Paris to the Moon (26 page)

He got out at Grand Central, took a cab all the way uptown to the Polo Grounds—his mother had told him to take taxis in New York—and asked to see John J. McGraw. McGraw, staccato and impatient, was at first skeptical, but he finally agreed to watch while the kid threw, because he was so polite and the letter from his parents was so insistent and because, well, you never know. He called Big Six, the great Christy Mathewson, out of the dugout to watch, and Chief Meyers, the great American Indian catcher, to get behind the plate. The Chief came out, with a weary, crippled, long-suffering gait, and squatted. (I thought of the Chief as a creased veteran, though the real Chief was still in his twenties and not yet even a Giant.) The little guy walked to the mound, tugged at his cap—not a baseball cap, the cap of his knickers suit—and let fly.

Everybody was impressed, to put it mildly. "Hey, Mr. McGraw!" cried the Chief. "I ain't never seen speed like that, and ain't he got movement on it too!"

"Well," Matty said mildly, peering at the tiny, doughty figure on the mound, "when you think about it, he's more or less got to have that upward movement on his fastball, don't he?" (My ideas of credible 1908 ballplayer dialogue were heavily influenced by Ring Lardner.)

McGraw shrugged, since tryouts were one thing and baseball was another, but in the end he decided to give the kid a start that Sunday in a big benefit exhibition that the Giants were playing at the Polo Grounds against the Detroit Tigers.

I stopped. Outside we could hear the steady stop-and-start rhythmic passage of the sanitation workers. Impossibly chic, in grass green uniforms with a white stripe running down the side, the men of the
Paris Propre
come down our street every night to collect the garbage. The garbage is put out by
gardiens
in city-issued green plastic canisters, and the garbage men place the canisters on little elevators, one on each side of the rear of the truck. The containers are lifted, turned upside down, shaken out, and returned trembling to the ground. Then the truck proceeds, at a stately, serene, implacable pace; a cabdriver who gets caught behind one on a little street lets out a moan, like a man who has just been bayoneted.

At this point I decided I'd made a decent start and was getting ready to say good night. "Go on," he said, muffled but sharp, from under his covers. An order.

In the benefit exhibition that Sunday (I went on at last), the big bathtub-shaped stadium, with its strange supporting Y beams, was packed with fans, come to see the three-year-old phenom. The Rookie took the mound, throwing smoke, and it looked as though it might be a first, a perfect perfect game, twenty-seven men up, twenty-seven Ks, until, in the sixth, he had to face the Terrible Ty Cobb. (I realized that I had a problem here since Cobb should have been batting cleanup from the start; I explained that he had been late suiting up, because he insisted on extorting extra payment from the Tigers' management for playing in a charity exhibition, even though everybody else was playing for free. Cobb was just like that, I explained: terrible.) The crowd quieted as the confrontation neared. Cobb came to the plate, sneering and drawling.

"Hey, baby," he called out, taunting the Rookie. "Looks to me like you're nothin' but a
baby."
(Luke's whole body stiffened. If there was a worse insult, he hadn't heard it; Jackie Robinson, in his first year with the Brooklyn Dodgers, had never been called a name so vile.) Shaken, the Rookie lost a bit off his heater. It was still blazing, though, and Cobb just got a piece of it, dribbling it toward first; he took off, and the Rookie, who knew his assignments, dutifully scampered over to cover. Cobb came in hard, hard as he could, his spikes sharpened to razor tips, and stamped down on the Rookie's three-year-old foot. The Rookie dropped the ball. Safe! Stinking rotten way to get on base, but safe all the same. Shaking off a couple of tears, the Rookie went back to the mound. "Hey, I reckon you're a crybaby. Hey, everybody, look at the crybaby! Looks to me like you're nothin' but a crybaby" came the taunting Georgia drawl from first, and the Rookie pitched out of trouble. But the pain lingered, and in the top of the ninth, the Giants having pushed over one run on a hit-and-run executed by the Chief, he made a few mistakes, walked a couple of batters—hey, he was
three—
and left himself with the bases loaded and the Georgia Peach due up again. The crowd was going crazy, and now the taunting began again, worse than ever. ("Hey, baby! Hey, crybaby! Whyn't ya cry some more, crybaby?")

