The Little Book (17 page)

At one point in the service Wheeler looked back at his old mentor and found that noble, dignified, and reserved Viennese aristocrat, like Wheeler, dissolved in tears, sobbing with great heaves of intolerable grief.

Wheeler’s mind raced, and then as if his grandmother’s frail hand reached back to him one more time, he remembered her last words at the conclusion of the waltz a few days before, as they sat on the couch. “You need to know—” she had said, catching her breath in short little gasps, then recapturing her composure. “My life was very different from others. But—” She paused and looked down, as if distracted by a thought too complicated for words. “Because of what I knew.” Then she looked up squarely into his eyes, as if trying to penetrate across time to the deepest recesses of collective history. “You must know—” He remembered something in those strong eyes of hers. What she might have called ardor. She took his hands in hers and held them tightly. “You must know this and remember this.” Wheeler felt something indescribable in her eyes and held them with his. “That I was happy.”

16

Dilly Burden’s Kid

After the funeral, Wheeler’s attitude toward Harvard changed and a lot of his enthusiasm for baseball had gone out of him. He still went to practice every afternoon, as he had for nearly ten years, but much of the spontaneity was gone. The coach, a former Red Sock from South Boston named Eddie Donovan, took the unproven but promising sophomore aside after practice and explained that, as everybody knew, his team was in a slump, and he was looking for some change of momentum against Yale. “I like the way you put the ball over the plate, son,” the coach said, putting a good face on his despair. He then announced with a shrug to the Harvard
Crimson
reporter that “Burden’ll go a few innings and we’ll see what happens.”

“One and Out’s going to shut down the Yalies,” his teammates kidded, and the
Crimson
ran the headline, “Son of Legend to Start against Yale.” The article pointed out the rich baseball tradition in the Burden family, how Burden Gate, the entrance to the varsity field, was named after Wheeler’s grandfather—a member of the first American Olympic team of 1896—and how the great Dilly himself had made his great catch in deep center field off a Yale batsman, while also lettering in track the same season. The article pointed out that everyone knew that, although the sophomore had pitched a legendary game at his prep school and could pitch strikes, he was being carried on the team for sentimental reasons. Wheeler was pretty much an unproven entity and a flake—although the writer never actually said it—who cared more about coffeehouse folk singers than baseball. He did have—it was conceded—quite a fastball, when he could control it. Wheeler felt like telling them what his pal Bucky Hannigan had known years ago: “Controlling the ball’s not the problem,” Bucky had said. “Controlling yourself’s the problem.”

The
Crimson
article also pointed out that a fellow St. Gregory’s alumnus, Prentice Olcott, a junior, was the Yale captain and a candidate for the All-American team. There seemed to be a great confidence on Yale’s part because Harvard’s weakened pitching staff meant that it was having to start the unseasoned Burden. Just about everyone picked the visiting team from New Haven to win.

Wheeler admitted to Joan Quigley that he had had a hard time concentrating since his grandmother’s death. “It’s a great honor to start a Yale game,” she said, although she had never actually been to one, and she was generally pretty much unsentimental. “It would mean a lot to your grandmother. ” Joan’s family was old Boston, and she knew well how much Wheeler’s coming to St. Greg’s and Harvard had been his grandmother Burden’s idea and how much she had enjoyed thinking of him there. She paused, as if he might not accept her as a sports authority. “Because of your father.” Wheeler pointed out that because of her heart his grandmother had never come to see him at Harvard, which now made him sad.

“I guess I’ll sort of be pitching for her,” he said, suddenly overcome by the sense of loss.

“For her,” Joan said, “
and
your father, I think.”

On the afternoon of the game, Wheeler was pulling things together in his room, getting ready to head over to the field house when there was a knock on his door. Joan Quigley was standing in front of him, looking more beautiful than ever, wearing a low-cut cashmere sweater and an inviting smile. “Nervous?” she said.

“A bit,” Wheeler said. “That’s an understatement, actually. It’s sort of a big deal.”

“Well, I’ve got something to settle you down,” she said and pushed her way past him and into his room. “It’ll only take a few minutes.”

