The Great American Novel (40 page)

“Isaac,” said his father, “I'm payink a high-class baseball manager fifteen t'ousand dollars a year, dat he should tell dem to bunt, dat behind his back, you should tell dem hit-and-run?”

“But I am a mathematical genius!”

“And
he
is a baseball genius!”

“He is a baseball
ignoramus.
They
all
are!”

“And so who should be de manager, Isaac—you? At de ripe age of ten!”

“Age has nothing to do with it! We are talking about conclusions I have reached through the scientific method!”

“
Enough
vit dat method! You ain' gung to manage a major leek team at age ten—
and dat's dat!
”

“But if I did, we would be in first place within a month!”

“And day vud t'row me from de leek so fast you vud'n know vat
hit
you! Isaac, day ain' lookin' already for some-t'ink day could tell me goodbye and good riddintz? Huh? Day ain' sorry enough day let a Jew in to begin vit, now I got to give dem new ammunition to t'row me out on my ear?
Listen
to me, Isaac: I didn't buy no baseball team juss for my own healt'—I bought it for
yours!
So you could grow up in peace an American boy! So ven came time to give it to de Jews again, day couldn't come around to my door! Isaac, dis is a business vere you could grow up safe and sound! Jewish geniuses, go look how long is de average life span in a pogrom! But own a big leek team, my son, and you ain' got for to vurry never again!”

“But what good is a big league team if the big league team plays the game
all wrong!
”

“In
your
eyes all wrong. But not to de big leekers! Isaac, please, if de goyim say bunt, let dem bunt!”

“But the hit-and-run—”

“
Svallow
de hit-and-run!
Forget
de hit-and-run! It ain' de vay day do here!”

“But the way they do it here is
wrong!
”

“But here is vere it
comes
from!”

“But I can prove they're wrong SCIENTIFICALLY!”

“You're such a genius, do me a favor, prove day're
right!
”

“But that's not what geniuses
do!
”

“I dun
care
about de oder geniuses! I only care about
you!
Dis is big leek baseball, Isaac—vat vuz here for a t'ousand years already!
Leaf vell enough alone!
” And here he related to Isaac yet again the long, miserable story of anti-Semitism; he told him of murder and pillage and rape, of peasants and Cossacks and crusaders and kings, all of whom had oppressed the Jewish people down through the ages. Only in America, he said, could a Jew rise to such heights! Only in America could a Jew ever hope to become the owner of a major league baseball team!

“That's because they only
have
baseball in America,” said Isaac, scowling with disgust.

“Oh yeah? Vat about Japan, viseguy?” snapped Ellis. “Day dun' got baseball dere? You t'ink a Jew could own a baseball team in Japan so easy? Isaac—listen to me, for a Jewish pois'n dis is de greatest country vat ever vas, in de history of de
voild!
”

“Sure it is, ‘Dad',” said the contemptuous son, “as long as he plays the game their way.”

Thus the seasons passed, the Greenbacks regularly finishing fifth and sixth in the Patriot League, and the genius son no less contemptuous of his father's old-country fearfulness than of the Greenbacks, who were bound by ignorance and superstition and habit to self-defeating taboos. Before Isaac's tirades and tongue-lashings, even the staunchest players eventually came to lose faith in the instructions they received from the bench, and by midseason most of them would wind up playing entirely on their own, heeding neither the conventional tactics of that season's manager, nor the unorthodox strategies of “the little kike” as the little tyke was now called; or, what was even worse, rather than following their own natural instincts, independent of seasoned manager or child prodigy, they would try to
reason
their way out of the dilemma, with the result that time and again, in the midst of straining to think the problem through, they would go down looking at a fat one. Finally, it was not the increase in Greenback strike-outs, but a sense of all the bewilderment that lay back of them, that caused the Greenback fans to become increasingly uneasy in the stands, and to emerge from the stadium at the end of nine innings as exhausted as if they had spent the preceding two hours watching a tightrope walker working without benefit of a net. So exhausting did it become to watch their team's strained performance, that even those Greenback fans whose interest had survived the expulsion of Gamesh and who had made their peace with the idea of a true-blue Yid as owner, eventually preferred to stay at home and wash the car on their day off, rather than going out to Greenback Stadium to see a perfectly competent ball club struggling in vain against eighteen men—the nine on the opposing team and the nine on their own.

