Life Sentences (4 page)

So he’d shout, “Spit in the mitt,” after every error, or to warn a player to be ready to go and get it, or simply to suggest a little concentration was advisable. “Get in the game! Spit in the mitt!” And he would lift the glove in the palm of his hand to show me how you wore it when expecting a bunt, or a pop, or to scoop up a grounder. Hot smashes were another matter—line drives. The spit in the mitt, he claimed, cooled off the ball. “That’s the way to cool one,” he’d yell after Kenny Keltner had snared a liner along the third base line.

The last clipping we came to, the last story in his set, was an account of his play for the Browns one day. The clipping was real and the headline amusing, but the story may have been about another time, another team, than I was told it was. I still wish to think my father had made the grade, a grade that lofty, even though it led to a sickening humiliation. It seemed my father tripped over something while chasing a foul beyond third base, where he was occasionally stationed, and fell, wet mitt and all, swallowing his chew when he hit the ground. He did manage, nevertheless, to get a good pock from
the ball, which he held in the air while the tobacco went down. A moment later, dizzy and green, as the newspaper gleefully reported, my father threw up on the field.

My father always told this story for my amusement, but I could see he felt a little sorry, a little sad—not because he’d fallen, or been sick, but because those good sweet years were now so far away, as are the small parks, the ardent crowds, and the grass which would shine its green shade on a player’s palm.

In my boyhood, the Fourth of July was a day set aside for noise. It was, I thought, such a suitable idea that no one I knew could be thanked for it. The Fourth was for small towns as well as for small boys. Things went bang at odd moments all day, but during the late afternoon people often gathered in the local park for a potluck picnic. Tables were customarily covered with white paper, but the bandstand would be decked out in red and blue bunting. There the town band would play robustly sentimental and patriotic tunes, badly but with beery energy, and a politician or two might speechify, making sounds as meaningless as the caps that went off for no reason other than exuberance. There would be a softball game, sack races, and, on the meditative side of the picnic grounds, horseshoes carefully tossed to collar a problem as if they were weighty thoughts. Their clang always seemed calm and immensely reassuring to me, and the men who tossed them at least serious, if not wise. They offered, before and after every turn, thoughts, briefly put, on the state of crops, morals, and the nation.

The women cleaned up after the men had eaten their hamburgers, beans, and potato salad, then sat about the tables gossiping, fanning away warmth and flies. I saw nothing the matter with any of this … I was busy being a boy, and I saw nothing the matter with
that either. I threw cherry bombs into the pond where there had been ducks that morning. Too excited to eat sensibly, I rushed from one activity to another, a large red firecracker in my left fist, as real as if it had been drawn by Norman Rockwell, a glorious burst that I was saving for the day’s end, which I knew would otherwise be marked by girls waving sparklers and shrieking with glee as they ran to make tracers within the darker environment of the trees.

Sports, food, speeches, music, noise: each a gift of the day that marked our independence, the day that was supposed to repuff our pride and reaffirm our loyalties. My father was an athlete but he had duties beyond the field of play. He was a veteran of the First World War and a member of the American Legion, so on the morning of the Fourth he would dress himself in puttees, a Sam Browne belt, and a shiny tin helmet, then oil the valves on his cornet, which would have stuck since last fingered, and make a few soft-mouthed toots to hear whether his lips were still strong enough to do it. The Legion’s small band would turn out for deaths and patriotic anniversaries, either to sound taps or tire out a few Sousa tunes. Then, as the sun set, it would conclude its part in the ceremonies by marching briskly behind the strains of “It’s a Grand Old Flag” till both band and flag left the park and were out of sight.

I was in awe of my father’s uniform, especially the shiny tin hat I was allowed to fondle, as much as I was of the photographs that showed him in his professional baseball stripes. They were memories for him, symbols for me, full of mystery, for he had been in a world I never knew and fought his war in advance of mine—an improbability that became reasonable only when I pushed my way out of my own past, fleeing my memories as if I had already been in battle a few times before I got decked out as an ensign by Saks Fifth Avenue and wore my one and only tailor-mades on leave, hoping to appear a person of accomplishment.

