The Pacific and Other Stories (28 page)

T
HE
W
HITE
S
OX
were a repulsive bunch of taciturn midgets whose throwing arms seemed attached to stolid blocks of steel. Whereas most pitchers were like supple human fly rods, the White Sox were like trench mortars or doughnut machines. They never looked anyone in the eye, they had flat heads, and although they did everything to win, as long as they belched forward like
steam shovels they really didn’t care if they won or lost, which was lucky for them, because, after Roger took to the field and single-handedly prevented a single ball from touching the grass, they had to decharter their airplane and go home on a bus. The final score for this, Roger’s second game, had been Chicago nothing, Yankees 147.

The Yankees were regretful but too stunned by the whole situation not to accept that Roger would play only three more games. Sure to lose him, they yearned to know how he did it, so Stengel gingerly asked him if he would hold a clinic for the rest of the team.

“A clinic?” Roger asked.

“A baseball clinic,” Stengel said. “You know, teach them how to hit, how to field, how to run. You’re only going to play three more games, and we thought, well, it’d be great if you could leave behind some of what you brought. We’re doing okay now—I mean, look at the score against Chicago—but you never know. The way we were going this year, before you came. … We could lose it.” He laughed nervously, not daring to bring up money, which he knew Roger would refuse.

“I don’t know from baseball,” said Roger, “not a thing.”

Stengel bowed his head. “Really,” he said, in awe.

“No.”

“Then how did you … how did you. …”

“That?” Roger asked.

“Yes, Roger,” Stengel said politely, “that.”

“I could tell them what I do know.”

Stengel looked at Roger, who was illuminated in fading reddish-brown light. He was less than half Stengel’s size. He didn’t know the rules of baseball, much less the subtleties. By rights and the laws of physics he should not have been able, even had he connected with the ball, to have hit it beyond the diamond. A child of his size and underdevelopment would not be able to throw the ball from home to second, much less leap twenty feet in the air (as he had done in the White Sox game) and then get the ball off on a flat trajectory to burn into the catcher’s mitt at home plate before the thrower was back on the ground. “Yes,” said Stengel, “tell us what you do know.”

“Okay,” said Roger, “but I’m telling you, I don’t know anything.”

That was not quite true. He had begun to think about the game. For example, he liked very much that the ball was an object descending from heaven, and he thought of it, therefore, not as an object to be captured for the glory of the captor but as a gracious gift that brought with it in train a bit of the loveliness of the sky.

F
OR THE SEMINAR
, the Yankees went to their secret practice field at Lake Honkus, near Mohonk, in the Shawangunks. The Yankees had bought a secluded estate and set up a baseball field on what had been a cow pasture, where they could practice in secret their surprise plays and coded signals. The lodge where they stayed was filled with wrought iron, Indian blankets, and buffalo heads. In fact, in Roger’s room, he and a moose had a staring contest for at least an hour.

The next morning, Roger and the Yankees put away a huge breakfast, during which Roger discovered that the maple syrup the Yankees used on their pancakes was kosher, and made an interesting sauce for pickled herring. Then they went outside and sat on benches facing a portable blackboard. The weather was wonderfully cool and clear at Lake Honkus. Stengel brought Roger up to the front, stood him next to the blackboard, gave him a piece of chalk, and said, “Kid, we’re totally secure.”

Roger looked at the Yankees, who looked at him expectantly. What could he possibly say that would enable them to hit a ball out of the park or jump twenty feet in the air?

“From baseball I know nothing,” he began, “but what’s a lock?”

“What’s a lock?” Mantle echoed.

Roger nodded.

“You mean like a lock on a door,” Larsen asked, “or a lock in a canal?”

“Both,” said Roger.

“A door lock is a metal thing with a lot of really smart junk in it,” Berra said.

“Okay,” said Roger, “and the lock of a canal?”

“A chamber for raising and lowering boats, with water from the river or canal to run it.”

“Yes,” said Roger.

Time passed. The Yankees stared at Roger. More time passed. Then Roger said, “Both illustrate the mechanism of the world.”

The Yankees inched forward. No clinic had ever begun like this.

