Underworld (14 page)

“I didn't have to rush outside. I was already outside. I rushed inside. I closed the door and died.”

“You were anticipating Kennedy,” Farish said, and got a little laugh.

“The next day I think it was I began to see all sorts of signs pointing to the number thirteen. Bad luck everywhere. I became a budding numerologist. I got pencil and paper and wrote down all the occult connections that seemed to lead to thirteen. I wish I could remember them. I remember one. It was the date of the game. October third or ten-three. Add the month and day and you get thirteen.”

“And Branca's number,” Sims said.

“Of course. Branca wore thirteen.”

“They called it the Shot Heard Round the World,” Sims told Farish.

“A little bit of American bluster?”

“But what the hell,” Sims said.

Glassic was looking at me in a strange way, almost tenderly, the way someone regards a friend who is too dumb to know he is about to be exposed.

“Tell them about the baseball,” Glassic said.

He reached across the table and took some food from Sims' plate.

Glassic was supposed to be my pal. I'd known Sims and Glassic a long time and Glassic, freckled free-style Brian, a man of shambling charm, was the guy I talked to when I talked about something. I talked to Big Sims but maybe I talked to Glassic more readily because he did not challenge me with his own experience, he did not narrow his eyes as Sims did and fix me in his gaze.

“Let's change the subject,” I told him.

“No. I want you to speak about this. You owe it to Sims. It's a crime that Sims does not know this. He's the only one here who still loves the game.” Glassic turned to the Englishwoman. “I go to ball games when I go at all for the sake of keeping up. It's a fall from grace if you don't keep up. Nick has fallen from grace. Only Sims is completely, miserably in touch. We had the real Dodgers and Giants. Now we have the holograms.”

Farish said, “What baseball?”

Sims was looking at me. He was finished with his food and was untubing a panatela, a simple exercise that he surrounded with detailed ceremony.

Glassic gave me a final melting look and turned to Sims.

“Nick owns the baseball. The Bobby Thomson home-run ball. The actual object.”

Sims took his time lighting the cigar.

“Nobody owns the ball.”

“Somebody has to own it.”

“The ball is unaccounted for,” Sims said. “It got thrown away decades ago. Otherwise we'd know it.”

“Simeon, listen before you make pronouncements. First,” Glassic said, “I found a dealer on a trip I took back east some years ago. This guy convinced me that the baseball in his possession, the ball he claimed was the Thomson home run, was in fact the authentic ball.”

“Nobody has the ball,” Sims said. “The ball never turned up. Whoever once had the ball, it never surfaced. This is part of the whole—what? The mythology of the game. Nobody ever showed up and made a verifiable claim to this is the ball. Or a dozen people showed up, each with a ball, which amounts to the same thing.”

“Second, the dealer told me how he'd traced the baseball almost all the way back to October third, nineteen fifty-one. This is not some fellow who turns up at baseball shows looking for bargains. This is pathological obsession. A completely committed guy. And he convinced me to a probability of ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent that this is the baseball. And then he convinced Nick. And Nick asked how much. And they worked out a deal.”

“You got rooked,” Sims told me.

I watched the Dodger shortstop field a grounder and make a wide throw to first.

Glassic said, “The guy spent many years tracing the thing. He probably spent more money in phone calls, postage and travel miles, I'm exaggerating, than Nick paid for the baseball.”

Sims had a derisive smile, a fleer, and it grew meaner by the second.

“Whole thing's phony,” he told me. “If that was the authentic ball, how could you afford to buy it?”

“I will count the ways,” Glassic said. “First, the dealer wasn't able to provide absolute final documentation. That cut the price. Second, this was before the market boom in memorabilia and the auctions at Sotheby's and the four hundred thousand dollars that somebody paid for an itty-bitty baseball card.”

“I don't know,” Sims said.

“I don't know either,” I said.

Farish finally got her wine. She looked at me and said, “How much did you pay?”

“My shame is deep enough. Let's not examine the details.”

“What shame?”

“Well, I didn't buy the object for the glory and drama attached to it. It's not about Thomson hitting the homer. It's about Branca making the pitch. It's all about losing.”