“Is that what you give your football captain before games?” Wheeler said, when they were finished and she was pulling on her cashmere sweater, which he had discovered had had nothing underneath it, and he was once again putting things together to head over to the field house.

“Are you kidding?” she said. “He’s much too focused for that.”

Wheeler was standing in the middle of his dormitory room, almost naked, the light from the curtained window casting him in dramatic chiaroscuro. Joan Quigley looked up at him and seemed awed for a moment, then she smiled. “My god, look at you,” she said. “Michelangelo’s David in a jockstrap.”

At the field, not long after, Wheeler was operating on pure adrenalin. He began almost by instinct working on the ball in warm-ups, finding that spot by the seam, loading it up with Bucky Hannigan wet ones until it was good and slippery. People came up and patted him on the back to wish him luck. He kept looking over to the Yale bench and seeing the arrogant Prentice Olcott, who didn’t seem to acknowledge him.

He gave the first couple of Yale batters his straight fastball, and it sizzled in there, as Bucky would say, just about exactly where Wheeler wanted it, high, low, inside, outside. He was onto his game.

Prentice Olcott batted in the third spot. When he first walked up to the plate, poised and cool, everyone from here to Worcester knew what was at stake. Wheeler eyed him squarely, tugging at his cap. Olcott’s Aryan blue eyes didn’t flutter; he looked back with warm indifference, tapping his spikes with the handle of his bat. The ill will of the past now, for Olcott at least, seemed a vague and distant memory. Wheeler touched his cap in salute. Olcott seemed not to notice.

Wheeler threw his leg high and fired toward the plate a fastball that would have sent the MIT machine back to the shop for repairs. It zinged into the center of the Yalie’s strike zone, and coolly he fouled it off. Strike one. Again, Wheeler threw his leg high, and again Olcott fouled it back. Strike two. Another high kick by Wheeler, and another foul ball. Still strike two. This could go on all afternoon.

Wheeler slapped the ball into his glove enough times to get the memories rolling in his elephantine sense of recall. This young man in the Yale uniform had dealt him measures of humiliation at St. Gregory’s School, had tormented the younger boys. Olcott was Wheeler’s first run-in with an anti-Semite. A sudden fury grabbed at his gut. “Asshole,” he found his lips whispering. Almost without thinking he sneaked a last gob of saliva onto his middle finger and onto the spot by the seam and rubbed it in. “Good and ripe,” Bucky would call it. He threw up his leg, the same as for the fastball. Down came the arm, and the ball snapped out of his fingers like a watermelon seed.

About halfway to Prentice Olcott it was headed right for the eyebrow hairs between his bigoted all-American blue eyes. He began to lean back, nothing hurried, but pulling his weight away from the plate. The ball dropped down and in, into the pay dirt of his strike zone, and slapped into the catcher’s glove. Olcott was away from the plate catching his balance when the umpire’s right arm shot up. Strike three. Prentice Olcott glared back at Wheeler Burden, as if noticing him for the first time. Inning over.

Wheeler strode from the mound, popping his fist into his glove. His eye caught the face of Fielding Shomsky in the bleachers. He was staring even more in awe than the rest of the crowd, his mouth wide agape, and for just an instant as he sat down in the no-man’s-land beside the old Red Sox coach, Wheeler wondered if the young professor had gotten over his resentment. “I’m in this,” the young pitcher said to the veteran coach, popping his fist into his ancient glove. “I want to go all the way.”

The middle innings went about the same. Wheeler’s control was good. He was in the groove, as Bucky Hannigan used to say. One of his Harvard tutors, a Hungarian graduate student with an unpronounceable name, called it “the state of optimal experience.” Wheeler had written in his notes, “A sense that one’s skills are adequate for the challenge. Concentration is intense. No attention left over for anything else. An activity so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with no sense of time.” That is where Wheeler now found himself. He was in the flow.

The good thing about the prongball was that it saved his arm. No one said anything to him after about the fourth hitless, runnerless inning, not wanting to be the one to break the spell. He continued to sit beside Coach Donovan, but there was a good four feet on the bench on his other side. Wheeler knew exactly what he was doing, even if no one else did. He had been here before. It’s just that they hadn’t. After inning five, he plopped himself down and slapped his glove furiously. Donovan put his hand on his knee. “Easy, son” was all he said, but didn’t look at him.

