Homesick (22 page)

“Well, you must be a real fan then. Because you’ve got plenty of experience sticking with losers.”

This successful sally prompted his grandfather to return to safer ground. “Mickey Mantle,” he said, pronouncing the name with scornful exaggeration, “isn’t he the cute one, though? Cute enough for them to make a Mickey Mantle doll for little girls, I’d say. They ought to nickname him Mickey Mantle Piece because that’s where he wants to be – up on some mantel where everybody can swoon at the sight of him. Up there nice and high so all the sportswriters can kiss his precious Yankee ass without the inconvenience of bending over to do it. Because you don’t ever want to put a sports-writer to any trouble, he might write something bad about you.”

“Oh, dear,” said Daniel, sensing an advantage, “who’s still mad because Mickey Mantle beat the great Ted Williams out of the ‘56 batting crown?”

For the first time, Vera detected the flavour of genuine anger in her father’s speech. “No, I ain’t mad about
that,”
he said emphatically. “You know what I’m mad about, it’s the
MVP
. One thing about the numbers, they don’t lie. So what happened in ’56? A young guy in the prime of life, supposed to herald the Second Coming, beats an old man, thirty-eight years old, out of the batting title by eight-points’ difference in their batting averages. Oh, didn’t he hand that poor old bugger a terrible eight-point whipping! If I had got licked the way Ted Williams got licked, by
eight whole points
, I don’t know how I’d have been able to live with the shame. I’d have blown my brains out in the clubhouse. Yes, sir. No way else out after a crushing
eight-point defeat,”
said the old man, relishing his dramatic effects. “Of course,” he added, “it only makes sense that the next year when senile old Williams bats .388 and Mr. Pin-Up hits .365 that the
MVP
should go to Mickey. That’s only fair. Why, anybody knows that an old fart like Ted Williams had to hit a lot more than twenty-three points better than Mr. Wonderful to earn a little recognition. And I won’t even mention how it’s the sportswriters who vote for the
MVP
and Williams never hid the fact he thought sportswriters were a big collection of horses’ asses and
wouldn’t talk to them. I mean, who gave him the name Terrible Ted? You’re a bright boy, you figure it out, the business of the
MVP
.” The old man paused significantly. “So I ask you, in all fairness: Who got fucked?”

“Language!” roared Vera.

“Pardon!” His grandfather lowered his voice and leaned toward Daniel confidentially. “So, as I say, these pencil pushers gang up and fuck him. The greatest hitter for power and average the game’s ever seen, fucked over by a bunch of jealous nobodies. But I ask you: What happened last year? Terrible Ted’s back with a vengeance. Numbers don’t lie. Hand the man another batting crown. That’s his revenge on all the press boys who prefer Mr. Oklahoma because he wouldn’t say shit if his mouth was full of it and Ted Williams says what he thinks. What the newspaper men can’t abide in him is that he plays his game, not theirs, and his game is baseball.”

“Ted Williams’ game is baseball. Brilliant observation,” said Daniel sarcastically. “So what’s Mickey Mantle playing then? Chinese checkers?”

“Jesus, give me a chance to explain. Listen. What I mean to say is that Williams’
only
game is baseball. He doesn’t play the game of pretending to be the All American Boy according to whatever some newspaper dope wakes up one morning and thinks that is. They hate him because he won’t wear a tie when he goes and testifies in front of Congress. They hate him because he won’t be forgiving and tip his hat to the crowd that booed him. He won’t smile a shit-eating smile and kick the dirt, aw shucks. I figure what they can’t stand is that he doesn’t think they’re important. It’s baseball that’s important. To my idea the man who really loved baseball would play it the same way in front of empty stands as he would in front of full ones. That’s Ted Williams. He never hit a ball to hear the roar of the crowd, he hit it to prove he could. If Jesus H. Christ were to put on a glove and take the mound and everybody else dropped to their knees, Ted Williams would step into the
batter’s box and say, ‘Okay, it’s you and me. Show me the best you got.’ The trouble with the fans and Ted Williams is that somehow the fans got it into their heads they ought to matter to him.”

