The Boys of Summer (26 page)

Not ten years had passed, but already the boys of summer
were aged. Frost could compose with wit at eighty-six; they slumped in hitless decline at thirty-five. As the first longing to seek them stirred, one thought settled on me like a headstone. If they were old, why then I was old myself. One judges age by one’s contemporaries. So this long journey, which did not end in sorrow, began with the memory of a poem written by a Japanese, Saigyõ, a thousand years ago, which still, in Donald Keene’s translation, pierces the heart:

According to the United States census of 1970, the city of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, on the Blackstone River, harbors 46,465 souls. Twenty years earlier, the population exceeded 50,000. Preparing for the drive to Woonsocket, where Clem Labine made his retreat in 1962, I tried to imagine this poised, impeccable man reaching middle years among decay. Woonsocket lies on a rough line between Boston and New York, but growth, like the interstate highways, has passed the city by. There are pockets like that in New England and the South. Turn right at a paint-flecked sign, proceed six miles and leave the present.

“Be glad to see you if you want to make the trip,” Labine said on the telephone, in a voice that sounded strong, assured and impersonal.

“Are you still designing clothing?” He had sketched sports jackets during his pitching days.

“No. I stopped that even before I went to the Mets—and got
dropped. I’m general manager up here now. We manufacture Deerfoot brand team jackets.”

“You’re successful, then.”

“In a way.”

“Do you still throw?”

“Snowballs at telephone poles. Come up and we can have lunch at my club.”

To find Woonsocket, you drive north and east from New York, on broad highways probing ugly and alien, into New England. For a time IS 95 runs near the coast of Connecticut, and on a clear, late-summer morning Long Island Sound dazzles the eye, a glinting blue dappled with white. That is an instant difference driving northeast from New York. The air clears. A man sees sunshine. He realizes how New York has grown more dirty and more dark. When last Labine snapped curves at Ebbets Field, the city was a cleaner, lighter place.

Everywhere New England bears its special markings: Indian names, nineteenth-century factories and individual local shrines. At Bridgeport, where the Poquonock River dawdles toward the Sound, I saw my first factory of red brick. Thirty miles farther, at New Haven, Yale Bowl gaped, an empty Coliseum. One comes abruptly on Hartford and its Great American Insurance obelisk, Travelers Tower, reaching 527 feet high. North, along Highway 15, open green country rises and falls, and you cross into Massachusetts at Mashapaug and ride past Sturbridge, where entrepreneurs have built a replica of a colonial farming village among the ridges.

Highway 15 feeds the Massachusetts Turnpike, where traffic floods toward Boston, but near Worcester, where Bob Cousy, the famous basketball player attended Holy Cross College, I turned off, away from the main line and followed a slow truck down a two-lane road for fifteen miles. It was 1:05.1 stopped to telephone him at a roadside booth.

“Where are you?” Labine said.

“Massachusetts. Route 146.”

“Okay. Stay on 146 a good way, toward Woonsocket. There’ll be a big foreign-car place. Triumphs and Volvos. I’ll meet you there.”

“I’m driving an undependable brown Citroën.”

“Well, have
you
gone French? My boss’s name is Finkelstein.”

After I left the Dodgers, Labine established himself as an excellent relief pitcher. In relieving, you are almost always correcting someone else’s mistakes, or trying to, and never opening scenes on your own terms. The records show that Labine saved ninety-six games other men started, and won only seventy-seven himself. But during the 1956 World Series he pitched a heroic ten-inning shutout against the Yankees. He was thirty then, and at the peak. In 1960 the Los Angeles Dodgers sold him to Detroit, where he lost three games, and the Tigers shipped him on to Pittsburgh, where he rallied. But by 1962 he was discarded to the original New York Mets, perhaps the poorest baseball team to play in the major leagues. No matter. The Mets released him, and a few months before his thirty-sixth birthday Clem Labine, pitcher, was out of business.

Had he grown fat? With days of glory done, bone-weary athletes are inclined to shun exercise. Working pitchers sweat their beer. Retired pitchers sprout bellies. Labine had worn his hair close-cropped. “Chop-top,” Dick Young called him. Beyond his forty-second birthday, would he still sport a crew cut?

Labine was waiting inside his car, a large, buff hardtop, in the Triumph dealer’s lot. He waved and I followed him for two more miles until we climbed a ridge and reached a sign that said “Kirkbrae Country Club.”

