Love and Hydrogen (24 page)

Mrs. Proekopp had by that time been reduced to grim little noises. Susan and I had been doing daily violence to the “Minuet in G” for two weeks. Mrs. Bunteen had begun to master the piece in six days. Mary Alice in three. Mrs. Proekopp crossed to the doughnut table and pulled a sheaf of dittoed pages from her satchel, which she divided between Susan and me.

“Here,” she said. “Take these home.”

Susan leafed through the first few, pale. Centered on the page before her was a small cartoon figure of a smiling quarter note. Hi
there,
he was saying.
I'm B flat.

SHE AGREED TO DINNER, at her place, after practice—circling the wagons, she called it. We sat on the living room sofa, Audrey snoring on one end, and looked out on the erratically shingled roof next door. We had a lot of California wine.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
was on cable. On the jacket of an album I pulled from behind her stereo, Art Tatum was making a thumbs-up sign and grinning, under the title
Piano Starts Here.

She apologized for the cork in the wine and said we should have more because of it. She laughed at the movie and made fun of a woman in a commercial who worried about feminine protection. During a Miller Lite ad she asked unexpectedly about football pads. “I never figured out where the pads went, exactly,” she said. The knees, I said. The thighs, the hips, the tailbone. She made a face and said I wasn't being too specific.

So I traced the outline of a knee pad around her knee. I traced the broader shape of the thigh pad. I showed her where on the hips.

She was looking at me, serious. My hands described around her head the narrowed globe of the helmet, my fingers outlining the full cage of the face mask.

Audrey sighed and turned onto her back. The commercial ended. Susan put her glass down and her legs flexed and resettled like beautiful animals. She relaxed, a little sadder, I thought. A frazzled Jimmy Stewart filibustered on the floor of the Senate. His head was lowered in close-up, and he examined letters in his hand. He mentioned lost causes. Claude Rains, sitting nearby, looked uncomfortable.

I woke in the darkness disoriented. I was on the sofa. Susan poked a coverlet under my chin like a bib, her frizzed hair silhouetted against the lamplight from her bedroom. I could hear Audrey lapping water faintly in the distance.

“My Boy Senator,” she said. “We sure bring a lot to the party, don't we?”

AROUND WEEK EIGHT of our lessons Audrey began to have difficulty rising after any time at all off her feet, and Susan worried about her getting old and stiffening up. Mrs. Proekopp posted her recital decisions. I was paired with Mary Alice—five-year-old Mary Alice—in a duet. If it was an effort to hide me, it could only have been spectacularly unsuccessful.

Mary Alice was no happier with the arrangement and in fact claimed equal humiliation. We resolved to make the best of it and huddled in one corner of the hall to schedule extra practice sessions, miserable Mary Alice in her MOZART sweatshirt trying distractedly to remember which days her mother could provide a ride, which days her father could pick her up. On the third emergency meeting she pounded the keys with startling force, crying, “No No No No No
No
,” and asked herself, as though I wasn't there, “What am I gonna
do
?”

THINGS GOT WORSE. Susan's improvement was imperceptible, and my fingers moved like sinkers as we hurtled toward our recital. She called and said something was wrong, Audrey wasn't getting up, she couldn't reach the vet, and when I went over, there was Audrey pained and sheepish over an inability to rise, pulling herself slightly this way and that in the hopes of lessening Susan's distress. The operation was authorized. Audrey was passed from arm to arm in the veterinarian's office and seemed bemused when I last saw her, before the doors shut us out.

WE STOOD AT THE GREYLOCK Animal Hospital before Audrey, packaged like an animal coming apart, and the boy with the mop said he had a lot of cleaning to do, and turned away. The four A.M. stillness amplified sounds. He went through the cabinets and poured Janitor in a Drum quietly into a clean yellow bucket, hushing the sound by easing the liquid down the tilted edge as though drawing a beer. The smell filled the air around us. On the far side of the room, the animals in their holding cages were quiet. Their nails made occasional and light sounds on the metal screens of the doors.

The boy's mop slid across the floor in even strokes, renewing the shine. The tile gleamed in streaks. We all listened to Audrey breathing. The boy worked around in the sterilizer, organizing the instruments. They glittered and clashed musically in the drawers. He wiped the counter and then his hands and left the room.

Audrey's bandage looked unwieldy and impractical. Her exhalations were a quiet rasp. Her muzzle trembled. Susan ran her hand over the ribs. A drop from the nose ran onto the stainless steel. Her whiskers moved briefly, and she smelled of the anesthesia and the medicated bandage.