“The fans pay his salary. He owes something to them, doesn’t he?”

“He doesn’t owe them his character. Nobody is owed that. That’s why I admire him. They boo and curse him in his own park, in Fenway. But he refuses to change to please them. He would rather be hated, even at home.”

“It sounds to me,” said Vera, leaning back from the sink to project her voice, “that this Mr. Williams is a big spoiled brat who wants everything his way!”

“Right now I think he’d be satisfied with a fair shake!” snapped back her father. But he knew there was no convincing Vera. He directed his efforts to Daniel. “Take all that fuss about his draft deferment. Wasn’t it a crime how a healthy young man like him should get a deferment with Adolf Hitler running loose in the world? But who said boo about DiMaggio who had a deferment too? Yeah but Joe DiMaggio was a Yankee and a gentleman and everybody loves a Yankee and a gentleman. So which one sees service in
two
wars, gets called up a second time for Korea? Williams. But then nothing he ever done was right. The crap he got accused of in the papers. He wasn’t at the hospital when his first baby was born. He got divorced. Then everybody wept big crocodile tears because he took a shotgun and blasted a bunch of dirty pigeons in Fenway Park so’s the groundkeepers could get a break from cleaning up pigeon shit. The sonsofbitches even said he sold the furniture out from under his mother when it was his good-for-nothing brother who had stole it.” His voice was growing more and more agitated, quivering with indignation. “Okay, so he didn’t sell her furniture, what else could they say? Let’s say he doesn’t go out to California often enough to visit her. Ted Williams won’t visit his poor old Salvation Army mother, the scribblers said. Who’re they to say how much is enough? Who’re they to say what a man feels?”

Vera, drawn from the sink by his plaintive, desperate tone, propped herself in the entrance to the living room and dried her arms with a tea-towel. “My,” she said, “aren’t you working yourself into a state. Who and what’re we talking about anyway? I don’t think it’s about Williams.”

“Who
else
then?” demanded her father sharply.

“Oh, I guess Earl hasn’t been by in quite a time, has he? Hasn’t paid a visit, I mean.”

Her father didn’t bother to reply, acted as if she hadn’t spoken. “You know,” he remarked to Daniel, “they say that even now old Ted’s eyesight is so sharp he can read the label on a seventy-eight spinning on the turntable. Do you believe that?”

“I don’t,” challenged Vera, tossing the towel over her shoulder. “And if you do, you’re even more gullible than you look.”

Daniel turned himself toward his grandfather. “It isn’t as if Mickey Mantle is
really
my favourite player,” he said. “I like Willie Mays a lot better than I ever liked Mickey Mantle. Loads better.”

There was nothing left for Vera to do but stand and stare at her son.

11

T
he station had signed off the air and now the empty, flickering screen was bleeding a numb stain of blue light into the darkness of the living room. The sound of rain on the roof, the gurgle of drain pipes discharging water from their throats masked the faint electrical buzz of the television set but did not disturb the two sleepers in the room.

Tonight was professional wrestling, scheduled after the late-night roundup of local news, sports, and weather. Daniel and his grandfather never missed it. The old man egged on the villains in their treachery and pretended to dismiss any possibility of fakery, or the fix. “You can’t tell me that one of those flying leaps off a turnbuckle down onto a man lying defenceless doesn’t do damage,” he would argue.

Daniel, still blind to instances of his grandfather’s irony, would attempt to reason with him. The old man got a kick out of seeing him so serious. “But that’s exactly my point. Don’t you see what I’m getting at? If it wasn’t fixed, if it wasn’t acting, somebody would get killed.”

“Maybe an ordinary man would. But we’re not dealing with ordinary men here. We’re talking blond negroes. Now a blond
negro has already defied one law of nature. No reason he can’t do it a second time and survive somebody leaping down on him off a turnbuckle.”

