Domestic Affairs (15 page)

Somewhere around the fourth season, David, the red-bearded pitcher (sports editor for a bigger newspaper now), had to sit the summer out on account of having broken his arm in a winter basketball game. Steve broke his arm too, skiing. The wife of one star player left him (“He’s always loved ballplaying more than me,” she said before leaving town for good). Doris gave up benchwarming in favor of amateur theatricals. Douglas got married and switched to bowling and volleyball. Gus got a telephone. Ricky, the team hellion, became a cop. Phil got a job near Boston as headmaster of a large private school. Sam turned forty and turned in his catcher’s mask.

Steve still played, and so did a handful of others from that first summer’s team—most of them even improved their playing, one way or another—but none was so quick to slide into home plate anymore or to try to steal a base. The players no longer went out for beers after the game (the kids had to get to bed, and besides, they’d be up early the next morning).

Of course, the roster changed considerably over those six seasons. The team changed its name when
The Messenger
stopped sponsoring. For one season, the players all wore T-shirts proclaiming “This shirt not paid for by The Messenger.” Then they became Homestead Builders, with a whole group of young and unfamiliar faces on the bench. And though they have yet to win the league championship, summer after summer they come close.

One odd turn of events is the surprising alliance the old Messenger players have built up over the years with the once-hostile adversaries on other local teams. Rivals on the field, still, they meet in the streets or at a wintry town meeting and shake hands, comparing summer plans and team rosters. They call each other Stevie, Freddie, Davey, Boomer. There is something that happens to men who have played ball together. They may not have dinner at one another’s houses, may not even know where the other fellow works (certainly almost none of my husband’s teammates has ever laid eyes on his paintings). And still the bond is tight, and deep.

They haven’t gotten around to taking a team portrait these past few seasons. We keep Steve’s from that first summer framed and hanging on our bedroom wall. The familiar faces in their black T-shirts catch my eye often, through the year: sober-looking young men, with babies and toddlers on their knees who are second-graders now. Younger, slimmer, with longer hair, and more of it. They are smiling, most of them, even though they’d lost a game moments before the picture was taken. It was summer, after all. There was still beer in the cooler. There would be other games, more victories.

I remember a night (we were in the sixth inning of a game against J and J Auto Parts) when an unexpected rain began to fall, just as the sun was setting, and a rainbow stretched clear across the field, from third base to first. Even the youngest children looked up from their hot dogs and squirt guns to watch. There was another night, when a giant purple hot-air balloon landed smack in the middle of the outfield during the seventh inning of a game against Contoocook Furniture. And then there was the night we played Profile Seafoods (this goes back to that first season, the only one in which Jake, the bookstore owner, ever played). It was August, and though the team always let Jake go in for an inning or two, as long as the score wasn’t close, he had yet to make a hit or catch a ball in the field. That night someone hit a pop fly, right in his direction, and he reached up his arm (more of a wave than a catching attempt) and caught the ball. He was so dazzled and amazed that he began jumping up and down, right there in the outfield, doing a little dance, screaming, “I caught it. I actually caught it.” The other Messengers joined in, yelling and calling out his name. Everyone was so happy that not one of us even noticed the runner from the other team, sliding into home plate to score. That night, nobody even minded.

I first met my friend Ursula more than ten years ago. We had just moved to town and knew no one.

Ursula and her husband Andy were outsiders too—though they had lived here close to thirty years. In their early sixties then, their children grown and gone, they didn’t belong to the big white church on Main Street, or the Moose lodge, or the local American Legion post. Andy was a longtime leftist who still reminisced fondly about the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace. He was a printer by trade, and briefly (until local sentiment forced him out) editor of the town paper,
The Messenger.
Ursula was a retired elementary-school teacher, the daughter of Finnish immigrants, raised on a nearby dairy farm where her sisters and various nieces and nephews still lived. From the first I could see in her a melancholy streak I always imagined as having something to do with Finland and those long sunless months among the fjords—even though she was born in Massachusetts.