Susan lifted her hand. The dog seemed dead, but I wondered if there was some check we could do. She asked, finally, for the collar, and the license jingled weakly when I took it off. The boy went back in when we left, and behind us there was the flat sliding sound of Audrey being pulled from the table. I wondered if he should move her before the vet looked at her, just to be sure. I kept the thought to myself. In the car Susan's only words had to do with whether I needed a lift to the recital, and I rode beside her all the way back with an overwhelming sense of what I could and couldn't do.

By the time of the recital it was raining. Susan's Opel, a sad mustard color in that weather, broke down, and she had to walk the last four blocks. She sat beside me in the wings of the makeshift stage with her hair dripping. The collar of her new black blouse was floppy and soaked. The recital crowd was small and uncertainly enthusiastic, as if the rain might have changed everything.

Susan was represented in the audience by Desmond, who looked apologetic, and an old boyfriend. The boyfriend's name was Kevin, and he looked more uncomfortable than I was. He looked at me with the unalloyed hatred of someone with no chance considering someone else in very much the same position.

Introduced, I walked to my piano, bowing unsteadily beside Mary Alice, her brown hair jumbled into an oversized pink bow. We sat down to our minuet. Unhappy Kevin two rows back seemed to wish the piano would detonate. Mary Alice's parents projected sympathy.

Mary Alice stretched with a child's grace to reach the pedals, her polished black shoes gently toeing the brass. She could not look at me. She waited for the sound of my opening chord to begin.

MY PIANO had not improved. Mary Alice's had not improved, and Susan's had perhaps deteriorated. We would work in concert with our instruments to order the sounds and give what we had to the music. Over the seats and before the mingy floor-to-ceiling divider I could see in the maroon linoleum wet with tracked-in rain an oscillating image of Susan coming to love me, of our raising wondrous children in a sunroomed house, with a Steinway and their growing young arms displaying a heartening gift for the instrument.

Susan would be unaware of the gift the future held for her: her life as a stirring solo across the harmonic map by Fatha Hines. Her life performed with the left-handed abandon of Oscar Peterson. Her life joined in mine and mine finding meaning in hers, if only I would have—and I knew I did—if only I would have the patience to wait.

BATTING AGAINST CASTRO

In 1951 you couldn't get us to talk politics. Ballplayers then would just as soon talk bed-wetting as talk politics. Tweener Jordan brought up the H-bomb one seventh inning, sitting there tarring up his useless Louisville Slugger at the end of a Bataan Death March of a road trip when it was one hundred and four on the field and about nine of us in a row had just been tied in knots by Maglie and it looked like we weren't going to get anyone on base in the next five weeks except for those hit by pitches, at which point someone down the end of the bench told Tweener to put a lid on it, and he did, and that was the end of the H-bomb as far as the Philadelphia Phillies were concerned.

I was one or two frosties shy of outweighing my bat and wasn't exactly known as Mr. Heavy Hitter; in fact, me and Charley Caddell, another Pinemaster from the Phabulous Phillies, were known far and wide as such banjo hitters that they called us—right to our faces, right during a game, like confidence or bucking up a teammate was for noolies and nosedroops—Flatt and Scruggs. Pick us a tune, boys, they'd say, our own teammates, when it came time for the eighth and ninth spots in the order to save the day. And Charley and I would grab our lumber and shoot each other looks like we were the Splinter himself, misunderstood by everybody, and up we'd go to the plate against your basic Newcombe or Erskine cannon volleys. Less knowledgeable fans would cheer. The organist would pump through the motions and the twenty-seven thousand who did show up (PHILS WHACKED IN TWI-NIGHTER; SLUMP CONTINUES; LOCALS SEEK TO SALVAGE LAST GAME OF HOME STAND) wouldn't say boo. Our runners aboard would stand there like they were watching furniture movers. One guy in our dugout would clap. A pigeon would set down in right field and gook around. Newcombe or Erskine would look in at us like litter was blowing across their line of sight. They'd paint the corners with a few unhittable ones just to let us know what a mismatch this was. Then Charley would dink one to second. It wouldn't make a sound in the glove. I'd strike out. And the fans would cuff their kids or scratch their rears and cheer. It was like they were celebrating just how bad we could be.

I'd always come off the field looking at my bat, trademark up, like I couldn't figure out what happened. You'd think by that point I would've. I tended to be hitting about .143.

Whenever we were way down, in the 12–2 range, Charley played them up, our sixth- or seventh- or, worse, ninth-inning Waterloos— tipped his cap and did some minor posing—and for his trouble got showered with whatever the box seats didn't feel like finishing: peanuts, beer, the occasional hot-dog bun. On what was the last straw before this whole Cuba thing, after we'd gone down one-two and killed a bases-loaded rally for the second time that day, the boxes around the dugout got so bad that Charley went back out and took a curtain call, like he'd clubbed a round-tripper. The fans howled for parts of his body. The Dodgers across the way laughed and pointed. In the time it took Charley to lift his cap and wave, someone caught him in the mouth with a metal whistle from a Cracker Jack box and chipped a tooth.

