Centuries of June (31 page)

“Revolting,” said Jane at the mirror, fixing the ends of her new hairdo. “Absolutely revolting.”

The old man stretched his long bare legs and crossed his arms. “Now, ladies, your bitterness is unbecoming. We all have faith in love, especially in our youth.”

I nodded my agreement, thinking the while of the girl surrounded by fireflies.

Abuzz with opinions, the women debated the merits of love, and the old man took advantage of their philosophizing to address me privately. “May I ask a personal question?” This he asks after spending who knows how long in my bathrobe, in my bathroom, and sharing as my coeval the sundry stories visited by the past upon my present. This he asks after saving my life no fewer than six times, and more to come, I fear. This he asks, though he does not realize, slender as it may be, that he is the reed upon which clings all hope that some sense and order may be restored. I thought and hoped that he might ask me about the girl and help me rescue her from my amnesiac fog. I gave him the okay.

He spoke in a serious manner that had a hint of sarcasm. “Where’d you get the money to afford a place like this? Surely not on your salary with the architects. At which, may I add, you’ve not designed and built more than an archway.”

Perhaps it was unintentional on his part, but the words stung. He may have detected the faint whiff of self-abnegation escaping from my body. I must have smelled of disappointment. Even the baby crinkled his nose, and the women briefly paused their discussions to note the aroma of failure and, now, mortification.

“Not that you haven’t got ideas, I’m sure,” he said. “Great designs in the mind. Plans to plan. But this place must have cost a small fortune.”

“You’re right,” I said. “My brother and I went in together. I never would have been able to afford this house on my own.”

“Must be a helluva fella,” the old man smiled and then reached out for the baby boy begging to be held.

The house lights dimmed and as the movie started once more, we fell silent to its spell. Three men in baseball caps and matching sweaters pose unhappily on a cold day. The guy in the middle mouths something to the other pair, the words emerge as clouds. Like bears waking from
hibernation, they loosen their limbs, roll their necks, shrug their shoulders. The title reads: “Hot Springs, Arkansas, Spring Training.” The man on the left has a serious air about him, the weight of gravitas.
Fred Clarke, outfield and manager
. In the middle stands an imp.
Tommy Leach, third base
. But the man on the right is of a kind not made anymore. Long-armed, broad hands, and long crooked fingers, he appears to be a kind of golem or man of baked clay. His legs are slightly bowed. A hooked nose dominates his face, and his gaze at first is circumspect. He shows the cameraman a pet miniature dachshund sitting nonchalantly in the cup of one hand. On command, the little dog barks and howls and then, still in its master’s palm, stands on its hind legs and begs until rewarded with a morsel hidden in the man’s other hand. Once it has finished the treat, the dog lifts its left hind leg and piddles down the big man’s arm. The other two roar with laughter, and the man dances on his bandy legs, feigning anger, until he, too, cannot escape the humor of the moment. His booming laugh can almost be heard.
Honus Wagner, the Flying Dutchman, shortstop
.

A
lthough she loved him, Adele fought the impulse to blurt out her feelings right then and there at the ball game in front of all those cranks. But she loved him, yes, and was so happy that he loved her, too. She kissed him quickly and for the rest of the day allowed Pat to hold her hand when she was not cheering another victory by the swaggering Pirates. He was good and kind and generous, and aside from that flash of anger at the man in the bowler hat, he had not shown a single fault. A drink now and then, but that could be hidden from her father. And, true, he liked to tease her at times, especially when Christy was around as coconspirator.

“Did I ever tell you,” Pat said near the end of the game, “about our man Hans Wagner and his big shovel of a hand? Out in St. Lou it was,
a batter hit a ground ball towards him, but instead of grabbing the baseball, he scooped up a rabbit that had wandered on the field.”

“A rabbit, no,” said Christy.

“Aye, Wagner throws it over to first base anyway, and the runner was out by a hare.”

Adele smacked the meat of his arm with her paper fan. “You boys,” she laughed. “You had me going for a moment. Feeling sorry for the little bunny.”

Up hopped a small hard chaw of a man, his bowler cocked forward to hide a black eye. He waited in the aisle between the rows of seats, as penitent as a scolded child, and he did not speak till Pat noticed him.

