Class C, and catch fly balls that most men could not, and throw them back to the infield or to home plate. But his talent was not what Harry was staring at. It was his lack of regret, his lack of retrospection, this young outfielder drifting in and, very soon, out of the profession that still held Harry, still demanded of him, still excited him. Harry was probably forty, maybe more, and his brain helped his legs cover the ground of a shortstop. He knew where to play the hitters.

My mother and father and I went to most home games, and some nights in the off-season we ate dinner at Poorboy's Restaurant with Harry and his wife. One of those nights, while everyone but my mother and me was smoking Lucky Strikes after dinner, my father said to Harry: My son says he wants to be a ballplayer. Harry turned his bright eyes on me, and looked through my eyes and into the secret self, or selves, I believed I hid from everyone, especially my parents and, most of all, my father: those demons of failure that were my solitary torment. I will never forget those moments in the restaurant when I felt Harry's eyes, looking as they had when he stared at the young outfielder who, bawdy and jocular, had not seen them, had not felt them.

I was a child, with a child's solipsistic reaction to the world. Earlier that season, on a morning before a night game, the Bulls hosted a baseball clinic for young boys. My friends and I went to it, driven by one of our mothers. That was before seatbelts and other sanity, when you put as many children into a car as it could hold, then locked the doors to keep them closed against the pressure of bodies. By then I had taught myself to field ground and fly balls, and to bat. Among my classmates at school, I was a sissy, because I was a poor athlete. Decades later I realized I was a poor athlete at school because I was shy, and every public act — like standing at the plate, waiting to swing at a softball — became disproportionate. Proportion is all; and, in sports at school, I lost it by surrendering to the awful significance of my self-consciousness. Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.

In the fall of 1947 I vowed — I used that word — to redeem myself in softball season in the spring. I used the word
redeem
too. We had moved to a new neighborhood that year, and we had an odd house, two-storied and brick, built alone by its owner, our landlord. It had the only basement in Lafayette, with a steep driveway just wide enough for a car and a few spare inches on either side of it, just enough to make a driver hold his breath, glancing at the concrete walls rising beside the climbing or descending car. The back wall of the living room, and my sisters' shared bedroom above it, had no windows. So I practiced there, throwing a baseball against my sisters' wall for flies, and against the living room wall for grounders. In that neighborhood I had new friends and, since they did not know me as a sissy, I did not become one. In autumn and winter we played tackle football, wearing helmets and shoulder pads; when we weren't doing that, I was practicing baseball. Every night, before kneeling to say the rosary then going to bed, I practiced batting. I had learned the stance and stride and swing from reading John R. Tunis's baseball novels, and from
Babe Ruth Comics
, which I subscribed to and which, in every issue, had a page of instructions in one of the elements of baseball. I opened my bedroom door so the latch faced me, as a pitcher would. The latch became the ball and I stood close enough to hit it, my feet comfortably spread, my elbows away from my chest, my wrists cocked, and the bat held high. Then one hundred times I stepped toward the latch, the fastball, the curve, and kept my eyes on it and swung the bat, stopping it just short of contact.