“You stay on the pine,” Skip said to him while he sat there trying to wiggle the ivory in question. “I'm tired of your antics.” Skip was our third-year manager who'd been through it all, seen it all, and lost most of the games along the way.

“What's the hoo-ha?” Charley wanted to know. “We're down eleven–nothing.”

Skip said that Charley reminded him of Dummy Hoy, the deaf-mute who played for Cincinnati all those years ago. Skip was always saying things like that. The first time he saw me shagging flies he said I was the picture of Skeeter Scalzi.

“Dummy Hoy batted .287 lifetime,” Charley said. “I'll take that anytime.”

The thing was, we were both good glove men. And this was the Phillies. If you could do anything right, you were worth at least a spot on the pine. After Robin Roberts, our big gun on the mound, it was Katie bar the door.

“We're twenty-three games back,” Skip said. “This isn't the time for bush-league stunts.”

It was late in the season, and Charley was still holding that tooth and in no mood for a gospel from Skip. He let fly with something in the abusive range, and I'm ashamed to say that I became a disruptive influence on the bench and backed him up.

Quicker than you could say Wally Pipp, we were on our way to Allentown for some Double-A discipline.

Our ride out there was not what you'd call high-spirited. The Allentown bus ground gears and did ten, tops. It really worked over those switchbacks on the hills, to maximize the dust coming through the windows. Or you could shut the windows and bake muffins.

Charley was across the aisle, sorting through the paper. He'd looked homicidal from the bus station on.

“We work on our hitting, he's got to bring us back,” I said. “Who else has he got?” Philadelphia's major-league franchise was at that point in pretty bad shape, with a lot of kids filling gaps left by the hospital patients.

Charley mentioned an activity involving Skip's mother. It colored the ears of the woman sitting in front of us.

It was then I suggested the winter leagues, Mexico or Cuba.

“How about Guam?” Charley said. “How about the Yukon?” He hawked out the window.

Here was my thinking: The season was almost over in Allentown, which was also, by the way, in the cellar. We probably weren't going back up afterward. That meant that starting October, we either cooled our heels playing pepper in Pennsylvania, or we played winter ball. I was for Door Number Two.

Charley and me, we had to do something about our self-esteem. It got so I'd wince just to see my name in the sports pages—before I knew what it was about, just to see my name. Charley's full name was Charles Owen Caddell, and he carried a handsome suitcase around the National League that had his initials, C.O.C., in big letters near the handle. When asked what they stood for, he always said, “Can o' Corn.”

Skip we didn't go to for fatherly support. Skip tended to be hard on the nonregulars, who he referred to as “you egg-sucking noodle-hanging gutter trash.”

Older ballplayers talked about what it was like to lose it: the way your teammates would start giving you the look, the way you could see in their eyes, “Three years ago he'd make that play,” or “He's lost a step going to the hole; the quickness isn't there.” The difference was, Charley and me, we'd seen that look since we were twelve.

So Cuba seemed like the savvy move: a little seasoning, a little time in the sun, some señoritas, drinks with hats, maybe a curveball Charley
could
hit, a heater I could do more than foul off.

Charley took some convincing. He'd sit there in the Allentown dugout, riding the pine even in Allentown, whistling air through his chipped tooth and making faces at me. This Cuba thing was stupid, he'd say. He knew a guy played for the Athletics went down to Mexico or someplace, drank a cup of water with bugs in it that would've turned Dr. Salk's face white, and went belly-up between games of a doubleheader. “Shipped home in a box they had to
seal,
” Charley said. He'd tell that story, and his tooth would whistle for emphasis.

But really what other choice did we have? Between us we had the money to get down there, and I knew a guy on the Pirates who was able to swing the connections. I finished the year batting .143 in the bigs and .167 in Allentown. Charley hit his weight and pulled off three errors in an inning his last game. When we left, our Allentown manager said, “Boys, I hope you hit the bigs again. Because we sure can't use you around here.”

So down we went on the train and then the slow boat, accompanied the whole way by a catcher from the Yankees' system, a big bird from Minnesota named Ericksson. Ericksson was out of Triple A and apparently had a fan club there because he was so fat. I guess it had gotten so he couldn't field bunts. He said the Yankee brass was paying for this. They thought of it as a fat farm.

“The thing is, I'm not fat,” he said. We were pulling out of some skeeter-and-water stop in central Florida. One guy sat on the train platform with his chin on his chest, asleep or dead. “That's the thing. What I am is big boned.” He held up an arm and squeezed it the way you'd test a melon.

“I like having you in the window seat,” Charley said, his Allentown hat over his eyes. “Makes the whole trip shady.”

