The Palace Thief (14 page)

W
ilson Kohler loved baseball. He thanked God for it, for the red basepath clay, the green grass, for the trim and piping of the uniforms. Gorgeous was what it was. It took his breath away. And he knew all about the game, too, the details of strategy, the pickoff plays, when to give a hitter the green light. At Fenway Park he’d watched the Red Sox since the days he had to carry his son, Brent, in his arms. Those were the days when Carl Yazstremski was still making his name in the majors, a bird-legged lefty with a funny swing; now Yazstremski had 452 homers and had retired, and Brent was about to start his senior year in college. He was going to school in the West, and when he called to say he’d be home for a day before flying out there, Wilson bought two tickets to the game.

It was the end of summer. The Red Sox were having a miserable year, mucking around in the bottom of the division that they’d won just two years before, losing games in every manner. Each afternoon, they went out under the cloudless Fenway sky and broke the city’s heart. This is what the fans said.
The old guys, the women in windbreakers, they all liked to say that the Red Sox had been cursed since 1920, the year they sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees. On Yawkey Way in front of the stadium, standing with the sausage barkers, they said, don’t put your heart behind this team. All they would do is break it.

But Wilson hoped anyway. He went once a week or so, driving straight to the park from work, and when he couldn’t go he listened to the late innings on radio. His wife, Abbie, had left him three years ago, and he didn’t have much else to do anyway. He played golf, took walks along the Charles River, and kept a small garden. He went out with women every now and then—women he met in the pricy bars around the Common or was introduced to by the wives of his colleagues—but the only thing he really liked to do, the only thing that didn’t come mixed with bad feeling or regret, was go to the ball game. He parked his Lincoln Town Car in one of the expensive neighborhoods in Brookline, a mile from the park, and in the wide front seat he changed quickly out of his suit into white trousers and a short-sleeved shirt that he stored in a gym bag in the trunk. Then, the late afternoon sunlight filling him with its clear, river-washed optimism, he walked to the park.

He usually sat in the bleachers. Although he had plenty of money, he liked the public seats—it was something about being around all those people, even if he didn’t talk to one of them. He liked the drama behind the big, green left-field wall—the lovers’ quarrels, the toughs wrestling with each other, falling down in their tight Budweiser shirts over the pitched seats until the army of blue-tied bouncers reached them. In the Lincoln’s glove box he kept a roll of five-dollar bills for ticket money.

But the day before Brent came home Wilson took fifty dollars to the park and bought expensive seats. Brent was going to be in Boston for only twelve hours, a morning-to-night
layover, and Wilson wanted him to enjoy it. The seats were very good, in the low rows behind third base, and on the morning Brent arrived Wilson also went out and bought some younger-looking clothes for himself. In a store in Cambridge he found an open-throated cotton shirt that had been made in India and a pair of denim pants that closed with a drawstring instead of a buckle and fly. He wore his new clothes to the airport.

“Buckaroo,” he called when Brent emerged from the landing gate.

“Hi, Dad.”

Wilson moved through the crowd and hugged him. “Hey,” he said, looking at his ear. “What’s that?”

“Nothing,” said Brent. He backed up and made an exaggerated show of looking at Wilson. “My dad,” he said. “The hipster.”

Wilson pulled at the drawstring on his pants. “You like?” He took Brent’s duffel and they made their way back through the crowded terminal. Wilson tried to fall behind a step to catch a glimpse of what looked like an earring in Brent’s ear, but whenever he slowed down to get an angle, Brent slowed down too.

“Hey, slugger,” Wilson said, “What’s the difference between a BMW and a porcupine?”

“With the porcupine,” Brent said, “the pricks are on the outside.”

“Damn.”

“Maybe I should leave my stuff in a locker,” Brent said. “My plane’s tonight.”

“You’ve heard that joke already?”

“Like, in 1979.”

“How come I just heard it yesterday?”

“I don’t know, Dad. How come?”

Wilson put the duffel down and raised both hands in the air. “Don’t shoot,” he said. “I give up.”

Brent started down the corridor again, and Wilson caught up with him and ruffled his hair. In the old days they used to watch George Carlin and Richard Pryor hamming it up with Johnny Carson on
The Tonight Show
, and Brent would come home from the library with joke books in his schoolbag, but now Brent was serious. Instead of Notre Dame, where Wilson had been a Phi Delt, Brent had gone to a college in Oregon where there were only two marks, complete and incomplete, no fraternities, and no intercollegiate sports. He had done this although in every other way he had been a normal kid—a good athlete, a fair student, and something of a cutup—and although he had been accepted at both Notre Dame and the University of Massachusetts.

As they made their way through the long corridor, Wilson asked him about his summer job and his upcoming year at school. He didn’t want to ask anything too personal because Brent shied away from that now, and he didn’t want to start bantering too soon or the whole visit would pass before they had a chance to talk, which is what had happened at Easter. Brent used to be a talkative boy, but lately, for some reason, he had retreated. Wilson longed to hear of his life—it was, in some ways, his only news of the world—but he was aware that the more he questioned Brent, the more reticent he would become. It was not that Brent never spoke of his own life—every now and then he would burst forth with long accounts of his thoughts and troubles—it was just that Wilson could never figure out when it was all right to ask. All he could do, he eventually decided, was try to make him comfortable. There wasn’t anything Wilson wanted to talk about exactly, but he wanted Brent to know he had a willing ear. Wilson had been
through a hard enough time himself. He understood the importance of a willing ear.