6

THE TEMPTATION OF ROLAND AGNI

(
continued
)

6

The arrival of Agni at Greenback Stadium; what befalls him amongst the Jews he there meets with, containing several dialogues between a Jew and a Negro that cause Roland to consider taking his life. Newspaper coverage of his suicide imagined by the rookie sensation. Isaac Ellis makes another appearance; a conversation on “the Breakfast of Champions,” wherein the desperate hero of this great history learns the difference between the Wheaties that are made in Minneapolis by General Mills and those that are manufactured in an underground laboratory by a Jewish genius, and something too about Appearance and Reality. Roland succumbs. Concerning winning and losing. A short account of the Mundy miracle, with assorted statistics. The bewilderment of Roland; his fears and hallucinations. In which the character of Mister Fairsmith appears, with an explanation as to why he disappeared from the scene so early in the book. A long digression on baseball and barbarism, with a very full description of Mister Fairsmith's adventures in Africa; his success there with our national pastime, his disappointment, his bravery, and his narrow escape from the savages who blaspheme all he holds sacred and dear. His faith in a Supreme Being is tested by the Mundys. A disputation between a devout and the manager on whether Our Lord loves baseball. The Mundy winning streak settles the issue. A heartwarming scene on a train to Tri-City. The disastrous conclusion of the foregoing adventure, in which Nickname's attempt to stretch a double into a triple with the Mundys thirty-one runs behind the Tycoons in the ninth constitutes the
coup de grâce.
Isaac and Agni have it out. Mister Fairsmith is laid to rest.

 

L
ATE ONE NIGHT
, not very long after his visit to Mrs. Trust, Roland Agni once again stole out of his hotel room after Jolly Cholly's bed check and made his way through the unfamiliar streets of Tri-City, this time toward the harbor instead of the business district. The Tycoons were at home fattening themselves on the visiting Mundys, the Greenbacks were on the road; nonetheless, a light was shining in a window above the scoreboard in right field, exactly as it had on each of the two previous excursions that Agni had secretly made to Greenback Stadium. As yet, however, he had not found the courage to ring the bell in the recessed doorway on the street side of the right-field wall. But was “courage” the word? Wasn't it more like “treachery”?

If you make a deal, Roland,
Mrs. Trust had told him,
you'll have to make it with the enemies of America, as an enemy of America …

“Vat
is
dis? Who
is
dis?” came a voice from a window some twenty-five feet above his head. For he (or the traitor in him) had rung the bell at last!

“Vat kind of joke is dis! Vat's gung on down dere!”

“I—I thought there was a night game … sorry…”

“At 2
A.M.
?” cried Ellis. “Get outta here, viseguy, de Greenbacks is on de road!”

“I—I have to see the owner.”

“Write de complaint department, dummy!”

But as the Jew's head withdrew, the miserable Mundy star cried out, “It's—it's Roland Agni, Mr. Ellis!”

“It's
who?
”

“Me! Roland! The leading hitter in the league!”

Agni was led up a steep circular stairway through the interior of the scoreboard, as terrified as if he were climbing the spinal column of a prehistoric monster. A single bulb burned at the very top, no larger than you would imagine a monster's brain to be, and with about as much intensity. Black squares of wood were fitted into the thirty or forty apertures that faced out onto the field, as though the mouths, ears, and nostrils, as well as all the eyes, had lids to pull shut when the great beast wasn't out breathing fire.… In all, mounting the dim hollow interior of the scoreboard produced the most eerie sensation in Roland—or maybe it was just walking behind a Jew. He did not believe he had ever even seen one up close before, though of course he'd heard the stories.

*   *   *

Mrs. Ellis immediately put up some hot water for tea. “A .370 hitter,” she said, pulling a housecoat over her nightgown, “and he goes out in the middle of the night without a jacket!”