“God is perfect,” Roger said. “His creation is perfect. It doesn’t seem so to us—we who suffer and die, who must live with sadness and terror—because we can’t see it in its entirety. If we could, we would see that it is in perfect balance. The counterweight for which we long—to right wrongs and correct injustices—is sometimes far away from us in space, time, or both. But, taken as a whole, from far enough afield, all is in balance, all is just.

“Good. What does this have to do with baseball and locks? As set out in the teachings of Rabbi Pepper of Biloxi and Rabbi Goldfinch of Barnevelt, the modern-day disciples of Rabbi Yoel ben Isaac of Zamosc, and his grandson Rabbi Yoel ben Uri (whose last names I will not say), each a
baal shem
, and their descendants, et cetera, in God’s eyes, in fact, and in truth, all souls, absent the deficit of sin, are equal. For example, a wise and brilliant king has no higher rank in the view of the Almighty than a beggar who has not even the comprehension to speak his own name. At the final judgment, both souls can glow equally in the same circle of continuous light.”

The Yankees nodded slightly. They understood; they had all deeply loved those who were far from perfect.

“Okay,” said Roger. “So here is the question that Yoel ben Isaac put forth and Yoel ben Uri answered. If these souls occupy the same level at the end, equally beloved of God, and if God’s creation is perfect, how can an imbalance exist in their lives on earth? How can one suffer all the miseries of this life, and the other know all the glories, if in the end every account is to be reconciled and they come to the same reward? In a perfect universe, how can such a shortfall exist? How can God allow it?”

Not even the entire Yankee lineup could answer this question, though they strained to do so. Roger again challenged them. “Tell me, how can God allow it? Do you know?” He surveyed them. They didn’t. “I’ll tell you, then. It’s simple. He doesn’t. What is equal in the end is equal also in the beginning and in the middle. There is no deficit even on this earth, even in the smallest picture, the tightest section of view. But how can this be? The king
and the beggar live vastly different lives. Ah! That’s what you think. That’s what may be apparent. But it isn’t true. Why? Because,” he said to the Yankees, their eyes unblinking, “the mechanism of creation is like a lock.”

The Yankees waited. How was it like a lock, both kinds?

“Both kinds. The metal lock has a cylinder that, for the door to open, must turn. This cylinder has a row of holes drilled in it, in which rest pins. In the barrel inside of which the cylinder turns and is encased, is a line of holes spaced exactly like their counterparts in the cylinder, with its own set of pins. In the locked position, the pins from the barrel fall into the holes in the cylinder and prevent it from turning, because they cross and block the interface. When the key is put in, it raises the pins exactly to the points—at a different level in each hole—where the barrel pins are above the line and the cylinder pins are below it. If all the pins were raised indiscriminately, sometimes the cylinder pins would block the interface, and sometimes the barrel pins would. If they were not raised at all, the barrel pins would block the interface and, thus, the rotation. To allow the turning, each pin must be raised according to what it requires. Some are raised more, some less, which is why the key is jagged. In the end, its unevenness makes a perfect equality that allows the lock to open.

“And a lock that lifts or lowers a boat is a mechanism that gets its power from the urge of all water to find its own level. Only that way can things flow, rivers run, and the world function—when the disparate forces of the universe are conjoined, and rest easy in an equality of perfection. Every force that exists is held in balance by a counterpart with which it must be united, and with which it is united, even if the connection be not apparent to us.

“Like the pins in a lock, the beggar and the king are lifted by God variously and invisibly, but equally, even in this world, so that the perfection will not be broken, for, by definition, the perfection
cannot
be broken. They ride unseen waves and are held aloft by unseen supports. Were they not so lifted, the world would not work.

“Only those who have suffered can know the strength of the compensation they acquire. The emissary that comes to them is all-embracing, and though some may deny or mock this, it is many times more real than the world itself, for next to this working of perfection the world itself seems only
a tinsel of the imagination. God compensates even in this world. He must. He does. And the reception of His compensation, like a quantity of physics, is the certain though insubstantial thing we call holiness. Those who would deny it would do so simply from lack of having received it. Perhaps the king, gifted in other ways, has no knowledge of holiness, while for the beggar with no gifts, it is overflowing. You may wonder what this has to do with baseball.”