The Rookie knew what he had to do. In the dugout he had taken his old bottle from the suitcase his mother had packed for him when he went off to join the Giants, just in case, and stowed it under his cap. Now he dripped a couple of drops of milk onto the seams of the baseball, the Rookie's soon-to-be-notorious bottieball. It was before they brought in the rule against foreign substances on the ball, I explained. The Rookie was playing fair. ("Hey, when are you guys going to sleep?" Luke's mother's voice came from the other room. "Soon," I called back abruptly. The lights of the traffic on the boulevard Saint-Germain came in through the windows, but I didn't even draw the curtains.)

The Rookie stretched and threw, and the bottleball dipped and twisted and dipped and twisted again, curving all the way out to the third-base line and then cruising halfway toward first before finally slipping in, softly and cleanly, right across the plate, a strike at the knees. Cobb had time to take a really good cut—he had
all day—
but the pitch had him so fooled that he didn't just whiff, he twisted himself in knots while he whiffed: real knots, his whole body pulled around like a wet washrag, hands ending up back of his butt. (Luke chuckled deeply at that.) "Steer-rike-uh three," cried the umpire. The bleachers of the Polo Grounds went nuts.

The Rookie trotted off the field. "Who's the baby
now,
Mr. Cobb?" he asked, with quiet dignity, on his way back to the dugout.

My kid sat up, shot up in bed, like a mechanical doll, as though he had a spring hinge right at his waist. Christy Mathewson (I went on) didn't say anything—that wasn't his way—but he went over as the Rookie came into the dugout, took off the Rookies cap, and mussed up his hair. Outside, the crowd wouldn't leave. They chanted, "Rookie! Rookie!"

Now the only sound from Luke's pillow was of short, constant breathing. I had the uncanny knowledge of a kind of silent excitement, the certainty—I have witnessed it once or twice on opening night in a theater, though I had certainly never created it before myself—that what we had here was a hit. The Terrible Ty Cobb had called him a baby, and he had thrown the bottle-ball, and
then
who was the baby?

That night (I said) the Rookie was offered a contract with the Giants (doubtless a mean, exploitative contract, but I left that out), and the team got on the overnight sleeper to St. Louis, heading out to steamy Sportsman's Park. (I knew that the Browns, not the Cardinals, played there, but I liked the way it sounded.) The Chief tucked the Rookie into his berth and, before he went off to play pinochle with the guys, asked him, gruffly "You OK, Rookie?" "I'm OK, Chief," the Rookie said, and then he listened to the sounds of the train tracks clacking and the whistle blowing and the other ballplayers in the next car, laughing and playing cards, before he fell deep asleep, somewhere outside Columbus.

"I'm OK, Chief," Luke repeated, and he did something he had never done before, or at least not in my presence: Without negotiation or hesitation, without tears or arguments or requests to come and sleep in the big bed, he rolled right over and fell asleep.

From then on we had a story about the Rookie—Luke called it the Rookie story—every night. The characters firmed up pretty quickly. The Rookie was an earnest, resourceful, somewhat high-strung little hero. The Chief was blustery and honest, wanting nothing more than to settle in with his copy of the
Police Gazette
and have a peaceful afternoon at McSorley's. The Rookie's triumph over Ty Cobb, though, had bad consequences. Cobb developed a bitter, unappeasable Tom DeLay-type enmity toward the Rookie and set himself the task of doing anything he could to destroy his career. John J. McGraw, thumbtack sharp and demanding, and Christy Mathewson, handsome and deep-voiced and friendly, though a little remote—on a couple of occasions, when the Chief left town to go on a scouting trip to Cincinnati, he was the Rookies baby-sitter—filled out the dramatis personae.