A neighbor introduced us, and Ursula invited me into her kitchen for tea and a slice of pie (blueberry) that day. In all my years of visits, all the hours I’ve spent in that kitchen, sipping tea and talking to Ursula, there was seldom a time when one kind of pie or another wasn’t just coming out of the oven. I’m not sure what we spoke about then: her garden (from which she gave me cuttings), the birds she fed daily, who flitted around her garden in such numbers that it could have been an Audubon sanctuary. Sewing maybe—she did that, too. I do know she took me on a tour of her wonderful old house: the basement filled with canned goods, and Andy’s enormous, hundred-year-old printing presses; her sunny sewing room, with fabric scraps all around, and boxes containing the pieces from every pattern she’d ever sewn; the collection of rocks and minerals she and Andy had gathered on their expeditions around New England, Ursula’s blue and white china, her wallful of cookbooks, and every issue of
Family Circle
and
Woman’s Day
from the last twenty years, filed for recipes; the big old upright piano in her living room, painted salmon pink. The garden, filled not just with the usual perennials, but with wildflowers Ursula had dug up and transplanted, including a jack-in-the-pulpit whose single annual bloom she’d call me every year to announce.

I guess a person could call it woman’s talk, all this discussion of pressure cookers and pie crust and flowers, crochet stitches and scarlet tanagers. But the truth is, we were always talking about more than those things, Ursula and I (or any of the dozens of mostly young people who passed through her kitchen constantly), over the years I visited there. What it came down to, really, was a way of looking at the world, a set of values, which acknowledged not just the importance of using old-fashioned cake yeast for making bread or of never cutting thread with your teeth, but also fairness and generosity and—always—a respect for the natural world.

A short woman (especially beside her tall, rangy husband), Ursula always despaired of her weight, and dressed mostly in loose homemade blouses and pants a little like pajama bottoms. My children always loved her embrace, in part, I’m sure, for the roundness and softness of her. Even for me, a grown-up, it felt good to get a hug from Ursula, and more than once, over the years, I turned up on her doorstep in need of one.

Even when I first met him, Andy wasn’t entirely well. He was an infinitely gentle, slow-moving, vague sort of man, and a few years after I met him we learned he’d been diagnosed as having Parkinson’s disease. He must’ve had it for years, but because he’d always been a little fuzzy, a little slow-moving, nobody noticed that much. I remember a visit Andy and Ursula made (to our kitchen, this time) just after the birth of Audrey: Audrey in Ursula’s arms, wrapped in a patchwork blanket Ursula had just finished making for her, all of us eating slices of a pie Ursula had brought. Andy sat, by the woodstove, in a rocking chair, silently munching on his pie, and then, slowly, he spoke up. “Isn’t it something,” he said, “that a man actually walked on the moon.”

Partly because of his completely unhurried, quietly thoughtful ways, he was a wonderful, natural companion to young children. When Audrey was little, I used to bring her to Andy and Ursula’s house whenever I’d try to sew a dress or to do a little canning. Ursula and I would be bustling about in the kitchen and there would be Audrey and Andy, in the living room, sitting together in Andy’s La-Z-Boy rocker, watching
Sesame Street.
“Are you sure Andy doesn’t mind?” I’d ask—as the hours went by. “Oh no,” said Ursula. “He likes watching that show anyway, but I don’t usually let him.”

The summer Audrey was three Andy began saying, quietly, that his heart was giving him trouble. Several times Andy and Ursula’s daughter, Alison (who came to visit every summer), rushed him to the emergency room at a hospital thirty miles away. Every time, some doctor or other would take Ursula and Alison aside and tell them there was nothing really wrong and offer lectures on hypochondria. The Parkinson’s was just affecting his mind, that was all.

All that summer, though, Andy was depressed. He stopped taking his afternoon swims down the road at Gleason Falls. He was too tired to take Ursula blueberry picking and looking for rocks. He told her she should learn how to drive. He sold his old horse, Duke, who had been living in the barn for years even though nobody could ride him.

Then one morning, very early, I got a call from Ursula, who was practically screaming. Andy had collapsed on the kitchen floor. The rescue squad was on its way. Come over, come over right away.

He was dead by the time they reached the hospital. Alison came; when she had to leave, Audrey and I drove back over with our suitcase and spent the night in an upstairs bedroom so Ursula wouldn’t be alone. We woke early, but of course Ursula, who in the best of times was always up by five, had been up for hours. With breakfast ready.