They nodded.

“It seems clear to me,” he said, as a breeze brought resinous air from a thick pine forest that bordered the practice field as evenly as a crewcut. “I have been able to do what I did because my arm was guided, my strength supplied, my speed achieved, by the ever-present will of God for balance and perfection. Perhaps a Phoenician ship listed too much to port, thousands of years ago; or it was too cloudy, for too long, over a glacier in the Himalaya; or a woman’s heart was broken for a day by her suitor in Montana. I don’t know. I do know that it is important to know that such balances exist, and that, if I didn’t know it, I wouldn’t have the heart to continue.”

“Can we hook into this stuff?” Berra asked.

“Not if all you want to do is win games,” Roger answered.

“But wait a minute,” Berra demanded. “Let’s say someone cheated in Chinese checkers a thousand years ago in Peru. If I could hook into that, I could run twenty feet back to the plate even though Zelinka is just an inch from it, and put him out, right?”

“No,” said Roger. “It doesn’t necessarily work that way, and God is not fond of games.”

“Even baseball?”

“Even baseball.”

“Why?”

“Games can become, because of their closed set of rules, an independent universe, a distraction from the seeking of perfection. If they are taken as a universe in themselves, what a meager universe that is. This offends God, who worked for six whole days to make the universe we have. Can you imagine what would come of the work of an omnipotent being for six whole days? What is the infinity of detail, the infinity of extent, the infinity of connectedness, and the infinity of surprise, times six?”

“It doesn’t apply to baseball?” Stengel asked, not quite sure of exactly what
it
was.

“If your object is merely to play baseball, it doesn’t.”

“What’s your object, then, Roger?” Mantle asked.

“Because of the imperfection I have seen, I live for the hope of restoration. That’s all I live for, even if it be a sin.”

“What imperfection?” Stengel asked.

Roger’s expression was incomprehensible to the Yankees as anything but some sort of nervous ailment, because boys his age who are not afflicted with a crippling disease do not show on their faces the pain of old men. “I was born during the war,” he said, to answer the question, “in a place called Majdanek. I knew nothing else. The physical privation of this place, the terror of the selections and the frequent killing of people around me, seemed natural. Until I was three, I existed in the aura of my parents’ love. I don’t know what they did to keep us alive, but I know that whatever it was it was done for me. I stop abruptly when I begin to imagine what they must have suffered, especially my mother. For this I pray with love and gratitude, every day. I wish it were they who had lived and I who had died, although that would have taken from them what they wanted most.

“Just before the liberation, when I was three, we were marched out and made to stand at the edge of a pit. In the pit were thousands of bodies. Bulldozers had compressed and shaped them. They were as white as snow, and beneath them was a lake of blood. Even among the crushed forms and severed limbs, some people remained alive, though not for long.

“My mother and father told me that they loved me. They tried to shield me with their bodies. When the firing began, the force of the machine-gun bullets caught them and the other adults and they were hurled into the pit as if a wind had blown them away. The firing had been over the heads of the children, who stood on the rim untouched and unable to move. The guns were not lowered, because bullets were scarce.

“A soldier came by and picked me up by both ankles. My head hit the ground, and then he swung me around like an ice skater swinging his partner. I remember the blood rushing to my head, and the world blurring into blue and white. Even as I was twirled, the soldiers were laughing. After I
was released, for a moment, I flew. Undoubtedly, I passed over my mother and father, and though I thought I was going to fly forever, I fell into the center of the pit, face-to-face with a dead woman upon whom I had fallen, whose mouth was open.

“I thought I was dead, too, until the bulldozers drove over us. The sound of bones breaking was like the sound of burning kindling. Many times, the bulldozer drove right over me, but though I was too frightened to move, I found myself each time between the treads. Then I was caught in a wave of tumbling bodies that, pushed by the blade, washed up at the edge. The bulldozer no longer came near me. I lay quietly as it worked, and then slept.