The Might Have Been (13 page)

The bakers and grocers in his uncle’s territory were, in their own ways, that man with bad hair. They drove Cadillacs or Lincolns; they spent January in Florida or Arizona; they earned ten times what Edward Everett ever had but, in his presence, they became again their boyish selves who had dreamed of playing ball, asking,
What’s it like up there?
as if he had been to a country their passports would not allow them to enter.

He told them stories—some true, some embellished, some patently false.

“Never disappoint,” his uncle told him, and he didn’t. If they asked about Gibson, he gave them the Gibson he thought they wanted. If they wanted a Gibson who was a fierce competitor, he described a Gibson who knocked down a hitter with a high-and-tight pitch; if they wanted a friendly Gibson, he invented a story about Gibson fronting a rookie meal money, telling him to forget about paying it back.

In the first week of February, his uncle took him to lunch at a country club he belonged to in St. Martinsville. It was past the noon rush and the tables were mostly empty, white-coated busboys gathering tablecloths and replacing them with fresh linens. They knew his uncle there; the hostess chatted with him in an easy way as she led them to a table beside a large window that looked out onto the golf course. The temperature was in the twenties but the course was free of snow and outside a foursome trailed up a slight rise in the tenth fairway, pulling wheeled golf carts behind them.

“Gotta admire the passion,” his uncle said, nodding toward the
golfers and taking a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, extracting one and lighting it with a silver lighter engraved with his initials and the logo of the flour company.

A waitress brought a tumbler of scotch and water on the rocks and set it in front of his uncle although Edward Everett had not heard him order a drink.

“Thanks, dear,” his uncle said, giving her a slight pat on her hip.

“Would you …” she said, nodding to Edward Everett.

“Yes, he would,” his uncle said, and the waitress left them there.

“I don’t really—” Edward Everett said.

“Today you do,” his uncle said, reaching into the inside breast pocket of his jacket and pulling out a cream-colored business envelope with the word “Ed” typed where an address would be. His uncle held it out for him and gestured with a slight nod that he should take it. “Go ahead and open it,” he said. Inside was a payroll check for January from the mill: one thousand thirty-seven dollars and eleven cents, along with a check stub enumerating deductions for Social Security, state and federal taxes. Aside from his signing bonus ten years earlier he had never held a single check for so much money.

“In two more months, you can get the health insurance,” his uncle said. “You can also sign up for payroll deductions for the stock plan.”

The waitress came back with a drink for him and his uncle picked up his own glass and clinked it against Edward Everett’s. “
L’chaim
,” he said, taking a swallow. Edward Everett took a drink himself. He had expected it to burn but it didn’t. Instead, it filled his entire body with a sense of warmth.

“Your mom asked if I would take you under my wing. She’s had a hard time. Even before your dad—may he rest in peace.” His uncle traced a perfunctory sign of the cross. “I thought,
Hell, I’ll do it for a month, tell her we gave it our best shot, but
 …” His uncle shrugged. “You’re raw but you have more of a gift than you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you do when we go to see someone?”

“I pretty much listen—” Edward Everett was going to say,
to you
, but his uncle interrupted with enthusiasm.

“Exactamundo. You
listen
. But the other thing you do is, those stories are great.”

Edward Everett blushed.
I make them up
, he wanted to confess.

“I know they’re bullshit,” his uncle said. “I know something about who played when. Roger Maris quit, what? Ten years ago? And Gibson: the guy would have to be schizophrenic as hell if he was all the people you described.” His uncle gave a laugh that shook his entire body. “People don’t buy flour. Flour’s flour. Our flour. Their flour. This other guy’s flour. They buy
you
. Well, mostly I like to think they buy
me
, but …” He laughed. “I just had one of the best months I’ve had in, shit, I don’t know when.”

Edward Everett wondered how much his uncle earned if the mill was paying him more than twelve hundred dollars gross for trailing him like a lost puppy. He had always thought of his uncle as a fat, ridiculous man, especially compared with his own father, who had done all the calisthenics he’d asked his football players to do up until the day he hung himself when Edward Everett was twelve. At family parties or Fourth of July picnics, whenever the two stood side by side in the requisite photos, they seemed like random strangers caught in the frame of the camera’s lens, not men who had shared the same bed until the older one, Edward Everett’s father, turned ten. Yet, for all of Edward Everett’s father’s fame in the town—for all of the photos of him in the back pages of the weekly newspaper where it ran the sports articles, for all of the backslapping by the men of the town whenever Edward Everett went out with him—it was, he realized, his uncle who was successful, the silly man with the belly people joked about (
How long are you going to carry that child, Stan?
) rather than his father, whom people compared to Gary Cooper. So many of his parents’ conversations suddenly made sense: when they needed a new transmission for their nine-year-old Buick, when the water heater went out the day before a Thanksgiving when his parents were hosting seventeen people for dinner.
Let’s ask Stan. Let’s ask Stan
. As a boy, Edward Everett had thought his uncle some sort of savant to whom his parents went when they were stumped and needed guidance.
Why, I think I’d take it to a mechanic. Why, I think it would be a good idea to call a plumber
. Sitting with him in the country
club, as the waitress set identical plates of filet mignon, roasted red potatoes and asparagus in front of them, he realized for the first time that it wasn’t his uncle’s wisdom his parents were after, but his generosity: the First National Bank of Stanley Yates.

“You didn’t have to do this,” Edward Everett said, cutting into his steak.

His uncle glanced up, steak sauce speckling his chin and cheeks. “Family’s family,” he said, picking up an asparagus spear with his fingers and folding it whole into his mouth.