After a couple of months I went down to the cellar of our building and got out the few baseball reference books I had brought to Paris and never unpacked. (This cellar is an honest-to-God
cave,
a stone cellar with little arches where you could keep wine. I kept meaning to bring the wine down, but I never remembered to do it, and instead the books were there, moldering away.) The 1908 National League pennant race, which I had plucked out of the air and dim memories of
The Glory of Their Times,
turned out to be even more interesting than I'd thought. It was a three-way race—Cubs, Giants, Pirates—that included Merkle's boner and the season-capping rematch it produced, and in a sense, it made baseball in America. I discovered that 1908 had been a kind of watershed year, a time when baseball had, for the last time, an air of improvisation about it, with, as someone said of those days, "stupid guys, smart guys, tough guys, mild guys, crazy guys, college men, slickers from the city, and hicks from the country." If a three-year-old with a major-league fastball
had
ever existed, 1908 would have been the right season for him to play, and he probably would have been roomed with an American Indian catcher.

I even found a wonderful photograph of the Polo Grounds in that magical year, and we hung it over Luke's bed. It shows a hundred or so fans lining up on Coogan's Bluff, overlooking the ballpark—too poor or, more likely, too cheap to buy tickets, since you can see that there are still a few seats left in center—backs turned and heads bowed as they stare down at the field. Every single one of the men (there are no women) is wearing a derby; the kids are wearing cloth caps. One kid and an elderly gent have got up on a barrel, and five men in suits and hats are standing, precarious but dignified, on a plank that slopes down from it. You can't really see a thing going on in the park—not a baseline, not a ballplayer, not a glimpse of a dugout or a bullpen, nothing except the outfield grass down below, a perfect and absolute blank. It's as good as a Magritte: the solemnly dressed businessmen, backs turned, gazing out at the bare and uneventful field. Of course Luke didn't have to be told whom they were looking at down there, and why; we both could see it plain as day. They were watching the Rookie, pitching his way out of another pinch.

Yet I began to wonder: What picture did he summon up when, night after night, he heard the words
Polo Grounds, full count, all the way to the
backstop
? Not an inexact picture; no picture at all. He had never been to a baseball game, never seen a bat or a glove, never been inside a ballpark or even watched a ball game on television. He spent his days in parks where kids played soccer on dusty gravel, and you put a toe in the grass on pain of being whistled down by the surveillant, watching from his shed. No one Luke knew played baseball, no one talked about it; the words and situations were pure language, pure abstract lore. The cliches I rolled out—"He had all day" "steamy Sportsman's Park," "no foreign substances on the old pill"—what did he think, what did he see when he heard them? I knew that he wanted to hear the words as much as I needed to say them— he zipped through dessert to get to bed every night—but what did the words mean to him?

I had spent my adult life believing that storytelling depends on the credibility of its details, and now, finally, I had made up a story that someone liked, and the details had no credibility at all, no existence except as sounds. You are supposed to use a word, I had always been taught, to point at a thing and hope that the thing will somehow end up pointing at a symbol: a feeling, a state of mind. When I lived in New York, I had on occasion even brought this faith to writing students. (Not that they cared. The fetching female ones listened gravely and then came up after class to ask if I had Gary Fisketjohn's phone number.) But now I said "Polo Grounds" or "full count" and the words called up in my son a powerful reaction. What of that second range, where the words were supposed to become things, even just images in his head?

There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't. Sometimes the words fly right over the fence and all the way out to the feelings. Make them do it one time out of three in private, and you've got a reputation as someone who can play a little, a dad who can tell a decent bedtime story. Do it three times out of three in public, and you're Mark McGwire or Dickens.

And I needed the words too, just as words. After four years in Paris I found that though I missed American sports a lot less than I had thought I would, I missed the lore of American sports keenly. I didn't really miss sports; I missed the sports pages. I didn't miss the things—sometimes the baseball season was twenty or twenty-five games old before I knew it had started— but I missed the words that went with the things. My passion for baseball, which at one point in my life was pretty intense, is now almost gone. My team, the Montreal Expos, is on the verge of going out of business; when I visit New York, I no longer know, or can even guess, which player is wearing which cap.

I still care about the words, though. One day, shopping for dinner along the rue du Bac and waiting in one of the interminable lines that are created by the individual care of French service—a line that is briskly, infuriatingly violated by the same arrogant dyed-blond woman in a fur coat and with a great jaw— I thought. Nobody in this line but me knows what an RBI is, or who Gene Mauch was, or what Jarry Park used to look like, or what a twinight doubleheader is. And I felt yearningly, unappeasably homesick. (This was not a rational emotion, since I have lived for years with a woman who doesn't know what an RBI is either.)