That summer, instead of coming home to Boston, Brent had gone to New York City, where he’d worked as a volunteer for The Homeless Alliance and lived in Brooklyn in, as far as Wilson could tell, a commune. The thought of it now, as they passed the bustling ticket counters, made him chuckle. Three years ago on Brent’s eighteenth birthday, the first after Abbie had left, Wilson had bought him a white Celica GT with a sunroof; now Brent was sowing carrots in a backyard garden in Brooklyn and cooking organic meals with six housemates.

“That thing in your ear,” Wilson said, “it isn’t a symbol for anything, is it?”

“Like what, Dad?”

“Like anything.”

“Hey, Dad,” Brent said, taking his arm, “It’s the nineties.”

“Sorry, buckaroo,” said Wilson. He didn’t know specifically what the nineties had to do with an earring, but he liked the fact that Brent had taken his arm. If Wilson had done the same thing, Brent would have leaped a foot in the air. Besides, he hadn’t meant to tease him.

They passed a shoe-shine stand, and when the old black man there smiled, Wilson felt a bolt of pride at being arm-in-arm with his son. “Buckaroo,” he said again, and he went back and handed the man a five-dollar bill. “I’m a lucky father today,” he said to him.

But by the time they reached the parking lot, Brent already looked thoughtful. He walked with both hands thrust in his pockets and his shoes scraping on the concrete. “Hey, slugger,” Wilson said, loading the duffel into the Town Car’s giant trunk, “Did you hear that Abraham Lincoln was Jewish?”

Brent looked at him.

“He was shot in the temple.”

Brent made a sound like a buzzer. “When are you going to wash this car?” he said, wiping his finger along the hood. Then he got in and put on his seat belt. When they were pulling out of the parking space, he added, “That was good of you to give the guy money, Dad, but you should have had him shine your shoes.”

Last year Brent had come back to Boston for the whole summer and worked in a place called The Sanctuary, which was a shelter for battered women, and although Wilson didn’t exactly understand a job like that, he had been happy to have Brent at home. He really didn’t care what Brent did. He didn’t even care if he earned money, as long as he was around. Since Abbie had left, Wilson’s own life had come to a strange halt. Everything moved on as it had before—his job, his walks on the river, the bustle of downtown Boston; it was just that nothing of importance seemed to happen to him. He found he could not remember his daily existence. Once, right after Abbie had left, he’d sat for ten minutes in his office trying to recall whether he had eaten breakfast that morning. Soon after that he lost his car in the Copley Square Garage. But with Brent around last summer his life had started right back up. They’d gone to night games together, eaten sausages and coffee for breakfast, and worked in the garden. Even when Brent was out, the house was livelier.

It was not that Wilson always understood his son. In fact, he sometimes wondered who had raised him. Every Sunday Wilson had taken Brent and his friends to brunch at the Charles Hotel, and in between courses at the buffet he listened with bafflement as they talked about world politics or the plight of women. Wilson liked it when the conversation came around to
girlfriends, and he made an effort to keep up with the names, but within minutes the subject was always back to politics. Some of the issues, such as paradigm shifts and hegemonic discourses, he had never even heard of, and he wondered what these Oregon professors were teaching his son.

The spring before, in fact, when Brent first told him he was coming home to work at The Sanctuary, Wilson had called around to his business acquaintances to see if he could find him a better-paying job. It wasn’t a malicious act; on the contrary, Wilson considered it friendly initiative on his own part, but Brent got angry when he found out. Wilson didn’t understand that. He knew enough to leave it alone, but it kept him up a few nights wondering what special sympathy his son might have for battered women. He couldn’t help thinking it had something to do with
him
, and when he thought about this he vacillated between anger, which kept him awake, and loneliness.

His own wife, Abbie, had left a month after Brent first went away to college, and in the ensuing weeks Wilson had felt no desire to hit her, only to weep. He was alone in a three-bedroom house and he might as well have been alone in the world. After she left he had gone through a period of drinking, and in his office a few times—he was a marketing manager at an electronics firm—he had closed the door and sobbed. But Brent had come home that summer and told him about the growing numbers of women who sought shelter from their husbands and boyfriends, about the women who came in with bruises under their eyes or cigarette burns on the insides of their arms. He had explained to Wilson that the location of The Sanctuary was a secret, that he could not even tell
him
, his own father. This way men could not come to find their wives.

For a few days Wilson wondered how the wives knew where the shelter was. Did they call a secret number? Was it written
in the stalls of their bathrooms? But Brent wouldn’t say. When Wilson asked, he just shook his head. Wilson tried to tease it out of him. On the street he pointed to women in dark glasses and asked Brent if he knew them from the office, and one time, riding on the red line into Harvard Square, he asked the well-dressed woman sitting next to Brent whether this was the right stop for the women’s shelter. When they got off the train, Brent told him never to say anything like that again.

There were other things Wilson wanted to ask. How was it possible, for example, to keep the location secret from so many men, and why did they allow Brent to work there? But Brent had become very serious about it, and Wilson realized it was better to let the subject drop. At breakfast Brent told an occasional story about the victims he dealt with, but if Wilson asked him questions, he looked back suspiciously. Wilson dished out the sausages, poured the coffee, then handed Brent the front page and took the sports section himself. It filled him with contentment to read
The Globe
with Brent in the morning, and he found that he could engage his son on the subject of the obscene salaries of major league baseball players. Then Brent would go back to the news.

Brent’s seriousness about the problems of strangers annoyed Wilson, although he would never tell him so. He could certainly see how women had suffered great difficulty in the world, but he did not understand why this should be of such concern to his son. The female gender, it seemed to him, could take care of itself. It could more than take care of itself. In truth, it seemed to him that in the last few years there had been a secret communication among women, and that this communication was growing and leaving men behind.