For the second time in his life word of Wheeler’s feat spread through the campus. “Dilly Burden’s kid’s got a perfect game through five” passed across campus. At Harvard, even important baseball games were pretty sparsely attended, but now, with the news spreading, an unusually large crowd began to form. Midway through the seventh inning Wheeler noticed that Professor Walker came up to the back of the stands. Wheeler looked up at him. He was smiling proudly and had brought with him a distinguished gray-haired man: the president of Harvard University. That was when he faced again his old nemesis Prentice Olcott, the last batter in the inning, who now carried his team’s hopes on his broad shoulders. Olcott’s eyes had changed. They now burned with an old Germanic fire, the deep-seated meanness Wheeler remembered from school. Wheeler saved the prongball. First, he let the Yale captain have an inside fastball that he fouled away, then another one inside that missed the zone by inches. Then Olcott took a ferocious rip and missed everything. It did not matter what each of them had done with old injuries and resentments. It did not matter that Yale’s All-American was a bigot and an anti-Semite. There was simply no way Prentice Olcott was going to hit Wheeler’s next pitch, and it was coming right down his strike zone. Wheeler glared into his catcher for the sign and saw in the batter’s Aryan blue eyes something worth a lifetime of waiting. The pitch blew past Olcott. But before the delivery Wheeler had seen what he had come for: in the eyes of his old adversary Prentice Olcott he had seen raw fear.

The eighth inning came and went, and as Wheeler stood to take the mound for the ninth and last inning, a palpable silence filled the air around Varsity Diamond. Everything seemed to stop. Even traffic out on Massachusetts Avenue, one could imagine. It was as if the eyes of an entire civilization were riveted on this young skinny kid from the Feather River bottomlands of California. He rose and inhaled deeply. Coach Donovan reached out and touched his knee again. Wheeler looked at him. The old major leaguer spat on the ground. “Burden—” he said. Wheeler turned and blinked at him, lizardlike. “You’ve showed a lot of sand today.” If it doesn’t last, he was saying, you’ve done nobly, and a helluva lot better than anyone had expected. Wheeler nodded as he rose and strode out to his place on the mound.

The first batter struck out on four pitches, next batter grounded to the first baseman on two. To the third batter, only the twenty-seventh he had faced, he threw a no-nonsense fastball for a strike on the first pitch. “The horse smells the barn,” Bucky Hannigan would have said. He was two pitches away from a perfect game, no hits, no runs, no errors, no runners on base.

It was the next, the penultimate pitch that everyone talked about, “The Pitch” it was called years later. Wheeler was pumped up, for sure. The ball was just the way he liked it. He was feeling in flow as much as he ever had in his life, and everything seemed present with him on that mound of earth in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where both his grandfather and father had stood. He reared back and threw the ball and it left with his greatest velocity and his fingers slid off the seams to virtually stop the spin. The ball flew toward the plate, then dropped a foot or two in a way that no one could hit it. The Yale batter swung at air, a good twelve inches above the ball. The umpire yelled, “Strike two.” Later, Wheeler thought that was the best he could do, the moment when the whole world stopped, with no need to go any further. The perfect pitch, the penultimate act in the perfect game.

His grandmother was gone. Back home, in Feather River, California, his mother was reading Jane Austen or haggling with a bank representative over a row of prune receipts, oblivious to this moment. But in the world that really mattered, what Frank Standish Burden III did with a small cowhide sphere in the next forty-five seconds was of monumental importance.

It was the Harvard-Yale game. No Yale batsmen had reached base. Wheeler slapped the ball into his father’s glove. He looked at the Yale batter, he looked over at Coach Donovan, he looked over at the president and Professor Broderick Walker, renowned authority on philosopher Egon Wickstein, and Dilly Burden’s best friend in prep school and college, then at the First Shomsky, who cared more about baseball than honor. He looked for Joan Quigley, but he knew she did not attend baseball games. The world that mattered waited, denying itself breath until Wheeler released the ball. One pitch away from athletic and kinesthetic perfection and from legend.

Wheeler breathed for them, a deep inhalation and loud release. Then he stood for a moment, lost in time.