Ursula lived alone in the big house four more years. We came by more often after Andy’s death, but still she complained that there was no one to cook for anymore. Pies went bad, cookies went stale. The house was cold in winter. The garden was too much to keep up with. Ursula took in boarders a few times, as much for the company as for the money, but there was always a problem. They would turn out to be vegetarians, or they’d be on a diet, or they didn’t believe in white sugar. Or they simply didn’t stop enough, at the kitchen table, for tea and conversation.

So finally, last fall, Ursula packed up and moved to an apartment in Massachusetts, near her sisters and the family farm. She put her house on the market; and all winter, driving by (explaining to Charlie, for the hundredth time, why we weren’t stopping at Ursula’s for pie), I’d fantasize about buying it.

But somebody else bought the house, and the closing is today. Hearing that Ursula planned simply to abandon Andy’s big old printing press in the basement, Steve and some friends spent all last weekend dismantling the press and hauling it to a neighbor’s barn. I noticed, as I watched them carry the last pieces out to the truck, that (though she had left her irises and lilies in the garden, and the special late-blooming lilac Andy had planted for her), Ursula had dug up and moved her jack-in-the-pulpit. As for the pink piano, it’s in our living room now, and I am working away at scales nightly. As Ursula says, no home should be without a piano, and no piano without a home.

My friend Jessica is, like me, a married woman, mother of three children, living in rural New Hampshire. She wears old clothes a lot and cleans out sheep stalls and buys groceries at Cricenti’s. She’s also a former Miss North Carolina, a fact which amuses her but isn’t central to her existence these days. But because Jessica and her husband are innkeepers, she frequently comes in contact with a pretty unlikely sort of person for these parts—the kind who flies in to New Hampshire for the weekend with his girlfriend, who brings with her three suitcases, none of which contain mud boots. Some of these visitors are kind and considerate people—friends—and some are virtual strangers who stop in for a quick dose of the country and a few sets of tennis and the novelty of a venison steak before heading back to the airport.

Now the truth is, Jessica is a beautiful woman—with the kind of natural glamour that doesn’t require klieg lights or makeup. She’s an artist by training, but for the last twenty years it’s been her children and her home to which she’s mostly turned her talent. Now her youngest son has his driver’s license and there are no more rooms left to redecorate, and she’s finally able to get back to her studio. But that twenty years’ interruption (as much as she chose it and, mostly, loved it) has had its cost. “Back in North Carolina,” she recently told one of these weekend visitors from the city, “a young woman was either talented or pretty, but never both.”

“Oh,” said the visitor (an actress, an ingénue). “And which one did you used to be?”

Well, one day when I was over at Jessica’s I asked her for a phone number I needed, and she handed me her address book to copy it down. And there on the same page with bug sprayer and bike repairs was the phone number of Marlon Brando.

Naturally I had to get to the bottom of this. It turned out that Jessica didn’t really know Marlon Brando. But one of these weekend visitors had the number in her book, which she kept leaving around open, next to Jessica’s kitchen phone (from which this weekend visitor was making frequent long-distance phone calls to “the coast”). And somewhere near the end of the weekend, after about the fourteenth of these phone calls—emptying out this woman’s ashtray again—Jessica found herself copying down Marlon Brando’s number. Also Jackie Onassis’s number, and Ryan O’Neal’s and Warren Beatty’s, and a few others besides. Not that she ever intended to call these people up. She just liked flipping through her address book and seeing their names now and then.

It was her own private joke, having Omar Sharif in there with her veterinarian. Then, too, every now and then someone like me would spot one of those names, and sometimes, like me, they would comment; but frequently they would simply be silent, and forever after they’d be wondering, every time they called Jessica and got a busy signal, whether maybe she was on the phone with Marlon.

I was getting so much enjoyment out of the idea that Jessica asked me if I’d like to put a few of those numbers in my address book. What woman couldn’t use the odd movie star in her life? So I said sure, and for the last couple of years now I’ve had Marlon Brando in there, right above “bus station,” and below “barbershop.” I never flaunt it, but every six months or so someone will notice the name there, at which point I either explain or (depending on the circumstances) simply act mysterious. The whole thing has worked so well I have come to feel that everyone ought to put a famous name or two into his or her address book, beside whatever number she chooses to make up. (The area code for Los Angeles, incidentally, is 213.) Not to put the neighbors in their place, or so the babysitter will see. Just as a reminder: There are all kinds of beautiful people.