H
is uncle began letting him take the lead on some sales calls, although he botched many at first. While his uncle knew unit prices and shipping lead times, Edward Everett had to page slowly through tabbed sections of the catalog binder his uncle had given him and calculate quantity breaks by doing math on a scratch pad tucked into the binder. Often, in his haste to quote a price, he made an error and it was only after he had told it to the customer that he would realize he had forgotten to carry a digit from one column to the next or had forgotten that two thousand pounds made a ton, not one thousand. Still, his uncle was patient and explained his awkwardness using baseball references, calling him “Rookie,” joking about giving him a tryout. His income continued to rise. By March, his check was for nearly fifteen hundred dollars.

They went to a men’s clothing store in Braverton, where his uncle helped him pick out three suits: a charcoal pinstripe, a navy blue and a tan. A tiny man who may have been in his eighties measured Edward Everett, standing on tiptoe to stretch the tape from shoulder to shoulder. His touch was so delicate and he moved the measuring tape from shoulder to arm and around his neck so quickly,
Edward Everett wondered if he was merely making a show of it, but when he picked up the suits they fit him better than anything else he had ever owned. It came to more than five hundred dollars but when he flinched at the bill, his uncle said, “It’s not an expense; it’s an investment.”

He moved out of his mother’s house, renting an apartment upstairs from the weekly paper; every Tuesday morning at three, the roar and vibration of the press shook him from his sleep. He bought a car, a four-year-old Ford Maverick. “Buy American,” his uncle advised. “A lot of these guys fought in the big one and wouldn’t like to see you pull up in a piece of Jap crap.” Despite his car, his uncle still picked him up in the morning because it made little sense for them to drive separately, since they were going to the same bakers and grocers and purchasing agents’ offices.

On the first Monday in April, his uncle brought Edward Everett to his house so he could begin teaching him the bookkeeping part of their work. Edward Everett had never been to his uncle’s house—not this one anyway. When his father was alive, his uncle had lived not far from them, in a modest three-bedroom place on a tree-filled lot. Some years before Edward Everett began working with him, however, he had bought ten acres that had been part of a prosperous dairy farm that once belonged to the district’s congressman, who had to sell it to pay legal bills when he got into trouble for skimming campaign contributions for a D.C. townhouse for his mistress. Edward Everett’s uncle and aunt had built a sprawling ranch house on the property: three bedrooms, three full baths, a large dining room with a vaulted ceiling. His uncle’s office was at the back of the house, where a large picture window looked out onto a pond the congressman had stocked with trout.

It was after seven in the evening and the sun was setting on the other side of a windbreak of maples on the far edge of the pond. Three ducks settled onto the water and paddled lazily. Edward Everett could hear his aunt in the kitchen, making dinner: the creak of the hinges on the broiler as she opened it to turn the steaks they were going to eat, and then the juices of the steaks sizzling. As she
worked, she sang a song quietly but still loud enough that Edward Everett could make out that she didn’t know many of the words: “The moment I dada before I dada dadada, I say a little prayer for you.” At his desk, Edward Everett’s uncle leafed through a thick red-and-black ledger, each page a neat line of names and columns of quantities, dollars and dates. His uncle invited him to sit in his leather chair to enter the day’s orders and gave him a fountain pen, a gold-and-tortoise Visconti that weighed more than any pen Edward Everett had ever held. He took his time, as if he had never written a letter or a figure before, making each stroke deliberately, nervous about ruining the precision of the other lines on the page. The totals staggered him: he knew they had been selling what he considered a lot of flour but, adding the figures, he saw that their sales over the two and a half weeks recorded on that page approached fifty thousand dollars.

“Hon, I’m making a Manhattan for myself,” his aunt called from the kitchen. “Can I make one for you and Ed?”

“Sure,” his uncle said, not waiting for Edward Everett to answer.

Edward Everett’s aunt brought the drinks to the office and they sipped them, his aunt and uncle side by side on a leather couch, Edward Everett in a matching upholstered wing chair. His aunt and uncle chatted but Edward Everett didn’t really listen, catching only snatches of their conversation: a banquet at which his uncle was going to receive some sort of award from the diocese for fund-raising, a friend who’d had quadruple bypass surgery and who, three days out of the hospital, was already smoking a pack a day. His aunt, who was heavy with a round face, was not what he would think of as an attractive woman, but it was obvious his uncle loved her by the way he touched one of her plump knees to make a point or when he laughed at a story she told him about a misunderstanding at the butcher’s.

The drink relaxed Edward Everett and he watched the evening soften and darken. He thought,
If I stick this out, take over my uncle’s territory when he retires, I could have my own house overlooking a pond, where my own wife would bring me a Manhattan just as I finished recording the evidence of our good fortune
.

That month, as his uncle suggested, he began buying stock in the company. Many evenings, he went home to his apartment, showered, changed into Levi’s and a T-shirt, and walked down the block to a diner, stopping at a newspaper box just outside to buy a copy of
The Wheeling Intelligencer
. He sat in a booth beside the front window and, after ordering, turned first to the stock pages and, running his finger down the column of agate type, found the symbol for the mill, GnFlr, to check the closing price for the day before. It rarely varied more than a quarter point, but was up three of every five days. It gave him satisfaction: partly it was watching his investment growing, but also partly because he had a sense that he was participating in something larger than himself, something he couldn’t understand fully, owning pieces of the American economy. Within two years, he estimated, the value of his stock would reach several thousand dollars, nearly as much as he earned for some seasons in the minor leagues: so much money for doing nothing, checking a box on a form that sat in a file drawer in an office somewhere he’d never been. In five or six years, he could cash it in and buy a house—a small one, yes, but a house nonetheless. It struck him that he had been foolish to give so many of his years to a game that gave so little back, realizing that, only half a year removed from it, he was already thinking of his life in terms of investment and return. If he’d gone to work for his uncle six or seven years ago, he’d have that house now.