The Fourth was more military and more masculine than Memorial Day. Memorial Day was for moms and old men, but on the Fourth we rattled our ceremonial sabers and shot off our toy guns
and proclaimed our might and main, resolving to resolve. I eventually learned that such festivities rarely meant a great deal. The holiday was as much about our nation’s independence as Christmas was about Christ. On such occasions we were to spend money and have a good time.

The first Fourth following Pearl Harbor I remember as too serious to be noisy. The Japanese had attacked our fleet as it lay asleep on a sunny Sunday before church. By the time Independence Day arrived we were at war in the full sense, already making many sacrifices, mobilizing our forces, our resources, and suffering humiliating losses every day. I remember being as shocked when Singapore fell as I was about the destruction at Pearl Harbor. The families of the sailors who died received the thanks of a grateful nation, but these sons had been sailors, after all, not civilians, and had signed a contract that endangered them. Still, when we were drafted we were insured for $
10
,
000
apiece—a policy that I haven’t permitted to be cashed yet.

People stayed on their porches that Fourth. There were gas-rationing regulations and rubber tire conservation rules that warned folks from the roads; trains were occupied by soldiers and their freight; and no one gave a thought to planes. Kids were sent to summer camps, though, because so many moms wanted to be near their husbands while the army bases could still be visited. Miniature golf got popular again, and Manhattanites sailed ’round their island on slow boats or bicycled in packs through startled parks. You had to put a lid on fireworks along the coast, because who knew when a bomb burst might be real and the beginning of a German or a Jap attack. Of course, we held parades and waved flags. The war had broken the Depression’s drought. There were quarters, not pennies, in our pockets. And more of them stayed in those pockets, because there was less to be bought. The war forced Sears Roebuck to drop antifreeze and accordions from its catalog, along with alarm clocks, wheelbarrows, sheets and pillowcases. Books were a popular item, though soon restrictions on paper would lessen their life span. In
most cities the best seller was Wendell Wilkie’s
One World
, with 1,700,000 copies purchased, except in St. Louis, where
The Joy of Cooking
, by the city’s own Irma Rombauer, led the list, and would eventually circle
One World
’s sales several times.

The Japanese had blown up warships at a naval base because warships were what you fought a war with and they didn’t want us to have ours, but the usurping passengers who were piloting their first aircraft that other dreadful morning had symbols as their targets and were borne aloft by the names United and American toward twin towers that stood for World Trade on a day that would be written “911” in unintended irony. They may have hoped, but they could not have counted on, a photographic coverage so vivid and complete it would bring dismay to a nation and joy to their cause in almost identical moments, and maybe in matching amounts.

The more dismay was ours, the more joy was theirs, for hate has an insatiable appetite, and will eat whatever’s offered it. Though thousands died, casualties were not the purpose of the attack. There were no islands to be won or lost, no towns to be taken. The World Trade Center had been wounded before; this time they killed it. And the towers fell of their own released weight, so that the head was the destroyer of the feet. No Pearl Harbor here. The target was what they believed we stood for: money—money and its power; greed—greed and what it served; arrogance—the arrogance of the rich.

The terrorists, as we decided to call them, did not smile wryly at the money of the wealthy men who funded them, or at the scams, the lies, the treacheries, the drug sales and robberies that were committed to support their cause. Nor did they examine their own ills, except to blame us for them. They are, and were, the least independent of all men. In exchange for our burning towers, they sent us images of boys throwing rocks and men firing guns at God. They became the bombs that blew up at their festivals. Such shells burst into the only stars their celebrations make: bloody wall spatter and street stain.

Now we have guards at every significant gathering. They peer
suspiciously in purses, in bags, at packages that are usually recent purchases, the soles of shoes, at IDs where the poorest possible pictures of ourselves tell them—these strangers—of our harmless hearts, our benevolent selves. At this huge joke no one is allowed to laugh. What bridge, dam, public building, bank, arena, school; what plane, bus, purification plant, or power station will be picked on next? Yet terrorists did not set the West on fire. We did. In St. Louis, where I live, thousands gathered at the arch to listen to Western tunes or rock schlock in the early evening, and subsequently to ooh and ahh at the fireworks, as they have done in the past, though this year there were plastic fences in a vulgar orange everywhere, police busy being noticeable, park rangers searching sacks, National Guardsmen who would have looked natty in their camouflage suits had we been able to see them, and, as a consequence of this protection, far fewer people.