“Bad luck,” Glassic said, spearing a potato on my plate.

“It's about the mystery of bad luck, the mystery of loss. I don't know. I keep saying I don't know and I don't. But it's the only thing in my life that I absolutely had to own.”

“A shameful secret?” Farish said.

“Yes. First to spend serious money on a souvenir baseball. Then to buy it for the reason I bought it. To commemorate failure. To have that moment in my hand when Branca turned and watched the ball go into the stands—from him to me.”

Everyone laughed but Sims.

Glassic said, “Even his name. Somber Ralph Branca. Like a figure out of an old epic. Somber plodding Ralph slain in something something dusk.”

“Dark-arrowed,” said the woman.

“Very good. Except it's not a joke of course. What's it like to have to live with one awful moment?”

“A moment in a game,” she said.

“Forever plodding across the outfield grass on your way to the clubhouse.”

Sims was getting mad at us.

“I don't think you fellows see the point.” The way he said fellows. “What loss? What failure are we talking about? Didn't they all go
home happy in the end? I mean Branca—Branca's got the number thirteen on his license plate. He wants us to know he was the guy. Branca and Thomson appear at sports dinners all the time. They sing songs and tell jokes. They're the longest-running act in show business. You fellows miss the point.” Making us sound like scrubbed boys in preppy jackets. “Branca's a hero. I mean Branca was given every chance to survive this game and we all know why.”

A little pall fell across the table.

“Because he's white,” Sims said. “Because the whole thing is white. Because you can survive and endure and prosper if they let you. But you have to be white before they let you.”

Glassic shifted in his chair.

Sims told the story of a pitcher named Donnie Moore who gave up a crucial home run in a play-off game and ended up shooting his wife. Donnie Moore was black and the player who hit the home run was black. And then he shot and killed himself. He shot his wife several times, nonfatally, and then shot himself. He took a dirt nap in his own laundry room, Sims said. Sims told this story to the Englishwoman but it was completely new to me and I could tell that Glassic barely remembered. I'd never heard of Donnie Moore and missed the home run and didn't know about the shootings. Sims said the shootings came a few years after the home run but were directly traceable. Donnie Moore was not allowed to outlive his failure. The fans gave him every grief and there weren't any skits at the baseball dinners.

Sims knew a lot about the shootings. He described the shooting of the wife in some detail.

Farish shut her eyes to see it better.

“We hear what you're saying,” Glassic said. “But you can't compare the two events on the basis of color.”

“What else is there?”

“The Thomson homer continues to live because it happened decades ago when things were not replayed and worn out and run down and used up before midnight of the first day. The scratchier an old film or an old audiotape, the clearer the action in a way. Because it's not in competition for our attention with a thousand other pieces of action. Because it's something that's preserved and unique. Donnie
Moore—well I'm sorry but how do we distinguish Donnie Moore from all the other ball games and all the other shootings?”

“The point is not what we notice or what we remember but what happened,” Sims said, “to the parties involved. We're talking about who lived and who died.”

“But not why,” Glassic said. “Because if we analyze the reasons honestly and thoroughly instead of shallow and facile and what else?”

“Unhistorical,” I said.

“Then we realize there were probably a dozen reasons why the guy started shooting and most of them we'll never know or understand.”

Sims called us fellows again. I switched sides several times and we ordered another round of drinks and went at it some more. We were not talking to Jane Farish now. We didn't notice her reactions or encourage her interest. Sims called us fellows many times and then he called us chaps. It began to get a little funny. We ordered coffee and watched the game and Farish sat in a thoughtful knot, arms and legs crossed, body twisted toward the window, yielding to the power of our differences.

“Buying and selling baseballs. What heartache. And you never told me,” Sims said.

“It was some time ago.”

“I would have talked you out of it.”

“So you could buy it yourself,” Glassic said.

“I deal in other kinds of waste. The real stuff of the world. Give me disposable diapers by the ton. Not this melancholy junk from yester-year.”

“I don't know,” I said again.

“What do you do, take the ball out of the closet and look at it? Then what?”