It was really only the sport of arguing that kept them awake, not the wrestling, and after what had happened earlier that evening neither of them had had their hearts in arguing. So they had fallen asleep. Stretched out on the chesterfield Daniel lay closest to the source of light emitted by the television screen. The wavering blue light gave him the face of a boy sunk senseless in six feet of water. Across the room his grandfather slumped in an armchair, dressed incongruously in striped grey flannel pyjamas, plaid carpet slippers, and his straw fedora.

Because he had worn the hat to the supper table there had been a dust-up with Vera. She had understood it as a provocation. That was the word she had used. He hadn’t meant anything by it. He had simply forgot. He was still forgetting the hat even with them living in the house.

She had got on her high-horse, as only Vera could, and spoke of deliberate rudeness, his lack of consideration. He hadn’t had the slightest clue of what she was talking about when she started in on him. “All I ask is that we eat in a semi-civilized manner. You wear that goddamn dirty hat to the table as a provocation, don’t you? Admit it.”

“I don’t have nothing to admit.”

That had started the donnybrook. Hot-tempered as she’d always been, Vera flew off the handle after a couple of exchanges and made a snatch for the offending article, tried to pull off his hat. He had thrown up his arm and knocked her hand away. It was instinct.

“Keep your hands to yourself, girl,” he had warned her, with an old man’s angry dignity.

“Mother may have tolerated eating with a boor in a hat,” she said, “but I’ll be damned if I will.”

It was her daring to bring Martha into it, in the same breath with the hat. “Be damned then,” he said.

Wasn’t it just like her to refuse to take her meal at the table with him? And to insist the boy be her hostage in the living room, the both of them eating with plates on their laps? He knew Daniel hadn’t wanted to join her. She had had to call him twice, in that certain tone of voice, before he finally got up and reluctantly went into the other room with his glass of milk and plate. He was a good boy. He had told himself that it was as much for the boy as himself that he paraded around for the rest of the evening in the hat. He had wanted to show him that everybody didn’t have to wave the white flag where Vera was concerned. Where the hell did that girl get off, telling him what he could and couldn’t do in his own house? She had no business grabbing things from him as if he was a sugar-tit sucking baby. Making him eat alone. He supposed she thought that was some terrible punishment being denied her company for a supper. At least he had eaten in peace.

The old man had begun to stir in his sleep. His massive head, which hung down from his neck like one of the sunflowers in his garden heavy with seed and drooping on its stalk, wobbled. His hands twitched and fumbled on the arms of his chair, opening and closing. Faster and faster the fingers curled and straightened, curled and straightened, until suddenly they shot out rigid and with a sharp, wordless cry Monkman snapped forward in his chair, eyes wide.

He stared into the screen of the television, blue, cold as the ice of the dream from which he had just surfaced. He heard the sound of water trickling in his head. Awake, he was still half-suspended in the chill, watery dark of the dream. Then he realized that the sound of water in his head was the sound of rain, the first in over a month. He passed his hand clumsily over his face and smiled for the sake of the parched garden, smiled to remember it was summer and really there was no ice.

The smile faded when he recalled what the boy had confessed to him. “Mom asked me to find out something from you,” Daniel
had announced after Vera had gone to bed and they were alone with their wrestling.

“What’s she want to know now?”

“She wants to know where Uncle Earl is. She said you’d never tell her just to spite her, but she said you might tell me if I got around you right.” The boy looked painfully guilty. “I don’t know. It sounded like spying or something the way she wanted me to do it. I thought if I just came out and asked you straight – that would be better.”

“I don’t know where Earl is,” he had answered. “Tell your mother that.”

With the cold of the dream present in him, more than anything he wanted to talk, wanted to wake the boy. But that would not be fair. He has learned that dreams ought to stay dreams to the young. Nobody ought to show them different. And he cannot allow himself to become a beggar, going crawling to Vera. Having people in the house was supposed to make it easier, instead it had become harder.