“Lock your car,” he called.

“This isn’t New York.”

“Lock it. We have trouble with teen-agers, too.” He stepped
out, agile, his build unchanged. He wore a pale V-neck sweater, over a white turtleneck, and when he walked, he held his forearms angled down and away from his body, an odd mannerism that had lasted. We shook hands and he led the way into a stone clubhouse, then toward an airy dining room with a window wall facing fairways. People nodded. He seemed a comfortable country-club man.

“You want to play, Clem? Eat in a hurry?” A motherly waitress hovered at our table.

“No,” Labine said. “We want to take our time.”

“Straight up?” the waitress asked.

“On the rocks,” Labine said. “What’ll it be?” he asked.

“Scotch and soda.”

The face across the table—even features with deep eyes, under arching brows—was youthful, but no longer looked boyish. Small lines converged at the mouth. The skin itself looked worn. Time was beginning to walk across the face.

“Still crew cut,” I said.

“That’s right,” Labine said. “I used to be a conformist and wear a crew cut. Now I’m a nonconformist—and wear a crew cut.”

He always made a passable phrase. “Harold Rosenthal used to say you were one ball player who wouldn’t have to worry about a pension.”

“I liked Harold,” Labine said. And the drinks came. He drank his vodka martini hard and quickly.

“It all seems real still,” he said, “and alive, and I can remember things and pitches I made and the hitters. Do you know I got Stan Musial out forty-nine times in a row? Somebody counted and told me. I’d curve him and jam him with the sinker. Then there was Henry Aaron. I never got him out. I was no superstar, never a Feller or a Koufax, but I could get the job done.

“Someone in high school here said I had a curve like a lefthander.
That was my pitch. Once Warren Spahn asked me how I threw it. I bent my thumb under a little. Cheating, they call that; cunny-thumb, but, hell, all the good curve-ball pitchers cheat.

“I tried spitters in Caracas once. Someone showed me and I worked on it and the first time I threw it, I hit the catcher in the throat. I had no spitter. I’m not talking about morality. I don’t have to. I couldn’t control the thing like Preach.”

My glass was low. The waitress had been watching. Fresh drinks came promptly and again Labine drank hard.

“It flashes before my eyes like a lifetime,” he said. “The kid with the curve. That was in 1945. Then, I blink twice and I see myself through with the Dodgers, one blink for all those years. Being traded is a hard thing. It’s knowing you’re not wanted any more and adjusting to a new environment, and you tell yourself, like I did with Detroit, Al Kaline and Norm Cash can really help a pitcher. You’re better off. But where are all the guys? Where’s everybody you’ve been playing with? You’re not in the fraternity any more. That’s one of the hardest things.”

“I would have thought that losing that World Series game in 1953 was hardest, when Billy Martin hit you, remember?”

“Goddamn right I remember.”

“I would have thought that would have been harder.”

“No. I broke down a little, but I learned. After that, when I lost a big one, I asked myself two questions: Did I do my best? Hell, yes. Do I want sympathy? Hell, no. Looking back, it was good I learned about losing. In 1951, were you with the club then? I pitched the shutout against the Giants in the play-off. Ten to nothing, it finished, but when the game was still close, Bobby Thomson came up and the count went to three-and-two. The bases were loaded. I threw the curve, and it must have broken a foot wide. It would have forced in a run, but Thomson swung, and I had a strikeout. The
next day I was sitting out in the bullpen and there were three of us. Erskine, Branca and myself. You remember?”

He told again how Newcombe had tired and the three of them—Branca, Erskine and himself—had thrown and how Dressen called on Branca and how Thomson lined the second pitch—a hanging spitball some say it was—into the grandstand. Like that, in the flash of one line drive, the Dodgers lost the pennant.

“There was a bench,” Labine said, “where we sat in the bullpen. If you can find it, you’ll see a chunk of wood is missing. That’s where I took a bite. And Erskine. Carl said, ‘Well, Clem, that’s the first time I ever saw a big fat wallet flying into a grandstand.’ That’s what it was. Thousands lost.”

“The baseball writers,” I said, “made up a song for their dinner that winter:

“I heard about that.”

“You had that great attitude. The bigger the challenge, the more you wanted to take it on.”

“I
said
I had that great attitude. But you don’t think I wanted that spot, do you? Or that Ralph did? Or Carl? Nobody wants a spot like that. You get older and you can face those things. Come on. Your glass is empty. Peggy! Another round!”