“I wasn't thinkin', ma'm. I wanted a little air, ya' see, and got lost…”

She put her hand to his forehead. “This I don't like,” she told her husband, and left the room, returning in a moment with a thermometer. “Please,” she said to Agni, who at first refused to rise from his chair, “you wouldn't be the first big leaguer what I seen with his pants down.”

So, scaling new heights of humiliation in his desperate attempt to shed the scarlet-and-gray, Roland did as he was told.

While Mrs. Ellis sat beside him, waiting for his fever to register, the Jew owner returned to the ledgers which lay open beneath the lamp on his desk. “You know vat I clear in a veek?” he asked the Mundy star. “Last veek, know vat I cleared in cash, after salaries, after rent and repairs, after new balls and new resin bags? Take a guess.”

“A thousand?” said Agni.

“Who you talkin' to, Mrs. Trust from de Tycoons, or me? Guess again.”

“Shucks, I can't, Mr. Ellis, with this here thing stickin' in me…”

“Sha,” whispered Mrs. Ellis, checking the second hand on her watch.

“Guess again, Roland!” said Ellis.

“A hundred a week?”

“Come again!”

“Ninety? Eighty? Look, how do I know—I got my own troubles, Mr. Ellis!”

With the enemies, as an enemy …

“Tventy-t'ree dollars a veek!” cried Mr. Ellis. “Less den de ushers! Less den de groundkipper! Less den de hooligan vat sells de beer!
And I'm de owner!
”

Mrs. Ellis extracted the thermometer. “Well,” she said, “I'll tell you the name of one .370 hitter who ain't running around Tri-City no more tonight! The league's leading hitter and he's out looking for pneumonia!”

“It's … it's bein' a Mundy, Mrs. Ellis…” whispered Agni.

“It's
what?
”

“Nothin',” he said, but instead of getting up and getting the hell out, he allowed himself (or the traitor in him) to be bundled into a pair of Mr. Ellis's pajamas and buried beneath three blankets on the sofa.

It wasn't making a deal with the enemy, was it, to stay overnight?

In the morning his temperature was normal, but Mrs. Ellis would not hear of his returning to his hotel without breakfast. “Please, you're not playing against the Tycoons on an empty stomach.” And he had to agree that that made no sense.

“Tell me somet'ink,” grumbled Ellis from across the breakfast table, “vy do vee haf all dese pitchers? Can somebody give me vun good reason?”

“Abe,” said his wife, from the stove, “enough with the pitchers.”

“God forbid dey should lift a finger around here between assignments! To get dem to pinch-
run
even, you got to get down on your knees and beg! Years ago, a pitcher who vas a pitcher would t'row bot' ends of a doubleheader! Ven I fois' came to dis country, belief me, you didn't
haf
eight pitchers sittin' dere on dere behinds for every vun vat vas on de mound! You had two, t'ree iron men, and dat vas it! Today,
nine pitchers!
No vunder I'm goink to de poor house! And
you
—” he cried, as into the room came his worst enemy of all, “Mr. Argument! Mr. Ideas! Mr. Sabotage-his-own-fad'er!”

“You sabotage yourself,” mumbled Isaac, and stuffed a sugar bun into his mouth.

“Isaac,” said Mrs. Ellis, “see who's here? Roland Agni! The league's leading hitter!”

“Bat him first,” said Isaac, “instead of eighth, and he'd be leading the league in runs scored, too.”

“I
would?
” said Agni. “I thought fourth.”

“First!” shouted Isaac. “Players should bat in the descending order of run-productiveness!
Dy
=
rp
× 1275. But try to explain that to the morons who manage this game!”

“Mr. Know-it-all!”

“They don't see eye-to-eye,” explained the kindly Mrs. Ellis.

“Neither does me and my dad,” Agni said.

“Vell, listen to him den!” snapped Ellis. “Maybe you'll loin somet'ink!”

“I did,” whined Agni, “that's how come everythin' that's wrong with me is wrong. On account of my father! Oh, Mr. Ellis,” cried Agni, “I—I—I—”

As an enemy, with the enemies, Roland.