In the weeks after 9/11, the homes that line my street were strewn with flags. They hung from attic windows; they rose up on poles stuck in yards; they fluttered like wash from improvised lines. On this Fourth three small grave-size flags were posted in flower boxes near my house. At the last minute, two more were hung down the block. But decals, once prominent on cars, are soiled; banners that flew from antennae have been shredded to indistinctness, bumper stickers have worn out their welcome. It’s only a small sample, I know, but it strikes me that the spirit of the Fourth, this year, was used up by September’s end and fell like an early leaf.

Instead of fresh defeats, which weekly headed our news after Pearl Harbor, and which refueled our anger and renewed our resolution, other types of towers have fallen, not cities in Asia or islands off Alaska, but those that many corporate entities and financial markets form, with consequences of a different kind: thousands whose jobs have been lost or are now in doubt, savings looted, pensions dissolved, smug and greedy members of small-town gambling clubs who have been left holding their handbags while businesses built of money-lust collapsed from moral decay, as nearby, steeples standing
for God’s good family enterprises sagged from similar fears: tarnish of reputations, drops in contributions, huge losses in civil suits. The terrorists could not have dreamed of luck like the luck they’ve had, because, though it sometimes seems so, 9/11 was not the cause of our present consternations, our tepid patriotism, our anxieties about the future, our massive mistrust of our leaders, or the weakening of our faith in mammon, the god, as our money ought to say, in whom we bank and trust.

The symbol our enemies chose was an appropriate one, and our failure to own up, even now, to what we often fly our flags for—how we are likely to seek justice mainly through litigation, or how our generosity and concerns tend to exhibit themselves by the size of our monetary contributions—is our defenseless underbelly, our possibly incurable weakness, because the fireworks and the crowds are made of money, too; the funnel cake vendors will complain when our custom declines; we shall celebrate as much in shops as at potlucks; our spirits will rise with the markets; we shall win this war without losses, endangering mostly drones; and crab-voiced codgers like me can sweeten the sour taste in our mouths by eating patriotically packaged cookies, available in sacks from machines, born and baked, they say, in the USA, to be offered to the palate in the shape of Uncle Sam himself, or his hat, or Lady Liberty, or the letters USA, and even the Grand Old Flag itself, though I notice, as the cookie commences its crumble, that the flag boasts but nine stars … well … now six. I wonder which states they stood for.

Winnie, the housewife of Samuel Beckett’s play
Happy Days
, appears, as the curtain rises and her day begins, to be buried nearly to her armpits in earth, in the monotonous routines of her English life. Winnie may be partly immobilized, but she still has her comforts: her parasol, for instance, which she can open against the glare of an incessant light, and her shopping bag, from which she can still remove her possessions: a toothbrush and a tube of paste, cosmetic mirror, small revolver, handkerchief, pair of specs. And, of course, she can still speak, still pray. “Begin, Winnie,” she says. “Begin your day.”

When the curtain rises again for the second act, Winnie is imbedded (Beckett’s suggestive word) like a post in the ground to the precincts of her chin, so that she cannot move her head either from side to side or up and down, but can only wiggle her lips, wrinkle her nose, blink her lids, swivel her eyes; while in place of her parasol a hat sits on her head, and her bag lies out of her reach, out of her sight, and comfortless. “Hail, holy light,” she says, undeterred.

Suppose we were to take Beckett’s symbolism a stage further. Imagine yourself to be without a body and thus incapable of any effect. Imagine yourself aware of the world without any part of yourself active in it, so that you saw without eyes, felt surfaces, heard sounds, identified scents, tasted sweets, without the use or need of a single sense; that you thought and felt and longed and hoped and
loved and feared without a skin to sweat or pore to prickle, brow to crease or sex to tingle. You were a consciousness in a capsule, your dreams and desires like boats in a bottle, your ideas stuck where they were issued like collected stamps. Winnie has a smile that goes on and off as if it were a switch on a wall, but your laugh has no lips and shows no teeth and pleases no ear. As an image, you have everything, but in being denied a body, you have been denied expression. You are a lost life, a ghost who can never affright, or groan, or beg of a son that he remember you; you are a movie without a screen, a sound track which provides rails for silence to run on.