Silent Retreats (12 page)

"I know you, right?"

"I don't think so," I said. "You a Cub fan?"

"What?"

"I see your cap—you gonna watch the Cubs this afternoon? First day of the season."

"Nah. This here's my brother's hat. You're Carl Landen, am I right? Took me a second because of the beard. Makes you look like a salesman. Good to see you. I'm Junior Guthrie."

"Junior," I said. "Good to see you."

"Hey, honey, this is Carl Landen, guy I played baseball with when I was a kid. His dad was the doctor that died, remember I told ya? Long time ago?" He looked back at me, smiling, but neither of us could think of a thing to say.

"Well," I said finally, "you take care."

"You knew it, didn't you?" He was asking hopefully, as if trying in a friendly way to find out if he'd not changed so much after all.

As I backed out, I saw he had a ball glove in the back window of the car.

"I wasn't sure, Junior. You know how that goes. You take care."

The rest of the morning I toured the rentals, head hurting and kind of cranky except I was by myself so maybe also a little lonesome—I think I was lonesome for my boy. I wanted to talk baseball with him. He was over at school sitting in a desk, bored stiff, age eleven. I mooched three fingers' worth of whiskey from the cleaning ladies at one of our places around noon. Under the sink I found a glass left by the last tenants and washed it with some of the cleaning ladies' Spic and Span. They must have thought they had a pretty cool boss, to tip one with them out there on the job.

I planned this to be the house I hit around noon, because it was partially furnished from inventory. It had TV and cable so I could pick up WGN (if the cable hadn't been disconnected yet—tenants had moved out the day before). There was a cot in the house, and a lamp, again, left behind by a former tenant—it was shiny black and shaped like the head of a horse, red shade.

The headache hadn't given out with the first hit of aspirin, and I'd taken more around ten-thirty, but still no give. So about noon, after I belted down the cleaning ladies' whiskey and they were gone, I stretched out on the cot, the TV droning with a soap opera. I think I still had the headache, but I couldn't feel it.

Lying out on that cot in our rental, I started thinking about my dad and baseball and Skidmore and all those kids I knew like Junior and Cliff who grew up, and all the things I learned. It was the same stuff my boy was going through now.

From the upstairs windows, the back bedroom, at my childhood home across town (my mom still lives there), I remember looking down into the yard one night. There wasn't a moon; the light from the stars lit the yard only a little. Near the doghouse, on a long chain, was my springer spaniel, Tad. He was lying down, but his head was up, on guard. He was watching the undergrowth. He would look deep into the black shade of the lilacs. His chain would clink in the dark. He was guarding his very best friend, my father, who was stretched out on the picnic table nearby, watching the stars.

From my lighted room, through the window screen and down into the dark, I could barely see him. He didn't move. I was listening to the Cardinal game on the radio—Harry Caray, Jack Buck, Joe Garagiola. Vinegar Bend Mizell was on the mound, high-kicking lefty. Infield of Stan Musial, Don Blasingame, Alvin Dark, Eddie Kasko. Outfield, Wally Moon in left, maybe Curt Flood, but I forget center field really, Joe Cunningham in right for sure. Behind the plate, Hal Smith. They were playing the Pirates. 1957. This was when
I
was eleven.

"Who's winning?" Dad asked me. He could see me clearly.

"Cards. Cunningham stole home again."

"Great." His voice was barely audible.

"What're you doing?" I asked him. His father had died that winter. He'd missed a last chance to see his father alive in the previous fall. Dad had gone out west on a quick trip to hunt pheasants and had neglected swinging through the old Nebraska hometown to see his folks. He was having a hard time getting over it.

"Looking at the stars. You start to get a sense of the dimension after a while. Come here," he said.

I went out and sat next to him on the table. He pointed out a dim formation overhead that, if you looked away from it just a bit, you could see was really a kite-shaped cluster of seven stars.

"Pleiades," he said. "Look real close and you can tell some of them are farther away than the others. You can catch the depth of it. Go get the binoculars." I got them but we didn't use them long. I knew, I thought I knew, what was on my dad's mind.

"What was it Grandpa said, in the hospital?" I asked him.