“Well, if it ain’t Charlie Wells hisself. I thought I made myself clear last night when we spoke.”

Tipping the brim of his lid, Wells acknowledged Adele and winced before he spoke, as though putting thoughts into words pained his mind. “Beggin’ your pardon, Patsy, but I just came to apologize—again—for the fracas and to inquire after your health.”

Reflexively, Pat brought his hand to his tender mouth. “Never mind all that. It’s you I hope learned your lesson.”

The briefest trace of resentment flashed across Wells’s face, the bitterness of a small man long-suffering and put upon by bullies. He reminded Adele of her father, a man of a thousand grievances against those richer or stronger or more handsome or more confident. Or just luckier in life. She knew countless such downtrodden men, boiling under the surface, who hesitate momentarily when confronted. “Never cross the Irish,” Wells said, with a laugh.

“That’s the style,” Pat said. He seemed unaware, Adele thought, of the little man’s obsequiousness. “Now tell me, do you still think the Pirates won’t finish first and win the flag?”

Let off the hook, Wells relaxed. “From what the touts say, I’d watch that Ed Doheny and see he doesn’t go buggy like the rumor has it. As
Doheny goes, so goest the team. They’re in first place now, but I warn you, the wheel of fortune turns for every man.”

“R
ound and round, round and round,” the little boy sang from the old man’s lap. I had forgotten he could talk.

T
he heat that summer drove everyone slightly mad. Not just the temperatures, brutal though they were, but the heat of the city generated by the steel mills along the rivers’ edges, and the coke ovens burning night and day. They called Pittsburg hell with the lid off, and as a July drought settled in, the clouds of smoke and soot thickened, so that the sun itself burned as through a woolen blanket. The new millionaires, whose homes lined Fifth and Forbes in the Oakland suburbs, would escape to the Great Lakes or the Atlantic shore. The workingman took relief where he could.

Pat and Adele would journey to the new zoo out in Highland Park or simply picnic in the groves nearby. Some afternoons they wandered among the modern art at the Carnegie Museum or in the cooled splendor of the Phipps Conservatory. It was all new, a sign of the money minted through the bars of pig iron and ribbons of molten steel, the largesse of the burghers and barons. The ball club began a monthlong western swing to Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis, so the Ahearn boys were free for a little sport. Pat and Adele and Christy and Helen hopped on the train to Carnegie Lake and bathed with the crowd of swimmers gathered there. Cartmen sold sandwiches and cold beer from a keg on ice, and the brothers drank mug after mug to stay cool. The sight of the two women in their bathing costumes raised the heat in the Ahearn brothers. In the covering waters, Pat held her close, and what she felt stirring against her thigh both thrilled and horrified her, but she
knew better than to pull away, so she let him press against her till he could no longer stand it and had to swim off like a lunatic, muttering oaths. Later that evening, after supper and over a game of rummy in the summer parlor of the Hopkins home, Adele and Pat passed a knowing glance when Mr. Hopkins asked how the water had been that day.

“Crowded,” Christy said. “People will do anything to beat the heat.”

Mopping his brow with a handkerchief, Mr. Hopkins paused at the table and waved his evening’s newspaper. “Did you hear about Doheny, the pitcher? Paper says he went bughouse. Up and left the Pirates and went home to Massachusetts.”

Suddenly alert, Christy said, “In the
Post
this morning, the headline was ‘His Mind Is Thought to Be Deranged.’ Claims detectives are following him.”

Pat laid down a card. “Don’t be too sure what you read in the papers. Eddie Doheny is a lefty, and you can never be sure about a lefty. He’s always had a temper. Remember that bat he threw at the Giants catcher back in May?”

“Gee, I don’t know, boys.” Mr. Hopkins shoved the wad of his kerchief in his back pocket. “The Pirates have the look of doom. Clarke has been hurt, and Sebring goes off to get married. And now this fella has lost his mind. It’s like they won’t have enough boys to field a team.”

“Maybe they’ll sign you, Papa,” Adele laughed.

“I think Doheny’s just worn out with all this heat,” Pat said. “Just needs to cool off a couple days at home with the missus.”

His remark drew a grunt from Mr. Hopkins, who then nodded and shuffled from the parlor, his kerchief bobbing like a rabbit’s tail.