Ericksson went on to talk about feet. This shortened the feel of the trip considerably. Ericksson speculated that the smallest feet in the history of the major leagues belonged to Art Herring, who wore a size three. Myril Hoag, apparently, wore one size four and one size four and a half.

We'd signed a deal with the Cienfuegos club: seven hundred a month and two-fifty for expenses. We also got a place on the beach, supposedly, and a woman to do the cleaning, though we had to pay her bus fare back and forth. It sounded a lot better than the Mexican League, which had teams with names like Coatzacoalcos. Forget the Mexican League, Charley'd said when I brought it up. Once I guess he'd heard some retreads from that circuit talking about the Scorpions, and he'd said, “They have a team with that name?” and they'd said no.

When Ericksson finished with feet he wanted to talk politics. Not only the whole Korean thing—truce negotiations, we're on a thirty-one-hour train ride with someone who wants to talk truce negotiations—but this whole thing with Cuba and other Latin American countries and Kremlin expansionism. Ericksson could get going on Kremlin expansionism.

“Charley's not much on politics,” I said, trying to turn off the spigot.

“You can talk politics if you want,” Charley said from under his hat. “Talk politics. I got a degree. I can keep up. I got a B.S. from Schenectady.” The B.S. stood for “Boots and Shoes,” meaning he worked in a factory.

So there we were in Cuba. Standing on the dock, peering into the sun, dragging our big duffel bags like dogs that wouldn't cooperate.

We're standing there sweating on our bags and wondering where the team rep who's supposed to meet us is, and a riot breaks out a block and a half away. We thought it was a block party at first. This skinny guy in a pleated white shirt and one of those cigar-ad pointed beards was racketing away at the crowd, which was yelling and carrying on. He was over six feet. He looked strong, wiry, but in terms of heft somewhere between flyweight and poster child. He was scoring big with some points he was making holding up a bolt of cloth. He said something that got them all going, and up he went onto their shoulders, and they paraded him around past the store-fronts, everybody shouting, “Cas
tro
! Cas
tro
! Cas
tro
!” which Charley and me figured was the guy's name. We were still sitting there in the sun like idiots. They circled around past us and stopped. They got quiet, and we looked at each other. The man of the hour gave us his fearsome
bandido
look. He was tall. He was skinny. He was just a kid. He didn't look happy to see us.

He looked about ready to say something that was not a welcome when the
policia
waded in, swinging clubs like they were getting paid by the concussion. Which is when the riot started. The team rep showed up. We got hustled out of there.

We'd arrived, it turned out, a few weeks into the season. Cienfuegos was a game down in the loss column to its big rival, Marianao. Charley called it Marianne.

Cuba took more than a little getting used to. There was the heat: One team we played had a stadium that sat in a kind of natural bowl that held in the sun and dust. The dust floated around you like a golden fog. It glittered. Water streamed down your face and back. Your glove dripped. One of our guys had trouble finding the plate, and while I stood there creeping in on the infield dirt, sweat actually puddled around my feet.

There were the fans: One night they pelted each other and the field with live snakes. They sang, endlessly. Every team in the
Liga
de Baseball Cubana
had its own slogan, to be chanted during rallies, during seventh-inning stretches, or just when the crowd felt bored. The Elefantes' was
“El paso del elefante es lento pero aplastante.”
Neither of us knew Spanish, and by game two we knew our slogan by heart.

“What
is
that?” Charley finally asked Ericksson, who
habla
'd okay. “What are they saying?”

“The Elephant passes slowly,” Ericksson said, “but it squashes.”

There were the pranks: As the outsiders, Charley and me expected the standards—the shaving-cream-in-the-shoe, the multiple hotfoot—but even so never got tired of the bird-spider-in-the-cap, or the crushed-chilies-in-the-water-fountain. Many's the time, after such good-natured ribbing from our Latino teammates, we'd still be holding our ribs, toying with our bats, and wishing we could identify the particular jokester in question.

There was the travel: The bus trips to the other side of the island that seemed to take short careers. I figured Cuba, when I figured it at all, to be about the size of Long Island, but I was not close. During one of those trips Ericksson, the only guy still in a good mood, leaned over his seat back and gave me the bad news: if you laid Cuba over the eastern United States, he said, it'd stretch from New York to Chicago. Or something like that.

And from New York to Chicago the neighborhood would go right down the toilet, Charley said, next to me.

Sometimes we'd leave right after a game, I mean without showering, and that meant no matter how many open windows you were able to manage you smelled bad feet and armpit all the way back. On the mountain roads and switchbacks we counted roadside crosses and smashed guardrails on the hairpin turns. One time Charley, his head out the window to get any kind of air, looked way down into an arroyo and kept looking. I asked him what he could see down there. He said a glove and some bats.