He sighed. "He said, 'Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.' Then he took a deep breath, and he died."

He was quiet a minute or so. "The Bishop out in Lincoln, he says they're going to name Grandpa a Knight of St. Benedict. It's a great honor, recognizing him as a holy man. The Pope has to do it."

"You think Grandpa's looking down on us right now?"

He didn't answer for a while, looking up, breathing quietly. It wasn't a question to answer, really, but just to think about. In those days the rural Illinois sky sparkled deep and black.

"I wouldn't know," Dad said finally.

That summer I saw my first professional ballgame, in the old Busch Stadium on Grand Avenue in St. Louis. My father, his good friend and partner in medical practice Bob Swift, and I stayed in a nearby hotel called the Fairgrounds, and drove across town to the zoo that Sunday morning.

On the way, we went to mass in the St. Louis Cathedral, unfinished in a hundred years of work, scaffolding high in the vaulted ceiling where the man who made the mosaics labored day after day, the altar candles far below. As we drove around the city, I remember that I would sit in the back seat of the car, and up in front Dad and Bob would be talking about patients, or investments, or other things that often seemed too convoluted to keep paying attention to. So mostly I absorbed the warm, sunny streets of St. Louis.

We ate lunch near the stadium, in a bar, sitting toward the back. Right now I can summon the smell of beer and that primitive air conditioning, see the reflection of the front windows and the gleam of traffic off the dark linoleum, taste the ham sandwich with ketchup and pickle relish eaten too fast, the anticipation of the ball park in less than an hour.

But when we came through the gates of the old Busch Stadium—formerly called Sportsman's Park and still called that by most of the fans—when we came up the walkway to find our seats, we popped into a strange, finished, green world like I'd never seen before. Every angle, every hue was planned, coordinated—the game was urbane and civilized, not like the pasture-type game, dry and weedy, we played at home. The afternoon air was heating up. People who behaved randomly and at odds outside acted in concert at the ball park, standing together and cheering or laughing when Cards manager Freddie Hutchinson kicked the dirt or someone stumbled rounding first. The crowd had a rousing, a great comforting, somehow knowing, collective voice.

Bob Swift had interned at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, and knew all there was to know about the ball park. Hand on my shoulder, he pointed out, against the back screen, Harry Caray, in slicked-back hair and black-and-white checked pants, conducting the dugout show for radio, interviewing Larry Jackson, last night's winning pitcher. The big batting cage loomed over the plate, and the venerable old catcher Walker Cooper, wad of tobacco in his jowl, was cracking line drives.

At home, I pictured the ballplayers as kids. At the ball park, I was amazed by the dark shadow of beard on the face of Blasingame, "the Blazer," as he was called. He was littler than I thought. Moon's eyebrows were astonishing, Kasko wore glasses, Cunningham was bald. Those were men out there.

The first time I saw Musial at the plate, his unusual stance (often described on the radio) amazed me. Perhaps I had pictured Babe Ruth or the drawing I had of Casey at the Bat, or the action photo I had of Ted Williams hitting the long ball with a big arching swing, a vicious, Y-chromosome rip. In reality, Musial's stance seemed soft, relaxed, almost like dance. The front foot was pointed forward, toward the pitcher, the rear foot back toward the catcher. The front knee bent inward, graceful; the bat was held too high and way too far back. The head was out over the plate and tilted a little. His stance communicated artistry, individuality, himself. By then he was getting to be a grand old man of baseball, his late thirties. During the game, when he blasted a home run, the crack of the bat communicated immediately that the park would never hold it. The enormous swelling roar of the crowd conveyed not only happiness but respect. The ball bounced on the roof of the upper deck in right field, up where the light tower was. The scoreboard Budweiser eagle flapped its wings and a little red Cardinal made of neon darted around the stadium. The stroke itself had been a level, easy, sweeping movement, not a wild-ass swing like you'd get from Kaline, Clemente, Frank Robinson. Not the tight, big-armed body turn of Yogi Berra. Somewhere along the way Musial broke the cadence of a sprint and settled into the relaxed stride of the home-run hitter in his parade lap, the crowd standing, amazed and happy.