“Tell the gals what Honus did last summer,” Christy said, “when it was so hot.”

“Last summer, the Pirates were the best. Nobody could beat ’em, talk about a team. Anyhow, comes September, and they’re guaranteed
to win the league championship flag, so a couple of my pals says they’re going out to Carnegie Township where Honus Wagner lives and give the Dutchman a box of cigars and the best steaks they can find, just to say thanks, since those cranks were real sporting men and had made a ton of dough off the Pirates. They take the tram over to his place and the father is there—you know he lives at home with his folks—and it is hotter than Hades, and he says sure, go on upstairs. John—that’s what they call him at home—is just cooling off. And what do you think, middle of the day, but the great Honus Wagner buck naked in a bathtub filled with ice he crushed with an old baseball bat, and he’s drinking a bottle of beer, and he says to the fellas, sit down and have one.”

Helen gave him a look. “Don’t say words like that.”

“Like what? Hotter than Hades?”

“No,” said Christy. “She don’t like you swearing in front of the women folk.”

“What’d I say? Buck naked?” He threw his cards into the middle of the table. “Gee, it’s so hot. That don’t sound like a bad thing right now.”

Pressed against her temple, the glass of iced lemonade did nothing to cool off Adele. It was a hot and muggy night.

T
hrough the screen window, light flashed, and thunder sounded in the distance. It had been a hot and muggy night, and perhaps that explains why I was naked when I landed on the bathroom floor. Usually I wear something to bed, unless pajamas prove uncomfortable when it is too early to air-condition but too humid for a good night’s sleep. The sudden spike in moisture must have made me strip. Now, with a thunderstorm threatening, I wondered if I should call the cat inside and close all the windows in the house in case of torrential rain.

“Not to worry,” the old man said. “We can turn it off or on by will.”

“You mean it’s not going to rain tonight?”

“Special effects,” he said. “Even as a little boy, you were prone to rather vivid imaginings.”

How could he know about my childhood, especially if he is the Irish playwright who wrote his masterpieces in French? I began to suspect that he was not who I imagined him to be. But if not Beckett, then who? The child at his feet was pretending that a bar of soap was some kind of aircraft that he could fly at the end of his hand, and he aimed the jet straight for the face of the commode, before swiftly turning at the last possible moment to avoid a crash, all the while making the sound of a sputtering engine. The old man had become distracted by the child’s play. “Bbbrum-bbrum-brum,” Beckett said to the boy.

The sound of his blubbering lips transformed into the sound of a movie projector. All of us except Adele turned our faces to the light. The young men in their antique costumes trotted the bases, hit the ball with their wooden sticks, and spun their arms like windmills before delivering the pitch. The big German, Wagner, stands poised at shortstop, and the batter’s hit skips sharply toward his left. He digs for it and throws a shower of dirt and pebbles out of which the baseball emerges tailed like a comet and lands in the first baseman’s mitt. Behind Adele, the game goes on, unabated by her continuing narrative.

L
ove is sweetest as it ripens, and they were in that pleasant interlude between awkward shyness and any formal engagement, though Adele, when he pressed his case, strongly implied the necessity of such a promise before she surrendered even a hint of her virtue. From time to time, his anger bested his good judgment, but he never took out any frustrations on her. Rather, Pat boiled over and started moving, doing something, going somewhere—tossing a medicine ball to his brother, hitting a punching bag, walking the whole way from Exposition Park to Birmingham, crossing two rivers along the way,
or once or twice going to a shooting range to try one of the rifles his father had stashed in the attic. But mostly, Pat was a perfect gentleman, and when the Pirates came back into town for their September games, he was readily distracted by the baseball and the chance to place bets among his fellow fanatics. Unrelenting August had given way and soon enough the heat had broken. Even the southpaw Eddie Doheny had rejoined the team after a few weeks, though all the cranks said he was not quite the same. Charlie Wells and the other sports would guy him on, but Pat would have no part of any such talk, thought the whole matter bad luck. His intuition proved correct when Doheny started acting out again and became unmanageable. His brother, a preacher, came to town on the twenty-second and took the pitcher back to Massachusetts. “Poor man,” Pat said when he read the news. “Some fellas can’t take the stress.”