Sunlight slanted into the room. The age lines around his mouth seemed softer; talking about younger days can do that to a man, make his face actually look youthful. “In World War II, I volunteered for the paratroops. Because I was a hero? Hell, because I was eighteen dumb years old. All this talk about guts. The first time I ever relieved for the Dodgers I got bombed. I mean I was awful. And Dick Young wrote, here was a new
fireman, whose best weapon was gasoline. That’s fine. I may not like being made a joke of, but he’s got a right to comment any way he wants. But then there was one game in Philadelphia. I relieved with bases loaded. The hitter bounced the ball back to the box and I was going for two and I never did this, not even in high school, ever, except for this one time. Going for two, home to first, I threw the damn ball over Campy’s head and all the way to the backstop. That got us beat. There was a little bar near the Warwick Hotel and that’s where I went after that game. I was standing with Dick Williams, who was trying to cheer me up, when Young came over. He said, ‘Clem, now don’t feel bad. That was a mechanical error and I’ve seen the greatest and the greatest make mechanical errors.’ I said thanks and bought him a drink and he asked me if I liked being a relief pitcher. I told him, hell, no, I wanted to be a starter. All right. I was dumb. I shot off my mouth.

“We got back to Brooklyn a few days later and the barber I used in Bay Ridge had a clipping to show me. It was a story by Young. He’d written that I lost in Philadelphia and I would always lose close games in relief because I wanted to start so badly. Subconsciously, or whatever, I was going to blow all the big ones in relief.” Labine’s right fist clenched. “Did Young have any right to do something like that?”

“Young had demons in him sometimes. Don’t make me defend it.”

“I’ve got no bitterness,” Labine said, bitterly. “I’m here and he’s still in New York with his column. I remember when the Mets dropped me. I deserved it. Still, it was the end. All Young could say, he’d known me thirteen years, was this. He said, ‘That’s the way it goes.’”

Golfers clattered in. Someone called a greeting. “Big man in Woonsocket, though,” Labine said. “Woonsocket is Indian for Thunder-mist. This is a strict Catholic mill town, or was when I was a kid. There are a lot of Italians here and Poles and then
there are the French Canadians like me. My father was a weaver. I spoke nothing but French until I was seven years old. Then the kids I started running with were Italian and they made fun of me for being French and I didn’t like that much, but I didn’t much like being French either. That’s what prejudice does. It makes you ashamed of yourself. I was raised a good Catholic like everyone else. Go to school, go to church. Work hard in the mill and when it’s over you get a good spot in the Cimetière du Précieux Sang.”

“But you were different,” I said. “You could pitch.”

“And play hockey,” Labine said. “And halfback in football. But what does that mean? I had coordination and some strength. But I didn’t understand
anything.
Then I came out of here into the Dodger organization, the best in baseball, and I’m playing in the minor leagues and at one club, I’ll never forget, there was a girl who shacked up with everybody excepting this catcher who was dumpy and kind of ugly, like the girl. Do you know what happened? The catcher fell in love with her. All the other fellers on the team wanted to tell him that he had fallen for a nymphomaniac. But we couldn’t tell him. He
loved
her. And they got married. We made a trip and the new bride threw a party for the other wives. Maybe six guys were married. She asked all the other women over, including the manager’s wife, understand. And they all came and this nymph shows them in, and opens the dining room doors. Wham! Inside there are seven guys. The nymph has gotten all the other wives dates.”

“What happened?”

“The catcher finished that year in another league.”

We laughed, and then there was a pause.

“You look fine,” I said. “And pretty damn young.”

Labine motioned for another martini. You can drink for joy or for idleness or to get drunk, but sometimes there are other reasons. “You heard about Jay?” Labine said, suddenly.

“Who’s Jay?”

“My son. Clement Walter Labine Junior. You think I look pretty damn young? You should have seen me a year ago. I looked much younger then, before Jay, that’s my son, stepped on a mine in Vietnam and blew his leg off.”

There is no dining room in the Woonsocket Motor Inn, which has large rooms and wooden-postered beds, a generally excellent motel. For breakfast you walk to the supermarket next door, where, at a small dining counter, fresh orange juice, two scrambled eggs, home-fried potatoes, toast and coffee cost eighty-four cents. Woonsocket has its own newspaper, the
Evening Call,
established in 1892, but at breakfast one depends on the larger Providence
Journal.