“He thinks about what it means,” Glassic said. “It's an object with a history. He thinks about losing. He wonders what it is that brings bad luck to one person and the sweetest of good fortune to another. It's a lovely thing in itself besides. An old baseball? It's a lovely thing, Sims. And this one's got a pedigree like no other.”

“He got taken big-time,” Sims said. “He's holding a worthless object.”

We paid the bill and started filing out. Sims pointed to a photograph over the bar, one of dozens of sporting shots. It was a recent photo of a couple of gray-haired ex-players, Thomson and Branca, dark-suited and looking fit, standing on the White House lawn with President Bush between them, holding an aluminum bat.

We went out and sat in the company box for ten minutes so Glassic could hear the crowd noise. Then we walked down the ramp and headed for the parking area. Farish had some questions about the infield fly rule. Sims and Glassic were able to get together on this by the time we got out to the car. It was an unexpected boon for the BBC.

I sat in back and looked at the city flowing past and I thought of Sims the kid running down a street in St. Louis. He's wearing dungarees with the lower legs rolled into bunchy cuffs that are paler than the dark denim twill of the outer cloth. He's waving his arms and shouting that he's Bobby Thomson.

I sat with my mother in her room and we talked and paused and watched TV We paused to remember. One of us said something that roused a memory and we sat together thinking back.

My mother had a method of documentary recall. She brought forth names and events and let them hang in the air without attaching pleasure or regret. Sometimes just a word. She spoke a word or phrase that referred to something I hadn't thought about in decades. She was confident in her recall, moving through the past with a sureness she could not manage to apply to the current moment or hour or day of the week. She made fun of herself. What day is it? Do I go to mass today or tomorrow? I drove her to mass and picked her up. This was the steadiest satisfaction of my week. I learned the mass schedule and the types of mass and the length of service and I made sure she had money for the basket. We sat in the room and talked. She seemed untouched by sentiment. She'd summon a moment that struck me with enormous force, any moment, something ordinary but bearing power with it—ordinary only if you haven't lived it, if you weren't there—and I saw how still she sat, how prudent she was in her recollecting.

I used to tell my kids when they were small. A hawser is a rope that's used to moor a ship. Or, The hump in the floor between rooms, I used to say. This is called the saddle.

We set her up with the dresser and the air conditioner and a hard mattress that was good for her back. She brought forth names from the family passional, the book of special suffering, and we paused and thought. Her hair was still partly brown in places, gone wiry and iridescent, goldshot in bright light, bobby-pinned, and we sat there with the TV going. I knew she would not say too much or remember carelessly. She was in control here, guiding us safely through the pauses.

After the riots in Los Angeles my son started wearing baggy shorts and a cap turned backwards and sneakers with bloated tongues. Before this he used to be nondescript, sitting in his room with his computer, a quiet kid just turned twenty. He dressed the same way all the time. He dressed for a job interview the way you'd dress to walk your dog—it was one continuous thing to him.

We designed and managed landfills. We were waste brokers. We arranged shipments of hazardous waste across the oceans of the world. We were the Church Fathers of waste in all its transmutations. I almost mentioned my line of work to Klara Sax when we had our talk in the desert. Her own career had been marked at times by her methods of transforming and absorbing junk. But something made me wary. I didn't want her to think I was implying some affinity of effort and perspective.

Famous people don't want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there's something crawling in their clothes.

My father's name was James Costanza, Jimmy Costanza—add the letters and you get thirteen.

At home we removed the wax paper from cereal boxes. We had a recycling closet with separate bins for newspapers, cans and jars. We rinsed out the used cans and empty bottles and put them in their proper bins. We did tin versus aluminum. On pickup days we placed each form of trash in its separate receptacle and put the receptacles, from the Latin verb that means receive again, out on the sidewalk in front of the house. We used a paper bag for the paper bags. We took a
large paper bag and put all the smaller bags inside and then placed the large bag alongside all the other receptacles on the sidewalk. We ripped the wax paper from our boxes of shredded wheat. There is no language I might formulate that could overstate the diligence we brought to these tasks. We did the yard waste. We bundled the newspapers but did not tie them in twine.