Baseball was different without interpretation, without Harry Caray or Dizzy Dean communicating it to you. You had to really watch. It was happening at some distance away. We were far down the left-field line, almost to the outfield wall, nearly a block away from home plate. The crack of the bat arrived a moment after the swing, the ball already lofting high toward right field, camouflaged by the shirts of patrons in the upper deck. Or on grounders the third baseman might already be reacting to his right, reflexively, as the sound of the hit just arrived.

Vernon Law was on the mound for the Pirates that day. A tall straight man, kind of thin. Sitting almost out to the left field wall you could still hear the pop of his fastball in the catcher's glove.

On a ball hit to left I remember watching Wally Moon, the handsome young Texan, rookie of the year three years before, who replaced the retired and venerable Enos Slaughter, reach back and lay the ball on the flat plane of green air. All I could compare the geometry and motion to was pool, the great green carpet of perfectly groomed grass like a pool table, flat, the smooth flight of the ball as though it were coasting not across the hot afternoon air but green felt, flat marble. The motion of his throwing was thrilling, how he reached back, stepped forward in a long low stride, the arm coming straight over the top, fast like the hammer on a pistol. The flight of the ball was low and fast—it skipped like a bullet on the infield dirt, the Blazer taking it on the short hop right at the bag. Big league, I thought to myself.

My dad got up from the seat next to me in the third inning, asking if Bob or I wanted something, saying he'd be right back. Bob Swift stayed with me, one empty seat away. He'd lean over and fill me in on things, like for instance the enormous black man selling beer, sweating, his voice full and shouting, for fifteen years an institution at the ball park.

I was enthralled. I stared through the binoculars at the players and the crowd. My dad's absence bothered me a little, but not terribly—sometimes I'd say something to him, forgetting he was gone. I stared until the heavy steel on my nose and against my eyes began to hurt, but I kept staring. The binoculars were very powerful, and because I'd used them on planets I could focus them as sharply as they could be focused. The creamy white and scarlet and blue and yellow of those old cotton uniforms was dazzling against the deep green of the grass field under the brilliant afternoon sun.

There was one strange thing that happened that day. Using the binoculars, I followed a foul ball up and back into the crowd, watched the fans scramble and laugh and spill their Coke and popcorn. I watched one lady laugh at her friends, and the guy who got the ball turned and waved at Harry Caray in the radio booth, knowing Harry would observe on the air, "Nice catch by a fan down long the first-base line!"

But suddenly, as I panned the crowd, there in my vision was my own dad—far away from me, he was standing along the concourse, leaning against a steel pillar, a beer in hand, watching the game alone from shadows.

I remember my father very well in those times, at my ball games. He stood out by the railroad maple down beyond third base at the very field where my son plays now. The Illinois Central had put out a plaque, inlaid in a sort of gravestone, commemorating the planting of the tree on Arbor Day 1905, and my father would invariably be sitting on it during the games, if he could be there at all. A few times he had the old 8-mm Brownie with him and would level it at me. I've seen the films in recent days. I remember how I felt then, but when I see the pictures only one impression hits now: I was pretty little.

As I've said, I was playing shortstop in those days. Later, in college, I played third. They don't now, and really never did, expect a shortstop to be a hitter. I console my own son with this to no avail. There was only one thing a shortstop need be able to do, and that was cover the ground. His area in the big leagues is seventy feet of real estate from behind second to twenty feet on the second-base side of third, and in addition he must be able to range into foul territory behind third, about where the IC maple is at the Pony League diamond, to rein in foul balls the third baseman ordinarily has no angle on.

The third baseman fielding foul balls down the line has his back to the infield, must stop, turn, understand where to throw, and throw. The shortstop makes this play somewhat facing the infield, somewhat set to throw. When the shortstop fields grounders to his right, he must be able to throw overhand to first, putting a vertical spin on the ball, or else the ball will float. When he fields to his left, back behind second, he must throw sidearm, quick and snappy like a second baseman, or with the long whipping action if he is throwing from farther out. In turning the double play, he must choose which side of the bag to work as he pivots, according to how the runner coming into second decides to try to take him out, and also according to how the ball arrives from the second baseman or the first baseman, whoever initiates the play.